Stolen Elections And Media Blackouts
Richard Moore
Stolen Elections And Media Blackouts
By Carolyn Baker
27 October, 2008
Carolynbaker.net
(Burlington, Vermont: October 24, 2008) Shortly before a public
lecture presented at Champlain College, I sat down with Mark Crispin
Miller, Professor of Media Studies at New York University, to ask him
a number of questions regarding stolen elections-a subject Miller has
researched and written about extensively. Greg Palast, Robert F.
Kennedy, Jr., Bev Harris, Steve Rosenfeld, Bob Fitrakis, and Lynne
Landes, have provided monumental contributions to the subject of
election fraud, each with their own unique styles and methods of
targeting the issue. Mark Crispin Miller's 2005 book Fooled Again,
impeccably documents the stealing of the 2004 election, and Loser
Take All, a 2008 collection of essays on stolen elections
incorporates the research of other investigators of election fraud
such as Robert Kennedy, Jr; Bob Fitrakis, and Steve Rosenfeld.
Generously, Professor Miller gave me both time and disturbing
insights regarding the upcoming election of 2008.
CB: In progressive circles there are countless issues that attract
people, and I'm curious about what drew you to fight for clean,
legitimate, democratic elections in the United States as opposed to
some other issue.
MCM: What immediately drew my interest was the overwhelmingly obvious
fact that the 2004 election was stolen. We already know the 2000
election was stolen because the Supreme Court intervened so
flagrantly, but I think the 2004 election was stolen on an even
grander scale. What struck me was not just that fact, but no less,
the general refusal to admit it which was evident not only throughout
the corporate media but on the left as well. Even now I can't quite
get over how the left fell into line and dismissed the evidence as
"conspiracy theory" on the basis of very sloppy reporting by very
good reporters in progressive circles.
So the immediate reason why I got into it was because of this
staggering miscarriage of proper civic procedure and a betrayal of
democracy. The more I thought about it, the more I also came to
believe that this is the most important issue, precisely because we
can make no progress on any other front if we don't have the right to
pick our representatives, and more importantly, reject those who
don't represent our interests. That's vital, so I often say in my
talks that regardless of what your issue is, you're kidding yourself
if you think you can get anywhere when government is able to act with
impunity.
CB: So what are the maybe top half-dozen pieces of evidence that the
2004 election was stolen?
MCM: Well primarily, there is the audit of the vote in 18 counties of
Ohio that was carried out by Richard Hayes Phillips who published
Witness To A Crime which is the result of three years labor by
Richard and his researchers who literally scrutinized every single
ballot that was cast in 18 Ohio counties. This book is scrupulous,
precise, and explicit-fully illustrated and comes with a CD with
illustrations of ballots and how they were tampered with.
CB: Who published this?
MCM: Well this is an interesting story. This book was supposed to be
published by Kent State University Press, but when Phillips handed in
the manuscript, they told him that it was twice as long as it should
be and that they couldn't afford illustrations. This was not their
original agreement. Phillips told them that without illustrations,
the book isn't convincing, and he then decided to self-publish.
Nevertheless, it's a superb book, beautifully written, but it has
sold to date, 900 copies. He put his life savings into it and he's
been trying to promote it, and as you can see, it's highly specific
and technical. Therefore, it's a sort of an unwieldy smoking gun, but
it is a smoking gun because they discovered that John Kerry was
variously robbed of two hundred thousand votes in those 18 counties
alone. There's no argument with this. In the illustrations you can
see ballots with stickers placed over the square beside John Kerry's
name, thousands of ballots that were marked so that they would be
over-votes when people voted on them. The range and the ingenuity of
the fraud tactics are astonishing. After Phillips did his research,
55 boards of election out of 86 counties in Ohio, in defiance of a
court order, destroyed all or part of their ballots-that is 1.5
million ballots. That was a malicious destruction of evidence.
CB: Where can one purchase this book?
MCM: You can only get it on Phillips' website.
CB: What evidence do we have currently, in addition to the voluminous
evidence that you've provided in your books, that the 2008 election
may already be stolen?
MCM: I do resist putting it that way with all due respect to Greg
(Greg Palast) and Bobbie (Kennedy). I don't like to say that it's
already been stolen because it's demoralizing, but I will say that
they (the Republicans) have made enormous strides toward a McCain
victory already.
CB: In what way?
