Election Fraud Blog

Here, in this shattering new interview, Stephen Spoonamore goes into harrowing detail about the Bush regime’s election fraud, past, present and–if we don’t spread the word right now–to come. Since he’s the only whistle-blower out there who knows the perps themselves, and how they operate, we have to send this new piece far and wide.

Here Spoon tells us that McBush’s team–i.e., Karl Rove and his henchpersons– have their plan in place to steal this next election: by 51.2% of the popular vote, and three electoral votes.

He also talks about the major role played by the Christianist far right in the electronic rigging of the vote.

And he defines our electronic voting system as a major threat to US national security, calling for it to be junked ASAP, in favor of hand-counted paper ballots.

Since Spoon is a Republican and erstwhile McCain supporter, as well as a noted specialist in nosing out computer fraud, his testimony is essential–not only for its expertise, but, no less, for the impact that his views will surely have on those Republicans who have been loath to see what Bush & Co. has done to our election system.

That whole story’s just about to break. In fact, tomorrow there will be a number of articles appearing, on a recent breakthrough in the lawsuit that Spoon’s testimony has enabled, and on other aspects of that all-important case.

MCM

9/26/08: New Spoonamore Interview – E-voting Machines are a National Security Threat

Last week, VR interviewed GOP Cyber security expert Stephen Spoonamore about the upcoming election and his testimony in the new Ohio litigation to take depositions of Karl Rove and others.

The video is posted in full below with ten short clips for You Tube viewing. This interview is so important and explosive that we urge everyone to watch it.

Spoonamore says that the GOP wanted e-voting to steal elections but now foreign governments will be hacking and the winner will be determined by the best hackers. He says that if the GOP wins the hacking competition, McCain will win 51.2 percent with three electoral votes over Obama, and it will be a stolen election.

Spoon also makes a crucial point about the people who have been implicated in much of the election theft: “They are religious extremists.” He names those who know about stolen elections, and he insists that the only way to protect this election is with paper ballots, hand-counted.

Check out this extraordinary interview here.

A Guest Editorial by author and NYU media professor, Mark Crispin Miller…

“Strategists say that Mr. McCain can now count on a more motivated social conservative base to help him in areas like southern Ohio, where the 2004 race was settled.”

—The New York Times, Sept. 7, 2008, A1

“In investigating the 2004 election in Ohio–examining pollbooks, talking to pollworkers and election officials, as well as reading local newspaper accounts –we could find no data of a late surge to the polls by born-again Christians. What we did find is certified voting totals in areas favoring Bush that didn’t match the number of voters who officially signed-in on the poll sign-in sheets.”

–Email from Bob Fitrakis of The Columbus Free Press, Sept. 7, 2008

To understand how Team McCain intends to get away with stealing this election, we must recall how Team Bush got away with it four years ago. (Those aren’t two different teams.)

The plan for stealing this contest has everything to do with the ostensibly surprising choice of Sarah Palin as McCain’s VP.

Here’s why…

1. Election Day, 2004: The Myth of Bush’s Christian “Surge”

First, let’s recall that, after the 2004 election, everybody said that Bush had won because the true believers of the Christian right had come out–or, rather, poured forth–in unprecedented numbers, often at the last minute, to support him. Of course, by “everybody,” I’m referring to the entire commentariate, both mainstream and left/liberal. On TV and in print, in news analyses and op-ed articles, they all said that Bush/Cheney had been re-elected by America’s “values voters.”

And they said it with a certain awe–as well they should, since Bush’s victory was a sort of miracle. He had disapproval ratings in the upper 40’s: higher than LBJ’s in 1968, higher than Jimmy Carter’s in 1980. Nor was he very popular in his own party, as many top Republicans came out against him–including moderates like John Eisenhower, rightists like Bob Barr, and many others such as William Crowe (chair of the Joint Chiefs under Ronald Reagan), General Tony McPeak (former Air Force chief of staff and erstwhile Veteran for Bush), libertarian Doug Bandow, neocon Francis Fukuyama, Lee Iacocca and Jack Matlock, Jr. (Reagan’s ambassador to the USSR); and many other, lesser figures in his party also publicly rejected him.

And so did sixty (60) newspapers–all in “red” states–that had endorsed Bush four years earlier: two thirds of them now going for Kerry, the others none of the above. American Conservative, Pat Buchanan’s own magazine, ran endorsements of five different candidates, only one of them for Bush. And 169 tenured and emeritus professors from the world’s top business schools all signed a full-page ad decrying his economic policies, adducing them as reasons not to vote for him. (The ad was written by top faculty at his own alma mater, Harvard Business School.) The ad ran in the Financial Times, which, like The Economist, endorsed John Kerry.

And still Bush won, despite such big defections, thanks to that enormous turnout by the Christian right, as everybody kept on saying–even though there were good reasons to be very skeptical about that notion.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Mark Crispin Miller

Certainly the outlook for democracy seems pretty bleak-and how could it be otherwise? The surest way to make a problem worse is to pretend it isn’t there, which is exactly what our press and politicians have been doing; and the rest is, unfortunately, history.

