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please contact Alllie.

Election 2000
A
Highway Robbery
and Supreme Injustice

By Samurai_Liberal

First Installment

At the outset let me make this clear; I'm partisan, a Liberal Democrat who abhors most things Republican. Yet, if the results of the Election 2000 hadn't been sullied and disgraced in so many salient ways, I was begrudgingly prepared to accept them, did in fact go on MSNBC and congratulate the Republicans there right after first results were in. But as that night, and the experience of the recount in the next month wore on, it became an article of faith not only to disagree with the legitimacy of the Supreme Court philanderings, but never to reconcile with them. Bush lost! The Court obstructed the recount and this administration doesn't deserve to be there. That changes everything!

But long before that process, and even before I was an Official Observer for the recount, it became a fiercely personal thing with me. Physical in fact!

A little history. Jesse Jackson was in West Palm Beach to give a rallying speech to the shocked, furious and in many cases, disenfranchised voters. It was being held in two environs, someplace I never found out about, and the street outside the County Courthouse.

But I knew nothing of this and was on my way across the bridge on my bike with a manuscript for the copier. The crowd was still meager so far at this, the second rallying point; Jesse was still speaking at the other location. But it was large enough to slow me down, make me dismount and push ahead on foot. I got interested enough to chain the bike to a pole and mingle with the crowd, mostly older people, Jewish for the most part, some carrying Gore/Lieberman posters.

There was a large podium set up in the middle of the street for the speakers with a dozen or so microphones. The usual contingent of media trucks and dishes, and floating interviewers filled the street.. An elderly Jewish woman gave me her huge Gore/Lieberman poster, and I took her place, moved up right in front of the stage. Suddenly a group of very large young black guys took up a noisy position right behind me, some giving out Black KKK leaflets. Black KKK??? I thought it was a put-on at first. Until a tall, grim-faced, buttoned-down white man started giving out bullhorns to them, and whispering orders.

At first they ignored me, busy with consolidating position directly in front, pushing the older group either back or totally out of the frame all together, and settling in. I discovered that they were from black Judo studios in Miami and that they'd been paid $75 each for the demonstration against Jesse Jackson by thugs out of the Tom DeLay office, notably a jerk named Tom Pyle.

Now they were focused, and there I was the only white dude between them and the stage, holding a Gore/Lieberman poster.....talk about raw meat. They pushed, insulted, jostled surged, dissed some more, then threatened my life in no uncertain terms. The cops watched from a fight-or-flight position on the sidelines. No help there. I realized it would look to them from their standpoint as though I were a Republican instigator messing with black democrats.

At first they were confused. I was wearing a bright red Marine Corps field cap, holding my position, and telling them I'd been part of the cause way back when with Reverend King, Abernathy etc. But that only slowed them down a few beats; in moments the leader of the fifty or sixty strong unit started getting physical with deadly intent. What the hell I was thinking I can't for the life of me explain, but I felt invulnerable. Held my place and glared back, feathering his probing thrusts with karate blocks....gently yet firm and quick. No question it was temporary. I was dog meat.

At that moment, 8,000 Jesse supporters arrived Deus ex machina around the corner, marching to the dais. By this time, I was crushed right up against the stage, but I'd picked the placard back up. In reflection, truly nuts. At least the focus had shifted to Jesse Jackson and his entourage, who were trying to speak now. The bullhorns started an overwhelming chant, drowning out even the loud-speaker. "Jesse go home! Jesse Go home!!!" Several different black speakers tried to calm them, ignore them, over-talk them, even resorting at one point to leading the audience in prayer. No use. The bullhorns were just too much. After a half hour of dithering, it was decided to move the entire scene to an open amphitheater down near the Intra-coastal Waterway. Once down there, pushed to the rear of the by-now huge gathering, the hired thugs were irrelevant and the demonstration went on successfully, ending up with a moving, rousing speech by Jackson as the center piece.

And now to me, it was very personal!

The next installment relates the fiasco in the recount at the Hurricane facility. And the stealing of the election.



