A Scream Heard Round The World?

Posted on November 5, 2004 in Accountability Campaign 2004

The red states are coming! The red states are coming!

There was something — something too much like the Philippines election of several years ago — about Ferdinand-and-Imelda-Marcos-rolled-into-one-George-W.-Bush winning when a Monday poll showed him losing to Kerry 44 to 55! I don’t much buy conspiracy theories — I’ve been burned by them too many times either as a promulgator or as an associate of people who repeat them without thinking. But when I woke on Tuesday and discovered that Bush had won, I raged “This election has been stolen.” My wife Lynn caught the moment on tape.

I am planning to take the weekend to rest and relax before I decide to act or not to act on this email that I received from my friend Josh:

The hot story in the Blogosphere is that the “erroneous” exit polls that
showed Kerry carrying Florida and Ohio (among other states) weren’t
erroneous at all – it was the
numbers produced by paperless voting machines that were wrong, and Kerry
actually won. As more and more analysis is done of what may (or may not)
be the most massive election fraud in the history of the world, however,
it’s critical that we keep the largest issue at the forefront at all
time: /Why are We The People allowing private, for-profit corporations,
answerable only to their officers and boards of directors, and loyal
only to agendas and politicians that will enhance their profitability,
to handle our votes?/

Maybe Florida went for Kerry, maybe for Bush. Over time – and through
the efforts of some very motivated investigative reporters – we may well
find out (Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org
just filed what may be the largest
Freedom of Information Act [FOIA} filing in history), and bloggers and
investigative reporters are discovering an odd discrepancy in exit polls
being largely accurate in paper-ballot states and oddly inaccurate in
touch-screen electronic voting states Even raw voter analyses
are showing extreme
oddities in touch-screen-run Florida, and eagle-eyed bloggers are
finding that news organizations are retroactively altering their exit
polls to
coincide with what the machines ultimately said.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1104-38.htm

If the above doesn’t work for any reason, here’s a fair use site with
the same article:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/110604Z.shtml

Remember how Big Media pointed to bloggers as the “blame” for the exit polls that the news media took in that Los Angeles Times story I cited the other day? The tensions between the media and the bloggers have been intense for some time. I blinked my eyes when I saw that one. We didn’t conduct the polls. We weren’t hounding news agents as they stopped voters and asked voters how they voted. How could we have caused them to turn out wrong?

This story makes no sense. But then, we brought down Trent Lott after the media slipped up missing his praise of Strom Thurmond’s racist days, remember? A centralized media has only one thing to fear: free agents such as you and me. People who do more than cough up press releases. People who look at the numbers given to them and evaluate them. Unlike the media, among us are trained software analysts, statiscians, and mathmaticians who freely and openly discuss the issues. The best of them know how to reject conspiracy theories like the disappearing airplane at the Pentagon hoax. They stick to the facts. And the facts are that there was a big gap between what the exit polls said and what electronic voting machines yielded.

To end this, we need to see the programs for the electronic voting machines and the punch card readers out in the public domain. Then, after they have been so evaluated, we need a recount in the presence of watchdog organizations such as the Electronic Frontiers Foundation and Common Cause and representatives of foreign nations. If corporate media wants to regain our trust, it will have to go along. If it pulls out its six-shooter and guns for us without entertaining the question in a way that will help us struggle towards unity as a nation, keep blogging!

Something’s seems fishy here and the only way to end the controversy here and now is to follow these steps. Injunctions must be filed to impound the machines. And if there is any hint that George W. Bush and the corporations lost this election as our hearts tell us, it is up to us bloggers to fire off the scream that will be heard round the world.