now a trickle

There are more stories than ever on the election results. All of the stories about recounts and potential irregularities are looking stronger and stronger, while the results in Ohio and Florida are looking shakier and shakier. But, who's looking?

Apparently they had Jesse Jackson on a talk show with Robert Novak. Novak seemed to say that, it was better to live with the results of a stolen election than to disrupt the country in order to force a fair vote count.

NOVAK: Reverend Jackson, in 1960, the first election I covered, they stole the election from Richard Nixon in Illinois. In Texas, there was a difference of less than 12,000 votes. And they took care of those very nicely. But Nixon never protested. The Republicans never protested because, in the interests of the country, they didn't want to have -- put the country through something.
You surely don't want to have some kind of question whether who won this election when it's not 10,000 or 12,000 votes. It's, as Paul says, what, 136,000 votes.

JACKSON: Well, we should be better 44 years later in the counting of an election. I mean, if we can protest an unfair election, a questionable one in Ukraine, why can't we have a good one here in our own country?
The point is, there are court suits asking, A, that all ballots be counted; 92,000 unprocessed ballots have not been counted; 155,000 provisional votes have not all yet been counted. And so, to expect all votes to count is reasonable. Whether Kerry win or loses, let the winner win and the loser lose, but count all the votes. That's a reasonable democratic expectation.

This is provided courtesy of Bob Fertik's blog on Democrats.com. Fertik also has a really nice compendium of November Ohio election bullets. This rocks! Thank you, Bob. Thank you, Jesse.

Ohio, again

The Boston Globe is among the mainstream media trying to weigh in on the story of stolen election/vote fraud 2004. The funny part is,

In any event, the probe's expected six-month time frame means results will not be known until after President Bush is inaugurated for a second term. But the lawmakers said a thorough investigation is necessary to preserve the integrity of the voting system, regardless of who the winner was.

By far, the laurels today go to Anne Pfeiffer with this article at Buzzflash, calling for a revote.

The problem with this election is, no matter how hard we try to look the other way, the exit polls are staring right back at us.

Gimme A Break

The mainstream news media have been excusing their lack of 2004 election fraud coverage by bemoaning a lack of factual, documented evidence in the 2004 Vote Fraud accusations that have been so prevalent on the internet since November 2nd.

Even Keith Olbermann has decried the lack of facts in the conspiracy theories. For every expert who comes forward with exit poll statistics and long odds, there's another expert who talks about another, less sensational interpretation of the numbers.

Yet, through it all, the Columbus Ohio hearings on the election speak the disturbing, irrefutable truth about the crisis in the 2004 Presidential election. Fritakis & Wasserman's November 25th article in the Free Press highlights the kind of testimony that damns the conventional wisdom of fair elections in Ohio and, for all we know, across the U.S.

it was only a matter of time

You can't rig elections all over the country without an army of operatives. Eventually, even the most loyal and well paid talk. People have consciences. This story from Online Journal looks like the next breaking wave in the "conspiracy theory."

Truthisall posted these numbers on DU today regarding exit polls in the 2004 election and their probability for deviations from the official results:

............Kerry
State Size Exit Vote Diff StDev MoE Prob >MoE? Favor
DE 770 58.50% 53.54% -4.96% 1.80% 3.53% 0.29 yes Bush
NH 1849 55.40% 50.51% -4.89% 1.16% 2.28% 0.00 yes Bush
VT 685 65.00% 60.20% -4.80% 1.91% 3.74% 0.60 yes Bush
SC 1735 46.00% 41.41% -4.59% 1.20% 2.35% 0.01 yes Bush
NE 785 36.76% 32.32% -4.44% 1.78% 3.50% 0.64 yes Bush

AK 910 40.50% 36.08% -4.42% 1.66% 3.25% 0.38 yes Bush
AL 730 41.00% 37.00% -4.00% 1.85% 3.63% 1.53 yes Bush
NC 2167 48.00% 44.00% -4.00% 1.07% 2.11% 0.01 yes Bush
NY 1452 63.00% 59.18% -3.82% 1.31% 2.57% 0.18 yes Bush
CT 872 58.50% 55.10% -3.40% 1.69% 3.32% 2.24 yes Bush

RI 809 64.00% 60.61% -3.39% 1.76% 3.45% 2.68 Bush
MA 889 66.00% 62.63% -3.37% 1.68% 3.29% 2.21 yes Bush
PA 1930 54.35% 51.00% -3.35% 1.14% 2.23% 0.16 yes Bush
MS 798 43.26% 40.00% -3.26% 1.77% 3.47% 3.29 Bush
OH 1963 52.10% 49.00% -3.10% 1.13% 2.21% 0.30 yes Bush

FL 2846 50.51% 47.47% -3.03% 0.94% 1.84% 0.06 yes Bush
MN 2178 54.50% 51.52% -2.98% 1.07% 2.10% 0.27 yes Bush
UT 798 30.50% 27.55% -2.95% 1.77% 3.47% 4.78 Bush
ID 559 33.50% 30.61% -2.89% 2.11% 4.14% 8.60 Bush
AZ 1859 47.00% 44.44% -2.56% 1.16% 2.27% 1.38 yes Bush

VA 1000 47.96% 45.45% -2.50% 1.58% 3.10% 5.66 Bush
LA 1669 44.50% 42.42% -2.08% 1.22% 2.40% 4.49 Bush
IL 1392 57.00% 55.00% -2.00% 1.34% 2.63% 6.78 Bush
WI 2223 52.50% 50.51% -1.99% 1.06% 2.08% 3.00 Bush
WV 1722 45.25% 43.43% -1.82% 1.20% 2.36% 6.54 Bush

