The Richardson Report: How To Rig an Election,
the 2008 Edition
As the Republicans target ACORN and try to boot registered voters
off the rolls across the U.S., new information surfaces about the 2004
election. Also: Signs greed is dying.
By: John H. Richardson
Ed. Note: This is the second installment of John H.
Richardson's weekly column, "The Richardson Report." It will
run on Tuesdays. You can view the archive here.
The Republicans Couldn't Steal the Election
Again, Right? Right?
It all came to a head last week with the uproar caused by the
Republican campaign against ACORN, a liberal get-out-the-vote group
that recently signed up 1.3 million new voters. While it's true that
every year a handful of ACORN canvassers turn in forms with names like
Donald Duck, Donald Duck never actually shows up to vote.
Nevertheless, election officials are investigating ACORN in eleven
battleground states like Ohio, Florida and North Carolina, and
last week the Justice Department announced its own
investigation. On his website, John McCain's accused Barack Obama
of both hiding "the true nature of his relationship to ACORN"
and bragging that he'd "been fighting alongside ACORN" all
his life. In a nutty moment of hysterical overstatement, he said that
ACORN was "on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest
frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric
of democracy." Reports of vandalism against ACORN offices and
even death threats soon followed.
But this year, the Democrats are in no mood to back down. In
Montana, the public outcry over the six thousand votes was so
ferocious the
GOP backed off and its executive director resigned.
Democrats in Michigan went to court and last week a federal judge
ruled the foreclosure challenge illegal. In Ohio, Secretary of State
Jennifer Brunner fought the Republicans all the way to the Supreme
Court and won. Obama's campaign quickly sent a letter to the Justice
Department asking a prosecutor to look into the "specious vote
fraud allegations." And Congressman John Conyers upped the ante
with a letter to both Justice and the FBI linking the anti-ACORN
campaign to the scandal over the U.S. attorney firings in 2006, two of
whom were fired for refusing to pursue equally bogus legal cases
against ACORN canvassers.
Three Ways To Make Sure Your Vote
Counts
More recently, the left-wing corners of the Internet have been
buzzing with two recent depositions in a long-running lawsuit against
J. Kenneth Blackwell, the former Ohio Secretary State. The first is
from a researcher named Richard Hayes Phillips who says he examined
126,000 ballots and 127 poll books and found
"much evidence of ballot alternation, ballot
substitution, ballot box stuffing, ballot destruction, vote switching,
tabulator rigging and old-fashioned vote voter suppression."
The other is
an affidavit from Stephen Spoonamore, a Republican expert
in data security who detailed his theory on how the votes were
switched. More dramatically, he reported a conversation with Michael
Connell, the Republican computer whiz who helped set up voting systems
in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 and is now the computer expert for
John McCain. "Mr. Connell is a devout Catholic. He has admitted
to me that in his zeal to 'save the unborn' he may have helped others
who have compromised elections. He was clearly uncomfortable when I
asked directly about Ohio 2004."
Although none of this has been proven, it was intriguing enough
to make me call the attorney fighting the case, Cliff Arnebeck.
"We tried to get Connell to come forward and initially thought he
was going to cooperate," he said. "Then we were told -- by
an anonymous person who is apparently a senior person in the McCain
campaign -- that he was threatened by Karl Rove, and the nature of the
threat was, "If you implicate me, we're going to prosecute your
wife."
Again, these may all turn out to be wild allegations, but if
you're interested in Arnebeck's grand unified theory tying Rove to the
tobacco companies and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the U.S.
attorney firings in a plot to steal both the 2000 and 2004 elections,
you can find
much of it here. And if you're just interested in making sure it
doesn't happen this time, you can take the advice of another person
who believes the 2004 election was stolen, NYU professor Mark Crispin
Miller:
"The spectacle of massive voter turnout is crucial, so they
can't say people didn't bother to show up. Second, people have to
double check and triple check to make sure they're sure they're
registered -- call your secretary of state, or check out a book
called
Count My Vote, A Citizen's Guide to Voting. Third, go to
videothevote.org, a grassroots
venture that will provide people with cameras so they can interview
people who are turned away at the polls. It's crucial to think ahead
of the possibility of a stolen race and collect evidence. And if
people have bizarre problems with the machinery, they shouldn't just
go home. They should stay there so the media will see them, and their
numbers should grow."