Reply #3: That article totally pissed me off, too. [View All]

[mojowork_n]

So I wrote up an outraged LTE:

Dear Mr. Borowski,

You guys totally suck. Please pass this news on to Patrick Marley, Stacy Forster and Steven Walters of the Journal Sentinel staff, who also contributed to the Front Page (Headline!) butt load of misinformation in today's "A" section.

Forgive me for being so blunt, but it's the truth. At least when it comes to reporting on issues related to the lack of honesty, fairness, reliability and transparency in the election process.

This criticsm isn't meant to be taken personally so much as it is a natural, honest reaction to the grossly skewed Journal-Sentinel editorial policy that's been guiding your reporting. Ever since the first stories in the paper started to appear with all the over-emphasis on "tire slashing", "voter fraud" and "cigarettes for votes."

Focusing election-related news reporting on those sorts of isolated, relatively insignificant events, without once acknowledging the real threat to the democratic process, is worse than silly. (Truth be told, it's harmful. It's a deliberate betrayal of your readers' right to be kept informed.)

The issue isn't "voter fraud." Theft of elections has been and will always be about "election fraud," installing the candidate with fewer votes as the "winner" of a fundamentally flawed, anti-democratic electoral outcome.

Start with the incredible number of voters, since 2000, whose votes may not have been accurately counted. Add in all those who were prevented from voting, victims of Republican "caging", and/or denied the vote by not having been given fair access to voting machines, or those whose votes were deliberately tossed as having been "spoiled." Factor in whatever percentage of the electorate have their votes switched as the result of (untrackable) digital mis-tabulation, or whose votes count for less than they should when vote totals are artificially padded, with phantom votes added to one candidate's total. (Google "Robert F. Kennedy, Jr + 2004 election + Rolling Stone magazine.")

It's not like any of that is a secret. It's easy to look up specific instances where elections may very well have been turned, as a result of those sorts of shennanigans. Consider the relative percentages of discarded ("spoiled" or "provisional") ballots, in New Mexico and Ohio, in 2004.

Or add up votes that may have been lost due to deliberate mis-allocation of voting machinery:

http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/111704Fitrakis/111704fitrakis.html

Excerpt:


"...The legendary affluent Republican enclave of Upper Arlington has 34 precincts. No voting machines in this area cast more than 200 votes per machine. Only one, ward 6F, was over 190 votes at 194 on one machine. By contrast, 39 Columbus city polling machines had more than 200 votes per machine and 42 were over 190 votes per machine. This means 17 percent of Columbus’ machines were operating at 90-100 percent over optimum capacity while in Upper Arlington the figure was 3 percent..."


For you people to write, "...The 2004 election in Wisconsin was decided by about 11,400 votes. Had a larger state, such as Ohio, gone to Democrats, Wisconsin could have faced the sort of scrutiny aimed at Florida in 2000..." -- without some sort of actual acknowledement of what did the fuck occur, in Ohio and Florida, is borderline criminal mis-reporting.

Forget what the final recount of Bush and Gore votes, in Florida, in 2000, actually showed.

Ignore the Gestapo tactics of the Republican operatives who stopped the Florida recount in 2000 (by posing as outraged Floridians.)

You could start doing some honest reporting with a little bit of research on Katherine Harris (in the dual role of official state election over-seer, as she was also serving as the state chair for the Bush campaign), and look at Ken Blackwell's record in Ohio, in 2004, serving a similar dual-role.

Here are a few links, for you:

http://www.counterpunch.org/fitrakis09082003.html

http://www.bradblog.com

http://www.freepress.org

Get busy. (That is, assuming you have any care or concern, at all, about upholding your reputations as journalists.)