Friends,

It has been five days since the election.

In that time, accounts of voter fraud and malfunctioning voting machines have flooded into local newspapers in Ohio, to public-interest groups, universities and weblogs.

This message is an overview of those reports.

The stories are summarized here, with links to the original publications. After seeing this evidence -- and there is more still to be rounded up -- I am no longer convinced that Bush won the election.

I hope you will read through these summaries, click on the links to the original stories, and come to your own conclusions.

I've included all the accounts of election tampering that I'm aware of, but have not done a broad search. This is only what I've learned in the past five days.

My education was provided by a group of concerned journalists who posted reports to a chat list. This is a compilation of their research.

I believe there is enough evidence to suggest that the electorate may have actually chosen Kerry on Tuesday. We don't know for sure -- we can't know till there is a recount. Or, if that's not possible because of electronic voting machines, until the election is held over in Ohio and Florida.

Bush has not yet been chosen by the Electoral College. The Electors meet and vote on Dec. 13. We need to raise questions about the results -- and raise them loudly -- to get an investigation launched before that date.

So far, the mainstream media in not picking up the story. They moved very slowly after the 2000 election.

Here are the accounts of election tampering from four states, plus reports on multi-state problems.

(Please note: some of the newspaper links may expire soon. You may want to print out the stories so that later on, you don't have to buy them from the newspapers' archives.)

FLORIDA:

The most troubling news comes out of Florida. Throughout most of the state, new electronic voting machines were in use. These machines -- many manufactured by a company called Diebold -- are controversial because they don't leave a paper trail.

There is no way to double-check the results.

The final Florida tallies on Diebold machines from Tuesday are literally unbelievable.

In 29 counties where Diebold machines (an optical scanner) were used to count the ballots, large majorities of voters were registered Democrats. But the final results gave all the counties to Bush, sometimes by huge margins.

The individual county data shows how unlikely the machine results were.

For instance:

In Calhoun County, 82% of registered voters are Democrats. But Diebold machines said 63% of the county voted for Bush.

In Lafayette County, 83% of voters are Democrats, but Diebold said 74% of the county voted for Bush.

In Liberty County, 88% of voters are Democrats, but Diebold said 64% voted for Bush.

In Washington County, 67% of voters are Democrats, but Diebold said 71% voted for Bush.

This same pattern appears in the results for 29 COUNTIES in Florida. In every one of those counties, the Diebold Optical Scanner produced the results.

The Optical Scanner has been called the voting machine that is most susceptible to tampering.

Many of you have been watching elections closely for years. Do you believe that in 29 Florida counties in which Democrats were in the majority -- in some cases with 4 out of 5 registered voters being Democrats -- they all voted strongly for Bush?

Here are the links.

You can find the voter registration/final result data here:

ustogether.org

You can find a story analyzing these results here:

commondreams.org

You can read about electronic voting machines -- an untested phenomenon in American elections, here:

moderateindependent.com

THE OTHER PROBLEM IN FLORIDA:

In 6 counties -- again, they were all using electronic machines -- more votes for President were recorded than there were actual voters in the counties.

Altogether, these six counties reported 188,885 more votes for President than there are voters living there.

Right now, no one knows whether those extra 188,000 votes were cast for Bush or for Kerry. But Bush won the state of Florida by a 5% margin -- contrary to what all the polls were showing only days earlier.

In Glades County: 2,443 votes for Bush / 1,718 votes for Kerry / 27 votes for Other. Those add up to 4,188. But the machines recorded the official turnout as 3,446. That adds up to 742 more votes than voters.

In Highlands County: 25,874 for Bush / 15,346 for Kerry / 271 for Other. Official Turnout: 33,996. That adds up to 7,495 more votes than voters.

In Miami-Dade County: 358,613 for Bush / 406,099 for Kerry / 3,841 for Other. Official Turnout 716,574. That adds up to 51,979 more votes than voters.

In Osceola County: 43,108 for Bush / 38,617 for Kerry / 453 for Other. Official Turnout 63589. That adds up to 18,589 more votes than voters.

In Palm Beach County: 211,894 for Bush / 327,698 for Kerry / 3,243 for Other. Official Turnout: 452,061. That adds up to 90,774 more votes than voters.

In Volusia County: 111,544 for Bush / 115,319 for Kerry / 1,495 for Other. Official Turnout: 209,052. That adds up to 19,306 more votes than voters.

Use this link to get to the data: dailykos.com

STILL MORE PROBLEMS IN FLORIDA

This account comes from partisans. Four Kerry volunteers working in Broward County sent a letter detailing election tampering to one of the reporters on our chat list. All four signed it and included their email addresses.

They report a wide, disturbing range of problems, from voters saying their electronic machines malfunctioned, poll workers denied them assistance, to police putting up roadblocks on the routes to polling places, and so on.

The entire text of the letter, along with the signatures, appears at the bottom of this letter.

OHIO

In Ohio, there were problems in four counties and one city.

In Howard County, a judge ruled on Election Day that everyone standing in line to vote at 7:30 p.m. had to eventually be allowed inside.

The order said the ruling was good for the day of Nov. 2. (You can view the order at the website below.) But maybe it didn't occur to the judge that everybody might not make it inside by midnight.

At the stroke of midnight, when the calendar legally clicked over to Nov. 3, Republican Ken Blackwell, the secretary of state, told all the waiting voters to go home. His workers gave them paper ballots (i.e., provisional ballots), told them to fill them out and bring them back later.

It was an improvised move that undercut the intent of the judge's ruling, and created chaos. Many people in Howard County still haven't turned in those ballots because they don't know where to take them or what the deadline is.

The only kind of ballot in a federal election that people can legally take home, fill out and turn in later is an absentee ballot, and those are marked as such. They're marked with clear rules concerning deadlines, postmarking, and so on.

So an uncounted number of people in Howard County--estimated in the thousands-- couldn't get in and were turned away with what may be ruled an illegal procedure. The vast majority of those votes wre expected to go to Kerry based on the heavily Democratic population of Howard County.

The Democrats have filed a lawsuit. You can click on the Ohio State University law school website to read about it:

Meanwhile, in Warren County, election officials locked the doors to the County building and refused to allow bi-partisan observers to watch the vote-count. They also denied access to the AP reporter (it is standard procedure for the AP to observe vote-counting in counties all over the country.)

The Sheriff of the county said he did it for "homeland security" reasons. He never explained or specified what the security concerns were.

Here is the link to the story in the Cincinnati Enquirer: enquirer.com

Meanwhile, in a Columbus suburb called Gahanna, the same problem showed up with electronic machines that we saw in Florida: more votes were cast than there were voters to cast them. In this case, however, the problem was investigated and the extra 3,893 votes were shown to have been erroneously tallied for Bush.

Here is the link to the story on the Ohio Network News:

onnnews.com

Meanwhile, in Mahoning and Mercer Counties, electronic machines again malfunctioned, but the effect that had on the vote count is not clear. The machines had to be re-set, and at one point showed votes of "negative 25 million," according to the head of the local board of elections.

Here is the story from the local Youngstown paper, called the Vindicator:

vindy.com

INDIANA

In Laporte County, electronic voting machines once again appear to have failed.

They tallied results for 22,200 voters, even though there are 79,000 registered voters in LaPorte County. Assuming the county actually had a 65% turnout rate (comparable to others in the area and its own track record), that means 29,000 votes were not counted.

Here is the link to the story in the Michigan City News-Dispatch:

michigancityin.com

NEW HAMPSHIRE This is one of several states where original exit polls (interviews with voters as they are leaving) do not jive with the results produced by electronic voting machines. I was told by an administrator at Bev Harris's group, called BlackBoxVoting (more on this below) that they are urging Ralph Nader to press for a recount in New Hampshire. Nader was on the ballot there, so he is in a good position to ask for a re-count. You can read about Harris and her work at BlackBoxVoting.org.

SIX STATES

In at least six states, there was a large difference between how people said they'd voted, and how officials said they'd voted.

In Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New Hampshire and New Mexico, there was a large discrepancy between what voters said in the original exit polls, and the final results claimed by election officials.

In each of those six states, electronic voting machines were used in some or most of the counties.

In contrast, in states where paper ballots were the primary method of voting, there was little or no discrepancy between original exit polls and official results.

To see an easily viewable graph of this data, go to

therandirhodesshow

That graph was originally compiled by a website affiliated with The Raw Story, which often gets quoted in the major dailies. So far as I know, it's a reputable site.

You can see their original posting here:

bluelemur.com

MORE ON EXIT POLLS

These are routinely conducted in elections by major news organizations. Accounts are surfacing that both the Associated Press and CNN (and perhaps others) later CHANGED their exit polling data to more closely resemble the official results.

So far as I know, none of the news orgs has offered an explanation. They may try to justify it on statistical grounds.

