Nader on Ohio Recount

[myschkin]

RALPH NADER: Good morning, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. First, can you comment on the electoral college vote in Ohio?

RALPH NADER: Well, there were a lot of irregularities, but most of them so far occurred before election day. This was a Katherine Harris production by Kenneth Blackwell, to depress the minority vote or the vote in heavily Democratic areas. One of the most notable ways was to reduce the number of voting machines in areas where there were heavy minority, pro-Democrat voters. We pointed all this out to Kerry-Edwards a few days after the election, chiding them for conceding too early and running out the back door and ignoring their repeated promise during the campaign that they were going to make sure every vote was going to be counted. So, it's good that there's going to be recount. How rigorous and fair it is and how upstanding the courts will be remain to be seen. The Ohio Supreme Court, notably in our case, ignored a clear U.S. Supreme Court decision in Pennsylvania that had exact parallels in Ohio to keep us off the ballot, so it's not very hopeful from the judicial point of view; but it's important that the coalition do what it's doing.

AMY GOODMAN: You had a strange situation at night, election night, when John Edwards came out and said: "Don't worry, every vote will be counted, be patient," and then hours later, the same John Edwards coming out, this time with John Kerry, conceding the election without many more votes counted. There is reports that there was a major split between them that morning -- of the morning after. What about that, Ralph Nader?

RALPH NADER: Yeah. My understanding is that John Edwards didn't want to concede that quickly, and there was a argument of sorts before the one o'clock concession on November third about raising the issue of every vote being counted, especially in Ohio. But the consultants to Kerry prevailed. I guess they didn't want him to appear to sour grapes or appear that he wasn't going out in a classy way.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, what about how the media now deals with this issue? Very much the media, you know, expressing the spectrum between the Democrats and the Republicans, but when the Democrats agree with the Republicans, then the media doesn't pursue things further. They very quickly -- The New York Times had a major piece on the conspiracy theories around any kind of electoral fraud. Your comment on that.

RALPH NADER: Yes, well, the media -- the general media will not move on this until the Democratic Party takes a strong role. Kerry did send some observers in there. The party, the D.N.C., did file along with the coalition in one of the legal proceedings; but the media has made up its mind that there's nothing there. They don't know what they don't know. I mean, nobody knows what's there. That's why there's going to be a recount. There are very sufficient, probative irregularities that occurred before, during the election that warrant a recall. Some of those are described on our website, votenader.org which is trying to keep up with this recount situation. Others are reflected in John Conyers' recent hearing on Capitol Hill, which was blacked out by the mass media. This is so far more an independent media focus.

AMY GOODMAN: What about what happened in New Hampshire, and where did you get a recount?

RALPH NADER: Well, we got a recount in a few wards in New Hampshire, which came out okay. New Hampshire has a Secretary of State that's been there for many years, very non-partisan, very professional. And they have a paper trail. And one of the things that we proved in New Hampshire as -- people who want more detail can go to our web site votenader.org -- is that the system worked there because there was a paper trail. But in Maryland and other states where there was not a paper trail, there's no way to make that kind of quick parallel connections.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think it's possible that John Kerry won? I mean, with reports in Ohio, for example, one precinct having 638 voters, about 4,000 votes going to Bush in that case and another when they were counting them at the end of the day, the county commissioner locking down, not allowing any observers, and when they were criticized over the next few days, she ended up saying that Department of Homeland Security and F.B.I. had approached her right before the election and said there was a 'number ten national security threat in the area,' and so she said she thought she responded appropriately. The F.B.I. and Homeland Security then said they never made this call or they had never sent an agent to approach them.

RALPH NADER: Well, in addition to examples like that, and there were 52,000 votes more than there were voters in Cuyahoga County, which was automatically corrected, so that's not -- That's just probative of a climate that there's something there: A very partisan Secretary of State (sort of a Katherine Harris wannabe), a Republican legislature, a Republican governor. The stakes were enormous. You have 11,500 precincts, ten vote a precinct on the average. Anything is possible with an honest recount.


http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/14/1459205

[piece sine]

1. Is he still alive?

Not in my book...he's long gone.

[grumpy old fart]

2. He's more alive than Kerry....

at least as far as caring, and doing something, about the vote fraud. Kerry's pledge to "count every vote" rings more hollow every day.

[Old Mouse]

11. true dat

I was furious at him during the election, but he sure has made up for it lately.

[myschkin]

3. He

seems to be on our side...

[Kellis]

5. That he does.

He's been on this since the beginning.

Thanks for posting.

[Vidar]

4. Reluctantly agreeing with Nader.

[GreenPartyVoter]

6. Thanks for posting this. :^)

[zimba]

7. Nader is a good man

and currently much more involved in bringing to light election fraud than the DNC is at this moment.

[robbedvoter]

9. How so? (I know DNC is doing nothing, but what is Ralphie doing?)

[robbedvoter]

8. Um, Ralphie dear, shouldn't you update us on New Hampshire?

Aren't you speaking on the wrong subject here?

[MelissaB]

10. another snip

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Ralph Nader, joining us in Washington, D.C. Ralph ran for president in this election. Now the election is over. Just to clarify did you say that you think it is possible John Kerry might have won? I mean --

RALPH NADER: In Ohio, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: In general?

RALPH NADER: No. I mean, nobody knows, but there's so many suspicious situations, so many gigantic mistakes that were made in a number of precincts which were corrected to warrant looking at the other 11,000-plus precincts. But worse than that, of course, is that Secretary Blackwell, who is a republican, tried to discourage registration forms from being accepted, when the Cleveland Plain Dealer recommended that people fill out a coupon in the newspaper. He said that wasn't thick enough paper. There were just a lot of things that he did before the election that he's going to get away with because doing these kinds of shenanigans by the Secretary of State is considered politics. The republicans are in control in some states, democrats control the others. It's not considered the Constitutional crime that it really is. So a lot of the damage, Amy, was done before election day. That's not going to be recovered with a recount, but there certainly is enough evidence, certainly enough eyewitness accounts, as Harvey Wasserman has pointed out and others in his daily dispatches, to warrant a recount, and that recount will occur, but it has got to occur under vigilance.

[ginnyinWI]

12. kicking it up--Nader offers insights n/t

[GetTheRightVote]

13. Nader assisted in recount efforts early on and opened door for Green/Lib

to continue with their efforts on a central 3rd party stand for Democracy, he played out his part and seems concern with the election results as well.