Election 2000
A
Highway Robbery and Supreme Injustice

Second Installment:
"What is past is prologue"

"A manual recount shall be conducted in preference to an electronic recount." GW Bush-signed into Texas Election Code sec. 127.130--- 1997

The ballot is valid if:

(1) at least two corners of the chad are detached:
(2) light is visible through the hole
(3) an indentation on the chad from the stylus or other object is present and indicates a clearly ascertainable intent of the voter;
(4) the chad reflects by other means a clearly ascertainable intent of the voter to vote.

Bush fought in court to prevent the recount in Florida. Hypocrisy? BIG TIME!

This won't be dealing with hanging chads or flaming dimples; everyone is well-aware of them after the national circus, the childish jokes of Leno and Letterman, and pictures of fat-heads peering through magnifying glasses at them. Some background on the Players is important though, because it includes a dynamic that swings the entire operation, and creates the opportunity for 'Clarence Thomas and the Supremes' to put Dim Son in office.

Theresa LePore is the dizzy elections supervisor for Palm Beach County who designed the notorious butterfly ballot that caused 3,407 Jewish voters to wake up one morning deciding to vote for a fascist. "Honey, Buchanan?" "Sure, Morris, why not, nice day for it."

Palm Beach Country's infamous butterfly ballot
(Click on picture for larger image.)

 

In early life Theresa LePore was registered as a Republican, but re-registered as an independent in 1979. Most recently, she's yet again re-registered..

The Presidential candidates had ALWAYS been on the first page! But this year there were ten Presidential and ten vice-presidential candidates and she thought the print would be too small for older voters. When the former supervisor, Jackie Winchester, saw LePore's handiwork with the butterfly ballot, candidates on both sides, staggered, but with the holes right under each other, she said, "Oh my God, now THAT'S confusing!"

It was apparent it was a debacle early on elections afternoon, and only got worse, and LePore's phone was ringing off the hook...when the enormity of what had happened finally sank in, suddenly sick to her stomach she flopped onto her chair and said, "Oh, shit!" And the nightmare had only just begun.

The second of the three elections commissioners was Carol Roberts. I told her she was my hero, and I still maintain that. Roberts was a County Commissioner, a Democrat on the Board of Elections. She's bright and tough, assertive and proud of her Jewish 'Maccabee' status as champion for Gore, but very aware of the need for legality and fairness in the mix. Without her there wouldn't have BEEN a recount as such in Palm Beach County. More on that later.

Charles Burton, third member and Chairman of the Palm Beach County Canvassing Board is the Trojan Horse, the Judas, the snake in the grass etc in the drama, as far as I'm concerned. He was a Democrat (though he's switching parties recently) but appointed to his judgeship by Jeb Bush, so to me he was suspect right from the first moment. He may be the most obvious reason Bush is in the White House now. At a meeting/interview out in front of the County Court House which turned into a sweaty face-off between Burton and Roberts, using LePore as a hockey puck,

"I move that his board conduct a manual recount of all the ballots for the presidential election," Roberts says to the cameras and crowd. Burton strenuously disagrees, saying they needed authority from the Secretary of State Harris for an advisory opinion!...he made that strongly as the chair of the board.

Bullshit! Roberts is having none of it!! "I'm asking for a vote, I don't believe we need an opinion on what we should do because we are HERE in Palm Beach County. I move that this board conduct a manual recount of all the ballots for the presidential election for the year 2000!"

People were screaming, it was like a battle cry. Burton whispered, "You fucking sandbagged me!" He moves to take the whole thing inside privately to discuss. No way, Roberts tells him.

"I'm asking for a vote right here and now!" They go ahead with it, Burton voting against a recount without approval from Harris, Roberts voting for, and poor LePore bouncing back and forth changing her vote twice with her attorney whispering in her ear. But she goes on to second Burton's move to wait. Her attorney ignores her and says, "She didn't mean to do that." LOL

LePore says to Burton, "I second your motion."

"NO!" shouts her attorney Bob Montgomery, "no no no no no, you don't mean to second HIS motion!"

"No!" LePore says out into space.

Roberts shouts for a vote! Now...."All in favor? I say aye." Theresa says a wispy, 'aye'. All opposed?"

Burton is opposed. Democratic bigwig Friedkin yells at Burton, "You'll never get elected in this county again!"

