As reported yesterday exclusively by BRAD BLOG, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s exposé “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” on the gaming of the 2004 Presidential Election is now live at Rolling Stone’s website.
The online version of the article has detailed footnotes for sourcing, etc., which Rolling Stone tells us are not available in the published articles to hit stands tomorrow around the country. The issue is currently available on newsstands in both NYC and LA, according to an RS spokesman.
Here are extended excerpts from the article…
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Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush’s victory as nut cases in “tinfoil hats,” while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as “conspiracy theories,” and The New York Times declared that “there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.” But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004.
Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad never received their ballots ? or received them too late to vote ? after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations. A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states, was discovered shredding Democratic registrations. In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes, malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots. Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment ? roughly one for every 100 cast.
The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush’s victory in the Electoral College. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.
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But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I’ve become convinced that the president’s party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election.
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In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots. And that doesn’t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes ? enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.
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Indeed, the extent of the GOP’s effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers of American elections. “Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,” Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. “You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.”
Kennedy offers fresh evidence and testimony on a number of aspects long questioned concerning the 2004 election.
The Exit Polls were one of the first indicators that soemthing was amiss that night. One month later, when Exit Polling in Ukraine showed the challenger winning in their country’s election for Prime Minister, yet Final Results showed the encumbant winning, the Bush Administration cried foul, declaring the disparity between the Exits and the Finals was a prima facea indication of electoral fraud.
The same company responsible for conducting Exit Polls in Ukraine, Mitofsky/Edison, administered the most extensive Exit Polling ever in the United States on November 2nd, 2004.
A few excerpts concerning the Exit Polls from Kennedy’s article…
On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks were briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed, had an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to Bush’s 174, with fifty-five too close to call. In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry.
As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states ? including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida ? and winning by a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush’s neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina. Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.
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In its official postmortem report issued two months after the election, [Exit Polling firm] Edison/Mitofsky was unable to identify any flaw in its methodology — so the pollsters, in essence, invented one for the electorate. According to Mitofsky, Bush partisans were simply disinclined to talk to exit pollsters on November 2nd — displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that skewed the polls in Kerry’s favor by a margin of 6.5 percent nationwide.Industry peers didn’t buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation’s leading pollsters, told me that Mitofsky’s ”reluctant responder” hypothesis is ”preposterous.”
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Now, thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky’s own data by Freeman and a team of eight researchers, we can say conclusively that [Mitofsky/Edison’s] theory is dead wrong. In fact it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were more disinclined to answer pollsters’ questions on Election Day.
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What’s more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent ? a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.“When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that supports the supposition of election fraud,” concludes Freeman. “The discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in states where there were the most Election Day complaints. All these are strong indicators of fraud ? and yet this supposition has been utterly ignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party.”
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The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered “27,” in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.
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According to Ron Baiman, vice president of the archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago, “No rigorous statistical explanation” can explain the “completely nonrandom” disparities that almost uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he adds, are “completely consistent with election fraud ? specifically vote shifting.”
On the illegal “caging lists” targeting Democratic voters through use of registered mail by GOP operatives to “prove” voters were illegally registered. When they weren’t…
A New York Times analysis before the election found that new registrations in traditional Democratic strongholds were up 250 percent, compared to only twenty-five percent in Republican-leaning counties. “The Democrats have been beating the pants off us in the air and on the ground,” a GOP county official in Columbus confessed to The Washington Times.
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[D]uring the summer of 2004, the GOP targeted minority voters in Ohio by zip code, sending registered letters to more than 200,000 newly registered voters in sixty-five counties. On October 22nd, a mere eleven days before the election, Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett ? who also chairs the board of elections in Cuyahoga County ? sought to invalidate the registrations of 35,427 voters who had refused to sign for the letters or whose mail came back as undeliverable. Almost half of the challenged voters were from Democratic strongholds in and around Cleveland.There were plenty of valid reasons that voters had failed to respond to the mailings: The list included people who couldn’t sign for the letters because they were serving in the U.S. military, college students whose school and home addresses differed, and more than 1,000 homeless people who had no permanent mailing address. But the undeliverable mail, Bennett claimed, proved the new registrations were fraudulent.
By law, each voter was supposed to receive a hearing before being stricken from the rolls. Instead, in the week before the election, kangaroo courts were rapidly set up across the state at Blackwell’s direction that would inevitably disenfranchise thousands of voters at a time ? a process that one Democratic election official in Toledo likened to an “inquisition.” Not that anyone was given a chance to actually show up and defend their right to vote: Notices to challenged voters were not only sent out impossibly late in the process, they were mailed to the very addresses that the Republicans contended were faulty.
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On October 27th, ruling that the effort likely violated both the “constitutional right to due process and constitutional right to vote,” U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott put a halt to the GOP challenge ? but not before tens of thousands of new voters received notices claiming they were improperly registered.
On Ohio Sec. of State (and Bush/Cheney ’04 co-chair) J. Kenneth Blackwell’s illegal order — disenfranchising perhaps scores of thousands of voters, or more — requiring voter registration forms be accepted only on “eighty-pound unwaxed white paper stock.” As many as “72,000 voters were disenfranchised through avoidable registration errors ? one percent of all voters in an election decided by barely two percent.” …
Justifying his decision to Rolling Stone, Blackwell portrayed it as an attempt to protect voters: “The postal service had recommended to us that we establish a heavy enough paper-weight standard that we not disenfranchise voters by having their registration form damaged by postal equipment.” Yet Blackwell’s order also applied to registrations delivered in person to election offices.
