Time to Grow Up?

First published in University of Toronto Quarterly 74.1 (Winter 2004-2005): 541-42.

Time to Grow Up? by Michael Keefer

​Review of Marcel Danesi, Forever Young: The Teen-Aging of Modern Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2003)

The central argument of this book is announced in its preface: “Teen tastes have become the tastes of all because the economic system in which we live requires this to be so, and it has thus joined forces with the media-entertainment oligarchy to promote its forever young philosophy on a daily basis.” But is this “media-entertainment oligarchy” somehow distinct from our economic system? Isn't it rather an essential component of that system, the means by which popular assent even to its grossest depredations is manufactured? Whatever the case may be, a reader interested in analysis of the economic and ideological concomitants of the cultural “juvenilization” that is the subject of this book will be disappointed.

Marcel Danesi's first chapter offers an outline both of the reconceptualization of childhood since the mid-nineteenth century, and also of the twentieth-century invention of adolescence (a supposedly universal “developmental stage” unknown to many societies)—in which a key moment was the business world's discovery in the late 1960s of “how to incorporate the powerful images of youth protest into the 'grammar' of everyday life.” The following chapter, “Looking like Teenagers,” analyses in terms of fashion and cosmetics the delinking of physical from social maturity in our culture. Chapters 3 and 4, “Talking like Teenagers” and “Grooving like Teenagers,” provide an entertaining account of the absorption into mainstream discourse of teenage slang, and an unsteady (and sometimes flatly misleading) history of the development of pop music from early rock to rap. In an admonitory final chapter Danesi proposes the elimination of adolescence as a socio-cultural category, urging as steps towards this goal “three obvious things: (1) eliminating our social-scientific view of it; (2) restoring worth to the family as an institution; and (3) imbuing media representations of adolescence and family life with more dignity.”

But by his own account, two at least of Danesi's proposed remedies are non-starters. Social scientists' interpretations of adolescence may indeed be in need of revision—and urgently so if the US National Academy of Sciences and the McArthur Foundation were in 2002 “pegging the end of adolescence” at the startling ages, respectively, of thirty and thirty-four. Yet unless Danesi intends radically to alter the social and educational structures that have produced the phenomena his colleagues are seeking to describe, it seems silly to speak of “eliminating” their interpretations. The notion that the media might be persuaded to reform a system of representations that has proven its value in marketing and manipulation seems equally futile, especially given Danesi's argument that there's no point trying “to censor or repress media images of any kind.”

An awareness of the futility of his project may be one reason for the repeated outbursts of petulance that Danesi permits himself. He seems particularly exercised by the possibility that some of the best rock-to-rap music might belong to the category that Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble have recently defined as “rebel musics,” and declares that any such music that “appears to have a transgressive or subversive intent” is actually, “like all other things in modern society ... nothing more than the shrieking of a pampered group of self-anointed pseudo-activists whose ultimate goal is to get teens to buy their CDs and music videos.”

Descents of this kind into the declamatory invective of Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity seem symptomatic of a larger conceptual failure. Cultural history of the sort that interests Marcel Danesi should require, at the least, clear analyses of late twentieth-century racial politics and of the interactions of the “media-entertainment oligarchy” with the cultural productions of a racialized underclass and of youth subcultures pushed into dissidence by an open-eyed awareness of global and systemic injustices. To these I'd add usable notions of cultural appropriation, of the recuperation of subversion (a subject thoroughly explored during the 1980s and 1990s by scholars in the field of cultural studies)—and also, if one wishes to avoid foolish comparisons between Chuck Berry and Beethoven's Appassionata sonata, of generic difference.

Having abstained from work of this kind, Danesi should not be surprised if his book gets a better reception from radio shock jocks than from cultural historians.  

Evidence of Fraud in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election: A Reader

This text was first published as a companion piece to my essay “The Stolen U.S. Presidential Election: A Comparative Analysis.” That essay appeared at the site of the Centre for Research on Globalization on 30 November 2004; this text followed it on 5 December 2004, and remains available there at http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE412A.html. This reading list was also reproduced online at five other websites.

Although the material made available here is now very dated, and some of the links provided are no longer active, the piece may retain some historical value—especially given the thoroughness with which public awareness of the fraudulence of George W. Bush's 2004 'victory' was resisted and suppressed by the mainstream media—as providing some impression of the range of evidence available during the weeks before the election results were formally certified on January 20, 2005. Typographical errors have been corrected, but except for comments on two entries relating to a methodologically invalid study, this reading list has not otherwise been altered.

Evidence of Fraud in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election: A Reader by Michael Keefer

This Reading List, a substantially expanded version of previous lists published on 11 and 15 November, has been prepared with the aim of making a wide range of readings on the subject of the integrity—or the lack of integrity—of the recent U.S. Presidential election readily available. It is being published as a companion piece to my article “The Stolen U.S. Presidential Election: A Comparative Analysis.”

I have sought to facilitate analytical use of the materials in this revised and expanded list by dividing them into five subject-sections:

1. The Openness of New Voting Technologies to Fraud;

2. Allegations and Evidence of Fraud in Recent U.S. Elections;

3. Advance Warnings of Fraud in the 2004 Presidential Election;

4. Allegations and Evidence of Fraud in the 2004 Presidential Election: The Developing Controversy;

5. Appendix: Selected Articles in the 2004 Presidential Recall Referendum in Venezuela and the 2004 Presidential Election (Second Round) in Ukraine.

Section 1  includes writings by computer scientists who have specialized in issues of electronic security, by statisticians who have studied questions of the detection of electoral fraud, and by journalists and activists who have assembled and critically analyzed the opinions of experts.

Section 2 provides some historical context for the present situation by offering a selection of writings in which the evidence of electoral fraud in recent U.S. Elections is documented and analyzed.

Section 3  shows how insistently computer scientists, investigative journalists and activists warned during the part two years about the dangers to democracy posed by electronic voting machines which remove the possibility of electoral recounts and audits—and how, despite their warnings, the U.S. entered the 2004 presidential elections equipped with voting-machine systems most of which were demonstrably open both to back-door manipulation and to hacking at the voting tabulator level.

Section 4  lists a wide variety of different texts. These include, most obviously, reports and analyses focusing on specific aspects of the voting and its aftermath, and studies that allege (and in my opinion cumulatively demonstrate) the theft of the presidential election by the Bush-Cheney Republicans and their corporate allies. But I have made a point also of listing writings by scholars who find no compelling grounds for suspecting large-scale or systematic electoral fraud. (See, with respect to the Florida vote tallies, Mebane [8 and 12 Nov. 2004], Sekhon [14 Nov. 2004], Wand, and Strashny—and, on the other side of the debate, Dodge, Dopp, Liddle, Mitteldorf, and Hout). I have also listed articles by journalists, often writing in mainstream outlets, who have dismissed allegations of electoral fraud as the result of over-hasty or ill-informed analysis, as an expression of conspiracy-theory paranoia, or as mere sour grapes. (See, for example, Corn, A. Freeman, Klein, Manjoo, Morano, Reid, Roig-Franzia and Keating, and Zeller. Critics of the mainstream coverage include Friedberg, R. Parry [13 Nov. 2004], S. Parry [12 Nov. 2004], Smith, and Wade.)

Section 5  seeks to facilitate comparisons between the U.S. election and recent presidential elections in Venezuela and Ukraine in which, as in the U.S., divergences between exit poll results and official vote tallies prompted charges of election-rigging.

The issues are complex, at some points hotly disputed, and in urgent need of further inquiry and analysis. I would maintain, nonetheless, that the evidence points with cumulative force to the conclusion that the official vote tallies in the U.S. presidential election of November 2, 2004 (listed by The New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/ref/elections2004/2004President.html), were produced by a massive and sustained project of electoral fraud.

1. The Openness of New Voting Technologies to Fraud

Brady, Henry E., Justin Buchler, Matt Jarvis, John McNulty. Counting All the Votes: The Performance of Voting Technology in the United States. 57 pp. Department of Political Science, Survey Research Center, and Institute of Government Studies, University of California, Berkeley. September 2001. http://www.ucdata.berkeley.edu.

Coleridge, Greg. “Closing the Circle: The Corporatization of Elections.” The Free Press (17 November 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/875.

Collier, James M., and Kenneth F. Collier. Votescam: The Stealing of America. Victoria House Press, 1992. ISBN 0963416308.

Collier, Victoria. “Computerized Election Fraud in America: A Brief History.” Votescam (25 October 2003), http://www.votescam.com/abriefhistory.php.

"Company Defends Electronic Voting System.” Associated Press, The New York Times (25 July 2003); available (thanks to W.R. Mebane) at http://www.macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/gov317/diebold/AP-Electronic-Voting-Flaws.25jul2003.html.

Conover, Bev. “Computerized voting systems cannot be made secure.” Online Journal (20 October 2003), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/102003Conover/102003conover.html.

----. “Voting: When low-tech beats high-tech.” Online Journal (25 June 2004), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/062504Conover/062504conover.html.

Diebold, Inc. “Technical Response to the Johns Hopkins Study on Voting Systems.” 25 July 2003; available (thanks to W.R. Mebane) at http://www.macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/gov317/diebold/technical.25jul2003.html.

Equal Justice Foundation. Vote Fraud and Election Issues. Last updated 27 September 2004. http://www.ejfi.org/Voting/Voting.htm#fraud.

“Groups Question Voting Machines' Accuracy.” Associated Press (30 October 2003); available (thanks to W.R. Mebane) at http://macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/gov/diebold/AP-Election-Worries.30oct.2003.html.

Halpert, Oscar. “Bev Harris was among the first to raise concerns about touch-screen machines.” Verifiedvoting.org (1 June 2004), http://www.verifiedvoting.org/article.php?id=2277.

Harris, Bev. Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century. Renton, WA: Talion Publishing/Black Box Voting, 2003. ISBN 1890916900. Free internet version available at http://www.blackboxvoting.org.

----. “Inside a U.S. Election Vote Counting Program.” Scoop (8 July 2003), http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00065.htm; also available at Truthout (July 2003), http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/voting.shtml.

----. “Bald-Faced Lies About Black Box Voting Machines and The Truth About the Rob-Georgia File.” Scoop (10 July 2003), http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00078.htm.

----. “Internal Memos: Diebold Doing End-Runs Around Certification.” Scoop (12 September 2003), http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0309/S00150.htm.

Internet Policy Institute. Report of the National Workshop on Internet Voting: Issues and Research Agenda. 62 pp. March 2001. Sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Conducted in cooperation with the University of Maryland and hosted by the Freedom Forum. http://www.nsfe-voterprt.pdf.

Jones, Douglas W. “Problems with Voting Systems and the Applicable Standards.” Testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Washington DC (22 May 2001), http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting.

----. “Auditing elections.” Communications of the ACM 47.10 (October 2004): 46-50, http://www.portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=0922594.1022622.

Kohno, Tadayoshi, Adam Stubblefield, Aviel D. Rubin, and Dan S. Walach. “Analysis of an Electronic Voting System.” IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Oakland CA, May 2004, http://avirubin.cm/vote/analysis/index.html.

Kocher, Paul, and Bruce Schneier. “Insider Risks in Elections.” Inside Risks 169, CACM 47, 7 (July 2004), http://www.csl.sri.com/users/neumann/insiderisks04.html.

Konrad, Rachel. “Electronic Voting Firm Drops Legal Case.” Associated Press (2 December 2003); available (thanks to W.R. Mebane) at http://macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/gov317/diebold/mherald.diebold.02dec2003.html.

Landes, Lynn. “Mission impossible: Federal observers & voting machines.” Online Journal (26 November 2002), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/1126032Landes/112602landes.html.

----. “Voting machines violate Constitution: Who will launch legal challenge?” Online Journal (15 April 2003), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/041503Landes/041503landes.html.

----. “Offshore company captures online military vote.” Online Journal (21 July 2003), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/072103Landes/072103landes.html.

----. “Internet Voting—The End of Democracy?” Ecotalk (27 August 2003), http://www.ecotalk.org/InternetVoting.htm; also available at Online Journal (4 September 2003), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/090403Landes/090403landes.html.

----. “Republicans and Brits will count California's recall votes.” Online Journal (6 October 2003), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/100603Landes/100603landes.html.

----. “NIST ignores scientific method for voting technology.” Online Journal (16 December 2003), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/121603Landes/121603landes.html.

Mebane, Walter R., and Jasjeet S. Sekhon. “Robust Estimation and Outlier Detection for Overdispersed Multinomial Models of Count Data.” American Journal of Political Science 48 (April 2004): 391-400, http://www.elections.fas.harvard.edu/index.html.

----, Jasjeet S. Sekhon, and Jonathan Wand. “Detecting and Correcting Election Irregularities.” Working Paper, 9 October 2003, http://wand.stanford.edu/elections.

Mercuri, Rebecca. Electronic Vote Tabulation: Checks and Balances. Ph.D Thesis, Department of Computer and Information Systems, School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Pennsylvania, 2001. Available from http://www.umi.com (Thesis #3003665).

----. Electronic Voting. http://www.notablesoftware.com/evote.html.

----, and Peter G. Neumann. “Verification for Electronic Balloting Systems.” Chapter 3 of Secure Electronic Voting, ed. Dimitris Gritzalis. Advances in Information Security, vol. 7. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002. ISBN 1402073011.

Norr, Henry. “The Risks of Touch-Screen Balloting.” San Francisco Chronicle (4 December 2000), http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article/cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/12/04/BU91811.DTL.

Rubin, Aviel. “Testimony, U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Dr. Aviel Rubin, Professor of Computer Science, May 5, 2004,” http://avirubin.com/vote.

Saltman, Roy G. Accuracy, Integrity, and Security in Computerized Vote-Tallying. NBS Special Publication 500-158. Institute for Computer Sciences and Technology, National Bureau of Standards. Gaithersburg, MD 20899, August 1988. http://www.iti.nist.gov/lab/specpubs/500-158.htm.

Schneier, Bruce. Applied Cryptography. 2nd edition. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996. ISBN 0471128457.

----. “Voting and Technology.” Crypto-Gram Newsletter (15 December 2000), http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0012.html.

Schwartz, John. “Report Raises Electronic Vote Security Issues.” The New York Times (25 September 2003); available (thanks to W.R. Mebane) at http://www.macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/gov317/diebold/25VOTE.25sep2003.html.

----. “File Sharing Pits Copyright Against Free Speech.” The New York Times (3 November 2003); available (thinks to W.R. Mebane) at http://www.macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/gov317/diebold/03secure.03nov2003.html.

Sludge, C.D. “Sludge Report #154: Bigger Than Watergate! How to Rig an Election in the United States.” Scoop (8 July 2003), http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00064.htm.

Thompson, Alastair. “Diebold Internal Mail Confirms U.S. Vote Count Vulnerabilities.” Scoop (12 September 2003), http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0309/S00106.htm.

Wand, Jonathan N.A., Jasjeet S. Sekhon, and Walter R. Mebane, Jr. “A Comparative Analysis of Multinomial Voting Irregularities: Canada 2000.” Proceedings of the American Statistical Society (2001), http://wand.stanford.edu/elections/canada/parliament.

Williams, Britain J. “Security in the Georgia Voting System.” 23 April 2003; available (thanks to W.R. Mebane) at http://macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/gov317/diebold/index.htm.

Zetter, Kim. “Time to Recall E-Vote Machines?” Wired News (6 October 2003), http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,60713,00.html?tw=wn_story_related.

----. “Aussies Do It Right: E-Voting.” Wired News (3 November 2003), http://www.wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,61045,00.html.

----. “E-Voting Undermined by Sloppiness.” Wired News (17 December 2003), http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61637,00.html?tw=wn_story_related.

----. “E-Vote Still Flawed, Exerts Say.” Wired News (29 January 2004), http://wired.com/news/business/0,1367,62109,00.html.

2. Allegations and Evidence of Fraud in Recent U.S. Elections

Collier, James M., and Kenneth F. Collier. Votescam: The Stealing of America. Victoria House Press, 1992. ISBN 0963416308.

Collier, Victoria. “Your stolen vote—the missing piece of the puzzle.” May 2000; republished by Online Journal (8 February 2001), http://onlinejournal.com/evoting/020801Collier/020801collier.html.

----. “Computerized Election Fraud in America: A Brief History.” Votescam (25 October 2003), http://www.votescam.com/abriefhistory.php.

Conover, Bev. “Once again, the media try to con the people into believing Bush won.” Online Journal (5 April 2001), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/040501Conover/040501conover.html.

----. “Florida's 'fixed it' farce.” Online Journal (11 May 2001), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/051101Conover/051101conover.html.

Conyers, John, Jr., and Democratic Investigative Staff, House Committee on the Judiciary. How to Make Over One Million Votes Disappear: Electoral Sleight of Hand in the 200 Presidential Election. A Fifty-State Report Prepared for Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (Ranking Member, House Committee on the Judiciary; Dean, Congressional Black Caucus). 122 pp. Washington, DC: U.S. House of Representatives, August 20, 2001. http://www.electionreport.pdf.

Equal Justice Foundation. Vote Fraud and Election Issues. Last updated 27 September 2004. http://www.ejfi.org/Voting/Voting.htm#fraud.

