[Liberation News Service]: LNS Post Coup II Supplement (12/16/04)

[richard power]

Here is the truth of the struggle for the life of
America…You won’t hear it from Tom Brokaw or Peter
Jennings or Chris Matthews or Tim Russert or George
Stop&Laugh at Us or Andrea Mitchell...Do you remember
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young? “Four dead in Ohio.
Four dead in Ohio. How many more? How many more?” That
song, honoring the four Kent State college students
shot dead by the Ohio National Guard during a protest
against the war on Vietnam, was an anthem for a
generation. What is happening in Ohio now is no less
tragic or of no less importance. Indeed, what is
happening in Ohio now is more tragic and of greater
importance. But where is the “US mainstream news
media”? They have deep-sixed the story of what is
happening in Ohio and in the Conyers hearings and
instead they carry the filthy water of their triad
partners, the Bush Cabal and its
wholly-owned-subsidiary-formerly-known-as-the-Republican-Party…The
ranking Democratic member of the House Judiciary
Committee, and one of the most senior members of the
Congress, has called for an FBI investigation. Two
eye-witnesses have come forward – one to testify to
possible illegality in Fraudida, one to testify to
possible illegality in Ohio…A Republican Congressman
from Fraudida has been accused -- in front of fellow
members of the House Judiciary and in sworn testimony
in a public hearing -- of requesting the development
of software to rig election results…And yet somehow
Bernard Ferik scandal and the Scott Peterson trial are
deemed bigger stories…Where is John Kerry? Where is
the Democratic Party leadership? We are relieved that
Kerry’s lawyers have finally weighed in – and in a
serious way – to the lawsuits to safeguard the Ohio
re-count, but Kerry, or one of his surrogates, should
be handing out coffee to the brave citizens who are
battling this criminal conspiracy to steal a second
consecutive illegitimate term in office for the
_resident and the VICE _resident…Are we alone? It
appears so…America is dying of vote fraud and vote
suppression in Ohio, America has been torn to pieces
in the chill precincts of Ohio. Meanwhile, most
Americans are living in denial. And why not? 	They
would have to jump-start their own conscience in a
vacuum. The “US mainstream news media” is wholly
complicit. The Democratic Party has seemingly
capitulated…“Four dead in Ohio. Four dead in Ohio. How
many more? How many more?”

The Theft of the 2004 Election

Bob Fertik, www.democrats.com: Keith Olbermann has the
scoop of the day, thanks to an excellent interview
with Rep. John Conyers. Conyers "prepared" to contest
Ohio Electoral Vote. The ranking Democrat on the House
Judiciary Committee told us tonight on Countdown that
he and others in Congress are considering formally
challenging the slate of electors who cast Ohio’s
votes, when those votes are opened and counted before
a joint session of Congress on January 6th.
“We’re prepared to do that,” Conyers said. “And we
understand the law as well as you.” 

Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman,
Columbus Free Press: Monday, December 13, saw a triple
play that will live in electoral infamy. But every new
day brings still more stunning revelations -- this
time from Toledo -- of vote theft and fraud and a
towering wall of resistance and sabotage against a
fair recount of the votes that allegedly gave George
W. Bush four more years in the White House.
  Three major events made December 13 a monument to
electoral theft: a lawsuit filed in the morning at the
Ohio State Supreme Court demanding a recount of all
Ohio ballots; a Congressional hearing held in Columbus
City Council chambers filled with angry, high-profile
testimony of vote fraud and disenfranchisement and the
illegal sabotaging of a recount; and then, at noon, a
block away at the statehouse, the vote of Ohio's
twenty illegitimate electors designating their choice
of George W. Bush to be president. 

www.democraticunderground.com: At 4 pm today, after
failing to get a match of hand counted ballots with
punch card tabulator (ESS), two hand counts and two
times through machine, after stating they were
awaiting a call back from that company to have a new
machine delivered, less than 30 seconds later convened
a board meeting, voted to suspend recount, to await a
new machine from ESS, and recount will be re-done
Saturday, same exact precincts, the building is now
closed, you are to exit the facility. BOE blaming
issues on "machine failure" in order to avoid the now
required entire county hand count. Precints were not
random, they were selected by BOE, one from the Dem
and one from the Repup.

William Rivers Pitt, www.truthout.org:    Among
activists and investigators looking into allegations
of vote fraud in the 2004 Presidential election, the
company always mentioned was Diebold and its
suspicious electronic touch-screen voting machines. It
is Diebold that has multiple avowed Republicans on its
Board of Directors. It was Diebold that gave hundreds
of thousands of dollars to Bush’s election campaign.
It was Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell who vowed to deliver
Ohio’s electoral votes to Bush. 
As it turns out, everyone was looking the wrong way.
The company that requires immediate and penetrating
scrutiny is Triad Systems. 
Triad is owned by a man named Tod Rapp, who has also
donated money to both the Republican Party and the
election campaign of George W. Bush. Triad
manufactures punch-card voting systems, and also wrote
the computer program that tallied the punch-card votes
cast in 41 Ohio counties last November…
AFFIDAVIT 
    December 13, 2004 
    Sherole Eaton 
    Re: General Election 2004 - Hocking County, TriAd 
    Dell Computer about 14 years old - No tower 
    On Friday, December 10 2004, Michael from TriAd
called in the AM to inform us that he would be in our
office in the PM on the same day. I asked him why he
was visiting us. He said, "to check out your
tabulator, computer, and that the attorneys will be
asking some tricky questions and he wanted to go over
some of the questions they maybe ask." He also added
that there would be no charge for this service…
Conyers, upon hearing these allegations, sent a letter
to both the FBI Special Agent in Charge in Ohio and
the Hocking County Prosecutor. The text of that letter
is as follows: 
    December 15, 2004 
    As part of the Democratic staff's investigation
into irregularities in the 2004 election and following
up on a lead provided to me by Green Party
Presidential Candidate, David Cobb, I have learned
that Sherole Eaton, a Deputy Director of Board of
Elections in Hocking County, Ohio, has first hand
knowledge of inappropriate and likely illegal election
tampering in the Ohio presidential election in
violation of federal and state law. 

Bob Fertik, www.democrats.com: BUSTED! Conyers calls
the FBI to investigate Triad - which finally gets the
attention of the NY Times, although they only manage
to get about one-third of the story…
The ranking Democratic member of the House Judiciary
Committee, Representative John Conyers Jr. of
Michigan, plans to ask the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and a county prosecutor in Ohio today to
explore "inappropriate and likely illegal election
tampering" in at least one and perhaps several Ohio
counties. 
The request for an investigation, made in a letter
that was also provided to The New York Times, includes
accounts from at least two county employees, but is
based largely on a sworn affidavit provided by the
Hocking County deputy director of elections, Sherole
Eaton….

Gary Polvinale, www.dailykos.com: Yesterday in 30
degree temperature with winds that knocked me over
while I was filming the Ohio Statehouse Rally, Ohioans
and people from all over America who came to Ohio to
help us, listened to Joan and Eve tell how they were
denied access to those public records in Greene County
Ohio.
Yes, those of us in Ohio ARE on the front lines - and
it feels like we are defending the Alamo. We are doing
our part. A handful of determined people are working
themselves to exhaustion. Yes, we ARE out there in the
streets. And we ARE at the statehouse. And we ARE at
the hearings. And we ARE filing the lawsuits. And we
ARE out there doing the recount. And we ARE out there
knocking on doors to investigate, verify and gather
the facts.People all over the country who are
web-tracking what's happening want to help, who feel
helpless, frustrated, and sorry for us in Ohio, are
offering good wishes and words of encouragement...
And believe me, we appreciate the encouragement. We
do, and thank you for that. But we here in Ohio need
more than a "You can do it" pat on the back. We ARE
doing it. But nobody knows. Ohio is screaming the
truth at the top of its lungs, literally, and no one
hears us because of all the noise of the media
silence.If you want to do something, here's what you
can do to help.I am asking the rest of the country to
please get out there and find well-known people who's
voices are loud enought to be heard by the press who
will stand up for us. Get a Senator or a media
personality or anyone of very high profile to come out
about this. The media blackout is killing us. Very few
members of Congress, and no one in the Democratic
Party has even seriously acknowledged the recount…
This is still looked at as the "sour grapes" effort of
a couple of disgruntled 3rd party candidates who can't
win anyway. It couldn't be further from that. The
civil rights of every man, woman and child in America
are at stake here.I don't care what it takes, convince
somebody to break our story, to back us and give us
the credibility we need and to let the world know
we're here doing this. Redford, Sting, Kennedy, Fonda,
Kerry... I don't care who, somebody, anybody who can
attract the attention of the media (evidently John
Conyers' and Jesse Jackson's brave voices are not loud
enough.) 
We've kinda got our hands full here, or we'd be doing
that ourselves too. Give us a voice and we will
deliver Ohio. Otherwise SOS Blackwell and the BOE will
continue to slap us around like we don't matter a
lick, at every turn. We are being squelched by a state
government that is willing to violate our rights and
even break the law as often as necessary to stand in
our way and prevent us from exposing what they've
done.I watched 100 of the greatest people I've ever
met freeze their butts off for three hours Sunday, and
1500 the week before. And today people are out there
at the Conyers hearing at the Columbus Statehouse
again freezing, supporting the hearing, the
investigation and the recount. And the Ohio recount
has begun this morning. 

Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman,
Columbus Free Press: Startling new revelations about
Ohio's presidential vote have been uncovered as
Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee
join Rev. Jesse Jackson in Columbus, the state
capital, on Monday, Dec. 13, to hold a rare field
hearing into election malfeasance and manipulation in
the 2004 vote.  The Congressional delegation will
include Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), Rep. Maxine Waters
(D-CA), Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, and others.  
Taken together, the revelations show Republicans – in
state and county government, and in the Ohio
Republican Party – were determined to undermine and
suppress Democratic turnout by a wide variety of
methods.  
The revelations were included in affidavits gathered
for an election challenge lawsuit filed Monday at the
Ohio Supreme Court. Ohio's Republican Electoral
College representatives are also to meet at noon,
Monday, at the State House, even though the
presidential recount, requested by the Green and
Libertarian Parties, is only beginning the same day. 
On Sunday, John Kerry spoke with Rev. Jesse Jackson
and urged him to take an more active role in
investigating the irregularities and ensuring a fair
and impartial recount. Kerry said there were three
areas of inquiry that should be addressed: 92,000
ballots that recorded no vote for president;
qualifying and counting provisional ballots; and
supported an independent analysis of the software and
set-up of the optical scan voting machines.

Buzzflash News Analysis, www.buzzflash.com: In case
you missed it, an exhaustive 23,422-word Vanity Fair
article, published just prior to the election
(October), spilled the beans that at least four of the
five Supreme Court justices who stole the election
from Al Gore did it with willing forethought. And the
fifth, Justice Kennedy, who came up with the
hypocritical, convoluted reason for awarding the
election to Bush, was probably just pretending to be
"open-minded." 
In short, the story, the first one to reveal the
inside machinations of the infamous decision of 2000,
confirmed that this wasn't a judicial decision that
decided the election 4 years ago; it was a
premeditated theft of democracy from the American
voters. 
The partisan choice of five justices -- led by the
judicial right-wing molotov-cocktail throwing Nino
Scalia -- outweighed the selection of the American
people. 
Why is this important now? Because it confirms that
the Bush Cartel will do and did everything to win --
and it doesn't take a leap of imagination or common
sense to speculate that with four years in office,
they were able to heist the election this time without
a nod and a wink to Nino and his right wing ship of
judicially radical pirates. 
What we forget in our focus on Ohio is that the
Republicans, through dirty tricks, voter suppression
and intimidation, faulty felons' lists, and the
deep-sixing of tens of thousands of Kerry votes --
among other anti-democracy tactics -- probably had the
election heisted before the polls even opened. They
privatized the counting of votes of Americans and
turned it over to companies deeply ensconced in the
Republican camp and Republican politics, with
checkered histories and Republican ownership. They
intentionally mis-registered college students, threw
away the registration forms of perhaps tens of
thousands of Democrats, and lost more than 55,000
absentee ballots in Jewish/Democratic leaning Broward
County, FL, alone. And this list is just for starters.

The Bush rogue regime was born a bastard child by a
fixed Supreme Court vote and now controls the process
by which any investigation of voting irregularities
would be pursued. Indeed, Ken Blackwell, one of the
two key Rove 2004 Katherine Harrises (along with
Florida Secretary of State Hood), wrote Congressman
John Conyers just this week that only the Department
of Justice or the GAO had the authority to investigate
voting in Ohio. So, two agencies under the
Republicans, who Blackwell has just declared the
winner of the Presidency, are the only ones Blackwell
would allow to investigate their victory. It's a
tactic worthy of Stalin -- and the Bush Cartel is one
terrorist attack short of achieving full dictatorship
powers, while the nation sleeps. 

