tank in la.bmpHello!
Please come to this event and send this out to your lists:
Come see the documentary video “Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers”

The very first monthly FIRST FRIDAY FLICKS!
Friday, June 1
Doors open at 6:30pm, movie starts at 7pm
Limited snacks
Free Press office, 1000 E. Main St., parking in rear
253-2571, truth@freepress.org

Iraq for Sale is “RIVETING, POWERFUL, BLEW MY MIND”
The story of what happens to everyday Americans when corporations go to war.
Acclaimed director Robert Greenwald (Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, Outfoxed, and Uncovered) takes you inside the lives of soldiers, truck drivers, widows and children who have been changed forever as a result of profiteering in the reconstruction of Iraq. Iraq for Sale uncovers the connections between private corporations making a killing in Iraq and the decision makers who allow them to do so.

Goreby Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
May 18, 2007

Al Gore has just made his second major contribution to our national political dialog. 

His first, “An Inconvenient Truth,” has helped make the perils of global warming real to the American mainstream.

Now his “Assault on Reason” is excerpted in Time Magazine.  With it he paints a compelling portrait of a democracy being obliterated by money and television. 

The content is very much on point.  But the former Vice-President must finally face the huge personal responsibility he bears for much of the problem.

First, he was an important party to the complex but catastrophic Telecommunications Act of 1996.  This Clinton-era corporate goodie bag enabled a huge spike in the monopolization of the electronic media Gore now decries. 

To fight the problem, Gore should now become an active agent in reversing that horrific  pro-monopoly give-away.  He could fight to re-establish meaningful pluralistic media ownership and public access, and for reviving both the Fairness Doctrine and Equal Time Provision, which once guaranteed balance in media content.

Second, Gore was victim of the theft of the election of 2000, but he also enabled it.  In the entire history of the United States, few events have more deeply damaged our democracy than the stolen Florida vote count and warped Electoral College outcome that followed.

The Electoral College was ostensibly designed at the 1787 Constitutional Convention to protect the rights of small states.  But it also facilitated the ability of slaveowners to cast 3/5ths of a vote for each of their chattel.  There are few more destructive monuments to electoral cynicism.   Gore would be a welcome ally in finally ridding ourselves of this historic obscenity. After all, he won by half a million popular votes and “lost” the election. 

That Gore was victimized in 2000 was largely his own fault.  Amidst the carefully choreographed chaos of the Florida 2000 vote count, the Gore campaign inexplicably asked for a recount only in four counties, rather than statewide.  This was a miscalculation of epic proportions.  In recent years it’s been proven that Gore did win the legitimate Florida statewide vote count, and would have prevailed with a full and honest recount.

The Florida 2000 recount was sabotaged by Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris, as J. Kenneth Blackwell did again in Ohio 2004.  In both cases, a very sophisticated GOP apparatus aided by key technicians from partisan voting machine companies, has been bound and determined to steal the presidency at any cost.

Gore’s actions on the 2000 recount might be discounted as a stategic failure.

But they were followed by something much much worse.  In January, 2001, the Black Caucus of the US House demanded a Congressional dialogue on the seating of the Florida delegation to the Electoral College.  This procedure had been established in 1887, in response to the stolen election of 1876.  It required the signature of one Representative and one Senator. 

Tragically, Gore prevented this from happening.  As the presiding officer over the joint session of Congress gathered to ratify the election, Gore repeatedly gaveled down those Representatives demanding a discussion of the theft of Florida’s decisive electoral votes.  This very ugly, politically catastrophic moment is forever memorialized in Michael Moore’s Farenheit 9/11. 

Staff from the office of the late Sen. Paul Wellstone have said Gore told those Senators inclined to join in that he would not recognize them if they tried.  Senator Hillary Clinton told the Free Press Editor that Gore “begged” her not to sign on to such a challenge.  

The result:  there was no Congressional challenge on the theft of the election of 2000.  Ironically, with Dick Cheney presiding over Congress, there was indeed such a session on the stolen election of 2004, facilitated by Sen. Harry Reid.  But following the cave-in of 2000, it again lacked the full weight of the Democratic Party and its presidential candidate. 

In short, Al Gore and the Democratic Party were complicit in the most demoralizing and anti-democratic events in the recent history of our nation.  It is fine for the brilliant and lucid former Vice President to decry the power of money and television in the destruction of our democracy.

But what can tangibly and irrevocably destroy a democracy more thoroughly than the outright theft of elections, especially when it happens without challenge from the opposition?

We welcome the heartfelt insights of Al Gore on the broader issues of modern democracy. But when will he finally come clean on what he and John Kerry did—and didn’t do—in allowing the theft of our last two presidential elections? 

When will Gore muster the courage of former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker in denouncing the role of voting machine proprietors and techno “insiders” in corrupting the voting process?

Most of all, we need to hear how Al Gore and the Democratic Party plan to guarantee it never happens again. And then we need to see them actually act on it.  


Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman’s three books on the theft of the 2004 election are available at www.freepress.org. Harvey’s  SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org.

Original article here:

https://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2600 
 

In the Land of the Free, and the
Home of the Brave

Paul R Lehto
 
Congressional Intent to Eliminate We the People
 from Our Own Elections   —  Congressional Failure to Secure and Guarantee Basic Rights to All Americans
 
Americans Must Act Within Two Weeks to Restore
Their Inalienable Right to Kick the Bums Out of Office
 
“The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure when the
transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them . . .” —Patrick Henry
 
“Give me Liberty, or Give me Death.”   —Patrick Henry
 
WARNING: a bipartisan Congress will, in the next few days, attempt to violate your #1 Inalienable Right.  Having talked to many folks, I’ve not yet found an American who says this warning is not well taken.  Although each person I’ve talked to understands   they’re being cheated by this;  they just tend to think that other Americans won’t listen, or think Americans too busy to preserve their own most basic rights.   
 
Are Americans, in fact, too lazy or stupid to defend their own freedoms anymore?   Some say that a few words about their own history will bore them to giving up their republic without so much as a fight, especially with an election law attorney writing like this as if he’s Paul Revere.    Will cynicism mean that Americans give up the fight for their rights on their own soil?  
 
Nowadays, some say American attention spans are so short that they won’t be able to finish an essay like this of just a few pages, even when told that Abe Lincoln’s “government of the People, by the People and for the People”  depends on it.   I’m told regularly to use extremely few words, give a quick action request at the end, so that Americans can go back to their slumbers.
 
But I don’t believe the pessimists.  I choose to address all of those who read this as concerned citizens, instead of addled consumers.    I believe that Americans respond when they know what’s at stake.   The USA did not become the world’s richest country and sole military superpower for no reason.    They will read a few more paragraphs of context that help explain why this is so important, before it’s time to prove why your #1 Inalienable Right must be defended.
 
Americans by and large remember the sacrifices of citizens and soldiers over the generations — millions of them who worked, fought, and died for the dream of American democracy – and they will not allow democracy to slip away during our generation — on our watch — if they understand clearly what’s at stake.
 
So, to be clear, please let me explain.    As an offer of my own seriousness about this, let me simply say I don’t particularly need this fight:   I’ve been in the hospital several times in the last year for as long as a week, and though medical bills and devotion to this cause have emptied the savings, and although fatigue follows me daily, and with two young children to worry about, I am nevertheless convinced of the need to give this my all.    After having sought the counsel of some fellow citizens and lovers of democracy, and short of funds and energy for renewing my license anyway, I’ve let my attorney license expire as a form of resignation as a lawyer, I will not have clients any more – other than American Democracy.   I feel that what I’ve learned about elections I can not ration and sell at $200 an hour, when as many as possible need to know some things, and soon.
 
In reaching this decision, I realized that the principles of our representative democracy are actually more important than life itself.   Otherwise, if this were not the case, how would you convince a man or woman to sacrifice their life for this principle of democratic self-government?   By what other persuasion would we send our young to the front lines of war other than with some version of Patrick Henry’s famous patriotic challenge:  “Give me Liberty, or Give Me Death?”     Americans believe that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.
 
But on our watch, there haven’t been quite enough sentinels of democracy, there have been too few watchdogs of our Constitutional and Inalienable Rights: those Rights we’re endowed with by our Creator under the Declaration of Independence.   That Declaration of Independence, and those American men and women took on a King and the world’s mightiest military – they dared greatly.   The wanted  to remake the history of the world in favor of the principles of self-government.  A revolution of perspective would, they believed, restore this continent to a state of Nature, with free and equal citizens joining in communities to protect their individual rights and the commonwealth.  
 
Today, historians write that we were the first nation founded on ideals – like “no taxation without representation,” like “legitimate political power comes only from the people” via free and fair elections establishing the consent of the governed, and that laws in derogation of the natural rights of the People are Void and without effect.  
 
On the purpose of government, Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “governments are instituted to secure [our] rights.”   Thus from that day in 1776 forward, we would have “Government Servants” or “public servants,” with the People as the Master of the government, and not the other way around.    With the right to vote for representatives and others, the People would never again be slaves to Tyranny or governmental abuse of power.    
 
Consequently, under the Declaration of Independence, the People have the Inalienable right to “alter or abolish” their Government servants if they no longer serve them well.   Today, we sometimes refer to this as the right to “kick the bums out.”   The very recognition of inalienable rights present at birth were an example and precedent for the whole world because, for the first time in European historical memory, the individual human being was an independent source of power and rights, just by virtue of being born.  In these notions, the Founders learned from both John Locke, and perhaps even more from the advanced civilization of the Iroquois, with its three branch form of government.    We all remember that humans are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these rights are life, liberty, and … though the last word was originally “property,” the Founders changed the word “property” in that phrase to the more familiar “pursuit of happiness.” 
 