Well, not as a Democrat.

The battle was on.

I got a couple of phone calls from friends in the Democratic Party, one from Boston and the other from Tallahassee, asking me to help as an official observer. Once I agreed---with hot breath and bared fang, I have to admit-I reported to the Electrical Union headquarters in West Palm Beach for some crash training on the recount process. It was pretty much a virgin science to them, too. But we learned how to interact with the Republican observers who were going to intimidate, stall, object to ballots, disagree with our findings, and try to fake us out at every turn to eat up the clock, of that there was no doubt.

Bush's outfit was sending in some heavy-hitters into Palm Beach County, high-powered lawyers from across the Nation, but mainly from the Federalists in Atlanta, the Southeast Legal Foundation. They were the same folks who were pushing the disbarment proceedings against Clinton in Arkansas. That plays an amusing turn later in the story.

Inside the Palm Beach Emergency Operations Center, the proscenium for the recount drama looked like an amphitheater/classroom, five tiers down to the front, seating about 150. About 25 teams consisting of two counters, one Democrat, one Republican, and two observers hanging over their shoulders, one from each party. You saw the setting on CNN ad nauseam, but it's been almost three years. (Hard to believe).

LePore was a basket-case, red-eyed, frantic and nursing a sinus infection. At one point during the sometimes literally riotous counting, I put my arm around Theresa and consoled her that it would all be OK. Right, Samurai!

The Republican observers were three-piece, buttoned down, smug, smooth intimidators, some of them, Atlanta sharks from the Southeast Legal Foundation, the group pushing for the dis-barment of Clinton in Arkansas. I decided to do some intimidating of my own right from the gun, right from the first team, to be repeated each new Republican observer I encountered; I put my USMC field cap down between us and asked, with not a trace of sarcasm in my voice, "Too bad what happened to Matt Glabin" Glabin was head of Southeastern Legal Foundation; he'd just been arrested in an Atlanta park for exposing himself to children. That REALLY gave the Federalist Society a black eye. "Are you with that group?" I asked the shocked face each time. "Oh, no, I'm with blah blah blah..." And I'd made my point. I wasn't going to back off squat for the duration!


Election 2000
A
Highway Robbery and Supreme Injustice

Third Installment:
Former Senator Bob Kerrey, "Judge Burton is throwing out Gore ballots by the hundreds!"

The Democrats were in a little white trash trailer that was so cramped, only eight people could fit in there comfortably at a time. The Republicans, on the other hand, had the Rolls Royce of trailers, a Windsor Monaco RV parked about a hundred yards from us, and it looked for all the world like a Clandestine Operation for CIA with all the hard-faced three-piece-suiters going in and out.

At first I'd allied myself with the staff from John Kerry's office, but I found them arrogant and rude, and jumped to Ted Kennedy's people, who worked just as hard, but had a sense of humor, a feeling for the absurd about the surreal steeple-chase of events.

Bob Kerrey was an authentic good-guy; tough but honest, and like most folks of the liberal persuasion, a little bit TOO even-handed as opposed the Republicans' "all's fair in love and war and money." Kerrey had been watching the proceedings on TV and couldn't believe the lies the Republicans were getting away with, especially Mark Racicot (pronounced roscoe). And George W. Bush's draft-dodging pissed him off more than Clinton's pettifogging on the issue. Not to mention the free-ride the media was giving Bush on it. He told me he was stunned when he read in the Boston Globe how Bush jumped 500 other guys to get in the guard, and couldn't BELIEVE how Dubya had a year unaccounted for, having not shown up for duty in Alabama during wartime.

Kerrey was no fan of Gore's. He'd worked to get Bradley nominated, but Gore went to Nam as an enlistee...could have had a commission out of Harvard, but enlisted! And volunteered for combat. Now here was this evader making an issue of Gore's character. On top of that, Lieberman's mush-mouthed mixed-message on television goaded him to get down to Florida fast! He'd figure prominently later in the overseas ballot rubbish.

Despite what the Republicans were clamoring, Gore hadn't demanded the recount, Under Florida of law where a margin of victory is less than one half of one percent and where the losing candidate does not in any way waive their right to seek a recount there is a mandatory recount automatically!!!!

