It could be that the huge increase in voters in this election was because the American people like being lied to and deceived. It could be that the young vote came out to support an Administration that is sending their jobs off-shore, and sending the military to far flung

areas of the world where they are murdered almost daily by extremists.

Or it could be that the huge increase in voters was countered by an administration

who came to power by stealing the Florida election in 2000, and now has the ability

to skew electronic voting machines by hacking into the software that was left precariously

vulnerable by the manufacturers of the machines. Remember the Diebold CEO who stated

that he would do "everything in his power" to give Ohio to Bush?

The first report of one evening news show last night was on a woman in New Orleans that said she touched the Kerry box, but her machine recorded a Bush vote. But that wasn't enough. They also did the "Katherine Harris" DIRTY trick of denying democrats a ballot.....140,000 of them in Ohio. By the way, the 57,700 democrats in Florida that were denied a ballot in 2000 are still off the voting rolls and could not vote this year either. The freedom to cheat is George W's favorite freedom.

Another wonderful display of Democracy.

Another fine win Mr. President.

...for a brief yet altogether effective demonstration of what has always passed for political discourse among Bush supporters.

Since you have obviously felt free to express your innermost feelings, here, allow me to return the favor: the election was rigged. How does it feel to be a crook among crooks, and support fascism in America?

Judging by your expressed views, pretty good, I'd wager. I guess that's what being a real American is all about, right? Winning at any cost? Funny, I must have skipped over that inalienable right in the Constitution, a document that at one time actually meant something in this country.



No more, I'm afraid. Oh, well, it was a pretty good run.

Next!

"the election was rigged. "

With all due respect Mark, please enlighten us all as to how this election was rigged.

Is it even remotely possible, in your mind, that perhaps the majority of Americans simply wanted a different outcome than you?

...spare us the "all due respect" bullshit ya cunt shitpile...

Since you've obviously got an answer why don't you tell us all how exactly it was that the election was rigged.

With all due respect that is.

Holding breath, starting.....now.

You mean, in addition to paperless Diebold voting machines being used in Ohio, produced by the same company whose CEO, William O'Dell, said he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president" in 2004? The good news: Mr. O'Dell certainly appears to be a man of his word.

Or, do you mean, the beyond-believability factor of Bush losing the country's popular vote in 2000 by 500, 000 votes, raping America in the ensuing four years, yet this time around, somehow beating his opponent by 3.5 million votes -- especially when millions more folks voted, which, traditionally (meaning in the olden days when presidential elections were mostly on the up-and-up), translates into automatic gains for Democrats?

Of course, new registered voters only make a difference if their votes are actually COUNTED, which brings us to the following (pre-election) article by Greg Palast:

An Election Spoiled Rotten

TomPaine.com

Monday, November 1, 2004

E-Mail Article

Printer Friendly Version





by Greg Palast

It's not even Election Day yet, and the Kerry-Edwards campaign is already down by a almost a million votes. That's because, in important states like Ohio, Florida and New Mexico, voter names have been systematically removed from the rolls and absentee ballots have been overlooked—overwhelmingly in minority areas, like Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, where Hispanic voters have a 500 percent greater chance of their vote being "spoiled." Investigative journalist Greg Palast reports on the trashing of the election.

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 .

John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not one ballot has yet been counted. He's also losing big time in Colorado and Ohio; and he's way down in Florida, though the votes won't be totaled until Tuesday night.

Through a combination of sophisticated vote rustling—ethnic cleansing of voter rolls, absentee ballots gone AWOL, machines that "spoil" votes—John Kerry begins with a nationwide deficit that could easily exceed one million votes.



The Urge To Purge

Colorado Secretary of State Donetta Davidson just weeks ago removed several thousand voters from the state's voter rolls. She tagged felons as barred from voting. What makes this particularly noteworthy is that, unlike like Florida and a handful of other Deep South states, Colorado does not bar ex-cons from voting. Only those actually serving their sentence lose their rights.

