Reply #2: It's not a question to me any more. It's blatantly obvious WHAT they

[Peace Patriot]

set up--to steal U.S. elections starting in 2002 and on into the future--WHO set it up, WHO has been corrupted by it, HOW it works and HOW it benefits Bushites and warmongers.

The story begins with the two biggest crooks in Congress, Tom Delay and Bob Ney, who engineered the "Help America Vote Act," as a $4 billion electronic voting boondoggle for Bush's buds at Diebold and ES&S.

Diebold: Until recently, headed by Wally O'Dell, a Bush-Cheney campaign chair and major fundraiser, who promised (in writing) to "deliver Ohio" to Bush-Cheney in 2004; and

ES&S: A spinoff of Diebold (similar computer architecture), initially funded by far rightwing billionaire Howard Ahmanson, who also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon Foundation (which touts the death penalty for homosexuals, among other things).

Diebold and ES&S have an incestuous relationship; they are run by two brothers, Tod and Bob Urosevich.

These are people who "counted" 80% of the nation's votes in 2004, using "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY programming code, with virtually no audit/recount controls--as the result of the piece of crap legislation that Tom Delay and Bob Ney (and also Dem Christopher Dodd) pushed through the Anthrax Congress.

HAVA (aka, the "Hack America's Vote Act," and the "Help America Vote for Bush Act"), not only permitted private, corporate "trade secret" vote tabulation, it failed to require any kind of paper trail, failed to ban partisan vendors, failed to ban or control lavish lobbying, failed to ban secret industry "testing" of the machines, and set up an underfunded Bush-appointed regulatory group (the EAC-Election Assistance Commission) that has been bribing, corrupting and bullying county/state election officials around the country, to purchase these crapass, insecure, hackable, Bushite-controlled voting systems.

All rushed into place for the 2004 election. This is the egregiously NON-TRANSPARENT, UNVERIFIABLE, CORPORATE-CONTROLLED voting system that kept Bush in office.

That is the starting point for any analysis of the 2004 election results. They deliberately, consciously installed a non-transparent voting system, controlled by Bushite corporations. They could have fixed it, at any point. Transparency is not difficult. It's a no-brainer, really. They did not.

Election Day, 2004. Bush was doing so poorly in the pre-election polls that Zogby (independent pollster) said he could not win. The Democrats had blown the Republicans away in new voter registration, in 2004, nearly 60/40. It was showing. All day long, Kerry was winning. People were flocking to the polls to oust Bush. Biggest turnout in history. The corporate news monopoly "consortium" exit polls said Kerry was winning, and the final exit polls said he won the election by a 3% margin. But we never got their final result. There was a suspicious computer "glitch" in the reporting system. It went down for an hour. And when it came back up, the corporate pollster had DOCTORED the exit polls--filled them with false numbers--to force them to 'FIT' the results that were coming in from Diebold/ES&S's secret vote tabulation formulae--that Bush won.

Exit polls are used worldwide to verify elections, and check for fraud. Not here. Here, they 'fit' the exit polls to the non-transparent "official results."

Biggest journalistic crime I've ever witnessed. They put false numbers one everybody's TV screens, then tried to hide the real exit poll results from the American people. Fortunately, alert bloggers and analysts took screen shots of the early exit poll results, analyzed them, and eventually forced the pollster to admit that Kerry had won the exit polls. Word got around the blogosphere in the week after the election--and many experts got involved. Meanwhile, reports began coming in of massive vote suppression against Democratic voters in Ohio--a critical battleground state, and a state that had NOT fully converted to Wally O'Dell's vote counting system, due to protests against the machines.* The vote suppression was blatant and visible--unnecessary shortages of precincts and voting machines in poor black and other Dem areas, resulting in 4-10 hour long voting lines; open intimidation and unfair challenges of voters. Also, the touchscreens, by far the worst of the election theft machinery, were reported to be changing Kerry votes to Bush votes--over 80 reports of this (with only 2 or 3 going the other way), and those were just the ones that voters caught and managed to report. Other investigators found out why Warren County was locked down by a phony "terrorist alert" during the count. They were taking un-numbered ballots with votes for Kerry to precincts where Kerry was on a different position on the ballot, thus 'disappearing' the Kerry vote.

In summary, based on overwhelming inferential evidence, in non-transparent conditions, Kerry won the election. In non-transparent conditions, the only evidence you HAVE is inferential. That's why the case cannot be conclusively proven. Where are the ballots for a recount? A third of the country voted with no paper trail at all, let alone a real ballot backup. You can't even recount it. But from the exit polls, the pre-election poll trend (toward Kerry), the overwhelming Dem success in new voter registration, direct analysis of what happened in the vote count in some cases, and all sorts of corollary evidence (such as hundreds of newspaper editors who had endorsed Bush in 2000 switching to a Kerry endorsement in 2004)--and from the deliberate set-up of non-transparent conditions, and secret partisan control of the count, it's just about as conclusive as it can be.

