Susan Sarandon calls for outside monitoring of US elections due to fraud

[Amaryllis]

MSNBC, guys. It's getting more mainstream.


By Jeannette Walls
MSNBC
Updated: 2:44 a.m. ET April 3, 2006

Susan Sarandon wants the U.S. presidential elections to be monitored by outside interests. The “Bull Durham” star says that the 2004 vote was so fraudulent that we need international oversight — like troubled third-world countries do.

“I believe our next election should be monitored by international entities, just like it happened in Haiti and Iraq,” Sarandon told Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo, according to our translator. “The last one was an embarrassment. Everybody knew there was fraud, but nothing was done about it. In some states there were more votes than people able to vote.”

More: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12096127/#storyContinued

[marmar]

1. Embarrasing but true...

Yet Condi and the rest of these BushCo fanatics are running around the world slamming countries for un-Democratic elections.
And of all the movies Susan Sarandon has starred in, why pick Bull Durham to identify her with? BTW, I loves me some Susan Sarandon.

[saltpoint]

2. That suggestion wouldn't hurt one bit. You know what?

I wish Susan Sarandon and Tim Roberts were my neighbors.

Those people have it TOGETHER.

[GrumpyGreg]

3. Susan who?

[Faygo Kid]

4. She is right. I only disagree with the level of sophistication needed.

It better be the very finest, toughest, most honest and comprehensive crew available. Which means it won't happen.

[Kurovski]

5. Wasn't there a post recently saying election reform could use

a high-profile spokesperson?

Did one of you guys put in a call to Susan? :-)

[kster]

6. We don't need outside monitoring, We need

the American people to demand a full hand count of all not five or ten % but all the ballots on election day, not to challenge the election, but to give people the confidence that the machine count was correct, and the hand count has to be the official count, because the evidence of the hand recount is out in the open for all to see.

My two cents.

[Generic Other]

7. I will never have confidence in rigged machines

my two cents.

[Peace Patriot]

8. Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Internat'l election monitors! YE-E-E-E-E-E-ES!!!!

The trouble is that that the groups that do election monitoring--the OAS, EU groups and the Carter Center--demand that certain standards of transparency be met, before they will monitor. They will help the country that wants to do transparent elections to set it up properly, but if no one is permitted to review the 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code in the electronic voting machines and central tabulators, and if half the country does not even have a paper trail, let alone a real ballot backup for recounts and audits, and if partisans of one political faction own all the voting machines and their secret programming, and if partisans of that same faction engage in purges of minority groups from the voting rolls, and use their political power to also short the opposition on the number of precincts and the number of voting machines, creating 5 to 10 hour long lines to vote...

I DON'T THINK WE WOULD QUALIFY!!!!!

We have the most non-transparent elections since Stalinist Russia! All of the above is true of us, as of 2004, brought to you by the "Hack America Vote Act" (HAVA), a $4 billion boondoggle for Bush's buds in the electronic voting industry, designed by the two biggest crooks in Congress, Tom Delay and Bob Ney, during the Anthrax Congress.

There is no question that WE NEED HELP. But we'd better show a little "self-help" first--or nobody would bother to waste precious resources on monitoring the most crooked elections in the world outside of Uzbekistan.

------------------------------------

Some resources for American Revolution II:

Hopeful signs - latest news:

California voters sue the state over Diebold:
www.VoterAction.org--just announced--is suing the state of California and 18 Calif county registrars on behalf of 25 California voter/plaintiffs, on the illegal Diebold "certification" by Schwarzenegger appointee Bruce McPherson.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2180496

Maryland rejects Diebold:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x418263

Florida - anti-trust accusations against Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia, re: heroic Florida election official Ion Sancho:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2183630
http://www.tbo.com/news/politics/MGBKSY8W8LE.html

Utah county clerk fights back!
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x419226