The Bush Abominations #1 Failure: National Security 

Deutsche Welle: The Pentagon expressed concern Monday
over a criminal complaint filed in Germany against US
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other officials
over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, warning that
"frivolous lawsuits" could affect the broader
US-German relationship.
  The complaint was filed in Berlin on Nov. 30 by the
New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR)
and Berlin's Republican Lawyers' Association on behalf
of four Iraqis who were alleged to have been
mistreated by US soldiers.
  Besides Rumsfeld, former CIA director George Tenet,
Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Steven
Cambone, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, Brigadier
General Janis 
  Karpinski and five other military officers who
served in Iraq were named in the complaint, which
seeks an investigation into their role in the prisoner
abuses at Abu Ghraib…
The groups that filed the complaint said they had
chosen Germany because of its Code of Crimes Against
International Law, introduced in 2002, which grants
German courts universal jurisdiction in cases
involving war crimes or crimes against humanity… 

John P. O’Neill Wall of Heroes

Larry Fine, Reuters: A portrait of President George W.
Bush using monkeys to form his image has led to the
closure of a New York art exhibition over the weekend
and anguished protests over freedom of expression.
"Bush Monkeys," a small acrylic on canvas by Chris
Savido, created the stir at the Chelsea Market public
space, leading the market's managers to close down the
60-piece show that was scheduled to stay up for the
next month.
The show featured art from the upcoming issue of
Animal Magazine, a quarterly publication featuring
emerging artists.
"We had tons of people, like more than 2,000 people
show up for the opening on Thursday night," said show
organizer Bucky Turco. "Then this manager saw the
piece and the guy just kind of flipped out. 'The show
is over. Get this work down or I'm gonna arrest you,'
he said. It's been kind of wild."

Restore the Sanctity of the Vote! Restore the Vital
Role of the Free Press! Restore Democracy in America!
Restore the Republic!
Stolen Election 2004: Thursday Update
by Bob Fertik on 12/15/2004 10:07pm. - revised
12/16/2004 10:40am
Keith Olbermann has the scoop of the day, thanks to an
excellent interview with Rep. John Conyers.
Conyers "prepared" to contest Ohio Electoral Vote
The ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee
told us tonight on Countdown that he and others in
Congress are considering formally challenging the
slate of electors who cast Ohio’s votes, when those
votes are opened and counted before a joint session of
Congress on January 6th.
“We’re prepared to do that,” Conyers said. “And we
understand the law as well as you.” 
However, Olbermann's scoop was not rock-solid:
After the on-air interview ended, the Michigan
representative added that he and his colleagues had
not yet decided whether or not to take the
extraordinary constitutional step, and he had not
sought the support of a Senator who would have to
co-sign the challenge.
Hey Keith, there are lots of Democratic activists who
are seeking the support of a Senator. For example,
here's an excellent report from the Vermont Guardian
describing how members of Vermonters for Voting
Integrity are lobbying Senators Jim Jeffords (I) and
Pat Leahy (D). And there's a well-organized
California-wide effort by Contest the Vote to persuade
Barbara Boxer (D).
Conyers also rebuffed criticism that his “voting
forums” in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio, had
included formal participation only by Democratic
congressmen and politicians. “The fact that
Republicans didn’t join us isn’t our problem, it’s
their fault.” Republican Congressman Bob Ney of Ohio
last week announced plans to conduct an investigation
into the 2004 vote under his auspices as Chairman of
the House Administration Committee.
Notice the absence of any date associated with Ney's
investigation. There is nothing on Ney's web site, but
the AP says the investigation will begin "next year" -
long after Bush takes the oath for a second stolen
term. (Many of us remember similar promises from
Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2001 about
investigating the hundreds of serious complaints about
Florida, which led to one insignificant reprimand
about the lack of translators in immigrant-heavy
precincts, but no prosecution of Katherine Harris or
Jeb Bush or anyone else for systematically and
criminally disenfranchising tens of thousands of
non-felons, a majority of whom were black and likely
to vote Democratic, thus stealing the White House for
W.)
Speaking of blacks, it dawned on me that the reason
the Ohio recount story is being covered almost
exclusively by a former sports reporter - Olbermann -
is because professional sports coverage on cable TV is
the only place in journalism where blacks are treated
equally with whites. The Ohio recount story largely
features black leaders - namely Ken Blackwell, John
Conyers, and Jesse Jackson. (It also features black
voters who were once again disenfranchised through
extraordinarily long lines and provisional ballot
rejections, but we haven't heard much from them. Memo
to Olbermann: the lead plaintiffs in Moss v. Bush
(petition and injunction) are Rev. Bill Moss and Ruth
Carol Moss, distinguished community leaders who told
their Election Day story at the Conyers forum in
Washington on Dec. 8.) Kudos for Olbermann for being
the only political journalist who treats blacks like
full American citizens.
Speaking of crimes, Fairfield County (an exurb of
Columbus) broke the law when it suspended its recount
after the manual count in the sample precincts did not
match the original count. As mtnester of
DemocraticUnderground reports,
At 4 pm today, after failing to get a match of hand
counted ballots with punch card tabulator (ESS), two
hand counts and two times through machine, after
stating they were awaiting a call back from that
company to have a new machine delivered, less than 30
seconds later convened a board meeting, voted to
suspend recount, to await a new machine from ESS, and
recount will be re-done Saturday, same exact
precincts, the building is now closed, you are to exit
the facility. BOE blaming issues on "machine failure"
in order to avoid the now required entire county hand
count. Precints were not random, they were selected by
BOE, one from the Dem and one from the Repup.
This after their call to SOS Kathy Blackwell.
Greens will be going for a TRO. They are fully aware
of entire circumstances of this report.
BOE's trying to get around mandatory handcounts of
entire counties by calling it machine failure rather
than follow clear statute. This will be breaking I am
sure before long.
First hand witness to events above....myself
We must be getting warm, because the rightwing media
has launched a fierce counterattack. On Tuesday, Cliff
Arnebeck was attacked by Sean Hannity. On Wednesday,
Joe Scarborough attacked the recount. The Cleveland
Plain Dealer wrote a long editorial attacking
conspiracy theorists.
MoveOn.Now 
The zealots who refuse to accept Ohio's vote count
risk undermining confidence in the system itself
Unfortunately, there is a small, but very vocal, group
of Americans who refuse to accept this reality [that
Bush won]. They argue that what appear to be routine
technical glitches and human errors were in fact an
elaborate conspiracy to skew the election results.
They claim that long lines at a few polling places,
the rather unsurprising result of high voter interest,
were evidence of a systematic campaign to discourage
participation. In short, having failed to get the
outcome they wanted at the polls, they have decided to
mount an irresponsible campaign aimed at undermining
public confidence in the electoral system itself.
That's just libel. Our whole goal is to restore public
confidence in an electoral system that cannot be
trusted because the people who are in charge of it,
like Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell - and the
companies that sell and maintain the voting machines,
like Diebold and Triad - are partisan Republicans
whose only interest is electing Republicans, not
running honest elections.