Kerry won.

And if you believe otherwise, prove it to me. Show me the ballots. Tell me how they were "counted." Tell me who "counted" them. Tell me, with the vast majority of new voters voting for Kerry, the vast majority of independent voters voting for Kerry, the vast majority of former Nader voters voting for Kerry, and, figuring Gore/Bush 2000 voters as a wash (about equal, canceling each other out), HOW did Bush win? Show me!

The whole thing was a goddamned BushWorld, corporate news monopoly DELUSION.

Next question: Why did the Democratic Party leadership not object? Are they insane? I thought that for a while--sent buggerhouse by fear of the Bush junta. But now I think it's a more complex answer--involving corruption on electronic voting, as well as on Bush's war, and fear. Fear of the junta. Fear of Diebold/ES&S's power. Fear of overpowerful, corrupt election officials. Word came down from the top--Terry McAulife, Donna Brazille, et al--don't rock the boat. Christopher Dodd (corrupt on electronic voting) was Kerry's adviser on the machines. My guess, they misinformed and bullied Kerry (who was facing a hostile Congress, a hostile press, a hostile Supreme Court, and the party wouldn't get his back, because they had become so fucking corrupt.) I don't fault him for his concession as much as I fault THEM. Our party leaders betrayed us, and sold away our right to vote.

A word about Diebold/ES&S vs. Ohio. I suspect that the massive vote suppression in Ohio occurred because Kerry's win was bigger than the rigged machines around the nation could handle. The riggable machines were Plan A. Ohio (massive, visible vote suppression) was Plan B. If true--if the machines have to be pre-programmed, and are not so easy to change on election day--this means that we can beat the machines with massive turnout. With the "trade secret" computer programming, they could shave off a half a percent here, two percent there, whatever they needed to pad Bush's popular majority, and to secure just enough electoral votes. These machines are easily hackable--just a line or two of code, one hacker, a couple of minutes, leaving no trace. The testing procedures are laughable (done in secret, by industry testers). The "trade secret" code is so secret that not even our secretaries of state are permitted to review it. The hacking probably occurred in the central tabulators, rather than individual machines (except for the touchscreens, which were blatantly changing votes).

When our Calif (Dem) Sec of State Kevin Shelley, newly elected in 2003, got onto this Bushite scam, sued Diebold and decertified the worst of their election theft machines, prior to the 2004 election, the Bush junta targeted him for a "swiftboating" and later destroyed him (early 2005), while the Calif Dem Party leaders hid under their desks, or openly sided with corrupt county election officials.

I have never been so shocked. I thought Calif was relatively safe on elections, with Kevin Shelley in charge. (As part of his suit, he demanded to examine Diebold source code, for instance.) Down he went--the victim of completely bogus corruption charges--aided and abetted by the war profiteering corporate news monopolies and the new Dem Party legislative leadership (the old guard had all just retired the year before). Now we Diebold shill Bruce McPherson--APPOINTED BY SCHWARZENEGGER in collusion with the Dem Party legislative leaders (who have a 2 to 1 majority in both houses, and could have stopped it). McPherson has now ILLEGALLY reversed Shelley's decertification of Diebold touchscreens. Sickening.

Things are turning around in Calif. Debra Bowen, a real election system reformer, a state senator, is running for Sec of State against McPherson. She was just endorsed by the Calif Dem Party, with 80% of the delegates votes. The grass roots are rising!

Why do I think the Bush junta stole the 2004 election? It is not just the exit poll evidence and everything else. It is also a classic case of Means, Motive, and Opportunity. And added to these: evidence of pre-planning. We could have had a transparent election system. They went out of their way to see that we did not. (There is also the Clint Curtis affidavit--a computer engineer who was hired by a FLA Repub Congressman to WRITE an election theft program!) Lying, deceit, unlawfulness, torture, mass murder, bribery, corruption of every kind. These are criminals. Give criminals the opportunity to control all evidence against them, power over the courts and the justice system, freedom to loot the federal government, massive unaccountability, and a corrupt, non-transparent election system to keep them in power, and what do you think they will do? Suddenly become virtuous and democratic?

Bah.

It's the naysayers who are living in fantasyland, and us 'conspiracy theorists' who are living in reality, on this one. Feel free to live in the corporate delusion of democracy, if you want to. But if you really want your country back, you need to face and understand the powers that are arrayed against American democracy, how power operates, what power is, what it means to be a sovereign people, how we exercise our sovereignty through voting, and that our vote is virtually equivalent to our sovereignty. It IS our power. They have taken it away. And we MUST get it back, for any other change to be possible.