Here's a special guest blog about rigged elections.
I usually don't publish anyone else's writing on my blog, but this analysis of election fraud by Richard Tamm is so outstanding that I just couldn't resist. He needed a URL and I needed to get this information out ASAP. So everyone wins -- except of course for America. But then after the 2000 stolen election and the 2004 stolen election and the 2014 stolen election, Americans should be used to losing by now. Or else, like me, they should be totally outraged!
What
happened in the 2014 U.S. election?
By Richard Tamm
I've been trying to understand
what happened myself. So, I've been reading many articles, etc. and
have come up with the following. These are my own thoughts on this
subject, and are subject to revision based on both my own further
reading and investigation as well as on your feedback.
Let's divide it by party:
1. The Republicans:
As Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis say in their 11/10 article entitled "How the GOP bought, rigged, stole and lynched the 2014 election" (http://freepress.org/article/how-gop-bought-rigged-stole-and-lynched-2014-election ),
"Since the Bush-Cheney-Rove theft of the 2000 election in Florida, the
right of millions of American citizens
to vote and have that vote counted has been under constant assault."
Dennis Brault, focusing more on Wisconsin, also uses this quote in his
equally good article entitled "Walker's 'Dark Way' Re Election - The Fix Was In. What it Means For The Future" (http://www.thedailycall.org/?p=65930 ) and
adds: "This assault has been brutal." They both go on to describe in
some detail the immoral and unethical but "legal" methods this minority
party used to not just win elections but guarantee they will continue to
win them for many, many years into the future.
First, the more visible methods
used:
A. Gerrymandering:
The GOP purposely set out to "win" (by any means, not necessarily
legal) control of as many states as possible in the 2010 elections.
Having done so, they were in position in 2011 to use the new census of
2010 to redraw congressional districts in an extremely partisan and
gerrymandered way.
As Jonathan Simon said on the weekly KPFA show, "Guns & Butter" entitled: "Voting Machines: Computerized Election Theft" (http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/108384 ) "Republicans
won control of Pennsylvania in 2010. They then redistricted
brilliantly, so that in 2012 the Democrats actually won a majority of
votes statewide for the U.S. House of Representatives in Pennsylvania,
and they wound up winning 5 of the 18 seats with a majority of the
vote!" (This hour-long audio is a real MUST to hear - packed with
information.) Here are pictures of two of these gerrymandered
districts:
Illinois 4th Congressional District:
These
gerrymandered districts will stay in effect till at least 2021. And
chances are, with redistricting within the state, it will be extremely
hard to remove the Republicans from power within the state for the next
redistricting. So, this may continue for decades.
B. Jim Crow voter suppression: As the Economist reported in "Stumbling blocks" (http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2014/11/voter-laws ), "Tuesday was the first federal election under laws that actually make it
tougher to
vote in 15 states. Eleven states rolled out new requirements for photo
identification at the polls; nine states made it trickier to register to
vote; eight states cut back early voting days; and three made it harder
to restore voting rights to former criminals.
These changes are part of a larger trend.
Since 2010 lawmakers have introduced around 180 bills to restrict
voting in 41 states. Many of these have been overturned or weakened by
courts, but quite a few have become law and are in effect in 21 states."
1. Removing valid registered voters from registration lists: As Greg Palast reports in "Jim Crow returns - Millions of minority voters threatened by electoral purge" (http://projects.aljazeera.com/2014/double-voters/ ),
"Election officials in 27 states, most of them Republicans, have
launched a program that threatens a massive purge of voters from the
rolls.... At the heart of this voter-roll scrub is the Interstate
Crosscheck program which has generated a master list of nearly 7 million
names.... Based on the Crosscheck lists,
officials have begun the process of removing names from the
rolls - beginning with 41,637 in Virginia alone. Yet the criteria used
for matching these double voters are disturbingly inadequate..."
Supposedly the match is on first, middle and last name, date of birth
and the last 4 digits of the Social Security number. But in practice it
is being done on only first and last name, with allowable differences
in all other fields.
3. Passage of Voter ID laws: In this same article, McElwee reports, "For this year’s midterm, comparing McDonald’s turnout estimates with states with photo ID, non-photo ID and no ID law at all shows that on average, states with a photo ID law had 4.4 percentage points lower turnout than those that did not. States
with a non-photo ID law also had lower voter turnout, about 1.52 points lower than states without voter ID."
And Richard Parker reported in "Election 2014: Surge or Theft?" (http://prospect.org/article/election-2014-surge-or-theft ), "Meanwhile in Virginia, nearly 200,000 otherwise-qualified citizens were denied their voting rights
because of improper or inadequate IDs; in Texas, the number was more
than 600,000. All part of a 33-state effort to guarantee against voter
fraud—a danger certifiably documented in 31 instances out of more than one billion votes cast since 2000, according to the Washington Post."
