[North-NV-Greens] Fwd: [usgp-dx] American Democracy Hangs by a
Thread in Ohio
Paul Etxeberri
eusko at earthlink.net
Thu Dec 16 21:27:10 PST 2004
>
>http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/121704Z.shtml
>American Democracy Hangs by a Thread in Ohio
> By Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman
> The Columbus Free Press
>
> December 15, 2004
>
>As the whole world watches, American democracy may be hanging by a
>thread in Ohio.
>
> Monday, December 13, saw a triple play that will live in electoral
>infamy. But every new day brings still more stunning revelations --
>this time from Toledo -- of vote theft and fraud and a towering wall
>of resistance and sabotage against a fair recount of the votes that
>allegedly gave George W. Bush four more years in the White House.
>
> Three major events made December 13 a monument to electoral theft:
>a lawsuit filed in the morning at the Ohio State Supreme Court
>demanding a recount of all Ohio ballots; a Congressional hearing
>held in Columbus City Council chambers filled with angry,
>high-profile testimony of vote fraud and disenfranchisement and the
>illegal sabotaging of a recount; and then, at noon, a block away at
>the statehouse, the vote of Ohio's twenty illegitimate electors
>designating their choice of George W. Bush to be president.
>
> On Tuesday, demonstrators staged the latest in a long string of
>protests at the statehouse. And at an evening hearing in Toledo,
>stunning new sworn testimony revealed that Diebold technicians have
>tainted official voting machines before a recount could be done,
>irrevocably compromising the process.
>
> The December 13 lawsuit was filed in the presence of Rev. Jesse
>Jackson, who compared it to the attempts to win voting rights for
>African-American citizens in the era of Dr. Martin Luther King.
>
> The suit seeks to overturn Ohio's presidential vote. It asked an
>immediate court order to stop Republican presidential electors from
>meeting and voting for George W. Bush.
>
> Republican election officials prevented a vote count from starting
>until that very morning. Supervised by Secretary of State Kenneth
>Blackwell, co-chair of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, Ohio
>simply ignored all challenges to the vote count and all requests for
>a recount. Within hours the Bush electors cast their votes, even
>though the bitterly contested ballots that allegedly gave them
>standing as electors had not been recounted.
>
> In other words, while every legal remedy to determine who won
>Ohio's presidential election was being pursued, the state's
>Republican political machine blocked the rights of those seeking to
>verify the vote.
>
> "Today, in the state capital of Ohio, we are witnessing a crime
>against democracy, a crime against the right to vote and a crime
>against the Constitution," said John Bonifaz, founder of the
>National Voting Rights Institute and attorney for the Green and
>Libertarian Parties in the recount. Ohio Republicans have " no right
>to convene a meeting of the presidential electors prior to the
>completion of the recount," he said.
>
> Bonifaz's remarks came amidst testimony at the second field
>hearing on the 2004 election held by Democratic members of the House
>Judiciary Committee. Last week in Washington, the committee opened
>what it said would be the first in an ongoing series of
>investigations into what happened on Election Day, when exit polls
>showed John Kerry heading toward victory but after midnight the
>returns shifted and network television declared Bush the victor.
>
> "At the outset of this hearing, I would like to announce that 10
>members of Congress, including myself, have written to (Ohio) Gov.
>Taft asking him to either delay or treat as provisional the vote of
>Ohio's presidential electors," Rep. John Conyers, the senior
>Democrat on the Judiciary Committee said at the outset. "The closer
>we get to Columbus and the Ohio presidential election, the worse it
>looks. Each and every day it becomes increasingly clear that the
>Republican power structure in this state is acting as if it has
>something to hide."
>
> Ironically, Democratic State Senator Ray Miller of Columbus had
>secured the North Hearing Room in the statehouse. But Republicans
>cancelled that, and forced the gathering to convene at city hall, a
>block away.
>
> Thus Ohio Republicans snubbed Conyers and Reps. Stephanie
>Tubbs-Jones (D-OH), Ted Strickland (D-OH), Jerold Nadler (D-NY),
>Maxine Waters (D-CA) as well as Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr (D-IL).
>
> Packed to overflowing, the nearly four hour hearing hosted new
>disclosures about election irregularities and fraud on Nov. 2, while
>also pursuing remedies to account for the vote and delay the
>Electoral College certification of the president.
>
> Prime target in the hearings was GOP Secretary of State Kenneth
>Blackwell, who supervised the state's elections while also serving
>as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. Calls for Blackwell's
>removal were constantly repeated.
>
> Conyers noted that Blackwell has ordered local election boards to
>not allow citizens to review poll registers of voters, a lockdown
>that is an apparent violation of Ohio state law.
>
> David Cobb, the Green Party presidential candidate, told the panel
>that he had confirmed reports that an employee of one electronic
>voting machine manufacturer had come to one county election office
>and had taken apart the county tabulator of voting machine results,
>apparently replacing parts, before that county had conducted its
>recount. Such an action would taint any recount. "This could be a
>serious matter," Conyers replied, asking Cobb to meet privately with
>committee staff to further investigate the matter.
