... there are sufficient proof points all over the intertubes suggesting that, in fact, that's exactly what's happened. The various tactics used to steal Florida in 2000 were well-documented by Greg Palast and a few others.
Here's a brief one by Palast from his website that breaks the theft down using official numbers from Florida's department of elections the US census. Of course, to read this kind of report you have to either buy their books or find articles on the web.
This is because, in America, it's a firing offense for a "journalist" to even breathe the words "election theft" in public -- probably even in a private stall in the executive washroom -- without being out on the streets two hours later looking for work.
As to 2004, it's same crime, different means, same mass media blackout. Corporate media will simply not touch this stuff with your 10 foot pole. Bobby Kennedy Jr. wrote this meticulously researched and footnoted
article on the 2004 election theft for Rolling Stone. Here's a couple of paragraphs:
Despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)
The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)
He wrote a follow-up article called
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11717105/robert_f_kennedy_jr__will_the_next_election_be_hacked">"Will the Next Election Be Hacked?", also for Rolling Stone, that's worth a read, too.
Mark Crispin Miller, journalist, author, professor of culture and communications at NYU and one of this country's most valuable and on-target pains in the ass to all things slimy and republican (is that redundant?), is
interviewed in the January 2008 Harpers on the tactics he feels the GOPiggies will use to try and steal this one, too. One of my favorite Miller quotes from the interview:
“Doublethink” is Orwell’s deft conception of this sort of simultaneous dissimulation and fanatical conviction: deliberate deception based on (partial) self-deception. And Klemperer was acutely conscious of the Nazis’ quasi-religious zealotry. In his diary he repeatedly makes note of Hitler’s wild medieval frame of mind (at one point he refers to Hitler’s oratory as “the mad bawling of a priest”), yet also notes the element of mammoth orchestration in the Nazi propaganda–a genius for spectacular manipulation that reminds him of the works of Hollywood. Klemperer understood, in short, that what made Hitler and the Nazi movement so profoundly and unusually dangerous was this combination of crusading zest and up-to-date technique.
As I point out in Fooled Again, that sort of ferocious cunning has, throughout the centuries, marked paranoid crusades of every kind. Certainly we see it in Bush/Cheney’s movement, which includes radical theocrats, neocon extremists, dedicated neo-Confederates, and other types who tend to see themselves as victims and their struggle, therefore, as defensive. In their eyes, the very people whom they’re trying to destroy are ruthless and relentless, full of hate and fury, while they themselves are innocent, outnumbered, “fighting back.” In short, Bush/Cheney’s movement is projective, lividly imputing their own darkest impulses to everybody else.
Sounds about right...
There's a
DU thread regarding a new tell-all book on just this subject written by one of the GOP's veteran perps. There are also some posts containing links to other sources of info on the massive con game the GOP has pulled off -- and damn well might again if they can just tweak the phony media-generated numbers in the final week before the election so that "the race" appears close enough to allay suspicions when they steal it again.
So I'd say that these "VERY bad campaigns" Gore and Kerry ran -- and it's impossible to understate the role corporate media played in perpetuating various lies about both of them, from the whole Swiftboat fairy tale to Gore's alleged claim to having invented the internet -- were still good enough to win both elections.
The public was pretty skeptical about the Bushies in 2000 and the uncertainty made the vote totals close enough to hide all the crap that's so well-described and documented by Palast and others.
By 2004, they were so sick of them they couldn't wait to get rid of them. Kerry was certainly not the strongest candidate, but in a fair fight, I think Ross Perot would have been tough for the Bushies to beat. The exit polls -- acknowledged by the parties, the networks, the FEC and even the UN "observers" as the most reliable cross-check against fraud or miscount of the actual ballots -- were lopsided in Kerry's favor the entire day.
Miraculously, when the polls closed and the exit polls showed that Kerry should be the clear winner in both popular and electoral votes, the networks -- on orders from the RNC -- simply threw out the exit poll results, claiming they were inherently flawed and that exit polls had never been known as the gold standard, and put the phony US mass media stamp of approval on another election theft and four more unbelievably hideous years of these raving madmen.
And then, just three weeks later, the hypocritical media hyenas did a 180 and praised the value of exit polls as the single non-impeachable source for determining the will of the people. This was apparently OK because they weren't talking about a US election.
Seems massive fraud was assumed to have completely corrupted national elections in The Ukraine. But how in hell would anyone be able to prove such and thing, much less determine a winner?
No problem, the exit polls were cited as solid evidence of vast election fraud by the bad guys (according the the Bushies). And because depravity isn't limited to the BushCo regime, the same network frauds -- the blow-dried simpletons known as "on-air talent" because even they know they're about as much "journalists" as I am a house cat -- this same pack of fools and suck-ups who had told us that the Ohio exit polls were flawed and inaccurate now told us that these very same exit polls had been the only thing standing between the will of the Ukrainian people and the scum who tried to steal their elections.
Bush, of course, weighed in.
According to the Washington Post, which also had no problem inducing selective memory and obliterating all traces of their reporting of three weeks previous, here's how The Commander Guy reacted:
The White House, in a statement issued in Crawford, Tex., where Bush is spending Thanksgiving, said the United States "is deeply disturbed by extensive and credible indications of fraud committed in the Ukrainian elections."
The statement noted that "the United States stands with the Ukrainian people in this difficult time." The White House urged Ukrainian authorities not to certify the results until allegations of "organized fraud" are resolved, and to respect the will of the people.
In a letter delivered to Kuchma on Friday, President Bush, echoing similar statements by the European Union, warned Kuchma to make sure that the voting was free and the count was accurate.
"A tarnished election . . . will lead us to review our relations with Ukraine," Bush wrote.
Isn't that just fucking amazing? How much of a pure sociopath do you have to be to sign a statement like that? I hope he had the decency to laugh his ass off while first reading through it.
So I think the "lousy campaign" hypothesis could be be revisited maybe, particularly when that nonsensical mantra began life when it emerged from the mouths of the same co-opted, suet-brained professional status quo-shilling "pundits" who just the previous evening had been parroting every Swiftboat lie they could remember in their drug and alcohol addled conditions -- good little soldiers in the right wing echo chamber, hoping their contracts would be renewed if they could just continue proving their worth to the corporate massuhs.
It's noteworthy that these bottom-feeders appear exclusively on corporate media -- which is to say, nobody with any sense of decency, journalistic integrity or respect for the truth will have them because they're so horribly corrupt, venal and consistently wrong on damn near everything.
Plus, you really wouldn't want your sister to marry one.
wp
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