Democracy means being allowed to vote. When voter suppression is used by any party to secure a victory, then our democracy has been thwarted.
The minority vote suppression tactics of people who hoped to secure the election of George Bush in Ohio must be investigated and prosecuted.
In addition a combination of ballot box stuffing and tabulation fraud has occured in the state of Ohio. Citizens such as myself and others have personally witnessed missing signatures in oster books, chain of custody violations of ballots, nonrandom selection of precincts to be recounted, and tampering with voting equipment.
I live in Hamilton County. The counties surrounding Hamilton, Butler, Warren and Clermont are considered to be reliably GOP counties. However reliably GOP these counties are, as you know, no county is 100% GOP.
As you may have heard Warren County, Ohio prevented independent observers and the media from watching the vote tally on election night
by citing an unconfirmed Homeland Security threat. Subsequent investigation by the Cincinnati Enquirer determined that the lock out was planned in a closed door meeting on Oct. 25, of which the press was not informed.
http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/11/05/loc_warrenvote05.htmlhttp://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/11/10/loc_warrenvote10.htmlIn 2000 the Gore campaign pulled out of Ohio. In 2004 the Kerry campaign and other groups such as ACT and MoveOn were extremely active in Ohio,
including reliably GOP counties like Butler, Warren and Clermont. A Kerry campaign volunteer coordinator in Warren County has told me that democratic GOTV efforts were unprecedented and amazing in Warren County in 04. Yet we are expected to believe that Kerry did no better than Gore did in 2000.
Statistical anomalies in these Southwestern Ohio counties indicate that something is not right about these results.
The Supreme Court Justice race was between Thomas Moyer (R) and an African American female municipal judge from Cleveland named C. Ellen
Connaly. She was so underfunded I saw not a single commercial or yard sign, and I live in a democratic precinct. The GOP candidate however
did have yard signs all over Butler, Warren and Clermont county AND was endorsed by the Cincinnati Enquirer:
http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/10/27/editorial_ed1b.htmlYet C. Ellen Connaly a retired African American municipal court judge from Cleveland got substantially more votes than Kerry in a down ticket race in areas where voting a straight GOP ticket is the norm for a certain percentage of people in those counties. I do not believe that Bush voters accidentally voted for a democratic judge from Cleveland because they could not remember the name of the incumbent GOP judge.
Add to that the lockdown of the vote tabulation in Warren County due to a Homeland security threat that Homeland Security and the FBI have denied and a podunkville county like Warren completing their tabulation so late that Cuyahoga, a county of 1 million registered voters got their tallies in before Warren.
Mama didn't raise no fool. Bush did not get 71% in Warren County. And probaly did not do as well as they claim in Butler, Clermont and Hamilton County.
Suppression, tabulation fraud and ballot box stuffing is not acceptable in America.