Public Relations News, Features, and Analysis – PR Week — This is getting more interesting by the minute. Like it has made any difference. Read the entire interview. It is quite interesting.
PRWeek: Why do you think this wasn’t covered heavily by major media directly after the election?
Kennedy: I think the mainstream media took up the Republican echo chamber, and just echoed the right-wing talking points.PRWeek: Why didn’t the Democrats themselves pursue this?
Kennedy: Well, there was a lot of complaining; there were a lot of lawsuits. But it got very little traction in the media. But you know, the Democrats on this issue have been abysmal as well.PRWeek: Your story wasn’t based on any secret information, correct?
Kennedy: No, that’s the whole thing. This was not a secret conspiracy. This was done openly and shamelessly. Across Ohio, there were people who did everything they could to stop this.
This discussion is also raging in the Cage Match. A good place for the inflammatory comments.
http://cagematch.dvorak.org/index.php/topic,234.0.html
he should know all about campaign fraud what with his grandfather and uncle paying off the mob for votes in chicago and west virginia talk about the pot calling the kettle black…. the system is rotten to the core BOTH PARTYS!
I read the article, a couple of times, and he convinced me.
I almost never ever believe conspiracy theories because they are so implausible. However, Kennedy claims about Ohio are totally plausible.
It didn’t take much. All they had to do was enforce the rules very strictly at the mostly democratic precincts and go easy on the Republican ones.
They just needed to swing the vote a few percentage and they succeeded. There were a few cases of outright fraud but, mostly, it just was simple unfairness.
Having read the Rolling Stone article I have to admit that there are way too many instances of vote manipulation to just write it off. More coming to a polling place near you soon, by the looks of it.
What facinates me John, it the way you structure the headline, making it sound like you are believe it’s just grandstanding by Kennedy. Coming from an admitted bit of a media whore (Will poke mac fan boys for clicks!), and someone who constantly rails about the stupidity of the current gov.com, it seems strange you would set it up with that slant.
Predictable will behow many comments will dismiss it with, “Well his uncle did it in Illinois, so what’s he bitching about? The whiney LIBERAL.” And, will also bet that that response will come from the same folks who get their knickers in a twist about the need to bring Democracy to Iraq.
I say send the troops to Cleveland where they are needed.
@faustus: ‘m assuming that at some point in your family history, someone related to you has broken the law in some capacity.
As a result, your comment is irrelevant because you’re related a criminal, and I hardly think the opinion of a criminal like yourself matters.
Next time you want to right someone off without even listening to what they have to say just because you’re biased against them for -who- they are, consider how you’d feel if it happened to you.
I have no doubt there was fraud. Ken Blackwell has been the Ohio neocon’s #1 uncle tom for 8 years.
Oh, come on, guys.
I do believe voter fraud occurs – but the claim that the election in Ohio was stolen was debunked long ago, by that famous right wing rag, Mother Jones.
O’Grady, the Democrats’ general counsel…says, “That point of view relies on the assumption that the entire Republican Party is conspiratorial and the entire Democratic Party is as dumb as rocks. And I don’t buy that.”
#7.
“O’Grady, the Democrats’ general counsel…says, “That point of view relies on the assumption that the entire Republican Party is conspiratorial and the entire Democratic Party is as dumb as rocks. And I don’t buy that.” ”
Yeah – so?
The Cleveland Plain Dealer looked into these claims and found nothing. The biggest problem with all these theories is if this vote fraud happened, it would have required complicity by many Democrats as well. There were poll watchers, vote count watchers, etc. Not to mention it’s generally Democrats who pushed for these ridiculous voting machines, and now want to go for internet voting.
“Harping” is the right word, here. I don’t disagree with him, per se, and I definately think the process needs to be reformed, but its like the idea of impeaching Bush now. Maybe he oughta be and maybe it might do some small good, but not enough to off-set Cheney taking over his job.
Then again, if anyone paid any attention to the Governor’s race here, you know it was tight, and took three recounts to get it right. Myself, I’m glad it turned out as it did; I like Christine Gregoire a lot, but it also clearly demonstrates that reforming the voting process is not an easy thing. Since everyone here can get an absentee when they register, participation went up, but it also got that much harder to track. The last two recounts came out within the margin of error.
Which probably says quite a bit, given that we’re that equally divided.
I wouldn’t trust Diebold to make an honest speak and spell, but there does need to be some serious reform and so far, nobody’s taking it seriously, yet.
Now if Bobby wants to get on the stick and do a Rolling Stone interview about what he’s doing on THAT front, I might let him wax Barak Obama’s car. Otherwise I got all this from Keith Olbermann right after the election…
Sour grapes, move on and nominate a democrat who can actually win.
I can’t believe Americans continue to use voting machines. One guy in the cage match showed that a company which makes lottery terminals also uses the same design for voting machines… that one’s too easy.
