"Election 2004: 'Sour Grapes' or Voter Fraud?"

Mike Whitney

If you believe that George Bush won last nights election "fair and
square" then forget about reading this article. If you know however
that tens of thousands of people who lined up for up to four hours at
a time in Ohio and Florida to have their vote counted, were not
standing there to endorse the aggression and suicidal policies of the
current administration then read on.

The unprecedented high turnout coupled with new registrations (that
were overwhelmingly in favor of John Kerry) suggest that there was
foul play at the voting booths. As a result, consumer investigator and
activist Bev Harris (founder of Black Box Voting) "is conducting the
largest Freedom of Information action in history. On election night,
Black Box Voting blanketed the US with the first in a series of public
records requests, to obtain internal computer logs and other documents
from 3,000 individual counties and townships."

If the Bush people are so confident in their victory let them "put up
or shut up."The fact of the matter is (as every reasonable person who hasn't been
hoodwinked by the pageantry of election night fraud realizes) that the
election was stolen again in full view of the American public. The
Republican owned voting machines prevailed over exit poll projections
and the will of the American people.

If that's not the case, then let's investigate the computer logs.

According to Lynn Landis' article "Could the AP rig the Election":
"The Associated Press (AP) will be the sole source of raw vote totals
for the major news broadcasters on Election Night.. They refused to
confirm or deny that the AP will receive direct feed from voting
machines and central vote tabulating computers across the country.
But, circumstantial evidence suggests that is exactly what will happen.

And what can be downloaded can also be uploaded. Computer experts say
that signals can travel both to and from computerized voting machines
through wireless technology, modems, and even simple electricity."
Landis just confirms what is already known about "sketchy" electronic
voting and how it invites vote tampering. Her connection between
election machinery, vote totals and the AP, however, has not
previously been made. She goes on to explain that, "AP spokespeople
would not give out information on who sits on their board, however AP
leadership appears quite conservative."

Landis continues: "Burl Osborne, chairman of the AP board of
directors, is also publisher emeritus of the conservative The Dallas
Morning News, a newspaper that endorsed George W. Bush in the last
election. Kathleen Carroll, senior vice president and executive editor
of AP, was a reporter at The Dallas Morning News before joining AP.
Carroll is also on the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME)'s
seven-member executive committee. The APME "works in partnership with AP
to improve the wire service's performance," according to their
website. APME vice president, Deanna Sands, is managing editor of the
ultra conservative Omaha World Herald newspaper, whose parent company
owns the largest voting machine company in the nation, Election
Systems and Software (ES&S)."

It's a cozy relationship considering that ES&S voting machines count
50% of all the votes in the country. The second largest company,
Diebold, is also tied to the Republican Party and promised (in a
comment by Wally Diebold that got widespread attention on the
internet) to "deliver the vote" in Ohio to President Bush.

Both Wally and ES&S apparently succeeded admirably in their task of
undermining the election.

Many readers are probably wondering what happened to the "Help America
Vote Act" that was passed by Congress to avoid the problems of Florida
2000? As Landis reports in an earlier article: "What Congress really
did was to throw $2.65 billion at the states, so that they could
lavish it on a handful of private companies that are controlled by
ultra-conservative Republicans, foreigners and felons." (Diebold, ES&S
and Sequoia were among the big winners)

None of the facts related to the presidential election add up. Voter
registration went up from 105 million to 120 million. In Ohio alone it
went up a whopping 17%. Whenever registration has surged like this in
the past, it has always favored the challenger and precipitated a
change in government.

Not so, this time, and Republican pollsters are eager to convince us
that the reason for this is a renewed interest among the American
public for "moral values". Is that it or are the results simply an
indication of massive (but well calculated) voter fraud?

The exit polling was equally skewed, showing a clear victory for
Kerry. Exit polling has traditionally been a reliable way of
determining the outcome of elections. Not so in Bush-world, where vote
totals are invariably higher for Bush in the contentious areas that
ultimately decide the election.

Give strategist Karl Rove his due; he knew what had to be done and did
it. The rest, of course, has been papered over by the pollsters, pimps
and pundits in American press corps.

Do we need to remind ourselves that representative government can only
be established by the power of the vote? It is the electoral process
that confers legitimacy on government. Without a popular mandate state
power can only be vindicated through force of arms.

Last night American democracy was skillfully subverted and replaced
with a mutant form of corporatism that operates independent of the
will of the people. It's impossible to know what the long term affects
of this will be, but it is a development that should greatly concern
us all.