And the margin between the two was way the hell below that!!!!

The Republicans were lead at the Hurricane Center by a blown-dry yuppie named Mark Wallace, a 32 year old hot-snot lawyer on the make up from Miami. His job is to run out the clock on the counting and render it moot. Gore beat Bush by 2-1 in Palm Beach County, so he figures stalling and quibbling is the best tactic. I hear them in little clusters, discussing just that. I look waspy and I'm well-dressed so they don't pay attention to me. "Slow things down, object, voice your objections as often as possible." And all the Republican observers are doing just that, pouring sand in the gears of the count. And it's going on in every county being retabulated. I know for a fact the Republicans are flat out lying to CNN etc, about the recount being chaotic. Death by a thousand cuts? Oh yes, that's for bloody sure!

It got so bad that even some of the Republican counters couldn't stomach it. One woman jumped up from table nine, "I've HAD it! I'm not coming back, these guys are playing games!" she screams after being harassed by the snotty, smug republican observer, who's been objecting every fifth of sixth vote for nothing. CNN reported that it had been a Democrat counter.

Next day, same thing. A young punk out of Atlanta is putting the game on an older black lady counter. She argues with him for a couple of minutes and he raises his hand for a formal objection, stopping the count! One of the Republican wranglers, some guy named Bolton comes over and remonstrates with the poor woman. I shouted from my team, "Who the hell are YOU?" Now it's Burton, the sheriffs, lawyers, the whole posse comes swarming....meanwhile, all the counting stops to watch. Plan A)! They leave the punk there and send the woman away! I'm steaming!

Nevertheless, it's going pretty well for Gore. Counting dimpled chads etc, we're finding lots of Gore votes. Until disaster strikes. Wallace tells Burton none too subtly, "Your actions are going to be judged for a long time!" The meaning, a threat almost, is unambiguous!

Halfway through the count, Burton, LePore and for a reason I still haven't determined yet, (my phone calls aren't getting answered, but I'll track her down) Carol Roberts, my heroine. They've decided to revert to a 1990 standard that is so strict, nearly all dimples are thrown out, even though they show 'clear intent'!! Up to there, we'd been using a version of the Texas Law Bush had signed. Burton says, "If the dimple is only for President, don't count it!" What?????

At one point, Judge Burton finally admits that there should be dimples counted because the old punch card machines have a problem with the tray underneath filling up with chads and doesn't punch through. He also had to admit that Precinct 29-E that originally came in with 0 votes, actually had 368 for Gore, 23 for Bush. But this kind of equal treatment doesn't last long, and he reverts.

This was horrible!

In the meantime, Bush's lawyers have gone to court to try to stop the recount altogether. It's so funny....Ted Olson is down in Miami District Court arguing that "Palm Beach has even changed its counting rules in the middle of the count"....even though it was done at the nefarious insistence of their boy, Wallace. It's Catch 22. What a hoot! Judge Middlebrook throws their case out.

But the damage is done for us. Palm Beach Democratic Headquarters is discussing whether or not to take Roberts and Burton and LePore to court to force them to adopt the more liberal ballot standard we'd been using up to there. After all, it is being used in Broward already.

It ends up in Judge Jorge LaBarga's court. The count is suspended while we wait for the ruling. LaBarga tells Burton, his per se exclusion of the votes is patently wrong. But he doesn't give any specific on what's right, no clearly delineated standard. It's useless. The votes are in the toilet.

The Republicans are relentless. Racicot is still lying to the press, telling them that there are chads all over the floor. I never saw one chad on the floor the entire count, and what's more ironic, they couldn't fall out of a solid ballot, they'd have to've been partially punched anyway, but logic never stopped a republican yet.

I'm very upset....and when I get mad, my vocabulary shrinks to the basic anglo-saxon. I got up in Racicot's face and told him, "Why the fuck don't you quit your lying and go back to Montana, this is my state!!!? Several, more stable voices intervened and got between us, doing the dance of diplomacy, and pushing me away. He's a Governor, for Christ sake!