Here are two accounts. The first is very brief, the second is in-depth:

buzzflash.com

globalresearch

MORE ON ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES

Here is an except from the Moderate Independent website about Bev Harris's work. She is a freelance journalist who has been documenting how unreliable the machines are, and how vulnerable they are to tampering.

"Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting and the BlackBoxVoting.org web site, has documented numerous cases of electronic disasters. One occurred in Volusia County, Fla., in 2000 in which county election officials hand recounted more than 184,000 paper ballots used to feed the computerized system, after the central ballot-counting computer showed a Socialist Party candidate receiving more than 9,000 votes and Al Gore getting minus 19,000. Another 4,000 votes were received for Bush that should not have been there.

"Election officials eventually tallied Gore beating Bush by 97,063 votes to 82,214. But the wrong numbers had already been sent to the media, which were used by FOX and other networks to erroneously call the election for Bush and swing the public relations part of the recount battle in his favor."

I urge you to get familiar with Harris and her work as quickly as possible.

Three Members of Congress Have Asked the GAO to Investigate the Election

Three Congressmen have asked the General Accounting Office, a federal agency, to investigate the election, citing questionable results in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina and California. Click here to see their letter to the GAO:

Randi Rhodes

Remember These Four Points:

-- Bush's approval numbers were consistently below 50% throughout the campaign.

-- New Democratic registrations in Ohio were 10 times that of Republicans, and in Florida, Democrats held a similar but somewhat smaller advantage.

-- All the polls that were still giving Bush leads after the debates were within the margin of error, and when the undecideds started making up their minds over the last weekend, Kerry's poll numbers were surging.

-- the $10 million exit-poll system, specifically designed not to fail this time, clearly showed, in the original reports, a Kerry victory.

Other Voices to Hear:

Other people besides me and the journalists I know are beginning to question the legitimacy of the election. Here are some of them:

tompaine.com

americablog.blogspot.com

ecotalk.org

smirkingchimp.com

Here is a report of voter complaints in 7 Southern states: ABC

Again, I urge you to realize that there may still be time to do something about this before the Electoral College meets on December 13th.

The first step is to educate ourselves. The second step is to educate the mainstream media. The local and regional press, and the alternative media, have been doing their jobs; now we need the national press to do its job, too.

If you are concerned about this election being stolen, please do two things:

1) Send your concerns to everyone you know, both inside and outside the United States.

2) Send your concerns to the major news organizations. A list of contacts appears at the end of this message.

Sincerely,

Donna Knipp, New York, N.Y.

The Letter from Kerry Workers In Broward County, Fla.:

"Spurred by the unwillingness of the broadcast media to report voting problems during the 2004 election race, we want to alert others to the widespread voter suppression and disenfranchisement that occurred in Broward County, Florida. We staffed the emergency hotline for the Kerry Campaign Headquarters in Broward County from late October through the election.

"All of us were devastated by the margin of Bush’s win in Florida, particularly since polls predicted the race would be extremely close.

"Many of the calls to our hotline were from voters who had pressed the “Kerry” button on their electronic voting screen, only to have “Bush” light up as the candidate they had chosen. In some cases, this would happen repeatedly until about the 5th or 6th time the voter pressed “Kerry” and eventually his name would light up. In other cases, the voters pushed “Kerry” but were later asked to confirm their “Bush” vote.

"We had calls about a road block, put up by the police at 7am on Nov. 2, which blocked road access to two precinct locations in majority black districts. There was no justification for the road block – no accident or crime scene or construction.

"Many of our calls dealt with voter suppression, or manipulation, of the Haitian population – occurrences which seem too numerous, and their targets too indefensible, as primarily poor, first-time-voter, Creole-speaking refugees, to be anything but systemic. In one example, a voter whose hands were bandaged could not press the touch-screen himself; he asked the nonpartisan election official to press “Kerry” for him, but the election official pressed “Bush” and sent his vote immediately into the machine. Many, many others were denied the right to vote and were not given provisional ballots, while others were refused assistance at the polls, even though provisional ballots and voter assistance are legal rights.

"Others were told they had already voted and were turned away, although they had never voted previously. This latter experience was a complaint not isolated to Haitians but also included other surprised voters with no recourse except their word against that of the Supervisor of Elections.

"We spoke with hundreds of voters who were certain they had registered to vote in the past 6 months, well before the October 18 deadline, but were not on the rolls. And those were just the people who had the information to contact us.

"The local paper, citing the Supervisor of Elections office as its source, told all people voting by absentee ballot that they could turn in ballots by hand to any of its seven offices by 5pm on Tuesday, Nov. 2.

"Every single one of those offices except one was closed on Tuesday.

"We had numerous calls from voters on Nov. 2 whose precincts had closed, yet the Supervisor of Elections office had given voters no notification of the closure, and no notification of where to go to vote.

"Thousands of people were likely disenfranchised because of inexcusable mishaps such as this. We had many calls from people who had been harassed by poll workers, who were turned away without being allowed the right to vote provisionally (another breech of voter rights). Other people were turned away because the address on their driver’s license did not match the address on their voter registration card; again, this is in direct violation of election law.

"All of these problems do not even take into account the 58,000 absentee ballots that had been “lost” by the Supervisor of Elections, in perhaps the most democratic county in the state, disenfranchising thousands of people who were disabled, out of the country, or elderly and unable get to the polls. These events, and many others, have been documented and also reported to lawyers, but we fear they will not get the attention they deserve. This is what we witnessed in just one county. We believe that these “voting irregularities” raise serious concerns about the legitimacy of the results in Florida, and more broadly, about the health of democracy in this country."

Libby Anker Libanker@berkeley.edu Ryan Centner rcentner@berkeley.edu Jill Greenlee jillgs@socrates.berkeley.edu Rachel Van Sickle-Ward rvansick@berkeley.edu

The Texas Clemency Memos

As the legal counsel to Texas Governor George W. Bush, Alberto R. Gonzales--now the White House counsel, and widely regarded as a likely future Supreme Court nominee--prepared fifty-seven confidential death-penalty memoranda for Bush's review. Never before discussed publicly, the memoranda suggest that Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise Bush of some of the most salient issues in the cases at hand

by Alan Berlow

On the morning of May 6, 1997, Governor George W. Bush signed his name to a confidential three-page memorandum from his legal counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, and placed a bold black check mark next to a single word: DENY. It was the twenty-ninth time a death-row inmate's plea for clemency had been denied in the twenty-eight months since Bush had been sworn in. In this case Bush's signature led, shortly after 6:00 P.M. on the very same day, to the execution of Terry Washington, a mentally retarded thirty-three-year-old man with the communication skills of a seven-year-old.

Washington's death was barely noted by the media, and the governor's office issued no statement about it. But the execution and the three-page memo that sealed Washington's fate--along with dozens of similar memoranda prepared for Bush--speak volumes about the way the clemency process was approached both by Bush and by Gonzales, the man most often mentioned as the President's choice for the next available seat on the Supreme Court.

During Bush's six years as governor 150 men and two women were executed in Texas--a record unmatched by any other governor in modern American history. Each time a person was sentenced to death, Bush received from his legal counsel a document summarizing the facts of the case, usually on the morning of the day scheduled for the execution, and was then briefed on those facts by his counsel; based on this information Bush allowed the execution to proceed in all cases but one. The first fifty-seven of these summaries were prepared by Gonzales, a Harvard-educated lawyer who went on to become the Texas secretary of state and a justice on the Texas supreme court. He is now the White House counsel.

Gonzales never intended his summaries to be made public. Almost all are marked CONFIDENTIAL and state, "The privileges claimed include, but are not limited to, claims of Attorney-Client Privilege, Attorney Work-Product Privilege, and the Internal Memorandum exception to the Texas Public Information Act." I obtained the summaries and related documents, which have never been published, after the Texas attorney general ruled that they were not exempt from the disclosure requirements of the Public Information Act.

Gonzales's summaries were Bush's primary source of information in deciding whether someone would live or die. Each is only three to seven pages long and generally consists of little more than a brief description of the crime, a paragraph or two on the defendant's personal background, and a condensed legal history. Although the summaries rarely make a recommendation for or against execution, many have a clear prosecutorial bias, and all seem to assume that if an appeals court rejected one or another of a defendant's claims, there is no conceivable rationale for the governor to revisit that claim. This assumption ignores one of the most basic reasons for clemency: the fact that the justice system makes mistakes.

A close examination of the Gonzales memoranda suggests that Governor Bush frequently approved executions based on only the most cursory briefings on the issues in dispute. In fact, in these documents Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence.

