An Open Letter to Senator John Kerry on Irregularities, Fraud, and Conspiracies

Dear Senator Kerry,

I was proud to support you in every way possible this year, including casting an enthusiastic vote for you in New York.

Since the polls closed on November 2, I have carefully monitored the counting and recounting of votes in Ohio, and the independent investigations of possible fraud.

Monday afternoon, your attorney Don McTigue joined John Bonifaz in two important motions to preserve and augment evidence of such fraud in the November election, stemming from Triad’s actions in Hocking County.

But Monday night, your attorney Dan Hoffheimer told Keith Olbermann your investigation is over:

"There are many conspiracy theorists opining these days. There are many allegations of fraud. But this presidential election is over. The Bush-Cheney ticket has won. The Kerry-Edwards campaign has found no conspiracy and no fraud in Ohio, though there have been many irregularities that cry out to be fixed for future elections. Senator Kerry and we in Ohio intend to fix them. When all of the problems in Ohio are added together, however bad they are, they do not add up to a victory for Kerry-Edwards. Senator Kerry’s fully-informed and extremely careful assessment the day after the election and before he conceded remains accurate today, notwithstanding all the details we have since learned."

I could rant at length about this evident contradiction and seeming betrayal.

But let me instead zero in on the crux of the matter:

1) When do "many irregularities" (Hoffheimer’s own phrase) rise to the level of "fraud" and ultimately "conspiracy"?

2) How much fraud would it take to "add up to a victory for Kerry-Edwards"?

1) When do "many irregularities" (Hoffheimer’s own phrase) rise to the level of "fraud" and ultimately "conspiracy"?

The answer to this question basically falls between two poles.

The "easy" pole is when a key co-conspirator steps forward and admits to "fraud" and "conspiracy" - and presents videotapes, pictures, and documents to prove it.

Unfortunately, few important crimes are solved this way.

The "hard" pole is when detectives painstakingly examine evidence and interview witnesses. In fits and starts, key discoveries are made, and key questions are highlighted. Gradually the detectives find a pattern, and create a narrative to explain the pattern.

If the detectives are lucky, they find incontrovertible evidence - a "smoking gun" - and confront the perpetrator(s). If they are really lucky, the perpetrator(s) confess, the guilty go to jail, and Justice Is Done.

If the detectives are unlucky, they end up somewhere between Scott Peterson, O.J. Simpson, and Lee Harvey Oswald - a theory and a bit of evidence, but a perpetrator who refuses to confess anything, mucks up the evidence, or gets murdered. In these cases, Justice remains murky, and crucial questions persist - sometimes for decades.

Let’s go from murder to stolen elections.

There is no doubt that George Bush stole Florida in 2000. In the midst of the 2000 recount - Dec. 4, 2000, to be exact - Greg Palast discovered that the "felon purge" list used by Katherine Harris disenfranchised thousands of non-felons, mostly Democrats who would have cast far more than the 537 votes (actually only 154 following Florida Supreme Court’s key ruling on Dec. 8) needed to make Al Gore the winner.

Did Palast discover an "irregularity" - or "fraud" and "conspiracy"? Palast’s initial discovery was "fraud" - the eligible voters were wrongly purged in clear violation of the law.

But eventually Palast found a "smoking gun" - the e-mails from the database vendor specifically warning Harris’ staff that her deliberately inexact "match" criteria would disenfranchise many votes. Harris’ staff told them to do it anyway - making it a "conspiracy." The only reason Harris - and her patron Jeb Bush - are not in jail is because Attorney General John Ashcroft engineered a coverup, the Republican majority in Congress refused to investigate, and the mainstream media ignored Palast’s documented work and instead marched in lockstep behind the Republican Party.

Now what about Ohio in 2004?

A large group of detectives are painstakingly examining evidence and interviewing witnesses. In fits and starts, key discoveries are being made, and key questions are being highlighted. I have documented all of the key discoveries on one concise page: http://democrats.com/ohio

Have we found the telltale pattern? Not yet. Have we created the narrative to explain the pattern? Not yet. Have we found the "smoking gun"? Not yet.

Why not? Because this is hard work and it takes time!

Still, we have made many important discoveries. We have gone beyond "many irregularities" to outright "fraud." And we are close to uncovering a "conspiracy."

The Republican effort to steal Ohio’s electors began long before Election Day, and continues to this very moment.

On August 14, 2003, the CEO of the nation’s largest electronic voting machine vendor - Diebold’s Wally O’Dell - sent a fundraising letter promising to "deliver Ohio’s Electoral votes" to Bush. There is growing evidence that Ohio’s touchscreen voting machines and electronic tabulators were tampered with. On October 16, 2004, ES&S employee Joe McGinnis got unauthorized access to Auglaize County’s computers, leading to the resignation of Deputy Director Ken Nuss. On Election Day, many touchscreen machines "flipped" Kerry votes to Bush votes - possibly by design. (Computer programmer Clint Curtis recently testified under oath in Ohio that he wrote a program in 2000 to "flip" votes at the request of Florida’s then-House Speaker Tom Feeney.) When the polls closed, some Youngstown touchscreens registered -25 million votes, while a Franklin County machine gave Bush 3,893 extra votes. Dozens of similar electronic voting problems were reported across the country.

