Dirty tricks were used to swing the vote for George W Bush – and could be used again.
London UK – 27 October 2008
Will next week’s US presidential vote be free and fair? Based on the conduct of the last election, possibly not.
We now know that the 2004 election was marred by vote-fixing that would disgrace a banana republic. Four years later, few new safeguards have been implemented to prevent a re-run of the voter exclusion and ballot tampering of 2004.
This is the conclusion of civil rights lawyer, Robert F Kennedy Jr, nephew of the US President, John F Kennedy.
In one of the most important pieces of investigative journalism in recent years, published in Rolling Stone magazine in 2006, he revealed how voting irregularities in 2004 were enough to steal the presidency for the Republicans. His mammoth, meticulous 14,000-word expose is a must-read for everyone who cares about the fate of US democracy:
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen
Kennedy’s investigation found that in 2004 nearly half the six million American voters living abroad never received their ballots or received them too late to vote. A consulting firm hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states was discovered shredding Democratic voter registrations. In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes, malfunctioning machines failed to properly register a vote on nearly 20,000 ballots, which may have altered the poll result. Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with election reform, up to one million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment.
This combination of incompetence and malpractice was particularly acute in the crucial swing state of Ohio, which decided the US presidency in 2004.
US congressman John Conyers, the Chair of the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, conducted an extensive investigation of the Ohio poll, which he published in a 102-page report entitled: Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio:
http://www.openelections.org/lib/downloads/references/house_judiciary/final_status_report.pdf
The report cites “massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies..In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behaviour, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio.” Unbelievable but true: the man in charge of the Ohio election was also the leader of the Ohio Republican election campaign.
Conyer’s findings of electoral malpractice are echoed by Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Studies at New York University. His wide-ranging investigation of the Ohio election was published in Harper’s Magazine in August 2005 under the title, None dare call it stolen. The entire 12,000-word article is archived here:
http://harpers.org/archive/2005/08/0080696
Prof Miller describes Preserving Democracy as documenting three stages of Republican chicanery: the run-up to the election, the election itself, and the post-election cover-up. He concludes:
“The wrongs exposed are not mere dirty tricks (though Bush/Cheney also went in heavily for those) but specific violations of the U.S. and Ohio constitutions, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, the National Voter Registration Act, and the Help America Vote Act.”
David Cobb was the Green Party’s presidential candidate in 2004. He campaigned against the Democrats, but he nonetheless has the integrity to state that the Democratic Party was robbed of the White House four years ago and could be robbed again in 2008.
Mr Cobb accuses the Republican and Democrat leaderships of wilfully ignoring the massive evidence of vote rigging in Ohio in 2004, including the Conyers Commission’s findings, the conviction of two Ohio Republican election officials for their role in tampering with the 2004 recount, and a 2007 Ohio study finding ‘critical security failures’ pervaded the state’s election system in 2004.
“Democratic politicians, including Barack Obama, are as unwilling as Republicans to discuss the threat of another stolen election, even though such irregularities cost them the last two presidential races,” said Mr Cobb.
Robert F Kennedy Jr’s in-depth investigation of the conduct of the key Ohio election found that “at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004 – more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls.upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes – enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.”
In Warren County, Ohio, Republican election officials even invented a non-existent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.
”Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,” Lou Harris, the founder of modern political polling, told Kennedy. ”You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.”
The huge discrepancies between the 2004 exit polls and the official Ohio vote is strong evidence of ballot stuffing and vote discarding.
According to the National Election Data Archive, the discrepancies were stacked almost entirely in Bush’s favour. The wildest discrepancy came from a precinct where, according to the exit poll, Kerry should have received 67% of the vote but the official tally gave him only 38%. The statistical odds against such a wide variance are just under one in three billion.
Ron Baiman, Vice-President of the Archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago concludes that the final Ohio poll result is ”completely consistent with election fraud – specifically vote shifting.”
Voter purging was widespread in 2004. Election officials in the major Ohio cities of Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo expunged the names of more than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous two national elections, notes Kennedy.
A total of 72,000 voters were disenfranchised in Ohio in 2004 through avoidable registration errors by election officials – this amounts to the exclusion of 1% of all voters in an election decided by two percent.
Around 95,000 valid ballots recorded no vote for president at all, which is many times greater than normal and was mostly down to voting machine malfunctions. Ohio State University law professor and election scholar Dan Tokaji suggests that at least 66,000 votes were invalidated by faulty voting equipment.
A New York Times analysis found that black precincts in Ohio experienced more than twice the rate of spoiled ballots than white precincts. In Dayton, pro-Kerry districts had nearly twice the number of spoiled ballots as Bush-leaning districts. Coincidence? You decide.
Kennedy recounts that Ohio’s African-American voters – who polled overwhelmingly for Kerry – were 20% more likely than white voters to be forced to cast a provisional ballot because of disputes over their eligibility. Almost 3% of all voters in Ohio were forced to vote provisionally – and more than 35,000 of their ballots were never counted.
