o'reilly , the "ill" factor... 

one reason why media sucks...the paranoid ramblings of mr "ill" o'reilly

our media here in the land of all flash and little substance have become not much more than a collective governmental mouth piece . ..the evening news brought to us by the corporate oil-garchy , read nightly by the teleprompted talking-headless, mindlessly regurgitating to the masses the government's daily spin .

according to what can be read at the smoking gun.com website , mr. "ill" o'reilly over at "faux" news channel is a disgusting little man .


hey "ill" , you just don't hold your female employees captive while you tell boorish stories of your sexual exploits that they don't want to hear , and you don't jerk off with a vibrator over the telephone while you tell them these stories they didn't ask for.

it's just something decent guys don't do.

you don't hit on your female employees because first of all , they are your employees . you being their employer with a say so over their livelihood and careers gives you too much of an unfair advantage .

you see "ill" , it's like these young women can't treat you like some obnoxious drunk bothering them in a bar, and throw a drink in your stupid face after slapping the hell out of you .they cannot embarrass you as they could any other mannerless lout they might encounter by publicly telling your ugly ass to shove off when you start describing to them your threesome fantasies that include them ... or how you would soap their "boobs" and "pussy" up in the shower before having oral sex with them ...or telling them that your vibrator looks like a dick... or telling them about your wife's vibrator ... or bragging to them about how you cheated on your wife in italy, because if they slapped you sillier than you already seem , it might affect their jobs and incomes...or even affect their safety if your "Al Franken" remarks are to be believed .

secondly , the poor woman kept informing you that she was not interested in your sorry ass--can't you take the numerous obvious "hints"?

thirdly , aren't you a self appointed spokesman for the "team" that is saying that liberals are the ones who have no morals and family values in america ?

fourthly , "ill" , aren't you a married man ?

fifthly , by threatening the poor woman and others of those who "cross" you and "faux news channel" with retaliation and with what reads to me like clear threats of physical harm , coming from "all the way to the top" in this country , aren't you committing a crime ?

maybe the info is all wrong ...but judging from the mean-spirited way you come across on tv , why does none of it seem out of your character , or out of the character of the team from "the top" in this nation that you represent ?

"If you cross Fox News Channel , it's not just me, it's (Fox president ) Roger Ailes who will go after you . I'm the street guy out front making loud noises about the issues , but Ailes operates behind the scenes , strategizes and makes things happen so that one day BAM! The person gets what's coming to them but never sees it coming .Look at Al Franken, one day he is going to get a knock on his door and life as he's known it will change forever . That day will happen , trust me .

During the course of this conversation , defendant Bill O'Reilly bizarrely rambled further about Al Franken : ' Ailes knows very powerful people and this goes all the way to the top.' Plaintiff queried : 'to the top of what?' Defendant responded : ' top of the country . Just look who's on the cover of his book (Bush and Cheney) , they're watching him and will be for years . (Al Franken's) finished , and he's going to be sorry he ever took fox news channel on.' Plaintiff found O'Reilly's paranoid ramblings both strange and alarming ."

"lucky as hell i didn't get caught...hahaha..." 

he's not dishonest... just very lucky...

What Were the Odds That Bush Would Win?


The statisticians and exit pollsters evidently got it wrong in the 2004 election



by Alan Waldman - November 25, 2004


Despite mainstream media attempts to kill or ridicule away the story, talk radio and the Internet are abuzz with theories about how John Kerry was elected president on Nov. 2 -- claiming Republican election officials made it difficult for millions of Democrats to vote while employees of four secretive, GOP-bankrolling corporations rigged electronic voting to steal the election for George W. Bush.

Florida´s 2000 election problems -- votes spoiled by chads, overvotes, undervotes, exclusion of minority voters, etc. -- were never solved. They worsened and spread to many other states. The Bush administration´s ¨fix¨ of the 2000 debacle (the Help America Vote Act) made suspect elections considerably easier by foisting paperless electronic voting on states before the bugs had been worked out or meaningful safeguards could be installed. Expressed fears about a possibly stolen election aren´t only coming from defeated Democrats this time around. The Wall Street Journal -- hardly a Democrat´s paper -- recently wrote that ¨Verified Voting, a group formed by a Stanford University professor to assess electronic voting, has collected 31,000 reports of election fraud and other problems.¨

University of Pennsylvania researcher Steven Freeman, in his November 2004 paper, ¨The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy,¨ concludes: ¨The odds that the discrepancies between predicted [exit poll] results and actual vote counts in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania could have been due to chance or random error are 250 million to one.¨ So the unavoidable hypothesis is that they were caused by ¨systematic fraud or manipulation.¨ Exit polls, interviews with voters after they cast their votes at their polling places, have a margin of error of +/- 3 to 4 percent.

So how could the exit polls have been so wrong? Unlike Europe, where citizens count the ballots, in the U.S., employees of a highly secretive Republican-leaning company, ES&S, totally managed every aspect of the 2004 election. That included everything from voter registration, printing of ballots, the programming of the voting machines, tabulation of votes (often with armed guards keeping the media and members of the public who wished to witness the count at bay) and the first reporting of the results -- for 60 million voters in 47 states -- according to Christopher Bollyn, writing in American Free Press . Most other votes were counted by three other firms that are snugly in bed with the GOP -- Diebold, Sequoia and SAIC. ¨Any actual counting of votes by citizens is very rare in the U.S., except for a few counties in Montana and other states where paper ballots are still hand-counted,¨ Bollyn explains.

The tall hill of evidence below will demonstrate that the 2004 election fiasco had enough "irregularities" for the late-Tuesday shift from Kerry (seen winning by 3 percent and more in exit polls and many other data sources) to Bush to raise concerns.

Smelling a Rat

This election is not the first with results widely seen as surprising if not suspicious. In November 2002, Georgia Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes led by 11 percent and Democratic Sen. Max Cleland was in front by 5 percent just before the election -- the first ever conducted entirely on touch-screen electronic machines, and counted entirely by company employees, rather than public officials -- but mysterious election-day swings of 16 percent and 12 percent defeated both these popular incumbents. In Minnesota, Democrat Walter Mondale (replacing highly regarded Sen. Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash), lost in an amazing last-minute 11 percent vote swing recorded on electronic machines. Convenient glitches in Florida aided Jeb Bush and defeated Janet Reno in their primary elections. Then in 2003, what's known as "black box voting" helped Arnold Schwarzenegger -- who had deeply offended female, Latino and Jewish voters -- defeat a popular Latino Democrat who substantially led in polls a week before the election -- in strongly Democratic California.

Realizing that the 2004 election results are highly questionable, many have begun to demand action. Recently, six congressmen, including three on the House Judiciary Committee -- Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.), Robert Wexler (Fla.), John Conyers (Mich.), Rush Holt (N.J.), Bobby Scott (Va.) and Melvin Watt (N.C.) -- asked the U.S. comptroller general to investigate the efficacy of new electronic voting devices because of numerous reports of lost votes across the country.

Black Box Voting -- the nonprofit group that spearheaded much of the pre-election testing (and subsequent criticism) of electronic machines after being able to hack into them in 90 seconds -- is filing the largest Freedom of Information inquiry in U.S. history. The organization´s Bev Harris claims, ¨Fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic voting machines. We base this on hard evidence, documents, inside information and other data indicative of manipulation of electronic voting systems.¨

Florida Democratic congressional candidate Jeff Fisher charged that he has, and will show the FBI evidence that Florida results were hacked. He claims to also have knowledge of who hacked it in 2004 and in the 2002 Democratic primary (so Jeb Bush would not have to run against popular Janet Reno). Fisher also believes that most Democratic candidates nationwide were harmed by GOP hacking and other dirty tactics -- particularly in swing states.

On Nov. 18, a New Hampshire recount requested by Ralph Nader began. If it finds the totals were altered, recount requests in Florida and Ohio are certain to follow. The Green and Libertarian parties have already requested an Ohio recount, claiming voting fraud, suppression and disenfranchisement. Recounts are also being sought in Nevada and Washington state.

Leading academics have also joined the fray, calling for widespread investigations. NYU professor Troy Duster called for a full-scale probe, because ¨the data suggest that even if Bush won, he didn´t win by the kind of margins that are out there. We have a crisis here of potential legitimacy, and the way to deal with it is to do the research.¨

Media Muzzled

Although the Internet is full of claims of election fraud -- and they have been reported in England, Canada and elsewhere -- the story is virtually nonexistent in the major U.S. media. Bev Harris says, ¨I have been told by sources that are fairly high up in the media -- particularly TV -- that there is now a lockdown on this story. It´s officially ´Let´s move on´ time.¨ On Nov. 6, Project Censored award-winning author Thom Hartman said, "So far, the only national 'mainstream' media outlet to come close to this story was Keith Olbermann, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seemed to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit polls had failed."

How to Steal

Votes Electronically

Votes collected by electronic machines (and by Op-Scan equipment that reads traditional paper ballots) are sent via modem to a central tabulating computer which counts the votes on Windows software. Therefore, anyone who knows how to operate an Excel spreadsheet and who is given access to the central tabulation machine can make wholesale changes to election totals without being found out.

On a recent CNBC program, Black Box's Harris showed guest host Howard Dean how to alter vote totals within 90 seconds by entering a two-digit code in a hidden program on Diebold's election software. "This is not a bug or accidental oversight," Harris says. "It is there on purpose."

More than 35 Ohio counties used electronic voting machines from Diebold, whose CEO, Warren O´Dell, declared in 2003 that he was ¨committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to¨ President Bush in 2004. Up to 50,000 Diebold touch-screen machines and 20,000 scanners of paper ballots were used in 38 states during the November 2004 election.

