[Vision2020] Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

[Ted Moffett]

All:

The evidence has mounted, after study by numerous PhD.'s in statistics, that
"something is rotten in Denmark" regarding Kerry v. Bush 2004.  But what is
perhaps more astonishing is that we are told to "move on" when it is certain
that our electoral system is broken, and even after the astonishing mess of
election 2000, with all the promises to correct the problems, remains so to
this day!

Why should any US citizen, regardless of political orientation, who has the
least interest in the integrity of our political system, "move on" till our
electoral system offers a fair, easy to understand and access, well
monitored and documented vote, to every eligible citizen nationwide, during
a presidential election, with real enforcement of voting fraud and abuse
laws, that don't allow felons to walk free, as in Florida 2000, in Martin
and Seminole counties, with felonious absentee voter application violations,
to list one example?

Let's back up: how many US citizens have studied the US Civil Rights
Commission report on what occured in Florida in Gore v. Bush 2000?  Now's
your chance.  Download may take some time with dial-up given the size of
some documents:

http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/report/main.htm

http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vote2000/main.htm

And this excellent article from Harper's gives pause for thought about Kerry
v. Bush 2004:

http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html
 None Dare Call It Stolen Ohio, the election, and America's servile
press Posted
on Wednesday, September 7, 2005. What actually happened in Ohio in 2004. An
excerpt from this report appeared in August 2005. The complete text appears
below. Originally from August 2005. By Mark Crispin Miller.

Whichever candidate you voted for (or think you voted for), or even if you
did not vote (or could not vote), you must admit that last year's
presidential race was—if nothing else—pretty interesting. True, the press
has dropped the subject, and the
Democrats, with very few exceptions, have "moved on." Yet this contest may
have been the most unusual in U.S. history; it was certainly among those
with the strangest outcomes. You may remember being surprised yourself. The
infamously factious Democrats were fiercely unified—Ralph Nader garnered
only about 0.38 percent of the national vote—while the Republicans were
split, with a vocal anti-Bush front that included anti-Clinton warrior Bob
Barr of Georgia; Ike's son John Eisenhower; Ronald Reagan's chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, William J. Crowe Jr.; former Air Force Chief of Staff
and onetime "Veteran for Bush" General Merrill "Tony" McPeak; founding
neocon Francis Fukuyama; Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute, and various
large alliances of military officers, diplomats, and business professors. *The
American Conservative*, co-founded by Pat Buchanan, endorsed five candidates
for president, including both Bush and Kerry, while the *Financial Times*and
*The Economist* came out for Kerry alone. At least fifty-nine daily
newspapers that backed Bush in the previous election endorsed Kerry (or no
one) in this election. The national turnout in 2004 was the highest since
1968, when another unpopular war had swept the ruling party from the White
House. [1] <http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html#1-note> Yet this
ever-less-beloved president, this president who had united liberals and
conservatives and nearly all the world against himself—this president
somehow bested his opponent by 3,000,176 votes.

How did he do it? To that most important question the commentariat, briskly
prompted by Republicans, supplied an answer. Americans of faith—a silent
majority heretofore unmoved by any other politician—had poured forth by the
millions to vote "Yes!" for Jesus' buddy in the White House. Bush's 51
percent, according to this thesis, were roused primarily by "family values."
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, called gay marriage
"the hood ornament on the family values wagon that carried the president to
a second term." The pundits eagerly pronounced their amens—"Moral values,"
Tucker Carlson said on CNN, "drove President Bush and other Republican
candidates to victory this week"—although it is not clear why. The primary
evidence of our Great Awakening was a post-election poll by the Pew Research
Center in which 27 percent of the respondents, when asked which issue
"mattered most" to them in the election, selected something called "moral
values." This slight plurality of impulse becomes still less impressive when
we note that, as the pollsters went to great pains to make clear, "the
relative importance of moral values depends greatly on how the question is
framed." In fact, when voters were asked to "name in their own words the
most important factor in their vote," only 14 percent managed to come up
with "moral values." Strangely, this detail went little mentioned in the
post-electoral commentary.[2]<http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html#2-note>

The press has had little to say about most of the strange details of the
election—except, that is, to ridicule all efforts to discuss them. This
animus appeared soon after November 2, in a spate of caustic articles
dismissing any critical discussion of the outcome as crazed speculation:
"Election paranoia surfaces: Conspiracy theorists call results rigged,"
chuckled the *Baltimore Sun* on November 5. "Internet Buzz on Vote Fraud Is
Dismissed," proclaimed the *Boston Globe* on November 10. "Latest Conspiracy
Theory—Kerry Won—Hits the Ether," the *Washington Post* chortled on November
11. The *New York Times* weighed in with "Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by
Blogs, Are Quickly Buried"—making mock not only of the "post-election
theorizing" but of cyberspace itself, the fons et origo of all such loony
tunes, according to the *Times*.