-----

More resources:

www.votersunite.org (MythBreakers - easy primer on electronic voting--one of the myths is that HAVA requires electronic voting; it does not.)
www.verfiedvoting.org (great activist site)
www.votetrustusa.org (news of this great movement from around the country)
www.UScountvotes.org (statistical monitoring of '06 and '08 elections)
www.solarbus.org/election/index.shtml (fab compendium of all election info)
www.freepress.org (devoted to election reform)
www.bradblog.com (also great, and devoted to election reform)
www.TruthIsAll.net (analysis of the 2004 election)* :patriot: :applause: :patriot:
Sign the petition (Russ Holt, HR 550, great bill-has 169 sponsors). http://www.rushholt.com/petition.html
www.votepa.us (well-organized local group of citizen activists in Pennsylvania, where important legal issues are at stake, including state's rights over election systems)

The Voter Confidence Resolution
http://tinyurl.com/rlnr2 (“We Do Not Consent”)
http://guvwurld.blogspot.com (GuvWurld blog main page)
http://tinyurl.com/amryg (Voter Confidence Resolution

www.debrabowen.com (Calif Senator running for Sec of State to reform election system)
www.johnbonifaz.com (running for Massachusetts Sec of State on strong election reform and antiwar platform)

*Some tributes to TruthIsAll, who is very ill:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x417007
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x417231
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x675477

Also of interest:

Bob Koehler (-- four recent election reform initiatives in Ohio, predicted to win by 60/40 votes, flipped over, on election day, into 60/40 LOSSES!--the biggest flipover we've seen yet; the election theft machines and their masters are now dictating election policy!)
www.tmsfeatures.com/tmsfeatures/subcategory.jsp?file=20051124ctnbk-a.txt&catid=1824&code=ctnbk

Bob Koehler's latest: "Take this box and stuff it" (3/16/06)
http://commonwonders.com/archives/col337.htm

Amaryllis (Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia lavish lobbying of election officials - Beverly Hilton, Aug. '05)
www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x380340

------------------------------------------------

Throw Diebold, ES&S and ALL election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor' NOW!

:think: :patriot: :woohoo: :patriot: :think:

-----------

"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it." --Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence

[Amaryllis]

10. Carter already said US elections wouldn;t qualify because they didn;t

meet the criteria.

[kster]

12. We can't even get Jimmy Carter to monitor our elections

How to Steal an Election
By Andrew Gumbel, AlterNet. Posted February 15, 2006

A few days before the November 2004 election, Jimmy Carter was asked what would happen if, instead of flying to Zambia or Venezuela or East Timor, his widely respected international election monitoring team was invited to turn its attention to the United States. His answer was stunningly blunt. Not only would the voting system be regarded as a failure, he said, but the shortcomings were so egregious the Carter Center would never agree to monitor an election there in the first place. "We wouldn't think of it," the former president told a radio interviewer. "The American political system wouldn't measure up to any sort of international standards, for several reasons."

What, after all, was to be done with a country whose newest voting machines, unlike Venezuela's, couldn't even perform recounts? A country where candidates, in contrast to the more promising emerging democracies of the Caucasus or the Balkans, were denied equal, unpaid access to the media? There were a number of reasons, in the sharply partisan atmosphere surrounding the Bush-Kerry race, to wonder whether campaign conditions didn't smack more of the Third World than the First. Every day, newspapers recounted stories of registration forms being found in garbage cans, or of voter rolls padded with the names of noncitizens, fictional characters, household pets, and the dearly departed. The Chicago Tribune, a paper that knows its voter fraud, having won a Pulitzer for its work on the infamous Daley machine, found 181,000 dead people on the registration lists of six key battleground states.

Bush opponents were all too inclined to believe, in fact, that the Republicans were about to steal the presidency, just as they believed it had been stolen the last time. The Republicans, for their part, laughed this off as conspiratorial nonsense, but they also weren't shy about announcing how hard or how dirtily they were prepared to fight if it came down to another Florida-style tug-of-war. Long Island's GOP congressman Pete King, caught on camera by the documentary maker Alexandra Pelosi during a White House function on election day, bragged even as the first polls were closing that Bush had already won. When Pelosi asked him how he knew, he answered, perhaps jokingly, perhaps not: "It's all over but the counting. And we'll take care of the counting."