There's no known, verified case of a Colorado convict voting illegally from the big house. Because previous purges have wiped away the rights of innocents, federal law now bars purges within 90 days of a presidential election to allow a voter to challenge their loss of civil rights.

To exempt her action from the federal rule, Secretary Davidson declared an "emergency." However, the only "emergency" in Colorado seems to be President Bush's running dead, even with John Kerry in the polls.

Why the sudden urge to purge? Davidson's chief of voting law enforcement is Drew Durham, who previously worked for the attorney general of Texas. This is what the former spokeswoman for the Lone Star state's attorney general says of Mr. Durham: He is, "unfit for public office... a man with a history of racism and ideological zealotry." Sounds just right for a purge that affects, in the majority, non-white voters.

From my own and government investigations of such purge lists, it is unlikely that this one contains many, if any, illegal voters.

But it does contain Democrats. The Dems may not like to shout about this, but studies indicate that 90-some percent of people who have served time for felonies will, after prison, vote Democratic. One suspects Colorado's Republican secretary of state knows that.



Ethnic Cleansing Of The Voter Rolls

We can't leave the topic of ethnically cleansing the voter rolls without a stop in Ohio, where a Republican secretary of state appears to be running to replace Katherine Harris.

In Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), some citizens have been caught Registering While Black. A statistical analysis of would-be voters in Southern states by the watchdog group Democracy South indicates that black voters are three times as likely as white voters to have their registration requests "returned" (i.e., subject to rejection).

And to give a boost to this whitening of the voter rolls, for the first time since the days of Jim Crow, the Republicans are planning mass challenges of voters on Election Day. The GOP's announced plan to block 35,000 voters in Ohio ran up against the wrath of federal judges; so, in Florida, what appear to be similar plans had been kept under wraps until the discovery of documents called "caging" lists. The voters on the “caging” lists, disclosed last week by BBC Television London, are, almost exclusively, residents of African-American neighborhoods.

Such racial profiling as part of a plan to block voters is, under the Voting Rights Act, illegal. Nevertheless, neither the Act nor federal judges have persuaded the party of Lincoln to join the Democratic Party in pledging not to distribute blacklists to block voters on Tuesday.



Absentee Ballots Go AWOL

It's 10pm: Do you know where your absentee ballot is? Voters wary about computer balloting are going postal: in some states, mail-in ballot requests are up 500 percent. The probability that all those votes—up to 15 million—will be counted is zip.

Those who mail in ballots are very trusting souls. Here's how your trust is used. In the August 31 primaries in Florida, Palm Beach Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore (a.k.a. Madame Butterfly Ballot) counted 37,839 absentee votes. But days before, her office told me only 29,000 ballots had been received. When this loaves-and-fishes miracle was disclosed, she was forced to recount, cutting the tally to 31,138.

Had she worked it the other way, disappearing a few thousand votes instead of adding additional ones, there would be almost no way to figure out the fix (or was it a mistake?). Mail-in voter registration forms are protected by federal law. Local government must acknowledge receiving your registration and must let you know if there's a problem (say, with signature or address) that invalidates your registration. But your mail-in vote is an unprotected crapshoot. How do you know if your ballot was received? Was it tossed behind a file cabinet—or tossed out because you did not include your middle initial? In many counties, you won't know.

And not every official is happy to have your vote. It is well-reported that Broward County, Fla., failed to send out nearly 60,000 absentee ballots. What has not been nationally reported is that Broward's elections supervisor is a Jeb Bush appointee who took the post only after the governor took the unprecedented step of removing the prior elected supervisor who happened be a Democrat.



A Million Votes In The Electoral Trash Can

"If the vote is stolen here, it will be stolen in Rio Arriba County," a New Mexico politician told me. That's a reasoned surmise: in 2000, one in 10 votes simply weren't counted—chucked out, erased, discarded. In the voting biz, the technical term for these vanishing votes is "spoilage." Citizens cast ballots, but the machines don't notice. In one Rio Arriba precinct in the last go-'round, not one single vote was cast for president—or, at least, none showed up on the machines.

