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US Vote Crashed on Falluja * Humanity Dims

16 November 2004

"The right of voting for representatives is the primary right
by which all other rights are protected.
To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery..."

—Thomas Paine

1) Most voters in Ohio chose Kerry. Here's how the votes vanished

- - Inside the Election Fraud Battle
- - Vote Fraud Coverage Puts Anchorman's Job at Risk
- - Kucinich Note On The Presidential Election in Ohio
- - What You Can Do About Election Fraud
- - Official Results Not Official until January 6, 2005

Most voters in Ohio chose Kerry. Here's how the votes vanished.

KERRY WON OHIO
JUST COUNT THE BALLOTS AT THE BACK OF THE BUS
In These Times
Friday, November 12, 2004

By Greg Palast

This February, Ken Blackwell, Ohio's Secretary of State, told his State Senate President, "The possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state's primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity." Blackwell, co-chair of Bush-Cheney reelection campaign, wasn't warning his fellow Republican of disaster, but boasting of an opportunity to bring in Ohio for Team Bush no matter what the voters wanted. And most voters in Ohio wanted JFK, not GWB. But their choice won't count because their votes won't be counted.

The ballots that add up to a majority for John Kerry in Ohio -- and in New Mexico -- are locked up in two Republican hidey-holes: "spoiled" ballots and "provisional" ballots.

OHIO SPOILED ROTTEN
American democracy has a dark little secret. In a typical presidential election, two million ballots are simply chucked in the garbage, marked "spoiled" and not counted. A dive into the electoral dumpster reveals something special about these votes left to rot. In a careful county-by-county, precinct-by-precinct analysis of the Florida 2000 race, the US Civil Rights Commission discovered that 54% of the votes in the spoilage bin were cast by African-Americans. And Florida, Heaven help us, is typical. Nationwide, the number of Black votes "disappeared" into the spoiled pile is approximately one million. The other million in the no-count pit come mainly from Hispanic, Native-American and poor white precincts, a decidedly Democratic demographic.

Ohio Republicans, simultaneously in charge of both the Bush-Cheney get-out-the-vote drive and the state's vote-counting rules, doggedly and systematically insured the spoilage pile would be as high as the White House.

Vote spoilage comes in two flavors. There are "overvotes" -- too many punches in the cards -- and "undervotes." Here we find the hanging, dimpled and "pregnant" chads created by old, dysfunctional punch card machines, in which the bit of paper covering the hole doesn't fall out, but hangs on. Machines can't read these, but we humans, who know a hole when we see one, have no problem reading these cards ... if allowed to. This is how Katherine Harris defeated Al Gore, by halting the hand count of the spoiled punch cards not, as is generally believed, by halting a "recount."

Whose chads are left hanging? In Florida in 2000 federal investigators determined that Black voters' ballots spoiled 900% more often than white voters, mainly due to punch card error. Ohio Republicans found those racial odds quite attractive. The state was the only one of fifty to refuse to eliminate or fix these vote-eating machines, even in the face of a lawsuit by the ACLU.

Apparently, the Ohio Republicans like what the ACLU found. The civil rights group's expert testimony concluded that Ohio's cussed insistence on forcing 73% of its electorate to use punch card machines had an "overwhelming" racial bias, voiding votes mostly in Black precincts. Blackwell doesn't disagree; and he hopes to fix the machinery ... sometime after George Bush's next inauguration. In the meantime, the state's Attorney General Jim Petro, a Republican, strategically postponed the trial date of the ACLU case until after the election.

Fixing a punch card machine is cheap and easy. If Ohio simply placed a card-reading machine in each polling station, as Michigan did this year, voters could have checked to ensure their vote would tally. If not, they would have gotten another card.

Blackwell knows that. He also knows that if those reading machines had been installed, almost all the 93,000 spoiled votes, overwhelmingly Democratic, would have closed the gap on George Bush's lead of 136,000 votes.

JIM CROW'S PROVISIONAL BALLOT
Add to the spoiled ballots a second group of uncounted votes, the 'provisional' ballots, and -- voila! -- the White House would have turned Democrat blue.

But that won't happen because of the peculiar way provisional ballots are counted or, more often, not counted. Introduced by federal law in 2002, the provisional ballot was designed especially for voters of color. Proposed by the Congressional Black Caucus to save the rights of those wrongly scrubbed from voter rolls, it was, in Republican-controlled swing states, twisted into a back-of-the-bus ballot unlikely to be tallied.

