What John Kerry definitely said about 2004�s stolen election and why it's killing American democracy
By Bob
Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
Online Journal Guest Writers
Nov 10, 2005, 21:35
The net is abuzz about what John Kerry may or may not be
saying now about the stolen election of 2004.
But we can definitively report what he has said about New
Mexico and electronic voting machines soon after his abrupt "abandon
ship" with 250,000 Ohio votes still uncounted.
And we must also report that what he's not saying is having
a catastrophic effect on what's left of American democracy, including what has
just happened (again) in Ohio 2005.
In recent days Mark Crispin Miller has reported that he
heard from Kerry personally that Kerry believes the 2004 election was stolen.
The dialog has been widely reported on the Internet. Kerry has since seemed to
deny it.
We have every reason to believe Miller. His recent book, Fooled
Again, has been making headlines along with our own How the GOP stole America's
2004 election & is rigging 2008.
As in his campaign for president, Kerry has been ambivalent
and inconsistent about Ohio's stolen vote count. Soon after the presidential
election, Kerry was involved in a conference call with Rev. Jesse Jackson and a
number of attorneys, including co-author Bob Fitrakis. In the course of the
conversation, Kerry said "You know, wherever they used those [e-voting]
machines, I lost, regardless if the precinct was Democratic or
Republican."
Kerry was referring to New Mexico. But he might just as well
have been talking about Ohio, where the election was decided, as well as about
Iowa and Nevada. All four of those "purple" states switched from
Democratic "blue" in the exit polls as late as 12:20 a.m. to Republican "red" a few
hours later, giving Bush the White House.
A scant few hours after that, Kerry left tens of thousands
of volunteers and millions of voters hanging. With Bush apparently leading by
some 130,000 votes in Ohio, but with a quarter-million votes still uncounted
here, Kerry abruptly conceded. He was then heard from primarily through
attorneys from Republican law firms attacking grassroots election protection
activists who dared question the Ohio outcome.
In the year since that abrupt surrender, Theresa Heinz Kerry
has made insinuations that she thought the election might have been stolen. But
there has been no follow-up.
Now we have this report from M. C. Miller that Kerry said he
knew the election was stolen, and then denied saying it. Coming from Kerry, the
inconsistency would be entirely consistent.
But those committed to democracy and horrified by the
on-going carnage of the Bush catastrophe still have no credible explanation as
to why Kerry abandoned ship so abruptly. He had raised many millions
specifically dedicated to "counting every vote," which clearly never
happened in Ohio. More than a year after the election, more than 100,000 votes
are still uncounted in the Buckeye state.
And now, tragically, we have had another set of stolen
elections. Four statewide referenda aimed at reforming Ohio's electoral process
have been defeated in a manner that is (again) totally inconsistent with
polling data, One statewide referendum, aimed at handing the corrupt Taft
Administration a $2 billion windfall, has allegedly passed, again in a manner
totally inconsistent with polling data, or even a rudimentary assessment of
Ohio politics.
We will write more about this tomorrow. But suffice it to
say these latest "official" vote counts make sense only in the
context of a powerful recent report issued by the Government Accounting Office
confirming that electronic voting machines, like those used in Ohio, can be
easily hacked by a very few players to deliver a vote count totally at odds
with the will of the electorate.
We have seen it in the presidential elections of 2000 and
2004, in at least three Senatorial races in 2002, and now in the referenda in
Ohio 2005, and possibly elsewhere.
How could this have happened?
By and large, the nation is in denial, including much of the
left.
Miller recently debated Mark Hertsgaard over a Mother Jones
review of both our books. The idea that the 2004 election could have been
stolen has also been attacked by others on the left.
Some reporters have briefly visited here or made calls from
the coasts and then taken as gospel anything that mainstream Democratic
regulars utter, even if it�s totally implausible and counter-factual.
For example, they would have you believe that, in direct
contradiction to how elections have gone in Ohio for decades, it�s now routine
for boards of elections to record that 100 percent of the precincts are
reporting, and then suddenly add 18,615 more votes at 1:43 a.m. after the polls have been closed
since 7:30 p.m. and 100 percent of
the precincts had been reporting since approximately 9 p.m.
Or that 18,615 Miami County votes could come in late with an
impossibly consistent 33.92 percent for Kerry, as if somebody had pushed a
button on a computer with a preset percentage -- just as the GAO says it can be
done.
Or that it's okay for a Democratic county election official,
with a lucrative contract from the Republican-controlled Board of Elections
(BOE), to admit he doesn't really know whether the vote count had been
doctored.
Or it's fine for BOE officials to take election data home to
report on from their personal PCs. Or for central tabulators to run on
corporate-owned proprietary software with no public access. Or for BOE
officials to hold up vote counts late into the night that time and again
miraculously provide sufficient margins for GOP victories, as with Paul
Hackett's recent failed congressional race in southwestern Ohio.
Or for one precinct to claim a 97.55 percent turnout when a
Free Press/Pacifica canvass quickly found far too many people who didn't vote
to make that possible.
There is clearly no end to this story, and there is no
indication the dialog on the net will diminish, even though the mainstream
media -- like the mainstream Democratic Party -- absolutely refuses to touch
this issue.
But ultimately, whatever John Kerry or the bloviators or
even the left press say about these stolen elections, America is very close to
crossing the line that permanently defines the loss of our democracy.
As we will show tomorrow, this week's theft of five
referendum issues in Ohio is yet another tragic by-product of the unwillingness
of John Kerry and so many others to stand up for a fair and reliable electoral
process in this country.
Bob
Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S
2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available at www.freepress.org, and, with Steve
Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO, to be published this spring by The New
Press.
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