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Lumpenproletariat

Tag Archives: Eric Zuesse

Election Day, Election Night, & the Aftermath in the United States: November 8, 2016 General Election

08 Tue Nov 2016

Posted by ztnh in Democracy Deferred, Free Speech, Political Science, Presidential Election 2016

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Amy Goodman, Bernie Sanders, Democracy Now!, Dennis Bernstein, Diana Ross, Donald Trump, Dr. Jill Stein, Dr. Michael Parenti, Dr. Richard D. Wolff, Dr. Stephanie Kelton, Eric Zuesse, Flashpoints, Green Party, Greg Palast, Hard Knock Radio, Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Nichols (b. 1959), KPFA, Mark Mericle, neoliberalism, Pacifica Radio Network

Vote_12345LUMPENPROLETARIAT   GONZO:  When many of us woke up this morning, we were quite certain that neoliberal Hillary Clinton would handily win the 2016 U.S. presidential election, whether we liked it or not.  But, now, as the polls close and as states report in favour of Republican Donald Trump, it’s looking like Hillary Clinton is struggling to capture a decisive win.  We underestimated just how much racism and white resentment resides in middle America, not to mention male patriarchy.  There is proving to be just enough to catalyse and propel an openly racist presidential candidate with absolutely no experience in political office into the White House.

In more ethnically diverse states, such as California, we may lull ourselves into thinking the United States has outgrown its white supremacist origins, but only at our own peril.  Evidently, in 2016, police can kill in broad daylight with impunity and a sleazy white man can be a complete bigot, male chauvinist, who boasts of sexually assaulting women, offend every standard of public decency, and still become president of the United States.  White man’s burden, or white man’s privilege?  Such grotesque behavior and rhetoric would have disqualified any woman or person of colour from the presidential candidacy.  But, as long as one saturates broadcast media, one is legitimated by society, no matter how degenerate, juvenile, sexist, or racist one’s attitudes and perspectives.  And, when one is part of the two establishment political parties, and especially when one is pushing the political centre rightward, one can be as toxic to our social discourse as one wants and get a pass because of the sheer establishment power the two-party system wields in its relationships with the corporate media.  It certainly paid off for Trump to have gotten the lion’s share of media exposure, as Edward Bernays or Walter Lippmann (or common sense) would expect.  This is what Dr. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman called manufacturing consent.  Meanwhile, Dr. Jill Stein, Ajamu Baraka, and the Green Party were virtually ignored by the corporate media jill_and_viggo2016(and even free speech media).  Despite the Green Party’s progressive platform, which best speaks to working class interests, the actuality of mass media propaganda kept voters’ political consciousness confined within a narrow two-party paradigm.  This is symptomatic of a crisis of political imagination.

Beyond the failings of our misguided ideological conclusions, we suffer from a flawed election system, which has already evidenced many examples of electoral fraud or voter suppression, as Greg Palast has documented in his writings, his book, and documentary film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.  Voter rolls are being rigged 2016corrupted or deleted.  And alternative political parties and candidates, such as the Green Party‘s Dr. Jill Stein, along with their ideas and policy proposals, are kept away from public view.  And, of course, ideas and perspectives are censored, or suppressed, most vigorously by the corporate media when they reflect political perspectives on the left of the political spectrum, which reflect egalitarian or humanitarian principles.

At my polling location, it seemed everybody, mostly Hispanic, Spanish-speaking voters, coming out in force to vote against Trump, had provisional ballots in their hands, for some reason.  We recall Greg Palast‘s reporting on the many problems with provisional ballots not being counted, of being placebo ballots.  So, to see this in a predominantly Hispanic/Latino community, too, raised questions.  I’ve voted at other polling locations, which did not consist predominantly of Hispanic voters, where this was not the case.  It seems people were given provisional ballots just so that they could avoid the long lines.  Voters seemed to walk past the long lines with their provisional ballots already filled out and sealed to hand them over to poll workers.  We need to make sure that we, the people, get a full audit of all of the ballots and such, at the very least.  We know presidential elections in the recent past have been corrupted, or outright stolen. [1]  At best, we seriously need to ask ourselves if there are modifications we can make to our election system, which can make it more democratic.  Of course, if we had adopted a ranked-choice voting system, then voters would have been liberated to vote their conscience and, possibly, elect a real people’s presidential candidate, such as Dr. Jill Stein, in this 2016 election.  Political alternatives could achieve surprise wins when people are allowed to rank their political preferences so as to fully express their political will and to fully vote their conscience, without fear of throwing their vote away.  Ah, but no.

2016 NOVEMBER GENERAL ELECTION RESULTS

Federal Office:

  • Donald Trump:  279 electoral votes
  • Hillary Clinton:  228 electoral votes

[Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, i.e., more people voted for her.  But Donald Trump won the antidemocratic Electoral College.  Is this the most democratic way to elect the president of the United States?]

California Ballot Propositions

  • Proposition 51 (School Bonds, High-Interest Debt-Funding for K-12 and Community College)—PASSED (54% Yes)
  • Proposition 52 (Medical Hospital Fee Program)—PASSED (70% Yes)
  • Proposition 53 (Revenue Bonds, Require Statewide Voter Approval)—FAILED (53% No)
  • Proposition 54 (Legislature, Legislation and Proceedings Initiative, Increase Transparency)—PASSED (64% Yes)
  • Proposition 55 (‘Millionaire’ Tax Extension to Fund Education and Healthcare)—PASSED (62% Yes)
  • Proposition 56 (Cigarette ‘Sin Tax’ to Fund Healthcare, Research, Law Enforcement, etc.)—PASSED (63% Yes)
  • Proposition 57 (Criminal Sentences, Parole Option, Judiciary Discretion for Trying Juveniles as Adults, etc.)—PASSED (64% Yes)
  • Proposition 58 (English Proficiency, Multilingual Education Option)—PASSED (72% Yes)
  • Proposition 59 (Campaign Finance, Repeal Citizens United)—PASSED (52% Yes)
  • Proposition 60 (Pornographic Films, Redundant Condom Requirement)—FAILED (54% No)
  • Proposition 61 (State Prescription Drug Purchases, Competitive Pricing Standards)—FAILED (54% No)
  • Proposition 62 (End the Death Penalty)—FAILED (54% No)
  • Proposition 63 (Firearms, Ammunition Sales Restrictions)—PASSED (63% Yes)
  • Proposition 64 (Cannabis Legalisation for Adults)—PASSED (56% Yes)
  • Proposition 65 (Redirect Funds Collected for Carryout Plastic Bags)—FAILED (55% No)
  • Proposition 66 (Death Penalty Procedures, Speed Up Execution Process)—PASSED (51% Yes)
  • Proposition 67 (Uphold the Ban on Single-Use Plastic Bags)—PASSED (52% Yes)

Messina

***

2016-general-election-ballot-img_20161108_165445

2016-general-election-ballot-2-img_20161108_165633

Model 100 optical scanner voting machine, ceres community center, ceres, california, 8 NOV 2016

***

FREE SPEECH RADIO GENERAL ELECTION COVERAGE, THE AFTERMATH ON WEDNESDAY

kpfa-free-speech-take-it-back-logo-121199TALKIES—[9 NOV 2016]  The Morning After  With Hosts Norman Solomon and Dante Chinni, Director of The American Communities Project.  Hosted by Kris Welch.  Listeners call ins at 1-800-958-9008

[Host Kris Welch chats, from a liberal perspective, with Norman Solomon and Dante Chinni about the general election aftermath.  There is much brooding about the dynamics between the Democratic and Republican parties, but not much discussion nor interest in expanding the narrow two-party system.  None of the guests during this broadcast lamented the antidemocratic disaster of our democratic process, nor lamented the plight of people who work for political alternatives, such as the Green Party and Dr. Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka’s progressive politics.  The great bellyache this morning is that they didn’t wake up to a Hillary Clinton America.  But Hillary Clinton would’ve been a neoliberal warhawk, without question.  So, perhaps, our perceptions are skewed.]

[snip]

[(c. 11:00)  Norman Solomon critique of Democratic Party and confronting class struggle]

[(c. 25:00)  In Norman Solomon’s closing remarks, he lamented the many problems with the corporate nature of the Democratic Party’s leadership.  And he urged that progressives need to clean all of that up to be ready to campaign in two years under the Democratic Party label.  That line of argumentation only makes sense if one is seeking to preserve a narrow two-party system, which blocks and suppresses all political alternatives and political competition to the status quo.  Norman Solomon doesn’t acknowledge the popular will and energy and desire for political alternatives, so-called ‘third parties’.  He can never mention the Green Party or expanding the debates, even though they represent a broad, if disaffected, segment of society, because liberals of his kind are so terminally wedded to the notion of reforming-the-Democratic-Party-from-within that they are forced to oppose any political competition.  In that sense, they diminish our collective political imagination and possibility.]

[(c. 32:00)  Kris Welch asks Norman Solomon about Roots Action.]

[(c. 45:00)  Jill Stein supporter calls in and gets bashed by Norman Solomon’s stock anti-third party rhetoric.]

[(c. 47:00)  Next caller cites a white backlash against the first black president.]

[(c. 50:00)  Next caller, Andrew from Los Angeles calls for unity.]

[(c. 53:00)  Next caller, Sharon in Sacramento supports Dr. Jill Stein and celebrates the fact that Dr. Jill Stein went down to the Dakota Access Pipeline and got arrested.  She challenged Norman Solomon to cite an example of a Democrat doing the same.]

[(c. 55:00)  Next caller, Remy in Newark resisted being “cynical”.]

[(c. 57:00)  Last caller, a Bernie Sanders supporter since the earliest primary until the end decried how Bernie Sanders didn’t contest any of the primaries.  Indeed, it sure looked like he went out very compliantly, as if helping cover up electoral fraud and manipulations.  Norman Solomon responded dismissively, saying that the caller’s complaints were exaggerated and that Bernie Sanders did draw attention to the ‘structural challenges’.]

[snip]

[snip]  (c. 59:59)  [9 NOV 2016]

Learn more at TALKIES.

*

Letters-and-Politics-Logo-No-Background-327x230LETTERS AND POLITICS—[9 NOV 2016]  [Intro by Mitch Jeserich.  On today’s broadcast, a roundtable discussion on Trump’s winning of the U.S. presidency.]

[KPFA News Headlines (read by Aileen Alfandary)]

[Adele Stan (AlterNet)]

[Rick Perlstein]

[(c. 41:00)  On how bad the Democratic primary was…]

[snip]  (c. 59:59)

Learn more at LETTERS AND POLITICS.

*

DN! logo (large)DEMOCRACY NOW!—[9 NOV 2016]

Headlines

Donald Trump Elected 45th President of the United States

Donald J. Trump was elected 45th president of the United States on Tuesday, defeating Hillary Rodham Clinton in a stunning upset that reverberated around the world. Trump carried at least 279 Electoral College votes to Clinton’s 218, although Trump appears to have narrowly lost the popular vote. Around 2:50 a.m., Donald Trump took the stage at a New York City victory party, saying he had received a phone call by Hillary Clinton congratulating him on the win.

President-elect Donald Trump: “To all Republicans and Democrats and independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united people. It’s time. I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans, and this is so important to me. For those who have chosen not to support me in the past, of which there were a few people, I am reaching out to you for your guidance and your help, so that we can work together and unify our great country.”

The contest pitted the two most unpopular candidates in modern presidential history against one another, with a majority of Americans viewing both Trump and Clinton unfavorably. Donald Trump has never held elective office. He opened his campaign in 2015 with a speech calling Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists. Trump has proposed banning all Muslims from entering the United States. He openly mocked his opponents, reporters, Asians, African Americans and the disabled. More than a dozen women have accused Trump of sexual assault, and he was heard in a 2005 videotape boasting about sexually assaulting women. Throughout the campaign, Trump drew the enthusiastic support of white nationalists and hate groups. Former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, who ran unsuccessfully for a U.S. Senate seat in Louisiana, cheered the outcome of the election. Duke tweeted, “This is one of the most exciting nights of my life -> make no mistake about it, our people have played a HUGE role in electing Trump! #MAGA.”

Hillary Clinton Supporters Shocked by Loss to Donald Trump

News of Trump’s victory left supporters of Hillary Clinton stunned and shaken. A crowd of thousands—a majority of them women—gathered under the glass ceiling of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York, where celebration turned to despair as it appeared Clinton was headed to defeat.

Early-Morning Protests Spring Up After Donald Trump Victory

Trump’s victory sparked early-morning protests around the country. At the campus of UCLA in California, about 1,500 people gathered to protest and burn a Trump piñata. Outside the White House, Trump’s opponents shouted at supporters, who responded with chants of “Build that wall!”

Republicans Retain House and Senate Majority

Meanwhile, Republicans captured both the House and Senate, positioning their party to control all three branches of government. Democrats gained a Senate seat but will fall short of the 51 seats needed to overcome Vice President-elect Mike Pence’s tie-breaking power. In the House, Republicans will hold a comfortable majority, with at least 236 of the chamber’s 435 seats.

Republican Sweep Likely to Tilt Supreme Court Balance

The congressional sweep makes it likely that Donald Trump will appoint a conservative to the Supreme Court post left vacant since Antonin Scalia died in February. Republicans have refused to consider Obama’s pick for the high court, Merrick Garland, and will likely ignore his nomination until Trump names his own nominee during the next Congress.

Stock Markets in Turmoil as Donald Trump Stages Upset

Markets in the U.S. and around the world plunged overnight as Trump’s victory became imminent, with the S&P dropping by 5 percent to its “limit down,” the maximum drop allowed before trading curbs kick in. Many stock indices recovered after Trump’s victory speech. The Mexican peso fell 11 percent overnight to an all-time low before recovering some ground.

Long Lines, Voter ID Laws and Fewer Polling Places Suppress Turnout

Tuesday’s election was the first in half a century to take place without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act. The Leadership Conference for Civil Rights says voters had 868 fewer polling locations. In key battleground states, many spent hours in line, while others gave up and left the polls. In Greenbelt, Maryland, voters waited for one ballot scanner for the entire precinct.

