20 Amazing Facts
About Voting In The United States
By Bob Rowe
1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S.
2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the US voting machine industry.
3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.
4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
5. 35% of ES&S is owned by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, who became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines.
6. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, a long-time friend of the Bush family, was caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee.
7. Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush's vice- presidential candidates.
8. ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the US and counts almost 60% of all US votes.
9. Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters.
10. Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail.
11. Diebold is based in Ohio.
12. Diebold employs 5 convicted felons as developers. These are the people who write the voting machine computer code.
13. Diebold's Senior Vice-President, Jeff Dean, was convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree.
14. Diebold Senior Vice-President Jeff Dean was convicted of planting back doors in his software and using a "high degree of sophistication" to evade detection over a period of 2 years.
15. None of the international election observers were allowed in the polls in Ohio.
16. California banned the use of Diebold machines because the security was so bad. Despite Diebold's claims that the audit logs could not be hacked, a chimpanzee was able to do it! (See the movie at http://blackboxvoting.org/baxter/baxterVPR.mov.)
17. 30% of all US votes are carried out on unverifiable touch screen voting machines with no paper trail. 18. Bush's Help America Vote Act of 2002 has as its goal to replace all machines with the new electronic touch screen systems with no paper trail.
19. All -- not some -- but all the voting machine errors detected and reported went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates.
20. Major statistical voting oddities (odds on the order of 250 million to 1!) -- again always favoring Bush -- have been mathematically demonstrated by experts.
Such amazing odds, the equivalent of statistical miracles these were. Was it God? or was it Diebold...?
Election 2004
Introduction: Did George W. Bush steal America's 2004
election?
by Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman
June 16, 2005
The following text is the Introduction to the 767 page: Did
George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election? Essential Documents.
You can buy the book here.
This volume of documents is meant to provide you, the reader,
with evidence necessary to make up your own mind.
Few debates have aroused more polarized ire. But too often the
argument has proceeded without documentation. This volume of
crucial source materials, from Ohio and elsewhere, is meant to
correct that problem.
Amidst a bitterly contested vote count that resulted in
unprecedented action by the Congress of the United States, here
are some news accounts that followed this election, which was
among the most bitterly contested in all US history:
• Despite repeated pre-election calls from officials across
the nation and the world, Ohio's Republican Secretary of State,
who also served as Ohio's co-chair for the Bush-Cheney campaign,
refused to allow non-partisan international and United Nations
observers the access they requested to monitor the Ohio vote.
While such access is routinely demanded by the U.S. government in
third world nations, it was banned in the American heartland.
• A post-election headline from the Akron Beacon Journal
cites a critical report by twelve prominent social scientists and
statisticians, reporting: "Analysis Points to Election
‘Corruption': Group Says Chance of Exit Polls Being So Wrong
in '04 Vote is One-in-959,000."
• Citing "Ohio's Odd Numbers," investigative
reporter Christopher Hitchens, a Bush supporter, says in Vanity
Fair: "Given what happened in that key state on Election Day
2004, both democracy and common sense cry out for a court-ordered
inspection of its new voting machines."
• Paul Krugman of the New York Times writes: "It's
election night, and early returns suggest trouble for the
incumbent. Then, mysteriously, the vote count stops and observers
from the challenger's campaign see employees of a voting-machine
company, one wearing a badge that identifies him as a county
official, typing instructions at computers with access to the
vote-tabulating software.
When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The challenger
demands an investigation. But there are no ballots to recount,
and election officials allied with the incumbent refuse to
release data that could shed light on whether there was tampering
with the electronic records.
This isn't a paranoid fantasy. It's a true account of a recent
election in Riverside County, California..."
• Hundreds of Ohio African-American voters give sworn
testimony that they were harassed, intimidated, deprived of
voting machines, given faulty ballots, confronted with
malfunctioning machines and hit with a staggering range of other
problems that deprived them of votes that were destined for John
Kerry, votes that might have tipped the Ohio outcome.
• A team of high-powered researchers discover results in
three southern Ohio counties where an obscure African-American
candidate for the state Supreme Court somehow outpolls John
Kerry, a virtually impossible outcome indicating massive vote
fraud costing Kerry thousands of votes.