Such was the news that most Americans received. Although the tone was
scientific, "realistic," skeptical, and "middle-of-the-road," the
explanations offered by the press were weak and immaterial. It was as if
they were reporting from inside a forest fire without acknowledging the
fire, except to keep insisting that there was no
fire.[3]<http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html#3-note>Since
Kerry has conceded, they argued, and since "no smoking gun" had come
to light, there was no story to report. This is an oddly passive argument.
Even so, the evidence that something went extremely wrong last fall is
copious, and not hard to find. Much of it was noted at the time, albeit by
local papers and haphazardly. Concerning the decisive contest in Ohio, the
evidence is lucidly compiled in a single congressional report, which, for
the last half-year, has been available to anyone inclined to read it. It is
a veritable arsenal of "smoking guns"—and yet its findings may be less
extraordinary than the fact that no one in this country seems to care about
them.

* * *

On January 5, Representative John Conyers of Michigan, the ranking Democrat
on the House Judiciary Committee, released *Preserving Democracy: What Went
Wrong in Ohio*. The report was the result of a five-week investigation by
the committee's Democrats, who reviewed thousands of complaints of fraud,
malfeasance, or incompetence surrounding the election in Ohio, and further
thousands of complaints that poured in by phone and email as word of the
inquiry spread. The congressional researchers were assisted by volunteers in
Ohio who held public hearings in Columbus, Cleveland, Toledo, and
Cincinnati, and questioned more than two hundred witnesses. (Although they
were invited, Republicans chose not to join in the inquiry.)
[4]<http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html#4-note>

*Preserving Democracy* describes three phases of Republican chicanery: the
run-up to the election, the election itself, and the post-election cover-up.
The wrongs exposed are not mere dirty tricks (though Bush/Cheney also went
in heavily for those) but specific violations of the U.S. and Ohio
constitutions, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, the
National Voter Registration Act, and the Help America Vote Act. Although
Conyers trod carefully when the report came out, insisting that the crimes
did not affect the outcome of the race (a point he had to make, he told me,
"just to get a hearing"), his report does "raise grave doubts regarding
whether it can be said that the Ohio electors selected on December 13, 2004,
were chosen in a manner that conforms to Ohio law, let alone Federal
requirements and constitutional standards." The report cites "massive and
unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies" throughout the
state—wrongs, moreover, that were hardly random accidents. "In many cases,"
the report says, "these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct
and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth
Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in
Ohio."[5]<http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html#5-note>

The first phase of malfeasance entailed, among many other actions, several
months of bureaucratic hijinks aimed at disenfranchising Democrats, the most
spectacular result of which was "a wide discrepancy between the availability
of voting machines in more minority, Democratic and urban areas as compared
to more Republican, suburban and exurban areas." Such unequal placement had
the predictable effect of slowing the voting process to a crawl at
Democratic polls, while making matters quick and easy in Bush country: a
clever way to cancel out the Democrats' immense success at registering new
voters in Ohio. (We cannot know the precise number of new voters registered
in Ohio by either party because many states, including Ohio, do not register
voters by party affiliation. The *New York Times* reported in September,
however, that new registration rose 25 percent in Ohio's predominantly
Republican precincts and 250 percent in Ohio's predominantly Democratic
precincts.)

At Kenyon College in Gambier, for instance, there were only two machines for
1,300 would-be voters, even though "a surge of late registrations promised a
record vote." Gambier residents and Kenyon students had to stand in line for
hours, in the rain and in "crowded, narrow hallways," with some of them
inevitably forced to call it quits. "In contrast, at nearby Mt. Vernon
Nazarene University, which is considered more Republican leaning, there were
ample waiting machines and no lines." This was not a consequence of limited
resources. In Franklin County alone, as voters stood for hours throughout
Columbus and elsewhere, at least 125 machines collected dust in storage. The
county's election officials had "decided to make do with 2,866 machines,
even though the analysis showed that the county needs 5,000 machines."

