Ohio Election Workers Indicted / Why Can't the Left Face the Stolen Elections

[Guest guest]

Ohio Election Workers Indicted / Why Can't the Left Face the Stolen

Elections of 2004 & 2008?

 

 

The Free Press -- Independent News Media - Election 2004

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1439 Ohio recount lawsuit

set for trial;

election workers indictedby Blair BobierSeptember 4, 2005On Tuesday August

30, a federal district judge set a trial date for the Green Party’s Ohio

Recount lawsuit and indictments were handed down against two Cuyahoga County

elections officials for their roles in the bungled election audit. The timing

was

coincidental; the two actions are not related though they both stem from

charges that the recount was conducted in violation of state and federal law.

Judge James Carr set the trial date for August 22, 2006. The lawsuit was

initiated by Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb and his Libertarian

counterpart, Michael Badnarik. The Ohio election and recount has been the

subject of a number of investigations and reports. A report by the U.S. House

Judiciary Committee’s Democratic staff states that “there were

massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio. In

many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and

illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell,

the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio.†The August issue of

Harper’

s magazine featured an article by Mark Crispin Miller on the Ohio election

fraud and the lack of “mainstream†media coverage devoted to it, entitled

“

None Dare Call it Stolen.†ARTICLE CONTINUED AT:

 

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1439

 

 

 

Published on Tuesday, October 18, 2005 by the Free Press (Columbus, Ohio)

Why Can't the Left Face the Stolen Elections of 2004 & amp; 2008? by Bob

Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1502 If some of its

key publications are any indicator,

much of the American left seems unable to face the reality that the election

of 2004 was stolen. So in all likelihood, unless something radical is done,

2008 will be too. Misguided and misinformed articles in both TomPaine.com

and Mother Jones Magazine indicate a dangerous inability to face the reality

that these stolen elections mean nothing less than the death of what's left of

American democracy, and the permanent enthronement of the Rovian GOP. As

investigative reporters based in Columbus, Ohio, we witnessed first-hand, up

close and personal, exactly how the 2004 election was stolen, and how it will

most likely be done in 2008. In the precinct in

which Harvey Wasserman grew up, and in the one where Bob Fitrakis now lives,

we saw the well-funded, profoundly cynical and deadly effective mechanisms

by which the Bush-Cheney-Rove-Blackwell GOP machine switched a victory for

John Kerry to an easily-repeatable defeat for democracy. That Kerry and

the spineless Ohio and national Democratic Parties have been complicit is a

crucial part of the problem much of the left also seems unwilling to face. But

if you live in Franklin County, Ohio, and watch the Republican and Democratic

Parties run joint pickets against progressive candidate, and cut backroom

deals allowing incumbents of either party run unopposed, you may miss the full

scope of the disaster. And until the left faces the rot that defines

the Democratic Party, there is no hope for a fair election in this country. In

other words: those who think the White House can be retaken in 2008, but

refuse to face the theft of the vote in 2004, should prepare to be ruled

by the likes of Jeb Bush, now and forever. Before we go into the

sordid details, we have to ask: exactly what is it about Team Bush that makes

people think they could not or would not steal an American election? Do they

lack

funds? Do they lack expertise? Is there something in the

Machiavellian/mobster moral code of Karl Rove and the Bush Family that would

prevent them from

doing here what they've been doing throughout the Third World for so long?

CIA meister Poppy Bush long ago perfected the art and science of stealing

elections. US manipulators have interfered with and tipped elections for

decades. Why should Ohio be any different? Especially when all the world knew

control of the most powerful office on earth would be decided right here.

