HOW
George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election.
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By Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey
Wasserman
This volume of documents is meant to provide you, the
reader, with evidence necessary to make up your own mind.
Few debates have aroused more polarized ire. But too often
the argument has proceeded without documentation. This volume of crucial
source materials, from Ohio and elsewhere, is meant to correct that problem.
Amidst a bitterly contested vote count that resulted in
unprecedented action by the Congress of the United States, here are some news
accounts that followed this election, which was among the most bitterly
contested in all US history:
When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The
challenger demands an investigation. But there are no ballots to recount, and
election officials allied with the incumbent refuse to release data that
could shed light on whether there was tampering with the electronic records.
This isn't a paranoid fantasy. It's a true account of a
recent election in Riverside County, California..."
There is far more...enough, indeed, to result in massive
court filings, unprecedented Congressional action and a library full of
documents leading to bitter controversy over the 2004 election, especially in
Ohio.
In this volume, we have attempted to present many of the
most crucial of those documents.
Do they prove that George W. Bush stole the US
presidential election of 2004?
Should John Kerry rather than Bush have been certified by
the Electoral College on January 6, 2005?
Historians will be debating that for centuries. What
follows are some of the core documents they will use in that debate:
The most hotly contested evidence comes most importantly
from Ohio, whose 20 electoral votes decided the election. But it also comes
from other key swing states��especially Florida and New Mexico��where exit polls and other
evidence raise questions about the officially certified vote tallies in favor
of Bush.
As mentioned, this book presents the most crucial
documents indicating how this bitterly contested election was actually
decided.
But it is also this book's purpose to memorialize the
successful grassroots campaign by voting rights advocates that forced an
historic Congressional challenge on the floors of the US Senate and House.
Acting on an 1887 law that grew out of the stolen election of 1876, a
concerned constituency called into question before Congress the electoral
votes of an entire state for the first time in US history.
Brought forth by US Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and by
Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH), the Ohio electoral delegation
challenge was the product of a unique grassroots campaign whose work is also
documented here. As the New York Times described it, "In many ways, the
debate came about because of the relentless efforts of a small group of
third-party activists, liberal lawyers, Internet muckrakers and civil rights
groups, who have been arguing since Election Day that the Ohio vote was
rigged for Mr. Bush."
The research and writing in this book has focused on Ohio,
where we have been collectively reporting on electoral politics for more than
three decades.
While the alleged irregularities, frauds and illegalities
that transpired here in 2004 have probably generated the most thorough documentation
of any state, important parallel assertions have arisen in other states
around the country, most importantly Florida and New Mexico.
As journalists and researchers with deep roots in
Columbus, the state capitol, we warned of serious problems developing in how
Ohio's 2004 balloting was being administered even before the actual votes
were cast.
Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who
oversaw the Ohio election, is an outspoken, extremely controversial partisan
who also served as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign, a conflict of
interest that aroused much anger.
In his dual role, Blackwell seemed to replay the part of
Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. In 2000 Harris also served as
co-chair of the state's Bush-Cheney campaign while administering the election
that first gave them the White House. In both cases, Harris and Blackwell
termed the elections "highly successful."
But were these "successes" defined in terms of
their public servant roles as Secretaries of State? Or were they defined in
terms of their partisan roles as campaign co-chairs for George W. Bush?
In this volume's first three documents, we reproduce
articles published before November 2, 2004. Widely distributed throughout the
Internet weeks before the election, they warned that a wide range of abuses
stemming from Secretary Blackwell's office and other sources had already
tainted the outcome of the upcoming Ohio vote.
On Election Day, these warnings seemed tragically
prophetic. The balloting throughout Ohio was riddled with a staggering array
of irregularities, apparent fraud and clear illegalities. Many of the
questions focused on electronic voting machines whose lack of official
accountability and a reliable paper trail had been in the news since the
bitterly contested election of 2000, four years earlier. (Similar questions
also arose in Georgia in 2002, where Democratic candidates for Governor and
US Senate had substantial leads in the major polls right up to election day,
only to lose by substantial margins).
The most widely publicized Ohio problems came as
predominantly African-American precincts turned up suspiciously short of
voting machines. Inner-city voters waited three hours on average and up to
seven hours, according to election officials and to swore testimony of local
residents. Many voters stood in the cold rain to cast their ballots while
nearby white Republican suburbs suffered virtually no delays. The wait at
liberal Kenyon College, located in Knox County, Ohio, was eleven hours, while
voters at a nearby conservative Bible school could vote in five minutes.