The largest vendor of tabulating systems in Ohio is Triad, whose founder is a major Republican donor. During the December recount, a Triad employee swapped Hocking County’s computer’s hard disk, "patched" the software, and instructed officials to post a "cheat sheet" with the original results to override any recount discrepancy. We recently learned that Triad had "dialup" access to election computers in several counties, which means the opportunity for fraud was unlimited. Rep. John Conyers recently sent a letter to Triad’s CEO seeking a detailed explanation of Triad’s activities.

In September 2004, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell - whose impartiality was obliterated by his service as Bush’s Ohio campaign chairman, just like Katherine Harris in 2000 - declared thousands of voter registrations on newsprint (using a form printed in the Cleveland Plain Dealer) were invalid. Blackwell reversed his ruling after a massive public protest, but an unknown number of forms were thrown out before his reversal. In October, Blackwell drastically changed Ohio’s rules for counting provisional ballots, outlawing provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct. As a result of these two decisions, rejected provisionals increased from under 10% in 2000 and 2002 to 23% in 2004.

In October 2004, South Dakota TV reporters exposed a Republican conspiracy to fraudulently "witness" absentee ballot requests. After an investigation, SD Republicans fired six campaign workers - but three of them (Executive Director Larry Russell, Nathan Mertz and Todd Schlekeway) were immediately hired by Ohio Republicans to work in Cuyahoga County!

On October 13, thieves broke into Democratic headquarters in Toledo and stole computers with crucial data - while ignoring office cash. In 1972, a similar campaign break-in at the DNC headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington DC - which President Richard Nixon brushed off as a "third rate burglary" - ultimately led his resignation when the conspiracy behind the break-in - and the conspiracy to cover it up - were fully exposed after a year of bi-partisan hearings.

In late October, Republicans publicly announced their plans to challenge Democratic voters across Ohio. In several counties, they sent "challenge lists" to election officials. In at least one county, election officials summoned dozens of challenged voters to public hearings to prove their eligibilility to vote. In the middle of the night before the polls opened, Republican lawyers won the right to challenge voters inside polling places themselves.

In the week before Election Day, Democrats received flyers telling them to vote on Wednesday. Cleveland Democrats were visited by canvassers who illegally offered to collect and deliver completed absentee ballots to the election office, and got phone calls incorrectly informing them that their polling place had changed. Lake County voters received a memo on bogus Board of Elections letterhead informing voters who registered through Democratic and NACCP drives that they could not vote. A Republican-backed "Texas Strike Force" in Columbus threatened ex-convicts not to vote.

On Election Day, voters in heavily-Democratic precints in Columbus and several Ohio colleges were forced to wait for 3-10 hours because too few voting machines were delivered, even though a heavy turnout was widely expected. This shortage alone is estimated to have cost Kerry 15,000 - 95,000 votes.

In Cleveland, some Spanish-speaking voters were unable to vote because of a lack of Spanish-speaking poll workers. This was the only 2000 problem addressed by Attorney General John Ashcroft. Other administrative problems caused Kerry votes to be registered for far-right candidates. Altogether, these problems may have cost Kerry 6,000 votes in Cleveland.

As polls closed on Election Day, the National Election Pool’s exit poll showed Kerry winning Ohio by 3.2%. Two polling experts, Steven Freeman and Ron Baiman, independently concluded the chances of the exit poll being so different from the "official" results are "impossible." Those polling experts - and Rep. John Conyers - asked the NEP to release the raw data, but they have adamantly refused.

On Election Night, officials in Warren County - which alone produced 35% of Bush’s margin of "victory" - cited a bogus "homeland security" warning to prevent the media and the public from observing the vote count.

In Miami County, officials mysteriously added 19,000 votes to their original tally. Several precincts reported nearly 100% turnout; a recent canvass by the Free Press found many voters did not actually vote.

A comparison of the Presidential race with the Ohio Supreme Court race found C. Ellen Connally, a black woman from northeastern Ohio, did far better than John Kerry in southwestern Ohio suburbs. This unlikely result is a key element of the Green/Libertarian contest - and possible evidence of "vote-flipping" software in the voting machines or tabulating systems.

Rep. John Conyers and other dedicated Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have held several hearings in Washington DC and in Ohio. They have examined dozens of fraud allegations and sought explanations from Ken Blackwell. Blackwell replied with utter contempt. This lack of transparency and accountability alone is sufficient to justify a challenge to Ohio’s electors on January 6.

The presidential candidates of the Green and Libertarian parties raised enough money from grassroots activists to pay for a state-wide recount. By law, each county is required to chose precincts (totaling 3% of the vote) at random for the recount. But in 86 of 88 counties, officials chose the precincts in advance, giving tabulating vendors the opportunity to rig the recount.

Recount observers were prohibited from examining the 92,672 "spoiled" ballots (undervotes and overvotes) that were rejected by vote-counting machines. As the Florida recount proved, many of these "spoiled" ballots were in fact "valid" ballots cast on defective machines in poor precincts, and the failure to count them most likely hurt John Kerry, as Dr. Richard Hayes Phillips has documented.