The four major companies control the U.S. vote count are all hard-wired into the Bush campaign and power structure. The Bush government gave them millions to roll out computerized voting machines. Diebold chief O´Dell is a top Bush fundraiser. Diebold´s election division is headed by Bob Urosevich, whose brother Todd is a top exec at ¨rival¨ ES&S. The brothers were originally staked by Howard Ahmanson, bagman for the extremist Christian Reconstruction Movement, which advocates the theocratic takeover of American government. Sequoia is owned by a partner member of the Carlyle Group, which has dictated foreign policy in both Bush administrations and which employed former President Bush for quite a while.

All Early Tuesday

Indicators Predicted a Kerry Landslide

Zogby International, which predicted the 2000 outcome more accurately than any national pollster, did pre-election polling which predicted a 100 electoral-vote triumph for Kerry. Zogby saw Kerry winning crucial Ohio by 4 percent. In the Iowa Electronic Markets, where ¨investors¨ put their money where their mouths are and wagered real moolah on election outcome ¨contracts,¨ Bush led consistently for months before the election -- often by as much as 60 percent to 39 percent. At 1 p.m. CST on Election Day, however, before vote-counting began anywhere, IEM had 51.9 percent of investors putting their money on a Bush win. Then something extraordinary happened: over the next six hours there was suddenly a massive shift to Kerry. At 3 p.m. CST, Kerry shot into the lead, with 60 percent of the hour´s investors banking on his victory. At 5 p.m. a mind-blowing 79.5 percent were betting on Kerry. And when the final sale was made at 7 p.m., 76.6 percent of the last hour´s traders had gone to Kerry, with only 20.1 percent plunking their bucks down on Bush. These people knew something.

As the first election returns came in, broadcasters were shocked to see that seemingly safe Bush states like Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina were being judged by the National Election Pool as ¨too close to call.¨ Then, at 7:28 EST, networks broadcast that both states favored Kerry by 51 percent to 49 percent.

Exit Polls Showed Kerry Won -- Until Something Happened

In his research paper, Steven Freeman reports, ¨Exit polls showed Kerry had been elected. He was leading in nearly every battleground state, in many cases, by sizable margins. But later, in 10 of 11 battleground states, the tallied margins differed from the predicted margins -- and in every one the shift favored Bush.¨ In 10 states where there were verifiable paper trails -- or no electronic machines -- the final results hardly differed from the initial exit polls. Exit polls and final counts in Missouri, Louisiana, Maine and Utah, for instance, varied by 1 percent or less. In non-paper-trail states, however, there were significant differences. Florida saw a shift from Kerry up 1 percent in the exit polls to Bush up 5 percent at evening´s end. In Ohio, Kerry went from +3 percent to -3 percent. Other big discrepancies in key states were: Minnesota (from +10 percent to +4 percent), New Mexico (+4 to -1), Nevada (+1 to -3), Wisconsin (+7 to +0.4), Colorado (-2 to -5), North Carolina (-4 to -13), Iowa (+1 to -1), New Hampshire (+14 to +1) and Pennsylvania (+8 to +2). Exit polls also had Kerry winning the national popular vote by 3 percent.

In close Senate races, changes between the exit poll results and the final tallies cost Democrats anticipated seats in Kentucky (a 13 percent swing to the GOP), Alaska (9 percent), North Carolina (9 percent), Florida, Oklahoma, South Dakota and possibly Pennsylvania -- as well as enough House seats to retake control of the chamber.

Republican consultant and Fox News regular Dick Morris wrote after the election, ¨Exit polls are almost never wrong. They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots and by substituting actual observation from guesswork. According to ABC-TV´s exit polls, Kerry was slated to win Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa -- all of which Bush ultimately carried.¨

The Center for Research on Globalization's Michael Keefer (a professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario) states, "The National Election Pool's own data -- as transmitted by CNN on the evening of Nov. 2 and the morning of Nov. 3 -- suggest that the results of the exit polls were themselves fiddled late on Nov. 2, in order to make their numbers conform with the tabulated vote."

How do we know the fix was in? Consider this: At 9:06 p.m., exit polls showed Kerry leading by nearly 3 percent. When the national exit polls were last updated at 1:36 a.m. EST, there was a 5 percent swing to Bush. But, says Keefer, ¨the total number of respondents at 9 p.m. was well over 13,000 and at 1:36 a.m. it had risen less than 3 percent -- to 13,531 total respondents. Given the small increase in respondents, this 5 percent swing to Bush is mathematically impossible.

¨In Florida, the exit polls appear to have been tampered with in a similar manner,¨ Keefer adds. ¨At 8:40 p.m., exit polls showed a near dead heat, but the final exit poll update at 1:01 a.m. gave Bush a 4 percent lead.¨ Again, the number of respondents made this swing mathematically impossible, because there were only 16 more respondents in the final tally than in the earlier one.

Florida Fiasco

In Broward Country, voting machines counted up to 32,500 votes and then started counting backwards. The problem existed in the 2002 elections in Broward County but was never fixed. Throughout Florida, as in most toss-up states, poll monitors saw prospective voters leaving because of long lines. There were reports of sub-par facilities and faulty equipment in minority neighborhoods. According to the Nov. 3 edition of the Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail , ¨Several dozen voters in six states -- particularly Democrats in Florida -- said the wrong candidate appeared on their touch-screen machine´s checkout screen¨ (i.e. they voted one way and the result which appeared was the opposite).

Republicans have argued that the Florida counties which had majority Democratic registration but voted overwhelmingly for Bush were all ¨Dixiecrat¨ bastions in Northern Florida that are traditionally very conservative -- and that all the reported votes were accurate. The facts do not bear this assumption out. Keith Olbermann demonstrated on MSNBC´s Countdown program that many of these crossover counties were voting Republican for the first time. He poked another hole in the Dixiecrat theory when he noted, ¨On the same Florida Democratic ballots where Bush scored big, people supported highly Democratic measures -- such as raising the state minimum wage $1 above the federal level. This indicates that only the presidential voting was rigged.¨ Moreover, the 18 switchover counties were not in the panhandle or near the Georgia border, but were scattered throughout the state. For instance, voters in Glades County (Everglades region) registered 64.8 percent Democrat but cast 38.3 percent more votes for Bush than for Kerry. Hardee County (between Bradenton and Sebring) registered 63.8 percent Democratic but officially gave Bush 135 percent more votes than Kerry.

What Happened

in Ohio Happened

in Lots of Places

Reports from Ohio indicate that the state´s chief elections official J. Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican, arranged for ample voting booths in GOP areas and a shortage in liberal college towns and minority precincts. Despite the huge increase in new voter registration (91 percent of which was Democratic), Blackwell provided fewer total voting machines than were used in 2000. Lawyer Ray Beckerman reported, ¨Hundreds of thousands of people were disenfranchised in Ohio. People waited in line for as long as 10 hours -- but only in Democratic precincts. All day long, touch-screen voting machines in Youngstown registered ¨George W. Bush¨ when voters pressed ¨John F. Kerry,¨ despite complaints to police throughout the day.

Voters Unite! (www.votersunite.org/electionproblems.asp) detailed 303 specific election problems, including 84 complaints of machine malfunctions in 22 states, 24 cases of registration fraud in 14 states, 20 abusive voter challenge situations in 10 states, U.S. voters in 18 states and Israel experiencing absentee ballot difficulties, 10 states with provisional ballot woes, 22 cases of malfeasance in 13 states, 10 charges of voter intimidation in seven states, seven states where votes were suppressed, seven states witnessing outbreaks of animosity at the polls, six states suffering from ballot printing errors and seven outrages in four states where votes were changed onscreen. In addition, the Voters Unite! site cites four states with early voting troubles, three states undergoing ballot programming errors, three states demonstrating ballot secrecy violations, bogus ballot fraud in New Mexico, cases of double-voting for Bush in Texas and 15 states victimized by a range of miscellaneous voting problems.

On Nov. 10, Olbermann reported that computerized balloting in North Carolina was so thoroughly messed up that all statewide voting may have to be recounted. A Craven County, N.C. district recorded 11,283 more votes than there were voters, overturning the results of a regional race.

And Now?

Kerry´s victory was predicted by previously extremely accurate Harris and Zogby pre-election polls, by the formerly infallible 50 percent rule -- an incumbent with less than 50 percent in the exit polls always loses (Bush had 47 percent, requiring him to capture an improbable 80 percent of the undecideds to win) and by the Incumbent Rule (undecideds break for the challenger -- as exit polls showed they did by a large margin this time). Nor is it credible that: the surge in new young voters (who were witnessed standing in lines for hours on campuses nationwide) miraculously didn´t appear in the final totals; that Kerry did worse than Gore against an opponent who´s lost support; and that exit polls were highly accurate wherever there was a paper trail, and grossly underestimated Bush´s appeal wherever there was no such guarantee of accurate recounts. Statisticians point out that Bush beat mathematical odds of 99 to 1 in winning the election. Election results are not final until the electoral college votes on Dec. 13. There is still time to investigate, to find the truth and, if the results match the probabilities, to swear in legitimately elected President John F. Kerry.

Alan Waldman is a Los Angeles journalist and blogger.

one more time...this is your vote...this is your vote under bush

Why Kerry Conceded
Though He Had the Most Votes

Tuesday, November 16, 2004
by Greg Palast

Sean Hannity called me a putz. Oh, my! And soft-porn-site scribe Frank
Salvato put me in with the "black helicopter" conspiracy league. Golly!

