1/28 Election Fraud, Reform, & Updates Thread

[MelissaB]

In order to organize and document I thought it would be a good idea to have a daily thread to place items related to the reform, fraud, and other items. This also make it easier to "catch up" when we are away from the computer for a while.

Please help us. If you see something that isn't here post it with a link to the thread and a thanks to the author. Thanks to everyone who is helping with this project.


Link to the thread from Wednesday: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x304970

(The other thread from today was deleted because I added too much to the title. :( Sorry. Also, I can't find the thread from yesterday.)

[MelissaB]

1. Michael Moore's webchat transcript

Michael Moore: Fahrenheit 9/11

The Fahrenheit 9/11 director dropped by for a webchat after C4's premiere of his film, causing quite a stir. Check out the transcript here, including a statement from Michael explaining how 'certain Americans' tried to sabotage this unique event.


Chat Ed: After Fahrenheit 9/11 had its UK premiere on Channel 4 on Thursday evening, the director, writer and producer Michael Moore joined us for an exclusive webchat. The chat happened an hour later than publicised due to forces at work in the US trying to silence Michael. Here's what happened...

Michael Moore: I just want to say that I feel really bad that Channel 4 innocently thought "Wouldn't it be nice if we had a filmmaker do a webchat?" but unfortunately the people of Channel 4 don't live in the US and didn't anticipate that certain Americans, when they learned of this webchat, did not see it as a webchat with a filmmaker but as an interview with the devil himself. They discussed throughout the week how and what they could do to stop it. So my apologies to the British audience who logged in this evening to have this webchat (the only one I have agreed to do in the past year) only to be prohibited from having this discussion with me thanks to the lunatic Right Wing in the US.

Jeremy Dumkrieger: Michael, at what point did you say to yourself, I have to make Fahrenheit 9-11, I have to tell the American people the truth?

Michael Moore: It was probably on a drive back across the country the week after September 11th whilst listening to Talk radio and hearing peoples' responses to it across the country and realising that Americans didn't quite understand how the world felt about us.

Chris Marsh: If you had a short interview with George W. Bush, what would be the most important thing for you to ask him?

Michael Moore: "Would you kindly pee in this cup?"


Much more here: http://www.channel4.com/film/reviews/feature.jsp?id=141822&page=1

[MelissaB]

2. Raw Story: Congressman to call on FBI to investigate ballet tampering alle

1/27/2005

Congressman to call on FBI to investigate ballot tampering allegations

by John Byrne/Raw Story Editor

Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.) will call on the Federal Bureau of Investigation tomorrow to investigate allegations of electoral tampering in Clermont County, Ohio, which Raw Story revealed Wednesday.

Rep. Conyers has received a letter from the Justice Department in response to an earlier letter the congressman issued. The Department said they had found nothing significant to support claims that Triad Election Systems tampered with electronic voting machines in Hocking County, Ohio.

In response, Conyers issued a new letter Friday which thanks the Department for investigating earlier charges, and asks them to expand their inquiry to include an examination of charges that stickers were placed on ballots in Ohio.

More here: http://rawstory.com/news/2005/index.php?p=9


Thanks to Wilms here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x308278

[Wilms]

8. FBI Letter to Conyers, Conyers Letter to FBI, and those Affidavits

<http://fairnessbybeckerman.blogspot.com/>
Posted by Ray Beckerman
January 28, 2005

FBI Refuses to Follow Up on Hocking County Triad Incident

In a January 12th letter attached to Congressman Conyers's January 28th letter, the FBI refused to further investigate or seek prosecution of the Triad vote machine tampering incident in Hocking County.

Also:

Cong. Conyers Asks FBI to Expand Investigation into Clermont, Union, Fulton, Hocking, Monroe, Henry, and Harrison Counties

Congressman Conyers has written to the FBI asking it to expand its investigation into further incidents in Clermont, Harrison, Union, Fulton, Hocking, Monroe, and Henry Counties.

Plus the affidavits:

All here in pdf form:

<http://miamedia.com/news/2005-01-28ohelecfbifollowupltr.pdf>

[MelissaB]

3. Discussion Worthy Article: Should The Left Ignore The 'Stolen Election'

by Bertell Ollman

In the course of his very rich article, "The Non-Election of 2004" (Z Magazine, Jan., 2005), Noam Chomsky sought to minimize the importance of the fact that the 2004 presidential election was stolen. And if there is still any doubt in the anti-Bush camp that this past election was stolen, it is - in my view - chiefly because most opinion formers (including writers in the "New York Times", the "Nation" and the "Village Voice") have (mis)understood "stealing" on the model of robbing a bank, where someone has to catch the winning candidate piling boxes of unopened ballots into the back of his pick-up truck before one can say it has occurred. Stealing an election, however, is more like stacking a deck of cards where a devious sleight of hand ensures that the same party wins every time.



