Rule By Theft, Reconstructing The Crime.

[Guest guest]

http://www.blackcommentator.com/113/113_cover_stolen_election.html

 

Rule By Theft, Reconstructing The Crime.

 

Massive irregularities in the November 2 presidential vote count " will

probably lead to congressional hearings in the Committee on the

Judiciary, " predicts Rep. John Conyers, the committee's ranking

Democrat and longest sitting member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

If tampering is found, said the Detroit lawmaker, " there will be

prosecutions " under federal law.

 

Watergate first surfaced as a short, curious story about a break-in at

Democratic Party headquarters, in the summer of 1972. A decidedly

low-tech crime, the Watergate conspiracy unraveled slowly as the

Republican malefactors turned on each other, finally leaving their

president naked to the world, disgraced. The Great Vote Theft of 2004,

on the other hand, was in part a series of high-tech crimes against

numbers – felonies designed to leave no physical trace, but which are

evident through the patterns created by the perpetrators. Squads of

dedicated sleuths are on the case – some of them at the top of their

technical game – assembling data to reveal tell-tale patterns of

massive vote fraud. There may soon be compelling circumstantial

evidence of how the crimes were committed and, by deduction, the

identity of the conspirators.

 

But first, Rep. Conyers and five congressional colleagues have to make

sure the evidence doesn't disappear quicker than John Kerry's

projected lead in the exit polls. On November 8, Conyers wrote his

second letter to the U.S. Comptroller General, requesting that the

non-partisan General Accounting Office " immediately undertake an

investigation of the efficacy of voting machines and new technologies

used in the 2004 election, how election officials responded to

difficulties they encountered and what can we do in the future to

improve our election systems and administration. " Time is of the

essence because " [t]here is substantial concern that much of the

primary evidence needed to evaluate these allegations will not be

preserved without immediate action. " Conyers fears " this evidence can

be moved or changed. "

 

Joined by fellow CBC members Robert C. Scott (D-VA) and Melvin Watt

(D-NC), and Representatives Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Robert Wexler

(D-FL) and Rush Holt (D-NJ), Conyers pointed to the " more than 30,000

complaints " registered at the Election Incident Reporting Service

(EIRS) and " 265 specific complaints " listed at the Voters Unite! site.

" We continue to receive additional reports every minute and will

transmit additional information as it becomes available, " the

legislators wrote.

 

Punk Press

 

The corporate media, who disavowed their own exit polls when the

numbers came out " wrong " (Kerry leading) on Election Day, are

institutionally invested in the legitimacy of George Bush's

presidency. " I was tipped off by a person very high up in TV that the

news has been locked down tight, and there will be no TV coverage of

the real problems with voting on Nov. 2, " wrote Bev Harris, head of

Black Box Voting and veteran mover-and-shaker on the dangers of

electronic ballots. " Even the journalists are pretty horrified. My

source said they've also been forbidden to talk about it even on their

own time, and he was calling from somewhere else. He was trying to

figure out how to get the real news out on vote fraud. This is a

person I've worked with off and on for nearly two years, and the voice

was so somber it really bothered me. "

 

Harris posted her online warning in the wee hours of November 8. But

later that day, the wall of corporate media collaboration cracked a

bit, when MSNBC Countdown host Keith Olbermann presented 16 minutes of

straight-up reporting on a range of vote irregularities in Ohio,

Florida and elsewhere, capped by an interview with Congressman

Conyers. The real domestic Story of the Century had " legs " – finally.

If Conyers can expand and maintain his congressional Coalition of the

Unwilling through to the hearings that he is entitled by rank to

conduct, even the craven corporate media will find it difficult to

dismiss the " conspiracy theorists. " Literally hundreds of reporters

are aware in detail of the real conspiracy – the late night decision

to validate the craziest election numbers in modern times – and some

of them have a conscience.

 

Conyers is compelled to go through the motions of requesting help from

the General Accounting Office, which is obligated to assist the

Congress in carrying out its duties. However, the true engines of

resistance to Bush's crime accompli are the grassroots investigators,

technicians and numbers crunchers busily in search of patterns of

anomalies in the corrupted election returns – numbers that should not

be there – and answers to how the tallies might have been engineered.

