An Open Letter to John FundRichard Charnin (TruthIsAll) source:http://richardcharnin.com/FundWSJ.htmApril 29, 2010Dear John,
In your latest
Wall Street Journal article, you wrote:
An attempt to hijack the state's election laws and open the door for voter fraud failed at the last minute this week in Wisconsin's legislature. But threats to ballot integrity continue in other states, and Congress may rush to pass ill-conceived legislation this year that would only sow confusion and increase the potential for chaos on a national level.
Wisconsin's story shows how high the stakes are. Late in March, a 72-page bill was suddenly introduced and rushed forward with only abbreviated hearings. The bill would have given "nationally recognized" community organizing groups access to the state driver's license database to encourage voter turnout. After the infamous registration scandals involving Acorn in 2008, this was clearly a strange priority. Requests for an absentee ballot in a single election would also become permanent (without requiring a legitimate reason, such as infirmity), and the ballots would be automatically mailed out in future elections.
Coercion and chicanery are made much easier by the excessive use of absentee ballots. Most of the elections thrown out by courts—Miami, Florida's mayoral election in 1998, the East Chicago, Indiana's mayor's race in 2005—involved fraudulent absentee votes.
We are in danger of forgetting the lessons of the 2000 recount debacle in Florida. Election laws should be clear, simple, applied equally, and balance ease of voting with the need for ballot integrity. A unanimous Supreme Court warned about the danger of loose election laws when it vacated a Ninth Circuit opinion, which had enjoined the use of Arizona's new voter ID law on the grounds it would disenfranchise voters.
You warn against a repeat of what happened in Florida 2000: Well, John, we sure do
remember Florida. It was a travesty — but not the way you portray it. Your “warning” is disingenuous, because you (and the mainstream media) have been in a permanent lockdown of what really happened in Florida.
- Thousands of butterfly ballots fooled Palm Beach County Gore voters into voting for Buchanan. Why don’t you talk about that?
- 65,000 under-punched ballots (most for Gore). Did you see the Dan Rather documentary on voting machines? It exposed the fact that thousands of faulty punch cards were distributed to Palm Beach County precincts. The purpose was to cut down the Democratic vote. It worked. The result was those infamous hanging chads. You should be blaming the manufacturer of the punch cards — not the voters. Why don’t you talk about that?
- 110,000 over-punched ballots (over 70,000 for Gore). These were not included in initial limited recount. The double-punched and triple-punched votes are the true unmentioned scandal. They were not caused by the voters. Why don’t you talk about that?
Was Florida 2000 an example of "voter fraud"? No John, it was an example of Election Fraud. You always seek to blur the distinction.
Voter fraud is non-existent; you always bring it up. On the other hand
Election Fraud is pervasive, but you never mention it. Why not?
And what about the thousands of minority voters
disenfranchised in Florida by Katherine Harris in 2000? How come you don’t talk about that?
You bash Acorn whose only crime was success in registering minority voters. Acorn has never been convicted of anything and in fact has been absolved of any wrongdoing. And that infamous “pimp” video has been exposed as a fake, edited to make it appear that Acorn employees were complicit. Why don’t you write about that?
And you have never criticized Blackwell, the Ohio Secretary of State, when he openly disenfranchised thousands of voters in 2004. How come you don’t talk about that?
And you avoid mentioning that election officials refuse to recount optical scan ballots, yet install unverifiable touch screen voting machines that can be programmed to silently switch votes in cyberspace. And let’s not forget the ultimate vote-stealing machines: the
Central Tabulators. Why don’t you talk about all that?
Why don’t you inform your readers about the
Miami Herald examination of ALL the ballots (the under-votes AND over-votes) months after the 2000 election? The study indicates that Gore won Florida by a MINIMUM of 46,000 votes. Gore even won the UNDERVOTES by 662. The data was never presented in any other publication, not even the “liberal”
NY Times:
The over-votes were NOT caused by stupid Gore voters. The ballots were double and triple-punched on purpose after the polls closed to void the Gore votes. And the thousands of Palm Beach County voters who were fooled by the Butterfly Ballot (created by the DINO Teresa Lepore) into voting for Buchanan were not stupid either.
The full state recount mandated by the Florida Supreme Court was all set to include the over-punched ballots, since they were a clear indication of voter intent. But the five Republicans on the US Supreme Court aborted the recount because they knew that if ALL the votes were counted, Gore would be the clear winner. They could never let that happen.
The news media consortium that sponsored the study conducted by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center (NORC), included the
Associated Press,
The New York Times, and
CNN, as well as
The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post Company, and the Tribune Company (which owns the
Chicago Tribune, the
Orlando Sentinel, and the
South Florida Sun-Sentinel).
This is from Media Matters:
In fact, the 2001 news media consortium study of the disputed ballots in the 2000 Florida recount found that there were at least four recount scenarios under which Gore would have won the state of Florida.
A November 12, 2001, Washington Post article reported on the findings of the study:
If Gore had found a way to trigger a statewide recount of all disputed ballots, or if the courts had required it, the result likely would have been different. An examination of uncounted ballots throughout Florida found enough where voter intent was clear to give Gore the narrowest of margins.
Media Matters concluded:
No, John, voter fraud is pure fiction meant to distract and confuse. The truth is that election fraud enabled Bush to steal both elections and denied Democratic landslides in the
2006 midterms and
2008 presidential election.