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by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey WassermanSEPTEMBER 7, 2016
Finally, the major for-profit media is approaching consensus that it’s easy to hack U.S. political elections. Even candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are raising unprecedented doubts – from very different directions – about the reliability of the upcoming vote count.
Ultimately, there is just one solution: universal hand-counted paper ballots, with carefully protected voter registration rolls, and a transparent chain of custody.
The corporate media and the Democrats are obsessed with the “Russians.” Donald Trump rants about a mythological army of voters voting multiple times.
But the real threat to our election system comes from private for-profit corporations that register voters, control voter databases, then count and report the vote with secret proprietary software and zero transparency, accountability, or recourse.
After ignoring or attacking the reportage since Florida 2000 of Bev Harris, Greg Palast, freepress.org and numerous others, the corporate media seems finally to be getting the message: under the current system, any American election – even the one for president – can be stripped and flipped by a tiny handful of electronic hackers working anywhere from the Kremlin to a party HQ to a state governor’s office to a teenager’s garage.
Here is some of what the mainstream media is finally admitting. In an article posted on July 28, 2016, NBC News pointed out that our elections are vulnerable to hacking because they “are not part of the vast ‘critical infrastructure protection’ safety net set up by the Department of Homeland Security.”
CBS News wrote August 10, 2016, about “the hackers at Symantec Security Response” who demonstrated how “Election Day results could be manipulated by an affordable device you can find online.”
Former national coordinator for counter-terrorism Richard Clarke, reporting for ABC News on August 19, 2016, analyzed the particular security problems related to battleground states like Ohio and Florida: “In 2000 and 2004, there were only a handful of battleground states that determined which presidential candidate had enough Electoral College votes to win. A slight alteration of the vote in some swing precincts in swing states might not raise suspicion. Smart malware can be programmed to switch only a small percentage of votes from what the voters intended. That may be all that is needed, and that malware can also be programmed to erase itself after it does its job, so there might be no trace it ever happened.” Clarke was on the White House National Security Council during both Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s administrations.
Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the North Carolina School of Information and Library Science, in his August 12, 2016 New York Times op-ed “The Election Won’t Be Rigged but It Could Be Hacked,” wrote: “The mere existence of this discussion is cause for alarm. The United States needs to return, as soon as possible, to a paper-based, auditable voting system in all jurisdictions that still use electronic-only, unverifiable voting machines.”
On August 30, 2016, the Washington Post wrote: “Deleting or altering data on voter rolls could cause mayhem on Election Day disenfranchising some voters. Many voting machines themselves also are vulnerable, especially touch-screen systems that do not create a paper record as a guard against fraud or manipulation.” The Post also supplied a list of the 15 states with the most vulnerable voting systems.
The list of those now admitting the obvious includes the Boston Globe, The Atlantic, USA Today, The Guardian, Mother Jones, and Politico, some of which have previously mocked those of us reporting on this issue. Most important has been the highly influential The Hill, which weighed in on May 2, 2016 with “Election fraud feared as hackers target voter records.” The lede was straightforward: “A series of data breaches overseas are spurring concerns that hackers could manipulate elections in the United States.”
Trump advisor Roger Stone wrote a column in The Hill with the headline: “Can the 2016 Elections Be Rigged? You Bet.” He also referred to our latest summary volume, “The Strip & Flip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft,” as “a must-read book on the strip and flip techniques used to rig these machines.”
But in the 2016 primary election, there are other must-reads as well. Perhaps the most important is Election Justice USA’s report entitled “Democracy Lost: A Report on the Fatally Flawed 2016 Democratic Primaries.” This report cites six major areas of election irregularities in this year’s 26 primary elections:
1) Targeting voter suppression
2) Registration tampering
3) Illegal voter purges
4) Exit poll discrepancies
5) Evidence for voting machine tampering
6) The security (or lack thereof) of various voting machines types.
