http://www.legitgov.org/index.html#breaking_news
Ohio Stolen
(blog entry, gnn.tv) 2004-11-03 16:26:30 "Greg Palast and Randi Rhodes
reported today that the state of Ohio was stolen by the Republicans in
election 2004. Ohio was the critical state that tipped the balance,
giving the presidency to Bush. Turns out one
County in Ohio, equipped with Diebold electronic voting machines,
reported NEGATIVE 25,000 votes. Wha?!? That’s what at least
one election official in Ohio said. The votes from that County are
lost. Not counted. GONE!"
Fixed - The
Stealing of Another Election (Democratic
Underground.com) --by EarlG --Kerry winning Exit Polls --"FRAUD LOOKS
PROBABLE --SoCalDem has done a statistical analysis... ...on several
swing states, and EVERY STATE that has
EVoting but no paper trails has an unexplained advantage for Bush of
around +5% when comparing exit polls to actual results. In
EVERY STATE that has paper audit trails on their EVoting, the exit poll
results match the actual results reported within the margin of error.
So, we have MATCHING RESULTS for exit polls vs. voting with audits vs.
A 5% unexplained advantage for Bush without audits."
CLG Newsletter editor: Lori
Price, General Manager. Copyright © 2004, Citizens For Legitimate Government
® All rights reserved.
AMERICAblog:
Because a great nation deserves the truth
Possible
evidence of voter fraud in Ohio
by John in DC - 11/3/2004 02:56:47 AM
I
just received a photo a Cincinnati poll manager took this evening,
and it seems to be proof of some fishy actions with ballots in Ohio.
Bottom line: Note the already-voted-with ballots in the back of the
truck with the Bush-Cheney sticker in the back window. Does this prove
fraud? Well, it certainly doesn't look good in a state that's already
had lots of problems this election.
Click
here to see the larger image
In a nutshell, Stefan Skirtz is a poll manager for the Kerry campaign
in Cincinnati. His precinct is heavily made up of minorities and
students (i.e., leans Kerry). One of the duties of the poll managers,
Stefan told me in a phone call minutes ago, is to follow the poll
workers to election headquarters as they drop off the ballots and
ballot boxes. Stefan followed the poll workers who didn't go directly
to the election headquarters. Instead, they went to a local public
school where workers put the ballot machines into a semi trailer, and
then the poll workers handed off the sealed bags containing the ballots
to someone Stefan assumed was with the county board of elections.
The first problem he noticed was that there was no sign off of the
transfer of the ballots. Nothing was written down and given to the poll
worker as proof that the ballots were passed off to the county
employee.
What's worse, Stefan noticed the pick-up truck of the supposed county
board of election - the truck the ballots for 40 precincts were loaded
into - had a big Bush-Cheney 2004 sticker in the back window. Stefan
did say that he followed the truck to the election headquarters, though
he didn't see what transpired after the truck pulled into the election
hq parking lot.
As Stefan explains it, the poll managers had such an extensive list of
voters rights and regulations that they had to follow, including it
being illegal to have any partisan buttons etc. in the polling place,
yet the ballots for voters in over 40 precincts were put in the hands
of Bush-Cheney partisans.
I don't know whether the Bush partisans did or didn't play any games
with the ballots they received, but it sure doesn't look good, and I
wonder whether it's even legal. And let's not forget, this is a state
that was already well on its way to becoming the new Florida of GOP
election fraud.
Stefan says he has 6 or 7 witnesses who also saw the sticker on the
truck. I have Stefan's contact info for members of the media.
|
An Election Spoiled Rotten
TomPaine.com
Monday, November 1, 2004
It's not
even Election Day yet, and the Kerry-Edwards campaign is already down
by a almost a million votes. That's because, in important states
like Ohio, Florida and New Mexico, voter names have been systematically
removed from the rolls and absentee ballots have been
overlooked-overwhelmingly in minority areas, like Rio Arriba County,
New Mexico, where Hispanic voters have a 500 percent greater chance of
their vote being "spoiled." Investigative journalist Greg Palast
reports on the trashing of the election.