The case of Terry Washington was typical. Gonzales devoted nearly a third of his three-page report on Washington to the gruesome details of the crime. He informed Bush that the victim, Beatrice Huling, was a twenty-nine-year-old restaurant manager, and wrote, "An autopsy determined she suffered 85 stab wounds, seven of which were fatal, and was eviscerated." But the summary refers only fleetingly to the central issue in Washington's clemency appeal--his limited mental capacity, which was never disputed by the State of Texas--and presents it as part of a discussion of "conflicting information" about the condemned man's childhood. (The page containing this discussion is missing from the copy of the summary signed by Bush, raising the possibility that he never actually saw it before authorizing Washington's execution.) Most important, Gonzales failed to mention that Washington's mental limitations, and the fact that he and his ten siblings were regularly beaten with whips, water hoses, extension cords, wire hangers, and fan belts, were never made known to the jury, although both the district attorney and Washington's trial lawyer knew of this potentially mitigating evidence. (Washington did not testify at his trial or his sentencing.)

Gonzales's lack of attention to Washington's mental retardation is particularly surprising because demand was growing nationwide to ban executions of the retarded, and because the most highly publicized case of a retarded defendant, that of Johnny Paul Penry, was even then playing itself out in Texas courts. The miscarriages in the Washington case were also precisely the kind of thing Bush claimed to want to be told about. "I don't believe my role is to replace the verdict of a jury with my own," he wrote in his autobiography, A Charge to Keep (1999), "unless there are new facts or evidence of which a jury was unaware, or evidence that the trial was somehow unfair." Such information had indeed come to light in Washington's case, yet Gonzales's memorandum did not tell Bush about it.

Not only did Gonzales ignore Washington's mental limitations, but he didn't mention that Washington's trial lawyer had failed to enlist a mental-health expert to testify on Washington's behalf (although he was entitled to one under a 1985 Supreme Court ruling), which in a death-penalty case clearly suggests ineffective counsel. Nor did he mention that ineffective counsel and mental retardation were in fact the central issues raised in the thirty-page clemency petition. Gonzales noted only that the petition had been rejected by the Board of Pardons and Paroles, a body that one federal judge condemned in 1998 for its tendency to rule on clemency appeals without any investigation or discussion among its members.

Gonzales declined to be interviewed for this story, but during the 2000 presidential campaign I asked him if Bush ever read the clemency petitions of death-row inmates, and he equivocated. "I wouldn't say that was done in every case," he told me. "But if we felt there was something he should look at specifically--yes, he did look from time to time at what had been filed." I have found no evidence that Gonzales ever sent Bush a clemency petition--or any document--that summarized in a concise and coherent fashion a condemned defendant's best argument against execution in a case involving serious questions of innocence or due process. Bush relied on Gonzales's summaries, which never made such arguments.

Did Gonzales reserve the most important issues and documents in the Washington case for a more extensive oral briefing of the governor? Only he and Bush know. It is highly unlikely, however, given that Gonzales usually presented an execution summary to the governor on the day of an execution and that, as he has acknowledged, his briefings typically lasted no more than thirty minutes--far too little time for a serious discussion of a complex clemency plea. Bush's appointment calendar for the morning of Washington's execution shows a half-hour slot marked "Al G--Execution."

All governors claim that they agonize over death penalty decisions. During his time in office Bush made numerous statements to this effect, among them "I take every death penalty case seriously and review each case carefully" and "Each case is major, because each case is life or death." In his autobiography he wrote, "I review every death penalty case thoroughly" and added, referring to his legal staff, "For every death penalty case, they brief me thoroughly, review the arguments made by the prosecution and the defense, raise any doubts or problems or questions." Bush always maintained that this review provided what he called a "fail-safe" method for ensuring due process and certainty of guilt. Asked about the governor's handling of capital cases, Johnny Sutton, Governor Bush's adviser on criminal-justice policy, told The New York Times in May of 2000, "This is probably the most important thing we do in state government."

But Gonzales's execution summaries belie these assurances of thorough and judicious review. The memoranda seem attuned to a radically different posture, assumed by Bush from the earliest days of his administration--one in which he sought to minimize his sense of legal and moral responsibility for executions. Bush repeatedly cited a Texas statute that says a governor may do nothing more than grant a thirty-day reprieve to an inmate unless the Board of Pardons and Paroles has recommended a broader grant of clemency. Admittedly, the governor's clemency authority is far more limited in Texas than in, for example, Illinois, where Governor George Ryan unilaterally commuted the death sentences of 167 men and women last January, shortly before leaving office. Nevertheless, Bush's failure to intervene was governed as much by personal choice as by legal limitation. Had Bush wanted to commute a sentence or otherwise prevent an execution, he unquestionably could have done so. Members of the BPP are appointed by the governor to six-year rotating terms. By the end of his governorship Bush had appointed all eighteen members. If he or Gonzales had had any serious doubts about a particular case, even on the morning of a scheduled execution, Bush could easily have prevailed on the board to reconsider the matter--to conduct an investigation, hold hearings, interview witnesses, or do whatever else was necessary to resolve those doubts.

In fact, on one highly controversial occasion, in 1998, Bush intervened with the board before it had a chance to make a recommendation to him. Henry Lee Lucas had been convicted of nine other murders (for which he was serving six life sentences, two seventy-five-year sentences, and one sixty-year sentence) but had also confessed falsely to hundreds more. After the 1984 trial at which Lucas was sentenced to death, it became apparent that he hadn't even been in Texas when the victim had been murdered; investigations by two successive state attorneys general subsequently concluded that Lucas had been wrongly convicted. Concerned that Lucas was about to be executed for a crime he hadn't committed, Bush's office let the BPP know that Bush was unwilling to see that happen. The BPP soon recommended (with a 17-1 vote) commutation to life in prison, which Bush then approved. Explaining his decision, Bush noted that the jurors at Lucas's trial "did not know" certain facts that came out only after trial. Gonzales could have raised a similar concern in his Terry Washington summary, but didn't.

At the outset of his administration Governor Bush presented a standard for clemency that all but ensured that few if any death sentences would be seriously examined. "In every case," he wrote in A Charge to Keep, "I would ask: Is there any doubt about this individual's guilt or innocence? And, have the courts had ample opportunity to review all the legal issues in this case?" This is an extraordinarily narrow notion of clemency review: it seems to leave little, if any, room to consider mental illness or incompetence, childhood physical or sexual abuse, remorse, rehabilitation, racial discrimination in jury selection, the competence of the legal defense, or disparities in sentences between co-defendants or among defendants convicted of similar crimes. Neither compassion nor "mercy," which the Supreme Court as far back as 1855 saw as central to the very idea of clemency, is acknowledged as being of any account.

The record suggests that what Bush described in his autobiography as "a fair hearing and full access to the courts" meant in reality nothing more than that a case had received some sort of legal attention at all state and federal levels. In the case of Karla Faye Tucker, the first woman executed in Texas in more than a hundred years, Bush wrote to at least two constituents that he had refused to grant a reprieve precisely because "the courts, including the United States Supreme Court," had "reviewed the legal issues in this case" and denied all appeals. But clemency is a political act, not a judicial one. By eliminating "legal issues" from executive consideration, Bush in effect refused to address what were often the condemned person's strongest claims. Indeed, the fact that courts have rejected a defendant's legal claims arguably places an added burden on a governor--as the conscience of the state and the literal court of last resort--to conduct a scrupulous review. This is especially true in Texas, where more than a third of executions in the United States since 1976 have occurred; where half of all capital cases are overturned on appeal because of errors during trial; where seven innocent men have been freed from death row, including one under Bush; where, according to The Dallas Morning News, nearly a quarter of the condemned were represented by attorneys who had been disciplined for professional misconduct; and where 30 percent of those executed under Bush between his inauguration in 1995 and June 11, 2000, according to the Chicago Tribune, were represented by attorneys who presented no mitigating evidence or only one witness during the sentencing phase of the trial. Given this environment, Gonzales's neglect of mitigating evidence in the clemency-review process is highly problematic.

But the real problem with citing thorough court review as a standard for denying clemency is that none of the 152 executions Bush approved would have landed on his desk had the cases not already passed through all the courts. To assert--as Bush did--that defendants have "full access to the courts" does not establish any sort of guideline for ensuring due process; it merely describes the judicial process.

