Reuters photo
U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer of California (center) and U.S. Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio discuss their filing of a formal objection to the certification of the presidential election results from Ohio today in Washington, D.C., shortly before a joint session of Congress to certify the November presidential election results. The certification of the presidential election results is usually a rubber-stamping without discussion or debate, but "the objection entered by Tubbs Jones and Boxer forced the Senate and House to retire to their separate chambers to debate the [election] irregularities cited in the objection," notes Reuters.
Boxer has big balls;
worthy of label 'Democrat'
If you are a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives or a Democratic U.S. senator and you are not Sen. Barbara Boxer or one of the 31 Democratic representatives who opposed today's rubber-stamping of the deeply flawed Ohio presidential vote, fucking shame on you. (If you are a Republican senator or representative, I already know that you have no fucking shame.)
I am proud to be represented by Boxer, who has bigger balls than any other Democrat in the U.S. Senate, including John Kerry, who, like my other U.S. senator, the fairly worthless Joe-Liebermanesque, Democrat-in-name-only Dianne Feinstein, is deeply reluctant to do anything that might be the least bit politically risky.
With "friends" like these looking out for our interests, who the fuck needs Republicans?
Today Boxer was the first U.S. senator in more than 125 years who voiced opposition to the rubber-stamp certification of the presidential election results during a joint session of Congress to once again coronate George W. Bush under circumstances that are suspicious at best.
If you saw "Fahrenheit 9/11," you should recall the footage, early in the film, of hapless U.S. representatives who couldn't get a single U.S. senator to join them in their early-2001 challenge of the 2000 presidential election results, despite the deeply flawed election in Florida, the state that "won" the White House for George W. Bush. ("In the much more rancorous aftermath of the 2000 race ... no senators stepped up to lodge an objection," Reuters notes, adding, "Boxer said she had refrained from objecting then at [Vice President Al] Gore's request, but had since come to regret her silence.")
Let me refresh your memory of Florida 2000: George W. Bush's brother, Jeb Bush, was (and remains) the governor of Florida; Florida's Republican secretary of state and top elections official, Katherine Harris, had sat on the Florida state committee to elect George W. Bush while she presided over Florida's presidential election process; and ultimately, in a 5-4 decision, the five members of the U.S. Supreme Court who were appointed by Republican presidents selected George W. Bush to sit in the Oval Office.
Ohio 2004 has at least one feature in common with Florida 2000: Ohio's Republican secretary of state and top elections official, Kenneth Blackwell -- who has been aptly nicknamed "Kenneth Harris" -- sat on the Ohio state committee to "re"-elect Bush while he presided over Ohio's presidential election process. While there was no U.S. Supreme Court intervention in Ohio 2004 and while a Bush isn't the governor of Ohio (yet), in Ohio 2004 there were electronic touch-screen voting machines manufactured and maintained by Republican Party-supporting corporations like Diebold Inc. -- voting machines that issued no paper receipts and so voters had to take it on blind faith that their votes were being accurately and permanently recorded -- and Blackwell made sure that in rich (i.e., Republican) voting precincts there were plenty of voting machines so that Republican voters could get in and get out quickly, while in poorer (i.e., Democratic) precincts, mostly Democratic voters were not supplied with enough voting machines so that they had to wait hours in line in inclement weather to vote -- if they were willing to do so.
Is this what we can expect every four years? That the Republicans will come up with new and interesting ways to commit election fraud and that most Democrats will roll over and play dead?
Speaking of rolling over and playing dead, the most I've heard out of post-election Kerry is that he will, as a U.S. senator, fight to ensure that future presidential elections are fair.
Some fucking good this does us now, as all three fucking branches of government are now controlled by the Republican Party, whose main agenda is to deliver what little the middle class has left to the party's corporate overlords.
I can understand that Kerry doesn't want to be labeled a "Sore Loserman" a la Florida 2000. However, while Kerry worries about how he looks for Election 2008, the Bush regime is now poised to finish the job it started -- the job of eliminating the middle class. (As a 37-year-old, I don't expect to see a fucking penny of Social Security or Medicare, although I've been paying into them since I was a teenager. God bless America, blah blah blah.)
