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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 8:42:45 GMT
To quote the conservative pundit Jack Kirkpatrick in the "Point/Counterpoint" segment of the 1980 disaster film spoof AIRPLANE!: " “Shanna, they bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say, let 'em crash.”
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 8:43:17 GMT
Episode 845: REDMAP June 1, 2018·8:54 PM ET Local elections used to be a low-key affair in Blue Hill, Maine. So residents of the small town were shocked, in 2010, when a candidate for the Maine State Senate was targeted by a flood of negative ads. The ads claimed he had canceled the town Fourth of July fireworks show and nobody in town knew who was paying for them. Listen: play.podtrac.com/npr-510289/npr.mc.tritondigital.com/NPR_510289/media/anon.npr-mp3/npr/pmoney/2018/06/20180605_pmoney_pmpod845v2.mp3?orgId=1&d=1319&p=510289&story=616212383&t=podcast&e=616212383&siteplayer=true&dl=1We trace the money back to a Republican strategist named Chris Jankowski who hatched a brilliant scheme to reshape national politics for a bargain. The strategy was called the Redistricting Majority Project, or "REDMAP." Today on the show: how Jankowski took a new approach to political campaign spending that reshaped campaigns across the country and helped earn Republicans advantages for years, maybe even decades to come including the midterms this fall. For more on REDMAP, check out Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count by David Daley. Music: "Waiting For You" and "Cadillac Attack." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook / Instagram Subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, PocketCasts and NPR One. Episode 846: Ungerrymandering FloridaJune 8, 2018·9:27 PM ET listen: play.podtrac.com/npr-510289/npr.mc.tritondigital.com/NPR_510289/media/anon.npr-mp3/npr/pmoney/2018/06/20180608_pmoney_pmpod846.mp3?orgId=1&d=1254&p=510289&story=618415954&t=podcast&e=618415954&siteplayer=true&dl=1Note: This is the second episode in a series on elections and how they can be gamed. The first episode is #845: REDMAP. (You can listen in any order!) Florida should be a swing state. But for the past 25 years, most of its representatives have been Republicans. That's because Republicans drew electoral maps that favored their own candidates. They gerrymandered. Then, in 2010, Florida tried to fix this. Citizens passed ballot initiatives that outlawed partisan gerrymandering. Today on the show: How politicians tried to sneak gerrymandering back into Florida—in disguise. Music: "Feel It Rising Hands Up" and "Bringing Tomorrow." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook / Instagram Subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, PocketCasts and NPR One.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 8:43:43 GMT
The right to vote should NOT be a USE IT OR LOSE IT proposition. Please name any other rights left to us (after republiconservatives took more rights away with their Patriot Act) that are use it or lose it. Sending a postcard to verify address should not be the main way to verify status. There are MANY ways i.e. drivers license, property records, utility records, etc. We know as fact how republiconservatives have withheld and redirected mail to thwart democrats and minorities from voting.Supreme Court decides case on purging voter registration rollsPublished on Jun 11, 2018
By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court ruled Monday that Ohio did not violate federal law by purging voters from the registration rolls if they haven't voted in a number of years. CBS News' Jan Crawford has more on the ruling.Our right wing Supreme Court is giving Republicons carte blanche to go even further in their efforts to purge legally registered voters from the rolls. And watch what happens when groups take efforts to help those disenfranchised by these purges to get them back on the rolls.....they will be STOPPED as they were here in Arizona by red state legislatures and governors. These people will GO MUCH FURTHER than this ruling allowed, it will disenfranchise enough people to win their elections in the short term and then they will be sued for going too far AFTER the election and the result? ALL THEIR ILL GOTTEN CANDIDATES WILL STAY IN OFFICE.
The other thing that will happen is when Ohio purges people it will send THEIR list to other Red States to remove them from there as well. It gets purposely confusing. Why Ohio's way of purging voter rolls is at the Supreme Court
Supreme Court Gives Green Light To Ohio's Voter Purges Sam Levine, HuffPost •June 11, 2018
www.yahoo.com/news/ohio-voter-purge-law-upheld-141250860.html?.tsrc=bell-brknews
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 8:44:13 GMT
These voter suppression laws always favor republicons. Supreme Court Hands Vote Suppressors Another Toolwhowhatwhy.org/2018/06/11/will-the-supreme-court-hand-vote-suppressors-another-tool/
Ohio, voting Ohio voters who don’t cast a ballot in three successive federal elections may be purged from rolls. Photo credit: Tim Evanson / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Editor’s Note: Following the publication of this article, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to uphold the voter removal process described below. The decision deals a blow to election integrity not just in Ohio but throughout the country.
For a variety of reasons, the voter removal system championed by Ohio’s Secretary of State Jon Husted disproportionately affects minorities. Now that it is allowed to stand, other states may swiftly follow suit to also purge eligible voters from their rolls under the guise of fighting voter fraud.
The Supreme Court could rule as early as today on whether states can purge citizens from voter rolls who have failed to provide confirmation of address after not showing up to vote.
Voting rights advocates worry that, if the challenge to this controversial practice fails, states across the country could use similar methods to suppress votes and tailor the electorate for political benefits.
At the heart of the case — Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute — is the strategy Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted has used to remove more than 2 million voters from the Buckeye State’s rolls since 2011.
Under the state’s contentious “supplemental process,” if registered voters don’t cast a ballot for two years, the secretary of state’s office mails them a prepaid notice, seeking to confirm that the individual still lives at the same address. If voters don’t return the mailing or don’t cast a ballot over the subsequent four years, they are removed from the state’s rolls and prohibited from voting unless they re-register.
Opponents of Ohio’s process — which initiates voter purges more quickly than any other state — say that it violates the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NRVA), which specifically bans states from purging voters for failing to vote. Husted and supporters have countered that the process removes voters for failing to verify their addresses by returning the confirmation notice — not for voter inactivity.
A Reuters analysis published in 2016 revealed that Ohio’s voter purges affected African American and Democratic communities most. www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-votingrights-ohio-insight/use-it-or-lose-it-occasional-ohio-voters-may-be-shut-out-in-november-idUSKCN0YO19D
more: whowhatwhy.org/2018/06/11/will-the-supreme-court-hand-vote-suppressors-another-tool/
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 8:44:41 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 8:45:09 GMT
Expect little change in our election outcomes. The system is rigged at every turn in favor of republiconservatives. When even the most tame of them are ratfuckers through propaganda outlets like FOX and right wing noise and where red states control the vote counting don't expect a different outcome.American democracy still has a glaring propaganda problem.Automated bot accounts that spread disinformation and sowed disgust and confusion among voters during the 2016 presidential election are poised to wreak havoc again in this year’s midterm elections, according to a leading expert.
“I think that it’s too late for 2018. I hate to be a pessimist,” Samuel Woolley, research director of the DigIntel Lab at the Institute for the Future, said in the inaugural episode of Yahoo News’ “Bots & Ballots” podcast. “It’s good that we’re seeing some action around this stuff, but I don’t think we have our arms around the problem in any significant way.”
Woolley has studied the rise of bot accounts and the “fake news” they generate for the past six years, focusing on how that propaganda affects U.S. elections.
“I can conclusively say that bots changed the flow of information during the 2016 election — yeah, absolutely, a hundred percent,” Woolley said. “These bots had an absolute effect upon the conversation in American politics. When you have the president of the United States retweeting or re-messaging or interacting with bot accounts, that affects public opinion. That affects communication.”
At this very moment, Woolley said, bots are already being employed in races across the country.
“You can almost look to any contested race going on in 2018 and see some degree of computational propaganda,” Woolley said. “One of the things I’ve been looking at lately is the way that propaganda is getting used against some of the most pivotal, contested elections in 2018. One of them is the election for the Jeff Flake Senate seat in Arizona. We’ve seen disinformation circulating about Joe Arpaio. There is some that gets used to knock him down or attack him, but the vast majority is used to build him up or build up the platform surrounding him as a candidate. It’s amplification.”