MCM: Well, election theft is a two-part process. On the one hand is
vote suppression. The purpose of vote suppression is to shrink the
electorate before the fact. In the last four years or so they have
moved somewhat away from fraudulent manipulation of ballots cast
toward grand pre-emptive tactics meant to prevent people from voting
in the first place. So within the realm of vote suppression, they
have managed to purge literally millions of names from the voter
roles. In New York state alone, we learned last week, 1.5 million
voters have been purged without their knowledge. That's New York;
it's not even a swing state.
There was a report, I think on Daily Kos, that the Justice Department
has managed to effect the purge of 13 million votes. I don't know how
many of those are legitimate purges because a lot of peoples' names
shouldn't be on the list because they're dead or something. But
between legal purges conducted by the Department of Justice and
illegal purges of the electronic voter roles carried out by various
partisan secretaries of state, and voter caging and other tactics,
they've managed to do a great deal to shrink the pool of voters who
would vote against McCain. That kind of thing will require a lot of
fighting and amassing evidence which means that there's got to be a
lot of video interviews, polls, phone calls placed to the hotlines-
what I'm saying is that this grand stroke of dis-enfranchisement
before election day has to be exposed and evidence thereof collected
and made available.
But that's not the only thing you do when you steal an election. You
also engage in electronic fraud. Here, we have the testimony of an
incredibly important person named Stephen Spoonamore who is the star
witness in a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations
Act) investigation in Ohio. He's a conservative Republican and a
former McCain supporter, but most importantly, he is a prominent
expert in the detection of computer fraud.
CB: Yes, Spoonamore and his testimony are featured in Lynn Landes
newly released documentary "Stealing America Vote By Vote" which I
recently watched and for which you, Professor Miller, were a consultant.
MCM: Yes, and Spoonamore has named the principal players in the Bush-
Cheney election fraud conspiracy. Specifically, he has named Mike
Connell, who has been helping Karl Rove steal elections since
Florida, 2000. Connell is the head of a company called GOVTECH
Solutions. If you check out a piece by Rebecca Abrahams on the
destruction of White House emails, which is actually about much more
than that, you'll learn that there's a list made up by Spoonamore
that he composed after a very troubling meeting of all the online
entities and companies that Connell runs or is involved with. It's a
huge menu of partisan and theocratic [Christianist, pro-life] outfits-
all part of the same terrifying matrix of disinformation, subversion,
and sabotage. Connell told Spoonamore that his motive for helping
Bush-Cheney steal elections was "to save the babies". As
progressives, this is something we have to wrap our minds around
because it turns out that most of the people who are involved in the
management of high-tech fraud are Christianists. These people are
fanatics who hate the majority. The majority doesn't buy their pro-
life agenda; the majority isn't going to sit still for bans on
contraception. The only way around that, in their eyes, is to subvert
the electorate.
There's an enormous corporate component to this too. One of the
defendants in the RICO suit is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because
they have spent to date $400 million on front organizations to defeat
candidates for the judicial bench nationwide who have an
insufficiently pro-business agenda. So we have a really unholy
marriage here of theocratic extremists and ruthless corporate interests.
CB: Hmmm. So how do you spell "fascism"?
Both your website, News From The Underground and Truth to Power
recently reported the October 4 interview with Naomi Wolf in which
she noted that police departments are mobilizing around the country
for unrest in relation to the economic crisis and the election, and
of course she mentioned what is now common knowledge, namely, that a
brigade of troops has returned from Iraq to assist with "crowd
control." In the light of this and your research on stolen elections,
I'm wondering how obvious you think a stolen election would have to
be in order for massive unrest to erupt.
MCM: I think at this point it would be quite obvious just because
Obama's lead is so big, and McCain is doing so poorly. All the
standard indicators suggest that the race is over and should be over.
I think, and I believe Naomi would agree with this, that all this
terrifying preparation for crackdown can only fail if there's a
sufficiently widespread mass resistance movement. I have always
thought that there's a lot more dissatisfaction and distrust around
our last few elections than we think there is. The press and the
Democratic Party are so blind to it that we tend to think that nobody
cares. I don't think that's true; I think a good half of the country
is suspicious.
CB: Well, that reminds me that I saw you recently on Free Speech TV
presenting a lecture at University of California at Santa Barbara
discussing stolen elections, and you suggested that there's kind of
an addiction in this society to voting even when we know our vote may
be meaningless as if we have a hopeless attachment to the belief that
we have legitimate, democratic elections in the United States. Would
you say more about that?
MCM: Yes, in all this talk about voting, it's important to
acknowledge that we have fettishized the ballot box and overestimated
voting as if it were the only instrument available to us for
democratic action. It's not the only instrument-there are all kinds
of things we can and should do; however, I do think that voting is a
fundamental and necessary instrument, but it's not really a
democratic action if there isn't popular control and oversight. We
have a long way to go before we have a democratic voting system. What
we actually have is a ritual-the same as in Iraq. People voted there
too!
