All the anguished soul-searching from the television pundits and the syndicated

Transcription

1 The death of democracy Jim Fetzer (READER WEEKLY 11 November 2004, pp ) All the anguished soul-searching from the television pundits and the syndicated columnists about why the Democrats lost presuppose that the election of 2004 was legitimate. There are multiple indications that it was stolen using electronic voting machines. Even the most general features of this election make no sense. Under the headline of the London DAILY MIRROR (5 November 2004), "Four More Years of Dubya," it asked, "How could 59,054,087 be so DUMB?" Which is a very good question, even with the correction that the number of recorded votes would turn out to be 59,209,925 when all the votes cast were counted. But were they? Bush's numbers represented a total of 51% of those reported, while his opponent, John Kerry, received 48%. In the election of 1990, Bush received 47.8% of the vote, while his opponent, Al Gore, received 48.4%. Does anyone in their wildest dreams think Bush is relatively more popular now after four years of divisive government? 59,209,925 votes would be the most ever cast for any candidate for president in the history of this nation. Does anyone seriously suppose that Kerry would do worse than Gore against an opponent who had polarized the nation and had even lost the support of dozens of Republican papers that endorsed him in 2000? Was that remotely likely? The pre-election indications suggested that Bush would lose. A WASHINGTON POST (25 October 2004) poll showed 55% of likely voters thought the country was "pretty seriously off course;" only 41% thought it was headed in the right direction. A WALL STREET JOURNAL poll for October 2004 showed his approval rating below 50%.

2 These were telling indications, because the historic pattern has been that questions like these are reliable predictors of an election's outcome. Averages of polls were showing Bush hovering around 47-48%, which pollsters agreed indicated an upperbound for an incumbent, since undecided voters tend to break for the challenger. On "The Daily Show" with Jon Stewart, John Zogby, perhaps the most accurate of pollsters, appeared on Thursday, 28 October, and unhesitatingly predicted that Kerry would win. On "Chris Matthews" show that Sunday, Tucker Carlson, right wing advocate, reported, alas!, that it was obvious that Kerry was going to win. "The Bush haters hate Bush more than the Bush lovers love Bush," he said. So it looked as though the most probable outcome would be a 51-48% or 52-47% split in Kerry's favor, which is very much the way the election began to play out. The exit polls were uniformly favorable to Kerry during the day and the early evening. On slate.com/id/ /, for example, the reports at 7:28 PM ET for Florida, Ohio, and other key states read as follows: Florida Kerry 51, Bush 49; Ohio Kerry 51, Bush 49; Michigan Kerry 52, Bush 46, Nader 1; Pennsylvania Kerry 53, Bush 46. Other sources, such as outsidethebeltway.com/archives/7883, were similar. As late as 10:38 PM ET, William Saletan writing for slate.com would explain that even if Bush were to win both Ohio and Florida, contrary to the exit polls, and if he were to pick up Colorado (down 1 point) and all the states in which he trails by less than 6 (Nevada, Iowa, New Mexico, and Wisconsin), he would have 269! "That's it", Saletan remarked. "Those are all the states he has to work with." And that meant that Kerry could win by taking any 28 electoral votes from that group, such as (a) Florida and any other state, (b) Ohio and Wisconsin, or (c) Ohio and two

3 of the little three (Nevada, New Mexico, Iowa). Other combinations would work, too. Exit polls are so reliable as evidential indicators of election outcomes that even the Bush campaign accepted the inevitable. An Associated Press Radio News report, for example, described Karen Hughes sitting down with Bush to explain that he had lost. While his aides were gagging, Bush was philosophical: "Well, it is what it is," he said. Within a few hours, however, the pendulum had swung toward Bush, portending an astonishing turn of events. The general trend toward Kerry, overwhelmingly in his favor, changed rather abruptly in the early morning hours. Outcomes that had been running strongly in his favor were now running strongly in favor of the incumbent. What had done it? An early analysis by "EarlG" that appeared on Rense.com (www. rense.com/general59/steal/.htm) 2:57 AM the morning after the election noted that "EVERY STATE that has E(electronic)Voting but no paper trails has an unexplained advantage for Bush of around +5%", when exit polls are compared to actual results. "In EVERY STATE that has paper audit trails on their EVoting, the exit polls match the actual results reported within the margin of error. So we have MATCHING RESULTS for exit polls and voting with audits vs. a 5% advantage for Bush without audits." It was only the most striking of many early indications the election was being stolen. In his article, "Kerry Won" (TomPaine.com, 4 November 2004), Greg Palast reported that Kerry had won Ohio, contrary to the official tally. "Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent... among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49." "Unless a third gender voted in Ohio," Palast observed, "Kerry took the state." He