Jide Eniola: “I actually asked the lady that’s there, ‘Why do you have one scanner here? I have a friend that lives in Montgomery County, and they have—in one place, they have about six or seven.’ She said that’s what they gave them. Yeah? I asked her, I said, ‘Why do you only have one here?’ The line was about—you have to make a U-turn, like 360, to get up to the first one. And it’s just—three hours is just too long.”

There were hours-long lines in parts of New York City, as well, where Donald Trump was booed as he entered Public School 59 in Midtown Manhattan to cast his ballot. Turnout was down among African-American voters in key battleground states, where federal lawsuits have challenged voter ID laws that civil rights groups say are targeted against communities of color.

House Speaker Paul Ryan Confident He Will Retain Leadership Role

In Wisconsin, Republican Paul Ryan easily reclaimed his House seat Tuesday. Ryan says he is confident he’ll retain his leadership role as speaker of the House.

Speaker Paul Ryan: “I’ve just been sitting there watching the polls. By some accounts, this could be a really good night for America. This could be a good night for us.”

Some Republican congressmembers say they’ll seek to replace Ryan as House speaker, after Ryan repeatedly condemned Donald Trump’s remarks on the campaign trail. Despite the criticisms, Ryan never dropped his endorsement of Trump.

Wisconsin: Russ Feingold Loses to GOP Incumbent Sen. Ron Johnson

Also in Wisconsin, Democrat Russ Feingold narrowly lost his bid to return to the Senate, falling to Republican incumbent Ron Johnson.

Florida: Republican Senator Marco Rubio Re-elected

In Florida, Republican Marco Rubio has retained his Senate seat, after reversing a pledge to retire from politics, and despite a failed bid for the Republican nomination for president. During the campaign, Trump repeatedly mocked Rubio’s appearance, calling him “Little Marco.” At a victory party on Tuesday, Rubio struck a conciliatory tone.

Sen. Marco Rubio: “I hope we will set the example in this great state that while we can disagree on issues, we cannot share a country where people hate each other because of their political affiliations. We cannot move forward as a nation if we cannot have enlightened debates about tough issues. You can disagree with someone without hating them.”

California: Kamala Harris Elected as Second-Ever Black Woman U.S. Senator

In California, state Attorney General Kamala Harris has won the Senate seat vacated by Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, who is retiring. Harris is a Democrat of Indian and Jamaican ancestry. She becomes only the second black woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate.

Gubernatorial Races Split Between Republicans, Democrats

In gubernatorial races, Democrats and Republicans appear to have evenly split the 12 governor’s seats up for election. In North Carolina, Republican Governor Pat McCrory is demanding a recount, after an initial tally showed him trailing Democratic challenger Roy Cooper by fewer than 5,000 votes.

Voters Raise Minimum Wage, Support Death Penalty, Legalize Marijuana

In ballot measures, 69 percent of voters approved an anti-union measure to make Alabama a right-to-work state, while a similar measure was defeated in Virginia. Voters in Colorado, Maine and Arizona all voted to increase the minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020, while in Washington state the minimum wage will increase to $13.50 an hour. In Colorado, voters have rejected a measure to create a single-payer health insurance system. Nebraska has voted to restore the death penalty, while in Oklahoma voters have approved a measure that amends the state constitution to guarantee the right to impose the death penalty. In California, a ballot measure to overturn capital punishment is trailing, while another measure to speed up the pace of executions is winning by a narrow margin. Voters in California, Massachusetts and Nevada voted to legalize the recreational use of marijuana, while North Dakota, Arkansas and Florida approved medical marijuana initiatives.

Minnesota: Ilhan Omar Elected as First-Ever Somali-American Legislator

In Minnesota, Ilhan Omar has been elected as the nation’s first Somali-American legislator, winning a seat in the state House as a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio Loses Bid for Seventh Term, May Be Jailed

In Arizona, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio lost his bid for a seventh term. Arpaio faces the possibility of jail time, after federal prosecutors announced they are charging him with criminal contempt of court over his refusal to end unconstitutional immigration patrols in Arizona.

California: Gunman Fires Near Polling Place, Killing 1 and Injuring 2

In California, two people were left dead and two others wounded after a man high on cocaine and armed with handguns, a rifle and shotgun opened fire near a polling station in the city of Azusa, east of Los Angeles. Police Chief Steve Hunt said the gunman was found dead after a battle with police.

Steve Hunt: “We believe that the suspect was armed with an assault rifle with a rapid-fire capability. Whether it’s fully automatic or semiautomatic, we don’t know at this time.”

The violence halted voting at two polling places and caused a lockdown at a nearby middle school. Police say the gunman fired at least 20 rounds at officers. The shooting came mere hours before California voters approved Proposition 63, which bans possession of magazines that hold more than 10 rounds, and provides a process for felons to have guns confiscated.

Orlando, FL Night Club to Become a Memorial to Gun Massacre Victims

In Orlando, Florida, city officials said Tuesday they will purchase the Pulse nightclub and convert it into a memorial for the 49 people killed there on June 12. It was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Shooter Omar Mateen purchased the guns he used in the killing, including an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, legally.

World Meteorological Organization Says Recent Years Hottest on Record

In climate news, the World Meteorological Organization said Tuesday that the five years from 2011 to 2015 were the hottest on record, with hundreds of thousands of deaths likely due to global warming from human activity. The findings were presented in Marrakesh, Morocco, where United Nations climate talks got underway this week. The report found human-induced climate change was directly linked to extreme events, including an East African drought and famine in 2011 that claimed over a quarter-million lives. Elena Manaenkova of the World Meteorological Organization says the Earth’s temperature has already risen by 1 degree Celsius, which is nearing the limit of a 1.5 degree rise set by the Paris Agreement.

Elena Manaenkova: “The conclusions are very clear that that was the warmest five-year period on record. We also confirm that the 2015 was the year when the global surface temperature exceeded 1 degree, and it links to the debate during this climate conference and the Paris Agreement targets.”

Trump Climate Denial Threatens U.N. Climate Change Agreement

Meanwhile, many delegates to the U.N. talks are expressing panic over the election of Donald Trump, saying the outcome threatens the future of any international agreement to slow catastrophic climate change. The Republican president-elect has said he will “cancel the Paris climate agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs.” Trump has also promised to promote coal power and fracking, and says he will allow for oil and gas drilling on federal lands. He has also promised to ask TransCanada to renew its permit application for the Keystone XL pipeline.

Indian Supreme Court Orders Action on Toxic Air Pollution Crisis

India’s Supreme Court has ordered the federal government to come up with a plan to combat toxic air pollution so thick that it’s being described as “beyond measurable limits.” The government has 48 hours to respond. A recent UNICEF report found 600,000 children under five die of air pollution every year, with about a third of the world’s at-risk children living in northern India and surrounding countries.

North Dakota: Pipeline Company Says It Will Soon Begin Drilling Despite Lack of Permit

In North Dakota, the company building the Dakota Access pipeline says it is preparing to drill beneath Lake Oahe on the Missouri River within two weeks, even though the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has not granted a permit. The announcement shocked and infuriated opponents of the $3.8 billion pipeline, which has faced months of resistance from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe along with representatives of over 200 other indigenous tribes and non-Native allies. Opponents, who call themselves “water protectors,” say they were promised by an Army Corps of Engineers official that the Dakota Access pipeline would be delayed by at least 30 days, should the Obama administration agree to a permit. But pipeline builder Energy Transfer Partners said Tuesday the Army Corps was mistaken when it said the company had agreed to slow construction. The announcement came one week after President Obama said the Army Corps was looking at a possible “reroute” of the pipeline.

Puerto Rico: Protesters March Against Federal Oversight Board

And in Puerto Rico, activists took to the streets for an Election Day protest against a federally appointed oversight control board with sweeping powers to run Puerto Rico’s economy. Jocelyn Velázquez of the Promises Are Over movement helped organize the protest.

Jocelyn Velázquez: “Today we celebrate the elections in Puerto Rico, and it is a futile exercise, because there is an oversight control board imposed by the United States government that is going to take the transcendental decisions about our future. It was indispensable not only to take this demand to the national level, but take it to the international level, too. In Puerto Rico, there is no democracy and no participation. The electoral exercise is simply a pantomime of what a democracy is.”

On Tuesday, Puerto Ricans elected Ricardo Rosselló of the New Progressive Party as governor. Rosselló is a conservative who strongly favors U.S. statehood for Puerto Rico.

From the First African-American President to One Supported by the Ku Klux Klan: Trump Wins in Upset

Donald J. Trump was elected 45th president of the United States on Tuesday, defeating Hillary Rodham Clinton in a stunning upset that reverberated around the world. Trump carried at least 279 Electoral College votes to Clinton’s 218, although Trump appears to have narrowly lost the popular vote. Donald Trump has never held elective office. He opened his campaign in 2015 with a speech calling Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists. Trump has proposed banning all Muslims from entering the United States. He openly mocked his opponents, reporters, Asians, African Americans and the disabled. More than a dozen women have accused Trump of sexual assault, and he was heard in a 2005 videotape boasting about sexually assaulting women. Throughout the campaign, Trump drew the enthusiastic support of white nationalists and hate groups. Former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, who ran unsuccessfully for a U.S. Senate seat in Louisiana, cheered the outcome of the election. Duke tweeted, “This is one of the most exciting nights of my life -> make no mistake about it, our people have played a HUGE role in electing Trump! #MakeAmericaGreatAgain.”

AMY GOODMAN: Donald Trump has been elected the 45th president of the United States, defeating Hillary Clinton in a stunning upset that reverberated around the world. Trump carried at least 279 Electoral College votes to Clinton’s 218, although Trump appears to have narrowly lost the popular vote. As recently as yesterday, some pollsters were predicting Clinton had a 99 percent chance of winning the election, but that was before Trump pulled off victories in the key battleground states of Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Ohio.

Donald Trump, who has never held elective office, opened his campaign in 2015 with a speech calling Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists. He has proposed banning all Muslims from entering the United States. He openly mocked his opponents, reporters, Asians, African Americans and the disabled. More than a dozen women have accused Trump of sexual assault, and he can be heard in a 2005 videotape boasting about sexually assaulting women. Throughout the campaign, Donald Trump drew the enthusiastic support of the Ku Klux Klan and other white nationalist and hate groups. Former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, who ran unsuccessfully for a U.S. Senate seat in Louisiana, cheered the outcome of the election. Duke tweeted, “This is one of the most exciting nights of my life -> make no mistake about it, our people have played a HUGE role in electing Trump! #MAGA [Make America Great Again],” unquote.

Around 2:50 Eastern time this morning, Donald Trump took the stage at the New York Hilton Hotel victory party, saying he had received a phone call from Hillary Clinton congratulating him on the win.

PRESIDENT–ELECT DONALD TRUMP: I have just received a call from Secretary Clinton. She congratulated us—it’s about us—on our victory. And I congratulated her and her family on a very, very hard-fought campaign. I mean, she—she fought very hard. Hillary has worked very long and very hard over a long period of time, and we owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country. I mean that very sincerely.

Now it’s time for America to bind the wounds of division, have to get together. To all Republicans and Democrats and independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united people. It’s time. I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans, and this is so important to me. For those who have chosen not to support me in the past, of which there were a few people, I am reaching out to you for your guidance and your help, so that we can work together and unify our great country.

As I’ve said from the beginning, ours was not a campaign, but rather an incredible and great movement made up of millions of hard-working men and women who love their country and want a better, brighter future for themselves and for their family. It’s a movement comprised of Americans from all races, religions, backgrounds and beliefs, who want and expect our government to serve the people.

And serve the people it will. Working together, we will begin the urgent task of rebuilding our nation and renewing the American dream. I’ve spent my entire life in business, looking at the untapped potential in projects and in people all over the world. That is now what I want to do for our country.

AMY GOODMAN: We’ll have more on Donald Trump’s election as 45th president of the United States in a minute.

[snip]  (c. 52:00)

[snip]

[In her closing remarks, Amy Goodman announced that a second hour of coverage will be available at DemocracyNow.org.]  [9 NOV 2016]

Learn more at DEMOCRACY NOW!

*

ELECTION NIGHT COVERAGE, TUESDAY

KPFA NEWS—[8 NOV 2016]  [Three-hour broadcast from 9pm PST to midnight.]

[The end of the Democracy Now! Election Night coverage ended at 9pm PST with a music break and local station identifications, appeals for support, and local announcements.  KPFA Radio has Mark Mericle come on the air announcing Trump is polling stronger than expected.  And stocks are crashing in response to the uncertainty associated with a potential Trump presidency.]

MARK MERICLE:  (c. 0:01)  “Republican Donald Trump has won his point, at least.  He proved he can run a cooperative and a competitive presidential campaign on his own idiosyncratic terms.  He still may win the presidency itself yet tonight.  All the signs are pointing to it.  Hillary Clinton, who has not performed as expected in state after state, must win nearly all the battles, which remain to be decided.  It’s still too close to call.  But it’s a lot closer than almost all the experts predicted.

“And stock analysts are warning investors not to make any hasty decisions to buy or sell.  The Dow futures and Asian markets are crashing.

“Meanwhile, plenty of business still tonight in California:  17 propositions are on the statewide ballot.  ”

[News Headlines are read by Mark Mericle.  Mark Mericle interviews Mitch Perry(sp?) in Tampa, Florida with FloridaPolitics.com.  (21:19 PST)  Mericle continues updating the ‘horse race’.  (21:20 PST) (c. 0:20) Sharon Saboda(sp?) reports from Hillary Clinton camp.  Mark Mericle interview Gavin Newsom.]

[KPFA News Department’s Max Pringle reads KPFA News Headlines]

[(c. 21:35 PST) (c. 35:00)  Next report.]

[(c. 21:45 PST)  Mark Mericle speaks with Tom Campbell, former south bay congressperson.]

[(c. 21:47 PST) (c. 47:00)  Mark Mericle interviews Brit-sounding Matt Cherry, who led the campaign for Proposition 62, to abolish the death penalty in California.  SF Bay Area is trending in favour of Prop. 62, but the rest of California seems to be against Prop. 62.  Matt Cherry cautions premature calls, as the Los Angeles area has still not fully reported election results.  (c. 21:52)  Mark Mericle dismissed Matt Cherry.]

