[Mb-civic] Dialing In For Democracy - Today Is Critical

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Dialing In For Democracy - Today Is Critical 

by Thom Hartmann 
Jeff Taylor is one of Vermont's three electors - representatives 
elected by the citizens of Vermont to vote for President of the United 
States. He and his two peers have joined the electors of several 
other states in signing resolutions asking their state's congressional 
delegation to protest the Ohio slate of electors. 
"If they can have fair elections in Kiev," Taylor told me, "why not in 
Cleveland?" 
Here's what troubles Taylor: 
If you flip a coin a hundred times, odds are that around fifty times it 
will come up heads and fifty times tails. In reality, it may be 49-51 or 
even 47-53, but it will always pretty much evenly split. That's the 
nature of random events, including random errors and mistakes. 
So if the tens of thousands of election "irregularities" being reported 
all across the nation - but particularly in Ohio, Florida, New Mexico, 
and North Carolina - showed "irregularities" worked randomly to the 
benefit of both parties, it would be easy to say that we have a 
broken, but not a stolen or hacked, election system. But that was 
not the case. 
In nearly every case now documented, producing odds not of 50:50 
but, according to credible statisticians, sometimes rising to 
1:250,000,000, "irregularities" seem always to favor George W. 
Bush or other Republican candidates. These include: 
*   machine errors 
*   misplaced machines 
*   unmailed absentee ballots 
*   certification of more votes than registered voters in some 
    areas, and dramatically low voter turnouts in other areas 
*   modem-connected voting machines and tabulators 
*   different standards for provisional ballot recounts in different 
    areas 
*   phony companies registering voters and then tearing up the 
    registrations of people who checked one party but not the 
    other 
*   voting machines defaulting to a particular candidate or 
    'jumping' by recording a vote for one candidate when 
    another's button was pushed 
*   exit polls not corresponding with reported votes 
*   voting elections officials creating what look like phony 
    election machine poll tapes and tossing original, signed 
    tabulations in the garbage.