  http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/121704Z.shtml
Democracy Hangs by a Thread in Ohio
  By Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey
Wasserman
  The Columbus Free Press
  December 15, 2004
As the whole world watches, American democracy may be
hanging by a thread in Ohio.
  Monday, December 13, saw a triple play that will
live in electoral infamy. But every new day brings
still more stunning revelations -- this time from
Toledo -- of vote theft and fraud and a towering wall
of resistance and sabotage against a fair recount of
the votes that allegedly gave George W. Bush four more
years in the White House.
  Three major events made December 13 a monument to
electoral theft: a lawsuit filed in the morning at the
Ohio State Supreme Court demanding a recount of all
Ohio ballots; a Congressional hearing held in Columbus
City Council chambers filled with angry, high-profile
testimony of vote fraud and disenfranchisement and the
illegal sabotaging of a recount; and then, at noon, a
block away at the statehouse, the vote of Ohio's
twenty illegitimate electors designating their choice
of George W. Bush to be president. 
  On Tuesday, demonstrators staged the latest in a
long string of protests at the statehouse. And at an
evening hearing in Toledo, stunning new sworn
testimony revealed that Diebold technicians have
tainted official voting machines before a recount
could be done, irrevocably compromising the process. 
  The December 13 lawsuit was filed in the presence of
Rev. Jesse Jackson, who compared it to the attempts to
win voting rights for African-American citizens in the
era of Dr. Martin Luther King. 
  The suit seeks to overturn Ohio's presidential vote.
It asked an immediate court order to stop Republican
presidential electors from meeting and voting for
George W. Bush. 
  Republican election officials prevented a vote count
from starting until that very morning. Supervised by
Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, co-chair of the
Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, Ohio simply ignored
all challenges to the vote count and all requests for
a recount. Within hours the Bush electors cast their
votes, even though the bitterly contested ballots that
allegedly gave them standing as electors had not been
recounted. 
  In other words, while every legal remedy to
determine who won Ohio's presidential election was
being pursued, the state's Republican political
machine blocked the rights of those seeking to verify
the vote.
  "Today, in the state capital of Ohio, we are
witnessing a crime against democracy, a crime against
the right to vote and a crime against the
Constitution," said John Bonifaz, founder of the
National Voting Rights Institute and attorney for the
Green and Libertarian Parties in the recount. Ohio
Republicans have " no right to convene a meeting of
the presidential electors prior to the completion of
the recount," he said. 
  Bonifaz's remarks came amidst testimony at the
second field hearing on the 2004 election held by
Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee.
Last week in Washington, the committee opened what it
said would be the first in an ongoing series of
investigations into what happened on Election Day,
when exit polls showed John Kerry heading toward
victory but after midnight the returns shifted and
network television declared Bush the victor.
  "At the outset of this hearing, I would like to
announce that 10 members of Congress, including
myself, have written to (Ohio) Gov. Taft asking him to
either delay or treat as provisional the vote of
Ohio's presidential electors," Rep. John Conyers, the
senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee said at the
outset. "The closer we get to Columbus and the Ohio
presidential election, the worse it looks. Each and
every day it becomes increasingly clear that the
Republican power structure in this state is acting as
if it has something to hide."
  Ironically, Democratic State Senator Ray Miller of
Columbus had secured the North Hearing Room in the
statehouse. But Republicans cancelled that, and forced
the gathering to convene at city hall, a block away.
  Thus Ohio Republicans snubbed Conyers and Reps.
Stephanie Tubbs-Jones (D-OH), Ted Strickland (D-OH),
Jerold Nadler (D-NY), Maxine Waters (D-CA) as well as
Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr (D-IL).
  Packed to overflowing, the nearly four hour hearing
hosted new disclosures about election irregularities
and fraud on Nov. 2, while also pursuing remedies to
account for the vote and delay the Electoral College
certification of the president.
  Prime target in the hearings was GOP Secretary of
State Kenneth Blackwell, who supervised the state's
elections while also serving as co-chair of the
Bush-Cheney campaign. Calls for Blackwell's removal
were constantly repeated. 
  Conyers noted that Blackwell has ordered local
election boards to not allow citizens to review poll
registers of voters, a lockdown that is an apparent
violation of Ohio state law.
  David Cobb, the Green Party presidential candidate,
told the panel that he had confirmed reports that an
employee of one electronic voting machine manufacturer
had come to one county election office and had taken
apart the county tabulator of voting machine results,
apparently replacing parts, before that county had
conducted its recount. Such an action would taint any
recount. "This could be a serious matter," Conyers
replied, asking Cobb to meet privately with committee
staff to further investigate the matter.
  Rev. Jesse Jackson told the congressmen that over
the weekend he had spoken to John Kerry, who has since
sent a letter to each of the state's 88 county
election boards, saying he supported three areas of
inquiry in the recount. Jackson said Kerry wanted
"forensic computer experts" to examine voting
machines, especially those using optical scan
technology, because in other states, notably New
Mexico, Bush had won all the precincts with that
voting system in place. Kerry also wanted to examine
92,000 ballots that recorded no vote for president,
and 155,000 provisional ballots that were rejected. 
  But early responses from the counties to Freedom of
Information Act requests for their voting records
indicate such an effort may already have been
sabotaged. Shelby County officials have admitted to
discarding key election data. One county referred
requesters to the software company that programmed the
county's voting machines, saying the company's
permission would be required for access to a recount,
as the code is proprietary. 
  New reports of voter suppression and fraud
corroborated the Supreme Court filing, which presented
a detailed analysis of where votes were incorrectly
counted for Bush instead of Kerry. An election
challenge must prove the wrong presidential candidate
was declared the winner. The challenge lawsuit asks
the Ohio Supreme Court to declare Kerry the victor.
Numerous witnesses offered testimony to support that
conclusion. 
  A second brief was also filed Monday, seeking a
temporary restraining order to block Republican
presidential electors from meeting until the recount
was done and the challenge was litigated. It focused
on "overwhelming statistical evidence" that pointed to
"statewide fraud allegedly conducted at the direction
of Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell."
  The TRO filing was primarily based on national and
statewide exit poll data, which was the extensive,
non-partisan polling done by a consortium of the
nation's major news organizations. Expert affidavits
accompanying the brief said an analysis of exit poll
data found that the final vote tallies in all but the
most contested battleground states mirrored the exit
poll's predictions. The experts said it was unlikely
the exit polls could be so accurate in some states
while significantly wrong in others. They said
election fraud was the only plausible explanation for
the discrepancy.
  The TRO filing identified exactly when they believe
the fraud occurred - at about 12.30 a.m. on Wednesday,
Nov. 3. At that time of night, Ohio's final voting
returns were being tabulated at regional and county
offices. It was about this time that the Ohio exit
poll data - posted on websites such as CNN - put Bush
ahead of Kerry, even though the exit polls expected
Kerry to win with 52.1 percent of the vote.
  What experts like Steven Freeman, Ph.D. of the
University of Pennsylvania say happened was at this
time the raw poll data, showing Kerry ahead, was
replaced online and on television by "calibrated"
data. This adjusted data was intended to reflect the
total vote counts, once the results came in from
late-reporting precincts - if it didn't match the raw
exit poll results. Ohio's results didn't match, and
the likely reason is because across the state, in a
variety of ways, the reported vote totals were being
manipulated. If Bush votes were added to the total, or
votes were taken away from Kerry, this shift was first
noticed at about 12:30 a.m., when the networks started
to report 'calibrated' figures, not the raw data.
  "The media has largely ignored this discrepancy
(although the Blogosphere has been abuzz), suggesting
the polls were either flawed, within normal sampling
error, or could otherwise be easily explained away,"
Freeman wrote in an article, cited in the TRO filing.
Instead, it simply reported Bush's final tally as 51
percent to Kerry's final tally of 48.5 percent.
  As Rev. Jackson and election attorneys explained to
the packed hearing, the election challenge suit
describes how votes were added to Bush's total, or in
many cases, taken away from Kerry - because they were
added to the totals of other Democratic candidates
further down the ballot.
  The Democrat whose totals were most likely to have
been boosted by this kind of 'vote-shifting' was C.
Ellen Connally, an African-American candidate for Ohio
Chief Justice, who was little-known and outspent in
the southern part of the state, the challenge
complaint says. Because Secretary Blackwell has
obstructed most efforts to examine ballots and poll
records, it has been almost impossible to investigate
and explain anomalies like Connally's strong showing
in the southern part of the state.
  "What are they hiding?" asked Rev. Jackson. One
after the other, witnesses argued that by making a
recount virtually impossible, Blackwell has offered
firm indication that the Republicans have something to
hide.
  "The secrecy of the ballot has been converted to the
secrecy of the vote count," added Ronnie Dugger,
founder of the Alliance for Democracy. Now based in
Massachusetts, the legendary Dugger is founder of the
Texas Observer. He said when Texas Republicans heard
complaints that voting machines could be corrupted,
"they knew that had found what they were looking for."
Voting machines, he said, are the "most
anti-democratic technology ever employed."
  Dr. Ron Baiman, a statistician from the University
of Illinois, Chicago, confirmed that the odds on vote
counts diverting from exit polls as they did the night
of November 2 were on the order of magnitude of
millions to one. Baiman told freepress.org that the
odds of the exit polls being wrong in the key
battleground states of Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio
alone were "155,000,000 to one."
  Dr. Norman Robbins of Cleveland testified that over
10,000 voters in Cuyahoga County alone were
disenfranchised by various means, and that nearly all
were "youth, poor and minorities."
  In one Cleveland ward, he said, 51% of the
provisional votes cast were thrown in the trash,
virtually all of them from African-Americans.
  Eve Roberson, a former election official from Santa
Rosa, California, testified that while working as
observer at precinct 354 in Wilberforce, home of
Central State University, she witnessed conscious
fraud aimed at a student body that went 95% for Kerry.
Election officials used an inconsistent,
discriminatory set of demands for Wilberforce students
to register as opposed to those used in white
precincts in Greene County.
  Roberson and others also testified that after the
election they discovered ballots sitting open, on
unguarded tables where manipulation and random
disposal could easily have occurred. It was, she said
"a serious breech" of election security. 
  Riveting testimony followed from Clinton Curtis, a
Tallahassee-based computer programmer who told the
hearing he had been hired by US Rep Tom Feeney, then
Speaker of the Florida House, to write a program that
would conceal the theft of an election. Curtis said
Feeney was then a lobbyist for a major computer
company as well as Speaker. Curtis said Feeney wanted
a program that could use voting machines to "flip an
election" without being detected. Curtis said he wrote
a prototype program, then quit.
  Under questioning Curtis said a program could be
written that would protect the security of voting
machines, but that it had not been deployed in Ohio.
He said it would be a simple matter, involving perhaps
100 lines of code and some simple switches, to turn an
entire election. 
  "One person in a simple tab machine can affect
thousands of votes," Curtis testified. "There is
absolutely no assurance of anything on those
machines."
  Given what he had seen, he said, the Ohio election
was "probably hacked." 
  The last hour of the Columbus hearing was filled
with testimony from local voters who were harassed,
intimidated and made to stand in long lines to cast
votes that may well have been pitched in the trash.
  Similar sworn testimony surfaced Tuesday at a
citizens' hearing in Toledo. Among other things eye
witnesses confirmed that a Diebold programming team
entered the Lucas County (Toledo) Board of Elections
to "reprogram" the opti-scan voting machines on the
day the recount began. 
  Catherine Buchanan, a Democratic Party observer,
testified that one of the sample precincts chosen as a
control for the recount---Sylvania Precinct 3---had
the programming card reprogrammed prior to the ballot
testing. While the observers watched, nearly seven out
of fifteen test ballots were rejected at least three
times before the machine would read them. 
  Janet Albright told hearing officers she had been
voting at the same Lucas County polling place for
fourteen years but that the polling place was changed
this year without notification to a station farther
away. Machines throughout Lucas County malfunctioned
in tests through the week prior to the election, and
on election day. Thousands of Ohioans---primarily in
Democratic precincts--thus lost their right to vote. 
  During the Lucas County reprogramming, election
observers were shocked when they were denied the right
to look at sheets that had target test results on
them, or the reprogramming of the opti-scan machines
used in the recount. Diebold-leased machines and
software malfunctioned in the weeks prior to the
election. 
  That echoed similar testimony from Green Party
candidate David Cobb in the Columbus hearing.
Witnesses said an unauthorized programmer from the
Triad Corporation dismantled at least one voting
machine in rural Hocking County. Conyers referred to
the incident as "pretty outrageous" and asked the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, and a county
prosecutor, to investigate "inappropriate and likely
illegal election tampering" in Hocking and perhaps
several other Ohio counties. 
  Brett Rapp, president of Triad, told the New York
Times it might be unusual to do what was done in
Hocking County, but that Triad was involved in voting
machines in 41 of Ohio's 88 counties. 
  The Hocking County investigation was spurred in
particular by testimony Sherole Eaton, the deputy
elections director. Such testimony will be transcribed
and presented at www.freepress.org as it becomes
available. But in the interim the battle of Ohio rages
on, machine by machine and hearing by hearing. Because
the recount process has been so severely tainted, the
call for a revote is growing.
  On January 6, Congress is scheduled to vote on
whether or not to approve the tally of electors,
including Ohio's tainted 20 votes. Conyers and the
other US Representatives present made it clear more
public hearings will be held before then.
  In 2001, a host of US Representatives, most from the
Black Caucus, asked that the tainted Bush electors be
challenged. This year at least 14 members of the House
of Representatives will demand an immediate
"investigation of the efficacy of the voting machines
and new technologies used in 2004 election, how
election officials responded to the difficulties they
encountered, and what we can do in the future to
improve our elections systems and administration."
  Their action requires the consent of a single
Senator, which did not come in 2001. As the battle to
save democracy rages in Ohio and elsewhere, January,
2005, could be very different.
  -------
  Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman
are co-authors of the upcoming "Ohio's Stolen
Election: Voices of the Disenfranchised," 2004
(http://freepress.org).
  -------
  
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x163172

Ohio, Fairfield County, suspends recount...UPDATED
WITH REPORT

Edited on Wed Dec-15-04 05:57 PM by mtnester
 
At 4 pm today, after failing to get a match of hand
counted ballots with punch card tabulator (ESS), two
hand counts and two times through machine, after
stating they were awaiting a call back from that
company to have a new machine delivered, less than 30
seconds later convened a board meeting, voted to
suspend recount, to await a new machine from ESS, and
recount will be re-done Saturday, same exact
precincts, the building is now closed, you are to exit
the facility. BOE blaming issues on "machine failure"
in order to avoid the now required entire county hand
count. Precints were not random, they were selected by
BOE, one from the Dem and one from the Repup.
This after their call to SOS Kathy Blackwell.

Greens will be going for a TRO. They are fully aware
of entire circumstances of this report.

BOE's trying to get around mandatory handcounts of
entire counties by calling it machine failure rather
than follow clear statute. This will be breaking I am
sure before long.

First hand witness to events above....myself
 


http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/121604Z.shtml

Proof of Ohio Election Fraud Exposed 
    By William Rivers Pitt 
    t r u t h o u t | Report 

    Wednesday 15 December 2004 

    Among activists and investigators looking into
allegations of vote fraud in the 2004 Presidential
election, the company always mentioned was Diebold and
its suspicious electronic touch-screen voting
machines. It is Diebold that has multiple avowed
Republicans on its Board of Directors. It was Diebold
that gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bush’s
election campaign. It was Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell
who vowed to deliver Ohio’s electoral votes to Bush. 

    As it turns out, everyone was looking the wrong
way. The company that requires immediate and
penetrating scrutiny is Triad Systems. 

    Triad is owned by a man named Tod Rapp, who has
also donated money to both the Republican Party and
the election campaign of George W. Bush. Triad
manufactures punch-card voting systems, and also wrote
the computer program that tallied the punch-card votes
cast in 41 Ohio counties last November. This Triad
company graphic displays the counties where their
machines are used: 
 
    Given the ubiquity of the Triad voting systems in
Ohio, the allegations that have been leveled against
this company strike to the heart of the assumed result
of the 2004 election. 

    Earlier this week, the allegations against triad
were first raised by Green Party candidate David Cobb,
who testified at a hearing held in Columbus, Ohio by
Rep. John Conyers of the House Judiciary Committee. In
his testimony, Cobb stated: 

    Mr. Chairman, though our time is limited, I must
bring to the committee's attention the most recent and
perhaps most troubling incident that was related to my
campaign on Sunday, December 12, about a shocking
event that occurred last Friday, December 10. 

    A representative from Triad Systems came into a
county board of elections office un-announced. He said
he was just stopping by to see if they had any
questions about the up-coming recount. He then headed
into the back room where the Triad supplied Tabulator
(a card reader and older PC with custom software) is
kept. He told them there was a problem and the system
had a bad battery and had "lost all of its data". He
then took the computer apart and started swapping
parts in and out of it and another "spare" tower type
PC also in the room. He may have had spare parts in
his coat as one of the BOE people moved it and
remarked as to how very heavy it was. He finally
re-assembled everything and said it was working but to
not turn it off. 

    He then asked which precinct would be counted for
the 3% recount test, and the one which had been
selected as it had the right number of votes, was
relayed to him. He then went back and did something
else to the tabulator computer. 

    The Triad Systems representative suggested that
since the hand count had to match the machine count
exactly, and since it would be hard to memorize the
several numbers which would be needed to get the count
to come out exactly right, that they should post this
series of numbers on the wall where they would not be
noticed by observers. He suggested making them look
like employee information or something similar. The
people doing the hand count could then just report
these numbers no matter what the actual count of the
ballots revealed. This would then "match" the
tabulator report for this precinct exactly. The
numbers were apparently the final certified counts for
the selected precinct. 