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Blackwell’s directive clearly violated the Voting Rights Act, which stipulates that no one may be denied the right to vote because of a registration error that “is not material in determining whether such individual is qualified under state law to vote.” The decision immediately threw registration efforts into chaos. Local newspapers that had printed registration forms in their pages saw their efforts invalidated. Delaware County posted a notice online saying it could no longer accept its own registration forms. Even Blackwell couldn’t follow the protocol: The Columbus Dispatch reported that his own staff distributed registration forms on lighter-weight paper that was illegal under his rule. Under the threat of court action, Blackwell ultimately revoked his order on September 28th ? six days before the registration deadline.But by then, the damage was done.
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State inspectors who investigated the elections operation in Toledo discovered “areas of grave concern.” With less than a month to go before the election, Bernadette Noe [wife of Thomas Noe, former head of the Toledo GOP who yesterday pled guilty to three counts of funnelling $45,000 illegal contributions to Bush/Cheney ’04] and her board had yet to process 20,000 voter registration cards. Board officials arbitrarily decided that mail-in cards (mostly from the Republican suburbs) would be processed first, while registrations dropped off at the board’s office (the fruit of intensive Democratic registration drives in the city) would be processed last.
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In April 2005, Noe and the entire Board of Elections were forced to resign. But once again, the damage was done. At a “Victory 2004” rally held in Toledo four days before the election, President Bush himself singled out a pair of “grass-roots” activists for special praise: “I want to thank my friends Bernadette Noe and Tom Noe for their leadership in Lucas County.”
On Blackwell’s illegal gaming and denial of provisional ballots to eligible voters…
In Ohio, Blackwell worked from the beginning to curtail the availability of provisional ballots. (The ballots are most often used to protect voters in heavily Democratic urban areas who move often, creating more opportunities for data-entry errors by election boards.) Six weeks before the vote, Blackwell illegally decreed that poll workers should make on-the-spot judgments as to whether or not a voter lived in the precinct, and provide provisional ballots only to those deemed eligible. When the ruling was challenged in federal court, Judge James Carr could barely contain his anger. The very purpose of the Help America Vote Act, he ruled, was to make provisional ballots available to voters told by precinct workers that they were ineligible: “By not even mentioning this group ? the primary beneficiaries of HAVA’s provisional-voting provisions ? Blackwell apparently seeks to accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in 2000.”
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But instead of complying with the judge’s order to expand provisional balloting, Blackwell insisted that Carr was usurping his power as secretary of state and made a speech in which he compared himself to Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and the apostle Paul ? saying that he’d rather go to jail than follow federal law. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Carr’s ruling on October 23rd ? but the confusion over the issue still caused untold numbers of voters across the state to be illegally turned away at the polls on Election Day without being offered provisional ballots. A federal judge also invalidated a decree by Blackwell that denied provisional ballots to absentee voters who were never sent their ballots in the mail. But that ruling did not come down until after 3 p.m. on the day of the election, and likely failed to filter down to the precinct level at all.
On Blackwell’s gaming of the placement of voting machines, disenfranching thousands in only pinpointed Democratic-leaning locations…
At liberal Kenyon College, where students had registered in record numbers, local election officials provided only two voting machines to handle the anticipated surge of up to 1,300 voters. Meanwhile, fundamentalist students at nearby Mount Vernon Nazarene University had one machine for 100 voters and faced no lines at all.
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An analysis by voter advocates found that all but three of the thirty wards with the best voter-to-machine ratios were in Bush strongholds; all but one of the seven with the worst ratios were in Kerry country.
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The result was utterly predictable. According to an investigation by the Columbus Free Press, white Republican suburbanites, blessed with a surplus of machines, averaged waits of only twenty-two minutes; black urban Democrats averaged three hours and fifteen minutes.
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By midmorning, when it became clear that voters were dropping out of line rather than braving the wait, precincts appealed for the right to distribute paper ballots to speed the process. Blackwell denied the request, saying it was an invitation to fraud.
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[From on of many hand-written affidavits included in the article, this one from] Precinct 40:
“I am serving as a presiding judge, a position I have held for some 15+ years in precinct 40. In all my years of service, the lines are by far the longest I have seen, with some waiting as long as four to five hours. I expect the situation to only worsen as the early evening heavy turnout approaches. I have requested additional machines since 6:40 a.m. and no assistance has been offered.”
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As day stretched into evening, U.S. District Judge Algernon Marbley issued a temporary restraining order requiring that voters be offered paper ballots. But it was too late: According to bipartisan estimates published in The Washington Post, as many as 15,000 voters in Columbus had already given up and gone home.
On the Faulty Voting Machines…
In heavily Democratic areas around Youngstown, where nearly 100 voters reported entering “Kerry” on the touch screen and watching “Bush” light up, at least twenty machines had to be recalibrated in the middle of the voting process for chronically flipping Kerry votes to Bush. (Similar “vote hopping” from Kerry to Bush was reported by voters and election officials in other states.) Elsewhere, voters complained in sworn affidavits that they touched Kerry’s name on the screen and it lit up, but that the light had gone out by the time they finished their ballot; the Kerry vote faded away.
