HARVEY WASSERMAN & THE STOLEN ELECTION
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Harvey Wasserman, noted longtime "No Nukes" activist and editor (w/ Bob Fitrakis) of the Columbus-based Free Press, appeared in Chicago Saturday, September 17, with statistician and professor Ron Baiman for a recounting of said evidence at Healing Earth Resources up north on Ashland. In spite of what I already knew about the case to be made for Republican electoral fraud, I was braced for the worst. Healing Earth is an old hippy-dippy spot, catering to a clientele that, in addition to its appetite for activist sloganeering, loves nothing more than the odd spiritual healing crystal or meditative incense. In short, the setting was rife with possibility for a meltdown of Chernybol-size proportions -- ultimately unfortunate, considering the mound of facts backing the arguments of both Baiman and Wasserman and others lately involved in efforts toward electoral reform**.
Baiman is one of a number of mathematician-computer scientist-statisticians (he's a researcher at UIC and teaches a class at the U. of C.) at the head of US Count Votes, a watchdog organization spanning the nation dedicated to ensuring "that correctly elected candidates (of any party) are sworn into office in the future," as goes their Web site. They are perhaps more accurately described as a voting rights organization that sprung up in the wake of last year's presidential election to analyze the data compiled from exit polls and the final vote count, which differed more wildly than even in the first of the presidential elections in Ukraine, which difference (or "differance," as Republicans might want you to see it in the case of our own election), be reminded, eventually forced a new vote and a change in the outcome due to the elimination of the first contest's fraud. Essentially Baiman and his many colleagues, PhDs and otherwise professors and analysts at various public and private institutions the nation over, have analyzed the exit polling data and found a seemingly systematic skew in the results reported from specifically Republican-run precincts that suggests tampering with the vote in said precincts. Further, the skew is particularly drastic in four of five "swing states" -- Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida -- where Republican vote-suppression techniques are well-documented (in the Conyers House Judiciary Committee report for Ohio, elsewhere for the rest: you will remember the press reports of jim crow-like Republican challengers at the polls on Election Day the nation over, the purging of ex-felons from lists of voters in southern states, etc.).
Baiman made his case, but frankly there's a reason he's a statistician. By the end of it my head was reeling. (You can check out their results and conclusions at the US Count Votes site.) Wasserman followed. He's author, with Bob Fitrakis, of a slim new volume, How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election and Is Rigging 2008, based on evidence previously compiled from public hearings the noted Ohio attorney and activist Fitrakis organized in the wake of the 2004 campaign, when more than 1000 respondents flocked to Columbus from various parts of the state to testify. The majority of testimony and other statistical evidence was compiled in a 767-page bound volume, Did George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election?: Ohio's Essential Documents
With a healthy dose of humor Wasserman posited that his home state, Ohio, well-known for its suitability as a test market for corporations and various television shows (Donahue, for instance, he said), was a kind of the proving ground for a program of mass voter disenfranchisement on the part of the GOP. He ran down a series of points that highlighted the various techniques on offer there.
1) Wally O'Dell, CEO of Diebold, the Canton-based manufacturer of electronic touch-screen voting machines (DREs), pledged early on in the campaign, in a now-well-known gaffe, to help "deliver [Ohio's] electoral votes to the president next year." A variety of incidents on and after Election Day saw employees of this and other GOP-connected manufacturers of voting equipment illegally tampering with machines -- in many cases ostensibly fixing broken-down machines, but in other cases actually reprogramming machines prior to demanded recounts in order that the machine recounts would accurately reflect the original results, a move that would seem to make sense if the machines tabulated the results erroneously, for whatever reason (many DREs, only a small part of the total vote in OH, produce no paper receipt, making a hand recount impossible though a partial hand recount is mandated by law). These incidents are cataloged in Wasserman's book, including the miraculous "Loaves and Fishes" vote count: "At the Ward 1B precinct in Gahanna, a suburb of Columbus, 4258 votes were tallied for George W. Bush where only 638 people were registered. The precinct was housed at the New Life Church, a fundamentalist congregation led by cohorts of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, a close associate of George W. Bush. The glitch was blamed on a faulty electronic transmission, but was later dubbed the 'loaves and fishes' vote count, in Falwell's honor...."
2) As in Florida in 2000, where Katherine Harris was simultaneously secretary of state (thus overseeing the statewide administration of elections) and cochair of the Florida Bush campaign, in Ohio in 2004 the secretary of state/cochair of the Bush campaign was Kenneth Blackwell, and his actions leading up to, during, and after the election show a concerted campaign to purge the rolls of Democratic voters and needle away at the unprecedentedly powerful Democratic registration drive. In just one strange instance, many ex-felons in Ohio received letters stating their ineligibility to vote, though in OH (unlike Florida and other southern states) ex-felons can vote.
