It Was Clear Before January 2005 That The
2004 Presidential Election Was Stolen
Geomorphologist Richard Hayes Phillips has produced a remarkable series
of number-crunching articles [1] identifying likely
instances of election fraud and error.
Professor Steve Freeman has written a clear, persuasive paper [2] arguing that the discrepancy between exit polls and
vote tabulations is an error, not in the exit polls, but in the
election itself.
Attempting to explain why vote tabulations gave Bush
several
percentage points more than exit polls in almost all the swing states
in the 2004 presidential election, resulting in a decision for Bush
instead of Kerry, Mark Blumenthal [3] cites
exit-poll architect Warren Mitofsky's hypothesis that Republicans
responded to exit pollsters at lower rates than Democrats as an effect
that biased exit polls in Kerry's favor, claiming that it has been
known for a dozen years. He quotes Mitofsky citing statistics to
support his hypothesis in a two-year-old article [4].
But if such an effect, supported by statistics from three federal
elections, was indeed known when Mitofsky was constructing his model,
why didn't he use these same statistics to correct for it?
One may guess the answer from Mitofsky's own admission [5]
that he cannot prove that this putative effect accounted for the
discrepancy between exit polls and election results. In the context of
an Ohio election supervised by the Republican state campaign chair in
gross conflict of interest; a context wherein the Board of Elections in
Ohio's populous Franklin County is known [6][7] to have systematically starved Democratic precincts
of voting machines, a clear abuse of power causing Kerry voters to wait
in line several hours longer than Bush voters; in the context of a
recount frustrated by the Ohio Boards of Elections systematically
cherry-picking the recount samples [8] instead of
choosing them at random as statistical and statutory law both require;
in the context of camouflaged "cheat sheets" [9]
designed to circumvent the recount; in the context of the exclusion of
appointed observers from both election [10][13] and recount [14] contrasting
with uncontrolled and illegal access to the ballots by a Republican
vote-tabulating firm [15][16]
--and this is just one state, there're plenty more [17];
in the context, in other words, of pervasive, lawless contempt for the
integrity of the vote on the part of the Republican party and ruthless
manipulation of the process, how is Mitofsky's unproven theory a more
plausible explanation of the discrepancy than ballot-tampering?
The misallocation of voting machines in Franklin county cannot be
anything but deliberate vote suppression [7].
Blackwell's lockdown of voting records [10] in
response to election observers investigating vote suppression through
registration tampering [12] is, as Ohio law states,
"a prima facie case of fraud".
These same election observers who reported Blackwell's lockdown to
Congress also documented that election records, probably including
ballots themselves, were left unlocked and unguarded overnight [11], exposed to possible tampering or theft.
The exclusion of reporters and non-Republicans from observing the
Warren County vote tabulation at the tail end of election night under
the demonstrably false [13] pretense of a terrorist
threat is more than suspicious, given the improbably high tabulated
turnout there that gave Bush a crucial margin in carrying the state.
- 5
Jan 05, T. Bagg. This was originally a letter (now reformatted as
a web page, with minor revisions) sent to the Senate, challenging the
fraudulently chosen Ohio electors.
References:
1. The papers are at Phillips' site,
with a partial summation at
2. The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy; Steve
Freeman, Ph.D.; 29 Dec 04; U. Penn. Ctr. for Org. Dynamics;
3. The Freeman Paper; Mark Blumenthal; 17 Nov 04;
4. Warren J. Mitofsky(2003), Public Opinion Quarterly,
67(1):p.51
5. "When asked if the full 1.9% deviation could be
explained by non-response bias (Kerry voters being more likely to
complete the exit poll than Bush voters), he said, 'It's my opinion,
but I can't prove it.'"
6. Mark Niquette reported in the Columbus Dispatch
that 22 Franklin County voting machines stayed in a warehouse while 17
were delivered to Democratic precincts after the polls had closed.
Moreover, these precincts actually were given 17 fewer machines in 2004
than they'd had in 2000, despite a countywide increase of 102,000
registered voters. Meanwhile, Republican suburbs were given an
additional 8 machines.