NM 1951 51.30% 49.49% -1.81% 1.13% 2.22% 5.54 Bush
CO 2515 49.10% 47.47% -1.63% 1.00% 1.95% 5.15 Bush
IN 926 41.00% 39.39% -1.61% 1.64% 3.22% 16.42 Bush
GA 1536 43.00% 41.41% -1.59% 1.28% 2.50% 10.69 Bush
MO 2158 47.50% 46.00% -1.50% 1.08% 2.11% 8.17 Bush

NJ 1520 55.00% 53.54% -1.46% 1.28% 2.51% 12.67 Bush
WA 2123 54.95% 53.54% -1.41% 1.09% 2.13% 9.70 Bush
IA 2502 50.65% 49.49% -1.15% 1.00% 1.96% 12.41 Bush
AR 1402 46.60% 45.45% -1.15% 1.34% 2.62% 19.55 Bush
KY 1034 41.00% 40.00% -1.00% 1.55% 3.05% 26.01 Bush

OK 1539 35.00% 34.00% -1.00% 1.27% 2.50% 21.63 Bush
MI 2452 52.50% 51.52% -0.98% 1.01% 1.98% 16.47 Bush
NV 2116 49.35% 48.48% -0.87% 1.09% 2.13% 21.29 Bush
ME 1968 54.75% 54.08% -0.66% 1.13% 2.21% 27.80 Bush
MD 1000 57.00% 56.57% -0.43% 1.58% 3.10% 39.18 Bush

DC 795 91.00% 90.91% -0.09% 1.77% 3.48% 47.96 Bush
MT 640 39.76% 39.80% 0.04% 1.98% 3.87% 50.72 Kerry
OR 1064 51.20% 52.00% 0.80% 1.53% 3.00% 69.91 Kerry
HI 499 53.30% 54.55% 1.25% 2.24% 4.39% 71.10 Kerry
TX 1671 37.00% 38.38% 1.38% 1.22% 2.40% 87.10 Kerry

TN 1774 41.50% 43.00% 1.50% 1.19% 2.33% 89.68 Kerry
CA 1919 54.00% 55.56% 1.56% 1.14% 2.24% 91.35 Kerry
SD 1495 37.76% 39.39% 1.63% 1.29% 2.53% 89.65 Kerry
ND 649 34.00% 36.36% 2.36% 1.96% 3.85% 88.58 Kerry
KS 654 35.00% 37.37% 2.37% 1.96% 3.83% 88.76 Kerry

Avg 1450 49.18% 47.38% -1.80% 1.42% 2.79% 21.67 Bush
Med 1507.5 49.23% 47.47% -1.81% 1.29% 2.52% 6.66 Bush

This is the explanation:

The individual state probabilities are calculated using the Normal distribution Function. For example, consider Florida: The probability that Kerry's 50.51% exit poll percentage would decline to 47.47% in the actual vote (a 4.04% deviation, far outside the 1.84% MOE) is equal to .06%. This calculation is based on the FL exit poll sample size of 2846, which produces a MOE of 1.84%. The corresponding standard deviation (StDev) is 0.94%. The StDev is plugged into the normal distribution function, along with the exit poll and reported vote percentages. The probability that this deviation would occur due to chance is: .06% = 100*NORMDIST(47.47%,50.51%,.94%,TRUE) Here are the Exit Poll and Voting Results for all the states: Size refers to the exit poll sample size for the given state. The percentages are Kerry's Exit Polls and reported Votes.

The drum beat gets louder

One of my favorite scenes in The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, is when they're in the crypt of Balin in Moria. They're all standing there in silent fear after Peregrin Took accidentally pushed a skeleton on a chain into into a well. It tumbles down into the depths in a crashing disturbance.

Suddenly, a faint but unmistakably sinister drum beat resounds from far below, in the fathomless depths of the gloomy mine. Orcs!

The drum beat repeats and grows stronger, louder -- is joined by others until a steady booming is reverberating through the mine, the crypt and the nerves of the fellowship.

Such is the sense of this article in today's Philadelphia Inquirer. The drum beat is foreboding, far off, but growing stronger.

1984

I finally got around to starting the Buzz Flash article by Jonathan Greenburg, "Why Bush's America Feels Like Orwell's 1984." It's good. There's so much to read. I rarely look at mainstream media now. I'm beginning to think of alternative media as underground.

A central premise of the Big Brother world of 1984 was what Orwell called "Doublethink," defined in the book as "the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them."

This is such a key concept for understanding today's voters. He goes on to describe in detail many of the actions voters apply this mechanism to.

In the mythical empire of Oceania in 1984, citizenship meant "not thinking -- not needing to think." The government of Big Brother alternates between war and alliance with two competing empires. At one point, the enemy changes in the middle of a patriotic speech, and the audience immediately accepts the new reality. They have no choice. In 1984, according to Orwell, "The heresy of heresies was common sense."

The Bush Administration has been tremendously successful at convincing its supporters to suspend common sense. Last month, a survey by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes found that 72% of Bush supporters believe that Iraq had actual WMD (47%) or a major program for producing them (25%). This survey was done after the widely-reported results of the CIA's "Duelfer Report," an exhaustive $1 billion investigation, which concluded that Hussein had dismantled all of his WMD programs shortly after the 1991 Gulf War and never tried to reconstitute them. The Duelfer Report also found that Saddam Hussein did not support Al-Qaeda terrorists.



When asked whether the U.S. should have gone to war without evidence of a WMD program or support to Al-Qaeda, 58% of Bush supporters polled said no. Yet these same voters support the war, suggesting an inability, or refusal, to accept "discernable reality."