Gumbel, Andrew. “All the President's votes? A quiet revolution is taking place in U.S. politics. By the time it's over, the integrity of elections will be in the unchallenged, unscrutinised control of a few large—and pro-Republican—corporations. Andrew Gumbel wonders if democracy in America can survive.” The Independent (13 October 2003), http://www.news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=452972; also available at Common Dreams News Center, http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/103301.htm.

Harris, Bev. Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century. Renton, WA: Talion Publishing/Black Box Voting, 2003. ISBN 1890916900. Free internet version available at http://www.blackboxvoting.org.

----. “Bald-Faced Lies About Black Box Voting Machines and The Truth About the Rob-Georgia File.” Scoop (10 July 2003), http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00078.htm.

Landes, Lynn. “2002 elections: Republican voting machines, election irregularities, and 'way-off' polling results.” Online Journal (8 November 2002), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/110802Landes/110802landes.html.

----. Election Fraud and Irregularities—BY YEAR. Http://www.ecotalk.org/VotingMachineErrors.htm.

Mercuri, Rebecca. “Florida 2002: Sluggish Systems, Vanishing Votes.” Inside Risks 149, CACM 45, 11 (November 2002), http://www.csl.sri.com/users/neumann/insiderisks.html#149.

Shafer, Jack. “Defending the Projectionists.” Slate (15 November 2000), http://slate.msn.com/id/1006506.

Zetter, Kim. “Did E-Vote Firm Patch Election?” Wired News (13 October 2003), http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,60563,00.html?tw=wn_story_related.

3. Advance Warnings of Fraud in the 2004 Presidential Election

Allan, David. “Inside an E-Voting Whitewash Conference Call.” Scoop (23 August 2003), http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0308/S00175.htm.

Boyle, Alan. “E-voting firm reports computer break-in.” MSNBC (29 December 2003), http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3825143.

CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project. “Immediate Steps to Avoid Lost Votes in the 2004 Presidential Election: Recommendations for the Election Assistance Commission,” July 2004, http://www.vote.caltech.edu/Reports/index.html.

“Electronic Frontier Foundation and Stanford Law Clinic Sue Electronic Voting Machine Company: Student Publishers and ISP Aim to Stop Diebold's Abusive Copyright Claims.” Electronic Frontier Foundation Media Release (3 November 2003), http://www.eff.org/legal/ISP_liability/OPG_v_Diebold/20031103_eff_pr.php.

Fitrakis, Bob. “Diebold, electronic voting and the vast right-wing conspiracy.” The Free Press (24 February 2004), http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/834.

----. “Death of a patriot: no more.” The Free Press (17 March 2004), http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/853.

----. “E-Voting: The new battle hymn of the republic.” Online Journal (11 September 2004), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/091104Fitrakis/091104fitrakis.html.

----, and Harvey Wasserman. “Diebold's Political Machine.” MotherJones.com (5 March 2004), http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/03/03_200.html.

----, and Harvey Wasserman. “Twelve ways Bush is now stealing the Ohio vote.” The Free Press (27 October 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/810.

Fox, Pimm. “Worrying About Election Day.” Computerworld (27 September 2004), http://www.keepmedia.com/pubs/Computerworld/2004/09/27/596859.

Gilmore, Dan. “Flawed Vote Could Give IT A Black Eye.” Computerworld (1 November 2004), http://www.keepmedia.com/pubs/Computerworld/2004/11/01/641469.

Goodman, Amy, et al. “Will Bush Backers Manipulate Votes to Deliver GW Another Election?” Democracy Now! (4 September 2003); available at Common Dreams News Center, http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0904-10.htm.

Gumbel, Andrew. “Mock the vote.” Los Angeles City Beat (29 October 2003); available at http://www.wesjones.com/mockthevote.htm.

----. “All the President's votes? A quiet revolution is taking place in U.S. politics. By the time it's over, the integrity of elections will be in the unchallenged, unscrutinised control of a few large—and pro-Republican—corporations. Andrew Gumbel wonders if democracy in America can survive.” The Independent (23 October 2003), http://www.news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=452972; also available at Common Dreams News Center, http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1033-01.htm.

----. “Portrait of a Country on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.” The Independent (24 October 2004); also available at Common Dreams News Center, http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1024-01.htm.

Hales, Paul. “'Civil disobedience' campaign targets Diebold: Students threaten freedom to manipulate elections.” The Inquirer (22 October 2003), http://www.theinquirer.net/?article==12261.

Harris, Bev. “Voting industry insiders hold secret meeting to hire PR firm to sell electronic voting to public.” Online Journal (26 August 2003), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/082604Harris/082604harris.html.

Hartmann, Thom. “If You Want to Win an Election, Just Control the Voting Machines.” Common Dreams News Center (31 January 2003), http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0131-01.htm; Scoop (31 January 2003), http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0302/S00009.htm; Online Journal (6 February 2003), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/020603Hartmann/020603hartmann.html.

----. “A Winning Machine.” AlterNet (4 February 2003), http://www.alternet.org/story/15103.

----. “Now your vote is the property of a private corporation.” SmirkingChimp.com (11 March 2003), http://www.smirkingchimp.com/print/php?sid=10536; Online Journal (13March 2003), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/031303Hartmann/031303hartmann.html.

----. “The Theft of Your Vote is Just a Chip Away.” AlterNet (30 July 2003), http://www.alternet.org/story/16474.

Heichler, Elizabeth. “Criticism of Electronic Voting Machines' Security is Mounting.” Computerworld (15 December 2003), http://www.keepmedia.com/pubs/Computerworld/2003/12/15/335119?from=search.

“How George W. Bush Won the 2004 Presidential Election.” Infernal Press (25 June 2003), http://www.infernalpress.com/Columns/election.html; also available at Centre for Research on Globalization (15 July 2003), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/INF307A.html.

Jones, Douglas W. “E-voting: Are our defenses adequate to defend citizens' rights?” Paper presented to the International Telecommunications Union Workshop on Challenges, Perspectives and Standardization Issues in E-government, Geneva, Switzerland (6 June 2003), http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/geneva.

----. “The Diebold AccuVote TS Should be Decertified.” ESENEX Security Symposium, Washington DC (6 August 2003), http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/dieboldudenix.html.

----. “Recommendations for the Conduct of Elections in Miami-Dade County Using the ES&S iVotronic System.” 13 May 2004, revised 7 June 2004. http://www.cs.uiowa/~jones/voting.

----, David Dill, Peter G. Neumann, Aviel Rubin, Dan Wallach. “To the concerned citizens and elected officials of the State of Ohio.” 26 February 2004, http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting.

“Journalist [Lynn Landes] seeks temporary restraining orders against use of voting machines & absentee ballots.” Online Journal (18 October 2004), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/101804NewsFlash/101804newsflash.html

King, Martin Luther III, and Greg Palast. “Jim Crow Revived in Cyberspace.” The Baltimore Sun (8 May 2003); available at http://www.gregpalast.com/detail/cfm?artid=222&row=1.

Landes, Lynn. “Voting machine fiasco: SAIC, VoteHere and Diebold.” Online Journal (20 August 2003), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/082003Landes/082003landes.html.

----. Voting Systems Orgs and Companies. http://www.ecotalk.org/VotingMachineCompanies.htm.

----. “Democrats send mixed signals in voting technology debate.” Online Journal (29 January 2004), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/012904Landes/012904landes.html.

----. “Questions mount over New Hampshire's primary.” Online Journal (11 February 2004), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/021104Landes/021104landes.html.

----. “Faking democracy: Americans don't vote, machines do, & ballot printers can't fix that.” Online Journal (7 April 2004), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/040704Landes/040704landes.html.

----. “Two voting companies and two brothers will count 80 percent of U.S. election using both scanners & touchscreens.” Online Journal (28 April 2004), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html.

----. “Federal commission nixes talk of paper-only elections; stacks panels with proponents of paperless touchscreens.” Online Journal (12 May 2004), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/051204Landes/051204landes.html.

----. “Could the Associated Press rig the election?” Online Journal (23 October 2004), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/102304Landes/102304landes.html.

----. “If this election is stolen, will it be by enough to stop a recount?” Online Journal (31 October 2004), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/103104Landes/103104landes.html.

Leopold, Jason. “Electronic voting minus paper trail makes it easy to rig elections.” Online Journal (4 September 2003), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/090403Leopold/090403leopold.html.

Machlis, Sharon. “A Voter's Paper Trail.” Computerworld (5 July 2004), http://www.keepmedia.com/pubs/Computerworld/2004/07/05/505110.

Mercuri, Rebecca. “MIT vs. Mercuri: Rebecca Mercuri rebuts recent MIT.CalTech voting systems analysis and calls for moratorium on new electronic balloting equipment purchases.” Press release, 24 September 2002. http://www.notablesoftware.com/Papers/MITvsMercuri.html.

Moore, Steve. “E-Democracy: Stealing the Election in 2004.” Global Outlook 8 (Summer 2004); Centre for Research on Globalization (11 July 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MOO407A.html.

“On Election Day 2004, How Will You Know If Your Vote Is Properly Counted? Answer: You Won't. NJ Rep. Rush Holt Introduces Legislation to Require All Voting Machines to Produce a Paper Trail.” OpEdNews (n.d.), http://www.opednews.com/holt%20paper%20ballot%20bill.htm.

Palast, Greg. “Florida Computers Snatch Thousands of Votes from Kerry.” Truthout (26 October 2004), http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/102904X.shtml; also published as “Florida's Computers Have Already Counted Thousands of Votes for George W. Bush.” Common Dreams News Center (28 October 2004), http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1028-02.htm.

----. “Electoral Fraud, Ethnic Cleansing of Voter Rolls, An Election Spoiled Rotten.” TomPaine.com (1 November 2004), http://www.tompaine.com; also available at the Centre for Research on Globalization (4 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/PAL411A.html.

Penn, Thomas. “Can we trust the vote count anywhere? In any race? In any election?” Online Journal (14 November 2002), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/111402Penn/111402penn.html.

Pitt, William Rivers. “Desperate Measures.” Truthout (20 October 2004), http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/102004A.shtml.

Plissner, Martin. “Exit polls to protect the vote.” The New York Times (17 October 2004), http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/weekinreview/plis.html; also available at Bellaciao.org (7 November 2004), http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=4196.

Redman, Colleen. “Voting machine voodoo: Democracy at risk.” Online Journal (19 November 2003), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/111903Redman/111903redman.html.

Roberts, Paul. “Dean, Other Dems Sound Off on E-voting Security.” Computerworld (2 August 2004), http://keepmedia.com/pubs/Computerworld/2004/08/02/518749.

Schute, Brigid. “Maryland Voting System's Security Challenged: Electronic Cheating Too Easy, Study Shows.” The Washington Post (25 July 2003); available (thanks to W.R. Mebane) at http://macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/gov317/diebold/A42928-2003jul24.

----. “Maryland Plans Fix After Vote System is Faulted.” The Washington Post (25 September 2003); available (thanks to W.R. Mebane) at http://www.macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/gov317/diebold/A60825-2003Sep24.

Shepard, Scott. “Electronic Votes Touch Off Doubts.” Atlanta Journal-Constitution (6 December 2003); also available at Common Dreams News Center, http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1206-01.htm.

Slashdot file of stories (dating from July 2003 to October 2004) about electronic voting machines, Diebold Incorporated, and free speech issues. The file includes the following stories:

“Maryland Tests Voting Machines, Declares Success” (22 Oct. 2004).

“Diebold Rejected in Copyright Takedown Attempt (10 Oct. 2004).

“Chimp Can Hack Diebold Electronic Voting System” (24 Sept. 2004).

“More Diebold E-Voting Vulnerabilities” (22 Sept. 2004).

“California AG Says He'll Sue Diebold” (7 Sept. 2004).

“No Secret Ballot for Military Personnel?” (4 September 2004).

“Vote Tabulator Security Hole Exposed” (30 Aug. 2004).

“Australian Voting Software Goes Closed Source” (4 Aug. 2004).

“Diebold Sued (Again) Over Shoddy Voting Machines” (12 July 2004).

“Who's Blocking Verified E-Voting?” (11 June 2004).

“Feds to Open BlackBoxVoting User Logs?” (19 May 2004).

“Indian Voting Machines Compared with Diebold” (14 May 2004).

“California County Sues State Over E-Vote Ban” (9 May 2004).

“Evoting in the News” (7 May 2004).

“CA Secretary of State Bans Diebold Machines” (1 May 2004).

http://slashdot.org/search.p?query=diebold&op=stories&author=tid=&section=&sort=1.

Sludge, C.D. “Sludge #156: SAIC Connected to E-Voting Whitewash.” Scoop (23 August 2003), http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0308/S00173.htm.

----. “Sludge Report #157: The ITAA, The Election Center, & Doug Lewis.” Scoop (23 August 2003), http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0308/S00174.htm.

Sperry, Mac. “Stopping the vote theft—urgent--drop all else.” Online Journal (25 October 2003), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/102503Sperry/102503sperry.html.

Stroh, Michael. “Defects detected in voting machines: Hopkins researchers say Maryland's electronic terminals are vulnerable to hackers.” The Baltimore Sun (24 July 2003); available (thanks to W.R. Mebane), at http://macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/gov317/diebold/A42928-2003jul24.

Verton, Dan. “E-vote at Risk.” Computerworld (18 October 2004), http://www.keepmedia.com/pubs/Computerworld/2004/10/18/622389.

Zeller, Tom. “Ready or Not (and Maybe Not), Electronic Voting Goes National.” The New York Times (19 September 2004); available at Truthout (20 September 2004), http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/092004L.shtml.

4. Allegations and Evidence of Fraud in the 2004 Presidential Election

“Academia still fixated on November 2.” Associated Press (19 November 2004), http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/11/19/election.aftermath.ap/index.html.

Adams, Brandon. An Examination of the 2004 Elections. 7 November 2004, updated 10 November 2004. This site includes the following items:

“President Bush given greater preference than Republican Senate candidate in all but two counties in Florida.”

“Total Votes Cast Outnumber Voter Turnout in Florida.”

“Floridan Votes, Sorted by Voting Technology.”

“Floridan Votes, Sorted by Machine Vendor.”

“Floridan Votes, Sorted by Voting Machine Model.”

“Percentage of Candidate's Votes Contributed by Model.”

http://www.electionexamination.blogspot.com.

Azulay, Jessica. “Amid Charges of Vote Suppression, Activists Look for Larger Fraud.” ZNet (13 November 2004), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=90&ItemID=6638.

“Berkeley Researchers Report 'Unexplained Discrepancy' in FLA Vote Totals. Study released Thursday indicates the possibility is that electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more in excess votes to Bush in Florida.” Buzzflash (18 November 2004), http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/04/11/ana04028.html. [The study in question, by Hout et al., turned out to be methodologically invalid.]

Bernstein, David S. “Questioning Ohio: No controversy this time? Think again.” The Boston Phoenix (12-18 November 2004), http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/multi-page/documents/04256171.asp.

Buchanan, Wyatt. “If It's Too Bad to be True, It May Not be Voter Fraud. Most statistical enigmas in recent election have logical explanations, despite Web rants.” San Francisco Chronicle (11 November 2004); available at http://www.verifiedvoting.org/article.php?id=5239.

Burns, Margie. “Dirty work at Philly polls.” OpEdNews (15 November 2004), http://www.opednews.com/burns_111504_philly_polls.htm.

Byrne, John. “Kerry seen as presidential victor in early exit polls.” The Blue Lemur (2 November 2004, 3:15 p.m.), http://www.blulemur.com/index.php?p=386.

----. “Odds of Bush gaining by 4 percent in all exit polling states 1 in 50,000; Evoting/paper variance not found to be significant.” The Blue Lemur (8 November 2004), http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=405.

CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project. “Voting Machines and the Underestimate of the Bush Vote.” Version 2 (11 November 2004); available at http://www.verifiedvoting.org/article.php?id=5243.

Cannon, Joseph. “The empire strikes back: Data and disinformation.” Cannonfire (12 November 2004), http://www.cannonfire.blogspot.com/2004/11/empire-strikes-back-data-and.html.

----. “Full court press on vote fraud.” Cannonfire (24 November 2004), http://www.cannonfire.blogspot.com/2004/11/full-court-press-on-vote-fraud.html.

Cardinale, Matthew. “A Genealogy of Votergate Media Coverage 2004: Through the Eyes of Googlenews.” OpEdNews (10 November 2004), http://www.opednews.com/cardinale_111004_votergate_media.htm.

'caro'. “Reconstructing the Crime.” Radio Left (12 November 2004), http://blog.radioleft.com/blog/-archives/2004/11/12/181769.html.

Chin, Larry. “The Stolen Election of 2004: welcome back to hell.” Online Journal (5 November 2004), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/110504Chin/110504chin.html; Centre for Research on Globalization (5 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHI411B.html.

Cohen, Ariella. “Voter Suppression Challenged by Ohioans, Allies.” The New Standard (25 November 2004), http://newstandardnews.net/content/?action=show_item&itemid=1249.

Cohn, Marjorie. “Litigating the Election.” Truthout (22 November 2004), http://www.truthout.ord/docs_04/112204A.shtml.

“Computer error at voting machine gives Bush 3,893 extra votes.” Akron Beacon Journal (5 November 2004), http://www.ohio.com/mld/beaconjournal/news/state/10103910.htm?1c.

“Computer glitch still baffles county clerk.” News-Dispatch (4 November 2004), http://www.michigancity.com/articles/2004/11/04/news02.txt.

