Here is the truth of the struggle for the life of America…You won’t hear it from Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings or Chris Matthews or Tim Russert or George Stop&Laugh@Us or Andrea Mitchell...Do you remember Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young? “Four dead in Ohio. Four dead in Ohio. How many more? How many more?” That song, honoring the four Kent State college students shot dead by the Ohio National Guard during a protest against the war on Vietnam, was an anthem for a generation. What is happening in Ohio now is no less tragic and of no less importance. Indeed, what is happening in Ohio now is more tragic and of greater importance. But where is the “US mainstream news media”? They have deep-sixed the story of what is happening in Ohio and in the Conyers hearings and instead they carry the filthy water of their triad partners, the Bush Cabal and its wholly-owned-subsidiary-formerly-known-as-the-Republican-Party…The ranking Democratic member of the House Judiciary Committee, and one of the most senior members of the Congress, has called for an FBI investigation. Two eye-witnesses have come forward – one to testify to possible illegality in Fraudida, one to testify to possible illegality in Ohio…A Republican Congressman from Fraudida has been accused -- in front of fellow members of the House Judiciary and in sworn testimony in a public hearing -- of requesting the development of software to rig election results…And yet somehow Bernard Kerik scandal (Rove's ploy of using bad news to bury worse news) and the Scott Peterson trial are deemed bigger stories…Where is John Kerry? Where is the Democratic Party leadership? We are relieved that Kerry’s lawyers have finally weighed in – and in a serious way – to the lawsuits to safeguard the Ohio re-count, but Kerry, or one of his surrogates, should be handing out coffee to the brave citizens who are battling this criminal conspiracy to steal a second consecutive illegitimate term in office for the _resident and the VICE _resident…Are we alone? It appears so…America is dying of vote fraud and vote suppression in Ohio, America has been torn to pieces in the chill precincts of Ohio. Meanwhile, most Americans are living in denial. And why not? They would have to jump-start their own conscience in a vacuum. The “US mainstream news media” is wholly complicit. The Democratic Party has seemingly capitulated…“Four dead in Ohio. Four dead in Ohio. How many more? How many more?”
The Theft of the 2004 Election
Bob Fertik, www.democrats.com: Keith Olbermann has the scoop of the day, thanks to an excellent interview with Rep. John Conyers. Conyers "prepared" to contest Ohio Electoral Vote. The ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee told us tonight on Countdown that he and others in Congress are considering formally challenging the slate of electors who cast Ohio’s votes, when those votes are opened and counted before a joint session of Congress on January 6th.
“We’re prepared to do that,” Conyers said. “And we understand the law as well as you.”
Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman, Columbus Free Press: Monday, December 13, saw a triple play that will live in electoral infamy. But every new day brings still more stunning revelations -- this time from Toledo -- of vote theft and fraud and a towering wall of resistance and sabotage against a fair recount of the votes that allegedly gave George W. Bush four more years in the White House.
Three major events made December 13 a monument to electoral theft: a lawsuit filed in the morning at the Ohio State Supreme Court demanding a recount of all Ohio ballots; a Congressional hearing held in Columbus City Council chambers filled with angry, high-profile testimony of vote fraud and disenfranchisement and the illegal sabotaging of a recount; and then, at noon, a block away at the statehouse, the vote of Ohio's twenty illegitimate electors designating their choice of George W. Bush to be president.
www.democraticunderground.com: At 4 pm today, after failing to get a match of hand counted ballots with punch card tabulator (ESS), two hand counts and two times through machine, after stating they were awaiting a call back from that company to have a new machine delivered, less than 30 seconds later convened a board meeting, voted to suspend recount, to await a new machine from ESS, and recount will be re-done Saturday, same exact precincts, the building is now closed, you are to exit the facility. BOE blaming issues on "machine failure" in order to avoid the now required entire county hand count. Precints were not random, they were selected by BOE, one from the Dem and one from the Repup.
William Rivers Pitt, www.truthout.org: Among activists and investigators looking into allegations of vote fraud in the 2004 Presidential election, the company always mentioned was Diebold and its suspicious electronic touch-screen voting machines. It is Diebold that has multiple avowed Republicans on its Board of Directors. It was Diebold that gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bush’s election campaign. It was Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell who vowed to deliver Ohio’s electoral votes to Bush.
As it turns out, everyone was looking the wrong way. The company that requires immediate and penetrating scrutiny is Triad Systems.