The election was lost for all intents and purposes, right there that day. There were more chances, sure, but we'd snatched defeat from the jaws of a certain victory then. In the trailer, The decision is made to sue Burton. They want a re-examination of 3,000 ballots Burton ruled unfairly against, after they started the recount all over again....461,988 ballots. Mind-numbing! By hand, under four pairs of eyes, then the protest ballots by the three canvassers and the carping Republican lawyers assessing them, objecting over and over to nothing, usually discarding only about four out of every four hundred, but slowing it down, slowing it down...

Burton gives us Thanksgiving Day off!!!!! Even with a reasonable standard, that would have been a killer---the clock was running..............

I'm confining this to what I actually experienced and that means Palm Beach County only, but I saw Tom Pyle on C-Span, ( DeLay's aide who paid $75 each to the Miami thugs up in West Palm Beach ---cheap bastard) standing right behind Bob Dole in Broward, and beside him, the KKK agent provacateur who was in charge of bullhorns, LOL You have to love it. That and the carnival outside theCenter protesting with hordes on each side hurling epithets and brandishing placards, and wearing imaginative T-shirts. My personal favorite T-shirt was, "JUST KEEP BILL"

Later the beat-the-clock race with Harris on the ballots.

And speak of the devil, Katherine Harris is a trip. Harris quit her job in real estate and was working in a night club in a Vanna White look-alike act before inheriting $6.5 million. Since then she's inherited another $250 million, so don't cry for her, Argentina. Not only but also, she just won a seat in Congress from the Sarasota district.

Oddly enough, in politics, she started out as a Democrat interning for Laughton Chiles. Bet he's tossing and turning in HIS grave!!


Election 2000
A
Highway Robbery and Supreme Injustice

Fourth Installment:

"And fire-eyed-fury be my conduct now!"

I hope that I've established that the Bush faction was out to win the election not through politics and law, but through subverting the democratic process with a concatenation of Alice Through-the-looking-glass kind of logic. Bush's singular goal? To keep legally cast ballots-whatever the hell: punched, partially punched, fully-punched, dimpled, whatever, from being counted!

Added to this, Katherine Harris...Secretary of State and in charge of the election despite the fact she's on the Bush Election Campaign staff (would a Martian believe this?), is tinkering with the rules and sandbagging the Democrats at every turn. On this she's being helped considerably by Judge Charles Burton in my County of Palm Beach, who as one Kerry aide put it, "Could fuck up a steel ball!" He's either intentionally throwing the election to Bush, or he's just inept with feet of clay, or all three, but except for the Pyrrhic stand on the 215 late ballots, which I'll talk about in a minute, he killed us with his decision on the standard! Three thousand plus votes!!!! He, along with Theresa LePore and the 3,408 lost votes from Precinct 194D caused by the butterfly ballot:( "I'd like to string her up!" "She should be shot!" She should drop dead!" among the printable quotes on poor Theresa.), accounted for well over 6,000 Gore votes right there. Bush's margin of victory???? was 537.

Circuit Judge Sanders N. Sauls, the right-wing dingbat who refused to even look at the ballots after ordering their transport to his courtroom, (remember the caravan of lawyers riding shotgun on two white vans from Miami and a yellow Ryder truck from West Palm Beach, driven by none other than Tony Enos, the actual designer of the effing butterfly ballot for poetic irony, laden with votes from Miami to Tallahassee?) called Burton, "A great American!" Sauls was under impeachment proceedings by the Florida Supreme Court at the time for something else.. Un-beLIEVable he didn't recuse himself! He'd already been forced to step down as Chief Judge of the Second District Circuit Court for 'autocratic and divisive practices.' Let's just leave it that his relationship with the Supreme Court wasn't rosy.

Votomatic expert Kimball Brace questioned by Sauls: "I want to inquire if I may," Sauls asks, "Do the voter instructions say to make a dimple?" Answer: "Well, they're not instructed to create dimples, they DO create dimples!" Brace goes on to explain how dimples are formed. "If the machines are not cleaned out on a regular basis and there's chad buildup, and therefore, the voter may not be able to push down as firmly. Or the stylus goes in the hole at an angle instead of straight in. Or if the rubber strips on the device aren't 'properly maintained' and they become old and brittle, and keep a voter..." ( I, myself, personally officially observed a precinct from the Island of Palm Beach that went 412 to Bush, 9 for Gore, that had eight dimples... for BUSH, even in those better kept machines.....)

