Media Blacks Out Voting Problems
By David Swanson, ILCA Media Coordinator
Part of the Media Blackout series on underreported labor stories
The "mainstream" media has fallen down on the job by failing to cover efforts since November 2 to ensure that all votes in the presidential election are accurately counted. The conclusion by John Kerry that an investigation could not possibly reverse the election may quite possibly have been premature. But the question that both activists and the media should be asking is not whether there was enough fraud and errors to decide the election, nor even whether there was more than is usual, but whether there was any fraud or errors, where the problems occurred, how they can be prevented in the future, and -- in particular -- whether new kinds of fraud were permitted by new technologies and by the privatization of our election process.
The ILCA is particularly concerned, because of indications, detailed below, that fraud may have occurred in areas where there are heavy populations of workers, African-Americans, and other progressive voters that our member organizations represent. People deserve to have their votes counted, and the strategists who will spend four years studying the election results deserve to have the facts. Some citizens and independent media outlets are raising these issues, but the corporate media is AWOL. An investigation by the media would seem especially appropriate, since the 2000 election led to investigations in Florida that determined the loser was occupying the White House.
Evidence existed before this election that quite possibly "the fix" was in: the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio was running the 2004 election in that state and had for weeks been demonstrating every intention to disenfranchise Democrats; the head of a company manufacturing electronic voting machines for use around the country had announced his intention to help Bush stay in the White House. The weaknesses and susceptibility to abuse of electronic voting machines, including the machines that many people vote on and the machines that add up the votes from multiple precincts, had been well documented. <snip>
http://www.ilcaonline.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=950&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
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