We’ve all heard the ’04 Ohio nightmares about voters punching the button for Kerry only to see the screen light up for that smirking incompetent who should have lost that year. (Think you’re pretty smart voting for that latte drinking wind-surfer, don’t you? Well, try outsmarting this machine.) Other voters got no choice at all in the presidential race; the screen refused to offer that race. (You live in a district that went 95 percent for Gore, so we don’t want to even know what you think.) Still others voted for Kerry and watched the light by his name fade out. (So sorry. We don’t feel like accepting that opinion. Move along now.) That last sort of problem occurred on 20-30 machines–all day long. Yet oddly enough there were NO undervotes in the precincts where voters signed affidavits describing their inability to vote in the presidential race.
How can you be not missing any votes for president when voters swear they didn’t get a say in that race? It happens when all blank presidential votes get counted for Bush.
And that’s just the shenanigans where DREs had been hacked. Lots of people didn’t even get a chance to be screwed by the e-voting machines. In Franklin County (Columbus), 122 machines were never delivered to the poorer precincts at all. Sixty-six of them were left in the warehouse, and another 54 were driven around town in trucks all day.
I listened to Richard Hayes Phillips speak Sunday morning at the St. Peters Ethical Society about those and all the other dirty tricks Republicans used to steal Ohio and the presidency. With twelve days left to election, his message is timely.
Phillips is not just some conspiracy nut who can be lightly dismissed. He has a couple of different Master’s degrees (in geography and history) and a Ph.D. in geomorphology. He has been called as an expert witness in state and federal proceedings, twice as a geologist and twice as an election fraud investigator. John Conyers relied on Phillips’ three year investigation of the debacle in Ohio, as did Robert Kennedy in the article he wrote about it for Rolling Stone magazine and as did Justice Algernon Marbley in issuing his federal court order protecting the ballots from destruction.
Average citizens also reacted as soon as Phillips published a paper on his findings. Within weeks, he had received letters from 71 Florida voters–in Broward and Miami-Dade counties–asserting that they had had the same experiences.
The one person who was unimpressed was the Chief Justice in Ohio, Republican Thomas J. Moyer. In Ohio, the Chief Justice gets to decide, all by his lonesome, which election challenges get a hearing and which don’t. And Phillips with his mounds of evidence … got zip. Consider the obvious conflict of interest. Not only was Moyers a Republican, but he was also up for election. Denying that hearing was bald and bold, but it was the only viable route when the evidence of fraud was so substantial.
The media were helpful … and not. When Phillips first became aware of some of the anomalies that obviously needed investigating, it was Bob Fitrakis, editor of the Columbus Free Press. who encouraged him to commit himself to the project. Fitrakis told Phillips about the DREs that were kept from delivery in the poorer districts, so that the lines were four hours long. Fitrakis warned him, too, that Phillips was taking on an incredibly complex task because the means of cheating differed in every county.
The Columbus Dispatch, on the other hand, pooh poohed Phillips’ findings. When he calculated that the failure to deliver those 122 DREs had cost Kerry–based on the results from the machines that were delivered–about 17,000 votes, the Dispatch implied that he was foolish. The reason? The missing machines probably only cost Kerry 15,000 votes, by their estimates. Oh well. That’s different, then.
My next posting will sum up two other major types of chicanery Republicans used to steal Ohio in ’04. Touch-screen machines were just the tip of the iceberg.
I heard Richard Philips at Ethical Society SL and had also heard an earlier report at Columbus,OH voting integrity conference ~6/06 (on lack of integrity & vote manipulations that the OH Republicans had been doing for over a decade). The Alliance for Democracy helped fund the still ongoing lawsuit on vote fraud in the 2004 Bush-Kerry election & gave some aide to Philips’ team of ballot analysts at OH boards of elections.
Philips actually physically compared ballots and vote register books with the official vote counts at the precinct level to prove vote manipulation, planned computer vote tabulation software counting errors and old-fashioned ballot stuffing. He shows purges of voter rolls in heavily Democratic urban precincts eliminated hundreds of thousands of likely Kerry votes in areas carried by Gore in 2000. This republican voter surging and caging is still going on in many states this year.
If the errors were random, they should have resulted in roughly equal Republican & Democrat favoring vote errors. But their analysis showed almost all given Bush extra votes. Vote manipulation is shown by comparison of Bush/Kerry totals against that for a OH supreme court judge. Punch card ballot manipulation is shown with PREPUNCHED presidential votes for third party candidates that caused high non counted overvotes, optical scan ballots are shown remarked with Kerry votes covered with a white sticker. Ballot were stuffed with hundreds on Bush votes in a row added just before official final vote tabulation. They compared precinct & county results with normal vote patterns and these unusual vote results to prove that these there manipulations by voting officials not voter errors. These errors were pre-planned so they didn’t show up in selected precincts where 3% of votes were recounted in a Green & Libertians parties lawsuit. Much of the miscounting was done by machines tabulating the ballots at county board or state offices, machines programmed by private companies controlled by the OH sec. of state. Thus many county election board officials never knew their machines were rigged and cooperated with Philips’s team with access to vote records while some tried to prevent them from physically examining ballots.
Philips analysis concludes that ~ 300,000 presidential ballots and 200,000 provisional ballots were never counted because of this fraudulent tabulation and decisions made by then Sec. of State & Bush OH campaign chairman Ken Blackwell resulting in a net loss of ~200,000 votes for Kerry. This gave Ohio’s electoral votes & thus the election to Bush. This data is carefully studied and explained in the “Witness to a Crime” book, which also includes a CD of pictures of altered vote records.
Philips believes that cheating is never going to stop if there is motive, means & opportunity, and no penalty. The coverup in trying to get the official count to match up with their vote manipulation enabled his small but diligent group to uncover the crime. He states that “it is ultimately for the governed to guard their democracy from their leaders”. He believes that only openly hand counted at the polling place paper ballots can stop vote fraud.
Buy the book, http://www.witnesstoacrime.com , ISBN: 978-0-97898722-3-5. The book sales help pay for Philips national speaking tour and reimburse him for several years of unpaid work so carefully analyzing the Ohio election.
Submitted by Rick LaMonica, chair of St. Louis Alliance for Democracy chapter
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