Will the GOP Election Theft Machine Do It Again in 2008?

Will the GOP election theft machine do it again in 2008?

By Harvey Wasserman

Created Oct 21 2007 - 10:28am

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman

With record low approval ratings for the Bush/Cheney regime and the

albatross of an unpopular war hanging from the GOP's neck, do you think that

a Democratic presidential candidate will win the White House, get us out of

Iraq, and end our long national nightmare?

Think again - the mighty election theft machine Karl Rove used to steal the

US presidency in 2000 and 2004 may be under attack, but it is still in place

for the upcoming 2008 election.

With his usual devious mastery, Rove has seized upon the national outrage

sparked by his electoral larceny and used it as smokescreen while he makes

the American electoral system even MORE unfair, and even EASIER to rig. Thus

the administration has fired federal attorneys when they would not

participate in a nationwide campaign to deny minorities and the poor their

access to the polls. It has spent millions of taxpayer dollars to install

electronic voting machines that can be "flipped" with a few keystrokes. And

under the guise of "reforming" our busted electoral system, it is setting us

up for another presidential theft in 2008.

Thus it should come as no surprise that our exclusive investigations into

the firings of eight federal prosecutors who refused to execute Rove's plans

for massive disenfranchisement of Democratic voters reveal a pattern of

illegalities and fraud aimed at reducing the number of minority, poor and

young voters at the core of Democratic support. In the wake of major news

breaks, two felony convictions have come from the rigging of the illegal

Ohio 2004 vote count and recount that gave George W. Bush a second

illegitimate term. Stunning new admissions from county election boards that

illegally destroyed voter records will almost certainly lead to new

convictions. And the multi-million-dollar electronic voting machine scam

that made possible the biggest electoral frauds in US history is under

massive new attack, with key states moving to scrap the machines altogether

in a desperate attempt to restore American democracy - but with the job far

from done.

Rove, Ney and the undead

Indeed, the Rovian theft engine is far from dead. The media groundwork has

already been laid out for the Republicans to claim that hordes of illegal

aliens have registered to vote. The Bush administration has been caught

ordering public agencies - possibly in violation of the law - to cease

registering voters. In an April, 2006 speech to the Republican National

Lawyers Association, Rove openly alluded to the strategy of demanding photo

ID and purging voter roles of poor, minority voters just as had been done in

2000 and 2004. And, as always with Bush/Rove, there is much more beneath the

surface.

All that has happened to challenge the GOP death grip on the American vote

count has been reported in the pages of Hustler and on the internet at

freepress.org, bradblog and elsewhere, and is being seized upon by a

national grassroots movement determined to restore American democracy next

year.

Nowhere has that movement been more in evidence than with the high profile

firestorm surrounding Bush administration Attorney General Alberto Gonzales'

firing of eight federal prosecutors without legitimate cause.

Evidence continues to surface from throughout the United States about this

blatant Bush abuse of executive power. But we have traced the roots of the

firings to an obscure Congressional hearing held at the statehouse in

Columbus, Ohio, on March 21, 2005, and to a shadowy GOP operative named Mark

F. "Thor" Hearne.

The hearing was conducted by none other than former US Rep. Bob Ney (R-18th

OH). The once-powerful Ohio Congressman (who is now behind bars) was the

godfather of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), the national boondoggle that

mandated electronic voting machines for the American electoral process.

That the machines would cost taxpayers billions was a big plus for Ney. They

would come from Diebold and other companies that poured money into

Republican coffers. Thanks largely to the manipulations of disgraced

lobbyist Jack Abramoff, these e-voting machine companies would help

guarantee the GOP's ability to steal elections.

Ney's hearing featured a marquee appearance by J. Kenneth Blackwell, the

Secretary of State responsible for delivering Ohio's decisive 2004 electoral

votes to Bush. Blackwell was a key operative for the Bush election campaign

in Florida in 2000 and co-chaired the Bush-Cheney 2004 re-election campaign

in Ohio.

"Haul butt!"

Congressional protocol required that Ney allow Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones

(D-Cleveland) to question Blackwell. Soon Blackwell and Jones were yelling

at each other in a legendary exchange that ended with Jones telling

Blackwell to "haul butt" out of the chamber.

Not quite so high profile was the ensuing testimony by Hearne, who

identified himself as the head of the American Center for Voting Rights.

Hearne is a long-time GOP dirty trickster, with a Rovian rap sheet dating to

the 1970s. He did not explain that the ACVR had a post box in a Dallas mall,

but no office, few staff, a board stacked with GOP operatives, no grassroots

mailing list or much else to confirm the functioning of a real organization.

Nor did Ney clarify that Hearne had served as election counsel to the

Bush-Cheney campaign, and had founded ACVR the previous month, at the urging

of Karl Rove.

