Bush stole yet another election making it two stolen elections in a row. Republican's in Ohio succeeded in suppressing the Democratic vote. It also proved that the voting machines can be hacked in ways that are untracable so far.
There is a huge gap in the results of exit polls and the results of he election and I don't think the exit polls are wrong. It will be interesting to see if the "error" in the exit polling is different in places with electronic voting than paper balots.
Nonetheless - we still have an unelected ductator and we need to do everything in our power to take America back.
Bush didn't steal the election. All Kerry and other voters are just mad that the guy actually won fair and square. Kerry actually was a man (unlike Gore) and said "No, I'm not going to win"....they lost Florida because of the last election and all the stuff they went through. They can't afford to lose Ohio too. I respect your opinion, but you all need to get over it because Kerry already has.
Posted by: Tash. at November 3, 2004 05:38 PMI don't think even this election win can erase the Bush "selected" legacy of 2000. I am greatly disappointed in the outcome of the election, however I'm relieved that we will not have to endure another 2000. This does not mean that I feel this election was taintless. I have no faith in the Republican right wing, thus it is my opinion that they will do whatever is in their power to win the White House. It is very easy to hack into e-voting systems.
I am greatly concerned over the direction this country has taken. This "mandate" which Bush has managed to accomplish seems to me a true backlash against all things hardwon by the left wing over the past three decades. After the Republicans re-shape the political, cultural and spiritual landscape of this nation, will we truly be able to bring together the two intellectual coasts with the heartland and the southern United States? I highly doubt it. We might liken this division/schism to the antebellum period before the Civil War. One might see the analogy here and begin to understand that we just might very well be headed toward another Civil War. We cannot compromise with the far Christian right wing nor can they compromise with us. The "coasts" and the intellectual classes of this country cannot long stand being dictated to by the faith based masses. A very dangerous predicament I think. So Bush has his work before him, but since he has miserably failed to unite the two nations, I hardly see how he will devise any means of true workable partnership between the two, particularly since he holds liberals and progressives in contempt. His speech today regarding his wish to earn the trust of all Americans was vapid and devoid of any true empathy for those of us who cannot stomach his belief system.
Posted by: Hope at November 3, 2004 08:36 PMI agree with you completely. The Spinmeisters and the Media Whores don't even consider the possibility. It just does not add up. With the source code secret and no paper trail, black box votes should all be thrown out and the election should be voided. I don't live in a fantasy world and I am no sore loser. I Do Know when I have been Hosed. I live in Texas, in Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's Home Town. And Now redistricted into Tom DeLay's district. This is just anecdotal, but around here Kerry yard signs,etc outnumbered Bush signs over 20 to 1.
Computerized voting is just like Religion. You have to believe Something you cannot See or Understand. I think it is called Superstition.
i think in a few weeks somthing will come out about cheating, but it wont catch out enough and bush will screw the american people once more.
Posted by: Joshua Gillogly at November 4, 2004 02:21 PMThe evangelical christians of america are nothing more than distant cousins of the taliban. They want to force their own moral values down everyone else's throat. They don't understand the concept of separation of church and state. Bush panders to them by giving lip service to abortion bans and no stem cell research and anti-gay issues. The truth is that he isn't concerned about any of that. What has he actually done about any of it? NO! He says what he knows the bible thumpers want to hear and they eat it up.
Posted by: wileycoyote at November 4, 2004 07:02 PMWhen the final results came in I was initially in shock and then deeply saddened for our country, the world, humanity; depression set in for many hours after and then reality. It didn’t make sense - it just didn’t add up. My main concern prior to the election was always the electronic voting machines. Expert after expert, report and study after report and study had the same conclusions – ease of tampering and fraud.
The facts: Gore received a majority of the popular vote in 2000 – where did all of those votes suddenly go? To Bush? The Supreme Court travesty of putting Bush in the White House (we were enraged), Bush debacle after debacle (especially those being revealed toward the end of his campaign - the media just couldn’t keep ignoring all of this stuff - resulting in Kerry poll numbers steadily and significantly on the rise), F911!, massive Kerry voter drives and voter turn out, unexpected public endorsements for Kerry from republicans day after day, some Bush supporter commentators stating Kerry win likely, exit polls reporting a “Kerry blowout” – and Bush gets the popular vote and electorate? Florida went too fast, too smooth. Also of note, NJDC reports “The much-vaunted Jewish vote in 2004 remained overwhelmingly Democratic, defying recent GOP claims and dramatically exceeding the average Jewish Democratic vote in recent years” (see full article - http://www.njdc.org/njdcspeaks/detail.php?id=421).
And there’s so much more.
Yes there are many Bush supporters and if the republicans didn’t so fiercely fight paper records of electronic machines and instituted them instead before the election and the same result occurred well then I would still be sad, etc. but would accept the result.
So on this November 3rd I immediately started researching “tampering electronic voting machine” on the Internet. Naturally there’s so much out there and all that was feared I strongly believe has occurred.
Please go to and read this page - http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ - read below. (Also of interest http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won_.php)
We must ensure all electronic voting machines have a paper record before any other elections occur.
November 3, 2004
Election 2004: "Sour Grapes" or Voter Fraud
A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Mike Whitney
If you believe that George Bush won last nights election "fair and square" then forget about reading this article. If you know however that tens of thousands of people who lined up for up to four hours at a time in Ohio and Florida to have their vote counted, were not standing there to endorse the aggression and suicidal policies of the current administration then read on.
