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New evidence of fraud. Only we can make it matter.

Submitted November 30, 2004 - 5:30 pm by Benjamin Melançon
Where's Kerry?  Where are the independent media?  Where are we, ourselves?  Are we waiting to feel good and pure about having "in reality" won the election, when all the evidence finally emerges, while the Bush administration controls the country another four years?

The latest evidence of fraud comes from New York Daily News reporter and Democracy Now! cohost Juan Gonzalez: in Columbus precincts he and Daily News reporter Larry Cohler-Esses looked into, blacks would appear to be voting for third-party candidates in ridiculous numbers.

Many independent media sources reported on the possibility or likelihood of Republican stolen elections in 2004, and some, including the Daily Kos are doing pretty well trying to sort through all the evidence of fraud and voter suppression.  But the people who decide on center columns at such sites, including Indymedia, haven't put much of the evidence or any calls to action in the center column.  Daily Kos has an Ohio status page and several recommended diaries on vote suppression and election fraud, but nothing center-columned except the same kind of issues as any time.  Even Thom Hartmann, showing how U.S.-funded groups in the Ukraine and elsewhere take back stolen elections, is talking about the left adopting these tactics for 2006 and 2008.

The vote-protection networks aren't doing anything.  The earliest protest called is for December 4, and that's way too little, too late, and not endorsed by any major group or highlighted by any independent media site.

There's no apology for posting this on Narco News because this is a huge issue for Latin America as well, not just in determining who the U.S. president will be but in seeing if anyone will use objective standards to check for free and fair elections.  Calling the United States 2004 election fraudulent based on exit polls is nothing like the Venezuela elite's attempt to call the recall referendum fraudulent based on exit polls: the U.S. exit polls were done by professionals, the pre-election polls were close, and there is no prospect of an official audit of the results, internationally monitored or not.

I'm absolutely serious about my offer to help support shutting down of the government in Ohio (for now) with whatever nonviolent tactics seem fit.  If it takes a sociologist to tell us that only direct action will work, so be it.  Ricky Baldwin interviewed Francis Fox Piven and wrote "movements found their concerns fell on deaf ears until they directly disrupted 'business as usual' either in government or business operations, and then they made significant gains."

That article was titled "How to Stop the War: Francis Fox Piven Says It Takes More Than Elections."  Now we need to disrupt business as usual to stop the stealing of an election.

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