Unlike the real thing, these ballots are counted only by the whimsy and rules of a state's top elections official; and in Ohio, that gives a virtually ballot veto to Secretary of State Blackwell.

Mr. Blackwell has a few rules to make sure a large proportion of provisional ballots won't be counted. For the first time in memory, the Secretary of State has banned counting ballots cast in the "wrong" precinct, though all neighborhoods share the same President.

Over 155,000 Ohio voters were shunted to these second-class ballots. The election-shifting bulge in provisional ballots (more than 3% of the electorate) was the direct result of the national Republican strategy that targeted African-American precincts for mass challenges on election day.

This is the first time in four decades that a political party has systematically barred -- in this case successfully -- hundreds of thousands of Black voters from access to the voting booth. While investigating for BBC Television, we obtained three dozen of the Republican Party's confidential "caging" lists, their title for spreadsheets listing names and addresses of voters they intended to block on any pretext.

We found that every single address of the thousands on these Republican hit lists was located in Black-majority precincts. You might find that nasty and racist. It may also be a crime.

Before 1965, Jim Crow laws in the Deep South did not bar Blacks from voting. Rather, the segregationist game was played by applying minor technical voting requirements only to African-Americans. That year, Congress voted to make profiling and impeding minority voters, even with a legal pretext, a criminal offence under the Voting Rights Act.

But that didn't stop the Republicans of '04. Their legally questionable mass challenge to Black voters is not some low-level dirty tricks operation of local party hacks. Emails we obtained show the lists were copied directly to the Republican National Committee's chief of research and to the director of a state campaign.

Many challenges center on changes of address. On one Republican caging list, 50 addresses changed from Jacksonville to overseas, African-American soldiers shipped Over There.

You don't have to guess the preferences registered on the provisional ballots. Republicans went on a challenging rampage, while Democrats pledged to hold to the tradition of letting voters vote.

Blackwell has said he will count all the "valid" provisional ballots. However, his rigid regulations, like the new guess-your-precinct rule, are rigged to knock out enough voters to keep Bush's skinny lead alive. Other pre-election maneuvers by Republican officials -- late and improbably large purges of voter rolls, rejection of registrations -- maximized the use of provisional ballots which will never be counted. For example, a voter wrongly tagged an ineligible "felon" voter (and there's plenty in that category, mostly African-Americans), will lose their ballot even though they are wrongly identified.

Article truncated, for the complete article, see:
gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=393&row=1

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- - Inside the Election Fraud Battle

Think Kerry Is Not Involved In This Fight? Think Again.
Also: Fallujah = Operation Distract From Fixed Election.
by Betsy R. Vasquez
www.moderateindependent.com/v2i21election.htm
also
smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=18651

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- - Vote Fraud Coverage Puts Anchorman's Job at Risk

Keith Obermann, the anchorman of MSNBC's "The Countdown", has been covering the election fraud story for 5 days now. He is covering it in a fair and balance way... presenting the facts, interviewing people from not only both sides, but also unbiased parties. He has not been painting those of us who question the results as fringe conspiracy nuts. He has sorted through what is fact and fiction, as well as investigated with expects the many theories presented by those who question the election results. He was the first mainstream media person to cover the story.

There is a rumor that his job is at stake. I do not know whether it is true, but let's make sure that he stays on the air investigating this. View the original story and send letters of express your desire to see that he continues to cover and investigate the election fraud stories to the contacts listed in the forwarded message below.

View all five of Keith's Election Fraud Blogs "Bloggerman" at: msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/

His show's web site is at countdown.msnbc.com. His election fraud coverage is really good, you should check it out. The show comes on at 8:00 pm est weeknights. Scroll down to the bottom right side of the page to see link to video of one of his election fraud stories.

Countdown with Keith Olbermann
Keith Olbermann Keith.Olbermann@msnbc.com
Richard Kaplan, MSNBC President Richard.Kaplan@msnbc.com
David Verdi, Executive News Director david.verdi@nbc.com
Meghan Schaefer, Executive Producer Maghan.Schaefer@msnbc.com

Mail to feedback emails in case the direct emails are disabled
countdown@msnbc.com
viewerservices@msnbc.com
letters@msnbc.com
feedback@msnbc.com

MSNBC
1 MSNBC Plz, Secaucus, NJ 07094
Phone: (201) 583-5000
Fax: (201) 583-5584

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- - Kucinich Note On The Presidential Election in Ohio

