Stolen election: Why did all these events occur involving the GOP and MSM

Peter King - "It's already over...the election is over...we won."
Reporter - "How do you know that?"
Peter King - "It is all over for the counting...and we'll take care of the counting."

http://www.lookingglassnews.org/viewvideo.php?vid=kingsprediction

Published on Thursday, August 28, 2003 by the Cleveland Plain Dealer
Voting Machine Controversy
by Julie Carr Smyth

COLUMBUS - The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.

O'Dell attended a strategy pow-wow with wealthy Bush benefactors - known as Rangers and Pioneers - at the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month. The next week, he penned invitations to a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser to benefit the Ohio Republican Party's federal campaign fund - partially benefiting Bush - at his mansion in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington.

The letter went out the day before Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, also a Republican, was set to qualify Diebold as one of three firms eligible to sell upgraded electronic voting machines to Ohio counties in time for the 2004 election.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.htm

The accessibility and accuracy of DREs, however, are offset by a lack of transparency, which has raised concerns about security and verifiability. In most of the DREs used in 2004, voters could not check that their ballot was recorded correctly. Some DREs had no capacity for an independent recount. And, of course, DREs are computers, and computers malfunction. A malfunction of DREs in Carteret County, North Carolina, in the November 2004 elections caused the loss of more than 4,400 votes. There was no backup record of the votes that were cast. As a result, Carteret County had no choice but to rerun the election, after which it abandoned its DREs. Other jurisdictions have lost votes because election officials did not properly set up voting machines.29

http://www.american.edu/ia/cfer/report/report.html

Whether the cumulative effect of these legal violations would have altered the actual outcome is not known at this time. However, we do know that there are many serious and intentional violations which violate Ohio’s own law, that the Secretary of State has done everything in his power to avoid accounting for such violations, and it is incumbent on Congress to protect the integrity of its own laws by recognizing the seriousness of these legal violations.

B. Need for Further Congressional Hearings

It is also clear the U.S. Congress needs to conduct additional and more vigorous hearings into the irregularities in the Ohio presidential election and around the country.

While we have conducted our own Democratic hearings and investigation, we have been handicapped by the fact that key participants in the election, such as Secretary of State Blackwell, have refused to cooperate in our hearings or respond to Mr. Conyers questions. While GAO officials are prepared to move forward with a wide ranging analysis of systemic problems in the 2004 elections, they are not planning to conduct the kind of specific investigation needed to get to the bottom of the range of problems evident in Ohio. As a result, it appears that the only means of obtaining his cooperation in any congressional investigation is under the threat of subpoena, which only the Majority may require.

http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/issues/issues/election.html

Conclusions:

Electronic voting systems hold promise for improving the efficiency, accuracy, and accessibility of the elections process, and many are in use across the country today. The American public needs to feel
confident using these systems--namely, that the systems are secure enough and reliable enough to trust with their votes. However, this is not always the case. Numerous recent studies and reports have highlighted problems with the security and reliability of electronic voting systems. While these reports often focused on problems with specific systems or jurisdictions, the concerns they raise have the potential to affect election outcomes. The numerous examples of systems with poor security controls point to a situation in which vendors may not be uniformly building security and reliability into their voting systems, and election officials may not always rigorously ensure the security and reliability of their systems when they acquire, test, operate, and manage them.

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05956.pdf

Fundraiser Admits Illegal Bush Donations
Associated Press
Thursday, June 1, 2006; Page A10

TOLEDO, May 31 -- A coin dealer and prominent GOP fundraiser at the center of an Ohio political scandal pleaded guilty Wednesday to federal charges that he illegally funneled about $45,000 to President Bush's reelection campaign.

Tom Noe, who also raised money for Ohio Republicans, also is charged with embezzlement in an ill-fated $50 million coin investment that he managed for the state workers' compensation fund.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/31/AR2006053101506.html

“Voters with active passports prefer Kerry 58% to 35%, while those without a passport are for Bush 48% to 39%. Union voters give Kerry a 22 point advantage – 55% to 33%.

http://www.zogby.com/news/readnews.dbm?id=851

Posted 9/21/2004 3:01 AM Updated 9/21/2004 11:53 AM
The Pentagon doesn't want you to vote overseas
A Web site maintained by the Department of Defense is blocking access to non-military Americans. Could it be worried that expatriates are leaning toward Kerry?

By Farhad Manjoo

Snip…

News of the Pentagon's traffic-blocking immediately aroused alarm and suspicion among voting-rights activists, and it's not hard to see why. For the 6 million Americans living abroad, signing up to vote at home is a daunting task, a Byzantine process that differs for each citizen depending on his or her home state and even home county.

Over the past year, the Federal Voting Assistance Program Web site has been widely advertised all over the foreign press as the way for Americans to get help on how to vote in the upcoming election. The site, which is maintained by the Department of Defense, is a nonpartisan, comprehensive, and official clearinghouse for voting registration information. Now that it's been put off-limits to many Americans just before registration deadlines kick in, activists fear that Americans will be unfairly barred from voting this year.

