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Wake up, Americans. The election is not over and it's not official.
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By Mike Cuenca | November 23, 2004
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If you watch only the television networks and read only the mainstream
press, you probably think the 2004 presidential election is over and
settled, and that GW Bush won. Fortunately, none of that is true. The
election outcome is still very much in doubt and most of the
uncertainty is based on the mess in Ohio. And it's pretty clear that
the election was rigged. And the uncertainty includes whether every
vote will indeed be counted.
What
you're not reading or seeing in the media are the many clear
indications that the GOP once again has at least attempted to steal a
presidential election.
What you probably know is that it takes
270 votes in the Electoral College to win the presidency. As the count
stands today, GW has 286 and John Kerry has 252. Ohio represents 20
electoral votes. Right now, those votes are in GW's total. But if they
were taken away and added to Kerry's, we would have a new president.
So, until the Electoral College meets to vote in December, it's all up in the air.
Here's a review of just a little bit of what's been happening:
Two days after November 2, journalist Greg Palast reported
that there are more than 90,000 so-called "spoiled" ballots and more
than 155,000 provisional ballots, presumably from mostly Democratic
counties and precincts. GW's unofficial margin in Ohio is only 138,000.
The Columbus Dispatch reported on November 5 that 4,258 votes were cast for GW in a precinct that had only had 638 voters cast votes.
As of last week, a statewide recount had been assured by the Green Party,
which was able to raise the $113,600 dollars necessary to pay for the
recount. They had raised the money within four days after announcing a
call for donations.
A coalition of democracy-protection groups held public hearings
in Ohio to try to identify specific problems and efforts to
disenfranchise voters (which should be the job of our government.) As a
result of the public hearings they announced on November 20
their preparations to file a challenge of the Ohio election results to
the Ohio Supreme Court. Ohio law requires that the challengers be able
to prove the wrong candidate was elected.
Just today, a group of U.S. representatives announced
that the Government Accountability Office, a non-partisan office of the
Congress, will investigate the complaints pouring in about election
problems.
The only holdup on the recount, apparently, is the
certification of the vote. No recount can happen until the vote is
certified. And the man responsible for that certification and the
conduct of the recount is Ohio's Secretary of State J. Kenneth
Blackwell, who is in charge of the election and the counting of votes
in Ohio. Blackwell also just happens to be the co-chair of Ohio's
Bush/Cheney reelection committee. In an editorial
published by the ultra-conservative Washington Times (which is owned
and operated by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon of the "Moonies",)
Blackwell himself wrote that the election was "tremendously
successful," while assuring us that "there was no widespread fraud and
no disenfranchisement."
How Blackwell could have already
determined that there was no fraud is questionable, especially since he
still has not yet certified the election results. And his claim that
there was no disenfranchisement was just simply a lie and a lot of
evidence and sworn testimony indicate that Blackwell and his office
coordinated a lot of it.
Public hearings conducted in Ohio by
various democracy-protection organizations revealed that Blackwell's
election officials caused massive voter disenfranchisement with
verified methods and in areas that would result in a suppression of
African-American (mostly Kerry) voters. Some of those methods included
placing too few voting machines in those precincts most likely to vote
for Kerry, which caused long lines and waits up to several hours, which
suppressed the vote by discouraging voters and making it too hard for
working voters to have enough time to vote. In an account of election problems
published by the Cleveland Scene weekly, reporters quoted an election
official as saying that the reason the voting was taking so long in her
precinct was because they only had one pen. They reported that of the
17 voting machines allocated to one heavily African-American precinct,
half of them would not function and one woman said she waited seven
hours to vote.
You have to figure that Karl Rove and Blackwell
assumed that they could fudge a little here and there with the vote
count and suppress votes by causing long lines and frustration for many
likely Democratic voters and have it add up to a Bush win. They've
succeeded so far. They got the initial numbers they wanted. But those
numbers might not hold up if there are enough obviously fraudulent
votes—or even accidentally miscounted votes—to counter the number of
votes that were suppressed.
As far as I'm concerned, some of the
people who are hanging in there and fighting to preserve democracy
deserve the highest honors that we can bestow upon them. Democracy is
sacred. We must preserve and protect our democracy. If we lose the
right to represent ourselves, we could lose all of the rights most of
us take for granted. All Americans should want elections to be fair,
honest, transparent and conducted in the light of day.
My biggest disappointments are the near total invisibility of the Democratic Party, which has been my own party, and journalism, which is my own profession.
Where
are those who we elected to represent us and to protect the
Constitution of the United States? I don't expect Republicans to make
any noise about election fraud. But the Democrats are showing an
indifference, cowardice or malfeasance that reveals too much about how
little they've been willing to steadfastly fight the right-wing.
And
where are the journalists, who are supposed to be the electorate's
source of information about their government? This is blatant, flagrant
dereliction of a journalist's duty to fully inform the electorate.
Three weeks after the election and we've been told a lot more about
Desperate Housewives than the tabulation of our vote and the
discernment of our true democratic intent.
Keep an eye on blackboxvoting.org and freepress.org for the latest information.
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