Corporate America controls the media and we get manufactured news.

Corporate America now controls the voting machines and we get manufactured elections.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. ”

– Margaret Mead – US anthropologist & popularizer of anthropology (1901 – 1978)

READ THIS FIRST

• Election Fraud Beginner’s Guide
• What’s Wrong with the News?
• Learn How the Broadcast News Media Deceives You!
• The 14 Characteristics of Fascism – flash video
• AmericanFascism.com
• Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression
• Media manipulation – From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

---

Rush Holt’s HR 550, the most comprehensive piece of election reform legislation written, now has bi-partisan sponsorship and 159 co-sponsors. Let’s make some more noise for its passage. IT’S THE BEST WE’VE GOT RIGHT NOW!
Combining the call for voter-verified paper audit records with mandated, unannounced, random audit of election results, and linking prohibition of undisclosed software and internet connection with accessibility measures, H.R. 550, if passed, would force the Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia e-voting and vote-counting junkware out of the market.
Please sign Rush Holt’s petition and write to your Rep if he/she is not on the H.R.550 co-sponsor list. Thanks. freedomfries

http://www.rushholt.com/petition.html

Dear Members of the House Administration Committee:

On February 2, 2005, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act (H.R. 550) was reintroduced to the U.S. House of Representatives. Its goal is simple: to set a national standard of security and independent auditability for our electoral process, and restore confidence in the outcomes of elections. H.R. 550 would require all voting systems to produce an actual paper record that voters themselves can inspect in the voting booth to check the accuracy of their votes, and that election officials can use to verify the accuracy of the vote count. Commonly referred to as a "voter-verified paper record," it is the most effective way to ensure an independent audit and provide voter-verified evidence as to the accuracy (or not) of election results.

You have heard from Members of the Maryland Delegation, who circulated a letter to the House in March reporting that "election judges unable to provide substantial confirmation that the vote was, in fact, counted" in certain elections in 2004 in Maryland. You have heard from Members of the Florida Delegation, who circulated a letter to the House in April reporting that more than 1,200 undervotes (voters who entered the voting booth without recording a vote) were recorded in an election in early 2005 in Florida in which there was only a single item on the ballot. You have heard from other Members who circulated letters reporting "more than 10,000 instances where a vote was not counted in three counties during the 2004 general election," on the same make of equipment that also was reported to have malfunctioned in Virginia in 2004. You have heard from the bi-partisan team of Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ) and Tom Davis (R-VA, the Chairman of the Government Reform Committee) repeatedly about election disputes resolved with finality by a hand count of voter-verified paper records; about the Carter-Baker Commission of Federal Election Reform’s recommendation for voter-verified paper records; and about the Government Accountability Office’s September 2005 report confirming the existence of a wide variety of irregularities, malfunctions, and inherent risks in unauditable electronic voting. Since H.R. 550’s predecessor bill was first introduced in May 2003, half the States (see map) have implemented requirements for voter-verified paper records. It is time to make this critical security measure a national standard. It is time to act.
….
http://www.rushholt.com/petition.html

The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act (H.R. 550) will:

Mandate a voter-verified paper ballot for every vote cast in every federal election, nationwide; because the voter verified paper record is the only one verified by the voters themselves, rather than by the machines, it will serve as the vote of record in any case of inconsistency with electronic records;
Protect the accessibility requirements of the Help America Vote Act for voters with disabilities;
Require random, unannounced, hand-count audits of actual election results in every state, and in each county, for every Federal election;
Prohibit the use of undisclosed software and wireless and concealed communications devices and internet connections in voting machines;
Provide Federal funding to pay for implementation of voter-verified paper balloting; and
Require full implementation by 2006

Sign the petition!
http://www.rushholt.com/petition.html

H.R. 550 currently has 159 co-sponsors

*Please feel free to thank the current co-sponsors of H.R.550, or encourage others by writing them.

Rep Abercrombie, Neil – 2/2/2005 Rep Ackerman, Gary L. – 3/2/2005
Rep Allen, Thomas H. – 2/2/2005 Rep Andrews, Robert E. – 11/18/2005
Rep Baird, Brian – 2/2/2005 Rep Baldwin, Tammy – 2/2/2005
Rep Barrow, John – 9/6/2005 Rep Becerra, Xavier – 2/9/2005
Rep Berkley, Shelley – 4/5/2005 Rep Berman, Howard L. – 2/2/2005
Rep Berry, Marion – 3/17/2005 Rep Bishop, Sanford D., Jr. – 2/16/2005
Rep Bishop, Timothy H. – 2/16/2005 Rep Blumenauer, Earl – 2/10/2005
Rep Bono, Mary – 9/28/2005 Rep Boucher, Rick – 4/5/2005
Rep Boyd, Allen – 3/2/2005 Rep Brady, Robert A. – 4/20/2005
Rep Brown, Corrine – 2/16/2005 Rep Brown, Sherrod – 2/9/2005
Rep Butterfield, G. K. – 3/17/2005 Rep Capps, Lois – 2/2/2005
Rep Cardin, Benjamin L. – 9/27/2005 Rep Cardoza, Dennis A. – 6/24/2005
Rep Carnahan, Russ – 9/13/2005 Rep Carson, Julia – 2/16/2005
Rep Case, Ed – 2/2/2005 Rep Clay, Wm. Lacy – 2/2/2005
Rep Cleaver, Emanuel – 9/13/2005 Rep Cole, Tom – 2/2/2005
Rep Conyers, John, Jr. – 2/2/2005 Rep Cooper, Jim – 2/2/2005
Rep Crowley, Joseph – 2/16/2005 Rep Cummings, Elijah E. – 2/9/2005
Rep Davis, Danny K. – 3/2/2005 Rep Davis, Jim – 3/2/2005
Rep Davis, Susan A. – 4/20/2005 Rep Davis, Tom – 2/2/2005
Rep DeFazio, Peter A. – 2/2/2005 Rep DeGette, Diana – 3/2/2005
Rep Delahunt, William D. – 2/16/2005 Rep DeLauro, Rosa L. – 3/10/2005
Rep Dicks, Norman D. – 2/2/2005 Rep Dingell, John D. – 3/17/2005
Rep Doggett, Lloyd – 2/16/2005 Rep Doyle, Michael F. – 2/16/2005
Rep Emanuel, Rahm – 2/16/2005 Rep Engel, Eliot L. – 4/5/2005
Rep Eshoo, Anna G. – 2/2/2005 Rep Etheridge, Bob – 2/16/2005
Rep Evans, Lane – 11/18/2005 Rep Farr, Sam – 2/2/2005
Rep Filner, Bob – 2/2/2005 Rep Fitzpatrick, Michael G. – 6/24/2005
Rep Ford, Harold E., Jr. – 3/10/2005 Rep Frank, Barney – 2/9/2005
Rep Gonzalez, Charles A. – 9/28/2005 Rep Gordon, Bart – 4/5/2005
Rep Green, Gene – 6/24/2005 Rep Grijalva, Raul M. – 2/16/2005
Rep Gutierrez, Luis V. – 2/16/2005 Rep Hastings, Alcee L. – 2/2/2005
Rep Higgins, Brian – 2/9/2005 Rep Hinchey, Maurice D. – 2/2/2005
Rep Honda, Michael M. – 2/9/2005 Rep Hooley, Darlene – 2/16/2005
Rep Inslee, Jay – 2/16/2005 Rep Israel, Steve – 4/5/2005
Rep Issa, Darrell E. – 9/6/2005 Rep Jackson, Jesse L., Jr. – 4/5/2005
Rep Jackson-Lee, Sheila – 3/2/2005 Rep Johnson, Eddie Bernice – 2/16/2005
Rep Jones, Stephanie Tubbs – 2/2/2005 Rep Kanjorski, Paul E. – 5/11/2005
Rep Kaptur, Marcy – 2/2/2005 Rep Kennedy, Patrick J. – 5/26/2005
Rep Kildee, Dale E. – 2/9/2005 Rep Kilpatrick, Carolyn C. – 2/2/2005
Rep Kind, Ron – 2/2/2005 Rep Kucinich, Dennis J. – 2/2/2005
Rep Kuhl, John R. "Randy", Jr. – 6/24/2005 Rep Lantos, Tom – 2/2/2005
Rep Larsen, Rick – 2/9/2005 Rep Lee, Barbara – 2/2/2005
Rep Levin, Sander M. – 7/13/2005 Rep Lewis, John – 2/9/2005
Rep Lowey, Nita M. – 3/2/2005 Rep Maloney, Carolyn B. – 2/2/2005
Rep Markey, Edward J. – 4/5/2005 Rep Matheson, Jim – 2/9/2005
Rep McCarthy, Carolyn – 2/9/2005 Rep McCollum, Betty – 2/9/2005
Rep McDermott, Jim – 2/2/2005 Rep McGovern, James P. – 2/2/2005
Rep McKinney, Cynthia A. – 2/2/2005 Rep McNulty, Michael R. – 3/2/2005
Rep Meehan, Martin T. – 9/6/2005 Rep Meek, Kendrick B. – 3/2/2005
Rep Menendez, Robert – 9/13/2005 Rep Michaud, Michael H. – 2/9/2005
Rep Miller, Brad – 7/21/2005 Rep Miller, George – 2/9/2005
Rep Mollohan, Alan B. – 2/2/2005 Rep Moore, Dennis – 2/2/2005
Rep Moore, Gwen – 9/6/2005 Rep Moran, James P. – 2/2/2005
Rep Murtha, John P. – 2/16/2005 Rep Nadler, Jerrold – 2/2/2005
Rep Napolitano, Grace F. – 2/9/2005 Rep Neal, Richard E. – 9/13/2005
Rep Oberstar, James L. – 2/2/2005 Rep Obey, David R. – 2/2/2005
Rep Olver, John W. – 2/16/2005 Rep Owens, Major R. – 2/9/2005
Rep Pallone, Frank, Jr. – 2/9/2005 Rep Pascrell, Bill, Jr. – 2/2/2005
Rep Pastor, Ed – 2/16/2005 Rep Payne, Donald M. – 2/2/2005
Rep Petri, Thomas E. – 2/9/2005 Rep Price, David E. – 2/2/2005
Rep Rahall, Nick J., II – 2/16/2005 Rep Ramstad, Jim – 9/6/2005
Rep Rangel, Charles B. – 2/16/2005 Rep Ross, Mike – 2/9/2005
Rep Rothman, Steven R. – 3/2/2005 Rep Ryan, Tim – 2/9/2005
Rep Sabo, Martin Olav – 2/2/2005 Rep Salazar, John T. – 6/24/2005
Rep Sanchez, Linda T. – 2/9/2005 Rep Sanchez, Loretta – 2/2/2005
Rep Sanders, Bernard – 2/9/2005 Rep Schakowsky, Janice D. – 2/2/2005
Rep Schiff, Adam B. – 2/2/2005 Rep Schwartz, Allyson Y. – 6/24/2005
Rep Scott, Robert C. – 2/2/2005 Rep Serrano, Jose E. – 2/9/2005
Rep Sherman, Brad – 2/2/2005 Rep Slaughter, Louise McIntosh – 5/5/2005
Rep Smith, Adam – 4/5/2005 Rep Snyder, Vic – 2/16/2005
Rep Solis, Hilda L. – 2/9/2005 Rep Stark, Fortney Pete – 4/5/2005
Rep Stupak, Bart – 3/10/2005 Rep Taylor, Gene – 11/18/2005
Rep Thompson, Mike – 2/16/2005 Rep Tierney, John F. – 2/9/2005
Rep Towns, Edolphus – 2/16/2005 Rep Udall, Mark – 2/9/2005
Rep Udall, Tom – 3/2/2005 Rep Van Hollen, Chris – 2/2/2005
Rep Velazquez, Nydia M. – 7/13/2005 Rep Wasserman Schultz, Debbie – 2/9/2005
Rep Watson, Diane E. – 3/10/2005 Rep Waxman, Henry A. – 2/2/2005
Rep Weiner, Anthony D. – 4/5/2005 Rep Wexler, Robert – 2/2/2005
Rep Woolsey, Lynn C. – 2/2/2005 Rep Wu, David – 2/2/2005
Rep Wynn, Albert Russell – 2/9/2005

