Election Reporting on Inauguration Day

George Salzman deserves better than this.  But then, so does everyone in the world.

Before, on, and after the national election of November 2, the people of the United States and the world desperately needed honest reporting about the honesty or dishonesty of that election.  Neither George Salzman nor I provided it.  We weren't dishonest.  We just didn't do the reporting.  Nor did anyone else, including the people who are paid to do it.

I mention George by name, because he honors me with inclusion in a list of luminaries who, he said, should know better than to believe the corporate media claim that several million more people voted for proven failure over hope in the presidential election.

Due to one (more) untimely hard drive failure, I don't know if I replied to George Salzman's e-mail to me - cited in his open letter - or if I only planned to reply.  If I did, I encouraged George to present convincingly as much good evidence as he could find of the possible fraud.  I read his articles eagerly, looking for the evidence of massive, and so mostly electronic, vote fraud.  In that open letter he finally presented some.  I've found better on my own.  Here it is. The exit polls, and Zogby's tracking polls leading up to the election, showed Kerry winning.  Another case for Kerry winning comes from diving beneath the total exit poll numbers to see where Bush or Kerry support comes from.  The answer is that Kerry won most of Gore voters and most of new voters, in short, won.  

It is possible a lot of Gore voters really didn't vote.  I think it's also clear a number of Gore voters, even in New Hampshire (not a southern state), didn't vote for Kerry, but switched to Bush.  (New Hampshire, a swing state that went to Kerry, shows one of the biggest exit poll to official result swing towards Bush, but Nader's recount said Bush really did do unexpectedly well in certain counties.)

Electronic vote fraud is not unthinkable or unprecedented.  Narco News reported that the ruling PRI stole the 1988 election in Mexico with electronic vote fraud, with an awkward shut-down of the computerized vote tabulation to rework and inflate it's vote totals.

I can see easily how the election would be stolen in Florida.  In the urban districts, where there was electronic voting, simply give Kerry a similar number of votes as Gore got– and make the Democratic-supporting groups voter registration effort in Florida, that registered far more Democrats than Republicans, and leaving the votes intact – and unaugmented – from increasingly Republican dixiecrats and a modest number of newly registered Republicans out in paper-trail verifiable counties.

Nebraska and Georgia, meanwhile, may be electronic wonderlands where votes can be changed at the will of the rabidly Republican companies that control the machines.

But not New Hampshire.  While working to get out the vote for John Kerry in New Hampshire, I told people who said "they won't count the votes anyway" that "No!  In this state your vote will be counted.  So it's even more important that you vote."  That was my gut feeling then, or New England democratic tradition pride or something (New Hampshire also has a long-time, professional Secretary of State), and I still feel that way.

So a true analysis of the possibility of electronic fraud flipping the popular vote would have to explain to me that the exit polls got it wrong in New Hampshire but right in some other key states.

Unfortunately, then, the exit polls cannot conclusively prove fraud, but as Salzman wrote we haven't seen any proof that Bush won the election either.  And the people in power in government and the media have refused to freely show the ballots and the exit polls they claim show Bush's victory.  We do have an obligation to disbelieve them.

I wrote this on November 7:

We may never know which candidate, Bush or Kerry, truly won the 2004 presidential election.

And if you believe in any kind of democracy, that should really tick you off.

George Salzman may not have read this, or it may not have been enough for him.

Aside from the need to publicly count our votes (and not just have a backup paper trail, but publicly hand-count right away as the first count), here are some facts about the election that I think have come out.  (I'll provide links later as requested.  I'm still using that failed-hard drive story for my failure to document, also.)

• Bush did not significantly increase turnout among evangelical right-wingers, the Karl-Rove-is-a-genius explanation for Bush's alleged victory.
• He did significantly increase his support among some whites who had voted for Gore.  Both examinations of better-than-expected turnout by Bush in countable, largely white counties, in New Hampshire in the Nader recount and in Florida with two-and-a-half recounts by the Miami Herald, show this improvement was real, but not due to new voters.
• The election, either way, was not an affirmation of war.

"Most Americans now understand they enjoy the standard of living that they do only by seizure of resources and labour from others," Chris Herz wrote.  In fact, at various times during the election campaign, and again now, with no national leadership (say, from a presidential candidate) and with the media hiding all the worst news and images, a bare majority of people told pollsters they think the war on Iraq is a bad idea.  This is at the same time a necessarily overlapping majority of people are telling pollsters they believe Iraq was connected to the September 11 attacks and has weapons of mass destruction, or was actively developing them.

