Dramatic new charges deepen link between Ohio's 'Coingate' and '04 Election Theft

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Dramatic new charges deepen link between Ohio's 'Coingate,' Voinovich mob connections, and the theft of the 2004 election

COLUMBUS -- New charges filed against Ohio Governor Bob Taft's former top aide have blazed a new trail between "Coingate" and the GOP theft of the 2004 presidential election.

Brian Hicks appears in court today to answer charges that he failed to report vacation trips he took to Coingate mastermind Tom Noe's $1.3 million home in the Florida Keys. A top Taft aide for a dozen years, Hicks stayed at Noe's place in 2002 and 2003. Another Taft aide, Cherie Carroll, is charged with taking some $500 in free dinners from Noe.

Noe is a high-roller crony of Taft, US Senator George Voinovich and President George W. Bush. Noe charged the Ohio Bureau of Workman's Compensation nearly $13 million to invest some $58 million. Ohio Attorney-General Jim Petro, to whom Noe once donated money, says some $4 million disappeared into Noe's pocket.

The new charges against Taft's former aide are at the edge of Coingate's links to Bush, Voinovich and organized crime. Through Noe's wife Bernadette, those links extend to the GOP theft of Ohio 2004.

Tom Noe, northwest Ohio's "Mr. Republican" and a close Bush/Rove crony, is under federal investigation for making possibly illegal contributions to the Bush/Cheney campaign

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1387

[Rausch]

It's time to wake up: a retard beat a puzzy in an election.

That's it. Fair and square.

Right now, both parties are pretty unhappy with the results.

Hopefully, they've both learned a lesson...

[BroncoInferno]

There is a good article in this months Harper's regarding the Ohio chicanery. It's pretty much established fact that the republicans used dirty polling tactics. The so-called "liberal-media" pretty much ignored the clear evidence, particularly what was found in the Conyers report. Whether or not it accounts for the margin of victory is unknown, however. Wish I could post the article here.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

There is a good article in this months Harper's regarding the Ohio chicanery. It's pretty much established fact that the republicans used dirty polling tactics. The so-called "liberal-media" pretty much ignored the clear evidence, particularly what was found in the Conyers report. Whether or not it accounts for the margin of victory is unknown, however. Wish I could post the article here.

Read the full article I linked, if you have the stomach for it.

The article not only documents the numerous frauds that took place in OH on election day '04 - it exposes a web of corruption linking the Ohio GOP and the Bush crime family so convoluted and deep it will make your head spin.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Bump...

Remembering why Dim Son is illegitimate...

None dare call it stolen - Ohio, the election, and America's servile press

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1383

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Reps. Conyers and Kaptur Seek Special Counsel for Noe Probe in Ohio 8/2

http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/05/08/ale05105.html

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Bump...

WASHINGTON - Americans' approval of President Bush's handling of Iraq is at its lowest level yet, according to an AP-Ipsos poll that also found fewer than half now think he's honest.

A solid majority still see Bush as a strong and likable leader, though the president's confidence is seen as arrogance by a growing number.

Approval of Bush's handling of Iraq, which had been hovering in the low- to mid-40s most of the year, dipped to 38 percent.

..................

Bush's overall job approval was at 42 percent, with 55 percent disapproving. That's about where Bush's approval has been all summer but slightly lower than at the beginning of the year.

The portion of people who consider Bush honest has dropped slightly from January, when 53 percent described him that way while 45 percent did not. Now, people are just about evenly split on that issue — with 48 percent saying he's honest and 50 percent saying he's not.

Full article:
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050805/ap_on_el_pr/bush_ap_ipsos_poll

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Speaking of election fraud...

GOP secretly paying legal bills of Bush official charged with conspiring to tamper with New Hampshire elections

By John Solomon, Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Despite a zero-tolerance policy on tampering with voters, the Republican Party has quietly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide private defense lawyers for a former Bush campaign official charged with conspiring to keep Democrats from voting in New Hampshire.

James Tobin, the president's 2004 campaign chairman for New England, is charged in New Hampshire federal court with four felonies accusing him of conspiring with a state GOP official and a GOP consultant in Virginia to jam Democratic and labor union get-out-the-vote phone banks in November 2002.

A telephone firm was paid to make repeated hang-up phone calls to overwhelm the phone banks in New Hampshire and prevent them from getting Democratic voters to the polls on Election Day 2002, prosecutors allege. Republican John Sununu won a close race that day to be New Hampshire's newest senator.

At the time, Tobin was the RNC's New England regional director, before moving to President Bush's 2004 re-election campaign.

A top New Hampshire Party official and a GOP consultant already have pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors. Tobin's indictment accuses him of specifically calling the GOP consultant to get a telephone firm to help in the scheme.

"The object of the conspiracy was to deprive inhabitants of New Hampshire and more particularly qualified voters ... of their federally secured right to vote," states the latest indictment issued by a federal grand jury on May 18.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050811/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_voter_suppression

[Raider Bill]

The American Center For Voting Rights Legislative Fund (“ACVR Legislative Fund”) today released the most comprehensive and authoritative review of the facts surrounding allegations of vote fraud, intimidation and suppression made during the 2004 presidential election.

The ACVR Legislative Fund report, “Vote Fraud, Intimidation & Suppression In The 2004 Presidential Election,” finds that while Democrats routinely accuse Republicans of voter intimidation and suppression, neither party has a clean record on the issue. The report finds that paid Democrat operatives were far more involved in voter intimidation and suppression activities than were their Republican counterparts during the 2004 presidential election. Examples include paid Democrat operatives charged with slashing tires on GOP get-out-the-vote vans in Milwaukee and an Ohio court order stopping Democrat operatives from calling voters telling them the wrong date for the election and faulty polling place information.

http://www.ac4vr.com/news/acvrnews080205.html

[Raider Bill]

The DNC Voting Rights Institute’s report on the election in Ohio, released on June 22, 2005, rejected these claims that the election was stolen. According to the report, the DNC’s own “statistical study of precinct-level data does not suggest the occurrence of widespread fraud that systematically misallocated votes from Kerry to Bush.” The DNC’s experts found that the similarity between the vote patterns for Kerry in 2004 and the Democrat gubernatorial candidate in 2002 was “strong evidence against the claim that widespread fraud systematically misallocated votes from Kerry to Bush.” The DNC report further stated that long lines at the polls on Election Day did not affect the election’s final result: “[T]he difficulties experienced by African American and other voters at the polls did not, in and of themselves, cost John Kerry the election in Ohio.” (132)

http://www.ac4vr.com/reports/072005/illegalvoting.html

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

ACVR Legislative Fund = Swift Boat Vets for (election) Truth.

Man, these people are WAY behind the curve - they aren't even caught up on coingate in Ohio.