Posted on Democratic Underground by freedomfries 

… or the DNC will be the "sore losers" in 2006.

Voting Activist Sheri Myers emailed this to me today. She wanted me to post this here. I really like her idea to fax this letter to the DNC.

DIEBOLD ADMITS TO THE GEMS DEFECT (VIDEO CLIP)

On Oct. 17 2005, an ordinary citizen in Cleveland, Mr. Wright, asked 

what may turn out be the most important question of the year. What 

is Diebold’s explanation, he wanted to know, for the VBA Script hack 

of the GEMS central tabulator performed by Dr. Herbert Thompson? 

Here is the videotape showing Diebold Election Systems Chief Engineer 

Pat Green admitting that Diebold knew of the defect since 2004: 

http://www.bbvdocs.org/videos/GEMSDefect.mpg (8,860 KB) 

Black Box Voting has learned that the August 18, 2004 

CompuWare Report was hidden from the public by Ohio Secretary 

of State Ken Blackwell). Here is the tampering risk assessment, 

which Blackwell had in his hands BEFORE the Nov. 2004 election, 

but withheld from both the public and the Election Assistence Commission 

(the federal oversight committee charged with ensuring the security of 

elections in all states, not just Ohio: 

http://www.bbvdocs.org/reports/GEMS-RISK.pdf 

(full report: http://www.bbvdocs.org/reports/diebReasses081804.pdf)

This leads to the crucial question: If Diebold knew, and if Ken 

Blackwell knew, why wasn’t the Election Assistence Commission told, 

why were no other secretaries of state told, why didn’t Blackwell tell 

the Ohio election officials using GEMS, and why weren’t the mitigations 

deemed necessary by CompuWare ever implemented? 

FEC TO INVESTIGATE RAPPER "P. DIDDY" SEAN COMBS

But Ignores Blistering GAO Report on Insecure Voting Machines 

— No Scrutiny of Election Violations — 

According to a press release 

(http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/13160.html,

)issued by the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), a conservative 

“ethics” watchdog group that specializes in filing complaints against 

progressive politicians and groups, the FEC has notified the NLPC 

that it will take up a complaint against rapper Sean Combs for his 

2004 “Vote or Die Campaign.” The NLPC Web site says the case 

has been assigned “Matter Under Review number 5684.” The 

NLPC hypes the so-called investigation, though the FEC letter itself 

appears more tepid, almost a form letter: 

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/FECCombs.pdf 

Black Box Voting, a minority-governed nonpartisan elections watchdog, 

says the FEC has better ways to spend its time and your dime. The FEC 

claims they are not staffed for many investigations. If that’s the case, 

why is a P. Diddy investigation on their priority list at all? 

The FEC is not investigating Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell 

who withheld critical security information. Public records requests

submitted by Black Box Voting have revealed that neither Blackwell nor 

Diebold corrected the GEMS defects before the 2004 election. These

defects remain uncorrected in nearly 800 jurisdictions. 

The FEC is not investigating the findings of the General Accounting 

Office voting system security report, released Oct. 21, 2005, which 

cites multiple security problems with the voting systems currently in 

use. Among the problems cited by the GAO Report: flaws in voting 

system security, access, and hardware controls, weak security 

management practices by vendors, and multiple examples of 

failures in real elections.  Full GAO report:

http://www.bbvdocs.org/reports/GAOReport_ElectionSecurity_102105.pdf

The Help America Vote Act allocated $4 billion to buy voting machines 

that taxpayers never asked for, many of which have turned out to be 

defective. The FEC is not investigating. 

A false claims lawsuit filed by Black Box Voting founder Bev Harris 

and investigator Jim March recovered $2.6 million for California taxpayers 

from Diebold Election Systems because of its poor voting machine 

security and improper testing and certification. The FEC never investigated 

whether such false claims affect any of the other 31 Diebold states, 

even after the California secretary of state requested a criminal investigation, 

citing Diebold’s lies to state authorities. More on false claims suit:

(http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/6738.html)

In October 2005, Black Box Voting revealed documents showing that

 in 2002, Diebold made misrepresentations to the Georgia secretary of 

state. (http://www.bbvdocs.org/diebold/GA-falsehoods.pdf)

In August 2005, Diebold submitted a letter to the Arizona secretary of state

(http://www.bbvdocs.org/diebold/AZ-sos-moreland.pdf) 

which contained serious misrepresentations pertaining to a security 

problem called “the GEMS defect.” One would think that making false 

claims to three secretaries of state in four consecutive years (2002, 

2003, 2004, and 2005), might represent a concern, but the FEC is not 

investigating this. 

(full Georgia sales presentation:

http://www.bbvdocs.org/diebold/GApresentation.pdf)

The FEC is investigating Sean Combs for allegedly flying in a private 

jet while conducting a “get out the vote” drive. The complaint alleges 

that people who spoke at his rallies made statements beneficial to a 

candidate (John Kerry). What the FEC has never investigated is 

Republican Senator Chuck Hagel’s $5 million stake in Election Systems 

& Software, the company that counted Hagel’s votes 

(http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-3.pdf)

when he ran for office in 1996 and 2002. Nor has the FEC investigated 

Wally O’Dell, the Diebold CEO who promised to “deliver the votes to 

Bush in 2004.” 

VOTING MACHINE PROBLEMS AND PROCEDURAL VIOLATIONS HIT HARD NOV. 8 

2005 elections, casting doubt on Ohio and Detroit elections and revealing 

civil rights violations in Los Angeles. 

On Nov. 8, 2005 in Texas, new touch-screens could not choke out a 

result, so technicians for a vendor “manually retrieved” the votes from 

inside the computer. The FEC has asked no follow up questions about 

why a vendor’s technicians are handling votes at all, since they are not 

certified or sworn elections officials, nor has the FEC inquired how touch-

screens with no paper ballots that can’t find their own votes managed to 

pass testing and certification, or how a technician can reach into a touch-

screen to “retrieve” votes. 

http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/13130.html

In Ohio, the Nov. 8, 2005 election produced staggeringly impossible 

numbers, but the FEC is not investigating why more votes showed up 

than voters, nor why the election reform ballot issue voting machine 

results were exactly opposite of the pre-election polls. 