In their 96-page report, Election Justice researchers documented how Hillary Clinton’s campaign benefited from these “various types of fraud.” Their conclusion: “Based on this work, Election Justice USA has established an upper estimate of 184 pledged delegates lost by Senator Bernie Sanders as a consequence of specific irregularities and instances of fraud.”
Election Justice’s well-documented estimate that Sanders lost 184 delegates means that if the election had been conducted fairly, the Senator from Vermont would now be the Democratic nominee.
Another document essential to understanding election irregularities that allowed Hillary Clinton to capture the Democratic Party nomination is a paper co-authored by Axel Geijsel of Tilburg University in the Netherlands and Rodolfo Cortes Barragan of Stanford University. Their analysis found that primary election results in states with the most vulnerable and hackable voting machines and without a paper trail overwhelmingly favored Hillary Clinton 65 percent to 35 percent. Sanders led Clinton 51 percent to 49 percent in states where the vote count could be verified with a paper trail.
The correlation between the increased Clinton vote and the increased vulnerability of the voting machines has been avoided like the plague by the corporate media.
Equally important to read is mathematician Richard Charnin’s blog. Charnin is a man the mainstream media often attacks – but not with mathematical formulas to rebut Charnin’s detailed analysis. Rather they attack him because, like the vast majority of Americans, he believes that John F. Kennedy was not killed by a lone gunman. In 2016, official Democratic primary vote counts compared to exit poll results were significantly outside the margin of error in 12 of 26 states. Charnin concluded that the probability of those official vote tallies being correct are one in 78 billion. There were no such discrepancies in this year’s Republican primaries.
Now 16 years after the theft of the presidency in Florida 2000, and a dozen since it was done again in Ohio 2004, the corporate media are approaching consensus that it is indeed very easy to strip millions of legitimate citizens from the voting rolls, and then to hack electronic voting machines and computerized central tabulators to flip the official final outcome.
The threat to this year’s election does not come from non-existent armies of mythological hordes voting multiple times. It comes from the private partisan companies with their secret proprietary software that control the voter rolls, the electronic machines, and ultimately the final outcome at all levels of government. The mega-corporations are the ones that flipped George W. Bush into the White House and Hillary Clinton into the Democratic nomination, not to mention manipulating countless Senate, House, and state and local elections along the way.
For a hopelessly vulnerable electronic election system which is flawed, hackable and riggable from top to bottom, there is just one solution: transparent unhackable voter rolls, and universal hand-counted paper ballots open to public scrutiny from the precinct level to the final official tallies, as dutifully reported by our slowly awakening corporate media.
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of The Strip & Flip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft, available at www.freepress.org and www.solartopia.org, where Bob’s Fitrakis Files and Harvey’s Solartopia! can also be found.
From Nicole’s youtube channel:
“Streamed live on Jun 10, 2016
This week, the video of a meeting about election integrity in California in which attorneys Bob Fitrakis & Cliff Arenbeck explain why they’ve filed lawsuits demanding the release of exit polling and returns to show that fraud is inherent in our system. This morning, Bob Fitrakis joins in to tell us of their concerns, give an update on the lawsuit, and what comes next.
Find out more and watch the full video of the 5-27 meeting at trustvote.org
In hour two, we’ll open the phones to get your reaction at 954-889-6410 or via Skype to nicolesandler.”
by Gerry Bello and Bob Fitrakis
November 5, 2012
Citizen concerns about untested software have multiplied since the Columbus Free Press broke the news that Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s office installed uncertified and untested software on the central vote tabulation machines in up to 39 counties in the state.
Memos circulated amongst senior staff at the Ohio Secretary of States’ indicate that they consider this skirting of Ohio Election Law is justified because the software does not directly tabulate or communicate actual votes. Their statements to the mainstream press reveal a different set of facts about the software and a different justification.
