President Vladimir Putin LOOK into our election

[keepthemhonest]

,since he and Bush seem to be Arch enemies. The last time I saw them together Putin was giving Bush the evil eye.Other countries know that something happened with the election, are they just too scared to say anything about it, then sugar daddy(USA) will cut them off.

I remember what Bush's buddy Prime Minister Toni Blair said after Bush won, " I thought you had lost when I went to bed, but when I woke up you had won." Gee why was he suprised?



edited spelling oops

[ccarter84]

1. Good point, lately i've been thinking similarly

Putin...Blair could become really popular if he played this right and started to attack the Bush legitmacy...or maybe brit media could take it on....something...anything....class time.

[keepthemhonest]

2. Yeah Blair could regain his respect

let's play this up, I am getting desparate now to try anything because of all the things that election reform people are doing across the country no one seems to be getting anywhere yet. Yes I want instant gratification, but this we are now approaching the 6 month mark since the election and we are still in what feels like stagnant water to me today. Let's open the flood gates.

[FreedomAngel82]

18. Could they do that though??

That's what I want to know.

[Bouvet_Island]

3. He wasn´t just giving Bush the evil eye,

he was saying "the US have it´s own problems" as a direct answer to Bush´s point about democratic reforms in. It was in the official press conference after the previous visit, and I saw it on the news here in Norway.

[keepthemhonest]

4. Great you saw it as well

so what do you think? Do you think other countries would help American's look into their election?

[Bouvet_Island]

5. There's plenty of well trained election observers in Europe

that could make a difference if they were allowed to observe the US elections for real. Norwegian election observers of which I believe there are about 2000 typically have master degree in political science, and are computer literate.

With internet versions of a lot of US papers, the European press could force the US media to pick up on a story that they would like to ignore. If the story is good enough, even a local paper could be able to force it into mass media via European press.

We maybe could boycott Diebold quite hard, if there is a good route for people to do so.

Also, the European NGOs have more experience in successful nonviolent civil disobedience which I still haven´t seen any discussion of in the election forums at DU or the blogs or media that are friendly. I might be wrong about this, I have just gotten the impression you don´t have as much of it while in Norway as an example we had 10 000 people of 4 million total signing up for chain gangs against Norways first Gas power plant, including bishops and several grown up parliamentarians. Which stopped it before any action was needed.

I think the Americans themselves will have to do the heavy lifting though, to answer your question.

[keepthemhonest]

7. These ar great ideas

How do you go about getting observers in US elections, what is the procedure.

I like your idea about the European press forcing US media to pick up on a story. How do we go about this? Thank You for your interest in America.

I have seen several threads since november 2 about civil disobedience and we actually just talked about that at the Nashville conference , that we need to do that. The organizers of the conference were wearing orange armbands for the Ukrane.

[Bouvet_Island]

13. The ideas.

I think election monitors won't be able to get work done before there are a change in public opinion in the US, before this I think any general findings would be subject to rather effective propaganda attacks|http://www.insightmag.com/news/2004/10/04/Commentary/Foreign.Election.Monitors.Opens.Pandoras.Box-741055.shtml. My favourite quote have to be this one;

"The constant blather about "transparent and fair elections" and the "democratic process" is simply a smokescreen to hide the real purpose of the monitors. They are coming here to impose a political agenda.

Finding specific fraud would be hard for them, they either don´t have access to the source code of the machines and I can hardly imagine foreigners organising an unbiased exit poll in the US. They could report and protest people opening or manipulating the machines, queue problems etc, it´d hardly make much of a difference if they didn´t chose to take up a hardlined PR attack like calling the US election "Frankenstein elections" or similar.

No matter how you turn it, changing the US public opinion is the key, I am convinced it can be done effectively without the support of the large media as we no longer are fully dependent on them, we have blogs, web magazines and instant spreading of stories that could be made to disappear. If you see a story in your local paper that says anything like "organised election fraud in the US" or "Suspicious results from elections". Then mail or/and fax it to The Guardian, the Paris office of the IHT, The BBC, Al Jazeerah, Le Monde and Il Manifesto, to mention something and write a short and as neutral a message as possible saying that you think it is funny that this story isn´t covered in the large meda that you sent it to and that you suspect it this is a result of the partisanship in the US, no big words like censorship or fascism. The European press don´t read US local news too much, so if you are lucky then this could make a real difference for said ignored story.

I think any wishful thinking about other countries government doing anything about this hardly is useful, the European press could do some work though if the US election fraud movement would make an organised and professional effort to keep them informed.

