Why Can't the Left Face the Stolen Elections of 2004 & 2008?

[Evan Daniel Ravitz <evan@xxxxxxxx>]

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1502


October 18, 2005
Free Press (Columbus, Ohio)

Why Can't the Left Face the Stolen Elections of 2004 & 2008?
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman

If some of its key publications are any indicator, much of the American left 
seems unable to face the reality that the election of 2004 was stolen. So in 
all likelihood, unless something radical is done, 2008 will be too.

Misguided and misinformed articles in both TomPaine.com and Mother Jones 
Magazine indicate a dangerous inability to face the reality that these stolen 
elections mean nothing less than the death of what's left of American 
democracy, and the permanent enthronement of the Rovian GOP.

As investigative reporters based in Columbus, Ohio, we witnessed first-hand, up 
close and personal, exactly how the 2004 election was stolen, and how it will 
most likely be done in 2008. In the precinct in which Harvey Wasserman grew up, 
and in the one where Bob Fitrakis now lives, we saw the well-funded, profoundly 
cynical and deadly effective mechanisms by which the Bush-Cheney-Rove-Blackwell 
GOP machine switched a victory for John Kerry to an easily-repeatable defeat 
for democracy.

That Kerry and the spineless Ohio and national Democratic Parties have been 
complicit is a crucial part of the problem much of the left also seems 
unwilling to face. But if you live in Franklin County, Ohio, and watch the 
Republican and Democratic Parties run joint pickets against progressive 
candidate, and cut backroom deals allowing incumbents of either party run 
unopposed, you may miss the full scope of the disaster.

And until the left faces the rot that defines the Democratic Party, there is no 
hope for a fair election in this country. In other words: those who think the 
White House can be retaken in 2008, but refuse to face the theft of the vote in 
2004, should prepare to be ruled by the likes of Jeb Bush, now and forever.

Before we go into the sordid details, we have to ask: exactly what is it about 
Team Bush that makes people think they could not or would not steal an American 
election? Do they lack funds? Do they lack expertise? Is there something in the 
Machiavellian/mobster moral code of Karl Rove and the Bush Family that would 
prevent them from doing here what they've been doing throughout the Third World 
for so long?

CIA meister Poppy Bush long ago perfected the art and science of stealing 
elections. US manipulators have interfered with and tipped elections for 
decades. Why should Ohio be any different? Especially when all the world knew 
control of the most powerful office on earth would be decided right here.

Lets do the bookends: before the voting, Ohio's infamous Republican Secretary 
of State J. Kenneth Blackwell clearly and vehemently denied poll access to 
teams of international observers from the United Nations and other 
international election observers.

Since the election, he has effectively stonewalled and sabotaged all recount 
attempts, to the point that no credible accounting of the Ohio election has 
ever been done. To this day, at least 100,000 votes remain uncounted, 
electronic voting machines remain unaudited, key hardware and data files have 
been trashed, paper ballots have sat unguarded for anyone to pilfer and tallies 
in dozens of key counties remain filled with statistical impossibilities.

In our How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008, we list 
more than 180 bullet points on how this theft was perpetrated. It was a 
brilliant, cynical and masterfully executed campaign of death by a thousand 
cuts.

In Florida 2000, the means of the crime were limited to a few instances of 
intimidation, butterfly ballots, computer manipulation and a corrupt Supreme 
Court. But four years after, in Ohio, dozens of sometimes subtle, sometimes 
blatant tricks were designed to steal a few thousand votes here, a few thousand 
more there, until victory was in GOP hands. Unless they are exposed and 
blocked, every one of these scams can and will be duplicated throughout the 
United States in 2006 and 2008. The question is: will the left follow 
mainstream Democrats with sheep-like acceptance as every election goes the same 
way from here on? And if so, why bother even staging more votes in this country 
at all?

Starting with Russ Baker at TomPaine.com, the indicators are grim. Last 
January, Baker penned an absurd, ill-reported piece of nonsense called "What 
Didn't Happen in Ohio." Baker traipsed into Columbus for a few days, 
interviewed the usual faux Democrats, and left with a Big Story: "The Election 
Was Fair."

If Baker had done any meaningful research he might have seen the dozens of 
other instances of intimidation, irregularities and fraud that went unmentioned 
in his glib paragraphs. Instead he relied on Bill Anthony, chair of the 
Franklin County Democrats and Board of Elections.

Bill is a pleasant, affable African-American with no commitment or fight for 
democracy or even the Democrats. He has appeared on Bob's local radio show and 
with Harvey on others. On one of them, Bill admitted that the Franklin County 
BOE knew there would be problems with voting machines, and asked Blackwell for 
paper ballots well before the 2004 election. Blackwell, Anthony said, turned 
them down. The result was the now infamous chaos at the polls, with inner city 
voters stuck in the rain for hours. Just what Blackwell wanted.

But did Bill Anthony fight Blackwell's absurd ruling? Did he make it a public 
issue prior to the election?

