Blogged by Brad from somewhere in TX…
We’ve been largely off the grid for the last 24, and will likely continue to be over the next two or three days. At least. (On the road, with frustratingly spotty net access and several article deadlines looming.) So for now, we’re happy to point over to AlterNet’s coverage of the story listeners may have heard us cursorily break during a phone call from Ohio’s Paddy Schaeffer on the air the Friday before last while we were Guest Hosting the Peter B. Collins Show from Houston.
Here’s the lede…
The lost records violate Ohio law, which states federal election records must be kept for 22 months after Election Day, and a U.S. District Court order issued last September that the 2004 ballots be preserved while the court hears a civil rights lawsuit alleging voter suppression of African-American voters in Columbus.
The destruction of the election records also frustrates efforts by the media and historians to determine the accuracy of Ohio’s 2004 vote count, because in county after county the key evidence needed to understand vote count anomalies apparently no longer exists.
“The extent of the destruction of records is consistent with the covering up of the fraud that we believe occurred in the presidential election,” said Cliff Arnebeck, a Columbus attorney representing the King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association, which filed voter suppression suit. “We’re in the process of addressing where to go from here with the Ohio Attorney General’s office.”
Read Steve Rosenfeld’s excellent report in full for much more detail and reminders of the raft of apparently fraudulent cases which these missing ballots may have helped to explain one way or another. Such as the “10,000 voters from several Bible belt counties who voted for Bush and voted in favor of gay marriage, if the results are true,” along with the “dozen rural counties, [where] virtually unknown Democrats at the bottom of the ballot received more votes than Kerry.”
As well, we’re given a few jarring reminders of where else these missing ballots might otherwise have filled in so many still-unexplained gaps (all, of course, completely ignored by the corporate mainstream media for years)…
“The same situation occurred in Clermont County,” he said. “We have sworn affidavits from people who saw white stickers placed over the Kerry-Edward ovals in this optical scan county,” he said, referring to one way of masking a would-be Kerry vote, because optical-scan machines read ink marks on paper ballots. “So the missing unused ballots would suggest they were used to remake ballots to reflect the desired vote for Bush.”
We’re reminded of the recent decision by a Judge in Alameda County, CA to re-run a 2004 election at the next available opportunity, after it was revealed the county had similarly allowed ballots (in that case, electronic ballots on Diebold touch-screen voting machines) to be destroyed. That case was a local ballot proposition, so we’re not sure if any precedent applies here, but we’d be happy to hear any thoughts from attorneys familiar with the two cases.
In lieu of such a remedy, of course, the Ohio story may well signal that the Theft of Ohio ’04 could well now be a full fait accomplis.
Knowing attorney Cliff Arnebeck and OH’s new SoS Jennifer Brunner, however — both of whom are on the case — we suspect that someone will eventually be held accountable here. Not that such accountability will do anything to undo the rape of our nation’s democracy which took place again in 2004 under our very noses. A rape, we will add, which could not have occurred without the tacit approval, willful “ignorance” and near-criminal negligence of the corporate American mainstream media.
The reality SoS Bowen found needs to be reflected in the federal legislation — which should essentially ban all electronic voting systems.
Whoever throws away election records should to be held to account. The Ohio SoS and AG need to look into this.
Blackwell and everybody else who could be complicit in the destruction should be prosecuted and go to jail. Are there any lawyers willing to follow up accordingly?
This is so a la Scooter throwing sand in the eyes of the Fitzpatric prosecution and obstructing any further justice upstream, except for the magnitude of it.
The result is that the big boys walk, and the little wannabe stool pidgeons take the fall. It is not as american as the bushies portray it as being.
Justice was done to the extent Scooter was convicted and sentenced, but justice was obstructed to the extent that preznit blush waved his magic wand, as the Protector Of The Bushie Gang, and set him loose.
If preznit blush, or those close to him in his gang, become implicated in this Ohio criminal coverup, he would pardon any and all of them.
But who gave the order to destroy the records? Who had authority over all these counties? One county official cannot tell an official from another county to do anything, much less anything criminal.
It was obviously a conspiracy, because how would 64% of all Ohio counties spontaneously just decide to disobey court orders and become subject to criminal contempt?