If there WAS a fix or conspiracy, the position and actions of the press should not be the cornerstone of either party’s argument. If you have actual evidence (not just whining and grandstanding) the proper avenue is through the AG’s and the courts, not Rolling Stone.
If you have no proof and just want to harp, piss and moan over losing, the media is your only option.
According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell was one of President Bush’s top fund-raisers, ranked in the elite “Pioneer” echelons for collecting a minimum of $200,000. In a 2003 fundraising letter, O’Dell wrote he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to (President Bush) next year.” O’Dell hosted a Republican fundraiser at his own posh private residence.
Is it any wonder many of us don’t trust the “black box” voting machines this company has manufactured?
>>If you have actual evidence (not just whining and grandstanding) the proper avenue is through the AG’s and the courts, not Rolling Stone.
You’d think this would be true but we live in a time when conservatives will not investigate their own.
Bush could be selling crack out the back door of the Whitehouse wrapped in kiddie porn and congress would never investigate.
If you have no proof and just want to harp, piss and moan over losing, the media is your only option.
Comment by Greg Mc — 6/21/2006 @ 8:33 am
If you bother to read the article, you might notice that Kennedy did NO investigative work. He totally relied upon already public information. One of his complaints is that NO media has followed up on the story. The courts have refused to take this up simply because the votes were already certified and thus beyond the court’s ability to correct them, the same action the Supreme Court took in 2000 when it appointed Bush as President.
BTW, The Plains Dealer is no longer the newspaper it once was. It too has become an Bush apology source.
Insert joke here:
– Lotto machines turned into voting machines. this is not a comparison, they ARE lotto machines. This is the lotto machine they used for the system http://www.olivetti.com/site/public/businesssector.asp?sid=&cid=296&iid=478 and they hid away the keyboard for the voters and made this http://www.smartmatic.com/solutions_03-2.htm. You have to download the PDF to be able to see a pic of that machine.
My thanks to pedro.
The saddest thing is that the Olivetti machine can and will produce a ballot receipt. They’re being used in other countries as voting machines exactly that way.
They had to remove that feature for American electoral commissions.
The problem as I see it moss is that this is still too complicated. Why not just mark a ballot?
Is this the one that smashed his car into a concrete barrier, DWI, DWB, and on Ambien and under congressional immunity, or is that another member of the Kennedy clan?
Wow, the one non-drunk in the family is crazy. Who’d a thunk it?
James Hill: That’s a really unkind thing to say about George W Bush.
Anyone who ever has read one of my comments knows that I’m a Conservative.
I read an interesting story about the Diebold machines, that under the election law that was passed a couple years ago, Diebold got the exclusive contract to sell their machines to the various states who were trying to impliment the law about touch screen voting. If you (a county election chief) chose Diebold machines, then you got them free from the Feds, if you chose another company, you had to pay for them yourself. Diebold, at the time refused to equip the machines with a paper vote recorder with the free machines. (this is why no paper in Ohio), but since that time a number of county election heads have made vigorious complaints to the feds and now Diebold is including the paper trail part of the machines.
California bought their machines from another company and in the primary this year, most counties had them up and running with the new paper trail attachments. They are rather cool and having worked the primary as a precient inspector, I can say that a lot of the people who refused to use touchscreen in the last election, did use the new machines and were quite happy with them.
Ohio had problems, many of them, but the worst of them were in Democratic controlled counties, and were caused by local authorities not doing a good job of seeing to it they had what was needed to conduct the election. A massive conspirousy would have required the collusion of those Democrats to have happened. Bush won the state, the rest is history, but it did raise a lot of legimate concerns about the machines.
Personally I would like to see all paper ballots, hand marked and hand tallied. I could wait until the next day to learn who won for County Dog Catcher, especially if it meant a much more secure vote.
What happend with these paper receipts? If the voters walk off with them, you’ve just eliminated the secret ballot, and open up more vote-buying.
I’ll take a minute to disagree with folks here, Left or Right, that I often agree with. Why, after all, are we geeks? It’s because we all know that we can construct advanced machinery to do a better job than humans can at a lot of things.
One of those things is to count stuff. Like ballots.
Do you really trust human beings counting ballots more than trusting a machine? These are, after all, usually the parents of that dweeb who brought you a hamburger with mustard on it instead of the ketchup you ordered. These are — very often — someone picked for the job on the basis of their “reliability” as determined by local political hacks.
Didn’t you watch all those well-trained people trying to count votes in Floriduh?
Of course, you watch the watchers. Of course, you run random checks on how the software was set up for an election. But, when push comes to shove, I’ll take a decent cash register over Aunt Sally — or her little boy, Marvin — trying to calculate my change, any day.
Oh, and for the less-than-mentally-agile, include the paper receipts so you can look at it and make certain the machine “voted” the way you thought you did. The poll watchers can void your effort on the spot by verifying that receipt against a machine record — allowing an instant revote — if your laws are sufficiently advanced.
Though you rarely get that chance even with a spoiled paper ballot in most voting districts.