Download or subscribe on iTunes: “Bots & Ballots” by Yahoo News
Woolley believes that the goal of most bot accounts is to “subtly manipulate public opinion” and confuse voters, as was the case with accounts in 2016 that promoted the falsehood to Hillary Clinton supporters that people could vote via text message.
While some of the automated accounts have been tracked to Russia, Woolley said, the bulk of the disinformation that continues to be spread on platforms like Facebook and Twitter originates from within our borders.
“A tremendous amount of the propaganda and disinformation that we see in the United States is homegrown,” Woolley said. “It comes from people within the United States who are savvy computer users. There’s a lot of people that know how to build bots.”
While Woolley is hopeful that better tools can be built to help identify and weed out bot accounts to dull their impact on the 2020 election, he said it is all but certain they will influence this year’s races.
“In 2018, what I’m most concerned with is, sort of, this underlying issue of the way that propaganda consistently seems to be [used] to exacerbate what is already terrible polarization in this country between Republicans and Democrats,” Woolley said.
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About “Bots & Ballots”: In the digital era, information and the social media platforms used to spread it have become weapons of choice for those seeking to short–circuit American democracy. Yahoo News’ new weekly podcast explores the intersection of politics and technology, as told by those in Washington, D.C., and Silicon Valley trying to prevent a repeat of the infiltration of the 2016 presidential election.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 8:45:40 GMT
Why Journalist & Filmmaker Greg Palast is Suing Ohio & Kansas for Voter Purges
The Supreme Court decision blessing the purge of half a million voters in Ohio is NOT the last word.
On Monday, the renowned law firm of Mirer Mazzocchi Julien of New York will serve a 90-day notice on Jon Husted, the Secretary of State of Ohio, of our intent to file suit in federal court unless we receive complete information on each of the hundreds of thousands of voters removed from the voter rolls.
We have already filed a demand for information on Kris Kobach, the e'minence grise behind Ohio and other mass purges nationwide, to open his purge program files to us. We are joined in this demand by the ACLU of Kansas. What we can do
As I explained in my prior report, the Supreme Court did not authorize Ohio to remove voters who skipped an election. Rather, failing to vote was merely one of Ohio's excuses to send a postcard to these voters. Not returning the postcard was taken, absurdly -- insanely -- as evidence the voter had moved away.
I discovered this nasty trick for Rolling Stone -- a plain evil system I call Purge by Postcard. The implications of the Supreme Court decision are unimaginably horrid, as at least two dozen states (not just Ohio) are using "evidence" that a voter has moved -- "proven" by the failure to respond to a piece of junk mail.
The purge could be massive: A half-million in Ohio will undoubtedly lead to millions nationwide.
Normally, a Supreme Court verdict is the final word, the last rodeo.
But there is hope. Jeanne Mirer, our principal attorney, explained that the civil rights groups lost at the Supreme Court on a matter of law: In the absence of evidence to the contrary, Ohio may assume a lapsed voter has moved if they failed to return a postcard.
But what if the facts say otherwise?
Just the Facts, Ma'am It's really simple to find out if failure to return a postcard is evidence you've moved: ask the voter. Call them up, knock on their door: Mr. Webster, have you moved to Virginia?
If Mr. Webster and others say, "No, here I am, I haven't moved..." well, then, the Court's factual assumption goes poof! Because the National Voter Registration Act says that removal methods must be "reasonable."
So, the way to challenge the Court's decision is to prove that purge-by-postcard is unreasonable, an absurd way to determine if someone has relocated.
(Note: Ohio not only sent the purging postcard to voters who missed elections, over 400,000 were sent to those identified by Kobach as having moved to another state -- the infamous Interstate Crosscheck list.)
To get to these victim voters, we need their names. Kobach has so far stonewalled our polite requests for information to which we are entitled by law. So, our new demand comes with a 90-day notice of a lawsuit. But, the doors to the truth are opening. Ohio's Husted has now given us the name of every single voter purged in the last decade. But we need the details of who got postcards, who returned them, and why he sent these voters postcards in the first place. And we need copies of the junk mail that stole Ohio's democracy.
I thank Mirer's firm for taking on this enormous task because, in all, we are filing in 25 states where mass purges are conducted. (And she is not charging the Palast Investigative Fund one dime for her firm's enormous and expensive effort.)
Our alliance with the ACLU of Kansas is especially vital as Kobach designed the Jim Crow postcards and created the list of 7.2 million voters he claims "moved" from their voting jurisdiction. In Illinois, we are joined by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and in Georgia by Helen Butler of the Georgia Coalition of the Peoples Agenda where Hon. Stacy Abrams is running for Governor. Abrams is likely to face Brian Kemp who has purged Georgia voter rolls in a manner at least as spurious, vicious and racist as Ohio's operation. We have just served papers on Mr. Kemp.
Through investigation, we have already obtained parts of these Ohio, Kansas and Georgia purge lists -- including the one targeting Donald Alexander Webster Sr., a 70-year-old Black voter in Dayton. He is listed as allegedly moving from Ohio to Virginia because there's a Virginia voter registered as Donald Eugene Webster Jr.
But Webster has not moved from Ohio. I can testify to that: I met with him in his Dayton home. And he swears he's never been a "Eugene" nor a "Junior."
Webster insists, "I vote every election and every primary, every one."
"I remember the Civil Rights Act, I remember all of those things. Almost all gone," Webster added, with a deep sadness in his voice, "Somebody dropped the ball. Maybe it was us, our age group, that we thought we didn't have to fight anymore."
Well, Mr. Webster, the fight is beginning. Again.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 8:46:07 GMT
Bush, who never won either of his elections appointed 2 Supreme Court Justices and Trump, so far appointed one that SHOULD have been appointed by Obama. All 3 are illegitimate in my opinion and they have given conservatives most of the power in the court. Lots of 5-4 rulings. Here is another that is sure to keep their conservative nest feathered for a generation by allowing crooked red states to gerrymander to favor Republiconservatives. This is why even though there are more registered Democrats than Republicans and more people vote for Democrats over Republicans the Republicans still win. Add that to other Republican suppression techniques, bogus voting info given out, voter roll purging of minorities, fractional voting in red states, vote tally flipping and it will be almost impossible to beat these schemers, including Trump.
U.S. top court largely backs Texas Republicans over electoral maps
Reuters By Lawrence Hurley,Reuters 2 hours 32 minutes ago .
FILE PHOTO: The U.S. Supreme Court is seen after the court revived Ohio's contentious policy of purging infrequent voters from its registration rolls, overturning a lower court ruling that Ohio's policy violated the National Voter Registration Act, in Washington, U.S., June 11, 2018. REUTERS/Erin Schaff
By Lawrence Hurley
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday handed a victory to Texas Republicans by reviving electoral districts drawn by the state legislature that had been thrown out by a lower court for diluting the influence of black and Hispanic voters.
In a 5-4 ruling, the conservative-majority court largely accepted the state's argument that the Republican-led Texas legislature acted in good faith when it adopted new electoral maps in 2013 for state legislative and U.S. congressional seats. Republican President Donald Trump's administration had backed Texas in the case. The court did rule, however, that one of the state legislature districts was unlawful.
Last September, the high court put on hold two lower court rulings from earlier in 2017 that had invalidated a series of Texas electoral districts. The justices then were divided 5-4, with the conservative justices backing the Texas Republicans and the liberals dissenting.
The maps, adopted in 2013 and challenged by individual voters and civil rights groups representing blacks and Hispanics, were based on court-drawn districts imposed for the 2012 election after prior Republican-draw maps also were tossed as racially discriminatory. But the maps at issue in the case have been in effect throughout the litigation.
