POLITICS: CantMoveOn.org
Fund, John H.
POLITICS JOHN H. FUND CantMove0n.org DEMOCRATS TOOK THEIR LOSS in the November elections hard. "I've been in this town now for 35 years," said Al Hunt on CNN's Capital Gang the Saturday after...
...House from Florida's Palm Beach County, told liberal radio talk show host Thom Hartmann on the Saturday after the election that he had called the FBI and was waiting for them to show up...
...There is no question of that...
...Everyone should realize how close the country came to another Florida-style litigation hell...
...But the cause of genuine reform will only be set back by conspiracy theories propounded by liberals—some of which make Oliver Stone's infamous conspiracy movie JFK appear quasi-rational...
...BUT NO AMOUNT OF DEBUNKING will wipe away all doubts about the 2004 election...
...Other groups, such as stolenelection2004.com, have formed efforts on Internet sites...
...i•John H. Fund, The American Spectator's Politics columnist, is author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (Encounter Books...
...This year, the paranoid style is asserting itself with claims that John Kerry simply couldn't have lost to someone as clueless, evil, or unpopular as George W. Bush...
...Deserves to be read by freedom-loving audiences worldwide...
...While news organizations have discounted the polls as inaccurate, some with voting fraud suspicions contend it was the ballot counts that were off...
...At the top of the list are suspicions about electronic "black box" voting machines: • A voting machine in Franklin County, Ohio, gave Bush more than 4,000 votes when only 638 votes were cast...
...No one would be more interested than me in finding out that we really won, but that ain't the case," Jack Corrigan, the lawyer who led Kerry's army of Election Day attorneys, told the Boston Globe...
...That helps explain why on November 11 the Kerry campaign belatedly agreed to send attorneys to Ohio on a "fact-finding mission" to gather data from election boards about uncounted ballots and other unresolved issues...
...Several states have reported software failures, and California officials have accused Diebold, the company that manufactures DREs, of using uncertified software and misleading them...
...and (d) citizens with limited English skills (the machines are multilingual...
...That doesn't mean we should tolerate them...
...The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review took about five minutes to shoot down this fevered speculation...
...Within a couple of days of Mr...
...Reporter Bill Steigerwald noted that he used "a high-tech personal communication device professional journalists refer to as a 'telephone...
...So sloppy that eight of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were registered to vote in Virginia or Florida...
...A still-unknown number of voters around the country have complained about problems with touch-screen machines that appeared to record a different candidate from the one they chose...
...Stewart and other Internet bloggers is that in about two dozen Florida counties, President Bush received far more votes than the number of registered Republicans...
...A brilliant portrayal...
...It turns out the votes were "a computer anomaly" that didn't affect or reflect the official vote count...
...Indeed, our election systems are the sloppiest of any industrialized democracy...
...Fisher is just sane enough not to suspect skullduggery in his own race, which he lost 68 to 32 percent to GOP incumbent Mark Foley...
...He says the conspiracy theories aren't healthy and last June he told the Maryland Association of Election Officials that "when it comes to electronic voting, most liberals are just plain old-fashioned nuts...
...Bush being such a man of God, perhaps we should not be surprised...
...Internet activist Juliet Stewart George Soros is asking for signatures and donations to initiate an "Investigate the Vote" campaign to learn if voters "were wrongly prevented" from casting ballots...
...Hartmann reported that "these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, a candidate who Jeb beat...
...MoveOn.org, the 2.3 million member liberal group bankrolled by financier George Soros, is asking for signatures and donations to initiate an "Investigate the Vote" campaign to learn if voters "were wrongly prevented" from casting ballots and if legitimate votes were "miscounted or not counted at all...
...Joe Andrew, chairman of the Democratic National Committee until 2001, is a senior adviser to a biotech firm that owned several Internet companies...
...Hunt's assessment, their surprise had been converted into speculation that the election had been stolen from John Kerry...
...John Lott, an American Enterprise Institute economist who has studied election systems, said that some of the obsession about DREs "sounds a lot like an effort to anger some people into voting while providing the basis for lots of election litigation if the results are close...
...In a separate move, Ralph Nader asked for a recount in New Hampshire, claiming that John Kerry had conceded too quickly and reneged on his promise that all votes would be counted...
...Terry Eastland, publisher, the weekly standard...
...Another theory, propounded by blogger Colin Shea, was that a number of precincts in Ohio's Cuyahoga County (which includes Cleveland) had voter turnout well above the national average, indeed well over 100 percent of registered voters in some cases...
...I've been in this town now for 35 years," said Al Hunt on CNN's Capital Gang the Saturday after the election...
...The danger is that the conspiracy theories will prompt people to ignore legitimate complaints about outdated technology, voter fraud, poor voter education, and poorly written and contradictory election rules...
...Absentee ballots from many precincts had beengrouped together by the computer and credited to Fairview Park, where 8,421 voted...
...If they dismissed them, they risked seeing them walk away from future giving to the Democratic Party," Trippi told me...
...We need to reform our systems by cleaning up outdated registration rolls, requiring photo IDs, training better poll workers, increasing voter education, and improving electronic voting machines by adding paper receipts...
...In North Carolina, an estimated 4,500 votes were lost because computer voting machines were allowed to exceed the capacity of their memory...
...For optical scan systems, the under-vote rate was 2.7 percent and for DREs it was only 1.5 percent...
...The Internet conspiracy theories made some modest progress in spinning their yarns despite being largely ignored by major media outlets...
...POLITICS JOHN H. FUND CantMove0n.org EMOCRATS TOOK THEIR LOSS in the November elections hard...
