Although I don't always have time to read comments, in answer to one that caught my attention How is this voter fraud? in response to Georgia Pits, allow my limited attempt to explain.
Of necessity, the media needs to be faulted for failing to report on the enormity of the issue and ignoring, as they mostly do, the facts.
Prior to Bush v Gore, Greg Palast had reported on the BBC the surrounding issues. He even presented the information to the US media that failed to report. Not one single US newspaper or television outlet reported the facts of the voter purges supervised by Katherine Harris. And that fails to include the widespread voter intimidation, relocating polling places with inadequate public notice, relocating polling places to those with inadequate parking, failing to provide an adequate number of properly functioning voting machines, and much else. (In one of his books, Greg Palast has explained the statistical anomalies of some of the votes. Again, the book[s] are available at your public library. The author has provided links to the information which is public.) Mary Francis Berry conducted hearings, broadcast on CSPAN that the Corporate Wasteland Media failed to cover or comment on.
Inquiry into new claims of poll abuses in Florida
Official: Florida disenfranchised minority voters
Florida's flawed "voter-cleansing" program
Subsequent elections have been much the same. Except for dedicated groups working to correct the process or working to circumvent attempts to stymie voters by employing early voting on PAPER BALLOTS, court action and an unparalleled voter education process to ensure that voters were made aware of their legal rights, the Corporate Wasteland Media was silent.
The author of the comment is fully aware of my contempt for the mindless US media, but for those unfamiliar, you might consider reading "The Republican Noise Machine ...." It's available at your public library. Since we watch little television, I am struck by the mindless prattle on the infrequent occasions when we do and found a comment from Natalie Jacobson that seems apt:
One of the reasons for her departure, she says now, was the celebrity-driven and corporate-run culture of the TV news industry.
"The business had changed to the point where I didn't feel I could do the kind of journalism that I enjoyed doing - digging into issues and people - and that's not any one person's fault," says Jacobson, who helmed her last newscast solo on July 18, 2007. "Also, big conglomerates own these media outlets. Disney owns ABC. Disney is an entertainment company whereas . . . it's become a bottom-line business more than it used to be."
As to "voter fraud," my understanding is that's an entirely different animal, defined by laws, that has to do with Mickey Mouse registering to vote and then appearing at a polling place, with identification and attempting to cast a vote. That's a crime and occurs infrequently. (see info below)
Failing to hear a more appropriate term applied, Election Fraud seems appropriate. It might include collecting absentee ballots and agreeing to deliver them and then not doing so (how did someone get the information? Can they be identified?); voter mailings deliberately intended to deceive or mislead; voter purges; voter suppression; voter intimidation; voter 'threats' (someone made me aware that tires had been slashed in one predominately "Democratic" precinct); 'matching lists' sorted too close to an election to adequately notify voters; failing to appropriately provide for overseas military ballots; provisional ballots that don't get counted; failing to provide adequate voting machines or paper ballots; relocating polling places without adequate public notification; and much else.
Rep. John Conyers conducted hearings and published the results What Went Wrong In Ohio: The Conyers Report On The 2004 Presidential Election.
My suggestion, instead, is to publicly threaten prosecution under RICO and move forward with investigations. The current Administration has politicized criminal investigation and prosecution to a level unparalleled in the history of this country. Prosecuting the GOP Under RICO?
The following is an assortment of articles, some specific to Georgia --
This sorry saga began with the election of Saxby Chambliss over Senator Max Cleland, triple amputee, Vietnam veteran, amidst one of the sleaziest campaigns.
The venomous Ann Coulter had this to say and hopefully, since this is Veterans' Day, some might truly grasp this:
Cleland lost three limbs in an accident during a routine noncombat mission where he was about to drink beer with friends. He saw a grenade on the ground and picked it up. He could have done that at Fort Dix. In fact, Cleland could have dropped a grenade on his foot as a National Guardsman – or what Cleland sneeringly calls "weekend warriors." Luckily for Cleland's political career and current pomposity about Bush, he happened to do it while in Vietnam.
Max Clelland
Personally, I give Georgia voters more credit than Saxby Chambliss' campaign.
Georgia
The following is an archived article that I was unable to locate on their site:
Verified Voting Newsletter
Volume 2, Number 11, on September 28, 2004
GEORGIA:
One of the first states to jump headlong onto the paperless
touchscreen bandwagon was Georgia, but it hasn't been a bed
of roses. This month GA was stung by a scorecard issued by
FreeCongress.org which gave it the lowest grade of the
fifty states (an F-). GA group CountTheVote.org reported
that July's primary found some counties with equipment
malfunctions, and voters disenfranchised by delays due to
insufficient emergency paper ballots in the polling places.
Voter GA
The following article is outdated, but in its entirety, provides a broad overview. There are several quotes below that seem unrelated, like the section on Abramoff. Even if you didn't follow the corrupt mess Abramoff created, just the inclusion of his name should raise suspicion.
Will The Next Election Be Hacked? .
The debacle of the 2000 presidential election made it all too apparent to most Americans that our electoral system is broken. And private-sector entrepreneurs were quick to offer a fix: Touch-screen voting machines, promised the industry and its lobbyists, would make voting as easy and reliable as withdrawing cash from an ATM. Congress, always ready with funds for needy industries, swiftly authorized $3.9 billion to upgrade the nation's election systems - with much of the money devoted to installing electronic voting machines in each of America's 180,000 precincts. But as midterm elections approach this November, electronic voting machines are making things worse instead of better. Studies have demonstrated that hackers can easily rig the technology to fix an election - and across the country this year, faulty equipment and lax security have repeatedly undermined election primaries. In Tarrant County, Texas, electronic machines counted some ballots as many as six times, recording 100,000 more votes than were actually cast. In San Diego, poll workers took machines home for unsupervised "sleepovers" before the vote, leaving the equipment vulnerable to tampering. And in Ohio - where, as I recently reported in "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" [RS 1002], dirty tricks may have cost John Kerry the presidency - a government report uncovered large and unexplained discrepancies in vote totals recorded by machines in Cuyahoga County.
