2000 Stolen Election

The Biggest Election Story Not on Your TV

davidswanson — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 20:55:16 -0400

By David Swanson

For over half the days during any period of years you choose to select, the biggest story in U.S. news outlets is the impending most important election in your lifetime. The story, of course, takes an infinite variety of forms, ranging from candidates' friends and associates to their diets, wardrobes, religions, childhoods, and hobbies. There are variations that take us through polls and fundraising and commercials and donors and staffers and analysis of commentary on reporting on sound bytes. We learn the ins and outs of the process, the demographics of likely supporters, and the statistical likelihood that a candidate of a given race, religion, gender, and shoe size will get an RBI in the next inning. Occasionally we even get a glancing glimpse at what a candidate might do if elected.

But what if there were a story about the entire process that flipped the whole thing upside down, radically altering many of the assumptions never mentioned but always assumed in all of the endless "reporting"? And what if, on top of that, this story involved strong evidence of the commission of major crimes and abuses by the highest officials in the land? And what if, on top of that, you could toss in the historic reversal of some of the major gains won by the most dramatic populist movement of civil resistance during the course of the last century? The question, of course, would be: Can we find a way to connect this information to some kinky form of illicit sex so that members of the media can feel responsible about using our airwaves to discuss it?

That, my friends, is your assignment. The raw material you have to work with is contained in the following two articles of impeachment introduced in the House of Representatives last Monday night by Congressman Dennis Kucinich. The model you should seek to emulate is, of course, the classic report named for its author: Kenneth Starr.

Article XXVIII
TAMPERING WITH FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS, CORRUPTION OF THE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE.

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution "to take care that the laws be faithfully executed", has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, conspired to undermine and tamper with the conduct of free and fair elections, and to corrupt the administration of justice by United States Attorneys and other employees of the Department of Justice, through abuse of the appointment power.

Toward this end, the President and Vice President, both personally and through their agents, did:

Engage in a program of manufacturing false allegations of voting fraud in targeted jurisdictions where the Democratic Party enjoyed an advantage in electoral performance or otherwise was problematic for the President's Republican Party, in order that public confidence in election results favorable to the Democratic Party be undermined;

Direct United States Attorneys to launch and announce investigations of certain leaders, candidates and elected officials affiliated with the Democratic Party at times calculated to cause the most political damage and confusion, most often in the weeks immediately preceding an election, in order that public confidence in the suitability for office of Democratic Party leaders, candidates and elected officials be undermined;

Direct United States Attorneys to terminate or scale back existing investigations of certain Republican Party leaders, candidates and elected officials allied with the George W. Bush administration, and to refuse to pursue new or proposed investigations of certain Republican Party leaders, candidates and elected officials allied with the George W. Bush administration, in order that public confidence in the suitability of such Republican Party leaders, candidates and elected officials be bolstered or restored;

Threaten to terminate the employment of the following United States Attorneys who refused to comply with such directives and purposes;

1.David C. Iglesias as U.S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico;
2.Kevin V. Ryan as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California;
3.John L. McKay as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington;
4.Paul K. Charlton as U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona;
5.Carol C. Lam as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California;
6.Daniel G. Bogden as U.S. Attorney for the District of Nevada;
7.Margaret M. Chiara as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Michigan;
8.Todd Graves as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri;
9.Harry E. "Bud" Cummins, III as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas;
10.Thomas M. DiBiagio as U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland, and;
11.Kasey Warner as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia.

Further, George W. Bush has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President conspired to obstruct the lawful Congressional investigation of these dismissals of United States Attorneys and the related scheme to undermine and tamper with the conduct of free and fair elections, and to corrupt the administration of justice.

Contrary to his oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, George W. Bush has without lawful cause or excuse directed not to appear before the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives certain witnesses summoned by duly authorized subpoenas issued by that Committee on June 13, 2007.

In refusing to permit the testimony of these witnesses George W. Bush, substituting his judgment as to what testimony was necessary for the inquiry, interposed the powers of the Presidency against the lawful subpoenas of the House of Representatives, thereby assuming to himself functions and judgments necessary to the exercise of the checking and balancing power of oversight vested in the House of Representatives.

Further, the President has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, together with the Vice President directed the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia to decline to prosecute for contempt of Congress the aforementioned witnesses, Joshua B. Bolten and Harriet E. Miers, despite the obligation to do so as established by statute (2 USC § 194) and pursuant to the direction of the United States House of Representatives as embodied in its resolution (H. Res. 982) of February 14, 2008.

In all of these actions and decisions, President George W. Bush has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore, President George W. Bush, by such conduct, is guilty of an impeachable offense warranting removal from office.

Article XXIX
CONSPIRACY TO VIOLATE THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution "to take care that the laws be faithfully executed", has both personally and acting through his agents and subordinates, willfully corrupted and manipulated the electoral process of the United States for his personal gain and the personal gain of his co-conspirators and allies; violated the United States Constitution and law by failing to protect the civil rights of African-American voters and others in the 2004 Election, and impeded the right of the people to vote and have their vote properly and accurately counted, in that:

A. On November 5, 2002, and prior thereto, James Tobin, while serving as the regional director of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee and as the New England Chairman of Bush-Cheney '04 Inc., did, at the direction of the White House under the administration of George W. Bush, along with other agents both known and unknown, commit unlawful acts by aiding and abetting a scheme to use computerized hang-up calls to jam phone lines set up by the New Hampshire Democratic Party and the Manchester firefighters' union on Election Day;

B. An investigation by the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee into the voting procedures in Ohio during the 2004 election found "widespread instances of intimidation and misinformation in violation of the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, Equal Protection, Due Process and the Ohio right to vote;"

C. The 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause guarantees that no minority group will suffer disparate treatment in a federal, state, or local election in stating that: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." However, during and at various times of the year 2004, John Kenneth Blackwell, then serving as the Secretary of State for the State of Ohio and also serving simultaneously as Co-Chairman of the Committee to Re-Elect George W. Bush in the State of Ohio, did, at the direction of the White House under the administration of George W. Bush, along with other agents both known and unknown, commit unlawful acts in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution by failing to protect the voting rights of African-American citizens in Ohio and further, John Kenneth Blackwell did disenfranchise African-American voters under color of law, by

D. Willfully denying certain neighborhoods in the cities of Cleveland, Ohio and Columbus, Ohio, along with other urban areas in the State of Ohio, an adequate number of electronic voting machines and provisional paper ballots, thereby unlawfully impeding duly registered voters from the act of voting and thus violating the civil rights of an unknown number of United States citizens.

E. In Franklin County, George W. Bush and his agent, Ohio Secretary of State John Kenneth Blackwell, Co-Chair of the Bush-Cheney Re-election Campaign, failed to protect the rights of African-American voters by not properly investigating the withholding of 125 electronic voting machines assigned to the city of Columbus.

F. Forty-two African-American precincts in Columbus were each missing one voting machine that had been present in the 2004 primary.

G. African-American voters in the city of Columbus were forced to wait three to seven hours to vote in the 2004 presidential election.

