Science Guardian

Stealing America doc review makes convincing case that George W. robbed the ballot box twice

But now New York Times allows Adam Cohen to blog reasons to worry about 2008

One of the most striking acts of political cowardice by the otherwise topic hungry mainstream media in the US has been their enduring unwillingness to take the cover off what is widely recognized by students of the political scene as a very ripe smelling data dumpster.

We refer to the strong circumstantial evidence that in both 2000 and 2004 that our blithely underqualified president avoided rejection by the voters only by allowing his devoted minions and supporters to hack the voting machines and flip the required number of votes from Gore and Kerry to Bush.

Whether Bush stole votes in seizing the presidential throne for eight years would seem to be the Story of the Century by the standards of traditional journalism whereby a pair of Washington Post reporters did not hesitate to bring down the Nixon presidency by mining the allegations of Deep Throat.

But for some reason unknown to us there has been a mysterious disinclination to get to the bottom of what looks like the greatest and most costly political theft in history. The nettle has not been grasped.

The media apathy about the topic is probably understandable in the absence of hard evidence but it has left the average Times reader seriously uninformed, and therefore naturally skeptical of this allegation as yet another paranoid conspiracy theory from the far left.

Valuable chance to review the story

But for the next week in New York City a new documentary will do what it seems only documentaries can do these days - parade the evidence and the witnesses in front of our eyes and ears so that we can review the matter in a hands on manner that the ordinary media cannot rival.

Our advice is to hurry to see Stealing America: Vote by Vote when it opens briefly tomorrow in Manhattan, or two weeks later in LA and in other venues around the country. In each case it will only be on for one week, and it seems likely there will be as usual scandalously little media coverage of the significant event.

For Stealing America: Vote by Vote is a persuasive account which makes it painfully clear that there is only one way to explain the evidence that has accumulated: both presidential elections were stolen by Republican operatives who tampered with the new fangled electronic voting machines and reversed the voting outcomes in major states.

The red flags in both cases are the exit polls which predicted an outcome different from the official count. In 2000 the picture was complicated when the vote count of the narrow Florida race, on which the final outcome turned, was actually challenged. The Supreme Court cut this short with its unprecedented “this is not a precedent” 5-4 decision to give George the prize, but the media review a year later found that Florida and the election itself would have been won by Al Gore if the state wide recount had been completed, and one thing was certain: the obstacles placed in the way of free and fair elections interfered with a lot more Democratic votes than Republican.

The evidence of electronic skulduggery became clearer in 2004, when more efficient hacking of the voting machines was apparently all that was needed to achieve a similar coup d’etat. According to the film this was the likely means by which the predicted John Kerry win was neatly reversed in a few hours on Election night in favor of the incumbent George W.

On what does this sickening conclusion rest? Simply that exit polls predicted the Kerry win, and there is no other way to explain why they have suddenly become unreliable indicators.

We challenge anyone with faith in the democratic system to see this movie without being disturbed.

Vote changing in front of your eyes

That is the story persuasively laid out by Stealing America: Vote by Vote by Dorothy Fadiman (pic), which will open August 1 in New York and August 15 in LA (see press release below), which features unusually convincing testimony from key figures involved in a clearly laid out, hour by hour rerun of the overnight election drama in 2004, when the Kerry win flipped to a Bush victory.

The film doesn’t leave any other way of accounting for the stark disparity that has opened up between the previously infallible exit polls and the official counts they reliably matched for thirty years before 1996, when the new fangled electronic voting machines first played their unreliable part. Unreliable because they are as susceptible to failure and hacking as your desktop PC, according to computer experts interviewed in Stealing America.

The heart of the story is 2004, when the biggest conflict to date between exit polling and outcome came about. Kerry was predicted on the basis of exit polling to win the 12 big states that mattered - including Ohio where the crucial official count was barred to reporters owing to a “terrorist threat”, one that national security agency officials later said was new to them - Kerry was expected to win by 51-48%. By the early morning the official vote counts had reversed the outcome and Bush was the winner by about the same margin as (not) predicted - an unprecedented flip of 6%.

The stunning final hour reversal was all the more incredible given the enthusiastic turnout of blacks and college students we see waiting in line many hours to vote in precincts which mysteriously tended to be the ones short of working machines, or to have machines plagued by the strange glitch which registered a vote for Kerry as one for Bush right before the voter’s eyes.

More votes for president were corrupted than any other time in the checkered history of US elections, if the evidence of the film is taken at face value.

