Read about the stolen 2000 and 2004 presidential contests
- From: Raymond <Bluerhymer@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 2 Feb 2008 02:49:51 -0800 (PST)
RE: Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
Bob & Harvey's 3-Step "Ohio Plan" for Fair and Reliable Voting and
Vote Counts
Posted January 17, 2008 | 05:20 PM (EST)
Shalom aleikhem;
Read about the stolen 2000 and 2004 presidential contests
Read More: 2008 Primaries, Disenfranchized Voters, Stolen Election,
Voter Disenfranchisement, Voter Fraud, Voting, Voting Reform, Breaking
Politics News The US Supreme Court now has at least four members who
will vote for anything that serves the partisan interests of the
Republican Party. ...... Will the GOP election theft machine do it
again in 2008? Why not? .It's easy yo do.
Read http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2379
America is awash in suspect and stolen elections. Since January, 2001,
the nation has been saddled with an unelected chief executive. The
consequences have been predictably horrific.
Along the way, three US Senate contests in 2002 and numerous other
Congressional and local elections have been subjected to partisan
disenfranchisement of qualified voters, and vote counts that smack of
theft and fraud.
Even now the primary in New Hampshire is rightly being challenged to
do an expensive but necessary recount procedure that could and should
have been avoided.
As has been shown in the Free Press and elsewhere through the stolen
2000 and 2004 presidential contests, there are scores of ways by which
elections can and have been rigged and ripped off in this new century.
And there are scores of cures that can be put forth.
But we believe they can boil down to a basic three:
1. Automatic Voter Registration, with Signature Verification:
Since the beginning of the American republic, more than 200 years ago,
voters have signed their registration forms, then signed again when
they came to vote. Falsifying a signature is a felony. All studies
indicate that the number of people who vote fraudulently is miniscule.
In recent years, Republican operatives have attempted to hype so-
called voter fraud into a major issue. The Bush administration has
fired nine U.S. Attorneys for their failure to find large numbers of
people committing this crime.
Nonetheless, the GOP and its minions in the media have hyped this non-
problem into a national crisis, whose "solution" is to demand photo ID
at the polling stations.
It's well-known that the impact of this demand would be to
disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of elderly, indigent, homeless
and other citizens, most of whom happen to vote Democratic. A lower
court has rightly labeled this requirement to be a "poll tax" which is
specifically barred by the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
But the US Supreme Court now has at least four members who will vote
for anything that serves the partisan interests of the Republican
Party. There is a widespread feeling the Court will approve this
requirement, with adoption in many states run by the GOP.
During Ohio 2004, and in New Mexico and other swing states, the GOP
also found ways to prevent many thousands of voters from registering
at all. The list of dirty tricks is too long and insidious to report
here. More are being unearthed every day.
The one most likely to surface in a big way in 2008 is the practice of
disqualifying voters if the spelling of their name or their middle
initial (or lack thereof) somehow varies from the one in the computer-
generated registration books. Since the voter rolls in some counties
and states have already been privatized, and are being run by partisan
for-profit vendors, we can expect widespread, systematic
disenfranchisement if this system remains in tact.
Our "Ohio Plan" solution is simple: everyone in the United States
should be automatically registered to vote upon turning 18 years old.
Forms addressed to election bureaus, with free postage, should be made
available in high schools and colleges, at motor vehicle bureaus,
social security offices, post offices, union halls, in military
recruiting offices and barracks and numerous other locales throughout
the nation.
All registration forms, and all polling places, can be festooned with
signs warning that fraudulent voting is a felony. No photo ID shall be
required at any voting place, only a signature that matches the one on
file, and a wide range of less intrusive ID. Innumerable federal,
state and government entities from school districts to the IRS know
when US citizens turn 18. Ohio allows some 17 different documents to
serve as suitable identification at the polls.
Voting is a basic American right. It should be the affirmative duty of
the state to promote universal registration and end the bizarre
practice of purging voters in a computer age. Short of a death
certificate, the few questionable voters can easily be moved to an
inactive status instead of purged from the computer database.
2. Universal Hand-Counted Paper Ballots:
It is by now a public article of faith that electronic voting machines
are perfectly designed to steal elections. A recent $1.9 million study
for the Ohio Secretary of State has confirmed that an electronic
voting machine can be flipped with a magnet and a Blackberry. After
reports by the Carter-Baker Commission, the Brennan Center, Princeton
University, the Government Accountability Office, the Conyers
Committee and many more, even the come-lately New York Times has now
deemed touch-screen machines to be eminently hackable.
The country owes a huge debt of gratitude to the grassroots uprising
of independent researchers and bloggers that has campaigned so bravely
and effectively in the face of a mainstream media intent on ignoring
the issue.
Now the Times and others seem to want a "middle ground" with Optiscan
machines that run paper ballots through a reader, and even worse, feed
them into computerized central tabulators.
