Pre-empt the Swiftboating of RFK Jr.

As Bradblog reported yesterday, , environmental Attorney, author and weekend Air America Host, Robert Kennedy Jr's Rolling Stone article is now up And I'm sure we should get good and ready for rapid and feral Swiftboating that Kennedy and his article on how the 2004 Election was stolen is sure to receive.

It's not like we haven't been down this road before.

Before Kennedy's article there was John Conyers Report on "What went Wrong in Ohio", as well as Mark Crispin Miller's book "Fooled Again".

So far the answer from the right and media has been a big yawn! With luck, the reaction to Kennedy's article just might be a big roar of indignation - and if so, we need to be ready.

The first thing we can do is get informed. Well armed is well prepared. Read Kennedy's article NOW! Then read it again. It's possible to do searches within the text of "Fooled Again" on the Amazon.com site, if you don't already have a copy.

Although many people fault John Kerry for failing to respond to the his own swiftboating (although he did), we have to recognize that this attack came from a third party, not a normal member of the campaign. Just as we've seen the swiftboat treatment for Rep John Murtha on Haditha, against Ray McGovern for daring to challenge Donald Rumsfeld with his own words, and the attempts against Al Gore's new movie "An Inconvenient Truth" by using junk pseudo-science against him, and just look at the spittle spewing response on C-Span (video) attorney Cliff Arnebeck received when he originally sued over the Ohio results in December of 04, if all goes well and this latest article isn't simply blown off as tin-foil hattery - we can expect Kennedy to get the exact same treatment. In this case, we're the interested third party, and we need to have our counter-response on the deck.

Key points from the article:

After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)

Then there is the issue of the exit polls.

On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks were briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed, had an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to Bush's 174, with fifty-five too close to call.(28) In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry.(29)

As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states -- including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida -- and winning by a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush's neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina.(30) Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.(31) ''Either the exit polls, by and large, are completely wrong,'' a Fox News analyst declared, ''or George Bush loses.''(32)

But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible disparities -- as much as 9.5 percent -- with the exit polls. In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.(33)

According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all three of those shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000. ''As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible,'' he says, ''it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.'' (See The Tale of the Exit Polls)

The key question of course are - "How did this happen?" and even more importantly "How can we prevent it from happening again?"

To determine that we have to look at what actually did occur. The core issues.

Kenneth Blackwell

John Conyers states...

''Blackwell made Katherine Harris look like a cupcake,'' Conyers told me. ''He saw his role as limiting the participation of Democratic voters. We had hearings in Columbus for two days. We could have stayed two weeks, the level of fury was so high. Thousands of people wanted to testify. Nothing like this had ever happened to them before.''

When ROLLING STONE confronted Blackwell about his overtly partisan attempts to subvert the election, he dismissed any such claim as ''silly on its face.'' Ohio, he insisted in a telephone interview, set a ''gold standard'' for electoral fairness. In fact, his campaign to subvert the will of the voters had begun long before Election Day. Instead of welcoming the avalanche of citizen involvement sparked by the campaign, Blackwell permitted election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive purge of their voter rolls, summarily expunging the names of more than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous two national elections.(55) In Cleveland, which went five-to-one for Kerry, nearly one in four voters were wiped from the rolls between 2000 and 2004.(56)

The Strike Force ("Knock 'em off the Rolls")

To stem the tide of new registrations, the Republican National Committee and the Ohio Republican Party attempted to knock tens of thousands of predominantly minority and urban voters off the rolls through illegal mailings known in electioneering jargon as ''caging.'' During the Eighties, after the GOP used such mailings to disenfranchise nearly 76,000 black voters in New Jersey and Louisiana, it was forced to sign two separate court orders agreeing to abstain from caging.(63) But during the summer of 2004, the GOP targeted minority voters in Ohio by zip code, sending registered letters to more than 200,000 newly registered voters(64) in sixty-five counties.(65) On October 22nd, a mere eleven days before the election, Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett -- who also chairs the board of elections in Cuyahoga County -- sought to invalidate the registrations of 35,427 voters who had refused to sign for the letters or whose mail came back as undeliverable.(66) Almost half of the challenged voters were from Democratic strongholds in and around Cleveland.(67)