The lower court found that the configuration of two U.S. House of Representatives districts violated the Voting Rights Act, a 1965 federal law that protects minority voters and was enacted to address a history of racial discrimination in voting, especially in Southern states. Texas has 36 U.S. House districts, 25 held by Republicans and 11 by Democrats.
The same court found similar faults with Texas state House of Representatives maps.
(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham)
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 8:46:35 GMT
Zz 45 Of The Myriad Ways Republicans Steal Elections - Poem by Saiom Shriver Ways Republicans Have Stolen Presidential, Gubernatorial, Senate, House, State Legislature, Mayor and Judicial RacesThis writer intends to vote for Rand Paul, the only antiwar candidate in the Republican Party and the only candidate among Democrats and Republicans who is making ending the illegal wars of the US a campaign priority. Unlike Rand Paul, many in the Republican Party steal elections. Why is there much more vote fraud among Republicans? Answer: They are a minority of voters. In addition the 1% need to give the illusion to the 99% that there is democracy in the US.
Because of these election crimes, the Iraq and Afghan wars were begun. Money has been stolen from the poor and given to the rich by their politician pawns. Our environment would have been better protected by Gore whom the people elected.
Although the word gerrymander was coined in 1812 after Gerry Mander, a Bostonian, the blue state of Massachusetts has less vote fraud than red or purple states.
How have Republicans cheated in elections 1. barring third parties from the ballot 2. barring third parties from debates 3. voting machine fraud 4. stealing ballot boxes 5. unpostmarked absentee ballots 6. absentee ballot forgeries 7. illegal removal of people from voting rolls (as Jeb Bush did in 2000 for his brother) 8. jamming the handicapped voter transportation lines (as NH Republicans did and went to jail) 9. switching yes to no (as Diebold machines and Secretary of State Husted's operation did in Ohio on a pot legalization vote) 10. conducting a phony unbiased voter registration drive and throwing away all nonRepublican registrations (as Nathan Sproul, hired by McCain, by Romney, by Karl Rove, and by state Republican parties in Virginia, Minnesota, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, MInnesota and other states did) 11. Voting the dead (as Nathan Sproul did in Florida and elsewhere for his Republican paymasters) 12. hacking the totals (Bev Harris of Black Box Voting showed Al Gore how Diebold machines could be hacked in 3 minutes' time 13. Sending police to intimidate voters or to block off their precincts (as Jeb Bush did in Florida in 2000) 14. Conspiring with the media to instruct the public incorrectly in order to invalidate ballots as the Jacksonville Florida Times Union did in 2000 putting out a special edition in the black precincts instructing voters to mark each page of the ballot (20,000 ballots invalidated) 15. delaying the opening of polls as the Ohio Republican Party did in 2004 in Akron Ohio and at Kenyon College, for instance 16. The Republican dominated Supreme Court (5 males who quash the will of the vast majority of Americans) have decided that money is speech which allows billionaires to flood the corporate owned media with ads. 17. Murder: Missouri's Democratic governor Mel Carnahan died during his 2002 campaign in a plane crash. Missouri's Democratic senate candidate Jerry Little died in a plane crash during the campaign in 1976. Iowa's Libertarian candidate, physician Doug Butzler, whose presence on the ticket would have given the Democrats a victory, died in a plane crash in 2014. Senator Paul Wellstone, Minnesota Democrat, died in a plane crash during his campaign. John Perkins who was an economic hitman for the government documents the number of leaders of other countries killed in the CIA's arranged plane crashes.* 18. barring Democrats and independents from the counting of ballots as happened in Warren Ohio in 2004. 19. Spreading lies about candidates as John Kasich did about his opponent Ed Fitzgerald in Ohio and Senator Thune did about Senator Tom Daschle in South Dakota.. 20. cutting back on the number of voting machines in Democratic precincts 21. draconian voter ID requirements which penalize the poor 22. owning the media as Mitt Romney did by purchasing Clear Channel through Bain Capital of which he was the sole owner 23. owning or controlling the voting machine companies, as Mitt Romney's son did purchasing a voting machine company in Ohio, as the Republican Party did through Wally O'Dell, CEO of Diebold 24. Racism: blacks, Latinos barred from the ballot by literacy tests, poll taxes, and in the modern era other ways 25. gerrymandering... the arrangement of a district to maximize Republican power as the Ohio Republican Party has done 26. the US Senate, an anachronism which gives 64 times as much power to a citizen of Wyoming with 584,000 as a citizen of California with 37,253,000 people. 27. A Supreme Court which has quashed the will of the majority (as in Gore V Bush in 2000) 28. treason (G H W Bush and others in March of 2012 as private citizens negotiated with the Iranian government to continue to hold US hostages until the election...) 29. Denying many prisoners the right to vote 30. truncating the hours in which voter registration is possible 31. truncating the hours in which citizens may vote 32. allowing the recipients of stolen elections to remain in office, as has happened in the 2015 election for Kentucky governor, both elections of G W Bush, etc. 33. Military control of nonofficer soldier ballots 34. The electoral college which has meant that candidates receiving fewer popular votes have still won. 35. spamming opposition party websites with pornography or commercial spam 36. having those trained in provocateur behavior disrupt internet forums, public meetings 37. campaign infiltrators who take charge of fundraising, financial records, media ads etc. 38. Hacking opposition sites... eliminating them from the Internet as happened with cleveland.indymedia.org etc 39. Democratic voters showed up in Jeb Bush's election of 2000 and were told they needed 2 forms of photo ID 40. Without suppression sf the Native American vote no Republican can win statewide in South Dakota. Thune, Republican candidate, became senator by paying people to run lying websites about Daschle, by suppressing the Native American vote in a variety of ways, including police intimidating Native Americans and writing down their license plate numbers. 41. Whole counties of votes in New Hampshire were thrown away by Republicans in NH desperate to defeat Ron Paul 'Party leaders at the county and state level have changed or violated party rules, cancelled caucuses, changed vote counts, thrown out entire counties of votes, counted public votes privately, called-in the SWAT team, and inexplicably replaced Paul delegates with Romney delegates to block Ron Paul from winning the nomination.' Quote from Jaret Glenn wordpress site See *22 42 Romney operatives erased whole flash drives and destroyed computers of operatives of other parties 43. Many polls were propaganda machines owned by Republicans.... with fraudulent numbers reported, fraudulent samples, biased questions 44. war profiteer and other corrupt ownership of media... giving much more air time to Republican candidate 45. In Alabama, Richard Shelby ran as a Democrat in order to be elected and then switched to the Republican Party. In Colorado, Democrat Ben Nighthorse Campbell switched to the Republican Party after elected.
Someone on a network news show said in December that Republicans are 28% of the population. Many dispute that figure. In 2012 Romney received less than 20% of the votes of those eligible.
in 2012, the estimated population was 314 million. If one deducts 2% for noncitizens, then 307 million were eligible to vote. If one deducts 23% for population under 18, then 236.9 million were the Americans eligible to vote. The total vote for president in 2012 was 127 million votes, with Obama receiving 51.19%, Romney receiving 47.32%, Libertarians receiving.99% and Greens.36% with other parties receiving less. Romney's 47.32% is 19.9% of the total number eligible to vote. of The numbers for third parties would be higher but many states block third party voters in a variety of ways, and corporate owned media block third parties from the debate, etc. In addition the Republicans on the Supreme Court have defined money as speech so that billionaires can flood the airwaves with ads for their politician pawns.
8.6% of the US population has a felony conviction but different states have different rules about voting by felons (a number which includes Jesus, Gandhi, and others) .
