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voting systems (run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations) (...duh). If California distribution holds true across the nation, urban areas were the first to purchase these election theft machines and get the systems up and running, while poor or sparsely populated rural counties lagged behind, still using punchcard machines and other systems, in many cases.
However, California had the damnedest stat of the whole election, and I still don't understand it. In California, John Kerry took the state by 10%, but Barbara Boxer, running for Senate, took the state by 20% in the same election. That might not be so hard to explain, except that the entirety of the difference between them occurred in Republican counties (many of which are the same as the rural counties). Boxer and Kerry ran about even in the Dem counties. In the Republican counties--and only in the Republican counties!--Boxer ran ahead of Kerry, creating the 10% difference between them statewide. Figure THAT out--a big chunk of people voting for Boxer...and Bush! And ONLY in Republican counties. And not tied to Diebold voting machines.
How I figure it is: First of all, though punchcards were still used in some of these Rep counties, the central tabulators are Diebold. So, theft of Kerry votes, if it occurred (and I'm pretty sure it did), occurred in the central tabulators. Second, Republican counties would be the safest places to steal Kerry votes (big votes for Bush wouldn't be so noticeable). Third, Boxer was going to win anyway, so why draw attention to the theft by making it a double-theft (and her opponent was a potential future Schwarz rival; Schwarz is a key Bush Cartel player; they had little reason to help Boxer's opponent do well, simultaneously with stealing votes from Kerry). Four, Kerry was likely to win Calif--they couldn't reverse that without being too obvious--but a percentage of Calif votes may have been needed to help pad Bush's national popular majority. They stole those votes from Rep's or Dem's voting for Kerry in Republican counties.
The only possible other explanation is women voting for Boxer, but, if Rep county women were voting for Boxer on women's issues, why would they also vote for Bush? That doesn't make sense. And why only in Repub counties?
So the Calif '04 picture doesn't fit well with the OP's point--that Bush increased his vote in urban areas, and decreased in rural areas. This "urban legend" is a preposterous outcome--totally unbelievable. But, anyway, the big Dem areas in Calif--which tend to be the big urban areas--went for Kerry at the approximately same rate as Boxer (by 20%). Aside from this stat, which runs contrary to the OP chart, the big urban/Dem areas of Calif were certainly equipped to steal votes for Bush, electronically--and maybe did steal them (Kerry may have won bigger than we know)--and were furthermore staffed, in many cases, by corrupt Diebold-shill county election officials.
JPGray mentions that other urban legend--the "soccer mom." Be very skeptical of any war profiteering corporate news monopoly meme about elections (or anything else), especially "soft talking points" like this (yeah, it COULD BE true, and so could a lot of other things), not backed up with hard facts, data, good analysis, and good context-setting, and even then, know that they are out to kill your brothers and sisters and profit from their deaths in Iraq. They are bad dudes. They don't have you interests at heart. They had the means, motive and opportunity to cover up the 2004 stolen election, and to create the illusion that it was an endorsement of the war and other fascist policy. But surely they wouldn't use their monopoly of our public airwaves to do that, would they? (It's kind of like putting "trade secret" vote counting code in the hands of a Bush/Cheney campaign chair and major fundraiser, Diebold CEO Wally O'Dell. Would Republicans cheat? Na-a-a-a-w! Trust them with your votes. Trust them with your life. Trust them with your sense of reality.)
(But I digress.) Every which way you look at the stats for the 2004 election, they point to election fraud. My favorite is that the Democratic grass roots blew the Bushites away in new voter registration in 2004, nearly 60/40. People were flocking to the Democratic Party to oust Bush. (Where did all those votes go?) But the one big thing that is missing from all efforts to analyze that coup..ahem, election...is the ability to recount the votes, 80% of which were cast in electronic systems (mostly Diebold and its brethren corp, ES&S), with a third of the country having no paper trail at all, and the rest having a paper trail but no automatic recount (audit), or, at best, a 1% recount (totally inadequate for extremely insecure and insider hackable voting machines, controlled by the opposition party)--a condition of non-transparency that was fast-tracked across the country in the 2002 to 2004 period, by the "Help America Vote for Bush Act" of 2002, passed in the same month as the Iraq War Resolution, in order to handle the voter blowback on the war. And that it did. (--and did again in '06, if the truth were known.)
This voting system was DESIGNED not to be recountable. That was the whole point--to pull the vote counting out of the public venue, and into the realm of "soft talking points." (Oh, it was the Soccer moms. Oh, it was Rove's magical-mystical GOTV. Oh, everybody was so-o-o-o afraid of the latest absurd "orange alert.") (So, why didn't they REGISTER Republican?)
We can talk about voter "caging lists" against black voters, and U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq, or the blatant crimes in Ohio (visible even then) against black, other minority, student, poor and other Dem voters. Or Republicans shredding Democratic voter registration forms. Or U.S. attorneys fired/purged to promote political prosecutions. Or the ungodly amounts of money in our campaigns, by which the rich outvote the poor, without even having to vote. But when you ADD "trade secret" vote counting, controlled by Bushites, to these other handicaps on the great progressive American majority, you've pretty much killed democracy in the U.S.
Will we recover? Will we get our country back?
One final stat. 56% of the American people opposed the war on Iraq, back in Feb. '03, before the invasion and before all of Colin Powell's pack of lies to the UN were exposed. 56%! That would be a landslide in a presidential election (and believe me, it was). 56%! --despite relentless, 24/7 warmongering, all channels, all the time. 56%, now grown to 70+%. It was to thwart that antiwar majority--which the war profiteers knew would only get bigger--that the diabolical scam of non-transparent vote counting, controlled by a Bush-Cheney campaign chair and rightwing fanatics, was devised, in the same month, by the same people (Delay & Co., and complicit Dems).
And until we repair this, and restore vote counting that everyone can see and understand, nothing is going to change.
That is the task that history has thrown in our path. That is the essential first step toward putting things right. When the first of these election theft machines goes splashing into 'Boston Harbor,' that will be the beginning of American Revolution II: the revolt against the Corporate Rulers.
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