The emergence of the “pursuit of happiness’ in place of property emphasizes that Liberty is ultimately more important than Property.   The real core of the American Revolution, the new idea with which the Founders wanted to “begin the world anew” was specifically that a government does not Grant rights (nor does it possess any rights); rather, as a servant of the people, the purpose of government is to Guarantee the rights of the people. 
 
Pledged irrevocably to these ideals, the signers of the Declaration pledged and lost their Lives or their Fortunes, but they still retain their Honor today.   By intentionally enslaving the Government as servant of the public’s rights and happiness, the energies of a whole nation of individuals of diverse races, colors and creeds were unleashed to maximize their potential.    As a result, Freedom, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, arises when a government of limited powers, working in trust, guarantees the individual rights of all citizens, thus unleashing the maximum potential of each person.   
 
At the Seneca Falls Declaration of Rights in 1848 that launched women’s suffrage movement, and again in Washington DC in Martin Luther King’s civil rights speech “I Have a Dream” speech, the history of American can largely be told as a process of women and minorities and their families and supporters insisting that our country live up to its ideals, that it make good on the promises of the Declaration for everyone.    Though heroes like Susan B. Anthony worked their whole lives without seeing a ballot in their hands, their vision and their engines of progress forced the American Dream to grow.    They insisted that the country make real its ideals, and they made it so.  As many state constitutions and the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights state, frequently recurring to fundamental principles is necessary to the preservation of Liberty and free government. 
 
Today, we are faced with a choice of recurring to our own principles of Freedom and Democracy, or letting democracy die.    Whenever we do not regularly bring to the fore these principles, they are eroded, chipped away, violated and harmed – just by the very process of not being considered because they are not at the negotiation table.  
 
Though popular, Freedom is always at risk of intentional harm from people who think they have a better idea about how to live our lives or run our country than ordinary Americans do.   Some of them are so convinced they will happily force you to go along for your own good.  But freedom is only free if you are safe being unpopular.  
 
Our representative democracy is always at risk of harm or manipulation because the passions of the day or the business interests at issue don’t wish to leave their fates to a majority vote sometimes any more than you or I would like to have a spouse chosen for us by majority vote.   Power is endlessly addictive to humans, once some government officials taste it, they don’t want to stop and may try to stay in office by crooked means.   Those of us on the internet often inform just our like-minded friends about internet polls in order to get them to help vote up our side of the issue.  But this one-sided get-out-the-vote effort on our part makes the internet poll even less scientific or accurate than it was in the beginning, and because of this distortion it’s the moral equivalent of stuffing the ballot box.      Now, given that we all try to stuff the ballot box for fun in these internet polls, imagine a real election where the stakes are just a little higher:   like for example  control of the world’s richest country and sole military superpower up for grabs in a presidential election.   Ever heard of the name President RutherFraud B. Hayes?   That name was quite popular back in the late 1800s.  Around that time, there was so much violence, intimidation, bribery and pressuring at and around the polls that the secret ballot came along as an innovation to reduce the intimidation and fraud.
 
But the secret ballot did not make all the pressure on elections go completely away.   It just moved location and changed tactics. 
 
So now at last, we are left at the point of seeing where we are losing our most sacred democratic rights.   Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.   There is one channel of political legitimacy and that’s the elections.  Everyone who votes takes a side and is biased.   Many political issues have both sides believing that great injustice will occur if they lose an election.   Most especially, because the government relies on elections for 100% of its power, money and legitimacy, it has a huge conflict of interest and can not administer elections without a check and balance from the public.  
 
But We the People have been eliminated from a meaningful role in elections, because nobody counts and nobody can watch the counting of the vote on the new electronic machines.     After well over a century of successfully hand counting paper ballots under the supervision of the public and the parties, and although the number of workers it takes per thousand hand counted  ballots has essentially not changed, we’ve grown fond of the wonders of computer and grown tired of Election Night labors for democracy.   Various types of computers have come in to take up the slack, both optical scanners using paper ballots originally, and touch screen computers, counting well over 80% of our ballots in complete invisibility and secrecy.   
 
We the People are no longer able to keep our eyes on, or supervise, our own elections.   We’ve been eliminated from elections by “modernization.”  The “modern” computers are amoral slaves that do whatever they are told to do without regard to law or democratic ethics.    Their electronic hard drives operate invisibly.  They might offer some convenience, but they also make us stand in line to wait for machines, and richer counties have shorter lines than poorer counties.   As might be expected given the nature of computers, numerous studies establish that one person with access to one results disk for about one minute can place a virus that can alter an entire county’s election results, or   alter an entire state’s election results.  Though elections have always been under pressure because of their stakes, this increases enormously the amount of cheating one person can do, how quickly they can do it, and how easily they can erase the evidence of what they did.  
 
It gets even worse.   The software that counts is the only thing that knows the true count, even the officials have no idea if the scanner or touch screen numbers are correct, barring the rare, expensive and (in Bush v. Gore 2000) terminable hand recount.   We’ve been taught to be frustrated with the hanging chad to embrace the computer, claiming the chad is paper, but in fact it is a punch card, and every punch card ever made was for a computerized process of counting.  
 
WARNING:  With computerized voting, your inalienable right to kick the bums out, or your inalienable right to alter or abolish your government through elections,   doesn’t exist.  It is not secured for you by your government.  They are not guaranteeing this right for you.    In fact any corrupt election insider could, for money, partisanship, pressure, threat or in the belief of doing a great justice to the whole Nation, alter the election results undetectably, erasing the steps along the way.    As long as the total number of votes match up roughly, and one doesn’t cheat more than say 20 percentage points, a whole industry of political pundits will chalk up the surprise victory to the last minute attack ad, or great get out the vote campaign, or a problem with the “loser’s” platform, the weather, or any of dozens of other colorable excuses.  
 
In short, with computerized voting by optical scanner or touch screen, your vote is simply whatever the invisible computer instructions say it is, computers can be programmed many months in advance, and instructing the computer to wait til election night poll closing before changing votes will defeat every test that ever happens, which are all with small amounts of votes anyway.    With a computer, it is really irrelevant what it does in a testing period the day before or the day after, it matters only what the computers in the real election (and we all know which ones they are) are actually instructed to do, on Election Day and election conditions.  
 
This means that you do still have the right to kick out an honest politician, you just don’t have the right to kick out a crooked politician.    But of course, that’s precisely when the inalienable right to kick the bums out is most needed:  with a no good cheating bum.  
 
Some folks in our government are accidentally or purposefully not checking in with or recurring to our fundamental principles frequently, as needed to preserve liberty and free government.    If they did, they would recall that our Founders taught us that power corrupts, they would not ask us for trust.  They would recall the America is about checks and balances, a form of distrust, and not about trust.  If they checked in with the Declaration of Independence, they would in the second paragraph realize that governments are instituted to secure us our rights.    In order to SECURE the right to kick the crooked bums out as needed, our elections must be secured FROM the government.  Our elections must be beyond the possible or ready manipulation of the government.   If you are not serious about your rights or your freedoms, you don’t need to take this seriously.  But if you are serious about preserving American rights and American freedoms, most especially the freedom to get rid of any crooks, you had best cast a suspicious and jealous eye on the Public Liberty of elections.   Be a sentinel of democracy, don’t let democracy wither on your watch.  
 
President McKinley said that Americans agree on principles, they disagree on politics or the application of principles.    The principles outlined here for the protection of freedom and democracy are our Nation’s most sacred.   They are revered by Americans.   An August 2006 Zogby poll I paid for with help from Nancy Tobi of New Hampshire and Michael Collins of electionfraudnews.com established that an incredible 92% of Americans supported a vote counting system where vote counting is observable by the public and the public can obtain information about vote counting.   http://www.zogby.com/News/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1163   This is one of the highest political values ever measured in polls, yet the 90% secret vote counting that is taking place in America shows how incredibly out of touch our government, of both parties, is with every demographic group in America. 
 
The only kind of voting system that is compatible with your inalienable rights and mine is one the public can watch like a hawk, and one that the public controls, and that it can observe.   Given it is the duty of government to secure and guarantee our rights, specifically including the right to kick them out, elections have no choice but to be publicly controlled.  
 
Those are the principles.  Now for the politics that get a little debatable with some people.    Essentially in the only system that provides for public control and observable elections is known as precinct counted hand counted paper ballots.   Simply put, this system is running unopposed in the democracy race.  We do not have a choice of much completely different systems.  The ability to peacefully preserve freedom and democracy through elections is far too valuable for any objection to it to have weight.  
 
But the Congress won’t listen.  Neither party listens to the needs of democracy, so they must hear from YOU the citizens.    On May 6, 2007 the House Administration Committee reported out a modified bill called HR 811, also known as the Holt bill.  In that bill’s markup in committee, it got better and it got worse in various particulars, if you follow the debate.   One way in which it got much worse is that instead of source code for the computer that would be given away for any citizen’s inspection, they committee put in language that made the source code a government-recognized trade secret, available only to “qualified” experts, and then only if a strict nondisclosure agreement is signed that incorporates trade secrecy laws of the states, which almost always contain harsh punitive damages and attorneys fees clauses for violating the secrecy.  
 
This language is particularly ominous.   I know of no time before that an American legislative body has ever tried to pass law to reinforce secret vote counting.   Of course, having a copy of the source code does not tell us if that code is the same as what’s used on election day, nor does it tell us what the actual voting computers are asked to do on election day.   It would be, of course, illegal for the software to differ, but it is readily possible to conceal a double Trojan Horse, for example, such that it is highly resistant to being found.   It is not possible to verify that a piece of software remains unchanged, if it were, the problem of viruses would be solved since each program could self-verify whether or not it had been changed.     As stated in the classic computer paper “Reflections on Trusting Trust” the only code you can trust is the code you wrote yourself and know nobody else has accessed.  
 