One can dispute the numbers used but the unchanging reality is that Republicans are a minority party. Saiom Shriver
www.poemhunter.com/poem/zz-45-of-the-myriad-ways-republicans-steal-elections/
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 8:47:49 GMT
Just for the record I do not believe Donald J Trump had anything to do with the stolen election of 2016. It was ALL GOP theft through all sorts of methodology. Trump's collusion with Russia was just icing on the cake and now a diversion. Yeah, it was shady and crooked but why isn't anyone, especially the DNC calling for investigations and challenging election results? answer: they stole their primary and don't want to shine that light on themselves if they can help it. How Trump Stole the 2016 Elections: The Blatant Evidence This post was originally published on this site www.therussophile.org/how-trump-stole-the-2016-elections-the-blatant-evidence.html/
Zamfir: You say Trump “stole the election with computers”. Really? What are you talking about here? I’ve looked into these bizarre claims and never found any proper evidence of anything.
They’re not bizarre. Republicans been doing it since 2000 because the public doesn’t really support them anymore, so like all capitalist, ruling class, and oligarchic political parties, they have to lie, cheat, and steal to stay in power. See the Latin American Right for example. The Republicans been stealing them with computers, especially since 2004. Bush out and out stole the 2004 election.
We can tell they were stolen by how the exit polls went radically off compared to the actual vote. Exit polls are the gold standard of politics for over 50 years now. They always reliably track with results. Out of 50 states, polls will be off in maybe two states, no more. They’ve been going off, often by a lot and almost always in a Republican direction, since 2000. This is when the Republicans started stealing them with the computers. That’s why the Republicans put the computers in in the first place – to steal elections.
In Michigan, all polls for weeks before the election – hundreds of them – were all off, including the exit polls. That can’t possibly happen. So Michigan was stolen. They refused to count 70,000 votes in Detroit for no reason except that they are nigger votes I guess. And many fraudulent votes for Republicans were found even before the recount. A recount was never done because all Michigan politicians opposed it. Why did they oppose a recount?
Wisconsin was also stolen. Exit polls were off but always in Republican districts. There was no real recount in Wisconsin. There was only a fake recount, and some precincts were incredibly shady to where it appeared to witnesses that they were seeing actual fraud taking place.
Also 30,000 fraudulent votes for Republicans were found before the recount even started. The vote in Milwaukee was not possible, and I think they never even recounted it. Write-in’s supported Clinton and those lean rightwing. All exit polls showed Clinton winning. Exit polls were perfect in all precincts that had hand counted ballots but went off in all precincts that had computer counted ballots.
50,000 fraudulent votes were found in Pennsylvania before the recount even started. Write in votes supported Clinton and those tend to lean conservative. There was no recount in Pennsylvania because the DNC governor fought it in court! All exit polls showed Clinton winning.
The vote in Florida was not possible. 70% of votes were write-in’s and they supported Clinton by a decent margin. For Trump to win, a huge number of voters on election day would have had to support Trump. That number was so large as to be statistically impossible. Republican turnout was not elevated on election day anyway. As many Democrats came out as Republicans.
Trump started saying the election was going to be stolen because he was going to steal it himself. He always accuses his opponents of doing what he does or is going to do. This is called projection but it is particularly prominent in this man. It is considered to be a primitive and immature defense that kids use a lot. Yes, adults use it a lot, but people who project all the time are notably unhealthy. It is particularly prominent in personality disorders.
Also Trump, Conaway, and Guiliani became unusually calm about Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania a few days before the election. All polls were pro-Clinton. Manafort said he had just talked to the Russians ,and they said not to worry about Michigan. I assume the Russians may have been in on the vote-hacking. Vote-hacking in this last election was never investigated by the FBI or by anyone.
I will add that sleazy Democrats do this too. Hillary had to have stolen a number of primaries. There is no way for the exit polls to go off like that, and the DNC laid down the law that Sanders could not win. Democrats don’t seem to want to fix these machines either I guess because they use them to steal elections themselves.
Republicans are fanatically opposed to all recounts of elections and to fixing the damned voting machines. They must know that the way they are set up now, they are hackable.
Really we need to get rid of them altogether and go back to hand counted ballots. States that hand count ballots never see their exit polls go off.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 8:48:22 GMT
10 Dirty Ways to Swing an Election
Politicians and their henchmen have lots of ways of messing with voters. Here are their favorites.
Adam SerwerNov. 1, 2012 10:03 AM
America has come a long way from the days of Jim Crow segregation, but our voting system is far from perfect, and even today there are organizations committed to preventing legitimate voters from excercising the franchise. Here are 10 of the most common legal and illegal paths to keeping Americans from the ballot box:
Voter Caging
Voter caging is the process of sending mail to the addresses of registered voters with the intent of challenging their votes if the mail goes undelivered and the voter still shows up at the polls. It still happens, but the most famous instance occurred in 1981, when Republicans sent thousands of letters to black and Latino voters in New Jersey, hoping to block as many as possible of these likely Democratic voters from voting. As a result of that stunt, the Republican National Committee entered into a consent decree with the Democratic National Committee agreeing not to engage in voter caging unless a court says it’s okay. They leave it to third-party conservative groups now.
Lying Flyers
Dropping flyers with erroneous or deceptive information about voting may not be effective, according to voting law expert Rick Hasen, but it certainly happens a lot. Flyers in Virginia in 2008 told Democrats to vote on the wrong day, while flyers distributed in black neighborhoods in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 2004 told residents they couldn’t vote if anyone in their family had been convicted of a crime. Dirty tricksters are getting with the times, however—the 2008 election saw erreoneous election information distributed through emails to students at George Mason University. “Those things are very hard to investigate,” says Penda D. Hair, co-director of the voting rights group the Advancement Project. “They’re usually anonymous, so we don’t have good data on what the impact is on people.”
Reprehensible Robocalls
When a lying flyer just isn’t good enough, there’s always the deceptive robocall to Democratic-leaning districts giving people false election information or urging them to stay home. Last year Paul Schurick, the former campaign manager of the ex-Republican governor of Maryland, Bob Ehrlich, was convicted of ordering 2010 robocalls aimed at black voters implying they could stay home and “relax” because the Democratic candidate, Martin O’Malley, had already won.
Felon Disenfranchisement
Many laws barring those convicted of crimes even after release emerged during Reconstruction as a way to disenfranchise newly freed blacks. Though defenders of such laws now justify them on race-neutral grounds, an estimated 2.2 million of the nearly 6 million Americans barred from voting because of prior felony convictions are black. Those are the kind of disenfranchisement numbers misleading flyers or robocalls can’t buy, which is exactly why newly elected Republican governors in Florida, Virginia and Iowa moved quickly to reinstate voting restrictions on the formerly incarcerated after taking office in 2010.
Voter ID Laws
The impact of voter ID laws is still unclear, but the intent is not. Republicans pushing voter ID laws sometimes write them so as to exclude forms of ID carried by Democratic-leaning constituencies (like student ID) while allowing those more likely to be carried by Republican voters (gun licenses). The Brennan Center, a left-leaning legal advocacy group, estimates that as many as 11 percent of Americans lack government-issued photo ID. There’s no mystery among Republicans as to whom these individuals are more likely to vote for: A Pennsylvania state legislator openly bragged that the state’s voter ID law (since halted by the courts) would deliver the state to Mitt Romney. Though many of these laws have been delayed or struck down, some poll workers are still demanding government issued photo ID anyway.
Voter Purges
States are supposed to keep the voter rolls current, but sometimes removals of dead or no longer valid voter registrations is undertaken in a reckless or partisan manner that can end up disenfranchising eligible voters. Just this year Florida tried to purge its rolls of alleged “noncitizens” on the rolls, only it turned out that many of them were perfectly eligible to vote. Colorado tried to do the same thing, with similar results. Coincidentally, flawed voter purges frequently seem to end up disenfranchising voters of color.
