STOLEN ELECTIONS AND MEDIA BLACKOUTS: An Exclusive Interview With Mark Crispin Miller

(Burlington, Vermont: October 24, 2008) Shortly before a public lecture presented at Champlain College, I sat down with Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Studies at New York University, to ask him a number of questions regarding stolen elections-a subject Miller has researched and written about extensively. Greg Palast, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Bev Harris, Steve Rosenfeld, Bob Fitrakis, and Lynne Landes, have provided monumental contributions to the subject of election fraud, each with their own unique styles and methods of targeting the issue. Mark Crispin Miller's 2005 book Fooled Again, impeccably documents the stealing of the 2004 election, and Loser Take All, a 2008 collection of essays on stolen elections incorporates the research of other investigators of election fraud such as Robert Kennedy, Jr; Bob Fitrakis, and Steve Rosenfeld.

Generously, Professor Miller gave me both time and disturbing insights regarding the upcoming election of 2008.

CB: In progressive circles there are countless issues that attract people, and I'm curious about what drew you to fight for clean, legitimate, democratic elections in the United States as opposed to some other issue.

MCM: What immediately drew my interest was the overwhelmingly obvious fact that the 2004 election was stolen. We already know the 2000 election was stolen because the Supreme Court intervened so flagrantly, but I think the 2004 election was stolen on an even grander scale. What struck me was not just that fact, but no less, the general refusal to admit it which was evident not only throughout the corporate media but on the left as well. Even now I can't quite get over how the left fell into line and dismissed the evidence as "conspiracy theory" on the basis of very sloppy reporting by very good reporters in progressive circles.

So the immediate reason why I got into it was because of this staggering miscarriage of proper civic procedure and a betrayal of democracy. The more I thought about it, the more I also came to believe that this is the most important issue, precisely because we can make no progress on any other front if we don't have the right to pick our representatives, and more importantly, reject those who don't represent our interests. That's vital, so I often say in my talks that regardless of what your issue is, you're kidding yourself if you think you can get anywhere when government is able to act with impunity.

CB: So what are the maybe top half-dozen pieces of evidence that the 2004 election was stolen?

MCM: Well primarily, there is the audit of the vote in 18 counties of Ohio that was carried out by Richard Hayes Phillips who published Witness To A Crime which is the result of three years labor by Richard and his researchers who literally scrutinized every single ballot that was cast in 18 Ohio counties. This book is scrupulous, precise, and explicit-fully illustrated and comes with a CD with illustrations of ballots and how they were tampered with.

CB: Who published this?

MCM: Well this is an interesting story. This book was supposed to be published by Kent State University Press, but when Phillips handed in the manuscript, they told him that it was twice as long as it should be and that they couldn't afford illustrations. This was not their original agreement. Phillips told them that without illustrations, the book isn't convincing, and he then decided to self-publish. Nevertheless, it's a superb book, beautifully written, but it has sold to date, 900 copies. He put his life savings into it and he's been trying to promote it, and as you can see, it's highly specific and technical. Therefore, it's a sort of an unwieldy smoking gun, but it is a smoking gun because they discovered that John Kerry was variously robbed of two hundred thousand votes in those 18 counties alone. There's no argument with this. In the illustrations you can see ballots with stickers placed over the square beside John Kerry's name, thousands of ballots that were marked so that they would be over-votes when people voted on them. The range and the ingenuity of the fraud tactics are astonishing. After Phillips did his research, 55 boards of election out of 86 counties in Ohio, in defiance of a court order, destroyed all or part of their ballots-that is 1.5 million ballots. That was a malicious destruction of evidence.

CB: Where can one purchase this book?

MCM: You can only get it on Phillips' website.

CB: What evidence do we have currently, in addition to the voluminous evidence that you've provided in your books, that the 2008 election may already be stolen?

MCM: I do resist putting it that way with all due respect to Greg (Greg Palast) and Bobbie (Kennedy). I don't like to say that it's already been stolen because it's demoralizing, but I will say that they (the Republicans) have made enormous strides toward a McCain victory already.

CB: In what way?

MCM: Well, election theft is a two-part process. On the one hand is vote suppression. The purpose of vote suppression is to shrink the electorate before the fact. In the last four years or so they have moved somewhat away from fraudulent manipulation of ballots cast toward grand pre-emptive tactics meant to prevent people from voting in the first place. So within the realm of vote suppression, they have managed to purge literally millions of names from the voter roles. In New York state alone, we learned last week, 1.5 million voters have been purged without their knowledge. That's New York; it's not even a swing state.

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