Election Theft Emergency

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Fri, 27 Jan 2006 05:01:58 -0500 (EST)

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Election Theft Emergency

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.alternet.org/story/31217/

 

Election Theft Emergency

 

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet. Posted January 27, 2006.

 

 

Mark Crispin Miller talks about how the right stole the 2004

presidential election -- and how they'll do it again unless we stop them

 

 

For GOP voters, the 2004 presidential election was little short of

miraculous: Behind in the Electoral College even on the afternoon of

the vote, the Bush-Cheney ticket staged a stunning comeback. Usually

reliable exit polls turned out to be wrong by an unprecedented 5

percent in swing states. Conservatives argued, and the media agreed,

that " moral values " had made the difference.

 

In his latest book, Fooled Again: How The Right Stole The 2004

Election, And Why They'll Steal The Next One Too (Unless We Stop

Them), Mark Crispin Miller argues that it wasn't moral values which

swung the election -- it was theft.

 

TERRENCE McNALLY: You're a professor of media studies. According to

your bio, you write about " film, television, propaganda, advertising

and the culture industries … " Why did you write this book?

 

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Out of a sense of civic emergency. I believe that

" Fooled Again " makes the case quite persuasively that there is

actually no convincing evidence that Bush and Cheney won re-election.

 

This is a civic story of the utmost importance. It has to do with the

dire need for election reform in the United States. But it's also a

story about the colossal failure of the American press to do precisely

the kind of job that the framers had in mind when they wrote the First

Amendment. What they had in mind was that the press would function as

a reliable check on executive power. It would keep the people informed

about what their government was up to, and it would keep them

politically engaged in national debate.

 

The newspapers, as limited and defective as they were in the 18th

century, did perform that function, and I believe they performed that

function for much of our history. We now have a corporate media system

that is not answerable to the people nor concerned about the people,

but [is] in the service of its pay masters. And it is far too close to

the government for the health of anything like a democratic system.

 

One of the points of " Fooled Again " is that this is a story of

tremendous importance, as far as a democracy is concerned. Yet the

press has for the most part ridiculed those who have come up with very

solid evidence of fraud. They've been in the business less of talking

about the situation than of preventing anybody else from talking about

it. And this includes some of the progressive media as well. In fact,

the most hostile reviews that I've received have been in Mother Jones

and Salon.

 

TM: I read the transcript of you on Democracy Now! with Mark

Hertsgaard, a progressive journalist who has been fairly dismissive of

those questioning Bush's victory. By the end he seemed to be agreeing

that everything should be more fully investigated.

 

I would think that the 2004 election story, if tracked and broken,

would be huge for whoever breaks it. Any other thoughts about why it's

so ignored?

 

MCM: We have to understand that for some decades the press has served

basically an establishmentarian function. They have the reputation,

and they certainly have the self-image, of being terribly skeptical,

prone to disrespectful questions, probing dark matters that authority

would just as soon have them leave alone. That's a very flattering

view of the press but completely undeserved. The press will not deal

with any story that goes beyond a particular scandal to cast doubt on

the very viability of the entire system. The press in this country

will studiously ignore any story that too violently rocks the boat,

whose implications are too shattering.

 

This is not new. Watergate was a story that the press avoided for

months and months. Only the Washington Post pursued that story;

everybody else made fun of it. Now we look back on Watergate with

tremendous nostalgia and self-congratulation, telling ourselves the

press saved the system. But since Watergate the press has preferred to

deal with meaningless and trivial scandals like the Clinton scandals.

They will not talk about 9/11, they will not talk about the theft of

the last three elections.

 

TM: You also include the 2002 congressional election. That one also

broke too consistently against predictions?

 

MCM: That's exactly right. In Colorado, in Minnesota, in Georgia, and

in a couple of other states -- there was what we might call " Diebold

magic " everywhere. In all these states, you had far-right-wing

politicians predicted to lose by pre-election newspaper polls and by

exit polls, and all of them won.

 

TM: Why do you believe the two successive Democratic candidates have

given in so easily?

 

MCM: I think basically Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry this last time

are far too concerned with establishment opinion, far too worried that

they'll seem to be sore losers, conspiracy theorists, etc. They have

therefore refused to go public with what they actually believe. Kerry

told me personally on October 28th at a fundraising party that he

believes the election was probably stolen.

 

TM: He then disavowed that in the press, didn't he?

 

MCM: Exactly -- a few hours after the story broke. The Democratic

Party is as much a part of the problem as the Republican Party.

 

TM: Are there exceptions among the ranks of mainstream politicians? I

think of Barbara Boxer and John Conyers. Any others?

