On March 8, 1994, scarcely a year into Bill Clinton�s first term, The New York Times reporter, Jeff Gerth, �broke� the infamous �Whitewater� story, claiming that the Clintons were involved in some sort of cryptic land investment scandal. The story was fed to Gerth by �The Arkansas Project,� a right-wing hit squad whose sole purpose was to �get� Clinton by publicizing groundless accusations. The New York Times, �the newspaper of record,� was somehow persuaded that this news was �fit to print.�

The so-called �Whitewater scandal� dogged Clinton throughout his presidency, as scarcely a week went by without the corporate media �reporting� some allegedly �new� developments in the case.

Six and a half years and some $70 million taxpayers� dollars later, Whitewater Special Prosecutor Ken Starr told the House Judiciary Committee that he lacked the evidence to continue his investigation. During those six plus years, the Washington Post published over 2,000 articles about �Whitewater� (Media Matters, Nexis search), but neglected to give prominent space to Starr�s virtual exoneration of the Clintons.

Now compare this extended media frenzy over what turned out to be a non-story, with another story which, if true, strikes at the very heart of our democracy. This is the substantial and unrebutted evidence that the past two presidential elections, along with the intervening congressional elections, were stolen and that, by implication, the United States has, for the past six years, been ruled by an illegitimate government.

Just last month, astonishing new evidence came forth that in 2004 millions of Kerry votes were �switched� to Bush, and millions more �graveyard votes� were added to Bush�s total. Mainstream media coverage? Nada! Instead the source is the New Zealand website, Scoop, and subsequently other progressive websites. I will return to this remarkable report later in this essay.

As noted, the mainstream media have been virtually silent about the issue of election fraud. The Democratic Party, the principle victim of the fraud (apart, that is, from the American voters), won�t touch the issue, as prominent Democratic politicians proclaim that their party lost these elections �fair and square.� Instead, the issue has been kept alive through the Internet and the independent and self-financed efforts of a few determined individuals and citizen-based organizations.

Their efforts have not been in vain. Last September, a Zogby poll reported that less than half of the American public was �very confident,� and about a third �not at all confident,� that George Bush won the 2004 election �fair and square.� Since then, still more evidence has accumulated validating these suspicions, most recently the US attorneys scandal and Greg Palast�s purloined e-mails revealing a coordinated GOP campaign to �purge� voting rolls of Democratic voters.

Congress now has bills before it that address the issue of electoral integrity, albeit half-heartedly. In fact, many election reform advocates claim that �the Holt Bill� now before the House (HR 811) will, if anything, make the situation worse.

The paperless electronic voting devices (�direct recording electronic,� or DRE), used to cast 39 percent of the votes in the 2006 election mocks the sanctity of the franchise. The undisputed facts make this mockery clear:

• The owners and managers of the leading DRE manufacturers, Dieblold, ES&S and Sequoia, are all rock-ribbed, right-wing Republicans. One of these executives has been convicted and has served time for computer fraud.
  
  
• The �source codes� -- the software that processes the votes, and thus can alter the outcomes -- is �proprietary� (i.e., secret). DRE companies will not operate in states such as North Carolina that require disclosure and examination of the source codes.
  
  
• There is no independent method of auditing the totals reported on DRE machines. �Recounts� are nothing more than exact repetitions of the original tabulations.
  
  
• DRE manufacturers will not allow independent experts to test the reliability of the machines. However, �purloined� DRE machines have been demonstrated to be highly vulnerable to hacking, leaving no evidence of the tampering.

Bottom line: There is simply no way to directly validate the fairness and accuracy of the DREs. To the citizens' demand for proof of accuracy, the only possible answer by the Republican manufacturers and programmers is �trust us.� However, indirect evidence, namely polling, indicates that in many crucial contests, the DRE election returns have, in fact, been rigged in favor of the GOP.

The statistical, circumstantial and anecdotal evidence add up to a compelling case that in every national election of the new century, some election fraud has frustrated the will of the American voters. Thus we have suffered through two illegitimate administrations. Even in 2006, when the Democrats took control of Congress, there is good reason to believe that several contests were rigged. However, this time the collective will of the voters was too strong to be overcome by the "fixers."

Such bold assertions require evidence and an argument. Fortunately, because I have offered both in abundance in numerous essays, I need not repeat them here. (See �Why We Must Not �Get Over It,�� �Has the Case for Election Fraud been Refuted?,� �In 2006, Election Fraud is the Keystone Issue,� and �Debunking the Debunker�).