[Raider Bill]

ACVR is a non-partisan, non-profit organization that neither supports nor endorses any political party or candidate.

[clarker]

http://www.ac4vr.com/news/acvrnews080205.html
I thought Dems were saints and never did anything wrong. I'm sure LABF was out there slashing tires. (Just kidding, LA)

Really though when guys like Inferno make post like the one on this thread it pisses me off. I'm not saying the Republicans are saints either, but Dems like to make themselves out to be the champions of fair play and bla, bla, bla and they are just as crooked.

Take the Tom Delay thing, Spider who I like, posted a thread about a lobbiest who was connected to Delay that got brought up on charges. He forgot though that a lot of Dems took some big time cash from the guy as well. See what I mean....

By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and Derek Willis

Updated: 11:47 p.m. ET June 2, 2005
Lobbyist Jack Abramoff and an associate famously collected $82 million in lobbying and public relations fees from six Indian tribes and devoted a lot of their time to trying to persuade Republican lawmakers to act on their clients' behalf.

But Abramoff didn't work just with Republicans. He oversaw a team of two dozen lobbyists at the law firm Greenberg Traurig that included many Democrats. Moreover, the campaign contributions that Abramoff directed from the tribes went to Democratic as well as Republican legislators.

Among the biggest beneficiaries were Capitol Hill's most powerful Democrats, including Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.) and Harry M. Reid (Nev.), the top two Senate Democrats at the time, Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.), then-leader of the House Democrats, and the two lawmakers in charge of raising funds for their Democratic colleagues in both chambers, according to a Washington Post study.

Democrats are hoping to gain political advantage from federal and Senate investigations of Abramoff's activities and from the embattled lobbyist's former ties to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.). Yet, many Democratic lawmakers also benefited from Abramoff's political operation, a fact that could hinder the Democrats' efforts to turn the lobbyist's troubles into a winning partisan issue.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8079308/

[Raider Bill]

The same cannot be said about freepress.org

[clarker]

BTW, Spider's thread was on the old server. I don't think it made it across. It was titled 1 down, more to go. Or something like that. It was thread about the lobbist talked about in the link I provided. I posted about it on the old server, but I didn't know they made the switch. So I put in here. Sorry about that.

[Raider Bill]

ACVR Legislative Fund = Swift Boat Vets for (election) Truth.

Man, these people are WAY behind the curve - they aren't even caught up on coingate in Ohio.


The American Center For Voting Rights (ACVR) was founded in February 2005 to protect the election process and zealously guard the constitutional right of all citizens to participate in deciding elections in a fair and equal manner free from discrimination, intimidation and fraud. ACVR will defend the election process through on-going civil litigation. ACVR’s activities will include voter education concerning election law and the election process to increase public understanding and thereby confidence in the fairness and outcome of elections. ACVR will sponsor symposiums and conferences with prominent legal scholars and election officials to address ways to improve the election process and increase public confidence that these processes contribute to fair and honest elections. ACVR is a non-partisan, non-profit organization that neither supports nor endorses any political party or candidate.

Defend the election process through civil litigation

Work toward providing equal access to the ballot for all eligible citizens irrespective of their race, gender, partisan affiliation and free of harassment or intimidation
Undertake voter education initiatives concerning election law and the election process to increase public understanding and confidence in the fairness and outcome of elections

Sponsor symposiums and conferences with prominent legal scholars and election officials to address ways to improve the election process and increase public confidence in fair and honest elections
Brian A. Lunde, Board Chairman

Brian A. Lunde has served at the highest professional levels within the national Democratic Party. Since beginning his political career as a field coordinator for the 1976 Jimmy Carter for President campaign, Mr. Lunde has served as Executive Director of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), as Campaign Manager for the Presidential bid of Senator Paul Simon, and as Director of two winning campaigns for the DNC Chairmanship (Chuck Manatt in 1981 and Paul Kirk in 1985).
Mr. Lunde currently serves as General Manager at Edelman Public Relations in Washington, D.C., where he leads Edelman Issues Advocacy, the firm's grassroots and issue management division. Mr. Lunde founded Helping Americans Vote (www.helpingamericansvote.org), a nonpartisan group helping corporations and trade associations educate employees about new voting rules such as vote-by-mail and early voting. A graduate of the University of South Florida, Mr. Lunde resides with his wife and two daughters in Arlington, Virginia.

Ann Browning
Attorney, Newport Beach, CA
Eric F. Kayira
Eric F. Kayira is an Associate at the Lathrop & Gage law firm in St. Louis, Missouri. Prior to joining Lathrop & Gage, Mr. Kayira served as Speechwriter to the late Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan (D). A 1992 graduate of Hampton University, Mr. Kayira received his law degree from St. Louis University School of Law in 1998. Mr. Kayira has served as an adjunct professor at St. Louis University teaching business law to undergraduate students.
Whitson W. "Whit" Robinson
Whitson W. "Whit" Robinson is Of Counsel at the law firm Robinson and Robinson. A graduate of Maine Maritime Academy and University of Baltimore School of Law, Mr. Robinson is licensed to practice law in Virginia and the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

[clarker]

LA

If you look at the board of the ACVR you will see that the chairmen used to be a big wig in the DNC. So I don't think it is a pro Bush group.


Brian A. Lunde, Board Chairman

Brian A. Lunde has served at the highest professional levels within the national Democratic Party. Since beginning his political career as a field coordinator for the 1976 Jimmy Carter for President campaign, Mr. Lunde has served as Executive Director of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), as Campaign Manager for the Presidential bid of Senator Paul Simon, and as Director of two winning campaigns for the DNC Chairmanship (Chuck Manatt in 1981 and Paul Kirk in 1985).
Mr. Lunde currently serves as General Manager

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

LA

If you look at the board of the ACVR you will see that the chairmen used to be a big wig in the DNC. So I don't think it is a pro Bush group.


I guess in the end all that matters is whether or not they have their facts straight.

It wouldn't appear so.

Did George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election?

Thursday 16 June 2005

The following text is the Introduction to the 767 page 'Did George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election? Essential Documents:'

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1318

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

* 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 US 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.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

(Continued)


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.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

(Continued)


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

[clarker]

I guess in the end all that matters is whether or not they have their facts straight.

It wouldn't appear so.

Did George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election?

Thursday 16 June 2005

The following text is the Introduction to the 767 page 'Did George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election? Essential Documents:'

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1318

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

* 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 US 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.So I am suppose to buy what is in your link, but you won't even cop to the fact that the Dems were up to some crooked sh.t as well. When you were provided a study by a group whose chairmen used to be from the DNC.

So you care about election fraud, but only if comes from republicans. If someone shows you proof that the Dems were up to shady stuff. Perhaps more than the republicans, then you just ignore it.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

If someone shows you proof that the Dems were up to shady stuff. Perhaps more than the republicans, then you just ignore it.