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In fact, some 95,000 ballots in Ohio recorded no vote for president at all ? most of them on punch-card machines. Even accounting for the tiny fraction of voters in each election who decide not to cast votes for president ? generally in the range of half a percent, according to Ohio State law professor and respected elections scholar Dan Tokaji ? that would mean that at least 66,000 votes were invalidated by faulty voting equipment. If counted by hand instead of by automated tabulator, the vast majority of these votes would have been discernable. But thanks to a corrupt recount process, only one county hand-counted its ballots.
On out and out fraud…
[T]he worst theft in Ohio may have quietly taken place in rural counties. An examination of election data suggests widespread fraud ? and even good old-fashioned stuffing of ballot boxes ? in twelve sparsely populated counties scattered across southern and western Ohio: Auglaize, Brown, Butler, Clermont, Darke, Highland, Mercer, Miami, Putnam, Shelby, Van Wert and Warren. (See “The Twelve Suspect Counties,” Page 56.) One key indicator of fraud is to look at counties where the presidential vote departs radically from other races on the ballot. By this measure, John Kerry’s numbers were suspiciously low in each of the twelve counties ? and George Bush’s were unusually high.Take the case of Ellen Connally, a Democrat who lost her race for chief justice of the state Supreme Court. When the ballots were counted, Kerry should have drawn far more votes than Connally ? a liberal black judge who supports gay rights and campaigned on a shoestring budget. And that’s exactly what happened statewide: Kerry tallied 667,000 more votes for president than Connally did for chief justice, outpolling her by a margin of thirty-two percent. Yet in these twelve off-the-radar counties, Connally somehow managed to outperform the best-funded Democrat in history, thumping Kerry by a grand total of 19,621 votes ? a margin of ten percent. The Conyers report ? recognizing that thousands of rural Bush voters were unlikely to have backed a gay-friendly black judge roundly rejected in Democratic precincts ? suggests that “thousands of votes for Senator Kerry were lost.”
Kucinich, a veteran of elections in the state, puts it even more bluntly. “Down-ticket candidates shouldn’t outperform presidential candidates like that,” he says. “That just doesn’t happen. The question is: Where did the votes for Kerry go?”
[Ed note: The Clermont County ballot stickers report was originally reported by Larisa Alexandrovna of RAW STORY.]
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The…likely explanation is that they were fraudulently shifted to Bush. Statewide, the president outpolled Thomas Moyer, the Republican judge who defeated Connally, by twenty-one percent. Yet in the twelve questionable counties, Bush’s margin over Moyer was fifty percent ? a strong indication that the president’s certified vote total was inflated. If Kerry had maintained his statewide margin over Connally in the twelve suspect counties, as he almost assuredly would have done in a clean election, he would have bested her by 81,260 ballots. That’s a swing of 162,520 votes from Kerry to Bush ? more than enough to alter the outcome.
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How might this fraud have been carried out? One way to steal votes is to tamper with individual ballots ? and there is evidence that Republicans did just that. In Clermont County, where optical scanners were used to tabulate votes, sworn affidavits by election observers given to the House Judiciary Committee describe ballots on which marks for Kerry were covered up with white stickers, while marks for Bush were filled in to replace them. Rep. Conyers, in a letter to the FBI, described the testimony as “strong evidence of vote tampering if not outright fraud.” In Miami County, where Connally outpaced Kerry, one precinct registered a turnout of 98.55 percent ? meaning that all but ten eligible voters went to the polls on Election Day. An investigation by the Columbus Free Press, however, collected affidavits from twenty-five people who swear they didn’t vote.In addition to altering individual ballots, evidence suggests that Republicans tampered with the software used to tabulate votes. In Auglaize County, where Kerry lost not only to Connally but to two other defeated Democratic judicial candidates, voters cast their ballots on touch-screen machines. Two weeks before the election, an employee of ES&S, the company that manufactures the machines, was observed by a local election official making an unauthorized log-in to the central computer used to compile election results. In Miami County, after 100 percent of precincts had already reported their official results, an additional 18,615 votes were inexplicably added to the final tally. The last-minute alteration awarded 12,000 of the votes to Bush, boosting his margin of victory in the county by nearly 6,000.
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Warren County from devising a way to count the vote in secret. Immediately after the polls closed on Election Day, GOP officials ? citing the FBI ? declared that the county was facing a terrorist threat that ranked ten on a scale of one to ten. The county administration building was hastily locked down, allowing election officials to tabulate the results without any reporters present.In fact, there was no terrorist threat. The FBI declared that it had issued no such warning, and an investigation by The Cincinnati Enquirer unearthed e-mails showing that the Republican plan to declare a terrorist alert had been in the works for eight days prior to the election. Officials had even refined the plot down to the language they used on signs notifying the public of a lockdown. (When Rolling Stone requested copies of the same e-mails from the county, officials responded that the documents have been destroyed.)
The late-night secrecy in Warren County recalls a classic trick: Results are held back until it’s determined how many votes the favored candidate needs to win, and the totals are then adjusted accordingly. When Warren County finally announced its official results ? one of the last counties in the state to do so ? the results departed wildly from statewide patterns. John Kerry received 2,426 fewer votes for president than Ellen Connally, the poorly funded black judge, did for chief justice.