In statements to the theGrio, NBC’s political blog, SOS spokesman Matt McClellan said the software is to “assist counties and to help them simplify the process by which they report the results to our system.” and that it was deemed experimental because “It is a pilot project that we’re doing with about 25 counties or so. So it’s not statewide, but it is a pilot project we’re trying.”
Ohio election law does not allow software or hardware to be used in election until it has been tested or certified by the Ohio Board of Voting Machine Examiners unless it is experimental. The confidential internal memos indicate that this software was never tested because of claims that it is not involved with the tabulation or communication of votes. Reporting election results from county tabulation systems to the secretary of state’s office, which is the purpose of this software as explained by McClellan, is in fact communication of votes.
The potential federal illegality of this software has been hidden from public scrutiny by the Secretary of State’s Election Counsel Brandi Seske. In a September 29 memo, Seske wrote, “Please see the attached letter from Matt Masterson regarding de minimis changes – one submitted by ES&S and one by Dominion Voting Systems. He has reviewed and approved the changes.” “De minimis” is a legal term for minute. Federal election regulations have a very specific definition of de minimis. This definition was clarified to all state level agencies in a federal Elections Assistance Commission memo dated February 8, 2012 entitled “Software and Firmware modifications are not de minimis changes.”
Ohio election law provides for experimental equipment only in a limited number of precincts per county. Installing uncertified and untested software on central tabulation equipment essential affects every single precinct in a given county. Nowhere in the memos circulated by Seske, nor in the contract, is the software called “experimental.”
The Secretary of State’s office has given one questionable justification to its own Board of Voting Machine Examiners and another to the public.
The contract provides for testing, performed jointly by the counties and the vendor within 30 days of the software being installed. This testing was required to be independent and overseen by the Board of Voting Machine Examiners, as required by Ohio law.
McClellan told theGrio “I’m not sure the exact timeline of that [the installation and testing], but I know we’ve been working with the counties for the past couple of months on getting these in place, testing them to make sure they work properly, and working with the vendors as well.”
This uncertified and untested software could easily malfunction and corrupt votes on the central tabulation machines, thus destroying any electronic record of the actual votes by citizens. This “experimental” software, as outlined in the contract, has no security protocols. A “man in the middle” attack, like the one that stole the Ohio election for George W. Bush in 2004, could be directly facilitated by this untested and uncertified software installation.
The Secretary of State’s office has used every legal contortion to avoid the use of science and the possibility of public scrutiny of this possibly illegal software. The Free Press will continue to report on this story as it develops.
—
Gerry Bello is the chief researcher at the Columbus Free Press. He holds a degree in computer security from Antioch College. Bob Fitrakis is the Editor of the Free Press. He holds Ph.D. in Political Science and a J.D. from the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University.
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
January 10, 2011
An epic legal battle now rages between Karl Rove and Ohio election rights attorneys. The question is whether the public has the right to see full transcripts of a court deposition that could shed explosive new light on the bitterly contested presidential election of 2004.
The deposition came from the late Michael Connell, Rove’s IT guru. Connell died in a mysterious plan crash in December 2008, one month after he spoke under oath to election protection attorney Clifford O. Arnebeck. Connell had implanted the state-contracted software used to compute Ohio’s electronic voting tabulations during the contest between Bush and John Kerry.
On December 10, 2010, attorneys in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville Neighborhood Association case moved to release the Connell transcript in an ongoing legal struggle with Rove and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The King-Lincoln case was filed in 2006 by attorney Arnebeck alleging civil rights violations against blacks, young voters and others in Ohio’s 2004 election process.
Connell’s November 3, 2008 deposition in Cleveland concerned his role in the 2004 election and whether or not he was being threatened by Rove. Just over a month later on December 19, 2008, Connell died in the mysterious crash of his small plane near his Akron, Ohio, home. Suspicions of foul play surround the accident.
The Connell deposition has been sealed since his death. During the closing days of the 2010 election, King-Lincoln attorneys sought the deposition of Karl Rove in connection with his activities involving the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in all Ohio elections since 2000.
