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Protecting Our Political Investment; The relative
absence of a serious investigation by the Democratic Party is a betrayal
of the investment of trust, energy, money, time and passion that
supporters placed in them. The investors have a right to understand why
they did not get a return on their political investment.
by Stephen Dinan
www.OpEdNews.com
Post-election analyses have swung between two positions: some see the
resounding defeat as a call for the Democratic Party to change positions
– perhaps towards more conservative policies or a more
spiritual/religious orientation. The other main stance is to encourage us
to keep our chins up and focus our attention on the next stage, working
harder and organizing even better for the next round.
Both of these positions are naïve because they rest on a crucial
assumption: namely, that the results that we were given are the actual
results.
Historically, there is no reason to assume an election is clean, in this
country or elsewhere. This isn’t even a partisan charge. The Democratic
Party has often been a perpetrator of election fraud, though the
preponderance of cheating now seems to have swung to the Republicans.
Where there is power, there is corruption and when the reins of the most
powerful country on earth are involved, we can count on attempted
corruption of the voting process.
The real question about an election is not whether it was clean or not.
The question is how much any particular election was tampered with. Did
cheating involve only local corruption or were there more widespread,
coordinated efforts? Was the cheating widespread enough to change the
outcome?
The Internet has been a great blessing in this election because it has
allowed the rapid dissemination of evidence of fraud. This has sometimes
resulted in hysterical over-reactions that proved groundless. In many
other cases, though, the data has proved remarkably resilient and
well-founded in truth.
The first thing a clear-thinking person needs to do in this environment is
to look for signs of systematic fraud. This year, we have a very simple
and, to date, unexplained discrepancy between exit polls and final
tallies. In some of the key battleground states, there was greater than a
5-6% swing between exit polls and final vote counts. Oddly, all these
“errors” slanted towards Bush. University of Pennsylvania professor
Steven Freeman performed a careful statistical analysis and concluded that
the odds of the composite discrepancies from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and
Florida occurring due solely to chance were about 250 million to one. PDF:
http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/11/The_unexplained_exit_poll_discrepancy_v00k.pdf
And that’s only one piece of evidence –the University of California's
Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team reported irregularities
associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded
130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in
Florida in the 2004 presidential election. http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/1118-14.htm
These two studies are the tip of an iceberg of data and attempts to cover
up evidence. The suspect nature of the results are bolstered by the fact
that Karl Rove immediately began dismissing exit polls as unreliable,
though exit polls have traditionally been used as a way to detect election
fraud. His behavior fits with an attempt to cover up clues that might lead
to discovery of more systematic corruption.
These facts alone are enough to warrant massive investigation, especially
in light of the warnings of dozens of organizations before the election
about how remarkably easy fraud now is with electronic voting. Strangely,
the Kerry campaign has been mostly quiet on the matter.
The relative absence of a serious investigation by the Democratic Party is
a betrayal of the trust that supporters placed in them. Every person who
contributes money or time to a political campaign is, to some extent, an
investor. We are each investing our assets into specific candidates who
promise to produce the kind of government and country we want to live in.
When a party fails as badly as the Democratic Party did in this election,
especially given the massive investment of time, money, and energy, the
investors have a right to understand why they did not get a return on
their political investment.
If the Democratic Party were a company that launched a product line that
flopped, and we were investors in the business, we would make sure the
company knew exactly what went wrong before investing another penny. Part
of the Democratic Party treating our investment honorably and
respectfully, then, is to take seriously the process of post-election
examination of voting fraud. It’s a necessary and important audit,
especially in a situation where we have strong statistical signals
pointing to fraud, demonstrated opportunities, and a clear motive.
Investigation of fraud is important for two reasons. First, if the fraud
is systematic, it may well affect the outcome of the election as a whole,
in which case we might even end up with a President Kerry. Second, if
fraud is present but less severe, exposing the individual nonetheless acts
as a crucial safeguard for future political investments and exposes flaws
in the system.
There are many ways to corrupt voting results, and evidence abounds of
cheating at all stages of the process this year. This problem is
compounded by the presence of Republican-dominated companies at all stages
of the balloting and counting process, often operating in secret,
typically with no paper trail, on machines that have been shown to be
easily hackable.
For every avenue of voting fraud that is available, there is at least one
major story chronicling the use of that method. Seen as a whole, this may
well have been enough to tip the election unjustly to Bush, which means
they all must be fully investigated. Here are some common ways to cheat:
1. Voter roll purges – often focused on supposed felons who happen to be
black, widespread in Florida, resulting in the disenfranchisement of tens
of thousands of legitimate voters.
2. Discarded voter registrations – this was exposed in Nevada in advance
of the election, where Republican operatives in a voter registration
company instructed workers to dispose of Democratic registrations.
3. Deception tactics – such as fliers stating that those in long lines
could come back the next day to vote. Common in Ohio.
4. Underprovisioning of districts – especially widespread in Ohio, where
lines in primarily Democratic areas stretched to eight or nine hours
because of gross underprovisioning of poll stations while neighboring
Republican counties had ten minute waits.
5. Ballot “spoilage” – These are ballots that dismissed for being
filled out “incorrectly,” and there are often ten times the number in
minority-dominated counties. Estimates are that 2 million were thrown out
in the 2004 election, with a high percentage of those from African
Americans.
6. Higher usage of provisional ballots in certain precincts –
Provisional ballots are generally not counted until the election winner
has already been declared, if ever.
7. Software problems – resulting in machine totals running in reverse,
vote dumping, and sometimes systematic bias towards certain candidates.
The Diebold software running electronic voting machines, for example, is
so easy to hack that some experts question whether it was intentionally
designed for manipulation.
8. Manipulations of county totals at central tabulators – this is very
easy to accomplish, as demonstrated by Black Box Voting on a
nationally-aired special. The question is not whether it is possible but
how widespread this form of manipulation was.
After reviewing the information that is emerging, anyone who assumes this
election was clean is naïve. The only real question is whether the fraud
was systematic enough to change the results and elect the wrong man. Given
that defeating Bush was the entire point of the hundreds of millions in
Democratic investment this year, I suggest that until the Party addresses
these issues rigorously, they do not deserve our future support. Exposure
and analysis of voting fraud is a pre-requisite to earn our trust that
future investments are well spent.
For a clearinghouse of information on voting fraud, see www.nov2truth.org
Stephen Dinan stephen@radicalspirit.org
is author of Radical Spirit (New World Library, 2002), and founder of TCN,
Inc. Stephen directed and helped to create the Esalen Institute's Center
for Theory & Research, a think tank for leading scholars, researchers,
and teachers to explore human potential frontiers. Currently, he is a
marketing consultant for a number of startups, political action groups,
and non-profits and runs workshops through the Radical Spirit Community.
For a full archive of his articles, visit www.stephendinan.com
OpEdNews.com's archive of Stephen
Dinan's articles
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