The relevant question, then, is whether the well publicized scandals over electronic voting, the numerous problems people had in registering and casting their ballots, the irregularities in counting votes, the politically biased actions of the secretaries of state in the key states of Florida and Ohio, the unwillingness of Republican politicians at all levels of government to address these problems over the last four years, the huge discrepancies between the "official" vote count and usually reliable exit polls, and the fact that practically all of the admitted incidents of blocked, lost, changed, and added votes favored Bush - the question is whether all this constitutes a "stacking of the political deck". If so, there should be no doubt in anybody's mind that the country that likes to bill itself as "the world's foremost democracy" has just gone through a stolen election.



For there to be a stolen election, however, or at least one that deserves to be taken seriously as such, there would have to have been a "real election". And this is what Chomsky says did not happen. While ignoring the often progressive views of the public, the two major political parties together with their public relations and media allies orchestrated a campaign based on lies, distortions, photo ops, trivialities and assorted feel-good slogans. In such a contest, whoever won it is clear that the public could only lose. That does not mean that Chomsky did not see that a victory by one or the other candidate would have some different consequences, but this does not compensate for the completely manipulated and undemocratic character of the entire electoral process. Moreover, most people are broadly aware that the elections are not serious affairs and therefore do not take them very seriously, which is why there has been so little public outrage at the possibility that the election was stolen, both now and in 2000. According to this view, the task of radicals is to explain why there was no real election and to protest that, and not to get sidetracked into relatively trivial debates over the tampering of ballots on election day (which seems to take for granted that a real election did occur).



Having said this - and it sorely needs being said - it doesn't follow that the Left should ignore or even try to play down the current controversy over Bush's theft of the election. First, there is the matter that the right to vote in this country - as limited and distorted as it is - was won by over 200 years of popular struggle and marks an important advance over what existed before.

More here: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=90&ItemID=7110


Thanks to L. Coyote here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x306598

[MelissaB]

4. The Empire of Vulgarity

and

The Empire of Vulgarity

by Mike Carlton

George Bush's second inaugural extravaganza was every bit as repugnant as I had expected, a vulgar orgy of triumphalism probably unmatched since Napoleon crowned himself emperor of the French in Notre Dame in 1804.

The little Corsican corporal had a few decent victories to his escutcheon. Lodi, Marengo, that sort of thing. Not so this strutting Texan mountebank, with his chimpanzee smirk and his born-again banalities delivered in that constipated syntax that sounds the way cold cheeseburgers look, and his grinning plastic wife, and his scheming junta of neo-con spivs, shamans, flatterers and armchair warmongers, and his sinuous evasions and his brazen lies, and his sleight of hand theft from the American poor, and his rape of the environment, and his lethal conviction that the world must submit to his Pax Americana or be bombed into charcoal.

Difficult to know what was more repellent: the estimated $US40 million cost of this jamboree (most of it stumped up by Republican fat-cats buying future presidential favours), or the sheer crassness of its excess when American boys are dying in the quagmire of Bush's very own Iraq war.

Other wartime presidents sought restraint. Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address in 1865 - "with malice toward none, with charity for all" - is the shortest ever. And he had pretty much won the Civil War by that time.

More here: http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0121-28.htm


Thanks to L. Coyote here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x307734

[MelissaB]

5. The Minus Touch

The Minus Touch

A study of touch-screen voting in Snohomish County suggests that machines favored Dino Rossi. But there's no way to prove it.

by Rick Anderson


Snohomish County Auditor Bob Terwilliger
demonstrates a Sequoia touch-screen voting
machine last summer.
(Elaine Thompson / Associated Press)

Even if you have followed every strange twist and U-turn of the 2004–05 Washington gubernatorial election, would it surprise you to hear that more than 100,000 votes were never recounted? These are the electronic votes from the two counties, Snohomish and Yakima, that have computerized touch-screen voting in Washington. The computers do not include a mechanism to recount and compare votes for error. More than 2.7 million paper votes statewide were recounted by optical-reader machine and by hand, ultimately giving Democrat Christine Gregoire a hairbreadth 129-vote victory. But the 106,000 touch-screen ballots—constituting almost 4 percent of the state vote—were simply re-totaled without review and added in. A new study questions the validity of many of those touch-screen votes, suggesting that Gregoire should have beaten Republican Dino Rossi in the initial tally of ballots on Election Day. Rossi was on top at that point by 261 votes, before a final hand recount gave the election to Gregoire.