Rove and Chamber attorneys, as well as the Ohio Attorney General’s office, claimed that there was no connection between Connell’s deposition and more recent activities involving Rove and the Chamber.
Connell’s attorney, James L. Ervin, represented Connell at the deposition and also represented Connell’s estate. He filed papers with the court asking for a 30-day extension of time to file a response to the court on December 27, 2010 regarding the opening of Connell’s deposition.
According to Ervin, “Mr. Connell’s deposition is comprised of questions, answers, and topics that are privileged and/or confidential and are reflected as such by being designated ‘sealed.'” No part of Connell’s deposition has of yet been made public.
Arnebeck told how Connell described what he did: “One, he integrated voter data files with the vote tabulation process in the Ohio Secretary of State’s office in the 2004 election and two, he broadened the accessibility to this information, including facilitating its appearance on a mirror site at the SmartTech offices in Chattanooga, Tennessee.”
“His testimony provided facts of a general nature. He did not, as suggested by his counsel, reveal or discuss anything that could be fairly described as a trade secret or an expert opinion,” Arnebeck asserted.
In the spring and summer prior to Connell’s deposition, contacts were made on behalf of Connell with both U.S. Representatives John Conyers and Dennis Kucinich in an attempt to have Connell testify before Congress regarding his role in the 2004 election.
Memorandum to U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich [PDF]
Ervin’s motion before the court states: “During calendar year 2009, Mr. Connell’s businesses, New Media Communications and GovTech Solutions, came under new ownership, and Mr. Connell’s Estate was probated.”
These pleadings before the court may offer insight into who exactly owns Connell’s election computer businesses. Ervin’s motion states: “because the deposition transcript addresses issues that constituted privilege and/or proprietary matters, the new ownership of Connell’s former businesses may have an interest in the deposition transcripts and may be the owners of the transcript.”
Ervin concludes “Decisions must be made as to who owns Mr. Connell’s 2008 deposition transcript….” This same line of argument has been used to allow private vendors to use secret proprietary source code in election software.
In a democratic society, the people should own Connell’s deposition. Karl Rove should testify under oath about the electronic machinery Connell devised to link Ohio’s 2004 real-time vote count to an obscure company in Chattanooga, Tennessee. That company was SmarTech, which according to public records, was hosting a website that was operating out of the White House on that election night.
Says Arnebeck: “Mr. Connell’s testimony is important to the plaintiffs and the public because it reveals how those seeking to steal the 2004 Presidential election in the State of Ohio, led by Karl Rove, were better able to do so through the utilization of these integrated data files and more accessible tabulation processes. SmarTech was simultaneously serving the electronic data processes for the George W. Bush presidential campaign in that election.”
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Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman’s four books on election protection are at freepress.org, where this article was first published. Disclosure: Fitrakis serves as co-counsel with Arnebeck in the King-Lincoln case and was at Connell’s deposition.
Original article posted here:
https://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2011/4046
Fight Back August 12, 2010 Diebold, Recorded August 12, 2010
Dr. Robert Fitrakis PHD JD and Connie Gadell-Newton JD
Discuss:
Diebold voting machines in the news, Columbus City Council secret meetings.
By Chris Pepus
Monday, August 11 @ 00:00:00 EDT
The American press corps has finally begun to report on illegal activities of the Bush administration. However, the subject of election theft remains largely ignored. In recent years, the Republican Party has used an array of tactics to subtract votes from opposing candidates. These include sending defective voting machines to strongly Democratic precincts and removing low-income and minority voters from electoral rolls.
Reporter Greg Palast has been covering this issue since 2000, when he revealed that Florida officials ensured the election of George W. Bush by illegally suppressing the African-American and Democratic vote. (Learn more about that subject here.) In this interview, I asked Palast about his reports on the GOP’s dirty electoral tricks since 2000 and the possibility that the ’08 election will be stolen. He explained how the Help America Vote Act actually helps crooked Republicans and he previewed his upcoming broadcasts and publications, which will include a free guide with tips for safeguarding your vote.