I can live with that. But when Salon disses my report of vote suppression in
Ohio ( "Was the Election Stolen?" by Farhad Manjoo), I have to respond.
Manjoo went after my article, "Kerry Won," the latest in my series of
investigations of our manipulated election system first published in America
by ... Salon: "Florida's Flawed 'Voter-Cleansing' Program."

Now, the facts. Most voters in Ohio cast their ballots for John Kerry, which
should, in accordance with Mrs. Gordon's civics lessons from sixth grade,
have given Kerry the Electoral College majority and the White House. Trouble
is, those votes won't be counted.

So where are these uncounted, but winning, votes? When I went to sleep the
night of Nov. 2, Kerry was down in Ohio by 136,000 votes. But over a quarter
million ballots had yet to be counted. Those abandoned ballots,
overwhelmingly Democratic, sit in two piles, one called "spoiled" and the
other "provisional."

The ugly, secret shame of American democracy is that 2 million votes are
"spoiled" in presidential elections -- tossed away untallied as
"unreadable." And the nasty part is that roughly half are cast by
African-Americans. To learn of this astonishing Jim Crow thumb on the U.S.
electoral scales, you have to hunt through the appendixes of the U.S. Civil
Rights Commission report on the Florida 2000 race. The government's
demographers concluded that of the 179,855 votes "spoiled" in Florida that
year, 54 percent were cast by blacks. All other credible studies tell us
that Florida is horribly typical of the nation.

On November 2, in Ohio, Republicans played the spoilage game for all it was
worth. Over 93,000 ballots were chucked on the spoilage pile, almost all of
them generated by those infernal chad-making punch-card machines.

Whose votes were lost in the chad blizzard? According to a recent ACLU
analysis of Ohio's system, votes stolen away by punch-card machine error are
"overwhelmingly" found in African-American -- read "Democratic" --
precincts.

After the swindle of 2000, who would have the nerve to keep these machines
in operation? Answer: the co-chair of Ohio's Bush-Cheney reelection
campaign, J. Kenneth Blackwell, who also happens to have the convenient post
of Ohio secretary of state. Blackwell, who makes Katherine Harris look like
Thomas Jefferson, concedes the racially bent effects of punch-card voting;
but in spite of this -- or because of this -- he refused to replace or fix
these machines for the 2004 election.

The result: 93,000 votes spoiled, uncounted. Salon's Manjoo, ignorant of the
ACLU's precinct-by-precinct studies, simply dismisses out of hand the
assertion that most of those were Kerry votes. But given that Ohio's spoiled
ballots are concentrated in black and poor communities, it is hardly a wild
leap to discern which candidate got punched out by the punch cards.

Now, on to the second pile of no-count ballots, the provisionals. And guess
who got these second-class, back-of-the-bus ballots? Once again, Ohio's
African-American voters.

The Republican Party declared the hunting season open for dark-skinned
voters in October, announcing a plan to challenge "fraudulent" voters on a
mass basis, the first such programmatic attack on the franchise since the
days of the Night Riders.

And the tactic was very much the same as that used by the allies of the
White Citizens Councils and Bull Conners in the early '60s: targeted and
unequal application of picayune registration and voting requirements. The
Ohio courts were not amused, slapping down the Republican Party's challenge
lists before Election Day.

However, the party kept secret lists and a secret program in its back pocket
to ambush black voters on Election Day, a scheme outed by BBC television the
week before the election.

Majoo has an answer for that, too. On Oct. 27, Manjoo wrote an entire column
defending the po' widdle Republicans from BBC's mean and unfounded attack,
subtitled, "Investigative reporter Greg Palast discovers a 'secret' voting
list, but the document doesn't necessarily prove Republican wrongdoing." Ace
reporter Manjoo's entire investigation of the matter comes down to three
quotations from a Republican Party flack, Mindy Tucker Fletcher, who --
surprise! -- denied the BBC's findings. I was never contacted nor was a
single one of our experts.

Here's what we discovered at the BBC: several lists of voters, every one of
them in an African-American precinct. Fletcher's official explanation (her
third variant, by the way) was that these were returned undeliverable
fundraising solicitations. Odd, that: Many of the addresses were those of
homeless men's shelters, not where I'd expect a lot of Bush-Cheney donors.
And why were the Republicans sending solicitations only to black voters? Is
that their normal funding group?

More suspicious is that these lists of "undeliverable addresses" were sent,
not to some clerk at a direct-mail house, but to the chief of research for
the Republican National Committee in Washington as well as the executive
director of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Florida. I guess they handle the
clerical overflow work.

Or maybe, as every expert told us, these were hit lists meant to stop,
impede, intimidate and slow down voters in African-American precincts. The
Republicans have more than embarrassment to motivate them to mislead us
about the true purpose of these lists: Profiling citizens of one race to
block their voting, even if each challenge itself has merit, is a criminal
violation of the Voting Rights Act.

Whatever their ultimate use of these lists, whatever the Republican game
plan, we have the result: In Ohio, an astonishing 155,000 voters were
shunted to provisional ballots, where their votes would be vulnerable to the
partisan predation of GOP Secretary of State Blackwell. And once again, the
provisionals were concentrated in the minority -- that is, Democratic --
areas.

Blackwell wasted no time in jiggering the rules to make sure as few
provisional ballots as possible would be counted. He began by announcing
that, for the first time in Ohio history, provisional ballots would not be
counted if cast by a legal voter in the "wrong" precinct, even though the
president remains the same for voters of all precincts. Furthermore, to
increase the number of provisional ballots subject to challenge, Blackwell
and other Republican office holders in Ohio went on a voter-roll-purging
frenzy prior to the election. A favorite, first practiced in Florida in
2000, is to tag them ineligible "felon" voters. If a voter is wrongly
purged, the registration is restored, yet the ballot will still be binned.

Add it up and the demographics of the spoiled and provisional ballots -- if
they were all counted -- would overtake George Bush's teeny lead.

Why Kerry Had to Concede

Lacking evidence to refute the hard stats and demographics that the
uncounted votes are mostly Kerry's, Manjoo ducks behind this tautological
rock: He can "prove that Kerry couldn't have won in Ohio: He conceded."

Kerry did not concede because he did not have the votes. He conceded because
he could not get them counted. Kerry would have to demand a hand count of
the spoiled punch cards. But the hard fact is that, just as Katherine Harris
stopped the hand count of the punch cards in Florida, Blackwell would
undoubtedly do the same in Ohio. And face it: In a legal showdown, Blackwell
could count on the help of that pus-hole of partisanship, the U.S. Supreme
Court. Been there, done that. Add in the ballot-by-ballot litigation
required to force a count of all the provisional ballots under rules à la
Blackwell, and Kerry, realistically, didn't stand a chance.

Unfortunately, neither did democracy.




- - - - - - - - - - - -

Greg Palast, the author of "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: New Election
Edition," investigated the 2004 race for BBC television's "Newsnight" and
Harper's magazine, for which he is a contributing editor.

See a trailer Palast's BBC Television film, "Bush Family Fortunes," now available on DVD, at http://www.gregpalast.com/bff-dvd.htm

falsified vote records scandal in florida election

'Stinking Evidence' of Possible Election Fraud Found in Florida

By Thom Hartmann
CommonDreams.org

Thursday 18 November 2004

There was something odd about the poll tapes.

A "poll tape" is the phrase used to describe a printout from an optical scan voting machine made the evening of an election, after the machine has read all the ballots and crunched the numbers on its internal computer. It shows the total results of the election in that location. The printout is signed by the polling officials present in that precinct/location, and then submitted to the county elections office as the official record of how the people in that particular precinct had voted. (Usually each location has only one single optical scanner/reader, and thus produces only one poll tape.)

Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org, the erstwhile investigator of electronic voting machines, along with people from Florida Fair Elections, showed up at Florida's Volusia County Elections Office on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 16, 2004, and asked to see, under a public records request, each of the poll tapes for the 100+ optical scanners in the precincts in that county. The elections workers - having been notified in advance of her request - handed her a set of printouts, oddly dated November 15 and lacking signatures.

Bev pointed out that the printouts given her were not the original poll tapes and had no signatures, and thus were not what she'd requested. Obligingly, they told her that the originals were held in another location, the Elections Office's Warehouse, and that since it was the end of the day they should meet Bev the following morning to show them to her.

Bev showed up bright and early the morning of Wednesday the 17th - well before the scheduled meeting - and discovered three of the elections officials in the Elections Warehouse standing over a table covered with what looked like poll tapes. When they saw Bev and her friends, Bev told me in a telephone interview less than an hour later, "They immediately shoved us out and slammed the door."

In a way, that was a blessing, because it led to the stinking evidence.

"On the porch was a garbage bag," Bev said, "and so I looked in it and, and lo and behold, there were public record tapes."

Thrown away. Discarded. Waiting to be hauled off.

"It was technically stinking, in fact," Bev added, "because what they had done was to have thrown some of their polling tapes, which are the official records of the election, into the garbage. These were the ones signed by the poll workers. These are something we had done an official public records request for."

When the elections officials inside realized that the people outside were going through the trash, they called the police and one came out to challenge Bev.

Kathleen Wynne, a www.blackboxvoting.org investigator, was there.

"We caught the whole thing on videotape," she said. "I don't think you'll ever see anything like this - Bev Harris having a tug of war with an election worker over a bag of garbage, and he held onto it and she pulled on it, and it split right open, spilling out those poll tapes. They were throwing away our democracy, and Bev wasn't going to let them do it."

As I was interviewing Bev just moments after the tussle, she had to get off the phone, because, "Two police cars just showed up."

She told me later in the day, in an on-air interview, that when the police arrived, "We all had a vigorous debate on the merits of my public records request."