But he didn't provide proof of this, i.e., that 'shady stuff' by Dems was "more than the republicans."

And he certainly didn't provide anything that would disconfirm the numerous instances of election fraud on multiple fronts that took place in Ohio as documented in the article I just posted.

[Raider Bill]

http://www.ac4vr.com/reports/072005/default.html

Here is the report of an orginization with no philisophical axe to grind. The Demos were just as bad if not more so.

[Spider]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050811/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_voter_suppression

[Spider]

I thought Dems were saints and never did anything wrong. I'm sure LABF was out there slashing tires. (Just kidding, LA)

Really though when guys like Inferno make post like the one on this thread it pisses me off. I'm not saying the Republicans are saints either, but Dems like to make themselves out to be the champions of fair play and bla, bla, bla and they are just as crooked.

Take the Tom Delay thing, Spider who I like, posted a thread about a lobbiest who was connected to Delay that got brought up on charges. He forgot though that a lot of Dems took some big time cash from the guy as well. See what I mean....

By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and Derek Willis

Updated: 11:47 p.m. ET June 2, 2005
Lobbyist Jack Abramoff and an associate famously collected $82 million in lobbying and public relations fees from six Indian tribes and devoted a lot of their time to trying to persuade Republican lawmakers to act on their clients' behalf.

But Abramoff didn't work just with Republicans. He oversaw a team of two dozen lobbyists at the law firm Greenberg Traurig that included many Democrats. Moreover, the campaign contributions that Abramoff directed from the tribes went to Democratic as well as Republican legislators.

Among the biggest beneficiaries were Capitol Hill's most powerful Democrats, including Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.) and Harry M. Reid (Nev.), the top two Senate Democrats at the time, Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.), then-leader of the House Democrats, and the two lawmakers in charge of raising funds for their Democratic colleagues in both chambers, according to a Washington Post study.

Democrats are hoping to gain political advantage from federal and Senate investigations of Abramoff's activities and from the embattled lobbyist's former ties to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.). Yet, many Democratic lawmakers also benefited from Abramoff's political operation, a fact that could hinder the Democrats' efforts to turn the lobbyist's troubles into a winning partisan issue.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8079308/

hmmmmmmmm ,interesting ...... If Dems took some of this cash , then bounce their asses out the door ......... coddling criminals just cause they are Dems , wont make the Party stronger or even better ......
here is the piece I posted on the other board ........
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/12/politics/12abramoff.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1123858827-kZxpVXD+w3iOj2kFLQJMKw

[clarker]

hmmmmmmmm ,interesting ...... If Dems took some of this cash , then bounce their asses out the door ......... coddling criminals just cause they are Dems , wont make the Party stronger or even better ......
here is the piece I posted on the other board ........
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/12/politics/12abramoff.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1123858827-kZxpVXD+w3iOj2kFLQJMKwThis is why I like you Spider and expected no less from you. If something smells bad to you, you don't let loyality to your politcal party keep you from saying it.

[clarker]

BTW, Don't worry about Daschle, we already took care of that here in South Dakota. :thumbsup: ;D

[Spider]

This is why I like you Spider and expected no less from you. If something smells bad to you, you don't let loyality to your politcal party keep you from saying it.
:D thanks ....... i see a Dem that is "Bad " like James trafficant , i want them out of there ....It reflects bad on the Party and me as a Democrat ........ We need good solid people .......

[W*GS]

Don't bother trying to get LABF to see the facts.

He's long since discarded facts - the only thing that matters to him is his dogma.

[clarker]

But he didn't provide proof of this, i.e., that 'shady stuff' by Dems was "more than the republicans."

And he certainly didn't provide anything that would disconfirm the numerous instances of election fraud on multiple fronts that took place in Ohio as documented in the article I just posted.You should read the full report first before you claim they had no proof. I know I'm wasting my time because you will never believe anyone that the Dems could be up to something even if it comes from a former high ranking memember of the DNC.

http://www.ac4vr.com/reports/072005/default.html

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

I know I'm wasting my time because you will never believe anyone that the Dems could be up to something even if it comes from a former high ranking memember of the DNC.

I didn't say I didn't believe it - I just said that it is in no way comparable to what the GOP has done, e.g., in Florida in 2K and in Ohio in '04.

[W*GS]

I didn't say I didn't believe it - I just said that it is in no way comparable to what the GOP has done, e.g., in Florida in 2K and in Ohio in '04.

You forget Illinois in '60.

Along with a lot of other things.

[ak1971]

Report: Democrat Operatives Far More Involved In Voter Intimidation And Suppression In 2004, Thousands Of Americans Disenfranchised By Vote Fraud On Election Day

Contact: Jim Dyke, (843) 722-9670

Washington, DC – The American Center For Voting Rights Legislative Fund (“ACVR Legislative Fund”) today released the most comprehensive and authoritative review of the facts surrounding allegations of vote fraud, intimidation and suppression made during the 2004 presidential election.

The ACVR Legislative Fund report, “Vote Fraud, Intimidation & Suppression In The 2004 Presidential Election,” finds that while Democrats routinely accuse Republicans of voter intimidation and suppression, neither party has a clean record on the issue. The report finds that paid Democrat operatives were far more involved in voter intimidation and suppression activities than were their Republican counterparts during the 2004 presidential election. Examples include paid Democrat operatives charged with slashing tires on GOP get-out-the-vote vans in Milwaukee and an Ohio court order stopping Democrat operatives from calling voters telling them the wrong date for the election and faulty polling place information.

The report further finds that thousands of Americans were disenfranchised by illegal votes cast and a coordinated effort by members of certain “nonpartisan” organizations to rig the election system through voter registration fraud in more than a dozen states. Examples include a law enforcement task force finding “clear evidence of fraud in the Nov. 2 election in Milwaukee,” including hundreds of felon and double voters and thousands more ballots cast than voters recorded as having voted in the city and multiple indictments and convictions of ACORN workers for voter registration fraud in several states.

ACVR Legislative Fund presents eight key recommendations focused on punishing those who engage in acts of vote fraud and voter intimidation and strengthening legal safeguards against such activity in future elections. The report’s central recommendation calls for both national parties to formally adopt a zero-tolerance fraud and intimidation policy that commits them to repudiate any effort to intimidate voters or volunteers or commit vote fraud.

“Until political parties and candidates are willing to adopt a zero-tolerance policy towards election fraud, the American public will have little confidence in other reforms,” said Brian Lunde, ACVR Legislative Fund board member. “There is no room for politics when it comes to the right to vote.”

“It should be easy to vote but tough to cheat,” said Mark F. “Thor” Hearne, ACVR Legislative Fund Counsel.