It seemed at times that Ohio's secretary of state was determined to try
every stunt short of levying a poll tax to suppress new voter turnout. On
September 7, based on an overzealous reading of an obscure state bylaw, he
ordered county boards of elections to reject all Ohio voter-registration
forms not "printed on white, uncoated paper of not less than 80 lb. text
weight." Under public pressure he reversed the order three weeks later, by
which time unknown numbers of Ohioans had been disenfranchised. Blackwell
also attempted to limit access to provisional ballots. The Help America Vote
Act—passed in 2002 to address some of the problems of the 2000
election—prevents election officials from deciding at the polls who will be
permitted to cast provisional ballots, as earlier Ohio law had permitted. On
September 16, Blackwell issued a directive that somehow failed to note that
change. A federal judge ordered him to revise the language, Blackwell
resisted, and the court was forced to draft its own version of the
directive, which it ordered Blackwell to accept, even as it noted
Blackwell's "vigorous, indeed, at times, obdurate opposition" to compliance
with the law.

Under Blackwell the state Republican Party tried to disenfranchise still
more Democratic voters through a technique known as "caging." The party sent
registered letters to new voters, "then sought to challenge 35,000
individuals who refused to sign for the letters," including "voters who were
homeless, serving abroad, or simply did not want to sign for something
concerning the Republican Party." It should be noted that marketers have
long used zip codes to target, with remarkable precision, the ethnic makeup
of specific neighborhoods, and also that, according to exit polls last year,
84 percent of those black citizens who voted in Ohio voted for
Kerry.[6]<http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html#6-note>

* * *

The second phase of lawlessness began the Monday before the election, when
Blackwell issued two directives restricting media coverage of the election.
First, reporters were to be barred from the polls, because their presence
contravened Ohio's law on "loitering" near voting places. Second, media
representatives conducting exit polls were to remain 100 feet away from the
polls. Blackwell's reasoning here was that, with voter turnout estimated at
73 percent, and with many new voters so blissfully ignorant as to have
"never looked at a voting machine before," his duty was clear: the public
was to be protected from the "interference or intimidation" caused by
"intense media scrutiny." Both cases were at once struck down in federal
court on First Amendment grounds.

Blackwell did manage to ban reporters from a post-election ballot-counting
site in Warren County because—election officials claimed—the FBI had warned
of an impending terrorist attack there. The FBI said it issued no such
warning, however, and the officials refused to name the agent who alerted
them. Moreover, as the *Cincinnati Enquirer* later reported, email
correspondence between election officials and the county's building services
director indicated that lockdown plans—"down to the wording of the signs
that would be posted on the locked doors"—had been in the works for at least
a week. Beyond suggesting that officials had something to hide, the ban was
also, according to the report, a violation of Ohio law and the Fourteenth
Amendment.

Contrary to a prior understanding, Blackwell also kept foreign monitors away
from the Ohio polls. Having been formally invited by the State Department on
June 9, observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe, an international consortium based in Vienna, had come to witness and
report on the election. The mission's two-man teams had been approved to
monitor the process in eleven states—but the observers in Ohio were
prevented from watching the opening of the polling places, the counting of
the ballots, and, in some cases, the election itself. "We thought we could
be at the polling places before, during, and after" the voting, said Søren
Søndergaard, a Danish member of the team. Denied admission to polls in
Columbus, he and his partner went to Blackwell, who refused them letters of
approval, again citing Ohio law banning "loitering" outside the polls. The
two observers therefore had to "monitor" the voting at a distance of 100
feet from each polling place. Although not technically illegal, Blackwell's
refusal was improper and, of course, suspicious. (The Conyers report does
not deal with this episode.)

To what end would election officials risk so malodorous an action? We can
only guess, of course. We do know, however, that Ohio, like the nation, was
the site of numerous statistical anomalies—so many that the number is itself
statistically anomalous, since every single one of them took votes from
Kerry. In Butler County the Democratic candidate for State Supreme Court
took in 5,347 more votes than Kerry did. In Cuyahoga County ten Cleveland
precincts "reported an incredibly high number of votes for third party
candidates who have historically received only a handful of votes from these
urban areas"—mystery votes that would mostly otherwise have gone to Kerry.
In Franklin County, Bush received nearly 4,000 extra votes from one
computer, and, in Miami County, just over 13,000 votes appeared in Bush's
column *after* all precincts had reported. In Perry County the number of
Bush votes somehow exceeded the number of registered voters, leading to
voter turnout rates as high as 124 percent. Youngstown, perhaps to make up
the difference, reported negative 25 million votes.

