January 4, 2005
Senator Barack Obama
Via email to: barack_obama@obama.senate.gov
Dear Senator Obama:
I have a dream, directly infused into my heart from Martin Luther King in 1965. That dream comes home today in my request to you to sign the Conyers' challenge of the 2004 election. My dream is that ALL will rise and support justice and fair play in our election system, with you in the lead.
I was one of those white northern students who found herself, inexplicably, in Alabama in 1965, helping with Martin Luther King's voter registration campaign. Nothing in my background explains how I was moved to do this. Let's just say it had to be done. There was nothing else to do but to oppose the unfairness of people getting beaten up, reviled and even killed—for the right to vote, for the right to dignity and full citizenship.
And fairness is what I'm writing to you about today. The 2004 election was fundamentally unfair—not just to black voters, who took the main hit of vote suppression, in Ohio and Florida—it was unfair to all voters in the presidential election, due to the blatant non-transparency and partisan conflicts of interest in the election system.
Martin Luther King's work resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, two magnificent accomplishments of our nation, and of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party paid a political price, in the alienation of white bigots, but the benefits were beyond compare. The Democrats became the "big tent" where ALL Americans are welcome. That has been the basis of my loyalty to the Democratic Party for 44 years—despite huge disagreements, such as on the Vietnam War and NAFTA. The Democratic Party alone defended the rights of all Americans, and alone represented the great diversity of our nation, our greatest strength.
Forty years later, we have seen a vicious assault on those basic rights of citizenship once again, in the reprehensible and illegal behavior of Republican election officials toward black and other Democratic voters in Ohio, Florida, and other states; in the utter non-transparency of the election system—including secret programming code, owned by Bush supporters, running the tabulation of all our votes, with no paper trail--and in the evidence of profoundly disturbing election numbers all over the nation that show virtually all machine malfunctions, all weird, anomalous numbers, all Exit Poll discrepancies, and all incidents of vote suppression, always favoring Bush, and hurting Kerry, with impossible odds calculated by leading statisticians that this could occur in any innocent manner.
Personally, I believe that John Kerry won this election by a landslide. I've read ALL the evidence, including expert reports from UC Berkeley, Univ. of Chicago, Univ. of Penn, Johns Hopkins, and many other studies, all the lawsuit briefs and a portion of the 57,000 election complaints to Congress.
But you do not have to believe or assert that Bush in fact lost the election to rise and join the Conyers challenge to certification of Ohio's (and possibly other states') Electors. You only have to believe in fairness and transparency. This election was unfair. The evidence for its unfairness is overwhelming.
Without fair elections, we do not have a democracy. And all that blood and all those tears, and all that long history of suffering and struggle and accomplishment will have been for nothing, because we will not be able to pass our democracy onto our children, as others passed it on to us.
On behalf of my entire family—all good, lifelong Democrats—I urge you to sign the Conyers petition, and make us proud once again of the Party to which we have given such loyalty and support.
People will tell you it’s dangerous, or let someone else do it. I didn’t take that attitude when I was a kid. What I did was dangerous, but I felt it was my responsibility to insure fairness in my country. I saw Martin Luther King and all the people with him standing up, despite the danger, and putting themselves personally on the line, and all they asked was that things be fair. It doesn’t seem like a lot to ask. It isn’t. It’s the bottom line of democracy. This presidential election has driven our democracy below its bottom line, and it should not be validated without a fight.
On election day, as we all watched our TV screens, seeing a Kerry victory, unknown to us, the networks began altering the Exit Polls that showed a Kerry win by “adjusting” that data to fit with “the official results” fed in by AP from central electronic vote tabulators run on secret, proprietary source code, owned by Bush “Pioneers.” Americans did not know that there were two sets of numbers, one showing a Kerry win (the Exit Polls) and one showing a Bush win (the “official results”). People in the Ukraine got to see the two separate figures, and knew something was very wrong.
The American pollsters said they had their reasons for doing it this way—for hiding this information from the American people-- but when you look at the second fact--who owned the code that was running the election numbers, and that it had had no public scrutiny (a second thing that most Americans did not know,) you have to ask: Why DIDN’T they do it the German way, or the Canadian way, or the Ukrainian way—as a check on our new electronic voting system—that is, for transparency?
This election was just about as unfair and as untransparent as you can get—from the tabulation of the votes to the broadcast of doctored Exit Polls on TV, and from Ohio to Florida in every “vote suppressed” black neighborhood. I urge you to oppose it. And I urge you to say, “That’s all we’re asking for--simple fairness. This wasn’t fair.”
Sincerely,
Info.:
http://www.bpac.info (complete Ohio report)
http://www.truthout.org/unexplainedexitpoll.pdf (Exit Poll discrepancy-Freeman)
http://www.appliedresearch.us/sf/epdiscrep.htm (Exit Poll discrepancy-Freeman)
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/997 (Exit Poll discrepancy-Baiman)
http://ucdata.berkeley.edu (100,000+ phantom votes for Bush in Florida-UC Berkeley)
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