This is no accident. For three years, the President and his Administration have used every opportunity to manage the perceptions of the public by distorting facts. Even after the conclusive CIA report, Bush and Cheney deliberately fused the war in Iraq with the war on those who caused the September 11 attacks. And who can forget the certainty with which the President declared, a few months after the Iraq war began, that "We found the weapons of mass destruction."

We have all heard the litany of assertions by this Administration that Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States, that the United Nations inspection program to disarm Hussein of weapons of mass destruction had failed, and that the Iraq War was necessary to prevent terrorist acts on American soil. Not one of these assertions was true. The truth, as former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil revealed last year, was that at their first cabinet meeting in January, 2001, the Administration was planning to go to war against Saddam Hussein -- nine months before the September 11 attacks.

Even the Administration's pursuit of Al Q'aeda could have been culled from Orwell's 1984, where 'Ignorance is Strength" was another key Big Brother slogan. Right after September 11, the President swore that he would stop at nothing to get the perpetrators of the attack. This was right after his Administration allowed a plane full of Saudi Arabians, including bin Laden's relatives, to fly out of the U.S. without being questioned by the F.B.I. Then, six months later, while laying the ground work to divert most of our country's military resources to a war against Iraq, Bush said of bin Laden, "He's a person who's now been marginalized...I just don't spend that much time on him...I truly am not that concerned about him." By April, 2002, Joint Chief of Staff Chairman Myers followed that with: "The goal has never been to get bin Laden."

No one ever thinks about applying this concept to the Bush Administration members themselves, though. It's always assumed that they are deliberately twisting the truth about issues in order to deceive voters. I wonder. I believe that in order to propound "doublethink" one must be a doublethinker oneself. And this brings us to the Edgar Allan Poe horror of the Orwellian world of Bush. He is his own primary victim. In order to win the Presidency, he lost his soul.

Jon Greenburg concludes with this, emphasis on "sad":

When Orwell created Doublethink and the dark world of 1984, he was satirizing the future of Stalin's Soviet Union. It is a sad time for America when his message applies most fittingly to our own country.

Just remember, Bush may have the right to sterilize his own corporate mind and spirit in order to "gain the world," but he doesn't have the right to take ours.

---

Of course, the "watchdog" media have become the Administration's lapdog. This is nowhere more problemmatic than in the Iraq war coverage.

As Michael Massing writes in, Iraq, the Press and the Election, published on Common Dreams,

[reporter Nir] Rosen believes that such encounters are common. The American soldiers he saw "treat everybody as the enemy," he said, adding that they can be very abusive and violent. "If you're a boy and see soldiers beating the shit out of your father, how can you not hate the Americans?" He added: "Why doesn't anybody write about this in the New York Times or the Washington Post? The AP always has people embedded -- why don't they write about it?"

One reason, he suggests, is that embedded journalists who write negatively about the US military find themselves "blacklisted." It happened to Rosen: a series of stories he wrote for Asia Times about his experience while embedded elicited an angry letter from the commander and the public affairs officer of the unit he accompanied, and he has not been allowed to become embedded since. Other correspondents told me of similar experiences.

Tom Delay

Tom DeLay

"We're google bombing Tom Delay:" an entry by danthrax on Daily Kos

It the Civil War taught us anything, though, it's that politicians like Tom DeLay and George Bush, however much they try to run the whole country into the ground, are too chronically self-destructive to ever get that far.

So I don't subscribe, anyway, to the racist, separationist, oversimplistic analysis on Democratic Undergound, "The New Civil War," by Ted McClelland. Actually, some of the writing isn't bad, and he seems to have researched a little of the demographics behind his thesis: Warring groups in England migrated to different areas of the US where they continue their regional conflicts.

He talks about the different character or psyche of the different social or geographic groups in America in a way reminiscent of Plato's analogy of Justice In The State. But he fails to understand the pervasive plurality of the American soul, and the essentially illusory quality of sectional character. It is superficial. People are not just a product of their environment, or even of their society. We are a mixtue of a lot of things. The sectional disunity of America was an illusion, one of the big miscalculations politicians made, especially in terms of another illusion: the local unity they so much wanted to stand upon.

Ohio, Michigan, Missouri and Indiana were full of southern sympathizers. So was Pennsylvania. Also, there are counties in Western North and South Carolina that have never voted anything but Republican.

One of the greatest of all post-bellum Yankee Bards -- Robert L. Frost -- was fatherd by a New England Confederate. Frost's father ran away to Virginia as a boy to fight against the "Yankee imperialists," and after the war sired an heir named after his hero, Robert Lee.

In 2004 the red states are stocked with Democrats, pro choice, equal opportunity, environmentalist, educated, responsible citizens. And the blue states have plenty of corporate schills and reign of terror-ists. It's not going to be as bad as 1860. There's no way they can thrust that kind of a disaster on us -- we are a plurality of pluralities.

democratic details

Let's hope that even if Victor Yushchenko's supporters don't prevail, Bush may still be sacrificed on the altar of democratic high standards, however frivolous and insulting those may be.

In BuzzFlash today, there's a ringing editorial on the psycho-verbal manipulation of the electorate: "framing." Unfortunately, in a society where literacy rates are falling, along with real incomes, living standards and job opportunities, television's talking heads have set up shop in our psyches comparably to the menage of the proverbial "seven spirits" of Matthew's gospel.

As on target as BF's assessment is, I wonder whether we can ever wage successful warfare against the Republicans until we have accepted the moral authority of Jesus. His words are the ultimate authority on earth and he is resurrected, immortalized.