“Computer May Have Lost 4,500 N.C. Votes.” Guardian Unlimited (4 November 2004), http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-459634,4,00.html.

Conover, Bev. “We Wuz Robbed ... Again!” Online Journal (12 November 2004), http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/111204Conover/111204conover.html.

“Conservatives rail against MSNBC's Olbermann for reporting election irregularities.” Media Matters for America (16 November 2004), http://www.mediamatters.org/items/printable/200411160006.

Conyers, John Jr., Jerrold Nadler, Robert Wexler (Members of the Congress of the United States, House of Representatives). “Letter to GAO Comptroller Walker Requesting Investigation of Voting Machines and Technologies Used in 2004 Election.” 5 November 2004, http://www.house.gov/conyers.

Conyers, John Jr., Jerrold Nadler, Robert Wexler, Robert C. Scott, Melvin Watt, Rush Holt (Members of the Congress of the United States, House of Representatives). “Follow-up Letter to GAO Comptroller Walker Requesting Investigation of Voting Machines and Technologies Used in 2004 Election.” 8 November 2004, http://www.house.gov/conyers.

Corn, David. “Going Down the Stolen Election Road?” The Nation (10 November 2004); available at Alternet, http://www.alternet.org/election04/20458.

“Countinghouse blues: Too many votes.” 6 News Omaha: WOWT.com (n.d.), http://www.wowt.com/news/headlines/1161971.html.

Crampton, Thomas. “Global monitors find faults.” International Herald Tribune (3 November 2004), http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=articles/2004/11/02/news/observe.html.

'DavidAdmin'. “Answers to Boston Globe's Dismissal of Voter Fraud Story.” ReDefeatBush (11 November 2004), http://www.redefeatbush.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=284.

DeHart, Sara S. “Something is Rotten in Denmark: Exit poll data in former Soviet Republic of Georgia vs. USA.” Online Journal (17 November 2004), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/111704DeHart/111704dehart.html.

'DemFromCT'. “On Voting Irregularities and Election Integrity.” dailyKOS (13 November 2004), http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/13/235655/22.

Dingus, Doug. “How Electronic Voting Impacts the Trustworthiness of our Elections.” OpEdNews (26 November 2004), http://www.opednews.com/dingusDoug_112604_electronic_voting.htm.

Dodge, David. “Response to MIT/Caltech.” Ustogether.org (13 November 2004), http://ustogether.org/election04/dodge/MIT_Caltech_rebuttal_11-13-04.htm.

Dopp, Kathy. “Surprising Pattern of Florida's Election Results.” Ustogether.org (3 November 2004, with later updates), http://www.ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm. For further analysis and graphic representation of Kathy Dopp's data, see http://www.ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and http://www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.thm.

Drobny, Sheldon. “Votergate 2004: We Don't Need Paper to Prove Fraud, But We Do Need Money and Leadership, NOW.” OpEdNews (9 November 2004), http://www.opednews.com/drobny_110904_election_investigation.htm; Centre for Research on Globalization (10 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/DRO411A.html.

Election Problem Reports. “Stolen Election Library—With Hundreds of Links.” National Ballot Integrity Project (17 November 2004), http://www.ballotintegrity.org/DCForumID1/174.html.

Engberg, Eric. “Blogging as Typing, Not Journalism.” CBS News (8 November 2004), http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/08/opinion/main654285.shtml.

Evans, Shaula. “Republican Election Theft Clearinghouse [Updated 11/12].” BOPNews (12 November 2004), http://www.bopnews.com/archives/002328.html.

----. “Outside eye: Dems Abroad Election Fraud Report.” BOPNews (12 November 2004), http://www.bopnews.com/archives/002420.html#2420.

“Exit Polls vs. Actual Results.” http://www.bandsagainstbush.org/cgi-bin/archives/exit_polls.gif; also at http://www.bandsagainstbush.org/cgi-bin/archives/000117.html.

Farrell, Maureen. “Another Rigged Election? The Elephant in the Voting Booth.” Buzzflash (9 November 2004), http://www.buzzflash.com/farrell/04/11/far04038.html.

----. “Election Angst Update: Clark Kent Vs the Media Wimps.” Buzzflash (23 November 2004), http://www.buzzflash.com/farrell/04/11/far04040.html.

Fertik, Bob. “Widespread Election Fraud in Cleveland?” Democrats.com/unity (22 November 2004), http://blog.democrats.com/node/812.

----. “Stolen Election 2004: Wednesday Update.” Democrats.com/unity (24 November 2004, http://blog.democrats.com/node/871/print.

Fitrakis, Bob. “Did Kerry Concede Too Soon?” The Free Press (5 November 2004), http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/981; Centre for Research on Globalization (6 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/FIT411A.html.

----. “None dare call it voter suppression and fraud.” The Free Press (7 November 2004), http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/983.

----. “And so the sorting and discarding of Kerry votes begins.” The Free Press (10 November 2004), http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/985.

----. “Document reveals Columbus, Ohio voters waited hours as election officials held back election machines.” The Free Press (16 November 2004), http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/990.

----. “How the Ohio election was rigged for Bush.” The Free Press (22 November 2004), http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/995.

----, and Harvey Wasserman. “Hearings on Ohio Voting Put 2004 Election in Doubt.” The Free Press (18 November 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/886.

----. “More Ohio voter suppression testimony prompts legal filing for statewide recount.” The Free Press (20 November 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/894.

----. “How a Republican election supervisor manipulated the 2004 central Ohio vote, in black and white.” The Free Press (23 November 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/917.

----. “New Ohio voter transcripts feed floodtide of doubt about Republican election manipulation.” The Free Press (25 November 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/930.

Fordahl, Matthew, et al. “Electronic Voting Machine Woes Reported.” Abc27.com (2 November 2004), http://www.whtm.com/news/stories/1104/184856.html.

Freeman, Alan. “No one cheated (but they could have).” The Globe and Mail (20 November 2004): F2, http://www.theglobeandmail.com.

Freeman, Steven F, PhD. “The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy.” [First Draft] Buzzflash (11 November 2004), http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/11/ale04090.html.

----. “The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy: Part 1.” Working Paper #04-10, Center for Organizational Dynamics, Graduate Division, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania. 21 November 2004, Scoop (23 November 2004), http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00305.htm.

Friedberg, Lilian. “An Open Letter to the New York Times (and by implication) the Rest of the US Media Who are Trying to Whitewash the 2004 Presidential Election Scandal.” OpEdNews (15 November 2004), http://www.opednews.com/friedberg_111504_media_whitewash.htm.

Gagliano, Richard A. “A Petition to Congress requesting an investigation into the Presidential Election of 2004.” http://www.petitiononline.com/cg-bin/mlk?http://www.dtmagazine.com.

Galen, Rich. “Exit Polls Miss Election Goals.” CNS News (22 November 2004), http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCommentary.asp?Page=%5Ccommentary%5Carchive%C200411%5CCOM20041122a.html.

“Glitch causes Franklin Co. recount.” Indianapolis Star (11 November 2004), http://www.indystar.com/articles/3/193880-4433-102.html.

Goldstein, Ritt. “US Election: Democracy in Question.” Inter Press Service (18 November 2004); available at Common Dreams News Center, http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1118-11.htm.

Goodman, Amy. “The Ohio Factor: Did Homeland Security and the FBI Interfere With the Vote Count?” [Interview with Erica Solvig.] Democracy Now! (10 November 2004), http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/10/1536254.

----. “Dave Cobb Discusses the Ohio Recount.” [Interview with Dave Cobb, Green Party presidential candidate.] Democracy Now! (19 November 2004); available at Scoop, http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00262.htm.

“GOP Wants to End Exit Polls: A Buzzflash News Analysis.” Buzzflash (10 November 2004), http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/04/11/ana04027.html. Includes the text of Doug Halonen, “GOP Wants News Organizations to Abandon Exit Polls,” TV Week, http://www.tvweek.com/news.cms?news/d=6674%OD.

“Green and Libertarian Presidential Candidates to Demand Ohio Recount.” Green Party News Release (11 November 2004), http://www.gp.org/press/pr_11_11_04.html.

Guina, Greg. “Suspicions stir belief that residential election was hijacked.” Vermont Guardian (11 November 2004), http://www.vermontguardian.com/national/0904/votingfraud.shtml.

Gwin, Harold. “Democrats' leader decries voting glitches.” Youngstown Vindicator (2 November 2004), http://www.vindy.com/basic/news/288078640794824.php.

Hargrove, Thomas. “Election commission: Voting problems widespread.” Scripps Howard News Service (23 November 2004), http://www.knowstudio.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=MISCOUNT-REACT-11-23-04&cat=PP.

Harris, Bev. “The Tampering of Electronic Voting Systems on November 2nd.” BlackBoxVoting (7 November 2004), http://www.blackboxvoting.org; Centre for Research on Globalization (8 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/HAR411A.html.

----. “Vote Fraud, Volusia County on Lockdown. County election records just got put on lockdown: Dueling lawyers, election officials gnashing teeth, Votergate.tv film crew catching it all.” Scoop (16 November 2004), http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00246.htm.

----. “Dems Pocket $52 Million, CNN Ignores Evidence, and Officials Stonewall... What Vote Fraud?” BreakForNews.com (24 November 2004), http://www.breakfornews.com/articles/WhatVoteFraud.htm.

Harrison, Ann. “The Ghost Votes in the Machine: Voting Snafus Across the Nation.” CounterPunch (3 November 2004), http://www.counterpunch.org/harrison11032004.html.

Hartmann, Thom. “The Ultimate Felony Against Democracy.” Common Dreams News Center (4 November 2004), http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1104-38.htm.

----. “Evidence Mounts that the Vote May Have Been Hacked.” Common Dreams News Center 6 November 2004), http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1106-30.htm.

----. “Restoring Trust in the Vote.” Common Dreams News Center (15 November 2004), http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1115-24.htm.

----. “'Stinking Evidence' of Possible Election Fraud Found in Florida.” Scoop (19 November 2004), http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00258.htm.

Hasty, Michael. “When fascism comes....” Online Journal (20 November 2004), http://www.onlinejournal.com/commentary/112004Hasty/112004hasty.html.

Herrin, Chuck, CISSP, CSA, MCSE, CEH. “How to Hack the Vote: The Short Version.” Chuckherrin.com: Computer Security Stuff (10 November 2004, revised 22 November 2004), http://www.chuckherrin.com/hackthevote.htm.

Hout, Michael, Laura Mangels, Jennifer Carlson, Rachel Best; with the assistance of the UC Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team. “The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections.” Working Paper, UC Data (Data Archive & Technical Assistance), UC Berkeley Survey Research Center (18 November 2004), http://www.ucdata.berkeley.edu. [This study was acknowledged to be methodologically invalid, and was withdrawn.]

'Hunter'. “Ohio Provisonal Ballots, Recounts, and Fraud [UPDATED].” dailyKOS (5 November 2004), http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/4/224812/643.

Hutchison, Earl Ofari. “The Painful Truth.” Alternet (15 November 2004), http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/20504.

'ignatzmouse'. “Unofficial Audit of NC Election: Comprehensive Case for Fraud.” Democratic Underground (12 November 2004), http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=45003&mesg_id=45003.

“Judge Denies Demand for Ohio Recount.” Associated Press (24 November 2004), http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041124/ap_on_re_us/ohio_vote_4.

Jurkowitz, Mark. “Media Accused of Ignoring Election Irregularities.” The Boston Globe (17 November 2004), available at Common Dreams News Center, http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1117-01.htm.

Keefer, Michael. “Footprints of Electoral Fraud: The November 2 Exit Poll Scam.” Centre for Research on Globalization (5 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE411A.html. Other observers have provided graphic confirmation from CNN's screens of the alterations of exit poll percentages noted in this article. See “Why Did CNN Change Their Exit Poll Data for Ohio After 1:00 a.m.?” Buzzflash (3 November 2004), http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/04/11/ana04025.html; and “Proof CNN is tampering with the election to cover the fraud,” Democratic Underground (3 November 2004), http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_masg&forum=132&topic_id=1290765&mesg_id=1295180&page=.

“Kerry/Edwards Campaign Participates in Ohio Recount.” U.S. Democratic Party Press Release, Scoop (22 November 2004), http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/W00411/S00261.htm.

Klein, Rick. “Internet buzz on vote fraud is dismissed.” The Boston Globe (10 November 2004), http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/11/10/internet_buzz_on_vote_fraud_is_dismissed?pg=2.

Kleinberg, Eliot. “Broward machines count backward.” Palm Beach Post (5 November 2004), http://www.palmbeachpost.com/politics/content/news/epaper/2004/11/05/a29a_BROWVOTE_1105.html.

Konrad, Rachel. “State settles electronic voting suit against Diebold for $2.6M.” The Sacramento Bee (12 November 2004), http://www.sacbee.com/state_wire/story/11380251p-12294653c.html.

----. “Conspiracy Theorists Still Question Bush's Victory.” Associated Press, The Miami Herald (21 November 2004); available at http://www.verifiedvoting.org/article.php?id=5327.

Kucinich, Dennis. “A Note on the Presidential Election in Ohio.” Common Dreams News Center (10 November 2004), http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1110-31.htm.

Kuhn, David Paul. “Online Liberals: We Wuz Robbed.” CBS News (10 November 2004), http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/10/politics/main655005.shtml.

Levy, Steven. “Black Box Voting Blues. Electronic ballot technology makes things easy. But some computer-security experts warn of the possibility of stolen elections.” Newsweek (3 November 2004), http://msnbc.com/id/3339650.

Liddle, Elizabeth. “2004 Presidential Florida by County by Voting Machine Type Election Analysis.” Ustogether.org (c. 12 November 2004), http://ustogether.org/election04/Liddle_Analysis.html.

Lindorff, Dave. “Double Standards on Exit Polls: Hypocrisy Sans Irony.” CounterPunch (24 November 2004), http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff112304.html.

Madsen, Wayne. “Grand Theft Election: Karl Rove's turd droppings all over this one.” Online Journal (5 November 2004), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/110504Madsen/110504madsen.html; Centre for Research on Globalization (5 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MAD411A.html.

----. “Saudis, Enron money helped to pay for US rigged election.” Online Journal (25 November 2004), http://www.onlinejournal.com/special_Reports/112504Madsen/112504madsen.html.

“Major bugs found in Diebold systems.” The Washington Times (12 November 2004), http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20041112-112037-7263r.htm.

Manjoo, Farhad. “Was the election stolen? The system is clearly broken. But there is no evidence that Bush won because of voter fraud.” Salon.com (10 November 2004), http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/11/10/voting/index_np.html.

Marcus, Jacqueline. “Voting: Is It All for Nada?” Common Dreams News Center (15 November 2004), http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1115-33.htm.

Margasak, Larry. “GAO to Investigate Voting Irregularities.” Associated Press, Yahoo! News (25 November 2004), http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/2004/1125/10_on_el_ge/voting_investigation.

Maxwell, John. “A Lobotomy for Democracy.” Jamaica Observer (7 November 2004); available at Autonomy & Solidarity (8 November 2004), [link now inactive].

McCarthy, John. “Machine Error Gives Bush Thousands of Extra Ohio Votes.” Associated Press (5 November 2004); also available at Common Dreams News Center, http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1105-23.htm.

----. “Ohio glitch favored Bush.” Associated Press (6 November 2004); available (thanks to B. Adams) at http://www.electionsexamination.blogspot.com.

Meacher, Michael. “Did Dubya rig the election?” New Statesman (29 November 2004), http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_NS&newDisplayURN=200411290018.

Mebane, Walter. “Letter Sent to the Editor of Common Dreams Regarding 'Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked,' by Thom Hartmann.” 8 November 2004, http://www.macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/commondreams/commondreams.html.

----. “Letter Sent to Kathy Dopp (organizer of ustogether.org) Regarding the Responses to My Letter that were Posted at ustogerther.org (12 November 2004), http://www.macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/ustogetrher/ustogether.html.

“Media Largely Ignored Berkeley Study on Florida Voting Irregularities.” Media Matters for America (22 November 2004), http://www.mediamatters.org/items/200411220005.

Mitteldorf, Josh. “Response to the VTP [CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project] criticism of the study by Dopp/Little.” (c.13 November 2004), http://ustogether.org/election04/mitteldorf/MITCaltechctp-response.htm.

Morano, Marc. “Left Wing Claims Exit Polls Were Accurate, Bush Stole Election.” Crosswalk (n.d.), http://www.crosswalk.com/news/1296007.html.

Morin, Richard. “Surveying the Damage: Exit Polls Can't Always Predict Winners, So Don't Expect Them To.” The Washington Post (20 November 2004), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64906-2004Nov20.html?sub=AR.

Mulligan, Buck. “Florida numbers vs. 2000—something is wrong.” dailyKOS (3 November 2004), http://www.dailykos.com/story/11/3/52213/1921.

'Mystery Pollster' (Mark Blumenthal). “Exit Polls: The NEP [National Election Poll] Report.” Mystery Pollster (5 November 2004), http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/u/exit_polls_the_.html.

“National Election Pool (ABC, AP, CBS, CNN, Fox News, NBC News), Conducted by Edison/Mitofsky.” http://www.exit-poll.net.

Newberry, Stirling. “The Voters Are Restless: Election Fraud Story circulates the internet. BOPNews (n.d.), http://www.bopnews.com/archives/002403.html#2403.

