U.S. National

On the flight to Nashville this past weekend, I sat next to a man who asked what I was writing.  Preparing a talk, I told him, for a conference of people sharing evidence that the 2004 presidential election was stolen.  Without missing a beat, he asked ‘Isn’t that next door to the convention on UFO sightings?’

I wasn’t surprised.  We’ve been painted as conspiracy theorists and worse by Democrats and Republicans alike, and even the liberal arm of the press has steered clear of this issue.

But when I arrived at the Jefferson Street Baptist Church in Nashville, my doubts about the election were reinforced by a community of sober professionals, none of whom seemed overtly loony.

Summary: On the evening of the opening of the National Conference on Election Reform, participants from twenty six states gathered in the sanctuary of the Jefferson Street Missionary Baptist Church in Nashville, Tennessee to listen to a civil rights panel, introduced by Bernard Ellis, conference organizer. Those present were former president of the NAACP Nashville, Reverend Sonnye Dixon, Dr Charles Kimbrough, and Michael Grant. Panelists discussed the struggle to obtain the right to vote during the civil rights era, the need to address the human needs of those most disempowered by the powers that be, and the need for election reform to preserve our democracy.

After the 2004 election I thought I would barf if I heard one more Democratic pundit or politician lament the lost election and blame it on the party's "message".   As grassroots activists across the country reported thousands of election irregularities and voting machine "glitches" that overwhelmingly benefited Bush, the Democratic leadership seemed unusually willing to look the other way.  John Kerry quickly conceded, former President Carter attended Bush's ignoble inauguration, and Bill Clinton now pals around with Bush the First.  

Rank and file Democrats are tearing their hair out.

Now, in a gesture calculated to win back their base, but gain little else (in terms of voting security), both House and Senate Democrats have offered a flurry of bills (with many state legislatures following in hot pursuit) that require ballot printers for touchscreen voting machines. 

Incredibly, none of these bills call for the ballots to be counted…except in the extremely remote event of a recount. 

March 19, 2005—After the 2004 election I thought I would barf if I heard one more Democratic pundit or politician lament the lost election and blame it on the party's "message." As grassroots activists across the country reported thousands of election irregularities and voting machine "glitches" that overwhelmingly benefited Bush, the Democratic leadership seemed unusually willing to look the other way. John Kerry quickly conceded, former President Carter attended Bush's ignoble inauguration, and Bill Clinton now pals around with Bush the First.

Rank and file Democrats are tearing their hair out.

Now, in a gesture calculated to win back their base, but gain little else (in terms of voting security), both House and Senate Democrats have offered a flurry of bills (with many state legislatures following in hot pursuit) that require ballot printers for touchscreen voting machines.

Incredibly, none of these bills call for the ballots to be counted .. except in the extremely remote event of a recount.

Study Will Be Released Tomorrow March 31st
Group of University Professors Urges Investigation of 2004 Election

Officially, President Bush won November's election by 2.5%, yet exit polls showed Kerry winning by 3%[1] #_ftn1>. According to a report to be released March 31^st by a group of university statisticians, the odds of a discrepancy this large between the national exit poll and election results happening by accident are close to 1 in a million.

In other words, by random chance alone, it could not have happened. But it did.

Two alternatives remain. Either something was wrong with the exit polling, or something was wrong with the vote count.

Exit polls have a long history of exceptional accuracy in past decades in the US, in the Ukraine, in Latin America, in Germany, and elsewhere. Yet in November 2004, the discrepancy was more than five times this (and similar to that of the invalid Ukraine election.[2] #_ftn2>)

For the last several decades, the corporate establishment, because of their control of the media, gained more and more control of the country. However, after the 2000 election, which won voter fraud in Florida and by the bizarre action of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, a great mobilization took place that was aimed at winning the next election. The accomplishments of this mobilization were phenomenal. A coalition of traditional democrats, old lefties, and new activists matched the tremendous 150 million dollar war chest accumulated by the Republicans. Theirs came from corporations and rich donors, ours mostly from small donations from more ordinary people. Then, we register millions of new voters—mothers, minorities, and young people—and they voted.

We stuck to the right issues—the mistake of going to war, the lose of good jobs, the huge tax give away to the wealthy and its consequences to our economy, the destruction of our environment, our failed medical delivery system, the erosion of our civil liberties, our loss of respect and support in the world, and the government’s lying to us on the reasons for going to war.

A spokesman for the Green Party's 2004 presidential campaign, which initiated the Ohio recount, today blasted the suggestion by Ohio's Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell that he would need to take depositions from John Kerry and John Edwards as part of the Ohio recount litigation.

"Mr. Blackwell's contention that he needs to depose Senators Kerry and Edwards is a laughable and blatantly political move. Mr. Blackwell has refused to be deposed himself about the Ohio election, has refused to appear before Congress and has refused to answer questions from members of the House Judiciary Committee who have been investigating allegations of election fraud. To suggest that Kerry and Edwards should be deposed to address a legal technicality while Mr. Blackwell continues to avoid any public scrutiny of his own misconduct in the Ohio election is the height of hypocrisy," said Blair Bobier, Media Director for the 2004 Cobb-LaMarche campaign.

All evidence suggests that our lives and that of our planet are in grave peril. If we are to survive, we must immediately dismantle the forces of greed and power that are destroying our lives in the toxic pursuit of empire. It is our refusal to face the realities of global warming and our continued illegal use of Depleted Uranium that are the true terrors of our time. Our governments and the corporate empires they defend must be compelled to cease and desist from all forms of violence against our earth and its inhabitants, to work towards mitigating the damage done and to begin creating a livable future.

Beware of exit polls and the analysts who study them.  These folks would have us believe that exit polls tell the gospel truth.  They even quote the duplicitous toe-sucking Dick Morris to make their case.  "Exit polls are almost never wrong," Morris writes.  The man is a known creep. 

Exit polls are completely non-transparent and unverifiable.  They're as bad as voting by machine, absentee, or early.  There's no meaningful oversight to either enterprise.   Worse yet, a belief in exit polls is a trap that's had tragic consequences for elections around the world.