    Triad is contracted to do much of the elections
work in this county and elsewhere in Ohio. This
included programming the candidates into the
tabulator, and coming up with the rotation of
candidates in the various precincts (that is, the
order of which candidate is first changes between
precincts). They also have a technician in the office
on election night to actually run the tabulator
itself. 

    Triad also supplies the network computers on which
all of the voter registration information and
processing is kept for the county. 

    It was unusual for the computers to be taken
apart. At least one member of the Board of Elections
was told the tabulator was in pieces when he called to
check on the office. 

    The source of this report believes that the Triad
representative was "making the rounds" of visiting
other counties also before the recount. This person
also stated they would not pass on the suggestion of
the "posted" hidden totals, and would refuse to go
along with it if it were suggested by the others in
the office at the time. 

    The source of this information believes they could
lose their job if they come forward. 

    The source of this information is named Sherole
Eaton, Hocking County deputy director of elections.
She has since written and signed an affidavit
describing her experience with the Triad
representative, the text of which is here: 

    AFFIDAVIT 
    December 13, 2004 
    Sherole Eaton 
    Re: General Election 2004 - Hocking County, TriAd 
    Dell Computer about 14 years old - No tower 

    On Friday, December 10 2004, Michael from TriAd
called in the AM to inform us that he would be in our
office in the PM on the same day. I asked him why he
was visiting us. He said, "to check out your
tabulator, computer, and that the attorneys will be
asking some tricky questions and he wanted to go over
some of the questions they maybe ask." He also added
that there would be no charge for this service. 

    He arrived at about 12:30PM. I hung his coat up
and it was very heavy. I made a comment about it being
so heavy. He, Lisa Schwartze and I chatted for a few
minutes. He proceeded to go to the room where our
computer and tabulation machine is kept. I followed
him into the room. I had my back to him when he turned
the computer on. He stated that the computer was not
coming up. I did see some commands at the lower left
hand of the screen but no menu. He said that the
battery in the computer was dead and that the stored
information was gone. He said that he could put a
patch on it and fix it. My main concern was - what if
this happened when we were ready to do the recount. He
proceeded to take the computer apart and call his
offices to get information to input into our computer.
Our computer is fourteen years old and as far as I
know had always worked in the past. I asked him if the
older computer, that is in the same room. could be
used for the recount. I don't remember exactly what he
said but I did relay to him that the computer was old
and a spare. At some point he asked if he could take
the spare computer apart and I said "yes". He took
both computers apart. I don't remember seeing any
tools and he asked Sue Wallace, Clerk, for a
screwdriver. She got it for him. At this point I was
frustrated about the computer not performing and
feared that it wouldn't work for the recount. I called
Gerald Robinette, board chairman, to inform him
regarding the computer problem and asked him if we
could have Tri Ad come to our offices to run the
program and tabulator for the recount. Gerald talked
on the phone with Michael and Michael assured Gerald
that he could fix our computer. He worked on the
computer until about 3:00 PM and then asked me which
precinct and the number of the precinct we were going
to count. I told him, Good Hope 1 # 17. He went back
into the tabulation room. Shortly after that he
(illegible) stated that the computer was ready for the
recount and told us not to turn the computer off so it
would charge up. 

    Before Lisa ran the tests, Michael said to turn
the computer off. Lisa said, " I thought you said we
weren't supposed to turn it off." He said turn it off
and right back on and it should come up. It did come
up and Lisa ran the tests. Michael gave us
instructions on how to explain the rotarien, what the
tests mean, etc. No advice on how to handle the
attorneys but to have our Prosecuting Attorney at the
recount to answer any of their legal questions. He
said not to turn the computer off until after the
recount. 

    He advised Lisa and I on how to post a "cheat
sheet" on the wall so that only the board members and
staff would know about it and and what the codes meant
so the count would come out perfect and we wouldn't
have to do a full hand recount of the county. He left
about 5:00 PM. 

    My faith in Tri Ad and the Xenia staff has been
nothing but good. The realization that this company
and staff would do anything to dishonor or disrupt the
voting process is distressing to me and hard to
believe. I'm being completely objective about the
above statements and the reason I'm bringing this
forward is to, hopefully, rule out any wrongdoing. 

    Further buttressing Eaton’s claim is an addendum
to a previous affidavit filed by Evelyn Roberson who,
you may recall, was involved in the Greene County
recount action that was summarily shut down by Ohio
Secretary of State Blackwell. Her addendum reads as
follows: 

    Addendum to Declaration of Evelyn Roberson dated
December 12, 2004 
    Re: Incidents of December 10, 2004 

    This is to add to the approximately 1 :15 p.m.
portion of the visit with the Deputy Director of
Elections Lyn McCoy with respect to the following
comment: 

"She said they would have their computer technician
check over their computers on Monday in case they has
been tampered with." 
the addition is that Lyn McCoy also mentioned to me at
the same time that her computer technician was with
Triad. 

I declare under penalty of perjury the forgoing is
true and correct. 

Dated: December 14, 2004 

Evelyn Roberson

    Original versions of these documents should be
available later on Wednesday on the website of Rep.
Conyers. 

    Conyers, upon hearing these allegations, sent a
letter to both the FBI Special Agent in Charge in Ohio
and the Hocking County Prosecutor. The text of that
letter is as follows: 

    December 15, 2004 

    As part of the Democratic staff's investigation
into irregularities in the 2004 election and following
up on a lead provided to me by Green Party
Presidential Candidate, David Cobb, I have learned
that Sherole Eaton, a Deputy Director of Board of
Elections in Hocking County, Ohio, has first hand
knowledge of inappropriate and likely illegal election
tampering in the Ohio presidential election in
violation of federal and state law. 

    I have information that similar actions of this
nature may be occurring in other counties in Ohio. I
am therefore asking that you immediately investigate
this alleged misconduct and that, among other things,
you consider the immediate impoundment of election
machinery to prevent any further tampering. 

    On December 13, my staff met with Ms. Eaton who
explained to them that last Friday, December 10,
Michael Barbian, Jr., a representative of Triad GSI
unilaterally sought and obtained access to the voting
machinery and records in Hocking County, Ohio,
modified the computer tabulator, learned which
precinct was planned to be the subject of the initial
test recount and made further alterations based on
that information, and advised the election officials
how to manipulate the machinery so that the
preliminary hand recount matched the machine count.
Ms. Eaton first relayed this information to Green
Party representatives, and then completed, signed and
notarized an affidavit describing this course of
events, a copy of which is attached. 

    The Triad official sought access to the voting
machinery based on the apparent pretext that he wanted
to review some "legal questions" the officials might
receive as part of the recount process. At several
times during this visit, Mr. Barbian telephoned into
Triad's offices to obtain programming information
relating to the machinery and the precinct in
question. I have subsequently learned that Triad
officials have been, or are in the process of
intervening in several other counties in Ohio - Greene
and Monroe, and perhaps others (see attached). 

    There are several important considerations you
should be aware of with respect to this matter. First,
this course of conduct would appear to violate several
provisions of federal law, in addition to the
constitutional guarantees of equal protection and due
process. 42 U.S.C. §1973 provides for criminal
penalties against any person who, in any election for
federal office, "knowingly and willfully deprives,
defrauds, or attempts to defraud the residents of a
State of a fair and impartially conducted election
process, by . . . the procurement, casting, or
tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to
be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under
the laws of the State in which the election is held."
42 U.S.C. § 1974 also requires the retention and
preservation, for a period of twenty-two months from
the date of a federal election, of all voting records
and papers and makes it a felony for any person to
"willfully steal, destroy, conceal, mutilate, or
alter" any such record. Further, any tampering with
ballots and/or election machinery would violate the
constitutional rights of all citizens to vote and have
their votes properly counted, as guaranteed by the
Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the
Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. 

    Second, the course of conduct would also appear to
violate several provisions of Ohio law. No less than 4
provisions of the Ohio Revised Code make it a felony
to tamper with or destroy election records or
machines.1 Clearly, modifying election equipment in
order to make sure that the hand count matches the
machine count would appear to fall within these
proscriptions. 

    Moreover, bringing in Triad officials into other
Ohio Counties would also appear to violate Ohio
Revised Code § 3505.32 which provides that during a
period of official canvassing, all interaction with
ballots must be "in the presence of all of the members
of the board and any other persons who are entitled to
witness the official canvass," given that last Friday,
the Ohio Secretary of State has issued orders to the
effect that election officials are to treat all
election materials as if they were in a period of
canvassing,2 and that "Teams of one Democrat and one
Republican must be present with ballots at all times
of processing." 

    Third, it is important to recognize that the
companies implicated in the wrongdoing, Triad and its
affiliates, are the leading suppliers of voting
machines involving the counting of paper ballots and
punch cards in the critical states of Ohio and
Florida. Triad is controlled by the Rapp family, and
its founder Tod A. Rapp has been a consistent
contributor to Republican causes.4 A Triad affiliate,
Psephos corporation, supplied the notorious butterfly
ballot used in Palm Beach County, Florida, in the 2000
presidential election. 

    Sincerely, 

    John Conyers, Jr. 

    Enclosures 

    cc: The Honorable F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr. 

http://blog.democrats.com/node/1953

Stolen Election 2004: Wednesday Update
by Bob Fertik on 12/15/2004 5:41am. - revised
12/15/2004 9:11am
BUSTED! Conyers calls the FBI to investigate Triad -
which finally gets the attention of the NY Times,
although they only manage to get about one-third of
the story.

Lawmaker Seeks Inquiry Into Ohio Vote
By TOM ZELLER Jr. 
Published: December 15, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/15/politics/15ohio.html

The ranking Democratic member of the House Judiciary
Committee, Representative John Conyers Jr. of
Michigan, plans to ask the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and a county prosecutor in Ohio today to
explore "inappropriate and likely illegal election
tampering" in at least one and perhaps several Ohio
counties. 

The request for an investigation, made in a letter
that was also provided to The New York Times, includes
accounts from at least two county employees, but is
based largely on a sworn affidavit provided by the
Hocking County deputy director of elections, Sherole
Eaton. 

Among other things, Ms. Eaton says in her affidavit
that a representative of Triad Governmental Systems,
the Ohio firm that created and maintains the
vote-counting software in dozens of Ohio counties,
made several adjustments to the Hocking County
tabulator last Friday, in advance of the state's
recount, which is taking place this week. 

Actually, she says the technician took the whole
tabulating computer apart along with its backup,
swapped some parts, and put it back together. That's
slightly more extreme than an "adjustment," wouldn't
you say? I'd say it's the difference between an office
visit to a chiropractor - and heart transplant
surgery.

Ohio recount rules require that only 3 percent of a
county's votes be tallied by hand, and typically one
or more whole precincts are selected and combined to
get the 3 percent sample. After the hand count, the
sample is fed into the tabulator. If there is no
discrepancy, the remaining ballots can be counted by
the machine. Otherwise, a hand recount must be done
for the whole county. 

Ms. Eaton contends that the Triad employee asked which
precinct Hocking County planned to count as its
representative 3 percent, and, upon being told, made
further adjustments to the machine. 

He also told the employees to write down the original
results from those precincts, then recount the votes,
then report the original results if they disagreed
with the recount results! Here's her affidavit: "He
advised Lisa and I on how to post a "cheat sheet" on
the wall so that only the board members and staff
would know about it and and what the codes meant so
the count would come out perfect and we wouldn't have
to do a full hand recount of the county."

Hey Zeller - isn't that "fit to print"?

County officials decided to use a different precinct
when the recount was done yesterday. No discrepancies
were found. 

"This is pretty outrageous," Mr. Conyers said. "We
want to pursue it as vigorously as we can." 

You go, Conyers!

But Brett Rapp, the president of Triad, said that
although it would be unusual for an employee to ask
about a specific precinct, 

And would Rapp consider it "unusual" to tell election
officials to ignore the recount results and re-use the
original results instead?

preparing the machines for a recount was standard
procedure and was done in all 41 counties where Triad
handles vote counts. 

How exactly does Triad "prepare" machines for a
recount? Hey Zeller, isn't that worth a sentence or
two?

He added that he welcomed any investigation. 

Excellent! Because there will certainly be one!

"I've been doing this since 1985, and in all my
experience this is the first time that we have had any
complaints whatsoever," Mr. Rapp said.

Hmm - maybe we need to look at the results of previous
Triad "recounts"...

Now what else did the Times not consider "fit to
print"?

1. John Conyers told the FBI that Triad's actions
potentially broke several fundamental federal and
state laws.

First, this course of conduct would appear to violate
several provisions of federal law, in addition to the
constitutional guarantees of equal protection and due
process. 42 U.S.C. §1973 provides for criminal
penalties against any person who, in any election for
federal office, "knowingly and willfully deprives,
defrauds, or attempts to defraud the residents of a
State of a fair and impartially conducted election
process, by . . . the procurement, casting, or
tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to
be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under
the laws of the State in which the election is held." 