----. “Not 'Was It Stolen', but 'Was it Stealable'.” BOPNews (11 November 2004), http://www.bopnews.com/archives/002412.html.

'nodictators'. “Miami County, Ohio. Fraud or incredible coincidences?” Democratic Underground (6 November 2004), http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x26390.

Olbermann, Keith. “Did Your Vote Count? The Plot Thickens.” With Richard Engel, Jim Miklaszewski. Countdown, MSNBC (8 November 2004). Complete transcript and video stream available at Centre for Research on Globalization under the title “November 2nd: Voter Fraud and Homeland Security Terror Threat 'Advisories' in Ohio and Florida: Fraud on a massive scale is now corroborated by Network TV.” http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MNB411A.html.

----. “Bloggerman: Zogby Vs. Mitofsky.” MSNBC News (24 November 2004), http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240.

Otter, Faun. “Vote Fraud—Exit Polls Vs Actuals.” Scoop (4 November 2004), http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00072.htm.

Palast, Greg. “Kerry won... Here are the facts.” TomPaine.com (4 November 2004), http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won_.php; Common Dreams News Center (4 November 2004), http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1104-36.htm; Centre for Research on Globalization (4 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/PAL411B.html; Online Journal (5 November 2004), http://www.onlinejounral.com/evoting/110504Palast/110504palast.html.

----. “Kerry Won Ohio: Just Count the Ballots at the Back of the Bus.” In These Times (12 November 2004), http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=393&row=0; also published as “Most voters in Ohio chose Kerry; here's how the votes vanished.” OpEdNews (15 November 2004), http://www.opednews.com/palast_111504_ohio_chose_kerry.htm.

----. “Why Kerry Conceded Though He Had the Most Votes.” Salon.com (16 November 2004), http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=395&row=0.

“Palm Beach County Logs 88,000 More Votes Than Voters.” The Washington Dispatch (5 November 2004), http://www.washingtondispatch.com/spectrum/archives/000715.html.

Parry, Robert. “Evidence of a Second Bush Coup?” Consortium News (6 November 2004), http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/110604.html.

----. “Explaining Ourselves.” Consortium News (10 November 2004), http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/111004.html.

----. “Big Media, Some Nerve.” Consortium News (13 November 2004), http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/111304.html.

----. “Big Media's Democracy Double Standards.” Consortium News (23 November 2004), http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/112304.html.

Parry, Sam. “Bush's 'Incredible' Vote Tallies.” Consortium News (9 November 2004), http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/110904.html; Centre for Research on Globalization (9 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/PAR411B.html.

----. “Washington Post's Sloppy Analysis.” Consortium News (12 November 2004), http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/111204.html.

Partridge, Ernest. “Is This the Smoking Gun That Proves the Election was Stolen?” The Crisis Papers blog (9 November 2004), http://www.crisispapers.org/features/ep-blogs.htm.

Paterson, James. Ph.D. “The Theft of the 2004 US Election.” Freewebs.com, http://www.freewebs.com/solenelection/index.htm.

Paulos, John Allen. “Errors in exit polls still a puzzle to many.” Philadelphia Inquirer (24 November 2004); available at November 2nd Truth (25 November 2004), http://nov2truth.org/article.php?story=20041125002114235.

Penenberg, Adam L. “Calling the Election: A Primer.” Wired News (2 November 2004), http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,65557,00.html.

Peterson, Evan Augustine III, J.D. “E-Voting Machine 'Error' in Ohio Gives Bush Thousands of Extra Votes.” OpEdNews (7 November 2004), http://www.opednews.com/peterson_110704_error.htm.

Philips, Richard Hayes, Ph.D. “Precinct-by-precinct analysis of electoral fraud in Cleveland.” Quoted in its entirety in Bob Fertik, “Widespread Election Fraud in Cleveland?” Democrats.com/unity (22 November 2004), http://blog.democrats.com/node/812.

----. “Stealing Votes in Columbus.” The Free Press (23 November 2004), http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/914.

Pitt, William Rivers. “Worse Than 2000: Tuesday's Electoral Disaster.” Truthout (8 November 2004), http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/110804A.shtml.

----. “Saving Your Right to Vote.” Truthout (22 November 2004), http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/112304Z.html.

Plissner, Martin. “In Defense of Exit Polls: You just don't know how to use them.” Slate (4 November 2004), http://slate.msn.com/id/2109186.

“PresidentialVotes Miscast on E-Voting Machines Across the Country.” Kansas City infoZine (2 November 2004), http://www.infozine.com/news/stories/op/storiesView/sid/4154.

Quirk, Kevin. “Something amiss in Ohio.” Online Journal (5 November 2004), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/110504Quirk/110504quirk.html.

Reid, Chip. “Internet theories on election abound: Even Democratic Party officials discount claims of unfair practices.” NBC News (11 November 2004), http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6463505.

Rockwell, Teed. “93,136 EXTRA Votes Found in ONE Ohio County.” Rense.com (19 November 2004), http://www.rense.com/general59/one.htm. [For an explanation of this—only apparent—anomaly, see my article “The Strange Death of American Democracy.”]

Roig-Franzia, Manuel, and Dan Keating. “Latest Conspiracy Theory—Kerry Won—Hits the Ether.” The Washington Post (11 November 2004), http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41106-2004Nov10?languge=printer.

Rosenfeld, Steven. “The Perfect Election Day Crime.” TomPaine.com (12 November 2004), http://www.tompaine.com/articles/the_perfect_election_day_crime.php.

Royle, Andy, et al. “Urban vs. rural voting patterns in Florida—comments by Andy Royle and others.” 4 November 2004, http://synapse.princeton.edu/~sam/royle_florida.html.

Sekhon, Jasjeet S. “The 2004 Florida Optical Voting Machine Controversy: A Causal Analysis Using Matching.” 14 November 2004, http://elections.fas.harvard.edu/index.html.

Shafer, Jack. “Updated Late Afternoon Numbers. Mucho flattering to Kerry; plus Nader makes an appearance.” Slate (2 November 2004, 4:28 p.m. PT), http://slate.msn.com/id/2109053/#Post1.

----. “Exit Zone. The official excuses for the bad exit poll numbers don't cut it.” Slate (5 November 2004), http://www.slate.com/Default.aspx?id=2109310.

Shane, Cory. “Should America Trust the Results of the Election?” The Washington Dispatch (2 November 2004), http://www.washingtondispatch.com/article_10500.shtml.

Shea, Colin. “I Smell a Rat.” Zogby International (15 November 2004); also available at Common Dreams News Center (16 November 2004), http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1115-20.htm.

Simon, Jonathan. (Introduction by Alastair Thompson, Scoop Co-Editor.) “47 State Ext Poll Analysis Confirms Swing Anomaly.” Scoop (11 November 2004); available at OpEdNews, http://www.opednews.com/votergate2004.htm.

Sludge, D.W. “Sludge Report #164—Vote Fraud 2004—WTF!!!” Scoop (9 November 2004), http://www.scoop/co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00124.htm#13.

Smith, Sam. “It's the Internet's Fault Again: Stupid journalist tricks.” Scoop (15 November 2004), http://scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00168.htm.

----. “Watching the Count: Blame It On the Blogs.” Scoop (15 November 2004), http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00175.htm.

----. “Watching the Count: Counter-Journalism Debate.” Scoop (23 November 2004), http://scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00296.htm.

Solarbus. A Stolen Election? Documenting what could be the highest crime in the history of our country. [List of Readings.] Solarbus.org, http://www.solarbus.org/stealyourelection/index.html.

----. “713 pages of Diebold internal memos leaked.” Solarbus.org (24 November 2004), http://www.solarbus.org/stealyourelection/index.html.

Solnit, David. “Massive Vote Suppression and Corruption in Ohio.” Centre for Research on Globalization (3 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/SOL411A.html.

Solomon, Ian H. “Did Lawyer-Observers on Election Day Miss Fraud Incidents?” Hartford Courant (14 November 2004), http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041114/OPINION04/11114009/-1/opinion.

Solvig, Erica, and Dan Horn. “Warren Co. Defends lockdown decision; FBI denies warning officials of any special threat.” The Cincinnati Enquirer (10 November 2004), http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/11/10/loc_warrenvote10.html.

Stapp, Katherine. “U.S. Election: Unease over E-Voting.” Verifiedvoting.org (16 November 2004), http://www.verifiedvoting.org/article.php?id=5263.

Strashny, Alex. “Working Paper: The lack of effect of electronic voting machines on change in support for Bush in the 2004 Florida elections.” Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, University of California, Irvine; available at Verifiedvoting.org (21 November 2004), http://verifiedvoting.org/article.php?id=5347.

Swanson, David. “Media Black Out on Vote Fraud Allegations: Votes Aren't the Only Thing Missing in Ohio.” CounterPunch (8 November 2004), http://www.counterpnch.com/swanson11082004.html.

“Take Back the Media,” and “People to People TV.” Electile Disfunction: Take Back Your Right to Vote. DVD (for release 13 December 2004); available at Buzzflash, http://www.buzzflash.com/premiums/04/11/pre04073.html. 

'TennisGuy2004'. “Comparison of Exit Poll Data from 2000 and 2004 Election—Pass it On.” Democratic Underground (18 November 2004), http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=62147&mesg_id=62226&page=.

'The Squanderer'. “Did Bush Lose ... Again?” 16 November 2004, http://www.thesquanderer.com/votingmachines.html.

Thompson, Alastair. “Complete US Exit Poll Data Confirms Net Suspicions: Full 51 State Early Exit Poll Data Released for the First Time.” Scoop (17 November 2004), http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/@00227.ht#ftnote.

----, and Ed Shalom. “Scoop Images: 2004 Exit Poll 'Red Shift' As Seen in Vote Numbers.” Scoop (19 November 2004), http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00264.htm.

Thoreau, Jackson. “Never say Die-bold: So you don't think the Bush campaign stole this election? Think again.” Online Journal (5 November 2004), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/110504Thoreau/110504thoreau.html.

----. “How You Can Help Fight the Vote Fraud that Stole the 2004 Election.” OpEdNews (13 November 2004), http://www.opednews.com/thoreau_111304_help_fight.htm.

'TruthIsAll'. “Spot the Difference—Exit Poll Variations Swing States Vs Non Swing States,” “To Believe that Bush Won the Election, You Must Also Believe...” Scoop (9 November 2004), http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00124.htm#13.

----. “There should be limits to freedom. A dictatorship would be better. Who cares what you think? Here are 100 Exit Poll Links: Be forewarned. Only a few know what they are talking about.” Democratic Underground (19 November 2004), http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x65001.

----. “One Out of 4.5 Billion! Those are the odds that Kerry's EXIT poll percentage would EXCEED his ACTUAL reported vote percentage BY MORE THAN THE MARGIN OF ERROR in 16 out of 51 States by chance alone.” Democratic Underground (26 November 2004), http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x79760.

Urie, Heath. “Activists protest electronic voting: Opponents of the technology gather at the Capitol and question exit-poll data.” The Denver Post (21 November 2004), http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~53~2549008,oo.html.

Vasquez, Betsy R. “Think Kerry Is Not Involved in This Fight? Think Again.” The Moderate Independent (10 November 2004), http://www.moderateindependent.com/v2i21election.htm.

Verified Voting Foundation. “Our Position on Fraud in the 2004 Presidential Election.” Verifiedvoting.org (15 November 2004), http://www.verifiedvoting.org/article.php?id=5249.

Verton, Dan. “Officials Defend System, Despite Early E-voting Problems.” Computerworld (1 November 2004), http://www.keepmedia.com/pubs/Computerworld/2004/11/01/641499.

----, and Patrick Thibodeau. “Electronic Voting Systems Pass Their Big Test—Maybe.” Computerworld (8 November 2004), http://www.keepmedia.com/pubs/Computerworld/2004/11/08/644061.

“Volusia County lawsuit alleges irregularities in Nov 2, 2004 election.” BlackBoxVoting.org, http://www.blackboxvoting.org/#lawsuit.

“Voting-Machine Woes in Cartaret [North Carolina] Have Officials Looking for Answers.” Associated Press (23 November 2004), http://www.verifiedvoting.org/article.php?id=5342.

Wade, Anthony. “Keith Olbermann Plays Hardball, Breaks Votergate Story on National, Mainstream Media.” OpEdNews (8 November 2004), http://www.opednews.com/wade_110904_olbermann.htm.

----. “Diversionary New Tactics, Votergate 2004.” OpEdNews (9 November 2004), http://www.opednews.com/bloganthonywade.htm.

----. “Pimping for Bush, NY Daily News Sells Out Its Readers and the Country, Continuing the Votergate 2004 Cover-up.” OpEdNews (16 November 2004), http://www.opednews.com/wade_111604_pimping.htm.

Waldman, Alan. “Was It Hacked?” Orlando Weekly (18 November 2004), http://www.orlandoweekly.com/news/Story.asp?ID=4688.

Wand, Jonathan. “Evaluating the Impact of Voting Technology on the Tabulation of Voter Preferences: The 2004 Presidential Election in Florida.” Working Paper, Version 0.2, 15 November 2004, http://wand.stanford.edu/elections/usFL2004.

Webb, Cynthia L. “Bloggers Let Poll Cat Out of the Bag.” The Washington Post (3 November 2004), http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21932-2004Nov3.html.

Weissman, Steve. “Who Counts in Ohio?” Truthout (11 November 2004), http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111104A.shtml.

Welsh, Ian. “Thinking about Vote Fraud.” BOPNews (9 November 2004), http://www.bopnews.com/archives/002357.html#2357.

Whitney, Mike. “Sour grapes or voter fraud?” SmirkingChimp.com (4 November 2004), http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=18549.

----. “The Ohio mandate.” SmirkingChimp.com (7 November 2004), http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=18588.

“2004 U.S. Election controversies and irregularities.” Wikipedia (12 November 2004), http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_controversies_and_irregularities#Evidence_of_electronic_voting_bias.

Williams, Mark. “Ohio Provisional Ballots Seem Legitimate.” Associated Press (17 November 2004); available at Truthout (18 November 2004), http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111804V.shtml.

Zeller, Tom. “Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried.” The New York Times (12 November 2004), http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/politics/12theory.html?

Zerbisias, Antonia. “Webb Abuzz With Vote-Rigging Tales.” The Toronto Star (14 November 2004); available at Common Dreams News Center (16 November 2004), http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1114-22.htm.

Zweifel, Dave. “Integrity of Voting System Paramount.” Capital Times, Madison, Wisconsin (17 November 2004); available at Common Dreams News Center, http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1117-22htm.

5. Appendix: Selected Articles on the 2004 Presidential Recall Referendum in Venezuela and the 2004 Presidential Election (Second Round) in Ukraine

(a) Venezuela

Barone, Michael. “Exit Polls in Venezuela.” USNews.com (20 August 2004), http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/baroneweb/mb_040820.htm.

Carter, Jimmy. “President Jimmy Carter: Venezuela Election Trip Report, Aug 13-18, 2004.” The Carter Center, http://cartercenter.org/doc1801.htm.

Del Valle Marcano, Vanessa Carolina. “Experts consulted by The Wall Street Journal ratify that patterns and ceilings are normal.” Vheadline.com (21 August 2004), http://www.vheadline.com/printer_news.asp?id=22538.

Gindin, Jonah. “Subverting Democracy.” Venezuelanalysis.com (14 August 2004); available at ZNet, http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=6045&sectionID=45.

----. “Venezuela's Opposition Resorts to Phony Exit Polls.” Venezuelanalysis.com (15 August 2004), http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1248.

Giordano, Al. “Penn & Schoen's Inaccurate and Dishonest 'Exit Poll' on Chávez Vote: Maneuver by U.S. Political Consultants Violated Venezuelan Law and Professional Ethics Codes.” The Narco News Bulletin (19 August 2004), http://www.narconews.com/Issue34/article1046.html.

Golinger-Moncada, Eva. “New York Lawyer Eva Golinger: 15A Testimonial from Ground Zero Caracas.” Vheadline (19 August 2004), http://www.vheadline.com/printer_news.asp?id=22506.

Hardy, Charles. “Charles Hardy: Penn, Schoen & Berland ... US News & World Report.” Vheadline (1 September 2004), http://www.vheadline.com/printer_news.asp?id=22625.

O'Donoghue, Patrick J. “Opposition Sumate claims electronic switch of final results to favor government.” Vheadline (17 August 2004), http://www.vheadline.com/printer_news.asp?id=22477.

Podur, Justin. “The Calm Before the?” ZNet (15 August 2004), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=45&ItemID=6048.

Rosnick, David. “Polling and the Ballot: The Venezuelan Referendum.” Center for Economic and Policy Research (19 August 2004), http://www.cepr.net/publications/venezuelan_referendum.htm.

Satanovsky, Alex. “Opposition leaders and their endangered parrots of the commercial media, are deservingly the laughing stocks of authentic journalists worldwide.” Vheadline (22 August 2004), http://www.vheadline.com/printer_news.asp?id=22552.

Selsky, Andrew. “U.S. polling firm lands in middle of Venezuelan referendum dispute.” Venezuela Information Office (19 August 2004), http://www.rethinkvenezuela.com/news/08-19-04ap.html.