No, this is a massive conspiracy to commit a crime during the process of statewide obstruction of justice.
This is a criminal uprising against the good people of America.
Another thing that this case illustrates is that the officialdom in any election context is the controlling factor.
Stalin was purported to say that it does not matter who votes or how they vote, what matters is who says they counted the votes and what numbers they report.
In this case the election officials, in a massive rebellion against American values, have destroyed the evidence of the numbers, after having been ordered by state law and federal courts not to.
Either they are massively stupid or they know that the court of appeals for the Sixth Circuit has been compromised and they will be protected. Or that preznit blush has promised them a pardon.
The bottom line is that a massive election rebellion of 64% of the counties of Ohio has taken place, and they have informed Americans that somehow they are above the law and they will elect whomever they want to and the rest of us be damned.
So we shall see if in fact a coup has taken place or that it has not fully taken place … yet.
Can we and shall we stop this rebellion?
It’s good that the bush administration has built all these secret detention center around the U.S. i have theories about how these fascist criminal bastards plan to use these prisons. Now, i’m gonna tell you who needs to go into these prisons.
It all started with stealing the 2000 Presidential election to gain access to the White House. Then came Bush’s blowjob, WORLD TRADE TOWER BUILDING #7 that disintegrated to the ground in 6 seconds without the help of any ARABS or AIRPLANES to help it’s controlled demolition collapse on 9/11, 10 1/2 hours after the other WORLD TRADE TOWERS FELL.
A fireman gave a 30 second countdown and poof, the treasonous murderers running our country now have their “terrorist” event necessary to scare and anger the American populace into giving up 200 years of progress in the area of human rights and an excuse to start waging their oil war. The Neo-Con assault on the constitution and Carl Rove’s successful control of the corporate mass media has forever altered the face of US Democracy and the respect it had by world citizens.
Not that this would get in the way of Cheney’s anti-environmental agenda, as president of the Senate over 250 laws have been reversed under his loser leadership always lowering heath standards in favor of polluters. Changing the rules of forestry so the people no longer have a voice other than an open comment period in some cases in December 2004, 1 month after stealing the Presidential election of 2004. These oil barons are lining their pockets as their and letting their ugliness lead our country’s do nothing approach to the global warming crisis.
The Congression corruption of these Republithug criminals and their democrap enablers never ceases to amaze me. While the Cheney administration openly breaks law after, it is obvious that this legislative branch is the biggest group of sellout patsies. Their members have proven over and over that they are part of this complete manipulation of “our” Democratic form of government. Their role as providing the important function our system of checks and balances on the executive and judicial branch has been replaced by deal cutting and allowing the secrecy of bush dictatorship to exist under the broad interpretation of the words “Executive Priviledge” and “i do not recall.”
These people have stolen the last 3 elections and will continue their path of destruction alway decrying “to stop terrorism” as their blanket excuse to justify their actions. Always pointing the WORLD TRADE TWIN TOWERS but never talking about the 3rd WORLD TRADE TOWER BUILDING #7. #7 MUST BE BURRIED BECAUSE IT CAN NEVER BE USED TO PIN 9/11 ON THEIR SWORN ENEMY ALQAEDA since this indicates the WHITE HOUSE TERRORISTS ARE THE GUILTY MURDERERS.
ALL ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES MUST BE ABOLISHED. Until we start using verifiable paper ballots to validate the will of “we the people” the people in power will be selecting who they want in position of power. That is unless the the people counting and or storing the ballots conveniently lose them. Currently 80% of the US votes are counted on hackable electronic voting machines.
Thank you Kenneth Blackwell. i look forward to the day you and the cheney administration spend the rest of your days in the new prisons you built. Watch out for this desperate group of criminals to do another false flag attack because bush signed an executive order last month giving him total power in the event of another 9/11 attack. We all must work to stop the Cheney administration.
As far as I can see, this is really where the three branches of government have left us:
Malcolm X – Ballot or Bullet
“This is part of what’s wrong with you — you do too much singing. Today it’s time to stop singing and start swinging. You can’t sing up on freedom, but you can swing up on some freedom. Cassius Clay can sing, but singing didn’t help him to become the heavyweight champion of the world; swinging helped him become the heavyweight champion. This government has failed us; the government itself has failed us, and the white liberals who have been posing as our friends have failed us.
