Election Issues

For the last several decades, the corporate establishment, because of their control of the media, gained more and more control of the country. However, after the 2000 election, which won voter fraud in Florida and by the bizarre action of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, a great mobilization took place that was aimed at winning the next election. The accomplishments of this mobilization were phenomenal. A coalition of traditional democrats, old lefties, and new activists matched the tremendous 150 million dollar war chest accumulated by the Republicans. Theirs came from corporations and rich donors, ours mostly from small donations from more ordinary people. Then, we register millions of new voters—mothers, minorities, and young people—and they voted.

We stuck to the right issues—the mistake of going to war, the lose of good jobs, the huge tax give away to the wealthy and its consequences to our economy, the destruction of our environment, our failed medical delivery system, the erosion of our civil liberties, our loss of respect and support in the world, and the government’s lying to us on the reasons for going to war.

The Bush family and friends stole both the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections. The covert operations long associated with George Herbert Walker Bush, former President and CIA director, are now overtly practiced in key battleground states.

The mainstream media is much like medieval theologians, who refused to accept the obvious, that the Earth revolved around the sun. Instead, they plotted bizarre planet rotations to prove the Earth was the center of the universe.

A spokesman for the Green Party's 2004 presidential campaign, which initiated the Ohio recount, today blasted the suggestion by Ohio's Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell that he would need to take depositions from John Kerry and John Edwards as part of the Ohio recount litigation.

"Mr. Blackwell's contention that he needs to depose Senators Kerry and Edwards is a laughable and blatantly political move. Mr. Blackwell has refused to be deposed himself about the Ohio election, has refused to appear before Congress and has refused to answer questions from members of the House Judiciary Committee who have been investigating allegations of election fraud. To suggest that Kerry and Edwards should be deposed to address a legal technicality while Mr. Blackwell continues to avoid any public scrutiny of his own misconduct in the Ohio election is the height of hypocrisy," said Blair Bobier, Media Director for the 2004 Cobb-LaMarche campaign.

Beware of exit polls and the analysts who study them.  These folks would have us believe that exit polls tell the gospel truth.  They even quote the duplicitous toe-sucking Dick Morris to make their case.  "Exit polls are almost never wrong," Morris writes.  The man is a known creep. 

Exit polls are completely non-transparent and unverifiable.  They're as bad as voting by machine, absentee, or early.  There's no meaningful oversight to either enterprise.   Worse yet, a belief in exit polls is a trap that's had tragic consequences for elections around the world.  

"The Libertarian Party is on the ballot in Russia, Afganistan, and Iraq, but not in Ohio," notes LPO Executive Director Robert Butler. "We had a veteran and a hero from the current war in Iraq who wanted to run as a Libertarian last year, but I had to explain to him why that wasn't possible."

The Libertarian Party of Ohio is asking the Ohio House of Representatives to modernize the state's ballot access laws.

Robert Butler, 31, Executive Director of the Libertarian Party of Ohio will testify on Wednesday March 2nd before the Ohio House Election and Ethics Committee.

"Our state's current ballot access laws were created during the Red Scare of the early 20th century," adds State Chair Jason Hallmark, "They do not reflect the ideals of open democracy, the foundation of our great country."

"We are only asking that Ohio modernize its laws, just as all of our neighboring states have recently done," explains Butler, "Ohio has been ranked 49th by OSU Political Science Professor Paul Allen Beck for its restrictive regulation of political parties. We want that to change."

As continuing investigations into the 2004 presidential election reveal yet more flaws in the nation’s election machinery, the call for meaningful election reform is growing across the country and in Washington, where members of Congress who opposed Ohio’s 2004 Electoral College vote have proposed sweeping reforms. It remains to be seen if a growing coalition of civil rights activists, election reformers and others can create a clamor for change that cannot be ignored – even by the Republican-dominated Congress.

On the night of November 1, 2004, Jim Branscome said, he overheard a man, a guest in the Holiday Inn where Mr. Branscome worked in Columbus, Ohio, tell someone over the pay phone in the hotel lobby:

"'Look, I know you got out of prison about'...X amount of months ago...I can't remember how many months he gave, but it was earlier this year, the year 2004, and he said, 'It's illegal for you to vote in this state, and if you show up tomorrow at the polls, we're going to have the FBI there waiting for you, and we're going to haul your ass right back into the slammer' he told him or into the 'can' or something like that."
-- From a videotaped interview with Robert Fitrakis and Linda Byrket.

In America, every vote should be counted correctly.  Following the General Election on November 2, 2004, we have learned that there were numerous incidents of evoting machines malfunctioning and/or being tampered with and significant voter suppression.  Congress is being asked to investigate.  In the name of preserving democracy itself, the purpose of this article is to outline two courses of action which will help prevent future voting fraud in all 50 states:

The following documents are supporting documents in the Blackwell presidential election sanctions case in Ohio. For more information about the sanctions, read the following articles.

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1138, http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1102, and see other articles in the Election 2004 department.

Briefs

MEMORANDUM OF UNITED STATES REPRESENTATIVE JOHN CONYERS, JR. AS AMICUS CURIAE IN OPPOSITION TO MOTION OF SECRETARY OF STATE BLACKWELL FOR SANCTIONS PURSUANT TO CIV. R. 11 AND S. CT. PRAC. R. XIV, §5

MEMORANDUM OF UNITED STATES REPRESENTATIVE JOHN CONYERS, JR. AS AMICUS CURIAE IN OPPOSITION TO MOTION OF SECRETARY OF STATE BLACKWELL AND OHIO’S TWENTY PRESIDENTIAL ELECTORS FOR SANCTIONS PURSUANT TO CIV. R 11 AND S. CT. PRAC. R. XIV, §5

J. Kenneth Blackwell is at it again. Ohio’s infamous Secretary of State and master of media distortion and hype, earning him the name “Inkwell” among the statehouse press corps, has announced his partisan agenda for governor of the Buckeye State.

Blackwell, Ohio’s first statewide African American office holder, has rapidly moved to stake out the far right of the Ohio Republican Party as his political base. The Secretary of State has found himself consistently at odds with mainstream conservatives in the state’s GOP.

Last week, the Franklin County Board of Elections, under the control of Republican Executive Director Matt Damschroder, obtained a temporary restraining order against Blackwell. In another of his notorious imperial decrees, the Secretary of State ordered all 88 county boards to buy optical-scan voting systems from two well-known Republican-linked companies, Diebold and ES&S.