Robert F. Kennedy Jr. thinks so, as he argues in the latest Rolling Stone."American history is littered with vote fraud -- but rather than learning from our shameful past and cleaning up the system, we have allowed the problem to grow even worse. If the last two elections have taught us anything, it is this: The single greatest threat to our democracy is the insecurity of our voting system. If people lose faith that their votes are accurately and faithfully recorded, they will abandon the ballot box. Nothing less is at stake here than the entire idea of a government by the people. "
Certainly not an endorsement of Diebold touch screen machines!
6 comments:
Read it and weep, all you who truly love America...(from the Buzzflash website)
This is a fact: On November 2, 2004, in the State of Ohio, 239,127 votes for President of the United States were dumped, rejected, blocked, lost and left to rot uncounted.
And not just anyone's vote. Dive into the electoral dumpster and these "spoiled" votes have a very dark color indeed.
In another life, I taught statistics. And these statistics stank: the raw data tells us that if you are a Black voter, the chance of you losing your vote to technical errors in voting machinery is 900% higher than if you were a white voter.
Any guesses as to whom those African-Americans chose for president on those junked ballots? Check Ohio's racial demographics, do the numbers, and there it is: Kerry won Ohio. And that, too, is a fact. A fact that could not get reported in the USA.
But the shoplifting of those votes in Ohio was just the tip of the theft-berg. November 2, 2004 was a national ballot-box bonfire. In total, over three million votes (3,600,380 to be exact) were cast -- marked, punched, pulled -- YET NEVER COUNTED. I'm not talking about the Ukraine or Uganda. I'm talking about the United States of America "with liberty and justice for all."
Well, not "all." The nine-to-one Black-to-White ballot spoilage rate is a national statistic -- not just an Ohio trick. Last year, I flew to New Mexico to investigate the 33,981 cast but not counted ballots of that state in the 2004 race. George Bush "won" New Mexico by 5,988 votes. Or did he? I calculated that, of all the ballots rejected and "spoiled," 89% were cast by voters of color. Who won New Mexico? Kerry won -- or he would have, if they had counted the ballots.
But they didn't count them. And that was deliberate. It's in the plan. It's the program. And the program for 2008 is simple. Two million ballots were cast but not counted in the 2000 race. (Over half, 54%, were cast by African-Americans.) In 2004, the GOP kicked it up to THREE million. Get ready, these guys aim high: "four in '06" and "five in '08" looks to be their game plan.
How will they pile up five million un-voters in 2008? Let's start with the three million "disappeared" of 2004:
Step 1: "Spoiling" ballots -- 1,389,231 of them. In the vote-count game, these are called "undervotes" and "overvotes." You can recognize these lost ballots by their hanging chads, punch cards without punches (an Ohio specialty), paper ballots eaten by scanners, and touch screens that didn't know you touched them.
Step 2: Rejecting "provisional ballots" -- 1,090,729 in this pile. Voters finding themselves at the "wrong" precinct, or wrongly "scrubbed" from voter rolls get these back-of-the-bus ballots first inaugurated in 2002. In '04, provisional ballots were passed out like candy to voters in the poorest precincts. They handed them out -- then threw them away -- one million dumped in all. In Ohio, Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell changed state rules, allowing him to toss out the ballots of legal voters who cast ballots in the wrong precinct although these citizens were told their vote would count after confirming their registration.
Step 3: Not counting absentee ballots -- 526,420 of them. At least, that's what we figure from official stats. But it's anyone's guess how many mailed-in votes were dumped. (However, in one case, in Palm Beach, Florida, Jeb Bush's candidate for Elections Supervisor, Theresa LaPore, counted more absentee votes than absentee ballots mailed in. Not the brightest bulb in the vote-fix biz, that Theresa.)
Step 4: Scrub'm, Purge'm, Block'm. These are the voters who never got to vote at all. This group includes those who found their registrations were never entered on the voter rolls. In Ohio, about one-fourth of those registered by Jesse Jackson's 2004 voter drive, found their registrations delayed beyond the election date or lost.
Add to this un-voter group, those who were wrongly "scrubbed" from registries as "felons." For example, there was Bernice Kines, purged in Florida in 2004 because she was convicted of a felony on July 31, 2009. I repeat: 2009. There was something especially odd about the Ohio felon purge: ex-cons are ALLOWED to vote in that state, Mr. Blackwell.
How many lost their chance to vote by scrubbing, purging and blocking? That's anyone's guess, but one million would not be an unfair estimate -- and that's not included in the 3.6 million tally of ballots uncounted.
Was it deliberate? Oh, my God, yes. I'd like you to take a look at the "caging" lists the Republican National Committee concocted to challenge voters with "suspect" addresses. It included page after page of African-American soldiers, like one Randall Prausa, shipped overseas. Mission accomplished, Mr. President?
And there's some new tricks for these old dogs. For 2006 and 2008, the GOP is pushing new Voter ID requirements. Your signature won't be good enough anymore.
What's wrong with the new ID laws? This: In the 2004 election, 300,000 voters were turned away from the polls for "wrong" ID. For example, in the "Little Texas" counties in New Mexico, if your voter registration included a middle initial but your driver's license had none, you were kicked out of the polling station. Funny, but they only seemed to ask Hispanic voters. We should see the number of voters rejected for ID quintuple by 2008, based on the new "voting reform" laws recently passed in several states.