• Up until 11pm Eastern time on election night, exit polls
show John Kerry comfortably leading George Bush in Florida, Ohio,
Pennsylvania and New Mexico, giving him a clear victory in the
Electoral College, and a projected national margin of some 1.5
million votes. These same exit polls had just served as the basis
for overturning an election in Ukraine, and are viewed worldwide
as a bedrock of reliability. But after midnight the vote count
mysteriously turns, and by morning George W. Bush is declared the
victor.
There is far far more…enough, indeed, to result in massive
court filings, unprecedented Congressional action and a library
full of documents leading to bitter controversy over the 2004
election, especially in Ohio.
In this volume, we have attempted to present many of the most
crucial of those documents.
Do they prove that George W. Bush stole the U.S. presidential
election of 2004?
Should John Kerry rather than Bush have been certified by the
Electoral College on January 6, 2005?
Historians will be debating that for centuries. What follows are
some of the core documents they will use in that debate:
The most hotly contested evidence comes most importantly from
Ohio, whose 20 electoral votes decided the election. But it also
comes from other key swing states—-especially Florida and
New Mexico—-where exit polls and other evidence raise
questions about the officially certified vote tallies in favor of
Bush.
As mentioned, this book presents the most crucial documents
indicating how this bitterly contested election was actually
decided.
But it is also this book's purpose to memorialize the successful
grassroots campaign by voting rights advocates that forced an
historic Congressional challenge on the floors of the U.S. Senate
and House. Acting on an 1887 law that grew out of the stolen
election of 1876, a concerned constituency called into question
before Congress the electoral votes of an entire state for the
first time in U.S. history.
Brought forth by U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and by
Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH), the Ohio electoral
delegation challenge was the product of a unique grassroots
campaign whose work is also documented here. As the New York
Times described it, "In many ways, the debate came about
because of the relentless efforts of a small group of third-party
activists, liberal lawyers, Internet muckrakers and civil rights
groups, who have been arguing since Election Day that the Ohio
vote was rigged for Mr. Bush."
The research and writing in this book has focussed on Ohio, where
we have been collectively reporting on electoral politics for
more than three decades.
While the alleged irregularities, frauds and illegalities that
transpired here in 2004 have probably generated the most thorough
documention of any state, important parallel assertions have
arisen in other states around the country, most importantly
Florida and New Mexico.
As journalists and researchers with deep roots in Columbus, the
state capitol, we warned of serious problems developing in how
Ohio's 2004 balloting was being administered even before the
actual votes were cast.
Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell who oversaw
the Ohio election, is an outspoken, extremely controversial
partisan who also served as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign,
a conflict of interest that aroused much anger.
In his dual role, Blackwell seemed to replay the part of Florida
Secretary of State Katherine Harris. In 2000 Harris also served
as co-chair of the state's Bush-Cheney campaign while
administering the election that first gave them the White House.
In both cases, Harris and Blackwell termed the elections
"highly successful."
But were these "successes" defined in terms of their
public servant roles as Secretaries of State? Or were they
defined in terms of their partisan roles as campaign co-chairs
for George W. Bush?
In this volume's first three documents, we reproduce articles
published before November 2, 2004. Widely distributed throughout
the Internet weeks before the election, they warned that a wide
range of abuses stemming from Secretary Blackwell's office and
other sources had already tainted the outcome of the upcoming
Ohio vote.
On Election Day, these warnings seemed tragically prophetic. The
balloting throughout Ohio was riddled with a staggering array of
irregularities, apparent fraud and clear illegalities. Many of
the questions focused on electronic voting machines whose lack of
official accountability and a reliable paper trail had been in
the news since the bitterly contested election of 2000, four
years earlier. (Similar questions also arose in Georgia in 2002,
where Democratic candidates for Governor and US Senate had
substantial leads in the major polls right up to election day,
only to lose by substantial margins).
The most widely publicized Ohio problems came as predominantly
African-American precincts turned up suspiciously short of voting
machines. Inner-city voters waited three hours on average and up
to seven hours, according to election officials and to sworn
testimony of local residents. Many voters stood in the cold rain
to cast their ballots while nearby white Republican suburbs
suffered virtually no delays. The wait at liberal Kenyon College,
located in Knox County, Ohio, was eleven hours, while voters at a
nearby conservative Bible school could vote in five minutes.