The Triad technician, Michael Barbian, was clearly
conspiring to tabulate false results by proposing the
use of a "cheat sheet."

42 U.S.C. § 1974 also requires the retention and
preservation, for a period of twenty-two months from
the date of a federal election, of all voting records
and papers and makes it a felony for any person to
"willfully steal, destroy, conceal, mutilate, or
alter" any such record. 

It's unclear whether the tabulating machine is a
"record or paper," but that's certainly arguable. And
as machines replace paper ballots, the laws certainly
need to be made explicit on this question.

Further, any tampering with ballots and/or election
machinery would violate the constitutional ri


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/12/14/175636/78
Plea for help from an Ohio activist
by Renee in Ohio 

Tue Dec 14th, 2004 at 14:56:36 PST

This was posted in the Blog for America comments. I
was amazed at how well Gary expressed what so many of
us in Ohio (or involved with the Ohio issues) are
feeling, and what we need from all of you... 

(please pass it around)
>From Voteprotection at voicelists.org which is moderated
by Mark Ritchie in Ohio. They are the source of most
of the post-election vote information:
From: Gary Polvinale [mailto:garyp at dentonatd.com]
Yesterday in 30 degree temperature with winds that
knocked me over while I was filming the Ohio
Statehouse Rally, Ohioans and people from all over
America who came to Ohio to help us, listened to Joan
and Eve tell how they were denied access to those
public records in Greene County Ohio. 
Yes, those of us in Ohio ARE on the front lines - and
it feels like we are defending the Alamo. We are doing
our part. A handful of determined people are working
themselves to exhaustion. Yes, we ARE out there in the
streets. And we ARE at the statehouse. And we ARE at
the hearings. And we ARE filing the lawsuits. And we
ARE out there doing the recount. And we ARE out there
knocking on doors to investigate, verify and gather
the facts.People all over the country who are
web-tracking what's happening want to help, who feel
helpless, frustrated, and sorry for us in Ohio, are
offering good wishes and words of encourgement. 

And believe me, we appreciate the encouragement. We
do, and thank you for that. But we here in Ohio need
more than a "You can do it" pat on the back. We ARE
doing it. But nobody knows. Ohio is screaming the
truth at the top of its lungs, literally, and no one
hears us because of all the noise of the media
silence.If you want to do something, here's what you
can do to help.I am asking the rest of the country to
please get out there and find well-known people who's
voices are loud enought to be heard by the press who
will stand up for us. Get a Senator or a media
personality or anyone of very high profile to come out
about this. The media blackout is killing us. Very few
members of Congress, and no one in the Democratic
Party has even seriously acknowledged the recount. 

This is still looked at as the "sour grapes" effort of
a couple of disgruntled 3rd party candidates who can't
win anyway. It couldn't be further from that. The
civil rights of every man, woman and child in America
are at stake here.I don't care what it takes, convince
somebody to break our story, to back us and give us
the credibility we need and to let the world know
we're here doing this. Redford, Sting, Kennedy, Fonda,
Kerry... I don't care who, somebody, anybody who can
attract the attention of the media (evidently John
Conyers' and Jesse Jackson's brave voices are not loud
enough.) 

We've kinda got our hands full here, or we'd be doing
that ourselves too. Give us a voice and we will
deliver Ohio. Otherwise SOS Blackwell and the BOE will
continue to slap us around like we don't matter a
lick, at every turn. We are being squelched by a state
government that is willing to violate our rights and
even break the law as often as necessary to stand in
our way and prevent us from exposing what they've
done.I watched 100 of the greatest people I've ever
met freeze their butts off for three hours Sunday, and
1500 the week before. And today people are out there
at the Conyers hearing at the Columbus Statehouse
again freezing, supporting the hearing, the
investigation and the recount. And the Ohio recount
has begun this morning. 

If you want to help, please turn over every rock to
find someone big who can get the media's attention who
is willing to speak up for us. We need that. And we
need it now. We'll take care of the rest. You'll have
to pardon the tone of this message - I'm tired, I'm
pissed and I'm still cold from yesterday. Thanks for
anything you can do toward this.Democracy = the vote,
Gary Polvinale Sandusky, Ohio 


http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/985

Startling new revelations highlight rare Congressional
hearings on Ohio vote
by Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman
December 13, 2004

Startling new revelations about Ohio's presidential
vote have been uncovered as Democratic members of the
House Judiciary Committee join Rev. Jesse Jackson in
Columbus, the state capital, on Monday, Dec. 13, to
hold a rare field hearing into election malfeasance
and manipulation in the 2004 vote.  The Congressional
delegation will include Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), Rep.
Maxine Waters (D-CA), Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, and
others.  

Taken together, the revelations show Republicans – in
state and county government, and in the Ohio
Republican Party – were determined to undermine and
suppress Democratic turnout by a wide variety of
methods.  

The revelations were included in affidavits gathered
for an election challenge lawsuit filed Monday at the
Ohio Supreme Court. Ohio's Republican Electoral
College representatives are also to meet at noon,
Monday, at the State House, even though the
presidential recount, requested by the Green and
Libertarian Parties, is only beginning the same day. 

On Sunday, John Kerry spoke with Rev. Jesse Jackson
and urged him to take an more active role in
investigating the irregularities and ensuring a fair
and impartial recount. Kerry said there were three
areas of inquiry that should be addressed: 92,000
ballots that recorded no vote for president;
qualifying and counting provisional ballots; and
supported an independent analysis of the software and
set-up of the optical scan voting machines.  

What follows are excerpts from some of the affidavits
for the election challenge. 

-         In Warren County, where election officers
declared a homeland security emergency on Election
Day, and barred reporters and others from watching the
vote count, it now has been revealed that county
employees were told the previous Thursday they should
prepare for the Election Day lockdown. That disclosure
suggests the lockdown was a political decision, not a
true security risk. Moreover, statements also describe
how ballots were left unguarded and unprotected in a
warehouse on Election Day, and they were hastily moved
after county officials received complaints. 

-         In Franklin County, where Columbus is
located, the election director, Matt Damschroder,
misinformed a federal court on Election Day when he
testified the county had no additional voting machines
– in response to a Voting Rights Act lawsuit brought
by the state Democratic Party that minority precincts
were intentionally deprived of machines. It now
appears as many as 81 voting machines were being held
back, out of 2,866 available, according to recent
statements by Damschroder and Bill Anthony, the
chairman of the Franklin County Board of Elections.
The shortage of machines in Democratic-leaning
districts lead to long lines and thousands of people
leaving in frustration and not voting.  Damschroder's
contradictory statements raise the possibility of
perjury.  

-         Also in Franklin County, a worker at the
Holiday Inn observed a team of 25 people who called
themselves the "Texas Strike Force" using payphones to
make intimidating calls to likely voters, targeting
people recently in the prison system. The "Texas
Strike Force" members paid their way to Ohio, but
their hotel accommodations were paid for by the Ohio
Republican Party, whose headquarters is across the
street. The hotel worker heard one caller threaten a
likely voter with being reported to the FBI and
returning to jail if he voted. Another hotel worker
called the police, who came but did nothing. 

-         In Knox County, students at Kenyon College,
a liberal arts school, stood in line for up to 11
hours, because only one voting machine was in use.
However, at nearby Mt. Vernon Nazarene University,
there were ample voting machines and no lines. This
suggests the GOP shorting of voting machines was a
more widespread tactic than just targeting inner-city
neighborhoods.  

-         Reports in sworn affadavits affirm numerous
instances of direct official interference with the
right to vote. In Warren County, Democrats were being
targeted and forced to use provisional ballots, even
if they had proper identification. These ballots were
then subjected to more rigorous standards to be
counted than were other ballots. In a half-dozen
precincts in Franklin County, people who were not
inside polling places by 7:30 PM were told to leave -
even if they had waited in line for hours. This is a
violation of the Voting Rights Act. Sworn affidavits
also confirmed reports of old voter rolls being used,
meaning that new voters were not on the list and would
be given provisional ballots, if allowed to vote at
all.    

Affidavits were also filed in support of the election
challenge suit raising questions about manipulating
exit poll results and computer tabulation of county
and statewide votes. 

In one exit poll affidavit, Jonathan David Simon, an
expert witness, notes that at 12:53 a.m. the exit
polls altered the projected winner – even though the
same number of votes had been cast. "Although each
update reports the same number of respondents (872),
the reported results differ significantly, with the
latter (12:53 a.m.) exit poll results apparently
having been brought into congruence with the tabulated
vote results." In other words, the exit polls were
made to conform to a political decision to declare
Bush the victor. 

Another exit poll affidavit, filed by Ron Paul Baiman,
an economist and statistician at the University of
Illinois and University of Chicago, said the swing in
national exit poll results, recorded at 12:33 a.m.,
when Kerry was winning with 50.8 percent of the vote,
to Bush winning with 51.2 percent, was,  "in lay
terms, impossible." 

"This is more than a 100 percent swing in the other
direction of the exit poll margin, he said. "There is
less than a one in 25,000,000 (1/25,507,308) chance of
this occurring." 

Another affidavit by Richard Hayes Phillips, a
geomorphology Ph.D. from University of Oregon with a
special expertise in spotting anomalous data, found
dramatic examples of erroneous voting patterns – with
votes taken away from Kerry - that can only be
explained by computer manipulation.  

For instance, in 16 precincts in Cleveland, he found
votes that were shifted from Kerry to other
candidates. In at least 30 precincts, there was
ultra-low voter turnout reported – as low as 7.1
percent or 13.05 percent – and seven entire wards
where total turnout was below 50 percent. He writes,
"Kerry won Cleveland with 83.27 percent of the vote to
15.88 percent for Bush. If voter turnout were really
60 percent of registered voters, as seems likely based
on turnout in other major cities of Ohio, rather than
49.89 percent as reported, Kerry's margin of victory
in Cleveland has been wrongly reduced by 22,000
votes." 

Phillips points to other counties where has says
"there is compelling evidence of fraud." In Miami
County early on election night, when 31,620 votes had
been counted, and later, when 50,235 votes were
counted, "Kerry had exactly the same percentage, 33.92
percent, and the percentage for George Bush was almost
exactly the same, dropping by 0.03 percent from 65.80
to 65.77 percent. The second set of returns gave Bush
a margin of exactly 16,000 votes, giving cause to
question the integrity of the central counting device
for the optical scan machines. " 

He cites many other examples, but summarizes his
findings: "It is my professional opinion that John
Kerry's margins of victory were wrongly reduced by
22,000 votes in Cleveland, by 17,000 votes in
Columbus, and by as many as 7,000 votes in Toledo. It
is my further professional opinion that John Kerry's
margins of defeat in Warren, Butler, and Clermont
Counties were inflated by as many as 37,000 votes in
the aggregate, and in Miami County by as many as 6,000
votes. There are still 92,672 uncounted regular
ballots that, based upon the analysis set forth of the
election results from Dayton and Cincinnati, may be
expected to break for John Kerry by an overwhelming
margin. And there are still 14,441 uncounted
provisional ballots." 

--
Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman are
co-authors of OHIO'S STOLEN ELECTION:  VOICES OF THE
DISENFRANCHISED, 2004, upcoming from
www.freepress.org.    

http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/04/12/ana04030.html

Theft of the Election, Redux. 

Why 2000 was Prelude to 2004 -- and the Democratic
Party Got Mugged a Second Time. 

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS 

In case you missed it, an exhaustive 23,422-word
Vanity Fair article, published just prior to the
election (October), spilled the beans that at least
four of the five Supreme Court justices who stole the
election from Al Gore did it with willing forethought.
And the fifth, Justice Kennedy, who came up with the
hypocritical, convoluted reason for awarding the
election to Bush, was probably just pretending to be
"open-minded." 

In short, the story, the first one to reveal the
inside machinations of the infamous decision of 2000,
confirmed that this wasn't a judicial decision that
decided the election 4 years ago; it was a
premeditated theft of democracy from the American
voters. 

The partisan choice of five justices -- led by the
judicial right-wing molotov-cocktail throwing Nino
Scalia -- outweighed the selection of the American
people. 

Why is this important now? Because it confirms that
the Bush Cartel will do and did everything to win --
and it doesn't take a leap of imagination or common
sense to speculate that with four years in office,
they were able to heist the election this time without
a nod and a wink to Nino and his right wing ship of
judicially radical pirates. 