Although Terry Washington's guilt was never seriously disputed, in at least two other capital cases profound doubts about guilt were raised by the defense but virtually ignored by Gonzales. In the case of David Wayne Stoker, for example, Gonzales devoted just eighteen sentences to the extraordinarily complex circumstances of the crime, leaving out essentially all the mitigating evidence and failing to address a multitude of questions about both the evidence against Stoker and his due-process rights. Ronnie Thompson, a key state witness, initially told the police, and then the court, that Stoker had confessed to a 1986 murder. But following Stoker's conviction Thompson recanted, explaining that he'd lied in court because the prosecutor had threatened to bring a perjury charge against him if he didn't stick to his original account. Bush should have been told that. During Stoker's trial, in 1987, Thompson's wife, Debbie, left him to move in with Carey Todd, the prosecution's chief witness; she got a piece of the Crime Stoppers reward that Todd received for naming Stoker. Gonzales failed to mention that drug and weapons charges against Todd were dropped the very day he testified against Stoker; and that Todd thus had an apparent motive for setting him up. Gonzales also failed to mention that a state investigator, a police officer, and Todd all lied in court about what Todd received for his testimony; that the jury wasn't told about Todd's possible motive for framing Stoker; and that James Grigson, a psychiatrist who testified that Stoker was a sociopath who would "absolutely" be violent again (thereby making him eligible for a death sentence), had never even examined Stoker. Grigson, whose expert testimony has helped send dozens of men to death row, earning him the nickname Dr. Death, had been expelled from the American Psychiatric Association two years before the Stoker case was reviewed by Gonzales and Bush, because his testimony had repeatedly been found to be unethical. Another expert medical witness against Stoker, Ralph Erdmann, had relinquished his medical license in 1994 after pleading no contest to seven felonies tied to falsified evidence and botched autopsies. A special prosecutor's investigation of Erdmann concluded that he falsified evidence in at least thirty cases, and that if "the prosecution theory was that death was caused by a Martian death ray then that was what Dr. Erdmann reported." All this information was in the public record, yet Gonzales mentioned none of it in his memorandum to Bush.

Stephen Latimer, who represented Stoker in his clemency appeal, told me recently that he received a call from Gonzales's office about a week to ten days before the execution, advising him that there would be no reprieve. The timing is significant, because Gonzales's execution summary is dated June 16, 1997, the day of Stoker's execution. If that decision had been made a week or more before Bush even read the summary, it is fair to ask whether Bush was actually in the loop or--as many suspected--had simply made clear to both Gonzales and the BPP that he wasn't interested in commutations.

The handling of Stoker's clemency appeal was not unusual. Consider the case of Billy Conn Gardner, whose death-penalty case was plagued by issues of incompetent counsel, dubious witness testimony, and unheard mitigating evidence.

Gonzales's report to Bush gave no sense of these circumstances. It matter-of-factly described the robbery of a high school cafeteria in Dallas, during which Gardner, wearing a stocking to obscure his face, allegedly shot and fatally wounded Thelma Row, sixty-four, a cafeteria worker. Also in the cafeteria at the time was Paula Sanders, a co-worker who had told her husband, Melvin, that several thousand dollars in daily cafeteria receipts were processed in a back room at the school. Melvin, who drove the getaway car, claimed that he had persuaded Gardner to participate.

Paula, who knew Gardner, said that she could provide no description of the assailant, because her back was turned. Before Row died, however, she had been able to describe a man with a "bony face ... and a two-inch goatee." Gonzales didn't tell Bush that the state was unable to produce a single witness who recalled ever seeing Gardner with a goatee, or that two witnesses to the shooting--Carolyn Sims and the school custodian, Lester Matthews--described a man with reddish-blond hair, whereas Gardner's hair was black. Matthews nevertheless positively identified Gardner as the killer, and Gonzales accepted this testimony at face value--although Matthews didn't know Gardner, admitted to having seen the killer for only three or four seconds, and didn't actually identify him until his third police interview, three months after the crime. Also missing from Gonzales's memo were the facts that only after prosecutors threatened to bring other charges against Melvin Sanders did he finger Gardner as the murderer, and that in exchange for this testimony Sanders received complete immunity from prosecution for the murder and probation for pending forgery and firearms charges. The state also agreed not to prosecute Paula Sanders.

Gonzales told Bush in his summary that Paula "testified that she was unaware of the robbery plans"; but he neglected to mention that she had received several phone calls only minutes before the robbery and shooting, and that according to Carolyn Sims (whose name is absent from Gonzales's report), she appeared "nervous and upset" after taking these calls. Sims was not deposed until years after the trial, during Gardner's habeas corpus appeal. More important, Gardner's lawyer never interviewed Paula Sanders and met with Gardner only once before jury selection, for fifteen minutes, raising an obvious suggestion of ineffective counsel--which Gonzales also dismissed with no discussion.

The case is a disconcerting tangle of speculation and uncertainty. What Gonzales should have made clear to Bush during the clemency review is that the case involved many unanswered and troubling questions. Gardner was put to death on February 16, 1995.

The Gonzales memoranda suggest that Gonzales was rarely, if ever, prompted to delve deeply into the cases he was reviewing for Bush. In his summary of the case of Carl Johnson, for example, dated September 18, 1995, the day before Johnson's execution, Gonzales failed to mention that Johnson's trial lawyer had literally slept through major portions of the jury selection. His memo on Irineo Tristan Montoya, dated June 18, 1997, the day of Montoya's execution, omits the single most important issue in the case: an alleged violation of international law, which had been brought to Bush's attention by, among others, the U.S. Department of State. His memo on Bruce Edwin Callins, dated May 21, 1997, the day of Callins's execution, fails to note that Callins's appeal to the Supreme Court generated the most famous death-penalty dissent in the past quarter century, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, a longtime death-penalty supporter.

Karla Faye Tucker's 1998 clemency review is one of the few in which any evidence exists of a significant discussion between Bush and Gonzales, and the only instance in which Gonzales is known to have provided any documentation beyond the execution summary. Bush cites the Tucker case as evidence of his compassion and his attentiveness to the process of clemency review. Gonzales has said that he and Bush began discussing Tucker's case months before the execution. Bush's autobiography devotes fifteen pages to Tucker. He writes that he anguished over his decision and had difficulty sleeping the night before her execution, and that signing off on it "was one of the hardest things I have ever done"; in the moments leading up to Tucker's execution he "felt like a huge piece of concrete was crushing me as we waited."

Why should Bush have been so tormented by assenting to Tucker's execution? According to the Bush standard for clemency, her case wasn't even worthy of consideration. Tucker didn't claim that she was innocent of murdering Jerry Lynn Dean and Deborah Thornton with a three-foot-long pickax in 1983. She said that she had been treated fairly by the courts and deserved her punishment. What helps to explain Bush's concern, of course, is that Tucker's case was the most highly publicized of any during his tenure as governor. In prison Tucker had become a born-again Christian, like Bush. Her execution was opposed by, among others, one of Bush's daughters and a slew of otherwise ardent death-penalty supporters, including Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who became convinced that she was remorseful, repentant, and rehabilitated. Nevertheless, dozens of Texas death-row inmates could claim similar conversion experiences, remorse, and repentance; and dozens had compelling claims regarding innocence or due process.

More than anything else, the Tucker case illustrates how Bush sought to deny responsibility for executions. "I could not convert Karla Faye Tucker's sentence from death to life in prison [without the BPP]," Bush stated, citing Texas law. Gonzales made the same point in a letter to the papal nuncio in Washington, who before the BPP made its recommendation had written Bush on behalf of the Pope to solicit clemency for Tucker: "Ms. Tucker's sentence can only be commuted by the Governor if the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles recommends a commutation of sentence." Of course, Bush did intervene in the subsequent Lucas case before hearing from the BPP.

Gonzales did not tell the papal nuncio that even after the BPP denied clemency the governor could have invoked a thirty-day reprieve to postpone this or any other execution. Bush didn't use this power because he had no interest in impeding the BPP, which was infamous for rubber-stamping executions. In a December 1998 district court hearing on a lawsuit brought by the death-row inmate Joseph Stanley Faulder (in whose trial a principal state witness was promised more than $10,000 by the prosecutor to testify), Judge Sam Sparks concluded, "It is abundantly clear the Texas clemency procedure is extremely poor and certainly minimal." Sparks found that "none of the members" of the BPP read clemency petitions in their entirety; that "a flip of the coin would be more merciful than these votes"; and that the board provided no rationale whatsoever for its clemency recommendations. "There is nothing," Sparks said during the hearing, "absolutely nothing that the Board of Pardons and Paroles does where any member of the public, including the governor, can find out why they did this."

Alberto Gonzales told me in 2000 that in his execution briefings he always presented Governor Bush with a "detailed factual background of what happened," along with "other outstanding facts or unusual issues." Yet a close examination of the written execution summaries he prepared for Bush certainly raises questions about the thoroughness of Gonzales's approach--and, ultimately, given the brevity of the summaries and the timing of their arrival at the governor's office, about the level of attention Bush could possibly have devoted to the clemency process. In his summaries of the cases of Terry Washington, David Stoker, and Billy Gardner, Gonzales did not make Governor Bush aware of concerns about ineffective counsel, essential mitigating evidence, and even compelling claims of innocence. These were all matters of life or death, requiring in-depth explanation and discussion, that no attorney in Gonzales's position should leave out of a written case summary or save for a thirty-minute oral briefing--especially if both are to be delivered on the very day of a scheduled execution. In a state where the criminal-justice system has erred with well-documented regularity, this was a grave failing.

by TocqueDeville
Wed Nov 10th, 2004 at 17:42:29 PST

A lot of theories and suspect evidence have been floating around here lately. Emotions are high as tinfoil and supposed reality collide. And in all of the banter I'm afraid that a real, provable election fraud is being overlooked.