Even worse, many electronic machines don't produce a paper record that can be recounted when equipment malfunctions - an omission that practically invites malicious tampering. "Every board of election has staff members with the technological ability to fix an election," Ion Sancho, an election supervisor in Leon County, Florida, told me. "Even one corrupt staffer can throw an election. Without paper records, it could happen under my nose and there is no way I'd ever find out about it. With a few key people in the right places, it would be possible to throw a presidential election."
Chris Hood remembers the day in July 2002 that he began to question what was really going on in Georgia. An African-American whose parents fought for voting rights in the South during the 1960s, Hood was proud to be working as a consultant for Diebold Election Systems, helping the company promote its new electronic voting machines. During the presidential election two years earlier, more than 94,000 paper ballots had gone uncounted in Georgia - almost double the national average - and Secretary of State Cathy Cox was under pressure to make sure every vote was recorded properly..
It is impossible to know whether the machines were rigged to alter the election in Georgia: Diebold's machines provided no paper trail, making a recount impossible. But the tally in Georgia that November surprised even the most seasoned political observers. Six days before the vote, polls showed Sen. Max Cleland, a decorated war veteran and Democratic incumbent, leading his Republican opponent Saxby Chambliss - darling of the Christian Coalition - by five percentage points. In the governor's race, Democrat Roy Barnes was running a decisive eleven points ahead of Republican Sonny Perdue. But on Election Day, Chambliss won with fifty-three percent of the vote, and Perdue won with fifty-one percent..Three of the four companies have close ties to the Republican Party. ES&S, in an earlier corporate incarnation, was chaired by Chuck Hagel, who in 1996 became the first Republican elected to the U.S. Senate from Nebraska in twenty-four years - winning a close race in which eighty-five percent of the votes were tallied by his former company. Hart InterCivic ranks among its investors GOP loyalist Tom Hicks, who bought the Texas Rangers from George W. Bush in 1998, making Bush a millionaire fifteen times over. And according to campaign-finance records, Diebold, along with its employees and their families, has contributed at least $300,000 to GOP candidates and party funds since 1998 - including more than $200,000 to the Republican National Committee. In a 2003 fund-raising e-mail, the company's then-CEO Walden O'Dell promised to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in 2004..The primary author and steward of HAVA was Rep. Bob Ney, the GOP chairman of the powerful U.S. House Administration Committee. Ney had close ties to the now-disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose firm received at least $275,000 from Diebold to lobby for its touch-screen machines. .Sinking in the sewage of the Abramoff scandal, Ney agreed on September 15th to plead guilty to federal conspiracy charges - but he has already done one last favor for his friends at Diebold. When 212 congressmen from both parties sponsored a bill to mandate a paper trail for all votes, Ney used his position as chairman to prevent the measure from even getting a hearing before his committee..The result was that HAVA - the chief reform effort after the 2000 disaster - placed much of the nation's electoral system in the hands of for-profit companies. Diebold alone has sold more than 130,000 voting machines - raking in estimated revenues of at least $230 million. "This whole undertaking was never about voters," says Hood, who saw firsthand how the measure benefited Diebold's bottom line. "It was about privatizing elections. HAVA has been turned into a corporate-revenue enhancement scheme.".In October 2005, the government Accountability Office issued a damning report on electronic voting machines. .In New Mexico, Gov. Bill Richardson has instituted what many consider an even better solution: Voters use paper ballots, which are then scanned and counted electronically. "We became one of the laughingstock states in 2004 because the machines were defective, slow and unreliable," says Richardson. "I said to myself, 'I'm not going to go through this again.' The paper-ballot system, as untechnical as it seems, is the most verifiable way we can assure Americans that their vote is counting." .You do not have to believe in conspiracy theories to fear for the integrity of our electoral system: The right to vote is simply too important - and too hard won - to be surrendered without a fight. It is time for Americans to reclaim our democracy from private interests. .Verified VotingBlackBoxVotingCommonCause: In Georgia, we're contacting 100,000 voters who do not have a valid driver's license to make sure they know they'll need a current photo ID in order to vote.What's Really Happening in GeorgiaPoliticoThe Obama campaign struck back, with campaign lawyer Bob Bauer asking Attorney General Michael Mukasey to appoint Special Prosecutor Nora Dannehy to investigate the “systematic development and dissemination of unsupported, spurious allegations of voter fraud” by the McCain campaign, the Republican National Committee, and also any possible involvement by the Justice Department and White House officials. .But faulty registrations rarely turn into illegal votes. While ACORN has admitted to errors in its registration process, documented cases of illegally cast ballots remain rare. A five-year investigation by the Bush administration resulted in the convictions of only 26 voters found guilty of voting more than once, registration fraud, or ineligible voting. “This is not a plan that was hatched yesterday,” said Daniel Tokaji, an election law specialist at Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. “The Republican party is using the whole ACORN rap as a justification for the stringent ballot security measures they are urging.” .Our Founding Fathers left us a spectacular framework that has allowed us to adapt to a changing world. It would seem that the integrity of the vote needs to be sacrosanct.
.We are left with the choice of defending and protecting that right or becoming just another Banana Republic.
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I hope I answered your query.
