New Ohio voter transcripts feed floodtide of doubt about Republican election manipulation!

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
November 25, 2004

COLUMBUS -- A floodtide of evidence of questionable practices in the 2004 election is mounting fast against Ohio Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and Republican Franklin County Board of Elections (BOE) Director Matt Damschroder. New transcriptions of sworn voter testimony, presented below for the first time, confirm growing suspicions of widespread use of rigged machines. Voters experienced hostility from poll workers, refusal of Republican election officials to follow the law, and discriminatory manipulation of voting machine placement, driving significant numbers of Democrats away from the polls.

The Columbus Dispatch, central Ohio's dominant conservative daily newspaper, which endorsed Bush for the presidency, says Damschroder “has faced criticism locally and across the country from groups that contend an already short supply of voting machines were shifted from Democratic precincts in Columbus to Republican areas outside the city.” read on...

Breaking News from Suburban Guerrilla:

The GAO to investigate voting irregularities:

(Washington, DC) Reps. John Conyers, Jr., Jerrold Nadler, Robert Wexler, Robert Scott, and Rush Holt announced today that, in response to their November 5 and 8 letters to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the GAO has decided to move forward with an investigation of election irregularities in the 2004 election. The five Members issued the following statement:"We are pleased that the GAO has reviewed the concerns expressed in our letters and has found them of sufficient merit to warrant further investigation. On its own authority, the GAO will examine the security and accuracy of voting technologies, distribution and allocation of voting machines, and counting of provisional ballots. We are hopeful that GAO's non-partisan and expert analysis will get to the bottom of the flaws uncovered in the 2004 election. As part of this inquiry, we will provide copies of specific incident reports received in our offices, including more than 57,000 such complaints provided to the House Judiciary Committee.
"The core principle of any democracy is the consent of the governed. All Americans, no matter how they voted, need to have confidence that when they cast their ballot, their voice is heard."

Exit, Stage Right GOP Wants to End Exit Polls

RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie wants to eliminate exit polls because he says they're not accurate, implying that the final vote was unquestionably correct. directly by major news organizations themselves. "But with the Internet today, we're kidding ourselves, aren't we, to think that everybody in America doesn't know what the exit data is showing?" he said.

He also said he was personally affected by the early reports, discouraged by what he was seeing. "But I've been through this before," he said. "In 2000 the exit data was wrong on Election Day. In 2002, the exit returns were wrong on Election Day. And in 2004, the exit data were wrong on Election Day -- all three times, by the way, in a way that skewed against Republicans and had a dispiriting effect on Republican voters across the country."

Sheldon Drobny: "There's a huge difference between polling what WILL happen and polling something that has already happened. The reliability of polling something that has already happened is highly reliable vs. predictive polls, like Gallup or Zogby, which is very risky. The reliability can be, not plus or minus 4 percent as we see with predictive polls, but rather a much more reliable plus or minus one half or one tenth of one percent with exit polls, because those are based on asking people who already voted. I would even say that if the exit polling were done in the key precincts of Florida and Ohio, which it was, then these results should be practically "bullet proof.'"

If the GOP eliminates exit polls before true verifiable voting is in place, there will be nothing left to warn us when our vote is stolen. Lastly, note that Gillespie only refers to the 2000, 2002, and 2004 elections -- all the major elections since George W. Bush dropped onto the national political scene -- as "being skewed against Republicans."

WASHINGTON - The Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said yesterday that John Kerry "deserved" his combat medals for heroism in Vietnam, which some vets have disputed.

Sen. John Warner, an ex-Navy secretary under President Richard Nixon, particularly defended the process by which Kerry won his highest honor, the Silver Star.

"I'd stand by the process that awarded that medal, and I think we best acknowledge that his heroism did gain that recognition," Warner (R-Va.) told CNN's "Late Edition."

"We did extraordinary, careful checking on that type of medal [the Silver Star], a very high one, when it goes through the secretary," Warner said.

Full Article

SIOUX CITY, Iowa -- President Bush has formidable obstacles to reelection, but he served a reminder last week that he is a politician with formidable strengths.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3650-2004Aug15.html

John F. Kerry's campaign unveiled yesterday a new ad accusing President Bush of using the same smear tactics that he used against Sen. John McCain in 2000, as partisan surrogates swamped the news shows to argue about an issue that has dominated the campaign for more than a week. .

Article:

After Bob Dole's remarks on CNN, Mr Marshall had this to say:

Today Bob Dole suggested that one or more of John Kerry's Purple Hearts may have been fraudulent in some way because they were for "superficial wounds."

Dole knows better.

