The Coverup that Cost the Election: Ohio GOP knew of huge loss in October

[farmbo]

The loss of $215 million in Ohio Worker's Compensation funds was known to GOP leaders-- and presumably reported to Karl Rove-- as early as September 2004.

http://www.cleveland.com/search/index.ssf?/base/news/1118309593207410.xml?nohio&coll=2

Had the scandal become public in the midst of Ohio's white-hot presidential campaign, Ohio's infuriated voters would assuredly have gone to the polls to send a strong anti incumbent message and there can be little doubt that John Kerry would be president today.

http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050610/OPINION02/506100332

What followed was a system-wide coverup, similar to Watergate in scope and effect, as GOP office holders stonewalled, delayed and ran feints, in an effort to run out the clock on the 2004 election. After all, MDL Investments, the Bermuda- based company that caused the losses, had strong ties to the Bush administration through its former Managing Director, Philadelphia neocon Joe Watkins, a former Bush aide.

http://www.pnionline.com/dnblog/attytood/archives/001992.html

Alas, the GOP controls all the levers of power in Ohio and the coverup worked. The Ohio Attorney General had the audacity to sign the MDL Investigation contract on the afternoon of election day; as George Bush lifted off on Air Force One from Port Columbus airport for his flight back to Washington, and Karl Rove's computer-banked war room.

Still, the next time Bush brags about spending his hard-earned "political capital', or Senate Republicans shrug of their votes for knuckle- dragging Bush appointees saying:"elections have consequences"; just remember: were it not for the malignant actions of Ohio's GOP leaders, he would be a resident of Crawford today.

[acmejack]

1. As more and more of this election comes to light it is appalling.

This will surely go down in history as the all time greatest example of highly coordinated mass deception. The question becomes what mitigating/compensatory actions are we entitled to? And how many will go down due to this rampant criminality? I suggest that "Tough, better luck next time" just won't do it.

[madrchsod]

2. i thought of this i moment i read this

posted a few -wake up-this is the story not "lets beat up dean,jon,and everyone else"-but it got no trraction. this is a big story,bigger than anything coming out of the last election.kerry would have taken ohio by enough votes to make the vote fraud a mute point. i am afraid that no one will care enough to demand any real answer...dean may but the dino`s will kick him in the balls again..

[Bob3]

3. Ohio is a stench in the nostrils of the Republic

Sorry to get so 19th Century there but boys and girls Boss Tweed had nothing on these guys.

This nest of utterly vile and oddly incompetent corruption needs to be cleaned out with a fire hose.

[TahitiNut]

4. If a publicly-traded company delayed disclosure of such material ...

... information, they'd be open to prosecution for stock fraud.

[Peace Patriot]

5. They did.

"...Ohio's infuriated voters would assuredly have gone to the polls to send a strong anti incumbent message...." --cleveland.com

They did go to the polls in massive numbers--as did the whole country--with a very strong anti-incumbent message. And they were massively defrauded of their votes.

I have a friend who says that if Kerry's message had been stronger--more populist, more anti-war, more anti-Bush Cartel corruption, mass murder and torture--he would have won by 20% instead of his probable 10%, and they would not have been able to steal it.

I don't agree. I think they had several backup plans. One that was well set up before the election and which they didn't use, for instance, was strategic "terrorist alerts" to shut down the vote in certain places (I believe California was one of them), particularly major cities (where Democrats are the majority) and then fight over whether a partial vote was valid. They planted many stories in the media just prior to the election, prepping this plan. And Dick Cheney took off for Hawaii--inexplicably--two days before the election, possibly an element of the "terrorist alert" plan. (They did use one "terrorist" shutdown--in Warren County, Ohio.)

I don't think ANYTHING could have thrown the Bush Cartel out of the White House. They had it all covered.