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1559

In Detroit’s Nov. 8, 2005 election, procedures broke down in 26 precincts 

causing nine electronic ballot boxes to go missing. These were not all 

recovered until two days later. At that time, thousands of other bogus 

votes were counted. However, the FEC is not investigating. 

http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/13139.html

Los Angeles citizens aren’t permitted to watch their votes being 

counted, a clear violation of California law. Black Box Voting was 

told the results “came out the same as expected” so we should not 

be concerned. Regardless of whether the votes “come out right,” 

hiding crucial vote-tallying processes is a civil rights violation, and 

powerful Los Angeles County Elections Registrar Conny Drake 

McCormack has a history with minority vote suppression and rights 

violations. 

Before taking the position in Los Angeles County, Registrar 

Conny Drake McCormack was the target of a Texas legislative 

effort referred to as the “Get Conny Drake bill,”(See footnote 1) 

an unsuccessful effort to find a way to fire elections officials who 

engage in voting violations targeting minorities. She had allegedly 

been withholding ballots in African-American districts. On another 

matter, regarding voting machines, she was found by the Department 

of Justice to have violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. She was 

also subjected to a two-year election fraud probe by Texas attorney 

general Jim Mattox on another matter. While still under investigation 

in Texas, Conny Drake McCormack took over elections in San Diego

(replacing Ray Ortiz after he was indicted), then became elections 

chief in Los Angeles County, where she has arranged for votes to 

be counted on a customized, home-brewed tallying system, hidden 

from public view. 

On Nov. 8, Black Box Voting observed Los Angeles County election 

workers conducting a bait and switch. 

(http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/13095.html)

While the press and the public were instructed to look in a window 

to a room containing optical scan machines, results actually came out 

of a different set of computers in another room, which was hidden from 

view. The press was told that the system is certified and tested, but Black 

Box Voting cannot find that the Los Angeles tallying system, customized 

under Conny Drake McCormack, was ever examined by federal testing 

labs or the state of California as required by law. Though she is now 

the most powerful elections official in California — and one of the most 

influential in the nation — the FEC is not investigating Conny Drake McCormack. 

For more information on things the FEC is not investigating, see investigations

(http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/1954.html) 

and News (http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/114.html)

at Black Box Voting (.ORG) 

(Footnote 1) Dallas Morning News, Mar. 31 1987: Elections Chief Resigning 

After Troubled Tenure 

…"bumpy roads … include Attorney General Jim Mattox’s continuing 

investigation into vote-fraud allegations … Ms. McCormack weathered 

investigations by the U.S. Justice Department, the Texas secretary of state’s 

office and the Dallas County district attorney’s office … legislation dubbed

the "Get Conny Drake (her maiden name) bill’ … Top Democratic officials 

called for her ouster. Roy Orr, a commissioner at the time, called her "a jerk 

at the wheel’ and "a typical bureaucrat.’ John Wiley Price, now a commissioner, 

called her a liar and a racist. 

———–

Black Box Voting is a nonprofit, nonpartisan 501c(3) elections watchdog. We 

are fighting for your right as a citizen to view and oversee your own voting

process. Our focus is on increasing your access to the elections process,

obtaining crucial public records to document what is going on in elections, 

and exposing procedural problems that corrupt the integrity of the election.

Black Box Voting is supported entirely by citizen donations. You can support

this important work by clicking here: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/donate.html

or by sending to 330 SW 43rd St. Suite K, PMB 547, Renton WA 98055

———–Black Box Voting

The GOP is Certain to Win in 2006, Unless…

July 26, 2005
By Ernest Partridge, The Crisis Papers

I have frequently been accused of being hopelessly optimistic. Perhaps so: that’s what keeps me going. But now, for those who thrive on gloom and doom – it’s your turn.

Here’s the very bad news – the Democrats will almost certainly lose in 2006 and again in 2008, for three essential reasons: (a) the GOP and the Bush junta simply cannot afford to lose, (b) they can prevent their defeat no matter what the voters have to say about it (as they have in the last three elections), and (c) apparently the Democratic Party, the media, and law enforcement are unable and/or unwilling to do anything about it.

A GOP win in 2006 and 2008 seems simply inevitable – as inevitable as LBJ’s re-election, Nixon completing his second term, and the endurance of the Soviet Union and apartheid South Africa. By this I mean that all this would have come to pass but for some extraordinary and unforeseen developments. Nothing less will budge the GOP from the White House and the Congress.

After all, their "private sector" supporters count and compile the votes with secret software – and do so with no official independent means of validation. These facts about voting in the United States are publicly known and undisputed. And yet, despite compelling and unrefuted evidence of voting fraud, no one, except some determined citizen groups and a small minority of members of Congress, seems willing to do anything about it.

So the GOP will win for three essential reasons. Let’s take them in order:

1. The GOP and Bush, Inc. cannot afford to lose

If the Democrats take control of just one house of Congress in 2006, they will gain the powers of Congressional investigation – the right to issue subpoenas to witnesses and for essential documents, and the right to require witnesses to testify under oath, which carries with it the threat of criminal conviction for perjury. And be assured that should the Democrats take charge of congressional investigations, chaired by such prosecutorial hawks as Henry Waxman, John Conyers and Patrick Leahy, the worm-cans would be opened.

To be sure, Congressional Democrats have recently held unofficial hearings on the 2004 voting irregularities in Ohio, on The Downing Street Memos, on media reform, and on the Karl Rove scandal. But these have all been rather toothless affairs, boycotted by the Republicans, with all testimony volunteered and none under oath. Official Congressional investigations would be a whole other story.

For there is good reason to suspect that the Bush Administration is less a government than it is a crime syndicate, which, thanks to a compliant Congress and Justice Department, has to date done its dirty work without fear of investigation or prosecution. Among the possible crimes that are crying for investigation: war profiteering, Congressional bribery and corruption, election fraud, war crimes, and of course the "outing" of a covert CIA operation – an act which Bush’s own father described as treasonous.

Accordingly, the loss of either house of Congress would not merely send the Busheviks back into private life: it might send many of them straight to federal prison. And the prospects for the GOP malefactors would be still worse if the Democrats reclaimed the White House in 2008, and with it the criminal investigation and prosecution powers of the Justice Department.

Nor is the threat of criminal prosecution the only concern. In addition, with a Democratic victory, the GOP oligarchs would be required to give back the keys to the federal candy store. With a return to fiscal sanity, the super-wealthy might once again be required to pay a fair share of federal taxes. Legislation might be passed to cut back on corporate welfare, to further reform campaign financing, and to reduce the influence of the lobbyists. Furthermore, the corporate foxes would be chased out of the regulatory hen-houses – the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, etc. – thus restoring to these agencies their intended function of protecting the public interest.

In sum, from the point of view of the Republicans, continuing control of the Congress in 2006 and of the White House in 2008 is not simply desirable – it is absolutely mandatory.

2. The GOP can prevent their defeat, no matter what the voters have to say about it

As things now stand, a Democratic win in 2006 is as likely as a vote for the restoration of the Romanov dynasty in the Soviet "elections" of 1930. And for the same reason: the party in power (more precisely its supporters in private business) counts the votes.

Evidence is abundant and compelling that the presidential election of 2004 and key congressional races in 2002 were stolen, primarily through the use of paperless touch-screen voting machines and the software that collected and totaled ("compiled") incoming election returns. Though numerous private individuals and public-interest groups have presented this evidence, it is only through their initiatives that the issue remains alive. Because I have expressed my suspicions repeatedly and at some length, I will not repeat them here.

But let’s suppose, despite all that evidence, that the 2002 and 2004 elections were entirely fair and accurate. If so, this was due solely to the civic-minded decision of the Republicans who built the machines and wrote the software to play it straight. They faced little prospect of exposure if they chose to fix the vote totals. The machines produce no independent record of the votes and, as noted, the software is secret. In addition, as numerous public demonstrations have proven, the machines can be readily hacked leaving no trace of the tampering.

So it comes to this: whether or not the past elections were stolen, the voting technology is now in place (and expanding under the "Help America Vote Act") that will allow its designers, the writers of its software, and whoever might have access to the back-door hookups to produce any election result that they might desire. Short of a confession by a guilty culprit and absent an arithmetic or programming blunder, there is simply no way that fraud can be proven after the fact through an examination of the polling and compiling equipment and software.

To those who demand verification of election returns, there is only one answer: "trust us!" And to those who shout "fraud!" there is the familiar response: "don’t be paranoid."

But while there are no direct means to validate paperless e-votes, statistical analyses of exit polling can provide external indications of election fraud. And in fact they have done just that as, for example, one such study has calculated the probability of Kerry’s loss at less than one in a million. However, we all know how much impact these statistical studies have had on the final "official" results. Zilch!

And what is the Republican response to those troublesome exit polls? Former RNC Chair, Ed Gillespie, has a straightforward answer: abolish the exit polls which, he claims, have been "proven unreliable" in the last three elections. In other words: shoot the messenger.

Then how about legislation requiring a paper record of each vote to provide validation? The Congressional Republicans won’t hear of it. Which causes one to wonder, doesn’t it? Is it just possible that they suspect (as I am convinced) that if we had a free and honest elections, the GOP would be burnt toast?

The bottom line: will the Republicans cheat in order to prevent defeat in 2006? They can if they want to, and as we have noted above, their motivation to avoid defeat is extreme.