Lets do the bookends: before the voting, Ohio's infamous Republican Secretary

of State J. Kenneth Blackwell clearly and vehemently denied poll access to

teams of international observers from the United Nations and other

international election observers. Since the election, he has effectively

stonewalled and sabotaged all recount attempts, to the point that no credible

accounting of the Ohio election has ever been done. To this day, at least

100,000 votes remain uncounted, electronic voting machines remain unaudited,

key

hardware and data files have been trashed, paper ballots have sat unguarded

for anyone to pilfer and tallies in dozens of key counties remain filled with

statistical impossibilities. In our How the GOP Stole America's 2004

Election & amp; Is Rigging 2008, we list more than 180 bullet points on how

this theft was perpetrated. It was a brilliant, cynical and masterfully

executed

campaign of death by a thousand cuts. In Florida 2000, the means of

the crime were limited to a few instances of intimidation, butterfly ballots,

computer manipulation and a corrupt Supreme Court. But four years after, in

Ohio, dozens of sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant tricks were

designed to steal a few thousand votes here, a few thousand more there,

until victory was in GOP hands. Unless they are exposed and blocked, every one

of

these scams can and will be duplicated throughout the United States in 2006

and 2008. The question is: will the left follow mainstream Democrats with

sheep-like acceptance as every election goes the same way from here on? And if

so, why bother even staging more votes in this country at all? Starting

with Russ Baker at TomPaine.com, the indicators are grim. Last January, Baker

penned an absurd, ill-reported piece of nonsense called " What Didn't Happen

in Ohio. " Baker traipsed into Columbus for a few days, interviewed the usual

faux Democrats, and left with a Big Story: " The Election Was Fair. " If

Baker had done any meaningful research he might have seen the dozens of other

instances of intimidation, irregularities and fraud that went unmentioned in

his glib paragraphs. Instead he relied on Bill Anthony, chair of

the Franklin County Democrats and Board of Elections. Bill is a

pleasant, affable African-American with no commitment or fight for democracy or

even the Democrats. He has appeared on Bob's local radio show and with Harvey

on

others. On one of them, Bill admitted that the Franklin County BOE knew

there would be problems with voting machines, and asked Blackwell for paper

ballots well before the 2004 election. Blackwell, Anthony said, turned them

down.

The result was the now infamous chaos at the polls, with inner city voters

stuck in the rain for hours. Just what Blackwell wanted. But did Bill

Anthony fight Blackwell's absurd ruling? Did he make it a public issue prior to

the election? Not a chance. For a quickie reporting job, Anthony

is a dream. He's well-spoken, charming and convincing. As an

African-American with union connections, he would seem the perfect liberal

source. In

2003, Anthony endorsed the Republican mayor's former press secretary

for the Columbus School Board. He then supported two Republican candidates

on a " Reform Slate " aimed at ousting the Board's only progressive Democrat, an

African-American. Bill Anthony is just one of a legion of what are known

throughout the state as DINOs---Democrats in Name Only. The Ohio Democratic

Party is a national embarrassment. Its chair, Denny White, was not long ago a

Republican, and will soon be one again, once the party is fully disemboweled,

a job very close to done. Throughout Ohio, DINOs piously cover this piece of

fraud and that piece of theft with glib " I hate Bush " rhetoric. The pity is,

out-of-state reporters actually take them seriously. Mark Hertsgaard

is a well respected author and reporter and a long-time friend of Harvey

Wasserman, and of election critic Mark Crispen Miller. He has contributed some

very valuable work over the years. But he's done himself---and the voting

public---very wrong on " Recounting Ohio " in the new Mother Jones.

Mark is smart and thorough enough to leave open the possibility that Ohio's

election was, indeed, stolen. But he also falls prey to the DINO trap,

failing to cover far too much of what happened here while taking seriously

centrist

Democrats who are known locally to have no credibility. So Mother Jones

questions the significance of the firing of a Democratic election official who

blew the whistle on computer manipulations by Triad, an obscure Republican

voting machine company. But Triad was involved in counting the votes in nearly

half of Ohio's 88 counties. Questions are still being raised about Triad,

including: " How did they get all these contracts in the first place? "

Mother Jones correctly points out that seven times the number of votes by which

Bush took Ohio were cast on Republican-controlled machines. But the magazine

fails to follow up with mention that those votes have been tabulated on

proprietary non-transparent software---a fact we pointed out in our

own article in Motherjones.com many months prior to the election.