What Ohio was, in my opinion, was backup plan #2 (after the electronic voting scam, nationwide). They had to risk the massive, blatant, and very visible vote suppression there, because Kerry was winning, and winning big. Their less risky 3% to 4% shave of the vote on the east coast (the portion of the country most at variance with the exit polls), mostly by electronic means, wasn't sufficient. Everything was pointing to a Kerry blowout (including the huge Dem success in new voter registration in 2004--nearly 60/40). This is what began to play out on election day--a Kerry landslide (well above the 3% to 4% shave they had programmed). So...they implemented plans to short Democratic precincts in Ohio on voting machines, and all the rest.

The massive vote suppression in Ohio (and in Florida)--and a few other operations, such as the Dem voter registration shreddings funded by the RNC in the west--added to the 3% to 4% shave on the east coast (4 to 5 million votes), and other lesser shavings here and there, was sufficient to flip a 4 to 5 million vote Kerry win into a 2.5 million vote Bush win. (--that mysterious flip on election night, when the news monopolies altered the exit poll data on everybody's TV screens--to make it look like Bush won the exit polls, which he did not).

If Kerry's margin had gone up into the 11%-20% region, they would have gone to backup plan #3 (terrorist alerts).

The information about this great Ohio money scam and its suppression is important NOW, in educating people about the election, and rallying them for election reform at the state/local level--and in getting the damned Democrats off their fearful, compromising behinds! But I don't think it would have meant ousting the Bush Cartel. They were not about to let that happen.

People need to know this.

[mod mom]

7. Excellent post PP, and don't forget the Noes (other big BWC

scandal) had control of the Lucas County BOE , a county rich in dem votes that had such serious problems it was fully investigated, and was one of only 2 counties (out of 88) that had Diebold machines.

[bunny planet]

10. Totally agree PeacePatriot.

Thanks for the nice, clear summation.
I definitely had a feeling before the election that they were planning for disruptions due to 'terra' alerts. I was worried about California in particular. People have been focusing on Ohio because it was so blatant. They stole Florida (again) and shaved lots of votes everywhere else.

We need an election fraud Deep Throat.
Is there anyway legally, if it is proven after the fact that an election was stolen, that the true winner can take office. I know that's a lot to hope for and it's probably not possible. It just seems simple, when you steal and you get caught, you give back what you stole.

[bleever]

12. Amen. n/t

[FogerRox]

13. Really good overview Peace Patriot

And probably right on----

[catzies]

23. Indeed, PeacePatriot. The fix was in. Layers of fixes, if need be.

Very nicely done.

[MelissaB]

6. Nominating!

:kick:

[meganmonkey]

8. Wow - this is being treated as a big story!

Scandalous!

:woohoo:

[salin]

9. great compilation!

[burythehatchet]

11. sheds light on Voinovich's state of mind.

Tom Delay and Karl Rove have destroyed the OH repub party for years to come. :)

[Stinky The Clown]

14. I have a small, minor, inconsequential question .........

How come NONE of the elected Dems in this country are making an issue of the obvious vote counting fraud and voter manipulations?

None.

Sure there was some noise for a very short while after election day and then the famous walk of the congresspeople into the senate. But it all seems like little more than political theater.

Congresspeople in particular need to get elected every two years. Why are NONE of them making this an issue?

I've asked this a few times, and never get a thought-out answer.

Most recently, I asked it here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3826594

[Peace Patriot]

15. I've discussed this many times, Husb2Sparkly, but I didn't notice your...

...thread. Let me just start by saying that I think the answer is a complex one. The question you pose is certainly the biggest political puzzle that I have ever come across--in 40 years of political activism, and much reading of history.

It goes back to HAVA (which was supposed to be the answer to 2000 election fraud) and the anthraxed (and Wellstoned) Congress of 2002. That's the Congress in which we began to see the Democrats cower under Bush Cartel bullying.

I don't remember the exact sequence of votes on HAVA--which I believe was first passed in Oct. '02, a month before the Congressional elections of '02. But what occurred was this: Congress ultimately appropriated over $4 billion to help the states purchase new voting systems, but failed to require a paper trail in electronic voting (specifically blocked by House Bushite Tom Delay), failed to forbid secret, private, proprietary software used to record and count votes, failed to debar partisan companies from providing voting systems, failed to prevent conflicts of interest of all kinds (such as private, partisan control of election systems, and "revolving door" employment between public officials and private voting machine companies), and underfunded the watchdog commission (the EAC).