But history can be changed, as We the People have continually learned, from our refusal of colonial subjection, to our (partial) establishment as a democratic republic, to the abolition of slavery, to the enfranchisement of women, to the end of formal segregation and the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

After that, our progress seemed to stop, and it must now resume: for history can be changed, and for the better, but only through our own unbreakable commitment to, and action for, enlightened policies for the renewal of our democracy. Based squarely on America’s first principles, such policies would not be wholly new, however revolutionary they must sound in these bad, backward times. As it was certain policies that got us into this horrific situation, certain other policies can get us out.

The fact is that We the People are in lousy shape, and must get straight as soon as possible. For we are all addicted to the horse race-and we can’t win, because it’s fixed. And so, before we end up losing everything, we need to pull ourselves together, face the music, and then take all necessary steps to change the tune.

A 12-Step Program to Save US Democracy

1. Repeal the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).
This step will inevitably follow an in-depth investigation of how HAVA came to be.

2. Replace all electronic voting with hand-counted paper ballots (HCPB).
Although politicians and the press dismiss this idea as utopian, the people would support it just as overwhelmingly as national health care, strong environmental measures, US withdrawal from Iraq, and other sane ideas.

3. Get rid of computerized voter rolls.
It isn’t just the e-voting machines that are obstructing our self-government. According to USA Today, thousands of Americans have had their names mysteriously purged from the electronic databases now used nationwide as records of our registration.

4. Keep all private vendors out of our elections.
With their commercial interests, trade secrets and unaccountable proceedings, private companies should have no role in the essential process of republican self-government.

5. Make it illegal for the TV networks to declare who won before the vote-count is complete.
Certainly the corporate press will scream about its First Amendment Rights, but they don’t have the right to interfere with our elections. When they declare a winner BEFORE WE even know if the election was legitimate, they PRE-DEFINE all audits, recounts and even first counts of the vote as the mere desperate measures of “sore losers.”

6. Set up an exit polling system, publicly supported, to keep the vote-counts honest.
Only in America are exit poll results not meant to help us gauge the accuracy of the official count. Here they are meant only to allow the media to make its calls.

7. Get rid of voter registration rules, by allowing every citizen to register, at any post office, on his/her 18th birthday.
Either we believe in universal suffrage or we don’t.

8. Ban all state requirements for state-issued ID’s at the polls.
As the Supreme Court smiles on such Jim Crow devices, we need a law, or Constitutional amendment, to forbid them.

9. Put all polling places under video surveillance, to spot voter fraud, monitor election personnel, and track the turnout.
We’re under surveillance everywhere else, so why not?

10. Have Election Day declared a federal holiday,
requiring all employers to allow their workers time to vote.
No citizens of the United States should ever lose the right to vote because they have to go to work.

11. Make it illegal for Secretaries of State to co-chair political campaigns (or otherwise assist or favor them).
Katherine Harris wore both those hats in Florida in 2000, and, four years later, so did Ken Blackwell in Ohio and Jan Brewer in Arizona. Such Republicans should not have been allowed to do it, nor should any Democrats.

12. Make election fraud a major felony, with life imprisonment–and disenfranchisement–for all repeat offenders.
“Three strikes and you’re out” would certainly befit so serious a crime against democracy.

***

This comes from Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008, a new collection of writings by the major Election Integrity people, which IG Publishing will be bringing out in early April.
_______
Mark Crispin Miller
About author

Mark Crispin Miller is the author of Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform, which is now out in paperback from Basic Books, with over 100 pages of new material. He may be reached through his blog at markcrispinmiller.com. A movie based on his off-Broadway show, A Patriot Act, is available on DCD at www.patriotnation.us.

Original Article

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Election integrity expert and author of Fooled Again, Mark Crispin Miller, made some remarkable comments while speaking to the LA Election Protection Task Force last night. Robert Carillo Cohen, producer of Hacking Democracy, was also a featured speaker at the event.

After covering some preliminary matters, Miller retold the story of his post 2004 election encounter with John Kerry when the Democratic candidate admitted that he believed the presidential election was stolen. This shouldn’t surprise anyone since, as Miller states:

And believe me, a cursory study of the evidence makes it abundantly clear that the election was stolen and it wasn’t even that close.

Which ultimately leads Miller to conclude that Kerry is in denial:

Because if you really do accept what happened, you realize that it is a catastrophe, it’s an emergency. And it’s something that a guy like John Kerry or Al Gore is simply not built to deal with, right? Because if you come to terms with what went down, you realize that it is an attack on American democracy. Business as usual can’t simply continue. We gotta do something. We gotta hit the barricades.

But resistance to the idea that American democracy is under attack goes far beyond Kerry and Gore. Miller believes the way to break through this resistance is to:

keep publicizing, to keep spreading the word, to keep making clear that it is not just this little thing here or that little thing there, we’re talking about a fringe movement that has taken over the Republican party that has been dismantling democracy, that has been destroying the voting system on every conceivable front, not just the machines. They are even messing with the census. They are preventing another census from being taken because if you have census data you can track this stuff more easily.

Finally, Miller concludes by going over a 12-step approach to reforming our elections.

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