We can frame the fascists all we want, but only the power of God can cast out Satan.

helping the ny times

This is a blog by Brad Friedman, thanks to Cannonfire, that cogently puts forward a salient set of questions for the paper that can't find the news.

The New York Times might find this story today, from a small North Carolina outlet, helpful, too.

The BeAmerica/ReDefeat Bush site now includes a petition recommending that states without honest vote counts suffer reduced representation in Congress!

Yes, the news on election irregularities keeps washing in-- in little waves --day after day. Kos continues to be the best source, along with Cannonfire and BBV.

ohio recount movement

Here is my New York County Black Box Voting entry:

OK. This may be the first post to this community but it won't be the last.

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ACT IV, scene iii.


Let's face it. New York needs an action plan.

So far I have:

1. Created this media bombardment kit on a Kos diary;
   
   
2. Found the NYS Board of Elections Homepage
   
   
3. Found the election results at NYS Board of Elections, and begun to scrutinize them;
   
   
4. Called the NY State Board of Elections and spoke with the Director of Elections Operations, Anna Svizzero;

What needs to be done:

1. I need to join forces, collaborate, find some other NY Activist(s)!
   
   
2. We need to plan a meeting and distribute posters and fliers;
   
   
3. We need to make a list of local, county and state board of elections officials -- a contact sheet for NY state;
   
   
4. We need to reach out to local, state and federal government officials;
   
   
5. We need to prepare press releases.

ANYBODY READING THIS MESSAGE, PLEASE RESPOND, FORWARD AND CONTRIBUTE!!

No responses yet.

warm rain

The only other news story besides the Plain Dealer's that I've seen declaring with certainty that the Ohio election results will be challenged is this one.

It sounds as if the voting was not fair in Ohio, and that Democratic attorneys believe the evidence is sufficient to challenge the result, based on unequal numbers of voters per machine in different precincts.

As the days roll by, there's an increasingly quixotic sense of delusion in this idea that the election results are inaccurate and are somehow going to be rectified. The fog and rain here in Pennsylvania lend an air of sorrow to the feeling of suppression that befalls us with the early darkness these days.

I still believe it is impossible that the Repubicans won the election. First of all, I don't feel that the representations in Congress and the Senate are fair, in terms of per capita representation. Second, whether or not overt and deliberate election fraud via electronic voting machines is proven, I will never rule out the possibility until a fully fair and transparent audit process is put in place. Even if the election computers weren't hacked or bugged, the results of voter suppression at the polls through provisional ballots, misinformation, inadequate and malfunctioning voting equipment, relocated polling places, and challengers inside the polls are probably enough to have swung the election, not only for Bush, but for Republicans in other close House and Senate races.

I was involved in the GOTV movement in Pennsylvania, and I know that the Democrats had a huge turnout, with phenomenal mobilization. I just can't beleive in my gut that people turned out as effectively on the other side in Ohio, Iowa and Florida. If the Republicans did get out their voters in the numbers the tallies actually show, then I am deluded and my judgment and intuition very flawed. I know in my gut that we did better than they did.

In These Times magazine tells it like it is in Mark Crispin Miller's article, Let's Get Real. He goes through the whole litany:

To nod agreement that this was indeed an honest win is to forget how Bush was shoehorned into office in the first place; to ignore the ease with which electronic totals can be changed without a trace; to suppress the fact that Diebold, Sequoia and ES&S—the major manufacturers of touch screen voting machines and central tabulators—are owned and run by Bush Republicans, who have made no secret of their partisan intentions; to deny the value of the exit polls, which turn out to have been “mistaken” only in the swing states; to downplay the weird inflation of the Bush vote in county after county, where the number of votes for president was somehow higher than the number of voters who turned out; to ignore the bald chicanery of the Bush supporters who ran the central polling station in Ohio’s Warren County and forced out the press and poll monitors so they could count the vote in secret; to forget the numerous accounts of vote fraud coast to coast throughout the prior weeks of early voting; to overlook the fact that every single “glitch” or “error” that has been reported favors Bush; to ignore the countless instances of ballots—absentee, provisional—thrown away or left uncounted; to forget that the civilian vote abroad (some four million Americans) was being mishandled by the Pentagon (which had somehow become responsible for doing the State Department’s job); and to ignore the many dirty tricks reported—the polling places quickly relocated at the last minute, the fake voter-registration drives, the thousands of Americans who found themselves not on the rolls, the police road-blocks, the bullying pro-Bush poll workers, the machines that kept translating votes for Kerry into votes for Bush. And so on.

To forget or ignore all this and to accept—on faith—the mere say-so of Bush & Company (and our compliant media) is to make clear that you are not a member of what the Busheviks deride as “the reality-based community.” Those who help discredit false reports are doing that community, and this erstwhile democracy, a precious service. But, those who would abort the whole inquiry in the name of science or journalistic probity and “closure” are putting that community, and this nation, at grave risk.

The election system is too partisan, too flawed and too inclusive of the failures and inequities in our society. There isn't any need for more evidence of the illegitimacy of the election; the election itself is self-incriminating. The only solution is a bipartisan movement to empower citizens to participate in democracy, beginning with the right to vote.

Media bombardment kit

This is the lastest version of the media bombardment diary.

I want to add a government links section and the democratic party media contact form today.

My problem is promotion.

I need someone else from New York I can work with to push the envelope.

Not exactly mainstream, but the buzzflash headlines box in the lower right of this page has a good story on BBV in Volusia County by Thom Hartmann.