While the exit polls are anomalous and some of the so-called evidence has been debunked, proponents of both sides should be able to agree on one thing: there should not even be a question as to who won.

Indeed, the fraud in this election that is incontravertable so far is that private corporations, using copyrighted, proprietary code, counted the public's votes in secret.

Now, we may very well uncover proof of tampering. But I seriously doubt it. The main feature of operating systems that use a Graphical User Interface (GUI) is that you only see the interface. The code and processes run undetectibly in the background. And this is the problem. A poll watcher can sit attentively at the vote counting machine and not see one vote counted. I actually saw a CVM advocate on NBC recently explain how you can in fact do a recount. "You just hit the 'Enter' key again and voila, a recount." It would have been funny...

Unverifiable ballots and ballot tabulation is a violation of the most basic principle of democracy. Proprietary software secretly tabulating our votes is the absolute equivalent to letting some guy named Ed go off into a closed room by himself and count our votes in private. That we're even having to have this conversion is incomprehensible to me.

This is why I, and many others, were so adamant that these things need paper reciepts at least, and should be scrapped at best.

I'm not an election lawyer, but I do know that many states --if not all-- call for a public monitored counting of the votes. And this is why counting votes behind the closed door of a Graphical User Interface is as much a fraud as stealing a box of ballots.

So before you guys and gals get too mad at each other over whether this or that is provable, please keep in mind that the very fact that we're even having to argue about it is the evidence of the real fraud in this election: that we just don't know.

ALERT: Is a gay man up for RNC chair?

by John in DC - 11/10/2004 11:57:47 AM

Please contact the RNC: Emails and phone #s provided at the end of this post.
Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman is reportedly a likely candidate for the job of head of the Republican party. There have been lots of questions about Mehlman's sexual orientation, and he won't answer. I for one think the public has a right to know Ken Mehlman's sexual orientation BEFORE he gets that job. And here's why...

Mehlman has REFUSED to answer direct questions from reporters about his sexual orientation. This wouldn't be relevant, except:

1. There have been rumors for years about Mehlman's sexual orientation. Now that he's a very public figure, those rumors gain an importance they didn't have before. Read on...

2. Mehlman has already said publicly that the gay issue is fair game for politics. If it's fair game, then the same rules apply to him.

3. Mehlman has publicly defended the president's anti-gay policies, including the federal constitutional amendment. Were Mehlman gay, he'd be guilty of hypocrisy, and that would justify his outing - again, were he gay.

4. The GOP has made it perfectly clear that gays and lesbians and their relationships are a threat to the fabric of society. As American citizens and voters we have the right to know if Ken Mehlman's so-far-undisclosed relationships are posing such a threat or not. The last thing the GOP should be doing is giving a position of prominence in the party to someone who, for all we know, might have a secret agenda of undermining the family. They can't have it both ways.

5. The Republican National Committee is an organization that makes NO BONES about using gay-bashing to help Republican candidates. There is good reason to believe that any RNC chair, were he not 100% straight, would be at pains to effectively run an organization that relies on gay-bashing to get its way. Don't red-state Americans have the right to know if the leader of their party, whomever it turns out to be, actually embraces the party's prefered lifestyle?

6. We have been told that part of President Bush's supposed "mandate" in the most recent election was a vindication of his attack on gays. The voting public has a right to know if the next RNC chair plans on subversively undercutting that mandate or actively supporting it.

Now, I have no idea whether Ken Mehlman is gay, bi or straight. But therein lies the problem. In the face of longtime rumors, this 37 year old single man has, oddly, refused to answer questions about his sexual orientation. I can't recall many, if any, straight men who refuse to acknowledge that they're straight - if anything, most are a bit too obvious about it - and that ultimately leads to speculation, caused by Mehlman's own failure to respond to a direct question posed by a reporter.

America is in the throes of a culture war, nurtured by groups like the RNC and people like Ken Mehlman. Americans have a right to know which side of the culture war Ken Mehlman is on, and whether, as RNC chair, he would be a fifth column for those very forces that the RNC tells us are out to steal America's Bibles and jam homosexual sex down its throats and the throats of its children.

Feel free to call the RNC and tell them you want to know why Ken Mehlman won't tell us whose side he's on.

Main contact info
Tel. 202.863.8500
Fax. 202.863.8820
Email: info@gop.com

Office of the Chairman and Deputy Chairman
Phone: 202-863-8700 (Ask for Chair Ed Gillespie and Deputy Chair Maria Cino.)
Chairman@gop.com

Communications Office
Phone: 202-863-8614
RNCommunications@gop.com

Final Races of 2004: LA-3 and LA-7 Runoffs

Silly me. I'm already talking about 2005 and 2006 and I forget to mention that 2004 isn't over yet! No, I'm not talking about voter fraud (and it wouldn't make a difference in the popular vote, where Bush did win undisputably). I'm talking about the Louisiana runoff system, which has caused two House races, LA-3 and LA-7 to be decided on December 4th. LA-3 is being vacated by ex-Democrat Billy Tauzin, Jr. , who is becoming a powerful lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry, and LA-7 is being vacated by Democrat Chris John, who lost a bid for the US Senate this year. Both races will be hard-fought and competitive, but with enough effort both races could fall our way. Let's take a look at each:

LOUISIANA 3: BILLY III VS. MELANCON

Louisiana's 3rd Congressional district is a large, sprawling region of Bayou country stretching from just outside New Orleans to the Mississippi delta and the Gulf Coast west and north towards Baton Rouge and including New Iberia. The district is predominantly Catholic by faith, conservative by ideology and Democratic by past peformance. 57% of registered voters are Democrats, in fact, and while clearly a smaller number are committed to Democrats in the full sense of the word, there remains a strong base for any Democrat here. Bill Clinton won here twice, both in landslides, and Senators Breaux and Landrieu, along with Governor Blanco all won here as well. The district has had only one Republican represent it: Billy Tauzin, Jr.

Tauzin, Jr. was elected in 1980-as a Democrat, albeit a conservative one. However, in 1995 he defected to the GOP, along with several other Southern Democrats who were ideologically closer to the GOP than their own party. Despite the switch, Tauzin has remained a very popular Congressman, and will be remembered well here after he leaves. But his attempts to leave an even bigger legacy-his own son in his seat-appear to be backfiring. More on that later.

Tauzin's son is Billy Tauzin III, a 30-year old conservative whose life experiences are suprisingly few and far between. His job before becoming a lobbyist (thanks to Daddy's influence) was as a salesman. That's right-his resume has exactly two things on it-salesman and lobbyist for a telecommunication firm that owed Tauzin the Elder bigtime. Wow, sounds like a great resume for a Congressman! As Charlie Melancon put it, "If he was Billy Smith, or Billy Jones, or anything other than Billy Tauzin, he'd be a non-contender."

The Democrat in the runoff is Charlie Melancon. Charlie is a longtime former State Representative, a former Economic Developement Commissioner and recently left the 6-figure Presidency of the American Sugar Cane League to run for Congress. Charlie is a conservative Democrat, which is the only type that can win here-he's pro-life and pro-gun, for example. However, he is an ecomomic liberal with an incredible track record on creating jobs in the Bayou area. In short, he's your typical Southern Democrat, except that he's a far cry from Rodney Alexander. Let me tell you, party-switching is not an option in Louisiana Democratic politics anymore.

In the months leading up to the primary, Tauzin the Elder attempted to coerce the State GOP into endorsing Tauzin the Younger for the race. However, State Senator Craig Romero (a moderate Republican) refused to leave the race and finished a close 3rd to Melancon (with two other Democrats far behind). Tauzin won the first round with 32%, to 24% for Melancon and 23% for Romero. However, Romero is staying completely neutral in the runoff, and many prominent GOPers are ticked off at the Tauzins for their attempt to coerce the State Committee to back Billy III. As a result, Romero's base in New Iberia is completely up for grabs, and Charlie has a great shot at winning those votes. Tauzin the Younger has also come under fire for checking off support for CAFTA in a recent candidate survey, then hastily backtracking on the whole issue, blaming it alternatively on "clerical error" or "a staff error". Right...

Charlie's website is http://www.melanconforcongress.com . I urge everyone to pay him a visit and see what you can do to give the Democrats a 7th pickup this cycle.

LA-7: WOULD-BE LORD BOUSTANY VS. WILLIE MOUNT

This is another very interesting race, to say the least. The 7th District continues where the 3rd left off, stretching from New Iberia to the Texas border. It includes Lafayette and St. Charles, the heart of Cajun country. The district has never elected a Republican to the seat since Reconstruction, and while it did vote for Bush twice it also voted for Clinton twice. In 1995 its Democratic Congressman switched to the GOP, but was defeated by Chris John in 1996. With John having vacated the seat in his losing bid for the US Senate, the seat now will have a runoff between Dem State Senator Willie Landry Mount and GOP surgeon and would-be British Lord Charles Boustany, Jr.