Recount observers were mostly prohibited from inspecting sign-in books to compare the number of votes cast with the number counted (see Miami County above). On November 15, in violation of Ohio’s open public records laws, Blackwell ordered all 88 Boards of Election to prohibit any public inspection of poll books until after certification. When the ban was lifted in Trumbull County, Dr. Werner Lange found 580 absentee votes for which there were no absentee voters identified in the poll books - a major fraud. If extrapolated state-wide, there could be 62,513 fraudulent absentees. In Perry County, the number of voters exceeded the number of people who signed the books in at least 11 of 46 precincts.

The Green and Libertarian Presidential candidates are in court contesting Bush’s "official" victory, citing evidence of widespread fraud. Ohio’s Chief Justice - Republican Thomas Moyer, whose own election in 2004 is under scrutiny - has repeatedly delayed and even obstructed this contest by failing to serve valid subpoenas to George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove. Ken Blackwell, who was served with a subpoena, refused to appear at a scheduled deposition and is seeking a court order to avoid testifying. If Ken Blackwell conducted a fair and honesty election - as he claims - he would have no reason to avoid testifying. What fraud is Blackwell hiding?

This brief summary represents just the tip of the iceberg of the "many irregularities" documented at http://democrats.com/ohio. Many more have been documented by VoteProtect.org, Ray Beckerman and the lawyers in Moss v. Bush.

A few of these "many irregularities" are finally being documented by reporters from the Washington Post and the NY Times, although they are way behind the lawyers and investigators on the ground. In the coming days and weeks, some of the "many irregularities" are likely to be revealed as outright fraud. And as the fraud investigations are traced to their sources, one or more "conspiracies" may indeed be found.

Thus, Dan Hoffheimer is profoundly wrong to declare America’s Presidential election "over" before these investigations are finished.

2) How much fraud would it take to "add up to a victory for Kerry-Edwards"?

Dan Hoffheimer implies that the fraud we document must add up to 118,458 votes - one more than Bush’s "official" margin - before John Kerry would challenge Bush’s "victory."

But this is a ludicrous standard. The effect of certain kinds of fraud can be roughly estimated by academics and statisticians - such as the estimated 15,000 - 95,000 votes lost to Kerry due to the shortage of voting machines in Columbus. More broadly, the total impact of the various frauds can be estimated by Kerry’s 3.2% victory according to the networks’ exit poll.

But Bush’s lawyers and Republican judges all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court would never accept any statistical estimates, no matter how scientific. In 2000, they wouldn’t even allow 175,000 uncounted ballots to be counted!

In an honest political system, widespread fraud is grounds for nullifying an election and holding another one, regardless of the precise quantification of that fraud.

Election fraud drives a dagger directly into the heart of democracy. If the citizens of a democracy do not believe the election was fair, then the government chosen by that election has no legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens or the world.

Election fraud by the ruling party is especially poisonous, because the ruling party controls the investigative bodies that alone have the power to determine how widespread the fraud was, and how high up the chain of command it went. That is why volunteers are conducting the investigation in Ohio - because Attorney General John Ashcroft is a partisan hack.

This past weekend, Ukraine held a second presidential election because of widespread fraud by the ruling party in the first election, and the belief that Ukraine’s ruling party could not investigate its own crimes. Both Republicans and Democrats - as well as the mainstream media - supported popular demands for a revote in Ukraine.

As in Ukraine, millions of Americans believe our own Presidential election was stolen. A post-election poll by Harris (Nov. 9-14) found 16% of Americans thought our election was not conducted fairly. In December, those who believe our election was stolen grew to 19%.

Why does fraud in Ukraine warrant a revote, but not fraud in Ohio? Is the Ukrainian Presidency more important than the American Presidency? Is Ukrainian Democracy more important than American Democracy?

As I write, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee and their staffs are scrutinizing all of the reports of fraud. At least one Representative - Maxine Waters - will challenge Ohio’s illegitimate Electors on January 6, just as she challenged Florida’s illegitimate Electors in 2001. Many of your most dedicated supporters are lobbying their Representatives and Senators urging them to "contest the vote." Thousands are taking to the streets in protests around the country, including a major rally in Columbus on January 3 and a "Save our Votes" March from Baltimore to DC, culminating in a "Patriotic Outrage" rally outside the Senate on January 6.

Senator Kerry, I urge you to fulfill your repeated campaign promise to "count every vote" by standing up now for the 59 million Americans who placed their ultimate trust in your hands.

Specifically, I urge you to:

* acknowledge - and support publicly - the ongoing investigations into possible fraud in Ohio. * condemn systematic Republican efforts to obstruct those investigations. * insist publicly that no election - overseas or at home - is "over" while valid claims of fraud remain unresolved. * join your House colleagues in supporting the challenge to Ohio’s Electors on January 6.

Sincerely,

Bob Fertik

p.s. Please share your own thoughts with Senator Kerry by calling 202-224-2742 or visiting http://www.kerry.senate.gov/bandwidth/contact/email.html

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