http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/04/opinion/04dowd.html?th The Red Zone By MAUREEN DOWD ASHINGTON
With the Democratic Party splattered at his feet in little blue puddles, John Kerry told the crushed crowd at Faneuil Hall in Boston about his concession call to President Bush. "We had a good conversation," the senator said. "And we talked about the danger of division in our country and the need, the desperate need, for unity, for finding the common ground, coming together. Today I hope that we can begin the healing." Democrat: Heal thyself. W. doesn't see division as a danger. He sees it as a wingman. The president got re-elected by dividing the country along fault lines of fear, intolerance, ignorance and religious rule. He doesn't want to heal rifts; he wants to bring any riffraff who disagree to heel. W. ran a jihad in America so he can fight one in Iraq - drawing a devoted flock of evangelicals, or "values voters," as they call themselves, to the polls by opposing abortion, suffocating stem cell research and supporting a constitutional amendment against gay marriage. Mr. Bush, whose administration drummed up fake evidence to trick us into war with Iraq, sticking our troops in an immoral position with no exit strategy, won on "moral issues." The president says he's "humbled" and wants to reach out to the whole country. What humbug. The Bushes are always gracious until they don't get their way. If W. didn't reach out after the last election, which he barely grabbed, why would he reach out now that he has what Dick Cheney calls a "broad, nationwide victory"? While Mr. Bush was making his little speech about reaching out, Republicans said they had "the green light" to pursue their conservative agenda, like drilling in Alaska's wilderness and rewriting the tax code. "He'll be a lot more aggressive in Iraq now," one Bush insider predicts. "He'll raze Falluja if he has to. He feels that the election results endorsed his version of the war." Never mind that the more insurgents American troops kill, the more they create. Just listen to Dick (Oh, lordy, is this cuckoo clock still vice president?) Cheney, introducing the Man for his victory speech: "This has been a consequential presidency which has revitalized our economy and reasserted a confident American role in the world." Well, it has revitalized the Halliburton segment of the economy, anyhow. And "confident" is not the first word that comes to mind for the foreign policy of a country that has alienated everyone except Fiji. Vice continued, "Now we move forward to serve and to guard the country we love." Only Dick Cheney can make "to serve and to guard" sound like "to rape and to pillage." He's creating the sort of "democracy" he likes. One party controls all power in the country. One network serves as state TV. One nation dominates the world as a hyperpower. One firm controls contracts in Iraq. Just as Zell Miller was so over the top at the G.O.P. convention that he made Mr. Cheney seem reasonable, so several new members of Congress will make W. seem moderate. Tom Coburn, the new senator from Oklahoma, has advocated the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions and warned that "the gay agenda" would undermine the country. He also characterized his race as a choice between "good and evil" and said he had heard there was "rampant lesbianism" in Oklahoma schools. Jim DeMint, the new senator from South Carolina, said during his campaign that he supported a state G.O.P. platform plank banning gays from teaching in public schools. He explained, "I would have given the same answer when asked if a single woman who was pregnant and living with her boyfriend should be hired to teach my third-grade children." John Thune, who toppled Tom Daschle, is an anti-abortion Christian conservative - or "servant leader," as he was hailed in a campaign ad - who supports constitutional amendments banning flag burning and gay marriage. Seeing the exit polls, the Democrats immediately started talking about values and religion. Their sudden passion for wooing Southern white Christian soldiers may put a crimp in Hillary's 2008 campaign (nothing but a wooden stake would stop it). Meanwhile, the blue puddle is comforting itself with the expectation that this loony bunch will fatally overreach, just as Newt Gingrich did in the 90's. But with this crowd, it's hard to imagine what would constitute overreaching. Invading France? *** Investigator Lynn Landes has been looking into problems with U.S. voting system for over two years. She has federal lawuits pending against Ashcroft et al. against the use of voting machines. She also filed a request for Temporary Restraining Orders against the use of voting machines and absentee ballots on Oct. 12, 2004 (which were denied). See http://www.ecotalk.org/VotingSecurity.htm for details. She says: "If people are voting on machines, they are not voting at all. In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court said that a "legal vote," as determined by the Supreme Court, is "one in which there is a 'clear indication of the intent of the voter.'" If a machine is involved in the voting process, the voter has been relegated to making inputs and hoping that the machines' output is the same." "I'm sorry if this sounds cruel, but to those who are devastated about the 2004 election - frankly, I'm glad Bush won - now perhaps people will get serious about voting reform. That would never have happened if Kerry had won." Lynn Landes ... PUBLIC OVERISIGHT OF ELECTIONS IS OVER... VOTING BY MACHINE, ABSENTEE, or EARLY, VIOLATES YOUR RIGHT TO VOTE and to have your vote counted properly. Elections must be fair and open in order to have integrity. Voting by machine or absentee introduces concealment and invites deception. They allow no meaningful public oversight. Worse still, in the U.S. there are absolutely no restrictions on who can count votes, they can be and are felons and foreigners. Two companies (ES&S and Diebold) started by two brothers (Bob & Todd Urosevich) with close connections to the Republican Party, will count over 80% of all votes in America using both touchscreens and ballot scanners. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice has held long-time policies that prevent effective oversight and thwart full enforcement of voting rights, and most state elections officials seem to care less. (see SUMMARY below) Absentee and early voters must be able to enjoy the security and privacy afforded by polling precincts, voting booths and same-day vote tallies overseen by poll watchers, the press, and the public. These precincts could be established locally, nationally, and internationally. - Oct. 28, 2004 - FIRST COUNTS VS RECOUNTS President Carter recently said in a NPR radio program, that voting machines need to spit out a ballot, not to count it as a vote, but to put it in a box to be counted only if the vote is close. Sooooo.... if you intend to commit vote fraud using the machines, just make sure you steal the election by a lot. Which looks like what happened in the 2002 election where in 16 upset elections, 74% went to Republicans by margins of 9-16% points off pre-election polling by Zogby. These guys are not going to be shy. Lynn Landes ------ http://www.ecotalk.org/Recounts.htm If This Election Is Stolen, will it be by enough to stop a recount? by Lynn Landes 10/31/04 Most people don't get it. Democrats don't get it. Even former President Jimmy Carter doesn't get it. During a recent National Public Radio interview with Terry Gross, Carter said that voting machines should produce paper ballots, just in case the election is "close" and a recount is needed. Recounts are triggered by close elections. But, stealing elections and avoiding recounts is duck soup for the dishonest among us. Keep in mind that both mechanical and computerized voting machines have a long history of vote fraud and irregularities. However, never before have so few entities dominated the tabulation of the vote. Today, two voting machine companies with strong and well-documented ties to the Republican Party will count 80% of all votes in the upcoming election. These two companies, ES&S and Diebold, manufacture, sell and service both touchscreens and computerized ballot scanners. A foreign-owned company, Sequoia, is the third largest voting machine company. This is not to say that the election will go against Democrat John Kerry. What it does mean is that election officials in America have privatized and outsourced the voting process. So, how can an election be stolen and recounts avoided? First, eliminate paper ballots. Thirty percent of all voters will use paperless computerized voting machines that are easy to rig and impossible to detect. Republicans in Congress successfully fought off legislation sponsored by Democrats in the House and Senate that would require voting machines to produce a paper trail. Even with this legislation, paper ballots were only to be used in case of a "close" election. Second, make sure the paper ballots that do exist are counted on computerized ballot scanners and not by-hand. This includes absentee ballots. Ballot scanners are also easy to rig and are owned by the same handful of corporations. Even in Nevada, where touchscreens must produce paper ballots, the ballots will only be counted in case of a close election. In California, which is allowing voters to choose paper ballots in the upcoming election, ballots still won't be hand-counted; instead they'll be scanned by computers. Third, and most importantly, steal the election by enough electronically-tabulated votes so that a recount will not be triggered. To many observers, that is exactly what happened in the 2002 election. In several upset elections across the country, the vast majority of victories went against Democrats by a margin of 9-16% points off of pre-election polling. Meanwhile, Republican upsets were well within the margin of error. After the election I interviewed John Zogby of Zogby International, a fairly well respected polling company. I asked him, if he had noticed over the years an increased variation between pre-election predictions and election results. Zogby said that he didn't notice any big problems until 2002. Things were very different this time. "I blew Illinois. I blew Colorado (and Georgia). And never in my life did I get New Hampshire wrong...but I blew that too," Zogby told this reporter. Or was he wrong? The 2002 election was, perhaps, a repeat of the 2000 presidential election, when the polls accurately predicted the winner (Gore), but the voting system in Florida collapsed under the weight of voting machine failure, election day chicanery, and outright disenfranchisement of thousands of black voters by Republican state officials. Georgia in the 2002 election was a particular cause for concern. The following is an excerpt from a July 30, 2003 article by Thom Hartmann, "'USA Today reported on Nov. 3, 2002, "In Georgia, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll shows Democratic Sen. Max Cleland with a 49%-to-44% lead over Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss." Cox News Service, based in Atlanta, reported just after the election (Nov. 7) that, "Pollsters may have goofed" because "Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss defeated incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Cleland by a margin of 53 to 46 percent. The Hotline, a political news service, recalled a series of polls Wednesday showing that Chambliss had been ahead in none of them. Just as amazing was the Georgia governor's race.. the Zogby polling organization reported on Nov. 7, "no polls predicted the upset victory in Georgia of Republican Sonny Perdue over incumbent Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes. Perdue won by a margin of 52 to 45 percent. The most recent Mason Dixon Poll had shown Barnes ahead 48 to 39 percent last month with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 points. Almost all of the votes in Georgia were recorded on the new touchscreen computerized voting machines, which produced no paper trail whatsoever." Implicit in the Constitution is the right to a recount of 'intact' ballots. Contested elections are addressed in Title 1 of the U.S. Code � 5 and in 26 American Jurisprudence 2nd � 444, "In an election contest the ballots themselves constitute the highest and best evidence of the will of the electors, provided they have been duly preserved and protected from unauthorized tampering, and recourse may be had to the ballots themselves in order to determine how the electors actually voted. However, one who relies on overcoming the prima facie correctness of the official canvass by a resort to ballots must first show that the ballots as presented to the court are intact and genuine." We've come a long way since 1892 when voting machines were first used. And it's been all in the wrong direction. This may or may not be a "close election", but one thing is for sure. There will be no way to prove who really won on November 2nd. That will be a lose-lose for all concerned. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! 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