On the gaming of the Ohio recount…
[E]lection officials in Ohio worked outside the law to avoid hand recounts. According to charges brought by a special prosecutor in April, election officials in Cleveland fraudulently and secretly pre-counted precincts by hand to identify ones that would match the machine count. They then used these pre-screened precincts to select the “random” sample of three percent used for the recount.“If it didn’t balance, they excluded those precincts,” said the prosecutor, Kevin Baxter, who has filed felony indictments against three election workers in Cleveland. “They screwed with the process and increased the probability, if not the certainty, that there would not be a full, countywide hand count.”
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[On admissions that employees from voting machine company, Triad, who provided tabulators for more than half of Ohio’s counties — made adjustments to the tabulators prior to the recount to avoid a full hand-count of all ballots…] Company president Tod Rapp ? who contributed to Bush’s campaign ? has confirmed that Triad routinely makes such tabulator adjustments to help election officials avoid hand recounts. In the end, every county serviced by Triad failed to conduct full recounts by hand.Even more troubling, in at least two counties, Fulton and Henry, Triad was able to connect to tabulating computers remotely via a dial-up connection, and reprogram them to recount only the presidential ballots. If that kind of remote tabulator modification is possible for the purposes of the recount, it’s no great leap to wonder if such modifications might have helped skew the original vote count. But the window for settling such questions is closing rapidly: On November 2nd of this year, on the second anniversary of the election, state officials will be permitted under Ohio law to shred all ballots from the 2004 election.
HIS DADDY’S SON!!!!!!!
This makes me cry with pride.
Hot Damn!
To the newstands!
Tomorrow!
Today in NY and LA!
Buy ’em up, spread ’em round! Let Rolling Stone hear us in sales! That’ll get corporate America’s short-term-profits attention!
Let’s Roll!
shw
Jann Wenner too! Buy ’em up faster’n they can print ’em and paper the nation with them!
LET’S ROLL!!!
Memorial Day For Trolls
I remember when I quoted from Freeman, and the trolls said I was quoting from a democrat. The article says:
"Puzzled by the discrepancies, Freeman laboriously examined the raw polling data released by Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. ”I’m not even political — I despise the Democrats,” he says. ”I’m a survey expert. I got into this because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have been so wrong.” In his forthcoming book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman lays out a statistical analysis of the polls that is deeply troubling" (see Rolling Stone articl).
Trolls, this scientist thinks with his brain, despises democrats, and concludes that election fraud is the most likely reason for the exit poll discrepancies.
I know trolls will not understand this because they do not have a clue about intellectual honesty.
They think intellectual honesty is when a redneck fundamentalist preacher puts down an intellectual.
One of the urban myths is that those who did the exit polls, which predicted a Kerry win, considered whether or not the official tally was wrong.
That is pure myth:
"Inaccurate Election Results
Edison/Mitofsky did not even consider this hypothesis, and thus made no effort to contradict it. Some of Edison/Mitofsky’s exit poll data may be construed as affirmative evidence for inaccurate election results. We conclude that the hypothesis that the voters’ intent was not accurately recorded or counted cannot be ruled out and needs further investigation" (link here, bold added).
Mitofsky considered the discrepancy to be because republicans were more shy than democrats, and therefore did not talk to the exit pollsters.
Mitofsky never even considered the possibility of election fraud.
That is why it should be investigated. It never has. Why investigate? Because:
"Exit polling is a well-developed science, informed by half a century of experience and continually improving methodology" (ibid, bold added).
We need to explain why the science that has been used in elections around the world for 5 or so decades, and continually improved, and always reliable, predicted a Kerry win.
But Ohio where the head of the republican election scenario was also the secretary of state, governing elections and recounts, was a disaster contrary to science, and clothed with conflict of interest.
I remember working the polls that afternoon and then listening to the buzz early evening – all indications were, as Bobby K says, that it would be a big victory for Kerry. The repubs not in the loop were all downcast. I heard that Karen Hughes even told Dubya it looked very bad.
The, presto! Somehow Dubya inexplicably "won".
It was stolen, but the media wouldn’t touch the story and mainstream dems wouldn’t either, which is really shameful.
Al Franken still won’t talk about it.
Hopefully Bobby K’s article will snowball till the truth come out and is acknowledged. It’s about time.
It’s the same old stuff. There’s nothing new here. It is full of misstatements and outright lies, in addition to misrepresentations.
Just one example:
"Instead of welcoming the avalanche of citizen involvement sparked by the campaign, Blackwell permitted election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive purge of their voter rolls, summarily expunging the names of more than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous two national elections.(55)"
Yes, indeed. This not only ALLOWED but REQUIRED by the NVRA (National Voter Registration Act). Any voter on Inactive status through two federal elections MUST BE PURGED! The Department of Justice is suing Missouri counties for NOT DOING THIS. They tried to sue the state, but the federal courts ruled they have to go after the counties.
More points —
Go to the Rolling Stone site and read the whole piece. Everything from footnotes 66 through 74 is presented as some sort of scandal. It is all according to the exact way the statutes are written. It’s no scandal. It is the NVRA, right to the letter.
Kurt #7
You missed the point of law. Due Process. The 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution.
The kangaroo court is nothing new in Ohio. They are fairness challenged there still, and took the rights of citizens away without due process of law.
Nice try at convenient memory, but the article points out that:
"On October 29th, a federal judge found that the Republican Party had violated the court orders from the Eighties that barred it from caging. ”The return of mail does not implicate fraud,” the court affirmed" (Rolling Stone article).
