Freeman & Bleifuss: A Call to Investigate 2004 Election

A call to investigate the 2004 election

By Steven F. Freeman and Joel Bleifuss | June 26, 2006

WE'VE ALL heard the story. Nov. 2, 2004, was shaping up as a day of
celebration for Democrats. The exit polls were predicting a victory
for Senator John Kerry. Many Americans, including most political
observers, sat down to watch the evening television coverage
convinced that Kerry would be the next president.

But the counts that were being reported on TV bore little resemblance
to the exit poll projections. In key state after state, tallies
differed significantly from the projections. In every case, that
shift favored President George W. Bush. Nationwide, exit polls
projected a 51 to 48 percent Kerry victory, the mirror image of
Bush's 51 to 48 percent win. But the exit poll discrepancy is not the
only cause for concern.

In Ohio, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, the Ohio co-chairman
of the 2004 Bush/Cheney Campaign, borrowed a chapter from Secretary
of State Katharine Harris's Florida 2000 playbook. Like Harris, he
used the power of his office to affect turnout and thwart voters in
heavily Democratic areas. Vote suppression and electoral
irregularities in Ohio have been documented, first in January 2005 by
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, and in June 2005 by the
Democratic National Committee, which found, in the words of DNC
Chairman Howard Dean: ``More than a quarter of all Ohio voters
reported problems with their voting experience."

Election Day 2004 also saw the advent of a congressional mandate
under the Help America Vote Act to replace punch-card systems with
new, unproven technologies. In that election, 64 percent of Americans
voted on direct recorded electronic voting machines or optical-scan
systems, both of which are vulnerable to hacking or programming
fraud. According to a September 2005 General Accountability Office
investigation, such systems contained flaws that ``could allow
unauthorized personnel to disrupt operations or modify data and
programs that are critical to . . . the integrity of the voting
process."

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http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/06/26/a_call_to_investigate_the_2004_election/

whores remain practically mute on the topic. Does this not impact everyone's voting rights?:grr:

:woohoo: :woohoo: :woohoo: :woohoo:

set off alarm bells about fraud when we monitor elections in other countries.

K&R