-In this exchange with Sauls, Judge Burton comes as perilously close to admission about his role in the stone-walling in Palm Beach County as possible. Burton; "I wanted to go about this in a more reasoned approach and analysis, and I wasn't given that opportunity. (Stopping the count in order to get Harris's input from Tallahassee) And I guess I've been the one accused (from the bottom of pg 1) " of trying to block this recount, which is not the case." Bullshit! Sauls tells him, "Absolutely not! I'll have to salute you as a great American, as a matter of fact"

Now, keep in mind, these numbers pale in comparison with the votes lost in places like Duval County, 27,000, mostly black precincts. Or 16,000 in Hillsborough. I'll just touch on those. Harris was supposed to use $100,000 passed by the Legislature for voter-education for all the newly registered. It's a he said/she said situation, because she told the Civil Rights Commission she sent the invoice to Jeb Bush for his signature; he says he never saw it.

But the up-shot was thousands of black votes were trashed. Not like it hasn't happened to them before. The 1889 Florida Poll Tax springs to mind; or the 1920 Ococee County murders and arson when blacks tried to vote; or the 1951 murder of NAACP Harry Moore on Christmas Day for trying to register blacks in Brevard. This time it was a phony sample ballot insert in Jacksonville's Florida Times-Union stating: "Step Four-vote ALL pages! Ten Presidential candidates were spread over two pages. Twenty-thousand plus follow instructions and ruin their ballots. Does that stink to the heavens? Bush wins by a bogus 537? Vomit-inducing!

Understand. The Bush people always know they have at least one ace-in-the-hole; the Republican legislature, who if push comes to shove, will just render their own slate of electors. But what if Florida's electoral votes are invalidated altogether? Happened four times before. Gore becomes President because he has more electoral votes if Florida is out of the mix. But the USSC would never let that happen this time, not those right-wingnuts! The fifth ace in the hole.

I mentioned Burton and the late votes. Here's what happened. On Sunday November 26th at 1:00PM Burton requests an extension of the deadline from 5PM to 9AM Monday. Harris has that discretion. All she has to do is not open her office on Sunday. Burton says, "Our people have been busting their asses 24/7 to finish. At 4:30 in the afternoon, we still have 1,000 ballots to complete, and only a half-hour. Out of 461,988. Give us a break."

Harris gave us a break, all right....all our arms and legs. She turns us down, and LePore starts to hurry up and tabulate what we've done so far. The name of the joint, The Palm Beach Emergency Operations Center was appropriate. Every operation was an emergency. Burton decides to quit counting and shut us down....to our howls of disapproval! Some Republicans start to pull out, but they realize how bad that looks and hang around. After the protest, Burton and the board send what we finished, and decide to continue the count for what it's worth. It took us two and a half hours. In the end we had 215 more for Gore, but it was all in vain.

We folded up our tents and with rocks in our guts and lead-heavy hearts, broke up,( some literally) and left the Center.

There's a heavy buzz going through the Bush camp, both in Florida and Crawford, that a huge push has been made in Tel Aviv to get out the absentee vote for Lieberman. Estimated at 4,000 votes. Bush figured to have the overseas ballots from the military, but who knew. Even between a war hero, Dole, and Clinton, it was very, very close. Shut down the whole thing seemed to be the way to go. A call went out to Jim Smith, former secretary of state of Florida. This is one of those ironic situations that becomes a crime for which the American Media is the main felon. Smith proclaims the law for the counties and precincts about the absentee ballots:

"The Florida Law is simple, straightforward, and reason-based." says Smith, "Let me go over some of the controlling rules. First, overseas ballots MUST be either postmarked by November seventh, signed and dated no later than November seventh. With respect to this election, the time to complete an absentee ballot ended on the day of the election. Any overseas ballot completed after November seventh is invalid, inVALID...and cannot be counted! Next! For voters mailing overseas absentee ballots, only those ballots mailed with an APO (army post office) FPO (fleet post office) or foreign postmarks shall be considered valid. Ballots that area not mailed with these postmarks are invalid and cannot be counted."