H. Willfully issuing unclear and conflicting rules regarding the methods and manner of becoming a legally registered voter in the State of Ohio, and willfully issuing unclear and unnecessary edicts regarding the weight of paper registration forms legally acceptable to the State of Ohio, thereby creating confusion for both voters and voting officials and thus impeding the right of an unknown number of United States citizens to register and vote.

I. Ohio Secretary of State John Kenneth Blackwell directed through Advisory 2004-31 that voter registration forms, which were greatest in urban minority areas, should not be accepted and should be returned unless submitted on 80 bond paper weight. Blackwell's own office was found to be using 60 bond paper weight.

J. Willfully permitted and encouraged election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive partisan purge of registered voter rolls, eventually expunging more than 300,000 voters, many of whom were duly registered voters, and who were thus deprived of their constitutional right to vote;

K. Between the 2000 and 2004 Ohio presidential elections, 24.93% of the voters in the city of Cleveland, a city with a majority of African American citizens, were purged from the voting rolls.

L. In that same period, the Ohio county of Miami, with census data indicating a 98% Caucasian population, refused to purge any voters from its rolls. Miami County "merged" voters from other surrounding counties into its voting rolls and even allowed voters from other states to vote.

M. In Toledo, Ohio, an urban city with a high African-American concentration, 28,000 voters were purged from the voting rolls in August of 2004, just prior to the presidential election. This purge was conducted under the control and direction of George W. Bush's agent, Ohio Secretary of State John Kenneth Blackwell outside of the regularly established cycle of purging voters in odd-numbered years.

N. Willfully allowing Ohio Secretary of State John Kenneth Blackwell, acting under color of law and as an agent of George W. Bush, to issue a directive that no votes would be counted unless cast in the right precinct, reversing Ohio's long-standing practice of counting votes for president if cast in the right county.

O. Willfully allowing his agent, Ohio Secretary of State John Kenneth Blackwell, the Co-Chair of the Bush-Cheney Re-election Campaign, to do nothing to assure the voting rights of 10,000 people in the city of Cleveland when a computer error by the private vendor Diebold Election Systems, Inc. incorrectly disenfranchised 10,000 voters

P. Willfully allowing his agent, Ohio Secretary of State John Kenneth Blackwell, the Co-Chair of the Bush-Cheney Re-election Campaign, to ensure that uncounted and provisional ballots in Ohio's 2004 presidential election would be disproportionately concentrated in urban African-American districts.

Q. In Ohio's Lucas County, which includes Toledo, 3,122 or 41.13% of the provisional ballots went uncounted under the direction of George W. Bush's agent, the Secretary of State of Ohio, John Kenneth Blackwell, Co-Chair of the Committee to Re-Elect Bush/Cheney in Ohio.

R. In Ohio's Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, 8,559 or 32.82% of the provisional ballots went uncounted.

S. In Ohio's Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, 3,529 or 24.23% of the provisional ballots went uncounted.

T. Statewide, the provisional ballot rejection rate was 9% as compared to the greater figures in the urban areas.

U. The Department of Justice, charged with enforcing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, and other voting rights laws in the United States of America, under the direction and Administration of George W. Bush did willfully and purposely obstruct and stonewall legitimate criminal investigations into myriad cases of reported electoral fraud and suppression in the state of Ohio. Such activities, carried out by the department on behalf of George W. Bush in counties such as Franklin and Knox by persons such as John K. Tanner and others, were meant to confound and whitewash legitimate legal criminal investigations into the suppression of massive numbers of legally registered voters and the removal of their right to cast a ballot fairly and freely in the state of Ohio, which was crucial to the certified electoral victory of George W. Bush in 2004.

V. On or about November 1, 2006, members of the United States Department of Justice, under the control and direction of the Administration of George W. Bush, brought indictments for voter registration fraud within days of an election, in order to directly effect the outcome of that election for partisan purposes, and in doing so, thereby violated the Justice Department's own rules against filing election-related indictments close to an election;

X. Emails have been obtained showing that the Republican National Committee and members of Bush-Cheney '04 Inc., did, at the direction of the White House under the administration of George W. Bush, engage in voter suppression in five states by a method know as "vote caging," an illegal voter suppression technique;

Y. Agents of George W. Bush, including Mark F. "Thor" Hearne, the national general counsel of Bush/Cheney '04, Inc., did, at the behest of George W. Bush, as members of a criminal front group, distribute known false information and propaganda in the hopes of forwarding legislation and other actions that would result in the disenfranchisement of Democratic voters for partisan purposes. The scheme, run under the auspices of an organization known as "The American Center for Voting Rights" (ACVR), was funded by agents of George W. Bush in violation of laws governing tax exempt 501(c)3 organizations and in violation of federal laws forbidding the distribution of such propaganda by the federal government and agents working on its behalf.

Z. Members of the United States Department of Justice, under the control and direction of the Administration of George W. Bush, did, for partisan reasons, illegally and with malice aforethought block career attorneys and other officials in the Department of Justice from filing three lawsuits charging local and county governments with violating the voting rights of African-Americans and other minorities, according to seven former senior United States Justice Department employees.

AA. Members of the United States Department of Justice, under the control and direction of the Administration of George W. Bush, did illegally and with malice aforethought derail at least two investigations into possible voter discrimination, according to a letter sent to the Senate Rules and Administration Committee and written by former employees of the United States Department of Justice, Voting Rights Section.

BB. Members of the United States Election Assistance Commission (EAC), under the control and direction of the Administration of George W. Bush, have purposefully and willfully misled the public, in violation of several laws, by;

CC. Withholding from the public and then altering a legally mandated report on the true measure and threat of Voter Fraud, as commissioned by the EAC and completed in June 2006, prior to the 2006 mid-term election, but withheld from release prior to that election when its information would have been useful in the administration of elections across the country, because the results of the statutorily required and tax-payer funded report did not conform with the illegal, partisan propaganda efforts and politicized agenda of the Bush Administration;

DD. Withholding from the public a legally mandated report on the disenfranchising effect of Photo Identification laws at the polling place, shown to disproportionately disenfranchise voters not of George W. Bush's political party. The report was commissioned by the EAC and completed in June 2006, prior to the 2006 mid-term election, but withheld from release prior to that election when its information would have been useful in the administration of elections across the country

EE. Withholding from the public a legally mandated report on the effectiveness of Provisional Voting as commissioned by the EAC and completed in June 2006, prior to the 2006 mid-term election, but withheld from release prior to that election when its information would have been useful in the administration of elections across the country, and keeping that report unreleased for more than a year until it was revealed by independent media outlets.

For directly harming the rights and manner of suffrage, for suffering to make them secret and unknowable, for overseeing and participating in the disenfranchisement of legal voters, for instituting debates and doubts about the true nature of elections, all against the will and consent of local voters affected, and forced through threats of litigation by agents and agencies overseen by George W. Bush, the actions of Mr. Bush to do the opposite of securing and guaranteeing the right of the people to alter or abolish their government via the electoral process, being a violation of an inalienable right, and an immediate threat to Liberty.