To this day no one can definitively tell how many
citizens, seeing the long lines, went home or to work or to take care of
their children, thus losing their right to vote.
But long waits were hardly the only problems predominantly
Democratic voters encountered on Election Day. Selective harassment by
partisan poll "inspectors," provisional ballot manipulations, missing
registration records, denial of absentee ballots, absentee ballots
pre-punched for Bush, faulty computer screens reflecting votes for Bush that
were meant for Kerry, apparently deliberate misinformation regarding polling
locations, inadequate poll worker training in predominantly Democratic
precincts, and much more threw scores of polling places into serious
disarray.
In two heated public post-election hearings, attended by a
thousand central Ohioans, several hundred angry voters testified��under oath��on the details of the
irregularities that quickly led to the widespread belief that the election
had been stolen. Their testimony got virtually no mainstream media coverage.
But the verbatim essence of their sworn affidavits appears in this book.
Like the elections of 2000 and 2002, much of the doubt
about the election of 2004 continues to center on the counting of votes,
especially on electronic voting machines.
About 15% of Ohio's ballots were cast on computerized
devices that left no paper trail. With more than 5.7 million votes cast in a
state yielding an official margin for Bush of less than 117,000 votes, a
skewed vote count on those machines alone could have made the difference for
George W. Bush.
Sworn testimony recorded in public hearings in Columbus,
Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo, and Warren cast serious doubt on how those
voting machines performed. In Warren, voters pressing Kerry's name on
electronic screens repeatedly saw Bush's name light up. In predominantly
Democratic Lucas County, Diebold Opti-scan machines broke down early in the
day and were never fixed, denying thousands��mostly Democrats��their right to vote.
Reports surfacing in other precincts verified that
technicians dismantled key electronic machines before a recount could be certified.
Election officials in Franklin County (where Columbus is located) reported
that 77 of their machines malfunctioned on Election Day, virtually all of
them in heavily Democratic precincts. Inner city precincts in Cincinnati and
Cleveland had all-too-familiar Florida-style problems with their punch card
machines.
To date, there has been no credible, independent audit of
these machines, not in Ohio or in any other state. In Ohio, Secretary of
State Blackwell issued an order in the weeks following the election that all
2004 election records, paper and electronic, were to be sealed from public
access and inspection. As of this book's publication date, those records
remain unobtainable.
The controversy surrounding the voting machines remains
extremely fierce in part because major manufacturers such as Diebold,
ES&S, Triad, and others are controlled by partisan Republican companies
with secret proprietary software. This unfortunate lack of transparency calls
all US elections into question.
In a highly publicized controversy, Die bolt principal
Walden O'Dell, a resident of central Ohio, pledged in a 2003 GOP fundraising
letter to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to George W. Bush, leaving the
indelible suspicion that he might do it fraudulently. US Senator Chuck Hagel
(R-NE) is a principle in another major voting machine company, ES&S, on
which many millions of votes were cast in 2004. Hagel was elected and
re-elected in balloting that relied on ES&S machines. Such apparent
conflicts of interest have left the poisonous impression that America's right
to cast a ballot in secret has been transcended by a private partisan
company's right to count votes in secret.
In fact, the question of electronic voting machines
remains the single largest "black hole" in the entire electoral
process. Nationwide at least 30% of the votes in 2004 were cast on such
"black box" machines, more than enough to have tipped the balance
in the popular vote from John Kerry to George W. Bush.
Despite the intense battle over this election and the
scrutiny it has received worldwide, it is virtually certain there will never
be a clear answer as to how many votes cast on those machines really went to
which candidate. The 3.5 million-vote margin claimed by George W. Bush in the
2004 election remains unverifiable and, at best, forever suspect.
In reaction, GOP operatives have put forth three major
arguments to defend a Bush victory.
First, they argue that in Ohio and elsewhere, county
election boards are bi-partisan, meaning Democrats would have had to accede
to any theft of an election. This book provides a verbatim interview from
William Anthony, Democratic election board member in Ohio's Franklin County.
Among other things, Anthony confirms that Blackwell had the power to remove
any election board member, including Democrats, whose actions displeased him.
Anthony and other Ohio election board members confirm that Blackwell in fact
made at least one such threat in the lead-up to the 2004 election. And that
Blackwell specifically denied central Ohioans access to paper ballots, a
decision that might well have affected the overall outcome.