An
Election Spoiled Rotten
by Greg Palast
John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not
one ballot has yet been counted. He's also losing big time in Colorado
and Ohio: and he's way down in Florida, though the votes won't be
totaled until Tuesday night.
Through a combination of sophisticated vote rustling-ethnic cleansing
of voter rolls, absentee ballots gone AWOL, machines that "spoil"
votes-John Kerry begins with a nationwide deficit that could easily
exceed one million votes.
---The Urge To Purge---
Colorado Secretary of State Donetta Davidson just weeks ago removed
several thousand voters from the state's voter rolls. She tagged felons
as barred from voting. What makes this particularly noteworthy is that,
unlike like Florida and a handful of other Deep South states, Colorado
does not bar ex-cons from voting. Only those actually serving their
sentence lose their rights.
There's no known, verified case of a Colorado convict voting illegally
from the big house. Because previous purges have wiped away the rights
of innocents, federal law now bars purges within 90 days of a
presidential election to allow a voter to challenge their loss of civil
rights.
To exempt her action from the federal rule, Secretary Davidson declared
an "emergency." However, the only "emergency" in Colorado seems to be
President Bush's running dead, even with John Kerry in the polls.
Why the sudden urge to purge? Davidson's chief of voting law
enforcement is Drew Durham, who previously worked for the attorney
general of Texas. This is what the former spokeswoman for the Lone Star
state's attorney general says of Mr. Durham: He is, "unfit for public
office... a man with a history of racism and ideological zealotry."
Sounds just right for a purge that affects, in the majority, non-white
voters.
From my own and government investigations of such purge lists, it is
unlikely that this one contains many, if any, illegal voters.
But it does contain Democrats. The Dems may not like to shout about
this, but studies indicate that 90-some percent of people who have
served time for felonies will, after prison, vote Democratic. One
suspects Colorado's Republican secretary of state knows that.
---Ethnic Cleansing Of The Voter Rolls---
We can't leave the topic of ethnically cleansing the voter rolls
without a stop in Ohio, where a Republican secretary of state appears
to be running to replace Katherine Harris.
In Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), some citizens have been caught
Registering While Black. A statistical analysis of would-be voters in
Southern states by the watchdog group Democracy South indicates that
black voters are three times as likely as white voters to have their
registration requests "returned" (i.e., subject to rejection).
And to give a boost to this whitening of the voter rolls, for the first
time since the days of Jim Crow, the Republicans are planning mass
challenges of voters on Election Day. The GOP's announced plan to block
35,000 voters in Ohio ran up against the wrath of federal judges; so,
in Florida, what appear to be similar plans had been kept under wraps
until the discovery of documents called "caging" lists. The voters on
the "caging" lists, disclosed last week by BBC Television London, are,
almost exclusively, residents of African-American neighborhoods.
Such racial profiling as part of a plan to block voters is, under the
Voting Rights Act, illegal. Nevertheless, neither the Act nor federal
judges have persuaded the party of Lincoln to join the Democratic Party
in pledging not to distribute blacklists to block voters on Tuesday.
---Absentee Ballots Go AWOL---
It's 10pm: Do you know where your absentee ballot is? Voters wary about
computer balloting are going postal: in some states, mail-in ballot
requests are up 500 percent. The probability that all those votes-up to
15 million-will be counted is zip.
Those who mail in ballots are very trusting souls. Here's how your
trust is used. In the August 31 primaries in Florida, Palm Beach
Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore (a.k.a. Madame Butterfly Ballot)
counted 37,839 absentee votes. But days before, her office told me only
29,000 ballots had been received. When this loaves-and-fishes miracle
was disclosed, she was forced to recount, cutting the tally to 31,138.
Had she worked it the other way, disappearing a few thousand votes
instead of adding additional ones, there would be almost no way to
figure out the fix (or was it a mistake?). Mail-in voter registration
forms are protected by federal law. Local government must acknowledge
receiving your registration and must let you know if there's a problem
(say, with signature or address) that invalidates your registration.
But your mail-in vote is an unprotected crapshoot. How do you know if
your ballot was received? Was it tossed behind a file cabinet-or tossed
out because you did not include your middle initial? In many counties,
you won't know.