Barriers to Registration ("Keep 'em off the rolls")

To further monkey-wrench the process he was bound by law to safeguard, Blackwell cited an arcane elections regulation to make it harder to register new voters. In a now-infamous decree, Blackwell announced on September 7th -- less than a month before the filing deadline -- that election officials would process registration forms only if they were printed on eighty-pound unwaxed white paper stock, similar to a typical postcard. Justifying his decision to ROLLING STONE, Blackwell portrayed it as an attempt to protect voters: ''The postal service had recommended to us that we establish a heavy enough paper-weight standard that we not disenfranchise voters by having their registration form damaged by postal equipment.'' Yet Blackwell's order also applied to registrations delivered in person to election offices. He further specified that any valid registration cards printed on lesser paper stock that miraculously survived the shredding gauntlet at the post office were not to be processed; instead, they were to be treated as applications for a registration form, requiring election boards to send out a brand-new card.(90)

In one of his most effective maneuvers, Blackwell prevented thousands of voters from receiving provisional ballots on Election Day. The fail-safe ballots were mandated in 2002, when Congress passed a package of reforms called the Help America Vote Act. This would prevent a repeat of the most egregious injustice in the 2000 election, when officials in Florida barred thousands of lawfully registered minority voters from the polls because their names didn't appear on flawed precinct rolls. Under the law, would-be voters whose registration is questioned at the polls must be allowed to cast provisional ballots that can be counted after the election if the voter's registration proves valid.(114)

The Wrong Pew ("Even if they still show up to vote, don't let it count")

''Provisional ballots were supposed to be this great movement forward,'' says Tova Andrea Wang, an elections expert who served with ex-presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford on the commission that laid the groundwork for the Help America Vote Act. ''But then different states erected barriers, and this new right became totally eviscerated.''

The Long Lines ("Wait 'em out")

When Election Day dawned on November 2nd, tens of thousands of Ohio voters who had managed to overcome all the obstacles to registration erected by Blackwell discovered that it didn't matter whether they were properly listed on the voting rolls -- because long lines at their precincts prevented them from ever making it to the ballot box. Would-be voters in Dayton and Cincinnati routinely faced waits as long as three hours. Those in inner-city precincts in Columbus, Cleveland and Toledo -- which were voting for Kerry by margins of ninety percent or more -- often waited up to seven hours. At Kenyon College, students were forced to stand in line for eleven hours before being allowed to vote, with the last voters casting their ballots after three in the morning.(132)

The long lines were not only foreseeable -- they were actually created by GOP efforts. Republicans in the state legislature, citing new electronic voting machines that were supposed to speed voting, authorized local election boards to reduce the number of precincts across Ohio. In most cases, the new machines never materialized -- but that didn't stop officials in twenty of the state's eighty-eight counties, all of them favorable to Democrats, from slashing the number of precincts by at least twenty percent.(136)

Faulty Machines ("Change the Vote")

Voters who managed to make it past the array of hurdles erected by Republican officials found themselves confronted by voting machines that didn't work. Only 800,000 out of the 5.6 million votes in Ohio were cast on electronic voting machines, but they were plagued with errors.(164) In heavily Democratic areas around Youngstown, where nearly 100 voters reported entering ''Kerry'' on the touch screen and watching ''Bush'' light up, at least twenty machines had to be recalibrated in the middle of the voting process for chronically flipping Kerry votes to Bush.(165) (Similar ''vote hopping'' from Kerry to Bush was reported by voters and election officials in other states.)(166) Elsewhere, voters complained in sworn affidavits that they touched Kerry's name on the screen and it lit up, but that the light had gone out by the time they finished their ballot; the Kerry vote faded away.(167) In the state's most notorious incident, an electronic machine at a fundamentalist church in the town of Gahanna recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry.(168) In that precinct, however, there were only 800 registered voters, of whom 638 showed up.(169) (The error, which was later blamed on a glitchy memory card, was corrected before the certified vote count.)