Republicans also argue that exit polls were wrong because
Republicans failed to respond to them throughout the country on election day.
They also say a late surge of evangelical voters in Florida and elsewhere
overwhelmed the polling data, and that social issues prompted tens of
thousands of core Democrats to drop their long-standing party loyalties and
to vote for George W. Bush where in 2000 they had voted by wide margins for
Al Gore.
These assertions remain unsupported by hard data. A number
of documents in this book indicate they could not be true. And in large part
as a result of these refutations, the movement demanding further scrutiny of
the national vote continued to gain momentum in the weeks and months after
the election.
Amidst the bitter controversy that was voiced in Ohio's
post-election public hearings, unprecedented national attention began to
focus on what may or may not have happened here. In late November, the
Reverend Jesse Jackson let it be known he had serious questions about the
conduct of the Ohio balloting.
In a series of visits Jackson rallied an African-American
community that felt it had been deprived of its vote. A former cohort of Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jackson compared the grassroots campaign for voter
justice in Ohio to the civil rights marches of the 1950s and 1960s. Terming
the campaign here "a bigger deal than Selma," Jackson likened what
happened in Ohio 2004 to the deprivation of black voting rights throughout
the Jim Crow South dating to the 1890s.
As a grassroots movement grew within the state��and across the nation��to demand a recount, Jackson
enlisted the support of Congressman John Conyers (D-MI) and Rep. Tubbs Jones.
While a citizens movement demanded to know what Ohio had to hide, Secretary
of State Blackwell dragged his feet on the recount. He used a wide range of
legal and bureaucratic maneuvers that deprived the public of meaningful
scrutiny prior to the convening of the Electoral College, which Blackwell had
long since proclaimed would go for Bush.
The grassroots efforts coalesced into two legal actions.
On the morning of December 13, at the federal courthouse in Columbus, suits
were filed on behalf of candidates from the Green and Libertarian Parties,
demanding that the Ohio Electors not be seated until a full investigation of
both the balloting and the recount could be conducted. Meanwhile, the conveners
of the citizens' post-election hearings assembled a legal team to file two
election challenge lawsuits, Moss v. Bush, and Moss v. Moyer, at Ohio's
Supreme Court.
Rev. Bill Moss, a former member of the Columbus School
Board, was the lead plaintiff in the suits, filed against George W. Bush and
Thomas Moyer, Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court. Small donor
contributions from across the country financed both actions.
Later that morning, Rep. Conyers, the ranking Democrat on
the House Judiciary Committee, convened a public forum on voting
irregularities in Ohio that was covered by C-SPAN. Conyers had already taken
testimony at a hearing in Washington. Now he was joined by Rep. Jones and
Congressman Ted Strickland (D-OH), Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA),
Congressman Jerome Nadler (D-NY) and others at the Columbus City Council
Chambers. The hearing had originally been called for the Statehouse, but
Republicans there denied the Congressional delegation a room.
Taking additional testimony from Ohioans who were denied
their right to vote, Conyers' City Hall hearing also heard from national
election experts. While they testified, Republican Electors cast their
ballots around the corner at the statehouse, votes that would, as Blackwell
predicted, give the election to George W. Bush.
In the wake of these new hearings, and with growing
momentum built by Jackson, Jones, Conyers and others, a truly national
movement arose to demand a new look at what had happened on November 2. With
an almost total blackout on all coverage from the mainstream media, the vast
bulk of the information was spread through FreePress.org. The Free Press articles were in turn
picked up by CommonDreams.org,
Truthout.org and other
democracy-minded internet outlets. Co-authors Fitrakis, Wasserman and
Rosenfeld appeared on Air America Radio Shows hosted by Laura Flanders, Randi
Rhodes, Stephanie Miller, and Marty Kaplan, as well as Pacifica Radio, NPR,
independent radio stations and with Amy Goodman on the Democracy Now TV
network.
But by and large, the fact that the story spread at all
was a tribute to the ability of the Internet to operate independently from
the major media, whose scant coverage of what happened in Ohio was almost
uniformly hostile to the idea that anything could have gone seriously wrong.
On January 3, 2005, Rev. Jackson hosted a rally in
downtown Columbus at which Rep. Jones officially announced that she would
formally question the seating of the Ohio Electoral delegation on January 6.
The challenge would come through a law passed by Congress in 1887 in response
to the Republican theft of the 1876 election.
That year the New York Democratic Samuel Tilden outpolled
the Ohio Republican Rutherford B. Hayes by about 250,000 votes. But the
Republican Party manipulated the electoral votes in Florida and other states.