We oppose this hackable non-solution. At least two Optiscan scams come
quickly to mind. In Toledo, Ohio, inner city wards, Optiscan ballots
were improperly calibrated causing a higher rate than normal to be
rejected by the reader. Scores of them remain uncounted from the 2004
Ohio presidential election. In fact, most of the 93,000 or so
uncounted ballots in Ohio fell under the label "machine rejected."
In Miami County, Ohio, an Optiscan machine produced phantom votes that
couldn't be explained in the final tabulation. See the Free Press
article.
Yet Ohio's Secretary of State is poised to order Cuyahoga County
(Cleveland) -- which overrode citizen objections against spending $20
million on touchscreen voting machines -- to now spend an additional
$11 million on Optiscan machines to replace them. How long will it
take before those Optiscan machines are, in turn, rejected?
The real solution is obvious: use paper ballots, and count them by
hand. This is not, of course, fool proof. But it works beautifully in
places like Germany and Switzerland, where official vote counts
regularly conform to within 0.1% of exit polls.
Hand counted paper ballots could and should work here. In particular,
we should reach out to high school and college students in the
tradition of democratic public service to facilitate the vote count
process.
The "revolutionary concept" of all of us voting on ballots that have
the actual name of the candidates on them, with the opportunity to put
a visual, tangible "X" next to those we choose, has the merit of
obvious simplicity. These ballots can be counted and recounted, with
high reliability and no dependence on source codes or incomprehensible
computer glitches.
To be sure, ballots can be stolen and manipulated. But there is every
indicator the possibility of fraud is still far less than with
electronic machines. One can stuff ballots one at a time, so to speak,
at the retail level. But computerized voting and tabulation allow for
the far more dangerous wholesale shifting of votes and the deadly pre-
programming of election results.
It should also be noted that federal law now requires that all
election records be retained for 22 months after a federal vote. In
Ohio, 56 of 88 county election boards ignored federal law -- and a
court injunction -- and destroyed all or some of their records from
the 2004 election, making a meaningful recount essentially impossible.
Thus far, no state or federal official has indicated any willingness
to do anything about this blatant abuse of federal law.
So meaningful reform will require that federal election laws actually
be enforced.
As part of the King-Lincoln civil rights lawsuit (in which we are
attorney and plaintiff) extensive research into Ohio 2004 makes it
clear that nearly all the electronic records were virtually worthless
anyway, and could have been easily manipulated had they been retained.
That would not have been the case had the election been conducted
entirely on paper ballots. They are thus the worst alternative we have
-- except for all the other ones.
3) A Three-Day National Voting Holiday, with Ballots Hand-Counted by
Students:
The current practice of voting on Tuesday was adopted in the 1700s
because that was when Americans came to market. We are no longer a
farm society, and we need not vote on the first Tuesday following a
Monday after final harvest. Today this practice discriminates against
working people and is nothing more than an inappropriate, anti-
democratic anachronism.
Ohio's Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has proposed a two-week
window for voting. We think three days should suffice. They should be
the Friday, Saturday and Sunday nearest to November 11, Veteran's Day.
The polls should be staffed by high school and college students, who
will then be given that Monday off to count the paper ballots.
The current demand for electronic tabulating has no basis other than
the demand by the media for quick results and the demand for great
profits (at public expense) by the companies who make these easily
hackable machines.
We believe the American public can wait for election results to be
accurate and reliable. We also see in this a great civics lesson for
our young people. And a reliable way to get a true, democratic outcome
from our most critical means of keeping the government accountable and
under public control.
Universal voter registration, a ban on electronic voting machines and
the requirement for hand-counting of paper ballots can all be done
with simple legislation. The three-day voting process is more complex.
The requirement that we vote the first Tuesday after November's first
Monday is embedded in the Constitution. Changing that would require a
Constitutional Amendment. (Voting on Saturday through Tuesday, with
vote counting on Wednesday -- a five-day process -- would not).
Overall, simple as they are, these three simple, practical steps could
revolutionize our democratic process and restore control of our
government to the people. Which is precisely why we expect the
mainstream media, voting machine manufacturers and major parties to
heap scorn on them.
We have not addressed the problem of money in politics, proportional
voting, or of the corporate media's undemocratic domination of the
campaign process.
But this administration has certainly taught us the consequences of
having an unelected executive. We must start somewhere.
These three steps will help us at least regain control of the voting
process. From there, anything is possible.
Let's vote on it!
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of How the GOP Stole
America's 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008, available at www.freepress.org,
of which Bob is publisher and Harvey is Senior Editor. Their What
Happened in Ohio?, with Steve Rosenfeld, is from the New Press.
L'Shalom...Shabbat Shalom -- [have a] peaceful Sabbath.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-fitrakis-and-harvey-wasserman/bob-harveys-3step-oh_b_82074.html
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