4. Removal of Same-day registration: McElwee further reports, "Research suggests that same-day registration reduces
the class bias of the electorate. Previous Demos research finds that when same-day registration is available, hundreds of thousands of voters use it.... States with SDR had
turnout 7.92 points higher than states without SDR. This is likely a
combination of factors, including the fact that states committed to turnout generally pass many reforms which work together to boost turnout."
5. Removal of Early Voting
Days: As Richard Parker reported in the same article, above, one example is the state of North Carolina: "In the North Carolina race for U.S. Senate—at $107 million, the most expensive statewide race in
American history—state House Speaker Thom Tillis beat Senator Kay Hagan
by a margin of 1.7 percent, or about 48,000 votes, under one of the
harshest new election laws in the country. It’s a law that Tillis
himself helped craft, that eliminated seven early voting days and same-day registration, and prohibited voting outside
a voter’s home precinct — all disproportionately likely to affect
student and African-American voters.
In North Carolina’s 2010 election,
200,000 voted in the early voting days, while in 2012 nearly 700,000—including one-quarter of all African Americans voting in the election—did, as well; this year that was illegal."
And Mark Gollom reported in "Will new voter ID laws swing the U.S.
election?
(http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/will-new-voter-id-laws-swing-the-u-s-election-1.1252564 ) "It's
true that Republican-dominated state legislatures in some states have
passed laws that could make voting more difficult. In Florida, laws were
passed to limit the number of early-voting days, prohibit voting on the
Sunday before the election and impose a 48-hour time limit on
third-party voter groups to register new voters. "
6. Making it more difficult to register to vote: As Richard Parker further reported in the same above article: " According to the Brennan Center: Kansans faced two new voting restrictions
this year—a strict photo ID law that was put into effect right before
the 2012 election, and a new documentary proof of citizenship
requirement for voter registration … We know from the Kansas secretary
of state that more than 24,000 Kansans tried to register this year but
their registrations were held in "suspense" because they failed to
present the documentary proof of citizenship now required by state law."
7. Destruction of Democratic voter registration forms: Googling "destruction of voter registration forms"
will bring up a number of stories of GOP operatives destroying
Democratic voter registration forms, for ex, as reported by David
Ferguson in "3rd GOP Operative caught trashing Dem Voter Reg. Forms, Local Authorities NOT investigating" (http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/10/third-instance-of-voter-registration-dumping-found-in-virginia/ )
"A
third instance of fraudulent voter registration has been
uncovered in the
important swing state of Virginia, where a Republican consultant has
been arrested and thousands of discarded voter registration forms were
recovered from a dumpster earlier this week."
C. Dark Money: With Citizens United the floodgates were opened. As Richard Parker, above, reported, "Final
figures aren’t in yet but it’s likely that donors spent nearly $4
billion on this off-year race for 435 House and 33 Senate seats. It’s
not all about the Koch brothers—but a lot of it is, especially since,
under Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court opened the
floodgates for dark money from an unlimited number of
undisclosed
donors in the name of free speech."
Then the less visible method:
D. The "Red Shift":
Since the introduction and widespread use of electronic voting
machines in 2002, there has been a consistency in pre-election and exit
polls showing Democratic candidates with a percentage that is 5 - 10%
higher than the percentage of the final vote count as reported by these
machines and voting systems.
Exit polls which are used worldwide to
determine if elections are honest or fraudulent used to be incredibly
accurate in the U.S. before these new voting machine systems were
introduced. But they are now considered to be "not working"
or have become "inaccurate" (not that
they are still accurate but are reporting that the vote counting is
fraudulent) since they indicate that the Democratic candidates should
get 5 - 10% more votes than is being reported by these machines, i.e.,
the numbers shift from blue (Democratic) to red (Republican).
Jonathan Simon
covers this topic in great detail in the "Guns & Butter" interview
mentioned above as does Richard Charnin in his book "CODE RED: Computerized Election Theft and The New American Century ".
And Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis speak for many of the leaders in
the election protection movement when they say in the linked article
above, "In evaluating the actual vote count, manipulation of untrackable electronic voting machines must also be accounted for. Over
the years, Bev Harris, Brad Friedman, Jon Simon, Richard Charnin and
many others have added vital research
leading to the inevitable conclusion that the 2014 election---like 2000
and 2004---was essentially bought, rigged, stolen and lynched."
2. The Democrats:
A. The abandonment of populism and the failure of the "Republican lite" strategy: Bill Clinton presented himself as a centrist Democrat. His and the Democratic Leadership Council's "distaste
for what they refer
to as "economic class warfare" has allowed the language of populism to
be monopolized by the right-wing.