[(c. 21:52 PST)  Mark Mericle gets into local SF Bay Area measures.  Oakland Measure HH, the sugar soda tax seems to be winning.  Unidentified guest interviews Dianne Wolsen(sp?) on the sugar soda tax.]

[snip]

[(c. 22:02 PST)  News Headlines (read by Aileen Alfandary)]

[(c. 22:17 PST)  Mark Mericle dismisses Don Nielsen(sp?) on presidential election commentary.]

[(c. 22:17 PST)  Next guest, Mike Walinski (CA Teachers Association), on statewide ballot propositions.]

[(c. 22:25 PST)  KPFA reporter on local politician Jesse Arreguin poised to be the first Latino mayor of Berkeley, endorsed by Bernie Sanders.  Arreguin speaks with KPFA’s Mark Mericle.  (c. 22:31)  Mark Mericle dismisses Arreguin.]

[(c. 22:32)  Music break]

[(c. 23:23 PST)  Podesta asks the audience to call it a night, as there’s still a few states, which are too close to call tonight.  Podesta asks everyone to go home for the night and tries to pump up the crowd one last time.  But signs of cracks in the veneer are starting to show.]

Podesta announces that Hillary Clinton will not be speaking on Election Night

Trump Speech After 2016 November Election

[(c. 23:46 PST)  New VP Mike Pence gave a victory speech and introduced the new US president Donald Trump.]

[(c. 23:51 PST)  Donald Trump took the stage, announced that Hillary Clinton just telephoned him to concede the election, gave a bloated and vacuous victory speech. (c. 23:59 PST)  Trump acknowledged his campaign team and offered his concluding remarks, including thanks to Rudy Giuliani, Governor Chris Christy, Senator Jeff Sessions, Dr. Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee and family, General Mike Flynn(sp?), General Kellog(sp?), et al.]

[Three-hour broadcast of the KPFA News Department’s Election Night coverage ended at midnight, in terms of the time-blocks in which the radio broadcasts are archived.  But, in reality, Mark Mericle and the KPFA News Department stayed on the air past midnight with their coverage of the U.S. presidential election.  The regularly scheduled programme, No Other Radio Network, was preempted for a few minutes, as Trump’s victory speech carried on.]

[(c. 00:03 PST)  Donald Trump continued after somebody, apparently his campaign manager, announced him as the ‘next president of the United States’.  Trump acknowledged the Secret Service and “law enforcement”.  Trump promised to “do a great job”.]

PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP:  “And law enforcement in New York City, they’re here tonight.  [audience cheers and applauds]  These are spectacular people, sometimes underappreciated, unfortunately, but we appreciate them.  We know what they go through.  So, it’s been what they call a historic event.  But, to be really historic, we have to do a great job.  [Audience member: Yeah!]  And, I promise you, that I will not let you down.  We will do a great job.  We will do a great job.  I look very much forward to being your president.  And, hopefully, at the end of two years or three years or four years or, maybe, even eight years—[audience cheers]—you will say—so many worked so hard for us, but—you will say that that was something that you were really were very proud to do.  And I can only—[responding to voice in the crowd] thank you—that, while the campaign is over, our work on this movement is, now, really, just beginning. [audience cheers]  We’re going to—”  [(c. 00:04 PST) (c. 04:27)  Mark Mericle cut into the broadcast, as it seemed Donald Trump had no intention of wrapping up his victory speech anytime soon.  In fact, it went on about four more minutes.  (See video above for extended audio of Trump’s remarks.)  On free speech radio, KPFA News Department boss Mark Mericle read credits of KPFA News Department’s coverage of the 2016 November General Election coverage.]

MARK MERICLE:  “And that’s it, folks.  We do have a winner.  His name is Donald Trump.  That’s a wrap.  But this is not a movie.  That will conclude KPFA’s Election Night coverage.  Donald Trump has been elected the next president of the United States.  Hillary Clinton conceded to him in a telephone call tonight without speaking to the nation at all.

“Thanks for joining us tonight, and thanks to the team, that produced this coverage.  Aileen Alfandary was our executive producer and newscaster.  Christina Aanestad was our producer.  Assistant producer: Corrine Smith.  Janeen Edder(sp?) was our engineer.  Max Pringle: our newscaster.  Christopher Martinez and Mike Cohn(sp?) provided statewide returns.  Megan Sussman provided returns from San Francisco.  Sadia Malik(sp?) handled the returns in Alameda County.  Tia Monroe(sp?) covered the Berkeley mayor’s race.  Justin Gold covered Proposition 64, the legalise marijuana measure, which easily passed.  Sharon Sabodo(sp?) was with the Democratic Party in San Francisco.  Taylor Romine(sp?) with Scott Weiner For State Senate.  Simon Peltier was our sound editor.  China Armstrong covered the Richmond Progressive Alliance and the Richmond Rent Control measure.  Amber Miles was with the Jane Kim For State Senate race in San Francisco.  Ruben Sapphire was with the Green County in the East Bay.  Vic Bedoyin(sp?) covered the central valley races from Fresno.  Glen Reader(sp?) was on the Oakland Measure HH, the soda tax measure.  Karen Argood(sp?) produced the voices of voters.  And our technical producer tonight was Dev Ross.

“If you appreciated this coverage, here, on KPFA, and our coverage of the election season throughout the last 18 months and can help us continue this work, please go to kpfa.org and make whatever contribution you can.  I’m Mark Mericle.  Good night.  [theme music funk instrumental]  (c. 6:43)  [(c. 7:25)  Hosts of No Other Radio Network take over the radio trransmission with its abstract audio collages, reflecting a particularly jilted sense of American pride amongst the liberals and progressives in the wake of Trump’s demagogic electoral victory.  Abolish the Electoral College.]

(c. 2:59:59)

Learn more at KPFA NEWS.

*

Vote_12345PACIFICA RADIO—[8 NOV 2016]  [Four-hour broadcast from 5pm to 9pm PST, produced by Democracy Now!]

[Four-hour special broadcast is scheduled for Election Day, Tuesday, November 8, 2016, starting at 5pm (when the first time zone of election polls close on the east coast at 8pm eastern time zone).]

[(c. 62:00)  Second hour begins.  Florida overwhelmingly passes medical cannabis legalisation.]

[(c. 74:00)  Thomas Frank critiques Hillary Clinton’s type of “liberalism”.  But he, nevertheless, admits that he voted for Hillary Clinton.  And, saliently, he carefully avoids the word neoliberalism]

[(c. 76:00)  Dr. Malveaux tepidly enunciates the explosive word “neoliberalism”.  But she does so dismissively.]

[(c. 77:00)  Amy Goodman moves on to voter suppression issues, including a lawsuit invoking the Ku Klux Klan Act and its legacy.]

[Guest argues that a moral hunger exists among liberals to reclaim the moral centre.]

[(c. 95:00)  Dr. Malveaux, the indefatigable Hillary Clinton apologist, says she’s not voting against Donald Trump but for Hillary Clinton.]

[(c. 96:00)  Reverend Barber:  There wouldn’t be a Donald Trump without a backlash against Obama.  On the race question:  People have suffered for rights, “died and bled”.]

[(c. 92:00)  Next guests…Mitch Perry(sp?)]

[(c. 97:00)  AG gives Thomas Frank an opportunity to respond, as she ‘knows he must leave the broadcast soon.]

[(c. 1:13:00)  Greg Grandin…]

[(19:04 PST) (c. 2:04:00)  Eddie Glaude:  There are no surprises.]  [This sounds like a repeat of what was said, or broadcast, earlier at 17:00 PDT, or earlier in the day, during the regular Democracy Now! broadcast.]

[Dr. Malveaux chimes in, largely agreeing and perpetuating this subtle Democratic Party apologia.]

[(19:08 PST) (c. 2:08:00)  AG updates the two-party dictatorship ‘horse race’.]

[snip]

[(20:06 PST)  Allan Nairn alleges the FBI may be swinging the vote in favour of Trump.]

[(20:08 PST)  CBS News has just reported that Trump has won North Carolina.]

[(20:13 PST)  (c. 3:13:00) Sheriff Joe Arpaio(sp?) has lost his election.]

[(20:13 PST)  (c. 3:13:00)  Next guest:  ]

[(20:23 PST)  Dr. Malveaux cites Dr. Ralph Nader]

[(20:23 PST)  John Nichols cuts in.]

[(20:25 PST)  Alan Nairn cuts in.]

[(20:26 PST)  Amy Goodman cuts in, brings up other issues, including 84-year old Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who is facing criminal charges and facing possible jail time.]

[(20:27 PST)  Alan Nairn applauds justice being served against Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who once called for prisoners caloric intake to be reduced, so that they wouldn’t have the energy to resist prison injustices.]

[c. 20:28 PST]  Female pundit joins in.

[(20:40 PST)  John Nichols retorts.]

[Professor Eddie Glaude, Hillary Rodham Clinton supporter, chimes in.]

[(20:43 PST)  The other male guest chimes in.]

[(20:43 PST)  Dr. Malveaux chimes in.]

[Back and forth chatter within a narrow two-party paradigm continues.]

[(20:44 PST)  Dr. Malveaux invokes Russia fearmongering:  ‘Maybe Trump has dealings with Russia.’]

[Back and forth chatter within a narrow two-party paradigm continues.  No mention of the erosion of democracy, which only Dr. Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka’s Green Party campaign are countering.]

[(20:25 PST)  Amy Goodman cuts in to the horse race banter to introduce Wayne Barrett(sp?).  AG reports the corporate media has now reported Iowa coming in favour of Trump.  Barett invokes Bruce Springsteen, a ‘man of the people’, who was ‘never asked’ to campaign for Hillary Clinton.  Deluded liberals are reeling as Trump appears to be winning county after county and state after state on election day.]

[(20:48 PST)  Amy Goodman cuts in to report that ‘Donald Trump has just won the battleground state of Georgia’.]

[(20:54 PST)  Amy Goodman asks about Trump’s relationship with the FBI, including James Comey (b. 1960).]

[Democracy Now’s neoliberal rhetoric continues until the KPFA News Department cuts in, giving no word that the broadcast will not be returning to Democracy Now’s ‘expert’ panel.]

[(21:00 PST)  Democracy Now! team silently ends their broadcast transmission.]

[snip]

[snip]  (c. 3:59:59)

Learn more at PACIFICA RADIO.

*

FLASHPOINTS—[8 NOV 2016]   [Broadcast summary from kpfa.org broadcast archive page:  “Today on Flashpoints: Greg Palast joins us for an election daypost mortem on voter-intimidation. Also The Pipeline: How Marin and San Francisco Financial Firms Fuel the Fracking Boom. And we’ll see if we can get in a few listener phone calls.”]

[snip]

Learn more at FLASHPOINTS.

*

HARD KNOCK RADIO—[8 NOV 2016]  [During the first half hour, Davey D spoke with a centrist liberal, whose remarks largely bolstered a Democrat apologist line of argumentation in the context of the 2016 November general election.]

[snip]

[snip]  (c. 59:59)

Learn more at HARD KNOCK RADIO.

*

LETTERS AND POLITICS—[8 NOV 2016]  [“Election Commentary with Richard Wolff” broadcast preview summary (accessed at 10:21 PDT on 8 NOV 2016):  “with Dr. Richard Wolff, a renowned American Marxist economist, and Professor of Economics Emeritus, about the elections, the state of politics in the US and his ideas for rewriting the economic script in the country.  His latest book is Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism.”] 

[transcript pending]

[Messina called in during the call-in section and raised a bunch of issues, particularly the economic fact that we can end involuntary unemployment as we know it through an MMT-based job guarantee programme.  MMT stands for modern money theory, which, as taught at heterodox economics departments throughout the United States, such as at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, shows us how we have monetary sovereignty, which allows us to use modern money for public purpose.  Your author’s former professor, Dr. Stephanie Kelton, for example, shows us that all money exists as an IOU.  This means, technically, taxes don’t pay for federal spending.  They pay for state spending, but not federal spending.  Dr. Richard Wolff agreed that everything was “correct”.  But he didn’t really delve into, or engage with, the issue of the MMT-based job guarantee programme because it seems to clash with his particular variety of Marxian ideology.]

[snip]  (c. 59:59)

Learn more at LETTERS AND POLITICS.

*

DEMOCRACY NOW!—[8 NOV 2016]  [Listen to this radio broadcast here; or view the TV version here.]

[Democracy Now! featured coverage of the many local ballot measures throughout the nation, apparently the most in any general election in recent history.  Many of the local ballot measures involve minimum wage laws, local revenue needs, medicinal (and so-called non-medicinal) cannabis sales, sin taxes, and other health care initiatives.]

[(c. 27:00)  Inequality.org]

[(c. 30:00)  Graham Nash music break/local station identifications and announcements]

[Rolling Stone’s Greg Palast (author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy) reported from the ‘battleground’ state of Ohio.  Greg Palast has also reported for free speech KPFA Radio’s Flashpoints for its Election Protection series during the 2016 presidential election.]

[On charges of ‘double-voting’ found through ‘cross-checking’ of ballots with similar names as a pretense for purging voters of colour from voter rolls.  At least one million voters are being deleted from the voter rolls; their ballots are being invalidated.  Audit functions are being turned off in Ohio.]

[(c. 45:00)  Amy Goodman dismisses Greg Palast]

[(c. 45:30)  music break/local station identifications and announcements/on KPFA, Christina Aanestad appeals for listener donations]

[On upgrading our democratic process:  abolishing the electoral college; National Popular Vote Interstate Compact; ranked-choice voting (or instant run-off voting); proportional representation.]  (c. 51:00)

[Guest from Fair Vote.]

[(c. 55:00)  Archive clip from Amy Goodman’s ambush interview of Bill Clinton on the political bankruptcy of the two-party system]

[snip]  (c. 59:59)

Learn more at DEMOCRACY NOW!.

