Kerry to Enter Ohio Recount Fray

[seemslikeadream]

Kerry to Enter Ohio Recount Fray
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Report

Thursday 23 December 2004

2004 Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry will file today, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, papers in support of the Green Party/Libertarian Party recount effort. Specifically, Kerry will be filing a request for expedited discovery regarding Triad Systems voting machines, as well as a motion for a preservation order to protect any and all discovery and preserve any evidence on this matter.

Triad Systems has come under scrutiny recently after Sherole Eaton, deputy director of elections for Hocking County, swore out an affidavit in which she described her witnessing the tampering of electronic voting equipment by a Triad representative. Rep. John Conyers, the ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee, has requested an investigation into this matter by the FBI and the Hocking County prosecutor.

Truthout will have more on this specific Triad allegation later in the day.

Previously, the Green Party and Libertarian Party has not fared well in their efforts to get emergency orders regarding this matter in Ohio. In order to pass muster with a judge, the individual or group requesting an emergency order for such a recount must show both irreperable harm as well as a substantial chance for success on the merits. While Green and Libertarian representatives have been able to show irreperable harm, they could not establish a substantial chance for success on the merits, because no recount would deliver Ohio to either party.

Kerry's entry into this recount effort changes the math on this matter dramatically. He can likewise show irreperable harm, and unlike the Green and Libertarian candidates, he can also prove a substantial chance for success on the merits because he lost the Ohio vote by a statistical whisker.
more
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/122404Y.shtml

[Pachamama]

1. Me thinks that Kerry was intentionally waiting till X-Mas to do this....

:eyes:

This is good, no, GREAT News! :bounce:

Thank you John! :hug:

[musette_sf]

2. We will be celebrating

at the Sweetwater tonight! This is GREAT news!!!!! :party:

[Pachamama]

8. Hi Musette! I wish I could be there! I'm off to Oregon & then Canada for

the holidays! I'll be checking in on the DU (especially from Canada) but enjoy and have a drink at the Sweetwater for me!

:hi:

PS: Thanks for the email and welcome again!

[jayfish]

3. More Like He Was Waiting For An Agreeble...

case-study, a-la WA, to materialize. Although it was difficult at times, I'm glad I refrained from Kerry-bashing immediately following 11/2.

Jay

[Occulus]

4. Well now.

All that Kerrybashing going on here lately looks like it could be a bit premature. Remember, both he and Edwards have trial experience, and they know- have in the past had to know- the timing of their legal maneuvering as they would know an art to its mastery. It's very possible Kerry conceded to await a specific legal "signal" that would increase his chances of success. In this case, it may have been the ruling the judge made regard "irreparable harm".... the same argument used in the decision that got * the White House in the first place.

Watch them ask for the source code and discover a line that tampers with the vote. That would be an explosive story. They may well be putting themselves into position to ask for exactly that.

So very much under the radar. It seems he has learned something from his recent past. HHHhhhhhmmm....

[C_eh_N_eh_D_eh]

14. "Tactics, comrades! Tactics!"

I'm with InvisibleBallots on this one. If Kerry really was serious about winning the election, why did he wait until now to jump on the bandwagon? Hell, for that matter, why did he concede in the first place? He must have known the vote was rigged.

Waiting until the conditions are favorable to make your move might be the key to a political victory, but if it means leaving your people at the mercy of the enemy in the meantime, it won't win you any support. It's all very well to talk about "long-term plans" and "looking at the big picture" - nobody's questioning the importance of that - but when people's lives are on the line, you have to be willing to sacrifice your ambitions, however noble they may be, in order to do the right thing RIGHT NOW, when it counts. John Kerry has proven, in my eyes at least, that he won't do that.

Edited for spelling

[InvisibleBallots]

13. why wait, so it would be too late to do anything?

Notice Kerry does this right after the Green party doing the recounts accused him of trying to sabotage their effort.

Kerry is just trying to keep his chance to run again in 2008 open - I guess that's why he refused to spend the money we donated to actually defeat Bush.

Anybody but Kerry 2008. Hell, I'd even vote for Hillary Clinton over Kerry now. Please, give us Clark or Dean or even Al Gore!

[Pachamama]

16. Sorry, but I've been following your "posts" for the last month, & I don't

think you have supported Kerry ever...these comments about him are flat our inaccurate and I couldn't disagree with you more....

Stay tuned....John never gave up...you'll see...

[InvisibleBallots]

17. no, I didn't support Kerry

I voted for him in the general election - but after his disgusting concession, I wish I hadn't. If I had known this I would have voted for Ralph Nader.

"these comments about him are flat our inaccurate and I couldn't disagree with you more"

Which comments are inaccurate? That he conceded quickly? That he did not spend all the money he had to defeat Bush? That the Green party accused him of sabotaging the recounts?

[mcscajun]

5. Duplicate thread...see link

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x189970

[seemslikeadream]

6. last paragraph

Perhaps the most significant aspect of all this, from the activist point of view, has been the effectiveness of the telephone calls and letters to Kerry. The activist push to get him involved had a very significant effect on his decision to enter this effort. Likewise, calls to other Senators in order to convince them to join House members in challenging the election have likewise had significant effect. If such an effort continues, the activists involved will very likely see the desired result unfold.