If you are going to organise large scale civil disobedience actions, I would be very pleased to put you in contact with people that have been successful at it, in the current situation I think you should be cautious about using it as it will be a fight were you could end up much further marginalized if you loose. I think it should be used as soon as there is something resembling a foothold in national press, or earlier only if there is a genious idea for it. It also would be tricky to organise, I imagine with infiltrators in the organisation and the possibility for particularly insidious provocation both from the police and said infiltrators, I´d warn about being naive about how you go about this matter.

If used properly though it is incredibly efficient propaganda warfare, and I believe you could could get lot of names on lists for a demand like getting to know "what the program in the machines are". As in all warfare, a clear win is when you win without any fighting or win by making an unbeatable impression at a small skirmish.

As I believe I mentioned, people in the rest of the World have little clue that the US state or people don´t have the right to inspect the election software, this fact builds 60% to the tinfoil factor of any mention of the possibility of stealing an election. This really doesn´t like the light of day, it could be a very good match for an action the rightist press really would like to give broadside.

I don´t think you would have any twosided quotes from European leaders if this issue were more out in the open, I´d expect them to be extremely quiet at the instant.

[FreedomAngel82]

19. What about everything

with Clint Curtis? He seems to be legit since he was clear on the polygram.

[garybeck]

12. not unless

someone asks them to

[Bouvet_Island]

16. That´s an obvious and a non obvious statement

at the same time.

To discuss something in itself isn´t a false accomplishment, the topic of the thread is interesting enough; how well the fraud is known with the European or the rest of the intelligentsia of the world and myself I hadn´t heard that quote from Tony Blair which is quite brilliant Imo.

I read the Herald Tribune fairly regularly, and they wrote fucking desperate editorials with a very clear tendency in advance of the election, nearly accusing the GOP of bureacracy style election fraud. Then silenced up completely from what I could gather, with a single exception; you read the comics and suddenly like the most political non sequitur comic I read that showed a frightened guy with a paper with Election fraud in war types. It might sound silly, but I´d say it made quite a statement in context I scanned it but alas it was lost in a hard disk sortof crash.

[keepthemhonest]

17. OK good

I like your idea of sending whatever happens in the media here and sending it to the media there. Excellent.

How about the two stories that just came out for one: the Paul Lehto lawsuit of Sequoyah in Washington(MSNBC article) and also Miami Dade might be going back to paper ballots(Miami Herold paper)

Do You think these are worthy articles?

[Bouvet_Island]

21. Can you give me links?

I´d like to be sure to get the right ones...

[keepthemhonest]

25. definately

1.One other interesting story is the Velevet REvolution's Divesture-have your heard about this They have sent letters to all the manufacutrer's of EVS and telling them to open theier source code or we will boycott them, they have 60 days to reply and I think there time is almost up.thanks for your interest in this,because of your idea , I have asked TomMcIntire if he would make a mediablaster for foreign media as well,He thought it was a good idea all from just hashing it out here on a DU thread.I am excited.Do you know of any way to find out foreign media email contacts? I am sure Tom know what to do,but I thought I would help if I could.

2.this is the Paul Lehto Link
http://famulus.msnbc.com/famulusgen/reuters04-12-165037.asp?t=renew&vts=41220051903

3.and this is the paper ballot link and the story!

"Nothing is more important, for the world's pre-eminent democracy, than assuring the sanctity of each vote."

ELECTIONS- Better votes, on paper

Robert Steinback, Miami Herald

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/columnists/ro...

Sometimes, low-tech is best.

Who wouldn't prefer hand-cranked ice cream to the mass-produced stuff that comes in supermarket cubes?

Every car I've ever owned has had a manual transmission.

As much as I am dismayed by the outsourcing of telephone service jobs, I'd rather talk to a human being in India than a machine programmed to ''understand'' my verbal responses.

Technology is cool, don't get me wrong -- I rarely use my land-line telephone at home, now that my cellular has been permanently sutured to my belt. I can do research that used to require hours in a library with single mouse click.

But applying technology to a process doesn't always mean progress.

No better example exists than computerized touch-screen voting machines, which haven't made elections foolproof or credible beyond doubt. While certainly superior to the hanging-chad-prone punch cards of the 2000 election, touch-screen machines are costly to operate, ripe for mistakes by untrained operators and poll workers and vulnerable to intrusions by hackers and intrigue by schemers.