Operation blizzard

We're now starting to see a few mainstream articles per day on post-election issues. This one starts off okay, but doesn't mention electronic vote tabulation concerns. I started a diary on the Daily Kos which I'm going to use to construct a media contact list, a government and public interest group contact list, and sample emails demanding scrutiny of voting fraud in election 2004.

I've decided to post the entire memo from Chas at BBV for today:

CyberChas
Member since Nov-7-04
48 posts Nov-18-04, 10:52 AM (PST)

"Talking Points for Thurday, November 18, 2004"

Today is Thursday, November 18, 2004 and the message to get out there is that this battle is just beginning.
While most of the mainstream media have already declared the election of 2004 over and moved on to other issues, there are tens of thousands of American activists who are not satisfied and are digging deeper. Representatives of BlackBoxVoting.ORG are in Florida auditing the election results and uncovering signs of VOTE FRAUD and/or incompetence and/or equipment malfunctions at each site they visit. The Ohio Green Party and Ohio Libertarian Party have already raised sufficient funds to call for a complete recount of the results in Ohio, where there have been thousands of different allegations of voter suppression and/or technical malfunctions and/or VOTE FRAUD. Presidential Candidate Ralph Nader has been granted a partial recount in New Hampshire where unusual anomalies indicate possible VOTE FRAUD, and may request a FULL recount of New Hampshire after preliminary review of the evidence. There are also investigations and audits under way in New Mexico, Iowa, Indiana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and elsewhere. In short, the myth that the 2004 election went off "without a hitch" is quickly being exploded. Mainstream media has been slow to respond to most of these stories, but as mass dissatisfaction with the way the recent election was handled begins to coalesce, we can expect the pressure on them to increase.


ACTION ITEM: Activists who want to get involved in HANDS ON activities should join a free networking group (such as meetup.org) and get together in person in their local area. Promote the message, and get information out there. Print small, one-page leaflets and spread them around. Print posters and get them up. Cite: BlackBoxVoting.ORG and HelpAmericaRecount.ORG and any others.


REFERENCES:

Blogging:
1. www.democraticunderground.com


Info:
1. www.gregpalast.com
2. www.blackboxvoting.org
3. www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/gaoinvestvote2004ltr11804.pdf
5. Another great article by a PhD: http://onlinejournal.com/evoting/111704DeHart/111704dehart.html


Action & Fundraising:
1. www.thealliancefordemocracy.org
2. www.votecobb.org
3. www.helpamericarecount.org


Keep the faith,

Charlie Levenson
Portland, Oregon
CLL2001@GMail.com

If we allow this election to stand without a fight, and the media convinces the masses that it was "fair and trouble-free" then we will never have another honest election in our lifetimes in this country.

bmoney07, Nov-18-04, 11:12 AM, (1)
Another thing "they" might do..., CyberChas, Nov-18-04, 12:05 PM, (2)
RE: Another thing "they" might do..., bmoney07, Nov-18-04, 12:17 PM, (3)

bmoney07
Member since Nov-9-04
47 posts Nov-18-04, 11:12 AM (PST)

1. "RE: Talking Points for Thurday, November 18, 2004"
In response to message #0

First of all good to har from you, I was beginning to think that you may have been silenced.
What is your take on the FBI raiding the Cybernet Headquarters in Grand Rapids MI this morning. I know you like to wait for the facts but this seems pretty big.

Is it related to the 6 congressional leaders asking the GAO to investigate/Jeff Fisher?

The reason I ask becasue the forums on Democraticunderground are going crazy right now and no one seems to be able to make heads or tales of this. In other words they are porcessing so much info that it is really going in all directions and this doesn't even include the other headlines making the blogesphere today. People are getting paranoid.




Benton Mobley

CyberChas
Member since Nov-7-04
48 posts Nov-18-04, 12:05 PM (PST)

2. "Another thing "they" might do..."
In response to message #1

I forgot to mention in my "How they will respond to this" post is the following...
If the story and the investigations begin to get serious traction, and media are beginning to publicize it, they will insert some FALSE INFORMATION or RED HERRING into the process. When this RH is debunked, they will try to spin the debunking to include the ENTIRE VOTE FRAUD.

Consider CBS/memogate as a means of totally defusing a growing question about Bush's national guard duty as the prime and best example of this strategy. A couple of well-planted, potentially false (not even necessarily) documents that can be questioned, and the whole story with the 1000 other non-false documents somehow "goes away." (Damn, sometimes I have to give these crooks credit -- they really are brilliant in an evil genius sort of way.)

It is why the strategy of collecting as much solid evidence as possible, making the legal requests as necessary, and going to court when appropriate, but not screaming CONSPIRACY at the first apparent sign of one will serve us best.

Besides, if the FBI seized the material in order to PROTECT those who perpetrated the VOTE FRAUD then there is not a single thing we can do about it. If they seized it to actually INVESTIGATE, then the truth will out, eventually.

IMHO,

Charlie Levenson
Portland, Oregon

Not silenced, just tired and having to do some of my "day job"


If we allow this election to stand without a fight, and the media convinces the masses that it was "fair and trouble-free" then we will never have another honest election in our lifetimes in this country.

bmoney07
Member since Nov-9-04
47 posts Nov-18-04, 12:17 PM (PST)

3. "RE: Another thing "they" might do..."
In response to message #2

I'm with you on the fact that there is nothing we can really do with the FBI situation.
Lets say the FBI, the GAO and even possible congressional hearings proove FRAUD which is what we would like to see.

Will anybody REALLY be punished or will the government/angencies involve just give slap on the wrists to the people involved?