And not every official is happy to have your vote. It is well-reported
that Broward County, Fla., failed to send out nearly 60,000 absentee
ballots. What has not been nationally reported is that Broward's
elections supervisor is a Jeb Bush appointee who took the post only
after the governor took the unprecedented step of removing the prior
elected supervisor who happened be a Democrat.
---A Million Votes In The Electoral Trash Can---
"If the vote is stolen here, it will be stolen in Rio Arriba County," a
New Mexico politician told me. That's a reasoned surmise: in 2000, one
in 10 votes simply weren't counted-chucked out, erased, discarded. In
the voting biz, the technical term for these vanishing votes is
"spoilage." Citizens cast ballots, but the machines don't notice. In
one Rio Arriba precinct in the last go-'round, not one single vote was
cast for president-or, at least, none showed up on the machines.
Not everyone's vote spoils equally. Rio Arriba is 73 percent Hispanic.
I asked nationally recognized vote statistician Dr. Philip Klinkner of
Hamilton College to run a "regression" analysis of the Hispanic ballot
spoilage in the Enchanted State. He calculated that a brown voter is
500 percent more likely to have their vote spoiled than a white voter.
And It's worse for Native Americans. Vote spoilage is epidemic near
Indian reservations.
Votes don't spoil because they're left out of the fridge. It comes down
to the machines. Just as poor people get the crap schools and crap
hospitals, they get the crap voting machines.
It's bad for Hispanics; but for African Americans, it's a ballot-box
holocaust. An embarrassing little fact of American democracy is that,
typically, two million votes are spoiled in national elections,
registering no vote or invalidated. Based on studies by the U.S. Civil
Rights Commission and the Harvard Law School Civil Rights project,
about 54 percent of those ballots are cast by African Americans. One
million black votes vanished˜phffft!
There's a lot of politicians in both parties that like it that way;
suppression of the minority is the way they get elected. Whoever is to
blame, on Tuesday, the Kerry-Edwards ticket will take the hit. In Rio
Arriba, Democrats have an eight-to-one registration edge over
Republicans. Among African Americanvoters...well, you can do the
arithmetic yourself.
The total number of votes siphoned out of America's voting booths is so
large, you won't find the issue reported in our self-glorifying news
media. The one million missing black, brown and red votes spoiled, plus
the hundreds of thousands flushed from voter registries, is our
nation's dark secret: an apartheid democracy in which wealthy white
votes almost always count, but minorities are often purged or
challenged or simply not recorded. In effect, Kerry is down by a
million votes before one lever is pulled, card punched or touch-screen
touched.
------
View Greg Palast's BBC Television film, "Bush Family Fortunes,"
available this week on DVD in an updated edition from The
Disinformation Company at http://www.gregpalast.com/bff-dvd.htm
To receive Greg's investigative reports click here:
http://www.gregpalast.com/contact.cfm
|
Welcome to Germany, 1936.
Isn't
it interesting that the
exit polls differed so markedly from the vote "count"?
Remember this recent article:
_____________
Rigged
By William Thomas | 10-10-04
"Those who cast the vote decide nothing. Those who count the votes
decide everything" - Joseph Stalin
GW Bush has already 'won' the 2004 Presidential selection. It doesn't
much matter that the actual vote has yet to be held, or that an
electorate enraged by the damage done by an ignorant, angry little man
is about to throw him out of a stolen White House on his remotely-wired
ear.
But there's a hitch. When US voters start tapping computer screens in
polling booths next month, more than three-quarters of the machines
they'll be using are – how to put this discreetly? – owned by powerful
Republican interests.
This time around, state after state is being set up to 'do a Florida'.
Given the record of America's voting machines in municipal and
congressional elections over the past four years, computer malfunctions
and malfeasance at polling stations across the land are more certain
than the sun continuing to rise in the east.
Whatever happens, post-election headlines are certain to read:
"Recounts Called For In Key States." Thousands of lawyers for both
camps are already standing by to file legal challenges as soon as the
first elusive bytes are electronically tallied. Kerry says his campaign
alone is readying 2,000 lawyers to "challenge any place in America
where you cannot trace the vote and count the votes."
Which is just about everywhere.