Hey I know honesty is just a word that the republican dictatorship throws around during the campaign, but for the rest of us, it is required, and we shall require their departure for their criminality.
SO THE ESSENCE AND ONLY PROOF IN THE WHOLE ARTICLE IS THAT “THE EXIT POLLS WERE RIGHT DAMMIT” AND ANYBODY THAT SAYS THE EXIT POLLS WERE WRONG IS A LIAR AND WORKING FOR BUSH.
BY THE WAY, HOW IS BOBBY KENNEDY’S PRIVATE JET DOING? I GUESS HE IS SO AWESOMELY MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE REST OF US THAT HE NEEDS ALL THAT FUEL TO ZIP AROUND IN UNLIKE THE REST OF US PEONS.
JUST ONE QUESTION: WHY DOES BOBBY KENNEDY ALWAYS SOUND SO DAMN NERVOUS WHEN HE TALKS………..LIKE HE IS A 24/7 LIAR KNOWING HE IS GETTING CAUGHT………AGAIN.
SO THE GIST OF HIS WHOLE ARTICLE IS ONCE AGAIN NOTHING MORE THAN “THE DAMN EXIT POLLS WERE RIGHT AND WE KNOW THEY WERE RIGHT SO THE ELECTION WAS STOLEN!”
WHERE IS THE PROOF? WHERE ARE THE ACCOMPLICES? WHY WON’T REACH MAN KERRY OFFER A TWO MILLION DOLLAR REWARD FOR THE PROOF?
“A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent.”
I would think a 98% turnout at the precinct level would be much easier to achieve than an over 100% turnout at the national level. Despite the fact that over 100% of surviving Bush 2000 voters were credited with returning to vote in 2004 by the national level midnight exit poll, I was told by the MSM that there was Bush supporter non-response bias in that exit poll. I guess you learn something new every day.
DREDD,
"”The return of mail does not implicate fraud,” the court affirmed" (Rolling Stone article)."
Fine. But the NVRA specifically allows (does NOT require) local jurisdictions to CANCEL any new voter registration from which mail is returned as undeliverable. At a minimum, the regisitration MUST be marked as INACTIVE, and start the two federal election clock ticking for purging. Most jurisdictions did the INACTIVE route, but they are within their statutorial rights to CANCEL them outright. Now if there was a specific court order restricting that, well that’s another story.
These cancellations occurred all over the country. If a new voter registration card is returned as undeliverable, the voter is notified to the best of the jurisdiction’s ability, but the registration is allowed to be CANCELLED.
#10: I guess you’re the evil twin…
Brad, thanks so much for getting this out there.
Reading through the article, I’ve seen almost every point here on your blog. You have been on the mark continuously.
And I am so thankful to Rolling Stone and Bobby Kennedy for bringing this to the forefront of a collective consciousness once again.
It is frightful to think that the evidence will be destroyed on November 2nd this year. Can’t this country wake up just long enough to get a real and thorough investigation started before it’s too late?
To Comment #10’s poster:
Perhaps you need a lesson in exit polling – those of us who actually work on voting rights might be able to teach you a little something!
And by the way, this is not, I repeat NOT, a partisan issue or sour grapes. Ensuring a free and fair election benefits everyone, regardless of your party affiliation. I’m sure you want to be confident your ballot is properly counted – as it should be no matter who you vote for!
DREDD,
Mr. Bob Lee, Voter Registration Chief in Philadelphia County, PA, and a Democrat’s Democrat, has said that a strict reading of the NVRA and PA Act 3, its PA law equivalent, actually DOES require new registrations with returned ID cards to be purged, but he won’t do it because as he puts it, "I’m more willing to answer a federal judge’s questions about why I let a potentially ineligible voter vote than why I prevented an eligible one from voting."
Just read the whole thing. Fucking hey!!!
Thank goodness for Robert Kennedy & the courage & patriotism it took for a Kennedy to come out like this with the truth.
History has shown it was risky business when previous Kennedys spoke truth in Washington, thanks to the dirty GOP.
I only hope this will spark interest in a national forum on the subject of gross misconduct & dishonesty by the GOP with Blackwell as poster boy.
So what would happen if were proven beyond a doubt that Bush rigged the election and shouldn’t be president?
Then what?
Doe he get booted from office? Do we have to replace Roberts and Alito too?
#10 Evil Twin — RFK Jr’s voice sounds that way because he suffers from spasmodic dysphonia, "a neurological voice disorder that involves involuntary ‘spasms’ of the vocal cords", according to the National Spasmodic Dysphonia Association. (proud of yourself now? do you always ridicule people with disabilities?)
and yet RFK Jr. has the guts to stand up in front of the world and speak the truth, knowing that he will be mercilessly ridiculed and mocked by small-minded bigots like yourself for his vocal condition. i wonder if you would demonstrate the same personal courage, given the same situation.
apparently you don’t suffer from the same vigorous intellect — no one who has actually studied the mountain of supporting evidence still unfolding could possibly boil it all down to ‘the exit polls were wrong’. the unprecedented exit poll discrepancies were merely the tip-off that an investigation into election fraud should have occurred immediately — much like in the Ukraine in ’04, where, i’m sure you recall, BushoCo fought the results because the exit polls didn’t match the election results. what hypocrites.
for your own sake, please go educate yourself!
btw, we can all ‘hear’ you just fine. no need to scream your comments (such as they are), in all caps.
