Why One Quarter of Americans (Including the Edwards) Knew Ohio 2004 Was Stolen in 2004

McCamy Taylor

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Sat Oct-06-07 02:00 PM
Original message

Why One Quarter of Americans (Including the Edwards) Knew Ohio 2004 Was Stolen in 2004

I can not believe the lengths that some people will go to to justify John Kerry's decision not to fight for the rights of Ohio voters in Election 2004. He blew it and he blew his political career at the same time, and the man will have to live with this bad decision for the rest of his life. It does not help that his wife, his running mate, and his running mates wife all wanted him to challenge the vote. It certainly doesn't help that his opponent's Secretary of State, Colin Powell was giving big hints that something was wrong by pointing a diplomatic finger at the rigged election in the Ukraine in which the exit polls provided the smoking gun. And it absolutely did not help that between one quarter and one third of the American people were convinced by December 2004 that the Ohio 2004 election was stolen based upon evidence uncovered by internet and non mainstream media journalists.

Here are the many ways in which John Kerry had to have at least suspected that something was amiss in Ohio.

1. Before the votes were even cast on election day 2004, Bush Campaign Chair in Ohio and GOP Secretary of State Ken Blackwell attempted to keep all exit pollsters more than 100 yards from the exit polls. The news agencies got an emergency injunction and were able to do their exit polls in their usual manner. The distance which Blackwell wanted to enforce is important. If you study exit poll scientific literature, you find that the reliability of polls decreases as the distance between pollsters and the polls increases. At the distance Blackwell chose, the polls would have lost all validity. In other words, Blackwell had been instructed by Karl Rove to make exit polls in Ohio unreliable so that when there was a discrepancy (which Rove knew there would be) he could blame it on the polls. Anyone who noted that news story that morning, knew that the fix was in.

2. The exit polls. Though all the news networks faithfully withheld their exit polls (they wanted Bush re-elected for the favors his FCC had promised, especially for the media expansion ruling appeal to the SCOTUS) the polls were leaked, and so we all saw that the polls did not match the final votes.

3. Actions taken by Blackwell such as purges of lawful voters, lack of equal access to voting machines all pointed to systemic disenfranchisement of Democratic voters.

4. Irregularities at Republican controlled precincts. Doors sealed in violation of the law. Greater than 100% turn out.

These were all reported on election day or before.

Kerry decided that it was about him . If he could not be sure that he would emerge the winner of an election challenge, then he did not want to risk seeming like a loser.

In fact, it was about each and every voter who had his or her vote tossed into a shredder somewhere. Whether the outcome of the election was changed, if an investigation had caught people engaged in election fraud and resulted in changes of the system to prevent these kinds of abuses from happening again, it would have been a victory.

Because Kerry did not choose to fight for the rights of disenfranchised voters, the only election reform that Ohio saw were the pathetic hearings in which Bill Frist's attorney brought in witnesses who lied that the NAACP had given out crack cocaine to encourage Blacks to vote. This resulted in draconian voting legislation for the state of Ohio, designed to further suppress the vote, in a futile effort on the part of the GOP to keep the state red.

So, don't try to trash the Edwards for something that John Kerry and John Kerry alone chose to do.

http://www.grandtheftelectionohio.com/050221.htm