[Mb-civic] Why Can't the Left Face the Stolen Elections of 2004 & 2008?

[Mha Atma Khalsa]

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1018-22.htm

Published on Tuesday, October 18, 2005 by the Free
Press (Columbus, Ohio)
Why Can't the Left Face the Stolen Elections of 2004 &
2008?
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
 

If some of its key publications are any indicator,
much of the American left seems unable to face the
reality that the election of 2004 was stolen. So in
all likelihood, unless something radical is done, 2008
will be too.

Misguided and misinformed articles in both
TomPaine.com and Mother Jones Magazine indicate a
dangerous inability to face the reality that these
stolen elections mean nothing less than the death of
what's left of American democracy, and the permanent
enthronement of the Rovian GOP.

As investigative reporters based in Columbus, Ohio, we
witnessed first-hand, up close and personal, exactly
how the 2004 election was stolen, and how it will most
likely be done in 2008. In the precinct in which
Harvey Wasserman grew up, and in the one where Bob
Fitrakis now lives, we saw the well-funded, profoundly
cynical and deadly effective mechanisms by which the
Bush-Cheney-Rove-Blackwell GOP machine switched a
victory for John Kerry to an easily-repeatable defeat
for democracy.

That Kerry and the spineless Ohio and national
Democratic Parties have been complicit is a crucial
part of the problem much of the left also seems
unwilling to face. But if you live in Franklin County,
Ohio, and watch the Republican and Democratic Parties
run joint pickets against progressive candidate, and
cut backroom deals allowing incumbents of either party
run unopposed, you may miss the full scope of the
disaster.

And until the left faces the rot that defines the
Democratic Party, there is no hope for a fair election
in this country. In other words: those who think the
White House can be retaken in 2008, but refuse to face
the theft of the vote in 2004, should prepare to be
ruled by the likes of Jeb Bush, now and forever.

Before we go into the sordid details, we have to ask:
exactly what is it about Team Bush that makes people
think they could not or would not steal an American
election? Do they lack funds? Do they lack expertise?
Is there something in the Machiavellian/mobster moral
code of Karl Rove and the Bush Family that would
prevent them from doing here what they've been doing
throughout the Third World for so long?

CIA meister Poppy Bush long ago perfected the art and
science of stealing elections. US manipulators have
interfered with and tipped elections for decades. Why
should Ohio be any different? Especially when all the
world knew control of the most powerful office on
earth would be decided right here.

Lets do the bookends: before the voting, Ohio's
infamous Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth
Blackwell clearly and vehemently denied poll access to
teams of international observers from the United
Nations and other international election observers.

Since the election, he has effectively stonewalled and
sabotaged all recount attempts, to the point that no
credible accounting of the Ohio election has ever been
done. To this day, at least 100,000 votes remain
uncounted, electronic voting machines remain
unaudited, key hardware and data files have been
trashed, paper ballots have sat unguarded for anyone
to pilfer and tallies in dozens of key counties remain
filled with statistical impossibilities.

In our How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election & Is
Rigging 2008, we list more than 180 bullet points on
how this theft was perpetrated. It was a brilliant,
cynical and masterfully executed campaign of death by
a thousand cuts.

In Florida 2000, the means of the crime were limited
to a few instances of intimidation, butterfly ballots,
computer manipulation and a corrupt Supreme Court. But
four years after, in Ohio, dozens of sometimes subtle,
sometimes blatant tricks were designed to steal a few
thousand votes here, a few thousand more there, until
victory was in GOP hands. Unless they are exposed and
blocked, every one of these scams can and will be
duplicated throughout the United States in 2006 and
2008. The question is: will the left follow mainstream
Democrats with sheep-like acceptance as every election
goes the same way from here on? And if so, why bother
even staging more votes in this country at all?

Starting with Russ Baker at TomPaine.com, the
indicators are grim. Last January, Baker penned an
absurd, ill-reported piece of nonsense called "What
Didn't Happen in Ohio." Baker traipsed into Columbus
for a few days, interviewed the usual faux Democrats,
and left with a Big Story: "The Election Was Fair."

If Baker had done any meaningful research he might
have seen the dozens of other instances of
intimidation, irregularities and fraud that went
unmentioned in his glib paragraphs. Instead he relied
on Bill Anthony, chair of the Franklin County
Democrats and Board of Elections.

Bill is a pleasant, affable African-American with no
commitment or fight for democracy or even the
Democrats. He has appeared on Bob's local radio show
and with Harvey on others. On one of them, Bill
admitted that the Franklin County BOE knew there would
be problems with voting machines, and asked Blackwell
for paper ballots well before the 2004 election.
Blackwell, Anthony said, turned them down. The result
was the now infamous chaos at the polls, with inner
city voters stuck in the rain for hours. Just what
Blackwell wanted.