Lord Boustany? What the heck? Well, here's what happened:
"A national Democratic campaign organization says Republican 7th Congressional District candidate Charles Boustany Jr. had higher aspirations before he began running for Congress - hoping to become British nobility. "Greg Speed, with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said researchers for the party turned up a 1995 lawsuit Boustany, a recently retired heart surgeon, filed against two men in Britain for defrauding him in a $50,000 investment and in the $18,500 purchase of a "title." "Court records show the two men from England - Martin Lewis and Stefanos Kollakis - were charged and found guilty in an English court in the mid-1990s for having sold bogus British noble titles to several Americans, among other nationalities.

"Not only is Boustany a wealthy doctor, he apparently dreams of being British nobility as well," Speed said. "America got rid of the monarchy over 200 years ago. Louisiana's not going to restore it by electing Lord Boustany to Congress.'

Take it for what it's worth, but I think it's hilarious. Trying to get a British lordship is not a good idea, especially when you're running in a Cajun district. Not to mention that Boustany is your typical conservative doctrinaire Republican. As for Willie Mount, she's served six years in the LA State Senate from St. Charles, and previously as the first female Mayor of St. Charles. She's compiled a solid record on budget, healthcare, child abuse and education issues, and was recognized as Legislator of the Year by the LA Orthopaedic Association. Like Melancon, she's pro-life and pro-gun, both also has a solid record on other social issues and is an expert on fiscal responsibility.

In the primary, Boustany got 38% to 25% for Mount. However, this is misleading as Boustany was the only major GOP candidate in the race, while State Senator Don Cravins (a liberal Democrat) garnered 23%. 5% voted for a minor Democrat, and 9% for a minor Republican. Mount starts off at a good position for the runoff, especially if the "Lord Boustany" episode leaves a mark in the voters' minds. Mount's website is http://www.williemount.com . Pay her a visit, too and see what you can do to get her elected. If she is, she will be the 66th female Democrat in the House.

Both races will be critical to show that the DCCC, and Democrats across the nation, are not going to roll over and die. Just like Mary Landrieu's runoff win in 2002 gave us hope, so too could these two runoffs give us hope for the next two years. So let's put our shoulders to the wheel, and get Charlie Melancon and Willie Landry Mount elected!

posted by MrLiberal @ 9:00 PM

Help America Recount!
If the Politicians and the Parties Won't Do It,
America's Citizens Will!

Donate!  

WEDNESDAY NOV 10, Washington D.C. -- Consumer groups rallying citizens for recounts in Ohio, Florida; voters can fund audits of Ohio and court challenges in Florida by donating to HelpAmericaRecount.org, a 527 tax exempt organization set up exclusively for recount funding.

Click Here to Donate!

Getting out the vote is good, but getting a 123 percent turnout is too good to be true. This happened in Fairview Park, Ohio. In Broward County, Florida, voting machines can do the moon walk: They count back-wards, but only on certain ballot measures.

If you want to buy a recount in Ohio you don't need to live there...you do need to be a US citizen and you need to get out your check book. How much is Democracy worth to you...starting next week no one can stop us from auditing Ohio were gonna get em.

In New Hampshire, voting trends seemed to depend more on which voting machine was used than on what party voters were affiliated with. When asked to produce “zero reports” at poll opening, some Florida touch-screen machines reported votes were already in the system, apparent stuffing of the electronic ballot box. Gahanna, Ohio had thousands more votes show up than voters.

Accounting for provisional ballots has been murky, and anomalies have now surfaced in Cuyahoga County, Perry County, and Youngstown Ohio. Florida optical scan machines in 40 counties had statistically improbable results, which did not exist in Florida touch-screens. Technicians got inside access to a central tabulator in Collier County during the middle of the election, and modem security settings may have been disabled for Diebold machines.

As hundreds of anomalies pop up, citizens are thinking:

Who really won? Don’t know. Gotta audit!

Click Here to Donate!

Black Box Voting, a nonpartisan, nonprofit consumer protection group for elections, has been investigating election irregularities for two years. The group has honed in on voting machines, citing problems with internal audit logs, tamperability, improper testing and certification, and bogus results. The National Ballot Integrity Project is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that has approached voting machines from another angle. The organization lobbies for transparency and public accountability in election systems. Both groups are now calling for citizen-initiated recounts. To fund these recounts, BlackBoxVoting.org and the National Ballot Integrity Project have formed a separate, 527 organization, the Help America Recount Fund.

Ralph Nader, who earned notoriety for decades as a consumer protection advocate, just wants to know the truth. How accurate are the Diebold voting machines in New Hampshire?

Using a little-known provision in Ohio law, any five Ohioans who did not vote for the winning candidate can file for recounts. In Florida, citizens can file to contest the election, county by county. Black Box Voting researchers are helping to identify key counties with the worst anomalies, for hand counts and other audits, to detect computer intrusions and vote count discrepancies.

Nader has set the pace for proper auditing, insisting on a hand count of New Hampshire’s Diebold optical scan machines. According to Black Box Voting Executive Director Bev Harris, this method, along with other auditing, is essential to verify machine results, because running ballots through the machines a second time is not a meaningful audit.

Click Here to Contribute to Help America Recount!

About the Help America Recount Fund
The Help America Recount Fund is a new 527 fund affiliated with BlackBoxVoting.org and the National Ballot Integrity Project. The sole purpose of the Help America Recount Fund is to finance presidential ballot recounts in Ohio, Florida and elsewhere, for the 2004 election. For more information, contact us at info@helpamericarecount.org. Or you can reach us at Help America Recount Fund, Law Offices of Lowell Finley, 1604 Solano Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94707-2109

51% Bush, 48% Kerry

It is hard to remember right now but we did take Bucks County for John Kerry!  We did register many, many new voters who showed up at the polls and stood in long lines to vote!  We did have a wonderful “Get Out the Vote” organization with volunteers from all over the country!

Remember, if we were correct in our view that the country would suffer from another four years of George W. Bush,  then we will see the problems grow and multiply in the next six months to a year.  We know we were right and we must stand ready to pick up the pieces as the economy, healthcare and jobs continue to spiral in the wrong direction.

Our job has not changed; we are still fighting for a better place for our children to live. We still need clean air, clean water, respect in the world, jobs for every person who wants and needs one, decent healthcare, and an education system that makes sense.

Our local organizations have grown and strengthened, let’s not lose the opportunity to build our party and our structures.

This is a very long winded way of saying thank you for everything you did to try to help me win this Congressional seat.  You were there for me when I needed you, you showed up, fought the fight and I will never forget your work, your friendship and your support.

I thank you with all my heart.

Love, Ginny

Donations are always needed and appreciated.  To contribute using a credit card on the internet, please visit http://www.ginnyschrader.com/getinvolved/donations.php or send your check (payable to "Schrader for Congress") to:

Schrader for Congress
P.O. Box 876
Morrisville, PA  19067

Contributions to the Schrader for Congress campaign are not deductible for federal income tax purposes. Under federal election law, an individual/partnership may contribute a maximum of $2,000 counting towards the general election. Corporate contributions are prohibited. Federal law requires us to use our best efforts to collect and report the name, mailing address, occupation and name of employer of individuals whose contributions exceed $200 in an election cycle.

Voter Registration Fraud Clearinghouse

From dKosopedia, the free political encyclopedia.

Alert: Follow along on the post-election irregularities. Submit breaking news to:

2004 Ohio Irregularities

2004 Florida Irregularities

BREAKING - Iraq will need vote challengers in January

We expect the GOP to continue their heartfelt and incessant concerns about "voter fraud", Donate to BlogPAC to help fund these dedicated GOP stalwarts to carry freedom's march to the Iraqi polls![1]

-Cope 10:07, 2 Nov 2004 (PST)

I don't see any way the Republican party can lose gracefully. As soon as they lose control of the DOJ their leadership is cooked. Look at it another way: the GOP is going for broke. -Tom Frank

And so it begins. Some say this will be the dirtiest election ever. The more people who vote, the tougher it is to suppress votes or tamper. So VOTE. But this time, we're asking you to do more. Democracy is not a spectator sport.

See also Election 2004 Problems

Table of contents [showhide]

1 Voting Irregularities 2 Great Summary on This American Life 3 Help Page 4 Most crucial news 5 High Ranking Republicans denouncing Voter Fraud 6 State-by-State Breakdown of stories 7 Regional, National, International Breakdown 8 General Overview 9 Breaking News 10 National Stories 11 Voter's Rights Laws, Codes, and Bills 12 Voter Registration Organizations and Tools 13 Get Out The Vote Activities and Organizations 14 Tools, Maps, Stats, States, and other stuff 15 Other Places to Check and Alert 16 Preparing for Election Day

Voting Irregularities

Use this space as a stub to begin collecting and organizing the various catalogued irregularities, suspicious results, and sundry indications of potential vote fraud.