There was a huge shortage of voting machines, especially in inner city districts that were more likely to vote Democrat. In these districts of Columbus, Cleveland and Toledo, which were voting for Kerry by margins of 90% or more, electors often waited up to seven hours.
Kennedy reports: “At Kenyon College, students were forced to stand in line for 11 hours before being allowed to vote, with the last voters casting their ballots after three in the morning.” Many voters got fed up of waiting and left without casting their ballots.
He also found: “3% of all Ohio voters who showed up to vote on election day were forced to leave without casting a ballot. That’s more than 174,000 voters.” It is also much more than Bush’s official margin of victory. Would Bush have won Ohio and the presidency if all those people had been allowed to vote?
Kennedy discovered that the electronic voting machines were often unreliable and did not always accurately record votes cast. In 2004, in the pro-Democratic district of Youngstown, Ohio, some voters pressed “Kerry” but saw the machines record a vote for “Bush.”
An electronic machine at an evangelical church in the town of Gahanna recorded 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry – in a district where there were only 800 registered voters, of whom only 638 cast ballots.
How do we explain this?
Kennedy reveals that three of the four companies that supply voting machines for US elections and count the votes – yes, count the votes! – have close ties with the Republican Party. Is that proper? It’s certainly not objective, impartial or independent.
He also found evidence that electronic voting machines are vulnerable to hacking to fix the election result. You can read his shocking, compelling evidence in his 2006 Rolling Stone feature, Will the next election be hacked?
“Two weeks before the 2004 election,” says Kennedy, “an employee of ES&S, the company that manufactures the machines, was observed by a local election official making an unauthorized log-in to the central computer used to compile election results. In Miami County, Ohio, after all precincts had already reported their official results, an additional 18,615 votes were inexplicably added to the final tally.”
Kennedy additionally reveals that in the state of Georgia computer staff covertly fitted patches, without official authorisation, to electronic voting machines in heavily Democratic strongholds. Company staff were told the patches were being fitted to fix the computer clocks, but one insider noted that they did not do so. Suspicious or what?
A 2006 study by computer scientists at Princeton University created vote-stealing software that can be inserted into a US electronic voting machine in one minute and can obscure all evidence of its presence and its alteration of the vote result. They also created a virus that can ‘infect’ other parts of the voting system, allowing “widespread fraud” by one person hacking a single machine.
Kennedy has unearthed evidence of electronic voting machine bias in favour of the Republicans. Statistical experts from the University of California examined Florida’s voting patterns in the 2004 election and concluded:
“The data show with 99.0 percent certainty that a county’s use of electronic voting is associated with a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases in support for President Bush between 2000 and 2004.”
Electronic voting machines, the California University report concluded, may have improperly awarded as many as 260,000 (Florida) votes to Bush – sufficient to have swung the result for the Republicans.
“No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained,” said Michael Hout, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
From this evidence concerning the conduct of the 2004 election, even a sceptic is bound to conclude that there was large-scale purging of eligible voters from the rolls and the barring of legitimate electors at the polling booths. Many votes were not counted and many voters were discouraged or prevented from voting by a shortage of voting machines and long waits in line. Moreover, voting machines variously spoiled ballots, did not count ballots and awarded votes cast for John Kerry to George W Bush. This all adds up to prime facie evidence of vote rigging and ballot tampering.
These irregularities and malpractices occurred in the 2004 US election. The ballot was, in effect, stolen by the Republicans. Since then, inadequate action has been taken to prevent it from happening again in 2008.
The 4 November poll is still not safe. We cannot rest assured that the man the majority of the American people want as president will become president. Barack Obama’s significant poll lead is no guarantee that he will win the White House.
In 2004 the Democrats registered hundreds of thousands of new voters. John Kerry was expected to win and was well ahead in the exit polls on the day of the presidential vote. He lost. Obama, watch out.
Robert F Kennedy Jr concludes:
“American history is littered with vote fraud — but rather than learning from our shameful past and cleaning up the system, we have allowed the problem to grow even worse. If the last two elections have taught us anything, it is this: The single greatest threat to our democracy is the insecurity of our voting system. If people lose faith that their votes are accurately and faithfully recorded, they will abandon the ballot box. Nothing less is at stake here than the entire idea of a government by the people.”
* An edited version of this article was published by the website of the Independent newspaper, in the Open House section, on 27 October 2008:
http://blogs.independent.co.uk/openhouse/2008/10/the-vote-grab-h.html/
Note: All the allegations in this article are documented in greater detail, with references and sources, in these three articles by Robert F Kennedy Jr and Mark Crispin Miller and the report by US congressman John Conyers:
Was the 2004 election stolen?
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen
Will the next election be hacked?
None dare call it stolen
http://harpers.org/archive/2005/08/0080696
Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio
http://www.openelections.org/lib/downloads/references/house_judiciary/final_status_report.pdf