The result was powerful corruption (the $4 billion--plus big lobbying $$$ by Diebold, ES&S and others), involving both Dem and Rep election officials--and taxpayers' money pouring into the pockets of people like Wally O'Dell (CEO of Diebold, Bush-Cheney campaign chair in Ohio, who wrote a letter promising to "deliver" Ohio to Bush-Cheney in '04) and the ES&S owners and investors (ES&S originally funded by rightwing billionaires).

Our tax money went to the Bush regime, thence via Congress back to the states, thence into the pockets of major Bush donors and partisans (the CEO's and investors of electronic voting machine companies), thence (some of it) into Bush-Cheney's campaign coffers, with the rest used as bribe money for the states to buy extremely insecure, hackable, fraud-prone election equipment. Jeez. It's so corrupt, it's mind-boggling.

The only Democrat that I know for sure was completely immune to this corruption was CA Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, who sued Diebold for the lies they told about the security of their voting machines, and decertified their touchscreen systems prior to the '04 election). They took care of him with a 'black ops' campaign (he was driven from office on trivial, unproven charges of corruption, and has now been replaced with a Schwarzenegger appointee).

And now we have a Democrat in Los Angeles, for instance--head of elections Connie McCormack--who is an advocate of paperless voting and of Diebold. (Her best friend was Diebold's chief salesperson in Calif.)--not to mention our former Republican Sec of State Bill Jones and his chief aid Alfie Charles now working for Sequoia.

I haven't tracked the corruption through Congress--but I'm sure it's there. (I think Christopher Dodd, for one, is corrupt on electronic voting issues.)

What should have happened, back in 2002, is that the Democrats should have SCREAMED BLOODY MURDER AND SHUT THE CAPITOL DOWN over paperless electronic voting and Bush partisan ownership and control (via secret, proprietary programming code) of our election system.

Why didn't it happen? Part corruption. Part obliviousness and stupidity. Part fear. (Keep in mind the atmosphere of 2002--9/11, anthrax, Paul Wellstone's plane falling out of the air, for no reason, with no official investigation afterwards.)

Fear causes people to want to "circle the wagons"--protect their rears, protect their own little fiefdoms. I think there are any number of Democrats who think they can ride this fascist coup out--and/or protect some little area of power and privilege, as the Bush barbarians raid the countryside. They may not be bad people necessarily--just fearful.

There are others who are in collusion with the Bush Cartel over the Iraq war and US control of the Middle East. They didn't necessarily want to win the 2004 election. They would just as soon Bush take the rap for the deaths and the cost--yet their interests and those of their donors are served. (I think some of these may have been advising John Kerry on election night.) And there are in addition, just plain military-industrial Democrats--wholly into the militarization of the country, often for corrupt reasons.

The thing is, the grass roots of the Democratic Party rose up--and in conjunction with a big majority of new voters, Independents and Nader voters--voted the Bush Cartel out of office, by a landslide (if the truth were known). (We gave the Democrats a blowout success in new voter registration in 2004, for instance--a nearly 60/40 advantage.)

Insider Democrats--and war Democrats--hate the grass roots. (The vast majority of the Democratic Party, and the majority of the country, are very anti-Iraq war.) I'm sure they hated the fact that Dean Democrats, for instance, put aside their differences with the DNC, and fully backed Kerry, and helped elect him. THE WAR DEMOCRATS DID NOT WANT A PRESIDENT WHO WAS BEHOLDEN TO AN ANTIWAR MAJORITY. (--and thus, they did not object to the stolen election, and not even to the egregious, massive violations of the Voting Rights Act in Ohio and Florida).

Do keep in mind that 125 members of Congress ('02) VOTED AGAINST THE IRAQ WAR, despite all this. (124 more than voted against the Vietnam war resolution!) So there were--and still are--Democratic leaders who believe in "consent of the governed" and the will of the majority. But fear and corruption--and also, just plain ignorance about electronic voting--are playing a big part in the Democratic Party silence on this matter.

