Posted on 12/12/2004 6:00:15 AM PST by Libloather
For Some, the Race Remains Far From Over
47 minutes ago
By Sam Howe Verhovek Times Staff Writer
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Clifford Arnebeck won't let it go. He can't let it go. Not, he says, while America refuses to recognize that John F. Kerry was elected president Nov. 2.
Arnebeck, a Democratic lawyer here and co-chairman of a self-styled national populist alliance, is petitioning the state's highest court to throw out official results that favor President Bush and instead hand Ohio's 20 electoral votes — and thus the White House — to Kerry. Or, at least, order a revote.
The bid appears quixotic, to put it politely, as Bush has been officially declared the winner by 119,000 votes and Arnebeck is arguing before a Republican-dominated Supreme Court in Ohio. Nor is the Massachusetts senator helping him out, said Arnebeck.
"I can't for the life of me understand why Kerry isn't fighting harder for this. Maybe it's some secret Skull and Bones tradition, where you're not supposed to show up the other guy," Arnebeck said, referring to the Yale secret society of which Bush and Kerry were both members.
Most of the country may have moved on, and electoral college slates are due to meet in all 50 states Monday to cast formal votes that will give Bush a 286-252 winning edge and a second term.
Even many who are disturbed by aspects of the recent election — such as long lines at polling places or touch-screen voting machines with no paper trail for audits — say they want future improvements but nonetheless believe Bush won a fair battle.
But for Arnebeck and thousands of others, this contest is far from over.
They feed each other's postelection rage over the Internet, swapping reports about voter suppression and possible computer hacking or other electronic manipulation of the results.
Protests continue to be staged, including a "rally to change the tally" in San Francisco and black-armband demonstrations in Denver and Boston this weekend against what organizers call the "media blackout of election fraud." But they are especially focused on Ohio, whose 20 electoral votes proved crucial.
"I would like to welcome you to Ukraine," said Susan Truitt, a speaker last weekend at a rally outside the Ohio statehouse, where 400 showed up to demand an inquiry into fraud allegations. She was referring to the nation about to hold a new presidential election after protests that the first one was rigged.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who also appeared at the rally, cited a recurring grievance of the groups who questioned the legitimacy of Bush's 2004 victory. Why is it, Jackson asked, that exit polls seemed to point toward a Kerry victory that day?
Rather than analyzing faults in the exit polls, Jackson and others say, why aren't the media and public officials digging more aggressively for chicanery in the tabulations?
"We can live with winning and losing," Jackson recently told a Baptist congregation in Columbus. "We cannot live with fraud and stealing."
Officials here are not taking kindly to the charges.
"Jackson owes every election official in Ohio an apology," said Keith Cunningham, vice president of the Ohio Assn. of Election Officials. "His accusations are outrageous, preposterous and baseless."
Because every Ohio county election board has two Democrats and two Republicans, officials here argue, manipulation of voting would require a massive conspiracy.
But that is just what Jackson and various protest groups allege, and they point to what they say are several suspicious occurrences that demand further investigation:
• In several counties, a Democratic candidate for state chief justice got more votes than Kerry, even though she lost statewide by a wider margin than did Kerry, and the overall total of votes cast in her race was 4.4 million, well below the 5.6 million cast in the presidential race.
• A "computer glitch," as local officials called it, recorded an extra 3,893 votes for Bush in suburban Columbus, in a precinct with only 638 votes cast. Officials say they caught the glitch and fixed it, showing that the system works; but protesters say they wonder where else such discrepancies may have gone undetected.
• Long lines forced many Ohioans to wait hours to vote and may have deterred some from voting at all. They were reported to be especially long in urban Democratic areas and in some college towns. Some voters want to know why. At Kenyon College in rural Knox County, a machine malfunction caused some students to wait as long as 10 hours to vote, college officials say, the last emerging at 4 a.m.
Another controversy, which surfaced last year and is a continuing target of outrage, involved the chief executive of Ohio-based Diebold Inc., a major player in the electronic touch-screen voting industry. In an August 2003 invitation to a Bush fundraising event, he wrote that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president."
The official, Walden O'Dell, later described himself to the Cleveland Plain Dealer as "a real novice on the political side," and he amended company policy to prohibit himself and other top officials from making or raising political contributions or engaging in any other political activity other than voting.