In Cuyahoga County and in Franklin County—both Democratic strongholds—the
arrows on the absentee ballots were not properly aligned with their
respective punch holes, so that countless votes were miscast, as in West
Palm Beach back in 2000. In Mercer County some 4,000 votes for
president—representing nearly 7 percent of the electorate—mysteriously
dropped out of the final count. The machines in heavily Democratic Lucas
County kept going haywire, prompting the county's election director to admit
that prior tests of the machines had failed. One polling place in Lucas
County never opened because all the machines were locked up somewhere and no
one had the key. In Hamilton County many absentee voters could not cast a
Democratic vote for president because county workers, in taking Ralph
Nader's name off many ballots, also happened to remove John Kerry's name.
The *Washington Post* reported that in Mahoning County "25 electronic
machines transferred an unknown number of Kerry votes to the Bush column,"
but it did not think to ask why.

Ohio Democrats also were heavily thwarted through dirty tricks recalling
Richard Nixon's reign and the systematic bullying of Dixie. There were
"literally thousands upon thousands" of such incidents, the Conyers report
notes, cataloguing only the grossest cases. Voters were told, falsely, that
their polling place had changed; the news was conveyed by phone calls,
"door-hangers," and even party workers going door to door. There were phone
calls and fake "voter bulletins" instructing Democrats that they were not to
cast their votes until Wednesday, November 3, the day after Election Day.
Unknown "volunteers" in Cleveland showed up at the homes of Democrats,
kindly offering to "deliver" completed absentee ballots to the election
office. And at several polling places, election personnel or hired goons
bused in to do the job "challenged" voters—black voters in particular—to
produce documents confirming their eligibility to vote. The report notes one
especially striking incident:

In Franklin County, a worker at a Holiday Inn observed a team of 25 people
who called themselves the "Texas Strike Force" using payphones to make
intimidating calls to likely voters, targeting people recently in the prison
system. The "Texas Strike Force" paid their way to Ohio, but their hotel
accommodations were paid for by the Ohio Republican Party, whose
headquarters is across the street. The hotel worker heard one caller
threaten a likely voter with being reported to the FBI and returning to jail
if he voted. Another hotel worker called the police, who came but did
nothing.

* * *

The electoral fraud continued past Election Day, but by means far more
complex and less apparent than the bullying that marked the day itself. Here
the aim was to protect the spoils, which required the prevention of
countywide hand recounts by any means necessary. The procedure for recounts
is quite clear. In fact, it was created by Blackwell. A recount having been
approved, each of the state's eighty-eight counties must select a number of
precincts randomly, so that the total of their ballots comes to 3 percent
(at least) of the county's total vote. Those ballots must then be
simultaneously hand counted and machine counted. If the hand count and the
new machine count match, the remaining 97 percent of the selected ballots
may be counted by machine. If, however, the totals vary by as little as a
single vote, all the other votes must be hand counted, and the results, once
reconfirmed, must be accepted as the new official total.

The Ohio recount officially started on December 13—five days after Conyers's
hearings opened—and was scheduled to go on until December 28. Because the
recount (such as it was) coincided with the inquiry, Conyers was able to
discover, and reveal in his report, several instances of what seemed to be
electoral fraud.

On December 13, for instance, Sherole Eaton, deputy director of elections
for Hocking County, filed an affidavit stating that the computer that
operates the tabulating machine had been "modified" by one Michael Barbian
Jr., an employee of Triad GSI, the corporate manufacturer of the county's
voting machinery.

Ms. Eaton witnessed Mr. Barbian modify the Hocking County computer vote
tabulator before the announcement of the Ohio recount. She further witnessed
Barbian, upon the announcement that the Hocking County precinct was planned
to be the subject of the initial Ohio test recount, make further alterations
based on his knowledge of the situation. She also has firsthand knowledge
that Barbian advised election officials how to manipulate voting machinery
to ensure that [the] preliminary hand recount matched the machine
count.[7]<http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html#7-note>

The committee also learned that Triad similarly intervened in at least two
other counties. In a filmed interview, Barbian said that he had examined
machines not only in Hocking County but also in Lorain, Muskingum, Clark,
Harrison, and Guernsey counties; his purpose was to provide the Board of
Elections with as much information as possible—"The more information you
give someone," he said, "the better job they can do." The report concludes
that such information as Barbian and his colleagues could provide was
helpful indeed:

Based on the above, including actual admissions and statements by Triad
employees, it strongly appears that Triad and its employees engaged in a
course of behavior to provide "cheat sheets" to those counting the ballots.
The cheat sheets told them how many votes they should find for each
candidate, and how many over and under votes they should calculate to match
the machine count. In that way, they could avoid doing a full county-wide
hand recount mandated by state law. If true, this would frustrate the entire
purpose of the recount law—to randomly ascertain if the vote counting
apparatus is operating fairly and effectively, and if not to conduct a full
hand recount.

