Rolling Stone : Was the 2004 Election Stolen? — This is an interesting article. Of course it’s tradtionally been the Democrats accused of rigging elections. But if it’s now the Republican machine doing it then they should sweep to victory in 2006, right? Perhaps this is why nobody seems too worried about it.
But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots — or received them too late to vote(4) — after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment — roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)
The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush’s victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent.
found by Bill Cornelius
I didnt SAY internet…
I said DIAL UP…
Direct connection to server based information… CALLEd a Bulletion board service…or are you too young??
IT ENCODED to each person…What more of a paper trail do you want??
Better then some person sending in a request for a card, for a DEAD 2 year old, and getting to vote with an assumed name…DUH..
as I mentioned at the top, records of Bither and DEATH are not correlated very well, and Before 75-80, almost NEVER..
ECA:
When I lived in Florida, there was a fiasco when felon records were used to clean up the voter registrations. Apparently non-felons were also being stricken from the voter roles.
Then again, I also received absentee ballot information from Florida two years after I moved to Arizona. It only proves that nothing’s changed since then.
John:
The 2000 Elections in Florida messed everything up and the courts decided that the spirit behind our election process doesn’t matter.
I remember thinking that the laws regarding when the ballots had to be counted (3rd week after the Election) so they could get to Congress in time were way to stupid for this day and age.
The election system needs to be reformed to take the politics out of it and I’m not holding my breath.
ECA: Do you really think some piece of paper that you printed on your own printer, on your own paper proves anything? Why not do away with the mint while we’re at it? Just print money with your own printer and paper. You can claim you logged on to some website that said you earned it!
19. I can’t drive my SUV to the ballgame, the parking is just terrible.
And pardon me for taking a jaundiced view of these allegations of fraud and other disenfranchisement, but I remember FLA 2000. Note that in FLA the Gore camp did not want ALL the votes recounted, esp in areas where more GOP votes could turn up. And he initially tried to block overseas votes from coming in, since the perception was that they would trend Republican. So much for counting every vote.
not as bad as the GOP sending their goons over to the offices where the ballots were being counted or getting their pet Scalia to stop the recount until Republican judges could make up a new Constitutional doctrine to keep it stopped, but it does mean that we could not trust either side. people with beefs about the system tend to have beefs with the outcomes, not a disinterested concern for the fairness of the process.
the fundamental problem here is that the people who have a stake in the outcome of the system are also the ones running the system. there needs to be a non-partisan official in every state – essentially banned from participating in partisan politics – who is in charge of the vote. no more heads of political campaigns running the vote counts.
and every vote needs to generate a piece of paper. we all know computers and we know everything that can go wrong. and we all know that problems can be missed until it is too late.
They should also dump absentee balloting and vote by mail which are ripe for fraud, and probably unconstitutional too as elections are supposed to happen on one day.
there are to many holes in ANY method.
Even the current computerized system has had a snafu or 3…
esp with REP’s and Demo’s having fingers into it all..
Interesting statement from the link [page 1, paragraph 4] – in light of all our differing opinions on how “The Election” should be run:
“We didn’t have one election for president in 2004,”
says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University.
”We didn’t have fifty elections.”
“We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.”
Mother Jones already did the research on this, and even they don’t buy it.