Bush went into this election with extremely high disapproval ratings. The national turnout in 2004 was the highest since 1968, when another unpopular war had swept the ruling party from the White House (the high turn out, which historically favors Democrats, in fact was reflected in many elections, for eg. the Democrats took back the statehouses in Montana, Colorado and North Carolina, all three of which Bush miraculously won). Throughout the nation statistical improbabilities became common place.
Rather than investigate and report to us the media conglomerates suppressed evidence, ridiculed those who raised questions and dutifully served the interests of the government, much as a state-run media system would have behaved. There’s a reason so many of us believed that Bush, against impossible odds, did in fact win all these races Kerry was predicted to win. But what if instead the media had told us about the vocal anti-Bush front of eminent Republicans who came out before the election: that included anti-Clinton warrior Bob Barr of Georgia; Ike’s son John Eisenhower; Ronald Reagan’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, William J. Crowe Jr.; former Air Force Chief of Staff and onetime "Veteran for Bush" General Merrill "Tony" McPeak; founding neocon Francis Fukuyama; Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute, and various large alliances of military officers, diplomats, and business professors. And what if the media had reported that at least fifty-nine daily newspapers which had backed Bush in the previous election endorsed Kerry (or no one) in this election.
Had we had a responsible media we would have known that something was very wrong. Rep. Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, was determined to investigate and on January 5, 2005 the committee released Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio. The Conyers Report found "massive unprecedented voter irregularities"...."which affected hundreds of thousands of votes and voters in Ohio. Among the broad range of irregularities and anomalies, "not one of which resulted in a loss for Bush", Mark Crispin Miller , Fooled Again.
The 2004 election saw a massive effort to disenfranchise the more vulnerable Democrats in key states and the usual dirty tricks were employed with a particular ferocity, but electronic voting machines have made disenfranchisement possible on a whole other level. In October, 2005 the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO), known for its general incorruptibility, released its report confirming that concerns of electronic voting unreliability, previously dismissed as "conspiracy theories", were legitimate and "have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes". The GAO’s findings made it clear that there is a lack of transparency and accountability in electronic voting systems and underscored the urgency to address the inadequacy, insecurity and unreliability of these machines. The report’s recommendations for improving the security of electronic systems have been ignored. This extremely powerful and critical confirmation of the unreliability of electronic voting systems, begging the question of the legitimacy of the 2004 election, was largely suppressed by our media.
Paul Krugman of the New York Times wrote: "It's election night, and early returns suggest trouble for the incumbent. Then, mysteriously, the vote count stops and observers from the challenger's campaign see employees of a voting-machine company, one wearing a badge that identifies him as a county official, typing instructions at computers with access to the vote-tabulating software. When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The challenger demands an investigation. But there are no ballots to recount, and election officials allied with the incumbent refuse to release data that could shed light on whether there was tampering with the electronic records.
This isn't a paranoid fantasy. It's a true account of a recent election in Riverside County, California..."
Such accounts along with machine failures and unexplainable glitches occurred throughout the country, but Ohio, where Bush is said to have won by 118,000 votes, was the focus of much post-election attention. In Ohio more than 35 counties used Diebold electronic voting machines, accounting for 800,000 votes, all of which were tabulated using Diebold’s proprietary "secret" software and therefore cannot be verified. The GAO report confirmed that the electronic network on which 800,000 votes were cast in Ohio, was vulnerable enough to permit a few people to alter the outcome. Thus Republican-controlled machines, over which neither the state government nor any independent persons had oversight, accounted for seven times the number of votes by which Bush took Ohio. How can it be legal to permit a private partisan company to control the votes in an election with no accountability? What rational reason would anyone have to believe that votes were in fact cast as citizens had intended?
Consider the following facts from Ohio which our media might have informed us of, but didn’t:
– In Warren County voters pressing Kerry’s name on electronic screens repeatedly saw Bush’s name light up. When it came time to count the votes, public observers and the press were locked out allegedly because of an FBI warning of a major terrorist attack. This lockdown (or lockout), which permitted the votes to be tallied in secret, occurred twice. The second lockdown to recount the votes resulted in an even greater Bush margin. Not only did the FBI deny giving any such warning, but one local paper later reported, email correspondence between election officials and the county’s building services director indicated that lockdown plans—"down to the wording of the signs that would be posted on the locked doors"—had been in the works for at least a week!
– In Butler County an underfunded Democratic candidate for State Supreme Court implausibly took in 5,347 more votes than the best funded Democratic Presidential candidate in history.
– In Franklin County, Bush received nearly 4,000 extra votes from one computer.
– In Miami County voter turn out was an improbable and highly suspect 98.55% and after 100% of the precincts were reported, an additional19,000 extra votes were recorded for Bush.
– In Perry County the number of Bush votes exceeded the number of registered votes, leading to voter turnout rates as high as 124 percent.
– In Mahong County 25 DREs transferred an unknown number of Kerry votes to Bush.
Election results in Ohio were not only hidden by virtue of the use of electronic machines and the media’s suppression of and refusal to investigate evidence, but Ohio's Republican Secretary of State Blackwell, who also served as Ohio's co-chair for the Bush-Cheney campaign, refused to allow non-partisan international and United Nations observers access to monitor the Ohio vote.
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