Election day itself, at least in the battleground states, was a deeply jarring experience for America's trusting majority, which had led itself to believe that all was for the best in the best of all possible democracies. Everyone bristled with suspicion and mutual mistrust. The Republicans accused the Democrats of trying to sneak ineligible voters to the polls and threatened to deploy official challengers to sniff out the mischief -- something much discussed ahead of time but that ultimately failed to materialize on any scale, perhaps because of a flurry of negative publicity stirred up on the eve of the election.

REDA MORE......... http://www.alternet.org/story/32084/

[garybeck]

9. the story of Susan Sarandon and the Solar Bus

Sometimes you're right about what you say, but the timing isn't exactly correct.

Two days after 11/2/04, Susan Sarandon was on the Bill Maher program and predicted that there is going to be a huge scandal about the election being stolen. On the program she said "something big is about to happen," referencing the scandal.

At that time, I had a relatively small mailing list of people who I had made contact with, just by taking the Solar Bus to public events, talking about solar energy, and some politics of course.

When I read the quote from Susan, I decided to put it in the subject line of an email that went out to my list and I included some info about the exit polls, electronic voting machines, etc.. I also asked people to forward to everyone they knew. The subject of the email said "SOMETHING BIG IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN."

the rest is history. everyone DID forward it to everyone they knew. within hours, my site was getting so many hits, I couldn't keep up. I started a new section on the website, some of you may recall it, "Steal Your Election." I had links to all the evolving info, and I was updating it every minute. I was literally getting several hundreds hits every minute.

I was up for days. I got a call from the New York Times. I had to start a new mailing list that was exclusively devoted to election stuff. I had to ask for volunteers to manage the mailing list that was growing by the minute.

So, in a way, Susan helped put the Solar Bus on the Election Justice Map. I sometimes wonder, if I hadn't put that "Something big is about to happen" in the subject line of the message I put out, if things would have evolved as they did for the Solar Bus. I'm sure I would have pursued the issue myself but the Solar Bus might not be a "driving force" in election reform...

The point i'd make now is, that when she said "something big is about to happen" perhaps she was right. but as the Universe often shows us "about to happen" is a relative term. The world has been here for millions of years, so if it really does break open in the next few months, she was right. I hope so.

Thanks Susan. I loved you in Rocky Horror, and just about everything you've done since then.

[Amaryllis]

11. I remember all that, Gary! I was on your list at the time. I remember

you talking about getting the call from the NYT. I remember hoping and hoping that Susan or someone with enough clout to make a difference woudl stand up and call it like it was...call a press conference and really call attention to it. But nothing...

[garybeck]

13. Something BIG is about to happen

for notstalgia -- here is the email


11/8/2004
From: the Solar Bus
Subject: Something BIG Is About To Happen


Dear Friends,

When actress Susan Sarandon appeared on the Bill Maher show over the weekend, he asked her what is the biggest issue we face as a nation.

Her reply was "voter fraud."

The usually knowledgeable Maher had no idea what she was talking about. When he asked, she replied:

"Something BIG is about to happen."


What I'm about to tell you is going to be hard to swallow at first. But if you're like most of us, once you start looking at the evidence, you'll scrape yourself off the ceiling, put your eyeballs back in their sockets, and you'll try to figure out what to do.

So here it is.

The highest crime in the history of our country took place on November 2nd. The evidence is now mounting (into a HUGE mountain) that the election was stolen. There is already a congressional investigation underway and a consumer investigation (headed by Ralph Nader).

Electronic voting machines that were manufactured by supporters of the Republican Party were used to alter the will of the people.

The internet message boards and chat rooms are bursting with talk about this. You can wait another couple days to hear about it in the mainstream media, or you can read on. Just remember where you heard it first.

I will outline the key points in this email and provide a link with much more information at the bottom. More information is coming out literally by the minute.

The election was stolen with not just one tactic, but with several.