Smith, Ron. “UK's Independent Newspaper Falsifies Venezuelan Election Results!” The Narcosphere (15 August 2004), http://narcosphere.naconews.com/story/2004/8/15/205259/595#1.

Stinard, Philip. “Governor Enrique Mendoza: Greenberg's man for the Venezuelan Presidency.” Vheadline (4 July 2004), http://www.vheadline.com/printer_news.asp?id=21881.

----. “The Washington Post: A Venezuelan Monitor.” Vheadline (30 July 2004), http://www.vheadline.com/printer_news.asp?id=22217.

----. “PPT [Patria Para Todos] denounces opposition plan to sabotage referendum resuts via 'exit polls'.” Vheadline (10 August 2004), http://www.vheradline.com/printer_news.asp?id=22360.

“Súmate.” [Súmate is a Venezuelan opposition group funded by the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy to promote a campaign for a recall referendum on President Chávez; this file includes Jeremy Bigwood's request to the CIA for information on the group.] http://www.venezuelafoia.info/NED/SUMATE/SUMATE%20index.htm.

“The Providence Journal: Reason to be skeptical about Venezuela's referendum.” Vheadline (19 August 2004), http://www.vheadline.com/printer_news.asp?id=22511.

“The Venezuela Recall: Answering all that is answerable.” Vheadline (31 August 2004), http://www.vheadline.com/printer_news.asp?id=22620.

(b) Ukraine

Aslund, Anders. “Ukraine's Future and U.S. Interests. Testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Europe.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (12 May 2004), http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1533.

----. “Ukraine At A Crossroads.” The Washington Post (29 September 2004); available at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publcations/index.cfm?fa=view&id=15893.

----. “Ukraine's Voters do not need Moscow's advice.” The Financial Times (11 November 2004); available at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publcations/index.cfm?fa=view&id=16120.

Chin, Larry. “Cold War Crisis in the Ukraine: Control of Oil: Key Grand Chessboard 'Pivot' at Stake.” Centre for Research on Globalization (26 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHI411D.html.

Chossudovsky, Michel. War and Globalization: The Truth Behind September 11. Shanty Bay, ON: Global Outlook, 2002. ISBN 0-973110902.

----. “IMF Sponsored 'Democracy' in the Ukraine.” Centre for Research on Globalization (28 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO411D.html.

“Eurasia Foundation Grantees Pave the Way to Democratic Elections in Ukraine. A Eurasia Foundation Grantee Profile.” Eurasia Foundation, http://www.eurasia.org/success%20Stories/articlke-elect.html.

Finn, Peter. “Partial Vote Results Show a Tight Race in Ukraine Runoff.” The Washington Post (22 November 2004), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2478-2004Nov21.html.

Foulner, Martin. “Ukraine is part of a wider US pattern.” The Glasgow Herald (26 November 2004); available at the Centre for Research on Globalization (27 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/TRA411A.html.

Holley, David. “Ukraine: Russia-Backed Candidate Declared Winner.” Los Angeles Times (24 November 2004), http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-112404ukraine_lat,0,2214793.story?coll=la-home-headlines.

“In quotes: World concern at Ukraine election.” BBC News (23 November 2004), http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4034013.stm.

Kubiniec, John. “Election Fraud in Ukraine Presidential Vote.” Freedom House (22 November 2004), http://www.freedomhouse.org/media/pressrel/112204.htm.

Kuzio, Taras. “Post-Election Blues in the Yanukovych Camp.” Eurasia Daily Monitor, Vol. 1, issue 124 (10 November 2004); available at Talkaboutnetwork (15 November 2004), http://www.talkaboutculture.com/group/soc.culture.ukrainian/messages/119741.html.

Laughland, John. “How the US ad Britain are intervening in Ukraine's elections.” The Spectator (5 November 2004); available at the Centre for Research on Globalization (25 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/LAU411A.html.

----. “The revolution televised: The western media's view of Ukraine's election is hopelessly biased.” The Guardian (27 November 2004), http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1360811,00.html.

“McCain Statement on Elections in Ukraine.” International Republican Institute (23 November 2004), http://www.iri.org/11-23-04-McCain.asp.

“New EU-Ukraine oli pipeline completed.” EU Business (20 August 2001), http://www.eubusiness.com/imported/2001/08/55762.

Oliker, Olga. “Ukraine and the Caspian: An Opportunity for the United States.” Issue Paper 198, RAND Center for Russia and Eurasia (2000), http://www.rand.org/publications/1P/1P198.

“Opposition pulls out of election talks.” The Guardian (30 November 2004), http://www.guardian.co.uk/ukraine/story/0,15569,1362804.html.

“Planned Coup d'État in the Ukraine.” Itar-Tass (26 November 2004); available at the Centre for Research on Globalization, http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/TAS411A.html.

Popeski, Ron. “Ukraine exit poll shows liberal winner.” Reuters (21 November 2004), http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=625014&section=news.

“Press Release.” [Exit Polls in the March 2002 Election to be conducted by the Kiev Institute of Sociology, SOCIS Company, and the Social Monitoring Center, coordinated by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation.] http://www.def.org.ua/ep/en/pr.

Traynor, Ian. “US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev.” The Guardian (26 November 2004); available at the Centre for Research on Globalization (28 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/TRA411A.html.

“Ukraine.” Centre for Public Opinion and Democracy, The University of British Columbia. Http://www.cpod.ub.ca/tracer/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewitem&itemID=2591.

“Ukraine cities defy poll result.” BBC News (22 November 2004), http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4033475.stm.

“Ukraine Crisis: A Western circus with Yushchenko, the clown.” Pravda (25 November 2004), http://english.opravda.ru/printed.html?news_id=14639.

“Ukraine: 2nd Round of Presidential Election.” British Helsinki Human Rights Group, http://www.bhhrg.org/CountryReport.asp?CountryID=22&ReportID=230.

Vasovic, Alexsandar. “Ukraine's Early Results, Exit Polls Differ.” Associated Press (21 November 2004); available at Findlaw, http://news.corporate.findlaw.com/ap_stories/i/1103/11-21-2004/20041121220016_16.html.

Woronowycz, Roman. “U.S. Expresses strong support of Odessa-Brody oil pipeline.” Ukraine Weekly (8 June 2003), http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive/2003/230808.shtml.

The Stolen U.S. Presidential Election: A Comparative Analysis

First published as “Election Fraud in America,” Centre for Research on Globalization (30 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE411D.html (together with a companion piece, “Evidence of Fraud in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election: A Reader,” Centre for Research on Globalization [5 December 2004], http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE412A.html). This essay appeared under the present title at the now defunct website of Autonomy & Solidarity (2 December 2004); under its original title it was also published at six other websites in 2004, and is also available at http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=209. In the original text, parenthetical references to sources referred to items listed in the “Evidence of Fraud” reader; in the present text, these parenthetical references have been replaced by footnotes.

Two issues raised in this essay call for comment. In referring on pp. 12-13 to a statistical study published on November 18, 2004 by Michael Hout of the University of California at Berkeley that claimed to discover massive irregularities in Bush's Florida vote due to electronic voting machines, I also cited a response to this study published three days later by Alex Strashny of the University of California, Irvine, that criticized Hout's study. Strashny's refutation of Hout's analysis, as Hout himself acknowledged with some embarrassment not long after the appearance of my article, was correct.

On p. 14 I referred to Teed Rockwell's discovery that according to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections website, 93,000 more votes were cast in 29 communities of that county than there were registered voters. Here again a correction is needed. Rockwell was not mistaken in his reading of the data published by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections: I read over the same data myself and found, as I noted on p. 14, that he had if anything been conservative in his assessment of the scale of the irregularities that that website revealed.

But as I wrote in “The Strange Death of American Democracy: Endgame in Ohio” (published on January 25, 2005), this was a “very large-scale false alarm.” In that essay, I explained the matter as follows:

The election results published by Cuyahoga County (which includes the city of Cleveland) led a number of commentators in November 2004—myself among them—to believe that there had been massive 'ghost-voting' fraud in the suburbs of Cleveland. But the official lists showing twenty-nine communities with voter turnout figures of more than 100 percent (and hence some 93,000 'ghost votes' in the county) turned out to result from a bizarrely structured software program that grouped communities in the same congressional, house and senate districts, and added the total number of absentee ballots within the combined districts to the voter turnout figures for each community in these districts—though not to the vote totals for candidates or issues. This programming oddity worked, the County's website idiotically declared, in “even-numbered years.”

I have left the text of the present article unchanged: these passages provide an instructive indication of the potential pitfalls involved in work of this kind.

The Stolen U.S. Presidential Election: A Comparative Analysis by Michael Keefer

1. ‘Let us compare mythologies’: Presidential Votes in the U.S., Ukraine, Venezuela

Imagine the sensation that would have ensued if a United States Senator had declared, less than three weeks after the 2004 U.S. presidential election, that “It is now apparent that a concerted and forceful program of election-day fraud and abuse was enacted with either the leadership or co-operation of governmental authorities.” The story would have made banner headlines around the world.

As a matter of fact, on November 22, 2004, BBC News attributed these very words to Republican Senator Richard Lugar. However, Lugar was speaking in his capacity as Chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee—and he was referring, not to the U.S. presidential election of November 2, but to the Ukrainian presidential election of November 21, 2004.1

The primary evidence for Lugar’s charge of electoral fraud is a striking divergence between exit poll data and official vote tallies. As it happens, wide divergences of this kind have been a feature of three important recent elections: the Venezuelan recall referendum over President Chávez’s mandate held on August 15 and the U.S. presidential election of November 2, as well as the Ukrainian presidential election of November 21. In all three cases there is substantial evidence of fraud—though the dishonesty appears to be very differently distributed. In brief: the Venezuelan election was clean and the exit poll flagrantly dishonest; the Ukrainian vote tallies and exit polling seem both to have been in various ways seriously corrupted; the American election, despite the Bush Republicans’ pose as international arbiters of integrity, was manifestly stolen—though the U.S. exit polling was professionally conducted. (The exit polls were subsequently tampered with, but accurate results had in the mean time been made public.)

     a. Venezuela

Hugo Chávez’s landslide victory in August was a surprise only to the hostile U.S. corporate press, which had represented the Venezuelan election campaign as a dead heat: the last opinion poll prior to the referendum in fact showed Chávez leading by a wide margin, with 50 percent of registered voters to the opposition’s 38 percent. In the official tally, Chávez won 58.26 percent of the votes, while 41.74 percent were cast against him. International observers, including the Organization of American States and the Carter Center, declared that the election had been fair: in ex-U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s words, “any allegations of fraud are completely unwarranted.”2

But on election day the leading New York polling firm Penn, Schoen & Berland disgraced itself by releasing (before the polls closed, and hence in violation of Venezuelan law) a purportedly authoritative exit poll, with a claimed margin of error “under +/-1%,” according to which Chávez had been defeated, gaining a mere 41 percent of the vote to the opposition’s 59 percent. The exit polling, it emerged, had been conducted—though not in Chavista neighbourhoods, where the pollsters did not venture3—by an opposition group named Súmate, which had been formed to agitate for a recall referendum, and whose leadership had been implicated in the 2002 anti-Chávez coup. Súmate appears to have been largely funded by the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has been aptly described as “the CIA’s ‘civilian arm’,”4 and by the CIA itself;5 in the period leading up to the election, Venezuelan opposition groups like Súmate received altogether more than $20 million from the U.S., including over $3 million funneled through the NED.6 As had been understood prior to the event,7 fraudulent exit polling was part of a concerted U.S.-backed project of delegitimizing and destabilizing the government of a geopolitically important oil-producing nation. Had the election been less of a landslide, and had it not been conducted with what appears to have been scrupulous correctness, the plan might have succeeded.

     b. Ukraine

Ukraine is likewise recognized as a country of pivotal geopolitical importance;8 it is a key element in the U.S.’s Silk Road Strategy for domination of central Asia.9 Here the election results were much closer, and have been more vigorously contested. Viktor Yanukovych, the candidate favoured by Ukraine’s Russian neighbours, was declared the winner, with 49.4 percent of the vote to the Western-leaning Viktor Yushchenko’s 46.7 percent. But Yushchenko and his party—supported by a growing chorus of Western commentators and governments—have cried foul, and Ukraine’s Supreme Court has rejected the certified vote tally, declaring that the election must be repeated in late December.

While the Ukrainian exit poll figures publicized in the Western media immediately after the November 21 election do support claims of electoral fraud, the exit polls themselves are not wholly above suspicion. The most widely disseminated claim has been that an authoritative exit poll showed Yushchenko to have won the election with a 6 percent lead; Yanukovych’s governing party would thus have stolen the election, fraudulently swinging the vote by 8.7 percent. According to better-informed reports, however, two distinct exit polls were conducted. One of these, organized by the right-wing U.S. think-tank Freedom House and the U.S. Democratic Party’s National Democratic Institute (NDI), and carried out by the Kyiv Democratic Initiatives Foundation,10 perhaps as part of a group calling itself the Exit Poll consortium,11 found that Yushchenko won 54 percent of the vote to Yanukovych’s 43 percent. (It is perhaps this poll that the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Public Opinion and Democracy is referring to in its claim that “an exit poll conducted by independent research firms” showed Yushchenko to have won by 54 to 42 percent.)12 The other national exit poll, based on interviews rather than questionnaires, was conducted by SOCIS Company and the Social Monitoring Center, and gave Yushchenko 49.4 percent of the vote to Yanukovych’s 45.9 percent.13

It is not my purpose to attempt an unraveling of the complexities of the Ukrainian election. The British Helsinki Human Rights Group has challenged the validity of the exit polls, claiming that the exit pollsters they observed in one city were open Yushchenko supporters and were not following proper procedures.14 While Western observers have reported major irregularities in the government’s conduct of the election, Michel Chossudovsky and Ian Traynor have on the other hand adduced strong evidence of interventions in the Ukrainian electoral process by U.S. governmental and quasi-governmental agencies that resemble the same agencies’ interventions in Serbia, Georgia, Belarus, and Venezuela.15 The voter turnout figures of 96 percent recorded in Yanukovych strongholds in eastern Ukraine are strongly indicative of fraud; so likewise may be “the 90% pro-Yushchenko results declared in western Ukraine,” where the British Helsinki Group observed that Yushchenko’s opposition party “exercised disproportionate control over the electoral process in many places.”16 In what seems to me a well-balanced assessment, Dave Lindorff describes Leonid Kuchma’s outgoing regime as “corrupt and dictatorial,” and sees the opposition’s vehement protests against electoral corruption as being largely “indigenous and heartfelt”—while also noting that “the CIA and various American ‘pro-democracy’ front groups [are] playing a crucial hand in destabilizing the pro-Russian regime.”17 To which Timothy Garton Ash would respond with the proverb about not seeing the forest for the trees: whatever “bad trees” may be visible, “the shape of the wood” is that “An election was stolen.”

I would like merely to suggest that the interview-based exit poll which gave Yushchenko a 3.5 percent lead over Yanukovych—and hence indicated an irregular swing of 6.2 percent in the latter’s favour in the vote tallies—is more likely to have been properly conducted than the exit poll which was organized by Freedom House and the NDI, and which may well have been marked by Súmate-type improprieties.

     c. The United States

Let us turn to the American presidential election, where the same kind of data has encouraged similar suspicions—though thanks to the soothing ministrations of the U.S. corporate media, with nothing resembling the massive public outcry in Ukraine. George W. Bush was hailed the winner on November 2, with 51 percent of the vote to John Kerry’s 48 percent. But there are good reasons to be skeptical of the official vote tallies. The last wave of national exit polls published on the evening of November 2—polls which appear to have been duly weighted to correct for sampling imbalances—showed Kerry, not Bush, leading by 51 to 48 percent.18 A divergence of 6 percent between weighted exit polls and the official numbers is a strong indicator of electoral fraud.

At the decisive point, moreover, the divergence between the exit poll results and the vote tally was wider still.19 Prior to the election, political analysts identified Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania as the three key swing states: the candidate who carried these states, or a majority of them, would win the election.

Bush won Florida, with 52.1 percent of the vote to Kerry’s 47.1 percent. (This tally, by the way, diverges by 4.9 percent in Bush’s favour from the state exit poll, which gave Bush a paper-thin 0.1 percent lead.) Kerry won Pennsylvania, with 50.8 percent of the vote to Bush’s 48.6 percent. (Here again the vote tally differs in Bush’s favour from the exit poll results—this time by 6.5 percent.)

That left Ohio as the deciding state, the one on which the national election results depended. George W. Bush won Ohio, according to the official vote tally, with 51 percent of the vote to John Kerry’s 48.5 percent. The divergence in this case between the vote tally and the exit poll, which showed Kerry as winning by 52.1 percent to Bush’s 47.9 percent, is fully 6.7 percent.