As a consequence of all of the above, while computers have many wonderful uses, they are not compatible with democracy.   
 
On the same infamous day of May 6, 2007, the House Administration committee did more than just insert language that would give a specific statutory “anchor” or claimed basis in law for secret vote counting.   On that day they also dismissed, without allowing discovery via the Congress or hearing any evidence in the Congress, 4 Congressional election contests.   Three were in Florida and one in Louisiana.  A remaining fifth contest in Florida’s 13th Congressional District was not dismissed but already has a state court ruling holding that “trade secrecy” overcame the need to investigate the truth in that Congressional election. In another, Florida’s 24th, candidate Clint Curtis collected many hundreds of affidavits showing his official results were underreported by 12% to 24%.  The House Administration Committee ignored and refused to hear this evidence, dismissing this and 3 other contests without any discovery of facts or any evidentiary consideration.    
 
Pursuant to a self-serving law called the Federal Election Contest Act, the Congress claims to be the judge of its own elections!    Thus, in one case that I personally litigated near San Diego California, in a June 6, 2006 special election for Congress, one of the candidates, Brian Bilbray, was sworn in only 7 days later, on June 13, 2006.   The June 13 Congressional Record recites that there were 68,500 uncounted votes on the very first count!  This was considered a bellwether for the November 2006 congressional races, and Francine Busby led in all of the pre-election polls except one controversial one right before the election, where it’s claimed she made a gaffe.   But regardless, the Congressional Record admits the results were unofficial, there were 68,500 uncounted votes in a race with a margin of less than 5000 votes, and it was weeks prior to the earliest date anyone can file an election contest or a recount request.    But the Congressional Record states there are no “known” disputes or contests.   Mr. Bilbray, a former Congressman known to many of the members, was sworn in.  
 
Subsequently, when two lady citizens sued to contest the election, Mr. Bilbray   claimed that no state or federal court had any jurisdiction since only the Congress had an exclusive jurisdiction thanks to his premature swearing in. He cited Art. I, sec. 5 of the Constitution for the idea that the House could not be second guessed after an unconditional swearing.    This insult to democracy and the people of the 50th District was made worse.   For having the audacity to question Mr. Bilbray’s election termination maneuver, Bilbray countersued with a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) counterclaim for damages and attorney fees, a suit usually brought by the little guy against the big corporation.   Plaintiffs Jacobson and Ritt never asked for money, they simply wanted their rights and their votes counted.   But even for that privilege, the election officials jacked the recount price up about 7 times higher than similar races, for an estimated cost of $150,000.    That’s one expensive personal right to vote. 
 
Our government “servants” while often noble in motivation, are also too frequently lazy or corrupt.    Few  know, since it was only reported in local Ohio news, that convictions have been obtained for rigging the 2004 presidential recount for Bush and Kerry, requested by the Libertarian and Green parties.    As shown by two felony convictions for rigging the Presidential recount in 2004 in Cuyahoga county Ohio show, partisanship is by no means the only motive that distorts elections.   In cases like the inflated recount price tag above, government officials are very uninterested in having their first “official” counts made to look bad (they’re human), and they are also very uninterested in working through Thanksgiving (one of the motives in Ohio’s presidential recount rigging convictions).   In a nutshell, recounts and audits are so hazardous because they have many legal hurdles and take place after the election, when lots of pressure is put on the “sore loser” to concede.   This means that only the first count really matters, and certainly the first count controls headlines, and swearing-ins.  
 
The presidential election, in particular, has a special time limit of December 13 that came into play with Bush v. Gore that makes post-election “remedies” very unreliable.    But, it is very gravely concerning that the first counts are secret.  Literally only the hacker or rigger knows what the true count is.   The greatly enhanced ability to cheat means we have reached more than just a dangerous time for democracy.  With no basis for confidence in election results because indeed we have no evidence at all of the counts, we are forced to take the elections purely on trust instead of evaluating the evidence and the checks and balances.  
 
Publicly controlled elections must be restored immediately, based on considerations of the values of democracy.   If we only consider non-democratic values like convenience, we’ll end up with a non-democratic system.  Harry Truman laid it out straight:  If you want just efficiency, you’ll get a dictatorship.  The most likely route to a loss of freedom comes when realizing that a successful election criminal gets to be an election official or set election policy.    What if a bank robber got to be bank president and set bank vault policy?   Thus, when protective of liberty and looking for suspect election criminals, look in office.
 
 In contrast, the longtime values of democracy are openness, inclusion, equality of one person one vote, consent of the governed, and the rights of the people to alter or abolish their government.    These and related values are the ones we should frequently refer to, use as compass guides to keep us pointing in the right direction.  Even if we don’t achieve our ideal destination, we are lost indeed if we can not orient ourselves in the direction of progress.   
 
The congressional election contests unfairly dismissed, the California election contest prematurely terminated by swearing in, and the problem of secret vote counting on electronics share a common theme:   It is not possible to run democratic elections without a major role by We the People, and the government has too many conflicts and partisanships to do the job of auditing itself, investigating itself, or potentially undermining a fellow Member in Congress The necessity of a role for We the People in controlling elections should not surprise us, we are after all the master, the government the servant.   In the Judiciary branch, for example,  We the People still walk in to the jury box and judge innocence and guilt, life and death, liability and non-liability.   
 
But our elimination from our proper role controlling elections? This is a crime against democracy.   We need to remember who we are as Americans, and act soon to tell the House and the Senate in DC and in our state houses, that we will not stand for secret vote counting, that they most definitely will not pass laws purporting to authorize or legalize that even indirectly, that it is a shame of immense proportions for them to vote for secret counting of votes in their own re-election races, by simply amending the Help America Vote Act with HR 811 without abolishing secret vote counting.   That this huge conflict of interest, voting on their own re-elections, ought to sensitize Congress to a great need to act against its own perceived interests, and that politicians who love representative democracy and their own constituents surely ought to be competing with each other to see who can restore more power to the people in elections than the other guy.  
 
Because if they don’t, if they keep the secret counting easily manipulated by insiders and their cavalier attitudes toward election contests, our #1 inalienable right to kick the crooked bums out will remain violated and denied by our own government.    Denying We the People the steering wheel of elections keeps our government “stuck on stupid” and out of touch with the public, unable to obey the public will.    Without elections, featuring voting as the right that controls all other rights, it is we who are the slaves, and not the government.  
 
This, if it remains, is a revolution against democracy.   It is un-American.   It must change by all means necessary. 
 
The Star Spangled Banner always ends with a question:
 
O Say Does that Star Spangled Banner Yet Wave,
O’er the Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave?  
 
A land of free and brave people will not fight amongst themselves on partisan elections results, they will first secure their most important inalienable rights.   A land of free and brave patriots will never again let their elections get out of their sight, or out of control.  
 
So if you feel as I feel, if you wish as I wish, that America will never become a banana republic with an out of control government, then talk to your fellow rulers, your fellow citizens, spread the word far and wide, and make the US House, the US Senate, and your state legislatures here Freedom’s bell, so they know what it sounds like.   We are not the Slaves, we are in charge.  We are watching.   We demand control of our elections.   We will not give up.  Democracy and Freedom both depend on that.
 
Paul R Lehto
Juris Doctor
plehto@psephos-us.org
www.psephos-us.org  
 
Starting Friday, May 18, 2007 at 8pm EST, you can go to www.HR811.com for more detailed information on the Holt Bill, HR 811.  

RalphNader

Saturday, May 19, Ralph Nader Live Webcast at the Drexel Gateway

Meet and talk with Ralph Nader during a live webcast after the showing of his movie, “An Unreasonable Man,” at 7pm at the Drexel Gateway. The movie is two hours long, webcast will begin around 9pm.

$8.50 admission, SPECIAL DISCOUNT: $2 off for Free Press subscribers! Just tell them at the door!

Truth@freepress.org, 253-2571.
Drexel Gateway: 614-545-2255, 1550 N. High St.

www.anunreasonableman.com

globanim.gifby Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
May 11, 2007

From Ohio and California to Scotland and France, the disputes surrounding electronic voting machines have gone truly global.

E-voting machines have already been extensively studied and condemned by a wide range of expert committees, commissions and colleges, including the General Accountability Office, the Carter-Baker Commission, Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, Stanford University and others. Rigging of a recount in Cleveland has resulted in two felony convictions. The failures of e-voting machines have been the subject of numerous documentary films, including the aptly titled HBO special “Hacking Democracy.”

Now the secretaries of state in Ohio and California are subjecting e-voting to still more official review. Ohio’s Jennifer Brunner has announced she’ll seek bids to conduct independent studies of both touch-screen machines, which record votes electronically, and optical scanners, which tabulate paper ballots electronically.

Brunner has already removed the entire board of elections of Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) in part because of a major fiasco caused by new electronic machines in the state’s 2006 primary election. Voting rights activists vehemently opposed the $20 million purchase, but it was rammed through by Board Chair Robert Bennett and Executive Director Michael Vu.

The machines then caused long reporting delays. Vu resigned under pressure from the board. Bennett then resigned—along with the rest of the board—under pressure from Brunner. Bennett chairs the Ohio Republican Party, works closely with White House advisor Karl Rove, and was instrumental in delivering Ohio’s decisive votes to George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election. Two felony convictions have so far arisen from what prosecutors call a “rigged” recount that occurred that year in Cleveland, under Bennett’s supervision.

