Home > Media Whites Out Vote Fraud Despite Well Documented Evidence

Media Whites Out Vote Fraud Despite Well Documented Evidence

by Open-Publishing - Monday 3 January 2005
14 comments

Elections-Elected USA

There is strong evidence of vote theft in Ohio. That will be news to anyone who gets their news from a television or from most print media.

When forced to talk about ethics, media big shots often insist that they draw no conclusions. They endlessly reported Dick Cheney’s claims that Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks of September 11, 2001, but it would not have been their place to label that a "conspiracy theory." When it comes to election fraud in Ohio and other U.S. states, on the other hand, the media has jumped straight to reporting that it’s all a "conspiracy theory" before ever reporting any of the facts. The Bush Administration has recently presented the media with a nutty theory that our Social Security system is broken, which the media in turn has presented to us as established fact. But to anyone who reads more than just the news that’s fit to print, it’s our election system that has broken down.

Some voices in the media, including the New York Times’ editorial page, admit that the election system is badly broken. But they insist that it also functioned quite acceptably in November. It’s broken in the abstract, as it were, but not in any concrete time or place.

As the ILCA reported on November 8th, the U.S. media has reversed its usual position on the value of exit polls.
The media has always relied on exit polls to predict election outcomes and to question the accuracy of official vote counts, such as in the Venezuelan recall attempt or the Ukrainian presidential election. Exit polls in November predicted victories for Kerry in a number of swing states that swung, in the official results, dramatically for Bush. The U.S. media immediately declared the exit polls inaccurate. How they could be so far off has not been explained, and the networks’ refusal to turn the raw data of the exit polls over to Congress doesn’t help.

I did some searching in the Nexis database on New Year’s Eve. I searched for <"election fraud"> in articles and transcripts from the past 60 days. It came back saying there were more than 1,000 articles, too many to display.
Of course, most of these were bound to be about the Ukraine and other countries where the U.S. media likes to discuss election fraud. So I searched for <"election fraud" AND Ohio>. This time I found only 177 articles, many of them letters to the editor complaining about the lack of coverage. One article from the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reported on a protest at its offices over the lack of coverage (but no coverage appeared from that paper). Several of the 177 were editorials, all of them dismissive of claims of election fraud, which in most cases the papers hadn’t reported on. And Ukraine was here, too, showing up in Ohio newspapers. The Columbus Dispatch ran an editorial demanding a new election in Ukraine. The Plain Dealer reported in oddly respectful tones (considering its usual coverage of activists) on Ohioans involved in the Ukrainian election. And there were quite a few columns and "analyses" dismissing "conspiracy theories."

What about actual coverage of what the "theories" are about and what in them is solidly proven, what’s speculative, what’s disproved? Any of that? Wouldn’t a conspiracy theory go away more quickly if you refuted it than if you avoided it and called it names? Hasn’t over half the country stopped believing in the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after only minimal discussion of the evidence and acknowledgement by the media that there weren’t any weapons there?

Well, quite a few articles reported on protests and hearings and legal filings, but most of them didn’t delve into the actual charges of fraud. Only about 10 articles contained any substance, even on a single minor allegation. One of these was from the Madison (Wis.) Capital Times, two were from Salon.com, one from Morning Star, one from a California chain of papers including the Oakland Tribune, Fremont Argus, and Tri-Valley Herald, one from the Village Voice, and three from the AP. The AP article that went into the most depth as a 492-word piece on an Ohio couple who had voted twice. Most AP articles have been short and dismissive, but the AP has provided more coverage than anybody else, judging by Nexis.

The high points in what was turned up in this Nexis search were, sadly, sound bites on Fox News. Although on December 3rd, Fox brought on a guest to attack Jesse Jackson in absentia, on the ninth, Hannity and Colmes allowed Hillary Shelton of the NAACP to make a few points and did not attempt to dispute them. And on the 29th, Sheila Parks of the Coalition Against Election Fraud made several points, refusing to allow the interviewer to cut her off. He did not attempt to discuss the points she’d made. And, although it didn’t turn up in this search, on the 23rd, Hannity and Colmes had on David Lytel of ReDefeatBush.com who began to make a case for election fraud before the hosts cut him off and changed the subject.

The other place where this story has squeezed into the corporate media is on MSNBC and the MSNBC website, through the reporting of Keith Olbermann - and the Newsweek website which posted an interview of Jesse Jackson Sr. Olbermann has been to the media the closest thing to what John Conyers has been to the Congress: a clear indication that there’s life there without having to feel for a pulse. Olbermann has given credence to some claims and rejected others, and explained why. On December 27, for example, his blog post treated with all the seriousness that it seems to merit the Green Party’s contention - backed up by many other observers - that the Ohio recount has been an illegally conducted farce making virtually no attempt to actually recount anything. (But, with typically bizarre media smugness, he then questioned the motivations of those protesting, as if concern for democracy could have nothing to do with it.) And in the same post, he continued an argument against giving credence to the claims by a Florida programmer that he had been asked to write a vote-switching program.

