It's the Tabulators, Stupid! The theft of the 2004 Election, a short retrospective

Kip Humphrey

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Sat Apr-05-08 10:10 PM
Original message

It's the Tabulators, Stupid! The theft of the 2004 Election, a short retrospective

Rove planned to flip the vote by 4% in 2004. He needed two diversions to affect success and ensure deflection of any revelations of what actually would happen:
1. A massive country-wide Republican effort to disenfranchise 1 million likely Democratic voters to generate an excuse why the polls were so wrong
2. A campaign to conflate and confuse the language and the issue: for every statement of "election fraud", counter with "voter fraud"

Meanwhile...
On election night, Rove arrived at the White House at 9:38PM. The White House had been transformed into a self-described "Election War Room". In the Executive Dining Room, RNC staffers sat at folding conference tables, their faces buried in computer screens filled with voting results pouring in from key counties in the so-called battleground states. In the privacy of the Oval office, similar tables were arranged: 6 in all with 2 PCs on each, arranged in rows with a center aisle dividing them into 2 groups of 3 tables. At the head of that center aisle an oak podium set facing the group of tables. Behind and to the right of the podium the president's desk had been relocated off center to its usual location. In this setting, Rove and Bush oversaw a small cadre of highly loyal RNC employees as they accessed key vote tabulators via modem and Internet to execute algorithms that flipped the vote from Kerry to Bush. In the White House dining room, a RNC regulars sat monitoring vote totals, unknowingly providing the Oval Office Loyals with lists of locations used to target tabulator vote flipping. (to find videos of the above scenario, they reside in the bowels of the MSNBC and CNN archives, November 3rd, 2004)

That's how it was done. It didn't matter that 1 million voters were disenfranchised when 3.8 million votes were flipped electronically from that oval room by fewer than a dozen people. It didn't matter on which machines voters voted: touchscreen, optical scan, or mechanical levers. What mattered was: no one can know.

What followed was an organized campaign of misdirection and extortion engineered to ensure there would be no evidence or initiative that might uncover evidence of the greatest theft ever. Kerry was persuaded not to contest the election. He conceded the next day. But he knows. His wife knows. The election was stolen. Edwards objected to the concession but could do nothing beyond get Kerry to issue his infamous statement that "every vote would be counted". The MSM operated under a virtually total wall of silence until the inauguration on January 19th. Producers were threatened with firing should they run stories questioning the election results or should they reveal they were threatened with firing. Only Keith Obermann dared run stories questioning the result of the election in the early days after election day. But that lone voice was isolated and alone (and had a small audience too). At that time, Keith had an ironclad contract giving him full editorial control of Countdown's content so he could not be threatened.

That spring and summer, the Carter-Baker commission was made ineffectual and suffered from the same media silence surrounding election fraud. Their report was compromised by equal time given to "voter" fraud and a focus on voter ID in the name of bi-partisanship (that would be the James Baker contribution). They were infiltrated by RNC operatives consulting or testifying as election experts. We did manage to provide the commission with a little discomfort by holding the Election Assessment Hearing on the day prior to the Carter-Baker commission's second hearing in Houston Texas and did provide their staff with our testimony and findings. However, the fix was in and our evidence was effectively buried.

Our fledgling ER movement was stalked, watched, and infiltrated. My home telephone was tapped from December 13th to January 19th - Inauguration Day. My 12/12/04 Election Fraud protest effort was approached by a person operating off of a server in Atlanta named FED1 (we traced him). He started asking all sorts of personal questions when attempting to volunteer. Even here on DU, it quickly became politically incorrect to discuss "who" stole the election. The ER movement quickly fell to internal bickering (HCPB vs. fix the machines; exit poll analysis vs RBr; litigation vs. legislation, etc.). This was shades of the demise of the SDS during the Vietnam era (thanks then to the FBI and CIA) and had infiltration written all over it.

The exit polls were effectively (if arbitrarily) discredited. The fictitious RBr (Reluctant Bush responder) was invented, explaining that Bush voters refused to tell exit pollsters how they voted. The pre-election tracking polls were dismissed: After all, 1 million+ voters were disenfranchised and didn't vote; pre-election polls aren't that accurate anyway; the religious right came out to vote against gays.

This all had the mark of a Rove operation: complex, comprehensive, deceptive, and effective - Karl Rove, the "Architect" of Bush's re-election.

One final comment: If you want your country back, Hand-Counted Paper Ballots.

Kip Humphrey