The specifics of Brunner’s investigation, which she wants done by September, are not yet public. But the newly elected Democrat says she intends to “fill in the gaps” on studies of Diebold, ES&S and Hart InterCivic machines whose vote tallies were key to giving Bush a second term. The conservative Columbus Dispatch has already predicted that the results of the investigation “likely will disappoint conspiracy theorists.”

California’s new Secretary of State Deborah Bowen will begin her study May 14, and wants it done by late July. An interagency agreement with the University of California will use three “top-to-bottom review teams” with about seven people each to inspect documents, previous studies, computer source code and a penetration attack to test system security. Cost is estimated at $1.8 million to be covered by system vendors and the Help America Vote Act. Systems from Diebold, ES&S, HartIntercivic, Sequoia and InkaVote of Los Angeles will be examined.

Other states are also re-evaluating their electronic voting systems, and fierce controversy is raging nationwide over a federal bill from Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ) which institutes certain voting reforms but allows the use of electronic machines to continue.

Now the issue has spread worldwide. Widespread cries of theft and fraud erupted in Ukraine, just before the US 2004 election. A forced re-vote ousted the “official” winner.

In Mexico, leftists contend the recent presidential election there was stolen just as Bush did it in the US, with some of the same personnel pulling it off.

Now similar cries are coming from Scotland and France. May 3 elections in Scotland using new electronic counting systems resulted in as many as 100,000 votes being classed as “spoilt papers.” (About 90,000 such ballots from Ohio 2004 remain uncounted to this day).

Complex methods of tabulating and weighting the Scottish votes yielded “chaos.” Several vote counts were suspended. In some races the tally of rejected ballots was greater than some candidates’ winning margin. “This is a temporary interruption to one small aspect of the overall process,” says a spokeswoman for DRS, the company responsible for the vote counting technology.

The language in France has not been so polite. A watershed presidential election has just been won by Nicolas Sarkozy, a blunt right-wing Reagan-Bush-style extremist over the socialist Segolene Royal. Sarkozy is a hard-edged authoritarian whose intense anti-immigrant rhetoric matches his support for the American war in Iraq and his avowed intent to slash France’s social service system, including a public health program widely considered among the best in the world.

Like the balloting in Ukraine, the US, Scotland and Mexico, Sarkozy’s victory was marred by angry, widespread complaints about dubious vote counts whose discrepancies always seem to favor the rightist candidate. Throughout France, the cry has arisen that the conservatives have done to Segolene Royal what Bush/Rove did to John Kerry.

In the not-so-distant past, other elections were engineered by George H.W. Bush, head of the Central Intelligence Agency and father of the current White House resident. During the Reagan-Bush presidencies, in the Philippines, Nicaragua, El Salvador and other key third world nations, expected leftist triumphs somehow morphed into rightist coups. “CIA destabilizations are nothing new,” said former CIA station chief and Medal of Merit winner John Stockwell in 1987. “Guatemala in 1954, Brazil, Ghana, Chile, the Congo, Iran, Panama, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay—the CIA organized the overthrow of constitutional democracy.”

The recent trend to privatizing vote counts, with corporations claiming “proprietary rights” to keep their hardware and software covert, has added a new dimension to an old tradition. The recent “e-victories” in the US and France have significantly tipped to the right the global balance among the major powers. So while Ohio and California conduct their studies of electronic voting, the whole world will be watching.


Bob Fitrakis’s forthcoming book, THE FITRAKIS FILES: COPS, COVERUPS AND CORRUPTION, is at https://freepress.org/, where this article first appeared. Harvey Wasserman’s SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030, is at http://www.solartopia.org/.
Original link at:

https://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2585

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
May 6, 2007

The 1970 killings by National Guardsmen of four students during a peaceful anti-war demonstration at Kent State University have now been shown to be cold-blooded, premeditated official murder. But the definitive proof of this monumental historic reality is not, apparently, worthy of significant analysis or comment in today’s mainstream media.

After 37 years of official denial and cover-up, tape-recorded evidence, that has existed for decades and has been in the possession of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), has finally been made public.

It proves what “conspiracy theorists” have argued since 1970—that there was a direct military order leading to the unprovoked assassination of unarmed students. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) documents show collusion between Ohio Governor James A. Rhodes and the FBI that aimed to terrorize anti-war demonstrators and their protests that were raging throughout the nation.

It is difficult to overstate the political and cultural impact of the killing of the four Kent State students and wounding of nine more on May 4, 1970. The nation’s campuses were on fire over Richard Nixon’s illegal invasion of Cambodia. Scores of universities were ripped apart by mass demonstrations and student strikes. The ROTC building at Kent burned down. The vast majority of American college campuses were closed in the aftermath, either by student strikes or official edicts.

Nixon was elected president in 1968 claiming to have a “secret plan” to end the war in Southeast Asia. But the revelation that he was in fact escalating it with the illegal bombing of what had been a peaceful non-combatant nation was more than Americans could bear.

As the ferocity of the opposition spread deep into the grassroots, Nixon’s Vice President, Spiro Agnew, shot back in a series of speeches. He referred to student demonstrators as Nazi “brownshirts” and suggested that college administrators and law enforcement should “act accordingly.”

On May 3, 1970—the day before National Guardsmen under his purview opened fire at Kent State–Rhodes echoed Agnew’s remarks by referring to student demonstrators as “the strongest, well-trained militant revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America … They’re worse than the brownshirts and the Communist element and the night riders and the vigilantes. They are the worst type of people that we harbor in America….”

Rhodes told a reporter that the Ohio National Guard would remain at Kent State “until we get rid of them” referring to a demographic group that was overwhelmingly white, middle class and in college.

The next day, Rhodes, the administration and the FBI sent those students a lethal message.

Rhodes was the perfect messenger. Bumbling and mediocre, with a long history of underworld involvement, Rhodes was a devoted admirer of Nixon, and of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Public records reveal that Rhodes was a virtual stooge for the FBI because of the agency’s files tying Rhodes directly to organized crime.

When Kent’s ROTC building was torched on May 2 under suspicious circumstances (student protestors couldn’t get it to light until a mysterious “biker” showed up with a canister of gasoline) it provided the perfect cover for Rhodes to dispatch the National Guard.

But contrary to law, they were supplied with live ammunition. On May 4, in the presence of a peaceful, unthreatening rally, the Guard was strung along a ridge 100 yards from the bulk of the protestors. Earlier, rocks and insults had been hurled at the Guard. But not one of the numerous investigations and court proceedings involving what happened next has ever contended any of the students were armed, or that the Guard was under threat of physical harm at the time of the shooting.

For 37 years the official cover story has been that a mysterious shot rang out and the young Guardsmen panicked, firing directly into the “mob” of students.

This week, that cover story was definitively proven to be a lie.

Prior to the shooting, a student named Terry Strubbe put a microphone at the window of his dorm, which overlooked the rally. According to the Associated Press, the 20-second tape is filled with “screaming anti-war protectors followed by the sound of gunfire.”

But in an amplified version of the tape, a Guard officer is also heard shouting “Right here! Get Set! Point! Fire!”

The sound of gunshots follow the word “Point.” Four students soon lay dead. Two days later, two more would die at Jackson State University, as police fired without provocation into a dorm.

Strubbe gave a copy of the Kent tape to the FBI soon after the shooting (he has kept the original in a safe deposit box). Eight Guardsmen were later tried for civil rights violations, and acquitted. Neither their officers, nor Nixon, nor Agnew, nor Rhodes, nor the FBI, were ever brought to trial. But massive volumes of research—including an epic study by James A. Michener and William Gordon’s Four Dead in Ohio—strongly imply an explicit conspiracy to intimidate the national anti-war movement.

After 37 years, Strubbe’s tape got its first widespread public perusal last week. Six months ago, Alan Canfora, 58, one of the nine wounded Kent students, learned it had been given to Yale University’s archives. Last week he played it to a group of students and reporters at a small university theater.

The fact that the Guard got direct orders to set, aim and shoot flies directly in the face of the official cover story that they were responding in panic to a random shot fired at them, or that they were defending themselves from some kind of student attack.

In fact, it seems highly likely no shot ever rang out prior to the order to fire. Nor could the Guard, who killed a student as much as 900 feet away from the rally, say they were under any serious attack from the students.

The Kent State killings are now prominently featured in virtually every history book of the United States used in American schools. The accounts often include the famous photo of an anguished Mary Ann Vecchio crying for help next to the dead body of student protestor Jeffrey Miller. (They were 265 feet away from where the shot that killed Miller was fired.) Rendered into song by Neil Young’s classic “Ohio,” there are few more definitive moments in the history of this nation.

But meaningful analysis of the implications of this tape has been mysteriously missing from the American media. The Associated Press did carry a widely-runstory about the surfacing of this evidence, as did National Public Radio. But the Columbus Dispatch, in Ohio’s capital, buried the report on page A-5 under the innocuous headline “Victim shares audio tape of Kent State shootings.” Virtually absent from the major US media has been a concerted examination of the fact that the keystone in this monumental American saga has been re-set.

For we now know that a premeditated, unprovoked order was indeed given to National Guardsmen to fire live ammunition at peaceful, unarmed American students, killing four of them. The illegal order to arm the Guard with live ammunition in the first place could only have come from the governor of Ohio. The very loud, very public nod to shoot some “brown shirt” students somewhere in order to chill the massive student uprising against the Southeast Asian war was spewed all over the national media by the second-highest official in US government.

Now the magnitude of Kent State’s impact on American politics and culture, already immense, has been significantly deepened.

Alan Canfora intends to use this tape to re-open investigations into what happened at Kent State 37 years ago.