Power to RFK, Jr., Brad, All the good bloggers, statisticians, etc. who have worked so freaking tirelessly on this for years! It brings back very painful memories of the day after, "Who ARE all those people!" rolling through the majority of minds.
And Blackwell is still around!? Remember also when Brad reported that Blackwell sent out a fundraising letter on illegal stationary?
Keep the heat on!! No stone unturned…
#18
I was wondering the same thing.
I would want to be sure my vote has been counted in future elections for sure, but what effect would it have on the present? You cannot rewind history. If Bush were a decent leader it probably wouldn’t bother me so much, but because he is such a terrible president, what would be the end result? You can’t bring all the people back to life that have died on this nitwits watch. You can’t take back the damage he has done to our great nation and our respect in the world, or the horrors that he has perpetrated in our name. If this is true I am all for giving him the boot, but how would we fix everything or even anything this idiot has broken?
COMMENT #18 [link]
"…Blomi said on 6/1/2006 @ 2:11pm PT…
So what would happen if were proven beyond a doubt that Bush rigged the election and shouldn’t be president?
Then what?
Doe he get booted from office? Do we have to replace Roberts and Alito too?"
Yeah… like back when we were kids… ‘do overs’ LOL
If the conspiracy to rig the vote could be better substantiated there ought to be measures to saction the whole damn GOP. Hell, I don’t care what stripe you are… If you particpate in ellection rigging in THIS democracy you don’t deserve the right to vote in a free election.
How’s about a manditory 4 year vacation to some tin-pot dictatorship for the lot of em ;>)
DES, #19, I’m sure the evil twin could give a rat’s ass what the truth is, and is just wind surfing to every opposition site to pass wind loudly.
Thank goodness these dirt-brained psychos have the internet upon which to vent their spleen, or we might have them knifing people in the streets.
Kurt #12
v. Kurt Bellman #15
The pecking order in law is:
1) US Constitution
2) Federal Law
3) State Law
4) County Law
5) Municipal Law
The Big Dog (#1) has a 14th Amendment, which requires the states, when administering elections, to remember due process of law. To the extent a voter has a right to vote, it cannot be removed without due process of law.
Sending a letter to someone who does not pick it up is not evidence they do not want to vote in the next election, it only indicates they are not picking up mail at the moment.
To take such an important right away from someone, you have to at least meet the requirements of service of original process. The method you described does not do that.
To comply with due process, if that person does show up to vote, the voter must be allowed to vote then and there.
You election officials who focus on local statute tend not to remember the US Constitution. It is the big dog.
These guys did this not to win 2 elections, they did this to PERMANENTLY CHANGE this country. Until this is known and understood by the masses of Americans, we are headed down a very dark and ugly path.
‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’ I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell – ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!… You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: [screaming at the top of his lungs] "I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"
COMMENT #21 [link]
…Jo-Joy said on 6/1/2006 @ 2:31pm PT…
… You can’t bring all the people back to life that have died on this nitwits watch. You can’t take back the damage he has done to our great nation and our respect in the world, or the horrors that he has perpetrated in our name. If this is true I am all for giving him the boot, but how would we fix everything or even anything this idiot has broken? "
You are correct… giving him the boot doesn’t undo the damage… BUT lots could be done internally within this country. We could start by fixing what the current administration has done to the constitution. All that’s required is political will & public pressure. Currently we’re all too damn apathetic we’ve appear to lack the will to protest…
Seems like protesting is one of those jobs Americans are unwilling to do… its left up to illegal aliens. ::wry smile::
Brad,
I too was convinced back in 2004 that the vote was rigged. I have read your blog ever since. Almost alone you fought to get the truth out. America owes you a tremendous debt of gratitude. Thanks too to RFK for running with it and giving you the credit you deserve. You are a Hero!
They stole the last two elections, are imperialist warmongers and war criminals. Education and infrastructure of America going down.
They killed the Kennedys who have been compared by some to the Gracchi brothers of Rome.
Thanks RFKjr for all of your good work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracchi
Just finished reading Kennedy’s whole, beautifully synthesized article via Raw Story’s link. As I commented to RollingStone.com via their feedback comment box:
W.O.W….
I am NOT worthy, Robert Kennedy, Jr…
Your article is SIMPLY SUPERB.
Tightly and powerfully written – covering all the most important facts in detail, yet clear as a bell.
Well-chosen quotes, copious footnotes. This article quite simply should shake the foundations of the establishment in Washington, D.C. to its core. Would Bobby Kennedy ever be proud of his son today. Ted Kennedy ought to be busting his seams with pride. OUTstanding overview and recap of the voting situation in our country today. SOMEONE has finally stepped up to fill the leadership vacuum in this country, and how…
Every investigative journalist in America should start TODAY to follow-up on this profound opening summary. RFK, Jr. just blazed the trail for all of you – and he’s "safe" to follow because he’s a celebrity from a famous, wealthy political family, so your corporate overlords can’t complain anymore, can they?
Every state in the union, and every maker of electronic/computerized voting machinery and software is RIPE for the picking. Go GET THEM, journalists: Better late than never.
Brad unquestionably rocks. I fell hard for him the first time I read him on HuffPo. Way up on hero scale, and I don’t think history will omit that.