SHELL GAME
Corporate mass media mesmerizers tout electronic voting machines as
"just like ATMs". They are not. Bank machines give users a printed
record of their electronic transactions. Despite pending legislation
making it mandatory, none of America's electronic voting machines issue
tickertape receipts providing each voter with a record she can
immediately check against the vote she electronically cast.
"It's a shell game, with money, companies and corporate brands
switching in a blur of buy-outs and bogus fronts," writes columnist
Chris Floyd in the St. Petersburg Times.
"Bigger than Watergate," says the editor of the Sludge Report. "Imagine
that you are a political interest group that wishes to control
forevermore the levers of power. Imagine further that you know you are
likely to implement a highly unpopular political agenda, and you do not
wish to be removed by a ballot driven backlash."
Imagine that you could subvert the voting process in ways that would
allow you to steal elections without anyone knowing. This is an
accurate description of the voting system that will determine the next
leader of the most bankrupt and militarily powerful nation on the
planet - regardless of how Americans actually vote.
WHO OWNS AMERICA'S VOTING MACHINES?
Last year, some kids "really interested in computers" had clicked onto
the unsecured FTP site of the biggest electronic voting machine
provider in the USA. One teen helpfully posted the source codes for
Diebold voting system and vote counting programs on his top-ranked
website, igniting a furor that has yet to subside.
It turns out that Diebold Election Systems' CEO is Bob Urosevich. His
brother Todd founded "rival" ES&S. Together, these two companies
will tally around 80% of votes cast next November.
Howard Ahmanson bankrolled the Urosevich brothers in the vote-counting
business. Ahmanson is also a member of the Council for National Policy,
a right-wing "steering group" that whispers into Dubya's other ear.
The publicity shy Ahmanson is also a major financial backer behind the
extremist "Christian Reconstructionist" movement. The St. Petersburg
Times reveals that this group "openly advocates a theocratic takeover
of American democracy, placing all Americans under the 'dominion' of
'Christ the King'" – personified by God's chosen representative in
Washington, holy warrior GW Bush.
As John Kaminski reveals, the family whose machines will be tallying
most of the next presidential vote were key financiers behind
California's anti-affirmative action law, as well as efforts to ban gay
marriage. the unannounced agenda behind Bush's backers include killing
all homosexuals, stoning "sinners", excluding all non-Christians from
US citizenship, and re-imposing slavery - "one of the most beneficent
of Biblical laws."
These fundamentalists are the principal players controlling Diebold and
ES&S . November's crucial vote will see some 98 million Americans -
five out of every six of the roughly 115 million who will go to the
polls - consign their democratic determinations to computers made and
serviced by four private corps.
Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia and Hart "are hardwired into the Bushist
Party power grid," Floyd writes. Among them are at least two voting
machine providers operating under the ownership and philosophy of
America's hardcore Republican religious right. Ahmanson-controlled
Election Systems & Software will tabulate about a third of the next
presidential vote using machines that have already scrambled many US
elections.
In 1988, Jeb Bush's first choice for a running mate in his
gubernatorial race was ES&S lobbyist Sandra Mortham, who grew rich
installing the machines counting Jeb's votes. Faulty ES&S machines
used in Hawaii forced that state's first-ever election recount.
SEQUOIA
Sequoia is also supplying electronic voting machines in this fall's
follies. Sequoia featured prominently in a massive corruption court
case that sent top Louisiana state officials to jail for taking bribes
funneled through Mob-connected "front" firms. Sequoia's parent company,
Madison Dearborn is – wait for it – a partner in the Carlyle Group.
Sequoia also manufactures casino slot machines. So don't be surprised
if your electronic vote wins you a pocketful of change.
DIEBOLD
Last spring, Republican-controlled Diebold Election Systems
malfunctioned across California, disqualifying thousands of voters.
Citing concerns over its security and reliability, California's top
elections official called for a criminal investigation in Diebold.
When he started quality-checking Diebold's "AccuVote" machines arriving
at the company's Atlanta warehouse, former Diebold programmer Rob
Behler and his crew found problems with "every single one" of them.
About one in five Diebold voting machines couldn't be fixed and were
discarded as unusable.