–Chris Pepus
Chris: Your reports on vote suppression led to a congressional inquiry and the resignation of Tim Griffin, one of President Bush’s U.S. Attorneys.[i] Could you describe how the Bush administration interfered with voting rights in 2004?
Greg: Item one is something that we discovered called caging. There were e-mails written by the Republican National Committee’s chief researcher, a character named Tim Griffin, who was a protégé of Karl Rove.[ii] He was sending out caging lists, which are hit lists of voters to challenge. The way caging works is they send out registered letters to voters and when the voters aren’t around to receive their letters—the envelopes say, “Do Not Forward”—the voters end up being subject to challenge. The particular hit list that we got was substantially filled with voters from the naval air station in Jacksonville ( Florida). There are reasons why someone at a naval air station wouldn’t be at their voting address. That’s because, unlike Bush during Vietnam, they are off in a foreign war. Republicans also sent letters to students at black colleges in August knowing that they wouldn’t be there. They illegally challenged their votes. The Republicans challenged three million voters in 2004, which is absolutely unbelievable and unreported. That fact was right there in the records of the Election Assistance Commission of the federal government. Those voters received provisional ballots and a million of those ballots were thrown in the garbage. That is just one of the tricks. There are several and they are being sharpened for 2008.
Chris: But Griffin claimed that he didn’t know what caging was until he read your report. “I had to look it up,” he said.
Greg: Well, actually, I determined that he is correct. He sent out an e-mail saying, “Here is a caging list.” As he said, you have to be an expert in direct-mail marketing to understand what caging is. Now, that means that someone told him to send out an e-mail with caging lists, someone whose orders were so important that he wouldn’t question them, even if he didn’t know what (the list) was. Now, who would know direct marketing and who could give orders to Tim Griffin? Well, before he worked for George W. Bush, Karl Rove was head of Rove & Company, a direct-mail marketing firm. Rove is an expert on caging. Law professor Bobby Kennedy Jr., my co-investigator, says that this was an illegal act. So who ordered this illegal act? Hm, Mr. Rove?
Chris: How did you obtain these e-mails?
Greg: Griffin is not the sharpest knife in the drawer and he copied these e-mails not to GeorgeWBush.com, which was the campaign’s internal e-mail system, but rather to GeorgeWBush.org, a parody web site. The head of that site, John Wooden, knows me. He immediately passed (the e-mails) on to my team. He didn’t know what they were and, frankly, we didn’t know what they were at first either. It took a lot of work to decode.
Chris: Have there been any new developments in the case, other than Karl Rove’s refusal to testify before the House Judiciary Committee?
Greg: I have just returned from a meeting with David Iglesias, a fired prosecutor from New Mexico. Caging and gimmicks like it were behind his firing and the firings of other U.S. prosecutors.[iii] The U.S. press corps, as usual, got it completely wrong. The firing of U.S. Attorneys is not simply about the politics of the prosecutors or even the operations of their offices. Rather, it is about an attempt to force prosecutors to be involved in a scheme to arrest voters under voter-fraud laws to create hysteria to justify vote suppression. I was constantly asking Republicans, “If there are so many criminal voters, why haven’t you arrested them? Why aren’t there prosecutions?” The Republicans said, “Oh, there will be. Talk to David Iglesias.” I called him and other prosecutors and got all this hemming and hawing. So, I’m being told that Iglesias is about to bring prosecutions and he is saying, “I don’t think so.” It’s very clear to me that Iglesias was resisting phony prosecutions. He ran around the bases looking for fraudulent voters and he didn’t find one. Some were in the military, so they were not at their voting addresses.