In addition to common-sense recommendations such as required government issued photo ID at the polls, accurate statewide voter registration databases and a zero-tolerance policy against vote fraud and intimidation, ACVR Legislative Fund identifies five cities as election fraud “hot spots” which require additional immediate attention prior to the 2006 elections. These cities were identified based on the findings of the report and the cities’ documented history of fraud and intimidation.

1. Philadelphia, PA
2. Milwaukee, WI
3. Seattle, WA
4. St. Louis/East St. Louis, MO/IL
5. Cleveland, OH
A letter delivered today to DNC and RNC chairmen Howard Dean and Ken Mehlman urged party leaders to formally adopt the zero-tolerance policy against fraud and intimidation. ACVR Legislative Fund further asked party leaders to identify issues of concern in each of the election fraud “hot spots” by October 1, 2005.
ACVR Legislative Fund was founded on the belief that public confidence in our electoral system is the cornerstone of our democracy. The organization was established primarily to further the common good and general welfare of citizens of the United States of America by educating the public about vote fraud, intimidation and discrimination which impacts the constitutional right of all citizens to participate in the electoral process. ACVR Legislative Fund is a non-partisan, non-profit organization that neither supports nor endorses any political party or candidate.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

The report finds that paid Democrat operatives were far more involved in voter intimidation and suppression activities than were their Republican counterparts during the 2004 presidential election. Examples include paid Democrat operatives charged with slashing tires on GOP get-out-the-vote vans in Milwaukee and an Ohio court order stopping Democrat operatives from calling voters telling them the wrong date for the election and faulty polling place information.


This article doesn't really offer any specifics, i.e., names, dates, times, etc., does it?

The tire-slashing incident was one isolated incident (someone here on this board posted the story when it happened) and no one on the left defended it here. There was no evidence, if I recall, that the perp was a party operative.

And repubs - not Dems - were calling people and giving them the wrong election date.

[W*GS]

This article doesn't really offer any specifics, i.e., names, dates, times, etc., does it?

Have someone read

http://www.ac4vr.com/reports/072005/default.html

to you.

[Raider Bill]

The thing is too damn long to post here LABF.... it cannot be distilled down to a catchy soundbite or funny picture!

[W*GS]

September 2, 2004: Gun Shot Fired Into Huntington, WV, Republican Headquarters. (95)

September 3, 2004: Windows Broken, Anti-Bush Messages Scrawled At Gallatin County, MT, Republican Headquarters. (96)

September 6, 2004: Huntington, WV, Republican Headquarters Egged. (97)

September 13, 2004: Swastika Drawn On Duluth, MN, Resident’s Lawn, Signs Also Defaced With Words “Nazi” And “Liar.” (98)

September 16, 2004: Community College Professor In Florida Punched Republican County Chairman In Face. (99)

September 22, 2004: West Elmira, NY, Resident Found Swastika Drawn On Bush Campaign Sign In His Yard. (100)

September 23, 2004: Office Ransacked During Break-In At Vilas County, WI, Republican Headquarters, Obscene Words And Graphic Pictures Sprayed On Campaign Signs. (101)

September 26, 2004: Windows Smashed And Signs Stolen At Oxford, MS, Bush-Cheney ‘04 Headquarters. (102)

October 1, 2004: Laptops Of Executive And Field Director Stolen From Bush-Cheney ‘04 Headquarters In Seattle, WA. (103)

October 1, 2004: Swastika Burned Into Front Yard Of Bush-Cheney ‘04 Supporter In Madison, WI. (104)

October 2, 2004: Collinsville, OH, Resident Chains Down Bush-Cheney ‘04 Signs After Several Signs Stolen And One Was Replaced With Kerry Sign. (105)

October 3, 2004: Burglary At Thousand Oaks, CA, Victory 2004 Headquarters Where Bush-Cheney ‘04 Banner Was Stolen From Outside Premises. (106)

October 5, 2004: Gun Shots Fired Into Knoxville, TN, Bush-Cheney ‘04 Office, Shattering Office’s Glass Front Doors. (107)

October 8, 2004: Two Men Were Caught On A Hidden Camera Tearing Down And Urinating On Bush-Cheney ‘04 Sign In Akron, OH. (108)

October 9, 2004: Oxnard, CA, Supporter Placing Bush-Cheney ‘04 In Yards Verbally Abused, Knocked Down And Had Signs Stolen. (109)

October 9, 2004: Bush-Cheney Signs Near Vail, CO, Cut In Half And Burned In “Ransacking.” (110)

October 10, 2004: Office Windows Broken And Field Director’s Laptop Bag and Purse Stolen In Burglary At Canton, OH, Victory Office. (111)

October 11, 2004: Windows Broken, Petty Cash Stolen And Computers Tampered With In Burglary At Spokane, WA, Victory 2004 Headquarters. (112)

October 13, 2004: Walls And Windows Of York, PA, Victory 2004 Headquarters Vandalized With Pro-Kerry Spray-Paint And Signs Outside Destroyed. (113)

October 13, 2004: Window Smashed At Laconia, NH, Victory 2004 Headquarters. (114)

October 13, 2004: Kerry Supporter Caught Stealing Bush Sign In Cape Girardeau, MO, Pulled Knife On Sign’s Owner And Was Arrested. (115)

October 15, 2004: Someone Destroyed Large Plywood Bush-Cheney ‘04 Sign, Then Tried To Smash Debris Though Glass Door Of Santa Fe, NM, Republican Party Headquarters. (116)

October 15, 2004: Someone Lined Window Sill With Bullet Casings At Littleton, NH, Republican Headquarters. (117)

October 16, 2004: Unknown Suspects Vandalized Large Bush-Cheney Campaign Sign In Hollister, CA, With Obscenities. (118)

October 17, 2004: Stickers Placed Over Windows Of Gettysburg, PA, Victory 2004 Headquarters. (119)

October 18, 2004: Eggs Thrown At Keene, NH, Victory 2004 Headquarters. (120)

October 18, 2004: 21 Protesters Arrested At Bush-Cheney ‘04 Campaign Headquarters In Arlington, VA. (121)

October 20, 2004: Rocks Thrown Through Windows At Multnomah County, OR, Republican Party Headquarters. (122)

October 21, 2004: Bomb Threat Made Against Lake Havasu, AZ, Republican Party Headquarters. (123)

October 21, 2004: Windows Smashed At Multnomah County Republican Party Headquarters In Portland, OR. (124)

October 22, 2004: Break-In Discovered At Cincinnati, OH, Victory 2004 Headquarters. (125)

October 22, 2004: Break-In Discovered At Flagstaff, AZ, Victory 2004 Headquarters. Perpetrators gained entry by throwing a cinder block through a plate glass window. (126)

