American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [80]
After it was too late, the Washington Post published a piece about how if all the votes had been recounted in all 67 counties, Gore would probably have been in the White House. A study cited by CBS and AP, conducted by the University of Chicago, reported: “Under any standard that tabulated all disputed votes statewide, Gore erased Bush’s advantage” and won by a narrow margin.10 Ho-hum, I guess, the deal was already done.
Of course, Gore won the national popular vote from the get-go. How can you get a half million more votes than the other guy and lose? The presidential is the only election where we allow that to happen. We should have gotten rid of the Electoral College long ago. It was fine back in the days when everybody was still on horseback. We now have cars and airplanes, and it’s time to leave an antiquated system behind. Who’s profiting from keeping it going? As a third-party guy, I was hoping 2004 would bring the opposite result: Bush would win the popular vote and Kerry would take the Electoral. Maybe that would have brought them to the table to abolish the whole thing.
But 2004, it turned out, was even more blatant election theft than in 2000. The exit polls were predicting a huge victory for Kerry. But, by late that night, somehow Bush had taken a decisive lead and Kerry conceded on the day after. “There is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale,” the New York Times “informed” us. The Washington Post called any talk of vote fraud “conspiracy theories.”11
Bull-crap. For starters here’s what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. later documented: “Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad never received their ballots—or received them too late to vote—after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations. A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states, was discovered shredding Democratic registrations. In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes, malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots. Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment—roughly one for every 100 cast.”12
The electronic voting machines played an even bigger role in the 2004 election, with 36 million votes being cast on the touch-screen systems owned by four private companies that use their own proprietary software. Three of those companies had close ties to the Republican Party. One of them, Diebold (including employees and their families) had contributed at least $300,000 to GOP candidates and party funds since 1998. The company’s CEO, Walden O’Dell, had gone so far in a fund-raising e-mail as to promise to deliver Ohio to Bush in ’04!13 With enemies like that, Kerry could have used a few friends demanding a return to paper ballots.
Ohio was where Bush’s “victory” put him over the top in the electoral college. From 12:20 in the morning until around 2 AM, the flow of information in Ohio mysteriously stopped while the vote count switched dramatically to Bush’s side.14 A comfortable 118,000-vote-plus official margin in Ohio then gave him a second term as president. But what really went down? “Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines, and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency.”15 Lou Harris, who basically invented modern political polling, said: “Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen.”16
The fellow in charge of the vote-counting was Ohio secretary of state J. Kenneth Blackwell, who also happened to be the co-chair of Bush’s reelection committee there. And nobody seemed