 

MCM: Tom Daschle has told me he thinks very highly of the book and has

given me permission to quote him to that effect. Stephanie Tubbs

Jones, Rush Holt. There are growing numbers of Democratic politicians

who are willing to take the risks of facing the truth on this issue.

 

Let's put it less dogmatically. All right, maybe I haven't proven that

the election was stolen, but I am completely confident that I've

provided ample grounds for a serious investigation of what went on

last year. It seems to me that any Democrat who refuses to even go for

that kind of inquiry is really failing his or her constituency.

 

TM: -- and failing the voters. As a citizen, it bothers me that we

leave it to a Gore or a Kerry, who's thinking about his future

reputation or his future career, to stage the protest. I don't care

about their careers. I care about my vote getting counted or discounted.

 

What's the statement that you're willing to make in " Fooled Again "

about the 2004 election: stolen? worthy of investigation? evidence

clearly shows in six states …?

 

MCM: The evidence in Ohio, as anyone who followed the story knows, is

copious. Bush allegedly won that state by 118,000 votes. As I point

out -- and this part of the book is largely based on John Conyers'

report to the House Judiciary Committee -- the various stratagems,

tricks and tactics used to prevent people from registering, to prevent

them from voting, to throw away provisional ballots -- all these add

up to a number far greater than 118,000.

 

TM:: That's news to me. Many people have said, yes, there were long

lines, yes, there was disproportionate distribution of voting

machines, yes, there was trouble with provisional ballots, yes, there

was intimidation -- but the margin was 120,000. You're saying that

they add up to over 120,000?

 

MCM: Oh easily, easily. It was in the urban parts of Ohio that most of

this stuff went down. All the urban centers in Ohio were Democratic.

If people want to get a strong sense of what was happening at the

grassroots level coast to coast last year, go to a website called the

Election Incident Reporting System, EIRS. Then type in the name of a

state or a county, and you'll get a transcript of all the complaints

that were lodged that day by people who called 1-866-MY-VOTE.

 

Now a lot of them couldn't get through because it was understaffed,

but those who did get through left messages. You can find copious

firsthand evidence of what the average person had to go through to try

to vote against Bush. This didn't happen only in Ohio. Electronic

touchscreen machines flipped Kerry votes into Bush votes in at least

11 states.

 

TM: You say similar practices (and occasionally worse ones) were

applied in several other key states -- Florida, Oregon, Pennsylvania,

New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and even New York?

 

MCM: In New Mexico, for example, we're told that Bush won by some

7,000 votes. We know of over 17,000 Democratic voters who were unable

to cast a vote for president because the touchscreen machines in their

districts refused to record a vote for president.

 

These 17,000-plus New Mexicans turned out to vote in Democratic areas,

and they didn't record a vote for president. Seventeen thousand is

10,000 more than 7,000. That glitch alone can account for the

ostensible victory margin of Bush over Kerry in New Mexico. Greg

Palast's new book will have a whole chapter on New Mexico. It's

hair-raising stuff, and we haven't heard a word about it. The same

kind of thing happened in Iowa, where Bush supposedly won by under

10,000 votes.

 

Tom Daschle was supposedly beaten in South Dakota by 4,500 votes.

There was so much chicanery going on there, that it's easy to argue

that John Thunes should not have won. I know Daschle believes he was

robbed.

 

This isn't only a matter of the White House, it's also a matter of the

Congress. I don't believe that this government represents the people

of this country. The people of this country, however frightened some

of them may be by terrorism, are essentially not theocratically

inclined. They don't want a Christian republic. They were not happy

with the way the government dealt with the Terry Schiavo case.

Americans basically believe in the American system of government.

Checks and balances, the separation of church and state.

 

The press kept telling us after the election that a huge outpouring of

religious voters account for Bush's miraculous victory. Well that's

nothing more than a talking point that the religious right itself put

out after the election. There is no statistical evidence whatsoever

that there was any increase in the number of religious voters.

 

TM: The big thing that people seized on was one particular exit poll

in which people, when given a choice of a few things, said moral

values was the No. 1 reason for their vote. More people answered moral

values in 1996 and in 2000 than in 2004. There was actually a drop in

the number of people who attributed their vote to moral values in

2004, not a rise.

 

Let me check a couple of things with you. I've heard that exit polls

were most inaccurate -- by a big margin -- in those areas that used

electronic voting machines with no paper trail. True?