After a tense five-month stand-off, a deal was cut and
Hayes became president. In exchange, the GOP ended Reconstruction by pulling
the last federal troops out of the defeated south, leaving millions of freed
slaves to the mercies of Jim Crow segregation and a system designed to
deprive them of their right to vote, a Constitutional violation not seriously
challenged until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
The 1887 law provided that at the formal request of a
Senator and a Representative, the two houses of Congress would debate
separately for two hours the legitimacy of seating a specified state's
delegation to the Electoral College.
In 2000, members of the Congressional Black Caucus rose to
challenge the Florida delegation. But Vice President Al Gore, who was
presiding over the Senate at the time, recognized no senator willing to join
them.
As of January 3, 2005, no US senator had stepped forward
to join Rep. Jones. The next day a busload of activists left from Columbus
for an overnight "freedom ride" to Washington. As they arrived the
morning of January 5, the burgeoning "Election Protection"
coalition staged a media briefing at the National Press Club, finally
generating major global media coverage, including ABC's Nightline. Throughout
that day, and the next, Rev. Jackson, with Fitrakis and others in tow,
lobbied the Congress, providing in-depth briefings for key Democratic
senators, including the newly installed Democratic leadership and former
first lady Hillary Clinton (D-NY).
On January 6, at a morning rally across from the White
House, Rev. Jackson announced that Senator Boxer would join Rep. Tubbs Jones
in questioning the seating of the Republican delegation from Ohio to the
Electoral College.
Boxer's historic decision was greeted with loud cheers
from the Election Protection coalition. In her California re-election
campaign, Boxer had been America's third-leading vote-getter, behind Kerry
and Bush. But extremely harsh personal attacks spewed from Rep. Tom DeLay
(D-TX) and the Republican leadership in the Congress and in Ohio. Much of the
Ohio media, which had ignored the story since election day, jumped in with
personal attacks on Rep. Tubbs Jones and the voting rights activists.
As the day progressed, public rallies accompanied the
Congressional debate, much of which we have reproduced here. Then the two
chambers re-convened, certified the Ohio delegation��and George W. Bush was given a
disputed second term.
But the historic controversy over the 2004 election has
not ended.
At its core remain unanswered questions surrounding the
actions of Secretary of State Blackwell, the fine print of election procedure
and vote counting, as well as the still unresolved exit poll controversy and
the nature of electronic voting.
Up until 11pm Eastern Standard Time, the major
election-day exit polls showed John Kerry winning the national election. But
in nine of eleven swing states, including Florida and Ohio, massive,
unexplained shifts gave Bush the election.
Nationwide what appeared to be a victory for Kerry by
about 1.5 million votes suddenly became a 3.5 million margin for Bush.
As shown in the documents here, the hard realities of such
a shift remain unexplained.
In the months after the election, dozens of polling
experts and statisticians have scrutinized every corner of the public exit
polling data as it stacks up against the official vote counts. The major
pollsters and their national media clients still refuse to release the raw
data. The consensus, as shown here, is that the reversal of Kerry's fortunes
late on election night was in essence a statistical impossibility, with the
odds at roughly 1 in 950,000. According to these experts, John Kerry should
have been inaugurated in January, 2005.
These exit poll analyses have been generally ignored but
not disputed by the mainstream press. In early 2005, two major pollsters
issued statements saying that their initial work was in error, and that they
had somehow "under-interviewed" Republican voters, thereby skewing
their findings toward the Democrats.
But such denials are simply not credible in the eyes of a
broad spectrum of independent experts. As shown in the documents here, nearly
all the "errors" in the polling were somehow in Bush's favor. The
odds against the reversals that were shown in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania
alone are in the hundreds-of-thousands to one; according to experts such as
the University of Illinois's Ron Baiman, nationwide the odds approach 150
million to one.
Ironically, just prior to the 2004 US election, similar
exit polls led to the reversal of a presidential election in Ukraine, where
mass demonstrations forced a re-vote. The challenger's "defeat" in
the first voting ran so clearly counter to the exit polls that a second vote
was forced, which he won.
The Bush administration supported the revote in the
Ukraine. But there was no parallel reversal here.
The drama in Ohio continues. In early 2005, Secretary of
State Blackwell issued a fundraising letter congratulating him for delivering
Ohio to George W. Bush. The letter contained an illegal solicitation of
corporate money, and was withdrawn as a "mistake."
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