7. "...There are 146 wards in Franklin
County. In 73 wards, exactly 50%, there were fewer than 300
voters per voting machine, and in 2 wards there were 300 exactly.
This was the median, and should have been the target number for
equitable distribution of voting machines...
...The median ward with fewer than 300 registered voters per voting
machine had a 62.33% voter turnout. The median ward with 300 or
more registered voters per voting machine had a 51.99% turnout. The
voting machines could and should have been distributed more
equitably. Data on voter registration was available before the
election.
There were 14 urban and 33 suburban precincts which could have been
provided with one less voting machine and still have had 300 or fewer
registered voters per machine. This would have freed up 47
machines, which would have ensured that no precinct had more than 410
registered voters per machine. There were another 19 urban and 46
suburban precincts which could have been provided with one less voting
machine and still have had fewer than 330 registered voters per
machine, within 10% of the median. This would have freed up
another 65 machines, and no precinct would have had more than 361
registered voters per machine.
All of these data are for 'machines placed by close of polls'."
...That is, Phillips has excluded from this calculation the dozens of
machines that either remained in the warehouse or were delivered too
late.
8. "Under Ohio law, each county must randomly choose a
precinct to recount by hand and by machine. If the two counts do not
match, officials must conduct a countywide recount by hand. Most county
Boards of Elections, however, chose to preselect the sample precinct, a
violation of the law. Some counties refused to proceed with a full hand
recount when the hand and machine tallies failed to match."
9. "...attempting to ascertain the precinct to be
recounted in advance, and then informing the election officials of the
number of votes they need to count by hand to make sure it matches the
machine count is an invitation to completely ignore the purpose of the
recount law."
10."After some conversation Garman hung up the
phone and informed us that Secretary of State Blackwell had ruled that
all voter records were 'locked down' and that they now were 'not
considered public records'. I asked what legal authority
Blackwell had given for 'locking down' those public records. Garman
responded that it was Blackwell's decision she was following. I
then asked Garman if we could have the requested copies if we paid for
them but she refused. Quinn then handed Garman copies of the
following Ohio Elections Code which required her to comply with our
request for inspection and copying of public election records...
At approximately 4:00 p.m. Quinn and I returned to the employee break
room and Quinn placed a cell phone call while I continued to copy down
names from the precinct books. Garman then entered the room and
physically removed the books from my hands, gathered up the remaining
precinct books and departed the room to go back to her office."
11. "We opened the door and walked in and were
shocked to find no lights on in the office...
Sumner and I went together down the stairs at the end of the office
hall to check whther the basement door was also unlocked. We found it,
too, was unlocked and together we walked around the two rooms with
Sumner filming the various election materials stored there. She filmed
the precinct voter signature rosters which were placed on shelves
around the first room. These were the ones Quinn and I had been using
the day before and which had been taken from us pursuant to Secretary
of State Blackwell's order to 'lock down' all election records. In the
same room, we noticed stacked on the shelves there were a number of
metal boxes with seals over the padlocks. They were oblong in shape and
heavy, and it appeared to me they could very likely contain stacks of
card punched ballots."
Ibid.; pp8,16-17.
12. "It appears that the required box numbers
were provided with the registration applications (or else the voter's
name would not be put in the precinct book), but were removed when the
voter's name was put in the precinct book."
ibid.; p14.
13. "On election night, Warren County locked down its
administration building and barred reporters from observing the
counting. When that decision was questioned, County officials claimed
they were responding to a terrorist threat that ranked a "10" on a
scale of 1 to 10, and that this information was received from an FBI
agent. Despite repeated requests, county officials have declined to
name that agent, however, and the FBI has stated that they had no
information about a terror threat in Warren County."
14. "Summit County: Recount witnesses were threatened
with expulsion if they spoke to counting teams. In some instances, they
were expected to "observe" from up to 20 feet away, despite Ohio
Election Law allowing observers to be close enough to actually observe."
15. "Triad employees possibly accessed computers and
tabulating machines before the recount and out of the presence of board
members and witnesses in 41 counties."
16. "It appears that officials in Fulton and Henry
counties have confirmed that Triad had remote access to tabulating
computers controlled by Boards of Elections."
17. A Sampling of Election 2004 News Reports; Voters
Unite!