Robert Kennedy Jr Rolling Stone Article: 2004 US Election

[john williams]

I am no fan of Rolling Stone, however, I was driving to work this morning and heard Kennedy being interviewed and was stunned by what I heard. I'm pretty skeptical but Kennedy's arguments seemed quite compelling. I have to say what he described was shocking and would never happen in Australia; we stil use the tried and true pencil and paper voting system and are proud of our Electoral Commission/voting processes.

Article too long to post but here is the link and a starter.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/sto...lection_stolen

Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House. BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

The complete article, with Web-only citations, follows. Talk and read about it in our National Affairs blog, or see exclusive documents, sources, charts and commentary.
Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,''(1) and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.''(2)
But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)
The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)
Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ''We didn't have one election for president in 2004,'' says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ''We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.''
But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)
''It was terrible,'' says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in 2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. ''People waiting in line for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to vote because they were in the wrong precinct -- it was an outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican outcome. I'm terribly disheartened.'' Indeed, the extent of the GOP's effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers of American elections. ''Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,'' Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. ''You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.''

...

I haven't read the whole article yet but will over the next day or so. I was wondering if this article has received any coverage in US Canada (Patricia?). What do people think. I've always though the Bush family were basically gangsters and this would seem to support that.

[rollhead]

I read that Kennedy is planning to sue over this.

For the most part, Americans don't care if their democracy is corrupt. So, no, there has been very little coverage in the "news" media on this.

[patricia]

Originally Posted by JBW

I haven't read the whole article yet but will over the next day or so. I was wondering if this article has received any coverage in US Canada (Patricia?). What do people think. I've always though the Bush family were basically gangsters and this would seem to support that.

The press here, both electronic and printed, have covered this story since before the elections in '04. When the irregularities were apparent in '00, there was skepticism about the much-touted reforms that were promised. That skepticism seems to have been warranted, since the conducting of the '04 election seems to have been suspiciously dodgy as well.
Most of the attention here was paid to the hackability of the Diebold and other voting machines, but skulduggery such as Kennedy talks about in his article was feared as well.
An honest election is not guaranteed if the people who monitor it are determined to skew the results.
Going high-tech and complicated, as opposed to using paper ballots, with monitoring, is not always an advancement. Sometimes it is a more complicated version of plain old fraud.

Even if there was fraud, there seems to be no provision in your election law to well, throw the bums out who were complicent in the fraud, if it is shown to have been perpetrated on the American people, and by extention, on the world.

[tristano's ghost]

Even Christopher Hitchens--no fan of John Kerry, he--wrote an article, albeit much-less researched and detailed than RFK Jr.'s, about "something going funny in Ohio" for Vanity Fair a year or so back. I'm glad Kennedy's making a more substantiated case for Ohio being stolen. (BTW, anybody else think it would've been the end of the Electoral College if Kerry had won Ohio and still lost the popular vote? The GOP didn't mind the Electoral College in 2000, in fact was damned grateful for it. I think we would've seen a very quick end to it if they hadn't managed to push Ohio into the win column.)

Did they ever figure out the cause for that "terror alert" shutdown in a rural Ohio county on Election Night?

[tristano's ghost]

Go back and read Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo blog on Election Night 2004. He was on to a lot of this right away, and wondered aloud why the press wasn't covering it.

[tristano's ghost]

It's fucking outrageous. And heartbreaking at the same time. I'm not sure I can keep sorting through all of the evidence that's amassed in this article.

Anybody who mocks the idea that American democracy (as well as the Constitution) is gravely endangered by the present gang in charge should read this.

[Frank Kimbrough]

More on the stolen elections of '00 and '04 (and how they'll try again) in Greg Palast's chilling new book "Armed Madhouse". Where are we going, and what are we doing in this handbasket?

[rollhead]

This is from Mediachannel.org

RFK JUNIOR MAY SUE OVER STOLEN ELECTION

Robert Kennedy Junior told PR Week that he is considering litigation against people responsible for what he says was a stolen 2004 election.

PRWeek: Is there a next step?

Kennedy: I've been meeting with attorneys... to devise a litigation strategy. And I would say that very soon we'll be announcing lawsuits against some of the individuals and companies involved.

PRWeek: Who exactly would that litigation be targeting?

Kennedy: I wouldn't say, right now.

Here’s more from that RFK Jr. interview:

PRWeek: Why do you think this wasn't covered heavily by major media directly after the election?
Kennedy: I think the mainstream media took up the Republican echo chamber, and just echoed the right-wing talking points.
PRWeek: Why didn't the Democrats themselves pursue this?
Kennedy: Well, there was a lot of complaining; there were a lot of lawsuits. But it got very little traction in the media. But you know, the Democrats on this issue have been abysmal as well.
PRWeek: Your story wasn't based on any secret information, correct?
Kennedy: No, that's the whole thing. This was not a secret conspiracy. This was done openly and shamelessly. Across Ohio, there were people who did everything they could to stop this.
PRWeek: Have you had any indication that the national media will take another look at this issue?
Kennedy: I had a good indication [June 7]. The New York Times, as its lead editorial, did a piece on [Ohio secretary of state] Kenneth Blackwell's current efforts to suppress registration drives in Ohio. And the Republicans are doing the same thing in Florida, and the Times talked about that, as well."

[RBS]

There is one fatal flaw in the article: that the exit polls are unerringly accurate. Disenfranchisement of African-American voters is one thing.

However, exit polling can be quite flawed.

[rollhead]

Originally Posted by RBS

There is one fatal flaw in the article: that the exit polls are unerringly accurate. Disenfranchisement of African-American voters is one thing.

However, exit polling can be quite flawed.

ummmm... I don't think he was suggesting that exit polls were evidence of election fraud. He suggested that is why he wanted to look into it.

and as a result of his looking into it, he found:


Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)

... among other things.

[tristano's ghost]

What's astonishing--or perhaps not--is that even the irregularities and malfunctions that could be ascribed to true error or chance favored Bush in nearly every instance.