While the press corps rushed to report the Jones-Blackwell dust-up, Hearne

laid out for Ney and the few of us left listening the essential template for

the new GOP strategy for disenfranchising millions of suspected Democrats

from voting in future elections. In classic Rovian terms, Hearne bemoaned a

litany of "voter fraud" abuses allegedly committed by the National

Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Association

for Communities Organizing for Reform Now (ACORN) and other multi-racial

coalitions working to register millions of new voters across the United

States.

Among other things, Hearne told Ney the voter registration campaigns were

using "crack cocaine" as an "incentive" for registering new voters. Adding

the AFL-CIO and ACT-Ohio to his list of evil-doers, Hearne warned that

millions of "fraudulent" ballots would be cast in future elections unless

something was done to curb the ability of ordinary citizens to vote without

extensive identification papers.

Hearne's testimony drew little press. But it has led directly to the

national Bush/Rove push for new laws requiring voters to show picture IDs at

the polls and other methods of mass disenfranchisement - and the firing of

eight US prosecutors who apparently refused to go along.

The cover-up

References to Hearne's ACVR have now mysteriously disappeared from the

internet. But the McClatchy Newspapers have reported that Hearne's ACVR and

the Republican Lawyers Association have actively campaigned - with a war

chest of at least $1.5 million - in at least nine battleground states. They

stump for voter ID laws and rigid registration restrictions and other

tactics aimed at radically reducing the ability of Democrat-leaning

organizations to register new voters.

The ACVR agenda embraces the Administration's illegal demand that public

agencies stop registering new, mostly poor voters. And the pressure to rid

our democracy of such voters has carried over to the offices of the nation's

federal prosecutors, even in the face of widespread investigations showing

the numbers of people illegally trying to register and vote have been

miniscule.

Emblematic of the firings is the case of David Iglesias of New Mexico.

Iglesias has testified to Congress that Albuquerque lawyer Patrick Rogers

pressured him to prosecute alleged vote fraud perpetrators. When he

resisted, Iglesias was fired by Gonzales.

Rogers is listed as "secretary" of Thor Hearne's American Center for Voting

Rights, as well as a former general counsel to the New Mexico Republican

Party.

Meanwhile, the Bush Justice Department's Civil Rights Division has reversed

its mandate by fighting to narrow rather than broaden the voting rights of

minorities, and to prosecute voter registration operations without just

cause. An ACVR director, Cameron Quinn, is now the Division's voting

counsel.

A key target has been Project Vote, which registered 1.5 million voters in

2004 and 2006. Five days before the 2006 election, Bush's interim US

attorney in Kansas City issued indictments against four ACORN workers under

contract with Project Vote. Prosecutions that close to election day have

traditionally been discouraged by the Justice Department. Acorn officials

had notified the federal officials when they noticed the doctored forms. But

ACVR's "job was to confuse the public about voter fraud and offer bogus

solutions to the problem," said Michael Slater, the deputy director of

Project Vote, They used "deception and faulty research" to help Rove's GOP.

The common denominator in the firings of the federal attorneys has been an

unwillingness to pursue prosecutions on the basis of such research.

Iglesias, for example, told Newsweek magazine he "had been repeatedly pushed

by New Mexico GOP officials to prosecute workers for ACORN" who were

registering voters.

Media missed it again

The media has missed what DID happen when the attorneys complied with the

Bush/Rove game plan. Just four days prior to the 2004 vote, Assistant

Attorney-General Alex Acosta, the civil rights chief of the Bush Justice

Department asked a federal judge in Ohio to sign off on policies that would

disenfranchise thousands of black voters. The move almost certainly had a

significant impact on Bush's subsequent victory in the Electoral College.

Joseph Rich, a former chief of the Justice Department's Voting Rights

Section, has called the Ohio scheme "vote caging," which is illegal.

The case arose when Republicans allegedly sent "caging" letters to thousands

of registered voters in inner city districts. The letters had "do not

forward" stamped on them, with a return receipt requested. When some 23,000

came back as undeliverable, GOP operatives demanded the right to get the

names removed from voter rolls. Acosta argued in his letter that restricting

such challenges would "undermine" the electoral process.

But an exclusive investigation by freepress.org found that at least 25% of

the people being removed from the voter rolls were in fact still living at

their registered address. Greg Palast has reported that the GOP deliberately

targeted black soldiers still fighting in Iraq.

Acosta says his letter endorsed the GOP challenges as "permissible" as long

as they were not racially motivated, and that anyone whose eligibility was

challenged could still get a provisional ballot.

But due to the actions of former Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell, more

than 16,000 provisional ballots from the 2004 election remain uncounted.

Independent observers have testified that thousands more may have been

discarded right at the polling stations. (Bush's official margin of victory

in Ohio was less than 119,000 votes.)

