Had we had a responsible media we would have known that something was very wrong. Rep. Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, was determined to investigate and on January 5, 2005 the committee released Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio. The Conyers Report found "massive unprecedented voter irregularities"...."which affected hundreds of thousands of votes and voters in Ohio. Among the broad range of irregularities and anomalies, "not one of which resulted in a loss for Bush", Mark Crispin Miller , Fooled Again.
The 2004 election saw a massive effort to disenfranchise the more vulnerable Democrats in key states and the usual dirty tricks were employed with a particular ferocity, but electronic voting machines have made disenfranchisement possible on a whole other level. In October, 2005 the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO), known for its general incorruptibility, released its report confirming that concerns of electronic voting unreliability, previously dismissed as "conspiracy theories", were legitimate and "have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes". The GAO’s findings made it clear that there is a lack of transparency and accountability in electronic voting systems and underscored the urgency to address the inadequacy, insecurity and unreliability of these machines. The report’s recommendations for improving the security of electronic systems have been ignored. This extremely powerful and critical confirmation of the unreliability of electronic voting systems, begging the question of the legitimacy of the 2004 election, was largely suppressed by our media.
Paul Krugman of the New York Times wrote: "It's election night, and early returns suggest trouble for the incumbent. Then, mysteriously, the vote count stops and observers from the challenger's campaign see employees of a voting-machine company, one wearing a badge that identifies him as a county official, typing instructions at computers with access to the vote-tabulating software. When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The challenger demands an investigation. But there are no ballots to recount, and election officials allied with the incumbent refuse to release data that could shed light on whether there was tampering with the electronic records.
This isn't a paranoid fantasy. It's a true account of a recent election in Riverside County, California..."
Such accounts along with machine failures and unexplainable glitches occurred throughout the country, but Ohio, where Bush is said to have won by 118,000 votes, was the focus of much post-election attention. In Ohio more than 35 counties used Diebold electronic voting machines, accounting for 800,000 votes, all of which were tabulated using Diebold’s proprietary "secret" software and therefore cannot be verified. The GAO report confirmed that the electronic network on which 800,000 votes were cast in Ohio, was vulnerable enough to permit a few people to alter the outcome. Thus Republican-controlled machines, over which neither the state government nor any independent persons had oversight, accounted for seven times the number of votes by which Bush took Ohio. How can it be legal to permit a private partisan company to control the votes in an election with no accountability? What rational reason would anyone have to believe that votes were in fact cast as citizens had intended?
Consider the following facts from Ohio which our media might have informed us of, but didn’t:
– In Warren County voters pressing Kerry’s name on electronic screens repeatedly saw Bush’s name light up. When it came time to count the votes, public observers and the press were locked out allegedly because of an FBI warning of a major terrorist attack. This lockdown (or lockout), which permitted the votes to be tallied in secret, occurred twice. The second lockdown to recount the votes resulted in an even greater Bush margin. Not only did the FBI deny giving any such warning, but one local paper later reported, email correspondence between election officials and the county’s building services director indicated that lockdown plans—"down to the wording of the signs that would be posted on the locked doors"—had been in the works for at least a week!
– In Butler County an underfunded Democratic candidate for State Supreme Court implausibly took in 5,347 more votes than the best funded Democratic Presidential candidate in history.
– In Franklin County, Bush received nearly 4,000 extra votes from one computer.
– In Miami County voter turn out was an improbable and highly suspect 98.55% and after 100% of the precincts were reported, an additional19,000 extra votes were recorded for Bush.
– In Perry County the number of Bush votes exceeded the number of registered votes, leading to voter turnout rates as high as 124 percent.
– In Mahong County 25 DREs transferred an unknown number of Kerry votes to Bush.
Election results in Ohio were not only hidden by virtue of the use of electronic machines and the media’s suppression of and refusal to investigate evidence, but Ohio's Republican Secretary of State Blackwell, who also served as Ohio's co-chair for the Bush-Cheney campaign, refused to allow non-partisan international and United Nations observers access to monitor the Ohio vote.
Exit polls funded by six major news organizations showed Kerry comfortably leading Bush in Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico and Nevada as late as 12:20 am on Wednesday morning. These same exit polls, seen worldwide as so reliable that they’re used to ensure against fraud, had just been used to overturn the Ukranian election and have until 2000 been a bedrock of reliability in the US (significant, inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and official tallies only started showing up in the U.S. in 2000 and only in Florida). And yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in the vote count mysteriously turns and the election is called for Bush. The odds on one state switching the next morning from Kerry to Bush "are about one in one hundred. For four, it's a virtual statistical impossibility. Add the fact that not one, not four, but TEN of eleven swing states showed drastic shifts from Kerry to Bush and you enter the realm of, well, a stolen election." Fitrakis and Wasserman, 10/18/05, Why Can’t the Left Face the Stolen Elections of 2004 & 2008
The media, lacking the responsibility and the curiosity of your average second grader, reported that all the exit polls were somehow mistaken or just wrong. Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an article for the Hill on 11/04/2004 in which he noted:
"Exit Polls are almost never wrong.....This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."
University of Pennsylvania statistician Steve Freeman, Ph.D., analysed the exit polls of the swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida in 2004 and concluded that the odds of the exit polls being as far off as they were are 250 million to one.