These are the people who will craft the technical indictment against

the Bush men. Bev Harris is at the center of the rebellion. On Monday

she renewed her call for " lawyers, computer people, statisticians " and

" funds to pay for copies of the evidence. " For non-specialists, Harris

has other assignments:

 

" Discrepancies please, and hurry. E-mail them to

tips . Pass the word. Need source documents, too.

ASAP. Follow your nose, or join the Black Box Scavenger Hunt: Pick a

county. Look at small counties, as we are seeing many discrepancies in

those. Look in any state. Get the official number of registered

voters, Dem and Republican. Get the number of votes cast on Nov. 2,

Republican and Dem. Make a grid like this…. "

 

Harris is looking forward to putting Republicans in the dock. " We are

working now to compile the proof, based not on soft evidence – red

flags, exit polls – but core documents obtained by Black Box Voting in

the most massive Freedom of Information action in history, " she wrote.

There are " strong indications that both Florida and Ohio would be

flipped if election manipulations are rolled back. Some indication

that fraud may

have occurred in at least 30 states. "

 

Power trumps exit polls

 

It may be possible to mortally wound the Bush administration without

" flipping " the election – a tall order. If " at least 30 states " were

subjected to GOP fraud, then hundreds of individual operatives were

involved in the crimes. The more perpetrators, the better the fishing.

Untying one knot could cause the whole conspiracy to unravel in a

chaos of recriminations and crime-compounding cover-ups. Remember

Watergate.

 

The networks, the " horse race " impresarios who fed the public a daily

campaign diet of dueling polls rather than issues and facts, have

disgraced themselves in their eagerness to discredit the Mother of All

Political Surveys, the presidential exit polls. This is their

Electiongate, too. The aborted November 2 exit poll finally engaged

150,000 real voters, face to face, about a subject they cared enough

about to show up for: voting. The usual commercial poll involves 800

to 1500 respondents, drawn from the dwindling minority of people who

agree to speak to pollsters on the phone – sometimes as few as 20

percent of those called.

 

( calculated that Kerry was penalized up to three percentage points by

flawed commercial polls in the lead-up to the election, especially the

Gallup Poll, whose electoral model projected that Blacks would make up

only 7.5 percent of the turnout. Black participation had hovered

around 10 percent in the last two presidential elections, and reached

11 percent in 2004.When the exit polls came in, we felt vindicated.)

 

Morally challenged but professionally competent former Bill Clinton

advisor Dick Morris got it right before (like John Kerry) he got it

wrong: " That an exit poll is always right is an axiom of politics. It

is easier to assume that a compass is not pointing north than to

assume that an exit poll is incorrect. It takes a deliberate act of

fraud and bias to get an exit poll wrong. Since the variables of

whether or not a person will actually vote are eliminated in exit

polling, it is like peeking at the answer before taking the test, "

said Morris, correctly. Then he flipped out. " But these exit polls

were wrong. And the fact that they were so totally, disastrously wrong

is a national scandal. There should be a national investigation to

unearth the story behind the bias. "

 

Amazing. Like the networks, Morris cannot acknowledge the truth that

is obvious to Black voters everywhere. Since official returns must be

right, he reasons, the exit polls must have been rigged. Who was the

puppeteer of hundreds of exit pollsters at locations all across the

country? Dick Morris doesn't say. Because there is nothing to say.

 

David Swanson, former spokesman for the Dennis Kucinich presidential

campaign and now media coordinator for the AFL-CIO associated

International Labor Communications Association (ILCA), notes that

 

" the exit polls were accurate within their margin of error in many

states but were surprisingly far off in a number of swing states, and

always off in the same direction, showing more support for Kerry than

was found in the official counts. Warren Mitofsky, co-director of the

National Election Pool, told the News Hour with Jim Lehrer that `Kerry

was ahead in a number of states by margins that looked unreasonable to

us.' Mitofsky speculated that perhaps more Kerry voters were willing

to participate in the exit poll, but did not suggest any reason for

that speculation other than the difference between the exit polls and

the final counts. "

 

As Swanson says, it's all " circular reasoning " – an attempt to avoid

the obvious, and all the more maddeningly ironic since, by Dick

Morris's reasoning, Mitofsky is the guy best-placed to " rig " the exit

polls in Kerry's favor. Instead, he ordered them shut down, for

presidential choice purposes. Swanson's article cites University of

Pennsylvania Professor Steven F. Freeman, whose November 9 study of

the exit poll and official tallies in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania

finds the figures totally incompatible. " The likelihood of any two of

these statistical anomalies occurring together is in the order of

one-in-a-million. The odds of all three occurring together are 250

million to one, " the MIT Ph.D calculated. " As much as we can say in

social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the

discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three

critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due

to chance or random error. "