Officials, including the Republicans who are suing for a new election, don't seem too bothered by the unvetted touch-screen votes, despite promises to explore all the breakdowns of the state's ballot botch. Snohomish County elections manager Carolyn Diepenbrock, for one, says the election process was as honest and accurate as her county could make it. Last fall, she says, Democratic and Republican party representatives randomly selected some of the Sequoia-brand touch-screen machines to be used to test the precision of electronic voting. And on Nov. 2, the system worked, insists Diepenbrock. "Altogether, we deployed 956 machines, I think, out of the 1,000 we own. On the dozens of machines that were preselected by the parties, we ran parallel monitoring tests all Election Day. The sampling showed every vote was being recorded."

The nagging question: Were they recorded accurately? Diepenbrock and other officials in the state's third-largest county, run by Democrats, think so. About one-third of Snohomish County's voters—90,000 or so—used the computerized machines, and another 16,000 voted electronically in Yakima County. At least 28 Snohomish touch screens had "calibration issues," officials concede. That includes electronically shifting votes to a candidate other than the one selected by the touch-screen voter. Some screens also appeared with votes already selected by the computer. Similar problems cropped up in earlier elections in the county, which has employed touch screens for three years. But, "No votes were impacted by those errors," maintains Diepenbrock, because voters alerted poll workers to the glitches and the errant votes were corrected.

That's the opposite of findings by Paul Lehto and Jeffrey Hoffman, who have just completed a study of the Snohomish vote. They contend the outcome of the Nov. 2 election was affected by electronic irregularities. Their 29-page report found that problems of switched votes or machines freezing up occurred at more than 50 polling places. Under their scenario, Gregoire likely beat Rossi in Snohomish County or, at worst, lost by a much narrower margin—meaning she likely lost enough votes to account for Rossi's 261-vote statewide lead shortly after Election Day. Two-thirds of Snohomish County voted with paper absentee and provisional ballots, favoring Gregoire over Rossi by 97,044 to 95,228. The remaining one-third, voting electronically Nov. 2, favored Rossi—and by a much greater margin: 50,400 to 42,135. Though they can't prove it, Lehto and Hoffman think many Democratic votes were switched to the GOP. They believe it was "a mathematical impossibility that Gregoire's 1,800-vote lead on absentee paper ballots was completely overcome by an 8,000-vote Rossi landslide on Election Day on the Sequoia touch screens, ultimately leaving Republican Rossi with a 6,000-vote margin in traditionally Democratic Snohomish County."

More here: http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0504/050126_news_snohomish.php

Thanks to Carolab in post #7 of this thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x307766

[MelissaB]

6. This article is also discussed here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x307783

[MelissaB]

7. Ohio's Secretary of State Blackwell libels election protection attorney at

and

Ohio's Secretary of State Blackwell libels election protection attorney at junket sponsored by voting machine vendors

January 27, 2005

Ohio's Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell has publicly labeled as "a complete idiot" an Election Protection attorney he is attempting to have sanctioned. Blackwell made the derogatory personal attack outside a banquet-laden conference in Columbus being sponsored by Diebold, ES&S, Triad and other voting machine vendors.

Blackwell told the 56th annual winter conference of the Ohio Association of Election Officials that the 2004 vote in Ohio was the "gold standard" for national balloting. "We were shocked when people flew in and said the election could be stolen," he told an audience of several hundred election officials from around the state. "The election was not perfect, but it was perfectly inspiring."

The four-day conference held January 25-8 a Columbus's Hyatt Regency Hotel features banquets, luncheons and parties (including one entitled "A Night in the Caribbean") sponsored by the nation's leading voting machine manufacturers, including ES&S, Diebold, Triad, Hart InterCivic and other names now widely associated with questions about the accuracy of the vote counts in the 2000, 2002 and 2004 elections.

Many of the voting machine vendors represented at the convention have strong ties to the Republican Party. On January 6, the Ohio delegation to the Electoral College became the first since 1876 to be challenged on the floor of the United States Congress.

More: http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/7/2005/1054

Thanks to McKenzie here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x308321

[MelissaB]

9. Pictures from Iraq

I've debated about whether to post these here or not. I decided that if you want to view the pictures you can, and if you don't I certainly understand. I just want a place where they are posted in one place.


The Children of Iraq
www.zonaeuropa.com/01467.htm

Discussion here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x1536848


Pictures of Destruction and Civilian Victims of the Anglo-American Aggression in Iraq
http://www.robert-fisk.com/iraqwarvictims_page1.htm

(Thanks to Gary173 in this thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x305921#307917)

I don't know if there is a link to this set for discussion or not.

[MelissaB]

10. 18,181

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%2218%2C181+votes%22&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t&fl=0&x=wrt

This link appears at the bottom of every post by Goldeneye.