The outcome of that debate was that they all went from the Elections Warehouse back to the Elections Office, to compare the original, November 2 dated and signed poll tapes with the November 15 printouts the Elections Office had submitted to the Secretary of State. A camera crew from www.votergate.tv met them there, as well.

And then things got even odder.

"We were sitting there comparing the real [signed, original] tapes with the [later printout] ones that were given us," Bev said, "and finding things missing and finding things not matching, when one of the elections employees took a bin full of things that looked like garbage - that looked like polling tapes, actually - and passed by and disappeared out the back of the building."

This provoked investigator Ellen Brodsky to walk outside and check the garbage of the Elections Office itself. Sure enough - more original, signed poll tapes, freshly trashed.

"And I must tell you," Bev said, "that whatever they had taken out [the back door] just came right back in the front door and we said, 'What are these polling place tapes doing in your dumpster?'"

A November 18 call to the Volusia County Elections Office found that Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe was unavailable and nobody was willing to speak on the record with an out-of-state reporter. However, The Daytona Beach News (in Volusia County), in a November 17th article by staff writer Christine Girardin, noted, "Harris went to the Department of Elections' warehouse on State Road 44 in DeLand on Tuesday to inspect original Nov. 2 polling place tapes, after being given a set of reprints dated Nov. 15. While there, Harris saw Nov. 2 polling place tapes in a garbage bag, heightening her concern about the integrity of voting records."

The Daytona Beach News further noted that, "[Elections Supervisor] Lowe confirmed Wednesday some backup copies of tapes from the Nov. 2 election were destined for the shredder," but pointed out that, according to Lowe, that was simply because there were two sets of tapes produced on election night, each signed. "One tape is delivered in one car along with the ballots and a memory card," the News reported. "The backup tape is delivered to the elections office in a second car."

Suggesting that duplicates don't need to be kept, Lowe claims that Harris didn't want to hear an explanation of why some signed poll tapes would be in the garbage. "She's not wanting to listen to an explanation," Lowe told the News of Harris. "She has her own ideas."

But the Ollie North action in two locations on two days was only half of the surprise that awaited Bev and her associates. When they compared the discarded, signed, original tapes with the recent printouts submitted to the state and used to tabulate the Florida election winners, Harris says a disturbing pattern emerged.

"The difference was hundreds of votes in each of the different places we examined," said Bev, "and most of those were in minority areas."

When I asked Bev if the errors they were finding in precinct after precinct were random, as one would expect from technical, clerical, or computer errors, she became uncomfortable.

"You have to understand that we are non-partisan," she said. "We're not trying to change the outcome of an election, just to find out if there was any voting fraud."

That said, Bev added: "The pattern was very clear. The anomalies favored George W. Bush. Every single time."

Of course finding possible voting "anomalies" in one Florida county doesn't mean they'll show up in all counties. It's even conceivable there are innocent explanations for both the mismatched counts and trashed original records; this story undoubtedly will continue to play out. And, unless further investigation demonstrates a pervasive and statewide trend toward "anomalous" election results in many of Florida's counties, odds are none of this will change the outcome of the election (which exit polls showed John Kerry winning in Florida).

Nonetheless, Bev and her merry band are off to hit another county.

As she told me on her cell phone while driving toward their next destination, "We just put Volusia County and their lawyers on notice that they need to continue to keep a number of documents under seal, including all of the memory cards to the ballot boxes, and all of the signed poll tapes."

Why?

"Simple," she said. "Because we found anomalies indicative of fraud."

Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning and best-selling author and host of a nationally-syndicated daily progressive talk show. His website is thomhartmann.com and his most recent books include "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call to Take Back America" and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return to Democracy."

-------

"Bend over America ...you know the drill..." 

"The Rest of the World Fights the Empire With Money -
What We Should Have Been Doing Here All Along

*
Now is the Time to Attack on the Fronts Where We
Have Real Power" ---Mike Ruppert 

"Snap Out Of It ! " by Mike Ruppert

© Copyright 2004, From The Wilderness Publications, www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.

SNAP OUT OF IT!

*
The Day to Forget the November 2nd Election Forever is November 3rd

*
The Rest of the World Fights the Empire With Money -
What We Should Have Been Doing Here All Along

*
Now is the Time to Attack on the Fronts Where We
Have Real Power

by

Michael C. Ruppert

November 5, 2004 1900 PDT (FTW) - The rest of the world has known for some time that it is pointless to oppose this Empire either militarily or electorally. They haven't the resources for the former and are legally barred from the latter. I think it's time the American people adopted the same philosophy. We are, after all, legally barred from inspecting electronic voting machines. The rest of the world has been fighting with money and public relations because these tactics work and work well. This is a lesson that American activists and true patriots should have learned four years ago. Now the tempo of battle will increase just as surely as the stakes have been raised both globally and domestically for us all.

While everyone waits for the administration's first move a Rubicon has been crossed and there is no turning back. America will fight for oil wherever it feels the need.

Now the real Fourth World War begins. Sorry to disappoint all the scriptwriters and futurists who were thinking exclusively in terms of bombs, plagues, famine etc. The first weapons of mass destruction in this war will be economic and they will be devastating beyond imagination.

I feel good now, three days after the election. It was much easier for me to recover than most because FTW and its readers had less invested in the election than most. But I am not so glib or cavalier as to overlook the massive disillusionment that weighs like a wet blanket on all who had hoped that their prodigious efforts might oust the Neo-cons.

The biggest blessing today is that the disillusionment is so deep, so fundamental, that at last people who have bound themselves to ineffective political strategies may rethink their deeper core beliefs; their beliefs about what America was supposed to be versus what it has become. They will redraw their maps. Perhaps with that process - painful as it might be - will also come a willingness to abandon strategies which no longer work for entirely different ones that do. In order for that to happen, however, those on the left, as well as those conservative and libertarian voices who wanted to return a degree of sanity to the Republican party, will have to admit that America is not America anymore.

We are living in a foreign land; a nation that is behaving like our enemy; a nation which has weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

This nation is so deeply divided that the words "civil war" stand for a possibility that is longer remote. Next year, even the next few months, will reveal these deep and irreconcilable divisions. The electoral process is dead. Only the fear that there is nothing to replace it except revolution and bloodshed will prevent people from seeing that there are different ways to fight; ways that should have been adopted four years ago. The rest of the world knows that physical force is not effective in this struggle and the rest of the world has something to teach us. We will look anew perhaps at the Second Amendment to the Constitution, but it is in what's left of the First that we will find our strength. The freedom of association includes within it the right to decide where and how to spend our money.

Perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of prudence, I have been told that some activists and whistleblowers are planning on leaving the country in short order. A thought I have seen circulate in discussions since the election is that many well-known activists and whistleblowers think it wise to run before Dick Cheney and Karl Rove get their legs and start hunting us down, one by one. Reuters published a November 3rd story about many Democrats seeking to emigrate to Canada.

As a man who has written a book charging the President and especially the Vice President, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Commander of NORAD, the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General and the former Directors of Central Intelligence and the FBI with multiple counts of premeditated murder, it is my belief that it is foolish to wait and see what the administration does. Now is the time to attack, and to attack with all of the vigor our movement and our wounded, offended spirits can muster. It is our best means of self healing. If we cut and run now, we die.

No longer is that word hyperbolic.

I am going on the attack.

Let me be quite clear about this: This is spiritual warfare. There is no place to run. There is no safe place to hide. On her home page (www.solari.com) Catherine Austin Fitts posts a great quote from Gandhi.

"The only devils in the world are those running around in our own hearts - that is where the battle should be fought."
- Mahatma Gandhi

Only the protection offered by a universe that responds more powerfully to love than to fear can be an effective shield now. That protection has no limits in geography, nor do the dangers against which it guards. I criticize no one for making a decision to expatriate. Some may have physical or financial limitations and concerns. Some may be honoring an old Special Forces axiom that running today makes possible a fight more likely to succeed another day. This is a sifting out for the battles that are to come; battles which will be unlike anything ever seen in this country. There will also be a great many new brethren who will show up on battle lines that we must now redraw to suit ourselves. We must begin choosing the times and places of battle to suit our needs. No task is more important than this.

We have expended our money, our liberty, our hearts and our souls by spending money as powers that be, and media programming describing a fictitious America, told us we should; by volunteering in efforts that were laid out for us by others; by believing that we were doing the right thing playing in a rigged game. The biggest ball and chain for us now is the notion that we might resurrect an electoral process that officially died four years ago. Anything brought to life now would be a Frankenstein rather than a happy ending to an episode of ER; and at what additional cost in terms of time and energy?

What happened on Election Day was no surprise to me and it should have been no surprise to long-term FTW readers. Perhaps now some of the over-conditioned lefties out there will start to ask serious questions about what kind of bang they get for their buck - and their dedication. Billions of dollars and countless man/woman-hours that could have been expended on real-deal strategies that had a chance of making a change have been diverted and pulled away and wasted as badly as the energy of tens of millions of demonstrators who poured into the world's streets for months in an effort to prevent the US invasion of Iraq in 2002-2003.

When will the American opposition start to ask what kind of return on investment they are getting? When will they start demanding better performance? What a waste and what a cost in broken hearts for the young, those just beginning to try and change the world. If the young are to save themselves (and us) they must refuse to be herded into a political process that is, in itself, their prison.

Even though there is evidence that Ohio was stolen, John Kerry has given up; conceded; thrown in the towel. There won't be any lawsuits because he won't allow it. Bush won the popular vote. If the 2000 election passed into history "as-is" it is certain that the 2004 election is zip locked. Fuggedaboudit! The people now performing that task of documenting electoral fraud in Ohio and elsewhere have safely made themselves historians and targets of lesser priority for Cheney and Rove. They are no longer activists.