***

ENDNOTES

[1]  For example, see the following articles:

  • “The Stolen Presidential Elections” by Michael Parenti, MichaelParenti.org, May 2007 (updated version)
  • “How the 2004 Presidential ‘Election’ Was Stolen by George W. Bush” by Eric Zuesse, 25 OCT 2016.

***

[‘ranked-choice ballot’ image by source, used via fair use. ]

[‘Model 100 voting machine’ by Messina]

[8 NOV 2016]

[Last modified 17:37 PST  10 NOV 2016]

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“How the 2004 Presidential ‘Election’ Was Stolen by George W. Bush” by Eric Zuesse

25 Tue Oct 2016

Posted by ztnh in Anti-Totalitarianism, Democracy Deferred, History, Political Science

≈ Leave a comment

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Eric Zuesse, Washington's Blog

Vote_12345LUMPENPROLETARIAT   Eric Zuesse is an investigative historian, who has written a number of books.  He is a reporter and commentator for Huffington Post and for Business Insider.  He has newly published an excellent article for Washington’s Blog from his personal archives, entitled “How the 2004 Presidential ‘Election’ Was Stolen by George W. Bush“.  With investigative journalists, such as Greg Palast (The Best Democracy Money Can Buy) reporting extensively on voter suppression, election tampering and fraud, and sundry problems with our elections, including in 2016, it’s important to know our history, so that we don’t continue to make the same mistakes. [1]

Messina

***

ceres-ca-voting-machine-model-100-optical-scanner-img_20161108_170017WASHINGTON’S BLOG—[25 OCT 2016]  How the 2004 Presidential Election Was Stolen by George W. Bush

Eric Zuesse

In 2006, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. headlined at Rolling Stone “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” and he presented an argument that it had been — by George W. Bush. Below is the argument that I had already prepared to the same effect but never (until now) sought to publish:

Of course, Ohio was the critical state in the 2004 U.S. Presidential election. Concerning specifically the theft of the Ohio election, such articles as www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/914 “Stealing Votes in Columbus,” by Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D., on November 23rd, made manifestly clear just how much the U.S. major media were lying to say that the 2004 U.S. Presidential election was honest and fair. A detailed analysis was presented there of the politicized allocation by Republicans of voting machines in one Ohio city. Phillips found such things as: “Of the 60 precincts with the fewest voting machines per registered voter, only 5 were won by Bush, and 55 were won by Kerry.” In other words, people in Kerry precincts were shortchanged on voting machines; the votes were suppressed there, but not in Bush precincts. Was this supposed to be coincidence? Statistical studies had already been performed of some of 2004’s electoral anomalies and found that they almost certainly weren’t coincidence. The U.S. major media simply ignored them anyway. In his summation at the end, Phillips said: “Thus I conclude that the withholding of voting machines from predominantly Democratic wards in the City of Columbus cost John Kerry upwards of 17,000 votes.” Other articles at the same freepress.org website provided first-person testimony as to how this politicized allocation of voting machines might very well have thrown the “election” to Bush. For example, www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/886 “Hearings on Ohio Voting Put 2004 Election in Doubt,” by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, includes such testimony as this from a voter in Columbus:

“What I saw was voter intimidation in the form of city employees that were sent in to stop illegal parking. Now, in Driving Park Rec Center there are less than 50 legal parking spots, and there were literally hundreds and hundreds of voters there, and I estimated at least 70 percent of the people were illegally parked in the grass around the perimeter, … and two city employees drove up in a city truck and said that they had been sent there to stop illegal parking, and they went so far as to harass at least a couple of voters that I saw. … I saw 15 people who left because the line was too long. The lines inside were anywhere from 2½ to 5 hours.” Frustrated Democratic election officials presented testimony at http://freepress.org/images/departments/4254PublicHearing “Public Hearing, New Faith Baptist Church … November 13, 2004.” One speaker was Joe Popich, Kerry/Edwards field organizer in Fairfield and Perry Counties. On November 4th, he had visited the Perry County Board of Elections to audit the count, and found “a total of 393 votes that should be attributed to that precinct. However, the Board of Elections is attributing 96 more votes to that precinct than what this log book reflects.”

Richard Hayes Phillips posted to the internet an “AFFIDAVIT December 10, 2004,” summarizing the evidence which his statistical analyses, thus far, of the vote-counts in Ohio, had provided indicating systematic fraud. The eighth item listed was as follows:

“8. There are still 92,672 uncounted votes in Ohio, exclusive of any uncounted provisional ballots. According to unofficial results provided by the Ohio Secretary of State, there were 5,574,476 ballots cast, and 5,481,804 votes counted, which leaves 92,672 regular ballots (1.66%) still uncounted. The official results, now certified, do not include these ballots, but differ from the unofficial results only in the addition of provisional ballots and some absentee ballots to the tally. In Montgomery and Hamilton counties, these uncounted votes come disproportionately from precincts that voted overwhelmingly for John Kerry. In Montgomery County there are 47 precincts, all of them in Dayton, where the percentage of uncounted ballots is 4% or more. Kerry won all 47 of these precincts, by a margin of 7 to 1 in the aggregate. County wide in Montgomery County, the percentage of uncounted ballots was 1.70%. In Hamilton County there are 26 precincts, 22 of them in Cincinnati, where the percentage of uncounted ballots is 8% or more. Kerry won all 26 of these precincts, by a margin of 10 to 1 in the aggregate. Altogether there are 86 precincts in Cincinnati where the percentage of uncounted ballots is 4% or more. Kerry won 85 of these precincts, by a margin of 5 to 1 in the aggregate. County wide in Hamilton County, the percentage of uncounted ballots was 2.34%. Although I have not yet had time to examine similar data for Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo, Akron, Youngstown, Canton, or elsewhere, it is possible that the same pattern will emerge in these cities as well. If these 92,672 uncounted votes were cast for Kerry by a 5 to 1 margin, this would reduce the statewide margin between the candidates by another 61,781 votes.”

The national news media ignored all of Dr. Phillips’s analyses and findings.

Ohio’s electors in the electoral college met on December 13th to vote George W. Bush into a second term.

A story that finally did receive some slight national coverage in the major media appeared just two days later, on December 15th, in The New York Times, where Tom Zeller Jr., headlined “Lawmaker Seeks Inquiry into Ohio Vote.” He reported that, “The ranking Democratic member of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, plans to ask the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a county prosecutor in Ohio today to explore ‘inappropriate and likely illegal election tampering’ in at least one and perhaps several Ohio counties.” The key documents and more details of the story were simultaneously posted on the internet at www.truthout.org/docs_04/121604Z.shtml#1, http://rawstory.com/exclusives/kerry_ohio_suit_1215.php, http://web.archive.org/web/20080725103331/http://rawstory.com/exclusives/programmer_1215.php, http://moritzlaw.osu/electionlaw/key-recounts.html, and a few other places. Most important was a sworn affidavit from Sherole Eaton, a Deputy Director of the Hocking County, Ohio, Board of Elections. She had filed it on December 13th in support of an ongoing lawsuit for an Ohio vote recount. Her affidavit is part of http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/docs/Yost/notice2.pdf. She described there how a technician from Triad Election Systems, which had written the software and manufactured the computers that counted the votes — they made the “tabulators” — for 41 of the state’s 88 counties, entered her office on December 10th, “to check out your tabulator.” She followed him to the tabulator, and, “He said that the battery in the computer was dead and that the stored information was gone. He said that he could put a patch on it and fix it.” She saw him disassemble the computer. He then advised her “how to post a ‘cheat sheet’ on the wall so that only the board members and staff would know about it and what the codes meant so the count would come out perfect and we wouldn’t have to do a full hand recount of the county.”

Rep. Conyers on the 15th delivered to both the FBI special agent in charge in Ohio, and the Hocking County Prosecutor, a letter requesting an investigation into Eaton’s allegations. In this letter, posted at http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/docs/Yost/notice2.pdf, he noted that, “Triad is controlled by the Rapp family, and its founder Tod A. Rapp has been a constant contributor to Republican causes.” Congressman Conyers also alleged that, “Triad officials have been, or are in the process of” manipulating tabulators “in several other counties in Ohio.” This letter, furthermore, listed numerous Ohio and federal laws prohibiting what the Triad technician was alleged by Ms. Eaton to have done.

The same day, December 15th, the Washington Post headlined “Several Factors Contributed to ‘Lost’ Voters in Ohio,” and offered the first-ever American major-media coverage of the rigging of the election in Ohio, including: “After the election, local political activists seeking a recount analyzed how Franklin County officials distributed voting machines. They found that 27 of the 30 wards with the most machines per registered voter showed majorities for Bush. At the other end of the spectrum, six of the seven wards with the fewest machines delivered large margins for Kerry.” The Republican Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell (who was also the co-chairman of the Bush/Cheney campaign in Ohio) had arranged for voting machines to be allocated throughout the state so as to produce short lines in Republican precincts and long lines in Democratic ones; and he introduced, in addition, other rules that similarly discouraged or disallowed far more votes in Democratic than in Republican districts. One Democrat on voting-day who had waited out her line for long enough a time to vote was here quoted as saying, “A lot of people left in the four hours I waited. … A lot of them were young black men who were saying over and over: ‘We knew this would happen.’”

The best summary of the electoral irregularities in Ohio was provided on December 17th by Marshall Helmenberger of the Timberjay News, a weekly newspaper serving northern Minnesota. At www.timberjay.com/current.php?article=1365, he headlined “Election Lawsuit Gathering Steam in Mainstream Media,” and reported that until Congressman Conyers’s hearings on the electoral irregularities in Ohio, “Questions about the vote in Ohio and elsewhere have been rampant on the Internet ever since Nov. 2, but the mainstream media has been slow to pick up on this story — until this week.” He went on to note:

“The questions about Ohio have only been exacerbated by the reaction of that state’s Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, who, like Katherine Harris in Florida four years ago, headed Bush’s re-election effort in Ohio. Blackwell has stonewalled Conyers’ investigation and has failed to respond to inquiries from Kerry campaign lawyers. Blackwell may have also violated Ohio law last week when he ordered that voting records in one Ohio county be locked down, preventing citizen investigators from examining them. Ohio law is explicit that such records are open to public inspection.”

The same day as that summary, December 17th, the Green Party, which had initiated and paid for the recount of votes in Ohio, issued a press release headlined “Ohio Election Officials Obstruct Recount,” and listed several ways in which, as they alleged, “Ohio election officials are violating both the spirit and the letter of the law governing the recount.” For example, “In the vast majority of counties, election officials have pre-selected precincts to be sampled, rather than choose them randomly as required by law.”

Two days later, www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/997 posted “The United States of Ukraine? Exit Polls Leave Little Doubt that in a Free and Fair Election John Kerry Would Have Won both the Electoral College and the Popular Vote.” This detailed statistical analysis, by Ron Baiman, from the University of Illinois, concluded, as did the November 11th study by Steven F. Freeman, that the vote-count variances from the exit polls were astronomically unlikely in any other scenario  than “election fraud and/or discriminatory voter suppression … that is contrary to what would have occurred in a free and fair election.”

Three days after this, on December 22nd, www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1015 reported that Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell’s “office told the attorneys issuing the notice of deposition and subpoena that Blackwell will not testify under oath” about his actions.

On Christmas Eve, Werner Lange at www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1032 headlined about “Kerry Votes Switched to Bush and Ballots pre-Punched for Bush,” and also quoted testimony from a public hearing held on December 21st at the Warren-Trumbull Public Library in the Mahoning Valley. Among the irregularities noted were these:

“The unusually high number of Ohio votes discarded for double-punching remains unexplained. A possible reason was shared at this hearing by a voter from Cuyahoga County who stated that she inspected her paper ballot prior to voting and was shocked to notice that it was pre-punched for Bush.  She also noticed another ballot had the same tampering problem. A voter from Niles came to the polls and noticed someone else had signed their name into her signature box. A voter in Precinct D of Warren Township came to the polls and discovered that someone else had already voted in her name. John Williams of Niles stated that after the election officials in Mahoning County refused to give him a precinct breakdown of the vote. Russ Buckbee noted that there seems to have been a pattern of expunging inactive registered voters from inner-city precincts but not the suburbs. Several testifiers complained about long lines at the polls causing many voters to leave in frustration. Maureen Lauer-Gatta, who observed the vote recount in Trumbull County, wondered how many votes where lost due to a last-minute change of voting sites on Election Day itself. She said there were ‘several’ such voting site changes on November 2. Ariel Vegosan, who observed the vote recount in Mahoning County, noticed baskets full of votes not counted and wondered if there were ‘missing baskets of votes’ in Mahoning County. She called this to the attention of election officials who seemed unconcerned about this irregularity. … 

“In Westlake the general climate of the roving bands of partisan police officers backed by Republican public officials who were threatening Democratic supporters and poll workers, removing legally posted Democratic messages, and chasing Democratic supporters from the polling places with the threat of arrest, all of this amounted to a fraud. The process was also tainted at the poll with militant Bush supporters serving as the Board of Election Poll Judges.

“Finally, note was taken at the hearing of the curious fact that exit polls showed Kerry with a 4.2% lead over Bush in Ohio, but the vote results gave Bush an alleged 2.5% victory over Kerry, a 6.7% final vote tally percentage shift toward Bush. The chances of this enormous shift being legitimate and the exit polls so wrong are infinitesimal. Another explanation is much more likely, plausible and real. It was clearly expressed well before this rigged election by the CEO of Diebold, Walden O’Dell, brother of the top executive at ES&S [another electronic voting-machine manufacturer]: ‘I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral vote to the President next year.’”

The same day, December 24th, The New York Times bannered on its front page “Voting Problems in Ohio Call for Overhaul.” This story described “problems,” definitely excluding anything that might indicate fraud. It closed by quoting a “spokesman for the Ohio Democratic Party” as saying, “Irregularities that are normally overlooked have become the focal point of attention this year. I just can’t see those people walking away satisfied.” These non-Republicans who were complaining of the need for investigations of the election’s irregularities were being blamed by this Democrat, as if they were cranks, and as if the irregularities they reported were necessarily inconsequential or non-existent. The impression the mainstream U.S. press communicated was that this election had been a democratic, thoroughly honest, but somewhat chaotic, electoral process, which was simply overwhelmed by too many voters coming to the polls.