>
> Rev. Jesse Jackson told the congressmen that over the weekend he
>had spoken to John Kerry, who has since sent a letter to each of the
>state's 88 county election boards, saying he supported three areas
>of inquiry in the recount. Jackson said Kerry wanted "forensic
>computer experts" to examine voting machines, especially those using
>optical scan technology, because in other states, notably New
>Mexico, Bush had won all the precincts with that voting system in
>place. Kerry also wanted to examine 92,000 ballots that recorded no
>vote for president, and 155,000 provisional ballots that were
>rejected.
>
> But early responses from the counties to Freedom of Information
>Act requests for their voting records indicate such an effort may
>already have been sabotaged. Shelby County officials have admitted
>to discarding key election data. One county referred requesters to
>the software company that programmed the county's voting machines,
>saying the company's permission would be required for access to a
>recount, as the code is proprietary.
>
> New reports of voter suppression and fraud corroborated the
>Supreme Court filing, which presented a detailed analysis of where
>votes were incorrectly counted for Bush instead of Kerry. An
>election challenge must prove the wrong presidential candidate was
>declared the winner. The challenge lawsuit asks the Ohio Supreme
>Court to declare Kerry the victor. Numerous witnesses offered
>testimony to support that conclusion.
>
> A second brief was also filed Monday, seeking a temporary
>restraining order to block Republican presidential electors from
>meeting until the recount was done and the challenge was litigated.
>It focused on "overwhelming statistical evidence" that pointed to
>"statewide fraud allegedly conducted at the direction of Secretary
>of State J. Kenneth Blackwell."
>
> The TRO filing was primarily based on national and statewide exit
>poll data, which was the extensive, non-partisan polling done by a
>consortium of the nation's major news organizations. Expert
>affidavits accompanying the brief said an analysis of exit poll data
>found that the final vote tallies in all but the most contested
>battleground states mirrored the exit poll's predictions. The
>experts said it was unlikely the exit polls could be so accurate in
>some states while significantly wrong in others. They said election
>fraud was the only plausible explanation for the discrepancy.
>
> The TRO filing identified exactly when they believe the fraud
>occurred - at about 12.30 a.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 3. At that time of
>night, Ohio's final voting returns were being tabulated at regional
>and county offices. It was about this time that the Ohio exit poll
>data - posted on websites such as CNN - put Bush ahead of Kerry,
>even though the exit polls expected Kerry to win with 52.1 percent
>of the vote.
>
> What experts like Steven Freeman, Ph.D. of the University of
>Pennsylvania say happened was at this time the raw poll data,
>showing Kerry ahead, was replaced online and on television by
>"calibrated" data. This adjusted data was intended to reflect the
>total vote counts, once the results came in from late-reporting
>precincts - if it didn't match the raw exit poll results. Ohio's
>results didn't match, and the likely reason is because across the
>state, in a variety of ways, the reported vote totals were being
>manipulated. If Bush votes were added to the total, or votes were
>taken away from Kerry, this shift was first noticed at about 12:30
>a.m., when the networks started to report 'calibrated' figures, not
>the raw data.
>
> "The media has largely ignored this discrepancy (although the
>Blogosphere has been abuzz), suggesting the polls were either
>flawed, within normal sampling error, or could otherwise be easily
>explained away," Freeman wrote in an article, cited in the TRO
>filing. Instead, it simply reported Bush's final tally as 51 percent
>to Kerry's final tally of 48.5 percent.
>
> As Rev. Jackson and election attorneys explained to the packed
>hearing, the election challenge suit describes how votes were added
>to Bush's total, or in many cases, taken away from Kerry - because
>they were added to the totals of other Democratic candidates further
>down the ballot.
>
> The Democrat whose totals were most likely to have been boosted by
>this kind of 'vote-shifting' was C. Ellen Connally, an
>African-American candidate for Ohio Chief Justice, who was
>little-known and outspent in the southern part of the state, the
>challenge complaint says. Because Secretary Blackwell has obstructed
>most efforts to examine ballots and poll records, it has been almost
>impossible to investigate and explain anomalies like Connally's
>strong showing in the southern part of the state.
>
> "What are they hiding?" asked Rev. Jackson. One after the other,
>witnesses argued that by making a recount virtually impossible,
>Blackwell has offered firm indication that the Republicans have
>something to hide.
>
> "The secrecy of the ballot has been converted to the secrecy of
>the vote count," added Ronnie Dugger, founder of the Alliance for
>Democracy. Now based in Massachusetts, the legendary Dugger is
>founder of the Texas Observer. He said when Texas Republicans heard
>complaints that voting machines could be corrupted, "they knew that
>had found what they were looking for." Voting machines, he said, are
>the "most anti-democratic technology ever employed."
>
> Dr. Ron Baiman, a statistician from the University of Illinois,
>Chicago, confirmed that the odds on vote counts diverting from exit
>polls as they did the night of November 2 were on the order of
>magnitude of millions to one. Baiman told freepress.org that the
>odds of the exit polls being wrong in the key battleground states of
>Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio alone were "155,000,000 to one."