What we forget in our focus on Ohio is that the
Republicans, through dirty tricks, voter suppression
and intimidation, faulty felons' lists, and the
deep-sixing of tens of thousands of Kerry votes --
among other anti-democracy tactics -- probably had the
election heisted before the polls even opened. They
privatized the counting of votes of Americans and
turned it over to companies deeply ensconced in the
Republican camp and Republican politics, with
checkered histories and Republican ownership. They
intentionally mis-registered college students, threw
away the registration forms of perhaps tens of
thousands of Democrats, and lost more than 55,000
absentee ballots in Jewish/Democratic leaning Broward
County, FL, alone. And this list is just for starters.


The Bush rogue regime was born a bastard child by a
fixed Supreme Court vote and now controls the process
by which any investigation of voting irregularities
would be pursued. Indeed, Ken Blackwell, one of the
two key Rove 2004 Katherine Harrises (along with
Florida Secretary of State Hood), wrote Congressman
John Conyers just this week that only the Department
of Justice or the GAO had the authority to investigate
voting in Ohio. So, two agencies under the
Republicans, who Blackwell has just declared the
winner of the Presidency, are the only ones Blackwell
would allow to investigate their victory. It's a
tactic worthy of Stalin -- and the Bush Cartel is one
terrorist attack short of achieving full dictatorship
powers, while the nation sleeps. 

So what happened in the Supreme Court in the fateful
days following the election of 2000? You should find
someplace to read or still buy a back edition of the
October, 2004, Vanity Fair, because they don't have
the article we are about to discuss on their website
(http://www.vanityfair.com/). 

Be patient, as we walk you through a few select,
edited, passages from this pivotal journalistic
article in the publication edited by Haydon Carter,
author of "What We've Lost," a courageous man who
continually exposes the Bush crimes against America
and the world. 

The following writing is from Vanity Fair and is
copyright of Vanity Fair. Please read the entire
article, "The Path to Florida," within the October
Vanity Fair -- and subscribe to the magazine (even if
you are not into celebrities) for its commentaries by
Haydon Carter and insightful articles on the Bush ship
of fools and scoundrels.: 

As the Florida recount ate away at George W. Bush's
margin of victory (1,784 votes ...327 ...154 ... ),
the machinery of political power sprang to life. In
Washington, stunned U.S. Supreme Court clerks watched
justice become partisan, while in Florida, tens of
thousands of citizens-thousands of them
African-American-found themselves disenfranchised by
misleading, faulty, and uncounted ballots, or
inexplicably purged from the rolls. Zeroing in on the
frenzied 36 days that followed the 2000 election,
David Margolick, Evgenia Peretz, and Michael
Shnayerson investigate the "Brooks Brothers riot," Jeb
Bush's high-tech felon hunt, and the new voting
machines that leave no paper trail, and ask, "Could it
happen again?" 

Shortly after the presidential vote in November 2000,
two law clerks at the United States Supreme Court were
joking about the photo finish in Florida. Wouldn't it
be funny, one mused, if the matter landed before them?
And how, if it did, the Court would split five to
four, as it so often did in big cases, with the
conservative majority installing George W. Bush in the
White House? The two just laughed. It all seemed too
preposterous. 

Moreover, the very jurists who'd normally side with
Bush were the ones most solicitous of states' rights,
most deferential to state courts, most devoted to the
Constitution's "original intent"-and the Founding
Fathers had specifically provided that the Congress,
not the judiciary, would resolve close elections. 

The commentators agreed. The New York Times predicted
that the Court would never enter the Florida thicket.
A law professor at the University of Miami pegged
Bush's chances before the tribunal at "between slim
and none, and a lot closer to none." 

It all turned out very differently, of course, and the
Court, by the very margin that the incredulous clerk
envisaged, put George W. Bush in the White House. Now
out in the working world, the two clerks, along with
most of their colleagues who worked for the four
liberal justices and the occasional conservative
justice, remain angered, haunted, shaken, and
disillusioned by what they saw. They'd learned in
their elite law schools that the law was just and that
judges resolved legal disputes by nonpartisan analysis
of neutral principles. But Bush v. Gore, as seen from
the inside, convinced them they'd been sold a bill of
goods. 

The 2000 election in Florida shook Americans from all
walks of life and of all political persuasions. Many
were left wondering about the viability of America's
democratic system. Much has changed since the
election's frenzied aftermath, in which hordes of
reporters jammed the streets of Tallahassee, Palm
Beach, and Miami, chasing ballots and lawyers for 36
days before the presidency was called by a margin of
537 votes out of the six million cast in Florida. But
Florida is a state with a history of disenfranchising
blacks-a legacy that seemed all too current in 2000.
And the president's brother is still governor. 

Could it happen again? [Here, Vanity Fair presented
evidence on how it could happen again, as many would
argue it did. There would be more focus on Florida
than Ohio in the election's aftermath, but Jeb's in
charge of Florida and pro-democracy advocates have
tacitly conceded that it is a lost cause to take him
on again.] 

At 2:16 a.m., November 8, 2000, six hours after the
networks projected that Florida would go to Gore, a
young hotshot at Fox News named John Ellis, who
happened to be George W. Bush's cousin, called the
state-and the election-for Bush. Within four minutes,
ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN followed suit. "It was just the
three of us guys handing the phone back and forth,"
Ellis would later say to The New Yorker. "Me with the
numbers, one of them a governor, the other the
president-elect. Now, that was cool." 

Gore phoned Bush to offer his congratulations, but as
he made his way from campaign headquarters at his
Nashville hotel to the War Memorial to give his
concession speech, Nick Baldick, his chief operative
in Florida, saw that something was seriously amiss. A
computer glitch, it turned out. Baldick watched the
Bush lead wither with each new report. 

By the time Gore pulled up to the memorial, he was
trailing statewide by fewer than 2,000 votes. 

Gore called Bush again, and the conversation went
something like this: 

"Circumstances have changed dramatically since I first
called you," Gore told him. "The state of Florida is
too close to call." 

"Are you saying what I think you're saying?" Bush
asked. "Let me make sure I understand. You're calling
back to retract your concession?" 

"You don't have to be snippy about it," said Gore. 

Bush responded that the networks had already called
the result and that the numbers were correct-his
brother Jeb had told him. 

"Your little brother," Gore replied, "is not the
ultimate authority on this." 

None of these irregularities would be addressed by the
automatic recount, which at best would merely check
the totals of successfully cast votes. Manual recounts
would be needed to judge the more questionable votes. 

James Baker, another ex-secretary of state, dug in
like a pit bull. Unlike [Warren] Christopher and
company, Baker spoke to the press loudly and often,
and his message was Bush had won on November 7. Any
further inspection would result only in "mischief."
Privately, however, he knew that at the start he was
on shaky political ground. "We're getting killed on
'count all the votes,'" he told his team. "Who the
hell could be against that?" 

Baker saw his chance that Thursday, November 9, when
the Gore team made a formal request for a manual
recount in four counties: Volusia, Palm Beach,
Broward, and Miami-Dade. Asking for a recount in these
large, Democrat-dominated counties left the Gore team
fatally vulnerable to the charge that they wanted not
all votes counted, as Gore kept claiming in his
stentorian tones, but only all Gore votes. Yet the
Bush team knew full well that Gore could not have
asked for a statewide recount, because there was no
provision for it in Florida law. A losing candidate
had 72 hours to request a manual recount on a
county-by-county basis or wait until the election was
certified to pursue a statewide recount. 

The automatic recount was finished on November 9, and
for the Bush team the news was sobering. Though many
of Florida's 67 counties "recounted" merely by looking
at their previous tallies, Bush's lead had shrunk from
1,784 votes to 327. Gore votes, it seemed, were
everywhere. 

Sure enough, the Bush campaign asked the Court to stay
the decision and halt the recount. In a highly unusual
move, Scalia urged his colleagues to grant the stay
immediately, even before receiving Gore's response.
Gore had been narrowing Bush's lead, and his campaign
expected that by Monday he would pull ahead. But
Scalia was convinced that all the manual recounts were
illegitimate. He told his colleagues such recounts
would cast "a needless and unjustified cloud" over
Bush's legitimacy. It was essential, he said, to shut
down the process immediately. The clerks were amazed
at how baldly Scalia was pushing what they considered
his own partisan agenda. 

In the meantime, the conservative justices began
sending around memos to their colleagues, each of them
offering a different rationale for ruling in Bush's
favor; to the liberal clerks, it was apparent that the
conservatives had already decided the case and were
merely auditioning arguments. So eager was the
majority to stop the recount, one clerk recalls, that
Stevens had to plead for more time to complete his
dissent. 

Finally, shortly before three o'clock, the Court
granted the stay. No more votes would be counted. 

But to the liberal clerks it was all over. The brother
of a Ginsburg clerk, who covered legal affairs for The
Wall Street Journal, had learned that the paper would
soon report how, at a party on Election Night,
O'Connor was overheard expressing her dismay over
Gore's apparent victory. Once that information became
public, the liberal clerks felt, O'Connor would have
to step aside. When, on the night before the Court
convened, she sent out a sealed memo to each of her
colleagues, those clerks hoped this had actually come
to pass. In fact, she was merely stating that she,
too, felt the Florida Supreme Court had improperly
usurped the state legislature's power. 

O'Connor railed against what she suggested was the
stupidity of Florida's voters, who were too dumb or
too clumsy to puncture their ballots properly. "Well,
why isn't the standard the one that voters are
instructed to follow, for goodness' sake?" she asked.
"I mean, it couldn't be clearer." Boies tried to
explain that for more than 80 years Florida's courts
had in fact focused on the intent of the voter rather
than the condition of his ballot, but this was one
instance for the Rehnquist Court in which deference to
the states, and precedent, didn't matter. 

Sensing trouble, the Bush camp gave her [Katherine
Harris] a "minder": Mac Stipanovich, a coolly
efficient Republican lobbyist who worked in
Tallahassee. Stipanovich had served as a campaign
adviser for Jeb in his first, unsuccessful run for
governor, in 1994, and he had remained closely aligned
with him ever since. Stipanovich appealed to Harris's
grandiosity. He told her that nothing less than the
course of history rested on her shoulders. "You have
to bring this election in for a landing," he repeated
again and again. 

On Friday, November 10, three of Gore's four target
counties-Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach-which all
used punch-card voting machines, started to weigh
whether to conduct manual recounts of, at first, 1
percent of their ballots, and then, if the results
were dramatic, the other 99 percent. At issue were
"undervotes," meaning blank or incompletely filled-out
ballots. While totally blank ballots could hardly be
counted, what about, in the case of the punch-card
machines, ballots where the puncher, or stylus, hadn't
quite gone through? 

In those counties using optiscan machines, manual
recounts also had to consider "overvotes," where
voters appeared to have cast more than one vote in a
contest. (In 2000, a majority of Florida's counties-41
of 67-had optiscans. A voter filled in ovals next to
his candidates of choice on a paper ballot and then
fed it into the optiscan, which looked rather like a
street-corner mailbox. The ballot was then recorded
electronically.) No one would dispute that some
overvotes had to be put aside-when, for example, a
voter had filled in the ovals next to Bush's name as
well as Gore's. But some voters had filled in the Gore
oval and then written "Al Gore" next to it. Should
those ballots be nixed? For that matter, a stray
pencil mark on an otherwise properly filled-in ballot
would cause the ballot to be rejected as an overvote
by an optiscan voting machine. Shouldn't these all be
examined, since the gold standard of Florida election
law was voter intent? There were, in all, 175,000
overvotes and undervotes. 

Harris and Stipanovich couldn't tell the four target
counties how to do their l percent recounts-at least,
not directly. But they could, and did, send a young,
strawberry-blonde lawyer named Kerey Carpenter to
offer help to Palm Beach County's three- person
canvassing board. According to the board's chairman,
Judge Charles Burton, Carpenter mentioned she was a
lawyer, but not that she was working for Katherine
Harris. 

At one point, when the recount had produced 50 new
Gore votes, Burton, after talking to Carpenter,
declared the counting would have to start again with a
more stringent standard-the punched-out paper chad had
to be hanging by one or two of its four corners. By
this stricter standard, Gore's vote gain dropped to
half a dozen. Carpenter also encouraged Burton to seek
a formal opinion from Harris as to what grounds would
justify going to a full manual recount. Burton happily
complied. 