****

Mark Crispin Miller Live Online Tonight Taking Your Questions

davidswanson — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 08:08:30 -0400

Tonight from 8 - 9 p.m. ET I'll be interviewing Mark Crispin Miller and he'll be taking your questions at http://www.thepeoplespeakradio.net

Mark Crispin Miller is professor of media studies at New York University and the author of the book: Fooled Again, How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections. He is known for his writing on American media and for his activism on behalf of democratic media reform. His books include Boxed In: The Culture of TV, Seeing Through Movies, and Mad Scientists, a study of war propaganda.

Miller writes in his book, Fooled Again, that the 2000 U.S. Presidential election and 2004 U.S. Presidential election were “stolen”. Miller presents extensive documentation, backed by 56 pages of notes, supporting his contention that the outcome of both elections was altered and controlled by a small minority. He states that the American voting populace can no longer assume that their votes will be accurately assessed, and that the installation of electronic voting machines in state after state is a fundamental flaw in the U.S. electoral system. He appeared in the 2004 documentary Orwell Rolls in His Grave, which focuses on the hidden mechanics of the media, its role as it should be and what it actually is, and how it shapes (to the point of almost controlling) U.S. politics.

Mark’s new book is: Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008.

A Manchurian Candidate in the White House?

dlindorff — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 08:34:28 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

With a viral campaign underway via email, right-wing radio, and on the street suggesting that Barack Obama is a black “Manchurian Candidate,” secretly trained as a Muslim fanatic who will insinuate himself into the White House, thence to undermine all that we hold dear, perhaps it is time to look at the Manchurian Candidate we already have in the White House, who, together with his handler over in Blair House, has pretty much done all the damage already.

George Bush came to office in 2001 promising a new era of integrity, civility and “compassionate conservatism,” an era of humble American foreign policy, and a bi-partisan approach to government.

What did we actually get?

Once in office, this chameleon president almost immediately set out to embroil the country in a major war in the Middle East against the nation of Iraq. The game plan was laid out at the president’s first National Security Council meeting, attended by Vice President Dick Cheney (the man holding Bush’s controller), Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neal (who later spilled the beans about the session).

Bush also famously ignored all warnings about the imminent attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. How much he and the rest of the administration knew about that attack in advance, or whether elements within the administration may have even helped it along, remains the subject of considerable interest and investigation and may never be answered, but it is clear that there were ample warnings about it, and he did nothing—even rudely blowing off a briefer who tried to alert him to the danger. Moreover, it is known that Israeli Mossad agents (who we know have close ties to both the US intelligence apparatus and to the Neocons who infest the Bush White House) did indeed have advance knowledge, and were set up across New York Harbor with a video camera to tape the attack on the Twin Towers (they were subsequently arrested by New Jersey police, only to be later released and sent back to Israel, through intercession by the US government). As well, we know that unidentified people made a killing by placing negative bets, called “puts,” on the stocks, several days before 9-11, of the two airlines that were hijacked, American and United, and of two investment banks that would be seriously hurt by the building collapses, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. (The puts were placed through an investment bank, Alex Brown, which until a year earlier had been headed by a man who moved over to become the number three person in the CIA.) It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Bush/Cheney administration, at a minimum, wanted an attack on American soil, and a national disaster that would put the country on a war footing.

Certainly instead of rallying the public and defending the nation’s democratic traditions and its Constitution, Bush and his handlers after 9-11 immediately set in motion a concerted scare campaign to undermine both. While urging the public to buy sheets of plastic and duct tape to construct “safe rooms” in their homes, they rammed through Congress a deceitfully named measure, the so-called Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (USA PATRIOT Act), which effectively undermined most of the articles of the Bill of Rights (and which appeared, suspiciously, fully drawn up in bill form, only days after the attacks).

At the same time, the president, only one week after the attacks, obtained an Authorization for Use of Military Force for a military attack on the Taliban government in Afghanistan and on Al Qaeda forces in that country, which he subsequently interpreted broadly as an authorization for a global “war” on terror which he then claimed made him effectively a dictator with absolute power both at home and abroad (the so-called “unitary executive” theory). Under this claim of absolute power as commander in chief in time of war, Bush went on to order the use of torture against captives, foreign and domestic, including US citizens, to strip even US citizens of the right of habeas corpus—that is, the right to have their arrest and detention brought before a federal court—and to establish secret torture centers around the globe and on military installations in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay on the island of Cuba.

As well, even before the 9-11 attacks, the president began a sweeping program of electronic spying, run through the super-secret National Security Agency, on Americans’ telephone and internet activities. It was and remains a program that deliberately avoids seeking warrants and court approval even by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court—a body that has only rejected some five requests for warrants out of hundreds of thousands sought since its establishment in 1978.

Finally, in a perhaps fatal undermining of the Constitution, the president after 9-11 began a practice of simply refusing to enact or obey laws passed by the Congress, effectively rendering the legislative branch an impotent debating club.

Not content to simply explode or dismantle the legal foundations of the American government and rule of law, Bush and his handlers also went about systematically destroying the country’s basic institutions and even its economy.

The education system was fatally ensnared in a test-driven system called “No Child Left Behind,” which has in short order dumbed down public education to an extent shocking even to this already anti-intellectual society, with many schools simply giving up the teaching of art, literature or history, in order to focus desperately on math and reading in order that their students would do well enough on standardized tests to keep the schools from losing their funding.

The dollar has been cast adrift to become the new Lira as the government has gone on an unprecedented borrowing spree to fund endless war and ever-larger military budgets, while erasing the taxes on the wealthy, the super-rich, and corporations. Banks were given free rein to enter into all manner of risky ventures, leading to the current collapse in credit. Corporations were encouraged to ship their production and jobs overseas. Homeowners were encouraged to spend, spend, spend and to mortgage their homes to the hilt and then some. Towns, cities and pension funds were encouraged to invest in fantastic “structured” products that were actually towering card houses. Domestic car manufacturers were encouraged to build every larger, ever more voraciously gas-guzzling vehicles, pumping out ever larger quantities of carbon into the already overstressed atmosphere.

The nation’s infrastructure—its roads, dams, bridges, levies, airports, veterans hospitals etc.--were left to decay, with predictable results, the most dramatic of which was the loss of an entire city, New Orleans, to a routine Category 3 hurricane (after which, the president did nothing to rescue the survivors or fund a recovery).

Surveying at the appalling wreckage left after eight years of the Bush administration, it is hard to recognize the country that he started out with in 2001. A once proud nation—one that only a few years ago was admired around the world and that now is viewed as a pariah and a rogue state—today trembles before a handful of turbaned fanatics holed up in caves in the Hindu Kush, its trillion-dollar high-tech military colossus fought to a standstill in Iraq and Afghanistan by a few thousand brave men and women armed with RPGs, antique AK-47s and home-made roadside bombs. A nation that once was the envy of the world for its free society now has scientists afraid to report their findings, university professors afraid to support outspoken colleagues, members of Congress afraid to defend their Constitution, citizens afraid of their neighbors, journalists afraid of government criticism, lawyers afraid to defend clients...

Hey, this place starts to look and feel an awful lot like the China I lived in back in 1991!

Forget all the nonsense about Barack Obama being a closet Muslim. We already have our Manchurian Candidate in the White House, and he has largely accomplished what he was programmed to do: destroy the country.

