Sour grapes or voter fraud?
4 November 2004, Mike Whitney, The Smirking Chimp
If you believe that George Bush won last night's election "fair and square" then forget about reading this article. If you know however that tens of thousands of people who lined up for up to four hours at a time in Ohio and Florida to have their vote counted, were not standing there to endorse the aggression and suicidal policies of the current administration then read on.
The unprecedented high turnout coupled with new registrations (that were overwhelmingly in favor of John Kerry) suggest that there was foul play at the voting booths. As a result, consumer investigator and activist Bev Harris (founder of Black Box Voting) "is conducting the largest Freedom of Information action in history. On election night, Black Box Voting blanketed the US with the first in a series of public records requests, to obtain internal computer logs and other documents from 3,000 individual counties and townships."
If the Bush people are so confident in their victory let them "put up or shut up."
The fact of the matter is (as every reasonable person who hasn't been hoodwinked by the pageantry of election night fraud realizes) that the election was stolen again in full view of the American public. The Republican owned voting machines prevailed over exit poll projections and the will of the American people.
If that's not the case, then let's investigate the computer logs.
According to Lynn Landis' article "Could the AP rig the Election": "The Associated Press (AP) will be the sole source of raw vote totals for the major news broadcasters on Election Night.... They refused to confirm or deny that the AP will receive direct feed from voting machines and central vote tabulating computers across the country. But, circumstantial evidence suggests that is exactly what will happen.
And what can be downloaded can also be uploaded. Computer experts say that signals can travel both to and from computerized voting machines through wireless technology, modems, and even simple electricity."
Landis just confirms what is already known about "sketchy" electronic voting and how it invites vote tampering. Her connection between election machinery, vote totals and the AP, however, has not previously been made.
She goes on to explain that, "AP spokespeople would not give out information on who sits on their board, however AP leadership appears quite conservative."
Landis continues: "Burl Osborne, chairman of the AP board of directors, is also publisher emeritus of the conservative The Dallas Morning News, a newspaper that endorsed George W. Bush in the last election. Kathleen Carroll, senior vice president and executive editor of AP, was a reporter at The Dallas Morning News before joining AP. Carroll is also on the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME)'s 7-member executive committee. The APME "works in partnership with AP to improve the wire service's performance," according to their website. APME vice president, Deanna Sands, is managing editor of the ultra conservative Omaha World Herald newspaper, whose parent company owns the largest voting machine company in the nation, Election Systems and Software (ES&S)."
It's a cozy relationship considering that ES&S voting machines count 50% of all the votes in the country. The second largest company, Diebold, is also tied to the Republican Party and promised (in a comment by Wally Diebold that got widespread attention on the internet) to "deliver the vote" in Ohio to President Bush.
Both Wally and ES&S apparently succeeded admirably in their task of undermining the election.
Many readers are probably wondering what happened to the "Help America Vote Act" that was passed by Congress to avoid the problems of Florida 2000? As Landis reports in an earlier article: "What Congress really did was to throw $2.65 billion at the states, so that they could lavish it on a handful of private companies that are controlled by ultra-conservative Republicans, foreigners and felons." (Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia were among the big winners)
None of the facts related to the presidential election add up. Voter registration went up from 105 million to 120 million. In Ohio alone it went up a whopping 17%. Whenever registration has surged like this in the past, it has always favored the challenger and precipitated a change in government.
Not so, this time, and Republican pollsters are eager to convince us that the reason for this is a renewed interest among the American public for "moral values". Is that it or are the results simply an indication of massive (but well calculated) voter fraud?
The exit polling was equally skewed, showing a clear victory for Kerry. Exit polling has traditionally been a reliable way of determining the outcome of elections. Not so in Bush-world, where vote totals are invariably higher for Bush in the contentious areas that ultimately decide the election.
Give strategist Karl Rove his due; he knew what had to be done and did it. The rest, of course, has been papered over by the pollsters, pimps and pundits in American press corps.
Do we need to remind ourselves that representative government can only be established by the power of the vote? It is the electoral process that confers legitimacy on government. Without a popular mandate state power can only be vindicated through force of arms.
Last night American democracy was skillfully subverted and replaced with a mutant form of corporatism that operates independent of the will of the people. It's impossible to know what the long term affects of this will be, but it is a development that should greatly concern us all.
related articles from Lynn Landes:
31 October 2004, If this election is stolen, will it be by enough to stop a recount?
22 October 2004, Could the Associated Press (AP) rig the election?
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