Triad is owned by a man named Tod Rapp, who has also donated money to both the Republican Party and the election campaign of George W. Bush. Triad manufactures punch-card voting systems, and also wrote the computer program that tallied the punch-card votes cast in 41 Ohio counties last November…
AFFIDAVIT
December 13, 2004
Sherole Eaton
Re: General Election 2004 - Hocking County, TriAd
Dell Computer about 14 years old - No tower
On Friday, December 10 2004, Michael from TriAd called in the AM to inform us that he would be in our office in the PM on the same day. I asked him why he was visiting us. He said, "to check out your tabulator, computer, and that the attorneys will be asking some tricky questions and he wanted to go over some of the questions they maybe ask." He also added that there would be no charge for this service…
Conyers, upon hearing these allegations, sent a letter to both the FBI Special Agent in Charge in Ohio and the Hocking County Prosecutor. The text of that letter is as follows:
December 15, 2004
As part of the Democratic staff's investigation into irregularities in the 2004 election and following up on a lead provided to me by Green Party Presidential Candidate, David Cobb, I have learned that Sherole Eaton, a Deputy Director of Board of Elections in Hocking County, Ohio, has first hand knowledge of inappropriate and likely illegal election tampering in the Ohio presidential election in violation of federal and state law.
Bob Fertik, www.democrats.com: BUSTED! Conyers calls the FBI to investigate Triad - which finally gets the attention of the NY Times, although they only manage to get about one-third of the story…
The ranking Democratic member of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, plans to ask the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a county prosecutor in Ohio today to explore "inappropriate and likely illegal election tampering" in at least one and perhaps several Ohio counties.
The request for an investigation, made in a letter that was also provided to The New York Times, includes accounts from at least two county employees, but is based largely on a sworn affidavit provided by the Hocking County deputy director of elections, Sherole Eaton….
Gary Polvinale, www.dailykos.com: Yesterday in 30 degree temperature with winds that knocked me over while I was filming the Ohio Statehouse Rally, Ohioans and people from all over America who came to Ohio to help us, listened to Joan and Eve tell how they were denied access to those public records in Greene County Ohio.
Yes, those of us in Ohio ARE on the front lines - and it feels like we are defending the Alamo. We are doing our part. A handful of determined people are working themselves to exhaustion. Yes, we ARE out there in the streets. And we ARE at the statehouse. And we ARE at the hearings. And we ARE filing the lawsuits. And we ARE out there doing the recount. And we ARE out there knocking on doors to investigate, verify and gather the facts.People all over the country who are web-tracking what's happening want to help, who feel helpless, frustrated, and sorry for us in Ohio, are offering good wishes and words of encouragement...
And believe me, we appreciate the encouragement. We do, and thank you for that. But we here in Ohio need more than a "You can do it" pat on the back. We ARE doing it. But nobody knows. Ohio is screaming the truth at the top of its lungs, literally, and no one hears us because of all the noise of the media silence.If you want to do something, here's what you can do to help.I am asking the rest of the country to please get out there and find well-known people who's voices are loud enought to be heard by the press who will stand up for us. Get a Senator or a media personality or anyone of very high profile to come out about this. The media blackout is killing us. Very few members of Congress, and no one in the Democratic Party has even seriously acknowledged the recount…
This is still looked at as the "sour grapes" effort of a couple of disgruntled 3rd party candidates who can't win anyway. It couldn't be further from that. The civil rights of every man, woman and child in America are at stake here.I don't care what it takes, convince somebody to break our story, to back us and give us the credibility we need and to let the world know we're here doing this. Redford, Sting, Kennedy, Fonda, Kerry... I don't care who, somebody, anybody who can attract the attention of the media (evidently John Conyers' and Jesse Jackson's brave voices are not loud enough.)
We've kinda got our hands full here, or we'd be doing that ourselves too. Give us a voice and we will deliver Ohio. Otherwise SOS Blackwell and the BOE will continue to slap us around like we don't matter a lick, at every turn. We are being squelched by a state government that is willing to violate our rights and even break the law as often as necessary to stand in our way and prevent us from exposing what they've done.I watched 100 of the greatest people I've ever met freeze their butts off for three hours Sunday, and 1500 the week before. And today people are out there at the Conyers hearing at the Columbus Statehouse again freezing, supporting the hearing, the investigation and the recount. And the Ohio recount has begun this morning.
Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman, Columbus Free Press: Startling new revelations about Ohio's presidential vote have been uncovered as Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee join Rev. Jesse Jackson in Columbus, the state capital, on Monday, Dec. 13, to hold a rare field hearing into election malfeasance and manipulation in the 2004 vote. The Congressional delegation will include Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, and others.
Taken together, the revelations show Republicans – in state and county government, and in the Ohio Republican Party – were determined to undermine and suppress Democratic turnout by a wide variety of methods.
The revelations were included in affidavits gathered for an election challenge lawsuit filed Monday at the Ohio Supreme Court. Ohio's Republican Electoral College representatives are also to meet at noon, Monday, at the State House, even though the presidential recount, requested by the Green and Libertarian Parties, is only beginning the same day.
On Sunday, John Kerry spoke with Rev. Jesse Jackson and urged him to take an more active role in investigating the irregularities and ensuring a fair and impartial recount. Kerry said there were three areas of inquiry that should be addressed: 92,000 ballots that recorded no vote for president; qualifying and counting provisional ballots; and supported an independent analysis of the software and set-up of the optical scan voting machines.
Buzzflash News Analysis, www.buzzflash.com: In case you missed it, an exhaustive 23,422-word Vanity Fair article, published just prior to the election (October), spilled the beans that at least four of the five Supreme Court justices who stole the election from Al Gore did it with willing forethought. And the fifth, Justice Kennedy, who came up with the hypocritical, convoluted reason for awarding the election to Bush, was probably just pretending to be "open-minded."
In short, the story, the first one to reveal the inside machinations of the infamous decision of 2000, confirmed that this wasn't a judicial decision that decided the election 4 years ago; it was a premeditated theft of democracy from the American voters.
The partisan choice of five justices -- led by the judicial right-wing molotov-cocktail throwing Nino Scalia -- outweighed the selection of the American people.
Why is this important now? Because it confirms that the Bush Cartel will do and did everything to win -- and it doesn't take a leap of imagination or common sense to speculate that with four years in office, they were able to heist the election this time without a nod and a wink to Nino and his right wing ship of judicially radical pirates.
What we forget in our focus on Ohio is that the Republicans, through dirty tricks, voter suppression and intimidation, faulty felons' lists, and the deep-sixing of tens of thousands of Kerry votes -- among other anti-democracy tactics -- probably had the election heisted before the polls even opened. They privatized the counting of votes of Americans and turned it over to companies deeply ensconced in the Republican camp and Republican politics, with checkered histories and Republican ownership. They intentionally mis-registered college students, threw away the registration forms of perhaps tens of thousands of Democrats, and lost more than 55,000 absentee ballots in Jewish/Democratic leaning Broward County, FL, alone. And this list is just for starters.
The Bush rogue regime was born a bastard child by a fixed Supreme Court vote and now controls the process by which any investigation of voting irregularities would be pursued. Indeed, Ken Blackwell, one of the two key Rove 2004 Katherine Harrises (along with Florida Secretary of State Hood), wrote Congressman John Conyers just this week that only the Department of Justice or the GAO had the authority to investigate voting in Ohio. So, two agencies under the Republicans, who Blackwell has just declared the winner of the Presidency, are the only ones Blackwell would allow to investigate their victory. It's a tactic worthy of Stalin -- and the Bush Cartel is one terrorist attack short of achieving full dictatorship powers, while the nation sleeps.
The Bush Abominations #1 Failure: National Security
Deutsche Welle: The Pentagon expressed concern Monday over a criminal complaint filed in Germany against US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other officials over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, warning that "frivolous lawsuits" could affect the broader US-German relationship.
The complaint was filed in Berlin on Nov. 30 by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and Berlin's Republican Lawyers' Association on behalf of four Iraqis who were alleged to have been mistreated by US soldiers.
Besides Rumsfeld, former CIA director George Tenet, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Steven Cambone, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, Brigadier General Janis
Karpinski and five other military officers who served in Iraq were named in the complaint, which seeks an investigation into their role in the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib…
The groups that filed the complaint said they had chosen Germany because of its Code of Crimes Against International Law, introduced in 2002, which grants German courts universal jurisdiction in cases involving war crimes or crimes against humanity…
John P. O’Neill Wall of Heroes
Larry Fine, Reuters: A portrait of President George W. Bush using monkeys to form his image has led to the closure of a New York art exhibition over the weekend and anguished protests over freedom of expression.