Worst of all, computer voting machines deny critics, reporters, attorneys general and historians the chance to recheck results -- which undermines the confidence any citizen can have in what are billed as free and fair elections.

Administrators in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, where goofed-up elections have now ruined the careers of three county elections supervisors in barely two years, are cautiously opening their eyes to the light -- studying whether to drop touch screens for paper ballots.

Nothing is more important, for the world's pre-eminent democracy, than assuring the sanctity of each vote. Why can't we have a single nationwide system, with optically scanned paper ballots -- as easy to fill out as a Lotto ticket -- printed locally and sorted by bar coding to custom-fit each of America's 170,000 precincts? The ballots could be counted within a few hours -- hardly an imposition on the populace if it serves to reaffirm democracy itself.

Best of all, the paper ballots would survive to be counted again, and again if necessary. And to guard against the odd warehouse fire that might use ballots as kindling, the counting machines could generate receipts that could be stored separately for the benefit of posterity.

Thwarting fraud

Switching to optically scanned paper ballots obviously won't end all attempted subterfuge to distort elections -- but low-tech vote-counting systems make fraud attempts more labor intensive, and thus more readily detected. Paper ballots can be forged or lost, for example, but attempting to swing elections using such methods almost surely requires a team of conspirators, and likely would leave a trail of evidence. With computerized voting machines, a hacked line of code can instantly alter thousands of votes.

We may never find out what Walden O'Dell, CEO of touch-screen voting machine manufacturer Diebold Inc., meant when he told Republicans in a 2003 fund-raising letter that he was ``committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.''

We may never learn the truth behind the affidavit of computer programmer Clinton Curtis alleging then-Florida Rep. Tom Feeney -- now a U.S. congressman -- asked the software company for which he worked in 2000 to design an undetectable computer program for flipping touch-screen machine votes.

We may never know for sure if Nov. 2 exit polls that projected John Kerry winning several states he ultimately lost were themselves biased -- or whether they were accurate, exposing tampered election results. The victors, after all, never question the score -- or the scoring.

But wouldn't it be nice in the future not to have to ask?



(Sorry this is so long guys but it was too good and too important to snip! KA)

It was fraud and I will NOT get over it!

[Bouvet_Island]

28. Hi,

Sorry for a slow response, of the two I think the bottom one sticks out but as I understand that article comes from an elsewhere quite hostile newspaper? or am I wrong, that it was the Miami Herald that recounted four precincts in north florida and made an article on the three good ones?

I think the ideal article would be

a) not re-published by AP, reuters or other news wires.
b) have some (national) colour and character, something unexpected about it eg. White people protesting their vote rights being taken away by a black man, or includes Indians.
c) Either the fact that the election computers did an error that would have sent the moon trip to the sun and/or the fact that WE THE PEOPLE OR THE STATE DON´T HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW HOW THE VOTES ARE COUNTED. That either or both of these too facts have such an important role in the story that it´d be hard to cut them out. This is the only important part. The rest is just to try and give you the idea I have.
d) From a paper with a traditional sounding name, like "Herald" or "Times" or "Dealer", not "Sun" or "Daily" that in Europe are filthy tabloids.
e) That doesn´t directly imply that the general state or police is corrupt in the sence that it is criminal, it should be as family friendly as possible so people don´t turn their filter on a high setting. A good example is a case that are avaiting action from the court system or the police, and where they have not done anything evil yet. Not like the New Mexico recount effort that got pissed on, without people or the journalist having a good understanding of the fact I wrote in Capital Letters, the story won´t really get into peoples heads.

And as a Bonus
f) there are facts or parts of the story that makes it look funny that it didn´t get more coverage in the US, from a journalistic standpoint.

So it´s a story that wasn´t published too much other places, which doesn´t scream "conspiracy!" and treated to a short one or two paragraph light coverage still would leave the reader in no doubts as to if the STATE or the PEOPLE have the right to find out how their votes are counted in the USA. It could easily include a stupid elk, naked people or whatever crutch or filth that would help our sentence get printed in "neutral" surroundings. If this piece falls into place, a lot will easily follow.

A blaster is good, I´d say blasting all and every article we like should be appropriate, volumes speak.

If there is a candidate for my "Sentence" story a few people doing more targeted call+fax+call could do a lot of work in just a day or two. My email is ntllgns æt start dott no.

As for the Velvet Revolution I believe they or their supporters have an effort going and will probably want to sort this out themselves, but if they are ignored by your press with such a line up that fact in itself could make it a good enough story in the European press if they were to get to them.