But did Bill Anthony fight Blackwell's absurd ruling?
Did he make it a public issue prior to the election?

Not a chance.

For a quickie reporting job, Anthony is a dream. He's
well-spoken, charming and convincing. As an
African-American with union connections, he would seem
the perfect liberal source.

In 2003, Anthony endorsed the Republican mayor's
former press secretary for the Columbus School Board.
He then supported two Republican candidates on a
"Reform Slate" aimed at ousting the Board's only
progressive Democrat, an African-American.

Bill Anthony is just one of a legion of what are known
throughout the state as DINOs---Democrats in Name
Only. The Ohio Democratic Party is a national
embarrassment. Its chair, Denny White, was not long
ago a Republican, and will soon be one again, once the
party is fully disemboweled, a job very close to done.
Throughout Ohio, DINOs piously cover this piece of
fraud and that piece of theft with glib "I hate Bush"
rhetoric. The pity is, out-of-state reporters actually
take them seriously.

Mark Hertsgaard is a well respected author and
reporter and a long-time friend of Harvey Wasserman,
and of election critic Mark Crispen Miller. He has
contributed some very valuable work over the years.
But he's done himself---and the voting public---very
wrong on "Recounting Ohio" in the new Mother Jones.

Mark is smart and thorough enough to leave open the
possibility that Ohio's election was, indeed, stolen.
But he also falls prey to the DINO trap, failing to
cover far too much of what happened here while taking
seriously centrist Democrats who are known locally to
have no credibility.

So Mother Jones questions the significance of the
firing of a Democratic election official who blew the
whistle on computer manipulations by Triad, an obscure
Republican voting machine company. But Triad was
involved in counting the votes in nearly half of
Ohio's 88 counties. Questions are still being raised
about Triad, including: "How did they get all these
contracts in the first place?"

Mother Jones correctly points out that seven times the
number of votes by which Bush took Ohio were cast on
Republican-controlled machines. But the magazine fails
to follow up with mention that those votes have been
tabulated on proprietary non-transparent software---a
fact we pointed out in our own article in
Motherjones.com many months prior to the election.

Mother Jones also discounts the fact that a phony
Homeland Security alert in Warren County landed the
vote count in an unauthorized warehouse rather than
the official secure location, and that reporters were
barred from the vote count. That count, which went
hugely and suspiciously and very importantly for Bush,
was observed by nominal Democrats. But so were other
highly dubious vote counts around the state, as they
had been in Florida 2000, which Mother Jones argues
adamantly was indeed stolen.

The irony of this is that the same issue of Mother
Jones leads off with a dead-on story about Ohio and
national Democrats who are sabotaging the campaign of
the aggressively electable Paul Hackett for a key US
Senate seat. And another MoJo piece bemoans the fact
that national Democrats seem adept only at losing.

Yet here the back of the book is a story discounting
evidence compiled by a legion of independent,
grassroots election rights advocates, while favoring
phone interviews with the very Democrats being
denounced in the front of the book.

Above all, the core of evidence that the election was
stolen in Ohio 2004 comes from some 500 sworn
statements and signed affidavits taken by people of
all political parties, including two Republican
hearings officers, in the weeks after the election.
Anyone truly committed to finding out what happened
here needs to start with that huge body of evidence.

As MoJo points out, none of this has been made easier
by the "abandon ship" of the biggest DINO of all, John
Kerry. Kerry had $7 million in the bank earmarked to
"count every vote" and was apparently losing by just
136,000 Ohio votes with more than 250,000 still
uncounted when he turned tail and conceded. Even
Blackwell's corrupt, virtually meaningless first fake
recount dropped Bush's official tally by 18,000 votes.

The Democrats have since attacked the election
protection movement here through a lawyer named Daniel
Hoffheimer who comes from none other than the stalwart
Cincinnati Republican law firm of Taft, Stettinius et.
al. MoJo quotes another Kerry/DINO lawyer Michael
O'Grady, counsel to the state Democratic Party, who
argues that for Ohio to have been stolen, the entire
GOP would have had to be "conspiratorial," while the
Democrats were "dumb as rocks."

In fact, that's an assessment many activists in Ohio
heartily endorse, though you might add the word
"inert" to the description of the Democrats.

O'Grady claims, for example, that an impossible vote
count in three southern Ohio counties that gave Bush
his entire margin of victory can be explained by a
feminist outpouring for an African-American court
candidate who ran zero campaign in those counties. But
the presumption is that those same feminists somehow
didn't bother to vote for Kerry over George W. Bush.
No local student of that election could begin to take
such an assessment seriously.

Or how about the quote from Chris Rakocy, a "tech
specialist" about those notorious touchscreens in
Mahoning County where voters who chose Kerry saw Bush
light up. Rakocy says that problem was "only" on 18 of
1,148 machines, and that it was corrected early.