Not a chance.

For a quickie reporting job, Anthony is a dream. He's well-spoken, charming and 
convincing. As an African-American with union connections, he would seem the 
perfect liberal source.

In 2003, Anthony endorsed the Republican mayor's former press secretary for the 
Columbus School Board. He then supported two Republican candidates on a "Reform 
Slate" aimed at ousting the Board's only progressive Democrat, an 
African-American.

Bill Anthony is just one of a legion of what are known throughout the state as 
DINOs---Democrats in Name Only. The Ohio Democratic Party is a national 
embarrassment. Its chair, Denny White, was not long ago a Republican, and will 
soon be one again, once the party is fully disemboweled, a job very close to 
done. Throughout Ohio, DINOs piously cover this piece of fraud and that piece 
of theft with glib "I hate Bush" rhetoric. The pity is, out-of-state reporters 
actually take them seriously.

Mark Hertsgaard is a well respected author and reporter and a long-time friend 
of Harvey Wasserman, and of election critic Mark Crispen Miller. He has 
contributed some very valuable work over the years. But he's done himself---and 
the voting public---very wrong on "Recounting Ohio" in the new Mother Jones.

Mark is smart and thorough enough to leave open the possibility that Ohio's 
election was, indeed, stolen. But he also falls prey to the DINO trap, failing 
to cover far too much of what happened here while taking seriously centrist 
Democrats who are known locally to have no credibility.

So Mother Jones questions the significance of the firing of a Democratic 
election official who blew the whistle on computer manipulations by Triad, an 
obscure Republican voting machine company. But Triad was involved in counting 
the votes in nearly half of Ohio's 88 counties. Questions are still being 
raised about Triad, including: "How did they get all these contracts in the 
first place?"

Mother Jones correctly points out that seven times the number of votes by which 
Bush took Ohio were cast on Republican-controlled machines. But the magazine 
fails to follow up with mention that those votes have been tabulated on 
proprietary non-transparent software---a fact we pointed out in our own article 
in Motherjones.com many months prior to the election.

Mother Jones also discounts the fact that a phony Homeland Security alert in 
Warren County landed the vote count in an unauthorized warehouse rather than 
the official secure location, and that reporters were barred from the vote 
count. That count, which went hugely and suspiciously and very importantly for 
Bush, was observed by nominal Democrats. But so were other highly dubious vote 
counts around the state, as they had been in Florida 2000, which Mother Jones 
argues adamantly was indeed stolen.

The irony of this is that the same issue of Mother Jones leads off with a 
dead-on story about Ohio and national Democrats who are sabotaging the campaign 
of the aggressively electable Paul Hackett for a key US Senate seat. And 
another MoJo piece bemoans the fact that national Democrats seem adept only at 
losing.

Yet here the back of the book is a story discounting evidence compiled by a 
legion of independent, grassroots election rights advocates, while favoring 
phone interviews with the very Democrats being denounced in the front of the 
book.

Above all, the core of evidence that the election was stolen in Ohio 2004 comes 
from some 500 sworn statements and signed affidavits taken by people of all 
political parties, including two Republican hearings officers, in the weeks 
after the election. Anyone truly committed to finding out what happened here 
needs to start with that huge body of evidence.

As MoJo points out, none of this has been made easier by the "abandon ship" of 
the biggest DINO of all, John Kerry. Kerry had $7 million in the bank earmarked 
to "count every vote" and was apparently losing by just 136,000 Ohio votes with 
more than 250,000 still uncounted when he turned tail and conceded. Even 
Blackwell's corrupt, virtually meaningless first fake recount dropped Bush's 
official tally by 18,000 votes.

The Democrats have since attacked the election protection movement here through 
a lawyer named Daniel Hoffheimer who comes from none other than the stalwart 
Cincinnati Republican law firm of Taft, Stettinius et. al. MoJo quotes another 
Kerry/DINO lawyer Michael O'Grady, counsel to the state Democratic Party, who 
argues that for Ohio to have been stolen, the entire GOP would have had to be 
"conspiratorial," while the Democrats were "dumb as rocks."

In fact, that's an assessment many activists in Ohio heartily endorse, though 
you might add the word "inert" to the description of the Democrats.

O'Grady claims, for example, that an impossible vote count in three southern 
Ohio counties that gave Bush his entire margin of victory can be explained by a 
feminist outpouring for an African-American court candidate who ran zero 
campaign in those counties. But the presumption is that those same feminists 
somehow didn't bother to vote for Kerry over George W. Bush. No local student 
of that election could begin to take such an assessment seriously.

Or how about the quote from Chris Rakocy, a "tech specialist" about those 
notorious touchscreens in Mahoning County where voters who chose Kerry saw Bush 
light up. Rakocy says that problem was "only" on 18 of 1,148 machines, and that 
it was corrected early.