It's also possible that some Democrats are in very direct collusion with the Bush Cartel--and have bargained with them to be the token opposition, that is, to retain some power and privilege in the junta. (Lieberman comes to mind.)

Finally, I think, at this point, some Democrats may be worrying that if they cry the alarm on the election system, people won't vote. 120 million people voted in 2004--a huge turnout. Will that happen again? Will all those new Democratic voters ever vote again? It's a real question. I've thought about it myself. But I don't think the answer is SILENCE ON THIS THOROUGHLY CORRUPTED ELECTION SYSTEM.

Talk about sweeping things under the rug! Covering up the fact that Bush partisans own and control the election system would be catastrophic--not just for the Democratic Party, but, of course, for the whole country--for our democracy.

We have got to clean house--really clean house. And it is one hell of an uphill battle--with the almost complete lack of help we are getting from the Democratic leadership. They surely fear that, in a real house cleaning, some of them will have to go. And they are quite right about that.

It's as if every flaw--every fissure, every neglected problem, every compromised issue--in our democracy is coming upon us, in full force, all at once. Corporate control of elections through campaign contributions (our utterly filthy political system). Increasing corporate control over policy. Bought and paid for politicians. Over-militarization--long a problem--being like a ripe fruit plucked by the fascist junta. The increasing distance over the years between the governed and those in power. The Congress constantly improving their own salaries and benefits--while passing legislation that would outsource millions of jobs (as a favor to corporations). The re-writing of the tax code under Reagan. Capital punishment--every civilized country in the world has abandoned it, except us. Our festering prison system. Our deteriorating schools. Our dependence on oil, and lack of planning. The failure of the "War on Poverty" (it becoming a war on the poor). The increasing corporate monopolization of the news (a big one!) Etc. Etc.

The Democratic Party has contributed to many of these problems--by an increasing tendency to compromise--and by our leaders themselves increasingly coming from the rich class. (Only the rich can afford to run for office.)

As I said above, it's a complex answer. We need very much to understand it. And I hope my musings here will help us to sort it out.

I think we need to face that we are in a dire situation--and that outright fascism is right at our door. I think the only way to set things right is to battle for transparent elections--with or without the Democratic Party.

And I think we also need to remember this: We are the majority. (The Bush Cartelists and their news monopolies are trying to convince us otherwise. They are wrong.)

[mod mom]

16. PP, have you ever wondered if the threat of another 911 might be the

reason? I have been thinking about why on earth Kerry, after knowing what occurred in 2000, would concede so quickly after he promised to count every vote and was aware of the extraordinary voter registration that occurred. The only thing I can think is that perhaps he did it to protect the country in ways we might not understand. Certainly it has to be more than flucuations in the market as I have heard some suggest. If * threatened another massive attack, that would further play into the hands of the thug's agenda, MAYBE, Kerry sought to buy time searching for another solution.

That said, I think the two party system needs to be ended. I would like to see at least 4 parties, (1) greens and progressives (2) labor and dem centrists (3) fiscally responsible republicans (4) fundies. my 2 cents.

[Stinky The Clown]

17. Thank you for that. Thank you very much. Thanks for being thoughtful, and

thanks for taking the time to write it all for me. I really appreciate it.

Some of what you've stated I already knew (Wally O'Dell, and that whole thing).

Some of it I knew but now see in a different light (HAVA and all the background you provided).

Some of what you mention, however, I never tied to voting issues. The 'loyal opposition' role. The fact that, indeed, some Democrats may well be benefiting from this.

Right here in Maryland we have unverified BBV and a bill to require paper is being held in committee ... by a Democrat! That has always mystified me. Maybe not anymore, though.

Again, thanks for your views. A lot to think about .......

[BillyDoc]

18. PP, you are so right-on I feel like crying . . .

Our country has turned into a sewer of swirling greed and corruption. Even worse, our citizens have been carefully conditioned to believe themselves helpless in the face of this corruption. It is nearly impossible to get them to do anything that resembles a fight . . . at least in any numbers. We are too polite for that. And I think it is this sense of politeness that has been and will continue to be our undoing. We are like frogs complacently lounging in a nice warm pan, while the tiny flame underneath slowly raises the temperature. By the time we figure out that we have been truly cooked, it will be too late.

