Home About us Comments Webmaster Links Books To Read Movies Archives Blog
Votes Aren't the Only Thing
Missing in Ohio
Media Black Out on Vote Fraud Allegations
By DAVID SWANSON
The "mainstream" media has fallen down on the job by failing to cover
efforts since November 2 to ensure that all votes in the presidential election
are accurately counted. The conclusion by John Kerry that an investigation could
not possibly reverse the election may quite possibly have been premature. But
the question that both activists and the media should be asking is not whether
there was enough fraud and errors to decide the election, nor even whether there
was more than is usual, but whether there was any fraud or errors, where the
problems occurred, how they can be prevented in the future, and -- in particular
-- whether new kinds of fraud were permitted by new technologies and by the
privatization of our election process.
The International Labor Communications Association is particularly concerned,
because of indications, detailed below, that fraud may have occurred in areas
where there are heavy populations of workers, African-Americans, and other
progressive voters that our member organizations represent. People deserve to
have their votes counted, and the strategists who will spend four years studying
the election results deserve to have the facts. Some citizens and independent
media outlets are raising these issues, but the corporate media is AWOL. An
investigation by the media would seem especially appropriate, since the 2000
election led to investigations in Florida that determined the loser was
occupying the White House.
Evidence existed before this election that quite possibly "the fix"
was in: the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio was running the 2004
election in that state and had for weeks been demonstrating every intention to
disenfranchise Democrats; the head of a company manufacturing electronic voting
machines for use around the country had announced his intention to help Bush
stay in the White House. The weaknesses and susceptibility to abuse of
electronic voting machines, including the machines that many people vote on and
the machines that add up the votes from multiple precincts, had been well
documented.
QUESTIONS ABOUT EXIT POLLS
If the pre-election context wasn't enough to put the media on alert, the exit
polls on election day should have been. The polls by the National Election Pool,
throughout the day, showed Kerry ahead in a number of swing states. Media
commentators made it quite clear that they had seen and took seriously the
polls. Professional pollster John Zogby took them seriously enough to call the
race for Kerry. Wall Street took them seriously enough to start dropping stock
prices.
Back on September 28, the New York Post, in agreement with other U.S. media
outlets, editorialized that the results of a recall election in Venezuela had
been proven fraudulent by exit polls. "It is unconscionable," the Post
quoted Jimmy Carter as saying, "to perpetuate fraudulent or biased
electoral practices in any nation." The Post then commented:
"Oh, really? Funny, Carter quickly endorsed the results of last month's
recall effort against Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez. Chavez, a pal of
dictators from Saddam Hussein to Fidel Castro, officially beat back the recall
with nearly 59 percent of the vote. Oddly, that result was completely opposite
the findings of an exit poll conducted by a well-regarded polling firm used
often by the U.S. Democratic Party, which showed Venezuelan voters booting
Chavez by the same 59 percent....Yet Jimmy Carter said that the election was
'free and fair.'"
Other U.S. media coverage was similar. The Miami Herald ran this headline:
"Find Out If Chavez Stole Vote." United Press International ran a
column arguing that Carter was unqualified to criticize voting procedures in
Florida because exit polls had proved him wrong in Venezuela. Carter had said
that Florida's voting arrangements didn't meet "basic international
requirements."
On October 17, the New York Times ran an article on the use of exit polls to
identify and prevent election fraud in a number of countries. The article
suggested that exit polls might play a similar role in the upcoming U.S.
election.
A November 5 New York Times article, and the rest of the U.S. media's coverage
after the election, sang a very different tune, building in as an unargued
assumption that the November 2 exit polls had been proved wrong by the official
vote counts. The Times' article sought to determine in a very
"balanced" and "objective" manner exactly what went wrong
with the exit polls, but not whether they were wrong or right.
The New York Post switched song books as well, running on November 3 in its
online edition a column by Dick Morris demanding to know who had rigged the exit
polls. Exit polls, according to Morris, cannot be off by as much as they were
this time without intentional fraud. Morris presented no evidence of fraud in
the exit polling and no evidence that it was the polls rather than the official
counts that got it wrong.
As pointed out in various analyses, the exit polls were accurate within their
margin of error in many states but were surprisingly far off in a number of
swing states, and always off in the same direction, showing more support for
Kerry than was found in the official counts. Warren Mitofsky, co-director of the
National Election Pool, told the News Hour with Jim Lehrer that "Kerry was
ahead in a number of states by margins that looked unreasonable to us."
