The 2004 election was stolen - will someone please tell the media?

[Guest guest]

N

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 20:26:29 -0400

The 2004 election was stolen - will someone please tell the

media?

 

 

http://commonwonders.com/

 

 

 

The silent scream of numbers

The 2004 election was stolen — will someone please tell the media?

 

By ROBERT C. KOEHLER

Tribune Media Services

 

As they slowly hack democracy to death, we're as alone — we citizens —

as we've ever been, protected only by the dust-covered clichés of the

nation's founding: " Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. "

 

It's time to blow off the dust and start paying the price.

 

The media are not on our side. The politicians are not on our side.

It's just us, connecting the dots, fitting the fragments together,

crunching the numbers, wanting to know why there were so many

irregularities in the last election and why these glitches and dirty

tricks and wacko numbers had not just an anti-Kerry but a racist

tinge. This is not about partisan politics. It's more like: " Oh no,

this can't be true. "

 

I just got back from what was officially called the National Election

Reform Conference, in Nashville, Tenn., an extraordinary pulling

together of disparate voting-rights activists — 30 states were

represented, 15 red and 15 blue — sponsored by a Nashville group

called Gathering To Save Our Democracy. It had the feel of 1775:

citizen patriots taking matters into their own hands to reclaim the

republic. This was the level of its urgency.

 

Was the election of 2004 stolen? Thus is the question framed by those

who don't want to know the answer. Anyone who says yes is immediately

a conspiracy nut, and the listener's eyeballs roll. So let's not ask

that question.

 

Let's simply ask why the lines were so long and the voting machines so

few in Columbus and Cleveland and inner-city and college precincts

across the country, especially in the swing states, causing an

estimated one-third of the voters in these precincts to drop out of

line without casting a ballot; why so many otherwise Democratic

ballots, thousands and thousands in Ohio alone, but by no means only

in Ohio, recorded no vote for president (as though people with no

opinion on the presidential race waited in line for three or six or

eight hours out of a fervor to have their say in the race for county

commissioner); and why virtually every voter complaint about

electronic voting machine malfunction indicated an unauthorized vote

switch from Kerry to Bush.

 

This, mind you, is just for starters. We might also ask why so many

Ph.D.-level mathematicians and computer programmers and other

numbers-savvy scientists are saying that the numbers don't make sense

(see, for instance, www.northnet.org/minstrel, the Web site of Dr.

Richard Hayes Phillips, lead statistician in the Moss v. Bush lawsuit

challenging the Ohio election results). Indeed, the movement to

investigate the 2004 election is led by such people, because the

numbers are screaming at them that something is wrong.

 

And we might, no, we must, ask — with more seriousness than the media

have asked — about those exit polls, which in years past were

extraordinarily accurate but last November went haywire, predicting

Kerry by roughly the margin by which he ultimately lost to Bush. This

swing is out of the realm of random chance, forcing chagrined

pollsters to hypothesize a " shy Republican " factor as the explanation;

and the media have bought this evidence-free absurdity because it

spares them the need to think about the F-word: fraud.

 

And the numbers are still haywire. A few days ago, Terry Neal wrote in

the Washington Post about Bush's inexplicably low approval rating in

the latest Gallup poll, 45 percent, vs. a 49 percent disapproval

rating. This is, by a huge margin, the worst rating at this point in a

president's second term ever recorded by Gallup, dating back to Truman.

 

" What's wrong with this picture? " asks exit polling expert Jonathan

Simon, who pointed these latest numbers out to me. Bush mustered low

approval ratings immediately before the election, surged on Election

Day, then saw his ratings plunge immediately afterward. Yet Big Media

has no curiosity about this anomaly.

 

Simon, who spoke at the Nashville conference — one of dozens of

speakers to give highly detailed testimony on evidence of fraud and

dirty tricks from sea to shining sea — said, " When the autopsy of our

democracy is performed, it is my belief that media silence will be

given as the primary cause of death. "

 

In contrast to the deathly silence of the media is the silent scream

of the numbers. The more you ponder these numbers, and all the

accompanying data, the louder that scream grows. Did the people's

choice get thwarted? Were thousands disenfranchised by chaos in the

precincts, spurious challenges and uncounted provisional ballots? Were

millions disenfranchised by electronic voting fraud on insecure,

easily hacked computers? And who is authorized to act if this is so?

Who is authorized to care?

 

No one, apparently, except average Americans, who want to be able to

trust the voting process again, and who want their country back.

 

" Our world faces a crisis as yet unperceived by those possessing the

power to make great decisions for good and evil. The unleashed power

of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and

thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. " — Albert Einstein

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who

are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.--Mark Twain