Bush v. Kerry in Election 2004
As bad as 2000 was, Election 2004 was worse because technology smoothed the way with electronic ease. Following the 2000 election, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) passed in 2002 as the first ever comprehensive electoral law designed to facilitate fraud. Hailed as a major advance, it, in fact, corrupts the process because of how it's abused. It ushered in the age of privatized voting — on touchtone electronic machines owned, programmed, operated and controlled by giant corporations with close Republican ties. Today, over 80% of all votes are cast and counted this way. Most states require no verifiable paper receipts, so it's easy to manipulate pre-arranged outcomes, and not just for president.
A record 16.8 million new voters registered for Election 2004 — most, according to surveys, for Kerry making him a heavy favorite when George Bush's approval rating hovered around 40%, and most voters believed the country was headed in the wrong direction. At the time, Zogby International reported that no president since Harry Truman won a second term with a below-50% rating. Yet (officially) Bush got 11.6 million more votes than in 2000 and beat Kerry by a comfortable three million margin. It was much closer in the Electoral College (286 - 251), and again Florida (and Ohio) made the difference.
As in 2000, extensive fraud explained things with Greg Palast again doing first-rate investigative work. So did activist, media critic and Professor of Media Ecology Mark Crispin Miller in his superb book Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform. In 2007, it came out in paperback with 100 new pages for added insight into our electoral problems:
- it exposed denial in the progressive media — publications like The Nation, Mother Jones, TomPaine.com and Salon that saw "no evidence" of electoral fraud when the work of Miller, Palast and others exposed loads of it;
- it showed the 2006 elections were just as fraudulent at a time independent surveys indicated a huge Democrat sweep; yet they only gained 31 House seats for a majority and five in the Senate for a 49 - 49 tie along with two independents — Bernie Sanders allied with Democrats and Joe Lieberman with Republicans plus Vice-President Cheney as tie-breaker if needed;
- it documented how Ohio was stolen much like Florida in 2000 and again in 2004 with electronic-voting-machine ease plus an array of other practices that betray a rigged process (and that's Miller's purpose for his book: a plea for reform with practical ideas like banning electronic voting, returning to verifiable paper ballots, and placing civil servants in charge of elections, not partisan politicians or self-serving corporations. Short of that, future elections will be predictable. "The election of 2008 will be (like) 2004 — and a preview of 2012, 2016, 2020 and every 'presidential race' thereafter," according to Miller. Who can disagree based on clear evidence since 2000 alone.)
Post-election, Kerry told Miller he knew that Republicans stole the election and denied him the presidency. He then claimed he never said it, putting him strongly in the business as usual camp with electoral and other progressive reforms off the table. Miller called his response "an irrational refusal to confront, or even to perceive, a clear and present danger to American democracy." Like Gore in 2000, he quit without a fight but didn't wait as long to do it. He conceded on November 3, less than 24 hours after the previous day's election.
Sourcewatch.org documented a sampling of some "deeply troubling" 2004 practices:
- the major media blackout (and too much of it from progressive sources);
- nearly half the six million American voters living or expected to be abroad never received requested absentee ballots, or got them too late; military personnel, likely to vote Republican, had no such problems;
- the Republican National Committee hired consulting firm Sproul & Associates to register voters in six battleground states; they reportedly refused to register Democrats;
- malfunctioning New Mexico voting machines wiped out 20,000 votes to let Bush carry the state by a 5988 margin;
- faulty voting equipment spoiled one million or more ballots; Greg Palast reported "over three million votes cast but never counted" broken down as follows:
- rejected provisional ballots (for registered voters unlisted on rolls) - 1,090,729;
- rejected spoiled ballots (ones malfunctioning machines didn't count) - 1,389,231;
- uncounted absentee ballots (for minor technical reasons) - 526,420; and
- registered voters barred from voting (alleged ex-felons, blacks, Latinos, and others in Democrat counties) — no precise number known nationwide but it was easily in the hundreds of thousands.
Palast also reported that a US Census voter turnout announcement (seven months after the election) confirmed (in a footnote) that 3.4 million fewer votes were cast than the "official" Clerk of the House of Representatives tally — telling evidence of voter disenfranchisement.
Sourcewatch.org further reported:
- exit polls in 30 states deviated from final results by amounts far beyond margins of error; in all but four states, discrepancies favored Bush; it's widely acknowledged that exit polling is the most reliable predictor of final results; not in 2004 with Ohio Exhibit A:
- tens of thousands of eligible voters were illegally purged from the rolls;
- Democrat registration cards weren't processed;
- 357,000 voters, overwhelmingly Democrat, were prevented form voting or their votes weren't counted; Bush's Ohio "victory" margin was 118,599 — clear proof he lost and Kerry carried the state and the election;
- there were too few Democrat precincts, and they got fewer voting machines than Republican ones; as a result, people waited up to 12 hours to vote; some gave up and went home; others were denied and told they were at the wrong precinct;
- evidence that over 80,000 Kerry votes went for Bush, and most disturbing of all that
- one in every four Ohio registrants showing up to vote discovered they weren't listed on the rolls because of Republican Secretary of State and co-chair of Bush's re-election committee Kenneth Blackwell's purging.
These and other practices were rampant in Ohio, Florida and around the country in key battleground and other states:
- the Republican National Committee's Voter Outreach of America collected thousands of Nevada voter registration forms; Republican ones were turned in to public officials; those for Democrats were destroyed;
- too few voting machines were in Democrat precincts, and many of them malfunctioned or broke down; in Republican precincts, voting went smoothly;
- some Democrat precinct polling stations never opened; others opened late and closed early;
- Republican-funded agitators were deployed in key Democrat precincts; they intimidated voters with unfounded threats of imminent arrest for failure to pay child support, unpaid parking tickets, and other false accusations;
- key Republican counties recorded impossibly high turnouts — up to 98% and in some cases higher than the number of registered voters; in Democrat ones, the reverse was true — as low as 7%;
It showed democracy in America is pure fantasy, but you'd never know it from major media reports — and too many reports from sources that should know better.