October 22, 2004: Chunk Of Concrete Tossed Through Glass Door Of Republican Headquarters In Santa Cruz, CA. (127)

October 23, 2004: Two Kerry Supporters Arrested After Stealing Pro-Bush Signs From Activist And Pushing Police Officer At Edwards Rally In St. Petersburg, FL. (128)

[Raider Bill]

And repubs - not Dems - were calling people and giving them the wrong election date

.The Marion County Common Pleas Court issued a temporary restraining order against the Marion and Greene County Democratic Parties, the Ohio Democratic Party and America Coming Together (ACT) enjoining them from making inaccurate and deceptive phone calls to targeted voters. (71) (Exhibit F) The judge originally assigned to the case recused himself because he had “personally received a phone call” like the one described by the plaintiff in which incorrect information about date of the election and polling place was given, a point he noted in the Judgment Entry he signed effectuating his recusal. The Ohio Supreme Court appointed a visiting judge to hear the case who then issued a temporary restraining order against the county and state Democrat parties and against ACT. (72)

Judge David C. Faulkner ordered state and local Democrats and ACT to stop their calls “misstating the date of the November 2, 2004 election” and “directing [voters] to the wrong location to which they should report to vote.” (73) Faulkner’s restraining order specifically stopped the Democrats from the following activities:

“Any acts of interfering in any way with the rights of Ohio registered voters to vote in the November 2, 2004 election, including, but not limited to, telephoning or contacting in any way any such registered voters and misstating the date of the November 2, 2004 election, directing them to the wrong location to which they should report to vote, telling such voters that they must bring certain documentation to the polls in order to vote and suggesting to, telling or implying to said voters that there are procedural and/or documentary hurdles they must overcome in order to vote in the November 2, 2004 election.” (74)

http://www.ac4vr.com/reports/072005/democraticincidents.html

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

The thing is too damn long to post here LABF.... it cannot be distilled down to a catchy soundbite or funny picture!

No catchy soundbites here:

• 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.

[clarker]

It looks to me that both parties were guilty of foul play, but of course LA only sees guilt on the Republican side. He cares more about making sure the Republicans look bad than voter fraud or intemidation.

Other wise he would own up to what the Dems did. Sounds like they were just as bad or worse than the Republicans.

Notice how he doesn't reply to the list W*GS puts up. He doesn't condem those actions.

No he only sees guilt in Republicans.

[Raider Bill]

And I can post a laundry list of wrongdoings by the Demo's, point is both parties are guilty.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

The Honorable F. James Sensenbrenner
Chairman
Committee on the Judiciary
2138 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Mr. Chairman:

We write to you at the very outset of the 109th Congress, to request that our committee hold hearings and investigate the vital issue of protecting our citizens right to vote. The right to vote is the very foundation of our Democracy and is at the core of our Committee’s jurisdiction, and we can think of no more important or urgent issue before us than protecting our democratic rights. While the election is settled, however, our job as legislators on the Judiciary Committee to make sure that the constitutional right to vote is protected is just beginning.

In congressional forums many of us participated in Washington D.C. and Columbus, Ohio, we learned of significant voter irregularities in Ohio. These irregularities are included in a 100 page report Mr. Conyers issued, and include the following:

• The misallocation of voting machines led to lines of ten hours or more that disenfranchised scores if not hundreds of thousands of predominantly minority and Democratic voters. In Franklin County, 27 of the 30 wards with the most machines per registered voter showed majorities for Bush, while six of the seven wards with the fewest machines delivered large margins for Kerry.

• The Ohio Republican Party’s decision to engage in preelection “caging” tactics, selectively targeting 35,000 predominantly minority voters for intimidation had a negative impact on voter turnout. The Third Circuit found these activities to be illegal and in direct violation of consent decrees barring the targeting minority voters for poll challenges.

The Ohio Republican Party’s decision to utilize thousands of partisan challengers concentrated in minority and Democratic areas disenfranchised numerous legal voters, who were not only intimidated, but became discouraged by the long lines in the adverse weather. Shockingly, these disruptions were publicly predicted by Republican officials: Mark Weaver, a lawyer for the Ohio Republican Party, admitted the challenges “can’t help but create chaos, longer lines and frustration.”

Numerous instances of intimidation and misinformation occurred across the state of Ohio that would appear to violate the Voting Rights Act. For example, the NAACP stated that it received over 200 calls regarding incidents of suspected voter intimidation or unusual election related activities, particularly actions taken by challengers who intimidated poll workers and voters. Other specific incidents involved a caller who reported that someone was going door-to-door telling people they were not registered to vote. A voter in Franklin County received information in the mail identified as being from the state that said he would have to vote by provisional ballot because he had moved; in fact, the voter had not moved and had lived at the address for 10-15 years. One polling place worker was reportedly only asking African American voters for their address.

In Franklin County, a worker at the Holiday Inn observed a team of 25 people who called themselves the “Texas Strike Force” using payphones to make intimidating calls to likely voters, targeting people recently in the prison system. The “Texas Strike Force” members hotel accommodations were apparently paid for by the Ohio Republican Party, whose headquarters is across the street. The hotel worker heard one caller threaten a likely voter with being reported to the FBI and returning to jail if he voted. Another hotel worker called the police, who came but did nothing. There were also reports of phone calls incorrectly informing voters that their polling place had changed.

• The Cleveland Plain Dealer found that several Lake County residents received an official-looking letter on Board of Elections letterhead informing them that their polling place had changed or that they were not properly registered to vote. A fake voter bulletin from Franklin County Board of Elections was posted at polling locations, and fliers were distributed in the inner city, telling Republicans to vote on Tuesday and Democrats to vote on Wednesday due to unexpected heavy voter registration.

• In Cleveland, the Washington Post reported that unknown volunteers began showing up at voters’ doors illegally offering to collect and deliver complete absentee ballots to the election office. The Election Protection Coalition testified that in Franklin County, voters received fliers informing them that they could cast a ballot on November 3. Also, in Franklin County there were reports that about a dozen voters were contacted by someone claiming to be from the county board of elections, telling them their voting location was changed, and “door-hangers” telling African-American voters to go to the wrong precinct were distributed.

In our view, this course of events is not consistent with the right to vote as we understand it. The fact that many of these instances appear to be focused particularly on minority voters is all the more disheartening, and triggers even more clearly our jurisdiction involving civil rights.

We look forward to full and open hearings concerning these instances of disenfranchisement in Ohio and around the Nation. We very much would like to work with you and your staff to insure that allegations of improprieties by both Democrats and Republicans are looked into and considered.

[clarker]

And I can post a laundry list of wrongdoings by the Demo's, point is both parties are guilty.He doesn't care about the Dems wrong doing. Those people who wanted to vote for Bush deserved what they got to him.