Is it possible that these three divergences in Bush’s favour between exit polls and vote tallies could have occurred by chance? I wouldn’t bet on it. Dr. Steven Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Organizational Dynamics has calculated that the odds against these statistical anomalies occurring by chance are 662,000 to 1.20

Or are exit polls perhaps just not as reliable as people think? Dr. Freeman has an answer to this question as well. In the last three national elections in Germany, the differential between the exit polls and the vote tallies was, on average, 0.27 percent; and in the last three elections to the European Parliament, the differential in Germany was 0.44 percent.21 Exit polls conducted professionally and without political bias are highly accurate—which is why they have been used (more honestly in most cases, it would seem, than in the Penn, Schoen & Berland poll in Venezuela and the Freedom House-NDI poll in Ukraine) as a measure of electoral integrity in situations where improprieties have been anticipated. The U.S. exit polls were conducted by Mitofsky International, a survey research company founded by Warren J. Mitofsky, who as the company’s website proclaims “created the Exit Poll research model” and “has directed exit polls and quick counts since 1967 for almost 3,000 electoral contests. He has the distinction of conducting the first national presidential exit polls in the United States, Russia, Mexico and the Philippines. His record for accuracy is well known.”22

The fact that Mitofsky International systematically altered the U.S. presidential exit poll data early on the morning of November 3, contaminating the exit poll figures by conflating them with the vote tally percentages, has quite rightly become a matter of controversy.23 But there seems no reason to doubt that the Mitofsky exit poll data made available by the CNN website on the evening of November 2 was professionally gathered and weighted.

Mightn’t one propose, as a last resort, that Bush’s election-winning divergence of 6.7 percent between the Ohio exit poll results and the Ohio vote tally was, at any rate, somewhat less scandalous than the 13.7 percent swing Yanukovych’s party was blamed for by the Freedom House-NDI exit poll? (Ignore, if you like, the lesser 6.2 percent swing indicated by the SOCIS and Social Monitoring exit poll—which, if accurate, shows the Freedom House-NDI poll to be skewed in Yushchenko’s favour by fully 7.5 percent.) But if stealing elections is like knocking off banks, the fact that one practitioner can dynamite the vault of the central bank and get away with it, while his less fortunate compeer draws unwanted attention by blowing out all of the windows of the neighbourhood Savings-and-Loan, doesn’t make the former any less a bank robber than the latter.

The parallels between the Ukrainian and the U.S. presidential elections extend beyond the exit poll divergences. Ballot-box stuffers appear to have achieved a 96 percent turnout in parts of eastern Ukraine, with turnout figures in some areas exceeding 100 percent. There is evidence of similar indiscretions on the part of Bush’s electoral fraud teams. Twenty-nine precincts in a single Ohio county reported more votes cast than there are registered voters—to a cumulative total of over 93,000 votes.24 And in six Florida counties the total number of votes reported to have been cast exceeded by wide margins the total number of registered voters.25 Senator John McCain, manifesting the same stunning lack of irony as other Republican spokesmen, has weighed in on the issue: “IRI [the International Republican Institute] found that in a number of polling stations, the percentage of votes certified by the Central Election Commission exceeded 100% of total voters. This is simply disgraceful.”26 McCain is of course referring to eastern Ukraine; when it comes to Florida or Ohio, he keeps his eyes wide shut.

The question of advance indications of electoral fraud offers a final point of comparison. In the United States, as in Ukraine (where international observers described the polls and vote-counts in previous elections as deeply flawed), electoral fraud was widely anticipated prior to the 2004 presidential election.

As the materials itemized in the first three sections of the Reading List that is being published to accompany this article make clear, the electronic voting technologies in use in the U.S. were widely denounced by electronic security experts months and even years in advance, as permitting, indeed facilitating, electoral fraud; there is clear evidence that the 2000 election and the 2002 mid-term elections were marked by large-scale fraud on the part of the Bush Republicans; and U.S. computer scientists and informed analysts warned insistently that fraud on an unprecedented scale was likely to occur in this year’s election.27

How has it been possible for the massive ironies arising out of the similarities between the elections in the U.S. and Ukraine to pass unobserved in the corporate media. Have the media been simple-mindedly buttering their bread on both sides? If so, it is a habit that makes for messy eating. On November 20, an article in The Washington Post informed those who might question the U.S. election that “Exit Polls Can’t Always Predict Winners, So Don’t Expect Them To.”28 Two days later, The Washington Post carried breaking news of the early election results from Ukraine—and quoted a purported election-stealer who holds exactly the same opinion of exit polls: “‘These polls don’t work,’ said Gennady Korzh, a spokesman for Yanukovych. ‘We will win by 3 to 5 percent. And remember, if Americans believed exit polls, and not the actual count, John Kerry would be president’.”29

2. Key Issues and Evidence in the U.S. Presidential Election

Mainstream media assessments of the integrity of the 2004 U.S. presidential election have tended to focus on particular and local problems—computer errors or ‘glitches’ for the most part—that came to light on the day of the election or shortly afterwards. Naturally enough, the fact that these problems were noticed, and in some cases corrected, works if anything to enhance public confidence in the integrity of the electoral system.

The stance of the mainstream media is inadequate in at least two respects. First, some of the ‘problems’ were not mere accidents, but open and flagrant violations of democratic principles. Prominent among these was the election-night ‘lockdown’ of the Warren County, Ohio administrative building, on wholly spurious grounds of a ‘terrorist threat’: as a result, the public, the press, and the local legal counsel for the Kerry-Edwards campaign were prevented from witnessing the vote count.30 This maneuver generated widespread outrage: Warren County’s Republicans may perhaps have ‘misoverestimated’ the degree to which previous conveniently timed ‘terror alerts’ and Osama bin Laden’s late-October Jack-in-the-Box act had tamed the electorate.

But more importantly, while ‘problems’ and ‘glitches’ have commonly been covered by the corporate media as local issues, they can be recognized as belonging to a larger pattern. As James Paterson’s compelling analysis of “The Theft of the 2004 US Election” makes clear, Republican intentions were evident well before the election.31 And as Joseph Cannon has remarked, “An individual problem can be dismissed as a glitch. But when error after error after error favors Bush and not a single ‘accident’ favors Kerry, we’ve left glitch-land.”32

There is widespread evidence, which goes well beyond any mere accumulation of local problems, that “glitch-land” is indeed far behind us. The landscape to which the 2004 U.S. presidential election belongs includes the murky swamps of Tammany Hall-style election-fixing—and the still more sinister morasses of ‘Jim Crow’ as well.

It has been reported that Republican-controlled counties in Ohio and elsewhere sought to reduce the African-American vote by deliberately curtailing the numbers of polling stations and voting machines in working-class precincts: large numbers of would-be voters were effectively disenfranchised by line-ups that were many hours long.33 The Republican Party’s purging of African Americans from voters’ lists gained the 2000 election for George W. Bush;34 as informed observers had anticipated,35 this shameful illegality was repeated in 2004 on a wider scale.

Large-scale polling-station challenges were used to further slow the voting, and to turn the new provisional ballots into a mechanism for effectively disenfranchising minority voters. In the swing state of Ohio this year, it appears that fully 155,000 voters—most of them African-Americans—were obliged as a result of polling-station challenges to cast provisional ballots.36 Although it is becoming clear that the great majority of these citizens were legally entitled to vote,37 the likelihood that their votes will be fairly counted, or that Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell will permit them to be included in the official tally, remains slender.

The effect of this Jim Crow mechanism appears to be compounded by racially-biased judgments of ballot spoilage. As Greg Palast reports, 54 percent of all ballots judged ‘spoiled’ in the 2000 election in Florida were cast by African-American voters, and similarly scandalous percentages are expected in key states this time round. Nor have African Americans been the sole victims of these tactics: it appears that in New Mexico, where Hispanics’ ballots are five times more likely to be laid aside as ‘spoiled’ than those of white voters, 13,000 Hispanics were effectively disenfranchised by means of provisional ballots.38 Bush won New Mexico by less than half that number of votes.

But it is the co-presence of other forms of corruption, in addition to all these, that establishes the difference between an election dirtied by illegalities, and one that was not merely soiled and distorted by fraud but actually stolen. The evidence presented within the texts listed in my “Evidence of Fraud” bibliography suggests with gathering strength that the Karl Rovian maneuvers alluded to above were supplemented on November 2, 2004 by less conspicuous—and yet decisive—manipulations of the machines that recorded and tabulated the votes.

How precisely this apparent manipulation may have been carried out in different jurisdictions—by rigging machines in advance to mis-record or delete votes, by configuring proprietary software so as to allow ‘back-door’ access for unrestrained vote-tampering, or by hacking into the notoriously insecure vote-tabulation systems—remains as yet undetermined. However, the evidence has been coming to light with surprising rapidity.

As observers and analysts noted at once, troubling discrepancies were apparent between the exit poll results published by CNN on the evening of November 2 and the official vote tallies.39 No less disturbing, as I observed in my article on the subject, is the fact that the exit poll data was systematically tampered with early on November 3 to make the figures conform to the vote tallies. At 1:41 a.m. EST on November 3, for example, the Ohio exit poll was altered: Kerry, who had previously been shown as leading Bush by 4 percent in that state, was now represented in the revised exit poll as trailing him by 2.5 percent. And yet the number of respondents in the poll had increased from 1,963 to only 2,020. An additional 57 respondents—a 2.8 percent increase—had somehow produced a 6.5 percent swing from Kerry to Bush. At 1:01 a.m. EST on November 3, the Florida exit poll was likewise altered: Kerry, who had previously been shown in a near dead heat with Bush, now trailed him by 4 percent. In this case, the number of respondents rose only from 2,846 to 2,862. A mere 16 respondents—0.55 percent of the total—produced a 4 percent swing to Bush.40

However, the key exit-poll issue remains the divergence between the November 2 exit polls and the vote tallies. Steven Freeman concluded, in the first draft of his judicious study of the November 2 exit poll data, that “Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature conclusion, but the election’s unexplained exit poll discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is the responsibility of the media, academia, polling agencies, and the public to investigate.”41

Other evidence points toward a strengthening, indeed to a substantial confirmation of this “unavoidable hypothesis” of systematic fraud. Some of this evidence has been emerging from the swing state of North Carolina, and from the two key swing states of Florida and Ohio—either one of which, had John Kerry won it, would have made him the acknowledged President-elect.

In North Carolina, the tell-tale marks of electronic electoral fraud have been brought to light by an analyst who publishes at the Democratic Underground site under the name of ‘ignatzmouse.’ (“Ignatz,” remember, is the name of the mouse who in the Krazy Kat cartoons smacks the unhappy cat with the inevitable brick. That pesky mouse is once again on target.)

What gives the game away in the North Carolina election data is the disparity within the presidential and senatorial vote-counts between the so-called “absentee” votes—a category that apparently includes the early voting data as well as votes cast by citizens living abroad and military personnel—and the polling-day votes cast on November 2.

In the race for Governor, 30 percent of the votes cast for the Republican and the Democratic candidate alike were absentee votes; the other 70 percent were cast on November 2. The Democrat won with 55.6 percent of both the absentee and the polling-day votes. In most of the other statewide races in the North Carolina election there were similarly close correlations between absentee and polling-day votes. For example, Democrats won the post of Lieutenant Governor, with 55.7 percent of absentee and 55.5 percent of polling-day votes; the post of Secretary of State, with 58 percent of absentee and 57 percent of polling-day votes; and the post of Attorney General, with 56.7 percent of absentee and 55.2 percent of polling-day votes. In three other statewide races, and in the voting for three constitutional amendments, the correlation between absentee and polling-day votes remains very close (though tight races for three other positions in the state administration were won by Republicans with polling-day swings in favour of the Republican candidates of 4.2, 5.2, and 5.4 percent respectively).

Given the close correlations between absentee and polling-day votes in ten of the thirteen statewide races, the senate result looks suspicious: the Democrat’s narrow lead in the absentee voting became a clear defeat on November 2, with a 6.4 percent swing in the polling-day votes to the Republican. And the presidential results look more seriously implausible. In the absentee votes, Kerry trailed by 6 percent, a result that ‘ignatzmouse’ remarks “is consistent with the pre-election polls and most importantly with the exit polls of November 2nd.” But in the election day voting, there was a further swing of fully 9 percent to Bush. Bush led in the absentee votes (30 percent of the total) by 52.9 percent to Kerry’s 46.9 percent; but on polling day he took 57.3 percent of the remaining votes, while Kerry received 42.3 percent. In the absence of any other explanation, these figures point to electronic fraud—and, more precisely, to “a ‘date-specific’ alteration in the software, a hack, or a specific [software] activation just prior to the election.”42

The Florida evidence is, if anything, more flagrant. On November 18, Professor Michael Hout of the University of California at Berkeley released a statistical study indicating that electronic voting technology had produced a very substantial distortion of the presidential vote tally in Florida. According to the analyses conducted by Hout and his team, irregularities associated with electronic voting machines accounted for at least 130,000 votes in Bush’s lead over Kerry in Florida—and possibly twice that much. (The uncertainty stems from the fact that the machines may have awarded Bush “ghost votes” which increased his tally without reducing Kerry’s, or they may have misattributed Kerry votes as Bush votes. As Hout explains, the disparities “amount to 130,000 votes if we assume a ‘ghost vote’ mechanism and twice that—260,000 votes—if we assume that a vote misattributed to one candidate should have been counted for the other.”)43

Hout’s results have not gone unchallenged;44 obviously enough, the validity of statistical analyses depends on the extent to which all possible causal factors have been accounted for. But other data indicates that the ‘haunting’ of Florida’s electronic voting tabulators was if anything more serious than Hout and his associates believe. As I have already noted, in six Florida counties the number of votes purportedly cast exceeded the number of registered voters—by a cumulative total of 188,885.45 These are apparently “ghost votes,” and unless we’re willing to assume a level of electoral participation resembling those claimed by totalitarian states like Ceaucescu’s Romania or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a significant percentage of the other votes cast in these counties must also represent the electoral choice not of human beings but of Republican hackers.

Further evidence which may help to identify the agents involved in Florida’s electronic voting fraud has in fact begun to emerge. Brandon Adams, for example, has noted striking divergences among Florida voters according to the makes and models of the voting machines they used in different counties;46 and a heavy hacking of vote-tabulation systems used in conjunction with the older optical-scan voting machines is now well-established.47

Moreover, statistically-based work is being complemented by acquisitions of direct material evidence. In Volusia County, one of Florida’s six most seriously ‘haunted’ counties, where 19,306 more votes were cast than there are registered voters, Bev Harris’s BlackBoxVoting team caught county election officials red-handed on November 16 in the act of trashing original polling-place tapes which BlackBoxVoting had asked for in a Freedom of Information request. In addition to filming the behaviour of county officials, her team was able to establish that some copies of the tapes that officials had prepared to give them in response to the Freedom of Information Act request had been falsified in favour of George W. Bush—in one precinct alone by hundreds of votes.48 The Volusia County materials provide proof, moreover, that the GEMS central vote-tabulation system, which was supposedly “stand-alone” and non-networked, was remotely accessed during the election.49

Ohio, remember, was the deciding state. John Kerry conceded the election after calculating that the some 155,000 provisional ballots cast in Ohio would not suffice—even if they were properly counted, and even if, as expected, they were very largely cast by Kerry supporters—to overturn the tallied results, according to which Bush had won the state by 136,483 votes.

However, the exit poll data indicates that it was Kerry who won the state, and by a comfortable margin. Once again, there is substantial evidence of electronic electoral fraud. Teed Rockwell found, after careful study of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections website, that twenty-nine precincts in this county “reported votes cast IN EXCESS of the number of registered voters—at least 93,136 extra votes total.” The same website he studied also repays further study, for Rockwell’s tallying of ‘ghost votes’ is in fact conservative.50 To cite just one example, Brook Park City is listed as having 14,491 registered voters, of whom it is claimed that fully 14,458 exercised their civic duty and cast ballots—for a turn-out rate of 99.4 percent. I leave it to the curious to discover how many of these high-minded but possibly nonexistent citizens supported their incumbent President.

Those who want to pursue the questions of vote fraud and suppression in Ohio may also want to consult the studies carried out by Richard Philips, whose work, together with the data available on the websites of Cuyahoga and other counties, provides depressing evidence of successful vote suppression in urban precincts. (It has been estimated that vote suppression tactics may have cost Kerry 45,000 votes across the whole state of Ohio.)51

The Green Party and Libertarian Party presidential candidates, belatedly followed by the Kerry/Edwards campaign, have called for a recount in Ohio. But if Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Blackwell permits no more than a recount, without a rigorous audit of the electronic voting machines and tabulators as well, the numbers for a reversal of the election results are probably not there. On the optimistic assumption that a fair count of the 155,000 provisional ballots would result in 10 percent of them being disqualified and 70 percent of the remainder being validated as Kerry votes, those ballots might reduce Bush’s lead in Ohio by as much as 55,800 votes. However, it seems unlikely that a recount, including a re-examination of the more than 96,000 Ohio votes (most of them cast on old punch-card machines) that were discarded as spoiled, would turn up the almost 81,000 additional Kerry votes that would still be needed.

Together with the principle that every duly cast vote must be counted, advocates for democracy need to assert another complementary principle: the principle that votes cast not in polling booths, but in the hard drives of voting-tabulation machines; and not by citizens, but rather by ghosts summoned into existence by Republican hackers’ nimble fingers, have no business getting counted, and should be removed from the tally.

The effect of turning a ‘Ghostbuster’ computer-auditing team like Bev Harris’s BlackBoxVoting organization loose on the Ohio results, to carry out a serious audit of any polling precinct and computer-log data that hasn’t already been quietly destroyed, might well be startling. For while a simple recount would probably leave Kerry trailing by several tens of thousands of votes, a thorough computer-audit ‘exorcism’ of the vote tallies, should such a thing ever be permitted, might well lead to a reversal of the national election results.