3. The Democratic Party, the media, and the law are unwilling to do anything about it

The Democrats

As we all know, John Kerry, who promised to see to it that "every vote was counted," threw in the towel a few hours after the last polls closed, even as an avalanche of reports of vote total anomalies, of voter intimidation, and of voting machine malfunctions were incoming. The Kerry Campaign, sitting on millions of dollars in their war chest, gave no support to the challenges of the Ohio returns – these challenges were pursued by the Libertarian and Green candidates.

The Democratic Party’s continuing refusal to face up to grim realities was made evident in the DNC’s investigation of the irregularities in the 2004 Ohio election, released just last month. As Steven Rosenfeld and Bob Fitrakis of the admirable Columbus Free Press see it:

[The DNC report] is a shocking indictment of a party caught completely off-guard in its most heated presidential campaign in years, and a party that still doesn’t fully understand what happened and how to avoid a repeat in the future.

The report primarily documents the fact that Jim Crow voter suppression tactics targeting Democratic African-American voters were rampant in Ohio’s cities during the 2004 presidential election…

But the DNC reports says those factors do not mean John Kerry won the election, nor does it mean that the new electronic voting machines are unreliable – even though some of the precincts with the highest percentages of reported problems were outfitted with the new electronic voting machines…

The DNC was denied access to the voting machines and software, and to the tabulating computers in Ohio. Apparently on the assumption that what they cannot examine doesn’t exist, the "fraud factor" does not figure significantly into the DNC report.

And so the Democratic Party is cheerfully carrying on as if nothing has changed since Bill Clinton was re-elected in 1996. They are looking hopefully to taking back the Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008, as they fire up the base, and solicit still more contributions. They uncritically assume that all they need to do is get more voters to the polls than the GOP, and that the voting machines and compilers will do the rest – reliably and automatically.

Those poor, naive, fools!

Like Charlie Brown, they just assume that if they run up to the football once again, Lucy won’t snatch it away this time. But of course, GOP-Lucy will do just that, thanks to the Democrats’ reliable gullibility. Like Brooklyn Dodgers fans in the 1940s and 1950s, they keep saying "wait till next year." And next year the "Bums" are creamed again by the Yankees.

2002 and 2004 were "next year" for the Democrats. So too are 2006 and 2008. By refusing to face up to the fact that they’ve been had by the GOP voting machines and software, the Democratic Party is setting itself up for certain defeat in 2006 and 2008.

The Media

A week after the 2004 election, actor Peter Coyote reported:

I received a phone call from a good friend who works at CBS – I’ve known her for years and she is a Producer for some of the news programs, one well known one in particular. She tipped me off that the news media is in a "lock-down" and that there is to be no TV coverage of the real problems with voting on Nov. 2nd. She said similar "lock-down orders" had come down last year after the invasion of Iraq, but this is far worse – far scarier. She said the majority of their journalists at CBS and elsewhere in NYC are pretty horrified – every one is worried about their jobs and retribution Dan Rather style or worse. My source said they’ve also been forbidden to talk about it even on their own time but she was pissed and her journalistic and moral integrity as what she considers to be a government watchdog requires her to speak out, … [and] to "spread" the word…

Regardless of the reliability of Peter Coyote’s report, it is easy enough to tell if the mainstream media (MSM) has put an embargo on the election fraud issue. Just try to find any treatment of the issue on the MSM (Keith Olberman honorably excepted). If there is any such mention, more than likely it is to dismiss accusations of election fraud as "kookery" and "conspiracy theory" – beyond the pale of respectable public opinion.

Thus, what may be the greatest political crime in the history of the American republic is deemed by the MSM as unworthy of their attention. Maybe there was no such crime. But given the unmistakable indication that there might have been, isn’t at least an investigation by the media in order? Say, something on the order of an investigation of the (ultimately innocent) Whitewater land deal by the Clintons?

Law Enforcement

The greatest vulnerability of the e-voting companies might be a rigorous application of state and municipal voting fraud laws. Though I keep a close and steady eye on the issue of electoral integrity, I have heard of no criminal investigations in progress. Have you? If so, please report them to me. (crisispapers@hotmail.com). Of course, if such investigations are in their early stages, the public is unlikely to hear of them. So some good news just might be in the pipeline.

Is there any hope?

Not if things continue as they are. There may have to be a dramatic disruption in the flow of events. And there is no guarantee that this disruption won’t have horrible consequences. For example, if Al Qaeda manages to slip a nuclear device into a shipping container and it goes off in one of our ports, all bets are off. Martial law is a distinct probability, and American democracy will be a goner.

As it happens, Bush’s Department of Homeland Security has done precious little to intercept such horrors. And who knows, Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert operation just might have been able to intercept it – had she been allowed to stay on the job.

Hopefully, if a different kind of "dramatic disruption" comes around, it will work to our favor. For all we know, it may even now be in its early stages: the Rove/Plame/CIA scandal may be at the "third-rate burglary" phase, with the analogs to "the cancer on the Presidency" and the White House tapes still to come. The new "deep throat" may yet enter the stage.

Tomorrow, some state Attorney General or municipal District Attorney might open an investigation of voting fraud. In the United States, elections are administered on the state and municipal level. So if paperless machines were used in said AG’s or DA’s jurisdiction, Diebold and ES&S executives and technicians could be subpoenaed and required to testify under oath. If in fact these companies cooperated in the stealing of a Presidential election, "the truth is out there" to be gathered and exposed by an aggressive prosecutor.

Would that kind of news be just too much to be ignored by the MSM? Who knows? If the truth is that the conduct of all recent elections was 100% copasetic, then the GOP should welcome such investigations. It may be noteworthy that the GOP does not seem to be encouraging such investigations.

Is the mainstream media united and unmovable in its determination to spare the American public the discomfort of reading or hearing bad news about its government and its president? The credibility and audience of the MSM is falling alongside the public opinion scores of George W. Bush. Will one or two mainstream TV networks or print publications defect from the pack and try to do journalism for a change? Will others follow? Or will the MSM become irrelevant as alternative and independent media and the Internet become the primary public sources of news? (The "Pravda/Samizdat solution").

Is the CIA going to sit still for this? After all, that’s in their charter – stay out of US politics. But of this much we can be confident; the rank and file of the CIA is super-pissed-off. One of their own has been trashed, her operation demolished, and dozens (?) of agents and operatives put in grave danger. Possibly some have been killed. Nor is that all. The CIA has been asked to take the fall for the Iraq fiasco – the result of "flawed intelligence" the Bushistas tell us. The motto on the floor at Langley, The Truth Shall Make Your Free, has been effectively supplanted with The Truth Shall Get You Canned.

Pissing off the CIA can be a very dangerous business. These folks are very good at overthrowing governments. What does it take to get them to bring these skills home? I’m not talking about tanks surrounding the White House. Just the usual bag of behind the scenes spook-tricks: bribery, blackmail, intimidation, disinformation – you know, the sort of stuff that Karl Rove uses to perfection. If I were Bush, I’d be afraid – very afraid.

What about the Republicans? To date, they are a solid block. In the entire GOP Congressional delegation, not a single Senator or Congressperson has stood up to denounce and deplore Plamegate. What does it take for at least some Republicans to face up to their conflict of loyalties between the Republican Party and the United States Constitution, to which they all swore an oath of allegiance? Where is today’s Howard Baker, now that the country so desperately needs him? Might it be Voinovich? Chaffee? Snowe? Collins? Lugar? McCain? Maybe Chuck Hagel, who has a lot to tell us about e-voting. When will just a few Republicans come to appreciate that, as in Watergate, if the President goes down he could take the party down with him – to avoid which, they may have to cut him loose? When a few start to defect, who will follow?

Then there’s the economy. A sudden downturn would surely get the public’s attention. How long will China and Japan continue to support our deficit spending? As middle class incomes continue to decline, consumer debt expands, and interest rates rise, when does the retail market collapse? With China, Japan and India entering the market and production at a peak, oil and gas prices can only go up. Most informed economists outside of Bush’s reservation are pessimistic. Clearly, the U.S. economy can not go on like this, and yet Bush is determined to stay the course – all the way to and over the precipice.

Something’s gotta give – and when it does, if the Democrats are smart, resourceful and bold, will seize the moment. But if they sit by and ponder, as they’ve been inclined to do of late, then they, and we, are done for.

What to do?

Can the GOP be beaten in 2006 and 2008? As we said, not if things continue as they are. So do we give up? Not on your life! We do our utmost to determine that things do not continue as they are.

Here are some suggestions (and send me some of your own):

If you live in a state or a district that uses paperless voting machines, and if there is statistical or other evidence of voting fraud, contact your state Attorney General or your local District Attorney and demand a criminal investigation.

As the 2006 election approaches, join the determined effort to abolish e-voting and to use paper ballots instead. Failing that, demand paper receipts from the e-voting machines. If, as is likely, e-voting and computer compilation remains in place, it is still possible to institute safeguards, e.g., double-balloting, random inspection of touch-screen machines, and parallel compilation of regional votes. (For more details, see my "What Can We The People Do About Election Fraud?")

Insist on exit polling. If the RNC tries to put the exit polling companies out of business, set up alternative exit polls. Same with pre-election polls.

A simple majority may not suffice in your district or state. Work relentlessly for a super-majority. If sufficiently large, the "fixers" might not dare to steal the election. Suppose, for example, that the imminently defeatable Rick Santorum were behind in the late polls by 65% to 35%. How would a "surprise" Santorum victory go down? Add this to several more "surprises," resulting in continuing GOP control of Congress. Might it finally dawn on the U.S. public that their trips to the polls are a waste of time, and that the election results are simply what the GOP want them to be? And might that public finally begin to see the 2002 and 2004 elections in a new light?