Mitofsky speculated that perhaps more Kerry voters were willing to participate
in the exit poll, but did not suggest any reason for that speculation other than
the difference between the exit polls and the final counts. He and his
colleagues have since produced other speculative reasons why the exit polls
could have been wrong, all grounded in circular reasoning. Mitofsky told the
News Hour that on the evening of November 2 he decided to wait for the official
counts and then use those to "correct" the exit polls, thus rendering
the hugely expensive exit polls useless as either predictors of the election
outcome or measurements of the count's accuracy. Media outlets
"corrected" the exit polls on their websites early in the morning of
November 3. Mitofsky promised in the future to keep exit poll results secret,
thus fully rendering them useless for any stated purpose related to election
outcomes (they will still be able to tell us after the fact how many voters were
female or Jewish or go to church weekly or believe health care is the most
important issue, etc.).
Other surprising outcomes should stimulate investigation, including the low gain
in voter turnout for Kerry in Florida despite massive get-out-the-vote efforts
and widely reported record lines at polls on election day and in early voting.
MISCOUNTING DOCUMENTED
Reasons for concern over this election are, however, no longer limited to
surprise over the outcome. Nor need this issue be focused on the uncountable
votes of those wrongly denied voting status, turned away, intimidated, forced to
vote on provisional ballots, or discouraged from voting by long lines.
Specific evidence of miscounting has been uncovered. And, despite the national
media's near-blackout of the issue, local reporting has documented some of the
problems. In fact, although you won't learn it from the corporate media, three
members of Congress have asked the General Accounting Office to investigate
irregularities with voting machines in the November 2 election. The Congress
Members, John Conyers, Jerrold Nadler, and Robert Wexler, cited a few of the
problems that have already arisen, including a machine in a single Ohio precinct
awarding Bush an extra 3,893 votes, machines in North Carolina losing 4,500
votes, machines in Florida miscounting absentee ballots, and voters in both
Florida and Ohio reporting machines registering votes for Bush that were
intended for Kerry.
More troubling than these problems and others like them is the fact that much of
the electronic vote counting is in the hands of private companies, produces no
auditable record, and can easily be tampered with. A leading investigator of
this problem, BlackBoxVoting.org, appeared in 23 "mainstream" media
articles or transcripts in the weeks leading up to the election, according to a
Nexis search, but only one since then, and that was a mention by a caller to a
radio show. BlackBoxVoting has not vanished from the media because it's ceased
activity. Rather, it's launched the largest series of FOIA requests in history
and announced that it believes fraud took place in the election.
An analysis reported on by Thom Hartmann found that in Florida, in the smaller
counties in which optically scanned ballots were counted on a central computer
the results were quite surprising. For example, Franklin County, with 77.3
percent registered Democrats, went 58.5 percent for Bush. Holmes County, with
72.7 percent registered Democrats, went 77.25 percent for Bush. "Yet in the
larger counties," Hartmann noted, "where such anomalies would be more
obvious to the news media, high percentages of registered Democrats equaled high
percentages of votes for Kerry. And, although elections officials didn't notice
these anomalies, in aggregate they were enough to swing Florida from Kerry to
Bush. If you simply go through the analysis of these counties and reverse the
'anomalous' numbers in those counties that appear to have been hacked, suddenly
the Florida election results resemble the Florida exit poll results: Kerry won,
and won big."
According to Hartmann, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of
Representatives from Florida's 16th District, Jeff Fisher, claimed to have
evidence of hacking that would explain these results, and to be turning that
evidence over to the FBI. Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org explained how easy
such hacking is on a CNBC talk show some months back. Watch the clip. The
"mainstream" media has not touched this story.
Nor has the corporate media touched on the topic of spoiled ballots and hanging
chads in Ohio, which BBC reporter Greg Palast believes wrongly cost Kerry the
election there.
The stories of election problems that would seem to merit investigation are
numerous. See, for example, these:
one, two, three, four, five, six. In New Hampshire, the Nader/Camejo campaign
has challenged the electronic voting results. In Auglaize County, Ohio, in
October, a former employee of Election Systems and Software (ES&S), the
company that provides the voting system in Auglaize County, was allegedly on the
main computer that is used to create the ballot and compile election results,
which would go against election protocol.
The mainstream media will not report these claims unless indisputable evidence
is produced that Kerry won the election. And, if the 2000 election is any guide,
the media will bury the story even then. In the meantime, following the
narrowest win for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson, the media has
announced that Bush has a "clear mandate" to enact his agenda an
agenda that the media is reporting on more now than prior to the election.
Clearly the top agenda item for those who care about democracy in this country
must be reshaping our media. Passing media reform through Congress presents the
same chicken-and-egg problem as campaign finance reform or term limits or
instant runoff voting or greater access for third parties: how do you force
politicians to oppose their own interests and those of their funders?
An alternative is to build our own media to compete with the corporate version.
Rebuilding labor media is the mission of the ILCA, and we see that mission as
having just grown more important than ever.
David Swanson is the media coordinator for the International Labor
Communications Association. He can be reached at: dswanson@aflcio.org
Source: http://forum.therandirhodesshow.com/index.php?act=ST&f=88&t=36457
Home About us Comments Webmaster Links Books To Read Movies Archives Blog