The Menacing Billboard
Republicans, convinced that Democrats only win elections through voter fraud, have taken to setting up billboards warning that “voter fraud is a felony” in swing states this year. Naturally, these billboards only seem to pop up in minority neighborhoods. It’s unclear how effective the billboards are at intimidating people out of voting, but there’s no mistaking who they’re aimed at. “They use a lot of threatening language to associate voting with a crime, that may just make people want to stay away,” says the Brennan Center’s Larry Norden. Norden says the billboards leave the impression that “if you go to the polls there might be somebody there to take you to jail or fine you.”
Poll Watchers
Republicans have developed an extensive network of poll watchers who think of themselves as protecting the integrity of the ballot box, but they’re really there to prevent people they think are Democrats from engaging in “voter fraud.” As Brentin Mock noted in his report on the conservative group True the Vote, the group’s national elections coordinator said that he wanted voters to feel like they are “driving and seeing the police following you.” These poll watchers can be misinformed about what’s required to be able to cast a ballot, which means eligible voters can be prevented from voting. “When these folks show up at the polling places,” Hair says, “our view is that it’s to scare people away just by being there.”
Messing With Early Voting
Early voting can cut down on long lines on Election Day and allow Americans who might not be able to get to the polls—maybe because they have jobs—cast a ballot. That sounds like a good thing, right? Well, not to the governments of Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee, and West Virginia, all of which cut down on early voting for 2012. Except for West Virginia, all of these states have GOP governors, and as Ari Berman noted in a piece for Rolling Stone, Ohio and Florida specifically “banned voting on the Sunday before the election—a day when black churches historically mobilize their constituents.”
Making Voter Registration More Difficult
After Republicans chalked up Barack Obama’s 2008 win to voter fraud engineered by the now-defunct community organizing group ACORN, GOP governors in Texas and Florida sought to cut down on registration drives by third-party groups. Florida’s restrictions were ultimately struck down in court, but the law had done its job: According to the Florida Times-Union, “the number of new Democrats registering in Florida has all but disappeared.” The irony? Last month, Florida announced it was investigating a longtime GOP activist for voter registration fraud. And if you can’t ban third-party voter registration groups, you can always destroy the voter registration forms of the opposite party, as one GOP activist is suspected of doing in Virginia.
In-Person Voter Fraud
Just kidding! As my colleague Kevin Drum has written, in-person voter fraud is so rare that eight years of the Bush administration ended in only a handful of prosecutions* and no evidence of an organized conspiracy to steal elections through in-person voter fraud, despite the fact that such conspiracies comprise the beginning and end of Republicans’ interest in voting rights matters. Absentee ballot fraud is more common, but voter ID laws wouldn’t stop it. Also, many Republicans vote absentee, and they’re not really interested in disenfranchising their own.
The good news? Many of the mostly GOP-supported laws seeking to restrict voting have been hard to defend in court. “A lot of the most restrictive laws we were worried about have been overturned through the referendum process or weakened by the courts,” Norden says. “The worst of those laws will not be in effect this November.”
*Clarification: None of the Bush voter fraud prosecutions were for voter impersonation—the kind that might be stopped by photo ID—but instead involved people who didn’t know they were ineligible, people who voted twice, or people who sold their votes.
www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/11/election-dirty-tricks/
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 8:48:52 GMT
Greg Palast on “Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps”StoryOctober 18, 2012 Watch iconWatch Full Show: www.democracynow.org/2012/10/18/greg_palast_on_billionaires_ballot_bandits
Billionaires & Ballot Bandits is just as the title says. By the way, this story, hunting down Mitt Romney and his money with the vultures, is in Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.
But how do they steal the election in nine easy steps? We’ve been here before. If you remember, I did the story about how Katherine Harris knocked off tens of thousands of black voters off the voter rolls: she called them felons. But their only crime was voting while black. That was in 2000. That felon purge, other purge—purges, are back with a vengeance.
We’ve lost two—3.2 million people off the voter rolls who are citizens who should be allowed to vote. In the last election, 2.7 million ballots—this is the official number, Amy—2.7 million ballots were cast and not counted. They call those, by the way, “spoiled ballots” in the ballot business. But, you know, votes don’t spoil because you leave them out of the fridge; they spoil because someone is challenging those ballots. And right now, you’ve got a massive new challenge machine, created first by the Koch brothers, who have a computer system called Themis, and that’s one of the things they can use to challenge and knock out voters. Karl Rove, who is funded mainly by Paul Singer and his buddies—there we are with the vulture again—Karl Rove has a massive database called DataTrust, which they have used—we’ve caught them—they have used to challenge voters of color throughout the nation.
So, they are using the old purging systems. They are challenging votes; that’s called “spoiling.” You have something called “caging,” in which we have, again, caught Karl Rove sending letters to, if you can imagine, active-duty soldiers. They send letters to these active-duty soldiers at their military bases. In the letters, they write, “Do not forward.” Those letters come back. Those voters, who are active-duty soldiers, lose their vote because they’ve been challenged as fraudulent voters. So, in other words, if you go to Afghanistan and you’re a black soldier in Florida, you can expect to see your ballot challenged. And you don’t even know it. We talked to one of the voters, who said, “I got to mail in my ballot from overseas,” while he was on duty. But he didn’t realize that his ballot had been challenged by the Rove machine.
Now, Bobby Kennedy, who wrote the introduction to Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, is of course a dean of the law school at Pace University. And he has said this is a felony crime. So, some of the nine ways that they burgle the vote are not only creepy, but in fact they’re illegal.
And this is one of the things that we are trying to say. Here’s nine ways that they take your ballot from you, but we also include, by the way—and very important for people is, at the back of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, we have what we call the ballot condom for safe voting. What it is is seven ways to beat the ballots—ballot bandits so that you can protect your own vote. I’m very concerned about this. I don’t want people to say, “Oh, my god, they’re stealing my vote. I’m not going to vote. I give up.” Don’t do that. Don’t let them shoplift your ballot.
For example, one of the things we have said—and I was just talking to some of the people here in the studio—check your registration. We have the seven ways to beat the ballot bandits poster at ballotbandits.org; you can download it for free to protect yourself. The guy who designed the poster for me didn’t take advice from the—didn’t take our suggestion number three—check your registration. He showed up and was listed as an inactive voter. Nine million people are listed as inactive voters, as if they know that you haven’t been doing your sit-ups or something. You lose your vote. Please check your registration.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 13, 2020 8:55:03 GMT
It’s the Republicans who rig elections, Donald: The GOP history of voter suppression goes way backDonald Trump’s paranoid attacks on democracy aside, only one party has a history of manipulating elections Heather Digby Parton October 18, 2016 12:05pm (UTC)
This presidential election has featured the Republican nominee talking about the size of his manly member on national TV and about grabbing women by the crotch on video. He has also endorsed torture, mass deportations, a 2,000-mile border wall, war crimes, nuclear proliferation, a ban on Muslims and jailing his opponent — cheered on wildly by his rapturous supporters.
All of this is a terrible commentary on the state of American democracy. But as hard as it is to believe, something even more disturbing is happening. Yesterday morning Politico reported that 41 percent of registered voters believe that the election could be "stolen" from Republican Donald Trump because of voter fraud. That number rises to 71 percent among Republicans.
Trump has been pushing this theme ever since his poll numbers started slipping. His TV surrogates and campaign advisers started out spinning his charges as more or less metaphorical, saying that he meant the media was on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's side and therefore "rigging" the election. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich said, "The complaint isn't at the polling level; it's at the news media level." And Trump's running mate Mike Pence explained, "The American people are tired of the biased media. That's where the sense of a rigged election goes." Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani claimed Trump had "never talked about cheating at the polling place."