“And once we see that all these other sources to which we’ve turned have failed, we stop turning to them and turn to ourselves. We need a self help program, a do-it — a-do-it-yourself philosophy, a do-it-right-now philosophy, a it’s-already-too-late philosophy. This is what you and I need to get with, and the only time — the only way we’re going to solve our problem is with a self-help program. Before we can get a self-help program started we have to have a self-help philosophy….
“America is just as much a colonial power as England ever was. America is just as much a colonial power as France ever was. In fact, America is more so a colonial power than they because she’s a hypocritical colonial power behind it.
“What is 20th — What do you call second class citizenship? Why, that’s colonization. Second class citizenship is nothing but 20th century slavery. How you gonna tell me you’re a second class citizen? They don’t have second class citizenship in any other government on this earth. They just have slaves and people who are free. Well this country is a hypocrite. They try and make you think they set you free by calling you a second class citizen. No, you’re nothing but a 20th century slave….
“So today, our people are disillusioned. They’ve become disenchanted. They’ve become dissatisfied, and in their frustrations they want action.
“And in 1964 you’ll see this young black man, this new generation asking for the ballot or the bullet. That old Uncle Tom action is outdated. The young generation don’t want to hear anything about the odds are against us. What do we care about odds?
“When this country here was first being founded there were 13 colonies. The — The whites were colonized. They were fed up with this taxation without representation, so some of them stood up and said “liberty or death.†Though I went to a white school over here in Mason, Michigan, the white man made the mistake of letting me read his history books. He made the mistake of teaching me that Patrick Henry was a patriot, and George Washington, wasn’t nothing non-violent about old Pat or George Washington.
“Liberty or death was what brought about the freedom of whites in this country from the English. They didn’t care about the odds. Why they faced the wrath of the entire British Empire. And in those days they used to say that the British Empire was so vast and so powerful when the sun — the sun would never set on it. This is how big it was, yet these 13 little scrawny states, tired of taxation without representation, tired of being exploited and oppressed and degraded, told that big British Empire ‘liberty or death.’â€
[Much Much More]
56 of 88 counties sounds like an “accident”? Do they think we’re stupid?
56 of 88 counties was a PLAN and a COVER-UP!
56 of 88 counties? NO ACCIDENT!!!!!!!!
WHO DID IT????????????????????????????
Blacks should be angry at Ken Blackwell who is black, who sold his race down the river for the party of disenfranchzing blacks in the DOJ scandal AND the party that has ZERO BLACK CONGRESSMEN!!!!!!!!!!
Brad: Where’s the CMSM story: “GOP HAS ZERO BLACK CONGRESSMEN”??? You think they didn’t notice that? Yeah, right! Which means SOMEONE is squashing the story! They’ll report on Edwards $400 haircut (meaningless), but WON’T report that a party has ZERO BLACK CONGRESSMEN! Which is a “story”???
“You, today, have — are in the hands of a government of segregationists, racists, white supremacists who belong to the Democratic party, but disguise themselves as Dixiecrats. A Dixiecrat is nothing but a Democrat. Whoever runs the Democrats is also the father of the Dixiecrats, and the father of all of them is sitting in the White House. I say and I say it again: You got a President who’s nothing but a Southern segregationist from the state of Texas. They’ll lynch you in Texas as quick as they’ll lynch you in Mississippi. Only in — in Texas they lynch you with a Texas accent; in Mississippi they lynch you with a Mississippi accent.”
http://www.americanrhetoric.com...otorbullet.htm
“These Northern Democrats are in cahoots with the Southern Democrats. They’re playing a giant con game, a political con game. You know how it goes. One of them — One of them comes to you and makes believe he’s for you, and he’s in cahoots with the other one that’s not for you. Why? Because neither one of them is for you, but they got to make you go with one of them or the other. So this is a con game. And this is what they’ve been doing with you and me all these years….