Mother Jones also discounts the fact that a phony Homeland Security alert in

Warren County landed the vote count in an unauthorized warehouse rather than

the

official secure location, and that reporters were barred from the vote count.

That count, which went hugely and suspiciously and very importantly for

Bush, was observed by nominal Democrats. But so were other highly dubious vote

counts around the state, as they had been in Florida 2000, which Mother Jones

argues adamantly was indeed stolen. The irony of this is that the same issue

of Mother Jones leads off with a dead-on story about Ohio and national

Democrats who are sabotaging the campaign of the aggressively electable Paul

Hackett for a key US Senate seat. And another MoJo piece bemoans the fact that

national Democrats seem adept only at losing. Yet here the back of the

book is a story discounting evidence compiled by a legion of

independent, grassroots election rights advocates, while favoring phone

interviews with the very Democrats being denounced in the front of the book.

Above all, the core of evidence that the election was stolen in Ohio 2004

comes from some 500 sworn statements and signed affidavits taken by people of

all political parties, including two Republican hearings officers, in the weeks

after the election. Anyone truly committed to finding out what happened here

needs to start with that huge body of evidence. As MoJo points out, none

of this has been made easier by the " abandon ship " of the biggest DINO of

all, John Kerry. Kerry had $7 million in the bank earmarked to " count every

vote " and was apparently losing by just 136,000 Ohio votes with more than

250,000

still uncounted when he turned tail and conceded. Even Blackwell's corrupt,

virtually meaningless first fake recount dropped Bush's official tally by

18,000 votes. The Democrats have since attacked the

election protection movement here through a lawyer named Daniel Hoffheimer

who comes from none other than the stalwart Cincinnati Republican law firm of

Taft, Stettinius et. al. MoJo quotes another Kerry/DINO lawyer Michael

O'Grady, counsel to the state Democratic Party, who argues that for Ohio to

have

been stolen, the entire GOP would have had to be " conspiratorial, " while the

Democrats were " dumb as rocks. " In fact, that's an assessment many activists

in Ohio heartily endorse, though you might add the word " inert " to the

description of the Democrats. O'Grady claims, for example, that an

impossible vote count in three southern Ohio counties that gave Bush his entire

margin of victory can be explained by a feminist outpouring for an

African-American court candidate who ran zero campaign in those counties. But

the

presumption is that those same feminists somehow didn't bother to vote for

Kerry over

George W. Bush. No local student of that election could begin to

take such an assessment seriously. Or how about the quote from Chris

Rakocy, a " tech specialist " about those notorious touchscreens in Mahoning

County where voters who chose Kerry saw Bush light up. Rakocy says that problem

was " only " on 18 of 1,148 machines, and that it was corrected early.

But Rakocy stands alone against dozens of sworn statements and affidavits

confirming that the problem went on all day, and was never fixed, and may have

involved far more machines than 18, and not only in Mahoning County but also in

Franklin. Even at that, in heavily Democratic Youngstown (not to mention

Columbus), just 18 machines could have accounted for switching thousands of

votes. And, in fact, Kerry's margins in both Youngstown and Columbus were

suspiciously light. And what would Mother Jones herself do to machines

that

disenfranchised even one voter, no matter what the apparent impact on the

ultimate vote count? Why is the magazine named for her discounting the

you-couldn't-make-this-one-up reality of voters pushing one candidate's name

on a touchscreen and seeing another's name light up, time after time after

time? Or are we taking this---and her---all too seriously? Then there's

the song and dance from Warren Mitofsky. The father of exit polls saw his

work used to overturn a stolen election in Ukraine just prior to the American

vote. But when his poll-taking here showed John Kerry with a nationwide margin

of 1.5 million votes, somehow Mitofsky jumped ship on his own decades of

professionalism. Exit polls funded by six major news organizations showed

Kerry carrying Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico and Nevada as late as 12:20 am on