"Bush Monkeys," a small acrylic on canvas by Chris Savido, created the stir at the Chelsea Market public space, leading the market's managers to close down the 60-piece show that was scheduled to stay up for the next month.
The show featured art from the upcoming issue of Animal Magazine, a quarterly publication featuring emerging artists.
"We had tons of people, like more than 2,000 people show up for the opening on Thursday night," said show organizer Bucky Turco. "Then this manager saw the piece and the guy just kind of flipped out. 'The show is over. Get this work down or I'm gonna arrest you,' he said. It's been kind of wild."
Restore the Sanctity of the Vote! Restore the Vital Role of the Free Press! Restore Democracy in America! Restore the Republic!
Stolen Election 2004: Thursday Update
by Bob Fertik on 12/15/2004 10:07pm. - revised 12/16/2004 10:40am
Keith Olbermann has the scoop of the day, thanks to an excellent interview with Rep. John Conyers.
Conyers "prepared" to contest Ohio Electoral Vote
The ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee told us tonight on Countdown that he and others in Congress are considering formally challenging the slate of electors who cast Ohio’s votes, when those votes are opened and counted before a joint session of Congress on January 6th.
“We’re prepared to do that,” Conyers said. “And we understand the law as well as you.”
However, Olbermann's scoop was not rock-solid:
After the on-air interview ended, the Michigan representative added that he and his colleagues had not yet decided whether or not to take the extraordinary constitutional step, and he had not sought the support of a Senator who would have to co-sign the challenge.
Hey Keith, there are lots of Democratic activists who are seeking the support of a Senator. For example, here's an excellent report from the Vermont Guardian describing how members of Vermonters for Voting Integrity are lobbying Senators Jim Jeffords (I) and Pat Leahy (D). And there's a well-organized California-wide effort by Contest the Vote to persuade Barbara Boxer (D).
Conyers also rebuffed criticism that his “voting forums” in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio, had included formal participation only by Democratic congressmen and politicians. “The fact that Republicans didn’t join us isn’t our problem, it’s their fault.” Republican Congressman Bob Ney of Ohio last week announced plans to conduct an investigation into the 2004 vote under his auspices as Chairman of the House Administration Committee.
Notice the absence of any date associated with Ney's investigation. There is nothing on Ney's web site, but the AP says the investigation will begin "next year" - long after Bush takes the oath for a second stolen term. (Many of us remember similar promises from Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2001 about investigating the hundreds of serious complaints about Florida, which led to one insignificant reprimand about the lack of translators in immigrant-heavy precincts, but no prosecution of Katherine Harris or Jeb Bush or anyone else for systematically and criminally disenfranchising tens of thousands of non-felons, a majority of whom were black and likely to vote Democratic, thus stealing the White House for W.)
Speaking of blacks, it dawned on me that the reason the Ohio recount story is being covered almost exclusively by a former sports reporter - Olbermann - is because professional sports coverage on cable TV is the only place in journalism where blacks are treated equally with whites. The Ohio recount story largely features black leaders - namely Ken Blackwell, John Conyers, and Jesse Jackson. (It also features black voters who were once again disenfranchised through extraordinarily long lines and provisional ballot rejections, but we haven't heard much from them. Memo to Olbermann: the lead plaintiffs in Moss v. Bush (petition and injunction) are Rev. Bill Moss and Ruth Carol Moss, distinguished community leaders who told their Election Day story at the Conyers forum in Washington on Dec. 8.) Kudos for Olbermann for being the only political journalist who treats blacks like full American citizens.
Speaking of crimes, Fairfield County (an exurb of Columbus) broke the law when it suspended its recount after the manual count in the sample precincts did not match the original count. As mtnester of DemocraticUnderground reports,
At 4 pm today, after failing to get a match of hand counted ballots with punch card tabulator (ESS), two hand counts and two times through machine, after stating they were awaiting a call back from that company to have a new machine delivered, less than 30 seconds later convened a board meeting, voted to suspend recount, to await a new machine from ESS, and recount will be re-done Saturday, same exact precincts, the building is now closed, you are to exit the facility. BOE blaming issues on "machine failure" in order to avoid the now required entire county hand count. Precints were not random, they were selected by BOE, one from the Dem and one from the Repup.
This after their call to SOS Kathy Blackwell.
Greens will be going for a TRO. They are fully aware of entire circumstances of this report.
BOE's trying to get around mandatory handcounts of entire counties by calling it machine failure rather than follow clear statute. This will be breaking I am sure before long.
