Atelier N°15, article 37
The Stolen Election of 2004
by Michael Parenti
copyright, July 2006
The 2004 presidential contest between Democratic challenger
Senator John Kerry and the Republican incumbent, President Bush Jr.,
amounted to another stolen election. This has been well documented by
such investigators as Rep. John Conyers, Mark Crispin Miller, Bob
Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman, Bev Harris, and others. Here is an overview
of what they have reported, along with observations of my own.
Some 105 million citizens voted in 2000, but in 2004 the turnout
climbed to at least 122 million. Pre-election surveys indicated that
among the record 16.8 million new voters Kerry was a heavy favorite, a
fact that went largely unreported by the press. In addition, there were
about two million progressives who had voted for Ralph Nader in 2000
who switched to Kerry in 2004.
Yet the official 2004 tallies showed Bush with 62 million votes,
about 11.6 million more than he got in 2000. Meanwhile Kerry showed
only eight million more votes than Gore received in 2000. To have
achieved his remarkable 2004 tally, Bush would needed to have kept all
his 50.4 million from 2000, plus a majority of the new voters, plus a
large share of the very liberal Nader defectors.
Nothing in the campaign and in the opinion polls suggest such a
mass crossover. The numbers simply do not add up.
In key states like Ohio, the Democrats achieved immense success at
registering new voters, outdoing the Republicans by as much as five to
one. Moreover the Democratic party was unusually united around its
candidate—or certainly against the incumbent president. In contrast,
prominent elements within the GOP displayed open disaffection, publicly
voicing serious misgivings about the Bush administration’s huge budget
deficits, reckless foreign policy, theocratic tendencies, and threats
to individual liberties.
Sixty newspapers that had endorsed Bush in 2000 refused to do so
in 2004; forty of them endorsed Kerry.
All through election day 2004, exit polls showed Kerry ahead by 53
to 47 percent, giving him a nationwide edge of about 1.5 million votes,
and a solid victory in the electoral college. Yet strangely enough, the
official tally gave Bush the election. Here are some examples of how
the GOP “victory” was secured.
---In some places large numbers of Democratic registration forms
disappeared, along with absentee ballots and provisional ballots.
Sometimes absentee ballots were mailed out to voters just before
election day, too late to be returned on time, or they were never
mailed at all.
---Overseas ballots normally reliably distributed by the State
Department were for some reason distributed by the Pentagon in 2004.
Nearly half of the six million American voters living abroad---a
noticeable number of whom formed anti-Bush organizations---never
received their ballots or got them too late to vote. Military
personnel, usually more inclined toward supporting the president,
encountered no such problems with their overseas ballots.
---Voter Outreach of America, a company funded by the Republican
National Committee, collected thousands of voter registration forms in
Nevada, promising to turn them in to public officials, but then
systematically destroyed the ones belonging to Democrats.
--- Tens of thousands of Democratic voters were stricken from the
rolls in several states because of “felonies” never committed, or
committed by someone else, or for no given reason. Registration books
in Democratic precincts were frequently out-of-date or incomplete.
---Democratic precincts---enjoying record turnouts---were deprived
of sufficient numbers of polling stations and voting machines, and many
of the machines they had kept breaking down. After waiting long hours
many people went home without voting. Pro-Bush precincts almost always
had enough voting machines, all working well to make voting quick and
convenient.
---A similar pattern was observed with student populations in
several states: students at conservative Christian colleges had little
or no wait at the polls, while students from liberal arts colleges were
forced to line up for as long as ten hours, causing many to give up.
---In Lucas County, Ohio, one polling place never opened; the
voting machines were locked in an office and no one could find the key.
In Hamilton County many absentee voters could not cast a Democratic
vote for president because John Kerry’s name had been “accidentally”
removed when Ralph Nader was taken off the ballot.
---A polling station in a conservative evangelical church in Miami
County, Ohio, recorded an impossibly high turnout of 98 percent, while
a polling place in Democratic inner-city Cleveland recorded an
impossibly low turnout of 7 percent.
---Latino, Native American, and African American voters in New
Mexico who favored Kerry by two to one were five times more likely to
have their ballots spoiled and discarded in districts supervised by
Republican election officials. Many were given provisional ballots that
subsequently were never counted. In these same Democratic areas Bush
“won” an astonishing 68 to 31 percent upset victory. One Republican
judge in New Mexico discarded hundreds of provisional ballots cast for
Kerry, accepting only those that were for Bush.
---Cadres of rightwing activists, many of them religious
fundamentalists, were financed by the Republican Party. Deployed to key
Democratic precincts, they handed out flyers warning that voters who
had unpaid parking tickets, an arrest record, or owed child support
would be arrested at the polls---all untrue. They went door to door
offering to “deliver” absentee ballots to the proper office, and
announcing that Republicans were to vote on Tuesday (election day) and
Democrats on Wednesday.
---Democratic poll watchers in Ohio, Arizona, and other states,
who tried to monitor election night vote counting, were menaced and
shut out by squads of GOP toughs. In Warren County, Ohio, immediately
after the polls closed Republican officials announced a “terrorist
attack” alert, and ordered the press to leave. They then moved all
ballots to a warehouse where the counting was conducted in secret,
producing an amazingly high tally for Bush, some 14,000 more votes than
he had received in 2000. It wasn’t the terrorists who attacked Warren
County.