On Christmas day, Richard Hayes Phillips, at http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1037, headlined about “Another Third Rate Burglary,” hearkening back to Watergate. He had now noticed for the first time that a story that was reported in the Toledo Blade months earlier, on October 13th, might help explain the stunningly low Democratic turnout that Phillips previously noted to have occurred in Lucas County. This Blade story was headlined “Thieves Hit Democratic Party Offices; Computers Containing Sensitive Data Removed.” These thieves had shattered a window during the night, and they stole a computer that contained all the information for the county’s crucial Democratic get-out-the-vote operation. Registered Democrats had to be informed, for example, of such things as the location of their polling places, because the Republican officials were changing the locations of polling places in predominantly Democratic precincts. The lists and phone numbers of these voters were now gone. The thieves left untouched other computers, the petty cash box, and other valuables. The only discernable motive was to suppress this county’s Democratic vote, which they succeeded at doing, stunningly well, to judge by the extraordinarily low Democratic turnouts in these precincts.

Probably those thieves were paid by the Republican Party and therefore had no particular interest in stealing anything else. Their work was part of a nationwide operation. For example, on 1 July 2004, the AP headlined “Former GOP Consultant Pleads Guilty to Jamming Democratic Phones on Election Day,” and reported, “The former head of a Republican consulting group has pleaded guilty to jamming Democratic telephone lines in several New Hampshire cities on Election Day two years ago.” This man’s operatives had flooded Democratic Party phone lines. “The lines that were jammed were set up so voters could call for rides to the polls. Democrats say the jamming was an organized statewide effort that may even have affected the outcome of some local races.” In fact, it might have tipped the tight important race between Democratic “Gov. Jeanne Shaheen and GOP Rep. John E. Sununu, who won by fewer than 20,000 votes,” so that Sununu was now New Hampshire’s new Senator (just as his father — CNP’er John H. Sununu — had previously been the state’s Governor, prior to his becoming George H.W. Bush’s Chief of Staff in the White House). Furthermore, “Republicans acknowledged last year that they hired” this consultant “for telemarketing services in 2002.” Then, on 9 February 2005, the Washington Post headlined “Former GOP Consultant Sentenced to Prison,” and reported that this consultant “was the first to be sentenced of three men charged after the revelation that Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts in Manchester, Nashua, Rochester and Claremont were peppered with more than 800 computer-generated calls over a period of 90 minutes on the morning of Nov. 5, 2002. Firefighters in Manchester, who were offering rides to the polls independently of the two parties, were also targeted, prosecutors said.” The state Democratic chairman explained, “They were trying to make it difficult for seniors and people who were economically depressed to get to vote.” This operation had itself been organized on a national level, and involved people in Virginia, Idaho, and other states. “Jim Tobin of Bangor, Maine, who resigned in October as New England regional chairman of President Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, has been charged.” The man convicted on that particular day was Allen Raymond, and his lawyer was quoted: “‘This was not Allen Raymond’s idea,’ he said, according to AP. ‘Tobin called on Raymond to do this.’” Although the specific tactic used in this “dirty trick” was different than was employed in Lucas County Ohio, the objective was the same, and in both instances paid thugs were hired by the Republican Party, so as to prevent enough Democrats from voting, to throw the political race to the Republican candidate. In fact, on 16 December 2005, the AP reported that, “A jury yesterday convicted a former national Republican official … for his role in a phone-jamming plot against New Hampshire Democrats on Election Day 2002.” This official was Tobin. On 6 February 2006, John DiStaso of the Manchester Union-Leader headlined “Tobin Legal Defense May Total $2.5 million” and DiStasio reported that apparently this entire huge legal bill was being paid by the Republican National Committee in Washington DC. The following month, on March 23rd, DiStaso reported that, “In the days before and after the state Republican Party’s 2002 Election Day phone-jamming scheme, the man who now chairs the Republican National Committee was the White House director of political affairs. … Court records show Ken Mehlman’s office [that very office in the White House] received more than 75 telephone calls from now-convicted phone-jam conspirator James Tobin from Sept. 30 to Nov. 22 of that year.” Then, on April 10th, the AP headlined “Phone-Jamming Records Point to White House,” and reported that, “Key figures in a phone-jamming scheme to keep New Hampshire Democrats from voting in 2002 had regular contact with the White House.” A week later, on April 17th, Adam Cohen’s “Editorial Observer” column in The New York Times headlined “A Small-Time Crime With Hints of Big-Time Connections Lights Up the Net,” and summarized this case’s “eerie parallels” to the 1972 Watergate burglary case which brought down Richard Nixon. Among the factors Cohen discussed was “3. The Return of ‘follow the money.’ (As if it ever left.) New Hampshire Democrats pored over the filings of the New Hampshire Republican Party and found three contributions for $5,000 each, all shortly before the election. One was from Americans for a Republican Majority, Tom DeLay’s political action committee. The other two were from the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, tribes that were clients of Jack Abramoff. Those checks add up almost exactly to the cost of the phone jamming.” On 17 May 2006, Tobin ended up being sentenced to prison for only 10 months, for “harassment by telephone.” But actually, he had stolen an election, for John E. Sununu, to the U.S. Senate. As the AP reported, on the day of Tobin’s sentencing, “Republican John Sununu defeated then-Gov. Jeanne Shaheen for the Senate that day in what had been considered a cliffhanger.” One of the reasons George W. Bush had cared so much about pulling off a victory for the young Sununu was that George H.W. Bush’s Chief of Staff had been “E.’s” father, John H. Sununu. It’s an aristocratic club up there, and it hits hard.

On 7 July 2006, rawstory.com headlined “Man Indicted in Phone Jamming Case Will Argue Administration Approved Election Scheme,” and John Byrne reported that, “The fourth man indicted in a New Hampshire phone-jamming scheme … will argue at trial that the Bush Administration and the national Republican Party gave their approval to the plan, according to a motion filed by his attorney.” This defendant, Shaun Hansen, had been the owner of the company which placed the hang-up calls. His “Notice of Affirmative Defenses” stated “that the government, or an agent thereof, actually induced the offenses with which Mr. Hansen is charged, and which Mr. Hansen was not otherwise predisposed to commit.” Hansen alleged “‘derivative entrapment’ in which the government uses a private party as its agent.” He alleged that “he relied in good faith upon the advice of counsel” that these acts were legal, and he said “that he had been assured by Messrs. Allen Raymond [the President of GOP Marketplace] and Chris Cupit [the VP of GOP Marketplace] that these acts had been vetted by an attorney and were completely legal.” He referred to “a conference call in which Messrs. Raymond and Cupit and an unknown ‘attorney’ provided further assurances that the acts which they and their business were contracted to perform in November 2002 were completely legal.” So, allegedly, Tobin had used Raymond as a shield from legal liability, and Raymond had used Hansen as a shield. But both Tobin and Raymond received short prison sentences for their participation in a “conspiracy.” Hansen was now saying that he had been duped, and that he had not participated willingly in this conspiracy. www.talkingpointsmemo.com/phonejamming.php presents a “TPM NH Phone Jamming Timeline,” which details the evolution of this operation, starting with a request, in October 2002, by Charles McGee, the Executive Director of the New Hampshire Republican State Committee, to the Party’s New England Regional Director James Tobin, “to hire a phone services company to jam Democratic phone banks on Election Day.” Since Tobin was also the Bush-Cheney New England Chairman, and since John E. Sununu was a close friend of both Bush and Cheney, it’s highly likely that Tobin communicated this request to the White House before acting upon it. Furthermore, Tobin was a major fundraiser for George W. Bush — a Bush “Ranger.” Perhaps if Tobin had testified against the President — or even against the President’s aides — Tobin would have received a stiffer sentence than just the ten months in prison and $10,000 fine he got. Tobin had faced up to 7 years in prison and a $500,000 fine, and so he was treated very leniently for what he had done. The judge who gave out that light sentence was a Republican: Steven McAuliffe, of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire. He had been appointed to this court in 1992 by President George Herbert Walker Bush. The husband of Challenger-disaster astronaut Christa McAuliffe, he had earlier been appointed (in 1986) by John H. Sununu as a trustee of the University of New Hampshire. He owed his political career to the two families who benefited from Tobin’s crimes. In justifying the light sentence, this gangster judge said to Tobin, in court, “You’ve led an otherwise exemplary life” — as if that criminal sentence were for the man, and not for the crimes which had been committed. Furthermore, only friends, no enemies, of Tobin were brought into court to testify as to Tobin’s supposedly “exemplary character.” Of course, none of the Democratic voters whose participation in a supposed “democracy” was stolen from them by him, nor any of their Democratic candidates such as John E. Sununu’s opponent Jean Shaheen, testified about this tyrant-enabler’s “character.” (In fact, Tobin was actually on record as demanding that his victims must have no role in his trial. On 17 May 2005, the AP headlined, from Concord, “Former GOP Official Says Grand Jury Included Democrats,” and reported: “The grand jury ‘included purported victims of the alleged scheme — Democrats,’ said a motion filed by Tobin. … ‘The government must demonstrate that it properly screened the grand jury to prevent bias, and if it cannot or will not do so, the indictment must be dismissed,’ the motion said.” He demanded that only Republicans and independents be seated in judgment of his crimes. His “jury of peers” could include his fellow criminals, but none of his victims. This outrageous demand was dismissed. Such was this man the judge considered to be of “exemplary character.”) And Tobin’s supposed “prosecutor,” in Republican New Hampshire, requested only a one-year sentence for these crimes. The entire proceedings were rigged, and all that Tobin had to do in order to keep them rigged in his favor was to stay mum about the White House’s involvement. Shortly before Tobin’s brief sentence was set to begin, an all-Republican three-judge panel ordered the sentence suspended until Tobin’s appeals were completed; they ordered this, despite Judge McAuliffe’s having rejected those appeals as presenting no “substantial question of law or fact.” McAuliffe wasn’t enough of a gangster judge to suit this White House. Lower-class criminals, who commit crimes against only a single person instead of against millions and even against democracy, enjoy no such special favors, but Republicans grant such privileges to only their colleagues in crime.

George W. Bush’s aristocratic thugs long operated mostly out of the limelight of America’s major “news” media, which, in fact, right after the 2004 “election,” prominently parroted Bush’s “electoral mandate,” rather than reporting at all on how he had stolen the 2004 election. Americans were fooled into thinking that a stolen “election” can occur only in places such as Ukraine.

But actually, there was good reason even on the day of the 2 November 2004 election, to suspect that the ‘election’ had actually been stolen in Ohio. International Data Group News Service headlined on November 3rd, “Group Tallies More than 1,100 E-Voting Glitches” and Grant Gross reported that, “U.S. voters calling in to a toll-free number had reported more than 1,100 separate incidents of problems with electronic voting machines and other voting technologies by late Tuesday during the nationwide election. In more than 30 reported cases, when voters reviewed their choices before finalizing them, an electronic voting machine indicated they had voted for a different candidate. E-voting backers called the number of reported problems minor in the context of almost 50 million U.S. voters projected to use e-voting machines on Tuesday. In a majority of cases where machines allegedly recorded a wrong vote, votes were taken away from Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, or a Democratic candidate in another race, and given to Republican President George Bush or another Republican candidate, said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).”

On 27 December 2004, as reported by Andrew Welsh-Huggins of the AP, “Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell has requested a protective order to prevent him from being interviewed as part of an unusual court challenge of the presidential vote.” This action by Blackwell followed up his promise on the 22nd to refuse testifying under oath about the election. Also on the 27th, William Rivers Pitt, at www.truthout.org/docs_04/printer_122804V.shtml, headlined “Kerry Files Motion to Protect Ohio Vote Evidence,” and reported that, “This afternoon, an attorney representing the Kerry/Edwards presidential campaign filed two important motions to preserve and augment evidence of alleged election fraud in the November election.” The purpose of these legal actions was to increase the likelihood of honesty in a total recount of Ohio’s votes, in the event that such a hand-recount were to be authorized by the Ohio Supreme Court.

The following day, the Ohio hand recount of the votes in just a few sample precincts (which were supposed to have been randomly selected for these hand recounts, but weren’t) confirmed Bush’s “electoral victory.” As Albert Salvato noted in The New York Times on the 29th, a spokesman for the Ohio Democratic Party said, of this hand recount, “that county elections officials sometimes ignored requests by recount observers to see rejected absentee and provisional ballots, and were not informed about procedures used to recount and reject ballots,” and, “that in one county, Clermont County, in southwest Ohio, numerous complaints were filed by Democrats and the two independent parties when access to recount procedures was ignored.” The important deception in this “news” report was its repeated fallacious implication that all of the millions of votes in Ohio were hand recounted. For example, it said: “The recount of Ohio’s 88 counties showed that Senator John Kerry gained 734 votes,” out of the 5.7 million votes that were recorded in Ohio. However, in fact, only approximately 3% of Ohio’s votes were hand recounted; and, because this was not a random recount as required, few of those machine-recounted votes had been wrongly recorded by these machines, and so there was no complete hand recount. In other words, the efforts by Triad Governmental Systems, and by the other Republicans, to avoid a complete hand recount of the vote in Ohio, were successful. For all intents and purposes, this “recount” of the entire state consisted of little more than running the ballots once again through the same possibly rigged voting machines that had previously produced Bush’s “Ohio victory.” Thus, there was no hand-count of the state’s 5.7 million votes. And, it’s important to note, no review was performed of the misallocation of voting machines, away from Democratic, and toward Republican, precincts, nor of the numerous other election-rigging activities. So, the “recount” that was performed was actually a show, like the old-time Soviet “show trials,” put on just to fool the faithful — which it did. However, the Libertarian and Green Parties, which had jointly financed the $113,600 official cost of the “recount,” were outraged that the state had ripped them off.