Key points

"Black Box" Electronic Voting Machines: The key to it all was the use of electronic voting machines, that produce no paper trail. These were manufactured mainly by the two companies ESS and Diebold. Both of these companies are big supporters of the Republican Party. Walden O'Dell, the owner of Diebold, said in a 2003 fundraising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." Similarly, Chuck Hagel, the owner of ESS used his own machines to get elected to the United States Senate in Nebraska. A bill was introduced in the House and Senate to outlaw these machines and require a paper printout of each vote so that they could be verified and/or recounted. The bill was stalled by the Republican Party, led by Senate Majority Leader Tom DeLay, and it was not allowed to come to vote. Shortly after the November 2rd election, countless stories of problems with the machines began to surface. Many people tried to vote for Kerry and said that when the final confirmation screen came up it said they voted for Bush. In one precinct in Ohio, 4,258 votes were given to Bush were there were only 638 registered voters. Many more stories about the black box voting machines, their problems, and the investigation into their tampering are circulating. Blackboxvoting.org is leading the way in the investigation to proving the results were tampered with.

Exit Polls: Exit polls were taken in every state. In those states that had verifiable paper trails for their ballots, the exit polls were virtually the same as the real results. However, in the states where electronic voting machines were used, the exit polls were mysteriously very different from the final reported totals. You can view the exit poll data directly yourself with the link at the bottom of this email.

Unusual Results: In the areas where computers were used to cast votes or tally them, some very strange results have surfaced. Here is just one example. In Baker County, Florida, there are 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them regsitered Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans. The vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush. Are we supposed to believe that 5 out of every 7 registered Democrats voted for Bush??? This pattern repeats itself in many Florida counties. You can view all the raw data for every Florida county at the link at the bottom of this email

Shenanigans: In addition to the electronic voting machines, there was widespread voter intimidation and disenfranchisement on election day. In many democratic areas, people waited hours to vote, while Republicans "challenged" voters' rights to vote, forcing them to fill out a provisional ballot instead of a real ballot. The provisional ballots were not counted on election day and we may never know how many of them there were, or what rules will be used to qualify them. Flyers were sent to democratic areas with an array of false information on them. People were told their voting precinct had changed, that their voter registration was not valid, or that they would go to jail of they tried to vote. The list of shenanigans goes on and on. You can see the some of the flyers that were sent out and read about more of the shenanigans at the link at the bottom of this email.

Investigations: This is not conspiracy theory. This is not heresay. There is evidence. There are witnesses. There are investigations underway. Three Congressmen have sent a letter to the General Accountability Office requesting urgent action and an investigation. Ralph Nader is leading a consumer investigation into voter fraud countrywide, and has already filed an official challenge to the voting results in New Hampshire. You can read the letter to the GAO and more about Nader's efforts at the link below.

They will call us sore losers. They will have their lawyers and computer experts too. They will refute the evidence. But the truth is on our side and we will prevail.

Here is the link to the information, if you would like to look into the details and become more aware of the biggest story about to break.

http://www.solarbus.org/stealyourelection

What we need now is for the information to get out to more people. The mainstream media will bury this until it's shoved down their throat. So please forward this email to your friends and family. If every person tells three other people, everyone will know before the media decides to wake up.

Peace,
Gary Beckwith

------------------------------------
THE SOLAR BUS
a solar energy education project
http://solarbus.org
[e-mail]
------------------------------------

kinda eerie, huh?

[Amaryllis]

16. Well....even though this went nowhere, it really helped launch your

website in a big way, as you say - and it's one of the best election websites in the country.

[Peace Patriot]

18. "Something big is about to happen." --the biggest journalistic crime

ever committed--the coverup of the 2004 election theft. That was/is big. Step one was falsifying the exit polls on everybody's TV screens on election night, to make them "fit" the results of Diebold's and ES&S's secret vote tabulation formulae. No, that wasn't step one. Step one was BEFORE the election, when they failed to inform the American people WHO was "counting" all their votes with "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY programming code and virtually no audit/recount controls, and who engineered THAT. THEN came the fiddling of the exit polls. And then the black hole into which the destruction of our democracy was shoved.

I never heard that Susan Sarandon was on this so quickly--missed that bit. But that's the feeling many of us had, that this non-transparent, Bushite-controlled, so-called 'election' could not, would not stand; that Ohio alone was sufficient to overturn it, but that, with the exit polls all screwy and impossible, and touchscreens changing Kerry votes to Bush votes right before the voters' eyes, and all the anomalous numbers, and the secret programming and the rightwing connections of the voting machine corporations, and all the rest of it, it COULD NOT and WOULD NOT stand.