Above all, remember: if things continue as they are, we’re cooked. The GOP will not be stopped. They count the votes. Simple as that. We must see to it that things don’t continue as they are.

Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics and Public Policy. He publishes the website, The Online Gadfly and co-edits the progressive website, The Crisis Papers. Send comments to: crisispapers@hotmail.com.

Crisis Papers Archive

These are two of the best articles I have seen on the subject.

Final Tallies Minus Exit Polls = A Statistical Mystery!
by John Allen Paulos

Professor of mathematics at Temple University and winner of the 2003 American Association for the Advancement of Science award for the promotion of public understanding of science, John Allen Paulos is the author of several best-selling books, including Innumeracy and A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market.

OpEd in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Nov. 24, 2004

http://www.math.temple.edu/~paulos/exit.html

Note: The belated "official" response" of January 19, 2005 to the controversy certainly points to a possible explanation, but I can’t say that I’m at all convinced by it. Unfortunately, if people – and the media in particular – couldn’t rouse themselves to demand (the investigation needed for) a truly convincing explanation before the inauguration, they certainly aren’t going to demand one now. Alas …

Why did the exit polls taken on election day in the battleground states differ so starkly from the final tallies in those states? As my crosstown colleague, Steven Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania has demonstrated in his paper, "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy," the pattern is unmistakable. In Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida, the differences between Bush’s final tallies and his earlier exit poll percentages were, respectively, 6.7%, 6.5%, and 4.9%.

Similarly huge differences between the final tallies and the exit poll percentages occurred in 10 of the 11 battleground states, all of them in Bush’s favor. If the people sampled in the exit polls were a random sample of voters, Freeman’s standard statistical techniques show that these large discrepancies are way, way beyond the margins of error. Suffice it to say that the odds against them occuring by chance in just the three states mentioned above are almost a million to one.

Since exit polls historically have been quite accurate (there is no question about likely voters, for example) and the differences as likely to have been in one candidate’s favor as the other’s, we’re confronted with the question of what caused them. Given the indefensible withholding of the full exit poll data by Edison Media Research, Mitofsky International, the Associated Press and various networks, we can only hazard guesses based on what was available election night. The obvious speculation, alluded to above, is that the exit samples were decidedly non-random.

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The Strange Death of American Democracy:
Endgame in Ohio
by Michael Keefer

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE501A.html

www.globalresearch.ca
24 January 2005

snip

Like the unsavoury Katherine Harris, who was Florida Secretary of State in 2000 and simultaneously state Chair of the Florida Bush-Cheney campaign, Kenneth Blackwell occupied a strategic double position as Co-Chair of the Ohio Bush-Cheney campaign and Secretary of State in what analysts correctly anticipated would be the key swing state of the 2004 election. From this position, a growing body of evidence shows, he was able to oversee a partisan and racist pre-election purging of the electoral rolls,<10> a clearly partisan reduction of the number of voting precincts in counties won by Gore in 2000 (a move that helped suppress the 2004 Democratic turnout),<11> a partisan and racist misallocation of voting machines (which effectively disenfranchised tens of thousands of African-American voters),<12> a partisan and racist system of polling-place challenges (which together with electoral roll purges obliged many scores of thousands of African-Americans to vote with ‘second-class-citizen’ provisional ballots),<13> and a fraudulent pre-programming of touch-screen voting machines that produced a systematic ‘flipping’ of Democratic votes into Bush’s tally or the trash can.<14> In a nation that enforced its own laws, the misallocation of voting machines–a clear violation of the equal protection provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution–would alone have sufficed to invalidate the Ohio election.

Having overseen one of the more flagrantly corrupt elections in recent American history, Blackwell and his Republican machine proceeded to "take care of the counting"–which involved a partisan and racist dismissal of scores of thousands of African-American ballots as "spoiled,"<15> a flagrantly illegal "lock-down" of the vote-tallying process in Warren County on the transparently false grounds of a supposed terrorist threat,<16> massive electronic vote-tabulation fraud in this and other south-western Ohio counties,<17> and marginally less flagrant but evidently systematic forms of ‘ghost-voting’ and vote theft elsewhere in the state.<18>Blackwell then saw to it (with the active assistance of partisan Republican judges, and the passive assistance of a strangely supine Democratic Party) that no even partial recount–let alone anything resembling a voting-machine or vote-tabulator audit–could get under way prior to the selection of Ohio’s Republican electors to the Electoral College.<19>

He also did his utmost to block public access to election data, ordering the Boards of Election in all eighty-eight Ohio counties to prevent public inspection of poll books until after certification of the vote, which he delayed until December 6th.<20> On December 10th, his Election Administrator, Pat Wolfe, intervened to prevent analysis of poll-book data by ordering, on Blackwell’s authority, a renewed "lock-down" of voting records in Greene County and the entire state. (According to Ohio Revised Code Title XXXV Elections, Sec. 3503.26, such records are to be open to the public; Ohio Revised Code Sec. 3599.42 explicitly declares that any violation of Title XXXV "constitutes a prima facie case of election fraud….")<21>

Bizarrely enough, on the night following the statement to election observers in Greene County that all voter records in the State of Ohio were "locked down" and "not considered public records," the Greene County offices were left unlocked: when the same election observers returned at 10:15 on the morning of Saturday, December 11th, they found the building open, a light on in the office (which had not been on when it was closed on the evening of the 10th), and all of the poll books and voting machines unsecured.<22>

When at last the Green and Libertarian parties’ lawyers were able to obtain a recount, Blackwell presided over one that was fully as corrupt as the election had been. Sample hand recounts were to be carried out in each county, involving randomly-selected precincts constituting at least three percent of the vote; any disagreements between the sample recount and the official tally were supposed to prompt a full county-wide hand recount. According to Green Party observers, however, a substantial proportion of Ohio’s eighty-eight counties broke the law by not selecting their hand-recount precincts randomly.<23> There is evidence, most crucially, that Triad Governmental Systems, the private corporation responsible for servicing the vote-tabulation machines in about half of the state, tampered with selected machines in counties across Ohio immediately before the recount in order to ensure that the sample recount tallies would conform with the official vote tallies.<24> (Triad’s technicians knew which machines to tamper with because, it would appear, Board of Election officials, in open violation of the law, told them which precincts had been pre-selected.)

Despite this widespread tampering, there were discrepancies in at least six counties between the sample hand recounts and the official tallies–and yet the Board of Elections refused to conduct full county-wide hand recounts.<25> As David Swanson writes,"Only one county conducted a full hand recount, which resulted in 6 percent more votes than in the original vote. Those extra votes were evenly split between Kerry and Bush, but–even assuming that one county’s votes have now been properly counted–how do we know where votes in the other 87 counties would fall? Should an extra several percent of them show up, and should they be weighted toward Kerry, the election would not have yet been what the media keeps telling us it is: over.<26>

more…

Posted on Democratic Underground by TruthIsAll

The DNC 2004 Election Report: An indictment of incompetence
by Steven Rosenfeld and Bob Fitrakis
June 25, 2005

The Democratic National Committee’s investigation into Ohio’s 2004 presidential election irregularities is the perfect postscript to the party’s ‘election protection’ efforts last fall: it is a shocking indictment of a party caught completely off-guard in its most heated presidential campaign in years, and a party that still doesn’t fully understand what happened and how to avoid a repeat in the future.

The report primarily documents the fact that Jim Crow voter suppression tactics targeting Democratic African-American voters were rampant in Ohio’s cities during the 2004 presidential election. It cites and spends most of its time analyzing the most visible problems: from shortages of voting machines in minority precincts, to unreasonable obstacles to voter registration, to disproportionate use of provisional ballots on Election Day among new voters and Democratic constituencies, to inadequate poll worker training and election administration, to poor post-Election Day record keeping.

But the DNC reports says those factors do not mean John Kerry won the election, nor does it mean that the new electronic voting machines are unreliable – even though some of the precincts with the highest percentages of reported problems were outfitted with the new electronic voting machines, known as DREs. The DNC asked for access to the new electronic voting machines and their software, but was denied by local election officials and the private manufacturers. The report leaves the matter there.

It is statements like this one, on page 189, and a failure to follow-through that make the report more than a disappointment to election protection workers, voter rights advocates and those grassroots activists who worked for John Kerry’s campaign. Speaking of the new electronic voting machines, the DNC report states, that “many of the county boards (of elections) do not actually control the electronic records created during the tallying process.” When the Fairfield County Board of Elections was asked for election results, they merely forwarded data from a private vendor.

Since county vote totals are tabulated on computers and sent directly to the Secretary of State’s office – who has real-time access to those figures – you might expect the report to address the question of whether the 2004 vote count was susceptible to fraud. It doesn’t.

The DNC says it sought access to the computers used to record and tabulate Ohio votes, but those same county boards of election that didn’t control the data – and the voting machine manufacturers who did – declined, citing “security concerns” (p.187) and “vendors pointed out their extreme discomfort with providing this sort of access to a partisan organization.”

