http://valleyadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:91516Did Bush Get Lucky? Or Were the Odds Stacked in His Favor?
Presidential candidate John Kerry conceded Nov. 3, and the mainstream media declared election fraud a non-story. But some sources too authoritative to ignore say the results of the vote are suspect.
by Alan Waldman - November 25, 2004
Despite mainstream media attempts to kill or ridicule away the story, talk radio and the Internet are abuzz with considerable evidence that John Kerry was elected president on November 2 -- but that Republican election officials made it difficult for millions of Democrats to vote while employees of four secretive, GOP-bankrolling corporations rigged electronic voting to steal the election for George W. Bush.
Florida's 2000 election problems -- votes spoiled by chads, overvotes, undervotes, exclusion of minority voters, etc. -- were never solved. They worsened and spread to many other states, exacerbated by new and more devious abuses. The Bush administration's "fix" of the 2000 debacle (the Help America Vote Act) made crooked elections considerably easier by foisting paperless electronic voting on states before the bugs had been worked out or meaningful safeguards could be installed.
Expressed fears about a possibly stolen election aren't coming exclusively from defeated Democrats this time around. The Wall Street Journal -- hardly a Democrat's paper -- recently revealed that "Verified Voting, a group formed by a Stanford University professor to assess electronic voting, has collected 31,000 reports of election fraud and other problems."
University of Pennsylvania researcher Dr. Steven Freeman, in his November 2004 paper "The Unexplained Election Poll Discrepancy," concludes: "The odds that the discrepancies between predicted
results and actual vote counts in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania could have been due to chance or random error are 250 million to 1." The unavoidable hypothesis: they were caused by "systematic fraud or manipulation."
How could this happen? Unlike Europe, where citizens count the ballots, in the U.S., employees of a highly secretive Republican-leaning company, ES&S, totally managed every aspect of the 2004 election. That included everything from voter registration, printing of ballots, the programming of the voting machines, tabulation of votes (often with armed guards keeping the media and members of the public who wished to witness the count at bay) and the first reporting of the results -- for 60 million voters in 47 states -- according to Christopher Bollyn, writing in American Free Press. Most other votes were counted by three other firms that are snugly in bed with the GOP. <snip>
This election is not the first with results widely seen as surprising if not suspicious. In November 2002, Georgia Democratic Governor Roy Barnes led by 11 percent and Democratic Senator Max Cleland was in front by 5 percent just before the election -- the first ever conducted entirely on touch-screen electronic machines, and counted entirely by company employees rather than public officials -- but mysterious election-day swings of 16 percent and 12 percent defeated both these popular incumbents. In Minnesota, Democrat Walter Mondale (replacing highly regarded Senator Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash) lost in an amazing last-minute 11-percent vote swing recorded on electronic machines. Convenient glitches in Florida aided Jeb Bush and defeated Janet Reno in their primary elections.
Then in 2003, what's known as "black box voting" helped Arnold Schwarzenegger -- who had deeply offended female, Latino and Jewish voters -- defeat a popular Latino Democrat who substantially led in polls a week before the election in strongly Democratic California.
Four major companies control the U.S. vote count: Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia and SAIC. All of them are hard-wired into the Bush campaign and power structure. The Bush government gave them millions to roll out computerized voting machines. Diebold chief Walden O'Dell is a top Bush fundraiser. Diebold's election division is headed by Bob Urosevich, whose brother Todd is a top exec at "rival" ES&S. The brothers were originally staked by Howard Ahmanson, bagman for the extremist Christian Reconstruction Movement, which advocates the theocratic takeover of American government. Sequoia is owned by a partner member of the Carlyle Group, which has dictated foreign policy in both Bush administrations and which employed former President Bush for quite a while. <snip>
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