Precisely because we have fettishized voting we are often that much
less able to face the fact that the whole process has been subverted
just as surely as it is subverted in closed societies. It's very hard
for Americans to wrap their minds around this because it's a
tremendous blow to our self-image and our exceptionalism. I don't
think that the general public has as much trouble facing that as the
establishment and media do.
CB: Last week CNN reported the story of former GOP operative, Allen
Raymond who wrote the book How To Rig An Election. What do you think
about CNN's reporting of the story?
MCM: The book is actually about vote suppression in New Hampshire in
2002. The context for this is that Republicans had lost control of
the Senate in 2002 as a result of the defection of Jim Jeffords.
There's strong evidence that they then stole a number of
Congressional elections as in Colorado, Minnesota, and New Hampshire.
One of the things they got caught for doing was a phone-jamming
scheme in the four cities of Southern New Hampshire which prevented
the unions from getting out the Democratic vote. Allen Raymond was a
hired gun and became a patsy who went to prison. After doing his
time, he wrote the book, but he doesn't really talk about election
rigging, and all he ends up saying is that he was part of a culture
that would do anything to win and that both parties are guilty of
such behavior-perfectly harmless stuff. He doesn't mention, for
example, that the phone-jamming operations were paid for by Jack
Abramoff with two checks from the Choctaw Indians. That's interesting
because it ties the two scandals together.
The reason he gets to go on CNN is that he's a much more palatable
witness to wrongdoing than I would be. Raymond's book is worth
reading, but it certainly doesn't compare with Richard Phillip Hayes'
book.
CB: You've just released Loser Take All: Election Fraud And The
Subversion Of Democracy which is a compilation of essays on stolen
elections, edited by you. In that book you offer a Twelve-Step
Program for taking back the American election process. First, I'm
wondering what inspired you to compile and edit this book, and I'd
like to hear your twelve steps.
MCM: I was simply tired of hearing people say that there's no
evidence of election fraud. There were essays out there that
constitute strong evidence as well as studies that could be done to
make this case, so I collected a number of pieces and asked the
authors to polish them up because I wanted to make available a
collection of these writings within six months of the election
because I wanted it all to be in one place.
The overall effect of the collection was necessarily kind of
harrowing and possibly demoralizing as this kind of analysis is for
people who haven't heard of this stuff which is pretty much everybody
because the press hasn't reported it. So I wanted something at the
end of the book that would give people a sense of constructive
possibility-of what they might fight for to fix the problem.
But the problem can't be solved unless we acknowledge that there is a
problem.
Summary: Mark Crispin Miller's Twelve Step Program can be viewed at
his News From the Undergroud website. I am deeply grateful to him for
his generosity in giving this interview in the midst of a very busy
schedule. Subsequently, we discussed our differences regarding our
willingness to participate in a rigged election system, my sharing
with him my unwillingness, for a plethora of reasons, to cast a vote
for a president on November 4. Professor Miller and I have
differences on a number of issues, perhaps the most fundamental,
although we did not discuss it, my contention that the values of
Western civilization itself have created not only irreparable
corruption in the American election system, but have contributed to
planet earth's triple threat: Climate change, energy depletion, and
global financial catastrophe and my belief that without the total
collapse of empire, humanity will continue to annihilate itself and
the earth community. Election fraud, from my perspective, is only one
aspect of a planetary affliction that is both ubiquitous and daunting.
Is that a potentially "demoralizing" perspective? Indeed it is if one
feels that a solution within the current paradigm of empire is
possible. Nevertheless, while I do not believe that the issue of
stolen elections trumps all others, I do believe that understanding
the scope and severity of electoral corruption is necessary for any
individual in pursuit of unmitigated truth-telling. Awakening to the
reality of rigged elections in the United States is as essential for
inhabiting adult reality as parting with one's belief in Santa Claus
or the Easter Bunny. Moreover, awakening from our denial about rigged
elections may enable us to penetrate other and more frightening
chimeras inherent in empire that not only provide illusions of
choice, but threaten to extinguish life on this planet as all of its
species have known it.
Mark Crispin Miller is professor of media studies at New York
University and the author of the book: Fooled Again, How the Right
Stole the 2004 Elections. He is known for his writing on American
media and for his activism on behalf of democratic media reform. His
books include Boxed In: The Culture of TV, Seeing Through Movies, and
Mad Scientists, a study of war propaganda.
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