I just think that this country is under the spell that no matter who gets involved and what he results are that there will be no real hard conscequences to the criminals.

Did Clinton get impeached?
Is Martha Stewart doing hard time?
Are all of the Enron people tried and convicted?
What ever happen to Bunnatine Greenhouse the pentagon whistle blower on Haliburton?
It's like a combination of a self serving and self protecting vicious cycle.

Its just ashame that we can not get the other side of the country to get more involved in protecting our democracy/votes - regardless of who they elected.

When are ALL of the people going to rise and start to take back what is rightfully theirs?

Maybe this maybe not

Benton Mobley

It's time to blow the lid off the voting fraud story

Yes, the middle-level media bigwigs are starting to weigh in on the side calling for an investigation. Today there was this story from a Vermont editor.

There's this very interesting piece from Florida regarding absentee ballots.

The anecdotal details that are unavailable to the public seem to be reaching a critical mass of conflict and mystery involving police, elections officials, lawyers, candidates, voters and public interest activists, that sparks are starting to fly in Ohio, and Florida.

Media Matters has posted some good coverage of the coverage, but what has to happen now is something quantitatively different: an explosion of public outrage driving relentless and irresistable major media scrutiny.

So, anyway, this is what I told Al Franken about his show today:

Look, Al, I was listening to your show and got p.o.d when you said you were being “responsible” about not fanning the flames of the election fraud investigation.

Your guest, Mike McCurry (or whoever it was) talked about how they had looked at all the irregularities in the numbers, thought through every scenario and concluded that they didn’t want to put the country through a partisan conflict ("bloodbath in the courts” was the phrase he used) when it was unlikely to turn the outcome of the election.

You concurred!

That’s what I’m mad about. Fairness in an election is nonpartisan. The people who worked for the Kerry effort deserve more than to be brushed aside as sore losers by you and Kerry. It’s understandable that John Kerry would want to stay out of this because it’s the people’s fight. But you have been way too dismissive of the cause of voter’s rights and using this election as a window to shed some light on the dark and crooked alleys of disfranchisement.

Sure, as you said, there’re shenanigans in every election, but that doesn’t make it right. The people deserve a fair election and this is the time to fight for it!

Posted by flotron9 on 11/17 at 03:59 PM

drip drip drip

The flood hasn't started yet, but this might give it a little momentum.

The author is on the faculty of Yale law school and presents what reads as the most cogent case yet for a fraud investigation into the election.

The recounts in NH and Ohio have not made it into the mainstream media yet.

Furthermore, it looks as if the one MSNBC reporter who was covering the story is getting canned. I'm not buying the "vacation" cover.

Let's face it: there's an industrywide gag order on this story, and anyone who leaks it is going down.

GMAFB, I am so sick of election-stress and gag-rule tension and hypocrisy. One of the things driving me crazy is this BLOG and reformatting it to put links on the side. Ai, chihuahua!

more on voting 11/02/04

The New York Times has put out an interesting piece, featuring this paragraph:

But rebuttals to the Florida fraud hypothesis were just as quick. Three political scientists, from Cornell, Harvard and Stanford, pointed out, in an e-mail message to a Web site that carried the news of Ms. Dopp's findings, that many of those Democratic counties in Florida have a long tradition of voting Republican in presidential elections. And while Ms. Dopp says that she and dozens of other researchers will continue to analyze the Florida vote, the suggestion of a link between certain types of voting machines and the vote split in Florida has, at least for now, little concrete support.

Their "rebuttal" is that our experts have a different opinion than your experts. This is the same argument that they accuse Dopp and the bloggers of using. Where is the scrutiny of the statistics, the hardware and the integrity of the tabulations?

As fallacious as the suspicions of fraud on the Florida panhandle may be, Zeller begs the question by ignoring the real issue of transparency, verification and equality of access to the polls.

As far as experts are concerned, Piven and Cloward asserted that

This dispute is not readily resolved by reference to available facts, since much of what passes for data on fraud consists of anecdotal charges by contemporaries, including the reformers themselves. While such charges cannot be dismissed out of hand, we must regard them as the opinions of highly motivated observers. Moreover, the bearing of fraud on turnout is complicated, as Argersinger points out, by the fact that fraud also took the form of intimidation or of deterring voting, or of stealing ballots, which deflated turnout.

Cloward, Richard A. and Piven, Frances Fox, Why Americans Still Don't Vote And Why Politicians Want It That Way, Beacon Press, Boston 2000, pp. 25, 26.

The point is this, that fraud has been taking place in many guises throughout the history of American elections. Although many of the historical allegations and their effects are of questionable veracity, the multifarious instances of fraud belie any posture of fairness and complacency on the part of the electorate and the media they rely upon for investigative reporting.

What about access to the polls, provisional and absentee ballots, registration scrub lists, malfunctioning voting machines, spoilage of votes and arbitrarily changing rules for recounts? If anyone needed evidence of intent, it's pervasive, and always has been.

Rather than dismissing the possibility of fraud in the November 2004 elections because a few statisticians and experts couldn't agree or justify their preliminary numbers, the press and the electorate need to be showering this process in bright glaring sunlight. Fraud, intimidation, irregularities and errors took place. They always have and they always will

Unitil we become that incredible, unanimal, mankind, and not until

as e.e. cummings put it. The papers should help unearth, expose and rectify the injustices against disfranchised voters, instead of conspiring with the special interest advertisers and corporate clients to sweep fraud allegations under the rug and promote business as usual until the next election. After all

Election machinery has always been something more than an instrument through which the will of the voters could be made known. It has been the means of influencing the verdict of the electorate. Any change in the machinery affected the fortunes of the major factions contending for political power ... No factor is more constant in explaining the development of election machinery than this one.