>
> Dr. Norman Robbins of Cleveland testified that over 10,000 voters
>in Cuyahoga County alone were disenfranchised by various means, and
>that nearly all were "youth, poor and minorities."
>
> In one Cleveland ward, he said, 51% of the provisional votes cast
>were thrown in the trash, virtually all of them from
>African-Americans.
>
> Eve Roberson, a former election official from Santa Rosa,
>California, testified that while working as observer at precinct 354
>in Wilberforce, home of Central State University, she witnessed
>conscious fraud aimed at a student body that went 95% for Kerry.
>Election officials used an inconsistent, discriminatory set of
>demands for Wilberforce students to register as opposed to those
>used in white precincts in Greene County.
>
> Roberson and others also testified that after the election they
>discovered ballots sitting open, on unguarded tables where
>manipulation and random disposal could easily have occurred. It was,
>she said "a serious breech" of election security.
>
> Riveting testimony followed from Clinton Curtis, a
>Tallahassee-based computer programmer who told the hearing he had
>been hired by US Rep Tom Feeney, then Speaker of the Florida House,
>to write a program that would conceal the theft of an election.
>Curtis said Feeney was then a lobbyist for a major computer company
>as well as Speaker. Curtis said Feeney wanted a program that could
>use voting machines to "flip an election" without being detected.
>Curtis said he wrote a prototype program, then quit.
>
> Under questioning Curtis said a program could be written that
>would protect the security of voting machines, but that it had not
>been deployed in Ohio. He said it would be a simple matter,
>involving perhaps 100 lines of code and some simple switches, to
>turn an entire election.
>
> "One person in a simple tab machine can affect thousands of
>votes," Curtis testified. "There is absolutely no assurance of
>anything on those machines."
>
> Given what he had seen, he said, the Ohio election was "probably hacked."
>
> The last hour of the Columbus hearing was filled with testimony
>from local voters who were harassed, intimidated and made to stand
>in long lines to cast votes that may well have been pitched in the
>trash.
>
> Similar sworn testimony surfaced Tuesday at a citizens' hearing in
>Toledo. Among other things eye witnesses confirmed that a Diebold
>programming team entered the Lucas County (Toledo) Board of
>Elections to "reprogram" the opti-scan voting machines on the day
>the recount began.
>
> Catherine Buchanan, a Democratic Party observer, testified that
>one of the sample precincts chosen as a control for the
>recount---Sylvania Precinct 3---had the programming card
>reprogrammed prior to the ballot testing. While the observers
>watched, nearly seven out of fifteen test ballots were rejected at
>least three times before the machine would read them.
>
> Janet Albright told hearing officers she had been voting at the
>same Lucas County polling place for fourteen years but that the
>polling place was changed this year without notification to a
>station farther away. Machines throughout Lucas County malfunctioned
>in tests through the week prior to the election, and on election
>day. Thousands of Ohioans---primarily in Democratic precincts--thus
>lost their right to vote.
>
> During the Lucas County reprogramming, election observers were
>shocked when they were denied the right to look at sheets that had
>target test results on them, or the reprogramming of the opti-scan
>machines used in the recount. Diebold-leased machines and software
>malfunctioned in the weeks prior to the election.
>
> That echoed similar testimony from Green Party candidate David
>Cobb in the Columbus hearing. Witnesses said an unauthorized
>programmer from the Triad Corporation dismantled at least one voting
>machine in rural Hocking County. Conyers referred to the incident as
>"pretty outrageous" and asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
>and a county prosecutor, to investigate "inappropriate and likely
>illegal election tampering" in Hocking and perhaps several other
>Ohio counties.
>
> Brett Rapp, president of Triad, told the New York Times it might
>be unusual to do what was done in Hocking County, but that Triad was
>involved in voting machines in 41 of Ohio's 88 counties.
>
> The Hocking County investigation was spurred in particular by
>testimony Sherole Eaton, the deputy elections director. Such
>testimony will be transcribed and presented at www.freepress.org as
>it becomes available. But in the interim the battle of Ohio rages
>on, machine by machine and hearing by hearing. Because the recount
>process has been so severely tainted, the call for a revote is
>growing.
>
> On January 6, Congress is scheduled to vote on whether or not to
>approve the tally of electors, including Ohio's tainted 20 votes.
>Conyers and the other US Representatives present made it clear more
>public hearings will be held before then.
>
> In 2001, a host of US Representatives, most from the Black Caucus,
>asked that the tainted Bush electors be challenged. This year at
>least 14 members of the House of Representatives will demand an
>immediate "investigation of the efficacy of the voting machines and
>new technologies used in 2004 election, how election officials
>responded to the difficulties they encountered, and what we can do
>in the future to improve our elections systems and administration."
>
> Their action requires the consent of a single Senator, which did
>not come in 2001. As the battle to save democracy rages in Ohio and
>elsewhere, January, 2005, could be very different.
>
> -------
>
> Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors
>of the upcoming "Ohio's Stolen Election: Voices of the
>Disenfranchised," 2004 (http://freepress.org).
>
> -------
>
>
>
>
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--
Paul Etxeberri
"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow" ---Chateaubriand
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