That might sound reasonable, if you don’t recall – and the report does not recall – that the chief executive of the nation’s largest electronic voting machine manufacturer, Diebold’s Walden O’Dell, was not only a top-tier fundraiser for George W. Bush, but also promised in an infamous August 14, 2003 fundraising letter to Republicans that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." Also, both ES&S and Triad corporations, the latter which tabulated ballots in 41 of Ohio’s 88 counties, have well-established Republican ties.

The DNC report is filled with omissions of that magnitude and dismissals of the work of citizen-activists who – with no help from the DNC, or Kerry campaign – fought for a fair accounting of the 2004 vote after Election Day.

Consider these paragraphs from an introductory letter to the report from Donna Brazile, the chair of the DNC’s Voting Rights Institute.

“Although voters across America voiced concerns which questioned the fairness and the accuracy of the 2004 general election, President George W. Bush’s narrow victory in Ohio (a pivotal state) provided sufficient electoral votes to ensure his re-election. There was a myriad of litigation surrounding the general election in Ohio that targeted controversial conduct on the part of the Office of the Secretary of State.

“Following the election recount, the House Judiciary Democratic Staff published an exhaustive report, “Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio” that is replete with anecdotal evidence of numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters.”

People who put their lives on hold and went to Ohio to work for John Kerry will shake their heads. Brazile cites “a myriad of litigation” that her party and candidate fought, did not fund and sought to undermine. Moreover, the reference to the House Judiciary Committee’s Democrat Staff inquiry as “anecdotal” is an insult to voting rights activists and volunteer lawyers who conducted public hearings – at their own expense, not the DNC’s – and took sworn testimony from more than 1,000 voters who cared enough and volunteered to testify under oath and file affidavits. The hearings were anything but anecdotal; they were perhaps the largest group of people to testify under oath about elections in the history of the state. The first two hearings in Columbus occurred within two weeks of Election Day. Four other hearings in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo and Warren occurred more than a month before the DNC could conduct its phone survey from the east coast.

It’s worth remembering the timing and origin of this report. The Democratic Party and its allied supporters, such as Americans Coming Together, spent millions of dollars on their election protection efforts. The same Ohio Democratic Party that told John Kerry not to challenge the result and to concede to Bush, also was completely caught off-guard with Republican’s resurrection of Jim Crow voter suppression tactics, according to its own report. What kind of a party stations hundreds of lawyers at polls in anticipation of poll challenges that don’t happen, but isn’t aware that voting machines will not be evenly distributed among white and black neighborhoods? Or isn’t aware of the fact that newly registered voters aren’t receiving proper precinct information, or are being targeted with new provisional ballots that are likely to be disqualified on frivolous technicalities?

There’s more history to the DNC report. The DNC announced it would investigate election irregularities on December 6th, two days before Rep. John Conyers, D-MI, and Democrats on the House Judiciary opened their first of several hearings into the 2004 Ohio presidential vote. In effect, the DNC knew Conyers’ inquiry would be explosive and sought to pre-empt his investigation by announcing its inquiry first.

The Ohio Democratic Party wanted nothing to do with examining the evidence of voting fraud – what Brazille derides as "anecdotal" – and did not participate in the election recount. The Kerry-Edwards campaign joined the recount effort late, only after it was embarrassed by the Libertarian and Green Parties. The Kerry campaign gave several hundred thousand dollars to the gubernatorial recount in Washington, but didn’t advance a dime to the Ohio election challenge lawsuit.

What the DNC did was announce – two days before Conyers’ first hearing – that its review would not contest the election results, but would “fulfill the Democratic Party’s commitment to ensuring that every eligible voter can vote and every vote cast is counted.” Rather than achieve that lofty goal, the party conceded for a second time – Kerry’s concession being first – by confirming Bush’s victory before a recount was completed and similarly by avoiding participation in a voter challenge suit.

The report contains other outrages. It states African-American voters waited an average of 52 minutes in line, compared to white voters waiting an average of 18 minutes. That calculation defies the experience of thousands of voters who waited four, five or six hours. That figure is the kind of statistical averaging is akin to having a tornado touch down in Columbus and having the National Weather Service say its been a breezy day across the state.

In the primarily African American 55th ward in Columbus, on the ground election protection volunteers clocked an average wait of 3 hours and 15 minutes. In the adjacent inner city 5th ward, the wait was 3 hours and 5 minutes. The Franklin County Board of Elections, under the control of former Franklin County Republican Party Chair Matt Damschroder failed to put out 76 voting machines by his own admittance. All 76 from the Democratic-rich city of Columbus and 42 of them from the African American wards on the city’s near east side. Apparently, a few blacks in Bucyrus didn’t wait long and needed to be averaged into the DNC’s report totals.

But the biggest disappointment of the DNC report is that it gives no indication that the old-school Jim Crow abuses will be addressed and rectified, and that the newer school electronic voting machine abuses will be similarly addressed. The report portrays a statewide landscape of separate and unequal rules in election jurisdictions across the state. It says local and statewide election officials – and the private companies they hire – aren’t interested in cooperating to make the system more transparent and equitable. And the party hierarchy that commissioned this report dismisses the work of its activists and loyal volunteers who worked before and after the 2004 race for electoral justice.

Is that any way to prepare for 2006 or 2008? Read the report at www.democrats.org and decide for yourself if the DNC learned the real lessons of 2004 in Ohio.

—
Steve Rosenfeld and Bob Fitrakis are co-editors, with Harvey Wasserman, of DID GEORGE W. BUSH STEAL THE 2004 ELECTION: ESSENTIAL DOCUMENTS, published by www.freepress.org. Revised June 26, 2005

Introduction: Did George W. Bush steal America’s 2004 election?
by Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman
June 16, 2005

The following text is the Introduction to the 767 page: Did George W. Bush Steal America’s 2004 Election? Essential Documents. You can buy the book here.

This volume of documents is meant to provide you, the reader, with evidence necessary to make up your own mind.

Few debates have aroused more polarized ire. But too often the argument has proceeded without documentation. This volume of crucial source materials, from Ohio and elsewhere, is meant to correct that problem.

Amidst a bitterly contested vote count that resulted in unprecedented action by the Congress of the United States, here are some news accounts that followed this election, which was among the most bitterly contested in all US history:

• Despite repeated pre-election calls from officials across the nation and the world, Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State, who also served as Ohio’s co-chair for the Bush-Cheney campaign, refused to allow non-partisan international and United Nations observers the access they requested to monitor the Ohio vote. While such access is routinely demanded by the U.S. government in third world nations, it was banned in the American heartland.

• A post-election headline from the Akron Beacon Journal cites a critical report by twelve prominent social scientists and statisticians, reporting: "Analysis Points to Election ‘Corruption’: Group Says Chance of Exit Polls Being So Wrong in ’04 Vote is One-in-959,000."

• Citing "Ohio’s Odd Numbers," investigative reporter Christopher Hitchens, a Bush supporter, says in Vanity Fair: "Given what happened in that key state on Election Day 2004, both democracy and common sense cry out for a court-ordered inspection of its new voting machines."

• Paul Krugman of the New York Times writes: "It’s election night, and early returns suggest trouble for the incumbent. Then, mysteriously, the vote count stops and observers from the challenger’s campaign see employees of a voting-machine company, one wearing a badge that identifies him as a county official, typing instructions at computers with access to the vote-tabulating software.

When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The challenger demands an investigation. But there are no ballots to recount, and election officials allied with the incumbent refuse to release data that could shed light on whether there was tampering with the electronic records.

This isn’t a paranoid fantasy. It’s a true account of a recent election in Riverside County, California…"

• Hundreds of Ohio African-American voters give sworn testimony that they were harassed, intimidated, deprived of voting machines, given faulty ballots, confronted with malfunctioning machines and hit with a staggering range of other problems that deprived them of votes that were destined for John Kerry, votes that might have tipped the Ohio outcome.

• A team of high-powered researchers discover results in three southern Ohio counties where an obscure African-American candidate for the state Supreme Court somehow outpolls John Kerry, a virtually impossible outcome indicating massive vote fraud costing Kerry thousands of votes.

• Up until 11pm Eastern time on election night, exit polls show John Kerry comfortably leading George Bush in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Mexico, giving him a clear victory in the Electoral College, and a projected national margin of some 1.5 million votes. These same exit polls had just served as the basis for overturning an election in Ukraine, and are viewed worldwide as a bedrock of reliability. But after midnight the vote count mysteriously turns, and by morning George W. Bush is declared the victor.

There is far far more…enough, indeed, to result in massive court filings, unprecedented Congressional action and a library full of documents leading to bitter controversy over the 2004 election, especially in Ohio.

In this volume, we have attempted to present many of the most crucial of those documents.

Do they prove that George W. Bush stole the U.S. presidential election of 2004?

Should John Kerry rather than Bush have been certified by the Electoral College on January 6, 2005?

Historians will be debating that for centuries. What follows are some of the core documents they will use in that debate:

The most hotly contested evidence comes most importantly from Ohio, whose 20 electoral votes decided the election. But it also comes from other key swing states—-especially Florida and New Mexico—-where exit polls and other evidence raise questions about the officially certified vote tallies in favor of Bush.

As mentioned, this book presents the most crucial documents indicating how this bitterly contested election was actually decided.

But it is also this book’s purpose to memorialize the successful grassroots campaign by voting rights advocates that forced an historic Congressional challenge on the floors of the U.S. Senate and House. Acting on an 1887 law that grew out of the stolen election of 1876, a concerned constituency called into question before Congress the electoral votes of an entire state for the first time in U.S. history.