It is not about voter fraud or the credibility of the election to him. It is about trying to paint the republicans in the worse light possible.

If he truly care about voter fraud, he would try to bash the link you posted from a group that tries to be fair to both parties and is ran by a former DNC big wig.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

He doesn't care about the Dems wrong doing. Those people who wanted to vote for Bush deserved what they got to him.

It is not about voter fraud or the credibility of the election to him. It is about trying to paint the republicans in the worse light possible.

If he truly care about voter fraud, he would try to bash the link you posted from a group that tries to be fair to both parties and is ran by a former DNC big wig.

Have you heard me excusing any wrongdoing by any Dems?

What I find funny is your continued focus on the Dems when the GOP currently owns all the marbles.

Your game is not unlike W*GS' - find some wrongdoing by some Dem or another, and hopefully this will take the heat off the current administration (which, BTW, is far worse than any Democratic administration in history) and give Bush and the GOP some cover and a pass.

[Raider Bill]

That non partisan report actually found more wrongdoing by dems in the 2004 elections.

[clarker]

Have you heard me excusing any wrongdoing by any Dems?

What I find funny is your continued focus on the Dems when the GOP currently owns all the marbles.

Your game is not unlike W*GS' - find some wrongdoing by some Dem or another, and hopefully this will take the heat off the current administration (which, BTW, is far worse than any Democratic administration in history) and give Bush and the GOP some cover and a pass.It doesn't matter who does the wrongdoing in voter fraud or intimidation. Just because the Dems lost doesn't excuse or doesn't mean their crimes don't matter.

These tatics hurt the credibility of the election no matter which party took part or if the party that does it happens to lose.

Who knows if the Republicans who committed these crimes had not did them, perhaps Kerry would have won. By the same token if the Dems had not commited their crimes perhaps Bush would have won by even a wider margin.

The point is these tatics effect in a adverse way the credibility of the election.

But you don't care about that, all you want to do is make sure that Republicans are put in the worse light possible.

You saying that what Dems did doesn't matter because they lost or are not in power, shows you don't know what the problem is.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

You saying that what Dems did doesn't matter because they lost or are not in power, shows you don't know what the problem is.

If you think this is what I'm saying then you are reading me wrong.

That non partisan report actually found more wrongdoing by dems in the 2004 elections.

Then it is at odds with virtually every other study that has been done.

[clarker]

If you think this is what I'm saying then you are reading me wrong.



Then it is at odds with virtually every other study that has been done.I donl't buy into studies done by your Move ON.org groups. The one that njibl put up seems to be from an unbaised group.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

I donl't buy into studies done by your Move ON.org groups. The one that njibl put up seems to be from an unbaised group.

Show me one study I posted by moveon.org

This sort of misrepresentation does nothing but damage your credibility.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

The one that njibl put up seems to be from an unbaised group.

"Seems" to be, eh?

So you simply accept its claims before you know for sure (and then you complain about my bias.)

[Raider Bill]

Then it is at odds with virtually every other study that has been done.


It was culled from actual court injunctions and police reports and the like.

You're going to sit there and tell me that the stuff you put up isn't coming from someone with a philisophical axe to grind?

[Raider Bill]

The report finds that paid Democrat operatives were far more involved in voter intimidation and suppression activities than were their Republican counterparts during the 2004 presidential election. Examples include paid Democrat operatives charged with slashing tires on GOP get-out-the-vote vans in Milwaukee and an Ohio court order stopping Democrat operatives from calling voters telling them the wrong date for the election and faulty polling place information.

http://www.ac4vr.com/news/acvrnews080205.html

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

You're going to sit there and tell me that the stuff you put up isn't coming from someone with a philisophical axe to grind?

Now you're working the same old fallacy that confuses the messenger with the message.

Whether someone has an axe to grind or not has no bearing on the truth or falsehood of his claims. It has no bearing on the question of whether his facts are in order or not.

Also, even if a study or report is posted on a site you perceive as politically biased, it doesn't follow that the sources cited by the study or report are biased.

[clarker]

"Seems" to be, eh?

So you simply accept its claims before you know for sure (and then you complain about my bias.)Well I went to part of the site that said about us. They are ran by former DNC big wig. There are other people who use to work for the DNC or indvidual Democrats. So I assume they are not ran by the RNC or connected with Bush. So if they say that the DNC were up to alot of crooked sh*t. then I assume they are not lying.

The sites you put up are move on.org type stuff. They have a agenda. They oppose the Republilcan party and would never report any wrongdoing by the Dems.

I doubt seriously you even read the report that story in Njbil posted. The report is right here in case you want to read it.

http://www.ac4vr.com/reports/072005/default.html

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

The report finds that paid Democrat operatives were far more involved in voter intimidation and suppression activities than were their Republican counterparts during the 2004 presidential election. Examples include paid Democrat operatives charged with slashing tires on GOP get-out-the-vote vans in Milwaukee and an Ohio court order stopping Democrat operatives from calling voters telling them the wrong date for the election and faulty polling place information.

Providing two vague (i.e., no times, dates, names. etc.) examples of tire-slashing and giving wrong dates to voters certainly doesn't prove that "paid Democrat operatives were far more involved in voter intimidation and suppression activities than were their Republican counterparts."

[clarker]

Providing two vague (i.e., no times, dates, names. etc.) examples of tire-slashing and giving wrong dates to voters certainly doesn't prove that "paid Democrat operatives were far more involved in voter intimidation and suppression activities than were their Republican counterparts."

The full report is right here. The post Njbil made was a summary of what is in it.

http://www.ac4vr.com/reports/072005/default.html

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

The sites you put up are move on.org type stuff. They have a agenda. They oppose the Republilcan party and would never report any wrongdoing by the Dems.

Shooting the messenger doesn't address the truth or falsehood of the claims made in the reports I have posted.

You are trying to argue, in essence, that the statement 2+2=4 is incorrect if it's posted on what you believe to be a left-leaning website.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

The full report is right here. The post Njbil made was a summary of what is in it.

http://www.ac4vr.com/reports/072005/default.html

I saw it.

Show me the specifics that prove the claim that "paid Democrat operatives were far more involved in voter intimidation and suppression activities than were their Republican counterparts."

[Spider]

The full report is right here. The post Njbil made was a summary of what is in it.

http://www.ac4vr.com/reports/072005/default.html
that fair and balanced site you guys keep throwing around doesnt say 1 word about this .. how come ?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050811/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_voter_suppression
I know Dems are not innocent , but your site is hardly fair and balanced .....Itis even gone as far as the RNC paying the legal fees ........ I bet this goes deeper then just 1 new england state .........

[clarker]

Shooting the messenger doesn't address the truth or falsehood of the claims made in the reports I have posted.