Robert Kengle, who served under Acosta at the Justice Department's Voting

Rights Section, says Acosta's unsolicited letter to the courts was

"cheerleading" for the GOP. "It was doubly outrageous," he said, "because

the allegation in the litigation was that these were overwhelmingly

African-American voters that were on the challenge list," precisely those

whose right to vote the Justice Department was charged to protect.

Acosta was not among the attorneys fired by Bush. In fact, he is now the

federal attorney in Miami.

Eyewitness testimony from throughout the state confirms that scores of GOP

activists did challenge voters in numerous inner city polling stations. Many

carried Blackberries and used sophisticated lists that may have included

those illegally garnered caging rosters. The challenges did lead to numerous

voters being turned away, and increased the long delays suffered by inner

city voters throughout the state.

Surveys show it took blacks nearly an hour to vote on average in Ohio in

2004, while whites voted in less than fifteen minutes. In the inner city of

Columbus, black voters waited between three and seven hours to vote, while

in the nearby suburb of Bexley it took just five minutes. The delays in

Columbus alone may have cost Kerry up to 60,000 votes.

Similar challenges were also endorsed by White House operative Tim Griffin,

who has been widely accused of trying to cage mostly black voters in

Florida. Rich says the scheme became public before the election, and the GOP

apparently dropped the idea.

But as he was firing the federal attorneys who refused to cage, Bush

appointed Griffin to be US attorney for Arkansas. Griffin has since resigned

the post under fire. But along with Ohio, the administration used similar

tactics in the key swing states of Florida and Pennsylvania, as well as in

Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Texas and Washington. Bush's Justice

Department also supported former California Secretary of State Bruce

McPherson's rejection of 20,000 voter registration forms, a move later

reversed in court. And it has helped push photo ID requirements - again

rejected in court - devised by Georgia to restrict black and poor voter

access.

A 35-year veteran of the Justice Department's Voting Right Sections, Rich

told the McClatchey papers that he quit over political appointees who

"skewed aspects of law enforcement in ways that clearly were intended to

influence the outcome of the elections." Thus Thor Hearne's original

blueprint for disenfranchising minorities and the poor is now established

administration policy, supported by Bush's Justice Department, and backed by

his firing of federal attorneys - illegal or otherwise - who refuse to go

along. Whether the Democrats in Congress do anything about it, and whether

the GOP successfully uses these tactics again in 2008, remain to be seen.

New cyber-thuggery

Alongside the Bush/Rove commitment to mass disenfranchisement, the key to

the outcome of the 2008 election may be the rise and incomplete fall of

electronic voting machines.

Unmonitorable DRE (Direct Record Electronic) voting machines have been

center stage at every Bush-era stolen election. In Florida 2000, some 16,000

votes that "disappeared" from Al Gore's tallies in Volusia County helped

turn the tide for Bush at a key election night moment, even though they were

later reinstated. In 2002, fraudulent electronic vote counts in Georgia

almost certainly deprived Vietnam war hero Max Cleland of his US Senate seat

in a race which all credible polls showed him winning by a substantial

margin.

The spread of DREs is at the core of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) pushed

through by then-Congressman (now jailbird) Bob Ney. High-powered studies

from the likes of the Government Accountability Office, the Brennan Center

on Voting Rights, the Carter-Baker Commission on Voting Rights, Princeton

University and US Representative John Conyers all conclude that DRE's can be

easily manipulated, with entire elections illicitly shifted by a few

keystrokes.

The GOPs HAVA means to put the nation on DREs as thoroughly as possible by

2008. But a public rebellion has slowed that plan. In Ohio, grassroots

campaigners stopped Blackwell from giving Diebold an unbid $100 million

contract to put virtually the entire state on DREs. Elsewhere, state and

local election boards rebelled against the high cost of maintaining the

machines, which often must be kept air conditioned around the clock,

resulting in huge electric bills. Programming and other costs make

administering elections on DREs far more expensive than doing it on paper

ballots. The DREs have become infamous because of widespread testimony in

Ohio that 2004 voters were pushing John Kerry's name, only to see George

Bush's name light up, or to have their Kerry vote simply disappear moments

later.

In response to nationwide opposition, US Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ)

proposed federal legislation that would have forced all electronic voting

machines to be fitted with devices that would produce a paper trail. An

accredited scientist, Holt also wanted to force manufacturers to make public

the software that ran their machines.

Holt's proposed House Bill 811 divided the election protection movement,

much of which saw it as an endorsement of DREs. And as the bill progressed,

the GOP gutted it, killing the software transparency requirements and

settling for unworkable paper trail provisions.

The governors of Florida and Maryland have already moved to ban DREs in

2008, and to use paper ballots instead. Grassroots confrontations over how

to cast and count votes will rage right up to election day.