To this day no one can definitively tell how many citizens,
seeing the long lines, went home or to work or to take care of
their children, thus losing their right to vote.
But long waits were hardly the only problems predominantly
Democratic voters encountered on Election Day. Selective
harassment by partisan poll "inspectors," provisional
ballot manipulations, missing registration records, denial of
absentee ballots, absentee ballots pre-punched for Bush, faulty
computer screens reflecting votes for Bush that were meant for
Kerry, apparently deliberate misinformation regarding polling
locations, inadequate poll worker training in predominantly
Democratic precincts, and much much more threw scores of polling
places into serious disarray.
In two heated public post-election hearings, attended by a
thousand central Ohioans, several hundred angry voters testified
– under oath – on the details of the irregularities
that quickly led to the widespread belief that the election had
been stolen. Their testimony got virtually no mainstream media
coverage. But the verbatim essence of their sworn affidavits
appears in this book.
Like the elections of 2000 and 2002, much of the doubt about the
election of 2004 continues to center on the counting of votes,
especially on electronic voting machines.
About 15% of Ohio's ballots were cast on computerized devices
that left no paper trail. With more than 5.7 million votes cast
in a state yielding an official margin for Bush of less than
117,000 votes, a skewed vote count on those machines alone could
have made the difference for George W. Bush.
Sworn testimony recorded in public hearings in Columbus,
Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo, and Warren cast serious doubt on
how those voting machines performed. In Warren, voters pressing
Kerry's name on electronic screens repeatedly saw Bush's name
light up. In predominantly Democratic Lucas County, Diebold
Opti-scan machines broke down early in the day and were never
fixed, denying thousands – mostly Democrats – their
right to vote.
Reports surfacing in other precincts verified that technicians
dismantled key electronic machines before a recount could be
certified. Election officials in Franklin County (where Columbus
is located) reported that 77 of their machines malfunctioned on
Election Day, virtually all of them in heavily Democratic
precincts. Inner city precincts in Cincinnati and Cleveland had
all-too-familiar Florida-style problems with their punch card
machines.
To date, there has been no credible, independent audit of these
machines, not in Ohio or in any other state. In Ohio, Secretary
of State Blackwell issued an order in the weeks following the
election that all 2004 election records, paper and electronic,
were to be sealed from public access and inspection. As of this
book's publication date, those records remain unobtainable.
The controversy surrounding the voting machines remains extremely
fierce in part because major manufacturers such as Diebold,
ES&S, Triad, and others are controlled by partisan Republican
companies with secret proprietary software. This unfortunate lack
of transparency calls all U.S. elections into question.
In a highly publicized controversy, Diebolt principal Walden
O'Dell, a resident of central Ohio, pledged in a 2003 GOP
fundraising letter to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to George W.
Bush, leaving the indelible suspicion that he might do it
fraudulently. U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) is a principle in
another major voting machine company, ES&S, on which many
millions of votes were cast in 2004. Hagel was elected and
re-elected in balloting that relied on ES&S machines. Such
apparent conflicts of interest have left the poisonous impression
that America's right to cast a ballot in secret has been
transcended by a private partisan company's right to count votes
in secret.
In fact, the question of electronic voting machines remains the
single largest "black hole" in the entire electoral
process. Nationwide at least 30% of the votes in 2004 were cast
on such "black box" machines, more than enough to have
tipped the balance in the popular vote from John Kerry to George
W. Bush.
Despite the intense battle over this election and the scrutiny it
has received worldwide, it is virtually certain there will never
be a clear answer as to how many votes cast on those machines
really went to which candidate. The 3.5 million-vote margin
claimed by George W. Bush in the 2004 election remains
unverifiable and, at best, forever suspect.
In reaction, GOP operatives have put forth three major arguments
to defend a Bush victory.
First, they argue that in Ohio and elsewhere, county election
boards are bi-partisan, meaning Democrats would have had to
accede to any theft of an election. This book provides a verbatim
interview from William Anthony, Democratic election board member
in Ohio's Franklin County. Among other things, Anthony confirms
that Blackwell had the power to remove any election board member,
including Democrats, whose actions displeased him. Anthony and
other Ohio election board members confirm that Blackwell in fact
made at least one such threat in the lead-up to the 2004
election. And that Blackwell specifically denied central Ohioans
access to paper ballots, a decision that might well have affected
the overall outcome.