But Rakocy stands alone against dozens of sworn statements and affidavits 
confirming that the problem went on all day, and was never fixed, and may have 
involved far more machines than 18, and not only in Mahoning County but also in 
Franklin. Even at that, in heavily Democratic Youngstown (not to mention 
Columbus), just 18 machines could have accounted for switching thousands of 
votes. And, in fact, Kerry's margins in both Youngstown and Columbus were 
suspiciously light.

And what would Mother Jones herself do to machines that disenfranchised even 
one voter, no matter what the apparent impact on the ultimate vote count? Why 
is the magazine named for her discounting the you-couldn't-make-this-one-up 
reality of voters pushing one candidate's name on a touchscreen and seeing 
another's name light up, time after time after time? Or are we taking this--- 
and her---all too seriously?

Then there's the song and dance from Warren Mitofsky. The father of exit polls 
saw his work used to overturn a stolen election in Ukraine just prior to the 
American vote. But when his poll-taking here showed John Kerry with a 
nationwide margin of 1.5 million votes, somehow Mitofsky jumped ship on his own 
decades of professionalism.

Exit polls funded by six major news organizations showed Kerry carrying Ohio, 
Iowa, New Mexico and Nevada as late as 12:20 am on Wednesday morning, well 
after balloting stopped even in Alaska and Hawaii. These four "purple states" 
gave the election to the "blue" Democrats, then miraculously switched to "red" 
for Bush, giving him the White House once again.

Given all that's known about exit polls---and it's a lot---the odds on one 
state switching like that are about one in one hundred. For four, it's a 
virtual statistical impossibility. Add the fact that not one, not four, but TEN 
of eleven swing states showed drastic shifts from Kerry to Bush and you enter 
the realm of, well, a stolen election.

Add huge, unexplained shifts from pre-election polls to post-election vote 
counts in crucial 2002 Senatorial races in Georgia, Minnesota and Colorado, 
then remember what happened in Florida 2000, and examine the basic Bush 
attitude toward democracy itself, and you've got a pattern to say the least. 
And an obvious prescription for one-party rule as far as the eye can see.

Except when you are dealing with America's Democratic Party in 2004 and with 
reportage that relies on a few phone calls and a disheartening lack of 
grassroots perspective. If all politics is local, as Tip O'Neill well knew, 
then so are all vote counts.

Our first article predicting what would happen in Ohio 2004 was published many 
months before the election in, of all places, MotherJones.com. We warned that 
electronic voting machines deployed by the likes of Diebold could give Ohio and 
thus the nation to George W. Bush. Wally O'Dell, Diebold's infamous CEO, 
pledged to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in 2004, and all evidence 
points to the fact that he at least helped.

What we missed in addition was the myriad clever tricks the GOP would bring to 
bear in pulling this off. Ohio has a long history as a test market. New 
products like white bread and spam are brought here first, to see how they'll 
fly with America at large.

In Ohio 2004, scores of tools for stealing an American election were tried and 
proven out. Outside reporters have come here again and again to pull at this 
one and tear at that one. Almost always, they get even that wrong. And almost 
always, they fail to see the bigger picture.

If we have a "know it all" attitude, as is sometimes charged, it's because we 
were (and are) here, we saw it happen, we witnessed the seven-hour waits and 
the denials of the absentee ballots, and we took the testimony of the hundreds 
who later went under oath.

And we see more unravel every day. Conspiracy theories happen sometimes when 
actual conspiracies occur. The stakes involved, the players on both sides and 
the events that are out there plain as day are all of a piece that's simply too 
obvious for anyone on the ground here to miss.

Hertsgaard has the good sense to mention indictments that have recently come 
down on election thieves in Cuyahoga County. We know that to be the tip of the 
iceberg.

What matters now is whether the GOP will be allowed to repeat nationwide in 
2006 and 2008 what they saw they could get away with in Ohio 2004.

Election theft skeptics tend to conclude their put-downs by urging we forget 
about the vote-count stuff and concentrate on coming up with candidates so good 
that "the election won't be close enough to steal."

Having seen what we saw here, knowing what Mother Jones is reporting about the 
Democratic attacks on Paul Hackett, and about the loser instinct ingrained in 
the Dems' DLC/DNA, we must charitably describe such a conclusion as being 
profoundly wishful thinking.

Someday we may indeed have candidates far worthier than Al Gore and John Kerry. 
But they both won the presidency of the United States, however corruptible 
their margins of victory.

We need to guarantee that if someone worthwhile and willing to fight ever does 
come along, we will have a left that's prepared to make sure the votes are 
fairly counted.

As Rev. Jesse Jackson put it while speaking to election protection activists 
here, "We can afford to lose an election. We can't afford to lose our 
democracy."

Who would agree more strongly than Tom Paine and Mother Jones?


Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of How the GOP Stole America's 
2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008, available at Freepress.org and 
harveywasserman.com. Their upcoming What Happened in Ohio, with Steve 
Rosenfeld, will be published by The New Press in spring, 2006.





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