The need for electronic safeguards has been confirmed to the hilt by an

astonishing flood of revelations from Ohio. To report Ohio's 2004

election-night vote count, Blackwell contracted with the same GOP computer

programmer who created the Bush-Cheney web site in 2000. Those

GOP-programmed results were then run through servers housed in the basement

of a bank in Chattanooga, Tennessee which also housed the servers for the

Republican National Committee (through which Karl Rove ran his

off-the-record e-mails, now being sought by Congress).

Supervised by Blackwell, those results showed a substantial victory for John

Kerry until about 12:20 at night, when reporting inexplicably stopped. When

it resumed about 90 minutes later, Ohio's margin - and the presidency -

suddenly switched to Bush.

After the election, a citizen-based federal lawsuit (in which we are

attorney and plaintiff) was filed, aimed at preserving all of Ohio's 2004

election materials for further investigation. Those materials were protected

by federal law until September 2, 2006, when Blackwell intended to destroy

them. But a week prior, we won a federal court decision barring the counties

from destroying any of these materials. Ohio's new Secretary of State (SOS),

Jennifer Brunner, then ordered the boards of election to deliver this

evidence to her.

But in July 2007, 56 of Ohio's 88 county BOEs admitted to illegally

destroying all or some of their records. John M. Williams, Director of

Elections in Hamilton County (Cincinnati) told Brunner he was "...unable to

transfer the unvoted precinct ballots and soiled ballots" essential to an

accurate audit because they "...were inadvertently shredded between January

19th and 26th of '06 in an effort to make room for the new Hart voting

system."

In Clermont County, a key Republican stronghold permeated with election

irregularities, Director Mike Keeley told Brunner that "in interviewing the

staff, no one could remember the disposition of said ballots," meaning the

actual number of votes cast remains a mystery. In neighboring Butler County,

Director Betty L. McGary informed the SOS on May 9, 2007 that they had lost

the "ballot pages" thus making it impossible to confirm how votes were

counted.

Delaware County, where the last 359 votes cast in one precinct were all

counted for Bush, informed Brunner that they had 29 boxes of ballots, but

then delivered only 26. The Delaware BOE initially reported 1872 provisional

ballots, but the official number is now 1462, feeding suspicions the boxes

were stuffed.

Two election officials in Cleveland have thus far been convicted of felonies

stemming from rigged recount procedures after 2004. Now a solid majority of

Ohio's election boards face potential federal criminal action. They have

made a reliable reconstruction of the true 2004 outcome virtually

impossible.

Brunner has pledged to preside over a fair election in Ohio 2008. Like Debra

Bowen, California's new Secretary of State, Brunner is running extensive

tests on the state's electronic voting machines. Most or all of California

and Ohio's DREs could be gone by 2008, possibly to be replaced by paper

ballots counted by electronic scanners.

But even those are not immune to fraud. In 2004, Diebold technicians

provided inner city precincts with malfunctioning opti-scan machines.

Throughout the state, more than 90,000 ballots were never counted because of

voting machine malfunctions. At a mostly Democratic precinct in Toledo, poll

workers handed out pencils whose marks could not be read by the electronic

counters, thus voiding the votes cast there.

Overall, our nation's history has been filled with stolen elections. Most

have been robbed with paper ballots and stuffed ballot boxes. But under

Bush/Rove, electronics are at center stage.

High tech Tammany

Bush/Rove stole the 2000 and 2004 elections by intimidation, vote caging,

rigged machines, rigged recounts, and much more. Bush's firing of the eight

federal attorneys only underscores the fraud perpetrated by those who

weren't

fired.

Whether Congress gets to the bottom of those firings remains to be seen. But

there is little doubt the Democrats were able to retake the House and Senate

in 2006 only because of the increased vigilance of a national grassroots

voter protection movement.

Though Democrats carried Ohio in the off-year elections of 2006, our

research indicates that the GOP still stole as much as 12% of the vote, and

is still intent on disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of minority, poor

and young voters. In a single election in Franklin County in 2006, a

magistrate found that more than 83% of all the precincts were miscounted on

the DRE machines.

And though DRE machines are under intense attack, their presence in 2008

will still be substantial, and will still subject the election to GOP theft.

The lessons of 2000 and 2004 are in the terror imposed on the registration

process and the error perpetrated in the vote count. Only by saying "never

again" can Americans hope to see a return to actual democracy.

_______

About author Harvey Wasserman is co-author, with Bob Fitrakis and Steve

Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO?, just published by the New Press. He is

author of SOLARTOPIA! and HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE U.S., available

at http://www.harveywasserman.com [1].

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Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107

"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their

spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their

government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are

suffering deeply in spirit,

and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public

debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have

patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning

back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at

stake."

-Thomas Jefferson