 

MCM: That's basically true, and it was particularly noticeable in five

swing states. There's a lot of stuff floating around out there in

cyberspace about the exit polls. The question of the exit polls has

been very badly muddied by a lot of disingenuous argument. Now a lot

of people think that it's not a reliable gauge, it doesn't tell us

anything. That's actually the result of propaganda obfuscation. The

exit polls' sudden divergence, sudden wrongness in these five states

is really a remarkable deviation from the norm.

 

The guy doing the best work on that particular issue is a statistician

at the University of Pennsylvania named Steve Freeman, who will have a

book coming out in a few months primarily about the exit poll question.

 

Bogus reasons for why the exit polls were so wrong include the

reluctant responder argument, which holds that Bush voters were

strangely reluctant to tell exit pollsters how they voted. Well,

Freeman has read the raw data at precinct level and has discovered

that, as a matter of fact, if anyone showed a greater reluctance to

come forward and say honestly who they voted for when confronted with

an exit pollster, it was actually the Democrats. There's no evidence

of any numerical kind that can support the view that somehow

Republicans wouldn't fess up.

 

TM: I would assume that the very ones being referred to as reluctant

are the ones who would be proud to say they voted for God's candidate.

 

MCM: One of the weirdest things about this whole election business is

that one of the two parties has, for over the last year and longer,

been vociferously complaining about the dangers of election fraud, and

that's the Republican party.

 

TM: Thus the ID card in Georgia, right?

 

MCM: Exactly. They're the ones who are always screaming about

Democratic fraud, but the Republicans in this last race were really

the only ones engaging in election fraud.

 

This has to do with the peculiarly paranoid quality of the crusading

mindset. I believe this theft was to a great extent carried out thanks

to a kind of crusader mentality. I've got plenty of evidence in the

book that the religious right played an enormously large role in the

theft of the election last year.

 

TM: I think first of Diebold, I think of the Ken Blackwells or the

Kathryn Harrises. How does the religious right itself play a role

beyond mobilizing its own troops?

 

MCM: That mobilization is significant when you consider that a lot of

those troops have actually become embedded inside the election system.

 

TM: Local polling officials, that sort of thing?

 

MCM: One Democratic election judge tried to observe the vote count in

Pima County, Arizona. A roomful of polling personnel who all belonged

to the same evangelical church in the area started to call him a

liberal demon, a liberal scum.

 

TM: When you talk about a crusader mentality, you basically mean that

if you do not support my candidate you are an infidel -- and the ends

justify the means?

 

MCM: Precisely. See, all these crimes that I attest to in the book

were committed with impunity by people who regard their political

adversaries as demons. And that's not an exaggeration. You know, this

government is to a great extent dominated by people who have that

metaphysical view of the current political situation.

 

It is a very serious mistake I believe to think that all of this is

happening only because of the excessive greed of certain corporate

powers. That greed is decisive It played an enormous role. There is no

question about it. But it could not have succeeded without the

vigorous grassroots assistance of a lot of people who are religious

true believers. And I think that they include the likes of Tom DeLay

and others.

 

TM: I've heard that almost all irregularities worked in Bush's favor.

True?

 

MCM: Absolutely true. I have not yet heard of a single example of a

touchscreen voting machine flipping a Bush vote into a Kerry vote.

This does not mean it never happened. I'm just saying I haven't heard

about it if it has.

 

TM: I've read that in New Hampshire, Ralph Nader's Green Party

campaign paid for an actual recount. They picked the precincts they

thought were suspicious, and the hand recount confirmed the actual

vote totals and showed that the exit polls were, in fact, wrong. What

do you say to that?

 

MCM: Well, the recount that they paid for found no evidence of fraud

in that particular case.

 

TM: It confirmed the hand recount, showing that the exit polls were in

fact wrong. So how does that fit your analysis of the whole scheme?

 

MCM: The only thing one can say about that with any scientific

certainty is that the particular hand count that they carried out did

not reveal any evidence of fraud. That does not mean that no fraud was

committed. This is a very fine point, but when we're dealing with

questions of electoral honesty and accuracy, I think we have the right

to make fine points. The distinction must be made -- that particular

hand count involved a sample, that sample revealed no fraud, but that

does not mean that we can then sit back and say, well, OK, so the exit

polls were wrong.

 

TM: To the question " What is the point of revisiting the last

election? " you point out that there has never been a great reform that

was not driven by a major scandal. Do you believe that true election

reform is not going to happen until the people and the media finally

wake up to this?

 

MCM: I think it's going to depend on the people. It's going to depend

on the people simply and irresistibly insisting that the media finally

deal with this subject. That's why I wrote the book.

 

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7FM, Los

Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org).