The report notes Triad's role in several other cases. In Union County the
hard drive on one tabulator was replaced after the election. (The old one
had to be subpoenaed.) In Monroe County, after the 3 percent hand count had
twice failed to match the machine count, a Triad employee brought in a new
machine and took away the old one. (*That* machine's count matched the hand
count.) Such operations are especially worrying in light of the fact that
Triad's founder, Brett A. Rapp, "has been a consistent contributor to
Republican causes." (Neither Barbian nor Rapp would respond to
*Harper's*queries, and the operator at Triad refused even to provide
the name of a
press liaison.)

There were many cases of malfeasance, however, in which Triad played no
role. Some 1,300 Libertarian and Green Party volunteers, led by Green Party
recount manager Lynne Serpe, monitored the count throughout
Ohio.[8]<http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html#8-note>They
reported that: In Allen, Clermont, Cuyahoga, Morrow, Hocking, Vinton,
Summit, and Medina counties, the precincts for the 3 percent hand recount
were preselected, not picked at random, as the law requires. In Fairfield
County the 3 percent hand recount yielded a total that diverged from the
machine count—but despite protests from observers, officials did not then
perform a hand recount of all the ballots, as the law requires. In
Washington and Lucas counties, ballots were marked or altered, apparently to
ensure that the hand recount would equal the machine count. In Ashland,
Portage, and Coshocton counties, ballots were improperly unsealed or stored.
Belmont County "hired an independent programmer ('at great expense') to
reprogram the counting machines so that they would only count votes for
President during the recount." Finally, Democratic and/or Green observers
were denied access to absentee, and/or provisional ballots, or were not
allowed to monitor the recount process, in Summit, Huron, Putnam, Allen,
Holmes, Mahoning, Licking, Stark, Medina, Warren, and Morgan counties. In
short, the Ohio vote was never properly recounted, as required by Ohio law.

* * *

That is what the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee found,
that is what they distributed to everyone in Congress, and that is what any
member of the national press could have reported at any time in the last
half year. Conyers may or may not have precisely captured every single dirty
trick. The combined votes gained by the Republicans through such devices may
or may not have decided the election. (Bush won Ohio by 118,601 votes.)
Indeed, if you could somehow look into the heart of every eligible voter in
the United States to know his or her truest wishes, you might discover that
Bush/Cheney was indeed the people's choice. But you have to admit—the report
is pretty interesting.

In fact, its release was timed for maximum publicity. According to the
United States Code (Title 3, Chapter 1, Section 15), the President of the
Senate—i.e., the U.S. Vice President—must announce each state's electoral
results, then "call for objections." Objections must be made in writing and
"signed by at least one Senator and one Member of the House of
Representatives." A challenge having been submitted, the joint proceedings
must then be suspended so that both houses can retire to their respective
chambers to decide the question, after which they reconvene and either
certify or reject the vote.

Thus was an unprecedented civic drama looming on the day that Conyers's
report appeared. First of all, electoral votes had been contested in the
Congress only twice. In 1877 the electoral votes of several states were
challenged, some by Democrats supporting Samuel Tilden, others by
Republicans supporting Rutherford B. Hayes. In 1969, Republicans challenged
the North Carolina vote when Lloyd W. Bailey, a "faithless elector" pledged
to Richard Nixon for that state, voted for George
Wallace.[9]<http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html#9-note>And a
new challenge would be more than just "historic." Because of what had
happened—or not happened—four years earlier, it would also be
extraordinarily suspenseful. On January 6, 2001, House Democrats, galvanized
by the electoral larceny in Florida, tried and failed to challenge the
results. Their effort was aborted by the failure of a single Democratic
senator to join them, as the law requires. Al Gore—still vice president, and
therefore still the Senate's president—had urged Democrats to make no such
unseemly waves but to respect Bush's installation for the sake of national
unity. Now, it seemed, that partisan disgrace would be redressed, at least
symbolically; for a new challenge from the House, by Representative
Stephanie Tubbs-Jones of Ohio, would be co-signed by Barbara Boxer,
Democratic senator from California, who, at a noon press conference on
January 6, heightened the suspense by tearfully acknowledging her prior
wrong: "Four years ago I didn't intervene. I was asked by Al Gore not to do
so and I didn't do so. Frankly, looking back on it, I wish I had."