4 was not alone in suspecting voting fraud. Michael Keefer, "Footprints of Election Fraud" (globalresearch.ca/articles/ke411a.html, 5 November 2004), for example, discovered that the villains appear to be the touch-screen voting-machine vendors. Following the debacle in Florida in 2000, the Voters News Service consortium (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and AP) had been disbanded and exit polling data was instead placed in the hands of the "National Election Pool," consisting of an outfit known as Edison Media Research with Mitofsky International. Keefer studied NEP's reports. "The National Election Pool's own data--as transmitted by CNN on the evening of 2 November and the early morning of 3 November--suggest very strongly that the results of the exit polls were themselves fiddled late on November 2 in order to make their numbers conform with the tabulated vote tallies," Keffer discovered. In eastern states, "by 9:06 PM ET, Bush had 9,257,135, and Kerry had 7,652,510, giving the incumbent a 9 percent lead, with 54 percent of the vote to Kerry's 45 percent. At the same time, embarrassingly enough, the national exit poll figures reported to CNN showed Kerry holding a narrow but potentially decisive lead." "The exit polls indicated that women's votes (54 percent of the total) were going 54 to Kerry, 45 percent to Bush, and 1 percent to Nader; men's votes (46 percent of the total) were going 54 percent to Kerry, 45 percent to Bush, and 1 percent to Nader," he said. "Kerry, in other words, was leading Bush by nearly 3 percent." Keefer surmises that the enormous discrepancy between the exit polls and the tabulated results compelled NEP to "fix up those awkward exit polls." By 1:36 AM, the men's vote was going 54 percent Bush and 45 percent Kerry, 1 percent

5 Nader; the women's vote 52 percent Kerry, 47 percent Bush, 1 percent Nader." This was almost a complete reversal of the previous percentages. And because the exit poll data included the number of respondents, it was possible for Keffer to prove that "the fix was in." At 9:00 PM ET, this number had been well over 13,000; by 1:36 AM ET, it had risen by less than 3 percent to a total of 13,531. "But," Keffer observed, "with a corresponding swing of 5 percent from Kerry to Bush in voters' reports of their choices. Given the increase in respondents [of 3 percent], a swing of this size is a mathematical impossibility." Keffer found that the same pattern was evident in the exit polls of the key states, Ohio and Florida. Think about it. An increase of 3 percent in the voters could not possibly bring about a change of 5 percent in the outcome, even if they had all voted for Bush! Which means that there were "loose ends" in manipulating the vote totals which can be and have been established on the basis of comparisons with exit poll data. In his article, "Grand Theft Election," 5 November 2004), Wayne Madsen explains, "There was something very wrong in Ohio, which Bush claims he won handily. Not only had the head of computer voting machine maker Diebold and Ohio's Republican establishment of Governor Bob Taft and Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell conspired to suppress registration and voter turnout in heavily Democratic precincts," he wrote, "but the Ohio Secretary of State web site was only reporting results from 9 counties as of 11:30 AM on November 3, just three hours before John Kerry conceded the election to Bush. Totalling the results from the 9 counties (Fayette, Fairfield, Geauga, Jefferson, Portage, Mahoning, Trumbull, Richland, and Washington), John Kerry was clearly ahead. [But] a 10th county,

6 Columbiana, suspciously showed up as 'NO RESULTS'." Bush, of course, would prevail. The connections between the voting machine vendors and the Republican Party are well-known. As Mike Malloy explained on "Air America" (Wednesday, 3 November 2004), "The American vote count is controlled by three major corporate players, Diebold, ESS, Sequoia, and a fourth, SAIC, Science Applications International.... "They have been given millions of dollars by the Bush regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines that were used in the 2004 election. The technology involved had a trial run during the 2002 mid-term election. Georgia had Diebold machines in every precinct. As a result, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called an 'amazing' 16% swing." Lynn Landes has not only explained how easy it is to steal elections using voting machines but even predicted that this election would be stolen by a margin that was sufficient to stop a recount. In "If this election is stolen,... " ( Recounts.htm, 31 October 2004), she explains that theft is as easy as (1), (2), (3): "First, eliminate paper ballots. Thirty percent of all voters will use paperless computerized voting machines that are easy to rig and impossible to detect.... Second, make sure the paper ballots that do exist are counted on computerized ballot optical scanners and not by hand.... Ballot scanners are also easy to rig and are owned by the same handful of corporations.... Third, and most importantly, steal the election by enough electronically-tabulated votes so that a recount will not be triggered." Landes believes 2002 was a pilot project for the grand theft of 2004: "To many observers, that is exactly what happened in the 2002 election. In several upset elections across the country, the vast majority of victories were against Democrats

