Sour Grapes or Voter Fraud

[Guest guest]

November 3, 2004

 

Election 2004: " Sour Grapes " or Voter Fraud

 

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION

by Mike Whitney

 

If you believe that George Bush won last nights 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.

 

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION