Summary So Far
So far, I have been discussing the Lucasville uprising as a whole. I’ve asked: Why should we doubt the accuracy of the trial court verdicts? What caused this rebellion, anyway? In what sense can these events be called “tragic”?

Let’s sum up where we have arrived.

In Essay 1 we offered some examples of the unreliability of conclusions asserted by prosecutors in trials after the end of the uprising. Particularly dramatic was the statement of one of the prosecutors (now a state court judge), Daniel Hogan, that we would never know “who hands-on killed the corrections officer, [Robert] Vallandingham. . . . I don’t know. And I don’t think we’ll ever know.” How can the State of Ohio propose to execute three men (Siddique Abdullah Hasan, Jason Robb, and James Were) for the murder of Officer Vallandingham when it doesn’t even know who killed him?

November 6 marks a tremendous victory for the fracktivists in Mansfield, Ohio. They passed a "Community Bill of Rights" referendum with 62.87% of the vote on Tuesday.

The Center for Health, Environment, and Justice reported this:

"Mansfield is a city with roughly 48,000 citizens located 80 miles southwest of Cleveland and 66 miles northeast of Columbus, right in the heart of the Utica Shale basin. Eric Belcastro, the Pennsylvania Organizer for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), explained the rationale behind the “Bill of Rights” push in a blog post:

Faced with the permitting of two 5,000 foot deep injection wells in Mansfield by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR)…[t]he amendment would drive a community Bill of Rights into Mansfield’s charter and then prohibit the injection of fracking wastewater on grounds that such prohibition is necessary to secure and protect those community rights. The amendment also recognizes corporate “rights” as subordinate to the rights of the people of Mansfield, as well as recognizing the rights of residents, natural communities and ecosystems to clean air and water."

Election 2012 probably doesn’t prove anything.

But it provides some evidence for the hopeful proposition that: even when the game is rigged, the cheaters lose:

· MONEY. Even though the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision allowed gross amounts of money (almost $6 billion) from known and unknown donors to distort the process, few elections near the top of the ballot appear to have been bought. But the down-ballot races may be most of the iceberg.

Big money may not have overwhelmed the electoral system in 2012, but that’s far from saying big money doesn’t control too much of government and too many public officials.

· PROCESS. Even though hyper-partisan Republican legislators, election officials, and outside groups made a concerted effort by a variety of means to suppress voting by likely Democratic-leaningconstituencies, there was sufficient pushback from the courts, the Justice Department, and professional election officials to allow the democratic process to function pretty well.

The simple truth of Barack Obama's victory is that if it had just come down to Ohio, Mitt Romney might have won.

The gears of the election theft machine were well-oiled and running at top speed...until an "October Surprise" named Hurricane Sandy intervened.

Those now rejoicing over the Obama triumph should know that there is absolutely no excuse for leaving this sinister apparatus of electronic election theft in place. Election reform should be at the top of the progressive movement's list, led by the non-negotiable demands for universal hand-counted paper ballots and universal automatic voter registration. As Obama said in his victory speech in reference to the long lines in Florida: "We need to do something about that."

This year, as in 2004, the Rovian blueprint was simple if not clean: keep the election close enough that Ohio and Florida would be the deciders…and then do the deciding.

Part One was the massive Jim/Juan Crow campaign aimed at disenfranchising millions of primarily black and Hispanic voters throughout the US, but especially in swing states Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania.

Election monitors are reporting funny numbers coming out of Clark, Columbiana, and Hamilton counties (Ohio). Two of these counties are listed in Ohio Secretary of State Directive 2012-49 as participating in the Secretary of State’s ENR (Election Night Reporting) Pilot Project. The most disturbing numbers are in Clark County where the computers seem to be subtracting numbers from vote totals early in the evening.

What’s currently happening at 12:23am fits the familiar pattern of election theft in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004. Here’s the scenario: the exit polls are predicting a Democratic win. The state is called and projected for the Democrat. Suddenly, after 11pm, Karl Rove emerges with supposed “magic numbers” saying “not so fast. I’ve got our own numbers on the ground.” Then what happens is that the projected Democratic victory disappears and numbers that fall outside the margin of error of the exit polls are accepted.