Also on the 29th, Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas J. Moyer, who had run as a Republican on the same 2004 Ohio ballot as did George W. Bush, crucially threw out the affidavit by Sherole Eaton, and claimed that its allegations were mere “hearsay.” He ignored the fact that Eaton there asserted she had personally witnessed the Triad computer technician recommend a “cheat sheet” and change the hard drive on the voting tabulator, both in violation of Ohio law. Moyer could have brought Eaton and the technician into court to testify under oath, but chose to simply dismiss the case, which also effectively eliminated Senator Kerry’s motion which had been filed on the 27th.

http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2004_12_26_cannonfire_archive.html critiqued Moyer’s decision in detail. However, any Democratic politician who would have publicly questioned the judge’s decision would have been jeered by the press: that would have been political suicide.

On 3 January 2005, David Swanson of the International Labor Communications Association, at www.ilcaonline.org/print.php?sid=1398, headlined “Media Whites Out Vote Fraud,” and documented the lockstep performance of the U.S. “news” media, who were deceiving the American public to hide the fraudulence of Bush’s 2004 “election.” Anyone who believes that the United States possesses a free press should read Swanson’s article, so as to become disabused of that faith-based lie. His article rips the propaganda mask right off of America’s new, fascist, government.

Typical of this deception was the editorial on January 7th by the Las Vegas Review-Journal. It was headlined, contemptuous of the millions of Democrats whose opportunity to vote, or else to have their vote registered, had been robbed from them, “‘Stolen Election’ Lives.” This editorial said: “Democrats used the ceremonial congressional count of the country’s electoral votes Thursday as a chance to rise and complain about missing voting machines, unusually long lines and other problems they insist plagued some Ohio voting districts (many in minority neighborhoods) on Nov. 2. In the end, Mr. Bush carried Ohio by 118,000 votes, far more than even the most inspired hallucinator could argue had been ‘stolen’ through any of the listed inconveniences.” To which a scientist might respond, noting that word “any”: “ — But hardly to all of the listed ‘inconveniences,’ as the statistical analyses, by Ron Baiman, by Steven F. Freeman, and by Richard Hayes Phillips, had clearly shown.  And why should electoral fraud be called merely ‘inconvenient,’ and each of its many thousands of individual instances only a ‘problem’ instead of a ‘crime’? Is such propagandistic ‘journalism’ not itself a participation in fascism? And, even if this editorialist were right, then, still, what would have been wrong with the appointment of an independent investigation of these matters, which is all that the petitioners were requesting?”

Because the Republican thugs blocked a fair election, and then blocked an independent investigation of the election, historians will never know whether George W. Bush was elected President on 2 November 2004, and the only scientific assumption we can make on the question is that he and his loyal Republican operatives rigged the election so pervasively that his second term of office was illegitimate and criminal, regardless of whether or not most voters attempted on November 2nd to register their votes for him. The crime consisted of what Bush and his Republican Party did to rig the election, not of its outcome — which was simply a tragedy. Whether or not the crime caused the tragedy, the crime was nonetheless a crime. Any historian who would assert that Bush legitimately won the U.S. Presidency in 2004 would be a religionist, not a scientist — there’s no evidence supporting that view, and numerous laws were undoubtedly broken in order for Bush to achieve his victory. The only basis upon which one could assert that Bush did it legitimately would be faith — lots of faith, about lots of things. Moreover, this would be faith in a President who routinely lied and distorted, and whose 2004 campaign was unquestionably riddled with abuse of power in order to prevent a fair and honest election from occurring. This would therefore be faith in assumptions that have already been proven false.

On 5 January 2005, Congressman John Conyers, the Ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, issued a 102-page report, “Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio,” which was linked, and well summarized and reviewed, by Joseph Cannon at http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2005_01_02_cannonfire_archive.html. Conyers’s report www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/ohiostatusrept1505.pdf cited numerous violations of both federal and Ohio laws by Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell and by other Republican officials in this election. Sometimes, the cited official had violated laws or directives from other Republican officials, such as from Blackwell himself, or else the 2000 Bush v. Gore decision by the Republican U.S. Supreme Court. Sometimes, Blackwell himself violated his own directives, such as his 7 September 2004 directive to county boards of elections mandating rejection of voter-registration forms that weren’t printed on uncoated thick 80-pound paper. Despite his order, “An Ohio lawyer, John Stopa, noted that voter registration forms obtained at Blackwell’s office were printed on 60-pound paper. An election board official stated he obtained 70-pound weight forms from Blackwell’s office.” This Blackwell directive resulted in rejections of unknown thousands of voter registrations. However, some counties ignored the directive, and the Bush v. Gore decision had ruled that such non-uniformity violates the Equal Protection provision of the U.S. Constitution. Conyers’s report said, “Secretary of State Blackwell has refused to answer any questions concerning these matters posed to him by Ranking Member Conyers and 11 other Members of the Judiciary Committee on December 2, 2004.”

The team of international observers of America’s 2004 Presidential election weren’t more sanguine about what had occurred. On 31 March 2005, these international electoral observers, the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, issued their “Election Observation Mission Final Report,” and said that, “Lack of observer access to the election process, both international and domestic, including at polling station level, is contrary to OSCE commitments [by the U.S. and all member governments], and limited the possibility of the OSCE EOM to comment more fully on the election process.” In other words: The U.S. had failed to meet the basic conditions of a democracy.

In August 2005, the Democratic Party issued a study it had commissioned from Dr. Walter Mebane Jr. of Cornell University, “Voting Machine Allocation in Franklin County, Ohio, 2004,” and this study found: “The allocation of voting machines in Franklin County was clearly biased against voters in precincts with high proportions of African Americans when measured against the standard of the November, 2004, electorate. … Using the April measure of the size of the active electorate, 5,023 working voting machines were needed, not 2,800 machines as data supplied by the county indicate were actually deployed on election day.” Furthermore, “Between April and November, the active voter population in the county increased by more than 15 percent. If nothing else, the surge of new registrants should have indicated that their plans made in mid-summer would prove woefully insufficient.” More like 6,000 machines were needed, though Kenneth Blackwell’s operation supplied only 2,800 on Election Day. Bush’s “Justice” Department said that Democrats had no cause for complaint. On that precedent, Democrats, if they ever again win power, can say that Republicans have no cause for complaint if voting machines are prejudicially allocated to favor only Democratic voters, etcetera. However, coing that would violate what the Democratic Party stands for; Democrats oppose fascism.

The anomalies in the 2004 U.S. Presidential election overflowed, wherever one looked. On 29 July 2005, http://billmon.org/archives/002067.html pointed out that two counties in Ohio, “Warren and Clermont … went for Cheneybush last year by margins of 72% and 71%, respectively. They could fairly be said to have played a pivotal role in keeping the Rovians in the White House, given that the combined GOP margin — almost 80,000 votes — accounted for two-thirds of Cheneybush’s entire statewide edge over Kerry. The ability of the Rovians to pull fresh GOP votes out of those two counties certainly challenged plausibility, and, in Clermont’s case, almost defied mathematics. Consider the fact that according to the Census Bureau, Clermont’s population rose only 4.4% (about 7,800 souls) between 2000 and 2003, while reported GOP turnout increased by roughly 31% (about 14,600 votes) from 2000 to 2004. This in a county that only had about 122,000 registered voters last year.” If such anomalies were unusual in the 2004 election, or else went both ways — equally for both Bush and Kerry — then one might reasonably conclude that this election had not been stolen by Bush. However, these anomalies were common, and they were astoundingly one-sided.

On 14 October 2005, Steve Freeman and Warren Mitofsky had a public face-off at the American Statistical Association, and Freeman’s presentation, “Polling Bias or Electoral Fraud?” was subsequently posted to the internet at www.appliedresearch.us/sf/ASA-P.htm, which linked to a stunning single-page “tabulation” giving a 50-state, state-by-state, breakdown of the “Official Vote” and the “Exit Poll,” where the discrepancies were stark: Each state that was switched, was switched from Kerry to Bush, as follows (showing percentages first for Bush and then for Kerry):

Colorado: (Exit Poll) 48.6% to 50.1%, (Official Vote) 51.7% to 47.0%.

Florida: 48.3% to 50.9%, 52.1% to 47.1%.

Iowa: 48.4% to 50.7%, 49.9% to 49.2%.

Nevada: 45.4% to 52.9%, 50.5% to 47.9%.

New Mexico: 45.9% to 52.9%, 49.8% to 49.0%.

Ohio: 45.4% to 54.2%, 50.8% to 48.7%.

The Exit Polls, in each state, if they had produced the Electoral College results, would have produced a 309 to 174 win by Kerry, instead of the Official Vote results, which were a 286 to 251 win by Bush.

The “Exit Poll” figures which Freeman provided there for many of the states were different from the “screen shot” figures which had been the basis of the debate up to that time, and these new figures exhibited almost uniformly higher discrepancies between the “Exit Poll” and the “Official Vote”; and so Freeman’s new figures indicated an even more egregious likely manipulation of the 2004 U.S. Presidential election.

(The figures from the screen shots, which were taken on Election Day, were shown in “Appendix C: Jonathan Simon Exit Poll Data” starting on page 28 of www.electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit_Polls_2004_Edison-Mitofsky.pdf “Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies”; and the single-page 50-state final table which was calculated by Freeman was www.appliedresearch.us/sf/Documents/2004ElectionOutcomeExitPolls.pdf “The Election Outcome Based on Exit Poll Reported Voting.”)

So, I asked Dr. Freeman, via e-mail: “The Ohio Exit Polls [the ones which were originally made available] in 2004 indicated a 52%/48% Kerry win in Ohio, but your ‘handout’ or ‘tabulation’ at ASA-P Fall Meeting, October 14, 2005, shows the Exit Polls in Ohio in 2004 as a 54.2%/45.4% Kerry Ohio win. How did you calculate that, and why does your figure vary so much from those screen shots?” His answer was simply: “The screen shots were election night estimates of the result based on incomplete exit poll data, telephone polls, early voting results and bellweather [sp.] precincts. The ASA-P Fall Meeting data [his final calculations] was [sic.] pure exit poll survey results.” Unsatisfied, I wrote to a prominent critic of Freeman’s work on this subject, Mark Lindeman, to ask whether he thought that Freeman was perhaps going overboard with these new figures. Dr. Lindeman replied, “No, I don’t think he faked those numbers.” Lindeman explained that, since the Exit-Polling organization refused to make public their final data, a complicated set of calculations had to be performed in order to adjust the preliminary (screen-shot) figures, and that this is all that Freeman did: “In effect he was using his own formula to calculate what he thought the exit poll results must have been or should have been.” Moreover, Dr. Lindeman, continued: “For what it’s worth, the archived Ohio data set is 53.9% Kerry, 45.6% Bush, so Freeman [whose final adjusted figures, as indicated above, were 54.2% and 45.4% respectively] wasn’t far off that particular ‘raw’ result for Ohio.”

In other words, the situation in Ohio was actually far worse than had previously been recognized. (Anyone who wants to see how vast the discrepancies were between the Exit Poll and the Official Vote in each of the 50 states should do a web-search for “The Election Outcome Based on Exit Poll Reported Voting” where everything is shown clearly on a single page. It’s simply shocking: this is not what one would see from a democracy; this country at that time was not a democracy — it was a gangland. Discrepancies like this might be expected in Russia, etc., but not in the United States.)*

Similarly, in July 2006 (and subsequently refined), statistician and polymath James Q. Jacobs posted to the internet at http://jqjacobs.net/politics/ohio.html, his painstakingly thorough analysis of Ohio punch-card-voting-machine results, in “The 2004 Ohio Presidential Election: Cuyahoga County Analysis. How Kerry Votes Were Switched to Bush Votes.” He opened: “Simply put, Ohio votes were NOT counted as cast. Many votes were miscounted, and Kerry votes were counted for Bush.” In his conclusion, he stated: “At precincts with the highest Kerry support, the percentage of uncounted votes is inexplicably high.” Furthermore, “Many individual ballots resulted in a vote-switch, a two-vote margin difference from the intended result. Switched-votes cast for Kerry and counted for Bush had twice the impact as their actual occurrence.” Moreover, “The fact that the irregularities discussed herein are known, and yet no official inquiry into the election has occurred, illustrates the broader failure of the current election process.”

The 2004 Republican Party campaign for President might as well have been operated by the Mafia, except that the Mafia were a smaller outfit, with resources that were tiny by comparison.

On 22 October 2005, at http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Presidential-Election-2004.pdf appeared “History of the Debate Surrounding the 2004 Election,” in which Kathy Dopp provided the back story describing how the main researchers in this saga came to be involved in it. For example, Dopp described the series of flukes by which an Edison/Mitofsky computer glitch caused the actual Exit Poll numbers to be posted on the internet for several hours longer than E/M had intended, and the fluke by which Jonathan Simon managed to save those figures onto his computer during those hours. “As ultimately acknowledged by Edison/Mitofsky as their ‘Call 3 Weighted’ data, these ‘Simon’ exit poll results revealed discrepancies between the exit poll results and vote counts both in key states and in the national popular vote, giving rise to the critical debate over the cause.” Were it not for such flukes, the only evidence which would exist of the Republican Party’s manipulation of the 2004 U.S. Presidential election would have been individual complaints from voters in key states around the country. 

That’s how Bush became empowered to do the things he did in his second term. It was, pure and simple, a rape of the nation.

Another way of describing this is as the theft of a country, or at least of its government. In this case, the government that was stolen happened to be the most powerful on earth. This wasn’t Italy; this was a far bigger heist than any the Mafia ever attempted.