There will be no successful suits over this election. The courts are rigged and lawyers are sea anchors. As I predicted a week after 9/11, every lawsuit since filed has been derailed, morphed, sidetracked or sabotaged from within. Any lawsuit over the 2004 election (assuming Kerry permitted it) would wind up in the Supreme Court. Has everyone forgotten Bill Rehnquist's cancer or that the Neocons get to pick the next three justices?

HUMAN AND MONETARY THERMODYNAMICS

Human energy works like physical energy.

Just a while ago I received a call from a source indicating that John Kerry ended his campaign with $45 million unspent dollars in his war chest. That money had reportedly been laid aside to pay for a recount or post-election court challenges. There will be none. The caller suggested that Kerry might get to keep it personally. This will need some checking but it would not surprise me.

In many respects the dynamics of money - as activists now spend it - parallels the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It only changes form in an entropic direction; from being able to do useful political and social work to being useless. But there is a way to make it multiply. This is the FTW model where dollars spent with us recirculate within the activist community and create more energy.

As Jesus pointed out, the gift of two pennies from the poor woman was infinitely more valuable than the large gift from the wealthy man. The corporations which profited from all the opposition advertising, the political campaign chests which swelled and spent that money, will never reinvest that money to slow America's descent into tyranny. That energy - created from the sweat of the people - has been pretty-well neutralized. Sure George Soros lost money (I suppose), but what was the percentage cost to him as opposed to all of the "little" Americans who opened their thinly-stretched purses in pursuit of regime change? Soros suckered you into spending money that was far more important to you than his was to him.

What if John Kerry had won? He was going to add 100,000 troops to the army. He denied Peak Oil's existence and promised a chimerical "independence from Mid-East oil". He endorsed the notion that 19 hijackers operating from caves executed the attacks of September 11th. Then he said he would fight the war on terror better than George W. Bush. He said nothing about a corrupt economic system which has fed and sustained both him and George Bush all these years. He hasn't lost a penny.

A day after Kerry conceded defeat; The Boston Herald ran a story:

Bay State electric customers facing shock of high oil prices
By Jay Fitzgerald

Thursday, November 4, 2004

Massachusetts electric customers can expect more jolts in coming months as rising oil and natural gas prices drive up the cost of generating electricity.

Crude oil prices jumped by $1.26 yesterday after President Bush's election, settling at $50.88 a barrel.

Rising natural gas prices also pushed wholesale electricity in New England up. Natural gas is used to power plants that generate electricity.

The bottom line: Expect electric bills to head higher this winter with heating oil and other energy costs…

Another story talked about how oil and gas companies breathed a sigh of relief after the Bush win because they would face less regulation. Duh. But less regulation only means a more frenetic, thoughtless and careless mad scramble to suck up remaining hydrocarbon energy resources rather than an effort to mitigate our dependence on them by the only real choices available: a reduction in consumption and an intense, transparent effort to look for and liberate renewables and any technologies that may have been suppressed.

Will someone up there in elite land - Yo, you guys up there on Olympus! - please get it. We know what's going on. You are not fooling us.

EVERY VOTE MAY NOT BE COUNTED BUT EVERY DOLLAR ALWAYS IS

So if we don't keep trying to fix the electoral process what do we do? For four years we at FTW and elsewhere have also been consistently saying that the way to change what's wrong with America and the world was to get outside of the election box into which most activists and opposition forces have placed themselves as if under house arrest. The way to fight is not with votes but with money. Every vote may not be counted. But every dollar always is.

For activists wishfully clinging to an old and inaccurate map, there is good reason for despair. On the FTW map, and the map of great economic thinkers like Fitts - the accurate map - there are no grounds for discouragement here. Yes, things will surely now get worse before (if ever) they get better. Yes, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, absent the need to show restraint before a re-election campaign, may now take the gloves off. Quel surprise!

So now what?

VOTE WITH YOUR MONEY

Since 9/11 we have witnessed the evolution of a number of powerful, truly authentic journalism syndicates. FTW is but one of many that are credible, trustworthy and which have proven themselves providers of valuable and accurate information. I know many of these people and small companies personally and we have all pretty much behaved the same way. Every dollar that was spent with used was used to benefit those who gave it to us. That keeps us all in the game.

In November of 2001, when I lectured at Portland State University I pledged to the audience there - and in the permanent record of my video "The Truth and Lies of 9/11" - that I would take money spent on us and devote it to making FTW bigger, more effective and capable of getting more important stories to them; stories that would give them information that might save their lives. In 2001 I had two part-time writers, an office staff of one and me.

Today FTW has an office staff of four, three editors/writers, four regularly contributing writers and now almost 20,000 subscribers in more than 40 countries. I have kept my promise and you have seen the results. I am still living in a studio apartment and driving a 9 year-old Ford. I may soon get to have - out of necessity - a larger and better place to live and for the first time own a home of my own but you get the point. There are many others who have behaved this way because we share a common sense of urgency.

But there's something else your help makes possible for me and for all of us. We are all knocking down the doors of the major media.

ANOTHER PROMISE - I'M GOING TO WASHINGTON

Before describing this economic warfare and how we can fight it let me make you another promise.

As soon as we can reasonably arrange it, I am throwing all of our meager funds for a book tour into one large, well-publicized book signing in Washington, D.C. Rubicon's publisher just did not have the resources to fund a book tour. I am going to ask for all the back-up and support I can get, for as many of you to come to Washington as possible, because I am going there - to the city where Bush, Cheney and Rove rule; the city where I was born - to stand up and publicly accuse them and others of murder: multiple counts, and with premeditation.

The world will be watching and your dollars made that possible.

The only way I know how to lead is from the front. We will keep you apprised of developments via the FTW web site.

MONEY IN THE WORLD - MONEY IN AMERICA

There's a great first rule in economic warfare. It's exactly the same reason why flight attendants instruct people to put on their oxygen masks before assisting others when an airliner's cabin depressurizes. To save the world you must save yourself first. The way you start to fight with money is to get out of debt. If that means simplifying your life then that's good anyway, you'll use less energy. But to be debt free is to stop paying your money to the corporations and banks that are creating this naked aggression anyway.

These are the same corporations and banks that will come and pluck your economic corpse when the economy crashes next year as it surely must. If you are debt free then there will be less for them to pluck.

All around the globe we see newly forming economic and political alliances. In South America and elsewhere new regional common markets are evolving rapidly. The Euro is rising to new significance as a world currency and a way to pull the rug from under the Empire. From Russia, to Iran, to China to Venezuela, to Saudi Arabia the world is drifting inexorably to a decision to price oil in Euros. China has just raised interest rates. In 2005 Iran is planning on opening an oil bourse trading futures in Euros and is quietly building consensus support. This is, in my opinion, the major motive for pressuring Iran just as Saddam Hussein's decision to price oil in Euros was his chief crime.

I still believe that any military adventurism against Iran is not possible and that the US knows this.

On October 22 Pravda reported that the Russian Central Bank had stopped supporting the US dollar. As I write this essay the Euro is now trading at close to $1.30 US (a record high) and gold is holding steady at close to $430 an ounce. It was $280 an ounce just three years ago. Sure, oil prices have dropped a bit but that has no bearing on the reality of Peak Oil. I am still expecting oil to hit $100 a barrel in 2005. What happens to your job then? Your mortgage? The housing bubble is on the verge of collapse and Fannie Mae is under criminal investigation. There may be three times more paper mortgages floating around than there are physical properties. (www.solari.com; www.sandersresearch.com)

Think again of the significance of the fact that Vladimir Putin in Russia has just ratified the Kyoto protocols limiting greenhouse gas emissions. This takes on a whole new meaning when one remembers that for the last 50 years there has been an overwhelming correlation between GDP growth and greenhouse gas emission. In other words, economic growth is not possible without burning more energy and this empire's Achilles heel is its insatiable living requirement of infinite growth even unto the death of the planet. This is the price of fractional reserve banking, debt-based growth, a fiat currency, and markets trapped in Price/Earnings ratios.

Russia's move is significant because under the Kyoto treaty - as reported by The Economist on October 7th - Russia's voice in resurrecting the 1997 accord carries special weight:

LIKE a swamp creature in a bad horror movie, the Kyoto treaty on climate change has risen from the dead. A certain Texan cowboy thought he had killed the Japanese monster. Alas, thanks to a last-minute betrayal by an inscrutable Russian spymaster, the green beast is back.

That is only a slight exaggeration of how some people view the revival of the Kyoto protocol. The controversial UN treaty, agreed in Japan in 1997, commits rich countries to cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases by 2012. But it was dealt a near-fatal blow when George Bush confirmed America's rejection in 2001. The EU, Japan, Canada and over 100 others remained in, but Russia wavered. If it did not ratify, the pact would fail.

Today, as I finished this essay, Putin has ratified the accord after overwhelming passage by the Russian legislature. The BBC writes:

Putin clears way for Kyoto treaty

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed the Kyoto protocol on climate change - clearing the way for the treaty to come into force next year.

This is Russia's final and crucial stamp of approval for Kyoto. The pact needed support from countries responsible for 55% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, which most scientists blame for global warming.

After the United States refused to ratify it, only Russia could enable this threshold to be passed.

The significance is clear. Limit greenhouse gas emissions and you limit economic growth. Limit economic growth and you undermine America's financial and economic vampire. The world is fighting back. We can too and in this way we can force a change.

HOW DO AMERICANS DO THIS?

There's a reason why I asked former Assistant Housing Secretary Catherine Austin Fitts to write the foreword for Crossing the Rubicon. She knows money and she knows how to change the system. I spoke with her yesterday and neither of us is contemplating a cut and run strategy. We are both committed to taking the fight to Washington and New York, no matter the cost.