KERRY TO ENTER OHIO RECOUNT FRAY - here it is
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=189970&mesg_id=189970

[ernstbass]

7. It's about damn time

[zann725]

9. I hope this wasn't the entire "BIG" announcement.

Ho-hum...

[Deja Q]

10. He's nearly 2 months late AND had already conceded. Who is going to

give him any credibility? The media? The DLC? Bush?

How about none of the above?

I wish him the best of luck, but he already put his foot in his mouth big-time and it's had 50 days for it to sink in. :-(

[Occulus]

12. If tampering can be proven,

I think a judge might give him credibility. Kerry may well have conceded because tampering deceived him into thinking he lost Ohio.

Prove the lies, prove the cover-up, convince a judge (using source code would be nice) and Bush goes down in a spectacular ball of flames.

It'll be amusing to see all the reactions when people realize how under-the-radar this all was. It'll be a very very rude and ugly surprise to most Republicans if that's the case.

[ooglymoogly]

11. lookin good mista kerry...eom

[diamond14]

15. Go JFKerry.....smarts moves.....great tactics....

if Kerry had done Gore's approach, we would NEVER have gotten to where we are today....

just take a look at the Gore approach to the Florida elections, and it's real clear: it wasn't the right approach...the reTHUGlicans just sent busloads of mob THUGS down to Florida to THREATEN election officials and pound on their doors screaming....and the whole mess was rushed throught the courts to a bush* selection in no time at all....


in Ohio2004, Kerry has taken a much different tactic.....and so far, the "bus-loads of reTHUGlican mobs" haven't appeared...the court processes are all winners for Kerry, and the votes are quietly being counted, and bush* thinks he won and went on vacation until sometime in January....


Kerry is SMART...that's what we need...a SMART President....

[CityDem]

18. Too little - - Too late

Christ, AWOL will be inaugurated in about 4 weeks. Kerry is just trying to placate the progressives who know this election as stolen.

[seemslikeadream]

19. Conyers: Vote firm had remote access to machines

from rawstory

The ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.) issued a followup letter to the president of Triad Election Systems Thursday, noting that he had confirmed that Triad Election Systems had remote access to voting machines controlled by local Board of Elections, RAW STORY has learned. The letter follows below.

(Note: We take things out of pdf to have ads help pay for our bandwidth, and because some people don't like pdfs.)

Image of letter at Raw Story:

http://rawstory.rawprint.com/1204/conyers_triadnew_122304.php

http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/Triad_Followup_Letter.pdf

MORE: DEVELOPING: Sources on the Hill say there's more video of the Triad folks...MORE: Partial transcript of new video on the way, source says... http://rawstory.com

[Octafish]

20. Gee. This is a big story. How come it's not on my television screen?

In the whodunit over who won it, the true villain is slipping away

The Case of the Ohio Recount

by Rick Perlstein
December 21st, 2004 12:00 PM

The game is still afoot in Ohio. Taking advantage of a state law that allows presidential candidates to request an official recount if they finance it themselves, David Cobb of the Green Party and Michael Badnarik of the Libertarians raised $113,600 in mid November, largely from progressives nearly tapped out after the campaign. Last week, the part-time bureaucrats of Ohio's 88 county boards of elections started slogging through the results once more. Teams of progressive volunteers watching over the recounts began clocking 20-hour days.

Meanwhile there have been the emotional hearings, led by ranking House Judiciary Committee member John Conyers, in which Ohio secretary of state and Bush-Cheney campaign co-chair Ken Blackwell was raked over the coals in absentia for answers to 36 questions about specific Election Day irregularities that Conyers posed to him in a now famous December 2 letter. The 36 questions are masticated endlessly in forums on democraticunderground.com—new outrages added each day, thousands of embittered idealists consuming the better part of their time in search of that elusive needle-in-haystack data point that will prove outright theft of the election. One lawyer, Cliff Arnebeck, even thinks he's found it, and has filed suit with the aim of kicking George W. Bush out of office.

It's possible that their vindication will come, that what's already being referred to as the "vote fraud community"—the allusion is to the "JFK assassination research community"—won't disappear up its very own grassy knoll. But the charges producing the greatest heat online often turn out to have the most innocent explanations. The recount isn't amounting to much, either. Last week the Franklin County Board of Elections did discover one extra vote for Kerry—offset by the extra vote they found for Bush. The irregularities volunteers have pointed to in the recount process itself are often picayune.

In many Americans' minds, it's not too hard to imagine, this will all be received as further evidence of the activist left's irrelevance. Which would, in fact, be a tragedy. For elections in America are indeed broken, badly, and vulnerable to fraud. That fact is not politically neutral: The problems in America's election system have advantaged the Republicans, in significant and consistent ways.

If the Democrats had a Karl Rove—a cunning master strategist who thinks so far in advance that he wins new wars before the other side even wakes up to discover there's been a fight—setting up an election reform movement might be the first thing he would do. It just wouldn't look anything like the reform movement we have—so uncoordinated, strategically unsound, and prone to going off half-cocked that it may end up hurting the crucial cause it seeks to help.

CONTINUED...

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0451/perlstein.php

[seemslikeadream]

21. Seems like a dream, You've got me horticultured, Octafish

And so it was that later
as the miller told his tale
that her face, at first just ghostly,
turned a whiter shade of pale