Also, coming to a polling station near you: more caging lists, scrub lists, ID challenge lists and more. Exactly why do you think they are compiling those "War on Terror" and War on Immigration databases? Behind the 2000 felon purge lists and behind the 2004 caging lists were databases from the same companies that now have those homeland security contracts. Are they saving us from Osama -- or from Democrats?
I wish I could give you a book on a page, because information is our weapon: Turn on the lights and the cockroaches scatter. That's why I'm asking you to read RFK's article on the "Theft of Ohio" in Rolling Stone magazine -- and GET ANGRY. Then read, Armed Madhouse: . The Scheme to Steal '08 -- AND GET READY.
BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast is author of ARMED MADHOUSE: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf? and other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War.
Just how stupid are the Dems? They are out slashing tires when the Republicans have fixed the election right under there nose. If this is fact, and common knowledge as you say it is, why have the Dems not exposed this? Afterall they do control the majority of the media. Or could it be this is not fact? This is a bunch of garbage. Is there some fraud, sure, on the level stated here, no way.
Doesn't seem like anyone is willing to actually prove much of anything these days. It is more fun to throw stones and run, particularly at those running for office who might actually make a difference with new and creative ideas. Republican MO is getting old. What are they afraid of?
Tell me, you who so confidentially states the media is liberal, what is your standing to make such a charge?
Are you one of those laughable individuals who thinks "60 Minutes" is liberal? Do you take your instructions on positioning opinions from Rushie, baby?
Before you embarrass yourself perhaps you should investigate just what liberal is. The American press and/or the mainstream media it ain't.
The main reason the Democrats do nothing about circumstances as they exist is they are, largely, spineless ninnies. The second reason is the public has been conditioned to reject their opinion by the rabid RIGHT WING press. And thirdly, the right wing press IGNORES what it does not want to push.
The left-side of the blogosphere is all atwitter about an interminably long article, by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in Rolling Stone, that posits that the vote was rigged in Ohio in 2004. It's really nothing more than a silly conspiracy theory piece and therefore, unsurprisingly, it uses a technique commonly used by kooks: the old, "Throw as many pieces of mud against the wall as possible and see what sticks," concept.
This is same sort of thing that the moonbats who claimed the Pentagon wasn't hit by a plane used to sell so many books to liberals and Frenchmen. The point isn't to make solid arguments, it's to sling countless out accusations, true or false, from reputable sources or not, and then say that unless all your wacky claims are disproved -- then only a conspiracy could explain it! Meanwhile, any contrary evidence, no matter how devastating it may be to your case, is simply ignored as if it didn't exist.
To Kennedy, things like making sure that voter addresses match up to where they actually live and purging the voter rolls of people who no longer live in a district are nefarious acts while poorly handled elections in districts that are run from top to bottom by Democrats are clearly part of a Republican plot. It doesn't matter if it makes sense or not, the important thing is just to run up the number of accusations.
He also seems, like a lot of conspiracy theorists who focus on the election, to put a great deal of stock in the supposed infallibility of the exit polls which seemed to show a Kerry victory. Yet, he doesn't believe the exit pollsters themselves who admit that they got it wrong, nor does he note the fact that in the last 4 elections prior to 2004, the exit polls have been off every time and have leaned towards the Democratic candidate in each instance, 3 times by rather large margins.
Does that mean the vast right wing conspiracy has controlled the results of the last 5 elections? If so, then it seems rather puzzling that they handed the election to Bill Clinton in '92 and '96, does it not? Moreover, how do they control the elections in states and districts run by Democrats? Who knows? It's just one of those mysteries that the conspiracy theorists never seem to be able to explain -- like what happened to the plane full of people who went missing if the Pentagon wasn't actually hit by a plane.
Kennedy goes on to claim that more than 300,000 voters, primarily Democratic voters, were disenfranchised and blocked from voting. Why, if they'd have had a chance to vote, it would have been a Kerry landslide!
However, Al Gore only received 2,186,19 votes in Ohio in 2000, while John Kerry received 2,741,165 votes in 2004. That's a pretty pathetic job of voter suppression by the vast right wing conspiracy if you ask me. If they were really on the ball, the number of votes the Democratic candidate received would have dropped, not gone up significantly.
But, if Bush wasn't, "cheating," how can Republicans explain the fact that Kerry was way up in the polls before the election? Oh wait, Bush actually won 9 out of the last 10 polls done in Ohio right before the election. So, the fact that he came out on top on election day wasn't surprising at all, it was expected.
How about the fact that Kerry's pollster, Mark Mellman, for all intents and purposes, predicted in an article that came out on election day that Kerry would probably lose? It's funny how Kennedy just skips right over inconvenient facts that undercut the tall tale he's trying to tell.
Here's the reality: people like Kennedy are not looking at the facts and determining that the election was rigged -- they decided that the election must have been rigged the moment that Kerry lost and then they worked from there. So, if Kerry had to have Ohio to win, then Ohio must have been rigged even though Bush won by a staggering 118,775 votes. The fact that you have so many Democrats crying, "fraud," in a race that wasn't even that close, just goes to show you how flaky parts of the "democratic mainstream" have gotten in the last few years.
Well said, Mr. Meyer. I take it you are a Republican and are pleased with the state of the union.
Power to you.
However to dismiss every criticism as a conspiracy theory amounts to blind obedience. In this case obedience to a crowd that has proved themselves to be liars and criminals. I would think even the blind could see that.
I admit I do not know what went on in Florida or in Ohio. But neither do you. You are accepting what "they say". Please admit that. At least admit that.
Post a Comment