"I can show these people how they and all of us can make more money by fixing money and what it does. But the first requirement is that people understand that they have to stop feeding the tapeworm that is creating all of this."

Perhaps now disillusioned Kerry supporters will take a second look at what FTW has been teaching for years.

* Get out of debt.
* Spend your money and time on things that give you energy and provide you with useful information.
* Stop spending a penny with major banks, news media and corporations that feed you lies and leave you exhausted.
* Learn how money works and use it like a weapon.

It is already becoming clear that as Peak Oil becomes a stark reality, survival will become a place-based, local phenomenon. Local economies, to the degree that they exist and are flourishing will provide strength to resist what is coming. Everyone who sees this essay should compare the return on investment they got with the election against something that offers more payoffs, an opportunity to become real, independent actors on the fields of their own lives.

Go to Fitts' web site http://www.solari.com and look at the section "Coming Clean". Not until each one of us looks at the ways that we feed the beast and accept responsibility for that do we have a chance for today and for tomorrow.

As I have said in Crossing the Rubicon and in almost every lecture for the last three years, "We will change nothing until we change the way that money works."

Perhaps now some people will be willing to listen to our voices crying in the wilderness.

Michael C. Ruppert

'War hero' Kerry AWOL while green party and libertarian party candidates raise $150,000 in 4 days for Ohio vote recount...Kerry's left over campaign funds reported at $45 million ... 

so where the hell is 'big bad john' ? War hero kerry AWOL

By Harvey Wasserman
Republished from Free Press

Where the hell are the Democrats & John Kerry?

Columbus, Ohio—-Hour after hour the testimonies are the same: angry Ohioans telling of vicious Republican manipulation and de facto intimidation that disenfranchised tens of thousands and probably cost the Democrats the election.

At an African-American church on Saturday and then at the Franklin County Courthouse Monday night, more than 700 people came to testify and witness to tales of the atrocity that was the November 2 election.

Organized by local ad hoc groups, the hearings had a court reporter and a team of lawyers along with other appointed witnesses. At freepress.org we will be making the testimonies available as they’re transcribed and organized, and we will present a fuller accounting of the hearings, along with a book that includes the transcripts.

But one thing was instantly and abundantly clear: the Republican Party turned Ohio 2004 into an updated version of the Jim Crow South.

The principle overt method of vote suppression was to short-change inner city precincts of sufficient voting machines to allow a timely balloting. In precinct after precinct, virtually all of them predominantly black, poor, young and Democratic, the lines stretched for two, five, eight, even eleven hours. The elderly and infirm were forced to stand in the rain while city officials threatened to tow their cars. No chairs or shelter were provided. Crucial signage was mysteriously missing. Thousands came to vote, saw the long lines and left.

How many thousands? Enough to turn the election? Almost definitely.

None of this was accidental. This was a well-planned GOP attack on the right to vote, and on Democratic candidacies. Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell was also co-chair of the Ohio campaign for Bush. A right-wing Republican was in charge of the Franklin County Board of Elections.

They all said the election went “smoothly.” By their standards they were right. At least 68 voting machines sat in a warehouse while precinct managers called desperately for help. Republican precinct judges and challengers harassed would-be voters. The names of long-time activists mysteriously disappeared from registration lists. The arsenal of dirty tricks was virtually endless.

With it the Bush/Rove team deprived countless Ohioans of their right to vote just as surely as if they’d levied a poll tax or invoked the grandfather clause.

In the coming days we’ll issue a more complete accounting of these devastating hearings. No one who cares about democracy and fears the consequences of its destruction could come away from them without being both infuriated and terrified.

But one thing also stood out—-the complete lack of Democratic support for these hearings or for the larger vote count movement. Nationally, it all stands in the shadow of the complete disappearance of John Kerry, on whose nominal behalf this was done.

A successful grassroots effort involving the Green and Libertarian Parties, among others, has raised—<>in just four days—some $150,000 to force a recount of the Ohio vote. (Ralph Nader has forced a similar recount in New Hampshire). But where were the countless millions raised by the Democratic Party and Kerry campaign by trusting American citizens who expected them to fight for democracy?

Right up to election day Kerry repeated his solemn vow to, in light of what happened in Florida 2000, guarantee everyone’s right to vote. But now that another highly dubious election has occurred, where the hell is he?

Rumors are circulating that he is biding his time, waiting for the right time to jump in. Or that the Democrats themselves have something to hide. Or that there’s a magic bullet just waiting to be fired.

Similar rumors spread about Al Gore four years ago. We’re still waiting for that fateful shot.

This election was not about apathy. Tens of thousands of smart, eager, fiercely dedicated volunteers came out this year, desperate to rid this nation of the curse of George W. Bush.

An escalating avalanche of evidence indicates a true vote count would have thrown Bush out of the White House.

But once again, the Democrats have dissed the grassroots. Once again, a candidate who promised democracy has disappeared with barely a whimper in the face of those who would destroy it. His silence has allowed an orgy of media bloviation in homage to a bigoted, war-crazed America that, if it won at all, took this election not by national consensus, but by the Rovian staples of dirty tricks and voter suppression.

The upcoming Ohio recount is fraught with danger. The Republicans battled successfully to prevent the state’s voting machines from including paper trails that can be reasonably recounted. These “black boxes” will require extreme sophistication to be properly evaluated. Unless intensely supervised down to the last detail, the Republicans who control these machines will turn this recount into a “proof” that the election “went smoothly.”

So a true recount will require serious additional financial resources and a very aggressive, well-organized team. So far we hear not a peep from the mainstream Democrats. So far, they seem utterly deaf to the cries of fury and despair from those who were so wrongly deprived of their right to vote.

Democracy itself was lynched in Ohio on November 2, by both high and low tech means. Our freedoms may be the ultimate victim. But where is the Democratic Party?
————————————-
HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is available through www.harveywasserman.com. He is senior editor of www.freepress.org.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. GNN.tv has no affiliation with the originator of this article nor is GNN.tv endorsed or sponsored by the originator. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

"clique of the deskRat"--blog II ...courtesy of GNN

clique of the deskRat
gnn debut--the recently stolen elections
B01517 Tue, 16 Nov 2004 17:20:52 -0800

well my goodness , as if one under-utilized blog wasn’t enough , now we have two .


in response to an article read at : http://freepress.org—“diebold , electronic voting and the vast right wing conspiracy” .


dated feb 24 , 2004 , dr. bob fitrakis delves into the sordid history of diebold and es&s two of the major players in the electronic voting machine industry responsible for machines involved in about 80% of the electronic voting that took place on nov 2nd.


well , well , well what a surprise that two of the major players in the industry seem to have major links to the christian religious right wingnuts .


in their religious zeal dating back to at least the reagan era the right wingnuts were secretly positioning themselves by buying into the electronic voting industry as well as big media and funding right wing think tanks—all for the puropse of moving american policy , both foreign and domestic , sharply to the right .


now it seems that well before this most recent election , diebold electronic voting software code was reported to have “stunning flaws” according to Johns Hopkins researchers at the Information Security Institute , and in previous elections , patches were installed on diebold voting machines without approval or supervision of independent testing authorities ,or election officials .

the name diebold now has above it a cloud of election irregularities and surprising , unexplained electoral upsets in contests where its machines have been used .


it should also be noted that the two brothers who started what became es&s have also been doing work for diebold in key positions .


it seems that a big push by the religious right did make monkeys of the exit pollers in this month’s presidential elections…its just that after reading bob fitrakis’ article , it appears that the big push began long ago during the reagan era and has now culminated in some very suspicious results that could trace back to the ‘programming’ of the voting machines .


diebold makes ATM machines along with other electronic machines , but according to the fitrakis article , the only diebold machines designed not to produce a paper trail receipt are the diebold voting machines… WHY ?


So finally , the question must be asked : was it a big “push” , or a big “putsch” from the religious right wingnuts that REALLY put george dubya bush in office for two terms ?

“Family values ” was supposed to be the key issue in this presidential election .


i thought “thou shalt not steal” elections , was an important ‘family value’ ?

"yeah , we stole the elections again...so what" 

"all the news that's fit to print"-- aint always the news that fits in print

So when the "traditional" media could no longer ignore the internet web bloggers and alternative online media unamimously screaming a loud and ugly cry of "FRAUD " concerning the theft of the presidency on nov 2 by george dubya bush , the good old boys finally decided it was time for a spin...enter stage right wing ---the good old new "yoke" times.


Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried
By TOM ZELLER Jr. / NY Times

The e-mail messages and Web postings had all the twitchy cloak-and-dagger thrust of a Hollywood blockbuster. "Evidence mounts that the vote may have been hacked," trumpeted a headline on the Web site CommonDreams.org. "Fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic voting machines," declared BlackBoxVoting.org.

In the space of seven days, an online market of dark ideas surrounding last week's presidential election took root and multiplied.

But while the widely read universe of Web logs was often blamed for the swift propagation of faulty analyses, the blogosphere, as it has come to be known, spread the rumors so fast that experts were soon able to debunk them, rather than allowing them to linger and feed conspiracy theories. Within days of the first rumors of a stolen election, in fact, the most popular theories were being proved wrong - though many were still reluctant to let them go.

no need to post the whole pile of manure , but i think you get the gist from a "whiff" of it ...we're all a bunch of hair-trigger , shoot from the lip, paranoid loonies who need to be under a "net" rather than on the net bitching and moaning about "aliens" and vast rightwinged conspiracies to steal elections , loot the public treasury , wage civilian-slaughtering petro-wars for bogus reasons and at home disenfranchise the voters in order to steal elections and continue the rightwing -extremist agenda ...

anyway ,the zeller article goes on to quote one idiot in particular smugly trying to spin away the members of alternative internet media ...an idiot whose name rang a bell because of some of the reading i had been doing while following the heroic attempts of the people in america to reclaim their rights to choose their leadership... the name of one matthew damschroder to be particular...