The New York Times, to its credit, on December 15, did print a short article on a particular allegation of fraud in the Ohio recount made by Congressman Conyers. But the Times has avoided most of the story.

Sadly, so has most of the labor media and other progressive media. You’d think that labor, after spending more than $200 million on the election, would want to make sure it got its money’s worth on the vote count. Unfortunately, like its candidate, John Kerry, most of the labor movement has so far dropped the ball on this one. A handful of established outlets and newly minted organizations have carried the ball. A collection of much of this coverage can be found at
– http://ilcaonline.org/modules.php?o....

Not a one of the "alternative" media outlets named above has published anything as inexcusably self-certain and wildly false as the "mainstream" media’s reports that Iraq had vast stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and plans to use them on the United States. The corporate media was wrong to cheerlead for the War on Iraq by uncritically parroting Bush Administration lies. The New York Times admitted some of its mistakes in this regard.
Most media outlets did not. The same media outlets are behaving as poorly on the election fraud issue, and someday one or more of them may even acknowledge as much, but should the rest of us wait for that before speaking and acting? Or do we have a duty to fill in where the corporate news has become too corporate and not enough news?

Well Documented Fraud and Areas for Further Investigation:

1. The manufacturers of voting machines who have made them easy to hack and impossible to verify by a meaningful recount, as well as making clear their loyalty to Bush.
2. The U.S. Congress and President, who have failed to make obvious corrections to our election system following the 2000 election, including requiring paper trails and non-partisan officials.
3. The television networks that have refused to release the exit poll data and refused to cover the story, all companies with a clear - and in several cases, clearly stated - interest in having Bush, rather than Kerry, control the FCC.
4. Bush-Cheney Ohio Campaign Co-Chair / Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, whose undisputed public actions before, during, and since the election have served to disenfranchise thousands of citizens.
5. A group of Republicans, claiming to be from Texas, who made illegal calls in Ohio to scare off potential voters. (This, I think, offers a fun, human interest story should an editor be in search of one).
6. Ohio judges who have refused to require that evidence be preserved and have refused to admit challenges to the election, including a judge whose own election could be affected but who refused to recuse himself.
7. Election workers in various counties, hired by Blackwell, who failed to open polling places on time, failed to equitably distribute machines and workers, directed voters to the wrong lines, resulting in the elimination of their votes, wrongly required identification, wrongly denied voters provisional ballots, shut observers out on grounds of "homeland security," failed to randomly select precincts for the recount, etc.
8. Activists who sought to intimidate voters outside of polls or distributed flyers sending people to the wrong polling place or telling them the election was on the wrong day.
9. Triad, a company that has admitted it tried to rig the Ohio recount.

For documentation, see longer version of this article at -http://ilcaonline.org/modules.php?o....

Forum posts

  • See DailyKos for an excellent 56 page report detailing the evidence of fraud in the Ohio election:

    http://dailykos.com/story/2005/1/2/19512/47013

  • Senator John Kerry and the leaders of the Democratic party which include Former President Clinton, Senator Clinton, Senator Kennedy, Minority Leader Congresswoman Pelosi, all agree that President Bush won this election.

    The President won by 3.5 million votes nationally. Today the day for the big voter protest in Columbus, Ohio, drew only several hundred protesters. It is time to move on and regroup. If not the Democrtic Party will continue to get weaker.

    LIKE IT OR NOT HE WON!

    • the evidence shows bush lost ohio, therefore the election.

      It’s a mere fact of catching who was responsable for changing the tallies.

    • Actually, neither Bush nor Kerry have won or lost so far. The elector’s votes still have to be accepted.

      However, that misses the point that an election is not about the candidates for public office; it is about the will of the people being expressed and accurately represented in the vote tally. When the process is flawed, then the result cannot be valid.

      Considering that humans have been accounting for things and doing so securely for thousands of years, it is really a terrible shame that an "advanced civilization" doesn’t seem to be able to present an accurate vote count.

  • It is unfortunate that main stream media refuses to cover the largest threat to our democracy. It is not the threat of terrorists, but rather our own indifference towards failures to exercise a legitimate presidential election in the United States. If our votes do not count, if our votes are all counted towards a specific candidate (regardless of who we vote for), we have taken a large step away from a free society. It is an embarassment to the United States of America that a legitimate election cannot be achieved and that the main stream media outlets not only fail to remember how to do investigative reporting, they obstruct justice by failing to provide exit polling data (what do they fear). Whether you believe Bush won the election is not the point. If a group of voters were not given their legitimate right to vote in this election, it is a travesty. If votes were defaulted to one candidate regardless of who was selected, it is a travesty. This is a large move away from a free society, a society where your choices are made for you and your vote has no impact on the election results. Hopefully we can learn from other countries that have legitimate elections...where voters and media take action and are not complacent to live in a society where voters are discriminated against and our president is not voted for, but rather selected for us.