Given the tone and style of the witnesses featured and the record they expose it is hard to think of a reason not to do so. There is very little of the conspiracy theorist about any of them, and producer-director Dorothy Fadiman has drawn them from both sides of the political spectrum:

• Bob Hagan – Ohio State Senator and first-hand witness to on-screen vote switching.
• Paul Craig Roberts — Economist and former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan and sometimes
called the “Father of Reaganomics.” He is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week
and Scripps Howard News Service, and is at present a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate.
• Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. – Activist, author, environmental lawyer and co-host of Ring of Fire on the Air America Radio network.
• Charles Lewis – Investigative journalist and former 60 Minutes producer. Founder, Center for Public Integrity.
• Bruce O’ Dell and Chuck Herrin – Fortune 100 company computer security analysts.
• Greg Palast – BBC investigative journalist whose reportage on the issue made the front page in U.K. and Europe, but was suppressed in the U.S.
• Dr. Avi Rubin – Director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
• Ion Sancho – Leon County Supervisor of Elections. Appointed by the Florida Supreme Court to count the
votes in the disputed 2000 presidential election, Sancho blazed a trail in proving that it is possible to “hack”
into voting machines and change the totals.
• Dr. Jonathan Simon – Data analyst, who has been focusing on exit poll discrepancies.
• John Zogby – International polling authority.

Media myopia on a taboo topic

As things went down that night and the numbers rolled in and the great reversal took place the close observers of the election on tv had one plain choice to make in their commentary. Were the exit polls suddenly a poor guide to the final voting outcome, for some unknown reason, or was there a serious need to review and recount the sudden Bush surge?

Apparently loathe to question the system or those in power, the commentators at once all turned into ostriches, and they have by and large resolutely kept their heads in the sand ever since, though Harpers magazine has been an exception.

They were helped along in this attitude by the company doing the exit polling, which immediately rolled over and played dead when their results were contradicted. According to “standard practice” the company (Edison/Mitofsky) simply brought their numbers in line with the official supposed outcome, though not before a computer freeze allowed interested observers to download the real breakdown.

The bottom line is that no one then or since has been able to account for the increasing divergence between exit polling and official vote count over the last decade. From the sixties, exit polls had proved an essential tool of election analysts because they were so helpful. Suddenly they went bad.

Since the emerging discrepancy coincides with the arrival of electronic voting machines the implication is obvious: someone has been manipulating the new electronic voting machines (You Tube video on hacking a Diebold).

Now who could that be? By some even stranger coincidence the bias introduced has been uniformly in favor of the Republicans, amongst whom are the people who run the machine system.

All kinds of electoral interferences took place. Apart from direct hacking, which one computer consultant testified was something a certain Florida politician requested that he demonstrate how to do, the election officials and others interviewed list a litany of outrages aimed at Democrat votes, including a skewed distribution of machines which forced waits of up to 11 hours for some black voters and 12 or more hours for Ohio’s Kenyon college students.

Requests for replacement machines were ignored even when the fact that other polling stations had closed made substitutes freely available.

Tears trickle down both cheeks of one beautiful African American volunteer as she recalls how all her registration work went for nought as even her own vote was hijacked by a machine which translated her Kerry vote to a Bush vote before her eyes. Also interviewed is Ohio State Senator Bob Hagan, whose vote flipped from one candidate to another while he was voting.

A taboo topic

The most astonishing part of the story (except perhaps to readers of this site) is the behavior of the no doubt honorable but apparently critically challenged senior members of the media. There is a vivid shot of Judy Woodruff expressing bewilderment as the numbers changed and their forecasts fell by the wayside.

To a man and woman however she and the liberal media reporters and commentators then and since have resolutely avoided raising the specter of intentional fraud as something apparently unmentionable, perhaps lest the faith of the American voter in the system might be undermined. If so, this matches one motivation of editors and reporters in HIV/AIDS who treat the possibility of grand error in the science of that field as a taboo topic, since if it is true full exposure will undermine the faith of the public in science, science journals and science reporting to an unprecedented extent.

One author stymied by this reaction is Mark Crispin Miller of NYU, whose Fooled Again received few reviews or mentions, yet when he was featured on WBAI in New York City provided much food for thought for listeners.