#25 joshua, a very effective form of “theft” can be accomplished without manipulating a single electron or paper ballot. According to an investigation by the Columbus Free Press, white Republican suburbanites, blessed with a surplus of machines, averaged waits of only twenty-two minutes, while black urban Democrats averaged three hours and fifteen minutes. You’ve got to REALLY want to vote to wait in line that long. I saw TV reports on election night showing precincts with wait times of well over 5 hours.
Why are you blaming the Democrats for not having enough voting machines in urban districts? Do you really think they didn’t try to get the machines they needed to reduce expected wait times to a reasonable level? Conduct of a fair election is the sacred (in a democracy) responsibility of the Secretary of State — oops, he was a Republican, and now he’s running for governor in Ohio. No doubt, he’s built up a little political capital with his party after his misallocation of the limited supply of voting machines in 2004.
Gary, the elections are run at the county and precinct level too. They get to choose how many voting machines they want and where to put them.
Here’s a link to Mother Jones’ partial debunking.
http://www.markhertsgaard.com/Articles/2005/RecountingOhio/
Sounds like he’s going out of his way to downplay things. I’ve never heard of unknown women getting a 10% boost in votes just for being women.
#26 AB CD…..the paper part is a black box, with a glass screen attached to the side of the touchscreen voting machines. It has a power source and a computor type connector that allows the votes on the touch screen to be printed on a scroll of paper. You the voter can watch each vote you cast being printed as you cast it. If you make an error you go through the regular error procedure and the error vote is then voided and the new vote printed under it. No one else can see what you vote or what the printer says without literally joining you at the screen. When you have finished the ballot, the touch screen has you verify that you are done 3 times. Then the voting card you inserted into the touch screen to begin the voting process is ejected, and then the paper scroll advances upwards, so that the view window is now blank and can recieve the next voter. There is no paper *reciept* for the voter. The scroll is locked and sealed in the *verivote* machine and can only be removed by the offical vote counters at the polling headquarters. It is only used if there is any type of discrepancy with the touch screen machine total. It must be kept for 1 or 2 years after that particular election. And additionally, each *verivote* machine has a serial number that must be checked 4 times by the Priecinct Inspector and another poll worker to match the machine it is attached to. If the verivote breaks down or jams or runs out of paper, then a field inspector must come and remove the verivote machine and replace it with a working or paper full one. The same 4 time serial number check must be done to match up the new machine with the touch screen. It seems to have a lot of checks and balances to keep it all up and up.
I just know that about 65 of my usual voters that refused to use the touch screens prior to the verivote being added all loved it and happily voted touch screen.
#27 eideard…..I have a schizoid thing going over this. I really like the touch screen machines and especially since they added the verivote feature. But this little something keeps flickering inside my head that says, that ANY computor type program can be made to do wondorous things by the person or persons who wrote the program or installed it. I keep smacking myself for being so cynical about this, but geeks and nerds can be crooks and vote stealers to.
So, I keep going back to a kind of voting that, as far as I know dosen’t exist anymore in the U.S…..paper ballots that you mark an *X* in the box next to candidate’s name, then you fold it, take the reciept off the corner and deposit it into a sealed and secure box. That box is then taken, under guard if needed to the county polling headquarters and people count them, by hand, not by electronic scanner or run through a mail sorter. Time consuming you bet. If you have a ballot box brought in from pricinct number 3444, you know how many voters there are in that polling place, how many signed in and voted, how many absentee voters walked their ballots in and how many voted *provisional* pending verification of their I.D….you know how many signed up to get absentee ballots, so if the number of votes matches what you show should be there, then you did good. And there are going to be people from all the parties there to watch everymove.
That makes me feel better.
As to Florida(another place where the counties that had problems were run by the Democrats), it wasn’t hand marked ballots that was the cause of hanging chads and the stupidity that followed. It was punch marked ballots, and then running them through a scanner. That and the very stupid Democratic ballot makers in the county where the holes didn’t match up to the candidates names(ie; Buchannon getting 2000 votes in a precinct that was heavily Democratic).
And to top it all off, Al Gore didn’t help himself by being too cute by a mile with his appeal asking for a recount in only what?…9 counties?
#29 Gary Marks…..the Secretary of State is the offical big cheese in elections. But, because this is a partisian job and other reasons, the actual planning of elections are done on the county level(in California, Ohio, and Pa. that I know for sure) The County people decide how many polling places there will be, plus buy and maintain the voting machines and train and pay the polling place workers. They also are the ones who have the offical ballots printed up. In other words, THEY run the actual election. If there isn’t enough machines, it’s THEIR fault, if there aren’t enough polling places, it’s THEIR fault, if the ballots are printed wrong, it’s THEIR fault……the Secretary Of State is just a PR position and he/she helps set the state laws on elections, with the Legislature.
The people in the medfia, or universities that make these claims have no clue about how elections are actually run and by whom.