GOP election fraud is a certainty

For the past couple of weeks, people have been asking me whether I think John Kerry can win the presidential election or, simply, who I think will win. I don’t know if many people are asking each other those questions or whether I’m approached so often because I frequently shoot off my mouth (and blog) on politics.

In any case, I have a ready answer. It seems to me obvious, and it is this:

I believe that if we could have an honest election, Kerry would win by a margin that would shock the public, which has been badly misled by poll takers who have failed miserably to keep up with reality.

However, I think it likely that George W. Bush will retain the presidency.

Note that I did not say win the election.

We are about to see the most crooked election in the history of this country. Widespread fraud probably will keep Bush and his crowd in power. Say bye-bye to representative democracy, folks.

The Republicans are so cocky, so sure that they will not be prosecuted and that their pet courts will shut down attempts to reverse illegally-obtained election results that they’re hardly bothering to cover their tracks. The ever sillier and more desperate George Will came out with his damage control column Sunday (Oct. 24), charging that Democrats and others who plan to challenge election fraud around the country are just making trouble because they won’t accept reality. (The reality is blatant, frequently felonious cheating on the part of the Republicans, but Will didn’t say that.)

Let’s do what the cowering press is failing to do and put some of the available evidence together in one place, so that the pattern is evident. Unfortunately, a complete list will take months to compile, and can’t be achieved before the election. Yet I don’t have room here to include even a third of the frauds already known.

Here’s just some of what your president and his friends, and the Republican Party, are up to:

*In Nevada, a Las Vegas television station (obviously not a Sinclair station) discovered that a "private company" called Voters Outreach of America, or sometimes America Votes, was running a Republican-sponsored voter registration scam of major proportions.

The company worked in Las Vegas and Reno for months, registering citizens at shopping malls and other places where many people gather. It employed about 300 part-time and temp workers, who helped citizens fill out their voter registration forms. However, at the end of each day, the company’s full-time supervisors went around, collected the registration forms and systematically tore up and threw away all the forms filled out by Democrats. (In Nevada, as in a number of other mostly western states, people must register by party affiliation.)

Some of the workers readily testified to seeing the destruction of the Democrats’ forms. The television station’s news personnel also witnessed the crimes. Shredded Democrat forms were found in trash bins, and the television reporters confirmed with county election officials that the Democrat forms had not been filed, although forms completed by Republicans were turned in for registration.

That means thousands of Democrats who show up at the polls will be turned away because they are not registered to vote, although they did what they were supposed to do to register.
Caught by the television crew, Voters Outreach of America abandoned its Nevada offices – without paying the rent – and disappeared. The company soon turned up doing "voter registration" in Oregon.

The company, it turned out, was set up by Republicans and was largely or totally financed by the Republican National Committee.

*In Arkansas and West Virginia, voters received mailings from the Republican Party stating flatly that if John Kerry and other Democrats are elected, they will ban the Bible in this country.
It didn’t say they aren’t respectful enough of Christianity, mind you, but that the Bible will be "banned." Some of the country folk obviously took the threat seriously (thus proving something about the quality of schools in West Virginia and Arkansas, among other things).

The Republican Party briefly denied responsibility for the mailing, but the evidence was such that the national party quickly gave in and admitted it produced and mailed the brochures. A spokeswoman "stood behind them," on the fictitious grounds that Christianity is in danger if Democrats are elected.

*In Minnesota and Wisconsin, 166,000 snowmobilers received a four-color beautifully produced mailing from the House Resources Committee in mid October, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported. The mailing also went to about 10,000 snowmobilers in Montana and Wyoming. The brochure claimed that Congressional Republicans are "working with President Bush" to make sure that the recipients can use their toys without restraint in national parks and forests. Snowmobilers are as paranoid about their polluting toys as are members of the National Rifle Association, and as easily swayed by lies.

The kicker is that the campaign brochure was paid for by you and me, to the tune of $68,000. It was produced and mailed at taxpayer expense. Six earlier Resources Committee mailings with equally political content cost somewhere between $78,000 and $90,000 of taxpayers’ money, the Star Tribune reported.

*You could call Ohio "Fraud Central" were it not for the fact that even more egregious plans to steal the election are in place in Florida and Texas – and Pennsylvania also qualifies for an international team to monitor the elections.

Ohio is the state where the chief election official – a Republican, of course – tried to disqualify thousands of new voter registrations on the grounds that the forms the citizens filled out were not printed on 80-pound paper, as required by a long-forgotten and doubtful rule adopted when all records were kept on paper. A court rejected that attempt, which was made because it is credibly assumed that a large majority of new registrations come from Kerry supporters.

Not to worry, Republicans. That was a mere blip. The big phony is in the state’s use of new touch-screen voting machines. There are two major producers of the machines, and the biggest, which sold the majority of the machines Ohio is using, is Diebold. The board chairman of Diebold is Walden O’Dell, who is one of George W. Bush’s most successful fund raisers and one of the top dogs in Bush’s Ohio campaign organization, a man who told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that he is "committed to help Ohio deliver its electors’ votes" to Bush.

As has been widely reported – though not widely enough – the machines in question are incredibly open to manipulation and fraud – and only the manufacturer -- nope, not state election officials -- has access to the software. Diebold successfully put down attempts to have the machines set up to produce paper copies of votes cast, although that is easily done. Go to the right side of this page and click on Feb. 27 under "archives" for more explanation of the coming voting machine scam. It’s the second article under that date.

