disrupter
12-17-2007, 04:07 PM
. . . we’re local boys. We live in Ohio, in Columbus. And we saw the election of 2004 stolen right in front of our faces. And we reported it extensively, and everybody laughed at us. And they said, “Oh, this couldn’t happen in America.” And we documented it in How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election and Is Rigging 2008. We documented scores of ways that this election was stolen. And we pointed out a myriad flaws that we saw right in our own neighborhoods, of what was done to keep people of color and young people from voting and to rig the vote count.
I mean, the servers for the computation of the Ohio vote count were in the same basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee that houses servers for the Republican National Committee. The programmers who did the stuff for Ken Blackwell, the Republican Secretary of State, were Republicans who did websites for the Bush administration. I mean, it’s amazing.
So, here we have—finally we have a Democratic Secretary of State, who took—spent $1.9 million of state money, hired Battelle, which is not exactly a progressive organization, to study it, and found that every single method of voting, pretty much, except for, you know, marking paper ballots, was corrupted in the 2004 election. They, you know—
AMY GOODMAN: Coming up with opposite results?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Any—basically what she says was, you could have
manipulated the 2004 election results with a Blackberry.
You know, the Conyers report basically said all you had to do was drive by with a Wi-Fi. And she comes up and says there are very simple ways the 2004 election could have been flipped just like that. And that’s what we said since 2004. Look, this election could have—
We are guaranteed certain that John Kerry won Ohio in 2004. The election—
the exit polls showed him winning. There was a flip of 6.7% in the exit polls from the official vote count.
You know, my favorite, in Youngstown and in Franklin County in Columbus, in the inner city, people went in, and they hit touch-screen machines, and
they pushed “Kerry,” and “Bush” lit up.
How do you invent that? How do you make that up? We had votes that were taken away in a county in southeastern Ohio. They proclaimed a Homeland Security alert. Nobody knows where this came from. The FBI, the Homeland Security agency, they never called a Homeland Security alert, but suddenly—
AMY GOODMAN: You mean, they locked down the place.
HARVEY WASSERMAN: They locked down. They kept out the media. Suddenly the ballots disappeared.
And most importantly—and this, Jennifer Brunner did not discuss—I am party to a lawsuit. We filed a civil rights lawsuit. We won. The federal election law says the ballots were supposed—had to be protected, under federal law. We got an overlapping decision from a federal judge to preserve, for our civil rights suit, the preservation of these ballots. Fifty-six of eighty-eight counties in Ohio destroyed their election ballots, destroyed all their election records, or most of them, making a pure recount impossible. This is in direct violation of a federal court injunction and standing federal law. So far, nobody has been prosecuted. What kind of country are we living in?
Now, the Secretary of State comes out with a $1.9 million report and says that all the electronic methods of counting the votes that were used in Ohio in 2004 were easily—“easily,” that was her word—flipped. Anybody with a simple electronic machine could have gone in there and turned the election, and we know it was done, because the Republican Secretary of State was also co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. How do you top that?
AMY GOODMAN: Ken Blackwell.
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Ken Blackwell, who’s gone.
AMY GOODMAN: And what’s he doing now?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: He’s out running a multimillion-dollar media operation, which is about to benefit from the FCC here. But—
AMY GOODMAN: The vote of Kevin Martin tomorrow.http://www.democracynow.org/2007/12/17/harvey_wasserman_on_new_ohio_voting
All Republican roads lead to corruption.
Republicans are the party of criminals & gangsters,
how does any actually decent person support unabashed criminals?
Religious right? -> Criminal wrongs.
I mean, the servers for the computation of the Ohio vote count were in the same basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee that houses servers for the Republican National Committee. The programmers who did the stuff for Ken Blackwell, the Republican Secretary of State, were Republicans who did websites for the Bush administration. I mean, it’s amazing.
So, here we have—finally we have a Democratic Secretary of State, who took—spent $1.9 million of state money, hired Battelle, which is not exactly a progressive organization, to study it, and found that every single method of voting, pretty much, except for, you know, marking paper ballots, was corrupted in the 2004 election. They, you know—
AMY GOODMAN: Coming up with opposite results?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Any—basically what she says was, you could have
manipulated the 2004 election results with a Blackberry.
You know, the Conyers report basically said all you had to do was drive by with a Wi-Fi. And she comes up and says there are very simple ways the 2004 election could have been flipped just like that. And that’s what we said since 2004. Look, this election could have—
We are guaranteed certain that John Kerry won Ohio in 2004. The election—
the exit polls showed him winning. There was a flip of 6.7% in the exit polls from the official vote count.
You know, my favorite, in Youngstown and in Franklin County in Columbus, in the inner city, people went in, and they hit touch-screen machines, and
they pushed “Kerry,” and “Bush” lit up.
How do you invent that? How do you make that up? We had votes that were taken away in a county in southeastern Ohio. They proclaimed a Homeland Security alert. Nobody knows where this came from. The FBI, the Homeland Security agency, they never called a Homeland Security alert, but suddenly—
AMY GOODMAN: You mean, they locked down the place.
HARVEY WASSERMAN: They locked down. They kept out the media. Suddenly the ballots disappeared.
And most importantly—and this, Jennifer Brunner did not discuss—I am party to a lawsuit. We filed a civil rights lawsuit. We won. The federal election law says the ballots were supposed—had to be protected, under federal law. We got an overlapping decision from a federal judge to preserve, for our civil rights suit, the preservation of these ballots. Fifty-six of eighty-eight counties in Ohio destroyed their election ballots, destroyed all their election records, or most of them, making a pure recount impossible. This is in direct violation of a federal court injunction and standing federal law. So far, nobody has been prosecuted. What kind of country are we living in?
Now, the Secretary of State comes out with a $1.9 million report and says that all the electronic methods of counting the votes that were used in Ohio in 2004 were easily—“easily,” that was her word—flipped. Anybody with a simple electronic machine could have gone in there and turned the election, and we know it was done, because the Republican Secretary of State was also co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. How do you top that?
AMY GOODMAN: Ken Blackwell.
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Ken Blackwell, who’s gone.
AMY GOODMAN: And what’s he doing now?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: He’s out running a multimillion-dollar media operation, which is about to benefit from the FCC here. But—
AMY GOODMAN: The vote of Kevin Martin tomorrow.http://www.democracynow.org/2007/12/17/harvey_wasserman_on_new_ohio_voting
All Republican roads lead to corruption.
Republicans are the party of criminals & gangsters,
how does any actually decent person support unabashed criminals?
Religious right? -> Criminal wrongs.