The Senate today voted 74-1 to uphold the Ohio presidential election results, with Boxer the only senator who had the courage to do what was right. (Kerry was conspicuously absent from the vote.) In the House the vote was 267-31 to uphold the Ohio results.
Yet within just a few years, the Democratic Party will ask us to give it money and then more money and then even more money, claiming that it has been fighting for us.
I, for one, will remember, when the Democratic Party comes around asking for money again, that only one Democratic U.S. senator and only 31 Democratic U.S. representatives fought for us today.
And I cannot see myself supporting Kerry in 2008. When the going gets rough, he sticks his finger in his mouth and then in the air to see which way the political wind seems to be blowing. I will never vote for Feinstein again; when she is up for re-election I will vote for the Green Party or another third-party candidate or I will vote for no one at all.
The reason the DINOs (Democrats in name only) keep selling us out is that we never punish them for doing so.
We need to start.
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Here are the remarks that Sen. Barbara Boxer made today, copied and pasted from her Web site:
For most of us in the Senate and the House, we have spent our lives fighting for things we believe in always fighting to make our nation better.
We have fought for social justice. We have fought for economic justice. We have fought for environmental justice. We have fought for criminal justice.
Now we must add a new fight the fight for electoral justice.
Every citizen of this country who is registered to vote should be guaranteed that their vote matters, that their vote is counted, and that in the voting booth of their community, their vote has as much weight as the vote of any senator, any congressperson, any president, any cabinet member, or any CEO of any Fortune 500 corporation.
I am sure that every one of my colleagues Democrat, Republican, and independent agrees with that statement. That in the voting booth, everyone is equal.
So now it seems to me that under the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees the right to vote, we must ask:
Why did voters in Ohio wait hours in the rain to vote? Why were voters at Kenyan College, for example, made to wait in line until nearly 4 a.m. to vote because there were only two machines for 1,300 voters?
Why did poor and predominantly African-American communities have disproportionately long waits?
Why in Franklin County did election officials only use 2,798 machines when they said they needed 5,000? Why did they hold back 68 machines in warehouses? Why were 42 of those machines in predominantly African-American districts?
Why did, in Columbus area alone, an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 voters leave polling places, out of frustration, without having voted? How many more never bothered to vote after they heard about this?
Why is it when 638 people voted at a precinct in Franklin County, a voting machine awarded 4,258 extra votes to George Bush? Thankfully, they fixed it but how many other votes did the computers get wrong?
Why did Franklin County officials reduce the number of electronic voting machines in downtown precincts, while adding them in the suburbs? This also led to long lines.
In Cleveland, why were there thousands of provisional ballots disqualified after poll workers gave faulty instructions to voters?
Because of this, and voting irregularities in so many other places, I am joining with Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones to cast the light of truth on a flawed system which must be fixed now.
Our democracy is the centerpiece of who we are as a nation. And it is the fondest hope of all Americans that we can help bring democracy to every corner of the world.
As we try to do that, and as we are shedding the blood of our military to this end, we must realize that we lose so much credibility when our own electoral system needs so much improvement.
Yet, in the past four years, this Congress has not done everything it should to give confidence to all of our people their votes matter.
After passing the Help America Vote Act, nothing more was done.
A year ago, Senators Graham, Clinton and I introduced legislation that would have required that electronic voting systems provide a paper record to verify a vote. That paper trail would be stored in a secure ballot box and invaluable in case of a recount.
There is no reason why the Senate should not have taken up and passed that bill. At the very least, a hearing should have been held. But it never happened.
Before I close, I want to thank my colleague from the House, Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones.
Her letter to me asking for my intervention was substantive and compelling.
As I wrote to her, I was particularly moved by her point that it is virtually impossible to get official House consideration of the whole issue of election reform, including these irregularities.
The congresswoman has tremendous respect in her state of Ohio, which is at the center of this fight.
Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones was a judge for 10 years. She was a prosecutor for eight years. She was inducted into the Womens Hall of Fame in 2002.
I am proud to stand with her in filing this objection.
To read the report Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, A Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff, click here.
8:47:30 PM 
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