THE GAMING OF THE 2004 ELECTION / RFK Jr
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.: Robert F Kennedy Jr
I have a great deal of respect for Robert F Kennedy Jr whose
hard stands against the Cheney/Bush administration's enviromental policies have been accurate and true.
Now kennedy is taking on the stealing of the 2004 Presidential election ~ particularly in Ohio ~ with his usual thoroughness and accuracy.
Here are Extended Excerpts from Robert Kennedy's Rolling Stone Article on New Evidence Suggesting a Stolen 2004 Presidential Election.
This is a must read ~ especially in light of the upcoming mid term elections wherein the Republicans will obviously do anything to maintain control of congress ~ and thus avoid the looming investigations into obvious abuses of power.
The 2004 Presidential election was a STING of classic proportions and every American should read Kennedy's tour de force.
Allen L Roland
WAS THE 2004 ELECTION STOLEN
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 today around the country. The issue is currently available on newsstands in both NYC and LA, according to an RS spokesman.
Here are several 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.
...
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.
...
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.
...
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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Now, thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky’s own data by Freeman and a team of eight researchers, we can say conclusively that the 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.”
The full article is now posted here... http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen
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