It was a story perfect for TV—a rare event, like the return of Halley's
comet; a scene of high contention in the nation's capital; a heroine
resolved to make things right, both for the public and herself. Such big
news would highlight Conyers's report, whose findings, having spurred the
challenge in the first place, would now inform the great congressional
debate on the election in Ohio.

As you may recall, this didn't happen—the challenge was rejected by a vote
of 267‒31 in the House and 74‒1 in the Senate. The *Boston Globe* gave the
report 118 words (page 3); the *Los Angeles Times*, 60 words (page 18). It
made no news in the *Wall Street Journal*, *USA Today*, *Newsweek*, *Time*,
or *U.S. News & World Report*. It made no news on CBS, NBC, ABC, or PBS. Nor
did NPR report it (though *Talk of the Nation* dealt with it on January 6).
CNN did not report it, though Donna Brazile pointedly affirmed its copious
"evidence" on *Inside Politics* on January 6. (Judy Woodruff failed to pause
for an elaboration.) Also on that date, the Fox News Channel briefly showed
Conyers himself discussing "irregularities" in Franklin County, though it
did not mention the report. He was followed by Tom DeLay, who assailed the
Democrats for their "assault against the institutions of our representative
democracy." The *New York Times* negated both the challenge and the document
in a brief item headlined "Election Results to Be Certified, with Little
Fuss from Kerry," which ran on page 16 and ended with this quote from Dennis
Hastert's office, vis-à-vis the Democrats: "They are really just trying to
stir up their loony left."

Indeed, according to the House Republicans, it was the Democrats who were
the troublemakers and cynical manipulators—spinning "fantasies" and
"conspiracy theories" to "distract" the people, "poison the atmosphere of
the House of Representatives" (Dave Hobson, R., Ohio), and "undermine the
prospect of democracy" (David Dreier, R., Calif.); mounting "a direct attack
to undermine our democracy" (Tom DeLay, R., Tex.), "an assault against the
institutions of our representative democracy" (DeLay); trying "to plant the
insidious seeds of doubt in the electoral process" (J. D. Hayworth, R.,
Ariz.); and in so doing following "their party's primary strategy: to
obstruct, to divide and to destroy" (Deborah D. Pryce, R., Ohio).

Furthermore, the argument went, there was *no evidence* of electoral fraud.
The Democrats were using "baseless and meritless tactics" (Pryce) to present
their "so-called evidence" (Bob Ney, R., Ohio), "making allegations that
have no basis of fact" (Candice Miller, R., Mich.), making claims for which
"there is no evidence whatsoever, no evidence whatsoever" (Dreier). "There
is absolutely no credible basis to question the outcome of the election"
(Rob Portman, R., Ohio). "No proven allegations of fraud. No reports of
widespread wrongdoing. It was, at the end of the day, an honest election"
(Bill Shuster, R., Pa.). And so on. Bush won Ohio by "an overwhelming and
comfortable margin," Rep. Pryce insisted, while Ric Keller (R., Fla.) said
that Bush won by "an overwhelmingly comfortable margin." ("The president's
margin is significant," observed Roy Blunt, R., Mo.) In short, as Tom DeLay
put it, "no such voter disenfranchisement occurred in this election of
2004—and, for that matter, the election of 2000. Everybody knows it. The
voters know it, the candidates know it, the courts know it, and the evidence
proves it."

That all this commentary was simply *wrong* went unnoticed and/or
unreported. Once Bush was re-inaugurated, all inquiries were apparently
concluded, and the story was officially kaput. By March talk of fraud was
calling forth the same reflexive ridicule that had prevailed back in
November—but only now and then, on those rare moments when somebody dared
bring it up: "Also tonight," CNN's Lou Dobbs deadpanned ironically on March
8, "Teresa Heinz Kerry still can't accept certain reality. She suggests the
presidential election may have been rigged!" And when, on March 31, the
National Election Data Archive Project released its study demonstrating that
the exit polls had probably been right, it made news only in the *Akron
Beacon-Journal*.[10]
<http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html#10-note>The article
included this response from Carlo LoParo, Kenneth Blackwell's
spokesman: "What are you going to do except laugh at it?"