On 6 January 2005, the San Francisco Chronicle, which had previously contributed nothing significant to the journalism concerning this heist of the nation, published, after-the-fact, a remarkable op-ed from Steve Freeman, the U. Penn. Researcher who had done the best analysis of the discrepancies between the exit polls and the vote counts. Headlining “Keeping Our Democracy Alive: Did voters really count in U.S. election?” he noted that the discrepancy nationwide was a statistically virtually impossible 5.5%. (Whereas the national exit poll showed Kerry winning by 3.0%, the national vote-count showed Bush winning by 2.5%.) He observed that, because of exit polls in other countries, “The citizens of Georgia and Ukraine refused to accept the official tallies, protested vigorously and, with international support, overturned the election, but U.S. voters have passively accepted the results of their election and gone back to business, oblivious to the discrepancy and blind to the implications.” Freeman continued: “A 5 percent shift in a poll like this is extraordinary. Exit pollsters do not have to guess about who is actually going to vote, or whether they might change their mind. Exit polls can achieve larger samples cost-effectively: the national election-day sample had more than 13,000 respondents, meaning that it should have accurately forecast the result within plus or minus 1 percent.” However, in the U.S. case, unlike in other nations, there were no mass demonstrations in the streets; there was only unquestioning media and public acceptance of Bush’s “mandate from the people.” Freeman closed: “The absence of questions does not make a democracy function; democratic processes do. It has been a long time since this country has paid a price for liberty. It seems clear now that a large payment of vigilance is long overdue.” He had in mind here, of course, the old adage, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

On January 8th, the AP reported from Ohio, that, “The state’s chief elections officer [Blackwell], accused of mishandling the presidential vote in Ohio, sent a fund-raising letter for his own 2006 gubernatorial campaign that was accompanied by a request for illegal contributions.” Blackwell’s letter solicited personal contributions, which were legal, but also “corporate” contributions, which the AP noted “are illegal in Ohio.” His letterhead, furthermore, displayed a facsimile of the Great Seal of the United States, showing the eagle holding the arrows. Federal law made that a felony. He was not prosecuted.

On January 11th, http://rawstory.rawprint.com/105/blackwell_campaign_letter2_105.php reported that, “Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell boasted of helping ‘deliver’ Ohio for President Bush and said he was ‘truly pleased’ to announce Bush had won Ohio even before all of the state’s votes had been counted.” Blackwell’s national letter to Republicans, raising funds now for his upcoming race for the Ohio Governorship, was posted. It opened: “As the Co-Chairman of Bush/Cheney ’04 in Ohio, I want to thank you for helping deliver the great Buckeye State for George W. Bush. Without your enthusiasm, generous support and vote, I’m afraid the President would have lost … and an unapologetic liberal Democrat named John Kerry would have won. Thankfully, you and I stopped that disaster from happening!” All of Blackwell’s public pretenses to his having adhered to the legally mandated nonpartisan execution of his duties as the Ohio Secretary of State were admitted, in this letter to wealthy Republicans, to have been fraudulent, and to have been intended only to deceive the broader public. Blackwell even indirectly admitted that his having led the push in Ohio to ban gay marriage was part of his role as Bush/Cheney co-chairman, not strictly a part of his duties as the State’s Secretary of State.

He went on: “I have no doubt the strong campaign we helped the President run in Ohio — coupled with a similar effort I helped deliver for State Issue One (the Marriage Protection Amendment) — can easily be credited with turning out record numbers of conservatives and evangelicals on Election Day. … And I draw great satisfaction in hearing liberal members of the media credit the Marriage Protection Amendment as [the] single most important factor that drove President Bush over the top in Ohio.”

Finally, he arrived at his personal request, delivered here baldly as from the “Ohio Secretary of State,” and even under the official United States Government seal, which was illegal to do: “After much thought and prayer, I am asking for your personal support in my campaign to become the next Governor of Ohio.” He also said, in implicit emphasis of his partisan religious political intentions and aims, appealing now to the specific Christian biases of the funders of this campaign, “My Christian parents taught me that if I did what was right, nobody could ever deny me the success I strived for.” The first thing that he was implicitly hinting here was that if he had been born and raised, for example, as a Muslim, then he wouldn’t qualify to run to become Ohio’s Governor. The second was that he was a successful man because God was on his side. This bigoted appeal was in implicit violation of Article VI, Section 3, of the U.S. Constitution: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” His implicit message was that his supporters were free to violate this provision, and that he encouraged them to do so. He then bragged directly about his having defeated in courts (though, he conveniently avoided mentioning, always with the help of fellow Republican judges) the legal efforts by “the ACLU and the other members of the radical left,” which had been attempting to protect the Constitutional rights of Blacks and poor people, in heavily Democratic precincts, to vote and to have their votes counted. Again: God was on his side.

The “Washington Whispers” column in the 23 May 2005 U.S. News & World Report mentioned speculation that Blackwell would become the 2008 Republican nominee for the Vice Presidency if he won Ohio’s statehouse in 2006: “With him as No. 2, it creates a dream ticket,’ said a GOP strategist.” The Party was hoping to be able to express its gratitude — and also to add to its winning coalition some votes from racist Blacks for whom a politician’s actions and policies are less important than his skin color. Blackwell’s fundraising letter thus represented for him the next step ascending through the ranks of today’s slavemasters — to become the #2 lord in today’s neo-Confederate U.S. plantation.

This fundraising letter had been forwarded by one of its recipients on to rawstory.com. It constituted a virtual admission by Blackwell of his leading role in a successful criminal conspiracy to steal the 2004 U.S. Presidential election for Bush.

The spirit and the fundamental beliefs that were reflected in this baldly multi-illegal letter were boiled down nearly three years earlier by Antonin Scalia’s statement, which he made on 25 January 2002, which belief of his has broad applicability to conservative politics, and which is especially germane here:

“It is easy to see the hand of Almighty God behind rulers whose forebears, deep in the mists of history, were mythically anointed by God, or who at least obtained their thrones in awful and unpredictable battle whose outcome was determined by the Lord of Hosts; that is, the Lord of Armies. It is much more difficult to see the hand of God or of any higher moral authority behind the fools and rogues — as the losers would have it — whom we ourselves elect to do our own will.”     

On 9 June 2006, www.bradblog.com/archives/00002933.htm headlined “Blackwell Refuses to Recuse Himself From Administering His Own Election,” and reported that the Democratic “Ohio gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland held a presser yesterday demanding that his opponent, J. Kenneth Blackwell recuse himself from administering his own election this November. Predictably, the rule-of-law-impaired Blackwell declined to do so.” The same day’s Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that Strickland suggested that this election be overseen instead by “Republican Attorney General Jim Petro, whom Blackwell savaged on the campaign trail before handily defeating him in last month’s GOP gubernatorial primary” (which Blackwell also oversaw). Ohio’s Republican Party stood behind Blackwell’s refereeing his own election contests, and a Republican spokesman said that Blackwell “has a personal responsibility under Ohio law” to run Ohio’s elections, “and his personal involvement is the key to making it work.” At bradblog.com, “A Concerned Citizen” commented, “Are we supposed to go vote this November? I see Deibold [sp.] trucks driving around and I always just cringe, It’s all so out in the open, I don’t understand how all this can continue to happen, November is getting close!!” The next day, June 10th, WTOL in Toledo headlined “Diebold’s Lobbyist Donates $10,000 to Blackwell Campaign,” and reported that, “The maximum-donor [$10,000] list also includes Mitch Given, who is a registered lobbyist for Diebold Election Systems. … Blackwell’s office approved Diebold’s selection.”

Today’s United States gives more lip service to democratic values than any other nation on earth; but now we know, beyond any reasonable doubt, that it’s no longer honest; it is now simply a fraud. The actual democratic standard in the U.S. today would be an embarrassment to almost any nation on earth.

However, Blackwell was becoming desperate for voters, because his tactics were so transparently evil that he was driving voters away. His right-wing base tended to be highly racist, and he became increasingly desperate to hold onto his base. Thus, on 9 October 2006, freepress.org headlined “Why Is the Man Who Stole Ohio Campaigning with a White Racist?” and Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman reported that, “J. Kenneth Blackwell, the man who stole Ohio’s 2004 presidential election, was out campaigning October 4, 2006 with a man widely viewed as one of America’s leading white supremacists. Blackwell is an Afro-American. … Blackwell toured the state with Larry Pratt, author of ARMED PEOPLE VICTORIOUS, which advocates the creation of militant right-wing militias. Pratt has spoken and shared platforms in the past with Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi Aryan Nation members. He was forced to take a leave of absence from Pat Buchanan’s 1996 presidential campaign over charges of white supremacist and anti-semitic views. … ‘We’re happy to have his support,’ says a campaign spokesman.” Religion (if not ideology generally) was even thicker than race. J. Kenneth Blackwell needed this affirmation from a renowned anti-Black racist telling his followers that this Black man, Kenneth Blackwell, was right to vote for in this election. This is the kind of political base Blackwell had. And Blackwell’s calling upon a person like Pratt indicates how desperate he was for votes — even though Blackwell would be controlling the vote-count in his own election.

What a change this was! Blackwell’s campaign had started out by claiming to be a test of how far Ohio had come in accepting Blacks. On 10 January 2005, a columnist at National Review Online had heralded Blackwell’s upcoming run for Ohio’s statehouse by headlining (with a clear implication that Blackwell’s becoming the first Black Governor would show how unbiased Ohio’s voters were) “Paint It Blackwell.” This commentary opened with a put-down of Black civil-rights leaders, all of whom were Democrats, “Unlike the Jesse Jackson-led Democratic convulsions after the 2000 election was settled [by Antonin Scalia], …” He went on by saying: “With no black Republicans in the House, Senate, or any governorships, Blackwell is one of the highest-ranking elected African Americans in the GOP. On top of that, he is a true conservative. … He is skilled, conservative, and on his way up. He could be governor in a couple of years and who knows where he could go from there. So Democrats have an interest in sullying his name before it gets big. … The attack dogs of personal destruction succeeded with their preemptive strike on [Miguel] Estrada [appointed by Bush to a high court but so far-Right that he wasn’t able to be approved even in a Republican-controlled Washington], and now they’ll try with Blackwell.” In other words, he was saying that Democrats are racist. “The presumption behind this attack is that while whites can believe anything they want, Blacks and Hispanics” can’t. Fortunately, this time, the fascist propaganda-machine failed.

On the eve of the President’s second inauguration, Edison/Mitofsky, the organization that had carried out the exit polls, came forth, on 19 January 2005, with a pallid attempt to “explain” the 5.5% nationwide discrepancy between their polls and “the actual vote count.” Essentially, Edison/Mitofsky dismissed the outrageous improbability of this, by assuming that Kerry voters must have been more willing to answer their pollsters’ questions than were Bush voters. No evidence was presented for that — only the bare assumption. Their report is linked at www.appliedresearch.us/sf/epidiscrep, along with rebuttals. On February 15th, Steve Freeman and Josh Mitteldorf produced, at www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1970/, an excellent summary of the bottom line after all was said and done: “A Corrupted Election: Despite what you may have heard, the exit polls were right.” This article links to a devastating critique, by a group of statisticians, “US Count Votes,” (http://uscountvotes.org) of the Edison/Mitofsky report: “Response to Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report.” Signed by nine professional statisticians and mathematicians, and never since refuted, this analysis proved that the official Edison/Mitofsky hypothesis was not just demonstrably false; it was the exact opposite of the provable reality, which is even worse: “In precincts with higher numbers of Bush voters, response rates [to the exit polls] were slightly higher than in precincts with higher number[s] of Kerry voters.” In other words, Bush voters were likely oversampled, Kerry voters were likely undersampled, and this was the exact opposite of the Edison/Mitofsky assumption. This consensus study eschewed strong conclusions, in order to achieve its consensus. However, it still couldn’t avoid one damning observation about the Edison/Mitofsky report: “They do not [even so much as] consider the hypothesis of election fraud.” The unspoken conclusion here was that no other hypothesis for the enormous discrepancy can stand up to a statistical analysis. On March 10th, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) issued a report by three authors titled, “A Review of Recent Controversies Concerning the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Polls,” which accepted uncritically the Edison/Mitofsky report, and which ignored the critique of it by US Count Votes. Instead of dealing with that critique, it referred only once, in its 33rd footnote, to the US Count Votes study, while failing even to mention that this study was critical of the Edison/Mitofsky report. It furthermore made no reference at all to the astounding US Count Votes finding that, “in precincts with higher numbers of Bush voters, response rates were slightly higher than in precincts with higher number of Kerry voters,” and it instead repeated uncritically the undocumented mere speculation to the exact contrary from the Edison/Mitofsky report. In other words, both the Edison/Mitofsky report, and the SSRC hack job reiterating it, “explained” the 5.5% discrepancy by an unfounded, and now even proven counter-factual, assumption, that fewer Bush voters than Kerry voters had opted to participate in the exit polls on election day.

This “Let sleeping dogs lie” crowd, defending the vote “count,” were much like the “moderate” Southerners during the Civil Rights Era around 1960, who were opposed to campaigners for civil rights, because those campaigners were laying bare an ugly underside of American society, which these “moderates” didn’t want to see, or even to acknowledge. The analogy to the 1960’s was even closer than this, however: On March 10th, Jesse Jackson Sr., who had been an aide to Martin Luther King in that earlier struggle, headlined at www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1197 “Republican Maneuvering to Get Voting Rights Act Killed,” and asked: “Will the Republican Congress reauthorize the Voting Rights Act? When asked in a meeting with the Black Caucus of the Congress, President Bush said he didn’t know anything about the question. … Now some GOP leaders are suggesting that the law be made ‘national and permanent.’ That sounds good. … But beware. This plan, hatched in right-wing think tanks, sounds good, but is designed to gut the Voting Rights Act. By making it ‘national and permanent,’ divorced from the record of discrimination that requires special review, the act could well be deemed unconstitutional. Republicans will have used the court to murder the Voting Rights Act while pretending to have clean hands.” The only reason the Voting Rights Act had withstood Constitutional muster as long as it had, was that it was designed to rectify discrimination in those areas (mainly the South) where discrimination had been proven to exist; it did not activate or apply in the absence of such discrimination; Republicans now wanted to change this. Already, Republican majorities on the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled (in 2000, Reno v. Bosier Parish) that even an intentionally discriminatory change in voting regulations is legally okay so long as it makes its victims no worse off (or produces no more “retrogression” of their voting rights) than they had previously suffered, and the Supremes had also ruled (in 2003, Georgia v. Ashcroft) to soften their new (“retrogression”) standard, so as to allow still more blatant discrimination.  President Bush and other Republicans were doing everything they possibly could to disenfranchise Blacks and the poor of all ethnicities, and their latest effort was just one more sly tactic in a long campaign which was as old as the post-Lincoln Republican Party, to disenfranchise the weak and the poor. Republicans were now gearing up for a big battle about whether to re-authorize the Voting Rights Act or let it expire in 2007 — and whether to cripple it, in the event that it would be reauthorized.

