Rigged Election: An Overview

Maureen Farrell has a great article at Buzzflashwith lots of good links about the stolen 04 vote. She sums up a bunch of known facts so far:

1. Warren County officials locked down the county administration building on election night and blocked anyone from observing the vote count as the nation awaited Ohio's returns. County officials say they took the action Tuesday night for homeland security, although state elections officials said they didn't know of any other Ohio county that closed off its elections board.

2. Before the election, Greg Palast described "ethnic cleansing of voter rolls" and other odious measures to yank as many as a million votes from John Kerry before voting even began – and later bluntly asserted: "Kerry won. Here are the facts"

3. Citing "new information" suggesting "that hackers may have targeted the central computers that are counting our votes," http://blackboxvoting.org/ is conducting "the largest Freedom of Information action in history" and has already asserted, based on "hard evidence" that "fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic voting machines." (While a guest on Topic A With Tina Brown, Black Box Voting founder Bev Harris actually demonstrated how easy it would be to tamper with election results. "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds," she told guest host Howard Dean, after an on-air demonstration. http://www.votergate.tv/)

4. Jeff Fisher, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District, told Thom Hartman that he was giving the FBI evidence that voting machines in Florida were hacked in 2002 and 2004, along with information regarding "who hacked it and how." Meanwhile, House Democrats have asked the GAO to investigate voting machine irregularities.

5. The day after the election, the AP reported that voters nationwide "reported some 1,100 problems with electronic voting machines" and that in many cases, (particularly in Florida and Ohio), citizens complained that though they intended to choose John Kerry, when the computer asked them to verify their vote, "it showed them instead opting for President Bush."

6. Palm Beach reportedly logged 88,000 more votes than voters while thousands of votes were added to Bush’s tallies in Ohio. (Magic ballot theory, anyone?) A previously discovered glitch in Florida's Broward Country caused computers to subtract votes once the absentee tally reached 32,500, casting "doubt on the accuracy of the elections.''

7. Despite a post-election CNN puff piece on the success of electronic voting, Wired collected reports of e-voting problems and the organization "Count Every Vote 2004" documented "hundreds of voting irregularities affecting poor and minority voters in seven Southern states."

8. After officials in Warren County, Ohio "blocked anyone from observing the vote count as the nation awaited Ohio's returns," WCPO-TV (Channel 9) News Director Bob Morford said he's "never seen anything like it." The county cited homeland security reasons for restricting media access to the vote count, to which Morford replied, "Frankly, we consider that a red herring. . .That's something that's put up when you don't know what else to put up to keep us out."

9. Prompted by requests from voting rights activists, Ralph Nader asked for a hand recount of ballots in New Hampshire due to "irregularities in the vote reported on the AccuVote Diebold Machines." Saying that the discrepancies between exit polls and election results favored Bush, Nader explained that "Problems in these electronic voting machines and optical scanners are being reported in machines in a variety of states." His request was rejected, however, due to a technicality.

Meanwhile, Phyllis Hasbrouck wants back the $25 she gave to the Kerry campaign:

I gave it to your campaign specifically for the fight around a contested election. Your e-mail said, "In the post-election period of 2002, the Republicans had four times as much money as we did. With your donation, we'll be ready this time, with an army of lawyers prepared for any contingency." You probably raised millions from that appeal, and we figured you really meant it...

Kerry should be back on camera soon, it will be interesting to hear what he has to say, if anything.