http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/14/1459205Audio:
http://play.rbn.com/?url=demnow/demnow/demand/2004/dec/audio/dn20041214.ra&proto=rtsp&start=30:27.00Also calls Dems "decadent" party.
Tuesday, December 14th, 2004
Ralph Nader on the Ohio Recount, Bush's Cabinet Reshuffle and the White House "Lowballing" of U.S. Casualties in Iraq
(snip)
"AMY GOODMAN: Do you think it's possible that John Kerry won? I mean, with reports in Ohio, for example, one precinct having 638 voters, about 4,000 votes going to Bush in that case and another when they were counting them at the end of the day, the county commissioner locking down, not allowing any observers, and when they were criticized over the next few days, she ended up saying that Department of Homeland Security and F.B.I. had approached her right before the election and said there was a 'number ten national security threat in the area,' and so she said she thought she responded appropriately. The F.B.I. and Homeland Security then said they never made this call or they had never sent an agent to approach them.
RALPH NADER: Well, in addition to examples like that, and there were 52,000 votes more than there were voters in Cuyahoga County, which was automatically corrected, so that's not -- That's just probative of a climate that there's something there: A very partisan Secretary of State (sort of a Katherine Harris wannabe), a Republican legislature, a Republican governor. The stakes were enormous. You have 11,500 precincts, ten vote a precinct on the average. Anything is possible with an honest recount. "
(snip)
And from earlier in the interview:
"AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Ralph Nader, joining us in Washington, D.C. Ralph ran for president in this election. Now the election is over. Just to clarify did you say that you think it is possible John Kerry might have won? I mean --
RALPH NADER: In Ohio, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: In general?
RALPH NADER: No. I mean, nobody knows, but there's so many suspicious situations, so many gigantic mistakes that were made in a number of precincts which were corrected to warrant looking at the other 11,000-plus precincts. But worse than that, of course, is that Secretary Blackwell, who is a republican, tried to discourage registration forms from being accepted, when the Cleveland Plain Dealer recommended that people fill out a coupon in the newspaper. He said that wasn't thick enough paper. There were just a lot of things that he did before the election that he's going to get away with because doing these kinds of shenanigans by the Secretary of State is considered politics. The republicans are in control in some states, democrats control the others. It's not considered the Constitutional crime that it really is. So a lot of the damage, Amy, was done before election day. That's not going to be recovered with a recount, but there certainly is enough evidence, certainly enough eyewitness accounts, as Harvey Wasserman has pointed out and others in his daily dispatches, to warrant a recount, and that recount will occur, but it has got to occur under vigilance. "
(snip)