Many argue that the Democrats'
abandonment of populism to the right-wing, shifting the form of that
populism from the economic realm to the "culture wars", has been
critical for Republican dominance of Middle America. (See, for instance, Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?.)" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Leadership_Council)
Along with
Clinton's moves to the
center-right with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and the passage
of NAFTA, there was a loosening of ties with labor and a seeking of more
campaign funds and support from Wall Street. This is still affecting
the Democrats negatively in not being able to fire up their base and
also not being able to get anything close to the amounts of unlimited
Dark Money now being unleashed against them.
Acting as "Republican
lite" has not been working.
If you take the city of Richmond as an
example, the progressive Democrats and Greens succeeded in winning their
races against over $3 million that Chevron spent to defeat them because
they spoke economic populism and what Howard Dean called "lunch-bucket"
issues and were able to really fire up their base to have a successful
grass-roots campaign. In contrast, the regular Democrats who took the
Chevron money to oppose the progressive Dems and Greens all lost.
Also,
in abandoning their close ties with labor and their commitment to
economic populism and "lunch-bucket" issues because of their more recent
need for campaign contributions from the same Wall Street big banks,
large corporations and plutocrats funding the Republicans, they have
refused to consistently speak up for and defend the poor and middle
class and champion economic justice for all.
By default, they often
simply appear to be accepting and allowing the terribly corrosive
revolving-door corruption so visible to everyone, and the slide toward
ever greater corporate, oligarchic and state power, growing militarism,
endless war, and drift from the truth - not the issues that will fire up
their base.
B. The abandonment of Howard Dean's 50-state strategy: As reported by Louis Jacobson in "Looking Back at Howard Dean's 50-State Strategy" (http://www.governing.com/blogs/politics/gov-democrat-howard-deans-fifty-state-strategy.html ). "Dean
said he continues to believe that every state, no matter how unfriendly
to his party, deserves to have a basic level of institutional,
financial, technological and personnel support, which can be 'relatively
inexpensive.'
'It
would be a terrible mistake to leave even one state out of a basic
package
of training, IT and staffing,' he said. 'I don't advocate
putting a zillion dollars into Alaska, but I do advocate having a
competent, well-run Democratic Party in place, because you never know
where lightning is going to strike.'"
C. The
refusal to even consider that the electronic voting machines could be
shifting votes and allowing the Republicans to steal elections:
1. Denial: As Jonathan Simon said in his interview on Guns & Butter, above, at minute 11: "...a
conversation I had in a public forum that was actually a conference on
media
reform back
in 2007 with a man who was at the time the DNC Democratic National
Committee official pollster Cornell Belcher. And, I asked him on this
panel whether he placed any credence at all in fact that we had all
these red shift patterns and whether the election returns could possibly
be being manipulated. And, of course, he said absolutely not, not a
chance. And then he said something curious. He said but you know it's
funny but I felt he was a little bit like on some truth serum. He said,
"You know when our internal polls show our guy ahead by 10 points,
we've learned to treat it as if he's even, as if it's a toss-up, you
know. And we can't figure out why."
So, internal polls are designed to
be very accurate because they allow the party to get the information
necessary to know where they should put money into elections at the last
minute, where the money is needed, where it's not needed, where it
would be
wasted. So, those polls are designed to really tell them the truth.
They are not designed to market any candidate or build momentum or
anything. They're internal. And when they're off, so they're doing
their best, methodology-wise, to come up with an accurate picture. And
he was talking about them being off by 10%! And so, then, I reframed my
question: "Well, in light of that, do you think that there's a
possibility that the vote counts could be manipulated?" And he said "Of
course not!"
"JB:
The $64,000 question is: Why do the Dems continue to act so spineless
on this issue of election theft? [Which is what all the "suppress all
the
voters who may
not be voting for your candidate/s" strategy amounts to]
Even on the
losing end of the stick, Democrats still represent tens of millions of
voters. Are they still so terrified of being tarred and feathered as
conspiracy theorists? All the less than savory yet very effective voter
suppression tactics are hardly even covered by the Mainstream Media.
HW:
It's actually a $64 trillion question and I have no answer. It's
totally contrary to my own nature to let such things go by, so I have no
idea beyond a bunch of politico/psycho-babble. But we do know they
absolutely refuse to discuss it. Daily Kos has banned a number of us who
blog about it. Gore and Kerry simply walked away and have never
discussed it since. If you have an answer, please let me know."
D. The refusal to really fight Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression. The Democrats are failing to see the incredible importance of voting rights and election protection as the keystone issues.
For more information on all the above, go to "Occupy Rigged Elections" on Facebook.