"It becomes a snowball of hearsay," said Matthew Damschroder, the director of elections in Columbus, Ohio, where an electronic voting machine malfunctioned in one precinct and allotted some 4,000 votes to President Bush, kicking off its own flurry of Web speculation. That particular problem was unusual and remains unexplained, but it was caught and corrected, Mr. Damschroder said.

"Some from the traditional media have called for an explanation," he said, "but no one from these blogs has called and said, 'We want to know what really happened.' "

---ny times article


so as i mentioned , while reading the zeller ny times article the name matthew damschroder struck a memory chord ...which led me to dig up this concerning the smug-ass mr damschroder from free press.org

"In Franklin County, where Franklin County Board of Elections Director Matt Damschroder is also the former Executive Director of the county’s Republican Party, the county Board of Elections building looked like a bunker. Scores of city buses blocked parking spaces on the street outside, numerous concrete barricades surrounded the parking lot, and a metal detector was stationed at the only entrance. A phalanx of armed deputy sheriffs swarmed the only site where provisional voters could cast a guaranteed ballot. The Columbus Dispatch confirmed an Election Day Free Press story that far fewer voting machines were present in predominantly black Democratic inner-city voting wards than in the recent primary election and the 2000 presidential election, with their lighter turnouts. The reduced number of machines caused voters to wait up to seven hours and wait an average of approximately three hours. One Republican Central Committee member told the Free Press that Damschroder held back as many as 2000 machines and dispersed many of the other machines to affluent suburbs in Franklin County."--free press.org article



ANY BLIND MAN CAN SEE "WHAT REALLY HAPPENED" ! And until i see otherwise , FUCK Matt Damschroder and FUCK the shitbag New York Times and the rest of the 'traditional' media for abandoning their vital responsibility by continually barfing up on command, like trained dogs, the REPLUTOCRATIC PARTY's official party line .

media in a democracy is supposed to be the people's advocate by being the advocates of transparency and honesty .

they are supposed to ask the hard questions...

instead we have a bunch of media-lapdogs and news anchor yes-men masquerading as honest messengers who swallow whatever slop they are fed by government in order to spin away the common sense of the public...

NOTHING i have seen has convinced me other than that the nov 2nd election was stolen by republican voter suppression and fucked up voting machines that across the country were recording kerry votes as bush votes...also nothing i've seen says otherwise than that votes in key areas where there was no paper trail were being tabulated by central computers that a highschool kid could hack into.

"kerry won ohio ...here's how the votes vanished"---greg palast

KERRY WON OHIO
JUST COUNT THE BALLOTS AT THE BACK OF THE BUS
In These Times
Friday, November 12, 2004
Most voters in Ohio chose Kerry. Here's how the votes vanished.

By Greg Palast

This February, Ken Blackwell, Ohio's Secretary of State, told his State Senate President, "The possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state’s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity." Blackwell, co-chair of Bush-Cheney reelection campaign, wasn't warning his fellow Republican of disaster, but boasting of an opportunity to bring in Ohio for Team Bush no matter what the voters wanted. And most voters in Ohio wanted JFK, not GWB. But their choice won't count because their votes won't be counted.

The ballots that add up to a majority for John Kerry in Ohio -- and in New Mexico -- are locked up in two Republican hidey-holes: "spoiled" ballots and "provisional" ballots.

OHIO SPOILED ROTTEN
American democracy has a dark little secret. In a typical presidential election, two million ballots are simply chucked in the garbage, marked "spoiled" and not counted. A dive into the electoral dumpster reveals something special about these votes left to rot. In a careful county-by-county, precinct-by-precinct analysis of the Florida 2000 race, the US Civil Rights Commission discovered that 54% of the votes in the spoilage bin were cast by African-Americans. And Florida, Heaven help us, is typical. Nationwide, the number of Black votes "disappeared" into the spoiled pile is approximately one million. The other million in the no-count pit come mainly from Hispanic, Native-American and poor white precincts, a decidedly Democratic demographic.



Ohio Republicans, simultaneously in charge of both the Bush-Cheney get-out-the-vote drive and the state's vote-counting rules, doggedly and systematically insured the spoilage pile would be as high as the White House.

Vote spoilage comes in two flavors. There are "overvotes" -- too many punches in the cards, and "undervotes." Here we find the hanging, dimpled and "pregnant" chads created by old, dysfunctional punch card machines, in which the bit of paper covering the hole doesn't fall out, but hangs on. Machines can't read these, but we humans, who know a hole when we see one, have no problem reading these cards … if allowed to. This is how Katherine Harris defeated Al Gore, by halting the hand count of the spoiled punch cards not, as is generally believed, by halting a "recount."

Whose chads are left hanging? In Florida in 2000 federal investigators determined that Black voters' ballots spoiled 900% more often than white voters, mainly due to punch card error. Ohio Republicans found those racial odds quite attractive. The state was the only one of fifty to refuse to eliminate or fix these vote-eating machines, even in the face of a lawsuit by the ACLU.

Apparently, the Ohio Republicans like what the ACLU found. The civil rights group's expert testimony concluded that Ohio's cussed insistence on forcing 73% of its electorate to use punch card machines had an "overwhelming" racial bias, voiding votes mostly in Black precincts. Blackwell doesn't disagree; and he hopes to fix the machinery … sometime after George Bush's next inauguration. In the meantime, the state's Attorney General Jim Petro, a Republican, strategically postponed the trial date of the ACLU case until after the election.

Fixing a punch card machine is cheap and easy. If Ohio simply placed a card-reading machine in each polling station, as Michigan did this year, voters could have checked to ensure their vote would tally. If not, they would have gotten another card.
Blackwell knows that. He also knows that if those reading machines had been installed, almost all the 93,000 spoiled votes, overwhelmingly Democratic, would have closed the gap on George Bush's lead of 136,000 votes.

JIM CROW'S PROVISIONAL BALLOT

Add to the spoiled ballots a second group of uncounted votes, the 'provisional' ballots, and -- voila! -- the White House would have turned Democrat blue.

But that won't happen because of the peculiar way provisional ballots are counted or, more often, not counted. Introduced by federal law in 2002, the provisional ballot was designed especially for voters of color. Proposed by the Congressional Black Caucus to save the rights of those wrongly scrubbed from voter rolls, it was, in Republican-controlled swing states, twisted into a back-of-the-bus ballot unlikely to be tallied.

Unlike the real thing, these ballots are counted only by the whimsy and rules of a state's top elections official; and in Ohio, that gives a virtually ballot veto to Bush-Cheney campaign co-chair, Blackwell.

Mr. Blackwell has a few rules to make sure a large proportion of provisional ballots won't be counted. For the first time in memory, the Secretary of State has banned counting ballots cast in the "wrong" precinct, though all neighborhoods share the same President.

Over 155,000 Ohio voters were shunted to these second-class ballots. The election-shifting bulge in provisional ballots (more than 3% of the electorate) was the direct result of the national Republican strategy that targeted African-American precincts for mass challenges on election day.

This is the first time in four decades that a political party has systematically barred -- in this case successfully -- hundreds of thousands of Black voters from access to the voting booth. While investigating for BBC Television, we obtained three dozen of the Republican Party's confidential "caging" lists, their title for spreadsheets listing names and addresses of voters they intended to block on any pretext.

We found that every single address of the thousands on these Republican hit lists was located in Black-majority precincts. You might find that nasty and racist. It may also be a crime.

Before 1965, Jim Crow laws in the Deep South did not bar Blacks from voting. Rather, the segregationist game was played by applying minor technical voting requirements only to African-Americans. That year, Congress voted to make profiling and impeding minority voters, even with a legal pretext, a criminal offence under the Voting Rights Act.

But that didn't stop the Republicans of '04. Their legally questionable mass challenge to Black voters is not some low-level dirty tricks operation of local party hacks. Emails we obtained show the lists were copied directly to the Republican National Committee's chief of research and to the director of a state campaign.

Many challenges center on changes of address. On one Republican caging list, 50 addresses changed from Jacksonville to overseas, African-American soldiers shipped Over There.

You don't have to guess the preferences registered on the provisional ballots. Republicans went on a challenging rampage, while Democrats pledged to hold to the tradition of letting voters vote.

Blackwell has said he will count all the "valid" provisional ballots. However, his rigid regulations, like the new guess-your-precinct rule, are rigged to knock out enough voters to keep Bush's skinny lead alive. Other pre-election maneuvers by Republican officials -- late and improbably large purges of voter rolls, rejection of registrations -- maximized the use of provisional ballots which will never be counted. For example, a voter wrongly tagged an ineligible "felon" voter (and there's plenty in that category, mostly African-Americans), will lose their ballot even though they are wrongly identified.


KERRY BLACKS OUT
It was heartening that, during his campaign, John Kerry broke the political omerta that seems to prohibit public mention of the color of votes not counted in America. "Don't tell us that in the strongest democracy on earth a million disenfranchised African Americans is the best we can do." The Senator promised the NAACP convention, "This November, we're going to make sure that every single vote is counted."

But this week, Kerry became the first presidential candidate in history to break a campaign promise after losing an election. The Senator waited less than 24 hours to abandon more than a quarter million Ohio voters still waiting for their provisional and chad-spoiled ballots to be counted.

