But that's not the only thing you do when you steal an election. You also engage in electronic fraud. Here, we have the testimony of an incredibly important person named Stephen Spoonamore who is the star witness in a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) investigation in Ohio. He's a conservative Republican and a former McCain supporter, but most importantly, he is a prominent expert in the detection of computer fraud.
CB: Yes, Spoonamore and his testimony are featured in Lynn Landes newly released documentary "Stealing America Vote By Vote" which I recently watched and for which you, Professor Miller, were a consultant.
MCM: Yes, and Spoonamore has named the principal players in the Bush-Cheney election fraud conspiracy. Specifically, he has named Mike Connell, who has been helping Karl Rove steal elections since Florida, 2000. Connell is the head of a company called GOVTECH Solutions. If you check out a piece by Rebecca Abrahams on the destruction of White House emails, which is actually about much more than that, you'll learn that there's a list made up by Spoonamore that he composed after a very troubling meeting of all the online entities and companies that Connell runs or is involved with. It's a huge menu of partisan and theocratic [Christianist, pro-life] outfits-all part of the same terrifying matrix of disinformation, subversion, and sabotage. Connell told Spoonamore that his motive for helping Bush-Cheney steal elections was "to save the babies". As progressives, this is something we have to wrap our minds around because it turns out that most of the people who are involved in the management of high-tech fraud are Christianists. These people are fanatics who hate the majority. The majority doesn't buy their pro-life agenda; the majority isn't going to sit still for bans on contraception. The only way around that, in their eyes, is to subvert the electorate.
There's an enormous corporate component to this too. One of the defendants in the RICO suit is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because they have spent to date $400 million on front organizations to defeat candidates for the judicial bench nationwide who have an insufficiently pro-business agenda. So we have a really unholy marriage here of theocratic extremists and ruthless corporate interests.
CB: Hmmm. So how do you spell "fascism"?
Both your website, News From The Underground and Truth to Power recently reported the October 4 interview with Naomi Wolf in which she noted that police departments are mobilizing around the country for unrest in relation to the economic crisis and the election, and of course she mentioned what is now common knowledge, namely, that a brigade of troops has returned from Iraq to assist with "crowd control." In the light of this and your research on stolen elections, I'm wondering how obvious you think a stolen election would have to be in order for massive unrest to erupt.
MCM: I think at this point it would be quite obvious just because Obama's lead is so big, and McCain is doing so poorly. All the standard indicators suggest that the race is over and should be over. I think, and I believe Naomi would agree with this, that all this terrifying preparation for crackdown can only fail if there's a sufficiently widespread mass resistance movement. I have always thought that there's a lot more dissatisfaction and distrust around our last few elections than we think there is. The press and the Democratic Party are so blind to it that we tend to think that nobody cares. I don't think that's true; I think a good half of the country is suspicious.
CB: Well, that reminds me that I saw you recently on Free Speech TV presenting a lecture at University of California at Santa Barbara discussing stolen elections, and you suggested that there's kind of an addiction in this society to voting even when we know our vote may be meaningless as if we have a hopeless attachment to the belief that we have legitimate, democratic elections in the United States. Would you say more about that?
MCM: Yes, in all this talk about voting, it's important to acknowledge that we have fettishized the ballot box and overestimated voting as if it were the only instrument available to us for democratic action. It's not the only instrument-there are all kinds of things we can and should do; however, I do think that voting is a fundamental and necessary instrument, but it's not really a democratic action if there isn't popular control and oversight. We have a long way to go before we have a democratic voting system. What we actually have is a ritual-the same as in Iraq. People voted there too!
Precisely because we have fettishized voting we are often that much less able to face the fact that the whole process has been subverted just as surely as it is subverted in closed societies. It's very hard for Americans to wrap their minds around this because it's a tremendous blow to our self-image and our exceptionalism. I don't think that the general public has as much trouble facing that as the establishment and media do.
CB: Last week CNN reported the story of former GOP operative, Allen Raymond who wrote the book How To Rig An Election. What do you think about CNN's reporting of the story?
MCM: The book is actually about vote suppression in New Hampshire in 2002. The context for this is that Republicans had lost control of the Senate in 2002 as a result of the defection of Tom Jeffords. There's strong evidence that they then stole a number of Congressional elections as in Colorado, Minnesota, and New Hampshire. One of the things they got caught for doing was a phone-jamming scheme in the four cities of Southern New Hampshire which prevented the unions from getting out the Democratic vote. Allen Raymond was a hired gun and became a patsy who went to prison. After doing his time, he wrote the book, but he doesn't really talk about election rigging, and all he ends up saying is that he was part of a culture that would do anything to win and that both parties are guilty of such behavior-perfectly harmless stuff. He doesn't mention, for example, that the phone-jamming operations were paid for by Jack Abramoff with two checks from the Choctaw Indians. That's interesting because it ties the two scandals together.
The reason he gets to go on CNN is that he's a much more palatable witness to wrongdoing than I would be. Raymond's book is worth reading, but it certainly doesn't compare with Richard Phillip Hayes' book.
CB: You've just released Loser Take All: Election Fraud And The Subversion Of Democracy which is a compilation of essays on stolen elections, edited by you. In that book you offer a Twelve-Step Program for taking back the American election process. First, I'm wondering what inspired you to compile and edit this book, and I'd like to hear your twelve steps.
MCM: I was simply tired of hearing people say that there's no evidence of election fraud. There were essays out there that constitute strong evidence as well as studies that could be done to make this case, so I collected a number of pieces and asked the authors to polish them up because I wanted to make available a collection of these writings within six months of the election because I wanted it all to be in one place.
The overall effect of the collection was necessarily kind of harrowing and possibly demoralizing as this kind of analysis is for people who haven't heard of this stuff which is pretty much everybody because the press hasn't reported it. So I wanted something at the end of the book that would give people a sense of constructive possibility-of what they might fight for to fix the problem.