First hand witness to events above....myself
We must be getting warm, because the rightwing media has launched a fierce counterattack. On Tuesday, Cliff Arnebeck was attacked by Sean Hannity. On Wednesday, Joe Scarborough attacked the recount. The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote a long editorial attacking conspiracy theorists.
MoveOn.Now
The zealots who refuse to accept Ohio's vote count risk undermining confidence in the system itself
Unfortunately, there is a small, but very vocal, group of Americans who refuse to accept this reality [that Bush won]. They argue that what appear to be routine technical glitches and human errors were in fact an elaborate conspiracy to skew the election results. They claim that long lines at a few polling places, the rather unsurprising result of high voter interest, were evidence of a systematic campaign to discourage participation. In short, having failed to get the outcome they wanted at the polls, they have decided to mount an irresponsible campaign aimed at undermining public confidence in the electoral system itself.
That's just libel. Our whole goal is to restore public confidence in an electoral system that cannot be trusted because the people who are in charge of it, like Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell - and the companies that sell and maintain the voting machines, like Diebold and Triad - are partisan Republicans whose only interest is electing Republicans, not running honest elections.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/121704Z.shtml
Democracy Hangs by a Thread in Ohio
By Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman
The Columbus Free Press
December 15, 2004
As the whole world watches, American democracy may be hanging by a thread in Ohio.
Monday, December 13, saw a triple play that will live in electoral infamy. But every new day brings still more stunning revelations -- this time from Toledo -- of vote theft and fraud and a towering wall of resistance and sabotage against a fair recount of the votes that allegedly gave George W. Bush four more years in the White House.
Three major events made December 13 a monument to electoral theft: a lawsuit filed in the morning at the Ohio State Supreme Court demanding a recount of all Ohio ballots; a Congressional hearing held in Columbus City Council chambers filled with angry, high-profile testimony of vote fraud and disenfranchisement and the illegal sabotaging of a recount; and then, at noon, a block away at the statehouse, the vote of Ohio's twenty illegitimate electors designating their choice of George W. Bush to be president.
On Tuesday, demonstrators staged the latest in a long string of protests at the statehouse. And at an evening hearing in Toledo, stunning new sworn testimony revealed that Diebold technicians have tainted official voting machines before a recount could be done, irrevocably compromising the process.
The December 13 lawsuit was filed in the presence of Rev. Jesse Jackson, who compared it to the attempts to win voting rights for African-American citizens in the era of Dr. Martin Luther King.
The suit seeks to overturn Ohio's presidential vote. It asked an immediate court order to stop Republican presidential electors from meeting and voting for George W. Bush.
Republican election officials prevented a vote count from starting until that very morning. Supervised by Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, co-chair of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, Ohio simply ignored all challenges to the vote count and all requests for a recount. Within hours the Bush electors cast their votes, even though the bitterly contested ballots that allegedly gave them standing as electors had not been recounted.
In other words, while every legal remedy to determine who won Ohio's presidential election was being pursued, the state's Republican political machine blocked the rights of those seeking to verify the vote.
"Today, in the state capital of Ohio, we are witnessing a crime against democracy, a crime against the right to vote and a crime against the Constitution," said John Bonifaz, founder of the National Voting Rights Institute and attorney for the Green and Libertarian Parties in the recount. Ohio Republicans have " no right to convene a meeting of the presidential electors prior to the completion of the recount," he said.
Bonifaz's remarks came amidst testimony at the second field hearing on the 2004 election held by Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee. Last week in Washington, the committee opened what it said would be the first in an ongoing series of investigations into what happened on Election Day, when exit polls showed John Kerry heading toward victory but after midnight the returns shifted and network television declared Bush the victor.
"At the outset of this hearing, I would like to announce that 10 members of Congress, including myself, have written to (Ohio) Gov. Taft asking him to either delay or treat as provisional the vote of Ohio's presidential electors," Rep. John Conyers, the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee said at the outset. "The closer we get to Columbus and the Ohio presidential election, the worse it looks. Each and every day it becomes increasingly clear that the Republican power structure in this state is acting as if it has something to hide."
Ironically, Democratic State Senator Ray Miller of Columbus had secured the North Hearing Room in the statehouse. But Republicans cancelled that, and forced the gathering to convene at city hall, a block away.
Thus Ohio Republicans snubbed Conyers and Reps. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones (D-OH), Ted Strickland (D-OH), Jerold Nadler (D-NY), Maxine Waters (D-CA) as well as Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr (D-IL).
