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Wednesday, April 16, 2003 |
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"President Bush announced tonight that he believes in democracy and that democracy can exist in Iraq. They can have a strong economy, they can have a good health care plan, and they can have free and fair voting. Iraq? We can't even get this in Florida."
- - Jay Leno
APRIL 16 IN HISTORY:
1971 -- Vietnam Veterans Against the War throw their medals & canes on White House Lawn at demonstration in Washington DC.
RHINO HERE:
I'm sure many of you are familiar with the investigative journalist, Greg Palast, whose work is so on point against the shrub gang that he has been forced to publish most of his work outside the U.S., namely as a journalist for the BBC. His recent documentary, "Unprecedented" chronicles the 2000 Florida election fraud.
http://www.unprecedented.org/
Today's BOTTOM LINE is a message from Peter Coyote, who narrated "Unprecedented", concerning another serious threat to the upcoming presidential election. Peter has written a letter to his Senator citing a good deal of evidence pointing to a voter fraud scandal that could make what happened in Florida in 2000 seem as antiquated as stuffing the ballet boxes with paper ballots.
I urge you to read Peter's note to us and his letter to Barbara Boxer and then join him in writing your Congress people & Senators. If you're not familiar with Palast, you can check out his website at:
http://www.gregpalast.com
Below is a link to a page with links to a variety of Palast's well documented columns detailing how the 2000 election was stolen. There's also links to columns from Harper's Magazine & The Washington Post.
Greg Palast Columns - Theft of Presidency
Theft
THE GREAT FLORIDA EX-CON GAME
How the "felon" voter-purge was itself felonious
by Greg Palast , Harper's Magazine, Friday, March 1, 2002
In November the U.S. media, lost in patriotic reverie, dressed up the Florida recount as a victory for President Bush. But however one reads the ballots, Bush's win would certainly have been jeopardized had not some Floridians been barred from casting ballots at all. Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state - Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, both protégées of Governor Jeb Bush- ordered 57,700 "ex-felons," who are prohibited from voting by state law, to be removed from voter rolls. (In the thirty-five states where former felons can vote, roughly 90 percent vote Democratic.) A portion of the list, which was compiled for Florida by DBT Online, can be seen for the first time here; DBT, a company now owned by ChoicePoint of Atlanta, was paid $4.3 million for its work, replacing a firm that charged $5,700 per year for the same service. If the hope was that DBT would enable Florida to exclude more voters, then the state appears to have spent its money wisely...
READ THE ARTICLE AT:
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=122&;row=1
The Wrong Way To Fix The Vote
by Greg Palast , The Washington Post, Sunday, June 10, 2001
If you liked the way Florida handled the presidential vote in November, you'll just love the election reform laws that have passed since then in 10 states, and have been proposed in 16 others.
These laws mandate a practice that was at the heart of the Florida debacle: computer-aided purging of centralized voter files. The laudable aim is to rid registries of the names of the dead, as well as of felons and others legally barred from voting. But the likely result will be the elimination of a lot of legitimate voters and an increased potential for political mischief...
READ THE ARTICLE AT:
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=84&;row=1
8:19:12 AM 
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THE BOTTOM LINE
An Important Alert From Peter Coyote
Dear Friends,
I'm including a copy of a letter I sent to Barbara Boxer and my other representatives with the evidence accumulated of a potential 'November surprise'-- the rigging of the next Presidential vote by private, inaccessible, untransparent voting machines that leave no paper trail. For a fuller discussion of the issue and links, please go to: CommonDreams.org Published on Friday, January 31, 2003
I consider this a critical issue and if you agree urge you to disseminate this widely and write a personal letter to your representatives: NOT AN E-MAIL. If you need their address go to: http://www.house.gov/writerep/ <http://www.house.gov/writerep/>; and for the Senate go to: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
Thank you very much,
Peter Coyote
Senator Barbara Boxer
112 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Barbara,
I'm writing to you about a situation of the greatest urgency. Last year, I narrated a film called "Unprecedented" by American journalist Greg Palast (currently writing for the London Guardian). This film documents the illegal expunging of 54,000 black and overwhelmingly Democratic voters from the Florida rolls just before the presidential election. We interviewed the computer company that did the work, filmed their explanations of the instructions they received and their admissions that they knew that their instructions would produce massive error. That figure has now been revised to 91,000.
Jeb Bush was sued, and was supposed to have returned these voters to the rolls, and did not, which explains his last re-election. The Republicans have something far worse in mind for the next presidential election and Democrats need to be prepared.
The recent elections of Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel, the loss in Georgia of Max Cleland, wildly popular Vietnam vet, and the victory of Alabama Governor Bob Riley, along with a handful of other Republican victories, (all predicted to have been losers by straw polls which our nation has refined to a high-art) points to an ominous source: corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable voting machine, recording and tabulating ballots.
You'd think in an open democracy that the government - answerable to all its citizens, rather than a handful of corporate officers and stockholders - would program, repair, and control the voting machines. You'd think the computers that handle our cherished ballots would be open and their software and programming available for public scrutiny. You'd think there would be a paper trail of the vote, which could be followed and audited if a there was evidence of voting fraud or if exit polls disagreed with computerized vote counts.
You'd be wrong.
The Washington, DC publication The Hill (http://www.thehill.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx) has confirmed that former conservative radio talk-show host and now Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel was the head of, and continues to own part interest in, the company that owns the company that installed, programmed, and largely ran the voting machines that were used by most of the citizens of Nebraska. When Democrat,Charlie Matulka requested a hand count of the vote in the election he lost to Hagel, his request was denied because Nebraska had a just-passed law that prohibits government-employee election workers from looking at the ballots, even in a recount. The only machines permitted to count votes in Nebraska, he said, are those made and programmed by the corporation formerly run by Hagel.
When Bev Harris and The Hill's Alexander Bolton pressed the Chief Counsel and Director of the Senate Ethics Committee, ( the man responsible for ensuring that FEC disclosures are complete), asking him why he'd not questioned Hagel's 1995, 1996, and 2001 failures to disclose the details of his ownership in the company that owned the voting machine company when he ran for the Senate, the Director reportedly met with Hagel's office on Friday, January 25, 2003 and Monday, January 27, 2003. After the second meeting, on the afternoon of January 27th, the Director of the Senate Ethics Committee resigned his job.
Hagel's surprise victory is a trial-run for the presidential election. Election 'reform' laws are now prohibiting paper ballots (no trail) and exit polls, effectively removing all trace and record of votes, making prosecution of voter fraud virtually impossible.
For whatever reasons, the Democrats decided not to pursue the issue of fraudulence in the last Presidential election. The three Supreme Court Justices who should have recused themselves (Scalia, Thomas, and O'Connor) were allowed to stand unchallenged and pass a bizarre one-time only ruling. That they were in place long before the election demonstrates how clearly the end-game of such moves was thought out.
Unless the issue of voter fraud is elevated to an issue of national importance, not only is it highly probably that Democrats will lose again and again, but eventually voters will "sense" even if they cannot prove, that elections are rigged, and the current 50% of those boycotting elections will swell to the majority. Privatization of the vote is tantamount to turning over the control of democracy to the corporate sector. I urge you to use your considerable powers and influence to address this issue.
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All copyrights belong to original publisher.
8:02:41 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Gary Rhine.
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