    • Unfortunately, I fear that due to the media’s silence the complacency has set in. I attended a rally in Boston on a mild 40degree, dry, eve, and there were only a few hundred people there. The stage was filled with knowledgable, accomplished, speakers but the crowd started dispursing well before the rally was over. If the truely compassionate about this issue weren’t even willing to put aside a few hours to try to preserve democracy that doesn’t bode well for our nation.
      The media is FULLY to blame. They kept people interested in Scot Peterson for overa year, butno mention of Election faud.
      Our rally marched by a Fox news channel and an WCVB van and there was no coverage, instead the big story of the day was the first N.Y. baby born.
      SAD!!!

    • Do like the other 50%, the non voters; do not lend credibility to a system that is obviously a fraudlent one. There is more democracy in the old U.S.S.R. than in the U.S.A. we need a revolution, when 75% of the eligible voters refuse to vote, the government will no longer function and the GAMING the voters will be over. DO NOT VOTE IN RIGGED ELECTIONS this will fix the problem, we have a couple of years to bring every democrat voter on board with the help of the democrat party who is giving us all the bird, it will be so easy to convince fellow voters to never participate again....this is the only fairness there will be and we can give it to ourselves without begging. And the beautiful thing is that it will bring about change, and it is the only thing that will.

  • The one thing that has not yet been explained by anyone is why the two individuals who have the most to gain by the election being thrown out, Senator Kerry and former Senator Edwards, have both conceded that they lost the election. Please remember that former Senator Edwards is a very talented trial attorney who made millions challenging hospitals and other large corporations. Don’t you think they would fight if they thought the election was fraudulent.

    THINK ABOUT THAT

    • Ralph Nader was right—both the Democrats and Republicans are in bed with each other. Others have suggested that both Kerry and Bush were puppet candidates and the global elite really rules this country.

    • > Please remember that former Senator Edwards is a very talented trial attorney who made millions challenging hospitals and other large corporations. Don’t you think they would fight if they thought the election was fraudulent.

      In fact, Edwards badly wanted to press the fight but Kerry called him off. Historically the Democrats have been just as guilty as the Republicans in election fraud (Daly delivering Illinois and thereby the election to Kennedy in 1960, e.g.) and both parties have cooperated diligently to legally rig the whole system heavily against upstart third parties. Maybe they are all complicit in this dirty little secret and just because the R’s out-cheated the D’s this time around, they don’t want to make a scene and air all that dirty laundry.

      THINK ABOUT THAT, instead.

    • Kerry is skull and bones, Edwards a bilderberger.

      Presidency pays 400,000 per year.... I wonder how much someone gets paid to throw an election?

    • A candidate may concede based on what he believed at the time were legitimate election results. Unfortunately, it appears that concession was made before it was known that voters were discriminated against, votes were flipped to Bush, voting machines were tampered with and allowed remote access for easy manipulation, and Blackwells apparent violation of state law in the recount along with the what appears to be his active discrimination against legitimate voters.

      Since Kerry has only recently become more involved in the recount/prenting the destrucion of evidence, one has to wonder if he, like many others, initially believed the lack of mainstream media coverage and investigation meant the election was legitimate. And only now, as the evidence continues to mount, realizes the great injustice that has occured in America.

  • Senator Kerry sent out an email today that stated:

    "Despite widespread reports of irregularities, questionable practices by some election officials and instances of lawful voters being denied the right to vote, our legal teams on the ground have found no evidence that would change the outcome of the election."

    Who are these legal advisors? Do they have a political agenda of their own or are they just spineless pacifists? Kerry listened to them when he conceded the election and still is listening to them. Apparently, because of their advice, he does not think anything is different.

    Why do these ‘legal teams on the ground’ assume there is no evidence that would change the outcome of the election, when all signs point to multi-method fraud? The 119,000 vote spread is not an unbridgeable gap when there are so MANY AREAS that may have been tampered with. Why are these Democrats such self-defeatists?

    It matters to me if there were illegal shenanigans that occurred, regardless of the outcome of an investigation. I want to know and I want the American public to know. If this is still America, we have a right and a duty to know the truth!

    • All of you guys have way too much time on your hands. The comment on the fact that the democratic party is going out killed me. Correct me if im wrong, but, isnt the political party just a ’feature’ of a man? Sure most republicans do this, and most democrats do that, but do we really need to bicker at someone else due their party, or, rejoice in the fact that one has more members? Get a life poeple, its the man who runs the country, not the party. Look past the party, seriously, would it kill you?

      Politics consume.