Kerry won the Democratic nomination by running as an anti-war candidate and anti-NAFTA and pro-health care and all that.  If ending the war and "fair trade not just free trade" had stayed in the debate, if Kerry hadn't dropped these issues, I think he would have won an unstealable margin of the electoral vote (enough states aren't fully electronic and paperless Georgia fairy-lands).

There, now I'm into full-blown analysis of the election.  I've been purposely avoiding this because I don't have time, and instead spotlighting the observable disenfranchisement of blacks, working-class, and other suspected Democratic voters in Ohio.

George Salzman erroneously attributed my lack of attack on the claimed popular vote victory to be acceptance of the establishment (not just corporate) media line.  Actually I, like Al, don't have time to read much more than Narco News and alerts from concerned people, like George Salzman's missives in my e-mail box.  I scan all the good, anti-establishment media sources I know of and can recall when there's some news I'm seeking, and that's what I'm trying, amidst all these incidentals, to write about here.  A news organization or network, giving people what is truly news, information about what matters in our lives and how we can gain a fair share of power over our future, has not hit the big time.

Take the election issue, for instance.

To whom can a patriotic leaker, inside Blackwell's office or the commercial media's polling operation or Diebold or wherever there might be hard evidence on the counting of the vote, turn?  I'll volunteer the Free Press or Al Giordano of this here Narco News as journalists who'll know how to go about verifying the source and presenting the information, but do potential sources know about these outlets?  They probably know enough not to bother with the New York Times, but do they have anyone to whom can they trust their careers and our future?

A credible leak from any of these sources and more could settle the question of the election results and help us move on to building democracy, though we can and must try to self-rule in any case.  Still, absent the hard data, I and others can't help but speculate.

I'd long said that any candidate who ran a half-decent campaign would beat Bush in 2004.  Unlike Al Giordano, I thought my homestate hero John Kerry was one of the worst choices, but he did run a decent campaign, and he should have won handily.  Even if he won with three million, I wouldn't exactly feel vindicated.  Fear played an even bigger role than I expected in the election (as did abortion), and the misinformation of the media must be combatted, or no representative of truth or progress has a chance.

It's important to note, though, that the charge that Kerry would somehow expand abortion was carried not by the mainstream media, which mostly tried to tell pro-choice women that abortion wasn't in danger of being outlawed by Bush, but through churches, especially the Catholic Church.  Kerry, a Catholic, reportedly did worse among Catholics than Gore.  Alternative avenues of information do work, and we must build them for many reasons, including taking down the greatest enemy of truth or change, establishment media itself.

If, say, everyone had just had Bill Conroy's stories on Homeland Security covering up it's own corruption, and Kerry could have made an issue of it, maybe all those people voting out of fear would have voted for change.

But I can't help myself from criticizing Kerry's campaign, for it provides the evidence that he could have lost, whether he won or not.  As perhaps his biggest campaign issue, he ran on internationalizing the war in Iraq.  Did he think he was running for the presidency of a country, let alone the U.S., or did he think he was running for UN Secretary-General?  The U.S. is an empire, but it's people are historically isolationist.  There are still more "Get the US out of the UN" signs in the US than there are "Get the US out of Iraq."  He's got to reach out to the less well off people who are genuinely angry at the whole world power structure, middle-and-upper-class people in search of a saner alternative to Bush are going to vote for him anyway.

Co-publisher Chris Fee, days after the election, offered a case arguing Kerry lost the Ohio election, and although I think Kerry would have won Ohio anyway if not for voter suppression, the analysis here is dead on.  Chris Fee tells us hell hath no fury as an electorate scorned:

The election was lost, at least in Ohio, the keys to the empire for this last election. Southern Ohio being the key, I believe to the loss in Ohio. I'd say a lot of votes were lost in WV, TN and KY if not the electoral votes as well.

Kerry, ignored the rednecks, a rather diverse group of folks, they come in both colors also, white and black. The media, Hollywood in particular has made these guys out to all be a bunch of drunken lynch mob, cross burning, BBQ eating, whiskey swigging, fag killing madmen. Yes, Hollywood has had a lot to do with this image, and the liberal democratic conclaves in their elitist suburban offices and homes across America have come to believe this to the point of ridiculing everything about them from their trucks, guns, dogs, to that damn hillbilly bluegrass country music, something the elitist's always leave out of those PBS roots of rock and roll shows, that melodic Celtic folk music that fussed with blues; after all it's the other half of rock music.

These morons, think Southern Mid-West, and automatically they think Deliverance, and see themselves in Ned Beatty's position squealing like a pig, something more likely to happen at a swinger's party in conservative Orange County Californian. So, Kerry visits S. Ohio, but where, Cincinnati, the only damn place that bears no resemblance to Southern Ohio, or the rest of the State for that matter.

