Posted on 01/30/2006 8:17:56 AM PST by Toddsterpatriot
As coincidence would have it, Mark Crispin Miller's new book, "Fooled Again" (Basic Books), documenting the Republican theft of the 2004 presidential election, arrived in the same mail delivery with the Jan. 12 edition of the Defuniak Springs Herald, the locally owned weekly newspaper in a Florida panhandle county seat.
The Florida panhandle is thoroughgoing Republican. Even Democrats run as Republicans. Nevertheless, the newspaper's editor, Ron Kelley, believes that American political life is measured by something larger than party affiliation. In his editorial, "The Shepherds and the Sheep," Kelley reports that two Florida counties have banned any further use of Diebold voting machines after witnessing a professional demonstration that the machines, contrary to Diebold's claim, are easily hacked to record votes differently from the way in which they are cast by voters.
The pre-election statement by Diebold's CEO that he would work to deliver the election to Bush was apparently no idle boast. In five states where the new "foolproof" electronic voting machines were used, the vote tallies differed substantially from the exit polls. Such a disparity is unusual. The chances of exit polls in five states being wrong are no more than one in a million. (OMG, what a stupid thing to say!!)
Miller describes considerably more election fraud than voting machines programmed to count a proportion of Kerry votes as Bush votes. Voters were disenfranchised in a number of ways. Miller reports incidences of intimidation of, and reduced voting opportunities for, poorer voters who tend to vote Democrat.
Some of Miller's evidence is circumstantial. However, he documents widespread Republican dirty tricks and foul play. The media's indifference to a stolen election burns Miller as much as the stolen election itself.
Miller is not alone in his concerns. The nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), in response to a congressional request, investigated a number of complaints regarding the electronic voting machines.
Here are some of the problems noted in the GAO's September 2005 report:
Some voting machines did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected.
It was possible to alter the machines so that a ballot cast for one candidate would be recorded for another.
Vendors installed uncertified versions of voting system software at the local level.
Access was easily compromised and did not require a widespread conspiracy. A small handful of people is sufficient to steal an election. Curiously, the media have shown no interest in the GAO report. In my opinion, a free press has proven to be inconsistent with the recently permitted highly concentrated corporate ownership of the U.S. media.
The electronic voting machines leave virtually no paper trail, and their use involves private, potentially partisan corporations tabulating the votes with proprietary software that is not transparent.
A number of counties in various states have decided to return to paper ballots that can be verified and recounted. But now that Republicans have learned that they can use the electronic machines to control election outcomes, the disenfranchisement of Democrats is likely to be a permanent feature of American "democracy."
Other reports claim that the undersampling by pollsters of Democratic voters creates a percentage bias that exaggerates the number of Republican voters by as much as 5 percent, thus providing cover for vote fraud. If hard-to-reach Democratic voters, such as the working poor, are less likely to answer telephones, polls can create the illusion that there are more Republican voters than in fact exist.
If the electronic voting machines are then rigged to shift 5 percent or 6 percent of the vote to the Republican candidate, the result is not at odds with the expected result and can be used as "evidence" to counter the divergence between exit polls and vote tally.
The outcome of the 2004 presidential election has always struck me as strange. Although Kerry was a poor candidate and evaded the issue most on the public's mind, by November 2004 a majority of Americans were aware that Bush had led the country into a gratuitous war on the basis either of incompetence or deception.
By November 2004, it was completely clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and that Bush had rushed to war. People were concerned by the changing rationales that Bush was offering for going to war. Moreover, the needless war was going badly, and the results bore no relationship to the rosy scenario painted at the time of the invasion. It seems contrary to American common sense for voters to have re-elected a president who had failed in such a dramatic way.
Miller directs our attention to Bush's high-handed treatment of dissenters. If electronic voting machines programmed by private Republican firms remain in our future, dissent will become pointless unless it boils over into revolution. Power-mad Republicans need to consider the result when democracy loses its legitimacy and only the rich have anything to lose.
COPYRIGHT 2006 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
There's a million kinds of people in the world. Those that throw crazy numbers around and those that don't.
I wonder if my favorite math major would get the joke?
I knew they were nuts over there, but not THAT nuts!
I love how these moonbats just simply assume that there is no chance of fraud and manipulation in exit polls which have no checks and balances, but all the fraud is in the real polls which are closely watched and have numerous checks and balances.
And why no mention of the state of Pennsylvania where the city of Philadelphia was clearly using voter fraud so that Kerry would carry the state?
Kerry carried PA because we got our @sses kicked in "Republican" suburbs. I'm very happy for the Dems to think they've lost because of Diebold machines, voter fraud, etc etc. It keeps them from changing their message, which is the real problem. We shouldn't make the same mistake. It might be reassuring to believe we lost PA because of a few thousand votes on voting machines in Philly, but we didn't. It's foolish to claim we did.
Paul Craig Roberts is a hack. No better than a DU nutbar. There is not a shred, not a single shred of evidence or fact that the GOP "stole" the election. There is however, documented evidence of democrat dirty tricks and vote fraud throughout the country.
Exactly. Bush would have won New Mexico in 2000 and Wisconsin in 2000 and 2004 if Dem fraud had been prevented.
No one even showed up to vote in the general election. A couple of times someone would try to steal an election by having a bunch of people show up and write in a candidate since it would have only taken a few dozen to change the outcome.
Now it is solidly Republican. I haven't subscribed to the Defuniak Herald and Breeze Combined in maybe thirty years. I wonder if they have dropped the "Breeze" portion of the title? Any way all it was was local events and who visited who for the weekend etc. Guess I won't subscribe again.
Thanks for that link. It's like the Mad Hatter's Tea Party in there, only madder.
Assuming for a moment this is true and we stole the 2000 election as well, we have to steal five or six more presidential elections just to break even!
Remember Chicago in 1960? The wise guys delivered and got Bobby Kennedy in return. Bang Bang Bang!
Section 1.
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
Cool. Bush/Cheney '08! How could the Donks object?
Just when did Paul Craig Roberts lose his mind?
We have to cheat smarter than them with all the Democrat dead voting.
Could have been as early as 1982. His symptoms got worse in 2001 after President Bush took office.
In the precinct where I was a watcher only 1 Republican voted on election day. They all voted early and Republican turnout was huge.
That's why they'll continue to lose elections. They blame it on fraud and not on their own positions.
Any that would vote for Al Gore or John sKerry would be nut jobs.. A proper count would/should have them both with much less votes..
In 2008 the democrat voter fraud may be even more "refined"..
You know, the "bugs" fixed..
Because republicans seem to care less about all that..
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