You are trying to argue, in essence, that the statement 2+2=4 is incorrect if it's posted on what you believe to be a left-leaning website.No, what I'm saying is that you can't come up with the whole picture if your not presented both sides to the argument. I mean would you believe statistics I found from Rush Limbaugh's site. I doubt it.

[clarker]

that fair and balanced site you guys keep throwing around doesnt say 1 word about this .. how come ?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050811/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_voter_suppression
I know Dems are not innocent , but your site is hardly fair and balanced .....Itis even gone as far as the RNC paying the legal fees ........ I bet this goes deeper then just 1 new england state .........The Dems were in on that as well. I already posted the link on it. I gave you a rep for being stand up and saying it was wrong for the Dems to take money from that guy.

LABF said well you can't compare the Dems on that to DeLay because DeLay said he knew the guy and he was a good friend. If that makes a difference. You either took crooked money or you didn't. It doesn't matter if you knew the guy or not.

[clarker]

I'm sorry Spider. I just gave that a quick glance. Thought it was the DeLay thing. My bad. Ignore my above post.

However, LA's "fair and balanced" report doesn't say one word about any Demorcratic voter fraud or intemidation, I would say Njbil's link is way more unbaised than LA's.

[Raider Bill]

Because the report is dated 9 days before that story broke.

[Raider Bill]

That ACVR report is culled from actuall court injunctions, police reports, etc. Not the DNC's version of what happened.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

That ACVR report is culled from actuall court injunctions, police reports, etc. Not the DNC's version of what happened.

More "attack the messenger and pretend you've discredited the message."

The same court injunctions and police reports are availible to the DNC.

What makes these complaints about alleged Dem abuses laughable is the following:

(For starters)

The companies that make the voting machines used in the '04 elections are all owned by rethugs with ties to Bush.

These companies refuse to allow any public scrutiny/oversight of the software used for casting and counting votes.

The president of one of these companies promised to do everything in his power to deliver his state's (Ohio's) electoral votes to Bush.

Ohio's Secretary of State (responsible for overseeing the elections, vote counts, etc.) was also the chairman of the the Ohio Bush campaign.

[Spider]

Because the report is dated 9 days before that story broke.
Plenty of time to update

[Spider]

I'm sorry Spider. I just gave that a quick glance. Thought it was the DeLay thing. My bad. Ignore my above post.
No problem bro we all have done that ....;D

However, LA's "fair and balanced" report doesn't say one word about any Demorcratic voter fraud or intemidation, I would say Njbil's link is way more unbaised than LA's.
I agree , both sides are dirty in this ... but you always attack the other party and brush aside your own dirt ......... If it smeels like a turd either side of the Isle I will call it a turd ......
I dont agree with the Dems thst did this , and if a person was paid by the DNC to preform any of these things , then I would want the DNC to answer ....... Like I said it reflects bad on the party , and me as a Democrat .....

[Raider Bill]

Plenty of time to update


It's a huge report of what actually transpired in the last election and comes to 13.17 megabites in PDF form.
.
I dont think it was meant to be an up to the minute reporting device.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

if a person was paid by the DNC to preform any of these things , then I would want the DNC to answer ....... Like I said it reflects bad on the party , and me as a Democrat .....

Same here.

However, I don't see the evidence that Dems engaged in more (or more serious) electoral dirty tricks in '04 than the rethugs.

What we know about the issues with the voting machines alone would call that claim into question.

Also, I've yet to see one Bush supporter own up to his party's dirty tricks in Florida in 2k.

[clarker]

No problem bro we all have done that ....;D


I agree , both sides are dirty in this ... but you always attack the other party and brush aside your own dirt ......... If it smeels like a turd either side of the Isle I will call it a turd ......
I dont agree with the Dems thst did this , and if a person was paid by the DNC to preform any of these things , then I would want the DNC to answer ....... Like I said it reflects bad on the party , and me as a Democrat .....I hope you don't think I'm dismissing the bullsh*t the Republican pulled because I'm not.

I do think is funny when guys like LA put up link after link on the wrong doings of Republicans and then has to read that his beloved party is not so clean themselves.

I wouldn't put you in that catagory. From what I've read of your posts, you call a spade, a spade.

It seems to me that both parties have alot of explaining to do, but I guess I'm too jaded, because I doubt that either one of them will.

[Raider Bill]

You haven't looked at the ACVR report then.

[clarker]

Same here.

However, I don't see the evidence that Dems engaged in more (or more serious) electoral dirty tricks in '04 than the rethugs.

What we know about the issues with the voting machines alone would call that claim into question.

Also, I've yet to see one Bush supporter own up to his party's dirty tricks in Florida in 2k.I'm sure there were some crooked things going on down in Florida. But I never bought Gore and his "I just want every vote counted" bullsh*t. Not when he wanted all those military votes cast aside because the military votes Republican over 90% of the time.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

I agree , both sides are dirty in this ... but you always attack the other party and brush aside your own dirt .........

People like Clarker are sitting here demanding that Dems own up to their alleged electoral abuses, but I've yet to see one republi-bubba on this forum admit to one single instance of election fraud - either in '04 or 2K.

For instance, even when it was proven that Kathy Harris illegally purged thousands of Democratic voters' names from the rolls in FL in 2K the Bush supporters still denied it ever happened.

[Raider Bill]

I work in Philadelphia... every election day union goons cruise the city in pickup trucks looking for Republicans to hassle.

[Raider Bill]

Summary Of Philadelphia Findings:

Republican volunteers violently intimidated by union members, who assaulted the volunteers’ vehicle and chased them in traffic.
At least 15 new registrants found to be deceased.
Many addresses listed for new registrants were in fact vacant lots and boarded-up buildings.
Polling places located in local bars, unsafe abandoned buildings, district office of Democrat state Sen. Vincent Fumo and private home decorated with Kerry sign in window.
43 polling locations inaccessible to the handicapped and 17 in businesses or homes where voters could be intimidated.
ACT and MoveOn illegally distributed and collected absentee ballots from prison inmates in at least one Philadelphia prison, according to news reports.
City voter rolls nearly matched census estimates of the voting-age population.
ACORN reportedly put inaccurate information on voter registration forms.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

I do think is funny when guys like LA put up link after link on the wrong doings of Republicans and then has to read that his beloved party is not so clean themselves.

I think it's funny when guys like Clarker focus on wrongdoing (mostly in the past) by Democrats when republicans currently control all three branches of government.

BTW, having a republican tell you your party is "not so clean" is like being called "ugly" by a frog.

[Spider]

I hope you don't think I'm dismissing the bullsh*t the Republican pulled because I'm not. ;D naw my meaning was Dems do it , ingore their own dirt ..Reps do it ingnore their own dirt .......