In this belated exposé—and clarion call for electoral reform—Miller (The Bush Dyslexicon) accuses George W. Bush and his “theocratic militants” of orchestrating electoral fraud to “hijack” the 2004 presidential race. Miller relies on original reporting, secondary sources and unadulterated outrage to make his case, marshaling evidence (much of it circumstantial) of Democratic voter disenfranchisement, mysterious computer snafus and discrepancies between exit poll results and official vote counts. He is especially critical of the press for what he describes as silence in the face of Bush’s and Cheney’s denials of fraud.

Whatever their motives the record stands as evidence of the current social psychology of reporters and talking heads who feel themselves to be invested in the system and more members of the club than independent watchdogs whose profession is to stand guard over the elite and watch where they put their hands on the levers of power.

That is the story persuasively laid out by Stealing America: Vote by Vote. As the movie reminds us the New York Times led this rush to reassure readers with its astonishing front page item immediately after the November 2004 election, Vote Fraud Theories, Spread By Blogs, Are Quickly Buried , noting that bloggers had raised questions but they had been reliably poo-pooed by knowledgeable mainstream officials and experts and there was no need to worry.

Mr. White also quickly withdrew his own analysis of voting systems in Ohio when he realized the data he had used was inaccurate.

John Byrne, editor of an alternative news site, BlueLemur.com, says it is too easy to condemn blogs and freelance Web sites for being inaccurate. The more important point, he said, is that they offer an alternative to a mainstream news media that has become too timid. “Of course you can say blogs are wrong,” he said. “Blogs are wrong all the time.”

For its part, the Kerry campaign has been trying to tamp down the conspiracy theories and to tell supporters that their mission now is to ensure that every vote is counted, not that the election be overturned.

“We know this was an emotional election, and the losing side is very upset,” said Daniel Hoffheimer, the lead lawyer for the Kerry campaign in Ohio. But, he said, “I have not seen anything to indicate intentional fraud or tampering.”

A preliminary study produced by the Voting Technology Project, a cooperative effort between the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came to a similar conclusion. Its study found “no particular patterns” relating to voting systems and the final results of the election.

“The ‘facts’ that are being circulated on the Internet,” the study concluded, “appear to be selectively chosen to make the point.”

Whether that will ever convince everyone is an open question.

“I’d give my right arm for Internet rumors of a stolen election to be true,” said David Wade, a spokesman for the Kerry campaign, “but blogging it doesn’t make it so. We can change the future; we can’t rewrite the past.”

Even the worldly Wall Street Journal failed to look into the matter, Paul Craig Roberts complains, he being Reagan’s assistant secretary of the Treasury and an editor and columnist for the normally bloodhound paper.

This and the premature capitulation of Kerry before all the Ohio votes were counted suggests that Democrats have some innate resistance to challenging the integrity of the system they share. When Ohio state senator Bob Hagan saw his own vote switched in front of his eyes and realized what was going on, he called the Kerry HQ, only to be told they didn’t wish the raise the issue.

Meanwhile according to the film, Edison/Mitofsky have never released the raw data for their exit polling. All anyone has been able to prise out of them is a summary report.

Watch out in 2008

Given the results of the 2006 elections,where Democratic hopes of 40-50 new seats were reduced to 28, it seems clear that the same thing is still going on. Meanwhile the Ohio ballots from 2004 have lost or destroyed in a variety of ways, against all the rules. When Dan Rather investigated for CNN he found nothing but stonewalling from the companies involved: AMERICA’S VOTING MACHINES NOT READY FOR 2008 ELECTION” (YouTube video).

Sites to visit include Black Box Voting. A very good source both comprehensive and detailed is this page, Introduction: Did George W. Bush steal America’s 2004 election? Essential documents, by Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman June 16, 2005 and other pages at Freepress.org.

In this volume’s first three documents, we reproduce articles published before November 2, 2004. Widely distributed throughout the Internet weeks before the election, they warned that a wide range of abuses stemming from Secretary Blackwell’s office and other sources had already tainted the outcome of the upcoming Ohio vote.

On Election Day, these warnings seemed tragically prophetic. The balloting throughout Ohio was riddled with a staggering array of irregularities, apparent fraud and clear illegalities. Many of the questions focused on electronic voting machines whose lack of official accountability and a reliable paper trail had been in the news since the bitterly contested election of 2000, four years earlier. (Similar questions also arose in Georgia in 2002, where Democratic candidates for Governor and US Senate had substantial leads in the major polls right up to election day, only to lose by substantial margins).

The most widely publicized Ohio problems came as predomin