DREDD,
I agree wholeheartedly with your hierarchy, but election officials don’t get to say, "You know what? I think this federal statute called NVRA violates the 14th Amendment, so I’m not going to follow the specifically worded federal law."
In the real world, bureaucrats must follow specifically worded statutes, regardless of what we may personally think about their constitutionality. There’s about four or five things I was required by law to do when I was a county E.D. that struck me as unconstitutional, but I had to follow the statutes until ordered otherwise. Only the Supreme Court gets to declare specific federal statutes unconstitutional.
Maybe you read about it. It was called Marbury v. Madison. It was in all the papers.
Here’s the citation:
Marbury v. Madison 5 US 137 (1803).
DREDD, don’t misunderstand me. I agree with your basic point. Where we depart company is on where a bureaucrat can decide what to do.
Thank You Robert Kennedy Jr. for the absolute best treatment of this most important issue in print!
For the best treatment to date on the radio listen to yesterdays Democracy Now!
Democracy Now segment
DREDD,
I’ll even go you one better. There is a section of PA election law regarding restrictions on content of political ads in the last week of an election campaign. The section was declared unconstitutional back in the 1980’s some time, but it still sits there in Purdon’s Title 25 in every new edition. Yes, there is a TINY LITTLE footnote in "Notes on Decisions" below it that mentions that the law was ruled unconstitutional, but you’d be surprised (or maybe you wouldn’t) how often that unconstitutional law gets cited, used, and even relitigated.
Every damned election, some poor county schmuck E.D. got burned by enforcing that stupid unconstitutional statute on some equally poor candidate schmuck.
I find it absolutely amazing that we, as a country, have allowed big government to overtake us little by little. We no longer hold our representatives accountable for their actions. We have allowed them to pass laws that are self serving (serve one term and you retain your salary for life, in addition to taxpayer paid health insurance). They ignore disenfranchizement of thousands of people. We allowed them to take us to war so huge corporations can profit. They send millions in humanitarian aide to foreign countries while letting our own suffer. They allow millions of undocumented people into this country then blame us because they take jobs that "Americans" won’t do? Election fraud is just the tip of corruption that is encased in our federal government and not one damned soul is doing anything about it! There is no such thing as "one honest man" anymore. This blog is an interesting read and assuming everything stated is 100% correct….what is going to be done about it….nothing. The corruption has roots running deeper than a giant redwood.
Kennedy is getting on Brad’s bandwagon a little late.
But, it’s better late than never.
Go Brad!
Amazingly, or not, this story is getting no coverage in the mainstream press.
What should RFK do to make sure this story gets the coverage it deserves?
Take the poll!
He’d have to buy some of the "liberal" press from the "conservatives" who own all of it. 😉
Excellent article. It clearly explains the issues.
Bravo Mr. Kennedy!
JP #25 –
How terrifyingly right you are.
But this article is a huge step towards our finding the way out of this deadly maze. Thank you from our hearts, Bobby K…and blessings upon "Rolling Stone" magazine! If enough of us are determined enough that America will not die, we can save her – and the planet along with her. If not…
Heres to Rolling Stone for sticking to it even without the great and suspiciously dead Hunter S. Thompson who was writing about the demolition of the world trade center and the white house paedophelia ring. http://www.thelawparty.org/Fran...ngtonTimes.htm (the gun he used had bullets in the cartridge but none in the chamber meaning it either malfunctioned or was not used in the way the police report described, + other inconsistencies). http://www.prisonplanet.com/arc...son/index.html
I just thought Id mention this since thompson was writing for the Rolling Stone and I was concerned that his death would affect the magazine’s ‘honesty’ stance.
The media heads especially Murdoch cannot hide behind any excuse of ‘we didnt really know, it wasnt obvious’ because they have systematically and purposefully aimed to descredit, derail and ridicule any evidence that points to this insipid and systemic betrayal by the government and corporatocracy of the billions of people in the US and the world. This indicates they know exactly what they are doing and are doing it purposefully because they know what really happened and they support it. This means their squatting in positions they dont deserve, no matter how they got there.
{Ed note: Comment deleted. Advocating violence is inappropriate and stupid and not tolerated here. Please knock it off. Thanks!}
Dredd wrote
"Mitofsky never even considered the possibility of election fraud" and he’s right of course. And Mitofsky’s sure not alone.
You know, it’s interesting: rightees accuse us of "believing" these "conspiracy theories", and from the very beginning have been saying "there’s no proof". I know I’ve said this a zillion times but normally proof is found after an investigation, not before. Seems kinda obvious.
Efforts to get out the truth are derided as "sour grapes" "bush-hating", "America-hating" and the like, all completely beside what is obviously the point, which is
"What actually happened? Was it deliberate fraud? Who did what, when, where & how?", all routine questions which, to any right-thinking person, would normally ensue when confronted with hundreds of complaints, irregularities, anomalies, allegations, mathematical impossibilities, affidavits, hours of sworn testimony and a slew of experts waving reports & shouting "Hey! Something’s goin’ on here, folks! And it smells like the crime of the century directly affecting the very foundations of democracy!"
You guys who come here & tell us how stupid & wrong we are, don’t you find it at all ODD that all of the above, all of which HAPPENED, is not front-page news AT ALL? EVER?
This is YOUR country, too. Whatever they’re paying you, is it enough?
Assuming that at least SOME bush-loyalists are honest, ordinary people who love America & care about its future, it seems curious that the one question they never seem to ask themselves is
"What if we’re wrong?"
