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Edited on Tue Apr-10-07 12:45 PM by Peace Patriot
during the 2004 election would be a good place to start.
Why did Kenneth Blackwell and the corrupt Ohio Republicon machine think they could get away with it? Why was there no federal investigation and no prosecution?
I think this may be a pullable thread in the tapestry of Republicon corruption we see nationwide.
For one thing, I think that Blackwell & Co. felt they had guaranteed immunity in a future Bushcon U.S. Attorney General. But why would they think that? The presidential election appeared to be neck and neck to the end. They could have been looking at former prosecutor John Kerry as president appointing real prosecutors as AG and as US attorneys in the civil rights division and elsewhere. You could say that this was their incentive to commit massive violations against Kerry voters in Ohio--their corruption was not limited to Voting Rights Act crimes--but I think it's deeper than this. I think that the smashing of black (and other minority, poor and student) voters was possibly gratuitous--or, in any case, extra insurance against a Kerry win--and that the real story lay in how the entire election "came down to Ohio" where Rove had created the most corrupt Bushcon machine in the country, just waiting with open arms for the election to "come down" to Ohio.
The real story lay in the guaranteed reelection of Bush/Cheney that was insured by the fast-track conversion--2002 to 2004--of most of the country's vote counting system to electronic voting, run on "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations. And they are...
DIEBOLD: Until recently, headed by Wally O'Dell, a Bush-Cheney campaign chair and major fundraiser (a Bush "Pioneer," right up there with Ken Lay), who promised in writing to "deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush-Cheney in 2004"; and
ES&S: A spinoff of Diebold (similar computer architecture), initially funded by rightwing billionaire Howard Ahmanson, who also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon Foundation (which touts the death penalty for homosexuals, among other things). Diebold and ES&S have an incestuous relationship; they were run by two brothers, Bob and Tod Urosevich.
These are the people who "counted" 80% of the nation's votes in 2004, under a veil of corporate secrecy. This attack on our nation's voting system was engineered by the biggest crooks in the Anthrax Congress--Tom Delay and Bob Ney (abetted by corporatist Democrats like Christopher Dodd): the "Help America Vote for Bush Act" of 2002, a $3.9 billion electronic voting boondoggle featuring secret industry "testing" of the voting machines, no paper trail requirement whatsoever, unchecked lavish lobbying of election officials and legislators, the writing of unamerican laws that protected the "trade secret" code, and extreme insecurity in these insider hackable voting systems.
How did the FBI miss this?
How did the Attorney General of the US miss this?
How did the US Attorneys across the land miss this?
How did Homeland Security miss this?
And, from our point of view as members of the Democratic Party, how did the Democratic Party leadership miss this?
If you were to design a "Stalinist" vote counting system, that would, for instance, manufacture a phony endorsement of the Iraq War, you couldn't do better than this. The system is DESIGNED for stealing elections.
But it hadn't been tested out on a nationwide basis. Maybe they didn't quite trust that it would do the job--and that's why they implemented Plan B, massive suppression of black and other Democratic voters in Ohio (and some other places, notably Florida). Or maybe Plan B was intended as a distraction. If election reformers focused on election fraud that could easily be prevented by simple enforcement of the Voting Rights Act--which many of them have done--no one would notice that an entirely fraudulent election system had been installed nationwide, which would not only guarantee permanent war, and other fascist policy, it would guarantee that no honest AG would ever be appointed again.
Dr. Ron Baiman (statistical expert, PhD) and others believe that Diebold/ES&S are putting a 5% to 10% "thumb on the scales" for Bushites, warmongers and corporatists. This is my guestimate as well. And this explains what happened in '06. The American people outvoted the machines--in their anger at the war, at vast corruption and at other fascist policy, in an effort to get themselves a half-decent Congress. The result: 75% of the American people oppose the war and want it ended, but they were only able to achieve a 50/50 Congress, one in which their will is expressed by some members but cannot be implemented. And the problem is not so much the Bushcon dinosaurs as it is the "Blue Dog" Democrats who want to cut spending on everything but the war budget. Bear in mind that Diebold/ES&S control the results of party PRIMARY elections (who gets to run), as well as general elections (who wins). Who gets to run and who wins are also determined by money, as we all know, and by the war profiteering corporate news monopolies (who gets good press, who gets "swift-boated"). But the 5% to 10% "thumb on the scales" is the coup de grace. It GUARANTEES continued war and fascist policy of every kind.
And it's quite interesting that this fascist coup--the Bushite corporate takeover of our election system--came out of Ohio in the first place. Bob Ney. Diebold. The Bush/Cheney campaign committee that Diebold CEO Wally O'Dell was head of, was Ohio's. The "Help America Vote for Bush Act" was crossing Bob Ney's desk at the same time as the Abramoff bribes. And how can this have all been taking place under the nose of the FBI, the US AG, the US Attorneys for the Ohio district, and the US Attorneys in every jurisdiction in the US where these lying, criminal, fascist corporations were plying their shoddy, insider hackable wares?
And when an honest Secretary of State--Kevin Shelley in California--poked his head into this matter, and sued Diebold for their lies about the security of their touchscreen voting machines, demanded to see their source code, and decertified their touchscreens, six months prior to the 2004 election, where was the federal investigation that these state actions should have triggered? And where is the investigation NOW of how this honest official was "swift-boated" out of office on entirely bogus corruption charges?
The bad guys knew that they had GUARANTEED election. That's what this is all about. GUARANTEED control of the vote counting, which provided GUARANTEED control of the Justice system.
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