Republicans also argue that exit polls were wrong because
Republicans failed to respond to them throughout the country on
election day. They also say a late surge of evangelical voters in
Florida and elsewhere overwhelmed the polling data, and that
social issues prompted tens of thousands of core Democrats to
drop their long-standing party loyalties and to vote for George
W. Bush where in 2000 they had voted by wide margins for Al Gore.
These assertions remain unsupported by hard data. A number of
documents in this book indicate they could not be true. And in
large part as a result of these refutations, the movement
demanding further scrutiny of the national vote continued to gain
momentum in the weeks and months after the election.
Amidst the bitter controversy that was voiced in Ohio's
post-election public hearings, unprecedented national attention
began to focus on what may or may not have happened here. In late
November, the Reverend Jesse Jackson let it be known he had
serious questions about the conduct of the Ohio balloting.
In a series of visits Jackson rallied an African-American
community that felt it had been deprived of its vote. A former
cohort of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jackson compared the grassroots
campaign for voter justice in Ohio to the civil rights marches of
the 1950s and 1960s. Terming the campaign here "a bigger
deal than Selma," Jackson likened what happened in Ohio 2004
to the deprivation of black voting rights throughout the Jim Crow
South dating to the 1890s.
As a grassroots movement grew within the state – and across
the nation – to demand a recount, Jackson enlisted the
support of Congressman John Conyers (D-MI) and Rep. Tubbs Jones.
While a citizens movement demanded to know what Ohio had to hide,
Secretary of State Blackwell dragged his feet on the recount. He
used a wide range of legal and bureaucratic maneuvers that
deprived the public of meaningful scrutiny prior to the convening
of the Electoral College, which Blackwell had long since
proclaimed would go for Bush.
The grassroots efforts coalesced into two legal actions. On the
morning of December 13, at the federal courthouse in Columbus,
suits were filed on behalf of candidates from the Green and
Libertarian Parties, demanding that the Ohio Electors not be
seated until a full investigation of both the balloting and the
recount could be conducted. Meanwhile, the convenors of the
citizens' post-election hearings assembled a legal team to file
two election challenge lawsuits, Moss v. Bush, and Moss v. Moyer,
at Ohio's Supreme Court.
Rev. Bill Moss, a former member of the Columbus School Board, was
the lead plaintiff in the suits, filed against George W. Bush and
Thomas Moyer, Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court. Small
donor contributions from across the country financed both
actions.
Later that morning, Rep. Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the
House Judiciary Committee, convened a public forum on voting
irregularities in Ohio that was covered by C-SPAN. Conyers had
already taken testimony at a hearing in Washington. Now he was
joined by Rep. Jones and Congressman Ted Strickland (D-OH),
Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), Congressman Jerome Nadler
(D-NY) and others at the Columbus City Council Chambers. The
hearing had originally been called for the Statehouse, but
Republicans there denied the Congressional delegation a room.
Taking additional testimony from Ohioans who were denied their
right to vote, Conyers' City Hall hearing also heard from
national election experts. While they testified, Republican
Electors cast their ballots around the corner at the statehouse,
votes that would, as Blackwell predicted, give the election to
George W. Bush.
In the wake of these new hearings, and with growing momentum
built by Jackson, Jones, Conyers and others, a truly national
movement arose to demand a new look at what had happened on
November 2. With an almost total blackout on all coverage from
the mainstream media, the vast bulk of the information was spread
through www.FreePress.org. The Free Press articles were in turn
picked up by www.CommonDreams.org, www.Truthout.org and other
democracy-minded internet outlets. Co-authors Fitrakis, Wasserman
and Rosenfeld appeared on Air America Radio Shows hosted by Laura
Flanders, Randi Rhodes, Stephanie Miller, and Marty Kaplan, as
well as Pacifica Radio, NPR, independent radio stations and with
Amy Goodman on the Democracy Now TV network.
But by and large, the fact that the story spread at all was a
tribute to the ability of the Internet to operate independently
from the major media, whose scant coverage of what happened in
Ohio was almost uniformly hostile to the idea that anything could
have gone seriously wrong.