The truth is this: If at the end of their second term, Bush and Cheney were to hop on a plane and fly off to a hideout in the mountains on the Afghan-Pakistan border, leaving a "Nya-nya!" note on the White House dining room table, few people would really be very surprised.
_____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist and columnist. His most recent book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006, and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Your Vote Will Be Thoughtful, But Will It Be Counted?

davidswanson — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:04:55 -0500

By David Swanson

By the time November 2008 rolls around, you will have endured over two years of breathless horse-race election coverage. (I, for one, am going to spend the next few days pushing Obama over Clinton, and then tune back in on Halloween to decide whether to vote for Obama, Nader, or McKinney. There are too many important things to work on in between.) But the big question (and one of the important things to work on) is this: will you have any way to know your vote is counted?

On February 12th, I'll vote for Obama in the Virginia Democratic Primary if it still matters (if it doesn't I'll vote for Kucinich). And I will have no possible way to determine whether my vote is counted. I'll be voting on a touch-screen electronic voting machine. There will be no piece of paper generated and stored as I vote. A "paper trail" may be produced later, but if the vote totals are monkeyed with by the machine, the paper trail will simply "confirm" the bogus numbers.

In the past few elections, and in the Florida primaries this week, we've seen such probems as: precincts turning out more voters than exist (is 110% voter turnout an achievement in some people's minds?), huge percentages of people voting in minor races but supposedly failing to vote at all in key contests, results that vary from unadjusted exit polls by unheard of margins, people forced to wait 12 hours to vote, people turned away in the general election who voted in the same location in the primaries, flyers advising Democrats to vote the day after the election, and dozens of other problems, most of them based in electronic voting machines, most - but definitely not all - of them swinging votes in favor of Republicans.

The new film "Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections" by David Earnhardt, tells this story powerfully and convincingly. If I were a reporter outside the United States and able to publish the story, I'd watch this film and report on the complete breakdown of credible democratic elections in the U.S.A. If I were an American of any political persuasion I'd have a hard time watching this film and not asking what I could do about this crisis. I'd leave a theater that showed this movie with a very different view of recent history from the orthodox. I'd come away understanding that the Democratic Party landslide in 2006 fell far short of what voters actually voted for, that George Bush has never once been elected president, and that the solution to the 2000 Florida debacle (the solution of buying electronic voting machines) took a relatively small problem and made it enormous.

"Uncounted" is a nonpartisan take on the issue that you can safely show to your Republican uncle. It concludes with a list of things you can do: Contact your congress member. Ask for election day to be a national holiday. Write a letter to the editor. Be an observer at the polls. Et cetera. But, as Brad Friedman of BradBlog.com points out in the film, if the cheating is happening inside a computer, it will make no difference how many people are observing it. What's needed is more than just ordinary involvement or passage of bills of the variety that George W. Bush will choose not to veto or erase with signing statements. Think for a minute about recent scandals coming out of Washington. I know there have been a great many of them, but the one I have in mind has been huge. Take a look at this list of proposed solutions from Mark Crispin Miller and pay special attention to points #11 and #12.

1. Repeal the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).
2. Replace all electronic voting with hand-counted paper ballots (HCPB).
3. Get rid of computerized voter rolls.
4. Keep all private vendors out of the election process.
5. Make it illegal for the TV networks to declare who won before the vote-count is complete.
6. Set up an exit polling system, publicly supported, to keep the vote-counts honest.
7. Get rid of voter registration rules, by having every citizen be duly registered on his/her 18th birthday.
8. Ban all state requirements for state-issued ID's at the polls.
9. Put all polling places under video surveillance, to spot voter fraud, monitor election personnel, and track the turnout.
10. Have Election Day declared a federal holiday, requiring all employers to allow their workers time to vote.
11. Make it illegal for Secretaries of State to co-chair political campaigns (or otherwise assist or favor them).
12. Make election fraud a major felony, with life imprisonment--and disenfranchisement--for all repeat offenders.

The first thing you may notice is that none of these 12 things can possibly be accomplished with Bush and Cheney in office. And, of course, the more election cycles we go through without accomplishing these things, the less likely it is that our elected officials will be people willing to attempt them. So, there is some urgency to this.

The scandal I hoped you might think of, of course, goes by the name "U.S. Attorney Firings," but it actually encompasses the politicization of the U.S. Department of Justice and an array of hiring and firing and indicting and prosecuting decisions all aimed at winning elections for Republicans. As this has played out in Congress, we've seen an attorney general unable to remember his own actions, and we've seen a president feloniously order former staffers not to comply with subpoenas. We've watched as the Democratic "leaders" in Congress refused for over half a year to vote on holding those staffers in contempt, and we've witnessed the removal of the power of impeachment from the U.S. Constitution.

By all means, get out there and vote and observe and counter any intimidation you see, and report any fraud you find evidence of. But, if you want to throw a monkey wrench into the gears of the machine that is stripping us of our hard earned franchise, you'll need more than computer software, you'll need a massive movement with enough force to compel the House Judiciary Committee to begin impeachment proceedings.

_________

RESOURCES:

Interview with David Earnhardt:
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/interviews/093

Commentary:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5620

Watch the Trailer and Buy the DVD:
http://www.uncountedthemovie.com

Watch "Uncounted" at House Parties on February 13th:
http://www.blogforamerica.com/view/23717

In Too Many Elections, Voters Remain 'Uncounted,' Miscounted or Denied the Right to Vote, As Filmmaker David Earnhardt Shows Us

davidswanson — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 10:50:42 -0500

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

For me, it's quite simple. I was appalled at what I'd seen in the 2004 election ...

-- David Earnhardt, Director of Uncounted

* * *

First of all, BuzzFlash wants to commend all those Americans who are working to ensure that every citizen can vote -- and that every vote is properly counted.

Since the debacle of the Florida vote in 2000, there has been a growing movement to ensure voting rights. It involves the unacceptable role of proprietary electronic voting machines (owned in large part by Republican affiliated corporations); the suppression of voting rights (think "Jim Crow" voter "identification cards"); and equal access to voting precincts, among other issues.

It's a complicated and long-term challenge to ensure that the legal right of "one person/one vote" is enforced -- and that a vote count accurately reflects the votes cast. Given the large number of issues involved, the voter advocacy community has, at times, disagreed about some of the potential solutions, particularly when it comes to electronic voting machines.

As for BuzzFlash, we believe that if there is not a count of paper ballots to audit any electronic total, then there is no possibility of ensuring an accurate vote count. We also believe that no private corporations should own any proprietary software that is not completely transparent. Unless one can count paper ballot "receipts," there is always room for monkey business. (In fact, having publicly owned electronic voting machines that produce printed ballots that can be reviewed and checked for accuracy by the voter allows for cross-matching totals to ensure a correct count. Remember that paper ballots alone can also be abused. That's how the term "stuffing the ballot box" came into being.)

All of this leads us into recommending Uncounted, an excellent, informative documentary about the broad range of voter integrity issues that confront us as a nation. Uncounted distills the most important problems confronting advocates for allowing every eligible voter cast a ballot -- and then making sure that the ballots are accurately counted.

We were delighted to interview David Earnhardt, who produced, directed and wrote Uncounted.