7 by a margin of 9-16% points off of pre-election polling. Meanwhile, Republican upsets were well within the margin of error." The most striking case was Georgia. where Senator Max Cleland had lost an election he was expected to win in a walk. Thom Hartmann (commondreams.org/views04/ htm, 7 November 2004), believes that evidence is mounting that the election has been stolen. He spoke with Jeff Fisher, Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District, who told him he had evidence that the Florida election was hacked by the same parties who had hacked the Democratic primary in 2002 to ensure that Jeb Bush would run against Bill McBride rather than Janet Reno, who was a real threat. The same pattern evident in Ohio was evident in Florida. Diagrams that bring home the difference between the exit polls and the recorded votes have been provided by Bellaciao ("Too many voting 'irregularities' to be coincidence," 5 November 2004), in which the diagram for Illinois displays what an honest election should look like. As contrasting cases, consider the records for Ohio and for Florida (both reprinted here).

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9 Hartmann quotes from an article by Dick Morris, which he wrote for THE HILL, an insider's political newsletter, endorsing the points he made: "Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris explained. "They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state [or the country]." "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points." Hartmann uses Bev Harris of blackboxvoting.org to explain how. "What surprises people (about computerized voting)," Harris reported, "is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer." During a television program hosted by Howard Dean, she demonstrated how easy it is to hack into a computer by changing votes in a demonstration taking 90-seconds. Morris wrote in THE HILL that he suspected the exit polls had been "sabotaged" to cause prospective voters in western states to "not bother voting for Bush," allegedly because the networks were going to call the election for Kerry based on the exit polls. But of course the networks had no such plans after the fiasco that occurred in Hartmann concluded by expressing agreement with Morris on one key point. As he concluded his piece for THE HILL, Morris wrote: "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play." Morris and Hartmann both appear to be right: this election was rigged. It was rather fascinating to observe Bill Schneider of MSNBC attempting to explain

10 the difference between the exit polls and the tabulated results as this issue began to surface. Acknowledging that Kerry had held a 2-3 point lead in the exit polls but lost to Bush by 3%, he suggested a 5% disagreement was merely "a minor difference." Similarly, Lee Miringhoff, the head of the Marist Poll appeared on "Countdown" with Keith Olbermann in the past few days and suggested there was nothing wrong with the exit poll discrepancy, which had been concocted by "conspiracy theorist". Why those who want to make sure this election was honest are "conspiracy theorists" is a point he did not explain. But the evidence goes far beyond mere speculation here. Anyone who doubts that stealing elections is serious business in the United States ought to read Bill Fitrakis, "Death of a Patriot: No More 'Blind Faith Voting'" ( March 2004), which concerns Athan Gibbs, a champion of verified voting trails for computerized machines, whose death on 12 March 2004 was as untimely as it was brutal. "Gibbs, an accountant for more than 30 years and the inventor of the TruVote system, died when his vehicle collided with an 18-wheeled truck, which rolled his Chevy Blazer several times and forced it over the highway retaining wall, where it came to rest on its roof." Egad! Fitrakis had interviewed Gibbs in January of this year. "I've been an accountant, an auditor, for more than thirty years. Electronic voting machines that don't supply a paper trail go against every principle of accounting and auditing that's being taught in American business schools," he said. "These machines are set up to provide paper trails. No business in America would buy a machine that didn't provide a paper trail to audit and verify its transactions. Now, they want the people to purchase machines that you can't audit? It's absurd."

11 He encouraged Fitrakis to look into the owners of Diebold and other machine makers, who have close ties with the Republican Party. "You'll find some interesting material." Gibbs, unlike Greg Palast and me, is not a likely candidate for "conspiracy theorist." Come to think of it, neither are John Zogby, Tucker Carlson, William Saletan, Thom Hartmann, Dick Morris, Lynn Landes, Mike Malloy, Wayne Madsen, Michael Keffer, Bev Harris, Bill Fitrakis, and others unnamed. Yet what they collectively have to tell us suggests that democracy, American-style, appears to have run its course. Fitrakis recalled Gibbs last words to him: "How do you explain what happened to Senator Max Cleland in Georgia? How do you explain that? The Maryland study and the Johns Hopkins scientists have warned us against 'blind faith voting'." "These systems can be hacked into. They found patches in Georgia and the people servicing the machine had entered the machine during the voting process. How can the people accept this? No more blind faith voting." A prophet in his time. Jim Fetzer, a professor of philosophy at UMD, believes that there may never be another free election in this country and that the U.S. has become a fascist state. More and more evidence on the unexplained exit poll discrepancy by Stephen A. Freeman, Ph.D., ( for example, and on the surprising pattern of Florida s voting pattern by Kathy Dopp ( support the inferences drawn here. Now the Republican National Committee Chairman, Ed Gillespie, has called for the complete elimination of exit polling, the final safeguard of democracy.