On January 3, 2005, Rev. Jackson hosted a rally in downtown
Columbus at which Rep. Jones officially announced that she would
formally question the seating of the Ohio Electoral delegation on
January 6. The challenge would come through a law passed by
Congress in 1887 in response to the Republican theft of the 1876
election.
That year the New York Democratic Samuel Tilden outpolled the
Ohio Republican Rutherford B. Hayes by about 250,000 votes. But
the Republican Party manipulated the electoral votes in Florida
and other states.
After a tense five-month stand-off, a deal was cut and Hayes
became president. In exchange, the GOP ended Reconstruction by
pulling the last federal troops out of the defeated south,
leaving millions of freed slaves to the mercies of Jim Crow
segregation and a system designed to deprive them of their right
to vote, a Constitutional violation not seriously challenged
until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
The 1887 law provided that at the formal request of a Senator and
a Representative, the two houses of Congress would debate
separately for two hours the legitimacy of seating a specified
state's delegation to the Electoral College.
In 2000, members of the Congressional Black Caucus rose to
challenge the Florida delegation. But Vice President Al Gore, who
was presiding over the Senate at the time, recognized no senator
willing to join them.
As of January 3, 2005, no U.S. senator had stepped forward to
join Rep. Jones. The next day a busload of activists left from
Columbus for an overnight "freedom ride" to Washington.
As they arrived the morning of January 5, the burgeoning
"Election Protection" coalition staged a media briefing
at the National Press Club, finally generating major global media
coverage, including ABC's Nightline. Throughout that day, and the
next, Rev. Jackson, with Fitrakis and others in tow, lobbied the
Congress, providing in-depth briefings for key Democratic
senators, including the newly installed Democratic leadership and
former first lady Hillary Clinton (D-NY).
On January 6, at a morning rally across from the White House,
Rev. Jackson announced that Senator Boxer would join Rep. Tubbs
Jones in questioning the seating of the Republican delegation
from Ohio to the Electoral College.
Boxer's historic decision was greeted with loud cheers from the
Election Protection coalition. In her California re-election
campaign, Boxer had been America's third-leading vote-getter,
behind Kerry and Bush. But extremely harsh personal attacks
spewed from Rep. Tom DeLay (D-TX) and the Republican leadership
in the Congress and in Ohio. Much of the Ohio media, which had
ignored the story since election day, jumped in with personal
attacks on Rep. Tubbs Jones and the voting rights activists.
As the day progressed, public rallies accompanied the
Congressional debate, much of which we have reproduced here. Then
the two chambers re-convened, certified the Ohio delegation—and
George W. Bush was given a disputed second term.
But the historic controversy over the 2004 election has not
ended.
At its core remain unanswered questions surrounding the actions
of Secretary of State Blackwell, the fine print of election
procedure and vote counting, as well as the still unresolved exit
poll controversy and the nature of electronic voting.
Up until 11pm Eastern Standard Time, the major election-day exit
polls showed John Kerry winning the national election. But in
nine of eleven swing states, including Florida and Ohio, massive,
unexplained shifts gave Bush the election.
Nationwide what appeared to be a victory for Kerry by about 1.5
million votes suddenly became a 3.5 million margin for Bush.
As shown in the documents here, the hard realities of such a
shift remain unexplained.
In the months after the election, dozens of polling experts and
statisticians have scrutinized every corner of the public exit
polling data as it stacks up against the official vote counts.
The major pollsters and their national media clients still refuse
to release the raw data. The consensus, as shown here, is that
the reversal of Kerry's fortunes late on election night was in
essence a statistical impossibility, with the odds at roughly 1
in 950,000. According to these experts, John Kerry should have
been inaugurated in January, 2005.
These exit poll analyses have been generally ignored but not
disputed by the mainstream press. In early 2005, two major
pollsters issued statements saying that their initial work was in
error, and that they had somehow "under-interviewed"
Republican voters, thereby skewing their findings toward the
Democrats.
But such denials are simply not credible in the eyes of a broad
spectrum of independent experts. As shown in the documents here,
nearly all the "errors" in the polling were somehow in
Bush's favor. The odds against the reversals that were shown in
Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania alone are in the
hundreds-of-thousands to one; according to experts such as the
University of Illinois's Ron Baiman, nationwide the odds approach
150 million to one.