That Monday, November 13, Harris supplied the opinion.
No manual recount should take place unless the voting
machines in question were broken. Within hours, a
judge overruled her, declaring the recounts could
proceed as planned. Harris countered by saying she
would stop the clock on recounts the next day,
November 14, at 5 p.m.-before Palm Beach and
Miami-Dade had even decided whether to recount, and
before Broward had finished the recount it had
embarked upon. (Only Volusia, far smaller than the
other three counties, was due to finish its recount by
November 14, in time to be counted on Harris's
schedule.) 

James Baker, the Bush team's consigliere, issued a
public threat after the Florida Supreme Court's
maddening decision. If necessary, he implied,
Florida's leading Republican legislator, incoming
House Speaker Tom Feeney, would take matters into his
own hands. What Feeney proposed, on Tuesday, November
21, was to vote in a slate of electors pledged to
George W. Bush-no matter what. Since both the state
House and Senate were Republican-dominated, he could
pass a bill to do that. 

In Miami-Dade that week, a manual recount of
undervotes began to produce a striking number of new
votes for Gore. There, as in Palm Beach and Broward,
fractious Democratic and Republican lawyers were
challenging every vote the canvassing board decided.
In Miami-Dade, Kendall Coffey, tall and gaunt, was the
Democrats' eyes and ears. As the Gore votes
accumulated, he recalls, "panic buttons were being
pushed." 

On Wednesday, November 22, the canvassing board made
an ill-fated decision to move the counting up from the
18th floor of the Clark Center, where a large number
of partisan observers had been able to view it, to the
more cloistered 19th floor. Angry shouts rang out, and
so began the "Brooks Brothers riot." 

Several dozen people, ostensibly local citizens [but
really DeLay Congressional staffer loyalists], began
banging on the doors and windows of the room where the
tallying was taking place, shouting, "Stop the count!
Stop the fraud!" They tried to force themselves into
the room and accosted the county Democratic Party
chairman, accusing him of stealing a ballot. A
subsequent report by The Washington Post would note
that most of the rioters were Republican operatives
[organized by Tom DeLay and a shady, ubiquitous GOP
operative named Roger Stone], many of them
congressional staffers. 

Elections supervisor David Leahy would say that the
decision to stop counting undervotes had nothing to do
with the protest, only with the realization that the
job could not be completed by the Florida Supreme
Court's deadline of November 26. Yet the board had
seemed confident, earlier, that it could meet the
deadline, and the decision to stop counting occurred
within hours of the protest. 

The day before Thanksgiving, the Bush campaign turned
to the United States Supreme Court. Claiming that the
situation in Florida had degenerated into a "circus,"
it asked the high court to stop everything, and cited
two highly technical federal issues for it to
consider. The first, based on an obscure law from
1887, prohibited states from changing the rules after
the date of that election. The second, a
jurisdictional issue, was that by stepping into the
case the Florida Supreme Court had usurped the Florida
legislature's exclusive powers to set the procedures
for selecting electors, as provided for by Article II
of the United States Constitution. The Bush lawyers
claimed, too, that the selective recounts violated
constitutional guarantees of due process and equal
protection-meaning the different criteria for
recounting the ballots did not give equal rights to
all voters. 

Bush's petition for certiorari-that is, for the Court
to take the case-went initially to Justice Anthony
Kennedy, whose task it was to consider all emergency
motions from Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. Batting
aside a Thanksgiving Day plea from the Gore campaign
to pass on the case, Kennedy urged his colleagues to
take it on, suggesting that the Court was absolutely
the essential arbiter of such weighty matters. 

When Kennedy's memo circulated, one flabbergasted
clerk had to track down Justice John Paul Stevens on
the golf course in Florida and read it to him over the
phone. Under the Court's rules, Kennedy needed only
three votes beside his own for the Court to hear the
matter. Quickly, the four others who make up the
Court's conservative block signed on: Chief Justice
William Rehnquist, along with Justices Antonin Scalia,
Clarence Thomas, and Sandra Day O'Connor. In an
unsigned order the day after Thanksgiving, the Court
agreed to consider the two more technical arguments,
spurning the equal-protection claim, and set down an
extraordinarily expedited calendar. Normally,
arguments are scheduled many months in advance. Now
briefs were due the following Tuesday, with oral
arguments set for December 1-only a week away. Clerks
and justices scotched their vacations and stuck close
to the Court; Scalia's clerks ended up having
Thanksgiving dinner together. The clerks for the
liberal justices watched the events unfold with
dismay. 

The liberal clerks were pessimistic. Why, they asked,
would a majority of the Court agree to consider the
Florida ruling unless they wanted it overturned and
the recount shut down? 

Certainly, that was what the justices who'd opposed
taking the case believed. Convinced the majority would
reverse the Florida court, they began drafting a
dissent even before the case was argued in
court.Certainly, that was what the justices who'd
opposed taking the case believed. Convinced the
majority would reverse the Florida court, they began
drafting a dissent even before the case was argued in
court. It was long -- about 30 pages -- and elaborate,
written principally by Justice Stevens, then 80, the
most senior of the would-be dissenters and, largely by
default, the Court's most liberal member, even though
a Republican, President Gerald R. Ford, had appointed
him. With the assistance of Justices Stephen Breyer,
David Souter, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stevens laid
out why the Court should never have accepted the case.


At a dinner on November 29, attended by clerks from
several chambers, an O'Connor clerk said that O'Connor
was determined to overturn the Florida decision and
was merely looking for the grounds. In this instance,
one clerk recalls, "she thought the Florida court was
trying to steal the election and that they had to stop
it." 

In 2000, as in most years, that system surrounded
Kennedy with true believers, all belonging to the
Federalist Society, the farm team of the legal right.
"He had four very conservative, Federalist Society
white guys, and if you look at the portraits of law
clerks on his wall, that's true 9 times out of 10,"
another liberal law clerk recalls. "They were by far
the least diverse group of clerks." 

It was unusual, then, for a conservative clerk to
visit the chambers of a justice on the other side. But
that is what Kevin Martin, a clerk for Scalia, did on
November 30 when he stopped by Stevens's chambers.
Martin had gone to Columbia Law School with a Stevens
clerk named Anne Voigts; he thought that connection
could help him to bridge the political divide and to
explain that the conservative justices had legitimate
constitutional concerns about the recount. But to two
of Voigts's co-clerks, Eduardo Penalver and Andrew
Siegel, Martin was on a reconnaissance mission, trying
to learn which grounds for reversing the Florida court
Stevens would consider the most palatable. They felt
they were being manipulated, and things quickly turned
nasty. "Fuck off!" Martin finally told them before
storming out of the room. 

Once the arguments were over, the justices met for
their usual conference. At the poles were Stevens and
Scalia-the one wanting to butt out of the case
altogether and let the political process unfold, the
other wanting to overturn the Florida Supreme Court
and, effectively, to call the election for Bush. But
neither had the votes. Eager to step back from a
constitutional abyss, convinced the matter could be
resolved in Florida, the Court punted. Rehnquist began
drafting a ruling simply asking the Florida Supreme
Court to clarify its decision: whether it had based
its ruling on the state constitution, which the Bush
team had said was improper, or had acted under state
statute, which was arguably permissible. 

By December 4, all nine justices had signed on to the
chief justice's opinion. The unanimity was, in fact, a
charade; four of the justices had no beef at all with
the Florida Supreme Court, while at least four others
were determined to overturn it. But this way each side
could claim victory: the liberal-to-moderate justices
had spared the Court a divisive and embarrassing vote
on the merits, one they'd probably have lost anyway.
As for the conservatives, by eating up Gore's
clock-Gore's lawyers had conceded that everything had
to be resolved by December 12-they had all but killed
his chances to prevail, and without looking needlessly
partisan in the process. With the chastened Florida
court unlikely to intervene again, the election could
now stagger to a close, with the Court's reputation
intact, and with Bush all but certain to win. 

On Friday, December 8, however, the Florida Supreme
Court confounded everyone by jumping back into the
fray. By a vote of four to three, it ordered a
statewide recount of all undervotes: the more than
61,000 ballots that the voting machines, for one
reason or another, had missed. The court was silent on
what standard would be used-hanging vs. pregnant
chads-and so each county, by inference, would set its
own. 

Sure enough, the Bush campaign asked the Court to stay
the decision and halt the recount. In a highly unusual
move, Scalia urged his colleagues to grant the stay
immediately, even before receiving Gore's response.
Gore had been narrowing Bush's lead, and his campaign
expected that by Monday he would pull ahead. But
Scalia was convinced that all the manual recounts were
illegitimate. He told his colleagues such recounts
would cast "a needless and unjustified cloud" over
Bush's legitimacy. It was essential, he said, to shut
down the process immediately. The clerks were amazed
at how baldly Scalia was pushing what they considered
his own partisan agenda. 

Rehnquist moved up the conference he'd scheduled for
the next day from 1 in the afternoon to 10 that
morning. In the meantime, the conservative justices
began sending around memos to their colleagues, each
of them offering a different rationale for ruling in
Bush's favor; to the liberal clerks, it was apparent
that the conservatives had already decided the case
and were merely auditioning arguments. 

This time, there would be no papering over the
divisions. Arrayed against the five conservative
justices wishing to stop the recount were their four
colleagues, who'd voted initially not to hear the
case. Justice Stevens would write for them; so eager
was the majority to stop the recount, one clerk
recalls, that Stevens had to plead for more time to
complete his dissent. What he wrote-that "counting
every legally cast vote cannot constitute irreparable
harm"- so provoked Scalia that, as eager as he was to
halt the recount, he delayed things by dashing off an
angry rejoinder, largely reiterating what he'd told
the justices the previous night. "Count first, and
rule upon legality afterwards, is not a recipe for
producing election results that have the public
acceptance democratic stability requires," he argued,
forecasting that a majority of the Court would
ultimately rule in Bush's favor on the merits. 

"The Court had worked hard to claim a moral high
ground, but at that moment he pissed it away," one
recalls. "He'd [Scalia] made our case for us to the
public about how crassly partisan the whole thing
was." Scalia's opinion held up release of the order
for an hour. Finally, shortly before three o'clock,
the Court granted the stay. No more votes would be
counted. Oral arguments were set for the following
Monday, December 11. 

When Gore's lawyers came to the Supreme Court for oral
arguments on the morning of December 11, they felt
that the Bush team's jurisdictional argument, that the
Florida Supreme Court had overstepped its bounds, was
a loser because it emasculated one appellate court
more than any other appellate court would ever want to
condone. And, though they didn't know it, Justice
Kennedy agreed with them. In a memo circulated shortly
before he took the bench, he endorsed what O'Connor
had written the night before, but declared that it
would not be enough: to carry the day, he argued, the
conservative justices needed to assert that evaluating
ballots under different standards in the various
counties violated the equal-protection clause. 

Up to now, this argument had received scant attention
from the clerks, the litigants, or even the
justices-and understandably so. Even in the best of
circumstances, voting procedures were riddled with
inconsistencies, beginning with the use of systems of
wildly varying reliability, such as punch cards and
optiscan machines, in different jurisdictions. Voters,
often poor or black, in counties with older machines
were far less likely to have their votes counted than
those in wealthier jurisdictions, and nobody ever
heard a peep from the Supreme Court about
unconstitutionality. Moreover, the Rehnquist Court had
always stingily construed the equal-protection clause
of the 14th Amendment, enacted after the Civil War to
protect freed slaves, applying it only when
discrimination was systematic, blatant, intentional,
incontrovertible. It was not surprising, then, that
the Court had originally declined to hear arguments on
the point, or that, when they returned to the Court,
Bush's lawyers had given those arguments only 5 pages
in a 50-page brief. 

But here was Kennedy dusting it off. And not as some
academic exercise, but as the very basis of the
Court's decision. The Court already had its majority.
Now it had its rationale. 

O'Connor railed against what she suggested was the
stupidity of Florida's voters, who were too dumb or
too clumsy to puncture their ballots properly. "Well,
why isn't the standard the one that voters are
instructed to follow, for goodness' sake?" she asked.
"I mean, it couldn't be clearer." Boies tried to
explain that for more than 80 years Florida's courts
had in fact focused on the intent of the voter rather
than the condition of his ballot, but this was one
instance for the Rehnquist Court in which deference to
the states, and precedent, didn't matter. 

Breyer and Souter saw Kennedy's new focus on equal
protection as an opportunity, suggesting during oral
argument that if there were problems with the fairness
of the recount the solution was simple: send the case
back once more to the Florida Supreme Court and ask it
to set a uniform standard. Breyer, whose chambers were
next door to Kennedy's, went to work on him
personally. An affable and engaging man, Breyer has
long been the moderates' most effective emissary to
the Court's right wing. But the politicking went both
ways; at one point, Kennedy stopped by Breyer's
chambers and said he hoped Breyer would join his
opinion. "We just kind of looked at him like he was
crazy-'We don't know what you're smoking, but leave us
alone'-and he went away," a clerk recalls. 