On March 30th, US Count Votes issued an “Executive Summary” of a more extensive new study of the discrepancy, and the following day issued their full 27-page report. Both documents are linked at http://scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0504/S00001.htm?mode=print. The 27-page complete report, titled “Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies,” was signed by twelve professional statisticians. Its chief new contribution was a tabulation “Exit Poll Discrepancy Rises with % of Bush Voters,” which pretty much sealed into a stone coffin the unsupported Edison/Mitofsky hypothesis that more Democrats than Republicans must have cooperated with the exit-pollsters. In other words, yet again, Edison/Mitofsky’s data actually indicated the exact opposite of E/M’s hypothesis “explaining” the discrepancy. The only remaining credible explanation for the discrepancy was that there was a systematically false vote-count in Bush’s favor.

Further confirming this likelihood that rigging of the vote count was behind Bush’s victory, was the odd finding that the exit polls were accurate on the Senate races: the skewing occurred only in the Presidential vote-count. Unless there was historically unprecedented ticket-splitting in 2004, this finding, too, indicated that the Presidential vote-count was fraudulent.

On April 2nd, Joseph Cannon at http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2005_03_27_cannonfire_archive.html headlined “Science Proves That Vote Fraud Is Real!” (and notice that he wasn’t alleging that ‘voter fraud’ is real; this is something very different).  His was by far the best summary anywhere of the evidence that the Edison/Mitofsky analysis of the 5.5% discrepancy was not believable. Cannon even noted a terribly important factor that US Count Votes had overlooked, and which had first been pointed out only shortly after the election, on 6 November 2004, at www.nicedoggie.net/back/archives/2004/11/the_missing_gor.php. Here is how Mr. Cannon summarized it: “On November 2, 2004, pollsters did not restrict inquiries to the votes cast on that date. They also asked voters about the 2000 election. 43% of the respondents said they had chosen Bush on that previous occasion, while 37% reported having cast a ballot for Al Gore. But Gore WON the popular vote. This simple fact — which even math illiterates should be able to comprehend easily — proves that the exit poll[ing] favored Republicans, not Democrats.” Consequently, here was yet another indicator buried in Edison/Mitofsky’s raw data showing that the exit polls probably overestimated President Bush’s 2004 vote, and underestimated Senator Kerry’s. This factor was perhaps the most powerful evidence of all, which proved, virtually to a certainty, the non-feasibility of the explanation that Edison/Mitofsky offered. Fortunately, when Edison/Mitofsky had “adjusted” their exit-poll results at around 1 AM on November 3rd, this anomaly was not “adjusted”: perhaps by some oversight, they left unchanged their figures showing that 43% of their 2004 respondents had voted for Bush in 2000; 37% had voted for Gore in 2000. (17% had not voted in 2000; and 3% had voted for other Presidential candidates.) Edison/Mitofsky in 2004, thus, far oversampled people who had voted for Bush in 2000, and far undersampled people who had voted for Gore in 2000. Then, when they prepared their analysis of the 5.5% discrepancy in the 2004 Bush/Kerry voting results, E/M conveniently ignored this powerful evidence discrediting/disproving their explanation, which said that in 2004 they had oversampled Democrats and undersampled Republicans — exactly the opposite of what their evidence actually showed.

Every indication, within Edison/Mitofsky’s own data, contradicts E/M’s hypothesis that the reason their exit polls on 2 November 2004 were off by a historically unprecedented high 5.5%, as compared to the subsequent “actual” vote count, was that their exit-poll sample had contained far more Democrats than Republicans. This “chatty Democrat” theory (as some called it) could now be credited only by ignoramuses and outright liars.

Moreover, of the 17% of 2004 voters who hadn’t voted in 2000, 54% went to Kerry; only 45% to Bush. That, too, contradicted common Republican “explanations,” which alleged that Bush “won” by bringing out the larger number of new voters. Although Edison/Mitofsky had doctored the final poll-percentage, there was enough remaining undoctored, so that the fraudulence of the “actual vote-count” remained clear.   

Chicago Tribune columnist Robert Koehler believed that the press itself was partly responsible for having turned off the lights on democracy and permitted Bush’s legitimacy to be unquestioned even half a year after the election. He wrote a commentary, “Citizens in the Rain: Maybe we can’t have election reform without media reform,” — a commentary which was supposed to have been published on 5 May 2005, but which was rejected for publication and which he then courageously posted on his own website, http://commonwonders.com/archives/col1293.htm. He asked there, “Isn’t our democracy at stake? Doesn’t that matter?” It turned out to matter not only to him, but to another commentator who likewise obtained no mainstream media outlet for his opinion despite his being part of the mainstream media himself: five days later, the ABC, NBC and CBS sports writer and producer, Jim Lampley, headlined at www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/2005/05/biggest-story-of-our-live.html

“The Biggest Story of Our Lives,” referring to what he powerfully argued that this story actually was. With incredulity, he challenged his mainstream media colleagues: “Karl Rove isn’t capable of conceiving and executing such a grandiose crime? Wake up. They did it.” Lampley, who possessed a deep knowledge and respect for professional sports bettors and for the scientific approach they take toward their job, noted that at 5 PM EST on Election Day, professional bettors had waged two-to-one odds on a Kerry victory, because exit polls showed Kerry strongly leading, and because exit polls had never been off by a big enough margin for Kerry not to become then the next U.S. President.

Besides the undocumented assumption by Edison/Mitofsky, saying that more Democrats than Republicans were willing to answer exit-pollsters’ questions on election day, the only other prominent reason provided by Republicans arguing that the 2004 U.S. Presidential election wasn’t rigged, was that rigging would supposedly have been impossible to do.

Usually, this argument pointed to the supposed “bipartisanship” of local boards of elections, as one reason rigging wouldn’t have worked. However, in some jurisdictions, this “bipartisanship” was purely fictional. Robert Fitrakis of freepress.org pointed this out in his 2 July 2005 “Open Letter to John Tanner, Chief, Voting Section, U.S. Department of Justice,” debunking the DOJ’s conclusion, which had asserted that the election in Franklin County, Ohio, was honest. Fitrakis said there:

“You praise the bipartisan nature of the Franklin County Board of Elections (BOE). But you fail to mention that the Director, Matt Damschroder, is the former Chair of the Franklin County Republican Party, and that J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio’s Secretary of State and the Co-Chair of the Bush-Cheney Re-election Committee appoints all board members as well as officers, and they serve at his pleasure. Blackwell’s actions throughout the election year were openly partisan and obviously unethical. For example, I was at a meeting prior to the election where Mr. Damschroder informed a delegation of esteemed international election observers that he would have them arrested based on the orders of Blackwell if they crossed the 100-foot line outside the polls to observe closer to the voting site. Is that what you refer to by ‘the spirit of cooperation’? Or is it the fact that both Republicans and Democrats get paid well to be officers and directors of the BOE, and if they are fired, they lose their paycheck?”

Fitrakis cited several examples where Blackwell had written to threaten Boards of Election with “official action, which may include removal,” in the event of “failure to comply with my lawful directives.”

The Bush “Justice” Department, in a letter by John Tanner, Chief of the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division, dated 29 June 2005, had cited the supposed bipartisanship of election boards as “proof” that the vote count in Ohio was honest. On account of such ruses by political appointees at “Justice,” Ari Shapiro of NPR’s “Morning Edition” headlined on 6 October 2005, “Career Lawyers Leaving Justice Department,” and reported: “Tension has been growing between career lawyers and political appointees in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. … Some career professionals who have left the division recently say they left because they were shut out of the decision making process in a way that did not occur under previous administrations.”

On 13 November 2005, the Washington Post headlined “Civil Rights Focus Shift Roils Staff at Justice,” and Dan Eggen reported that, “The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which has enforced the nation’s anti-discrimination laws for nearly half a century, is in the midst of an upheaval that has driven away dozens of veteran lawyers and has damaged morale for many of those who remain.” One fifth of the Division’s lawyers had departed in just the latest fiscal year, 2005; and, “Longtime litigators complain that political appointees have cut them out of hiring and major policy decisions.” Moreover, “prosecutions for the kinds of racial and gender discrimination crimes traditionally handled by the division have declined 40 percent” since George W. Bush entered office, and those assets were shifted to other duties, especially deportation orders. Four days after that WP news story, Mr. Eggen further headlined “Criticism of Voting Law Was Overruled,” and reported: “A team of Justice Department lawyers and analysts who reviewed a Georgia voter-identification law recommended rejecting it because it was likely to discriminate against black voters, but they were overruled the next day by higher-ranking [politically appointed] officials at Justice, according to department documents.” Then, the very next day, November 18th, Cox News Service and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution headlined “Georgia Voter ID Memo Stirs Tension,” and revealed that, “The chief sponsor of Georgia’s voter identification law told the Justice Department that if black people in her district ‘are not paid to vote, they don’t go to the polls,’ and that if fewer blacks vote as a result of the new law, it is only because it would end such voting fraud.” No evidence of such alleged “voting fraud” was cited by this Republican Georgia politician.

By contrast, the evidence of criminal intent on the part of the Bush Administration to rig elections in favor of Republicans could hardly have been made clearer. And that intent had long historical heritage within America’s conservative politics. As Tova Andrea Wang of The Century Foundation wrote, on 22 November 2005, “In so many ways, the right to vote is under national attack by conservatives today.” She especially cited a coordinated Republican campaign to cripple the 1965 Voting Rights Act. On 30 October 2006, she also headlined “Fraud, Reform and Political Power,” and quoted from Alexander Keyssar’s 2000 The Right to Vote:

“In 1836, Pennsylvania passed its first voter registration law. … Although the proclaimed goal of the law was to reduce fraud, opponents insisted [and documented that] its real intent was to reduce the participation of the poor.” This law, rammed through by conservatives, was specifically targeted against Philadelphia’s teeming lower classes, who were one of the greatest strengths of the Northern Democratic Party in national and Pennsylvania elections.

So, the will was definitely there to manipulate American democracy into fascism, and the historical origins of this fascistic plan went all the way back to the feudal origins of America’s conservative movement. As regards the sheer technological feasibility of changing vote-results, the Tallahassee Democrat headlined on 4 June 2005, “Test Shows Voter Fraud Is Possible.” This newspaper employed the Republican phrase “voter fraud,” which applies to fraud by voters. But the actual issue here wasn’t that at all. The newspaper continued by reporting: “All it takes is the right access. Get that, and an election worker could manipulate voting results in the computers that read paper ballots — without leaving any digital fingerprints. That was the verdict after Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho invited a team of researchers to look for holes in election software. The group wasn’t able to crack the Diebold system from the outside office. [Diebold, a Republican company, hadn’t provided them the code.] But at the computer itself, they changed vote tallies, completely unrecorded. Sancho said it illustrates the need for tight physical security, as well as a paper trail that can verify results, which the Legislature has rejected.” This test, carried out by Finnish investigator Harri Hursti, broke new ground in proving how unacceptable these black-box voting machines were for use in any democracy. Subsequently, a team of computer scientists from the University of California at Berkeley headlined, on 14 February 2006, “Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuBasic Interpreter,” and opened: “This report summarizes the results of our review of some of the source code for the Diebold AV-OS optical scan (version 1.96.6) and Diebold AV-TSx touchscreen (version 4.6.4) voting machines.” Their analysis concluded: “Harri Hursti’s attack does work. … He was indeed able to change the election results by doing nothing more than modifying the contents of a memory card. He needed no passwords, no cryptographic keys, and no access to any other part of the voting system. … However, there is another category of more serious vulnerabilities we discovered that go well beyond what Mr. Hursti demonstrated. …” Furthermore, on 5 May 2006, Bev Harris posted at www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=1954/27634.html a report on another test by Hursti, which Diebold machines again failed. This time, the “security testing by Harri Hursti and Security Innovation, Inc.” was performed in Emery County, Utah, as requested by the county’s director of elections, Bruce Funk. Despite the test-failure, and though “Diebold refused to provide a letter in writing indicating that machines it sold weren’t used or loaded with inappropriate software,” Harris reported that, “County commissioners told him [Funk] he was going to be required to use the machines.” Also as had happened with Ion Sancho in Florida, Diebold and Republican politicians promptly commenced actions to remove Funk from office.

On 12 May 2006, The New York Times headlined “New Fears of Security Risks In Electronic Voting Systems,” and reported that, “With primary election dates fast approaching in many states, officials in Pennsylvania and California issued urgent directives in recent days about a security risk in their Diebold Election Systems touch-screen voting machines, while other states with similar equipment hurried to assess the seriousness of the problem. ‘It’s the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system,’ said Michael I. Shamos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. … ‘This is the barn door being wide open, while people were arguing over the lock on the front door,’ said Douglas W. Jones, a professor of computer science at the University of Iowa. … David Bear, a spokesman for Diebold Election Systems, said … ‘For there to be a problem here, you’re basically assuming a premise where you have some evil and nefarious election officials who would sneak in and introduce a piece of software,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe these evil elections people exist.’ … Aviel Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, did the first in-depth analysis of the security flaws in the source code for Diebold touch-screen machines in 2003. After studying the latest problem, he said: ‘I almost had a heart attack. The implications of this are pretty astounding.’ … The new concerns about Diebold’s equipment were discovered by Harri Hursti, a Finnish computer expert who was working at the request of Black Box Voting Inc.”     

The same New York Times that had previously ignored the rigging of the vote-count (except when it ridiculed the very idea) was now, finally, starting to cover this, the most important news story in the United States at the time. As had earlier happened with regard to the false “news” reported in the Times about WMD in Iraq, the NYT switched to reporting the truth, when continuing to promote the lie was no longer viable for a major ‘news’ medium.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of Christ’s Ventriloquists: The Event that Created Christianity.

Learn more at WASHINGTON’S BLOG.

***

[1]  Also see:

  • “The Stolen Presidential Elections” by Michael Parenti, MichaelParenti.org, MAY 2007 (updated version)

 

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[10 NOV 2016.]

[Last modified at 17:41 PDT on 10 NOV 2016.]

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