WUI (Writing under the influence)

Just after the election I received this e-mail:

What actually happened on Nov. 2?

WARNING: The articles that you are about to read will convey a
sobering portrayal of the status of democracy in this country. Your
first reaction might be to discredit them as simply conspiracy
theories, but the facts don't lie, and the facts that are slowly
emerging about what actually happened on Nov. 2 are pointing to an
ominous conclusion: the election was stolen, but this time it was
done covertly and silently using electronic voting machines.

I was watching ABC's special 2004 election coverage when they called
Florida for Bush. Naturally, I was shocked. "What, that's it? No
uproar, no scandal, nothing? What about all those black community
leaders from Ohio and Florida I heard on the radio this morning
yelling about how excited they were that so many people showed up at
the polls?" Despair sunk in as I started to get the feeling that we
might lose. There was still hope though, because Ohio would decide
the election and Kerry had been a number of points ahead in the
polls there for a couple of days.

While I was waiting to see what was going to happen with Ohio, I
went to CNN.com to check out their up to the minute information as
more and more precincts reported in results. The interesting thing
about that website was that the exit polls, at the same time that
the actual results were counting Bush 52% to Kerry 48%, showed that
53% of women and 51% of men voted for Kerry. I took a screenshot at
about 1:00 am just because I had a feeling something might be going
on. It looks like I wasn't the only one who took a screenshot,
because there are pictures of CNN's website all over the internet
showing an odd discrepancy... at 1:41 am, the exit polls on CNN.com
suddenly changed; now, according to them, 52% of males and 50% of
females voted for Bush. The plot thickens.

The Ultimate Felony Against Democracy
Thom Hartmann is on this story and he's uncovering more and more
everyday, but he's also smart enough not to make outrageous claims
before all the evidence is in. So he brings our attention to the
larger issue at hand: why do we even need to ask ourselves if the
election results were tampered with? And how the hell did private
corporations all of a sudden become our democracy's vote-counters?

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

Evidence Mounts That The Vote Was Hacked
This is another one from Thom, but now it is about whether or not
the election actually was stolen, and it seems that there is an
accumulating amount of evidence being collected to prove it. I mean,
who would have thought that good 'ol Holmes County, a small county
in Florida with 72.7% of the population registered as Democrats,
would go 77.25% for Bush, while in larger counties where a
discrepancy like that would have definitely been noticed, high
percentages of registered Democrats meant high percentages of votes
for Kerry. This is just a taste, it gets worse.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm

Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes
The Associated Press is discovering very odd patterns in Ohio, too.
Apparently, "an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893
extra votes in suburban Columbus" and in a small precinct in
Franklin County, Bush received 4,258 votes to Kerry's 260 votes,
but, funny thing is, ONLY 638 VOTERS CAST BALLOTS IN THAT PRECINCT.
Keep in mind that this article is from the Associated Press on
YAHOO! News.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041105/ap_on_el_pr/voting_problems


CNN just changed their Ohio exit poll page
This is the graph that was changed on CNN.com.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x1293911


Exit polls and ‘actual’ results don’t match; Evoting states show
greater discrepancy
The inconsistencies of exit polling with actual results were not
limited to Ohio, but they were not found in all states either. For
some reason, the states with the greatest discrepancies between exit
polling and actual results all had one thing in common: they used
electronic voting machines. The shocking chart that they've posted
on this website reveals that the scale of this fraud is potentially
so massive that Kerry may have even won the popular vote.

http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=388

The shocking chart:

http://bluelemur.com/images/stories/evotingbig.gif


Surprising Pattern of Florida's Election Results
This chart compares, county by county, the numbers of registered
voters for each party, predicted voter turnouts, and "actual"
results. Counties with E-touch voting systems were generally
consistent with expected results, but counties using Op-Scan
machines "officially" experienced devastating declines in Democratic
voter turnout and massive increases in Republican turnout. In
Liberty County, a county with 7.9% registered Republicans and 88.3%
registered Democrats, the number of Republicans who voted was 712%
higher than expected while the Democratic turnout was 59.9% lower!
This voting pattern was experienced by almost all small counties
using Op-Scan machines, but only Op-Scan machines, and only small
counties where it wouldn't be so easily noticed.

http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm

If your into graphs, they did some interesting stuff with this data
(check out the last one especially):

http://ustogether.org/election04/florida_vote_patt.htm

You might be tiring of all this data, but if you try to talk to
anybody about this, YOU ARE GOING TO NEED IT. Most people in this
country believe we are living in a democracy, and when you show them
that even our right to vote has been sacrificed to the power of the
corporate machine, and that the American people don't actually get
to elect their representatives anymore, they will most likely not
believe you or simply write you off as a loony conspiracy theorist.
Hard facts are our only option, and even then, most people still
won't believe what you're telling them.

None the less, the American public is entitled to know the truth
about their government, their political parties, and their votes.
This is a crisis of democracy, regardless of whether or not the
election was stolen, but especially if it was, and that is
increasingly appearing to be the case. It is no wonder that George
W. Bush's second term would start with a crisis of democracy. If he
came to power by disenfranchising the American people, I can only
imagine what's in store for us in these next four years. We must
respond.

Please forward this newsletter to anyone who might be interested,
Oakwood Student or not.
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At first, I though it was just another Sore Loserman (remember him?) type conspiracy. But then, I received more e-mails with links to websites that used some believable arguments. At the same time, no conservative website were responding. I started to worry that either the accusations were true or even if they were not, without any serious rebuttal, they would undermine Bush's presidency. In fact, pretty soon, I started receiving e-mails like this:

There's nothing wrong with us using word of mouth to undermine the legitimacy of W's 'victory'. However - as far as a main strategy to move forward voter fraud won't work because it appeals mostly to the political junkie. Our challenge is to keep drawing in people who don't normally engage. I think Iraq is the central issue, it's Bush's achilles heal: the fact that it's based on lies, what it's doing to the Iraqis and our troops, and what it's doing to human needs at home, right in Forest Grove, as money goes into 'defense' contractors pockets while school days get cut and seniors lose their rest home coverage, etc. Local, creative actions to make people aware of the war could have more impact than big Portland marches, and wcchd is in the position to do it. Show up on Nov. 30, 6:30 pm at McMenimum's, upstairs in the Billy Scott rm, bring your ideas, get ready to fight back.

Of course, some on the extreme left didn't really care.

A terrible candidate (who supported more Bush initiatives the P Act & the I War for example - than some Republicans) of a party that has been betraying its base for at least 4 decades lost another election no more fraudulent than any other I've seen in the USA (e.g., Mayor Daley stealing the 1960 election for JFK). Big f'ing deal.

Can't we move on now to issues other than which wing of the imperial party should drag us ever further into fascism and war? That issue is dead for at least 4 years. I would suggest we work on getting the cities of Cornelius,Forest Grove & Gaston to pass anti-discrimination ordinances ala Beaverton,but I'm willing to work on almost anything that does not involve trying to relive the immediate past.

But I did care and so I waited for something that would at leat address the accusations and maybe even disprove them.

Finally, the media did their job. The following are links to articles as they appeared in the pasdt few days:

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=239735&page=1

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/11/10/voting/index_np.html

http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65665,00.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41106-2004Nov10.html

http://vote.caltech.edu/Reports/VotingMachines3.pdf

http://www.sptimes.com/2004/11/11/news_pf/Columns/Internet_post_electio.shtml

And finally, if NYT says something it must be true, right?

At this point I'm satisfied that no serious person can raise any more doubt about the outcome of this election.