Packed to overflowing, the nearly four hour hearing hosted new disclosures about election irregularities and fraud on Nov. 2, while also pursuing remedies to account for the vote and delay the Electoral College certification of the president.
Prime target in the hearings was GOP Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who supervised the state's elections while also serving as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. Calls for Blackwell's removal were constantly repeated.
Conyers noted that Blackwell has ordered local election boards to not allow citizens to review poll registers of voters, a lockdown that is an apparent violation of Ohio state law.
David Cobb, the Green Party presidential candidate, told the panel that he had confirmed reports that an employee of one electronic voting machine manufacturer had come to one county election office and had taken apart the county tabulator of voting machine results, apparently replacing parts, before that county had conducted its recount. Such an action would taint any recount. "This could be a serious matter," Conyers replied, asking Cobb to meet privately with committee staff to further investigate the matter.
Rev. Jesse Jackson told the congressmen that over the weekend he had spoken to John Kerry, who has since sent a letter to each of the state's 88 county election boards, saying he supported three areas of inquiry in the recount. Jackson said Kerry wanted "forensic computer experts" to examine voting machines, especially those using optical scan technology, because in other states, notably New Mexico, Bush had won all the precincts with that voting system in place. Kerry also wanted to examine 92,000 ballots that recorded no vote for president, and 155,000 provisional ballots that were rejected.
But early responses from the counties to Freedom of Information Act requests for their voting records indicate such an effort may already have been sabotaged. Shelby County officials have admitted to discarding key election data. One county referred requesters to the software company that programmed the county's voting machines, saying the company's permission would be required for access to a recount, as the code is proprietary.
New reports of voter suppression and fraud corroborated the Supreme Court filing, which presented a detailed analysis of where votes were incorrectly counted for Bush instead of Kerry. An election challenge must prove the wrong presidential candidate was declared the winner. The challenge lawsuit asks the Ohio Supreme Court to declare Kerry the victor. Numerous witnesses offered testimony to support that conclusion.
A second brief was also filed Monday, seeking a temporary restraining order to block Republican presidential electors from meeting until the recount was done and the challenge was litigated. It focused on "overwhelming statistical evidence" that pointed to "statewide fraud allegedly conducted at the direction of Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell."
The TRO filing was primarily based on national and statewide exit poll data, which was the extensive, non-partisan polling done by a consortium of the nation's major news organizations. Expert affidavits accompanying the brief said an analysis of exit poll data found that the final vote tallies in all but the most contested battleground states mirrored the exit poll's predictions. The experts said it was unlikely the exit polls could be so accurate in some states while significantly wrong in others. They said election fraud was the only plausible explanation for the discrepancy.
The TRO filing identified exactly when they believe the fraud occurred - at about 12.30 a.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 3. At that time of night, Ohio's final voting returns were being tabulated at regional and county offices. It was about this time that the Ohio exit poll data - posted on websites such as CNN - put Bush ahead of Kerry, even though the exit polls expected Kerry to win with 52.1 percent of the vote.
What experts like Steven Freeman, Ph.D. of the University of Pennsylvania say happened was at this time the raw poll data, showing Kerry ahead, was replaced online and on television by "calibrated" data. This adjusted data was intended to reflect the total vote counts, once the results came in from late-reporting precincts - if it didn't match the raw exit poll results. Ohio's results didn't match, and the likely reason is because across the state, in a variety of ways, the reported vote totals were being manipulated. If Bush votes were added to the total, or votes were taken away from Kerry, this shift was first noticed at about 12:30 a.m., when the networks started to report 'calibrated' figures, not the raw data.
"The media has largely ignored this discrepancy (although the Blogosphere has been abuzz), suggesting the polls were either flawed, within normal sampling error, or could otherwise be easily explained away," Freeman wrote in an article, cited in the TRO filing. Instead, it simply reported Bush's final tally as 51 percent to Kerry's final tally of 48.5 percent.
As Rev. Jackson and election attorneys explained to the packed hearing, the election challenge suit describes how votes were added to Bush's total, or in many cases, taken away from Kerry - because they were added to the totals of other Democratic candidates further down the ballot.
The Democrat whose totals were most likely to have been boosted by this kind of 'vote-shifting' was C. Ellen Connally, an African-American candidate for Ohio Chief Justice, who was little-known and outspent in the southern part of the state, the challenge complaint says. Because Secretary Blackwell has obstructed most efforts to examine ballots and poll records, it has been almost impossible to investigate and explain anomalies like Connally's strong showing in the southern part of the state.