3) The so-called "Texas Strike Force," operating throughout OH and particularly in Columbus, placed phone calls to Democratic voters in a disinformation and threat campaign; lodging for the "strike force" was paid for by the RNC. They used pay phones outside their hotel, and one witness, overhearing some of the shenanigans, called the cops, who came but soon left without taking any action.
4) Blackwell eliminated precincts, adding others, combining precincts in certain counties and changing polling places; letters were sent to Democratic voters, apparently by Republican party operatives (Texas Strike Force?), telling voters to go to the wrong polling place, or to vote on the wrong day.
5) Blackwell issued an edict barring the issue of the "provisional ballot" to voters if they were in the wrong precinct. The "provisional ballot" is required by the Help America Vote Act (2002) to be issued to voters who have no official residence or who are unsure of their correct precinct or whose registration has been "lost," as was the case with many even longtime Democratic voters in Ohio. Blackwell's edict was in direct contradiction with HAVA, and on Election Day the results were, as evidence establishes (in the Conyers report and elsewhere), miserable.
6) Various international monitoring groups, including a delegation from the UN, were denied entry into polling places, making monitoring virtually impossible.
7) In many cases, however, Republican "challengers," aka the Election Day jim crow-style threat squad intent on disenfranchising Democratic voters, were granted admittance.
8) Absentee ballots were held up via frankly unbelievable machinations. As happened to me in 2000 when I requested an absentee ballot from the state of SC, where my permanent residence was literally the house I'd lived my entire life in -- though I'd been in liberal Chicago for a year or so -- Wasserman himself requested an absentee ballot and was told it was not processed because the address on the ballot was faulty, though he'd lived at the same location and voted in every election since 1986. After the exchange of multiple letters, the situation was never rectified.
9) There were vast incongruities between the availability of machines in Republican and Democratic precincts, in many cases leading to lines so long at the latter the wait was up to five hours. (This particular inequity is heavily documented.)
10) The clincher, Wasserman says, is the discrepancy between the exit polling data and the official count, which, as Baiman said, seems to suggest an across-the-board padding of vote totals for the Republicans. The evidence for this is of course theoretical or circumstantial, and Wasserman is circumspect about the possibility of incontrovertibly proving such a thing -- but taking into consideration all of the above caging and obstructive tactics it doesn't take a conspiracy nut to extrapolate to the inevitable conclusion.
It was here that Wasserman went on to assail the Democratic Party, whose own obstructionist tactics seemed to put them in collusion with the Republicans. In a strange twist of fate, the lawyer for Kerry's Ohio campaign came after Wasserman and Fitrakis to attempt to stop their efforts at securing an Ohio recount. And as the Democrat-bashing began in the ever-ethereal climes of Healing Earth, the aforementioned volatility came to a head. A young man from an organization called "World Can't Wait" stood up with the expressed intent of asking Wasserman a question only to begin reading a prepared statement about the collusion of both parties with corporations, which is patently obvious for one, and secondly the dishonesty of his method of delivery was quite pathetic. And then the shouts came from all over the room and the proceedings came to resemble a dishonest election, full of provocative questions and over-the-top bluster. Twas a shame, not to mention a veritable caricature of the left in the flesh, considering the very real case to be made for widespread, systematic electoral malfeasance.
And when asked "Where from here?" Wasserman said very little while I was there. Of course, he didn't have much of a chance.
The Illinois Ballot-Integrity Project, one of the organizers of the event, is currently fighting to bar DRE machines from Illlinois (where manufacturers seem to be making inroads with officials lately); check out their site, and write your congressman. Demand a paper trail for these things. The technology is in use in certain states around the country that, as with ever-abundant ATM machines, allows for the printing of a voting receipt. It seems to me that that's an easy fix for ensuring the integrity of electronic voting. Of course, if the trends continue as they are -- every recount being fought tooth and nail by the prematurely declared winner, candidates who pledge to "count every vote" all of a sudden reneging their promise -- a paper trail may be simply worthless.
The truth will out, it's certain, if only a hundred years from now. As a colleague of mine recently pointed out, it's quite certain today that the 1876 election was stolen, ushering in the end of the south's Reconstruction and the beginning or continuance of the institutionalization of racist, repressive policies that would continue to reign there for nearly one hundred years. True, the nation didn't crumble, and the threat of an immediate resumption of the Civil War was avoided, but was it worth it? --TD
**And I'm not talking about Jimmy Carter and James Baker, who chaired American University's Commission on Electoral Reform whose final report is just out here. They've recommended good steps toward making the voter-registration process universal, i.e. uniform from state to state, and coming out strong in advocating international election monitoring, but they don't go far enough in condemning the political parties' administration of elections, instead seeming to place much of the blame for the chaos of the process on individual voters themselves.... Watch for Mark Crispin Miller's (Bush Dyslexicon
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