[MelissaB]

11. Arnebeck: Request for sanctions over (Ohio) challenge frivolous

From the LBN Forum



Lawyers: Request for sanctions over election challenge frivolous

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The lawyers behind an aborted challenge of the presidential election told the Ohio Supreme Court they presented a convincing argument and shouldn't be sanctioned.

The four lawyers said in legal documents filed Friday that the challenge they filed on behalf of 37 voters included enough evidence of voting irregularities to back up their allegations of widespread fraud.

The filing was in response to a request on Jan. 19 by Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro to sanction lawyers Cliff Arnebeck, Robert Fitrakis, Susan Truitt and Peter Peckarsky.

Petro's motion, filed on behalf of Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, said the election challenge was meritless and filed for partisan political purposes. Petro's office argued the challenge presented little evidence and instead relied on theories and conjectures.

more:
http://www.onnnews.com/Global/story.asp?S=2873366

Thanks to truthpusher here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x308685

[MelissaB]

12. Pelosi: President Urged to Order Full Disclosure of Covert Propaganda

WASHINGTON, Jan. 28 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Today, the House Democratic leadership and Ranking Democratic Members sent a letter to President Bush (news - web sites) asking him to direct the release of all contracts for secret publicity campaigns to promote Administration policies.

The text of the letter follows.

January 28, 2005

The President

The White House

Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

We are writing to request that you direct each department and agency of the Executive Branch to disclose to the appropriate Committee of the House of Representatives all public relations and advertising contracts signed during your Administration.

Over the past year, multiple investigations have revealed that federal agencies have employed secret publicity campaigns to promote administration priorities.

In separate analyses, the Government Accountability Office found that the Department of Health and Human Services (news - web sites) and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy violated the congressional prohibition on publicity and propaganda by distributing fabricated video news reports.(1)

More here: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/usnw/20050128/pl_usnw/pelosi__president_urged_to_order_full_disclosure_of_covert_propaganda123_xml


Thanks to librechik here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1192931

[MelissaB]

13. Media Matters: Uncovers White House Reporter Copying GOP Documents

Gannongate: Media Matters for America Uncovers White House Reporter Copying GOP Documents

1/27/2005 9:29:00

WASHINGTON, Jan. 27 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Talon News Washington bureau chief and White House correspondent Jeff Gannon, who accused his colleagues in the press corps of "work(ing) off of the talking points" provided by Democrats, has used Bush administration and Republican National Committee (RNC) documents and releases in his Talon "news reports" verbatim and without attribution. In at least two of his articles, Gannon lifted more than half of the text directly from GOP "fact sheets." Moreover, as Media Matters for America has pointed out, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh proclaimed that Gannon repeated a fabricated assertion of Limbaugh's in asking a question at President Bush's January 26 press conference.

From the January 27 edition of "Jeff Gannon's Washington" radio show on the conservative Internet radio website RIGHTALK:

GANNON: But what was very interesting, in his (Bush's) answer, was that -- that he's going to go to the American people. That was the first thing out of his mouth. That "Well, I'm going to take my case to the American people." Which told everybody in that room that not only was he not going to reach out to Democrats anymore, he was also going to go around the press corps, which, of course, deserves to be gone around because they're not telling the truth about Social Security reform. They continue to work off of the talking points provided them from the opposition. And I know that because I have seen some of my colleagues -- let's say one or two that I've actually witnessed - - read from DNC (Democratic National Committee) talking points on Social Security.

More here: http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=42277


Thanks to truthpusher here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1193511

[MelissaB]

14. (RFK Jr) Kennedy Bashes Bush for 'Crimes Against Nature'

Kennedy Bashes Bush for 'Crimes Against Nature'

By Scott Condon
January 28, 2005

>>>snip

He placed a big share of the blame for Bush's re-election squarely on the shoulders of the media.

It's more common to hear the media accused of a "liberal bias," but Kennedy claimed conservative influences have prevailed since 1987 when a policy called the Fairness Doctrine was abolished. The Reagan administration gutted requirements that forced television stations to provide multiple sides in political coverage and required them to cover topics of community interest. Reagan also eased laws that prohibited concentration of media ownership as a favor to conservative broadcasters, Kennedy said.

>>>snip

Kennedy considers this "a very troubling time" because of numerous ways that "corporate cronyism" dictates the Bush administration's actions without proper exposure. He's on a mission to expose it himself.

Kennedy has written that he has felt "fury" over what the Bush administration has done to the environment. For more than a year he has fired a blistering volley of accusations against the administration in magazine articles, interviews, speaking engagements and in his new book, "Crimes Against Nature."

More here: http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20050128/NEWS/101280023


Thanks to rodeodance here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1193182

[Wilms]

15. kick n/t