http://www.commonwonders.com/archives/col290.htm
The 2004 election was stolen will someone please tell
the media?
14 Apr 2005
By ROBERT C. KOEHLER
Tribune Media Services
As they slowly hack democracy to death, we're as alone we
citizens as we've ever been, protected only by the dust-covered clichιs of
the nation's founding: "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
It's time to blow off the dust and start paying the price.
The media are not on our side. The politicians are not on
our side. It's just us, connecting the dots, fitting the fragments together,
crunching the numbers, wanting to know why there were so many irregularities in
the last election and why these glitches and dirty tricks and wacko numbers had
not just an anti-Kerry but a racist tinge. This is not about partisan politics.
It's more like: "Oh no, this can't be true."
I just got back from what was officially called the National
Election Reform Conference, in Nashville, Tenn., an extraordinary pulling
together of disparate voting-rights activists 30 states were represented, 15
red and 15 blue sponsored by a Nashville group called Gathering To Save Our
Democracy. It had the feel of 1775: citizen patriots taking matters into their
own hands to reclaim the republic. This was the level of its urgency.
Was the election of 2004 stolen? Thus is the question framed
by those who don't want to know the answer. Anyone who says yes is immediately
a conspiracy nut, and the listener's eyeballs roll. So let's not ask that
question.
Let's simply ask why the lines were so long and the voting
machines so few in Columbus and Cleveland and inner-city and college precincts
across the country, especially in the swing states, causing an estimated
one-third of the voters in these precincts to drop out of line without casting
a ballot; why so many otherwise Democratic ballots, thousands and thousands in
Ohio alone, but by no means only in Ohio, recorded no vote for president (as
though people with no opinion on the presidential race waited in line for three
or six or eight hours out of a fervor to have their say in the race for county
commissioner); and why virtually every voter complaint about electronic voting
machine malfunction indicated an unauthorized vote switch from Kerry to Bush.
This, mind you, is just for starters. We might also ask why
so many Ph.D.-level mathematicians and computer programmers and other
numbers-savvy scientists are saying that the numbers don't make sense (see, for
instance, www.northnet.org/minstrel, the Web site of Dr. Richard Hayes
Phillips, lead statistician in the Moss v. Bush lawsuit challenging the Ohio
election results). Indeed, the movement to investigate the 2004 election is led
by such people, because the numbers are screaming at them that something is
wrong.
And we might, no, we must, ask with more seriousness than
the media have asked about those exit polls, which in years past were
extraordinarily accurate but last November went haywire, predicting Kerry by
roughly the margin by which he ultimately lost to Bush. This swing is out of
the realm of random chance, forcing chagrined pollsters to hypothesize a
"shy Republican" factor as the explanation; and the media have bought
this evidence-free absurdity because it spares them the need to think about the
F-word: fraud.
And the numbers are still haywire. A few days ago, Terry
Neal wrote in the Washington Post about Bush's inexplicably low approval rating
in the latest Gallup poll, 45 percent, vs. a 49 percent disapproval rating.
This is, by a huge margin, the worst rating at this point in a president's
second term ever recorded by Gallup, dating back to Truman.
"What's wrong with this picture?" asks exit
polling expert Jonathan Simon, who pointed these latest numbers out to me. Bush
mustered low approval ratings immediately before the election, surged on
Election Day, then saw his ratings plunge immediately afterward. Yet Big Media
has no curiosity about this anomaly.
Simon, who spoke at the Nashville conference one of dozens
of speakers to give highly detailed testimony on evidence of fraud and dirty
tricks from sea to shining sea said, "When the autopsy of our democracy
is performed, it is my belief that media silence will be given as the primary
cause of death."
In contrast to the deathly silence of the media is the
silent scream of the numbers. The more you ponder these numbers, and all the
accompanying data, the louder that scream grows. Did the people's choice get
thwarted? Were thousands disenfranchised by chaos in the precincts, spurious
challenges and uncounted provisional ballots? Were millions disenfranchised by
electronic voting fraud on insecure, easily hacked computers? And who is
authorized to act if this is so? Who is authorized to care?
No one, apparently, except average Americans, who want to be
able to trust the voting process again, and who want their country back.
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