For the current rundown of known voting irregularities, along with an incident reporting protocol, the one-stop shopping site is found at

VotersUnite! Incident Reporting

Great Summary on This American Life

Transcript of Jack Hitt's report on election fraud

Help Page

DailyKos Voting Tips

Voter Fraud Help If you have been the victim of Voter Fraud go here to learn about your rights!

Black Box Voting Incident Reporting

VotersUnite! Incident Reporting

Verified Voting Incident Reporting

Handy toll-free number to report disenfranchisement.

Election Protection Coalition 1-866-OUR-VOTE

Provisional Ballot GOTV Tactics Lawyer's Diary on GOTV / Provisional Ballots

Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights Under Law has more contact and legal information, and they need volunteers to run the hotline mentioned above.

State toll-free numbers-

Some state Democratic Parties will set-up toll-free lines to report problems in the field. We will post these numbers as the lines are established.

Election Protection 2004's downloadable Voters' Bills of Rights that are state specific for 20+ states.

They even have bi-lingual ones for AZ, CO, NM, FL, NV, OH and WI.

Also some other helpful links there on the same page as well as elsewhere on the EP2004 site.

Michigan Independent Media Center is covering Michigan and Ohio. Their toll-free hotline to report breaking developments is 1-877-825-9535

North Carolina Information

http://www.michaelmoore.com/electionwatch/index.php Michael Moore's Fraud Page]

For another voter fraud resource, and for a multiplicity of links to stories and resources, please check out eriposte's vote2004 and excellent roundup!

Voter's Rights - State by State Links

Most crucial news

Post the most crucial news here. Additional information may be found below, or in the relevant state section.

There is a multi-state effort to misdirect democrats to the polls[2] This is being reported in :

 - Florida : Broward, Palm Beach and Ft. Lauderdale 
 - Colorado : Denver
 - Michigan

Great Article on NPR's This American Life Daily Kos Diary Entry

It is now becoming clear that there is a massive, coordinated campaign orchestrated by the RNC and the GOP to commit nationwide fraud, disenfranchisement, confusion, and chaos. Nathan Sproul is behind voter fraud in many swing states, including Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

They have fraudulently used the name of another organization, America votes. Here is a summary of some of the various cases of voter fraud going on now.

The Republican party in Nevada ordered its employees to dispose of Democratic Voter Registrations.

Republican voter registration organizations have illegally shredded Democratic registrations in both Nevada and Oregon, which both are past their voter registration deadline of Tuesday October 12th, leaving many Democrats who thought they'd registered disenfranchised in the most important election of our lifetime.

The company Sproul & Associates, which is closely connected to the RNC and has recieved half a million dollars from them since July 14, 2004, is behind this. It is run by Nathan Sproul, a big Republican donor.

---

Any means necessary, Guardian 18 Oct 2004 In the 60s, police dogs and billy clubs kept black Americans from the polls. Today's methods are more refined...

Hollow Victory, Guardian 21 Oct 2004 Markos Moulitsas runs through the bare bones of the vote fraud, registration fraud, and voter suppression stories, mentions this page and another excellent resource, eriposte's vote2004 and brings the exposure of GOP mendacity to the global stage.

---

DKos Diary explaining the roots of the Republican Florida ACORN fraud claims.

High Ranking Republicans denouncing Voter Fraud

Does a party that refuses to tell the truth before Election Day deserve our vote on election day?

• 18 October 2004 kos diary Ex-Republican senator fires at NH GOP fraud

• 12 Oct 2004 RedDan diary Janklow exposes coordinated GOP voter fraud and cheating campaigns

• 17 Oct 2004 muddypaws diary Top GOP Kentuckian Quits Bush

I cannot in good conscience vote for President Bush in this election. What he has done since his election in 2000 goes against the values I treasure both in terms of leadership and in our nation. He has not done what he said he would do. He has lost my trust and my respect.

• AP article via jimbo2b2's dkos diary

"It would be easier to sit back and say and do nothing but at the same time I couldn't do that...I just think it's a disservice to the young people that are probably for the first time getting involved or looking forward to getting involved." ... she said she still doesn't want to be involved anymore. "I'm bothered. We need to keep it clean. We need to protect this process. And people that are involved in it need to understand that. The candidates need to set the highest standard and say this is what we need to do and I guess I don't think it's been done."

State-by-State Breakdown of stories

• Alaska Fraud (Lt. Governor involved in ballot manipulation )
• Arizona Fraud (Sproul shows up as a top donor to Congressman Trent Franks )
• Arkansas Fraud (Allegation that Governor's wife obstructed black votes)
• California Fraud (Observers shut out)
• Colorado Fraud (Republican Secretary of State limits provisional ballots )
• Florida Fraud (Early voting problems, Jeb's gonna deliver )
• Kentucky Fraud (Possible money laundering)
• Illinois Fraud (Ballot errors)
• Iowa Fraud (Limited registration problems )
• Maine Fraud Alleged inappropriate conduct by Rockland's registrar of voters.
• Massachusetts Fraud (GOP encouraging illegal absentee ballots)
• Maryland Fraud (More problems with felon purges)
• Michigan Fraud (Student voters targeted, etc)
• Missouri Fraud (Diminishing ballot access)
• Minnesota Fraud (Canvassers to only turn in GOP registrations)
• Nevada Fraud ( Dem. registrations shredded )
• New Hampshire Fraud (College students targeted)
• New Mexico Fraud (Pro-GOP voting machine behavior)
• North Carolina Fraud Slowdowns due to Challenges
• Ohio Fraud (Blackwell's shenanigans, GOP voter fraud ops moving in, Challenges galore)
• Oregon Fraud (Dem. registrations shredded )
• Pennsylvania Fraud (Moving polling places at last minute)
• South Carolina Fraud (Play hide-the-polling-station)
• South Dakota Fraud (GOP members resign over absentee stink)
• Tennessee Fraud (Planted special Olympics fliers)
• Texas Fraud (Austin electronic vote problems, Gerrymander case not over)
• Virginia Fraud Nader Chief - recent Republican activist/campaign worker
• Washinton Fraud Missing Absentee Ballots
• West Virginia Fraud (Absentee phone scams/registrations destroyed?)
• Wisconsin Fraud (Milwaukee urban ballot shortages)

Regional, National, International Breakdown

• Military Fraud (Rumsfield, Pentagon head up ballot counting)
• New England Fraud (Phone jamming scandal)
• Overseas Fraud (Absentee votes printed late, overloaded Pentagon server blocked IPs)

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Justice Dept to monitor elections: a locations list Great, Now everyone trust Ashcroft! -Cope 11:54, 29 Oct 2004 (PDT)

10/29/04 Study: DOJ pattern of anti-democratic actions thwarts voters-Cope 15:16, 31 Oct 2004 (PST)

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 -- Nota Bene, Fraud in this instance is used as a shorthand catchall phrase that includes
 -- everything from faked registrations, registration destruction, denial of access to critical
 -- registration or voting materials, intimidation campaigns, voter roll manipulation or purging,
 -- and so on. --RedDan 18:57, 14 Oct 2004 (PDT)

General Overview

This Page is devoted to collecting, organizing, and systematizing documented instances of voter fraud, disenfranchisement, and other "dirty tricks" that are ongoing in this election cycle.

Parties clash over new voters Allegations of registration cards being dumped and partisanship have spurred suits, investigations

-Cope 13:49, 21 Oct 2004 (PDT)

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Black Box Voting has fingered Diebold union busting as the source of many of the Ballot roblems!

The real story behind the October ballot problems Submitted by Andy Stephenson on Wed, 10/20/2004 - 18:46. News Articles Black Box Voting has obtained documents from June 2004 indicating that Diebold was concerned about upcoming ballot printing problems. Recent problems in California (Alameda, San Diego and Tulare counties) and Washington state (King County) appear to trace back to labor problems at the Diebold printing plant in Everett Washington.

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There seems to be a loophole in the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) with respect to how to count provisional ballots. See HAVA Fraud

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Get Out The Vote drives have become a strategic necessity for this election. Unsurprisingly, there have been allegations of voter registration abuse and fraud.

Most notably, Eric Russell a former Voters' Outreach of America employee, alleges that the private voter registration company destroyed hundreds of non-Republican registration forms. Voters Outreach of America has been linked to Sproul & Associates and Nathan Sproul, GOP consultants.

Recently, there have been allegations of voter registration fraud against ACORN in Florida alleging phony voter registrations and forged party-affiliation change cards, and absentee ballots.