Not everyone's vote spoils equally. Rio Arriba is 73 percent Hispanic. I asked nationally recognized vote statistician Dr. Philip Klinkner of Hamilton College to run a "regression" analysis of the Hispanic ballot spoilage in the Enchanted State. He calculated that a brown voter is 500 percent more likely to have their vote spoiled than a white voter. And It's worse for Native Americans. Vote spoilage is epidemic near Indian reservations.

Votes don't spoil because they're left out of the fridge. It comes down to the machines. Just as poor people get the crap schools and crap hospitals, they get the crap voting machines.

It's bad for Hispanics; but for African Americans, it's a ballot-box holocaust. An embarrassing little fact of American democracy is that, typically, two million votes are spoiled in national elections, registering no vote or invalidated. Based on studies by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and the Harvard Law School Civil Rights project, about 54 percent of those ballots are cast by African Americans. One million black votes vanished—phffft!

There's a lot of politicians in both parties that like it that way; suppression of the minority is the way they get elected. Whoever is to blame, on Tuesday, the Kerry-Edwards ticket will take the hit. In Rio Arriba, Democrats have an eight-to-one registration edge over Republicans. Among African Americanvoters...well, you can do the arithmetic yourself.

The total number of votes siphoned out of America's voting booths is so large, you won't find the issue reported in our self-glorifying news media. The one million missing black, brown and red votes spoiled, plus the hundreds of thousands flushed from voter registries, is our nation's dark secret: an apartheid democracy in which wealthy white votes almost always count, but minorities are often purged or challenged or simply not recorded. In effect, Kerry is down by a million votes before one lever is pulled, card punched or touch-screen touched.

Yeah, I heard Palast's hysterical and thoroughly undocumented sour grapes today on KPFK...sour grapes central.

Were there problems? Absolutely. Were dems found to be registering hundreds of fake names and multiple times in Ohio? Absolutely?

Was there any actual rigging or fraud? Who knows. Probably to whatever extent there was it certainly occurred on both sides and probably cancelled each other out.

As far as electronic voting goes...whine all you want into your conspiracy theory cereal.

The same machines that you're so convinced led to a nefarious Republican victory are the same ones that your hero Palast and KPFK lauded when they were used in Venezuela to stand up that fool Chavez.

Face it. You're just on the wrong side. Most people don't see things the way you do and you're beat.

Now weren't you supposed to be looking into a nice little two-bedroom in Cuba or North Korea about now?

Let's try this angle, then: It should be a snap to prove the election wasn't rigged. All that needs to be done is to tabulate the hard evidence.

Oh, whoops...

Re: "Now weren't you supposed to be looking into a nice little two-bedroom in Cuba or North Korea about now?"

Not that you care about this following observation (nor do I care that you likely don't care), but since you made the above comment, here's a little one of my own: Remarks like that are neither clever nor indicative of any innate intelligence, and only serve to undermine whatever point you may be trying to make. There's also something pretty weird about someone feeling compelled to attempt to insult someone she doesn't know and knows nothing about.

Over and out. Don't bother replying unless you simply want to spend your time showing others how witty you are.

Save us your indignation.

At the point that you come on here spouting the same tired predictable sour grape conspiracy theories with zero evidence short of, of all possible things, an article from Palast is the point that you and your intelligence are fair game.

Fact is, I never insulted your intelligence. Your capacity for beliefs in conspiracy theories that neatly fit your own biases are rather questionable but you seem fairly smart.

You simply have zero basis for your argument other than a desperate need to explain away how your passionate hatred of one man wasn't shared by the rest of us.

If you really beleive these fantasies perhaps it IS time to check out that two-bedroom.

This election was rigged? Why because that horse face Kerry didn't win? Give me a break, you are just a sore loser. You know the best man won. The smarter man won, the right man WON! FOUR MORE YEARS! I live in California and did you see how close Bush was to winning this State? There are more smart Americans in California then I had thought!

...excluding yourself, of course....