Moveon.org's Latest Spew Email to Its Membership (BARF Alert)

From: "Peter Schurman, MoveOn.org" To: Subject: Investigate the Vote Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2004 10:04:45 -0800

Questions are swirling around whether the election was conducted honestly or not. We need to know -- was it or wasn't it?

If people were wrongly prevented from voting, or if legitimate votes were mis-counted or not counted at all, we need to know so the wrongdoers can be held accountable, and so we can prevent this from happening again.

Members of Congress are demanding an investigation to answer this question. The decision on whether or not there will be an investigation could come as soon as Monday. Join us in supporting the call for one now, at:

Then please invite your friends and colleagues to sign, as well. We need to show Congress that hundreds of thousands of Americans are serious about protecting the integrity of the vote.

We're all hearing the stories and wondering what's true and what isn't. But at least two cases of serious problems are accepted beyond doubt:

* In Broward County, Florida, electronic voting machines counted backwards: as more people voted, the official vote count went down. [1]

* In one Columbus, Ohio suburb, election officials have acknowledged that electronic voting machines credited Bush with winning 4,258 votes, even though only 638 people voted there. [2]

These are just cases where we know something went wrong. There were also lots of reports of people being denied ballots on Election Day. So far, these reports remain anecdotal, but they must be compiled and examined. And the Internet is abuzz with theories about why the official counts were so different from the exit polls.

Six prominent members of Congress have called for an investigation. Representatives Conyers (D-MI), Holt (D-NJ), Nadler (D-NY), Scott (D-VA), Watt (D-NC) and Wexler (D-FL), have demanded that the U.S. General Accounting Office:

immediately undertake an investigation of the efficacy of voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election, how election officials responded to difficulties they encountered, and what we can do in the future to improve our election systems and administration. [3]

We've got to support their call by asking our own Representatives and Senators to join them.

If you have a personal story of disenfranchisement, tell us. These members of Congress have agreed to include our stories and comments in their call for an investigation. Please sign now -- we'll deliver our compiled statements to them on Friday.

Even if you don't have a personal story, your signature on our petition will still help build support for an investigation.

To keep our faith in democracy, we need to know the facts. Your signing this petition, and sharing your story if you have one, will help.

--Carrie, Joan, Lee, Marika, Noah, Peter, Rosalyn, and Wes The MoveOn.org Team November 11, 2004

3. Letters from members of Congress to David Walker, Comptroller General of the United States, demanding an investigation of the election: November 5th, 2004 & November 8th, 2004

I was sent this by a relative, who had me on a sizeable mailing list. I replied to all, with this message:
__________________________________________

Did you read the articles that were referenced?

For instance, in Broward County, what was in error was the vote for four local amendments, not the Presidential race. And it was the tally of total votes that was off, not the tally of yes or no votes. And the machine manufacturers (not Diebolt, by the way) had sent a software patch BEFORE the election to fix the problem, but the local election officials (Democrats, by the way) did not believe there was a problem.

As for why the exit polls were so far off:

What was released early in the day were NOT the official exit polls. There are conflicting sources as to where the data came from, but a cursory look would have shown the problems. For instance, Wisconsin and Michigan were listed twice with two very different sets of data. Pennsylvania, a state expected to be a tossup state, showed Kerry leading by 20 points. And 60% of the sample were women.

The real exit poll data was very close to actual rsults, and contained no major surprises. If anything, the widely reported false data gave the impression Kerry was routing Bush. It has been long asserted by both parties that the belief one candidate is going to win helps that candidate and harms his opponent's turnout. So if there was a fix, it was for the Democrats.

In other news:

Dozens of GOP busses in Wisconsin had their tires slashed, preventing the effort to help Republicans get seniors to the polls. The GOP lost Wisconsin by only 13,000 votes.

Philadelphia poll watchers complained that the voting machines were delivered with Kerry already receiving thousands of votes. The complaints were dismissed, but turnout in the 1st Congressional District, the Democrat's strongest, showed a 100% increase in turnout. Nationally, turnout was up only 12%. The Pennsylvania race was much, much tighter the Ohio race.

GOP local headquarters across the country were the targets of dozens of cases of shootings, arson, and firebombings.

The Cuyahoga county (Cleveland and suburbs) GOP office building was struck by a blackout that hit other buildings on the same block, except the Democratic office next door.

The Governor of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell, authorized absentee ballots to be distributed among inmates. Convicts are not allowed to vote in PA. On the other hand, he supported ballot challenges which delayed GIs deployed in Iraq from getting their absentee ballots, and then fought to prevent late-arriving absentee ballots from being counted.

There's a great myth in Florida that thousands of black men were prevented from voting in 2000 because their names had been identified incorrectly as being convicts, who aren't allowed to vote in Florida. In truth, the only election this affected was the 2002 Democratic primary. On the other hand, as a result of the media brouhaha, tens of thousands of convicts were allowed to vote, contrary to the law. 70-80% of them were expected to vote Democratic.

All of this, of course, probably pales to the vote fraud caused by the Motor Voter Act. While the Act did not give any of the 9-15 million illegal immigrants the right to vote, it did force states to adopt voter registration techniques which make it impossible to verify the status of citizenship or legal residence.

For the record, the vote margin in 2004 was fifteen times the vote margin in 1960.

It was also larger than the margin for:
FDR's last race (1944), Truman (1948), Eisenhower (1952), Kennedy (1960), Nixon (1968), Carter (1976), or Bush (2000)

And Bush got a higher percentage than the winner in all these races, as well as Clinton (1992 and 1996), and Reagen (1980).

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