McCormick, Richard P., The History of Voting in New Jersey: A Study in the Development of Election Machinery, 1664-1991. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ p. 217

more of the same

America believes Bush won the election. I don't. There was too much anti-Bush sentiment. I think there were also a lot of vote tabulation errors, too.

There's no way they got out the vote as well as we did, no way.

Why aren't the votes counted openly?

more to come

Get ready to build more prisons

Grover Norquist unveiled his inhumane and repressive anti-populist agenda in this Bill Moyers interview.

He fails to explain why he wants to have 100% of the electorate owning shares in stock.

hearsay, sour grapes and red herrings

The problem with David Corn's new piece on 2004 election voting fraud is that he is too comfortable with business as usual.

By the end of the piece, casting about for a conclusion that won't entirely disaffect his leftist readers, he calls for paper trails and bipartisanship in voting and vote counting.

Big deal!

What does the Secretary of State of Ohio tell a first time voter who stood in line to cast their ballot for 4 hours and then hears the winner announced before the ballots are even counted? This business of announcing a "winner" and creating a public perception of victory before the votes are counted, as if nothing could possibly go wrong, must stop now.

First of all, voting is far too important a safeguard for all our other rights as citizens to be "touched up" casually if a cursory glance at a major election leaves citizens jittery. Alarms should be going off: loud ones.

There can not be a valid election if the electorate perceives the process as being questionable. Why? Because the consent of the governed does not equal the indifference of the governed. The process is more important than the product. U.S. Presidential elections in the 21st century are more about validating our rights than electing a warm body. Whoever wins an election's outcome, the perception of democracy working effectively is essential for the election's success.

The perception of success is critical in trusting our elected officials.

The perception of success is critical in unified and cooperative self-governance and participation by the people.

The perception of success is critical in including all classes and minorities in the society and system of government.

The perception of success is critical in legitimizing the society and government, not only with their own citizens, but internationally.

Finally, the perception of success is critical in maintaining and propounding our values as a free society. If winning is the most important thing, then everyone loses something valuable enough to be worth keeping: the belief that reasonable people can fairly and honestly govern themselves.

That's something worth passing on to our children.

People have been talking about transparency, paper trails and bipartisanship for years, David, but why hasn't it been done? Because what we really care about is winning. The time is up for business as usual.

On voting in America

Voting has become the sine qua non of American culture.

Once we were the land of freedom from religious persecution, then the hope of the huddled masses, the land of opportunity, the land of freedom and equality.

But now, we are left with the right to vote. All our civil liberties-- speech, free press, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, habeus corpus-- depend on the fulfillment of the freedom to vote for our representatives.

The right to vote means

The right to have our vote counted;

The right to have confidence in a transparent and verifiable voting process;

The right to fairness in access to voting; and

The right to be educated and equipped to vote in our own best interest.

This is the biggest issue in America. Voting is the keystone of our culture. It is the defense of our freedom and the keystone of our civilization. It is the seed we must nourish for our communities to flourish.

It is the reason for us to organize, cooperate, educate ourselves and our children, plan together, stand against our foes and believe in the truth about our lives and our country.

Voting has to be the rallying flag of Democratic people all across our country.

more on voting rights

Here's the ACLU NY Voter Empowerment Card link.

What sickens me so much about our 'lections is the rush to win. We're so blinded by fear and powerlust that we can't see the riches of fairness and equality.

If the President can't suggest that all the votes should be counted before he retakes the reins, he shouldn't be President. None of these other so-called patriots should be in office, either. If we can't honor what we have in each other, we can't move forward one step together.

voting rights

Listen.

This is THE ISSUE! VOTING RIGHTS IN AMERICA! Red states, blue states!! This is what the DEMOCRATIC party needs to do.

Let's stay on this issue!! Every state has voting laws, procedures, &c.

We need to systematically restore fairness STATE by STATE.

Let's take back our government from the corporations!!!!!!!!!

Guardian voting results usa 04.

Initiative and Referendum Institute at the USC voting intiative catalogue.

Laura Flanders's blog on Air America has this story from Globalresearch.

This opednews story also has some purported factual evidence.

Here's one of the more compelling exposees.

This globalresearch story seems key.

democracy?

People shrug, but, what I want to know is, WTF happened to the 5-1/2 million uncounted votes?

Bush: 51% (58,941,293) Kerry: 48% (55,353,453) Nader: 0.3% (394,578) Turnout: 114.3 million counted, 120 million believed to have voted. Approx 60% turnout

New Campaign to Safeguard Right to Vote

We need a new campaign starting now to safeguard every voter's rights. This will include:

1. Paper ballots,
2. Mandatory completion of vote counts before announcing results,
3. Equitable national standards for voting facilities,
4. Elimination of electronic, no-paper-trail voting equipment,
5. Legislation emphasizing the paramount supremacy of this issue.

What Bev Harris has to say at this point in the process is

Who the heck is NASED?
They are the people who certified this stuff.

