[THS] !!! New Book Documents Widespread Election Fraud

[Peter Webster]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_jason_le_00424_groundbrea
king_new_b.htm

April 24, 2008 at 02:00:10

Groundbreaking New Book Documents Widespread Election Fraud

by Jason Leopold     

http://www.opednews.com


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Earlier this month, at a conference in San Francisco, several renowned
computer scientists warned that electronic voting machines remain
vulnerable to computer hackers due to serious security flaws in the
operating software, calling into question the integrity of a presidential
election that is still seven months away, and all other elections in the
U.S. where paper ballots have been replaced by these paperless
electronic machines.

There wasn't anything particularly new in the scientists' revelations
other than the fact that the magazine PC World covered the issue and
several other mainstream news organizations.

Arguably, any mainstream coverage these days of election fraud, voter
fraud, a topic of such national significance that it literally affects anyone
who has ever cast a ballot, can be credited to a handful of hard core
voting rights activists and muckraking citizen journalists who have made
it their life's mission to overhaul the way people vote and restore much
needed integrity to the process.

The scientists' warnings that this year's historic presidential election can
be tinkered with came on the heels of the publication of a
groundbreaking new book, "Loser Take All," 
http://www.amazon.com/Loser-Take-All-Subversion-Democracy/dp/0978843142/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209001748&sr=8-1 
a collection of
eye-opening investigative reports into past issues of election fraud
authored by voting rights experts, activists, and journalists, who used
old-fashioned gumshoe reporting to expose the seedy side of the
business of counting votes.

Unlike the reportage leading up the invasion of Iraq, which relied
heavily on anonymous sources who spoon fed mainstream reporters
wild tales of Iraq's vast weapons cache, lapped up by Pulitzer Prize
winning journalists and printed as fact, the reports about stolen
elections, the massive purge of minorities and poor people from voter
rolls, in "Loser Take All" is backed up by smoking gun evidence in the
form of documents and on the record accounts from public officials and
behind-the-scenes executives employed by e-voting companies.

Perhaps no one has been passionate about this issue or has worked as
hard to attract mainstream attention to the cause than bestselling
author Mark Crispin Miller and blogger Brad Friedman, who co-authored
an essay for the book with voting rights advocate Michael Richardson.

Well before anyone understood what election fraud meant, Miller, also a
professor at New York University, and Friedman, whose BradBlog
website is the go-to place on the Internet for comprehensive coverage
on voting issues, were sounding early warning alarms and educating
the public about voting machines plagued with software bugs, the ease
at which hackers can bust into the system and change the vote count
for candidates, such as George W. Bush, and place him ahead of
Democratic challenger John Kerry in states such as Ohio.

Miller, who wrote extensively in his book “Fooled Again” click here about
the theft of countless votes cast during the 2004 presidential election--in
Ohio and many other states-- were stolen from Kerry and handed to
Bush, said in an interview that the 2008 election can be stolen "through
pre-emption of innumerable votes, as well as through the use of e-
voting machines, both paperless touch-screen machines and op-scans."

“It's safe to say that the entire federal government, insofar as it's
controlled by BushCo's appointees, has been diligently working to
suppress all but those votes that will support the [Republican] party,”
Miller said. “The [Veterans Administration], for example, has announced
that it will not help badly injured veterans register to vote since those
who've been thus damaged by Bush/Cheney's war aren't likely to be big
McCain supporters.”

“On top of all this, there is, of course, the fact that somewhere between
85 and 90 percent of the electorate will either cast its votes on, or have
its votes counted by, computerized e-voting machinery that was
manufactured, and that is being serviced, by private companies with
close ties to the GOP,” Miller added. Warren O’Dell, the former chief
executive of Diebold, the top manufacturer of electronic voting
machines, famously declared in August 2003 that his company was
"committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president
[Bush] next year."

O’Dell’s promise became prophetic. Not only did Ohio “deliver” electoral
votes for Bush in 2004, the votes were delivered to Bush illegitimately,
which Bob Fitrakis documents heroically in the chapter, “As Ohio
Goes...” Fitrakis has repeatedly documented the rip-off in Ohio in
several books, and was instrumental in assisting the House Judiciary
Committee’s probe of what took place in Ohio during the 2004
presidential election.

Miller said as long as the GOP makes the 2008 presidential campaign
“look "close" enough--and, with a media system like ours, "close" can
be as much as eight percentage points or even more--they're in a very
good position to steal it...again.”

“All that they really need is a convincing rationale for the surprising
victory of John McCain; and that rationale has been set up
already--"America's not ready to vote for a black man" or "for a
woman," and/or "for that woman", and, as well, "It was that long,
fierce civil war within the Democratic Party," a "civil war" fomented by
the GOP itself, through their manipulation of the e-voting machines
used in many primaries, and the mass cross-over vote by thousands of
Republicans,” he said.

Sadly, while these events in “Loser Take All” are supported by a
mountain of documents, there are many, including some of the more
prominent players in the progressive movement, who dismiss these
findings and disregard calls to action because they believe, wrongly,
that it may cast them as some sort of left-wing loon. Indeed,
publications such as Salon, Mother Jones, The Nation, and
TomPaine.com, have virtually ignored this hot-button issue or have
written about it in such a way as to dismiss it as conspiracy theory.
Editors at those publications did not return emails or phone calls seeking
comment.

However, progressive news organizations such as Online Journal,
BuzzFlash, AlterNet, CommonDreams, OpEd News, have been covering
the issue since 2002 and are largely responsible for disseminating much
of the information that appears in “Loser Take All.”

Miller attributed such ignorance by the progressive elite to a “toxic
combination of denial and careerism.”

“On the one hand, there's that all-too-human tendency to turn a blind
eye to enormous threats because they're just too devastating to
acknowledge.. Better, therefore, to pretend they don't exist,” Miller said.
“This sort of blindness is, of course, well-known to therapists, who often
have to struggle with it as they deal with families ravaged by addiction
or domestic violence--families whose members can't and won't allow
themselves to see that, for example, mommy is an alcoholic, or that
daddy is a batterer. When they hear the awful truth, they just go deaf
to it, and stay stone-blind to all the painful evidence that it is so.”

But if progressives are truly defined as a movement of change than it is
the authors of “Loser Take All,” including Larisa Alexandrovna, Paul
Lehto, Steven Rosenfeld, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and a dozen others,
who deserve the accolades for speaking up mightily and forcing the
powers that be in Washington, D.C in the blogosphere, and in the
media, to take note.


“Loser Take All” is indeed an important historical document; a damning
indictment of the electoral process that also tells the real story of how
Bush was “elected” to a second term.



Jason Leopold is the author of the National Bestseller, "News Junkie," a
memoir. Visit www.newsjunkiebook.com for a preview. He is also a two-
time winner of the Project Censored award, most recently, in 2007, for
an investigative story related to Halliburton's work in Iran. He was
recently named the recipient of the Military Religious Freedom
Foundation's Thomas Jefferson Award for a series of stories he wrote
that exposed how soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have been pressured
to accept fundamentalist Christianity. Leopold is working on a new
nonprofit online publication, expected to launch soon.