A Note On The Presidential Election in Ohio
by Congressman Dennis Kucinich
Published November 10, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
See:
www.commondreams.org/views04/1110-31.htm

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- - What You Can Do About Election Fraud
by Susan Truitt, Co-founder, CASE Ohio, Citizens' Alliance for Secure
See: www.neohioact.org/electionaudit/WhatYouCanDoSusan.htm

Also - Investigate the VOTE
Tell Congress to Investigate the 2004 Election
www.moveon.org/investigatethevote/

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- - Official Results Not Official until January 6, 2005

The Fat Lady Hasn't Even Entered The Building, notes Paul V. Rafferty

2004-11-09 | If the U.S. Constitution is still in effect, the results of the 2004 Presidential Election are not yet official ! No one really knows who will be the next President of the United States !

Despite what the major media may say, the OFFICIAL results will not be OFFICIAL until January 6, 2005 !

The presidential election system in the United States is somewhat complex. American voters do not DIRECTLY elect the president and vice-president. Instead, there is an intermediary stage, whereby the vast electorate votes for "Electors" who are pledged to certain candidates and who then vote for them, in accordance with the popular vote.

While there is much valid criticism of the Electoral College system in the United States, in this instance, it may prove to be a welcome asset. There is still time for Courts to hear all the legal cases challenging voting procedures.

For more: "The Fat Lady Hasn't Even Entered The Building, notes Paul V. Rafferty"

See: www.unobserver.com/layout5.php?id=2001&blz=1

2) Fallujah - a city lies in ruins

- - NYTimes and Pitt's Fallujah Perspective Collide
- - Rules of War Broken in Falluja Assault - Amnesty Intl
- - U.S. Marine Executes Wounded Unarmed Iraqi
- - Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches
- - Democracy Now! - US Fallujah attack, and more

Fallujah - a city lies in ruins
A City Lies in Ruins, Along with the Lives of the Wretched Survivors
by Michael Georgy in Fallujah and Kim Sengupta
Published on Monday, November 15, 2004 by the lndependent/UK

After six days of intense combat against the Fallujah insurgents, US warplanes, tanks and mortars have left a shattered landscape of gutted buildings, crushed cars and charred bodies.

A drive through the city revealed a picture of utter destruction, with concrete houses flattened, mosques in ruins, telegraph poles down, power and phone lines hanging slack and rubble and human remains littering the empty streets. The north-west Jolan district, once an insurgent stronghold, looked like a ghost town, the only sound the rumbling of tank tracks.

For the complete article, see:
www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1115-01.htm

The second article at above URL page includes a related article:

THE CIVILIAN DEATH TOLL
By Harvey McGavin

US military officials were last night counting the cost of their week long assault on Fallujah in which they claim to have killed some 1,200 insurgents and some 44 servicemen lost their lives.

But in the city which was once home to 300,000 people there were few reports of the number of civilians killed.

Many are thought to have fled the fighting, but reports from the city say it is impossible to tell how many of the bodies that litter its rubble-strewn streets are those of ordinary citizens.

Last week a report collated by the UN said 20 doctors had died during a US air strike on a clinic and there have been numerous reports of the US dropping huge bombs.

In addition to the 38 Americans and six Iraqis killed in the assault, more than 200 US soldiers were injured. About 400 suspected insurgents have been arrested in Fallujah including "some" foreigners, interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said.

For the complete article, see second one at this url:
www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1115-01.htm

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- - NYTimes and Pitt's Fallujah Perspective Collide

His Red Right Hand
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Tuesday 16 November 2004

[Excerpt]

The top story on the New York Times website on Monday morning read, "Rebels Routed in Fallujah." It's a good thing, too, because we need to be fighting the terrorists over there in Iraq instead of over here in America. Who were these Fallujan terrorists, anyway? They really must have been the hardest of the hard-core to have gotten the kind of military reaction we have seen from U.S. forces in the last week. This is what I've been told, anyway.

As for American casualties, 67 soldiers have died in the last fifteen days. The total number of American soldiers killed in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion stands at 1,188. The total number of 'Coalition' troops killed to date stands at 1,334. There is no accurate count of the number of wounded from these first two weeks of November.

Thanks to the competent yet generous leadership of George W. Bush, the military invasion of Fallujah will certainly cure what ails us in Iraq. To be sure, the deaths of thousands of civilians will further inflame the Iraqi populace. To be sure, the number of 'insurgents' killed in Fallujah will be immediately replaced by fresh recruits. To be sure, fierce battles have erupted in Mosul, Tal Afar, Ramadi, Beiji, Baquba, Buhriz, Khabbaza, Baghdad, and indeed all across the country. To be sure, we will have to grind all these cities to powder, along with all the residents of these cities, to make sure no one thwarts our aforementioned God-given right to bomb and shoot and burn and smash whomever and whatever we please.