[Spider]

It's a huge report of what actually transpired in the last election and comes to 13.17 megabites in PDF form.
.
I dont think it was meant to be an up to the minute reporting device.
Still if you are going to run site about voting fraud .. I would consider this pretty important ........

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Speaking of updates...

New Data Shows Widespread Vote Manipulations in 2004

By Peter Phillips

In the fall of 2001, after an eight-month review of 175,000 Florida ballots never counted in the 2000 election, an analysis by the National Opinion Research Center confirmed that Al Gore actually won Florida and should have been President. However, coverage of this report was only a small blip in the corporate media as a much bigger story dominated the news after September 11, 2001.

New research compiled by Dr. Dennis Loo with the University of Cal Poly Pomona now shows that extensive manipulation of non-paper-trail voting machines occurred in several states during the 2004 election. The facts are as follows: In 2004 Bush far exceeded the 85% of registered Florida Republican votes that he got in 2000, receiving more than 100% of the registered Republican votes in 47 out of 67 Florida counties, 200% of registered Republicans in 15 counties, and over 300% of registered Republicans in 4 counties. Bush managed these remarkable outcomes despite the fact that his share of the crossover votes by registered Democrats in Florida did not increase over 2000, and he lost ground among registered Independents, dropping 15 points. We also know that Bush "won" Ohio by 51-48%, but statewide results were not matched by the court-supervised hand count of the 147,400 absentee and provisional ballots in which Kerry received 54.46% of the vote. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio the number of recorded votes was more than 93,000 greater than the number of registered voters.

More importantly national exit polls showed Kerry winning in 2004. However, It was only in precincts where there were no paper trails on the voting machines that the exit polls ended up being different from the final count. According to Dr. Steve Freeman, a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania, the odds are 250 million to one that the exit polls were wrong by chance. In fact, where the exit polls disagreed with the computerized outcomes the results always favored Bush - another statistical impossibility.
.
Dennis Loo writes, "A team at the University of California at Berkeley, headed by sociology professor Michael Hout, found a highly suspicious pattern in which Bush received 260,000 more votes in those Florida precincts that used electronic voting machines than past voting patterns would indicate compared to those precincts that used optical scan read votes where past voting patterns held."

There is now strong statistical evidence of widespread voting machine manipulation occurring in US elections since 2000. Coverage of the fraud has been reported in independent media and various websites. The information is not secret. But it certainly seems to be a taboo subject for the US corporate media.

Black Box Voting (www.blackboxvoting.org.) reported on March 9, 2005 that voting machines used by over 30 million voters were easily hacked by relatively unsophisticated programs and audits of the computers would not show the changes. It is very possible that a small team of hackers could have manipulated the 2004 and earlier elections in various locations throughout the United States. Irregularities in the vote counts certainly indicate that something beyond chance occurrences has been happening in recent elections.

That a special interest group might try to cheat on an election in the United States is nothing new. Historians tell us how local political machines from both major parties have in the past used methods of double counting, ballot box stuffing, poll taxes and registration manipulation to affect elections. In the computer age, however, election fraud can occur externally without local precinct administrators having any awareness of the manipulations - and the fraud can be extensive enough to change the outcome of an entire national election.

There is little doubt key Democrats know that votes in 2004 and earlier elections were stolen. The fact that few in Congress are complaining about fraud is an indication of the totality to which both parties accept the status quo of a money based elections system. Neither party wants to further undermine public confidence in the American "democratic" process (over 80 millions eligible voters refused to vote in 2004). Instead we will likely see the quiet passing of legislation that will correct the most blatant problems. Future elections in the US will continue as an equal opportunity for both parties to maintain a national democratic charade in which money counts more than truth.


Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and Director of Project Censored. Dennis Loo's report "No Paper Trail Left Behind: the Theft of the 2004 Presidential Election," can be viewed at http://www.projectcensored.org/newsflash/voter_fraud.html


--
Peter Phillips Ph.D.
Sociology Department/Project Censored
Sonoma State University
1801 East Cotati Ave.
Rohnert Park, CA 94928
707-664-2588
http://www.projectcensored.org/

[Play2win]

The deal is, if the Democrats do any dirty politics, it's NEWS, But if the Republican do the same exact thing, its just S.O.P. ...

[Raider Bill]

Still if you are going to run site about voting fraud .. I would consider this pretty important ........


They didnt mention New Hampshire at all for whatever reason.


What I found more interesting was an injunction was filed in Merion county Ohio for the DNC to stop making bogus phone calls but can find little mention of it in the media.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

The deal is, if the Democrats do any dirty politics, it's NEWS, But if the Republican do the same exact thing, its just S.O.P. ...

Exactly.

Anyone who remembers the Clinton years can attest to that.

[Spider]

They didnt mention New Hampshire at all for whatever reason.


What I found more interesting was an injunction was filed in Merion county Ohio for the DNC to stop making bogus phone calls but can find little mention of it in the media.
Probably cause the evidence is flimsy .........

[Raider Bill]

Probably cause the evidence is flimsy .........


The first judge had to recuse himself because he recieved one of the phone calls!

[Raider Bill]

Lets be honest here, both sides only want to end cheating on the other side while cheating like hell themselves!

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Lets be honest here, both sides only want to end cheating on the other side while cheating like hell themselves!

Even if this is true, the fact remains that only one side stole the last two presidential elections and cheated its way into power.

[W*GS]

Have you heard me excusing any wrongdoing by any Dems?

Since you've never admitted to wrongdoing by any Democrat...

Show me one instance where you've acknowledged criminal behavior on the part of a Democrat.

Your game is not unlike W*GS' - find some wrongdoing by some Dem or another, and hopefully this will take the heat off the current administration (which, BTW, is far worse than any Democratic administration in history) and give Bush and the GOP some cover and a pass.

You've missed the entire point. As usual.

For someone so easily outraged, your outrage only extends to the GOP. When I mention equal scummery on the part of Democrats, you accuse me of deflection - when in fact I'm interested to see if you're willing to criticize your own party. Since you never have, your morality is too narrow and partisan to be worth much.

Oh, and Bush is worse than any Democratic administration? You obviously don't count LBJ, or even JFK. Need I list the sins of those two pricks for you?

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Noe Pleads Guilty

A coin dealer and prominent GOP fundraiser at the center of an Ohio political scandal has pled guilty to federal charges he funneled about $45,000 to Bush's re-election campaign.

Tom Noe, once a powerful political figure who also raised money for Ohio Republicans, still is charged with embezzlement of the state workers' compensation fund.

The investment scandal has been a major embarrassment for Ohio's ruling Republicans and given Democrats a better shot at winning state offices this year, including the governor's office, which has been under GOP control since 1991.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060531/ap_on_re_us/coin_dealer_donations