That didn't last long. Trump himself has recently made it clear that he thinks the election is literally going to be stolen from him at the ballot box. On Monday night in Green Bay, Wisconsin, he said:
They even want to try to rig the election at the polling booths. Believe me, there's a lot going on. Do you ever hear these people? They say there's nothing going on? People that have died 10 years ago are still voting. Illegal immigrants are voting. Where are the street smarts of some of these politicians?
The Boston Globe recently quoted a Trump voter declaring how he planned to help out:
Trump said to watch your precincts. I’m going to go, for sure. I’ll look for . . . well, it’s called racial profiling. Mexicans. Syrians. People who can’t speak American. I’m going to go right up behind them. I’ll do everything legally. I want to see if they are accountable. I’m not going to do anything illegal. I’m going to make them a little bit nervous.
Actually, making people "a little bit nervous" at polling places is illegal. It's called voter intimidation.
Some Republican leaders have tried to reassure voters that the election will not be stolen, but it's too little, too late. After all, Republicans have been trying to manipulate elections for decades going all the way back to Operation Eagle Eye during the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign when future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist was a young lawyer who allegedly intimidated black and Latino voters in Arizona. Then, as now, this was done in the name of preventing unauthorized people from voting.
In the 1980s, there were consent decrees in place all over the country as various local arms of the GOP got caught violating federal election laws by trying to suppress minority votes. In the wake of Jesse Jackson's highly successful voter registration drives, Republicans instigated a campaign to purge voter rolls in African-American communities throughout the South and urban areas. They professionalized and nationalized their operation by recruiting lawyers and training them in the election laws of different jurisdictions so they could more efficiently challenge Democratic votes.
By the 2000 election they had hundreds of trained election lawyers at the ready and they all swooped in on Florida when Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore asked for a recount. (The state party under Jeb Bush had already taken care of the purge of African-Americans from the voter rolls, which helped make it so close.) Ironically, the chief justice of the Supreme Court was William Rehnquist and naturally he cast the deciding vote to stop the recount and hand the election to George W. Bush.
Immediately upon taking office, Republicans began to work on their next big vote suppression project. As Ari Berman reported in the Nation:
The incoming Bush administration prioritized prosecutions of voter fraud over investigations into voter disenfranchisement — longtime civil-rights lawyers were forced out of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, U.S. Attorneys were fired for refusing to pursue bogus fraud cases, and the first strict voter-ID laws were passed by Republican legislatures. The Bush Justice Department launched a five-year investigation into alleged voter-fraud abuses.
This will be the first presidential election in 50 years without the protections of the Voting Rights Act, which the conservative majority of the Supreme Court (including three members who voted to give the election to George W. Bush in 2000, and two more who worked on the recount on the behalf of the GOP) told America that there was no more need for such protections since we were past those ugly days of voter suppression. Seventeen states have new voting restrictions in place.
This is what's known as "rigging elections." Trump just got a little bit confused about who's doing the rigging. The Republicans have been at it for a very long time. Heather Digby Parton
Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.
www.salon.com/2016/10/18/its-the-republicans-who-rig-elections-donald-the-gop-history-of-voter-suppression-goes-way-back/
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 13, 2020 8:55:33 GMT
Recount Killed to Cover Up 75,000 Ballots NEVER Counted By Greg Palast, Reader Supported News
15 December 16
Officially, Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes. But a record 75,335 votes were never counted. Most of these votes that went missing were in Detroit and Flint.
How do you disappear 75,355 votes?
I flew to Michigan to investigate.
Thousands of bubbles filled in next to the candidate's name couldn’t be read by the optical scanning machines in Michigan and Wisconsin but a much better machine, the human eyeball, can easily read what the voter intended.
In Trumpville, rural Michigan, their hero, Bill Schuette, the Republican attorney general of Michigan shut down the recount. Schuette issued an order saying that no one would be allowed to look at the ballots in over half the precincts, 59%, in the Detroit area—the very place that most of the votes had gone missing.
Back in Detroit, some of the votes missing resulted when 87 machines, responsible for counting thousands of ballots, broke down. We went to speak with the secretary of state, whose spokesman said the missing votes in Detroit were simply people who waited in line but didn’t want to vote for president.
And so the recount slogged through, uncovering missing votes and missing voters that could change the presidency. So Republicans rushed in to shut down the recount completely. Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, here in Michigan—we may be way north of the Mason-Dixon Line, but the elections are still run by Jim Crow. For Democracy Now!, this is Greg Palast.
Greg Palast has been called the "most important investigative reporter of our time - up there with Woodward and Bernstein" (The Guardian). Palast has broken front-page stories for BBC Television Newsnight, The Guardian, The Nation Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Harper's Magazine. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, Armed Madhouse, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review. His books have been translated into two dozen languages. His brand new film of his documentary reports for BBC Newsnight and Democracy Now! is called Vultures and Vote Rustlers.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News. Comments A note of caution regarding our comment sections:
For months a stream of media reports have warned of coordinated propaganda efforts targeting political websites based in the U.S., particularly in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.
We too were alarmed at the patterns we were, and still are, seeing. It is clear that the provocateurs are far more savvy, disciplined, and purposeful than anything we have ever experienced before.
It is also clear that we still have elements of the same activity in our article discussion forums at this time.
We have hosted and encouraged reader expression since the turn of the century. The comments of our readers are the most vibrant, best-used interactive feature at Reader Supported News. Accordingly, we are strongly resistant to interrupting those services.
It is, however, important to note that in all likelihood hardened operatives are attempting to shape the dialog our community seeks to engage in.
Adapt and overcome.
Marc Ash Founder, Reader Supported News readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/40853-focus-recount-killed-to-cover-up-75000-ballots-never-counted
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 13, 2020 8:56:03 GMT
Great synopsis of the stolen 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections. It was statistically impossible for Bush to have won either election yet he "supposedly" did. Imagine how better a world we would have had if the people's will was followed.The Stolen Presidential Elections(updated version, May 2007) In one of the closest contests in U.S. history, the 2000 presidential election between Democratic Vice-President Al Gore and Republican governor of Texas George W. Bush (hereafter referred to as Bush Jr. to distinguish him from his father who was also a president), the final outcome hinged on how the vote went in Florida. Independent investigations in that state revealed serious irregularities directed mostly against ethnic minorities and low-income residents who usually voted heavily Democratic.
Some 36,000 newly registered voters were turned away because their names had never been added to the voter rolls by Florida’s secretary of state Kathleen Harris. By virtue of the office she held, Harris presided over the state’s election process while herself being an active member of the Bush Jr. state-wide campaign committee. Other voters were turned away because they were declared--almost always incorrectly--“convicted felons.” In several Democratic precincts, state officials closed the polls early, leaving lines of would-be voters stranded.
Under orders from Governor Jeb Bush (Bush Jr.’s brother), state troopers near polling sites delayed people for hours while searching their cars. Some precincts required two photo IDs which many citizens do not have. The requirement under Florida law was only one photo ID. Passed just before the election, this law itself posed a special difficulty for low-income or elderly voters who did not have drivers licenses or other photo IDs.
Uncounted ballot boxes went missing or were found in unexplained places or were never collected from certain African-American precincts. During the recount, GOP agitators shipped in from Washington D.C. by the Republican national leadership stormed the Dale County Canvassing Board, punched and kicked one of the officials, shouted and banged on their office doors, and generally created a climate of intimidation that caused the board to abandon its recount and accept the dubious pro-Bush tally.1
Then a five-to-four conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court in a logically tortured decision ruled that a complete recount in Florida would be a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause because different counties have different ways of counting the votes. At that point Gore was behind by only a few hundred or so votes in Florida and was gaining ground with each attempt at a recount. By preventing a complete tally, the justices handed Florida’s electoral votes and the presidency to Bush, a stolen election in which the conservative activists on the Supreme Court played a key role.