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BuzzFlash: We've seen your film, Uncounted, The New Math of American Elections. Your film is exceptional in how it presents a narrative about what is really quite a complex issue to follow. What motivated you to undertake a film like this on the voting issue, let alone distribute it on your own, show it around the country on your own?

David Earnhardt: For me, it's quite simple. I was appalled at what I'd seen in the 2004 election, and then, coupled that with, after the election was over and after Kerry conceded, watching the media just go away. From a mainstream media standpoint, there was no looking into many of the problems that had been observed on Election Day.

There was lots of great work going on on the Internet. There was great investigating going on in Ohio and New Mexico, from the legal standpoint, from the alternative journalistic standpoint. But in terms of the mainstream media, it did not exist. I was just naïve enough to be shocked. I just could not believe it. I thought we'd sort of fallen into a parallel universe.

And for me, like a lot of people, the 2004 election felt like a very important election. It felt like the stakes were very high. We closed down our office that day. Many of us wanted to go out and get involved, door to door, to encourage people to vote. My wife and I did that kind of thing for the first time. And I was struck by several interactions I had in a neighborhood that we were in.

It was a fairly low economic neighborhood. When I knocked on the door -- and this happened on three or four different occasions -- I would encourage people to get out and vote. The sentiment was something to the effect -- different forms of this - look, I'm not going to vote. This is not for me. This is not anything that has to do with me. They've already decided who's going to win. It's that kind of language. I'm saying, no, no, no, that's what they want you to do -- not go out and vote. You've got to get out there. You've got to. It was that kind of interaction.

I realized later that I was the naïve one. There was a certain truth in there that I was missing, and it upset me. I thought: my gosh, we really don't take this right very seriously. So I went to work. I went to work immediately and started studying everything I could. I decided, I'm going to find everything I can, and at least consider doing a documentary. Eventually I had enough material to where we could pull the trigger and say let's keep going. Let's do something on this. Let's try to get this issue out there.

BuzzFlash: Yours is the second film we've seen in the last year that is of a tremendous quality and very compelling that was made as a first-time feature effort. I assume this was a first-time feature effort for you?

David Earnhardt: Yes, it is.

BuzzFlash: This is your profession on a commercial basis. No End in Sight was also an extremely compelling film done by a gentleman we've interviewed who was the producer, director and script writer -- I don't know if you've seen it.

David Earnhardt: I have not.

BuzzFlash: It's an incredible film very focused on the mismanagement of the oversight of Iraq, post-invasion, and how the Bush administration completely bungled the administrative responsibilities of trying to reconstruct a country. In your case, you talk about the various ways in which people were denied the right to vote, or when the votes were inaccurately counted.

David Earnhardt: Yes.

BuzzFlash: Why did it hit you in 2004, not in 2000?

David Earnhardt: It did hit me in 2000. I just think I understood it on a deeper level in 2004, because it seemed more blatant. In 2000. I was especially affected by the heavy emphasis on the hanging chads and all that was one thing, when so little attention was given to the suppression of tens of thousands of votes, primarily African Americans, supposedly because they were ex-felons. But they really had similar names as ex-felons and so were stripped from the rolls. And that story was just kind of buried.

That was kind of a foundation for me in going into 2004. My eyes were wide open. And I thought that the media's eyes would be wide open. That's what surprised me. I think people so much did not want to go back to that trauma in 2000 -- people were ready to move on. And I mean everybody. People just kind of perceived that it was a comfortable margin, that Bush had the three million vote margin in the popular vote and thought, that's good enough for me. It's not really so close like 537 votes was in 2000. People forget that it really was one state where all kinds of shenanigans were going on. And Ohio would determine this election. If it had gone the other way in Ohio, Kerry would be our president.

BuzzFlash: Ohio wasn't the only issue in 2004. It just happened to become a pivotal state that decided the election.

But one of the things that we really liked about Uncounted was you covered the full array of voter suppression. We've seen a variety of articles and press releases focusing on different aspects of voter suppression. The biggest attention-getter is the electronic voting machines. But if you look at Ohio and at other states where Republicans have been in power, they've attempted to pass laws that suppress votes and keep people from voting even before they get to the electronic voting machines.

David Earnhardt: I agree totally. The electronic voting is scary, and it is the single most scary thing going on. But some much more insidious things that directly prevent people from voting don't get the same kind of play. All these ID laws that the Supreme Court is weighing in on in Indiana, or the ID law passed in Georgia, are supposedly to prevent vote fraud, where supposedly people are illegally voting. Well, it's a fake issue. Even with so much emphasis on trying to find voting fraud, they're not finding it. They're not able to prosecute cases on that.

And yet we're enacting this whole set of laws that make it more difficult to vote, more expensive to vote -- kind of a modern-day poll tax. This is having the effect of making it more difficult for large groups of people to vote. And that's a new form of voter suppression. That's probably the number-one thing going into the 2008 election. I just worry that state after state is going to enact these laws. And it tends to be Republican-dominated state legislatures that are enacting these laws that mostly affect the Democratic vote. It really affects how we look at things going into the 2008 election.

BuzzFlash: On BuzzFlash we first became educated about this issue shortly after the 2000 Florida theft of the election, when Greg Palast highlighted the caging list that had been assembled by then-Secretary of State in Florida, Katherine Harris, using the Republican-related firm, Choice Point. As Palast pointed out, even before they counted the votes -- putting aside hanging chads and whatever for the moment -- 80 to 90 thousand primarily African Americans were disenfranchised because they were put on this "felons' list." Many of them were not felons. Katherine Harris' office instructed them to come up with the widest possible list, so if you had two Andrew Johnsons, for instance, and only one was a felon, they were both not allowed to vote.

David Earnhardt: Well, I remember one of the stats that still floors me to this day is that 97% of the people on that list did not belong on that list. It was literally 3% of them that were correctly identified.

BuzzFlash: One point Greg Palast makes is that while it's extremely important to focus on the electronic voting, there's no doubt, as you point out so persuasively in Uncounted, that we must be careful what are we doing with proprietary companies that assert proprietary control over software to count a public vote. It's mind-boggling. But beyond that, Ken Blackwell in Ohio, as an example, basically tried to remove as many people as possible from the polls by defining the rules for counting provisional ballots.

David Earnhardt: Yes.

BuzzFlash: With the provisional ballots, you wouldn't get counted, or your vote was shoved to the side and didn't really play a role in the outcome.

David Earnhardt: That's right.

BuzzFlash: But it also sets a tone. A lot of people fear if, maybe they've had a run-in with the law or something, or they're just part of a minority that's used to the authorities kind of coming down on them, they just don't go to polls because they don't want trouble.

David Earnhardt: That's right. It sets up an intimidating atmosphere, instead of setting up an atmosphere that encourages voting. There tends to be an intimidating atmosphere for this.

I'm glad you brought up the provisional balloting, because that's, again, an example of something that seemed like a good thing when it came into being. It was addressing the fact that people would go in, and they weren't listed on rolls, and they were told you can't vote. There was no option for it. So they added this provisional balloting initiative. At least there's a way to vote.