"What are they hiding?" asked Rev. Jackson. One after the other, witnesses argued that by making a recount virtually impossible, Blackwell has offered firm indication that the Republicans have something to hide.
"The secrecy of the ballot has been converted to the secrecy of the vote count," added Ronnie Dugger, founder of the Alliance for Democracy. Now based in Massachusetts, the legendary Dugger is founder of the Texas Observer. He said when Texas Republicans heard complaints that voting machines could be corrupted, "they knew that had found what they were looking for." Voting machines, he said, are the "most anti-democratic technology ever employed."
Dr. Ron Baiman, a statistician from the University of Illinois, Chicago, confirmed that the odds on vote counts diverting from exit polls as they did the night of November 2 were on the order of magnitude of millions to one. Baiman told freepress.org that the odds of the exit polls being wrong in the key battleground states of Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio alone were "155,000,000 to one."
Dr. Norman Robbins of Cleveland testified that over 10,000 voters in Cuyahoga County alone were disenfranchised by various means, and that nearly all were "youth, poor and minorities."
In one Cleveland ward, he said, 51% of the provisional votes cast were thrown in the trash, virtually all of them from African-Americans.
Eve Roberson, a former election official from Santa Rosa, California, testified that while working as observer at precinct 354 in Wilberforce, home of Central State University, she witnessed conscious fraud aimed at a student body that went 95% for Kerry. Election officials used an inconsistent, discriminatory set of demands for Wilberforce students to register as opposed to those used in white precincts in Greene County.
Roberson and others also testified that after the election they discovered ballots sitting open, on unguarded tables where manipulation and random disposal could easily have occurred. It was, she said "a serious breech" of election security.
Riveting testimony followed from Clinton Curtis, a Tallahassee-based computer programmer who told the hearing he had been hired by US Rep Tom Feeney, then Speaker of the Florida House, to write a program that would conceal the theft of an election. Curtis said Feeney was then a lobbyist for a major computer company as well as Speaker. Curtis said Feeney wanted a program that could use voting machines to "flip an election" without being detected. Curtis said he wrote a prototype program, then quit.
Under questioning Curtis said a program could be written that would protect the security of voting machines, but that it had not been deployed in Ohio. He said it would be a simple matter, involving perhaps 100 lines of code and some simple switches, to turn an entire election.
"One person in a simple tab machine can affect thousands of votes," Curtis testified. "There is absolutely no assurance of anything on those machines."
Given what he had seen, he said, the Ohio election was "probably hacked."
The last hour of the Columbus hearing was filled with testimony from local voters who were harassed, intimidated and made to stand in long lines to cast votes that may well have been pitched in the trash.
Similar sworn testimony surfaced Tuesday at a citizens' hearing in Toledo. Among other things eye witnesses confirmed that a Diebold programming team entered the Lucas County (Toledo) Board of Elections to "reprogram" the opti-scan voting machines on the day the recount began.
Catherine Buchanan, a Democratic Party observer, testified that one of the sample precincts chosen as a control for the recount---Sylvania Precinct 3---had the programming card reprogrammed prior to the ballot testing. While the observers watched, nearly seven out of fifteen test ballots were rejected at least three times before the machine would read them.
Janet Albright told hearing officers she had been voting at the same Lucas County polling place for fourteen years but that the polling place was changed this year without notification to a station farther away. Machines throughout Lucas County malfunctioned in tests through the week prior to the election, and on election day. Thousands of Ohioans---primarily in Democratic precincts--thus lost their right to vote.
During the Lucas County reprogramming, election observers were shocked when they were denied the right to look at sheets that had target test results on them, or the reprogramming of the opti-scan machines used in the recount. Diebold-leased machines and software malfunctioned in the weeks prior to the election.
That echoed similar testimony from Green Party candidate David Cobb in the Columbus hearing. Witnesses said an unauthorized programmer from the Triad Corporation dismantled at least one voting machine in rural Hocking County. Conyers referred to the incident as "pretty outrageous" and asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and a county prosecutor, to investigate "inappropriate and likely illegal election tampering" in Hocking and perhaps several other Ohio counties.
Brett Rapp, president of Triad, told the New York Times it might be unusual to do what was done in Hocking County, but that Triad was involved in voting machines in 41 of Ohio's 88 counties.