But the media’s apparent unconcern about confirmation of the official order to carry out these killings may bear a simple message: that we should be prepared for them to happen again.


Bob Fitrakis’s forthcoming book, THE FITRAKIS FILES: COPS, COVERUPS AND CORRUPTION, containing further background information on James A. Rhodes, is at www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared. HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is at www.solartopia.org

Original article at:

https://freepress.org/departments/display/20/2007/2577

May 4, 2007

Ten days after Governor James A. Rhodes assumed office on January 14, 1963, a Cincinnati FBI agent wrote Director J. Edgar Hoover a memo stating: “At this moment he [Rhodes] is busier than a one-armed paper hanger . . . . Consequently, I do not plan to establish contact with him for a few months. We will have no problem with him whatsoever. He is completely controlled by an SAC [Special Agent in Charge] contact, and we have full assurances that anything we need will be made available promptly. Our experience proves this assertion.”

Why would the FBI assert that the newly-inaugurated governor of Ohio is “completely controlled”? Media sources like Life magazine noted the governor’s alleged ties to organized crime and the Mafia in specific. Gov. Rhodes’ FBI file, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, suggests that it may be because of the FBI’s extensive knowledge of Rhodes’ involvement in the numbers rackets in the late 1930’s that the Bureau could count on his cooperation.

FBI declassified material suggests that the Bureau’s extensive influence over Governor Rhodes, perhaps due to their knowledge of his ties to the numbers rackets, may have played a role in the Governor’s hard line law and order tactics that led to the deaths of four students at Kent State in 1970.

A November 19, 1963 FBI memo, again from a Cincinnati agent to Director Hoover, outlines specific allegations from a Bureau’s confidential informant about Rhodes’ involvement in the numbers racket between 1936-38. The informant, a bagman for local organized crime, gave detailed information about pick ups at a cigar store located between Buttles and Goodale Avenues reportedly owned by Rhodes’ sister. Rhodes purportedly was running the gambling operation. Years ago, a Dispatch reporter told the Free Press that the governor had run a gambling operation in the Short North, called Jimmy’s Place.

As Rhodes assumed public office, first as a Columbus School Board member, and later as the Mayor of the city, he began to make overtures to Director Hoover. In a February 1949 letter, Mayor Rhodes invited Hoover to sit on the advisory board of the All-American Newspaper Boys Sports Scholarships organization. Hoover declined. Rhodes thanked him and then invited him to address a banquet for the National Newspaper Boys Association in August of 1949. Hoover again declined.

Two years later, Rhodes was again attempting to contact Hoover. On July 27, 1951, Rhodes called the FBI director’s office and at first refused to speak to Hoover’s assistant L.B. Nichols. When told that the director was in “travel status,” Rhodes explained the important nature of his call. He wanted “to invite the director to attend a celebrity golf tournament, . . . since its benefits were to go to youth organizations and he knew of the director’s interest in youth work.” Nichols declined on behalf of Hoover.

Finally, Rhodes persistence paid off. Rhodes and his wife were given a special tour of the FBI building in Washington D.C. on January 19, 1953. “During the tour Mr. Rhodes stated he wanted to say with all possible sincerity that during all these years he has had continued and absolute faith in one government agency – the FBI,” reads the 1963 memo.

The “completely controlled” memo showed great sympathy to Rhodes’ youthful gambling enterprise: “It is understandable that Rhodes has previously said that it was necessary during the Depression to do many things to keep body and soul together and to provide food for existence.” Although the FBI fails to point out that Rhodes came from an affluent family who paid his way at Ohio State University during the Depression.

The memo goes on to describe Rhodes in the following manner: “He is a friend of law enforcement and believes in honest, hard-hitting law enforcement. He respects and admires FBI.”

Moreover, the agency recommended taking “no further action” against Governor Rhodes and his alleged ties to the gambling racket since, “persons very close to him, such as SAC contact Robert H. Wolfe, Publisher, the Columbus Dispatch, speak very highly of Rhodes and his personal attributes. Wolfe knows Rhodes well and was an active financier of the campaign of Rhodes . . . .”

The SAC of the Cincinnati office took special interest in Rhodes’ first election as governor. Incumbent Governor Michael V. Disalle had hired a former FBI agent to investigate and dig up dirt on Rhodes: “We have arranged with friendly newspaper contacts to endeavor to avoid any headline or other prominent mention of the former FBI status of [deleted].”

Following Rhodes’ 1962 election, the FBI described the governor-elect in the following terms: “Rhodes is a Bureau friend of long standing. Our first contact of record was in November, 1943.” The memo goes on to record that, “On June 18, 1945, the SAC of Cincinnati transmitted a news clipping from the ‘Columbus Dispatch’ of 6-7-45 indicating that Mayor Rhodes urged the establishment of a Bureau field office at Columbus.” Rhodes is portrayed as very “active and very friendly toward the Bureau.” Later FBI files would not include these early contacts between the FBI and Rhodes.

The Bureau does detail one obvious connection between Rhodes and organized crime in Columbus: “One informant stated that the gambling element in Columbus has made a great effort to influence Mayor Rhodes to permit open gambling in the city but without success. In 1949, however, it was noted that the informants alleged that Rhodes did not interfere with the ‘numbers racket’ as apparently he was still interested in the colored vote.”

In July of 1963, a memo from the Cincinnati office on the subject of “Communist Speakers on College Campuses” noted that “Governor James A. Rhodes has signed into law legislation authorizing the trustees of any state-operated college or university to bar from using campus facility any person that they wish to bar.”

The SAC in charge of the Cincinnati Bureau wrote Hoover on October 9, 1967 to relay a conversation he had with Rhodes three days earlier regarding the civil unrest and riots that had rocked the nation during the summer of 1967. “During the conference, we discussed matters of mutual interest, particularly civil disorders and the high crime rate. The Governor told me that he would extend his full facilities, and he is all for stopping racial discord the moment it starts. He revealed that his plan is to immediately deploy troops and/the state patrol as soon as trouble arises,” the memo states.

The Cincinnati SAC concludes, “Our relationship with the Governor is of the highest order and he assured me that we can expect full cooperation from the State of Ohio on any matter of mutual concern.”

By the mid-1960s, the CIA and the FBI were working together through the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on radical groups and harass peace organizations. The FBI’s operation was known as COINTELPRO. The CIA’s was Operation CHAOS.

In 1967, declassified government documents reveal that CIA Director Richard Helms, Hoover and President Lyndon Johnson believed that the domestic protest movements against the Vietnam War were being orchestrated by the Communist governments in Moscow, Peking, Havana and Hanoi.

Governor Rhodes used former SAC Ed Mason as an intermediary in an attempt to meet with Hoover on March 25, 1968. The FBI memo on the matter reads, “He formerly served as mayor of Columbus, Ohio and is a good friend of [deleted] of the ‘Columbus Dispatch.’”

The FBI memo said, “SAC, Cincinnati advises that Rhodes has been extremely cooperative.” Surprisingly, “there’s no indication that Governor Rhodes has ever met Mr. Hoover and he has not received an autographed photograph.”

Less than year before the tragic shootings at Kent State, the SAC of the Cincinnati Bureau sent Hoover a memo detailing Rhodes’ attitude towards civil unrest: “He personally feels that the Director is the outstanding American and that he is the only person who has consistently opposed those persons who would subvert our government. He feels that the Director’s stated position of dealing firmly with these groups is the only sensible method.”

“He [Rhodes] commented on the riots and unrest which have occurred repeatedly and said that some of this might well have been avoided if the Director’s warnings and advice had been followed. In Ohio, he has not hesitated to use the National Guard to deal with these situations and has instructed the Guard to act quickly and firmly. He feels that this is the only way to maintain law and order, and that the maintenance of law and order is the only way our government can survive,” the memo records.

On May 4, 1970, Sandra Scheuer, Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause and William Schroeder were shot dead by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State. Numerous investigative accounts have alleged that the FBI was involved in the burning of the campus ROTC building, which led to the deaths of the students.

The SAC in Cincinnati paid a “courtesy call” on Governor Rhodes 18 days after the shootings. Governor Rhodes informed the FBI agent that he intended to keep the Ohio State University campus open, despite what some historians regard as one of the largest student riots in U.S. history. “. . . He [Rhodes] intends to mobilize sufficient members of the Ohio National Guard (ONG) to accomplish this, ‘even if he has to put a guard in every classroom,’” the memo reads.

The Governor blamed the unrest on outside agitators and “commented that of the upwards of 100 persons arrested on May 21 and May 22, 1970, only a few were OSU students. . .” the memo notes. The FBI memo cites that of the 78 arrests, 35 were OSU students and two OSU employees, even though the majority of the arrests were made off-campus.

“. . . the Governor also referred to the current investigation at Kent State University (KSU) and commented that he felt this would present an excellent opportunity for the Department of Justice, through some detailed statement to the news media after the investigation is completed, to get to the public the true story of campus agitation and to identify the organizers of the violence. The Governor appeared somewhat concerned at the possibility that members of the Ohio National Guard might finally end up being charged with an offense in connection to the shooting of the students at Kent,” the memo stated, “He commented at one point that if the ONG members were indicted in regards to this matter that he felt a million dollars should be spent to defend them, if necessary.”

The memo also records for history that, “The Governor commented several times on the close relationship he has enjoyed with the Bureau locally and as a whole.”

Critics have long charged that the FBI deliberately covered up information about those responsible for ordering the Kent State shootings. A tape was recently released revealing what appears to be an order to shoot at Kent State. FBI declassified docouments strongly suggest that the FBI’s extensive influence over Governor Rhodes, perhaps due to their knowledge of his ties to organized crime and the numbers rackets, may have played a key role in the Governor’s violent and repressive tactics that led to death of four students at Kent State in 1970.