I´ll keep in touch, I have a week with little internet ahead though.

[keepthemhonest]

30. I am learning so much by talking to you about all of this

and appreciate your interest and help.It is Interesting what you are saying about names of papers being filthy tabloids,because that isn't neccesarily the case here. I don't really know the specifics about the Miami Herald, but that may have been the paper that was involved in the recount.

Is that yor email address up there? It is confusing to me ,I will PM you my email address and then maybe you can just send an email back so I can get it that way.

I will look forward to your return to your internet access so I can learn where to find the foreign media's email addresses.

Have a good week:)

[Verve]

6. I think Putin did make a public statement alluding to US election fraud

when the Ukraine election fraud was big news. I can't remember exactly but I think he remarked how unusual it is for us to be concerned with Ukraine's elections after the state of our own elections. I'll try to find his exact statement. Does anyone else remember this?

[keepthemhonest]

8. Cool

i get the feeling he would go against the grain and I think he has the balls to do it. We need any country with a back bone that is not afraid to think outside the box. Let me know if you find the statement.

[Verve]

9. Here's Putin's exact statement last December about US elections.

"Do you think that the electoral system in the United States is without flaws?" Putin said. "Need I remind you of how their elections were held in the United States?"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21917-2004Dec23.html

[keepthemhonest]

10. thanks verve

great article.I still wonder why the leaders of other countries are not doing anything for us, if they question the legitimacy of our election. I think we should cry out for help in a big way.

[FreedomAngel82]

20. Interesting

I think he probably knows something or is at least highly suspecious. Seems like he doesn't like Bush very much. Of course I could be biased. ;)

[garybeck]

11. why post this here?

I don't think Putin reads this forum.

It amazes me sometimes what people think they're going to accomplish by posting an idea here. Do you think someone will get inspired and maybe write a letter to Putin, by reading your post? Or maybe they'll write a letter to Moscow Times?

Your idea is well taken but it's misdirected. You should do something with it, not just post it here, which accomplishes nothing.

here are a few ideas

write a letter directly to Putin
start a petition, get signatures, send it to Putin
write a letter to Russian publications

I'm sure you can think of more ideas along these lines. But just posting this here serves no purpose, unless you're just making conversation.

[keepthemhonest]

15. I just wanted to run this by some people and see what they thought about

it and maybe get some ideas of how to go about it. It seems like despite
that fact that you did not like my thread, I found your information very helpful and maybe the next person can be even more enlightening and come up with a better person to send it to.

Believe me, I don't just sit around on this DU board and yack it up like some people do. I actually do things and get things done.I am an results person. However, I like to think about things first get ideas and make sure that I have made the right choicesbefore acting.

Thanks for your ideas, that is why I posted.

[garybeck]

23. i didn't mean to say

i didn't like your thread... i just think that in general there's a lot of good ideas tossed around here but few of them are acted on.

I think it's not just putin... there are many countries and leaders that need to hear our cry. we're just not reaching out to them.

[keepthemhonest]

26. You are right

we need to act and I will.

because of the ideas tossed around on this thread,I asked TomMcintire if he would start a foreign mediablaster.He agreed it was a good idea and so expect to see it soon.In the meantime,I would like to get all these great stories out about election reform/fraud.

and here is another.
ROBERT C. KOEHLER

For release 4/14/05

THE SILENT SCREAM OF NUMBERS

By Robert C. Koehler

Tribune Media Services

As they slowly hack democracy to death, we're as alone - we citizens - as we've ever been, protected only by the dust-covered cliches of the nation's founding: "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."

It's time to blow off the dust and start paying the price.

The media are not on our side. The politicians are not on our side. It's just us, connecting the dots, fitting the fragments together, crunching the numbers, wanting to know why there were so many irregularities in the last election and why these glitches and dirty tricks and wacko numbers had not just an anti-Kerry but a racist tinge. This is not about partisan politics. It's more like: "Oh no, this can't be true."

I just got back from what was officially called the National Election Reform Conference, in Nashville, Tenn., an extraordinary pulling together of disparate voting-rights activists - 30 states were represented, 15 red and 15 blue - sponsored by a Nashville group called Gathering To Save Our Democracy. It had the feel of 1775: citizen patriots taking matters into their own hands to reclaim the republic. This was the level of its urgency.

Was the election of 2004 stolen? Thus is the question framed by those who don't want to know the answer. Anyone who says yes is immediately a conspiracy nut, and the listener's eyeballs roll. So let's not ask that question.

