BOB FITRAKIS
The political scientist and newspaper editor on how, in plain view, the Ohio presidential election was rigged
~ By DEAN KUIPERS ~
As Election Day 2004 progressed, cold and rainy in Ohio, the exit polls were clear: Ohio had gone to John Kerry, and the presidency with it. Bob Fitrakis, Ph.D., is one of a majority of political scientists the world over who consider the Mitofsky exit poll the single most reliable polling strategy in politics, which has been used since 1967 with uncanny accuracy. But when the vote came in early the next morning, the total differed from the poll by a statistically impossible amount, and George W. Bush was president once again.
Even before the tally, however, it was apparent what had happened: voter fraud on a scale that would indicate the American polity itself is in serious trouble. Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who, coincidentally, co-chaired the Bush-Cheney campaign in the state of Ohio, withheld voting machines from heavily-Democratic areas of Columbus, where Fitrakis and others witnessed the largest voter turnout in history simply walk away, unable to vote. And that was just the beginning. Representative John Conyers (D-MI) and the Congressional Black Caucus opened an investigation that catalogued a morass of problems, causing Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Rep. Tubbs Jones (D-OH) to contest the electoral college for the first time since 1887. Now Fitrakis and his colleagues at The Free Press, a Columbus newspaper and website published independently since 1970, have put all their findings, including the Conyers Report, in a new book: Did George W. Bush Steal America’s 2004 Election? He’s in the L.A. area the next three days talking about it.
CityBeat: Are you alleging in your book that Blackwell threw the election to Bush? Bob Fitrakis: I think that’s what all the evidence points towards. This parallels Katherine Harris in Florida in 2000. It’s as though Karl Rove, who’s always pushed the edges of the political system and the law, realized that the key person to getting reelected is having the secretary of state in your corner. Blackwell really was engaged in activities that made papers like The Columbus Dispatch, which hasn’t endorsed a Democrat since Woodrow Wilson, question his behavior.
Did Blackwell break the law? Well, in an all-Republican state, where every state official, including the attorney general, is a Republican, I don’t know what he would have had to do to break the law
. His daily activities seemed to me to be violating the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and again, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It seemed that, routinely, he was violating due process and equal protection. The problem is, who was going to prosecute? Especially a secretary of state who is very close to the Bush family and to the president of the United States?
...snip
Was there a recount?
Yes, there was. And it was more obviously corrupt than the election. Under Ohio state law, they “randomly select” a three percent precinct count. If that “random” three percent matches the tally on the central tabulators, you don’t then have to look at the actual paper ballots.
More: http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=2217&IssueNum=106
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