Ironically, just prior to the 2004 US election, similar exit
polls led to the reversal of a presidential election in Ukraine,
where mass demonstrations forced a re-vote. The challenger's
"defeat" in the first voting ran so clearly counter to
the exit polls that a second vote was forced, which he won.
The Bush administration supported the revote in the Ukraine. But
there was no parallel reversal here.
The drama in Ohio continues. In early 2005, Secretary of State
Blackwell issued a fundraising letter congratulating himself for
delivering Ohio to George W. Bush. The letter contained an
illegal solicitation of corporate money, and was withdrawn as a
"mistake."
Blackwell was not indicted. But the letter enhanced the
widespread suspicion that Blackwell abused his position as
Secretary of State to wrongfully deliver Ohio, and the White
House, to George W. Bush.
In January 2005, Blackwell initiated an attempt by Ohio Attorney
General James Petro to sanction four attorneys who sued to get to
the bottom of what had happened on Election Day, 2004. Bob
Fitrakis, Cliff Arnebeck, Susan Truitt and Peter Peckarsky were
named as attorneys to be sanctioned at the pleasure of the Ohio
Supreme Court, which is dominated by Republicans. Petro's brief
essentially argues that there were no irregularities in the 2004
Ohio election and the Moss v. Bush and Moss v. Moyer filings were
"meritless" and "frivolous." Chief Justice
Thomas Moyer, who is cited in the second filing, refused to
recuse himself, and appointed himself to rule on the Moss v. Bush
case against the very lawyers who filed against him in Moss v.
Moyer.
Meanwhile, Blackwell escalated his own campaign for Governor of
Ohio, to be decided in primary and general elections he would
administer as Secretary of State. As the prime candidate of the
fundamentalist far-right, Blackwell planned to follow in the
footsteps of Florida's Katherine Harris, who was rewarded with a
safe Congressional seat after delivering her state – and the
presidency – to Bush in 2000.
As the documents in the final chapter and appendix to this book
show, the bitter controversy over the vote count in Ohio has been
mirrored in other key states around the US.
The outcome in Florida 2004 remains in many ways as severely
challenged as in 2000. Serious questions have erupted in New
Mexico, where every precinct that used electronic scanning
devices went for Bush, no matter what its demographic make-up or
party proclivities. As Kerry noted in a conference call involving
Jackson, Fitrakis and Arneback, it was not the Democrat or
Republican, Hispanic or Anglo, rich or poor make-up of a precinct
that decided the outcome in New Mexico, it was the presence of
opti-scan vote counters.
Similar new concerns have since surfaced in Maryland and
elsewhere.
Like the production of this book, the "Election
Protection" campaign that grew from the Ohio grassroots has
been unaided by either the Ohio Democratic Party, the Kerry
campaign or any other candidate, or the major media. But it has
coalesced into a nationwide movement for meaningful reform. Based
in grassroots organizing and independent internet outlets like
www.FreePress.org, they may be our only lifeline to any hope for
the future of democracy.
The Democratic representatives who stood up on January 6 are
pursuing election reform at the federal level. It remains to be
seen how that plays out.
But the bitter controversy over Ohio 2004, like that over Florida
2000 and Georgia 2002, rings like a firebell for the future of
democracy.
Four decades after the 1965 signing of the National Voting Rights
Act, and nearly fourteen decades after 1869 passage of the
Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States
guaranteeing freed slaves the right to vote, millions of
Americans and citizens worldwide believe that our electoral
process is still vulnerable to manipulation, fraud and theft.
We believe the documents in this book form the most complete
record so far of what really happened in Ohio and elsewhere
immediately before, during and after the election of 2004. Some
have been edited to avoid excessive repetition. All are
accompanied by citations meant to guide you to original documents
in their entirety, as well as to other sources providing a
variety of perspectives.
Many who are discontent with how this election was conducted now
argue for federal standards to apply to all future elections.
There are a wide range of additional reforms being proposed on
all sides of the political spectrum.
But few would disagree with the proposition put forth by Thomas
Jefferson that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. And
that free elections demand aggressive, informed, relentless
protection.
We hope this volume will facilitate informed decisions about how
that can be done in the future.
Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman
Columbus, Ohio
May 2005
Buy the book today!
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