Let's simply ask why the lines were so long and the voting machines so few in Columbus and Cleveland and inner-city and college precincts across the country, especially in the swing states, causing an estimated one-third of the voters in these precincts to drop out of line without casting a ballot; why so many otherwise Democratic ballots, thousands and thousands in Ohio alone, but by no means only in Ohio, recorded no vote for president (as though people with no opinion on the presidential race waited in line for three or six or eight hours out of a fervor to have their say in the race for county commissioner); and why virtually every voter complaint about electronic voting machine malfunction indicated an unauthorized vote switch from Kerry to Bush.

This, mind you, is just for starters. We might also ask why so many Ph.D.-level mathematicians and computer programmers and other numbers-savvy scientists are saying that the numbers don't make sense (see, for instance, www.northnet.org/minstrel, the Web site of Dr. Richard Hayes Phillips, lead statistician in the Moss vs. Bush lawsuit challenging the Ohio election results). Indeed, the movement to investigate the 2004 election is led by such people, because the numbers are screaming at them that something is wrong.

And we might, no, we must, ask - with more seriousness than the media have asked - about those exit polls, which in years past were extraordinarily accurate but last November went haywire, predicting Kerry by roughly the margin by which he ultimately lost to Bush. This swing is out of the realm of random chance, forcing chagrined pollsters to hypothesize a "shy Republican" factor as the explanation; and the media have bought this evidence-free absurdity because it spares them the need to think about the F-word: fraud.

And the numbers are still haywire. A few days ago, Terry Neal wrote in the Washington Post about Bush's inexplicably low approval rating in the latest Gallup poll, 45 percent, vs. a 49 percent disapproval rating. This is, by a huge margin, the worst rating at this point in a president's second term ever recorded by Gallup, dating back to Truman.

"What's wrong with this picture?" asks exit polling expert Jonathan Simon, who pointed these latest numbers out to me. Bush mustered low approval ratings immediately before the election, surged on Election Day, then saw his ratings plunge immediately afterward. Yet Big Media has no curiosity about this anomaly.

Simon, who spoke at the Nashville conference - one of dozens of speakers to give highly detailed testimony on evidence of fraud and dirty tricks from sea to shining sea - said, "When the autopsy of our democracy is performed, it is my belief that media silence will be given as the primary cause of death."

In contrast to the deathly silence of the media is the silent scream of the numbers. The more you ponder these numbers, and all the accompanying data, the louder that scream grows. Did the people's choice get thwarted? Were thousands disenfranchised by chaos in the precincts, spurious challenges and uncounted provisional ballots? Were millions disenfranchised by electronic voting fraud on insecure, easily hacked computers? And who is authorized to act if this is so? Who is authorized to care?

No one, apparently, except average Americans, who want to be able to trust the voting process again, and who want their country back.

- - -

Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at [e-mail] or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com

[ray of light]

14. The whole world knows it was stolen

even Bush and Rove know, but hey...it's good to steal when you're the benefactor. They learned their lessons from Nixon too well!

[go west young man]

22. My wife Elena lives in Voronezh, Russia and her whole family

is highly antiBush as are all her friends. When I visited back in December they were all joking about how Bush stole the election. They also all agreed Putin can't stand Bush. I, myself am English and most of the friends I talk to back home believe it was stolen. Writing the foreign press is definently the way to go. It may not change anything but it can't hurt.

[ray of light]

24. Amazing huh?!!!

Yes, I truly believe the world is snickering at us about this. I'm sure the media knows the truth as well. But we need to be people on the ground, spreading the word like wildfire, and we need to be the media. There is a site that I saw that is all about doing this and about getting people involved locally so that in 2006 we won't be unprepared. Check it out, please. It's kind of cool and they really intend to take back democracy.

http://www.democracycellproject.net

[keepthemhonest]

27. I went ahead and sent some

emails out today to the ones suggested above. I would really like to have more emails than that sent out.Anyone know an easy way to find out email addresses of foreign media.thanks

[Bouvet_Island]

29. Well, cool,

see my other post. Newsmedia often are members of their national press assosciation. I have some lists somewhere I believe. For magazines, one could focus on a few large publishing houses from each country, it probably is googlable which is.

I´ll get back to you in a week, for now I need a little sleep!

[keepthemhonest]

31. here is the link tothe blaster that Tom McIntire put together

It has been a good way to get the word to the media in the states, about what is going on with election reform.

http://www.independentmediasource.com/voteintegrity2_04_14_02.htm

If you go to the link ,it is the latest letter going out.