Rural Counties (Stuffing the Box)

Despite the well-documented effort that prevented hundreds of thousands of voters in urban and minority precincts from casting ballots, the worst theft in Ohio may have quietly taken place in rural counties. An examination of election data suggests widespread fraud -- and even good old-fashioned stuffing of ballot boxes -- in twelve sparsely populated counties scattered across southern and western Ohio: Auglaize, Brown, Butler, Clermont, Darke, Highland, Mercer, Miami, Putnam, Shelby, Van Wert and Warren. (See The Twelve Suspect Counties) One key indicator of fraud is to look at counties where the presidential vote departs radically from other races on the ballot. By this measure, John Kerry's numbers were suspiciously low in each of the twelve counties -- and George Bush's were unusually high.

How might this fraud have been carried out? One way to steal votes is to tamper with individual ballots -- and there is evidence that Republicans did just that. In Clermont County, where optical scanners were used to tabulate votes, sworn affidavits by election observers given to the House Judiciary Committee describe ballots on which marks for Kerry were covered up with white stickers, while marks for Bush were filled in to replace them. Rep. Conyers, in a letter to the FBI, described the testimony as ''strong evidence of vote tampering if not outright fraud.'' (184) In Miami County, where Connally outpaced Kerry, one precinct registered a turnout of 98.55 percent (185) -- meaning that all but ten eligible voters went to the polls on Election Day. An investigation by the Columbus Free Press, however, collected affidavits from twenty-five people who swear they didn't vote. (186)

In addition to altering individual ballots, evidence suggests that Republicans tampered with the software used to tabulate votes. In Auglaize County, where Kerry lost not only to Connally but to two other defeated Democratic judicial candidates, voters cast their ballots on touch-screen machines. (187) Two weeks before the election, an employee of ES&S, the company that manufactures the machines, was observed by a local election official making an unauthorized log-in to the central computer used to compile election results. (188) In Miami County, after 100 percent of precincts had already reported their official results, an additional 18,615 votes were inexplicably added to the final tally. The last-minute alteration awarded 12,000 of the votes to Bush, boosting his margin of victory in the county by nearly 6,000. (189)

The Phony Terrorism Alert

The most transparently crooked incident took place in Warren County. In the leadup to the election, Blackwell had illegally sought to keep reporters and election observers at least 100 feet away from the polls. (190) The Sixth Circuit, ruling that the decree represented an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment, noted ominously that ''democracies die behind closed doors.'' But the decision didn't stop officials in Warren County from devising a way to count the vote in secret. Immediately after the polls closed on Election Day, GOP officials -- citing the FBI -- declared that the county was facing a terrorist threat that ranked ten on a scale of one to ten. The county administration building was hastily locked down, allowing election officials to tabulate the results without any reporters present.

Last Step: Rigging the Recount

After Kerry conceded the election, his campaign helped the Libertarian and Green parties pay for a recount of all eighty-eight counties in Ohio. Under state law, county boards of election were required to randomly select three percent of their precincts and recount the ballots both by hand and by machine. If the two totals reconciled exactly, a costly hand recount of the remaining votes could be avoided; machines could be used to tally the rest.

But election officials in Ohio worked outside the law to avoid hand recounts. According to charges brought by a special prosecutor in April, election officials in Cleveland fraudulently and secretly pre-counted precincts by hand to identify ones that would match the machine count. They then used these pre-screened precincts to select the ''random'' sample of three percent used for the recount.

From the list of issues a series of talking points can be constructed, to push back against those who would argue that all of this is "tin-foil hattery" and sour grapes on the part of democrats.