I know this sounds very defeatist, but I speak from experience. I have spent the last nine months working darn near full time trying to spark some fighting spirit in my fellow Americans and have failed miserably. I put up a web site that simply asked people to pledge to provide a small part of a bounty fund to be paid to anyone who could get some of these sleazy election fraudsters convicted. No donations, no funds up front, just pledge to pay a few bucks to get up a bounty. So far, as of this date, 2,082 people have visited that site and poked around . . . and pledged a total of $6,249. And of this, several pledges were over $500, showing, at least, that there are some people who really care. But the very vast majority . . . nope. “Don’t want to get involved in anything like that.”

My second site was designed to directly attack the link between corporate campaign contributions and political largess to those contributors. I call the relationship exactly what it is: bribery. It would be so simple to break this link, just use citizen’s initiatives! Who is going to be in favor of political bribery? But do you think I can get anyone to actually go out and collect signatures to promote such initiatives? Nope. In Florida we even became an official PAC, with official forms and the whole works. Nothing.

OK, so these were both bad ideas, and I’m just whining. But I come from a family that has been in this country since 1620, and I think that I am just about as patriotic a dumb American as they come. But I am so disgusted that I have already started making plans to leave this country permanently. And I’m not leaving because of corrupt politicians. I hate what they have done to my country, but they wouldn’t be a problem if we had actual citizens. I’m leaving because of my fellow Americans. The ones who whine and bitch and are too polite or too afraid to fight. My ONLY regret is the very few Americans like you, PP, who I feel like I am leaving in the lurch. The rest of you . . . good luck. You are going to need a lot of that to survive under the Fascism you are promoting with your complacent inaction.

Oh, and back to the election thing. Again the solution is simple, but it involves a little work and a LOT of “impolite” behavior. Hold shadow elections, but do them right. Then use the courts. There is a paper here that explains. http://electionfraudbounty.org/Two%20simple%20election%20plans.php

Yeah, right.

[Carolab]

22. I wish you'd stay and fight, BillyDoc

My ancestors also came as original colonists in the early 1600s. They married Lincolns and Boones. Fought and were decorated in EVERY war. I feel betrayed to the very core of my being. But, what would our ancestors think if we didn't stay to fight this global empiricism right at its very heart? How would they have dealt with it? It's a betrayal of everything they hoped for, worked for, fought for, when they left England.

[BillyDoc]

24. I WANT to fight, and have tried hard to do so

but I can't do it alone. And I simply do not believe that a bunch of whining and appealing to the "better nature" of our adversaries will have any effect other than to give them a good laugh.

Effective fighting is going to involve the judicious application of a great deal of force, and by that I mean the kind of force that Ghandi and King used. Stubborn, relentless, personally painful, and implacable.

If our politicians are taking bribes (which they most certainly are) make bribery a very severe crime and INSIST on enforcing it. You may think that bribery is already a crime, but I assure you it is not. Go to http://breakthelink.org for more on that.

If our politicians are rigging our elections, take over those elections by holding our own! AND insist on honoring the results. (http://electionfraudbounty.org/Two%20simple%20election%20plans.php)

Both approaches involve the use of force, and we do not seem to have the will for this. Sure, a few, like me, do . . . but by far most don’t.

The frogs are warm and complacent in their nice clean pan. They don’t want to hear about the little flame underneath, it might mean they have to get out of their comfortable bath and face the cold surface of the stove-top. “We can wait a little longer,” they think. “Everything is just lovely here now. And besides, surely some other frog will turn off the flame.”

Frogs will be frogs. It is their nature.

[snot]

19. KICK n/t

[struggle4progress]

20. These traitors should be sent to Guantanamo. eom

[kster]

21. The wrong has got to be

righted,we can't let the wrong president run our country for the next three and a half years. Keep fighting........

[tommcintyre]

25. kick