Bob Fitrakis is the Editor & Publisher of https://freepress.org. Revised May 3, 2007. Originally posted on April 21, 2003.

Original article at:

https://freepress.org/columns/display/3/2007/1538

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
April 25, 2007

E-mails being sought from Karl Rove’s computers, and recent revelations about critical electronic conflicts of interest, may be the smoking guns of Ohio’s stolen 2004 election. A thorough recount of ballots and electronic files. preserved by a federal lawsuit, could tell the tale.

The major media has come to focus on a large batch of electronic communications which have disappeared from the server of the Republican National Committee, and from White House advisor Rove’s computers. The attention stems from the controversial firing of eight federal prosecutors by Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales.

But the time frame from which these e-mails are missing also includes a critical late night period after the presidential election of 2004. In these crucial hours, computerized vote tallies may have been shifted to move the Ohio vote count from John Kerry to George W. Bush, giving Bush the presidency.

Earlier that day, Rove and Bush flew into Columbus. Local election officials say they met with Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell in Columbus. Also apparently in attendance was Matt Damschroder, executive director of the Franklin County (Columbus) Board of Elections.

These four men, along with Ohio GOP chair Bob Bennett, were at the core of a multi-pronged strategy that gave Bush Ohio’s twenty Electoral College votes, and thus the presidency. Bennett and Damschroder held key positions on election boards in the state’s two most populous counties, with the biggest inner city concentrations of Democratic voters.

There were four key phases to the GOP’s election theft strategy:

1. Prior to the election, the GOP focused on massive voter disenfranchisement, with a selective reduction of voter turnout in urban Democratic strongholds. Blackwell issued confusing and contradictory edicts on voter eligibility, registration requirements, and provisional ballots; on shifting precinct locations; on denial and misprinting of absentee ballots, and more. Among other things, election officials, including Bennett, stripped nearly 300,000 voters from registration rolls in heavily Democratic areas in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo.

2. On election day, the GOP focussed on voter intimidation, denial of voting rights to legally eligible ex-felons, denial of voting machines to inner city precincts, malfunctioning of those machines, destruction of provisional ballots and more.

In Franklin, Cuyahoga and other urban counties, huge lines left mostly African-American voters waiting in the rain for three hours and more. A Democratic Party survey shows more than 100,000 voters failed to vote due to these lines, which plagued heavily Democratic inner city precincts (but not Republican suburban ones) throughout the state. The survey shows another 50,000 ballots may have been discarded at the polling stations. In addition, to this day, more than 100,000 machine-rejected and provisional ballots remain uncounted. The official Bush margin of victory was less than 119,000 votes.

3. After the final tabulation of the votes, and the announcement that Bush had won, the GOP strategy focussed on subverting a statewide recount. A filing by the Green and Libertarian Parties required Ohio’s 88 county boards of election to conduct random precinct samplings, to be followed by recounts where necessary.

A lawsuit was filed to delay the seating of Ohio’s Electoral College delegation until after the recount was completed. Among other things, the plaintiffs sued to get access to Rove’s laptop. But Blackwell rushed to certify the delegation before a recount could be completed. The issue became moot, and the suit was dropped. In retaliation, Blackwell tried to impose legal sanctions on the attorneys who filed it.

But two felony convictions have thus far resulted from what prosecutors have called the “rigging” of the recount in Cuyahoga County (where Bennett has been forced to resign his chairmanship of the board of elections). More are likely to follow.

The practices that led to these convictions were apparently repeated in many of Ohio’s 88 counties. The order to violate the law—or at least tacit approval to do so—is almost certain to have come from Blackwell.

4. Ultimately, however, it is the GOP’s computerized control of the vote count that may have been decisive. And here is where Rove’s e-mails, and the wee hours of the morning after the election, are crucial.

Despite the massive disenfranchisement of Ohio Democrats, there is every indication John Kerry won Ohio 2004. Exit polls shown on national television at 12:20am gave Kerry a clear lead in Ohio, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico. These “purple states” were Democratic blue late in the night, but, against virtually impossible odds, all turned Bush red by morning.

Along the way, Gahanna, Ohio’s “loaves & fishes” vote count, showed 4,258 ballots for Bush in a precinct where just 638 people voted. Voting machines in Youngstown and Columbus lit up for Bush when Kerry’s name was pushed. Rural Republican precincts registered more than 100% turnouts, while inner city Democratic ones went as low as 7%. Warren County declared a “Homeland Security” alert, removed the ballot count from public scrutiny, then recorded a huge, unlikely margin for Bush.

These and many more instances of irregularities and theft were reported at www.freepress.org and then confirmed by U.S. Representative John Conyers and others who researched the election.

But the most critical reversals may have come as exit polls indicated that despite massive Democratic disenfranchisement, and even with preliminary vote count manipulations, Kerry would win Ohio by 4.2%, a margin well in excess of 200,000 votes.

The key to that reversal may be electronic. It has now become widely known that the same web-hosting firm that served a range of GOP websites, including the one for the Republican National Committee, also hosted the official site that Blackwell used to report the Ohio vote count.

This astonishing conflict of interest has been reported at the epluribusmedia.org on-line investigative service. Cross-postings have come from luaptifer at Dailykos and blogger Joseph Cannon’s Cannonfire.blogspot.com. They all confirm that the RNC tech network’s hosting firm is SMARTech.com, based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. SMARTech hosts georgew.bush.com, mc.org and gop.com among other Republican web domains, in a bank basement.

Furthermore, the same hosting site that handled redirections from Blackwell’s “official” site also handled the White House e-mail accounts that have become central to investigations of the Gonzales purge of eight federal prosecutors, some of whom were themselves involved in vote fraud investigations.

Conflicts of interest in programming services and remote-access capability appear throughout the RNC’s computer networks, Rove’s secret White House e-mail, and the electronic vehicles used by Blackwell to finally reveal his “official” presidential vote counts for Ohio 2004.

One factor may be Ohio’s electronic touch-screen voting systems, on which were cast more than 800,000 votes in an election decided by about one-seventh that total. Such vulnerabilities, among other things, have been confirmed in exhaustive reports by Conyers’s Committee, by the Government Accountability Office, by the Carter-Baker Commission, by Princeton University, by the Brennan Center, and by others.

But overall, the electronic record of every vote in Ohio was transmitted to the Secretary of State’s office, and hosted in real time in Chattanooga. Under such circumstances, the joint hosting of the White House e-mail system and accessibility by Blackwell and Rove to the same computer networks linked to the Ohio vote count, takes on an added dimension.

Mike Connell, a Republican computer expert, helped create the software for both Ohio’s official 2004 election web site, and for the Bush campaign’s partisan web site during the 2000 election. The success of Connell’s GovTech Solutions has been attributed by Connell to his being “loyal to my network,” including the Bush family.

Blackwell shared those loyalties. Like Connell, he worked for the Bush-Cheney campaign, serving as its Ohio co-chair. He was also in control of the vote count that was being reported on software Bush loyalist Connell helped design.

It was in a crucial period after midnight on election night 2004 that these paired conflicts of interest may have decided the election. As exit polls showed a decisive Kerry victory, there was an unexplained 90-minute void in official reporting of results. By this time, most of the vote counts were coming in from rural areas, which are traditionally Republican, and which, ironically, usually report their results earlier than the Democratic urban areas.

In this time span, Kerry’s lead morphed into a GOP triumph. To explain this “miraculous” shift, Rove invented a myth of the greatest last-second voting surge in US history, allegedly coming from late-voting fundamentalist Republicans. No significant evidence exists to substantiate this claim. In fact, local news reports indicate the heaviest turnouts in most rural areas came early on election day, rather than later.

According to a January 13, 2005, release from Cedarville University, a small Ohio-based Christian academy, Connell’s GovTech Solutions helped make the shared server system run “like a champ…through the early morning hours as users from around the world looked to Ohio for their election results.”

After 2am, despite exit polls showing very much the opposite outcome, those results put Bush back in the White House.

In January, 2005, the U.S. Congress hosted the first challenge to a state’s Electoral College delegation in our nation’s history. At the time, the compromised security of the official Ohio electronic reporting systems was not public knowledge. But the first attempt to subpoena Karl Rove’s computer files had already failed.

Now a second attempt to gain such access is being mounted as the Gonzales scandal deepens.

Congressman Henry A. Waxman (D-CA) has raised “particular concerns about Karl Rove” and his electronic communications about the Gonzales firings.

Rove claims both his own computer records and the RNC’s servers have been purged of e-mails through the time the Ohio vote was being reversed. Rove’s attorney, Robert Kuskin, has told a Congressional inquiry that Rove mistakenly believed his messages to the RNC “were being archived” there.

But the RNC says it has no e-mail records for Rove before 2005. Rob Kelner, an RNC lawyer says efforts to recreate the lost records have had some success. But it’s not yet known whether communications from the 2004 election can be retrieved.

Nor is it known whether the joint access allowed to top GOP operatives Rove and Blackwell was responsible for the election-night reversal that put Bush back in the White House.

But there remains another avenue by which the real outcome of Ohio 2004 could be discovered. Longstanding federal law protected Ohio’s ballots and other election documentation prior to September 3, 2006. Blackwell gave clear orders that these crucial records were to be destroyed on that date.

Prior to the expiration of the federal statutory protection, a civil rights lawsuit was filed in the federal court of Judge Algernon Marbley, asking that the remaining records be preserved. The request was granted in what has become known as the King-Lincoln Bronzeville suit (co-author Bob Fitrakis is an attorney in the case, and Harvey Wasserman is a plaintiff).