That’s what I’d like them to consider. WHAT IF?
WHAT IF Bush is really NOT a good Christian man but a liar & a pretender, hiding behind the faith that alot of good people actually hold dear, take seriously & try to live by?
WHAT IF he really did gain the presidency through fraudulent means?
WHAT IF it turns out that the NSA spy program, supposedly so necessary to track terrorists & protect the country, is really being used to keep track of political opponents, spy on ordinary Americans, and gather dirt on both for illegal purposes such as blackmail?
Would it matter? Would you be comfortable with America being that sort of country?
Didn’t we send our kids to fight the "enemy" because that’s what THEY do?
All I’m asking you to do, in all seriousness, is find a quiet place, sit down, and think about it.
41
That’s pretty damn nasty, cap’t nasty, & really inconsiderate towards Brad. It might even put him in jeopardy, it being a goddamn threat. Pretty stupid of you.
A squad of black-clad leftists is on the way to your house to superglue your fingers to your keyboard, you moron.
#25
Somehow I think we may be past the point where shouting "I’m not gonna take this anymore" out our windows will accomplish anything other than having a few squad cars pull into our driveways.
Joan, Right on to all of your points in all of your posts.
V. Kurt Bellman #31, #33
I know that local police are trained in not only local law, but federal law. Such as Miranda v Arizona, and since election officials have fewer laws to administer than local police do, it would seem that election officials could handle knowing what law applies.
Federal constitutional law does apply in local elections and in national elections. It always has.
The 14th Amendment applies due process to the states, the other parts of the constitution apply to federal law officers applying federal law. All officials who apply law, whether federal or state, must comply with due process.
A bureaucrat, as you call it, should know what law applies to any endeavor that bureaucrat is doing. Otherwise that bureaucrat is personally liable (42 USC 1983) and can have to pay damages from his or her own pocket.
Policemen, judges, city council members, and every other type of state official are taken to court and found liable and have to pay serious damages and costs.
Happens every day sir.
Thank you, Laura.
I just read your comment about not running for office because you inhaled. C’mon! If politicians let that stop them we wouldn’t have many politicians. Like Brad said, telling the truth is what matters. Along with, I would add, having a thick skin to repel the inevitable barbs from rightees!
Dredd,
Thanks for bein’ smart.
For those of you who have been trying to spin this as being nothing new, nothing to see here, same old banality of evil, keep this in mind. Charles McGee, one of the Republican Party honchos convicted of conspiracy after masterminding an Election Day 2002 plan to jam Democratic get-out-the-vote phone lines, is opening his own campaign school. http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12981183/ That’s right, he is going to teach young Repubs "all the tools you need to win." Let us not forget either that the RNC has spent a million or so on defending James Tobin, one of McGee’s partners in crime. He too was convicted. This illustrates the point that dirty tricks and illegality are Standard Operating Procedure for Republicans these days.
I heard Al Franken talk about voter fraud but I don’t listen regularly. Susan Sarandon asked RRhodes on air to make voter fraud an issue. Randi just shook it off. Wouldn’t commit. What’s up with that? She will openly talk about 9/11 being an inside job. Don’t listen to Air America too often now so I may be wrong.
#40 I am too depressed now to even look up that about Hunter. I remember staring at the news for 15 min’s the day I read it. It didn’t make sense, I thought. I think I’ll wander off and contemplate building that fallout shelter again.
I want to know if John Kerry has read this article, and if somehow he is still denying the fact that he won the election. I am so angry at John Kerry because he needed to declare himself the winner and he still needs to. Our votes matter. It is so hard to come to grips with living in a nation that is not even attempting to be anything close to a democracy.
I’m sure John Kerry has seen the article. I’m sure he knew about it while it was being written, because RFK’s uncle Teddy would have told him. I’m sure Mark Crispin Miller told Kerry about it when they met at the book signing, the one where Kerry agreed with Miller that he’d been screwed in the election, then denied the next day (through his aide, not directly) that he’d agreed.
Look at it this way. If RFK’s article leads to the 2004 election’s being widely recognized as a fraud, this is bad for Kerry in two ways: 1) People will ask, "Why did you ever concede a stolen election?" and, 2) "This means Al Gore was cheated, too, therefore Gore and not Kerry should be president." In other words, Kerry’s chances for 2008 require that people NOT REALIZE THE 2004 ELECTION WAS STOLEN. Kerry understands this, and 2008, not 2004, is what Kerry thinks about, night and day.
I sincerly hope kerry does not run. 2008 needs to be about the issues & there will be enough disinformation & distraction flying around without his running muddying the waters further.
Sorry to keep repeating myself but kerry’s credibility is a shriveled raisin.
Gore, on the other hand, keeps saying he’s not planning to run; I hope he changes his mind. He is stronger by far than hillary in alot of ways.
I’d love to vote for a woman, but not her.
Please run, Al. Please run, Al.
TREASON.
Hang these dirty traitors on the steps of the capitol building as a reminder to the quislings and their fellow travellers. It is EXACTLY what the forefathers would have done…
I am disgusted by these pigs.
Considering the main source of the expertise underpinning current democratization efforts it will be interesting to see what kind of electoral process Iraq ends up with. I’m sure it will be a model for despots everywhere. Pre-determined outcomes tarted up with a patina of free choice.