Hell, they don't even cover the State House news out of Columbus in their 3 papers, all owned by the same company, yes even the so called alternative paper, toilet paper being the only other alternative, which I recommend. The visit was worthless; the vote was caste in stone there regarding the Dems and Reps, with the exception of the very people he didn't address, the apolitical angry blacks, and white Appalachians, both groups who usually find themselves on the murderous end of a policeman's billy club. They don't vote, and why should they, either way they lose, because the local heads of both parties hate them equally regardless of race.

So, Kerry should have turned his eyes East to real Southern Ohio where there are lots of vets, and families with soldiers in a new war. Here is where Kerry could have made a connection; if it was possible, but he looked like a fish out of water coming back from his Ohio goose hunt photo op, and probably doesn't know the difference between a 4 barrel and a 2 barrel, and if you think I am talking guns, please get professional help.

He still could have talked vet-to-vet, duty and honor. Hell, he did his Nam duty, and then attacked the war, these guys understand. Many of them don't like the fact their sons and daughters where thrown into an ill prepared war, and families have to make due on a minimum wage job, while their loved one's lives and wages hang in the balance in a far off land. Kerry may have been able to win here, as well as in KY, TN and WV, but someone steered him wrong and wrote these places off, where rebellion and resistance to government is a long an honored tradition, just as is service and duty to country.

It's here where even the young people who've volunteered for military service distrust government. Think coal strikes, moonshine, Larry Flynt, and the biggest cash crop in the impoverished parts of these states, marijuana. Some say gay marriage/ ballot initiatives turned the tides of the vote, by bringing out the Christian Right, a silver bullet, not at all. Everyone in these same communities and towns knows who the gay people are, and just about everything else. No, there are no gay bashing tailgate parties with some unsuspecting homosexual playing the piÒata, as the entertainment media, and gay political movements would like to have every open-minded wannabe believing. Gay marriage legal or not, no same sex couple is going to go walking down the isle to holy matrimony; just as no one's going to open fire on federal buildings housing the ATF, IRS and DEA. There is just some shit you don't do; like killing your gay neighbors, or blowing up the court house because it's full of corrupt S.O.B.'s parading around as pillars of the community.

So, the Democrats lost out, and the neo-cons swept in to take advantage, but that's politics, but the real loss is to the American people who had no choice in this election. This was a Yale -vs.- Yale frat boy election, and Kerry just couldn't shake his Ivy League image, and Bush beat him almost exclusively on media image. Bush talked like a good old' boy, and won their vote, their allegiance he'll never have.

Myself, I refused to vote, the American political system is nothing more than a two headed beast gone mad, and I want no part of it. So, please take Al's invitation to the kill the media. Hell, they let this bohemian redneck in on the revolution against media, so any of you right or left, if have any life left in you to fight for freedom, please join us in the Nacrosphere.

He's calling it like he sees it, from his direct observations and knowledge, not joining the media-entranced crowd.  And he's doing something to make things better: he's putting up $500 in matching donations for the Fund For Authentic Journalism, the sponsor of Narco News, so if you donate know your support is doubled.  I'm joining him with another $500, so more people get to double their contribution.  Just send you check or credit card number to the Fund For Authentic Journalism and ask Treasurer Andrew Grice that your contribution be doubled.

...

George Salzman deserves better than this. Hours before (due to a posting error, hours after) George W. Bush celebrates his graduation from King to Emperor (which like his graduation from Yale and Harvard will be done for him by powerful people for their own benefit), I present this mix of rant and amateur political analysis, links to supporting information forthcoming.  I'm just rattling my fingers on a keyboard– I haven't done significant Internet research and not one step of investigative reporting footwork.  We all deserve better than this.

The results of the failure to have enough authentic journalism (and not just the reporting but the distribution):

• (White) people voted for a war-and-economic failure president Bush in sufficient numbers for powerful Bush backers to steal the electoral college and either win the popular vote or successfully claim it through fraud.  (I don't think it was an accident of fair elections that first brought Hugo Chavez to power, it was the power of his popular support that made those then in power think it would be easier to corrupt him than directly deny the will of the people.)


• People in the progressive media are still debating facts about voter disenfranchisement and no one is truly pounding away at the information blockade around how we know how people voted.


• We're not moving on to the real next big thing, how to build democracy in the U.S. with or without elections.

There are some committed journalists doing that last, most important bit on Narco News, most recently with Jennifer Whitney's hurricane of democratic fresh air from the south.  I'm not one of these dedicated reporters, I'm a part-time commentator four-and-a-half hours into when I was supposed to be at work at my new desk job.  But I'm throwing my mouth and my money behind Fund that supports them.