If not to illegally skew the vote what was the justification for...

• The Exit Polls being so far wrong, even beyond a statistical impossibility?
  
• The purge of inactive voters centered on Democratic Strongholds?
  
• The use of illegal registered letters to "Cage" Democratic Voters?
  
• Blackwell's requiring 80 lbs stock for registration cards, and then supply non-80 lbs stock to voters?
  
• Some (Democratic) voters having to wait up to 7 hours (in the rain)?
  
• There being no safeguards to protect the electronic tabulators from tampering?
  
• The mysterious "Level Ten" Terror alert during the counting?
  
• why "Pre-counting" was premitted?

The key to all of this is tying the actions and events specifically to the actions of authorized Republicans such as Blackwell and the RNC. We're certain to hear claims that there was no deliberate malice involved, that there were Democratic election offices involved in many of these decisions - but none of that changes the fact that in each and every case - a problem generated more votes for Bush and less for Kerry in a critical "Battleground State".

I have to admit, that when things originally went down I was skeptical that a deliberate theft of the election had taken place. The amount of the vote discrepancy seemed to large, too massive. It couldn't be possible that nearly 3 Million votes national wide could have been shifted from Kerry to Bush, could it? But the fact is such as shift isn't really neccesary. All they needed was a few hundred here, and a few hundred there in key or close districts and states.

In order to protect what's left of our Democracy, and particularly the integrity of future elections (such as 2006) we need to be ready to challenge these and similar tactics before it's too late. We have to act Now, and the first thing to do is prepare LTE's asking why every newspaper in the country isn't running this story.

It doesn't matter if they agree with Kennedy, we just need them to address the issue -- keep the noise machine spinning - let them try and argue against the facts and science. They ignored Conyers. They ignored Miller. We can't afford to let them ignore Kennedy, whose planned a massive media sweep to support his article, including an appearance on Stephen COlbert on Monday. We need to TIVO that appearance, make sure Crooks & Liars have it. LInk it like crazy. If Kennedy goes on Olbermann, we need to bang on it. If he goes on (heaven help us) either O'Leily or Hannity - we need to be on top of it.

It's our Democracy - and our duty to protect it.

Just remember your Ghandi :"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you - then you win."

Vyan

[Update: Robert appeared on Tucker Carlson's show tonight and did a good job holding his own. Tucker threw up several straw men and Robert batted them back like a seasoned tennis pro...

• If this was such a massive conspiracy, why has no one come forward yet? (IMO Because they'd be admitting to a felony, duh! - Robert didn't even bother responding to this one)
• Bush ultimately won by over 3 million votes and Robert doesn't make the case that so many were stolen (Robert responded that only 160,000 were needed to flip Ohio and give the entire election to Bush.)
• Tucker doesn't think it's a "crackpot" article (Thanks, loads - just saying the word puts the suggestion in the listeners mind anyway, IMO. Robert pointed out that this has already been the subject of Congressional hearings and an investigation by Rep. John Conyers. The evidence is conclusive.)
• Tucker stated that "surely the Press would have covered it" and congress would have done something? (This he said less than 30 secs after Robert had just said that Congressman Conyers did do something, and that there are several ongoing prosecutions taking place in Ohio)
• Tucker made the accusation that one specific example in the article concern voting machines in Nevada doesn't "make the case" that it was specifically an effort by Republicans to steal the vote (Robert pointed out that he was only using the voting issue in other states as a comparison point for how specifically partisan the Ohio situation was)

Overall, he did a great job and didn't let Tucker bloviate over him without getting into a shouting match. Tucker was't convinced, but Robert didn't let him sow seeds of doubt - which was clearly his goal, to make the issue seem "murky and unclear" like that "Global Warming Thingy" we just need to keep studying... and studying... maybe someday we'll figure it all out, but right now we now we just don't know. Yeah, right Tucker -- how're those Brooklyn Bridge sales coming along?