The problem is that they started challenging more and more people. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission's own figures said that two million people had provisional ballots in the 2004 election. Greg Palast added a count for the states that didn't report, and estimated it more at three million. And a third of those didn't get counted at all.

In essence, they don't get counted on election day. You don't hear those news reporters saying: okay, these are our vote totals. It doesn't include the provisional ballots. They're reporting it and saying so-and-so has won. And then these ballots may get counted many days later. So that's another tactic, that gets more and more people to provisional balloting, and, in essence, those ballots don't get counted. Just to put it in graphic form, what that really shows us in the 2004 election is that two to three million people went to the trouble to go to polls to do their civic duty, feeling that they were registered. And they were told they were not eligible. It just kind of boggles the imagination to think that somebody would go to that trouble. We just need to make it easy. We need to make it where it's encouraging people to vote, instead of discouraging.

BuzzFlash: Well, Kenneth Blackwell, who was Ohio's Secretary of State in 2004, Republican again, was suppressing African American votes in a lot of different ways. One of them that you detail was that in minority districts as well as student college areas, a disproportionate number of districts had insufficient voting machines and the lines stretched for hours.

David Earnhardt: That's right. And even the Columbus Dispatch, which is a fairly conservative newspaper traditionally, did a report. They showed a pattern that between 2000 and 2004, the Democratic precincts tended to have less machines, and the precincts that went Republican in 2000 tended to have more machines in 2004. That misallocation basically created the long lines.

And then you had the situation where there were a number of machines sitting in the warehouse that were available. So it was not a machine shortage. It begs the question of how that happened.

But the main thing is that all across the State of Ohio, you saw lines, particularly in inner-city, African American precincts, that were two, three, five hours, seven hours long. And at Kenyon College the lines were up to fifteen hours. They had two machines there, one of which was broken in the first couple of hours of the day. And that was happening all across the State of Ohio.

At the same time, when you went into the suburban precincts that tended to be more for Bush, the lines were very short. It was just so brazen, to see that going on.

When you look at the exit polls, on top of everything else, in Ohio, there was a difference of 6.7% between the exit poll and the final tabulated votes in Ohio. And that's the votes that actually got counted.

Starting with Blackwell being the Chair of the Reelect George Bush campaign, much like a repeat of Katherine Harris in 2000 in Florida, it seems like there was a great deal of effort put into Ohio. That's the point. Ohio gets a lot of attention, but really it was going on all across the country. I think, correctly seen, Ohio was the pivotal state, and a lot of resources were put into that to make sure that state fell the right way.

BuzzFlash: Let's move again through this very complex topic of electronic voting. And I would recommend to anyone, as I think you would, Brad Friedman's blog at bradblog.com, which does a very good job of focusing on the entire issue of voter disenfranchisement. You have very lucidly in this film explained the electronic voting issue. Two things really struck me in your film. First of all, you have a woman who shows very simply, exactly how a vote can be changed on a laptop. Can you just explain that scene? It's about exactly what can happen if someone is controlling the software and no one else knows how to control the software.

David Earnhardt: Yes, that's Teresa Hommel out of New York. The beauty of her demonstration is that it's not just about the technology to flip the vote. I think that's what throws people, is that they say: well, it can be programmed to do that. And of course, that's what she did do for the demonstration. She programmed the vote to flip.

Her larger point is that if you're an election official and the vote gets flipped, and you can't get inside the machine itself, and the private company doesn't allow you to look at it, when the vote gets flipped, it still shows there was a vote. The election official only sees that a voter voted. You see they voted for somebody. You see no problems. It looks like a clean election.

That's because you can't know. So if private companies run these machines, if they have proprietary software, if they count the votes without any kind of observation by public citizens, even by the election officials themselves, which is inherent in the technology itself, then you can't see anything that's going on.

BuzzFlash: And she just shows you how it flips. But then you can just change the outcome.

David Earnhardt: That's right.

BuzzFlash: A software adjustment.

David Earnhardt: All of these things can be changed. Audit trails can be changed. You can have a paper record that's been put in your hand. It can say that you voted for this. But if what gets counted is what's in the machine, that's what's counted, not what's on the piece of paper that supposedly confirms who you voted for. That's not a ballot -- that's the bottom line.

How I try to explain this to people is that it really is a paper-ballot mentality. If a machine gives off a piece of paper, the only reason that matters at all is if that paper supercedes what's in the machine itself. Does that piece of paper that says who you voted for -- and you look at, and you verify -- does that become the ballot of record? Then we're starting to get in the right direction.

Now there are still plenty of problems with that. But if that's what gets counted -- that piece of paper -- it's a start. The problem is, a lot of times with the legislation for so-called paper trails or paper records, that's not necessarily what becomes counted in full. Sometimes it's a partial recount of them. Still, the bottom line is usually what's in that machine. And that's the real problem because you can just program the machines easily too many different ways to not say what the intent of the voter is.

BuzzFlash: I think one of the strengths of Uncounted is that you have a compelling narrative that brings you from beginning to end and threads this together, which is very challenging, given the complexity of this topic and the many different ways the Republicans are willing to disenfranchise people. But getting back to some solutions, you had focused somewhat on an inventor who has since died in an automobile accident who developed something called TruVote.

David Earnhardt: That's correct. Athan Gibbs.

BuzzFlash: He was an African American entrepreneur. When watching it, I thought: my God, this is ingenious. A solution to our electronic voting problem. Can you explain what it is?

David Earnhardt: He basically had the concept of developing software for a computer which would, in essence, be an electronic voting machine, so that the machine produced a paper ballot that showed you who you voted for. You could examine it. You could make sure it's correct. And then it would go into the ballot box. And that would be what would get counted.

Now in his concept, at that time, the machine would still do the counting. But the bottom line was that what had gone into that ballot box was the vote of record. his concept was still that the machine would count for convenience, and get a quick total out there. But you still developed a paper ballot that was the vote of record.

Now keep a context here. This was right after the 2000 election. This was a man that saw millions of votes go untallied in the 2000 election, and he said: I've got to do something. I'm an ordinary citizen. I'm an accountant. This should not be a complicated procedure. I'm going to work on it. I'm going to do what I can to develop something.

Now this was at a time where you had other manufacturers developing machines that had no backup -- none at all. Diebold, an ATM machine maker, clearly had the ability to do the technology with paper backup. But these were the machines that were going out on the marketplace.

Gibbs was making some real inroads. He had formed a good alliance with Rep. Cynthia McKinney, and she had worked with him to meet with the right people in the State of Georgia. They ended up going with all the Diebold machines. He was about to meet with the State of California at the time of this law. Things were starting to happen. He had gotten a great infusion of capital from Microsoft, who had been very interested in what he was doing. So the momentum was really building for what he was doing, and that's when he died in an accident.

BuzzFlash: Would his software have been open to the public?

David Earnhardt: I really don't know that because I did not meet the man. But I'll tell you my instinct about it, which is yes. I think he wanted everything to be transparent. With him, the whole process was something that needed to be open.

BuzzFlash: As you said, they don't want to wait until the next morning to count all the paper ballots. The TV stations want to know, and so forth. If we go back to Miami-Dade County in 2000, if they had had the TruVote machines, and everyone had a look at their ballot and said, yes, I voted for Al Gore, and they put it in a box, then all we would have had to do was for Al Gore to say, I want a recount of the paper ballots. And the paper ballots are the final ultimate determination of what the vote is.