Brought forth by U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and by Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH), the Ohio electoral delegation challenge was the product of a unique grassroots campaign whose work is also documented here. As the New York Times described it, "In many ways, the debate came about because of the relentless efforts of a small group of third-party activists, liberal lawyers, Internet muckrakers and civil rights groups, who have been arguing since Election Day that the Ohio vote was rigged for Mr. Bush."

The research and writing in this book has focussed on Ohio, where we have been collectively reporting on electoral politics for more than three decades.

While the alleged irregularities, frauds and illegalities that transpired here in 2004 have probably generated the most thorough documention of any state, important parallel assertions have arisen in other states around the country, most importantly Florida and New Mexico.

As journalists and researchers with deep roots in Columbus, the state capitol, we warned of serious problems developing in how Ohio’s 2004 balloting was being administered even before the actual votes were cast.

Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell who oversaw the Ohio election, is an outspoken, extremely controversial partisan who also served as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign, a conflict of interest that aroused much anger.

In his dual role, Blackwell seemed to replay the part of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. In 2000 Harris also served as co-chair of the state’s Bush-Cheney campaign while administering the election that first gave them the White House. In both cases, Harris and Blackwell termed the elections "highly successful."

But were these "successes" defined in terms of their public servant roles as Secretaries of State? Or were they defined in terms of their partisan roles as campaign co-chairs for George W. Bush?

In this volume’s first three documents, we reproduce articles published before November 2, 2004. Widely distributed throughout the Internet weeks before the election, they warned that a wide range of abuses stemming from Secretary Blackwell’s office and other sources had already tainted the outcome of the upcoming Ohio vote.

On Election Day, these warnings seemed tragically prophetic. The balloting throughout Ohio was riddled with a staggering array of irregularities, apparent fraud and clear illegalities. Many of the questions focused on electronic voting machines whose lack of official accountability and a reliable paper trail had been in the news since the bitterly contested election of 2000, four years earlier. (Similar questions also arose in Georgia in 2002, where Democratic candidates for Governor and US Senate had substantial leads in the major polls right up to election day, only to lose by substantial margins).

The most widely publicized Ohio problems came as predominantly African-American precincts turned up suspiciously short of voting machines. Inner-city voters waited three hours on average and up to seven hours, according to election officials and to sworn testimony of local residents. Many voters stood in the cold rain to cast their ballots while nearby white Republican suburbs suffered virtually no delays. The wait at liberal Kenyon College, located in Knox County, Ohio, was eleven hours, while voters at a nearby conservative Bible school could vote in five minutes.

To this day no one can definitively tell how many citizens, seeing the long lines, went home or to work or to take care of their children, thus losing their right to vote.

But long waits were hardly the only problems predominantly Democratic voters encountered on Election Day. Selective harassment by partisan poll "inspectors," provisional ballot manipulations, missing registration records, denial of absentee ballots, absentee ballots pre-punched for Bush, faulty computer screens reflecting votes for Bush that were meant for Kerry, apparently deliberate misinformation regarding polling locations, inadequate poll worker training in predominantly Democratic precincts, and much much more threw scores of polling places into serious disarray.

In two heated public post-election hearings, attended by a thousand central Ohioans, several hundred angry voters testified – under oath – on the details of the irregularities that quickly led to the widespread belief that the election had been stolen. Their testimony got virtually no mainstream media coverage. But the verbatim essence of their sworn affidavits appears in this book.

Like the elections of 2000 and 2002, much of the doubt about the election of 2004 continues to center on the counting of votes, especially on electronic voting machines.

About 15% of Ohio’s ballots were cast on computerized devices that left no paper trail. With more than 5.7 million votes cast in a state yielding an official margin for Bush of less than 117,000 votes, a skewed vote count on those machines alone could have made the difference for George W. Bush.

Sworn testimony recorded in public hearings in Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo, and Warren cast serious doubt on how those voting machines performed. In Warren, voters pressing Kerry’s name on electronic screens repeatedly saw Bush’s name light up. In predominantly Democratic Lucas County, Diebold Opti-scan machines broke down early in the day and were never fixed, denying thousands – mostly Democrats – their right to vote.

Reports surfacing in other precincts verified that technicians dismantled key electronic machines before a recount could be certified. Election officials in Franklin County (where Columbus is located) reported that 77 of their machines malfunctioned on Election Day, virtually all of them in heavily Democratic precincts. Inner city precincts in Cincinnati and Cleveland had all-too-familiar Florida-style problems with their punch card machines.

To date, there has been no credible, independent audit of these machines, not in Ohio or in any other state. In Ohio, Secretary of State Blackwell issued an order in the weeks following the election that all 2004 election records, paper and electronic, were to be sealed from public access and inspection. As of this book’s publication date, those records remain unobtainable.

The controversy surrounding the voting machines remains extremely fierce in part because major manufacturers such as Diebold, ES&S, Triad, and others are controlled by partisan Republican companies with secret proprietary software. This unfortunate lack of transparency calls all U.S. elections into question.

In a highly publicized controversy, Diebold principle Walden O’Dell, a resident of central Ohio, pledged in a 2003 GOP fundraising letter to deliver Ohio’s electoral votes to George W. Bush, leaving the indelible suspicion that he might do it fraudulently. U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) is a principle in another major voting machine company, ES&S, on which many millions of votes were cast in 2004. Hagel was elected and re-elected in balloting that relied on ES&S machines. Such apparent conflicts of interest have left the poisonous impression that America’s right to cast a ballot in secret has been transcended by a private partisan company’s right to count votes in secret.

In fact, the question of electronic voting machines remains the single largest "black hole" in the entire electoral process. Nationwide at least 30% of the votes in 2004 were cast on such "black box" machines, more than enough to have tipped the balance in the popular vote from John Kerry to George W. Bush.

Despite the intense battle over this election and the scrutiny it has received worldwide, it is virtually certain there will never be a clear answer as to how many votes cast on those machines really went to which candidate. The 3.5 million-vote margin claimed by George W. Bush in the 2004 election remains unverifiable and, at best, forever suspect.

In reaction, GOP operatives have put forth three major arguments to defend a Bush victory.

First, they argue that in Ohio and elsewhere, county election boards are bi-partisan, meaning Democrats would have had to accede to any theft of an election. This book provides a verbatim interview from William Anthony, Democratic election board member in Ohio’s Franklin County. Among other things, Anthony confirms that Blackwell had the power to remove any election board member, including Democrats, whose actions displeased him. Anthony and other Ohio election board members confirm that Blackwell in fact made at least one such threat in the lead-up to the 2004 election. And that Blackwell specifically denied central Ohioans access to paper ballots, a decision that might well have affected the overall outcome.

Republicans also argue that exit polls were wrong because Republicans failed to respond to them throughout the country on election day. They also say a late surge of evangelical voters in Florida and elsewhere overwhelmed the polling data, and that social issues prompted tens of thousands of core Democrats to drop their long-standing party loyalties and to vote for George W. Bush where in 2000 they had voted by wide margins for Al Gore.

These assertions remain unsupported by hard data. A number of documents in this book indicate they could not be true. And in large part as a result of these refutations, the movement demanding further scrutiny of the national vote continued to gain momentum in the weeks and months after the election.

Amidst the bitter controversy that was voiced in Ohio’s post-election public hearings, unprecedented national attention began to focus on what may or may not have happened here. In late November, the Reverend Jesse Jackson let it be known he had serious questions about the conduct of the Ohio balloting.

In a series of visits Jackson rallied an African-American community that felt it had been deprived of its vote. A former cohort of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jackson compared the grassroots campaign for voter justice in Ohio to the civil rights marches of the 1950s and 1960s. Terming the campaign here "a bigger deal than Selma," Jackson likened what happened in Ohio 2004 to the deprivation of black voting rights throughout the Jim Crow South dating to the 1890s.

As a grassroots movement grew within the state – and across the nation – to demand a recount, Jackson enlisted the support of Congressman John Conyers (D-MI) and Rep. Tubbs Jones. While a citizens movement demanded to know what Ohio had to hide, Secretary of State Blackwell dragged his feet on the recount. He used a wide range of legal and bureaucratic maneuvers that deprived the public of meaningful scrutiny prior to the convening of the Electoral College, which Blackwell had long since proclaimed would go for Bush.

The grassroots efforts coalesced into two legal actions. On the morning of December 13, at the federal courthouse in Columbus, suits were filed on behalf of candidates from the Green and Libertarian Parties, demanding that the Ohio Electors not be seated until a full investigation of both the balloting and the recount could be conducted. Meanwhile, the convenors of the citizens’ post-election hearings assembled a legal team to file two election challenge lawsuits, Moss v. Bush, and Moss v. Moyer, at Ohio’s Supreme Court.

Rev. Bill Moss, a former member of the Columbus School Board, was the lead plaintiff in the suits, filed against George W. Bush and Thomas Moyer, Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court. Small donor contributions from across the country financed both actions.

Later that morning, Rep. Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, convened a public forum on voting irregularities in Ohio that was covered by C-SPAN. Conyers had already taken testimony at a hearing in Washington. Now he was joined by Rep. Jones and Congressman Ted Strickland (D-OH), Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), Congressman Jerome Nadler (D-NY) and others at the Columbus City Council Chambers. The hearing had originally been called for the Statehouse, but Republicans there denied the Congressional delegation a room.