In Kansas City, MO, Neal Breitweiser a low-level Republican operative from St. Louis, has submitted a petition to the St. Louis County Board of Election Commissioners. He asks the board to investigate registration fraud he alleges has been committed by the Missouri Progressive Vote Coalition, America Coming Together, and MoveOn.org.

Breaking News

Please post breaking stories in the space below, and as the Wiki gets organized, these stories can (and will) be moved into the relevant sections.

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Democrats' votes challenged - Utah Fraud article. Republican candidate Brice Derek Carsno claims all of those residents do not live in the precincts they are registered in and therefore should not have the right to punch a ballot Tuesday. State and county election officials, however, disagree and at least one says Carsno's challenge could be criminal.

Democrats accuse Republicans of trying to block thousands of votes - Oregon Fraud article. PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Democrats accused Republicans Sunday of trying to block thousands of young people's votes, following a formal request by GOP lawyers to review ballots cast by first-time voters in Oregon's most populous county. In a letter issued Friday, attorneys for the Oregon Republican Party demanded that officials set aside ballots cast by new voters in Multnomah County who have not provided proof of identification. Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden said that the Republican demand flies in the face of Oregon law which does not require voters to show proof of identification when registering. "This is not Florida. We are about empowering citizens," said Wyden, who helped draft the relevant portion of Oregon's election law.

Republican Group Accused of Voter Fraud - Minnesota Fraud article. "They said if you bring back a bunch of Democratic cards, you'll be fired,".

anecdotal report regarding Texas voting machine troubles

Philly Enquirer story misquoted and used as propaganda Another Republican effort to make it look like both sides are equally culpable, and a good disemboweling of the effort. Link is to a message board thread that starts with a mail that is probably being sent out to tens of thousands and finishes with the accusation lying dead in the street.

Smell's like Rove in Tennesee

Bush's New England Campaign Chief Resigns over 2002 fraud

New Nevada Story - New witness comes forward verifying Registration Destruction stories

BREAKING STORY ON REUTERS

The article includes some Republican lies, trying to claim that Democrats are doing the same thing, to muddy the situation. This is pure Republican propaganda. They are the ones disenfranchising voters, not the Democrats.

RNC TIED TO MULTI-STATE REGISTRATION FRAUD

Original Diary entry

Story with additional information

First we get news out of a local Las Vegas news affiliate from CBS that an outfit called Voters' Outreach of America is caught trashing voter registration forms filled out by people trying to register to vote as Democrats. But while running down this outfit, they skipped town on their office space rent, and moved out of state (Nevada), and the CBS affiliate indicates that they might have moved their operation to Oregon.

We also learn not too long ago, that Sproul & Associates, which is based out of AZ, was misrepresenting itself as being under contract with the legitimate nonpartisan group America Votes, while trying to get permission to do voter registration sign-ups in Southern Oregon libraries. A sharp librarian down in Medford double-checks with America Votes, and finds out that the Sproul group which had sent a letter to the public library seeking the permission, are not under contract or affiliated with the non-partisan group America Votes. It should also be noted that because of this, some confusion is circulating in the news media and conflating America Votes with the shady Sproul outfit.

We now know that Sproul & Associates is a directly funded RNC consultancy firm.

Then we learn that a "traveling team" hired signature gatherer is caught in downtown Portland's Pioneer Square, the night before Edwards is planned to hold a debate watching rally, refusing to register Democrats, and admits to throwing out forms filled out by people registering as such.

This person also admits that the "traveling team" he is with was recently doing registration drives in Nevada. We still don't know if this "traveling team" is connected with either Voters' Outreach of America or not. This has led Oregon Sec. of State Bill Bradbury and Attorney General Hardy Myers to tell news outlets late this evneing that they plan to investigate. Bradbury telling the local news outlet KGW that they are investigating this serious matter, and he appeared to be more than a little pissed to see this sort of fraud taking place. Now it seems the story is being picked up by the AP.

We now find in a past story from The American Prospect that Voters' Outreach of America IS in fact connected with, and was under contract by Sproul and Associates which we know is directly funded by the RNC from FEC records at opensecrets.org. Voters' Outreach of America were under contract by Sproul to do signature gathering in AZ for petition gathering for "No Taxpayer Money For Politicians" petition AND to get Ralph Nader on the ballot in AZ (where he was eventually knocked off the ballot for fraudulent petition signatures).

The relevant TAP article passage which shows the contractual connection between Voters' Outreach of America and Sproul & Associates, who are directly funded by the RNC:

Nor has Nader denounced the covert assistance his Arizona ballot-qualification effort received from Sproul, who is currently running the No Taxpayer Money For Politicians" initiative, a right-wing effort to ban candidates from receiving public financing. According to several sources, two of the contractors Sproul hired to oversee petition gathering for No Taxpayer Money For Politicians -- Aaron "A.J." James, who directs Voters' Outreach of America, and Diane Burns -- were also paid by Sproul to get as many signatures as possible for Nader.

American Prospect Online, 06.25.04 (emphasis added)

We need to start digging on Aaron "A.J." James.

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Breaking News from KansasCity.com

The Republicans strike again. Following the alarming news of GOP puppet company Voters Outreach shredding voter registrations belonging to democrats, they're mounting a campaign to accuse the Democrats of the same thing.

Neal Breitweiser, a low-level Republican operative from St. Louis, has submitted a petition to the the St. Louis County Board of Election Commissioners. He asks the board to investigate registration fraud he alleges has been commited by the Missouri Progressive Vote Coalition, America Coming Together, and MoveOn.org.

He speaks of hundreds of registrations being trashed by those organisations. The organisations are defending themselves, and have declared that it is not the first time Republicans make similar baseless accusations.

Is this an attempt by Republicans to cover their asses the Nevada Voters Outreach scandal that is sure to break, so they can accuse Democrats of the same thing ? I don't know, but it scares me.

Source: http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/local/9901866.htm bugmenot.com for registration info --Kryostat 20:46, 12 Oct 2004 (PDT)

In Missouri no party affiliation is stated on the voter registration form, so the Republican accusation is bizarre as well as baseless.

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Just created New England Fraud Unindicted 2002 Co-conspirator - Just Named - is Regional Bush-Cheney '04 Chair. Added South Dakota Fraud Republican operatives resign over Absentee Ballot fraud and Ohio Fraud the operatives that resigned over the South Dakota Absentee Ballot fraud were shifted to lead the Ohio get-out-the-vote operation. Carneades 07:38, 15 Oct 2004 (PDT)

The South Dakota information comes from here: Bill Janklow, former Republican congressman and governor of South Dakota, says the national GOP is encouraging campaign workers to cheat, particularly in their Victory organization.

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National Stories

This American Life story on Voter Suppression (Real Media clip)

Is the DOJ poised to keep voters from voting? (Sept. 20 New Yorker)

DailyKos Diary on a Sproul Search indicating fraud perpetrated in PA, WV, Oregon, Arizona, Nevada, and...

DKos diary re: Election Postponement due to potential terror alert

CNN transcript with Tom Ridge re: Terrorism and Election Postponement

Meteor Blades (DKos) Roundup of postponement stories

Newsweek Soaries storie re: Postponement

DHinMI (DKos) re: GOP contracting to "Security Firms" to "protect the vote" (Pinkertons, Vance, and etc)

The American Prospect story on GOP collusion and conspiracy to suppress the vote

Black Box voting, an online book on how Diebold electronic voting machines have fraud problems at the upper right

Voter's Rights Laws, Codes, and Bills

Dept of Justice Voting Rights Laws

DOJ Voting Rights Section

Voting Rights Sec. 1971

ACLU Voting Rights Info

Voter Registration Organizations and Tools

Newsday Article on Record Voter Registration

Record numbers of new voters

Iowa voter Registration Records

Get Out The Vote Activities and Organizations

Act for victory (America Coming Together)

Election Protection Volunteer

Move On main

MoveOn Political Action Campaign

Driving Votes

Music for America

The League of Independent Voters

USAction

PIRG (Public Interest Research Groups)

ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now)

PFAW (People For the American Way)

America Votes NOTA BENE America Votes is in NO WAY associated with Sproul & Associates or any of their associated organizations. Sproul is using a similar name in order to hide his own activities and to provide a means of smearing the 527's operations.

Sunshine and Alligators (sorry for the shameless self-promotion, but we folks here in Tokyo have already voted and need something to do with our time...sor we're gonna go to Tampa/St. Pete...Join us!)

Tools, Maps, Stats, States, and other stuff

Fair Vote 2020 - massive map, demographic, and statistics database

Polling Station Locations determined via input of Zip Code - EXTREMELY USEFUL!!!

- 10 Oct 2004 MyDD Diary Discusses historical practices of voter fraud & intimidation.

Other Places to Check and Alert

Election 2004 Problems

The Everything Voting Guide

billhobbs.com vote fraud page (Dark Side Resource...)