David Earnhardt: Yes. The person examines it -- has seen it, and puts it in. Now you and I both know the whole history of voting in this country -- shenanigans from Tammany Hall, to Lyndon Johnson in the late forties, to Nixon-Kennedy in Chicago. These ballot boxes themselves can be stuffed, manipulated, and so on. But electronic voting does make it possible for someone to massively shift vote totals with the electronic touch-screen technology, or electronic technology in general. You really do have to have the potential of a hand count.

BuzzFlash: At the end of the evening, the machine counts the vote, and there's a preliminary vote count. But you're saying that would be pending the actual counting of the paper.

David Earnhardt: Absolutely. And again, I would have to emphasize that the bottom line is that the paper ballot be the official record. Personally, I'm a paper ballot guy. I think it's just as easy to mark a paper ballot. It works in many countries that have done this -- sophisticated countries like Germany. Computer scientists themselves will tell you that computers are just not a good thing for voting. It's just not a good mechanism. There's too many security issues. It's too difficult. The code is too complicated. It's just not needed because it's actually a very simple accounting act. And marking a ballot is a very simple thing to do. However, you know, if we are going to have electronics, and if we are going to have something where it does need to be there for the speed society and the attention-deficit society, if we need instant results, then that's fine as long as that is a provisional ballot. That is simply a provisional count. The bottom line is that the final results are in when those paper ballots are counted.

BuzzFlash: I have to admit there's something to be said for the Iowa caucuses, where your body is your vote. That's utter transparency. You put your name and body out there, and everyone knows you're for a given candidate because your body is there as the vote.

David Earnhardt: That's true.

BuzzFlash: But that aside, it's been an American tradition in general, outside of the caucuses, to have privacy in voting.

David Earnhardt: It's private.

BuzzFlash: And that seems reasonable. How about this idea? I go and vote a machine. The machine prints out a paper ballot. But it holds my vote for a moment. The paper ballot comes out and says please confirm that the ballot in your hand matches this number -- 1,042. And you then circle 1,042. Then if there's any question, the paper ballot can be matched against the computer to see if that's the same or if there's been some monkey business going on. Because 1,042 printed ballot should match the 1,042 electronic ballot.

David Earnhardt: Yes. And, again, you could confirm that your ballot is accurate. You could say I've looked at my ballot. I confirm it. I signed here. But it doesn't attach to the ballot itself.

BuzzFlash: That's another way of doing it. Normally, where I vote, they give you a sleeve for your punchcard ballot, an opti-scan. They give you a sleeve to put it in so no one sees the punchcard ballot. Privacy is preserved as it's fed into the machine. You could do the same thing with this sort of ballot.

David Earnhardt: Right. But honestly, Mark, telling Athan Gibbs' story for me was more about showing the spirit of the man who really wanted to do something, and do something that could make a difference and make everybody's vote count more properly.

BuzzFlash: It's an idea that works.

David Earnhardt: It is. It's a beautiful thing. And he's a beautiful man -- and a beautiful thing that the company was trying to do. I love what he was trying to do. But in my heart of hearts, where I think we need to transform as a country is to the beauty and simplicity of paper ballots. It's very simple. You mark a ballot. You put it in a box. It's private. Then precinct by precinct, votes are counted. Observers from all parties are observing the process, it's counted in public. You do it as a volunteer citizen's action. It's a very beautiful, democratic image. And it's very public. And then you report it.

It's the ultimate demonstration of democracy.

BuzzFlash: We're based in Chicago, and there's a history here of, when the polling booths close, people stuff the ballot box.

David Earnhardt: Sure.

BuzzFlash: So in some ways, electronic voting may have an advantage. If you take away the proprietary software and privatization of the voting machines -- make them completely transparent as TruVote wanted them to be -- you actually could have potentially the electronic voting machine as a balance to the paper ballot, so that someone couldn't stuff the paper ballot box.

David Earnhardt: That's very true. I don't disagree with that at all. I think the key, as we said there, that it's open sourced and it's very clear that the totals that are in the machine are really what the intent of the voters were. The big slippery slope on anything is just making sure that if computers are involved, they're completely open-sourced, completely observable. And that's a challenge.

BuzzFlash: Well, with a paper ballot, you don't run into a problem that you do with a hanging chad. You get a printout.

David Earnhardt: That's right. And, there is an element of this which has to do with how certain segments of the Republican Party may have been doing things to manipulate elections. But ultimately this is a non-partisan issue. Everybody's got a stake in this being run correctly. I'm going to say the high, high majority of people want a system in which their vote gets counted. In this day and age, because the Republicans are in power throughout most of the country, even with the shift over in 2006, they're in the best position to manipulate the system. There are, of course, certain pockets where there's still old-line Democratic Party's control, where the Democratic Party is more in a position to manipulate. So it is more of a question of power and control, in terms of being able to manipulate the voting process.

But what I found, at the screenings we've done -- with moderates, progressives, a smattering of Republicans -- when you get them in a room, and they observe the film, and they see how there's so many different ways that our election system is basically corrupt -- people do not want that, as public citizens. That's not how we were raised to believe it's supposed to work.

It's quite hard with the film to try to emphasize the non-partisan aspects of that. It's very difficult to do that because so much of the corruption in the last ten years has mostly gone in one way. And we can't run away from that. So often our film will get tagged by critics as a partisan film. And that's very frustrating to me, because I don't see this as partisan at all. I think you have to tell the truth of things that are going on. Ultimately, this is an issue that affects us all, and everybody's got a stake in it -- Republican, Democrat, Green Party -- everybody.

BuzzFlash: Let me again urge our BuzzFlash readers to buy your film and to look at it because it's a very, very lucid primer to this issue, and explains it in a very accessible way.

David Earnhardt: Thank you.

BuzzFlash: Also very professionally edited, but that's your business.

David Earnhardt: Thank you. This issue is important. People respond to something that's put together in a very professional manner because it gives it a sense that we're not just kidding around. This isn't a fringe issue. This is something for all of us.

BuzzFlash: My last question to you is about disenfranchisement. Right now, it's the Republicans that have tried to disenfranchise Democrats, basically, and the easiest way to do that is to go after minorities. They've had a multi-faceted approach to that, which we saw in Prosecutorgate. Some of the U.S. Attorneys who were appointed were asked to drum up even one case of Democratic voter fraud, even if it hardly existed, to create a case so that the Republican legislatures would then say: you see, there's voter fraud. We have to implement voter ID legislation or something of this nature.

David Earnhardt: Yes, they had all that pressure. People lost their jobs who didn't play ball.

BuzzFlash: An integral factor in Prosecutorgate was whether the prosecutors would indeed pursue trumped-up charges or the most minor of charges to create a context for Republican legislatures to demand the basically contemporary version of Jim Crow laws.

David Earnhardt: That's right. Modern poll taxes.

BuzzFlash: We know that fooling around with ballots has not been the territory of one particular party if you look back over the history of the United States. But right now, it's the Republicans who clearly are in a very strategic way, nationally, trying to disenfranchise a large group of people. Our country was founded behind the motivation of representation, and as the Supreme Court decided back in the Sixties, one person, one vote.