Even though Bush Jr. lost the nation’s popular vote to Gore by over half a million, he won the electoral college and the presidency itself. Florida was not the only problem. Similar abuses and mistreatment of voters and votes occurred in other parts of the country. A study by computer scientists and social scientists estimated that four to six million votes were left uncounted in the 2000 election.2
The 2004 presidential contest between Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry and the incumbent president George W. Bush amounted to another stolen election. Some 105 million citizens voted in 2000, but in 2004 the turnout climbed to at least 122 million. Pre-election surveys indicated that among the record 16.8 million new voters Kerry was a heavy favorite, a fact that went largely unreported by the press. In addition, there were about two million progressives who had voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 who switched to Kerry in 2004. Yet the official 2004 tallies showed Bush Jr. with 62 million votes, about 11.6 million more than he got in 2000.
Meanwhile Kerry showed only eight million more votes than Gore received in 2000. To have achieved his remarkable 2004 tally, Bush would needed to have kept all his 50.4 million from 2000, plus a majority of the new voters, plus a large share of the very liberal Nader defectors. Nothing in the campaign and in the opinion polls suggest such a mass crossover. The numbers simply do not add up.
In key states like Ohio, the Democrats achieved immense success at registering new voters, outdoing the Republicans by as much as five to one. Moreover the Democratic party was unusually united around its candidate-—or certainly against the incumbent president. In contrast, prominent elements within the GOP displayed open disaffection, publicly voicing serious misgivings about the Bush administration’s huge budget deficits, reckless foreign policy, theocratic tendencies, and threats to individual liberties. Sixty newspapers that had endorsed Bush in 2000 refused to do so in 2004; forty of them endorsed Kerry.3
All through election day 2004, exit polls showed Kerry ahead by 53 to 47 percent, giving him a nationwide edge of about 1.5 million votes, and a solid victory in the electoral college. Yet strangely enough, the official tally gave Bush the election by two million votes. What follows are examples of how the GOP “victory” was secured.4
In some places large numbers of Democratic registration forms disappeared, along with absentee ballots and provisional ballots. Sometimes absentee ballots were mailed out to voters just before election day, too late to be returned on time, or they were never mailed at all.Overseas ballots normally reliably distributed by the State Department were for some reason distributed by the Pentagon in 2004.
Nearly half of the six million American voters living abroad--a noticeable number of whom formed anti-Bush organizations--never received their ballots or got them too late to vote. Military personnel, usually more inclined toward supporting the president, encountered no such problems with their overseas ballots. A person familiar with my work, Rick Garves, sent me this account of his attempt to cast an overseas ballot:
I filled out the forms to register to vote absentee since I live here in Sweden. They were even done at a meeting for “Democrats Abroad in Stockholm.” I mailed the forms and when I got my packet back I looked at it and they had me as being in the military. Of course I am not and never have been. I also never checked any boxes on the forms even remotely close to anything insinuating that I was in the military.
So there was not enough time to fix the “error” and I did not even bother to vote because I knew they would check and find that I am not in the military and my vote would be invalidated. I now wonder even more if that happened because of the Pentagon taking over the handling of the absentee voter registration and too, how many more overseas voters had the same problem?
Tens of thousands of Democratic voters were stricken from the rolls in several states because of “felonies” never committed, or committed by someone else, or for no given reason. Registration books in Democratic precincts were frequently out-of-date or incomplete. Voter Outreach of America, a company funded by the Republican National Committee, collected thousands of voter registration forms in Nevada, promising to turn them in to public officials, but then systematically destroyed the ones belonging to Democrats.
Democratic precincts--enjoying record turnouts--were deprived of sufficient numbers of polling stations and voting machines, and many of the machines they had kept breaking down. After waiting long hours many people went home without voting. The noted political analyst and writer, Gregory Elich, sent me this account of his election day experience:
I recall being surprised when I went to vote before work here in Ohio in 2004. Normally, at election time, I can go to the polling place before work, walk in and be in a voting booth in less than two minutes, even in a presidential election. In 2004, when I arrived I saw a long, snaking line of people. I waited twenty minutes, and the line barely moved. It was clear I would be late for work if I persisted, so I left and decided to take an hour or so of vacation time in the middle of the day to vote. I thought surely, in the middle of the work day, the line would not be bad. The line was worse, and it took me close to two hours to vote.
My neighborhood is about 65 to 70 percent African-American. The next day, in conversation with an African-American co-worker, she told me that she waited in line for four hours. And I heard stories later of people waiting as long as 7 hours. I also stopped at the post office, and voting was a topic of conversation for those of us in the post office line. The man ahead of me, who lived in a well-to-do neighborhood said he was surprised to hear the stories, because it only took him two minutes to vote. Just anecdotal stories, but there were so many more, that there certainly seemed to be a pattern in regard to wealthy vs. working class neighborhoods.
Pro-Bush precincts almost always had enough voting machines, all working well to make voting quick and convenient. A similar pattern was observed with student populations in several states: students at conservative Christian colleges had little or no wait at the polls, while students from liberal arts colleges were forced to line up for as long as ten hours, causing many to give up.
In Lucas County, Ohio, one polling place never opened; the voting machines were locked in an office and apparently no one could find the key. In Hamilton County many absentee voters could not cast a Democratic vote for president because John Kerry’s name had been “accidentally” removed when Ralph Nader was taken off the ballot.
A polling station in a conservative evangelical church in Miami County, Ohio, recorded an impossibly high turnout of 98 percent, while a polling place in Democratic inner-city Cleveland recorded an impossibly low turnout of 7 percent.
Latino, Native American, and African American voters in New Mexico who favored Kerry by two to one were five times more likely to have their ballots spoiled and discarded in districts supervised by Republican election officials. Many were readily given provisional ballots that subsequently were never counted. In these same Democratic areas Bush “won” an astonishing 68 to 31 percent upset victory. One Republican judge in New Mexico discarded hundreds of provisional ballots cast for Kerry, accepting only those that were for Bush. Cadres of rightwing activists, many of them religious fundamentalists, were financed by the Republican Party. Deployed to key Democratic precincts, they handed out flyers warning that voters who had unpaid parking tickets, an arrest record, or owed child support would be arrested at the polls--all untrue. They went door to door offering to “deliver” absentee ballots to the proper office, and announcing that Republicans were to vote on Tuesday (election day) and Democrats on Wednesday.
Democratic poll watchers in Ohio, Arizona, and other states, who tried to monitor election night vote counting, were menaced and shut out by squads of GOP toughs. In Warren County, Ohio, immediately after the polls closed Republican officials announced a “terrorist attack” alert, and ordered the press to leave. They then moved all ballots to a warehouse where the counting was conducted in secret, producing an amazingly high tally for Bush, some 14,000 more votes than he had received in 2000. It wasn’t the terrorists who attacked Warren County. Bush Jr. also did remarkably well with phantom populations. The number of his votes in Perry and Cuyahoga counties in Ohio, exceeded the number of registered voters, creating turnout rates as high as 124 percent. In Miami County nearly 19,000 additional votes eerily appeared in Bush’s column after all precincts had reported. In a small conservative suburban precinct of Columbus, where only 638 people were registered, the touchscreen machines tallied 4,258 votes for Bush.
In almost half of New Mexico’s counties, more votes were reported than were recorded as being cast, and the tallies were consistently in Bush’s favor. These ghostly results were dismissed by New Mexico’s Republican Secretary of State as an “administrative lapse.”
Exit polls showed Kerry solidly ahead of Bush Jr. in both the popular vote and the electoral college. Exit polls are an exceptionally accurate measure of elections. In the last three elections in Germany, for example, exit polls were never off by more than three-tenths of one percent.
