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Nov. 11, 2004
Kerry Won; The Election Was Stolen
By Tony Brasunas
There is evidence that massive outright fraud occurred on November 2 in dozens of states, including in the swing states of Ohio, Missouri, Florida, and Pennsylvania. Warren Mitofsky, co-director of the National Election Pool, told Terence Smith on the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour that NEP, which managed national exit polling across the country for ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and the AP, polled 130,000 people in 49 states (all states but Oregon, for some reason) during the course of the day. The polls, Mitofsky said, showed Kerry up 51-48% nation-wide, and winning in all swing states except West Virginia.
While exit polling is occasionally attacked in the mainstream media, it is historically the most accurate polling conducted. First of all, it includes huge numbers of voters. A normal poll appearing in, say, USA Today or the New York Times, will have polled merely 900 or so people. Yet such a poll will claim to represent the whole country. 130,000 people, on the other hand, is obviously a much more reliable number of voters to have asked. Also, exit polling is not asking 'probable voters,' or 'registered voters,' or 'likely voters.' Only people who just actually cast a ballot are asked. No one has time to get sick or get called into work or decide not to go to the polls. Thus, exit polling is historically an extremely accurate science.
If exit polling does have any historic trend, it's that it typically slightly favors Republicans early in the day. This is because, demographically, Democratic voters are more likely to be city dwellers who work during the day. Democrats tend to vote in the evening. So early numbers often skew slightly Republican.
So when Nov. 2 rolled around, and the exit polling numbers from around the nation were showing Kerry winning, and taking most if not all of the swing states, it is understandable that there were celebrations in the Democratic camp. They knew they were going to win.
But then they didn't. Numbers that didn't add up, added up. People who thought they hadn't voted for Bush, had.
The oddest thing is that in safe states, the exit polling generally remained as accurate as it's always been. But in swing states, exit polling repeatedly apparently failed to call the right winner when that winner was Bush. Award-winning investigative reporter Greg Palast writes, "Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. At 1:05 a.m. Wednesday morning, CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53-47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51-49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state."
But Palast goes on to report how the exit polls have since been combined with – and therefore contaminated by – the tabulated results, ultimately becoming a mirror of the apparent actual vote.
DO THE MATH
There's obviously much, much more to this story. Articles are appearing daily all over the Internet, and, slowly but surely, in the mainstream media as well.
One persuasive way to think about all the numbers is to do some simple math with the voter turnout. I give you Mark Crispin Miller, a media critic, author, and professor of communications at New York University.
This election was definitely rigged. I have no doubt about it. It's a statistical impossibility that Bush got 8 million more votes than he got last time. In 2000, he got 15 million votes from right-wing Christians, and there are approximately 19 million of them in the country. They were eager to get the other 4 million. That was pretty much Karl Rove's strategy to get Bush elected.
But given Bush's low popularity ratings and the enormous number of new voters -- who skewed Democratic -- there is no way in the world that Bush got 8 million more votes this time. I think it had a lot to do with the electronic voting machines. Those machines are completely untrustworthy, and that's why the Republicans use them. Then there's the fact that the immediate claim of Ohio was not contested by the news media -- when Andrew Card came out and claimed the state, not only were the votes in Ohio not counted, they weren't even all cast.
I would have to hear a much stronger argument for the authenticity, or I should say the veracity, of this popular vote for Bush before I'm willing to believe it. If someone can prove to me that it happened, that Bush somehow pulled 8 million magic votes out of a hat, OK, I'll accept it. I'm an independent, not a Democrat, and I'm not living in denial.
And that's not even talking about Florida, which is about as Democratic a state as Guatemala used to be. The news media is obliged to make the Republicans account for all these votes, and account for the way they were counted. Simply to embrace this result as definitive is irrational. But there is every reason to question it ... I find it beyond belief that the press in this formerly democratic country would not have made the integrity of the electoral system a front page, top-of-the-line story for the last three years. I worked and worked and worked to get that story into the media, and no one touched it until your guy did.
I actually got invited to a Kerry fundraiser so I could talk to him about it. I raised the issue directly with him and with Teresa. Teresa was really indignant and really concerned, but Kerry just looked down at me -- he's about 9 feet tall -- and I could tell it just didn't register. It set off all his conspiracy-theory alarms and he just wasn't listening.
Talk to anyone from a real democracy -- from Canada or any European country or India. They are staggered to discover that 80 percent of our touch-screen electronic voting machines have no paper trail and are manufactured by companies owned by Bush Republicans.
It's simply hard to find where Bush's 8 million new votes came from. 90% of 2000 Bush voters voted for Bush, and 90% of 2000 Gore voters voted for Kerry. So that was a wash, or slightly favored Kerry (Gore won the 2000 popular vote). Kerry's 3 million new votes are easily accounted for – 2000 Nader votes and the massive voter registration drives over the past 6 months. There was little evidence of a voter registration drive among Republicans; indeed, it's unusual for people to become passionate to go out and register to vote to support an incumbent. So where did Bush's 8 million new votes come from? Is it a sum of fraudulent votes from swing states he actually lost?
I'll leave you with the comments of Wally O'Dell, CEO of Diebold, the private corporation that manufactures, tests, and runs Ohio's voting machines. In a letter to his fellow fundraisers for Bush, O'Dell penned, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president."
Please Read More
Documented Election Fraud in One Florida County
Berkeley graduate students personally experience election fraud...
A Brief History of Computerized Election Fraud in America
By Victoria Collier
BlackBoxVoting.Org
Home of a great organization investigating electronic voting fraud and now undertaking the largest Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in history, asking for the computer logs from over 3,000 voting machines around the country...
indyvoter.org
Another great resource on this issue...
Exhaustive CNN voting statistics for the 2004 Election
Tony Brasunas (tony@garlicandgrass.org) is publisher of Garlic & Grass.
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