David Earnhardt: That's right.

BuzzFlash: The Republican Party seems to be under the assumption that if you're wealthy and white, yes, there's one person, one vote. But if you're poor, you don't have the resources, you're a minority, your vote isn't necessarily as valid, and we can take it away, or we'll try to take it away. It undermines the most basic concept of democracy, that regardless of one's income, regardless of one's race, regardless of one's gender, you are entitled to vote. my vote is as equal to Bill Gates' vote or Warren Buffett's. Someone who is a poor Latino worker in a hotel in Nashville -- her vote is equal to George Bush's.

David Earnhardt: That's right.

BuzzFlash: And the assumption that we've seen from the Republicans in 2000, 2004 and 2006 is that that is not the case.

David Earnhardt: That's what gets me fired up. I think that's what gets a lot of people fired up. And I'd like to see even more people honoring the history of those who fought and died for the right to vote. Women died for the right to vote, for women's suffrage. African Americans died for the right to vote. And for it to really not matter, for the vote to be disregarded, disrespected, and not given the proper weight of one person, one vote, it invalidates all that history of where people fought and died for this right.

That's what we need to remember at this moment. That's how important it is. It's kind of the core of everything about who we are as a country. When people finally get the issue, that's what they realize is being messed with, and that's what makes people mad.

I hope that part of what we do with our film is that we share this very difficult information. And when people watch it, you always hear murmurs, groans. You hear -- it's painful. It's hard. I've seen this thing fifty, sixty times in screenings, and it still bothers me to hear it.

What we're trying to do is juxtapose that with people like Steve Heller, and Bruce Funk and Clint Curtis -- individual people who have taken a stand -- saying no, you can't do this. This is wrong. I am a single public figure that's going to stop and say you can't do that. I hope that's what our movie does as much as anything, is to balance this difficult information with people that we can be inspired by who are actually taking action. That's really the core of democracy -- taking action to say you can't do that with my vote. You can't do that with my country. You can't mess with this democracy in that way.

That's what I hope. And I hope we find the right ballots, because I hate for people just to walk away from a film and just say: damn, there's nothing I can do. You don't want people to feel like, no, I'm not going to bother to vote. You want people to walk away and feel like they want to do something. And that's how people are leaving the film. They want to do something. They want to share it with others, and they want to do their part. That makes me feel good.

BuzzFlash: Thank you very much. A fine film, and we recommend it. Thanks again for doing this. You didn't have to do, and you produced a great, informative, educational tool about enfranchising Americans.

David Earnhardt: Thanks for sticking with it. A lot of people have walked away. You stayed with it, and that means a lot. That keeps the word going.

BuzzFlash Interview conducted by Mark Karlin.

* * *

Resources

Uncounted, The New Math of American Elections, directed by David Earnhardt, a BuzzFlash premium.

David Earnhardt, articles at OpEdNews.com

David Earnhardt bio, at 'Uncounted' website

John Conyers -- What Went Wrong In Ohio

Debra Bowen Continues to Come Through

davidswanson — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 07:36:26 -0500

California seeks nearly $15 million from voting machine company
Associated Press

SACRAMENTO - Secretary of State Debra Bowen sued a major voting machine company Monday, accusing Election Systems & Software of selling unauthorized machines to San Francisco and four counties.

The lawsuit seeks nearly $15 million in penalties and reimbursements. Bowen contends that ES&S sold 972 of its AutoMark A200 voting machines to San Francisco and Colusa, Marin, Merced and Solano counties in 2006 even though the state had not tested and certified the machines.

"ES&S ignored the law over and over again and it got caught," Bowen said in a statement. "California law is very clear on this issue. I am not going to stand on the sidelines and watch a voting system vendor come into this state, ignore the laws and make millions of dollars from California taxpayers in the process."

The suit was filed for Bowen by the attorney general's office in San Francisco Superior Court. It seeks $9.7 million in penalties and asks the court to order ES&S to reimburse San Francisco and the four counties for the nearly $5 million cost of the machines.

Some of the AutoMark A200s apparently were used in the November 2006 election along with a previous version of the machines, Bowen said. Local election officials reported some problems with the AutoMarks, but Bowen said her office had no way of knowing if the problems were with the new machines or the older ones.

Omaha-based ES&S, which bills itself as the "world's largest and most experienced provider of
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total election management solutions," said the AutoMark A200 included only "minor hardware modifications" from an earlier model that was certified by the state.

The company said it followed an "established practice" in which California relied on federal testing to decide if it would allow minor modifications to existing voting systems without new state certification.

Ken Fields, an ES&S spokesman, said the AutoMark A200 modifications were submitted to federal labs in late 2005, when former Secretary of State Bruce McPherson was in office.

Under established protocol at that time, the state allowed equipment to be modified if the federal labs determined the changes didn't alter the "fit, form or function" of the equipment, he said.

The changes were intended to make the AutoMarks easier to service and manufacture, Fields said.

"The penalties sought by the secretary of state bear no relationship to the claimed violations, particularly given that the claimed violations resulted from ES&S adhering to the state's established practice," the company said in a statement.

But Bowen said it wasn't up to ES&S to determine if the hardware modifications were minor and that the AutoMark A200s had to be submitted to her office as well as to federal labs for testing and certification.

"California law does not ask the manufacturer if the changes to a voting system are big or small or medium size," she said in a conference call with reporters. "That's a matter for California's chief elections officer to decide."

A spokeswoman for Bowen, Nicole Winger, said the independent labs used by the federal government "clearly do not test these systems to the depth and breadth that California expects and the standards that California has."

The AutoMarks are designed to be used by voters with disabilities to mark ballots that are then read by scanners.

Bowen said the secretary of state's office became aware of the sale of the AutoMark A200s to San Francisco and the four counties when an ES&S employee accidentally mentioned the changes in the system during a conference call in July with members of the secretary of state's staff.

But Fields said examiners for the secretary of state's office saw the AutoMark A200 in 2006 as part of testing and certification of voting equipment used by San Francisco.

"I don't know if (the examiner) marked it A200, but that was the equipment that was there," Fields said.

Winger said local election officials were unaware they were getting modified equipment when they bought the AutoMark A200s. State officials also didn't know of any changes until the July conference call, she added.

Bowen said her office is now testing the AutoMark A200s to make sure they work as they should. She hopes to have results by early December.

If her lawsuit is successful, ES&S could be required to reimburse the five local governments for the AutoMark A200s, even if Bowen's office subsequently certifies the machines and they resume using the devices.

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On the Net:

Secretary of State's office: www.ss.ca.gov

Election Systems & Software: www.essvote.com

Gore Derangement Syndrome

Bob Fertik — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 08:57:43 -0400

Paul Krugman mostly nails it:

What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved...

Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Mr. Gore: in his case the smear campaign has failed. He’s taken everything they could throw at him, and emerged more respected, and more credible, than ever. And it drives them crazy.

My only quibble is saying "his opponent somehow ended up in the White House."

Bush stole it. And if we don't repeat it every time the issue comes up, we become accessories to the crime.