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(FIRST DRAFT of sample letter to be offered to DUers for mailing to members of Congress and the media. I think it's two long. It goes over 2 pages. Also, I'm considering eliminating the phrase "Ask yourself" from each of the items in the first section. That phrase may not be necessary. COMMENTS WELCOME.)
The members of the DemocraticUnderground.com 2004 Election Forum support rigorous investigation of the 2004 election, including careful and detailed investigation of all electronic voting equipment and programming and electronic voting results, and all vote suppression incidents and difficulties in voting, including potential violations of the Voting Rights Act and other laws.
The following alternative scenario of the 2004 presidential election was developed by a blogger at the DemocraticUndergound.com web site. We thought it was a good introduction to the subject, so we ask you to reflect for a moment or two, and…
Ask yourself if Kerry had won the election while Bush had won the national exit polls by 3%...
Ask yourself if Kerry had pulled out miraculous wins in most of the battleground states while trailing in the exit polls...
Ask yourself if touchscreen voting machines manufactured and programmed by Democratic voting machine companies defaulted to Kerry or repeatedly switched votes to Kerry throughout election day in Republican precincts...…
Ask yourself if Ken Blackwell had been Ohio's Democratic Secretary of State at the same time that he was heading the Kerry campaign and had distributed only a few, malfunctioning voting machines to White Republican precincts, so that White Republicans had to stand out in the rain for ten hours to vote, while he had glutted minority Democratic precincts with as many machines as they needed, then had locked out observers from witnessing the election count, then had stalled and obstructed recount efforts at every turn...
Ask yourself if voter registration drives funded by the Democratic National Committee had targeted, say, evangelical churches who had then found that the voter applications of registered Republicans had been torn up and thrown in the garbage...
Ask yourself if newly registered Republican Catholics had received mysterious phone calls from out-of-state with the caller supposedly speaking for Planned Parenthood and reminding the target to vote for Bush because he paid for his girlfriend's abortion in college...
Ask yourself if Kerry's brother had been Governor of Florida and had sent out "caging lists" to prevent voting by suspected white collar criminals, or anyone with a name similar to a white collar criminal, or any televangelist or military lobbyist ...
Ask yourself if African Americans and Hispanics had been in charge of rural white precincts, had taken pictures of White voters as they entered, had forced them to pass by the table of an African American Democratic challenger and show him ID before reaching the poll workers, and then had forced the White voters to fill out provisional ballots because they were on the Black guy's list...
Ask yourself if thousands upon thousands of votes had gone missing from electronic voting machines in White suburban Republican precincts though few if any had gone missing from Democratic minority precincts...
Ask yourself if the major voting machine companies had been owned by leading Democrats or people who had close Democratic ties and had provided no paper trail or way to audit the integrity of the election or a way to independently validate the source code of the electronic voting machines...
Ask yourself if a company staffed entirely by former members of the Congressional Black Caucus had been the sole company awarded the contract to test and verify whether the paperless, unauditable electronic voting machines were accurate...
Ask yourself if the Democratic, African American president of one of the electronic voting companies had publicly promised to deliver the deciding state in the electoral college to Kerry and then that state had slipped into Kerry's column even though Bush had a substantial lead in the exit polls...
Ask yourself, if all of the above things had happened that way, then…
…what do you suppose would have been happening in the months after that election? What fulminations would have been spewing from the mouths of Limbaugh, O'Reilly and Hannity? What stories of the shocking Democratic vote stealing scandal would have been running 24/7 in the mainstream media? What kind of investigations would the Justice Department have been initiating? What kind of demands and probes and allegations would Republican Senators have been exploiting? What would the courts have been ruling? What kind of protests would have been visiting the Capitol and its minority neighborhoods? And, ask yourself, would there have been an inauguration?
If these things had in fact occurred in this way—with the Democrats and the Kerry supporters massively suppressing Republican voters, and selecting them out of the voting process on the basis of race, income and party, and inflicting Republican precincts with inferior voting equipment and then disqualifying their votes on that basis, and shorting them on voting machines causing ten hour lines, and controlling the election process with secret, proprietary source code, and preventing a paper trail and auditablity in the voting process, and had, in addition, played all kinds of dirty tricks on the Republicans…
…you can be sure that the Bush regime and all advocates would be screaming bloody murder.
Well, please consider this a scream of bloody murder! And with this scream, we turn from the alternative election scenario to reality.
The members of the DemocraticUnderground who participate in 2004 Election Results and Discussion Forum are extremely concerned about the validity of the 2004 presidential election, due to:
1) highly insecure, unreliable and hackable electronic voting machines and central vote tabulators;
2) partisan Republican ownership of secret, proprietary source code that tabulates all the votes;
3) no paper trail in a third of the country, after special efforts by Republicans in Congress to prevent this and other election verification measures;
4) highly suspicious results in the official tabulation, indicated first of all by Kerry winning in the exit polls that were conducted on election day, and also indicted by studies from several different leading statistical experts, on measurements such as exit polls vs. official tabulation, and paper vs. electronic voting, showing large magnitude numerical anomalies always favoring Bush, and astronomical odds against such a skew in the results;
5) touchscreen voting machines consistently changing Kerry votes to Bush votes in many precincts;
6) a phony Homeland Security alert that resulted in the removal of observers from the vote counting in a key election state (Ohio) ;
7) massive vote suppression against minority voters in Ohio, Florida, New Mexico and other places, possibly resulting in the loss of as many as 3 million votes, in blatant violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965;
8) an invalid recount in Ohio that was interfered with by the Republican Secretary of State; and
9) added to all this, an intense campaign of dirty tricks against minority voters, such as calling people who had been in prison, but were now eligible to vote, and warning them that they would go back to prison if they showed up at the polling place.
We believe that, in any other America than this one--run as it is by the Bush regime--there would never have been unauditable electronic voting in the first place, but had it snneaked through the legislative process in some innocent way, and had it been revealed, post-election, that there was a large exit poll discrepancy and many other anomalies, the party in power, Republican or Democrat, would have initiated serious investigations and pursued prosecution of any wrongdoers, if, for no other reason, that to clear its name and remove the clouds of suspicion and illegitimacy—that is, if such a ruling party truly believed in its own innocence, and had nothing to hide. What would be the harm in investigating and clearing the matter up?
But in this case, in addition to anomalous and highly suspicious election results, we have something so shameful and disreputable that there can be no clearing of the air, and that is the behavior of Republican election officials in Ohio and Florida in particular, against African-American and other minority voters. This behavior cannot be covered up or excused. It was experienced by human beings—not by some machine with electrons whirling around in it pretending to be votes. Real people suffered ten hour voting lines and impossible requirements for registration, and having their votes disqualified. Real witnesses—who don't need a paper trail, because they have eyes and ears and feelings, and can speak out.
So there is the hidden election fraud, which might go away if it is not looked at too closely, and the open, bigoted, mean-spirited, personal election fraud, experienced by people who can testify to it.
We have no reason to expect that the Republican Party will deal with this matter honestly. Their moral value seems to be, "if it benefits us, than it's perfectly okay." That's why we asked you to imagine, what if it had been the other way around?
But we can hope that they will join with the Democrats in Congress in a rigorous and honest investigation, and that, if it turns out that they have won the White House illegitimately, they will relinquish it, or arrange for a re-vote.
Let us all try to imagine the alternative reality of an honest America, with an honest government, in which that could happen.
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