Just how many people are actively protesting the election is difficult to gauge, and interviews on the street suggest that a lot of people, Democrats and Republicans alike, just want to put it behind them.
"I voted for Kerry. I wanted him to win. I thought he would win," said Anne Matthieson, an account assistant at a downtown insurance firm. "But he didn't win."
Still, for those who believe otherwise, there are several websites dedicated to the cause. Several have links that allow a person, at the push of a button, to send a message to hundreds of reporters and public officials, demanding further investigation into voting problems. One accuses the media of "cowardice and complicity" in reporting on election results.
The sites are also raising money, enough to pay for a recount of the Ohio vote (which is formally being undertaken on behalf of the Green and Libertarian party presidential candidates, who are both critical of Ohio voting procedures) and for the legal challenge that Arnebeck, the Columbus lawyer, is spearheading.
State officials say the recount will cost more than the $10-per-precinct fee that the challengers are paying.
Kerry, who may be interested in running again in 2008, is walking a bit of a fine line in the matter, encouraging the recount process but dampening any expectation it will yield a political miracle.
"It's important that every vote be counted," said his spokesman, David Wade. "There's no reason to believe the outcome of the election will change."
A Democrat close to the Kerry campaign, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Kerry had received plenty of "do not make this concession" advice from party members.
"It's not just the Internet conspiracy community," said the Kerry ally. "The every-vote-counts community is very strong inside the Democratic Party, and one does not want to discourage them."
Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican who also was co-chairman of the state campaign for Bush and a likely gubernatorial candidate in 2006, said he was just as interested as anyone in counting every vote.
"This was an election where you have some glitches but none of these glitches were of a conspiratorial nature, and none of them would overturn or change the election results," Blackwell said Monday, announcing his certification of the results.
Under the certified results, Bush had 2.86 million votes, or about 51% , to Kerry's 2.74 million, or 49%. After all provisional votes were counted, the Bush margin represented a drop of about 17,000 votes from the totals announced just after election day.
Arnebeck, who has made two unsuccessful runs for Congress and was an Ohio coordinator for Ross Perot, is undeterred. If the court orders a full and thorough investigation, he said, Kerry will win. He wishes Kerry would join the fight.
"He and his people are too ready to disbelieve that Republicans could be this bad," Arnebeck said. "They are this bad. Ballot-box stuffing is an old American tradition, and they've just updated it. I'm not surprised that somebody hacked this vote."
The Democrats were certain Kerry would win Ohio, "if every vote is counted", their talking heads declared. There's no doubt in my mind that the Kerry campaign was certain of an illegal victory in Ohio. So was John Zogby.
"an inquiry into fraud allegations"
If anyone would know about voting fraud, it would be the "Democrats". Dims, Demo-rats, Demo-crits, Demo-traitors, etc.
A Rat tradition, Cliffy. That's how you got Saint JFK to the White House in 1960.
Blackwell, btw, is sharp as a tack and has announced for Governor. Watch him.
The Kerry Campaign gave MoveOn.Org and other 527s most of the control of the Grass Roots Democratic Campaign here in Ohio. In the past the Democrats had a fantastic grass roots organization made up of labor union "volunteers." I say "Volunteers" because the workers supplied by the labor unions were not paid. They "volunteered" to keep their jobs. In the past the labor efforts were fantastic. And they got every Democratic voter registered and got most of them to the polls. The were very good at buying votes.
The Soros funded 527s were just plain amateurs. They hired people to register Democratic voters. The hired registrars were paid 10 dollars for every person they registered. Many of these hired guns registered as many as 100 new voters a day. That is an impossible number unless they are just making up name. These hired guns registered a total of over 230 thousand "new" Democratic voters.
What became obvious to the Bush campaign was most of these "new" Democratic voters were names taken from city and county directories. Others were made up names that were given existing addresses. I was one of the Bush Volunteers tasked with checking out these "new" voters. It was obvious. Bush volunteers found as many as 15 people registered all living at the same one bedroom apartment address. They had to be fake.
That is the people they hired just filled out 100 registrations a day. They found the names in county directories, phone books or just made up names and gave them existing addresses. These "NEW" voters did not exist.
