Was the 2004 Election Stolen?: A Debate on Ohio One Year After Bush's Victory
democracynow.org
<<...AMY GOODMAN: Today we are going to explore some of the questions that still persist over the 2004 election. We are joined in our studio here in New York by New York University professor, Mark Crispin Miller. He is author of a new book; it’s called Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They’ll Steal the Next One, Too, (Unless We Stop Them). We are also joined on the telephone by investigative journalist, Mark Hertsgaard. He has investigated the claim that the elections were stolen, has written on the subject in the new issue of Mother Jones magazine. We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Mark Crispin Miller, let's begin with you. Lay out your arguments.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, I think we've focused understandably on Ohio, understandably because Ohio was the pivotal state that allegedly put Bush over the top, but there's a problem with that focus, and the problem is that the evidence of major election fraud is ubiquitous. It’s all over the place. I wrote this book, Fooled Again, to provide the reader with a panoramic view of what went on from coast to coast in the United States before and on, and in some cases after, Election Day.
There was election fraud -- extensive election fraud in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida. But there was also election fraud throughout the nation, places as different as West Virginia, Oregon, Montana, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, New Jersey, even in solidly Democratic states. There seemed to be a general program of doing everything possible, using the broadest possible array of tactics, to cut down the Kerry vote and to hype or pad the Bush vote, and this even extended to the expatriate vote.
I have a chapter in Fooled Again on the G.O.P.’s extensive efforts and successful efforts to cut back on the votes of those Americans living abroad, a constituency sometimes referred to as the 51st state, includes between four and seven million votes, a lot of people. The vote tends to skew Democratic, and the stuff that the government pulled – I should say, yeah – well, this one-party government pulled to interfere with that vote is quite, quite stunning.
My aim here – let me just say one thing – my aim here is not to challenge the outcome of the election in any way that would mean let’s, like, install Kerry in the White House. That’s not constitutional, and I think when Kerry conceded, he forfeited his moral right to do that anyway. The purpose of this book is to jumpstart a crucial movement for election reform. We need electoral reform as soon as possible, because if we don't have it, if we don’t let the scandal of last year resonate and we don’t have the requisite response of reform, we are cooked, we’re finished as a democracy.
JUAN GONZALEZ: The Ohio race, in particular, obviously has gotten the most attention because of the pivotal electoral votes involved there. Could you talk a little bit about what are some of the key or the most flagrant examples of what you think were done there to steal that election?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Yeah, well, the Conyers Report, which is available on a paperback called What Went Wrong in Ohio is very good on the subject. I have about ten pages in the book paraphrasing the report and describing what happened to the report, because it really fell into a black hole when it was published on January 5th of this year.
There were three phases of chicanery. First, there was a pre-election period, during which the Secretary of State in Ohio, Ken Blackwell, was also co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio, which is in itself mind-boggling, engaged in all sorts of bureaucratic and legal tricks to cut down on the number of people who could register, to limit the usability of provisional ballots. It was really a kind of classic case of using the letter of the law or the seeming letter of the law just to disenfranchise as many people as possible.
On Election Day, there was clearly a systematic undersupply of working voting machines in Democratic areas, primarily inner city and student towns, you know, college towns. And the Conyers people found that in some of the most undersupplied places, there were scores of perfectly good voting machines held back and kept in warehouses, you know, and there are many similar stories to this. And other things happened that day.
After Election Day, there is explicit evidence that a company called Triad, which manufactures all of the tabulators, the vote-counting tabulators that were used in Ohio in the last election, was systematically going around from county to county in Ohio and subverting the recount, which was court ordered and which never did take place. The Republicans will say to this day, ‘There was a recount in Ohio, and we won that.’ That’s a lie, one of many, many staggering lies. There was never a recount.
Now, I found stuff in writing Fooled Again that the Conyers people didn't go over. I talked to some people who worked in Ohio and have documentary evidence that some 10 to 20% of all the hard line Democratic voters in their precincts just disappeared from the rolls. I have all the details in the book, but it was systematic. There was something having to do with the computer program. Suffice it to say, Ohio's situation was egregious. It actually looks good compared to Florida, but the fact is this is simply a version of what happened nationwide...
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Mark Crispin Miller, final comment.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Yeah, I'm going to agree readily that the Kerry people ran a miserable campaign. I have got stuff about it in the book. They were tone deaf. They were ridiculous, however, they still won. That’s my argument. And to pay, you know, too much attention to how inexpert the campaign was misses the point that there's solid evidence that many, many millions of Americans voted against Bush, and this includes a lot of Republicans, Amy. This is not just a party issue. There's a lot of evidence – I have it in Fooled Again – that the Republican Party was fractured last time, whereas the Democratic Party was more unified than it had ever been since 1964.
Now, I enjoy faulting political operatives for running idiotic campaigns. You know, it’s kind of gratifying. It’s cathartic, but let's not be misled by this. The fact is that even though he ran a bad campaign, Bush had been running a far worse presidency, and the American people had had enough of that. I don't – you know, I'm not a Democrat, as I say, and I'm not at the moment much of an admirer of Senator Kerry, but the fact is that this was an anti-Bush vote, and it’s extremely important, because Bush represents the antithesis of democracy.
You know, you had a story at the beginning of the hour about Haiti. Is it any surprise that this administration would steal its way to power? You know, they evicted the first democratically elected government of Haiti. Here they have written the entire legal code for Iraq, where there’s no press freedom. They don’t believe in democracy. They are profoundly opposed to democracy. Fooled Again talks about that theocratic frame of mind...>> |