And while the vast majority of the "irregularities" in 2004 are 
breaking to the benefit of George W. Bush, they also did so in 2000, 
and for Republicans generally in 2002. 
It's time to start using the "F" word. George W. Bush was made 
President of the United States in 2000 by fraud, and apparently has 
done it again. 
First, 2000. 
As The New York Times reported on November 12, 2001, in an 
article titled "Examining The Vote: The Overview" by Ford 
Fessenden and John M. Broder, a media consortium was pulled 
together to actually count every questionable ballot in the 2000 
Florida election. 
    The media consortium included The Times, The Wall Street 
    Journal, The Tribune Company, The Washington Post, The 
    Associated Press, The St. Petersburg Times, The Palm 
    Beach Post and CNN. The group hired the National Opinion 
    Research Center at the University of Chicago in January to 
    examine the ballots. The research group employed teams of 
    three workers they called coders to examine each 
    undervoted ballot and mark down what they saw in detail. 
    Three coders provided a bulwark against inaccuracy or bias 
    in the coding. For overvotes, one coder was used because 
    there was seldom disagreement among examiners in a trial 
    run using three coders. 
    The data produced by the ballot review allows scrutiny of the 
    disputed Florida vote under a large number of situations and 
    using a variety of different standards that might have applied 
    in a hand recount, including the appearance of a dimple, a 
    chad dangling by one or more corners and a cleanly punched 
    card. 
The result clearly demonstrated that Al Gore won the 2000 Florida 
vote. But the Supreme Court, in the lawsuit initiated by George W. 
Bush against Al Gore now known as Bush v. Gore, ruled that 
"irreparable harm" might be done to candidate Bush if such a 
recount was performed in Florida by Florida authorities. Justice 
Antonin Scalia, in his concurring majority opinion in Bush v. Gore, 
wrote that "The counting of votes that are of questionable legality 
does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. 
Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he claims to 
be the legitimacy of his election." 
And Scalia was right, if "irreparable harm" means that counting all 
the votes may lead to the petitioner [Bush] "losing an election." 
When the Consortium examined all the ballots statewide, noted the 
Times, "The findings indicate that Mr. Gore might have eked out a 
victory if he had pursued in court a course like the one he publicly 
advocated when he called on the state to 'count all the votes.'" 
(To his eternal credit, Justice John Paul Stevens dissented, writing 
that: "Counting every legally cast vote cannot constitute irreparable 
harm. On the other hand, there is a danger that a stay may cause 
irreparable harm to the respondents [Gore]- and, more importantly, 
the public at large- because of the risk that 'the entry of the stay 
would be tantamount to a decision on the merits in favor of the 
applicants [Bush].'") 
Further, "In a finding rich with irony," note the Times writers, "a 
statewide recount -- could have produced enough votes to tilt the 
election his [Gore's] way, no matter what standard was chosen to 
judge voter intent." 
Count the dimpled chads or not. Count the overvotes or not. Count 
the pregnant chads or not. No matter WHAT standard was chosen - 
Gore won Florida in 2000. 
And that doesn't begin to examine the true fraud that occurred in 
Florida when Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris, according to the 
NAACP and Greg Palast's reporting on the BBC, illegally removed 
tens of thousands of African American voters from the voter rolls - a 
crime that is still in the courts and has yet to be prosecuted. (An 
amazing documentary of this is the DVD "Unprecedented".) Or, as I 
reported in an article commissioned by MoveOn.org in July of 2003, 
many computer irregularities across the nation also drew into 
question the legitimacy of the 2000 and 2002 elections. 
And now, in 2004, we are again visited by a Stalinesque fusion of 
cronies funding and controlling the election apparatus, national 
media intimidated into silence, and a populace so preoccupied with 
daily survival concerns - and uneasy about being identified as 
"troublemakers" by a new, highly centralized state security 
apparatus - that they don't have the means or time to react. 
Yet react we must. 
Congressman John Conyers has conducted hearings in Ohio, which 
uncovered sufficient evidence to call into question - at least in the 
mind of the Congressman himself and many associated with him - 
the validity of the Ohio vote. 
The Electoral College was modeled after a form of governance 
used by the British before the Norman invasion in 1066, as 
documented in The History of England As Well Ecclesiastical As 
Civil by Paul de Rapin Thoyras, one of the two books that Thomas 
Jefferson repeatedly cited as the most important histories every 
written. 
It's been out of print for two centuries, but in my copy, printed in 
London in 1728, Thoyras writes, presaging language later re-used in 
the U.S. Constitution, "Now in order to preserve a perfect Union, it 
was necessary some way of communication and intercourse 
between them [the people in remote locations and their government] 
shou'd be established. This was done by the means of a Wittena-
Gemot or Assembly of Wise Men, who were the Representatives of 
the whole Nation. This Method the Saxons brought with them from 
Germany, where all publick affairs were transacted in such like 
conventions...[including their] Presidents." (Italics from the original.) 
And now our wise elders - Electors like Jeff Taylor - are telling us 
they believe our elections may have been corrupted. 
Section II, Article 2 of the Constitution, amended by the Twelfth 
Amendment in 1804, create and define the Electoral College, 
modeled by the Framers after the Saxon Wittena-Gemot. Each 
state chooses its own electors any way it wants, although all today 
do so by election of the people. 
Electors have already met in the various states to vote, but that vote 
will not be opened until Thursday, January 6th. If Conyers' protest is 
matched by the protest of at least one single senator, then the 
House and Senate retire to their respective chambers for a 
maximum of two hours to debate the legitimacy of the Ohio (and, 
possibly, other) electoral slates. After two hours, with a maximum of 
5 minutes for any member to speak, a vote is taken. If both the 
House and the Senate vote by majority to sustain the challenge, 
then the presidential vote goes to the House of Representatives, 
where each state has a single vote. 
Given that Republicans control both the House and Senate, and a 
majority of states were "red" in this past election, even if a senator 
joins Conyers it won't change the outcome of this election, unless 
between now and Thursday such massive, credible evidence of 
election-changing vote fraud is presented that even Republicans will 
agree that the election was stolen. Given how often Republicans in 
the House and Senate have placed the interest of their party's 
power above the needs and interests of democracy or the nation in 
the past few decades, it's extremely unlikely that a challenge will 
result in a change in the election. 
But - vitally - it will put the issues of vote fraud in America on the 
table in a way that even the mainstream media can no longer 
ignore. And it may lead to getting private, Republican-affiliated 
corporations out of handling our votes in secret, and to other 
electoral reforms such as IRV and public financing of elections. It 
could be a huge step in pulling us back from the brink of the Stalinist 
state the Bush administration seems determined to lead us into. 
Rallies are being held in Columbus, Ohio and Washington, DC, and 
news stories of them are easily found on this and other progressive 
news sites. But for those who can't travel, perhaps the most 
important step you can take today is to call your two senators at 1-
800-839-5276 and ask them to join Conyers in his protest of the 
Ohio electors. This is particularly important if you live in California, 
West Virginia, Minnesota, Iowa, Vermont, Massachusetts, Michigan, 
Maryland, Illinois, or Maine, as those state have senators who may 
be more inclined to join Conyers than most. 
Make your call now. It's one of the last ways we still have available 
to access our elected representatives without a Republican 
corporation in the middle. 
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project 
Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally 
syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann.com 
His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," 
"Unequal Protection," "We The People," "The Edison Gene", and 
"What Would Jefferson Do?." 

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