Thus, by federal law, the actual ballots and electronic records should be available for the kind of exhaustive recount that was illegally denied—or “rigged,” as prosecutors in Cleveland have put it—by Blackwell, Bennett and their cohorts the first time around.

Ohio’s newly-elected Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, has agreed to take custody of these materials, and to bring them to a central repository, probably in Columbus.

This means that an exhaustive recount could show who really did win the presidential election of 2004.

It may also be possible to learn what roles—electronic or otherwise— Karl Rove and J. Kenneth Blackwell really did play during those crucial 90 minutes in the deep night, when the presidency somehow slipped from John Kerry to George W. Bush.


Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available at www.freepress.org and, with Steve Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO?, from the New Press. Fitrakis is publisher, and Wasserman is senior editor, of www.freepress.org.

by Steven Rosenfeld and Bob Fitrakis
April 22, 2007

Did the most powerful Republicans in America have the computer capacity, software skills and electronic infrastructure in place on Election Night 2004 to tamper with the Ohio results to ensure George W. Bush’s re-election?

The answer appears to be yes. There is more than ample documentation to show that on Election Night 2004, Ohio’s “official” Secretary of State website – which gave the world the presidential election results – was redirected from an Ohio government server to a group of servers that contain scores of Republican web sites, including the secret White House e-mail accounts that have emerged in the scandal surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s firing of eight federal prosecutors.

Recent revelations have documented that the Republican National Committee (RNC) ran a secret White House e-mail system for Karl Rove and dozens of White House staffers. This high-tech system used to count and report the 2004 presidential vote– from server-hosting contracts, to software-writing services, to remote-access capability, to the actual server usage logs themselves – must be added to the growing congressional investigations.

Numerous tech-savvy bloggers, starting with the online investigative consortium epluribusmedia.org and their November 2006 article cross-posted by contributor luaptifer to Dailykos, and Joseph Cannon’s blog at Cannonfire.blogspot.com, outed the RNC tech network. That web-hosting firm is SMARTech Corp. of Chattanooga, TN, operating out of the basement in the old Pioneer Bank building. The firm hosts scores of Republican websites, including georgewbush.com, gop.com and rnc.org.

The software created for the Ohio secretary of state’s Election Night 2004 website was created by GovTech Solutions, a firm co-founded by longtime GOP computing guru Mike Connell. He also redesigned the Bush campaign’s website in 2000 and told “Inside Business” magazine in 1999, “I wouldn’t be where I am today without the Bush campaign and the Bush family because the Bushes truly are about family and I’m loyal to my network.”

Ohio’s Cedarville University, a Christian school with 3,100 students, issued a press release on January 13, 2005 describing how faculty member Dr. Alan Dillman’s computing company Government Consulting Resources, Ltd, worked with these Republican-connected companies to tally the vote on Election Night 2004.

“Dillman personally led the effort from the GCR side, teaming with key members of Blackwell’s staff,” the release said. “GCR teamed with several other firms – including key players such as GovTech Solutions, which performed the software development – to deliver the end result. SMARTech provided the backup and additional system capacity, and Mercury Interactive performed the stress testing.”

On Election Night 2004, the Republican Party not only controlled the vote-counting process in Ohio, the final presidential swing state, through a secretary of state who was a co-chair of the Bush campaign, but it also controlled the technology that allowed the tally of the vote in Ohio’s 88 counties to be reported to the media and voters.

Privatizing elections and allowing known partisans to run a key presidential vote count is troubling enough. But the reason Congress must investigate these high-tech ties is there is abundant evidence that Republicans could have used this computing network to delay announcing the winner of Ohio’s 2004 election while tinkering with the results.

Did Ohio Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell or other GOP operatives inflate the president’s vote totals to secure George W. Bush’s margin of victory? On Election Night 2004, many of the totals reported by the Secretary of State were based on local precinct results that were impossible. In Clyde, Ohio, a Republican haven, Bush won big after 131 percent voter turnout. In Republican Perry County, two precincts came in at 124 percent and 120 percent respectively. In Gahanna Ward 1, precinct B, Bush received 4,258 votes despite the fact that only 638 people voted for president. In Concord Southwest in Miami County, the certified election results proudly proclaimed at 679 out of 689 registered voters cast ballots, a 98.55 percent turnout. FreePress.org later found that only 547 voters had signed in.

These strange election results were routed by county election officials through Ohio’s Secretary of State’s office, through partisan IT providers and software, and the final results were hosted out of a computer based in Tennessee announcing the winner. The Cedarville University releases boasted the system “was running like a champ.” It said, “The system kept running through the early morning hours as users from around the world looked to Ohio for their election results.”

All the facts are not in, but enough is known to warrant a serious congressional inquiry. Beginning with a timeline on Election Night after a national media consortium exit poll predicted Democrat John Kerry would win Ohio, the first Ohio returns were from the state’s Democratic urban strongholds, showing Kerry in the lead.

This was the case until shortly after midnight on Wednesday, Nov. 3, when for roughly 90 minutes the Ohio election results reported on the Secretary of State’s website were frozen. Shortly before 2am EST election returns came in from a handful of the state’s rural Republican enclaves, bumping Bush’s numbers over the top.

It was known Bush would carry rural Ohio. But the vote totals from these last-to-report counties, where Karl Rove said there was an unprecedented late-hour evangelical vote giving the White House a moral mandate, were highly improbable and suggested vote count fraud to pad Bush’s numbers. Just how flimsy the reported GOP totals were was not known on Election Night and has not been examined by the national media. But an investigation by the House Judiciary Committee Democratic staff begun after Election Day 2004 and completed before the Electoral College met on Jan. 6, 2005, was first to publicly point to vote count fraud in rural Ohio.

That report, “Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio,” cited near-impossible vote totals, including 19,000 votes that were mysteriously added at the close of tallying the vote in Miami County. The report cited more than 3,000 apparently fraudulent voter registrations – all dating back to the same day in 1977 in Perry County. The report noted a homeland security emergency was declared in Warren County, prompting its ballots to be taken to a police-guarded unauthorized warehouse and counted away from public scrutiny, despite local media protests.

In our book, “What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election” (The New Press, 2006), we go beyond the House Judiciary Democratic report to analyze precinct-by-precinct returns and we print copies of the documents upon which we base our findings. We found many vote-count irregularities based on examining the certified results, precinct-level records and the actual ballots.

The most eyebrow-raising example to emerge from parsing precinct results was finding 10,500 people in three Ohio’s ‘Bible Belt’ counties who voted to re-elect Bush and voted in favor of gay marriage, if the official results are true. That was in Warren, Butler and Clermont Counties. The most plausible explanation for this anomaly, which defies logic and was not seen anywhere else in the country, was Kerry votes were flipped to Bush while the rest of the ballot was left alone. While we have some theories about how that might have been done by hand in a police-guarded warehouse, could full Republican control of the vote-counting software and servers also have played a role?

The early returns on the Secretary of State’s website suggest Blackwell’s vote-tallying and reporting system could manipulate large blocks of votes. Screenshots taken during the early returns in Hamilton County, where Cincinnati is located, gave Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb 39,541 votes, which was clearly incorrect. Similarly, early return screenshots in Lucas County, where Toledo is located, gave Cobb 4,685 votes, another clear error. (The screenshots are in our book). Were these innocent computer glitches or was a GOP vote-counting and reporting system moving and dumping Kerry votes?

There’s more evidence the late returns from Ohio’s Republican-majority countryside were not accurate. During the spring and summer of 2006, several teams of investigators associated with Freepress.org, notably one team led by Ron Baiman, a Ph.D. statistician and researcher at Chicago’s Loyola University, examined the actual election records from precincts in Miami and Clermont Counties. These records – from poll books where voters sign in, to examining the actual ballots themselves – were not publicly accessible until last year, under orders from Ohio’s former Republican Secretary of State. Baiman compared the number of voters who signed in with the total number of votes attributed to precincts. He found hundreds of “phantom” votes, where the number of voter signatures was less than the reported vote total. That discrepancy also suggests vote count fraud.

There was other evidence in the observable paper trail of padding the vote, including instances in Delaware County where in one precinct, 359 of the final punch-card ballots cast on Election Day contained no Kerry votes, which means the day’s last voters all were Bush supporters, which also is improbable. In another Delaware County precinct, Bush allegedly received the last 210 votes of the day. Were partisan local election workers trying to mask what was happening electronically to tilt the vote count?

Ohio’s 2004 ballots were to be destroyed last September. However that fate was blocked by a federal judge, who ruled in the early phase of trying a Voting Rights Act lawsuit that accused Ohio officials of suppressing the minority vote in Ohio’s cities. The state’s new Secretary of State and Attorney General, both Democrats, are now holding settlement talks for that suit, suggesting its claims have merit. However, unlike Florida after the 2000 election, there still has yet to be a full accounting of Ohio’s presidential vote.

What’s clear, however, is the highest ranks of the Republican Party’s political wing, including White House counselor Karl Rove, a handful of the party’s most tech-savvy computer gurus and the former Republican Ohio Secretary of State, created, owned and operated the vote-counting system that reported George W. Bush’s re-election to the presidency. Moreover, it appears the votes that gave Bush his 118,775-vote margin of victory – the boost from Ohio’s countryside – have yet to be confirmed as accurate. Instead, the reporting to date suggests that what happened on the ground and across Ohio’s rural precincts is at odds with the vote tally released on Election Night.