*Most Republican incumbents and a number of GOP challengers for congressional seats have received money from the personal PACs of Tom DeLay, Republican congressman from Texas and the Majority Leader of the House of Representatives. DeLay has been unanimously rebuked an astonishing four times recently by the House Ethics Committee – a bipartisan committee, I must emphasize.

DeLay was admonished because: he made it clear that donors to his PACs would receive special treatment in energy legislation; because he used the resources of the Federal Aviation Administration for partisan purposes; because he offered a "political favor" (read bribe) to Michigan Congressman Nick Smith in exchange for support on the Medicare prescription drug bill; because he denied a lobbying organization access to Republican members of Congress because the organization hired a Democrat as its president, and because Delay made statements that indicated contributions to him and his political committees would earn the contributors special Congressional access and favors.

Three of DeLay’s associates/employees in Texas have been indicted for money laundering. The alleged crimes involved illegal use of money for political purposes. Fact: Nobody who works for DeLay scratches his behind without the boss’s approval.

DeLay is the author of the already established election theft in Texas, which will replace about eight Democratic congressmen with Republicans this year because of the most egregious gerrymandering since the Civil War. The re-fixing of congressional district boundaries – which effectively disenfranchises almost all of the state’s Hispanic and black voters – is so incredibly unethical and outlandish that even Business Week howled in protest last spring, rightly maintaining that such actions grossly undermine the American political system.

The Texan retains his leadership position because most Republican members of Congress owe him for his PAC money, and he continues to be a big force behind campaign tactics featuring lies, smears and dirty tricks.

For the presidential election, the Bushies and DeLay have drawn much from brother Jeb in Florida, and have in place a system to prevent many minority folks and other Democrat-leaners from voting in Texas. As in Florida it involves false lists of "felons," intimidation, establishing too few polling places in out-of-the-way places, all the Jeb tricks, and almost certainly voting machine "breakdowns" and fixing.

*In Michigan in July, State Rep. John Pappageorge -- a Republican, of course-- told the Detroit Free Press he was a little worried about how the state would vote this fall and that "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we’re going to have a tough time in this election." More than 80 percent of Detroit voters are black, and they tend to vote Democrat.

Pappageorge probably didn’t need to worry overmuch. His party had plans to suppress minority and liberal voting all over the country, and they’re very much in play right now.

Those of us in Minnesota who pay attention to such things thought our Minnesota secretary of state – the notoriously dim-witted and partisan Mary Kiffmeyer – was making up her own little games, probably with the help of someone a little brighter, perhaps someone in the governor's office.

She ordered signs be put up at polling places warning the public that terrorists might attack such places (a silly attempt to frighten voters away). Most county election officials refused to post the signs and after she was hit in the media, Kiffmeyer rescinded the order.

She set up all sorts of new regulations involving identification papers and such to make it very difficult for first-time voters to register and vote, claiming they were aimed at preventing wide-spread fraud – in Minnesota, which throughout its history has had the cleanest elections in the country.

Signs were posted at driver’s license examining stations and places where license plate tabs are purchased stating that "It is too late to register for the November 2, 2004, General Election." What they didn’t say is that it was too late ONLY to register at those places and that voters still could register at county auditors’ offices, the secretary of state’s office or at the polls on Nov. 2. Caught again, state officials had the signs taken down, although they already had done an unknown amount of damage.

What some of us have learned by scanning the Internet and newspapers here and there around the country is that such games are being played in every state that has Republicans in charge of voter registration and running elections. There is a nationwide program to keep new voters and likely Democratic voters away from the polls, and public officials are doing the dirty work.

* Sinclair Broadcast’s attempt to air a blatant political attack on Kerry on all 62 of its television stations and claim it is a "documentary," took a hit. The program has been revised, but there’s still dirty work afoot at Sinclair. And does anyone out there really believe the plan was hatched without any input, or even approval, from Karl Rove, the White House master of filthy campaign methods? I suppose so. Some folks are terribly naive, and some or too partisan to recognize truth when it slaps them in the face.

* And, of course, we’ll always have Florida. Rather than being embarrassed by what happened in 2000, Jeb Bush and his little playmates are using precisely the same tactics again this year – the phony felony lists, the blocking of access to polling places in poor neighborhoods, all of it. Plus this year they have those nifty, oh-so-fixable electronic voting machines. It will all play out before your eyes again, and it seems likely that the radical right judges will make nice with Jeb and his cheats.

Jimmy Carter, the most respected living public figure this country has, recently said he would not agree to oversee the Florida election as he has done in so many war-torn and otherwise messed up third world countries. Why? Because the Florida election system is so bent that it would be impossible to assure an honest vote, Carter said.

In another interview, he extended his oversight refusal to cover the entire United States.

Newspapers in other countries already have told their readers that fraud will be the rule in this country’s presidential election, and they have printed many undeniable examples of such fraud. They’re universally "hoping" Bush will somehow be beaten, but most admit they don’t have much faith that the election rigging can be overcome.

Welcome to the United States of Bush.

(I apologize for the length of this piece, but I feel that all of it had to be said. There is so much more that I’ve left out.)