Whatever the finally certified results may be, a larger informing context should not be forgotten. The regime of George W. Bush has made no secret of its scorn for the American Constitution and Bill of Rights, its hostility to any notion of international law, its contemptuous dismissal of the decent opinion of humankind both at home and abroad, its contempt, in the most inclusive sense, for truth.

Bush has claimed that the 2004 election gave him “capital”—which he now will not hesitate to spend. An early instance of this expenditure has been the assault on the city of Fallujah, and a compounding of the manifold war crimes of which Bush and those who serve him are already guilty.

But what is this “capital”? As the evidence is revealing with growing clarity, the 2004 presidential election was not in fact a victory for Bush, but rather the occasion for an insolent usurpation.

A ‘president’ who takes office through fraud and usurpation can make no legitimate claim to exercise the stolen power of his office.

As the knowledge of his offence becomes ever more widely disseminated, he may yet come, like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, “[to] feel his title / Hang loose upon him, like a giant’s robe / Upon a dwarfish thief.”

NOTES

1  See “Ukraine cities defy poll result,” BBC News (22 November 2004), http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4033475.stm; and “In quotes: World concern at Ukraine election,” BBC News (23 November 2004), http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4034013.stm.

2  David Rosnick, “Polling and the Ballot: The Venezuelan Referendum,” Center for Economic and Policy Research (19 August 2004), http://www.cepr.net/publications/venezuelan_referendum.htm.

3  Jonah Gindin, “Venezuela's Opposition Resorts to Phony Exit Polls,” Venezuelanalysis.com (15 August 2004), http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1248.

4  Michel Chossudovsky, “IMF Sponsored 'Democracy' in The Ukraine,” Centre for Research on Globalization (28 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO411D.html.

5  See “Súmate,” http://www.venezuelafoia.info/NED/SUMATE/SUMATE%20index.htm.

6  For documentation derived from Freedom of Information Act requests, see www.venezuelafoia.info.

7  See Philip Stinard, “Governor Enrique Mendoza: Greenberg's man for the Venezuelan Presidency,” Vheadline (4 July 2004), http://www.vheadline.com/printer_news.asp?id=21881.

8  See Anders Aslund, “Ukraine's Future and U.S. Interests: Testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Europe,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (12 May 2004), http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1533; Larry Chin, “Cold War Crisis in the Ukraine: Control of Oil: Key Grand Chessboard 'Pivot' at Stake,” Centre for Research on Globalization (26 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHI411D.html; and Olga Oliker, “Ukraine and the Caspian: An Opportunity for the United States,” Issue Paper 198, RAND Center for Russia and Eurasia (2000), http://www.rand.org/publications/1P/1P198.

9  Michel Chossudovsky, War and Globalization: The Truth Behind September 11 (Shanty Bay, ON: Global Outlook, 2002), pp. 65-75.

10  Alexsandar Vasovic, “Ukraine's Early Results, Exit Polls Differ,” Associated Press (21 November 2004), available at Findlaw, http://news.corporate.findlaw.com/ap_stories/i/1103/11-21-2004/20041121220016_16.html.

11  John Kubiniec, “Election Fraud in Ukraine Presidential Vote,” Freedom House (22 November 2004), http://www.freedomhouse.org/media/pressrel/112204.htm.

12  “Ukraine,” Centre for Public Opinion and Democracy, The University of British Columbia, http://www.cpod.ub.ca/tracker/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewitem&itemid=2591.

13  SOCIS and the Social Monitoring Center had previously collaborated in exit polling; see “Press Release” [Exit Polls in the March 2002 Election to be conducted by the Kiev Institute of Sociology, SOCIS Company, and the Social Monitoring Center, coordinated by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation], http://www.def.org.ua/ep/en/pr.

14  “Ukraine: 2nd Round of Presidential Election,” British Helsinki Human Rights Group, http://www.bhhrg.org/CountryReport.asp?ContryID=22&ReportID=230.

15  See Chossudovsky, “IMF Sponsored 'Democracy' in The Ukraine”; and Ian Traynor, “US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev,” The Guardian (26 November 2004), available at the Centre for Research on Globalization (28 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/TRA411A.html.

16  See “Ukraine: 2nd Round of residential Election.”

17  Dave Lindorff, “Double Standards on Exit Polls: Hypocrisy Sans Irony,” CounterPunch (24 November 2004), http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff11232004.html.

18  See 'Mystery Pollster' [Mark Blumenthal], “Exit Polls: The NEP [National Election Pool] Report,” Mystery Pollster (5 November 2004), http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/u/exit_polls_the_.html.

19  Steven F. Freeman, “The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy: Part I,” Working Paper #04-10, Center for Organizational Dynamics, Graduate Division, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, Buzzflash (21 November 2004), http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/11/ale04090.html; also available at Scoop (23 November 2004), http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00305.htm.

20  Ibid.

21  Ibid.

22  “National Election Pool (ABC, AP, CBS, CNN, Fox News, NBC News), Conducted by Edison/Mitofsky,” http://www.exit-poll.net.

23  See Michael Keefer, “Footprints of Electoral Fraud: The November 2 Exit Poll Scam,” Centre for Research on Globalization (5 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE411A.html; and Keith Olbermann, “Zogby vs. Mitofsky,” Bloggerman (24 November 2004), http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240.

24  Teed Rockwell, “93,136 EXTRA Votes Found in ONE Ohio County,” Rense.com (19 November 2004), http://www.rense.com/general59/one.htm. [As indicated in the note at the head of this article, the indication of large numbers of 'ghost' voters in Cuyahoga County was subsequently revealed to be mistaken; it arose because of the misleading manner in which election results were posted by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. My essay “The Strange Death of American Democracy: Endgame in Ohio,” Centre for Research on Globalization (24 January 2005), http://www.globalresearch.ca/article/KEE501A.html, reported other cases of impossibly high certified voter-turnout figures in two pro-Bush Ohio counties, Perry County and Miami County—as well as impossibly low certified turnout figures in predominantly African-American precincts in Cuyahoga County.]

25  Stirling Newberry, “The Voters are Restless: Election Fraud Story circulates the Internet,” BOPNews (n.d.), http://www.bopnews.com/archives/002403.htm#2403; and “Not 'Was It Stolen', but 'Was it Stealable',” BOPNews (11 November 2004), http://www.bopnews.com/archives/002412.html. In the state of Wyoming the number of votes cast likewise exceeded the number of registered voters—but in that case there are no evident grounds for suspicion. As the Wyoming Secretary of State’s website explains, “There were 232,396 registered voters in Wyoming prior to the [2004] General Election and 245,789 voted. This was possible because Wyoming state statute allows voters to register and vote at the polls on General Election Day.” (Wyoming’s current voting age population numbers 376,359, of whom 232,366 [62 percent] were registered; 245,789 people voted [106 percent of registered voters], for an overall turnout rate of 65 percent of eligible voters.) In Florida and Ohio, however, election-day registration is not permitted. According to Florida’s rules, “The registration books will be closed on the 29th day before each election and will remain closed until after that election. You must be registered for at least 29 days before you can vote in an election.” Ohio’s requirements are similar: “You must be a U.S. citizen and a resident of Ohio for at least thirty (30) days before the election and you must have registered to vote in Ohio at least thirty (30) days before the election.” Within these states, therefore, a surplus of votes cast over and above the number of registered voters is a clear indicator of electoral irregularities.

26  “McCain Statement on Elections in Ukraine,” International Republican Institute (23 November 2004), http://www.iri.org/11-23-04-McCain.asp.

27  See Michael Keefer, “Evidence of Fraud in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election: A Reader,” Centre for Research on Globalization (5 December 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/artickles/KEE412A.html.

28  Richard Morin, “Surveying the Damage: Exit Polls Can't Always Predict Winners, So Don't Expect Them To,” The Washington Post (20 November 2004), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64906-2004Nov20.html?sub=AR.

29  Peter Finn, “Partial Vote Results Show a Tight Race in Ukraine Runoff,” The Washington Post (22 November 2004), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2478-2004Nov21.html.

30  Erica Solvig and Dan Horn, “Warren Co. defends lockdown decision; FBI denies warning officials of any special threat,” The Cincinnati Enquirer (10 November 2004),  ; and Keith Olbermann, with Richard Engel and Jim Miklaszewski, “Did Your Vote Count? The Plot Thickens,” Countdown, MSNBC (8 November 2004), transcript and video stream available under the title “November 2nd: Voter Fraud and Homeland Security Terror Threat 'Advisories' in Ohio and Florida: Fraud on a massive scale is now corroborated by Network TV,” Centre for Research on Globalization, http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MNB411A.html.

31  James Paterson, “The Theft of the 2004 US Election,” Freewebs.com, http://www.freewebs.com/stolenelection/index.htm.

32  Joseph Cannon, “The empire strikes back: Data and disinformation,” Cannonfire (12 November 2004), http://www.cannonfire.blogspot.com/2004/11/empire-strikes-back-data-and.html.

33  Bob Fitrakis, “None dare call it vote suppression and fraud,” The Free Press (7 November 2004), http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/983; Fitrakis, “Document reveals Columbus, Ohio voters waited hours as election officials held back election machines,” The Free Press (16 November 2004), http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/990; Fitrakis, “How the Ohio election was rigged for Bush,” The Free Press (22 November 2004), http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/995.

34  John Conyers, Jr., and Democratic Investigative Staff, House Committee on the Judiciary, How to Make Over One Million Votes Disappear: Electoral Sleight of Hand in the 2000 Presidential Election. A Fifty-State Report Prepared for Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (Ranking Member, House Committee on the Judiciary; Dean, Congressional Black Caucus (Washington, DC: U.S. House of Representatives, August 20, 2001).

35  Greg Palast, “Electoral Fraud, Ethnic Cleansing of Voter Rolls, An Election Spoiled Rotten,” TomPaine.com (1 November 2004), http://www.tompaine.com; available at the Centre for Research on Globalization (4 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/PAL411A.html; Martin Luther King III, and Greg Palast, “Jim Crow Revived in Cyberspace,” The Baltimore Sun (8 May 2003); available at http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=222&row=1.

36  Greg Palast, “Kerry Won Ohio: Just Count the Ballots at the Back of the Bus,” In These Times (12 November 2004), http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=393&row=0; also published as “Most voters in Ohio chose Kerry; here's how the votes vanished,” OpEdNews (15 November 2004), http://www.opednews.com/palast_111504_ohio_chose_kerry.htm. See also David Solnit, “Massive Vote Suppression and Corruption in Ohio,” Centre for Research on Globalization (3 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/SOL411A.html.

37  Mark Williams, “Ohio Provisional Ballots Seem Legitimate,” Associated Press (17 November 2004); available at Truthout (18 November 2004), http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111804V.shtml.

38  Palast, “Kerry Won Ohio.”

39  See Faun Otter, “Vote Fraud—Exit Polls Vs Actuals,” Scoop (4 November 2004), http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00072.htm; Jonathan Simon, “47 State Exit Poll Analysis Confirms Swing Anomaly,” Scoop (11 November 2004); available at http://www.opednews.com/votergate2004.htm; David Dodge, “Response to MIT/Caltech,” Ustogether.org (13 November 2004), http://ustogether.org/election04/dodge/MIT_Caltech_rebuttal_11-13-04.htm; Sara S. DeHart, “Something is Rotten in Denmark: Exit poll data in former Soviet Republic of Georgia vs. USA,” Online Journal (17 November 2004), http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/111704DeHart/111704dehart.html; and Steven Freeman, “The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy.”

40  Keefer, “Footprints of Electoral Fraud.”

41  Steven F. Freeman, “The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy” [First Draft], Buzzflash (11 November 2004), http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/11/ale04090.html.

42  'ignatzmouse,' “Unfficial Audit of NC Election: Comprehensive Case for Fraud,” Democratic Underground (12 November 2004), http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=shpw_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=45003&mesg_id=45003.

43  Michael Hout et al., with the assistance of the UC Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team, “The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections,” Working Paper, UC Data (Data Archive & Technical Assistance), UC Berkeley Survey Research Center (18 November 2004), http://www.ucdata.berkeley.edu.

44  Alex Strashny, “Working Paper: The lack of effect of electronic voting machines on change in support for Bush in the 2004 Florida elections,” Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, University of California, Irvine, available at Verifiedvoting.org (21 November 2004), http://verifiedvoting.org/article.php?id=5347.

45  Newberry, cited in n. 25 above.

46  Brandon Aams, “An Examination of the 2004 Elections,” http://www.electionexamination.blogspot.com.

47  Paterson, “The Theft of the 2004 US Election”; Bev Harris, “The Tampering of Electronic Voting Systems on November 2nd,” BlackBoxVoting (7 November 2004), http://www.blackboxvoting.org, available at the Centre for Research on Globalization (8 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/HAR411A.html.

48  Bev Harris, “Vote Fraud, Volusia County on Lockdown. County election records just got put on lockdown: Duelling lawyers, election officials gnashing teeth, Votergate.tv film crew catching it all,” Scoop (16 November 2004), http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00246.htm; Thom Hartmann, “'Stinking Evidence' of Possible Election Fraud Found in Florida,” Scoop (19 November 2004), http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00258.htm.

49  Bev Harris, “Dems Pocket $52 Million, CNN Ignores Evidence, and Officials Stonewall … What Vote Fraud?” BreakForNews.com (24 November 2004), http://www.breakfornews.com/articles/WhatVoteFraud.htm.

50  The website is that of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, http://boe.cuyahogacounty.us/BOE/results/currentresults1.htm#top.

51  David S. Bernstein, “Questioning Ohio: No controversy this time? Think again,” The Boston Phoenix (12-18 November 2004), http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/multi-page/documents/04256171.asp.  

Footprints of Electoral Fraud: The November 2 Exit Poll Scam

First published three days after the election at the Centre for Research on Globalization (5 November 2004), http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE411A.html, and available also at www.globalresearch.ca/footprints-of-electoral-fraud-the-november-2-exit-poll-scam/115. This essay also appeared online at twenty other websites in 2004 and 2005; it was re-published by the Centre for Research on Globalization on 23 October 2012 under the title “Recalling the 2004 US Presidential Election: The Footprints of Electoral Fraud,” as being “of particular relevance in relation to the forthcoming November 2012 presidential election.” A correction has been made to one sentence of the original text, as indicated in note 3.

Footprints of Electoral Fraud: The November 2 Exit Poll Scam by Michael Keefer

Republican electoral fraud in the 2004 presidential election was widely anticipated by informed observers—whose warnings about the opportunities for fraud offered by “black box” voting machines supplied and serviced by corporations closely aligned with Republican interests (and used to tally nearly a third of the votes cast on November 2) have been amply borne out by the results.1

One of the clear indicators of massive electoral fraud was the wide divergence, both nationally and in swing states, between exit poll results and the reported vote tallies. The major villains, it would seem, were the suppliers of touch-screen voting machines. There appears to be evidence, however, that the corporations responsible for assembling vote-counting and exit poll information may also have been complicit in the fraud.

Until recently, the major American corporate infomedia networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and AP) relied on a consortium known as the Voter News Service for vote-counting and exit poll information. But following the scandals and consequent embarrassments of the 2000 and 2002 elections, this consortium was disbanded. It was replaced in 2004 by a partnership of Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International known as the National Election Pool.

The National Election Pool’s own data—as transmitted by CNN on the evening of November 2 and the early morning of November 3—suggest very strongly that the results of the exit polls were themselves fiddled late on November 2 in order to make their numbers conform with the tabulated vote tallies.

It is important to remember how large the discrepancy was between the early vote tallies and the early exit poll figures. By the time polls were closing in the eastern states, the vote-count figures published by CNN showed Bush leading Kerry by a massive 11 percent margin.2 At 8:50 p.m. EST, Bush was credited with 6,590,476 votes, and Kerry with 5,239,414. This margin gradually shrank. By 9:00 p.m., Bush purportedly had 8,284,599 votes, and Kerry 6,703,874; by 9:06 p.m., Bush had 9,257,135, and Kerry had 7,652,510, giving the incumbent a 9 percent lead, with 54 percent of the vote to Kerry’s 45 percent.

At the same time, embarrassingly enough, the national exit poll figures reported by CNN showed Kerry as holding a narrow but potentially decisive lead over Bush. At 9:06 p.m. EST, the exit polls indicated that women’s votes (54 percent of the total) were going 54 percent to Kerry, 45 percent to Bush, and 1 percent to Nader; men’s votes (46 percent of the total) were breaking 51 percent to Bush, 47 percent to Kerry, and 1 percent to Nader. Kerry, in other words, was leading Bush by nearly 3 percent.

The early exit polls appear to have caused some concern to the good people at the National Election Pool: a gap of 12 or 14 percent between tallied results and exit polls can hardly inspire confidence in the legitimacy of an election.

One can surmise that instructions of two sorts were issued. The election-massagers working for Diebold, ES&S (Election Systems & Software) and the other suppliers of black-box voting machines may have been told to go easy on their manipulations of back-door ‘Democrat-Delete’ software: mere victory was what the Bush campaign wanted, not an implausible landslide. And the number crunchers at the National Election Pool may have been asked to fix up those awkward exit polls.

Fix them they did. When the national exit polls were last updated, at 1:36 a.m. EST on November 3, men’s votes (still 46 percent of the total) had gone 54 percent to Bush, 45 percent to Kerry, and 1 percent to Nader; women’s votes (54 percent of the total) had gone 47 percent to Bush, 52 percent to Kerry, and 1 percent to Nader.