We should have known, as soon as the exit poll doctoring had been analyzed and became known (about a week later), that the "something big" was the coverup, not the exposure, of the most dishonest election in our history--really, a mockery of an election. A horrible joke of an election. A Stalinist election. In the land of the free, home of the brave.

But we didn't know, and, like Sarandon, we hoped--and we labored, and we hoped some more. And we followed TruthIsAll's, Freeman's, Baiman's and other's analyses with baited breath, hanging on every post; and we followed the Green/Libertarian lawsuits in Ohio and other places, hoping against hope that Kerry and the Democratic Party leadership would DO SOMETHING; and we cheered John Conyers and Barbara Boxer, and, at the very least, did not have to suffer the national disgrace of NO ONE standing up with the Black Caucus to protest the outrages in Ohio--and we hoped and we prayed some more.

And we cheered Solar Bus and FreePress.org and BradBlog and Truthout.org and the best of AAR, and so many others, as the passion to save our democracy grew and grew and grew, from small, demoralized or outraged beginnings, into a just now breaking wave of revolution about to ripple across the United States, from sea to shining sea.

Something big is about to happen. You bet it is. A tsunami.

It STILL may not happen as quickly as we activists--those of us who saw the truth of things right away--would like. But it IS happening. We knew--we KNEW--that, with Bush's approval rating starting to plummet on Day One of his second illegitimate term--on Inauguration Day January 2005 (49%!)--people would start putting two and two together. How could this jerk and his cabal have been 're-elected'? The protests were small that day, heartfelt but small, but it takes time, in this word-of-mouth culture that the war profiteering corporate news monopolies have reduced us to, for the word to get around; for the facts to leak out; for critical mass to be reached.

I have felt such hurt for my countrymen and countrywomen over this last year and half, because I KNOW that they tried to throw these criminals out of office, and came out in huge numbers to vote, to achieve that purpose--I was so proud of this country that day--and they were robbed of THAT revolution, and, what is worse, they largely didn't know how it happened, and have suffered demoralization and angst, and terrible feelings of powerlessness, as the Bush junta sank us further and further into its depraved notions of the U.S. of A.

But the election reform movement is most definitely on its way now. I think one of the mistakes that the junta has made was to install not just an illegitimate, fascist executive but also an illegitimate, fascist Congress, so that there has not even been the appearance of a "balance of power." That has gotten peoples' attention--that there is no check on the Bush junta's power. Why is that? Who ARE these lapdogs and idiots in Congress who are letting Bush openly commit felonies, without even a censure; and who have failed in oversight of an $8 trillion budget deficit; and who can't even get together a PLAN for withdrawal from Bush's illegal and disastrous war?

They, too, were installed by Diebold and ES&S (most of them). The dots are getting connected. And there is going to be hell to pay when the American people find out, this November, that they can't get rid of these Bushites, and that, in fact, the heart of the problem is secret vote 'tabulation' by Bushite corporations, who have been putting their thumb on the scales for Bushites and warmongers, giving them a 5% to 10% advantage at election time, and selectively shaping a Congress that is downright hostile to the majority of Americans.

I think that our democratic tradition, and our progressive beliefs, go very deep, indeed. The fascist corporatists have messed with us, to their peril. And I think that the huge, peaceful, democratic, leftist revolution that has swept Latin America, by means of TRANSPARENT elections, and that has peace and justice on its mind, is coming here next. And THAT is one of the reasons the Bushites are whining about immigration--because it's coming from countries to the south where the poor and the brown are at last achieving rightful power, in the best way possible, because we are the majority.

----------

"The time of the people has come." --Evo Morales

[farmboxer]

14. I have to agree.

I have to agree. It's good to hear some tell the truth about US Elections.

[Catfight]

15. I've been saying this for awhile, only an outside force can stop

Bush and his power hungry, oil thirsty criminals gone wild.

[TechBear_Seattle]

17. Patently absurd demand

The Repugs won't let American citizens see what is going on; why in the world would they allow outside observers?