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Protecting Our Political Investment
Stephen Dinan
www.stephendinan.com
Published by OpEdNews.com:
www.opednews.com/dinan_112304_investment.htm

Post-election analyses have swung between two positions: some see the resounding defeat as a call for the Democratic Party to change positions - perhaps towards more conservative policies or a more spiritual/religious orientation. The other main stance is to encourage us to keep our chins up and focus our attention on the next stage, working harder and organizing even better for the next round.

Both of these positions are naïve because they rest on a crucial assumption: namely, that the results that we were given are the actual results.

Historically, there is no reason to assume an election is clean, in this country or elsewhere. This isn't even a partisan charge. The Democratic Party has often been a perpetrator of election fraud, though the preponderance of cheating now seems to have swung to the Republicans. Where there is power, there is corruption and when the reins of the most powerful country on earth are involved, we can count on attempted corruption of the voting process.

The real question about an election is not whether it was clean or not. The question is how much any particular election was tampered with. Did cheating involve only local corruption or were there more widespread, coordinated efforts? Was the cheating widespread enough to change the outcome?

The Internet has been a great blessing in this election because it has allowed the rapid dissemination of evidence of fraud. This has sometimes resulted in hysterical over-reactions that proved groundless. In many other cases, though, the data has proved remarkably resilient and well-founded in truth.

The first thing a clear-thinking person needs to do in this environment is to look for signs of systematic fraud. This year, we have a very simple and, to date, unexplained discrepancy between exit polls and final tallies. In some of the key battleground states, there was greater than a 5-6% swing between exit polls and final vote counts. Oddly, all these "errors" slanted towards Bush. University of Pennsylvania professor Steven Freeman performed a careful statistical analysis and concluded that the odds of the composite discrepancies from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida occurring due solely to chance were about 250 million to one.
PDF: http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/11/The_unexplained_exit_poll_discrepancy_v00k.pdf

And that's only one piece of evidence -the University of California's Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team reported irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election.
http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/1118-14.htm

These two studies are the tip of an iceberg of data and attempts to cover up evidence. The suspect nature of the results are bolstered by the fact that Karl Rove immediately began dismissing exit polls as unreliable, though exit polls have traditionally been used as a way to detect election fraud. His behavior fits with an attempt to cover up clues that might lead to discovery of more systematic corruption.

These facts alone are enough to warrant massive investigation, especially in light of the warnings of dozens of organizations before the election about how remarkably easy fraud now is with electronic voting. Strangely, the Kerry campaign has been mostly quiet on the matter.

The relative absence of a serious investigation by the Democratic Party is a betrayal of the trust that supporters placed in them. Every person who contributes money or time to a political campaign is, to some extent, an investor. We are each investing our assets into specific candidates who promise to produce the kind of government and country we want to live in. When a party fails as badly as the Democratic Party did in this election, especially given the massive investment of time, money, and energy, the investors have a right to understand why they did not get a return on their political investment.

If the Democratic Party were a company that launched a product line that flopped, and we were investors in the business, we would make sure the company knew exactly what went wrong before investing another penny. Part of the Democratic Party treating our investment honorably and respectfully, then, is to take seriously the process of post-election examination of voting fraud. It's a necessary and important audit, especially in a situation where we have strong statistical signals pointing to fraud, demonstrated opportunities, and a clear motive.

Investigation of fraud is important for two reasons. First, if the fraud is systematic, it may well affect the outcome of the election as a whole, in which case we might even end up with a President Kerry. Second, if fraud is present but less severe, exposing the individual nonetheless acts as a crucial safeguard for future political investments and exposes flaws in the system.

There are many ways to corrupt voting results, and evidence abounds of cheating at all stages of the process this year. This problem is compounded by the presence of Republican-dominated companies at all stages of the balloting and counting process, often operating in secret, typically with no paper trail, on machines that have been shown to be easily hackable.

For every avenue of voting fraud that is available, there is at least one major story chronicling the use of that method. Seen as a whole, this may well have been enough to tip the election unjustly to Bush, which means they all must be fully investigated. Here are some common ways to cheat:

Voter roll purges - often focused on supposed felons who happen to be black, widespread in Florida, resulting in the disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of legitimate voters.

Discarded voter registrations - this was exposed in Nevada in advance of the election, where Republican operatives in a voter registration company instructed workers to dispose of Democratic registrations.

Deception tactics - such as fliers stating that those in long lines could come back the next day to vote. Common in Ohio.

Underprovisioning of districts - especially widespread in Ohio, where lines in primarily Democratic areas stretched to eight or nine hours because of gross underprovisioning of poll stations while neighboring Republican counties had ten minute waits.

Ballot "spoilage" - These are ballots that dismissed for being filled out "incorrectly," and there are often ten times the number in minority-dominated counties. Estimates are that 2 million were thrown out in the 2004 election, with a high percentage of those from African Americans.

Higher usage of provisional ballots in certain precincts - Provisional ballots are generally not counted until the election winner has already been declared, if ever.

Software problems - resulting in machine totals running in reverse, vote dumping, and sometimes systematic bias towards certain candidates. The Diebold software running electronic voting machines, for example, is so easy to hack that some experts question whether it was intentionally designed for manipulation.

Manipulations of county totals at central tabulators - this is very easy to accomplish, as demonstrated by Black Box Voting on a nationally-aired special. The question is not whether it is possible but how widespread this form of manipulation was.

After reviewing the information that is emerging, anyone who assumes this election was clean is naïve. The only real question is whether the fraud was systematic enough to change the results and elect the wrong man. Given that defeating Bush was the entire point of the hundreds of millions in Democratic investment this year, I suggest that until the Party addresses these issues rigorously, they do not deserve our future support. Exposure and analysis of voting fraud is a pre-requisite to earn our trust that future investments are well spent.

For a clearinghouse of information on voting fraud, see www.nov2truth.org
Permanent link to this article: www.stephendinan.com/2004/11/protecting-our-political-investment.html