* * *

In the summer of 2003, Representative Peter King (R., N.Y.) was interviewed
by Alexandra Pelosi at a barbecue on the White House lawn for her HBO
documentary *Diary of a Political Tourist*. "It's already over. The
election's over. We won," King exulted more than a year before the election.
When asked by Pelosi—the daughter of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi—how
he knew that Bush would win, he answered, "It's all over but the counting.
And we'll take care of the counting."

King, who is well known in Washington for his eccentric utterances, says he
was kidding, that he has known Pelosi for years, that she is "a clown," and
that her project was a "spoof." Still, he said it. And laughter, despite the
counsel of Kenneth Blackwell's press flack, seems an inappropriate response
to the prospect of a stolen election—as does the advice that we "get over
it." The point of the Conyers report, and of this report as well, is
*not*to send Bush packing and put Kerry in his place. The Framers
could no more
conceive of electoral fraud on such a scale than they could picture Fox News
Channel or the Pentagon; and so we have no constitutional recourse, should
it be proven, finally, that the wrong guy "won." The point of our revisiting
the last election, rather, is to see exactly what the damage was so that the
people can demand appropriate reforms. Those who say we should "move on"
from that suspicious race and work instead on "bigger issues"—like electoral
reform—are urging the impossible; for there has never been a great reform
that was not driven by some major scandal.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization,"
Thomas Jefferson said, "it expects what never was and never will be." That
much-quoted line foretells precisely what has happened to us since "the
news" has turned into a daily paraphrase of Karl Rove's fevered dreams. Just
as 2+2=5 in Orwell's Oceania, so here today the United States just won two
brilliant military victories, 9/11 could not have been prevented, we live in
a democracy (like the Iraqis), and last year's presidential race "was, at
the end of the day, an honest election." Such claims, presented as the
truth, are nothing but faith-based reiteration, as valid as the notions that
one chooses to be homosexual, that condoms don't prevent the spread of HIV,
and that the universe was made 6,000 years ago.

In this nation's epic struggle on behalf of freedom, reason, and democracy,
the press has unilaterally disarmed—and therefore many good Americans, both
liberal and conservative, have lost faith in the promise of self-government.
That vast surrender is demoralizing, certainly, but if we face it, and
endeavor to reverse it, it will not prove fatal. This democracy can survive
a plot to hijack an election. What it cannot survive is our indifference to,
or unawareness of, the evidence that such a plot has succeeded.
About the Author

Mark Crispin Miller is the author of *The Bush Dyslexicon* and, most
recently, *Cruel and Unusual*. His next book, *Fooled Again*, will be
published this fall by Basic Books.
Notes

1.

The print version of "None Dare Call It Stolen" contained the following
line, which was incorrect: "on Election Day, twenty-six state exit polls
incorrectly predicted wins for Kerry." The correct number was five states.
Although we regret the error, the context surrounding it bears further
explanation.

The mistake was brought to our attention by a letter from Warren Mitofsky,
founder of Mitofsky International, which, along with partner Edison Media
Research, has conducted exit polls of every presidential contest since 1996.
In the letter, Mr. Mitofsky stated that not only was the figure for
twenty-six states incorrect, so, too, was the assertion that
Edison/Mitofsky's exit polling contained any mistakes whatsoever. "One
hundred-twenty-three races for President, Senator, Governor, and
propositions," Mr. Mitofsky wrote, "were called without error." He further
attributed our misstep to "confusing the reports by bloggers with the exit
poll my partner and I did."

Perhaps. But a closer inspection of what Mr. Mitofsky actually means by
"called without error" could indicate otherwise. On January 19, 2005,
Edison/Mitofsky released a report that, while continuing to maintain that no
election projection mistakes were made, did acknowledge the existence of
serious "differences between the exit poll estimates and the actual vote
count." In thirty states, the voter estimates produced by Edison/Mitofsky
data was wrong to a statistically significant degree (twenty-six states for
Kerry, four for Bush). Our mistake came in failing to recognize that in
twenty-one of the twenty-six instances in which the estimates incorrectly
named Kerry as the front-runner, he ultimately carried the state, only by a
smaller margin than indicated by the exit polls. Still, an apparent logical
disconnect would seem to exist. How could the estimates be wrong but not the
final projection? To answer this question, a clear picture of the difference
between estimates and final projections is needed.