As numerous congressional committees attempt to retrieve and examine the secret White House e-mails surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ firing of eight federal prosecutors, those panels must also probe the privatization and partisan manipulation of the 2004 presidential vote count in Ohio. The lessons from 2004 have yet to be fully understood or learned.

Similarly, the House Administration Committee, which is expected to soon mark up H.R. 811, a bill by Rep. Rush Holt, D-NJ, to regulate electronic voting technology, also must take heed. The vote count and outcome of American elections cannot be left in the hands of known partisans, who can control and manipulate how the votes are counted and what is reported to the media and American people.

Public vote counts on private, partisan servers and secret proprietary software have no place in a democracy.

Bob Fitrakis is a political science professor and attorney in the King Lincoln Bronzeville civil rights lawsuit against Ken Blackwell. Fitrakis, Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman are authors of “What Happened in Ohio? A documentary record of theft and fraud in the 2004 election,” (New Press, 2006).

KEY LINKS: To trace the site-hosting history of election.sos.state.oh.us, go to:
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://election.sos.state.oh.us
(You will note on Nov. 3, 2004, the Ohio Secretary of State’s website was moved from a Columbus-based company, OARnet, to SMARTECH CORPORATION.)

Ken Blackwell Outsources Ohio Election Results to GOP Internet Operatives, Again
http://scoop.epluribusmedia.org/story/2006/11/7/115314/922
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/11/7/144314/082

Who is Michael L. Connell? Part II: Behind the firewall
http://scoop.epluribusmedia.org/story/2007/4/2/6328/14926

The White House, vote theft, and the email trail
http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2007/03/gwb43-white-house-vote-theft-and-email.html

Cedarville University A Major Player in Ohio’s Election Tallying Efforts
http://www.cedarville.edu/departments/marketing/publicrelations/newsarticle.cfm?ID=2132271177

“What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election,” by Robert Fitrakis, Steven Rosenfeld, Harvey Wasserman.
http://www.thenewpress.com/index.php?option=com_title&task =view_title&metaproductid=1597

Rove-ing emails: what else could go missing? by Todd Johnston
http://scoop.epluribusmedia.org/story/2007/4/22/33926/1773

http://scoop.epluribusmedia.org/story/2006/11/9/61233/1283
This shows a screen capture of the TN server 64.203.98.137 which in 2004 was where election.sos.state.oh.us was hosted from, and in 2006 it was still getting live data from Ohio, even though election.sos.state.oh.us was hosted on OARnet servers in Ohio.

Original article at:https://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2553

 

 

 

We Do Not Concede

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
April 16, 2007

Ohio’s Bob “Ballots for Bush” Bennett, an essential player in putting George W. Bush back in the White House in 2004, is no long chair of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. His milestone resignation leaves a legacy of scandal, recrimination, massive voter purges, felony convictions and a pivotal role in a stolen presidential election.

Bennett has quit in a signature cloud of graceless accusations and cheap shots at Jennifer Brunner, Ohio’s newly elected Secretary of State, who asked him to resign along with the rest of the Cleveland election authority. His forced departure marks the biggest landmark yet in the unraveling theft of the presidential elections in Ohio 2004.

Bennett remains chair of the Ohio Republican Party. In 2004 he was apparently asked by White House consigliere Karl Rove to stay on at the Cuyahoga BOE to help guarantee Bush’s second term. Cleveland is Ohio’s biggest and most Democratic urban center. A massive sweep there by John Kerry was widely expected to have given him the White House. It was Bennett’s job to mute that margin, and apparently that’s exactly what he did.

Leading up to the 2004 vote, Bennett oversaw the quiet purge of some 168,000 registered voters from the Cuyahoga rolls, including 24.93% of the entire city of Cleveland, which voted 83% for Kerry. In one inner city majority African American ward, 51% of the voters were purged. Centered on precincts that voted more than 80% for John Kerry, this purge may well have meant a net loss to the Democrats of tens of thousands of votes in an election that was officially decided statewide by less than 119,000.

In a report issued December 7, 2004, the Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition (GCVRC) reported that in addition to the purge of registered voters, some 3.5% of those applying for new registrations were never even entered on the rolls by Bennett’s BOE, or were entered incorrectly, which would result in disenfranchisement of those who had just tried to become new voters. Additionally, the GCVRC estimated that “over 10,000 voters in Cuyahoga County would be compromised because of these clerical errors.”

Bennett refused to respond to the report’s initial conclusions. When the study became public, BOE Executive Director Michael Vu accused the study coordinator of “inciting panic.” Vu did not respond to GCVRC’s request for the reinstatement of 303 voter registrations where there was direct evidence that they had been wrongly cancelled.

The GCVRC also documented that the Cuyahoga County BOE incorrectly classified 463 properly registered voters as not registered. This included 201 voters who were registered on BOE computers on August 17, but for some unexplained reason, were removed from the rolls by October 22. They then were forced to vote provisionally and their votes were rejected as not registered.

In Brunner’s formal complaint against Bennett she cited the fact that Bennett’s BOE did nothing when an estimated 10,000 voters were thrown off the voting roll by a Diebold voter registration computer glitch.

Also, Bennett’s BOE rejected 262 properly registered voters included on its own list as of October 22. They incorrectly listed 183 as not registered and 79 as no signatures. “The Board did not contest our data,” said the GCVRC, “but said again it was just a small percentage due to human error, and then proceeded to certify the entire Cuyahoga County vote even though they thereby knowingly possibly disenfranchised 463 individuals.”

Parallel purges were conducted by Republican-controlled boards of election in Hamilton County (Cincinnati) where some 105,000 voters were purged from the rolls, and in Lucas County (Toledo), where some 28,000 were purged in an unprecedented move in late August 2004. These remain the only three counties in the state known to have conducted massive registration purges prior to the 2004 election. The three mass urban purges decimated the rolls in heavily Democratic areas. Since then, another 170,000 voters have been purged from the rolls in Franklin County, primarily in the heavily Democratic Columbus precincts. Many rural Republican counties, like Miami, practice a “no-purge” policy.

From his post at the helm of both the Ohio GOP and the Cuyahoga BOE, Bennett was at the center of the purges. Many of the 300,000-plus purged voters reported that they never received notice that their voting rights had been cancelled. Should the general 80% pro-Democratic inner city margins have prevailed for all three purged lists, the net loss to the Kerry camp could have been in the range of 100,000 votes.

In addition to the purges, Bennett was also at the center of the election challenges to college students in Democratic enclaves.

Bennett is infamous for far more than massive voter purges. Under his supervision, a legally mandated recount of the 2004 presidential vote was illegally manipulated. Ohio law says precincts must be chosen at random for hand counting as part of the recount process. But two Cuyahoga BOE employees have been convicted of a felony and a misdemeanor each, and have each been sentenced to eighteen months in prison for what prosecutors have called “rigging” the recount.

Bennett was also instrumental in the purchase of some $20 million in Diebold voting machines for 2006 statewide elections. Election protection activists vehemently opposed the purchase, as seen in a nationally televised HBO special, “Hacking Democracy.” Under Bennett and Cuyahoga BOE Executive Director Michael Vu, the machines malfunctioned in Ohio’s 2006 primary, with vote count reporting delayed for five days.

Long-time election activist Adele Eisner characterizes Bennett’s reign at the Cuyahoga BOE as a “culture with fear.” Among other things, Bennett chose to disregard long-standing laws requiring that election results be posted at the precinct level, a decision backed by Ohio’s former Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.

In a recent audit of the general 2006 elections, Dr. Richard Hayes Phillips found that in the initial vote count, “Cuyahoga County alone accounted for 148,928 undervotes, or 42.47% of the statewide total.” The undervotes occurred in the race for U.S. Senate, where voters apparently opted to not vote for either incumbent Sen. Mike DeWine or Democrat Sherrod Brown, the eventual winner. The undervotes represented 26.48% of the county’s voters.

But, says Philips, “Once the official results were posted, Cuyahoga’s undervote total fell to 3.25%,” leaving him to wonder “how the unofficial results could have been so erroneous in the first place.”

Hayes also found that Cuyahoga County reported 30,791 uncounted absentee and provisional ballots. After these ballots were counted, they reported 39,262 votes, an outcome Phillips terms mathematically “impossible.”

Bennett and Vu were also responsible for more than $12,900,000 in BOE cost overruns, more than doubling the agency’s original budget of $11,000,000.

Vu resigned earlier this year, and has since been hired as an Assistant Registrar of Voters in San Diego County, the number two spot, with a $10,000 salary increase to $130,000 a year. The San Diego Union-Tribune noted that, “Vu’s resignation followed a tumultuous 3 1/2-year tenure as election chief, including a disastrous May 2006 primary when the county began using new electronic voting machines.”

In response to the chaos and recrimination, Brunner requested the resignations of the Cuyahoga board’s two Democrats and two Republicans. Only Bennett vowed to fight his removal.

But he has now become the highest election board official to resign here amidst the deepening scandals surrounding the 2004 election. He has joined the growing Republican chorus echoing Rove’s line that the Democrats are preparing to steal the 2008 election.

But Brunner has taken custody of the 2004 ballots and other vote count materials, which are currently protected by a federal court decision. She is expected to bring them from Ohio’s 88 county boards to a central repository in Columbus.

Meanwhile, new evidence is emerging that Karl Rove and the GOP had real-time computer access to both the actual vote numbers in Ohio as well as the exit polling data that would have allowed them to direct how many votes they needed from the suspect Ohio southwestern Republican counties that gave Bush his official margin of victory in the 2004 election. Stay tuned.

Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman’s books include HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION and WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO from the New Press (with Steve Rosenfeld). https://freepress.org/store.php

Original article at: https://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2542