Sound bites and talking points from Cleveland

[rightfoot]

I have been collecting these from the Cleveland teach in

These are paraphrased, I took notes but they aren't word for word, but I think I got them pretty close.

from Jonathan Simons, on why we shouldn't trust proposed legislation:
"No one is going to kill a goose that keeps laying golden eggs. New legislation is going to be built with holes in it so they can keep slipping through to get their golden egg."

from Jonathan Simons, on why no amount of improving the machines will work: "It's like your back porch in June, with a yard full of mosquitos. If you have even one tiny hole in the screen, you'll get eaten alive."

from Jonathan Simons, on why the only solution is hand counted paper ballots: "To do meaningful auditing, you need to allow any candidate to audit no matter what the margin of victory is -- because if you're going to rig you're going to rig it so it's not so close you'll get a recount. And if we do meaningful audits, the right way, we have to count all the ballots. If we count all the ballots, it will turn into election month. And there will be lawsuits, and pretty soon we'll have election season. So we might as well do away with the machines and just do the hand count in the first place."

from Lynn Landes, on why this movement needs a lot of different people doing different things: "We need to inflict 'death by a thousand cuts.'"

from Kathleen Wynne, on procurement and the money trail: "It is a club and we aren't in it. They are like Tinker Toys, the election officials, politicians, lobbyists, vendors, and indicted ones. They just keep switching places -- vendor, becomes indicted, while the indicted one becomes a vendor, and the politician becomes a lobbyist, and then the vendor becomes the election official. 'They' make the decisions among themselves, and 'they' is not 'us.'"

from Bev Harris, on the importance of this fight, and the resistance we should expect: "40 years ago, our brothers (pic of Malcolm X) died for this. And the voting rights act will expire in about a year. 85 years ago, our mothers (pic of Sufragettes) died for this. We think we've tried everything, but not even close. The media didn't want to cover them either. They threw themselves in front of race horses and allowed themselves to be run over to draw attention to this issue. 130 years ago, our soldiers died for this (pic of African American men in civil war uniform). Long ago, (pic of immigrants at Ellis Island) our ancestors came for this. And in the beginning (pic of founding fathers arguing) we fought a war over this. If this was easy, people wouldn't have to keep dying, just to give our children the right to vote."

from Bev Harris, on the need to have loosely independent, constantly shifting alliances: "If we try to attack a well funded corporate structure with a top down corporate-like activism structure of our own, we will fail. We will never outdo them at their own game. Instead we need a swarm of independents. Like Lynn Landes says, death by a thousand cuts. Because we are up against lobbyists, people protecting stock investments, big money, local yokels, butt-covering and incompetence. Add to that all the tampering methods -- magic ballots, suppression, dead people voting, gerrymandering, central tabulator hacks, remote access, electronic pollbooks. Then overlay the whole mess with cryptography. This will take as many of us as possible, each doing the small unexpected things that come naturally for us.

from Bruce O'Dell, on why machine tampering is more dangerous than paper ballot tampering: "It's the difference of retail vs. wholesale. One at a time vs. massive tampering at once."

from Dr. Vicki Lovegren, on the way citizens are treated when they attend meetings: "They give us five minutes to talk. I ask, 'Do you limit the vendor to five minutes?' They tell me that isn't relevant. I say, why are citizens less relevant than salesmen for vendors?"

There was a lawyer from Licking County. I wrote his name down but I can't find it. If someone has it, please post. He ran for judge and caught them red-handed tampering with the punch card machines, and has taken it to every level of government, none of them will investigate or prosecute. He said something really good: "It's like child abuse was 25 years ago. No one would talk about it. It was just not discussed. Well, child abuse existed and we finally had to bring it out of the closet and start dealing with it. Well, I'm here to tell you that vote fraud exists. It's just not polite to talk about it, but we need to bring it out of the closet and deal with it.

Bob Fitrakis is the best speaker I've ever seen. He really motivates you. He and Harvey Wasserman gave a perspective, Wasserman talked about how just a few people stopped a nuclear power plant. Bob Fitrakis does a great job of showing how ridiculous the excuses are. I wish I could remember his punch lines. He delivers them like karate chops, they come so fast.

Bob Koehler talked about how he worked his way up, starting with neighborhood weeklies, and he loved to cover the stories about the everyman. He said the voting movement is like that, real people dealing with real issues. He talks about being the media, writing letters, until the battering ram breaks open a few chinks of coverage here and there.

anyway, those are the sound bytes I wrote notes on. There were a lot more. Pretty much everyone was coming down on the side of hand counted paper ballots in the precinct.

[Fly by night]

1. Great Cleveland sound bites, rightfoot. Thanks kindly. n/t

[rigel99]

2. The Lawyer's Name from Licking is Paul Harmon /Video and Transcript

GREAT GREAT POST.. sorry I missed Bev's speech, sounded historic, and Vicki Lovegren is an angel to our cause, and Jonathon Simon, they are all true heroes!!!!


