From Truthout, the reason the left and center accuse the right of election tampering, and why they have to try to claim election theft in return - to try to cover their misdeeds.
The distinction here is that every credible independent examination of voter fraud finds it doesn't happen. There are no organized busloads of voters who go from precinct to precinct voting fraudulently or illegally; there are no scary hordes of felons stealing elections from honest Republicans.Rather there is excellent documentation, including convictions of misconduct by right wing funded voter registration tampering, and election tampering in the form of misdirecting voters to the wrong polling places, giving them the wrong election date information, attempted voter intimidation, altering with little information provided the polling hours, and funny business with provisional votes that get thrown out. Add to that the attempts to simply disenfranchise voters with last minute - and illegal - voter roll purges that apparently crooked Republican Secretaries of States have used to target likely Democratic voters.
Truthout gets to the heart of why the 2004 election was stolen by Rove and Bush, and how Rove attempted to do so again this election cycle for Romney. The right gives a lot of empty lip service to 'pure' and 'honest' elections; the reality is that the left DOES more to ensure honest elections.
from Truthout and the Free Press:
Why Rove Failed to Deliver Ohio on Election Day: What Happened in Ohio This Time Around
Friday, 16 November 2012 11:11 By Bob Fitrakis, The Free Press | News AnalysisWas the "fix" in on Election Day in Ohio? The questions surrounding Election Day activities in Ohio and Karl Rove's now-infamous meltdown on Fox TV election night are causing a buzz in the election integrity movement.
Of course we do not know for sure what happened in Ohio – but we do know the circumstances were eerily similar to election tampering techniques the Free Press discovered after the 2004 election.
One major similarity was Rove's insistence to his colleagues on Fox News that the media consortium's exit polls were wrong in Ohio. This is the same claim he made in 2004 concerning Ohio and 2000 in Florida.
Curiously, the Ohio Secretary of State's vote tabulation website went down at 11:13pm, as reported by Free Press election protection website monitors, and mentioned by Rove on the news. This was one minute earlier than the time on election night 2004 -- when Ohio votes were outsourced to Chattanooga, Tennessee -- and then the vote flipped for Bush. This isn't just a Free Press claim, but is well-documented by Vanity Fair Contributing Editor Craig Unger in his book Boss Rove.
This time, the Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) vote tabulation site went down as on election night as well.
In his rant on Fox, Rove argued that Fox News should not confirm Ohio for Obama until votes came in from the southwest Ohio GOP strongholds of Delaware, Butler and Warren counties and suburban Cincinnati. It was after the crash of the secretary of state's site in 2004 that improbable vote totals came in from Republican counties in southwest Ohio – particularly Butler, Clermont, and Warren counties. These three counties provided more than Bush's entire Ohio victory margin of 119,000.
Earlier in the day, I filed suit in both federal and state courts seeking to remove uncertified and untested "experimental" software patches from county vote tabulators in at least 25 Ohio counties. Election Systems & Software (ES&S) installed the last minute software on county tabulators linked to the secretary of state's office. Coincidentally, Warren and Cuyahoga counties were two of the counties targeted with the software patch.
When the Free Press investigated Bush's implausible 2004 victory in Ohio, we discovered ES&S and Triad technicians had placed similar last-minute unauthorized patches on tabulators in an estimated 44 Ohio counties.
All the counties that Rove mentioned on Fox News had irregularities and funny numbers in 2004.
This time, the Fox exit poll number crunchers simply refused to listen to Rove, and well they should not have. While Rove was claiming that the outstanding vote in Hamilton County (Cincinnati), which went to Obama in 2008, should break 60%-40% for Romney –- the exit polls showed 55% for Obama. Obama actually gained 5% of the vote in Hamilton County after Rove made his absurd prediction. The outstanding vote was not in the white suburban areas which had voted early and without long lines, but rather in the African American urban districts where lines were long.
As Rove raved on the air about the races being separated by only "911 votes" or "991" votes, Fox News put the stats up on a split screen next to him showing Obama up by 30,000 votes. Much like the famed anti-Communist demagogue of the Cold War era, Joe McCarthy, who couldn't keep his numbers straight regarding how many secret Communists had infiltrated the State Department, Rove's numbers seemed equally absurd.
As Rove babbled with improbable and impossible vote total numbers predicting a Romney comeback, Fox News split the screen and showed "Race Called" for Obama. The Fox News anchor repeatedly told Rove his numbers were not what the exit polls reflected. You expected her next line to be "At long last, Mr. Rove, have you no decency, sir?
So why didn't Rove's guy Romney win Ohio as Bush did in '04? All the voter suppression tactics and usual dirty tricks seemed to be in place. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted was the new Blackwell and Romney the new Bush, but Rove proved to be the same old Rove –- operating from his 2004 election theft playbook.
This time, after Columbus Free Press articles appeared about voting machines tied to Romney and scurrilous software patches installed on Ohio tabulators, 60,000 people emailed the U.S. Department of Justice with a change.org petition requesting an investigation of Ohio. Justice Department personnel as well as FBI agents were on the ground on Election Day in Ohio looking not only for voter suppression but also for electronic election tampering.