The unprecedented high turnout coupled with new registrations (that were overwhelmingly in favor of John Kerry) suggest that there was foul play at the voting booths. As a result, consumer investigator and activist Bev Harris (founder of Black Box Voting) "is conducting the largest Freedom of Information action in history. On election night, Black Box Voting blanketed the US with the first in a series of public records requests, to obtain internal computer logs and other documents from 3,000 individual counties and townships."
If the Bush people are so confident in their victory let them "put up or shut up."
The fact of the matter is (as every reasonable person who hasn't been hoodwinked by the pageantry of election night fraud realizes) that the election was stolen again in full view of the American public. The Republican owned voting machines prevailed over exit poll projections and the will of the American people.
If that's not the case, then let's investigate the computer logs. According to Lynn Landis' article "Could the AP rig the Election": "The Associated Press (AP) will be the sole source of raw vote totals for the major news broadcasters on Election Night.. They refused to confirm or deny that the AP will receive direct feed from voting machines and central vote tabulating computers across the country. But, circumstantial evidence suggests that is exactly what will happen.
And what can be downloaded can also be uploaded. Computer experts say that signals can travel both to and from computerized voting machines through wireless technology, modems, and even simple electricity." Landis just confirms what is already known about "sketchy" electronic voting and how it invites vote tampering. Her connection between election machinery, vote totals and the AP, however, has not previously been made. She goes on to explain that, "AP spokespeople would not give out information on who sits on their board, however AP leadership appears quite conservative."
Landis continues: "Burl Osborne, chairman of the AP board of directors, is also publisher emeritus of the conservative The Dallas Morning News, a newspaper that endorsed George W. Bush in the last election. Kathleen Carroll, senior vice president and executive editor of AP, was a reporter at The Dallas Morning News before joining AP. Carroll is also on the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME)'s 7-member executive committee. The APME "works in partnership with AP to improve the wire service's performance," according to their website. APME vice president, Deanna Sands, is managing editor of the ultra conservative Omaha World Herald newspaper, whose parent company owns the largest voting machine company in the nation, Election Systems and Software (ES&S)."
It's a cozy relationship considering that ES&S voting machines count 50% of all the votes in the country. The second largest company, Diebold, is also tied to the Republican Party and promised (in a comment by Wally Diebold that got widespread attention on the internet) to "deliver the vote" in Ohio to President Bush.
Both Wally and ES&S apparently succeeded admirably in their task of undermining the election.
Many readers are probably wondering what happened to the "Help America Vote Act" that was passed by Congress to avoid the problems of Florida 2000? As Landis reports in an earlier article: "What Congress really did was to throw $2.65 billion at the states, so that they could lavish it on a handful of private companies that are controlled by ultra-conservative Republicans, foreigners and felons." (Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia were among the big winners)
None of the facts related to the presidential election add up. Voter registration went up from 105 million to 120 million. In Ohio alone it went up a whopping 17%. Whenever registration has surged like this in the past, it has always favored the challenger and precipitated a change in government.
Not so, this time, and Republican pollsters are eager to convince us that the reason for this is a renewed interest among the American public for "moral values". Is that it or are the results simply an indication of massive (but well calculated) voter fraud?
The exit polling was equally skewed, showing a clear victory for Kerry. Exit polling has traditionally been a reliable way of determining the outcome of elections. Not so in Bush-world, where vote totals are invariably higher for Bush in the contentious areas that ultimately decide the election.
Give strategist Karl Rove his due; he knew what had to be done and did it. The rest, of course, has been papered over by the pollsters, pimps and pundits in American press corps.
Do we need to remind ourselves that representative government can only be established by the power of the vote? It is the electoral process that confers legitimacy on government. Without a popular mandate state power can only be vindicated through force of arms.
Last night American democracy was skillfully subverted and replaced with a mutant form of corporatism that operates independent of the will of the people. It's impossible to know what the long term affects of this will be, but it is a development that should greatly concern us all.
Bush is in the White House to make his family and thier friends money, we know that, we have always known that. What is interesting to me though is how George Sr. can be such an intelligent (I didn't say wise) man, and his son can end up the way he is. *Remember Bush senior was the head of the CIA for a number of years, right in the middle of the cold war. Hmmmm, connections. I am bracing myself for the next few years, I am getting an ulcer just thinking about it.
Posted by: DesertRat at November 7, 2004 12:34 AMI live in Austin, TX and think we lost because of the attitudes of some of the posters here. Namely the radical Hollywood types and the elite New Englanders. The comment above about the "intellectual coasts" is typical of this entire election. No wonder we can't get any votes in the middle when you act like we're a bunch of yocal locals without a lick of sense. I am a professional with a master's degree and studied and watched the election closely.
If we want to win, it's the DNC that is going to have to fix themselves. Kerry was a good candidate that probably could have won if there weren't 50 different puppeteers pulling his strings 50 different directions. Once Kerry got out of the convention (another screw up by the DNC) he would start getting momentum and then he would be directed a different direction (support Iraq, then don't support Iraq, then support gay marriages, then don't support them). It's a wonder that it was as close as it was.
If we want to win in 2008, we need a candidate that can think for himself and can appeal to a broad range of citizens and not just LA, SF, NY, and Boston. If you look at who's one the last several elections, it has been govenors from places other than the east. Senators legislate - they don't lead. We need a leader like a govenor.
My 2c.
Posted by: Tim at November 7, 2004 06:25 PMNot to worry Tim. Hillary is in for 2008. It is her's to lose. And to the powers that be, that is not an option. The Republican candidate will some weak candidate that the parties run in their off year ... Dole/Gore/Kerry.
Posted by: tomocius at November 8, 2004 07:14 PMIf this is true, this is really big:
http://homepage.mac.com/duffyb/nobush/iMovieTheater270.html
Posted by: MadBlue at November 11, 2004 02:43 AM