But how do we know the fix was in? Because the exit poll data also included the total number of respondents. At 9:00 p.m. EST, this number was 13,047; by 1:36 a.m. EST on November 3 it had risen by 3.6 percent, to a final total of 13,531 respondents—but with a corresponding swing of 4.5 percent from Kerry to Bush in voters’ reports of their choices.3 Given the increase in respondents, a swing of this size is a mathematical impossibility.

The same pattern is evident in the exit polls of two key swing states, Ohio and Florida.

At 7:32 p.m. EST, CNN was reporting the following exit poll data for Ohio. Women voters (53 percent of the total) favoured Kerry over Bush by 53 percent to 47 percent; male voters (47 percent of the total) preferred Kerry over Bush by 51 percent to 49 percent. Kerry was thus leading Bush by a little more than 4 percent. But by 1:41 a.m. EST on November 3, when the exit poll was last updated, a dramatic shift had occurred: women voters had split 50-50 in their preferences for Kerry and Bush, while men had swung to supporting Bush over Kerry by 52 percent to 47 percent. The final exit polls showed Bush leading in Ohio by 2.5 percent.

At 7:32 p.m., there were 1,963 respondents; at 1:41 a.m. on November 3, there was a final total of 2,020 respondents. These fifty-seven additional respondents must all have voted very powerfully for Bush—for while representing only a 2.8 percent increase in the number of respondents, they managed to produce a swing from Kerry to Bush of fully 6.5 percent.4

In Florida, the exit polls appear to have been tampered with in a similar manner. At 8:40 p.m. EST, CNN was reporting exit polls that showed Kerry and Bush in a near dead heat. Women voters (54 percent of the total) preferred Kerry over Bush by 52 percent to 48 percent, while men (46 percent of the total) preferred Bush over Kerry by 52 percent to 47 percent, with 1 percent of their votes going to Nader. But the final update of the exit poll, made at 1:01 a.m. EST on November 3, showed a different pattern: women voters now narrowly preferred Bush over Kerry, by 50 percent to 49 percent, while the men preferred Bush by 53 percent to 46 percent, with 1 percent of the vote still going to Nader. These figures gave Bush a 4 percent lead over Kerry.

The number of exit poll respondents in Florida had risen only from 2,846 to 2,862. But once again, a powerful numerical magic was at work. A mere sixteen respondents—0.55 percent of the total number—produced a four percent swing to Bush.

What we are witnessing, the evidence would suggest, is a late-night contribution by the National Elections Pool to the rewriting of history.

It is possible that at some future moment questions about electoral fraud in the 2004 presidential election might become insistent enough to be embarrassing. The pundits, at that point, will be able to point to the NEP’s final exit poll figures in the decisive swing states of Florida and Ohio—and to marvel at how closely they reflect the NEP’s vote tallies.

The Ohio Fifty-Seven (is there a Heinz-Kerry joke embedded in the number?) and the Florida Sixteen will have done their bit in ensuring the democratic legitimacy of the one-party imperial state.

NOTES

1  Among the warnings, see Bev Harris, Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century (Talion Publishing/Black Box Voting; free internet version available at www.BlackBoxVoting.org); Infernal Press, “How George W. Bush Won the 2004 Presidential Election” (Infernal Press, 25 June 2003); Steve Moore, “E-Democracy: Stealing the Election in 2004” (Global Outlook, No. 8, Summer 2004); and Greg Palast, “An Election Spoiled Rotten” (www.TomPaine.com, 1 November 2004). Early assessments of the election include Greg Palast, “Kerry Won… Here are the Facts” (www.TomPaine.com, 4 November 2004); and Wayne Madsen, “Grand Theft Election” (www.globalresearch.ca, 5 November 2004).

2  The information supplied here is from http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results.

3  My original text did not provide the final number of respondents to the national exit poll, and stated, mistakenly, that the number of respondents had risen “by less than 3 percent,” and “with a corresponding swing of 5 percent from Kerry to Bush....” These errors, corrected in the present text, did not affect the validity of the argument.

4  The exit poll data for Ohio and Florida, as well as the national exit poll data, broke down responses by Gender, by Race and Gender (with figures for white men, white women, non-white men, and non-white women), and by Race (with figures for whites, African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and Others). These figures show corresponding shifts from Kerry to Bush.    

Michael Winterbottom’s In This World

This text was delivered on 3 October 2004 as an introduction to the first film shown in my colleague Paul Salmon's Beyond Hollywood 2004/2005 series at the University of Guelph. It has not previously been published.

Michael Winterbottom’s In This World by Michael Keefer

The remarkable film that we are going to see this-evening, Michael Winterbottom’s In This World, is at once a documentary and a drama. At intervals documentary-style voice-overs will give us crucial historical and contextual information; and we will see on contour maps the itinerary followed by two young Afghans who are seeking to get to London from the refugee camp outside Peshawar which has been their home. The film is shot with hand-held cameras, to which the people who appear on camera are sometimes clearly responding. There is a story-line, established by the film crew in advance—and yet that story-line consists simply of a journey through actually-existing networks of refugee-trafficking. The two principal characters in the film are paid actors, but also real refugees. Their dialogue, and that of the other people in the film, is unscripted: they are saying what it comes into their own minds to say in the situations they find themselves in. The Iranian border policemen are real border policemen, whom Winterbottom and his colleagues persuaded to participate in their narrative. And at the end of the film the younger refugee, Jamal, is living in London, though subject to a deportation order which is to be activated the day before his eighteenth birthday: his journey to London has been both fictive and actual. His companion Enayatullah returns to his wife and young children in the camp at Peshawar; with the money he has made from the film, he is able to buy a pick-up truck and start a small business.

* * *

My goal in introducing this film is to offer some additional understanding of the historical events that led after the Soviet intervention in December 1979 to the collapse of civil society in Afghanistan and to the long-term refugee crisis. (Sixteen-year-old Jamal was born in the Peshawar camp, and until his departure for London knew no other home.)

Afghanistan’s internal divisions flared into civil war after 1979—perhaps less because of the country’s internal socio-political dynamics than as a result of imperial geopolitics. During the nineteenth century Afghanistan, as the ‘Northwest Frontier’ of British India, was the site of a ‘Great Game’ of intrigue, diplomacy, and intermittent border warfare played out between the British and Russian empires and their surrogates. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, explained in a 1998 interview that after July 1979 it became the deliberate policy of the United States to revive this ‘Great Game’ in a new form by seeking to destabilize Afghanistan’s secular and (thanks to a recent coup d'état) pro-USSR government. The calculation was that the Russians would not tolerate the collapse of a friendly regime on their southern border, and could thus be drawn into a counter-insurgency war that the U.S., with the help of Islamist guerrilla forces supplied from Pakistan, could turn into the USSR’s “own Vietnam war.”1

This strategy succeeded: the Afghan war broke the morale of the Red Army and contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. A significant part of the ‘Western’ costs of the war was borne by U.S. surrogates, especially Saudi Arabia, which also provided Islamist moujahidin (among them Osama bin Laden) to fight godless secularism in Afghanistan. But the human costs to Afghans were appalling: they were exposed both to the horrors of Russian aerial bombardments and helicopter attacks, and also to the tyrannies of the competing warlords who eventually overthrew the Russian-supported Najibullah regime, and who then proceeded to reduce the capital city of Kabul to rubble with their own internecine struggles for supreme power. Urban Afghan women lost the civil rights they had begun to enjoy under secular governments. Opium poppy production sky-rocketed, with the Afghan warlords and the CIA using the profits of the drug trade to finance their respective endeavours.2 Fighting among the warlord factions ended only in 1998 when they were militarily defeated in all but the northern provinces of Afghanistan by a puritanical Islamist movement known as the Taliban—which was, by the way, created and run by Pakistan’s own CIA, the Interservices Intelligence Directorate (ISI).

In the mean time, a different kind of geopolitical pressure was emerging. During the 1990s, the United States gave public notice of a new strategy aimed at gaining military and economic control over the hydrocarbon reserves both of the Middle East and of Central Asia—and at denying access to these reserves by competing powers such as Russia, China, India, Japan, and France. This new ‘Great Game,’ discussed in documents published by the Congressional Committee on International Relations in February 1998, was adopted by the U.S. Congress in the Silk Road Strategy Act of March 19, 1999.3

The 1991 Gulf War had advanced American military-geopolitical and oil interests very significantly: Iraq, a major regional power, was removed from contention, and the U.S. was able to establish bases in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Other aspects of the emerging Silk Road Strategy fell into place when the United States established a regional military alliance, under NATO protection, with Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Moldova, and secured permission to construct air bases in Tajikistan, Kyrgistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan.

The importance of Afghanistan in relation to this strategy has been underlined by Michel Chossudovsky:

It not only borders the “Silk Road Corridor” linking the Caucasus to China’s Western border, it is also at the hub of five nuclear powers: China, Russia, India, Pakistan and Kazakhstan. [….] Afghanistan is at the strategic crossroads of the Eurasian pipeline and transport routes. It also constitutes a potential land bridge for the southbound oil pipeline from the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan to the Arabian Sea across Pakistan….4

Such a pipeline from the Caspian Basin oilfields across Afghanistan was negotiated by the oil giant Unocal with the Taliban government, though by early 2001 the Taliban had lost interest in the idea. In the summer of 2001 the Taliban was informed by American diplomats that it should expect to be overthrown by the U.S. military by October.

When it came, the American attack upon Afghanistan in October, 2001 was legitimized in world opinion by the terrorist attacks upon the United States of September 11, 2001, the generally accepted mastermind of which, Osama bin Laden, enjoyed the protection of the Taliban state. United Nations Security Council Resolution 1368 called “on all States to work together urgently to bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of these terrorist attacks”—which, as Stephen Shalom and Michael Albert have observed, “is a far cry from authorizing the United States to decide unilaterally to wage a war against Afghanistan.”5

There is reason to believe, as I have already implied, that the primary motivation for the American attack on Afghanistan had more to do with geopolitics than with any desire to capture the planners of the terrorist crimes of September 11th. The London Daily Telegraph reported on October 4, 2001 that the government of Pakistan had rejected an agreement reached by the Taliban according to which Bin Laden would be extradited to Pakistan to stand trial there for the September 11 attacks before an international tribunal. It has been suggested that the United States vetoed this proposal—which seems plausible, given other evidence that the U.S. was less keen on capturing Bin Laden than it professed to be. (For example, a U.S. official was quoted during the war as saying that “casting the objectives too narrowly would risk a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr bin Laden were captured.”)6

Two important new books cast further retrospective light upon the Afghan war. In The New Pearl Harbor, David Ray Griffin, a distinguished American theologian and philosopher, concludes after a lucid and careful weighing of the evidence that there are a total of forty distinct reasons—“smoking guns,” he calls them—which point to complicity by the government of President George W. Bush in the attacks of September 11.7 Michael Ruppert, a former LAPD detective, goes further in his forthcoming book Crossing the Rubicon, which presents evidence that the Bush administration was not merely complicitous in 9/11, but actually organized the attacks.8

During the year after October 7, 2001, the United States lavished some ten billion dollars on Afghanistan—84% of which “was spent to bomb the country and to finance anti-Taliban fighters [….] paying warlords $100,000 each and supplying them with truckloads of weapons.”9 Although estimates of casualties resulting from the bombing campaign can be no more than approximations, it seems that some 3,000 civilians were killed, and that a further 20,000 died from causes such as starvation and disease as an indirect result of the bombing.10

President Bush claimed in his State of the Union address in January 2002 that the United States had “saved a people from starvation, and freed a country from brutal oppression.” Wrong on both counts. On September 6, 2001 the World Food Program had announced, in response to “widespread pre-famine conditions,” a new project to provide food aid to 5.5 million Afghans; but the aid convoys were blocked when, at U.S. insistence, the Afghanistan-Pakistan border was closed on September 16. By October 2002, the mortality rate in one northern refugee camp had risen to twice what it had been before the bombing. A policy brief published by the aid agency CARE in September 2002 suggested that “promises [to rebuild Afghanistan] now look increasingly suspect”: though reconstruction needs were “significantly higher” than in Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, or East Timor, the international aid pledged to Afghanistan was less than 30% of the average per capita rate for those countries in 2002—and the amount pledged for the following five years was only 17% of that rate.11

“Today,” George Bush said in that same State of the Union address, “[Afghan] women are free.” Wrong again. On March 2, 2003, CBC Newsworld showed the documentary The Daughters of Afghanistan, featuring the journalist Sally Armstrong. As Michele Landsberg wrote in the Toronto Star, “Armstrong says that only about 30 per cent of Afghan girls attend school today, due to lack of resources and a Taliban-like fundamentalist grip on the country outside the capital. The warlords are still running the country, and their rule is cruel, violent, and deeply misogynist. Outside of Kabul, girls and women are still jailed for trying to escape forced marriages. They are forced to wear the burqa, attacked by fanatic vice squads […]. Schools are firebombed; warlords’ troops rape with impunity.”12

The war exacerbated the refugee situation as a result of what can only be described as terror bombing of civilian populations. The manner in which the ground war was fought would appear also to have been designed to provoke terror. There is evidence, for example, that American troops, CIA agents, and the forces of Northern Alliance General Dostum collaborated in major war crimes in November 2001 following the surrender of Taliban forces in Kunduz. The murder of more than 3,000 prisoners of war at Mazar-i-Sharif has been very thoroughly documented, in part by the Irish director Jamie Doran’s film Massacre in Mazar. (This film was a major news story in Europe after it was shown in June 2002 to deputies and members of the press at the European parliament in Strasbourg; news of it was blacked out by the American media.)13

What is the current situation in Afghanistan? The American-imposed Prime Minister Hamid Karzai, a former employee of Unocal, has been described as effectively no more than the mayor of Kabul. Within the territories he and his close allies control, corruption, thievery, and a resurgent opium trade are rampant.14 The rest of the country is controlled either by U.S.-allied warlords or else, intermittently, by a resurgent Taliban resistance. The U.S. is spending $950 million per month to keep 9,000 pairs of boots on the ground in Afghanistan (with a further 35,000 support troops outside the country providing logistical support); other countries, among them Canada and Germany, have provided brigade-level forces for what amounts to a garrison of Kabul. There has been some movement of refugees back to their communities from the camps into which they had been driven by war and starvation, but large parts of the country remain humanitarian disaster areas—not least because of growing resentment against the American occupation forces and an intensifying insurgency. (As of February 2004, the mortality rate for U.S. troops in Afghanistan was three times higher than for U.S. troops in Iraq.)

As Marc Herold writes, “violence is endemic, corruption and extortion are rampant, the countryside is balkanized into fiefdoms, opium is the crop of choice, most Afghans (87%) still have no access to clean water, the lot of women has barely improved….”15 One can understand why, in 2004 no less than in 2001 or 2002, Afghan refugees might think the long, dangerous, and ruinously expensive journey from their dusty camps to the safety of Western Europe to be worth attempting.16

Welcome to “this world.”

NOTES

1  The quoted words are Brzezinski’s. See John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism (2nd ed., London: Pluto Press, 2000), p. 19.

2  See Cooley, pp. 127-61.

3  See Michel Chossudovsky, War and Globalization: The Truth Behind September 11 (Shanty Bay, ON: Global Outlook, 2002), pp. 66-68.

4  Chossudovsky, War and Globalization, p. 69.

5  Stephen Shalom and Michael Albert, “9/11 and Afghanistan: Part B of 45 Questions on U.S. Foreign Policy,” ZNet (October 9, 2002), http://www.zmag.org//content/showarticle.cfm?SectionD=40&ItemID=2447.

6  See Milan Rai, War Plan Iraq: Ten Reasons Against War on Iraq (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 37-38.

7  David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (2nd ed., Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2004), pp. 196-201.

8  Michael Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. Ruppert made a preliminary presentation of his case in an address to San Francisco’s prestigious Commonwealth Club on August 31, 2004; much of the evidence presented in his book is available at Ruppert’s website, http://www.copvcia.

9  James Ingalls, “Afghanistan: The First Puppet Regime in the Post Sept 11 World (Talk given at the Afghan Women’s Mission Conference, October 30, 2002),” ZNet, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=49&ItemID=2565.

10  See the articles of Ingalls and of Shalom and Albert cited above, and also Marc W. Herold, “A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting [revised],” Cursor (March, 2002), http://www.cursor.org/stories/civilian_deaths.htm.

11  See the article by Ingalls cited above.

12  Michele Landsberg, “Afghanistan documentary exposes Bush’s promises,” Toronto Star (March 2, 2003).

13  See Stefan Steinberg, “Afghan war documentary charges US with mass killings of POWs,” World Socialist Web Site (June 17, 2002), http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jun2002/afgh-j17.shtml.

14  See Marc W. Herold, “AfghaniScam: Livin’ Large Inside Karzai’s Reconstruction Bubble,” Cursor (September 24, 2003).

15  Herold, “The Taliban’s Second Coming,” Cursor (February 29, 2004), http://cursor.org/stories/secondcoming.html. 

16  For an account of the actual journey of a young Afghan refugee (also named Jamal!) to Norway, see Aseem Shrivastava, “Which Way Now? The Saga of an Anguished Afghan,” CounterPunch (August 7-8, 2004).