On Election Day, exit poll interviewers submit their results to
Edison/Mitofsky three times, during regularly scheduled "calls," the last of
which comes shortly before the close of the polls. These results do not
contain official vote numbers, which is important. Many people would assume
that Edison/Mitofsky's final projections exclusively utilize the information
collected at the polls and sent in during the calls; however, this is not
the process. Edison/Mitofsky's report makes clear that it does not "rely
solely on exit polls in its computations and estimates." When the voting is
complete, actual vote numbers are combined with the exit poll responses and
"as in past elections, the final exit poll data used for analysis . . . [is]
adjusted to match the actual vote returns." So, even if the exit poll
estimates are erroneous, Edison/Mitofsky still isn't wrong-because they just
add in the actual vote numbers to ensure everything checks.

This practice is by no means secret, although perhaps the average voter or
election-night network-television watcher might not have been aware of it. I
certainly wasn't. Maybe knowing this should serve to highlight the risks of
viewing exit polls as a hedge against improprieties in the vote count. Or
perhaps that is precisely the best use for them. The chances that the state
exit poll estimates erred by such a wide margin was one 1 in 16.5 million,
according to a study by the National Election Data Archive Project. One
final key point remains: of the five states Edison/Mitofsky had Kerry
leading that he eventually lost, Ohio was one. — Theodore
Ross<http://www.harpers.org/TheodoreRoss.html#ExcerptNoneDare>
[Back] <http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html#1-anchor>

2. Another poll, by Zogby International, showed that 33 percent of voters
deemed "greed and materialism" the most pressing moral problems in America.
Only 12 percent of those polled cited gay marriage.
[Back]<http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html#2-anchor>

3. Keith Olbermann, on MSNBC, stood out as an heroic exception, devoting
many segments of his nightly program Countdown to the myriad signs of
electoral mischief, particularly in Ohio.
[Back]<http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html#3-anchor>

4.

The full report can be downloaded from the Judiciary Committee's website at
www.house.gov/judiciary_ democrats/ohiostatusrept1505.pdf and is also, as of
May, available as a trade paperback, entitled What Went Wrong in Ohio. I
should note here that, in a victory for family values, the publishers of
that paperback are my parents, Jordan and Anita Miller.
[Back] <http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html#4-anchor>

5. When contacted by Harper's Magazine, Blackwell spokesman Carlo LoParo
dismissed Conyers's report as a partisan attack. "Why wasn't it more than an
hour's story?" he asked, referring to the lack of media interest in the
report. "Everybody can't be wrong, can they?"
[Back]<http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html#5-anchor>

6. Let it not be said that the Democrats rose wholly above the electoral
fray: in Defiance County, Ohio, one Chad Staton was arrested on 130 counts
of vote fraud when he submitted voter-registration forms purportedly signed
by, among others, Dick Tracy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Michael Jackson, and Mary
Poppins. Of course, depending on party affiliation, the consequence of
election misdeeds varies. Staton, who told police he was paid in crack for
each registration, received fifty-four months in jail for his fifth-degree
felonies; Blackwell, for his part, is now the G.O.P. front-runner for
governor of Ohio. [Back]<http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html#6-anchor>

7. In May 2005, Eaton was ordered by the Hocking County Board of Elections
to resign from her position.
[Back]<http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html#7-anchor>

8. The recount itself was the result of a joint application from the Green
and Libertarian parties.
[Back]<http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html#8-anchor>

9. Offended by the president-elect's first cabinet appointments (Henry
Kissinger, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, et al.), Bailey was protesting Nixon's
liberalism. [Back] <http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html#9-anchor>

10. On the other hand, the thesis that the exit polls were flawed had been
reported by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune,
USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Columbus Dispatch, CNN.com,
MSNBC, and ABC (which devoted a Nightline segment to the "conspiracy theory"
that the exit polls had been correct).
[Back]<http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html#10-anchor>

-------------

Vision2020 Post by Ted Moffett

On 6/17/06, Chasuk <chasuk at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> "But it was written by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., you dishonest liberal,"
> some will sniff.  "Of course it's biased!"
>
> "Respond to the article, not the author," I reply.
>
>
> http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen
>
> --
> http://emmagoldman.wordpress.com/
>
> "Aren't people absurd! They never use the freedoms they do have, but
> demand those they don't have; they have freedom of thought, they
> demand freedom of speech." -- Søren Kierkegaard
>
> =====================================================
>
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