I just came back from checking out some of the so-called fraudulent voters that Iglesias refused to prosecute. Republican leaders gave me their names. There was one lady, a waitress, who was signed up twice and there were two different signatures of her name. So I spoke to her—this “criminal”—and I said, “Did you register twice?” She said, “Yes.” She explained that, under the law, if you don’t receive formal acknowledgment of your registration, you can and should register again. They don’t put your name on the roll twice. I asked why there were two signatures: “Was there some fraudulent game going on?” She said: “No. One time, I signed at a table. The other time, I signed it on my hand.” This woman was supposed to be one of the six most obvious cases of a fraudulent voter in New Mexico. Governor Bill Richardson signed laws making it harder for people to register because of these so-called frauds. The laws are so horrible that Richardson, a Hispanic Democrat, is being sued by the Brennan Center for Justice for illegally impeding Hispanic voters.
Chris: It’s remarkable how many groups are targeted. I recall reading about defective voting machines in (Palast’s 2006 book) Armed Madhouse. You mentioned that, in ’04, the county in New Mexico where the most votes disappeared was a predominantly white, working-class county.
Greg: Yeah, I call vote theft “class war by other means.” Places like Native American precincts, black precincts, and Mexican barrios are often the hardest hit. But, statistically, we find that it is income more than race that determines whether your vote will count. I can tell you the probability that your vote will count if you tell me your income. By the way, the Republican secretary of state[iv] in Colorado (Mike Coffman) just attacked me. I reported that he purged all these voters. He said, “Palast is just trying to raise money for his operation,” but he didn’t say I was wrong. He said he was just following the law. I’d heard all this from Katherine Harris[v] before. I’d said, “Guess the color of the voters purged.” He said, “We don’t keep track of voters’ race on our voter forms.” Yeah, right. They know. It’s by zip code. That’s the other thing: if they don’t know, they should know. Civil rights law does require election officials to take steps to determine that their actions don’t have a racial bias. When he said, “I don’t know,” that’s not true and, also, that’s not a legal answer. He’s supposed to know, especially when he removes a fifth of the voters in Colorado.
Chris: Another state with a history of vote suppression is Florida. In 2000, you reported that Florida Republicans removed tens of thousands of Democratic voters from the rolls. Have you found evidence pointing to a similar result this year?
Greg: Worse than ever. The whole nation’s been Floridated. George Bush signed the Help America Vote Act (in 2002) and, in 2006, they did a Katherine Harris on the whole nation. They told secretaries of state, who are partisan officials in every state, to purge away and remove “suspect voters.” A lot of the things that were illegal, like caging, that’s now in the law. Basically, we now have federal cover for mischief, instead of federal prohibition. In one New Mexico county, half the Democrats who showed up to vote in the (2008) primary/caucus couldn’t vote. You have address purges, I.D. purges. The Brennan Center said that about 85,000 voters in Florida are losing their right to vote, because they signed up in voter drives and couldn’t verify their identity. Overwhelmingly, those voters are black, because many black voters register in voter drives out of their churches. So, Florida’s back in the game. They’re just changing the rules.
Chris: How does the Help America Vote Act enable those tactics?
Greg: For example, Florida, when imposing special identity requirements on voter drives, they cited the Help America Vote Act. They said that it was required. Now, the fact that forty-six states don’t agree with them on that interpretation didn’t stop them. Also, HAVA basically required every state in America to change its laws. Once you open up the howling Pandora’s Box of election law, every reform becomes grounds for new mischief. HAVA creates this new shadow world of law. Florida officials said, “Well, we did this for HAVA.” Then the lawyers at the Brennan Center said, “Where in HAVA? How can you say this is for HAVA?” They said, “Oh, well, that’s our own interpretation.” Is this federal law? Is it state law? No, it’s Bush law; it’s Rove law. The nice thing about elections for vote thieves: there’s a “Fuck you” clause in vote theft. If you win, you control the review. You own the police.
Chris: Which provisions of the act are most often cited as authority for attacks on voting rights?