Fear not, however. All is well. "The objective," said John Ashcroft in his resignation letter last week, "of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." This is what I've been told, anyway.

Mission accomplished.

For the complete article, see:
www.truthout.org/docs_04/111604A.shtml

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- - Rules of War Broken in Falluja Assault - Amnesty Intl
Published on Monday, November 15, 2004 by Reuters
Rules of War Broken in Falluja Assault - Amnesty Intl

LONDON - The rules of war protecting civilians and wounded combatants have been broken by both sides in the week-long assault on the Iraqi city of Falluja, the human rights group, Amnesty International said on Monday.

[Excerpts]

Not only had the attacking U.S. and Iraqi troops failed to take the necessary steps to ensure that non-combatants did not come under fire, but insurgents had also abused flags of truce and fired indiscriminately.

For the complete article, see:
www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1115-02.htm

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- - U.S. Marine Executes Wounded Unarmed Iraqi

War Crime Caught on Tape:
U.S. Marine Executes Wounded Unarmed Iraqi

An NBC cameraman caught on tape video of a US Marine executing an unarmed and wounded Iraqi prisoner in a mosque in Fallujah. Democracy Now! speaks with Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Listen/Watch/Read
www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/16/1611204

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- - Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches
Dahr's personal log and hard news stories from Iraq
Following are some blog titles:

November 15, 2004
Dogs Eating Bodies in the Streets of Fallujah

November 12, 2004
"Iraq is burning with wrath, anger and sadness…"

November 11, 2004
Prayers for Vengeance, More Death…

November 09, 2004
The Fire is Spreading…

The Siege Begins, Outrage in Baghdad

November 07, 2004
Carnage and Martial Law

November 05, 2004
Spiraling Into Occupied Iraq

Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches

http://dahrjamailiraq.com/weblog

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- - Democracy Now! - US Fallujah attack, and more..

Democracy Now! Headlines for November 15, 2004

- U.S. Attack Devastates Fallujah
- U.S. Blocks Humanitarian Workers Access to Fallujah
- U.S. Accused of War Crimes in Fallujah
- Gunmen Assassinate Iraq Nat'l Council Member in Kirkuk
- Iraq Deputy PM: Elections May Be Postponed
- Haiti To Issue Arrest Warrant for Aristide
- Presbyterians Moves Forward on Israeli Divestment
- Miami Police Fires Taser Guns At Children

Link to:
www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/15/1447256

3) White House Orders CIA Shakeup

- - Election Over, McCain Criticizes Bush on Climate Change

White House Orders CIA Shakeup
to Get Rid of "Soft Leakers and Liberal Democrats"
Monday, November 15th, 2004

Reports have emerged over the weekend that the White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

For the complete Democracy Now! story, see, listen, or read::
www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/15/1448214

For the Newsday post:

www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-uscia1114,0,707331.story?coll=ny-top-headlines

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- - Election Over, McCain Criticizes Bush on Climate Change

Wasting no time distancing on an issue that has long divided them, Senator John McCain yesterday called the White House stance on climate change "terribly disappointing" and said inaction in the face of mounting scientific data was unjustified.

www.nytimes.com/2004/11/16/politics/16mccain.html?oref=login

4) Web Abuzz With Vote-Rigging Tales

- - More Vote-Truth Resources

Web Abuzz With Vote-Rigging Tales
by Antonia Zerbisias
Published on Sunday, November 14, 2004 by the Toronto Star

John Kerry may have conceded the White House to George W. Bush,
but millions of Americans have not.

Of course, driving all these charges of election hijacking is a healthy dose of paranoia based on the all-too-real 2000 election mess. Mix in bewilderment over how so many Americans swallowed the Bush administration lies about 9/11 and Iraq with a generous helping of sore loserdom — and you have the perfect recipe for a conspiracy theory.

But this is one cow pie that stinks to high heaven. You have to wonder why the media aren't sniffing around it.

For the complete article, see:
www.commondreams.org/views04/1114-22.htm

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- - More Vote-Truth Resources

www.stolenelection.net

www.votersunite.org

www.pissedoffvoters.net

"The right of voting for representatives is the primary right
by which all other rights are protected.
To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery..."

—Thomas Paine

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