Here is Paul Harmon's video of his speech at the Columbus teach -in...
www.countpaperballots.com/VIDEO/NashvilleVideo.htm
to donate to paul just put "paul" in the comments of this link
www.countpaperballots.com/donate.htm

also here are his legal briefs, he's got the BEST CASE EVER OF FRAUD in Ohio I want to rally as many people to support Paul as possible...


LEGAL FILINGS FOR PAUL HARMON IN LICKING COUNTY
December 22, 2004
Licking County officials refuse to permit recount observer to look at voting machines
http://fairnessbybeckerman.blogspot.com/2004/12/licking-county-officials-refuse-to.html
-----
February 25, 2005
Election Fraud by Licking County Officials Exposed in Criminal Complaint Filed by Paul D. Harmon
http://fairnessbybeckerman.blogspot.com/2005/02/election-fraud-by-licking-county.html
-----
February 28, 2005
Paul Harmon to Appeal Licking County Case to Ohio Supreme Court
http://fairnessbybeckerman.blogspot.com/2005/02/paul-harmon-to-appeal-licking-county.html


also, here is part of his transcript...
Transcript of Speech given at the May 7th, Ohio Teach-In Sponsored by Case Ohio.
Please send an email to [e-mail] if you know a lawyer that wants to help Paul in his case.

QUOTABLE QUOTE:
While any of us are out there trying to find the truth there are people trying to hide the truth. That’s my experience.

PAUL HARMON: (Lawyer Running for Judge, Lost His Bid for Judge in Licking County, Finished 2nd Place, Lost by 189 Votes But Found a 40% Undervote problem, he is suing and his case is currently in the Ohio Supreme Court).

BEGIN SPEECH:

I am an attorney and I’ve been a lawyer for 25 years, my office is in Newark Ohio, and I’ve practiced here in Licking and as well as most of the surrounding counties in this area. And Last summer I decided to run for domestic relations Court Judge, I’m an independent, I didn’t take any money from anybody, I shutdown my law practice and went door to door went to pretty much every home in licking county, and frankly I didn’t give alotta thought to how it worked,how they counted votes, I made the assumption that we would be able , that the people in power want votes counted fairly and accurately.

AND BOY WAS I WRONG. Audience reaction.

I saw the returns and the returns alone were enough to raise a lot of red flags.

There were 5 candidates for domestic relations court judge, none of the candidates won. Undervotes won in a landslide. (audience laughing)

UNBELIEVABLE, UNBELIEVABLE

Of the candidates, I finished 2nd by 189 votes.

The areas where I did the best had a 40% undervote.
Just looking at the numbers, I though wow, how could undervotes win an election.
I’ve never heard of such a thing, and I asked around in fact I got calls from members who had served on the Licking county board of elections that said they had never seen anything like that. So That immediately raised red flags.

But I accepted the result. I was Obviously not happy about it, but to be careful I wrote a letter to the Director of the Board of Elections, Mary Jo Long

And I said, Don’t touch any of the paperwork, don’t touch any of the voting machines until I have a chance to see them.

And I wrote her several times over the period of a couple of weeks, not expecting much to come of that but to be safe I wanted to look in licking county there are punch cards in little boxes

These are little cases about yea big, you pop open the top, legs come out

And You take your computer punch card and stick it in and you use your stylus to make your vote

And I thought well maybe pages were missing and they didn’t vote in the judicial races or maybe the rotation of the names was wrong
That’s really what I was looking for

And about a month after the election I went to the board of elections because I lost by 3 tenths of one percentage point which required an automatic revote, I’m sorry not revote, recount.

And I arrived thinking the way I chose to do things was look at the machine for each precinct they were setup correctly and then I looked at punchcards.

Well when I got to the board of elections, I suggested that process as a way to do all of that.

They locked the doors and the press was there in the hallways and they voted unanimously not to let me look at the Votematics machines, which frankly surprised me

And I said well, I’m not going to be able to tell much by looking at the punchcards and see how how they intended to vote,

well that wasn’t going to happen, in addition to that I took family members Mike Periwinkle and myself and we were demeaned like you wouldn’t believe “NO TALKING” it was like you know in ?? school

While any of us are out there trying to find the truth there are people trying to hide the truth. That’s my experience.

I hate to say it but the boards of elections, the members of board get paid, they get state retirement, they get state insurance, they don’t keep track in other states they are political players and they very active political people, and they are not looking to be real, they are looking to cover up fraud, that’s my experience.


I went to the recount and I was told if you want to look at those Votermatics, they’re really our public records, that you have to sue us.
(laughs)

Uh, I’m pretty stubborn, I said alright

AND THAT’S WHAT I DID.

(Big applause from audience)

[rigel99]

3. welcome to DU, You landed with a splash!

welcome indeed....