You’ve gotta ask yourself: Are they nuts? Some of them are computer experts. Well, it seems that several of these people suddenly want to retire, and the whole NASED voting systems board is becoming somewhat defunct, but these are the people responsible for today's shoddy voting systems.
If the security of the U.S. electoral system depends on you to certify a voting system, and you get a report that plainly states that security was “not tested” and “not applicable” -- what would you do?
Perhaps we should ask them. Go ahead. Let's hold them accountable for the election we just had. (Please, e-mail us their answers) They don't make it very easy to get their e-mail and fax information; when you find it, let us know and we'll post it here.
NASED VOTING SYSTEMS/ITA ACCREDITATION BOARD
Thomas R. Wilkey, Executive Director, New York State Board of Elections
David Elliott, (former) Asst. Director of Elections, Washington State
James Hendrix, Executive Director, State Election Commission, South Carolina
Denise Lamb, Director, State Bureau of Elections, New Mexico
Sandy Steinbach, Director of Elections, Iowa
Donetta Davidson, Secretary of State, Colorado
Connie Schmidt, Commissioner, Johnson County Election Commission, Kansas
(the late) Robert Naegele, President Granite Creek Technology, Pacific Grove, California
Brit Williams, Professor, CSIS Dept, Kennesaw State College, Georgia
Paul Craft, Computer Audit Analyst, Florida State Division of Elections Florida
Steve Freeman, Software Consultant, League City, Texas
Jay W. Nispel, Senior Principal Engineer, Computer Sciences Corporation Annapolis Junction, Maryland
Yvonne Smith (Member Emeritus), Former Assistant to the Executive Director Illinois State Board of Elections, Illinois
Penelope Bonsall, Director, Office of Election Administration, Federal Election Commission, Washington, D.C.
Committee Secretariat: The Election Center, R. Doug Lewis, Executive Director Houston, Texas, Tele: 281-293-0101

so we have someplace to start, anyway.

election fraud

It seems that the question of election fraud is too inevitable. Wouldn't Republicans want a verifiable recount as much as Democrats? Then why don't we have one?

There's something wrong with that reasoning. A verifiable recount is univerally understood to be a prerequisite in a fair election.

That's problem number 1 with the 2004 election.

There's too much partisan concern over victory or defeat and too little objective interest in fairness. Such a process can never satisfy the public confidence.

It seems like the blogs about fraud raise some interesting and compelling questions:

1. The 88,000 overvotes in Palm Beach County;

2. The 3,000 overvotes registered in one Ohio precinct;

3. The exit polls showing the election going for Kerry until after 10:00 PM EST and the beginning of computerized vote tabulation at central office computers;

4. The known vulnerability of electronic voting machines and computerized vote tabulations;

5. The partisan corporate voting machine manufacturing interests.

We are just going to have to wait for a critical mass of coherent, hard evidence to materialize, though, before the momentum will carry this story into the mainstream. Too much is attributable to human error and is sporadic, anecdotal or speculative.

Sure, everybody's seen the statistics on the Florida optical scan machines and the county boards of elections websites that show amazing discrepancies with reasonable variations -- anomolous patters in no paper trail states.

But we really need a groundbreaking confession or smoking gun in order to plant the story with a fixture that can be built on. Has anyone recorded interviews or observations with exit poll workers or experts?

Right now, we are all waiting for BBV to provide such a keystone to this story, or there won't be any way to further construct it -- other than painstakingly going around interviewing election board vote tabulation officers and scrutinizing registration, turnout and tallies for precincts across America.

On the other hand, if the FOIA requests really turn up something substantive -- like glaring malfunctions, anomolies, then that will generate some momentum to the story.

While we're on the subject,

What is the Margin of Error for an exit poll?
Every number estimated from a sample may depart from the official vote count. The difference between a sample result and the number one would get if everyone who cast a vote was interviewed in exactly the same way is called the sampling error. That does not mean the sample result is wrong. Instead, it refers to the potential error due to sampling. The margin of error for a 95% confidence interval is about +/- 3% for a typical characteristic from the national exit poll and +/-4% for a typical state exit poll. Characteristics that are more concentrated in a few polling places, such as race, have larger sampling errors. Other nonsampling factors may increase the total error.

That's from the FAQ section at National Election Pool.

This is the best yet, the Cuyahoga County precinct by precinct results.

voter division graphic

A simple chart raises a simple question.

black box

There's a brew gurgling up at Daily Kos about the suspicious exit polls, new voter, voting machine data in the 2004 Presidential race in Florida and Ohio.

The idea seems to have stemmed from the discrepancy between exit poll and vote tabulation in Florida and Ohio.

Then somebody bumped their head on a rock and turned and went away.

I still think Bev Harris is on the right track and that the Kossaks are letting this one get away.

If Nader weren't so busy running for President we might still have a chance.

U.S. Justice Allows Challengers at Ohio Polls

Of course, it happened in the middle of the night.

The thing about it is, it's a diversion.

The Republicans know they can't win at the polls. It's been over for weeks. They're planning to win after the election, by fudging the electronic tally.

By focusing everyone's attention on POLL PROBLEMS, they're creating a diversion from the real theft -- THE COUNTING!!!!

Read about it here.

RNC/BC04 charge "fraud, intimidation" in PA

I'm staying in a Republican-leaning district in PA, doing GOTV. This afternoon I checked the answering machine. One of the messages said [paraphrase]

"John Kerry and his trial lawyer running mate are trying to use
tactics of fraud and intimidation to keep voters away from the
polls tomorrow. But don't let it affect you.

Republican lawyers around the country are already filing lawsuits
to protect voters against fraudulent Democratic voting practices
and hardball election tactics.

Remember to go to the polls on Tuesday, November 2nd and vote
Republican. Don't let Kerry and the trial lawyer's hardball tac-
tics keep good Republicans from supporting our President and
Republican candidates on election day.

This message is provided by the Republican National Committee
and approved by Bush/Cheney '04."

I was appalled. My mom is a registered Republican who voted for Kerry by absentee ballot. She's 81 years old and lives by herself. I was pissed off that some thug was trying to scare her with these lies!