In a 1988 campaign-trail autobiography, here's how Dole described the incident that earned him his first Purple Heart: "As we approached the enemy, there was a brief exchange of gunfire. I took a grenade in hand, pulled the pin, and tossed it in the direction of the farmhouse. It wasn't a very good pitch (remember, I was used to catching passes, not throwing them). In the darkness, the grenade must have struck a tree and bounced off. It exploded nearby, sending a sliver of metal into my leg--the sort of injury the Army patched up with Mercurochrome and a Purple Heart."

Votergate is here!

Votergate has been hacked! I found a version here:

Video

Who knows how long they will be up and running. We weren't that interested in posting this link originally, but since it got hacked...

Back in May, I argued that with the American electorate's across-the-board preference for Democratic policies and a historically unpopular Republican president, John McCain's campaign would turn the November election into a "character war." In September, campaign chairman Rick Davis confirmed the GOP would follow its tried and true strategy from 2000 and 2004 when he announced "this election is not about issues" but instead about "a composite view of what people take away from these candidates." On Tuesday night, Americans will learn not only whether Barack Obama won the election, but whether voters literally thought he was a better man.

Heading into Election Day, Senator Obama looks like to outperform his recent Democratic predecessors across a range of policy and demographic measures. An October Rasmussen survey showed that Americans trust Democrats more than Republicans across each of the 10 issues tracked. The party of Obama enjoys double-digit leads on the economy (by 13%), Social Security (12%), health care (20%)and education (by 19 points).

That issue advantage, compounded by John McCain's feeble response to the economic crisis and the GOP's increasingly xenophobic line towards immigrants, is helping fuel Obama's strong performance among critical voting blocks. As I detailed last week, media myths notwithstanding, Barack Obama will approach traditional levels of Democratic support among Jewish voters and outpoll Al Gore and John Kerry among Hispanics. And with his backing among white voters reaching 44% in the final CBS News/New York Times survey, the African-American Obama may surpass the levels achieved by Gore (42%), Kerry (41%) and even Bill Clinton (43%). Four years ago, John Kerry lost among white men by a 25 point margin (62% to 37%); according to a Fox News poll, Obama now trails John McCain by only 5 points among the same group.

But from the moment John McCain secured the Republican nomination, his fall strategy rested on creating a "character gap" between himself and Obama. As in 2000 and 2004, I argued, the Republicans would try to turn the race into a presidential personality contest:

And to win it, they need to manufacture a "character gap" between John McCain and Barack Obama...The data is clear. If the election is about the economy, health care and Iraq, John McCain cannot become the 44th president. Only if the GOP succeeds once again in transforming the race into a media medley about lapel pins, angry ministers and Muslim-sounding middle names can the Republicans hope to maintain their hold on the White House.

Sadly, we've been here before. The 2000 and 2004 exit polls clearly show the Republican Party succeeded both in portraying the presidential contest as being about character and in defining the accepted media narrative for candidates Bush, Gore and Kerry.

Continue reading »

  Anyone who has dipped a toe in the wild and woolly currents of politics in the last thirty years should be familiar with the name of Richard Mellon Scaife.  As partisans go, there isn't anyone else willing to put so much of their money where their ideologies drive them, $340 million by some estimates.

Among the right-wing organizations substantially funded by Mr. Scaife are the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Judicial Watch, Cato Institute and a working group within his American Spectator publication called the "Arkansas Project," whose specific aim was to locate and create dirt on the Clintons in order to smear them, in hopes of removing Clinton from office.

Those rumors around Vince Foster's suicide lay squarely on Scaife's lap. During the 2004 election cycle, Scaife had his targets set directly on the Kerrys (and specifically Teresa Heinz Kerry), devoting a considerable sum to breaking open records to find dirt to smear the Democratic candidate through his wife.

Which makes this news story all that much more schadenfreude-licious.  Scaife is going through divorce proceedings from his wife, one that has provided lots of fodder for the gossip pages with arrests for trespassing, accusations of abuse and dognapping, of all things.  At issue now is how much of Scaife's fortune is owed to his wife, and guess what?  What's good for the right wingnut gander is apparently not good for the rest of geese.  Scaife wants his records sealed and rival paper Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to return documents.

Mr. Scaife's attempt to make court documents inaccessible is unusual for the head of a news organization. Historically, newspapers and television stations have fought for greater rather than more restricted access. In fact, Mr. Scaife's Tribune-Review joined other organizations in seeking to unseal the estate records of the late Sen. John Heinz during the presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry, who is married to Sen. Heinz's widow, Teresa.[..]

Mr. Scaife's attorneys say the Post-Gazette article describes "at length various highly confidential and personal matters contained in the record, none of which have any news value nor are legitimate subjects of public scrutiny."

Karma, baby...