“Up here, in the North you have the same thing. The Democratic Party don’t — don’t do it — they don’t do it that way. They got a thing that they call gerrymandering. They — They maneuver you out of power. Even though you can vote, they fix it so you’re voting for nobody; they got you going and coming. In the South, they’re outright political wolves. In the North, they’re political foxes. A fox and a wolf are both canine, both belong to the dog family. Now you take your choice. You going to choose a Northern dog or a Southern dog? Because either dog you choose I guarantee you you’ll still be in the dog house….â€
-Speech given in 1964
Since there was a judicial order to preserve these records isn’t this grounds for 56 citations for contempt of court?
Ghost:
“This is how big it was, yet these 13 little scrawny states, tired of taxation without representation, tired of being exploited and oppressed and degraded, told that big British Empire ‘liberty or death.â€
RIP Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. Now a days we do it the easy way. The “liberal” press tells us to “just get over it”. So now a days when our representation is stolen from us we don’t fight or die. We just “get over it” and pay a larger share of the taxes to help out those poor corperations with their share. 😉
Every last person involved in destroying or losing those ballots should be sitting in the clink on felony charges. They are traitors to this country and its ideals. The entire lot should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. They’d be a better use of Gitmo than some Afghan goatherder who got chumped by a jealous rival.
“The lost ballots are on RNC computers …” 🙂
.
I am with Dan Stafford. The culprits responsible should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. With lengthy prison terms confronting them, some of the “little fish” might just plea-bargain and spill their guts about the “big fish” who are really responsible and the larger conspiracy.
OT … but it is about votes and government officials …
Speaking of memorable votes …In August of 2005:
(Boston Globe, emphasis added).
So, with the most money ever to fix things:
(HuffPo). After allocating the most money in History for just such problems, is this the answer:
(CNN). I think we need to take a hard look at what happened to the most money in history two years ago, before we spend the most money in history again.
That is my vote.
Dredd,
You are 100% correct that elections officials are the controlling factor and to me, this story shoots away the case of what I call the “paper ballot absolutists” — because these were boxes of paper records that were destroyed, and in at least some of these counties, the evidence destroyed very likely showed that unused ballots were marked for Bush BY HAND and substituted for Kerry votes or just added to the pile. Ballot boxes were being stuffed long before anyone dreamed of touchscreen machines and hand-marked paper ballots will not “save” us. We need professionally run elections and good oversight.
What struck me while I read these stories (and there are three excellent ones posted over at freepress.org, Rosenfeld’s Alternet story as well as a more statistically oriented one by Richard Hayes Phillips and an overview by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman) is the level of sheer amateurishness and sloppiness. The excuses from the boards read like people that not only aren’t in the 12st century, they’re still in the 19th. They run these boards like little local civic groups. As Fitrakis told me yesterday, “Some of them said they were too busy to comply with our open records requests but you go in there and they’re sitting around talking about the local Republican golf tournament.”
While I am one who feels evidence WAS deliberately destroyed in some cases, it’s MORE obvious that these boards are simply incompetent to run an electino and virtually ALL the officials responsible for ballot loss, whether deliberate or not, should be replaced by people with a better understanding of the law and more ability to follow directions.
I’d like to add that the media coverage of this in state has been execrable. Both the Cleveland Plainly Republica…I mean, Plain Dealer, and the Columbus Dispatch ran six-paragraph stories yesterday buried deep in the back of their Metro sections. Both stories were essentially “Oh, a little careless was discovered but it’s nothing and BUSH WON BUSH WON BUSH WON.” There’s even a quote from our Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner that HAD to be out of context, quoting her as saying that the destruction of the ballots and “legitimate” and they were “entitled” to do so “in some counties.” Only they weren’t — in ANY counties.
Today’s Plainly Republica…I mean, Plain Dealer, has a massive cover story on the Minneapolis bridge collapse banner “Could this happen here?” (Yeah, actually, it could, considering we’d rather spend our money on white elphant sports stadiums). Meanwhile, here is evidence of the collapse of our elections system due to neglect and they bury it. And they wonder why their circ. is dropping?
I am so upset over this. The powerful GOP must have so many people working for them in criminal ways in Ohio that they were able to carrying out this illegal move without anyone stopping it.
It’s truly embarrassing to be Ohio right now. I am deeply ashamed. God – where is the justice in all of this? Haven’t we endured enough?
Oops. What I meant to write is, “It’s embarrassing to be living in Ohio right now.”