Why would the Pentagon do this? Officials at the Voting Assistance Program have told some Americans living abroad that the blocked ISPs were havens for "hack" attacks against the voting site; the Pentagon had no choice but to block them in order to keep the voting site secure from attack. But that explanation is extremely fishy, say critics who see something more nefarious at work. The Defense Department maintains all manner of sensitive Web sites -- for instance, MyPay, which allows military personnel to manage their compensation online -- and it's had no problem protecting those from hackers while keeping them open for legitimate uses.

"This is a completely partisan thing," one Defense Department voting official told Salon. The official, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of being fired, is one of the many people in the department assigned to help both uniformed military personnel as well as American civilians register to vote. The offical described the Pentagon as extremely diligent in its efforts to register soldiers stationed overseas -- for instance, voting assistance officers have been told by the department to personally meet with all of the soldiers in their units in order to help them register. But the department has ignored its mandate to help overseas civilians who want to vote, the official said.

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2004/09/21/overseas_voting/index.html

Smeared by Ginsberg
August 27, 2004

BENJAMIN L. Ginsberg is the smoking gun. As national counsel to Bush-Cheney for five years, he has operated continuously at the center of President Bush's political organization. He was James Baker's right-hand man during the 2000 Florida recount challenge.

Snip...

Here we have a group of bitter veterans who detest Kerry's leadership in opposing the war 30 years ago and are willing to say almost anything -- frequently contradicting their own earlier statements -- to hurt Kerry's candidacy. They turn to Bush's top political lawyer for advice on campaign finance laws and then to one of Bush's top campaign contributors to fund their attack ads.

No memo trail needs to be found linking Bush personally to Ginsberg and the veterans' group; the connection is apparent.

For far too long this attack has worked to Bush's advantage. Even when Kerry and other veterans were defending his war service effectively…

Ginsberg resigned his Bush campaign position with unintended comedy, saying he was saddened that his role had "become a distraction from the critical issues at hand in this election." Was he suggesting this bogus smear is a critical issue?

...The members of the Federal Election Commission, appointed by Bush and Bill Clinton, have betrayed their office by not reining in groups that are too closely aligned with both campaigns.

But that is not the issue with the anti-Kerry veterans. The issue is Bush -- his refusal to condemn a patently false attack, his willingness to try to reap some political reward on the cheap, his utter lack of leadership in brushing off the role played by his close political aides.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2004/08/27/smeared_by_ginsberg

By the time the Swift Boat story had played out, CNN, chasing after ratings leader Fox News, found time to mention the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth–hereafter, Swifties–in nearly 300 separate news segments, while more than one hundred New York Times articles and columns made mention of the Swifties. And during one overheated 12-day span in late August, the Washington Post mentioned the Swifties in page-one stories on Aug. 19, 20, 21 (two separate articles), 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, and 31. It was a media monsoon that washed away Kerry’s momentum coming out of the Democratic convention.

http://blog.thedemocraticdaily.com/?p=2880

"You are alleging a massive (Carlson's emphasis) conspiracy to, as you put it, fix the 2004 election. A conspiracy of this size would have required the complicity of literally thousands of people. Why have none of those people come forward to admit they were part of it."

Real Problems

...Foremost among the decisions that might reasonably be questioned are his order not to count provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct, and the order (later rescinded) to require that registration forms be on 80-lb. paper weight...

...Kennedy estimates (based partly on my work) that 66,000 votes were lost due to unreliable voting equipment. This seems to me a reasonable estimate if we include the votes lost due to non-notice punch-card and optical scan systems...

...While it's difficult to measure with any degree of precision how many votes were lost due to long lines, this undoubtedly was a serious problem that discouraged some people from voting.

A Grain of Salt
- Kennedy describes a group of Republican operatives known as the "Mighty Texas Strike Force" which allegedly "us pay phones to make intimidating calls to likely voters."...since the Conyers Report was relying on a statement made at a hearing by someone other than the hotel worker -- if true it's obviously very troubling.

Snip...

To summarize: There's no doubt that some votes were lost due to faulty voting technology (let's say 66,000). There were also likely some voters whose provisional ballots weren't counted due to registration errors (the most that this could possibly be is 35,000). Add to that voters who report leaving the polls without casting a ballot (174,000, generously estimated), and you've still only got a total of 275,000 lost votes-- and keep in mind that this is indulging very optimistic assumptions in Kerry's favor. If my algebra is right, Kerry would still have had to pick up about 196,500 of those lost votes, or over 71%, in order to tie Bush, given the 118,000 margin of victory. Perhaps not beyond the realm of possibility, but not very likely.

Even if this is true, however, it doesn't tell us who those voters completing the exit survey in Bush strongholds were -- or more precisely, whom they supported. More specifically, it doesn't eliminate the possibility that Kerry voters in Bush strongholds were more likely to speak with interviewers than were Bush voters in those strongholds.

The most important question we now face, however, is not whether Kerry really won. It is instead what ought to be done about the very real and serious problems that emerged in Ohio and other states in 2004, which Kennedy exhaustively documents, for the most part quite accurately.