About that new evidence

On June 13, the New Zealand based website, Scoop, published Michael Collins� �Election 2004: The Urban Legend.� In that election, 11 million more votes were cast than in the 2000 election. Of these additional votes, 8 million were for Bush, and 3 million were for Kerry.

By comparing the 2000 and 2004 totals from five distinct geographical regions -- rural, small towns, suburbs, medium cities, and big cities -- Collins has discovered that Bush�s support in the rural areas was unchanged, that he lost support in the small towns, and remained essentially even in the suburbs. These regions were the locations of most of Bush�s �base,� and this net decline indicated a landslide loss in the election.

How, then, did Bush win? We are expected to believe that he did so through an astonishing and totally inexplicable �surge� of support in the medium and large cities. In those big cities, Bush's support increased from 26 percent of the vote in 2000, to 39 percent in 2004, and from 2.3 million votes in 2000, to 5.4 million in 2004 -- an increase of 153 percent. This �surge� of Bush-support encompassed urban whites, blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities, whose enthusiasm for Bush was utterly inconspicuous and unanticipated in the pre-election polling. So great was this enthusiasm, that the vote totals, in many urban precincts, exceeded the voter registration. In addition, there were apparently more than a few posthumous votes as well.

This �urban surge� took place, despite the fact that Bush and Cheney did relatively little campaigning in the cities, and that the Bush-Cheney issues (�gays, guns and God�) failed, by and large, to excite the interest of urban voters.

With tongue firmly in cheek, Collins concludes:

Accepting this strange event requires accepting that an election without any precedent occurred. The Democrats have seen retreats in urban turnout and vote share but these have never been accompanied by retreats in the Republican base area. The two phenomena just don�t happen in the same election. Democrats increased their votes in a diminished rural voting block, significantly improved performance in the small towns, and held close in the suburbs. They were taking three out of every five new voters around the country -- but then we are expected to believe that they lost the election in the big cities after taking a similar beating in the smaller cities. This combination of events has never happened before in American history. It is unprecedented . . . and unbelievable.

If these numbers are genuinely unbelievable, as they most assuredly are, we are left with only one possible explanation: wholesale ballot-shifting and ballot box stuffing. In a word: the election was stolen.

Read Collin's article, where you will encounter the numbers, the supporting argument, and extensive documentation. But don�t expect to find any of this it in the mainstream media.

The accumulated evidence that the 2000 and 2004 elections were stolen is, I submit, more than adequate to convince an impartial jury -- �proof beyond reasonable doubt.�

Yet the thieves are secure in their purloined offices. How is this possible?

The silence of the media and the paralysis of the Democrats goes a long way toward explaining this. Even so, the secret is �out,� as Zogby tells us that more than half of the population smells a rat.

I once believed that when this crime against our body politic was exposed, as with Nixon and the �smoking gun� tapes, the House of Bush would surely fall and that the GOP would be relegated to minority status for a full generation. What I did not count on was the possibility that the crime would be unpunished despite exposure. Yet that is what has happened.

As Senator Dole used to ask, �Where�s the outrage?�

One theory is that both the Democrats and the Republicans, along with the mainstream media, have agreed to a vow of silence, lest public knowledge of the crime destroy our �democratic� form of government.

What this excuse fails to acknowledge is that the fraud has accomplished just that: it has abolished our democracy. The government of the United States no longer �derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.�

The task before us is not simply to preserve our democracy, it is to restore our democracy. The founders of our republic articulated the remedy: �whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of [life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.�

The first step toward that end is for the citizens to acknowledge the crime against the people and their Constitution, and then to demand impeachment, conviction and punishment of the criminals.

Not long ago, such an outcome seemed impossible, as it still does to most members of Congress. But with the decline of Bush�s approval ratings and the growing irrelevance of the mainstream media, the demand and the feasibility of impeachment grows.

The congressional hearings will continue to disclose the crimes of the Bush regime, the economy will continue to decline, shrinking the middle class, the national debt will continue to grow, the dead and wounded will continue to return home from the Bush and Cheney wars, the international community of nations will continue to isolate and shun the United States.

We simply can�t go on like this. Something�s gotta give.

My greatest fear is of what the desperate Busheviks might attempt in order to avoid their day of reckoning.

Better we the people act, than be acted upon.

Copyright � 2007 Ernest Partridge