Wednesday

morning, well after balloting stopped even in Alaska and Hawaii. These four

" purple states " gave the election to the " blue " Democrats, then miraculously

switched to " red " for Bush, giving him the White House once again. Given

all that's known about exit polls---and it's a lot---the odds

on one state switching like that are about one in one hundred. For four,

it's a virtual statistical impossibility. Add the fact that not one, not four,

but TEN of eleven swing states showed drastic shifts from Kerry to Bush and you

enter the realm of, well, a stolen election. Add huge, unexplained

shifts from pre-election polls to post-election vote counts in crucial 2002

Senatorial races in Georgia, Minnesota and Colorado, then remember what

happened

in Florida 2000, and examine the basic Bush attitude toward democracy

itself, and you've got a pattern to say the least. And an obvious prescription

for

one-party rule as far as the eye can see. Except when you are dealing with

America's Democratic Party in 2004 and with reportage that relies on a few

phone calls and a disheartening lack of grassroots perspective. If all

politics is local, as Tip O'Neill well knew, then so are all vote counts.

Our

first article predicting what would happen in Ohio 2004 was

published many months before the election in, of all places,

MotherJones.com. We warned that electronic voting machines deployed by the

likes of Diebold

could give Ohio and thus the nation to George W. Bush. Wally O'Dell,

Diebold's infamous CEO, pledged to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in

2004,

and all evidence points to the fact that he at least helped. What we

missed in addition was the myriad clever tricks the GOP would bring to bear in

pulling this off. Ohio has a long history as a test market. New products like

white bread and spam are brought here first, to see how they'll fly with

America at large. In Ohio 2004, scores of tools for stealing an American

election were tried and proven out. Outside reporters have come here again and

again to pull at this one and tear at that one. Almost always, they get even

that

wrong. And almost always, they fail to see the bigger picture. If we

have a " know it all " attitude, as is sometimes charged, it's

because we were (and are) here, we saw it happen, we witnessed the

seven-hour waits and the denials of the absentee ballots, and we took the

testimony of

the hundreds who later went under oath. And we see more unravel every

day. Conspiracy theories happen sometimes when actual conspiracies occur. The

stakes involved, the players on both sides and the events that are out there

plain as day are all of a piece that's simply too obvious for anyone on the

ground here to miss. Hertsgaard has the good sense to mention

indictments that have recently come down on election thieves in Cuyahoga

County. We

know that to be the tip of the iceberg. What matters now is whether the

GOP will be allowed to repeat nationwide in 2006 and 2008 what they saw they

could get away with in Ohio 2004. Election theft skeptics tend to

conclude their put-downs by urging we forget about the vote-count stuff and

concentrate on coming up with candidates so good that " the election won't

be close enough to steal. " Having seen what we saw here, knowing what

Mother Jones is reporting about the Democratic attacks on Paul Hackett, and

about the loser instinct ingrained in the Dems' DLC/DNA, we must charitably

describe such a conclusion as being profoundly wishful thinking. Someday

we may indeed have candidates far worthier than Al Gore and John Kerry. But

they both won the presidency of the United States, however corruptible their

margins of victory. We need to guarantee that if someone worthwhile and

willing to fight ever does come along, we will have a left that's prepared to

make sure the votes are fairly counted. As Rev. Jesse Jackson put it

while speaking to election protection activists here, " We can afford to lose an

election. We can't afford to lose our democracy. " Who would agree more

strongly than Tom Paine and Mother Jones? Bob Fitrakis and Harvey

Wasserman are co-authors of How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election

& amp; Is Rigging 2008, available at Freepress.org and harveywasserman.com.

Their upcoming What Happened in Ohio, with Steve Rosenfeld, will be published

by The New Press in spring, 2006.

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1502