Election Reform, Fraud, & Related News Thursday 8/11/05

[MelissaB]

All members welcome and encouraged to participate.

Link to previous Election Reform, Fraud, & Related News thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x388567

All previous daily threads are available here:

http://www.independentmediasource.com/DU_archives/du_2004erd_el_ref_fr_thr_calenders.htm




Please "Recommend" for the Greatest Page (it's the link just below).

[MelissaB]

1. George McGovern on Imus (MSNBC) says FL in 2000 and OHIO in 2004

seriously question the outcome of the presidential election. DRIP DRIP DRIP


Thanks to mod mom here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=388725&mesg_id=388725

[MelissaB]

2. NC: House OKs 3 Methods To Cast Ballots

House OKs 3 Methods To Cast Ballots
Lost Votes In 2004 Election Prompt New Rules

POSTED: 10:58 am EDT August 12, 2005

RALEIGH, N.C. -- The state House unanimously agreed late Thursday to permit only three types of voting methods in North Carolina and also agreed on how to disburse government grants to help pay for machine upgrades.

The measure, developed after Carteret County electronic voting machines lost 4,438 ballots in last November's election, also requires state election officials to hand out more than $36 million in grants to meet new standards.

With the 2006 elections, voting in North Carolina only will occur in the form of optical scan ballot machines, electronic recording machines or paper ballots counted by hand. Electronic machines would have to provide a paper copy of a voter's ballot, which could be corrected by the voter before they are recorded.

The bill will help voters know their ballots are being counted by accurate and reliable machines that have a backup if a machine fails, said Rep. Jean Preston, R-Carteret.

"If we don't have people feeling good about their vote and making sure their vote was recorded as they intended ... and counted, then we are in a sad state of affairs in North Carolina," Preston said.


More: http://www.nbc17.com/news/4843010/detail.html

[MelissaB]

3. Mississippi: Questions Raised over Voting Machines

Questions Raised over Voting Machines

By Cheryl Lasseter
[e-mail]

Hinds County election officials say the voting machines they purchased recently from a company called AVS are top-rate. So they can't understand why the AVS machines were barely even considered for the statewide choice.

Thursday, Secretary of State's Office Representative Cliff Davidson demonstrated the new Diebold voting machines to Hinds County election officials and supervisors. He stated repeatedly that the AVS company did not submit the necessary bid bond. So they were eliminated as a choice. But county officials were skeptical. And it turns out they had good reason to be.

A representative with the AVS company, Skip Stanley, arrived and said a bid was submitted. "It was from Aero Electronics, a ten billion dollar company five times the size of Diebold," Stanley said. "It was returned to us last week. Just another in the ongoing screwups, the way you've handled this whole thing."

David Blount with the Secretary of State's Office called us to clarify the confusion. "AVS did post the bond," said Blount. "Their machine did not score high enough to be a finalist. And the AVS machines don't have a verified paper trail."


More: http://www.wlbt.com/Global/story.asp?S=3712903

[Name removed]

11. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[MelissaB]

4. Election Fraud Continues in the US New Data Shows Widespread Vote Manipula

Election Fraud Continues in the US
New Data Shows Widespread Vote Manipulations in 2004

by Peter Phillips

August 12, 2005
GlobalResearch.ca


In the fall of 2001, after an eight-month review of 175,000 Florida ballots never counted in the 2000 election, an analysis by the National Opinion Research Center confirmed that Al Gore actually won Florida and should have been President. However, coverage of this report was only a small blip in the corporate media as a much bigger story dominated the news after September 11, 2001.

New research compiled by Dr. Dennis Loo with the University of Cal Poly Pomona now shows that extensive manipulation of non-paper-trail voting machines occurred in several states during the 2004 election. The facts are as follows: In 2004 Bush far exceeded the 85% of registered Florida Republican votes that he got in 2000, receiving more than 100% of the registered Republican votes in 47 out of 67 Florida counties, 200% of registered Republicans in 15 counties, and over 300% of registered Republicans in 4 counties. Bush managed these remarkable outcomes despite the fact that his share of the crossover votes by registered Democrats in Florida did not increase over 2000, and he lost ground among registered Independents, dropping 15 points. We also know that Bush "won" Ohio by 51-48%, but statewide results were not matched by the court-supervised hand count of the 147,400 absentee and provisional ballots in which Kerry received 54.46% of the vote. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio the number of recorded votes was more than 93,000 greater than the number of registered voters.

More importantly national exit polls showed Kerry winning in 2004. However, It was only in precincts where there were no paper trails on the voting machines that the exit polls ended up being different from the final count. According to Dr. Steve Freeman, a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania, the odds are 250 million to one that the exit polls were wrong by chance. In fact, where the exit polls disagreed with the computerized outcomes the results always favored Bush - another statistical impossibility.
.
...snip

There is now strong statistical evidence of widespread voting machine manipulation occurring in US elections since 2000. Coverage of the fraud has been reported in independent media and various websites. The information is not secret. But it certainly seems to be a taboo subject for the US corporate media.


More: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=PHI20050812&articleId=828


Discussion here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x388805

[MelissaB]

5. Administration Fails to Meet Nazi Benchmark

Administration Fails to Meet Nazi Benchmark

On the eve of the CAFTA vote, Brown sounded like a man who didn't want to use all of his rhetorical bullets on Ohio. When I asked him about Ken Blackwell, the Ohio secretary of state who has come under fire for his conduct during the last election, Brown chose to speak in generalities rather than refer to the specific charges laid out in the report issued by his colleague Conyers.

"Some of the things Blackwell did undoubtedly hurt turnout," he said. "And turnout traditionally aids the Democrats. Part of the Secretary of State's job is to get people to vote. I think what we saw with Blackwell was that he never encouraged more people to vote."