...In Lafayette County, for example, Bush won 74 percent of the vote even though 83 percent of residents are registered as Democrats...
...The bloggers immediately began trying to raise $110,000 to cover the costs of recounting all of Ohio's approximately 9,000 precincts...
...In the 1960s, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote a classic essay called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," in which he talked about the American tradition of hatching conspiracy theories...
...A total of 93,000 extra votes appeared to have been inexplicably cast on November 2. "It's the ballot-box equivalent of Jesus' miracle of the fishes...
...But Lafayette County Supervisor of Elections Lana Morgan points out that her county is in the Bible Belt and routinely votes for Republicans...
...Find out how you can help to distribute this play throughout he Arab world...
...It's incumbent upon both Congress and the state legislatures to revisit our election laws early next year before memories of this year's near miss fade away...
...I've never seen Democrats as down as I've seen them the last three or four days...
...There were dark tales by Internet bloggers of curious voting patterns in Florida counties, Ohio precincts with more votes cast than registered voters, and, of course, "Manchurian" computer programmers who could have hacked into electronic voting machines and altered the results...
...He called the Cuyahoga County election office, which is run by Democrats...
...What about another claim that an astonishing 18,472 votes had been counted in Fairview Park, a Cleveland suburb that had only 13,342 registered voters...
...Mr...
...Tell the story of America...
...While conservatives were skilled at coordinating their messages, he added, "that does not mean there is avast right-wing conspiracy trying to steal votes in America, as the loudest voices on the left are saying today...
...This year, the paranoid style is asserting itself with claims that John Kerry simply couldn't have lost to someone as clueless, evil, or unpopular as George W. Bush...
...52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2004/JANUARY 2005 JOHN H. FUND Jeff Fisher is only one of many liberal activists who won't accept the fact that George W. Bush won with a 3.5 million margin and 286 electoral votes, 16 more than needed...
...They persuaded Green Party candidate David Cobb and Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik to demand a recount of the votes in Ohio...
...Jeff Fisher, the Democratic candidate for the U.S...
...As for the theories that DREs could be programmed to change an election outcome, Mr...
...The fever swamps of post-election conspiracy theories were bubbling...
...If the margin in Ohio had been 36,000 votes rather than 136,000, we would have seen another post-election meltdown," says Dan Tokaji, a law professor at the Ohio State University...
...In an election in a country with 186,000 precincts and over 120 million votes cast, a certain number of irregularities are to be expected...
...They really are depressed, not just because it was a bit of a surprise that they lost as convincingly as they did, but as I said earlier, as they look ahead, they don't see anything that's particularly good on the horizon...
...DDING TO THE SPECULATION are early exit polls that showed Kerry leading in states where he ltimately lost...
...But Kerry advisers cautioned that they didn't expect to find anything dramatic...
...b) the less educated (they're comforted by the machines' similarity to the ATM...
...Bob Dole carried the county in 1996 even as he lost Florida to Bill Clinton...
...In last year's California recall election, punch-card systems didn't register a valid vote on 6.3 percent of all ballots cast...
...BUT SUCH STATEMENTS FROM DEMOCRATS in a position to know did nothing to dissuade some people you'd expect to be semi-serious...
...Democratic consultant Joe Trippi, who served as Howard Dean's 2004 campaign manager, says the Kerry campaign came under intense post-electionpressure from major donors not to ignore the Internet conspiracy theorists...
...Indeed, whatever problems DREs have must be compared to other existing systems...
...One of the main pieces of evidence cited by Ms...
...54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2004/JANUARY 2005 Th a ave enough votes to dominate the government FOUNDING FATHERS is a dramatization of the Constitutional Convention of 1787...
...The circumstances were similar to today's Irma country in chaos—yet the problems were the same' how to give power to the majority while protecting the rights of minorities...
...But exaggerating the problems with DREs will only fuel a litigation mindset that could see the controversy about some future election make Florida's 2000 fiasco look like a moot court...
...Fisher claimed to have evidence not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how...
...Andrew dismissed them by saying "the liberal Internet activists are bonkers...
...All of these groups tend to recycle the same complaints...
...Andrew said the people obsessed about DRE manipulation are either computer experts with impressive technical knowledge but little practical experience with elections or left-leaning computer users who are conspiratorial by nature...
...But she admits that never-say-die Kerry supporters have been unable to persuade anyone in the Kerry camp to embrace their claims...
...He noted with regret that they have been joined in their hysteria by prominent Democrats who "are rallying behind the anti-DRE bandwagon in a big election year because they think that this movement is good for Democrats...
...Unlike 2000, there is no doubt that they actually got more votes than we did, and they got them in the states that mattered...
...The error was corrected after a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch called the county board of elections...
...But many Democrats didn't stay down for long...
...It's true some states have moved too quickly using new federal money to buy Direct Recording Electronic voting machines (DREs), which work like an ATM...
...DECEMBER 2004/JANUARY 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 53 POLITICS of Cincinnati says flatly, "We believe that John Kerry legally won Ohio...
...We are publishing a special Arabic edition of this exciting new play by American Spectator writer William Tucker...
...c) the elderly (you can increase the type size...
...They're wrong...
...Indeed, Mr...
...The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights has generally supported electronic voting because the voters who are most likely to be helped by DREs are (a) the disabled (they can vote without assistance...
...Blackboxvoting.org, founded by Seattle journalist Bev Harris, claims to have documents proving fraud in the November balloting...
...Examples abound in modern politics, from the McCarthyism of the 1950s up to Hillary Clinton inventing a "vast, right-wing conspiracy" during her husband's impeachment travails...
...It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told Hartmann...
Vol. 37 • December 2004 • No. 10