But Rakocy stands alone against dozens of sworn
statements and affidavits confirming that the problem
went on all day, and was never fixed, and may have
involved far more machines than 18, and not only in
Mahoning County but also in Franklin. Even at that, in
heavily Democratic Youngstown (not to mention
Columbus), just 18 machines could have accounted for
switching thousands of votes. And, in fact, Kerry's
margins in both Youngstown and Columbus were
suspiciously light.

And what would Mother Jones herself do to machines
that disenfranchised even one voter, no matter what
the apparent impact on the ultimate vote count? Why is
the magazine named for her discounting the
you-couldn't-make-this-one-up reality of voters
pushing one candidate's name on a touchscreen and
seeing another's name light up, time after time after
time? Or are we taking this---and her---all too
seriously?

Then there's the song and dance from Warren Mitofsky.
The father of exit polls saw his work used to overturn
a stolen election in Ukraine just prior to the
American vote. But when his poll-taking here showed
John Kerry with a nationwide margin of 1.5 million
votes, somehow Mitofsky jumped ship on his own decades
of professionalism.

Exit polls funded by six major news organizations
showed Kerry carrying Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico and
Nevada as late as 12:20 am on Wednesday morning, well
after balloting stopped even in Alaska and Hawaii.
These four "purple states" gave the election to the
"blue" Democrats, then miraculously switched to "red"
for Bush, giving him the White House once again.

Given all that's known about exit polls---and it's a
lot---the odds on one state switching like that are
about one in one hundred. For four, it's a virtual
statistical impossibility. Add the fact that not one,
not four, but TEN of eleven swing states showed
drastic shifts from Kerry to Bush and you enter the
realm of, well, a stolen election.

Add huge, unexplained shifts from pre-election polls
to post-election vote counts in crucial 2002
Senatorial races in Georgia, Minnesota and Colorado,
then remember what happened in Florida 2000, and
examine the basic Bush attitude toward democracy
itself, and you've got a pattern to say the least. And
an obvious prescription for one-party rule as far as
the eye can see.

Except when you are dealing with America's Democratic
Party in 2004 and with reportage that relies on a few
phone calls and a disheartening lack of grassroots
perspective. If all politics is local, as Tip O'Neill
well knew, then so are all vote counts.

Our first article predicting what would happen in Ohio
2004 was published many months before the election in,
of all places, MotherJones.com. We warned that
electronic voting machines deployed by the likes of
Diebold could give Ohio and thus the nation to George
W. Bush. Wally O'Dell, Diebold's infamous CEO, pledged
to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in 2004, and
all evidence points to the fact that he at least
helped.

What we missed in addition was the myriad clever
tricks the GOP would bring to bear in pulling this
off. Ohio has a long history as a test market. New
products like white bread and spam are brought here
first, to see how they'll fly with America at large.

In Ohio 2004, scores of tools for stealing an American
election were tried and proven out. Outside reporters
have come here again and again to pull at this one and
tear at that one. Almost always, they get even that
wrong. And almost always, they fail to see the bigger
picture.

If we have a "know it all" attitude, as is sometimes
charged, it's because we were (and are) here, we saw
it happen, we witnessed the seven-hour waits and the
denials of the absentee ballots, and we took the
testimony of the hundreds who later went under oath.

And we see more unravel every day. Conspiracy theories
happen sometimes when actual conspiracies occur. The
stakes involved, the players on both sides and the
events that are out there plain as day are all of a
piece that's simply too obvious for anyone on the
ground here to miss.

Hertsgaard has the good sense to mention indictments
that have recently come down on election thieves in
Cuyahoga County. We know that to be the tip of the
iceberg.

What matters now is whether the GOP will be allowed to
repeat nationwide in 2006 and 2008 what they saw they
could get away with in Ohio 2004.

Election theft skeptics tend to conclude their
put-downs by urging we forget about the vote-count
stuff and concentrate on coming up with candidates so
good that "the election won't be close enough to
steal."

Having seen what we saw here, knowing what Mother
Jones is reporting about the Democratic attacks on
Paul Hackett, and about the loser instinct ingrained
in the Dems' DLC/DNA, we must charitably describe such
a conclusion as being profoundly wishful thinking.

Someday we may indeed have candidates far worthier
than Al Gore and John Kerry. But they both won the
presidency of the United States, however corruptible
their margins of victory.

We need to guarantee that if someone worthwhile and
willing to fight ever does come along, we will have a
left that's prepared to make sure the votes are fairly
counted.

As Rev. Jesse Jackson put it while speaking to
election protection activists here, "We can afford to
lose an election. We can't afford to lose our
democracy."

Who would agree more strongly than Tom Paine and
Mother Jones?

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of
How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election & Is Rigging
2008, available at Freepress.org and
harveywasserman.com. Their upcoming What Happened in
Ohio, with Steve Rosenfeld, will be published by The
New Press in spring, 2006.

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