Nevertheless, in November's national elections at least 50 million
voters are expected to "play the slots" using Diebold's dud machines.
Diebold corporate chief and top Bush fundraiser, Wally O'Dell has
publicly committed himself to "delivering" his home state's key votes
to Bush. Nine Ohio counties will be using the paperless machines.
SAIC
Run by Admiral Bill Owens, former military aide to Dick Cheney; Carlyle
crony Frank Carlucci, and ex-CIA chief Robert Gates, weapons contractor
SAIC aims to become a major player in the vote-counting roulette now
going global in places like England, Latin America, Eastern Europe, the
Middle East, India, and Asia.
SAIC's long history of fraud charges and "security lapses" in its
electronic systems has helped it become one of the largest contractors
for the CIA and the Pentagon, where several trillion dollars of
taxpayers' money is still missing.
FOR DISCRIMINATING VOTERS …
The move to convert the USA to unverifiable computer voting machines
was launched by the same man who benefited most from the last rigged
presidential selection. In 2003, Bush signed the Help America Vote Act
at the behest of Northrop-Grumman and Lockheed-Martin.
The two arms making giants also lobbied hard for a law ordering all
states to adopt the same computerized "voter purge" system used by Jeb
Bush to hand the 2000 election to his brother after eliminating 91,000
eligible, democrat-favoring black voters from the Florida rolls.
Having reintroduced segregation where it matters most, the same
Republican-run company – ChoicePoint – has handled most of the new
Bush-ordered "voter purge" state efforts in the run-up to this year's
selection.
I SAID, YOUR RECEIPT PLEASE
The Nation's Ronnie Dugger reports, "About a third of the votes, 36
million, will be tabulated completely inside the new paperless,
direct-recording-electronic (DRE) voting systems, on which you vote
directly on a touch-screen."
Dugger observes that because there no paper receipts available for
cross-checking and probable recounts, DRE voters "never know, despite
what the touch-screen says, whether the computer is counting your vote
as you think you are casting it or, either by error or fraud, it is
giving it to another candidate."
SHORT-CIRCUITING DEMOCRACY
Not surprising to anyone who uses a computer, America's Big Four
"election engineers" are running into a few…'er …glitches. Companies
handed billions by Bush to "computerize" the nation's vote will not
finish installing machines controlled by the powerful
Republican-military-Christian Right before next November – when 50 to
70 million voters will gamble their democratic rights on touch-screen
machines.
Next month, three American voters out of four will confront the same
voting machines they used in 2000.
A VOTE TOO BIG TO RIG?
Considering the millions of Americans who have repeatedly protested
Bush's policies in cities across the nation - and what could be a
massive first-time vote by university-age Americans whose collective
co-ed anatomies are definitely feeling a draft – and the resulting
Kerry victory could be too overwhelming to be rigged.
But the contest cannot be contested if Republican judges rule requested
recounts to be illegal invasions into "proprietary" software already
available on the Internet.
Florida officials have already refused to allow independent audits of
electronic voting machines. And they are not alone. In 2000, just
before the US Supreme Court intervened, a judge was pre-empted from
announcing that previously untabulated ballots would be counted after a
Jeb Bush spokesman accused those seeking audits of trying to "undermine
voters' confidence."
Also that year in Dallas, 18 faulty machines were finally pulled after
registering "Republican" when voters pushed "Democrat". A judge blocked
investigation into the accuracy of the tally.
In 2002, a Democrat handily won the Alabama governor's race. But the
winning tally was flipped to the Republican contender after ES&S
optical scan machines "lost" 6,300 Democratic votes overnight. When a
recount was requested, the state's Attorney General ruled that anyone
recounting the ballots would be subject to arrest.
AMERICA'S ELECTRONIC APARTHEID
As award-winning elections investigator Greg Palast discovered, in the
last presidential selection 1.9 million Americans cast ballots that
were never counted. About a million of these rejected ballots were cast
by African Americans who make up only 12 percent of the US electorate.
Florida, asserts the author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, "is
typical of the nation."
And this year, it could get worse, Palast pronounces. Both bills
holding machine votes accountable are stalled in the Republican
congress.
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