Unlike ordinary opinion polls, the exit sample is drawn from people who have actually just voted. It rules out those who say they will vote but never make it to the polls, those who cannot be sampled because they have no telephone or otherwise cannot be reached at home, those who are undecided or who change their minds about whom to support, and those who are turned away at the polls for one reason or another. Exit polls have come to be considered so reliable that international organizations use them to validate election results in countries around the world.
Republicans argued that in 2004 the exit polls were inaccurate because they were taken only in the morning when Kerry voters came out in greater numbers. (Apparently Bush voters are late sleepers.) In fact, the polling was done at random intervals all through the day, and the evening results were as much favoring Kerry as the earlier sampling. It was also argued that exit pollsters focused more on women (who favored Kerry) than men, or perhaps large numbers of taciturn Republicans were less inclined than chatty Democrats to talk to pollsters. No evidence was put forth to substantiate these fanciful speculations.
Most revealing, the discrepancies between exit polls and official tallies were never random but worked to Bush’s advantage in ten of eleven swing states that were too close to call, sometimes by as much as 9.5 percent as in New Hampshire, an unheard of margin of error for an exit poll. In Nevada, Ohio, New Mexico, and Iowa exit polls registered solid victories for Kerry, yet the official tally in each case went to Bush, a mystifying outcome.
In states that were not hotly contested the exit polls proved quite accurate. Thus exit polls in Utah predicted a Bush victory of 70.8 to 26.4 percent; the actual result was 71.1 to 26.4 percent. In Missouri, where the exit polls predicted a Bush victory of 54 to 46 percent, the final result was 53 to 46 percent.
One explanation for the strange anomalies in vote tallies was found in the widespread use of touchscreen electronic voting machines. These machines produced results that consistently favored Bush over Kerry, often in chillingly consistent contradiction to exit polls.
In 2003 more than 900 computer professionals had signed a petition urging that all touchscreen systems include a verifiable audit trail. Touchscreen voting machines can be easily programmed to go dead on election day or throw votes to the wrong candidate or make votes disappear while leaving the impression that everything is working fine.
A tiny number of operatives can easily access the entire computer network through one machine and thereby change votes at will. The touchscreen machines use trade secret code, and are tested, reviewed, and certified in complete secrecy. Verified counts are impossible because the machines leave no reliable paper trail.
Since the introduction of touchscreen voting, anomalous congressional election results have been increasing. In 2000 and 2002, Senate and House contests and state legislative races in North Carolina, Nebraska, Alabama, Minnesota, Colorado, and elsewhere produced dramatic and puzzling upsets, always at the expense of Democrats who were substantially ahead in the polls. All of Georgia’s voters used Diebold touchscreen machines in 2002, and Georgia’s incumbent Democratic governor and incumbent Democratic senator, who were both well ahead in the polls just before the election, lost in amazing double-digit voting shifts.
In some counties in Texas, Virginia, and Ohio, voters who pressed the Democrat’s name found that the GOP candidate was chosen. It never happened the other way. No one reported choosing a Republican and ending up with the Democrat. In Cormal County, Texas, three GOP candidates won the touchscreen contest by exactly 18,181 votes apiece, a near statistical impossibility.
This may be the most telling datum of all: In New Mexico in 2004 Kerry lost all precincts equipped with touchscreen machines, irrespective of income levels, ethnicity, and past voting patterns. The only thing that consistently correlated with his defeat in those precincts was the presence of the touchscreen machine itself. In Florida Bush registered inexplicably sharp jumps in his vote (compared to 2000) in counties that used touchscreen machines, including counties that had shown record increases in Democratic voter registration.5
In sum, despite an arsenal of foul ploys that prevented people from voting, those who did get to vote still went decisively for Kerry--but had their votes subverted by a rigged system.
Companies like Diebold, Sequoia, and ES&S that market the touchscreen machines are owned by militant supporters of the Republican party. These companies have consistently refused to allow election officials to evaluate the secret voting machine software. Apparently corporate trade secrets are more important than voting rights. In effect, corporations have privatized the electoral system, leaving it susceptible to fixed outcomes. Caveat emptor.
Postscript. In the 2006 mid-term congressional elections, the Democrats won back the House with a 30-seat majority and the Senate by one seat. This might lead us to conclude that honest elections won the day. To be sure, the U.S. electoral system is a patchwork of fifty different state systems, all with additional county-level variations. So there must have been honestly conducted electoral proceedings in many parts of the country.
Still, what has to be explained is why the Democratic victory was so relatively slim. Given the massive crossover reported in the polls, why was it not a landslide of greater magnitude? From 15 to 30 percent of erstwhile Republican voters reportedly either switched or stayed home. Most Democratic gains in 2006 were in normally Republican, White, suburban, middle class districts. Meanwhile traditional Democratic strongholds held fairly firm. It seems the Republicans lost because while they focused on trying to suppress and undermine the Democratic base, they lost a large chunk of their own following.
In several states, residents in Democratic areas were confronted by purged registration lists, falsely based threats of arrest, and exacting voter ID requirements. Irregularities were so outrageous in Virginia that the FBI was called in. According to the polls, Senate Republican incumbent George Allen should have lost Virginia by a substantial margin instead of a few thousand votes. Touch screen irregularities and voter discouragement tactics helped him close the gap but not enough. In Florida’s district 13, the Democratic candidate Christine Jennings lost by a few hundred votes after 18,000 ballots were lost by touchscreen machines that left no paper trail to rectify the situation.
Democrats lost another seat in Florida and at least two in Ohio, Harvey Wasserman reports, that they should have won according to the polls. The Democrats should have won the House by 50 or more seats and the Senate by a wider margin, Wasserman suggested in a radio interview (Pacifica, May 2007).
Touchscreen machines have been variously described as “faulty,” or ridden with “glitches.” This is not usually the case. If it were simply a matter of malfunction, the mistakes would occur randomly, rather than consistently favoring the GOP. What we are dealing with are not faulty machines but fixed machines.
The United States is the only country (as compared to Western Europe) that makes it difficult for people to vote. Historically the hurdles have been directed at low-income voters and ethnic minorities. In 2006, various states disqualified voters if their registration information failed to match perfectly with some other record such as a driver’s license. Because of this at least 17 percent of eligible citizens in Arizona’s largest county were denied registration. In some states persons who conduct voter registration drives risk criminal prosecution for harmless mistakes, including errors in collecting forms. In Florida some 50,000 voters were purged in 2004 (in addition to the many purged in 2000), many of them African-American, who still were unable to vote by 2006. In various states and counties the subterranean war against electoral democracy continues.6
Notes:
For these various irregularities, see New York Times, 30 November 2000 and 15 July 2001; Boston Globe, 30 November 2000 and 10 March 2001. A relevant documentary is Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election, L.A. Independent Media Center Film, 2004. New York Times, 15 September 2002; the investigators were from California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mark Crispin Miller, Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too (Basic Books, 2005), 7-31, 262, and passim. All the various instances that follow—with the exception of the Rick Garves and Gregory Elich testimonials-- are from Miller, Fooled Again, passim; Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election and Is Rigging 2008 (CICJ Books/www.Freepress.org, 2005); Anita Miller (ed.), What Went Wrong in Ohio: The Conyers Report on the 2004 Presidential Election (Academy Chicago Publishers, 2005); Andy Dunn, “Hook & Crook,” Z Magazine, March 2005; Greg Palast, “Kerry Won: Here Are the Facts,” Observer, 5 November 2004; Steven F. Freeman (with Joel Bleifus), Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? (Seven Stories, 2006). Jonathan Simon and Ron Baiman, “The 2004 Presidential Election: Who Won the Popular Vote? An Examination of the Comparative Validity of Exit Polls and Vote Count Data,” Freepress.org, 2 January 2004; . Freeman, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? 99-134 and passim; Fitrakis and Wasserman, How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election, 51, 55-57. New York Times, 9 November 2006. www.michaelparenti.org/stolenelections.html
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