Given the approaching deadline, Rehnquist decreed
after oral arguments that any decision to send the
case back to Florida had to be handed down
immediately; were the Court to reverse, time would
cease to matter, and the decision could wait a day.
Stevens banged out a one-paragraph opinion, remanding
the case to Florida, and sent it around. "It seemed
like a Hail Mary to me," recalls a clerk in one of the
conservative chambers. There were no takers. The Court
was going to reverse, and throughout Monday evening
and into Tuesday morning the two sides drafted and
circulated their proposed opinions. Rehnquist was
writing what he thought would be the majority opinion,
reversing the Florida court on both the jurisdictional
and equal-protection grounds. Stevens was drafting the
principal dissent; it would reiterate what he'd
written in the unused dissent from the first round,
but shorn of all legalese, in order to be easily
understood by ordinary people. It chastised the Court
for holding the justices of the Florida Supreme Court
up to ridicule. "Although we may never know with
complete certainty the identity of the winner of this
year's Presidential election, the identity of the
loser is perfectly clear," it stated. "It is the
Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial
guardian of the rule of law." 

The other dissenters would join Stevens, but had their
own points to make. Because they, too, believed the
case would hinge primarily on the autonomy of the
Florida legislature, they dealt only secondarily, and
peripherally, with the equal-protection argument.
Stevens and Ginsburg denied that it applied at all.
For better or worse, Ginsburg wrote, disparities were
a part of all elections; if there were any
equal-protection concerns at all, she wrote, they
surely applied more to black voters, noting a New York
Times report that a disproportionate number of blacks
had encountered problems voting. Though racial
questions already hung over the Florida vote, hers was
to be the only reference to race in any of the
opinions, and it was relegated to a footnote. But to
the liberal clerks, these issues needed to be
acknowledged, and a footnote was better than nothing
at all. 

As the drafts began circulating, tempers began to
fray. In an unusual sealed memo-an unsuccessful
attempt to avoid the clerks' prying eyes-Scalia
complained about the tone of some of the dissents. He
was, he confessed, the last person to criticize
hard-hitting language, but never had he, as the
dissenters were now doing, urged the majority to
change its decision based on its impact on the Supreme
Court's credibility. He charged that his opponents in
the case were inflicting the very wounds to the Court
that they had supposedly decried. As Jeffrey Toobin
first reported, he objected in particular to what he
called the "Al Sharpton footnote" in Ginsburg's
dissent: her comment on Florida's disenfranchised
black voters. Whether out of timidity, collegiality,
or affection-Scalia was her closest friend on the
Court-Ginsburg promptly took it out. "It was the most
classic example of what kind of bully Scalia is," says
one clerk, who called Scalia's complaint "an attempt
to stifle legitimate discourse worthy of Joe
McCarthy." As for Ginsburg, this clerk says her
response "showed a lack of courage." 

Despite their loyalty to their justices-a striking,
filial-like phenomenon among most clerks-several
concede that the dissenters in Bush v. Gore were
simply outmaneuvered. Never did the four of them have
the votes to prevail. But first by endorsing a
decision suggesting that the Florida Supreme Court had
overstepped its bounds, then by appearing to buttress
the majority's equal-protection claims, the dissenters
had aided and abetted the enemy. "They gave just
enough cover to the five justices and their defenders
in the press and academia so that it was impossible to
rile up the American people about these five
conservative ideologues stealing the election," one
clerk complains. In the meantime, Bush's lead had
diminished to 154 votes 

(End of edited material from October, 2004, Vanity
Fair Article. Italics were inserted by BuzzFlash.com.
Subscribe to Vanity Fair by going to
http://www.vanityfair.com/) 

So here was a damning indictment that revealed, from
inside participants, that a right wing judicial coup
had stolen a Presidential election -- and that Nino
Scalia had played the role of a ward hack who would
stop at nothing to install his candidate, whatever the
will of the voters. 

How did the mainstream press respond? With virtually
deafening silence and some ridicule. 

The Washington Post, in its "Style Section" on Sunday,
October 17th, ran an article that was laughably
ludicrous, if the issue of the theft of democracy had
not been at stake. It was headlined, "In Court's
Breach, a Provocative Precedent." 

Did the story discuss how legal scholars were
expressing outrage at the conduct of the felonious
five? 

No. This is what the Post article had to say: 

Lawyers are buzzing -- but the buzz centers less on
the article's content than the fact that some of the
brilliant, ambitious young men and women who work for
the justices broke their vow of silence. 

"Since 'The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court' [the
1979 Supreme Court exposé by Bob Woodward and Scott
Armstrong], I don't think there has been another case
where law clerks spoke so openly to the press about
the inner workings of the court," says Noah Feldman, a
professor of law at New York University and ex-clerk
for Justice David H. Souter. "I'm shocked." 

Roll back the tape please, "Lawyers are buzzing -- but
the buzz centers less on the article's content than
the fact that some of the brilliant, ambitious young
men and women who work for the justices broke their
vow of silence." 

The Vanity Fair article was 23422 words in length on
how five justices were the only voters that ended up
deciding an American election for president -- and the
Washington Post says that the content of the story
didn't matter. Good lord, "No!", what's really
shocking, the Post wants us to believe, is that some
law clerks revealed the workings of a crime against
democracy and violated their Supreme Court "honor" by
telling the truth!  In short, if you see a felony
being committed against America, don't come forth as a
witness, but honor the Federalist Society/Bush code of
Omerta. 

The mainstream media in America today could work for
that funny looking guy running North Korea and not
miss a beat. 

Democracy, voting, content -- none of this matters
anymore. All that matters is loyalty to the status quo
of a radical right wing regime. Think Franco. Think
Pinochet. Think Stalin. All totalitarian regimes
require the same kind of press, one that lies on its
back and takes dictation -- and then publishes it with
the official spin. 

What does all this mean? 

That most Americans, except for people like our
beloved BuzzFlash readers, "got over" the theft of the
2000 election and the felony committed against
democracy, only to give the criminals four years to
create the ability to systemically define and steal
the election. There was no one way that the Bush
Barbary Pirates took the Presidency this November. It
was through a multi-pronged strategy, of which the
snagging of Ken Blackwell as Ohio Katherine's Harris
was a key element, but hardly the only dirty trick. We
don't know who Blackwell's Mac Stipanovich was, but we
do know that this heist of the American election was
four years in the making. 

A bastard presidency couldn't win a free and
transparent election. It systemically stole this one
through fear, character assassination, and a wide
range of dirty tricks before and at the polls,
including the likely manipulation of electronic voting
machines in key states. 

The truth is that the valiant band of Democratic
Congressional Representatives led by Congressman
Conyers -- as well as the Green and Libertarian
Parties -- are carrying on the Spirit of '76 in
pursuing the voting irregularities in Ohio. 

But the theft of the 2004 election goes much deeper
than Ohio, although it was the linchpin electoral
state. It was widespread, systemic, and coordinated --
throughout the nation. 

But with a one-party government, who will investigate
the perpetrators of the crime against democracy redux,
when it is the perpetrators who hijacked our system of
government and who control the committees and
departments that could investigate, well, themselves? 

The news in America is now on six hour cycles. Each
day, we forget the morning's news by the afternoon. 

It is no wonder that so many have forgotten that four
years ago, the Supreme Court of the United States put
the nails in the coffin of democracy. It occurred in
the darkness of a winter Washington night on Tuesday,
December 12th, with an unprecedented 10 PM decision
release that elected George W. Bush president by a
vote of 5-4. 

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS


http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/121504Y.shtml

 Lawsuit against Rumsfeld Threatens U.S.-German
Relations
  Deutsche Welle

  Tuesday 14 December 2004 

  The Pentagon made thinly veiled threats on Monday,
suggesting US-German relations could be at risk if a
criminal complaint filed in German courts over Abu
Ghraib proceeds. 

  The Pentagon expressed concern Monday over a
criminal complaint filed in Germany against US Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other officials over the
Abu Ghraib prison scandal, warning that "frivolous
lawsuits" could affect the broader US-German
relationship.

  The complaint was filed in Berlin on Nov. 30 by the
New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR)
and Berlin's Republican Lawyers' Association on behalf
of four Iraqis who were alleged to have been
mistreated by US soldiers.

  Besides Rumsfeld, former CIA director George Tenet,
Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Steven
Cambone, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, Brigadier
General Janis 

  Karpinski and five other military officers who
served in Iraq were named in the complaint, which
seeks an investigation into their role in the prisoner
abuses at Abu Ghraib.

  U.S.-German Relations at Risk

  "Generally speaking, as is true anywhere, if these
kinds of lawsuits take place with American servicemen
in the cross-hairs, you bet it's something we take
seriously," said Lawrence DiRita, the Pentagon's
spokesman. "If you get an adventurous prosecutor who
might want to seize onto one of these frivolous
lawsuits, it could affect the broader relationship. I
think that's probably safe to say," he told AFP.

   Germany is home to some 70,000 US troops, many of
which have rotated into and out of Iraq from German
bases. Sanchez, the former US commander in Iraq, is
stationed in Germany as commander of the Army's 5th
Corps.

  Universal Jurisdiction for War Crimes

  The groups that filed the complaint said they had
chosen Germany because of its Code of Crimes Against
International Law, introduced in 2002, which grants
German courts universal jurisdiction in cases
involving war crimes or crimes against humanity.

  It also makes military or civilian commanders who
fail to prevent their subordinates from committing
such acts liable. DiRita said he did not know whether
the United States had raised specific concerns
directly with the German government. But he said, "I
think every government in the world, particularly a
NATO ally, understands the potential effect on
relations with the United States if these kinds of
frivolous lawsuits were ever to see the light of day."

  Similar Tussle with Belgium

  The United States clashed with Belgium last year
over a similar law that allowed war crimes charges to
be brought against retired General Tommy Franks
(photo), who led the US invasion of Iraq, as well as
numerous other international figures.

  The 1993 law empowered Belgian courts to judge
suspects accused of war crimes, crimes against
humanity and genocide, regardless of where the alleged
acts were committed, or the nationality of either the
accused or the victims.

  US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld threatened to
block funding for a new NATO headquarters in Belgium
over the law, and said the United States was
considering whether it would continue to send
officials to meetings in Brussels as long as the law
was in place.

  The Belgian parliament replaced the law with a
watered down version in August 2003 and its high court
threw out lawsuits against Franks, former president
George H.W. Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell and
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

  Indicating the US planned to play a similar game of
hardball with Germany, Rumsfeld has informed the
German government via the US embassy that he will not
take part in the annual Munich security conference in
February should the investigation proceed.

  -------
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml?type=entertainmentNews&storyID=638021

Bush monkey portrait sparks protests
Mon Dec 13, 2004 08:50 PM GMT 
Printer Friendly | Email Article | RSS        
 

  
By Larry Fine
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A portrait of President George W.
Bush using monkeys to form his image has led to the
closure of a New York art exhibition over the weekend
and anguished protests over freedom of expression.

"Bush Monkeys," a small acrylic on canvas by Chris
Savido, created the stir at the Chelsea Market public
space, leading the market's managers to close down the
60-piece show that was scheduled to stay up for the
next month.

The show featured art from the upcoming issue of
Animal Magazine, a quarterly publication featuring
emerging artists.

"We had tons of people, like more than 2,000 people
show up for the opening on Thursday night," said show
organizer Bucky Turco. "Then this manager saw the
piece and the guy just kind of flipped out. 'The show
is over. Get this work down or I'm gonna arrest you,'
he said. It's been kind of wild."

Turco took the show down on Saturday and moved the art
work to his small downtown Animal Gallery. Calls to
the management of Chelsea Market for comment were not
returned.

>From afar, the painting offers a likeness of Bush, but
when you get closer you see the image is made up of
chimpanzees or monkeys swimming in a marsh.

Savido, 23, said he was surprised by the strong
reaction to his painting, listed in the catalogue at
$3,500 (1,820 pounds).

"It seems like people got a kick out of it," Savido
said. "When they really see it, they almost do a
double-take. I like to get a reaction from people."

The Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-bred artist said he was
happy for all the attention paid to his work but said
the decision to shutter the exhibit was "a blatant act
of censorship."

Savido plans to auction the painting and donate
proceeds to an organization dedicated to freedom of
expression.

"This is much deeper than art. This is fundamental
American rights, freedom of speech," Savido said. "To
see that something like this can happen, especially in
a place like New York City is mind boggling and
scary." 

© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.