I asked him if he thought anyone would ever be able to tie Blackwell's numerous indiscretions to the Bush campaign.

"I doubt it," he said. "I doubt we'll ever know."

Well, shit, I thought. This is depressing.

...snip

But I get the sense that even if I'd had all the time in the world with those few Democrats still on the record as being interested in the Ohio story, they wouldn't have had much to say. The party in general has been so effectively marginalized that its elected officials now seem to be rationing political capital the way men in lifeboats ration rainwater.

The aforementioned Conyers, the leader of the congressional effort to reopen Ohio, is in the middle of a desperate struggle to preserve his relevancy on the House judiciary committee, where he is the ranking Democrat. Last week, while attending a committee hearing, I watched as Conyers struggled repeatedly to get blimp-shaped committee chairman F. James Sensenbrenner to recognize him. In the hearing I watched, Conyers and other Democrats (especially our own Jerrold Nadler, who appears to inspire Sensenbrenner's particular loathing) had to shout out "Mr. Chairman!" four, five, or even six times before Sensenbrenner would open the floor for their remarks. In the current Congress, Democrats have to fight just to force the Republicans to respect normal legislative procedure.


More: http://www.freezerbox.com/archive/article.asp?id=360

[MelissaB]

6. Coingate: Wives found ways to share wealth, coin records show

Wives found ways to share wealth, coin records show
Petro says Noe's spouse billed firm

By JOSHUA BOAK
BLADE STAFF WRITER


COLUMBUS — Records show that Bernadette Noe belonged to the state coin funds’ wives club, an unofficial cadre of spouses who found employment with the $50 million investment that their husbands managed for the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation.

Mrs. Noe is married to former Toledo-area coin dealer Tom Noe, who is under criminal investigation and is being sued by the state because of his management of two state rare-coin investment funds.

Last month, Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro accused him of stealing more than $4 million from the funds to bankroll a swanky lifestyle.

Mrs. Noe, a lawyer, has claimed in court papers that she never “engaged in a business relationship” with the coin funds.

But yesterday, Mr. Petro accused her in a court filing of billing one of the coin funds, and some of its subsidiaries, at least $2,946 for legal services.


More: http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050812/NEWS24/50812003/-1/NEWS

[MelissaB]

7. The Real Meaning of Buckeye Special Election: Is Ohio Turning Blue?

The Real Meaning of Buckeye Special Election
Is Ohio Turning Blue?

by John Gizzi
Posted Aug 12, 2005


In the wake of a Democratic candidate’s narrow loss in the August 2 special election in Ohio’s most Republican U.S. House district, pundits have begun pondering whether the Buckeye State is turning blue.

The problem for Republicans seems to be the stench that has begun to envelop the administration of Ohio GOP Gov. Robert A. Taft.

Republicans have held the Ohio governorship for 16 years and in the last two presidential elections the state has been indispensable in providing an Electoral College majority to George W. Bush. If Democrats can take back the governorship in 2006, however, they would improve their chances of taking the state’s electoral votes in the 2008 presidential contest. In another tight red state-blue state race, that could give the White House to Hillary Clinton or whoever happens to be the Democratic nominee.

The chances of this calamity’s taking place have been enhanced by the investigation into coin dealer Thomas Noe, a Republican contributor, into whose enterprises the state, under two Republican governors, has invested millions of state employee pension funds. In May, the state froze Noe’s assets.


More: http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=8524

[MelissaB]

8. How the blogosphere forced the media to do their job

When “Old News” Has Never Been Told
U.S. media produce excuses, not stories, on Downing Street Memo

Extra! July/August 2005

Julie Hollar and Peter Hart


Journalists typically condemn attempts to force their colleagues to disclose anonymous sources, saying that subpoenaing reporters will discourage efforts to expose government wrongdoing. But such warnings seem like self-puffery after one watches contemporary journalism in action: When clear evidence of wrongdoing emerges, with no anonymous sources required, major news outlets can still virtually ignore it.

A leaked British government document that first appeared in a London newspaper (Sunday Times, 5/1/05) bluntly stated that U.S. intelligence on Iraq was shaped to support the drive for war. Though the information rocked British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s re-election campaign when it was exposed, for weeks it received little attention in the U.S. media.


...snip

The report came the day after Rep. John Conyers (D.-Mich.) sent a letter signed by 89 House Democrats to Bush, asking him to respond to the questions raised by the memo. But despite the new hook, few other outlets showed any interest in pursuing the leaked memo’s key charges. The Charleston (W.V.) Gazette (5/5/05) wrote an editorial about the memo and the Iraq War. A columnist for the Cox News Service (5/8/05) also mentioned the memo, as did columnist Molly Ivins (Chicago Tribune, 5/12/05).

While the mainstream media kept quiet, the Sunday Times report was circulating on the Internet, and citizens started to make some noise. In a brief segment on hot topics in the blogosphere (5/6/05), CNN correspondent Jackie Schechner reported that the memo was receiving attention on various websites, where bloggers were “wondering why it’s not getting more coverage in the U.S. media.” (Acknowledging the lack of coverage didn’t mean CNN was doing any better, though; the network had mentioned the memo in only two earlier stories, both about Blair’s re-election campaign—5/1/05, 5/2/05.)

...snip

Finally, more than two weeks after it broke in Britain, the Downing Street Memo made the front page of a major U.S. newspaper, the Chicago Tribune (5/17/05).


More: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2612

[GuvWurld]

9. Kicked and Nominated (C'mon y'all!)

[intheflow]

10. You know I love Cindy Sheehan...

but we can't let the election travesty be forgotten. Thanks you so much, MelissaB, for never flagging in posting these threads! :patriot:

[MelissaB]

12. This should say FRIDAY! I forgot to change the day.

Sorry!