Smith then goes on to add fear to the quotient. "It is a felony to perpetrate, attempt, or aid in any fraud of any vote cast or attempted, such as backdating an absentee ballot!"

Here comes the sadistic rub. Mark Herron will thank you if his name isn't at the tip of your tongue, but for a while there, he was 'the satan' in Republican ads, and tirades, and even among a few Democrats who were silly and stupid. Herron had already lost his job with a republican law firm for working for the Democrats so this was the unkindest cut. Gore's people had asked him to work on the overseas/absentee ballot thing. Joe Scarborough (the walking sneer) then R.Fla, has an attorney working for him named Ed Fleming. Fleming finds out that Herron is circulating the exact...EXACT memo Jim Smith has been ballyhooing, and feels he's hit the jackpot. Nobody remembers hearing Smith on the subject, and the pack of wild beasts in the media run with it like fresh kill. "Count every vote? Yeah, except for American servicemen!"

Katherine Harris rings in Norman Schwarzkopf to storm and blow hot air about it being, "A very sad day in our country when the men and women of the armed forces are serving abroad and facing danger on a daily basis (this was peace-time, remember) yet because of some technicality out of their control, they are denied the right to vote for the President of the United States who will be their Commander-in-Chief." And some more blustery bullshit like that wherever he could show his big, blowhard face.

Not one media outlet mentions Jim Smith's press conference. And the Republicans like Racicot go on the warpath, lying, subverting, exaggerating, making lurid insinuations, challenging the patriotism of Democrats....and a typhoon of bullshit on into the night! Senator Bob Graham is missing in action; Butterworth is worthless, mush-mouth Lieberman crumbles in front of the Nation and Tim Russert, Sells out Herron, who has only stated Florida law....again, exactly as the Republicans have. Herron is not only out of a job, he's pilloried by his own party, and used as a bludgeon by Bushites....

Only Senator Bob Kerrey rides in on one leg as the one hero for sanity and reason. Kerrey figures, "...a one-legged Vietnam vet with the Medal of Honor can make the case that ballots received from the military...two weeks late SHOULD be disqualified!" Looking into the actual ballots, Kerrey finds some with no signatures, no voter ID, no addresses, no witnesses, no postmarks, or postmarks from American port cities....

Here's the final tabulation on it. 23,246 absentee ballots went out.14,415 came in by election day. A week later, 446 more military overseas ballots came in...three days later it was 2,575, and the day after that, it was 3,733. Where the hell are all these ballots coming from was the suspicious question, almost naive in it's sweetness. Remember, the Military mail is more efficient than regular post office mail. The suspicions were on firm ground. Political operatives abroad, (republicans) had been encouraging specific troops to vote. And in the process the voter registration ID made it easy to figure out who was black and who was white, and who among the whites was more apt to vote Republican. And these were targeted expeditiously, to say the least!

This is of course, a crime. A serious crime! But with Ashcroft at Justice, forget about an investigation in his professional lifetime.

.
Last installment: The Supreme Injustices of it all.


Comment:

Great reportage, Samarui_Liberal. It's fascinating to hear from someone who was there. I agree about Burton. I couldn't understand the media's kidglove treatment, their identifying him as a Democrat and as someone who was for the Democrat's interest when it seemed to me he was just the opposite. I've read that public officials in Florida are subject to having their phone records examined. I always wondered why some citizen didn't sue to have La Pore and Burton's phone records checked. I think their flagrant partisanship (which was Republican despite their Registered-Democrat-To-Get-Elected designation) should have led to more questions being asked…like were they in contact with any members of the Republican Party or the Bush team. Sadly no one asked that question.

Second, Ronnie Duggers definitive article, The Annals of Democracy: Counting Votes (1988), describes how the design and printing of ballots used with the Votomatic (used in much of Florida) can accidentally or deliberately lead to misvoting:

In 1970, the election commissioners in St. Louis, who were considering buying the Votomatic system, asked the accounting firm Price Waterhouse to evaluate it, with devastating results. Security controls on the Votomatic would be "more easily subject to abuse" than those on the mechanical machines in place, the firm said. Candidates' names could be misaligned with the rectangles on the ballot "by manipulation of the ballot book pages' printing or positioning, by manipulating the positioning of the punched card used to record the vote, or by manipulation of the program used to tabulate the vote," the report continued.