Greg: I go back to the 2006 codicils. Certain things kicked in in ’06 regarding verification of voter identity. That is the most mischievous thing. The law demanded that, beginning in ’06, each state must have centralized, computerized rolls of voters. Again, the first state to go full-on with computerized, centralized purging of voter rolls was Florida. That’s how we ended up with the phony felon purge (in 2000). With HAVA, they used the Florida fix as an excuse to create a so-called reform and the “reform” was to take Florida’s method and nationalize it. But people say, “Well, why shouldn’t we have verified rolls?” The answer is that this is a new law to prevent a crime that almost never happens. We have five or fewer convictions for vote fraud a year in America. We figure that, under the new system, five million voters a year lose their right to vote. You literally have a million voters losing their right to vote to catch one ne’er-do-well. You don’t arrest a million people to catch one murderer.
Chris: Now, regarding these centralized lists, you’ve written about a firm called Accenture that runs computerized voting lists for various state governments. Could you talk about that?
Greg: Accenture used to be Arthur Andersen, but after they got caught cooking the books for Enron, they tend not to use that name. Arthur Andersen was split into two parts: one was liquidated, put into bankruptcy, and one was renamed Accenture. They haven’t changed their ways. There’s Accenture; there’s ES&S (Election Systems & Software). These characters are some of the greasiest operators out there. They combine bias with incompetence and high fees. ES&S has been involved in New Mexico. It’s a firm founded by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel (of Nebraska). Every time ES&S gets involved in purging voter rolls, they turn astonishingly Republican. Everyone knows that if you use certain methods, it knocks out certain types of voters. That’s why I’m doing this investigation with Bobby Kennedy. We are investigating the theft of the 2008 election before it happens. We’re looking at what’s happening in Colorado, New Mexico, Alabama, Florida. We’re going to be putting out a big national magazine article with our findings. We can’t say where.
Chris: When is that going to come out?
Greg: In September. We will then also have a film out starting with a broadcast on BBC Television and a U.S. national network. For the first time, we’re going to break through the electronic blockade in America.
Chris: I read that you’re raising funds for the broadcast. How are you doing on that?
Greg: Well, that’s the thing. (The network) finally opened the door, but they said, “Of course, we’re not paying for this.” Okay, I’ll tell my cameramen to eat dog food. My staff is pretty good at living on very little. They were here last night ’til 2 a.m. (Research associate) Zach Roberts—I want to give him his due—his last day off was about seven weeks ago. This is a nonstop operation, but I have to raise money to provide the bare minimum. We do want to be able to provide outreach and give stuff out to some activist groups. We’re going to have a voter guide, Steal Back Your Vote, which I’m putting together with Kennedy. A lot of this is going to be in comic-book form, designed by Top Shelf. I had a complaint from one of my fundraisers that we give away too much stuff—my books, DVDs. But that’s our game: to get the word out and build a knowledge base. Now, I’ll give a hint of my age. The protests against the war in Vietnam began with massive teach-ins: “Here’s where Vietnam is.” We need to learn the issues. People are unarmed. That is, people know that they’re getting shafted, but they don’t really know exactly how.
[i] U.S. Attorneys are senior prosecutors in the Justice Department. There are 93 U.S. Attorneys, each in charge of his/her own district.
[ii] Nicknamed “Bush’s brain,” Rove served as chief strategist for Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. From 2001-2007, Rove held various posts in the Bush administration, including senior advisor and deputy chief of staff.
[iii] In 2006, the Justice Department fired nine U.S. Attorneys, nearly all of whom had received high performance ratings from the department. The subject is being investigated by Congress. Alberto Gonzalez, the attorney general at the time, claims to remember very little about the firings.
[iv] The official in charge of a state’s elections.
[v] In 2000, Harris was the secretary of state in Florida and the co-chair of George W. Bush’s presidential campaign in that state. She presided over the various voter purges in 2000 and was the one who officially certified Bush the winner of the election.
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