Here’s how it happened. 

It was a hot and clammy North Carolina night, even at two a.m.   I was resentfully awake, sweating over an update for the re-print of “Cheated!.”

“Cheated!” is a non-fiction graphic novel that narrates what happened in Ohio during the 2004 presidential election: the too-long lines, malfunctioning voting machines, the sudden upswing in Bush’s numbers after the polls closed. 

“Cheated!” reports what happened after the election - inspiring history that a lot of Americans don’t know - that some ordinary heroes did not concede the election, but fought tooth and nail in Ohio for a fair recount.   A month after the election, no mainstream media bothered to show up for the Conyers hearings in Columbus.  But I was there, and heard the collective gasp from the audience as Clint Curtis revealed under oath that he’d been hired by Rep. Tom Feeney of Florida to write vote-stealing software in October of 2000.   Hours of shocking testimony of election fraud were barely reported.   No wonder people still think Bush won Ohio in 2004!

Americans should know that when the late, great Representative Stephanie Tubbs-Jones declared that she would formally object before Congress to Ohio’s electoral votes on January 6, 2005, thousands of citizens rallied to support her.   I joined fifty disenfranchised Ohio voters and activists who traveled from Columbus to Washington, D.C.   The Winter Freedom Bus Riders, led by Reverend Bill Moss, packed a bus and rode 400 miles to urge a Senator to stand with Rep. Tubbs-Jones.   Here’s Wil b at the D.C. rally, singing our theme song.

Nearly forty years before, Winter Freedom bus rider Cheryl had marched from Selma to Montgomery with Martin Luther King.  Now, she needed a cane to get around, but she was fiercely determined to get in the face of power, and tell them how it felt to be denied a proper ballot.   Cheryl wasn’t on the 2004 voter rolls at her precinct.   How could that be?   She never missed an opportunity to vote!    Can you imagine caring so much about your vote, that you are physically sick when you can’t?   Cheryl told me she felt violated.  Actually, she said “raped.”

So, on that sleepless night, with the crickets clicking sweetly and the humidity gathering on my forehead,  I was updating the book and thinking of Cheryl.   I was reading about the EAC - Election Assistance Commission -  the federal agency charged with overseeing elections.   What exactly were they doing to straighten out the mess that we experienced in 2004?  

Voting Problems in Several Swing States is a CNN.com report  that the Election Assistance Commission has not notified election officials across the country about “electronic voting machine failures and registration glitches.”   “Glitches” is misleading.   We are not looking at temporary hiccups here and there, we are peering down into big black holes in the database into which hundreds of thousands, if not millions of voters will fall.  Maybe you.  Maybe me.  Maybe Cheryl from Ohio. Again.  Here’s more bad news…

Common Cause and the Century Foundation find that 10 very vital swing states have had significant voting problems that have not been addressed since the last election.   In some cases, the problems are worse than in 2004.  And who exactly has not addressed these problems?   The Election Assistance Commission.

Perhaps it was my ancestors breathing down my neck that night, adding to the heat.   In the 1600’s they’d sailed fitfully over a vast sea because they could not bear living under the tyranny of a willful, unjust king.   They grew generations of New Englanders who farmed and taught school and sent their husbands and sons off to war, who participated in the matters of their villages, because they felt a duty to speak fully and freely and run their own country.   They were proud to be Americans.   Now, in the dark and the damp, they were outraged and demanded that something be done.

You see, on that sleepless, hot Carolina night two years ago, my look at the Election Assistance Commission eventually led to Texas in the 1980’s, where a Plan was put into play to corrupt our election system and destroy our democracy.   That’s why we are in such danger this November.   The Plan has come to fruition.

Harry Bridges, the famed union organizer was fond of saying, “I may be wrong, but I don’t think so.”  Here’s what I’ve deduced from my two years of obsessive research:

The first stage of The Plan involved the take-over of the elections industry.  Certain people knew full well that the machines could be hacked;  computer scientists had already presented studies warning of security dangers.   This 1972 New Yorker article, “Six Ways Your Vote can be Stolen” (A) warned that “Skilled technicians can trigger a computer to switch a candidate tally on every tenth or twentieth ballot.”  Ronnie Dugger, founding editor of The Texas Observer, described the spread of computerized voting and the dangers in his profoundly researched Annals of Democracy, first published in the New Yorker Magazine in 1988. 

Next step of The Plan was made under cover of a private, “nonprofit” “nonpartisan” organization called The Election Center that served as a nexus for the voting machine vendors and election officials.   A core group from the Election Center seized control of the testing and certifying of the voting machines and spawned another private, “nonprofit” “nonpartisan” organization called NASED, the National Association of State Election Directors.
(SEE “The Scoop on Turdblossom” PDFs 1A – 25 below)

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