So it has been known for 30 years that the deliberate mis-design of the ballot book can result in the voter punching votes for different candidates than that the voter intended. At first I believed that Lapore was an innocent official who had made a bad decision but her actions during the recount and reading Dugger's article convinced me that the design of the ballot was deliberate and served exactly the purpose it was intended: To help George Bush steal the election.

Alllie

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Articles of Interest

Bush and the Assassination of JFK by Paul Kangas

ANNALS OF DEMOCRACY : COUNTING VOTES by Ronnie Dugger (Nov 7, 1988)

Computerized Systems for Voting Seen as Vulnerable to Tampering by David Burnham, The New York Times (July 29, 1985) plus emphasis, links and comments

Sigmund Aas

The Terrorist's Achilles Heel: An Alternative Blow to Terrorism (June 24, 2004)

Aleister

Apocalypse Number Nine
(mp3, 2.9 meg, Oct 4, 2002)
Souces:Artist: Kumi Tanioka
Album: Final Fantasy XI Original Soundtrack (CD TWO)
Track :The Awakening
Vocals: George W. Bush
Plus Additional sounds & subliminal track
Editing by Aleister

Fun with Paperdolls
(May 19, 2003)

Algorythm

Just Say No!
( Oct 21, 2003)
A Real Protest (April 9, 2003)
Who's to Blame (Feb 20, 2003)
Listening to the Lies (Sept.12, 2002)
White Storm (August 2, 2003)
!!!Fight!!! (September 9, 2003)
Happy Endings: A Theory of (November 16, 2002)
It Just Isn't Fair
(December 11, 2003)
Every Picture Tells a Story (January 23, 2004)
Who Do You Trust? (April 17, 2004)
The Criminal - Fiction (May 8, 2004)
Why I Believe Bush is the Anthrax Terrorist (October 10, 2004)

Arachne & TaoUrso

TURTLE TALES: Exodus in a Tin Can on Wheels

Part 1 -
Part 2 -
Part 3 -
Epilogue

Turtle Tales II: The Road Warrior (November 2004)

Jimmy2k^

What is the American Way of Life (Jan27, 2003)
America is Under Siege (Dec 3, 2002)
Ozzy Osbourne - American Idol
(Nov 26, 2002)
Thomas Jefferson and Ann Coulter - Comparison and Contrast (Nov 21, 2002)
Some Thoughts on American Media (Nov 11, 2002)
Some Thoughts on Addiction
(Oct 28, 2002)
What Color is the Sky? (Oct 25, 2002)
The End is Near - And Other Truths
(Oct 7, 2002)

Hoopie

News_Asylum (Sept 15, 2002)

ItsMarty

Virtue is not chosen, the chosen becomes virtuous (October 14, 2003) Conspiracy Theory This!(November 18, 2003)
Black & White (November 21, 2003)
From Cordoba to Jerusalem (November 25, 2003)
Free Speech and Intolerance (January 20, 2004)
State of the Old Union seen from the New Union (Febuary 2, 2004)

KG4ZMP
Lunar Cheese And Federal Pork
(January 20, 2004)

Lester Michaels

Morality & Ethics: A case study of the Carlyle Group

Marij
Bush's Folly

Samurai_Liberal

Election 2000-Highway Robbery and a Supreme Court Disgrace-

Part 1 (May 23, 2003)
Part 2
(May 29, 2003)
Part 3 (June 12, 2003)
Part 4 (July 8, 2003)

TaleWgnDg

Bush Is Packing The Federal Courts: What Can I Do? (June 28, 2003)

Thargor

The Rantings of an Angry, Fed Up Conservative

BUSH BASHING DONE WITH LACK OF EVIDENCE OR CONCERN FOR ACCURACY (July 1, 2003)

A RECAP OF THE USSC'S 2002 TERM (July 5, 2003)

Warpster

The Myth of Free Trade (Febuary 3, 2004)

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