 

Day-long Hell

 

Somebody's figures are bogus in all three states, and for much of the

nation at large. The conspirators are the same people who, as

crusading journalist Greg Palast regularly documents, have made vote

theft an institutional crime – that is, Republicans (and others) steal

Black votes with such regularity through both legal and informal means

that their crime sprees have grown to seem much like weather. (See

" Kerry Won, " TomPaine.com, November 4.) Count Every Vote 2004

documented hundreds of voting irregularities in seven southern states,

typically involving " faulty equipment and sub-par facilities in some

poor neighborhoods [that] contributed to possible voter

disenfranchisement. "

 

The digital vote tricksters are the same people who created a day-long

Hell for voters in the mostly Black Broward County, Florida precinct

where Marsha Johnson, an African American attorney from New York City,

was assigned as a voter protection volunteer:

 

" I saw an incompetent poll clerk telling approximately 1 in every

5 registered voters (who voted at the very same polling place last

year and who's voter registration cards indicated that they were at

the correct polling site) that they had mysteriously been `reassigned'

to other sites but failing to tell them where to go, or worse, giving

them incorrect information. "

 

And so on, at thousands of locations, thefts of awesome dimensions and

howling arrogance – the humiliation of African Americans in order to

secure George Bush another chance to destroy the planet.

 

Yet, in the continental insane asylum that (white) Manifest Destiny

has made of America, this is only " soft " evidence of crime, as Bev

Harris correctly notes in her summons for a posse to corral the

electronic ballot stuffers and stealers. The " soft " crimes of 2000

were repeated with a vengeance in 2004, and there is no reason to

expect the system to respond any differently this time around. Exit

polls are " soft " too: they only point us to the methodology of the

criminal, who must be ensnared in the provable act of ballot tampering

– a " hard " crime.

 

John Maxwell, the esteemed Jamaican activist, educator and journalist,

sees the United States much more clearly from Kingston than ABC's

Peter Jennings does through his teleprompter. The U.S. corporate media

got whiplash disassociating themselves from their own very expensive

exit polls. Many lost their composure in trying to acclimate to the

new corporate line, that voters had " swung " from Kerry to Bush in the

latter hours of Election Day – a totally counter-intuitive proposition

when considering that Black and poor folks vote late. " But there was

no swing, " wrote Maxwell. " According to one exit pollster, both

candidates retained 90 per cent of their party's 2000 voters. So the

swing came in the computers. In Florida people complained that their

votes were recorded for Bush although they had voted for Kerry. "

 

Hard evidence

 

On January 6, the United States Senate will once again be called upon

to say " Yes " or " No " to the verdict of the Electoral College. Four

years ago, as millions were reminded in Michael Moore's movie,

" Fahrenheit 9/11, " 20 members of the Congressional Black Caucus rose

to ask that at least one Senator raise his or her voice to object to

awarding Florida's stolen electoral votes to George W. Bush. Not one

Senator spoke up. Apparently, the evidence was too " soft. "

 

This year, the Bush men reached into the voting machinery to alter the

results of the election in a large number of jurisdictions, apparently

adding lots more votes than they subtracted. The Republican operatives

and their handlers need to do " hard " time, and be forced to trade in

their co-conspirators up and down the line, like other criminals. The

patterns and sources of the Great Vote Theft of 2004 may well be

discerned in the coming weeks. No hand is truly unseen.

 

Richard Nixon didn't personally plan the Watergate break-in – his

subordinates did. However, two years of lying about the crime so

thoroughly discredited Tricky Dick that he found it necessary to

resign. We at doubt that George Bush knew the details of his

henchmen's high- and low-tech election crime wave – why would anybody

tell that fool anything? – and we would be surprised if the evidence

pattern reveals enough purloined votes to reverse the results of

November 2. But fixing elections is a crime, and covering up a crime

is a bigger felony, as Nixon's crew discovered. If Conyers and Bev

Harris and squadrons of citizens run their show right, we may at least

look forward to four years of a once-again " illegitimate " Bush

presidency. With luck, we might even send Karl Rove to prison.

 

At any rate, it will be good to have the hounds yelping at the

" master's " heels, for a change.