Taking additional testimony from Ohioans who were denied their right to vote, Conyers’ City Hall hearing also heard from national election experts. While they testified, Republican Electors cast their ballots around the corner at the statehouse, votes that would, as Blackwell predicted, give the election to George W. Bush.

In the wake of these new hearings, and with growing momentum built by Jackson, Jones, Conyers and others, a truly national movement arose to demand a new look at what had happened on November 2. With an almost total blackout on all coverage from the mainstream media, the vast bulk of the information was spread through www.FreePress.org. The Free Press articles were in turn picked up by www.CommonDreams.org, www.Truthout.org and other democracy-minded internet outlets. Co-authors Fitrakis, Wasserman and Rosenfeld appeared on Air America Radio Shows hosted by Laura Flanders, Randi Rhodes, Stephanie Miller, and Marty Kaplan, as well as Pacifica Radio, NPR, independent radio stations and with Amy Goodman on the Democracy Now TV network.

But by and large, the fact that the story spread at all was a tribute to the ability of the Internet to operate independently from the major media, whose scant coverage of what happened in Ohio was almost uniformly hostile to the idea that anything could have gone seriously wrong.

On January 3, 2005, Rev. Jackson hosted a rally in downtown Columbus at which Rep. Jones officially announced that she would formally question the seating of the Ohio Electoral delegation on January 6. The challenge would come through a law passed by Congress in 1887 in response to the Republican theft of the 1876 election.

That year the New York Democratic Samuel Tilden outpolled the Ohio Republican Rutherford B. Hayes by about 250,000 votes. But the Republican Party manipulated the electoral votes in Florida and other states.

After a tense five-month stand-off, a deal was cut and Hayes became president. In exchange, the GOP ended Reconstruction by pulling the last federal troops out of the defeated south, leaving millions of freed slaves to the mercies of Jim Crow segregation and a system designed to deprive them of their right to vote, a Constitutional violation not seriously challenged until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

The 1887 law provided that at the formal request of a Senator and a Representative, the two houses of Congress would debate separately for two hours the legitimacy of seating a specified state’s delegation to the Electoral College.

In 2000, members of the Congressional Black Caucus rose to challenge the Florida delegation. But Vice President Al Gore, who was presiding over the Senate at the time, recognized no senator willing to join them.

As of January 3, 2005, no U.S. senator had stepped forward to join Rep. Jones. The next day a busload of activists left from Columbus for an overnight "freedom ride" to Washington. As they arrived the morning of January 5, the burgeoning "Election Protection" coalition staged a media briefing at the National Press Club, finally generating major global media coverage, including ABC’s Nightline. Throughout that day, and the next, Rev. Jackson, with Fitrakis and others in tow, lobbied the Congress, providing in-depth briefings for key Democratic senators, including the newly installed Democratic leadership and former first lady Hillary Clinton (D-NY).

On January 6, at a morning rally across from the White House, Rev. Jackson announced that Senator Boxer would join Rep. Tubbs Jones in questioning the seating of the Republican delegation from Ohio to the Electoral College.

Boxer’s historic decision was greeted with loud cheers from the Election Protection coalition. In her California re-election campaign, Boxer had been America’s third-leading vote-getter, behind Kerry and Bush. But extremely harsh personal attacks spewed from Rep. Tom DeLay (D-TX) and the Republican leadership in the Congress and in Ohio. Much of the Ohio media, which had ignored the story since election day, jumped in with personal attacks on Rep. Tubbs Jones and the voting rights activists.

As the day progressed, public rallies accompanied the Congressional debate, much of which we have reproduced here. Then the two chambers re-convened, certified the Ohio delegation—and George W. Bush was given a disputed second term.

But the historic controversy over the 2004 election has not ended.

At its core remain unanswered questions surrounding the actions of Secretary of State Blackwell, the fine print of election procedure and vote counting, as well as the still unresolved exit poll controversy and the nature of electronic voting.

Up until 11pm Eastern Standard Time, the major election-day exit polls showed John Kerry winning the national election. But in nine of eleven swing states, including Florida and Ohio, massive, unexplained shifts gave Bush the election.

Nationwide what appeared to be a victory for Kerry by about 1.5 million votes suddenly became a 3.5 million margin for Bush.

As shown in the documents here, the hard realities of such a shift remain unexplained.

In the months after the election, dozens of polling experts and statisticians have scrutinized every corner of the public exit polling data as it stacks up against the official vote counts. The major pollsters and their national media clients still refuse to release the raw data. The consensus, as shown here, is that the reversal of Kerry’s fortunes late on election night was in essence a statistical impossibility, with the odds at roughly 1 in 950,000. According to these experts, John Kerry should have been inaugurated in January, 2005.

These exit poll analyses have been generally ignored but not disputed by the mainstream press. In early 2005, two major pollsters issued statements saying that their initial work was in error, and that they had somehow "under-interviewed" Republican voters, thereby skewing their findings toward the Democrats.

But such denials are simply not credible in the eyes of a broad spectrum of independent experts. As shown in the documents here, nearly all the "errors" in the polling were somehow in Bush’s favor. The odds against the reversals that were shown in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania alone are in the hundreds-of-thousands to one; according to experts such as the University of Illinois’s Ron Baiman, nationwide the odds approach 150 million to one.

Ironically, just prior to the 2004 US election, similar exit polls led to the reversal of a presidential election in Ukraine, where mass demonstrations forced a re-vote. The challenger’s "defeat" in the first voting ran so clearly counter to the exit polls that a second vote was forced, which he won.

The Bush administration supported the revote in the Ukraine. But there was no parallel reversal here.

The drama in Ohio continues. In early 2005, Secretary of State Blackwell issued a fundraising letter congratulating himself for delivering Ohio to George W. Bush. The letter contained an illegal solicitation of corporate money, and was withdrawn as a "mistake."

Blackwell was not indicted. But the letter enhanced the widespread suspicion that Blackwell abused his position as Secretary of State to wrongfully deliver Ohio, and the White House, to George W. Bush.

In January 2005, Blackwell initiated an attempt by Ohio Attorney General James Petro to sanction four attorneys who sued to get to the bottom of what had happened on Election Day, 2004. Bob Fitrakis, Cliff Arnebeck, Susan Truitt and Peter Peckarsky were named as attorneys to be sanctioned at the pleasure of the Ohio Supreme Court, which is dominated by Republicans. Petro’s brief essentially argues that there were no irregularities in the 2004 Ohio election and the Moss v. Bush and Moss v. Moyer filings were "meritless" and "frivolous." Chief Justice Thomas Moyer, who is cited in the second filing, refused to recuse himself, and appointed himself to rule on the Moss v. Bush case against the very lawyers who filed against him in Moss v. Moyer.

Meanwhile, Blackwell escalated his own campaign for Governor of Ohio, to be decided in primary and general elections he would administer as Secretary of State. As the prime candidate of the fundamentalist far-right, Blackwell planned to follow in the footsteps of Florida’s Katherine Harris, who was rewarded with a safe Congressional seat after delivering her state – and the presidency – to Bush in 2000.

As the documents in the final chapter and appendix to this book show, the bitter controversy over the vote count in Ohio has been mirrored in other key states around the US.

The outcome in Florida 2004 remains in many ways as severely challenged as in 2000. Serious questions have erupted in New Mexico, where every precinct that used electronic scanning devices went for Bush, no matter what its demographic make-up or party proclivities. As Kerry noted in a conference call involving Jackson, Fitrakis and Arneback, it was not the Democrat or Republican, Hispanic or Anglo, rich or poor make-up of a precinct that decided the outcome in New Mexico, it was the presence of opti-scan vote counters.

Similar new concerns have since surfaced in Maryland and elsewhere.

Like the production of this book, the "Election Protection" campaign that grew from the Ohio grassroots has been unaided by either the Ohio Democratic Party, the Kerry campaign or any other candidate, or the major media. But it has coalesced into a nationwide movement for meaningful reform. Based in grassroots organizing and independent internet outlets like www.FreePress.org, they may be our only lifeline to any hope for the future of democracy.

The Democratic representatives who stood up on January 6 are pursuing election reform at the federal level. It remains to be seen how that plays out.

But the bitter controversy over Ohio 2004, like that over Florida 2000 and Georgia 2002, rings like a firebell for the future of democracy.

Four decades after the 1965 signing of the National Voting Rights Act, and nearly fourteen decades after 1869 passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guaranteeing freed slaves the right to vote, millions of Americans and citizens worldwide believe that our electoral process is still vulnerable to manipulation, fraud and theft.

We believe the documents in this book form the most complete record so far of what really happened in Ohio and elsewhere immediately before, during and after the election of 2004. Some have been edited to avoid excessive repetition. All are accompanied by citations meant to guide you to original documents in their entirety, as well as to other sources providing a variety of perspectives.

Many who are discontent with how this election was conducted now argue for federal standards to apply to all future elections. There are a wide range of additional reforms being proposed on all sides of the political spectrum.

But few would disagree with the proposition put forth by Thomas Jefferson that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. And that free elections demand aggressive, informed, relentless protection.

We hope this volume will facilitate informed decisions about how that can be done in the future.

Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman
Columbus, Ohio
May 2005
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