While disappointing, I can understand the cold calculus against taking the fight to the end. To count the ballots, Kerry's lawyers would, first, have to demand a hand reading of the punch cards. Blackwell, armed with the Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore diktat, would undoubtedly pull a "Kate Harris" by halting or restricting a hand count. Most daunting, Kerry's team would also, as one state attorney general pointed out to me, have to litigate each and every rejected provisional ballot in court. This would entail locating up to a hundred thousand voters to testify to their right to the vote, with Blackwell challenging each with a holster full of regulations from the old Jim Crow handbook.

Given the odds and the cost to his political career, Kerry bent, not to the will of the people, but to the will to power of the Ohio Republican machine.

We have yet to total here the votes lost in missing absentee ballots, in eyebrow-raising touch screen tallies, in purges of legal voters from registries and other games played in swing states. But why dwell on these things? Our betters in the political and media elite have told us to get over it, move on.

To the victors go the spoils of electoral class war. As Ohio's politically ambitious Secretary of State brags on his own website, "Last time I checked, Katherine Harris wasn't in a soup line, she's in Congress."


NEW MEXICO GOES KERRY - BUT WHO'S COUNTING?

Why single out Ohio? So it also went in New Mexico where ballots of Hispanic voters (two-to-one Kerry supporters) spoil at a rate five times that of white voters. Add in the astounding 13,000 provisional ballots in the Enchanted State -- handed out "like candy" to Hispanic, not white, voters according to a director of the Catholic Church's get-out-the-vote drive -- and Kerry wins New Mexico. Just count up the votes … but that won't happen.



Investigative reporter Greg Palast is author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Penguin 2004).

Oliver Shykles and Matthew Pascarella of GregPalast.com contributed to this article.

View Greg Palast's BBC Television film, "Bush Family Fortunes," now available on DVD, at http://www.gregpalast.com/bff-dvd.htm

diebold flawed?... oh my... DUH !

Major bugs found in Diebold vote systems

Washington, DC, Nov. 12 (UPI) -- The voting machine controversy likely will linger after a look at the systems source code software from Ohio-based Diebold yielded reports of numerous bugs.

Diebold was one of three companies -- including Election Systems & Software and Sequoia -- that provided updated technology for the 2004 election.

Computer Science Professor Avi Rubin of John Hopkins University analyzed Diebold's 47,609 lines of code and found it uses an encryption key that was hacked in 1997 and no longer is used in secure programs.

Rubin said Diebold has said it repaired the security flaws in subsequent programs, but that the company has not produced the code for analysis.

Diebold did return a call for comment.

The Digital Encryption Standard 56-bit encryption key used can be unlocked by a key embedded in all the source code, meaning all Diebold machines would respond to the same key.

Rubin, his graduate students and a colleague from Rice University found other bugs, that the administrator's PIN code was "1111" and that one programmer had inserted, "This is just a hack for now."

The implication is that by hacking one machine you could have access to all Diebold machines.


Copyright 2004 United Press International

"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -- Russian Dictator Joseph Stalin

* LOOKS LIKE THE BUSHITES DID IT AGAIN ...EVIDENCE IS MOUNTING THAT THEY STOLE YET ANOTHER NATIONAL ELECTION RIGHT OUT FROM UNDER THE PEOPLE'S NOSES...


Kerry Won. . .
Greg Palast
November 04, 2004



Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided—known as “spoilage” in election jargon—because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Drawing on what happened in Florida and studies of elections past, Palast argues that if Ohio’s discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots. So far there's no indication that Palast's hypothesis will be tes

ted because only the provisional ballots are being counted.



Greg Palast, contributing editor to Harper's magazine, investigated the manipulation of the vote for BBC Television's Newsnight. The documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes," based on his New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has been released this month on DVD .





Kerry won. Here's the facts.

I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy,

it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.

Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.

So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know.

Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, "An Election Spoiled Rotten," November 1.]

Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.

The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called "spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49 percent, don't you believe it ... it has never happened in the United States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The television totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote.

Whose Votes Are Discarded?

And not all votes spoil equally. Most of those votes, say every official report, come from African-American and minority precincts. (To learn more, click here.)

We saw this in Florida in 2000. Exit polls showed Gore with a plurality of at least 50,000, but it didn't match the official count. That's because the official, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, excluded 179,855 spoiled votes. In Florida, as in Ohio, most of these votes lost were cast on punch cards where the hole wasn't punched through completely—leaving a 'hanging chad,'—or was punched extra times. Whose cards were discarded? Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black folks. (To read the report from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, click here .)

And here's the key: Florida is terribly typical. The majority of ballots thrown out (there will be nearly 2 million tossed out from Tuesday's election) will have been cast by African American and other minority citizens.

So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again. Because unlike last time, Democrats aren't even asking Ohio to count these cards with the not-quite-punched holes (called "undervotes" in the voting biz). Nor are they demanding we look at the "overvotes" where voter intent may be discerned.

Ohio is one of the last states in America to still use the vote-spoiling punch-card machines. And the Secretary of State of Ohio, J. Kenneth Blackwell, wrote before the election, “the possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state’s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity.”

But this week, Blackwell, a rabidly partisan Republican, has warmed up to the result of sticking with machines that have a habit of eating Democratic votes. When asked if he feared being this year's Katherine Harris, Blackwell noted that Ms. Fix-it's efforts landed her a seat in Congress.

Exactly how many votes were lost to spoilage this time? Blackwell's office, notably, won't say, though the law requires it be reported. Hmm. But we know that last time, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a democracy-damaging 1.96 percent. The machines produced their typical loss—that's 110,000 votes—overwhelmingly Democratic.

The Impact Of Challenges

First and foremost, Kerry was had by chads. But the Democrat wasn't punched out by punch cards alone. There were also the 'challenges.' That's a polite word for the Republican Party of Ohio's use of an old Ku Klux Klan technique: the attempt to block thousands of voters of color at the polls. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, the GOP laid plans for poll workers to ambush citizens under arcane laws—almost never used—allowing party-designated poll watchers to finger individual voters and demand they be denied a ballot. The Ohio courts were horrified and federal law prohibits targeting of voters where race is a factor in the challenge. But our Supreme Court was prepared to let Republicans stand in the voting booth door.

In the end, the challenges were not overwhelming, but they were there. Many apparently resulted in voters getting these funky "provisional" ballots—a kind of voting placebo—which may or may not be counted. Blackwell estimates there were 175,000; Democrats say 250,000. Pick your number. But as challenges were aimed at minorities, no one doubts these are, again, overwhelmingly Democratic. Count them up, add in the spoiled punch cards (easy to tally with the human eye in a recount), and the totals begin to match the exit polls; and, golly, you've got yourself a new president. Remember, Bush won by 136,483 votes in Ohio.

Enchanted State's Enchanted Vote

Now, on to New Mexico, where a Kerry plurality—if all votes are counted—is more obvious still. Before the election, in TomPaine.com, I wrote, "John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not one ballot has yet been counted."

How did that happen? It's the spoilage, stupid; and the provisional ballots.

CNN said George Bush took New Mexico by 11,620 votes. Again, the network total added up to that miraculous, and non-existent, '100 percent' of ballots cast.

New Mexico reported in the last race a spoilage rate of 2.68 percent, votes lost almost entirely in Hispanic, Native American and poor precincts—Democratic turf. From Tuesday's vote, assuming the same ballot-loss rate, we can expect to see 18,000 ballots in the spoilage bin.

Spoilage has a very Democratic look in New Mexico. Hispanic voters in the Enchanted State, who voted more than two to one for Kerry, are five times as likely to have their vote spoil as a white voter. Counting these uncounted votes would easily overtake the Bush 'plurality.'

Already, the election-bending effects of spoilage are popping up in the election stats, exactly where we'd expect them: in heavily Hispanic areas controlled by Republican elections officials. Chaves County, in the "Little Texas" area of New Mexico, has a 44 percent Hispanic population, plus African Americans and Native Americans, yet George Bush "won" there 68 percent to 31 percent.

I spoke with Chaves' Republican county clerk before the election, and he told me that this huge spoilage rate among Hispanics simply indicated that such people simply can't make up their minds on the choice of candidate for president. Oddly, these brown people drive across the desert to register their indecision in a voting booth.

Now, let's add in the effect on the New Mexico tally of provisional ballots.

"They were handing them out like candy," Albuquerque journalist Renee Blake reported of provisional ballots. About 20,000 were given out. Who got them?

Santiago Juarez who ran the "Faithful Citizenship" program for the Catholic Archdiocese in New Mexico, told me that "his" voters, poor Hispanics, whom he identified as solid Kerry supporters, were handed the iffy provisional ballots. Hispanics were given provisional ballots, rather than the countable kind "almost religiously," he said, at polling stations when there was the least question about a voter's identification. Some voters, Santiago said, were simply turned away.

Your Kerry Victory Party

So we can call Ohio and New Mexico for John Kerry—if we count all the votes.

But that won't happen. Despite the Democratic Party's pledge, the leadership this time gave in to racial disenfranchisement once again. Why? No doubt, the Democrats know darn well that counting all the spoiled and provisional ballots will require the cooperation of Ohio's Secretary of State, Blackwell. He will ultimately decide which spoiled and provisional ballots get tallied. Blackwell, hankering to step into Kate Harris' political pumps, is unlikely to permit anything close to a full count. Also, Democratic leadership knows darn well the media would punish the party for demanding a full count.

What now? Kerry won, so hold your victory party. But make sure the shades are down: it may be become illegal to demand a full vote count under PATRIOT Act III.

I used to write a column for the Guardian papers in London. Several friends have asked me if I will again leave the country. In light of the failure—a second time—to count all the votes, that won't be necessary. My country has left me.