Election protection activists blanketed the state with a visible Video the Vote project that was based out of Columbus and also included Cleveland and Cincinnati.
Although the judges in the software patch cases denied the temporary restraining orders, the cases are still open. However, the story of the Free Press lawsuit was announced the day before Election Day, was picked up by the Associated Press, and appeared in more than 500 newspapers. Just prior to Election Day, the best reporting in Ohio was ironically coming from Channel 19 -- Fox News in Cincinnati. Also, at 12:23am on Election Day morning, Forbes.com posted one of the greatest anti-vote tampering deterrent articles in U.S. history. Essentially, they outlined the shaky electronic voting technology and how it might be used to tamper with votes in the United States' foremost swing state. On the page, linked above, Forbes links to the Channel 19 Fox News report.
Under the glare of intense light activated from law enforcement, media and election protection activists, no one seemed willing to tamper this time with Ohio's vote totals – despite the unrelenting magical numerology of Rove. This time, reality and fact-based numbers prevailed.
Olde Turd Blossom knew that Hamilton County was the key ... and he projected that it would return to 2004 form where Bush carried the county by a little more than 20,000 votes and Obama won in 2008 by just under 30,000 ... but Romney did not invest heavily enough to ensure that. Romney/Ryan wasted time visiting small Ohio towns instead of living in Cincinnati. By my recollection, he visited the Hamilton County three or four times and had 20 plus paid staffers in three offices. Obama increased his number of offices during the 2012 campaign from seven then eight and had hundreds of trained volunteers. After converting Hamilton to Obama-country in 2008, Obama's team was not going to let that slip away. It didn't ... Obama won by 20,000 votes getting 51.8% of the vote. Rove's projection of Romney getting 60% was unrealistic ... and even if Romney did get that 60%, he still would have lost Ohio.
ReplyDeleteSo, what's the difference in Hamilton County from 2004 to 2012 ... a Latino population that more than doubled over the last decade is one ... but the other is the early voting especially the "Souls to the Polls" program ... but in the end it was that central question for voters ... voters looked at look at Mitt Romney, feared a return to the Bush policies and they did not want that.
BTW, isn't it funny that they have all these problems with voting machines when the Secretary of State is a Republican, but when John Kasich and the Republicans took over the state legislature in 2010, the Secretary of State was a Democrat.
So far as I can tell, the ONLY states with any significant voter problems have had Republicans as Secretary of State.
DeleteThis was my first year as an election judge, both for the primaries and for the general election. It was instructional. I also participated last week in the state post-election audit, where randomly drawn precincts are checked against the ballots, in a process very like the hand count done for the past elections in the Franken/Coleman senate race, and the Governor Dayton /Emmer race. Because the county auditor was wandering in and out, we got caught up on what went right and what went wrong during this election and the primary. In our case, the precinct where I was judging had the mandatory flag get locked in a supply room by mistake, where the person who had the key was out deer hunting -- and someone had to rush out and buy an inexpensive additional flag to our very nice large one like those one sees standing behind presidential candidates. Pretty small stuff, and kind of funny in retrospect, although we were certainly scrambling at the time because we had a large number of people who showed up before the polls opened. One of the things discussed was a problem that occurred in Hennepin county where a few of the vote counting machines had trouble reading ballots. We had a very instructional discussion on who prints the ballots, how they are read, etc. - turns out the printer for those ballots was slightly out of alignment with the part of the machine that does the reading of the marked ovals. The ovals were too far to one side to be read by the older machines; apparently the newer machines are a little more forgiving on that. My impression is they have either more sensitive or larger reading sensors, but we didn't go into a lot of detail as to why or how the newer machines were better. In any case this did produce a problem with people having to wait in lines at some polls apparently. One of the things we were hurrying to get done before the polls officially opened at 7 am was to count and initial the ballots- each one requires the initialing in black ink of two election judges. But before we ever get those ballots, at least a few of them have been sent through the voter machines a few days ahead to be sure they can be read properly. We would have needed 4 days lead time had the ballots NOT read properly to have more printed -- and most counties use the same service to do that btw. It would seem from that information then that the one precinct that had a problem did NOT have a problem with most of them, there was just a bad batch of ballots that held things up. In our county, one machine jammed three times, producing a tape count that was off by 3 ballots, due to the jam, which is also noted, with a time stamp on that original tape. The solution was for ALL the ballots to be run through a second time on a different machine - the same kind used state wide - to confirm that the count was correct. That kept our poor audit employees - those same nice people who belong to demonized unions - up until 4:30 in the morning of the Wednesday after election day...and then they had to be back at work at 8 am later that morning. I think they are badly under-appreciated. We also chatted about how many more machines we might need next election cycle, the ages of current machines and their use in MN, as a high voter turnout state, etc. Obviously, with a high turnout, we wear them out faster than other states -- but hooray for us! I just read some precincts in Hennepin county were over 90% - I believe the highest turnout was 96%. Hooray for those wedge issues after all!!!!!!!!