LEONARD PITTS: It's too late for a replay on the Ohio vote

[Freddie Stubbs]

I don't want to hear anything else about Ohio.

My apologies to the Buckeye State, but I've had it up to here with overheated Internet postings purporting to prove that massive fraud swung the vote in the state that decided the election of 2004. If you haven't seen them, well . . . I'm sorry your hard drive crashed and I hope it's fixed real soon. The rest of us have been unable to escape the nonstop conspiracy theorizing that began about 30 seconds after John Kerry conceded the election.

I thought it had petered out, but this week, the former candidate himself stoked the fire, making unusually sharp accusations of GOP malfeasance during a Martin Luther King Day breakfast in Boston.

Voting machines, said Kerry, were ''distributed in uneven ways,'' and voters in Democratic precincts had to wait up to 11 hours to exercise the franchise while Republicans breezed on through. What he didn't say -- what I have yet to hear any credible expert say -- is that these irregularities made any material difference to the bottom line.

more: http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/columnists/leonard_pitts/10695582.htm

[Twist_U_Up]

1. wow your on to something

http://funwavs.com/wavfile.php?quote=4163&sound=21

[pacalo]

7. Like your style, Twist...

Here's my reply to Mr. Pitts:

http://www.the-earchives.com/wavs/i/insman02.wav

[Twist_U_Up]

8. I gotta find the HEY KOOL AID one lol n/t

[helderheid]

2. this is a dupe

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=299780&mesg_id=299780

:)

[Wright Patman]

3. I agree with him

Unfortunately, 59 million Americans do not so much like the BFEE as that they despise anyone the Dems nominate.

Also, this same segment will never, ever, ever concede it has ever been wrong about anything, no matter how badly the decisions of the BFEE turn out.

It's all Gawd's weeill and all that. Matter of fact, Gawd done told Dubya to do all that anyhow. Dubya said so himself. So it's really not his fault. Nothing ever is.

[pacalo]

12. See #7 up above...

;)

[berniew1]

4. Whats your def. of a credible expert. there's a huge amount of documentati

that shows huge numbers affect by touchscreen fraud, ballot manipulation and ballot stuffing to affect vote totals, widespread dirty tricks and official malfeasance to reduce minority votes, uncounted votes(hanging chad), other uncounted votes(machines set up to not count Kerry votes such as in Cuyahoga County), etc. There is solid documentation of this already, but there could be a lot more specifics were it not for the (illegal) obstruction of recount people to the voter logs and other documentation. The numbers due to all of this are clearly in the range that would change the result of the election. The fact that the authorities have refused to cooperate in allowing the evidence to be looked at is proof that they fear the results of a real recount; if they were sure they won all they had to do was cooperate in a serious recount.

Documentation indicating a stolen election in Ohio

http://northnet.org/minstrel/alpage.htm
http://www.freepress.org departments articles
http://www.flcv.com/fraudpat.html
http://www.flcv.com/ussumall.html Ohio
Greens web page on recounts
and lots more

[berniew1]

5. There are a lot of credible experts who've said the election was stolen

Dr. R. Phillips; Dr. Freeman, Dr. Hout, myself, etc.
who has better credentials and a case that the election was not stolen. I haven't seen it.

[ottozen]

6. What is theft, really?

Can you own what is stolen in an ownership society?
Can you own what is borrowed in an ower-ship society?
Can you borrow what is stolen?
Can you get a good price for what is borrowed after it has been stolen in an ownership society?

[johnaries]

9. How much is the WH paying him?

I think we should all email him and ask.

[Karenca]

11. maybe he's lost......nt

[Orsino]

10. Voting is private.

Therefore, we can't know what happened to a given person's ballot. We can only exmine statistics after the fact.

Why are you still asking for evidence when you've already listed it? The uneven distribution of voting machines in Democratic precincts surely drove potential voters away; we *know* this is true, though we will never be able to measure its effect, as by definition it prevents data from being gathered.

We also *know* that the voting machines are easily hacked. Knowing the huge amounts of money riding on the election's outcome, I believe that presuming no fraud took place is naive. The best we can hope for, IMO, is a full investigation to reveal the extent to which the election was perverted, and by whom. This means holding one's nose for the years it will take, and delving as deeply as possible into the Ohio data, and that from *every* state.

Why in the world would we wait for proof before investigating? That strikes me as bass-ackwards. Dig, dig, dig, I say, and formulate better and better theories (conspiracy or otherwise) as more data become available. Whether or not the facts will ever show that any given race should have gone the other way, we owe our loved ones and our descendants a voting system that is secure and verifiable.

I take a dim view of opinions which parse to "get over it."