---Bush did remarkably well with phantom populations. The number
of his votes in Perry and Cuyahoga counties in Ohio, exceeded the
number of registered voters, creating turnout rates as high as 124
percent. In Miami County nearly 19,000 additional votes eerily appeared
in Bush’s column after all precincts had reported. In a small
conservative suburban precinct of Columbus, where only 638 people were
registered, the touchscreen machines tallied 4,258 votes for Bush.
---In almost half of New Mexico’s counties, more votes were
reported than were recorded as being cast, and the tallies were
consistently in Bush’s favor. These ghostly results were dismissed by
New Mexico’s Republican Secretary of State as an “administrative lapse.”
Exit polls showed Kerry solidly ahead of Bush in both the popular
vote and the electoral college. Exit polls are an exceptionally
accurate measure of elections. In the last three elections in Germany,
for example, exit polls were never off by more than three-tenths of one
percent.
Unlike ordinary opinion polls, the exit sample is drawn from
people who have actually just voted. It rules out those who say they
will vote but never make it to the polls, those who cannot be sampled
because they have no telephone or otherwise cannot be reached at home,
those who are undecided or who change their minds about whom to
support, and those who are turned away at the polls for one reason or
another.
Exit polls have come to be considered so reliable that
international organizations use them to validate election results in
countries around the world.
Republicans argued that in 2004 the exit polls were inaccurate
because they were taken only in the morning when Kerry voters came out
in greater numbers. (Apparently Bush voters sleep late.) In fact, the
polling was done at random intervals all through the day, and the
evening results were as much favoring Kerry as the early results.
It was also argued that pollsters focused more on women (who
favored Kerry) than men, or maybe large numbers of grumpy Republicans
were less inclined than cheery Democrats to talk to pollsters. No
evidence was put forth to substantiate these fanciful speculations.
Most revealing, the discrepancies between exit polls and official
tallies were never random but worked to Bush’s advantage in ten of
eleven swing states that were too close to call, sometimes by as much
as 9.5 percent as in New Hampshire, an unheard of margin of error for
an exit poll. In Nevada, Ohio, New Mexico, and Iowa exit polls
registered solid victories for Kerry, yet the official tally in each
case went to Bush, a mystifying outcome.
In states that were not hotly contested the exit polls proved
quite accurate. Thus exit polls in Utah predicted a Bush victory of
70.8 to 26.4 percent; the actual result was 71.1 to 26.4 percent. In
Missouri, where the exit polls predicted a Bush victory of 54 to 46
percent, the final result was 53 to 46 percent.
One explanation for the strange anomalies in vote tallies was
found in the widespread use of touchscreen electronic voting machines.
These machines produced results that consistently favored Bush over
Kerry, often in chillingly consistent contradiction to exit polls.
In 2003 more than 900 computer professionals had signed a petition
urging that all touchscreen systems include a verifiable audit trail.
Touchscreen voting machines can be easily programmed to go dead on
election day or throw votes to the wrong candidate or make votes
disappear while leaving the impression that everything is working fine.
A tiny number of operatives can easily access the entire computer
network through one machine and thereby change votes at will. The
touchscreen machines use trade secret code, and are tested, reviewed,
and certified in complete secrecy. Verified counts are impossible
because the machines leave no reliable paper trail.
Since the introduction of touchscreen voting, mysterious
congressional election results have been increasing. In 2000 and 2002,
Senate and House contests and state legislative races in North
Carolina, Nebraska, Alabama, Minnesota, Colorado, and elsewhere
produced dramatic and puzzling upsets, always at the expense of
Democrats who were ahead in the polls.
In some counties in Texas, Virginia, and Ohio, voters who pressed
the Democrat’s name found that the Republican candidate was chosen. In
Cormal County, Texas, three GOP candidates won by exactly 18,181 votes
apiece, a near statistical impossibility.
All of Georgia’s voters used Diebold touchscreen machines in 2002,
and Georgia’s incumbent Democratic governor and incumbent Democratic
senator, who were both well ahead in the polls just before the
election, lost in amazing double-digit voting shifts.
This may be the most telling datum of all: In New Mexico in 2004
Kerry lost all precincts equipped with touchscreen machines,
irrespective of income levels, ethnicity, and past voting patterns. The
only thing that consistently correlated with his defeat in those
precincts was the presence of the touchscreen machine itself.
In Florida Bush registered inexplicably sharp jumps in his vote
(compared to 2000) in counties that used touchscreen machines.
Companies like Diebold, Sequoia, and ES&S that market the
touchscreen machines are owned by militant supporters of the Republican
party. These companies have consistently refused to implement a
paper-trail to dispel suspicions and give instant validation to the
results of electronic voting. They prefer to keep things secret,
claiming proprietary rights, a claim that has been backed in court.
Election officials are not allowed to evaluate the secret
software. Apparently corporate trade secrets are more important than
voting rights. In effect, corporations have privatized the electoral
system, leaving it easily susceptible to fixed outcomes. Given this
situation, it is not likely that the GOP will lose control of Congress
come November 2006. The two-party monopoly threatens to become an even
worse one-party tyranny.
___________________
Michael Parenti's recent books include
The Assassination of
Julius Caesar (New Press),
Superpatriotism
(City Lights), and
The
Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press). For more information
visit:
www.michaelparenti.org.