The Bush campaign made lists of these so called voters. One possible scenario was that a least some people would show up on election day claiming to be these fake voters and demanding to vote. The Bush campaign was prepared to challenge the fake voters. They never showed.
The conclusion is they Soros funded 527s were ripped off. They was no plan to get ringers to vote these fake registrations. They did try to call them from Democratic party headquarters. That is evidence the Democratic party believed that the Soros funded 527s had actually registered these people.
The Kerry Campaign believed their Soros funded 527s had registered 230 thousand new voters. The truth is those 230 fake voters never voted. They were counting on them to vote. And were very surprised when they did not.
It is interesting to look a the turn out numbers. You may recall that Rush and others were reporting that some Columbus, Ohio precincts had more people registered than there were voting age residents. Those were city precincts where the Soro's paid people had registered tens of thousands of "new" voters. The turn out in Ohio was about 68 percent. It is worth noting the turn out in those city precincts was about 40 percent. That proves the fake voters names were not voted.
The actual truth is that Soros paid rip off artists 1,000 dollars a day to rip him and the Democratic Party off.
Kerry was convinced that he was going to win Ohio because he believed those fake voters were going to vote.
It seems likely to me that the exit pollsters took those registration numbers and used them to weight the turn out in those precincts in Ohio. So the exit polls were very wrong. Wrong because the exit pollsters believed the fake voters were voting. The precincts full of fake registrations actually exit polled at 10 to 1 for Kerry. The registration numbers and the 68 percent turnout projections showed that there should be 1600 votes and that Kerry would get 1400 of them. But the turn out was only 600 voters and Keary actually got 540 votes. If they were counting on 200 democratic presents having 900 more Kerry votes than were actually cast, then they could expect Kerry to have 150 thousand more votes than he got and a 30,000 vote win.
And because although he (Kerry) is a loathsome, liberal creep, he is not a deluded fool like Arneison.
Especially from that paragon of honest financial gains the "Rev" Jackson
excuse me ARNEBECK... not Arneison.
Any support by Kerry for a recount, of course, is another flip-flop since a concession means the loser isn't going to contest the election. This guy has no integrity in anything he does, from tossing his medals over the White House fence to spending Christmas in Cambodia.
I hope Blackwell gets the nomination.
It seems the "establishment" is trying to stick us with Betty Montgomery. If she gets the nomination, I fear much of the GOP base stays home on Election Day. It would be more of the same of what we got now.
A revote????
And as for those lines??
Millions of Americans across this country voted .. and the left doesn't understand why there would be a line of people waiting to vote??
And the people of Ohio can now identify with the Florida voters.
What went on in Florida in 2000 was a "tempest in a teapot". Because of the butterfly ballot and the closeness of the count, all hell broke loose and the Dems thought they could "steal" an election. It wasn't any more confusing that wnat happens in most states if that state is placed under a microscope.
And Ohio did not "win" this election for Bush, Ohio was no more important than a half dozen other close states that had a narrow victory for Kerry. The parts make the whole, and we could just as easily be counting PA or WI or MI to see why Bush didn't win those states but since Kerry won, the Dems aren't concerned about "every" vote being counted in those states.
So in Florida because there was so much screaming about the punch cards and hanging chads in 2000, we changed to touch screen, and now that Harris woman is claiming the touch screens were manipulated in Florida.
Well, excuse me, but if they don't want punch cards, they don't trust touch screens, and they don't like optical scanners, they're a little too conspiratorial for me.
"I would like to welcome you to Ukraine," said Susan Truitt, a speaker last weekend at a rally outside the Ohio statehouse, where 400 showed up to demand an inquiry into fraud allegations"
That was their big rally last week that was going to let the world know that Bush couldn't have possibly won. They had visions of the entire city being covered by demos protesting. 400 people gathered from all around the country. Now if 400 doesn't send a clear message...
I would be much more impressed with these count every vote people if they were looking into the closer races like WI, NH or even PA.
What? Kerry won those, so by definition there could have been no fraud in those? Never mind then.
YOU LOST!
Bloody well shut up and suck on a tailpipe if you don't like it, you whingeing crybabies.
Ivan
Who is Betty Montgomery? Popular? Able to beat Blackwell in a primary?
Any mind that is capable of accepting and believing in the delusional, provably false economic theory of socialism doesn't have to far to jump to accept the conspiracy theory that John Kerry really won.
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