Originally posted by Charlie Nakatestes, Japanese Golfer:
Can someone please remind me how Bush "stole" the 2004 election?
remind, as in, you've been told already? or lay it out to you from scratch? can't blame ya, charlie, if you haven't heard a peep about it; countdown with k. olberman was the only program on any network that even raised the question: something is completely askew here, shouldn't we investigate these claims?
there's mark crispin miller's book "fooled again"
there's the recent GAO report
there's fitrakis/wasserman's 2 books
there's also upcoming books by Freeman (statistician), g. pallast, and others, blackboxvoting.org, the televised 90 second hack of a diebold machine with howard dean, etc.
4 rightwing co.s own the paperless, closed source, unverifiable and hackable machines that count over 80 million (over 60%) of the US votes. countless testimony in Nov 2004 of touchscreen voteswitching from kerry to bush, but zero reports of the opposite, many reports of 4-10,000 votes cast for bush in precincts where there are only 1000 registered voters (but no corresponding 'glitches' the other way, which would be expected if these were honest mistakes), the complete divergence of the exit polls from the votecount for the first time. indeed, the exit polling data was changed overnight to fit the election results. in NM, which W 'won' by 8k votes, in every single county where the diebold machines were used, kerry lost, even in the democratic strongholds. for those areas of NM that didn't use the diebold machines, the exit polls and election results matched.
"For example, they would have you believe that, in direct contradiction to how elections have gone in Ohio for decades, itâ??s now routine for boards of elections to record that 100% of the precincts are reporting, and then suddenly add 18,615 more votes at 1:43 a.m. after the polls have been closed since 7:30 p.m. and 100% of the precincts had been reporting since approximately 9 p.m.
Or that 18,615 Miami County votes could come in late with an impossibly consistent 33.92% for Kerry, as if somebody had pushed a button on a computer with a pre-set percentage---just as the GAO says it can be done.
Or that it's ok for a Democratic county election official, with a lucrative contract from the Republican-controlled Board of Elections (BOE), to admit he doesn't really know whether the vote count had been doctored.
Or it's fine for BOE officials take election data home to report on from their personal PCs. Or for central tabulators to run on corporate-owned proprietary software with no public access. Or for BOE officials to hold up vote counts late into the night that time and again miraculously provide sufficient margins for GOP victories, as with Paul Hackett's recent failed Congressional race in southwestern Ohio.
Or for one precinct to claim a 97.55% turnout when a Free Press/Pacifica canvass quickly found far too many people who didn't vote to make that possible.
There is clearly no end to this story"
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1556 there is a ton of gathering info that even i was skeptical of at first, until i went thru it as much as i could. i believe a nat'l investigation is required; you might want to at least check out one of the books mentioned and come to your own conclusion.
ps-walkonby, gotta give you props for that quickwitted mink stoles response.
