ATTENTION PULITZER PRIZE COMMITTEE: Please prepare nominations for Juan Gonzales and Larry Cohler-Esses of The New York Daily News!

Yes, it's true! Two reporters from a major American, Corporate-Owned, Mainstream Newspaper are actually investigating the results of Election 2004!

Gonzales reports this morning, in a piece titled "Ohio tally fit for Ukraine"(!), that he and reporter Larry Cohler-Esses have discovered yet more anomalies in the Ohio vote count! (All by themselves! And they're not even "disgruntled loony left-wing blogger conspiracy theorists!)

Specifically, Gonzales reports that he and Cohler-Esses have uncovered unusual vote totals in several of Cleveland's black neighborhoods. They studied the precinct-by-precinct totals released by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections (see the previous story about them) and found that third party candidates has surprisingly high vote totals! In several cases, candidates such as Constitutional Party's Michael Peroutka mysteriously received tallies as much as 600% higher than even George W. Bush's!

Perhaps even more troubling, is the fact that these numbers demonstrate what ought to make even the most jaded wingnut sit up and take notice:

...And that after 2004's unprecedented GOTV effort in Cuyahoga and Ohio in general, and of course the population increases in the state since 2000.

And Gonzales promises more to come:

In the past week or two, I've encouraged you to express your displeasure about the reporting from some of America's Corporate Media Outlets (e.g. The New York Times here, and Newsweek here).

But now, I'd encourage you to write a "Thank you! And keep up the good work!" note to The Daily News and Messrs Gonzalez and Cohler-Esses! lcohler-esses@edit.nydailynews.com; voicers@edit.nydailynews.com; news@edit.nydailnews.com...e.com&Subject=Thank you for investigating and reporting on Election 2004!" target="_blank">Click here to sent a thank you note to them all!

NOTE: If you wish to have your letters considered for publication by Daily News be sure to include you full name, street address and telephone number. Only name will be included if they publish it.

(Hat tip Emailer Susan E. for the link!)

The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports today that the Cuyahoga County Election Board certified election results in the county Monday and will now be passing them onto the state for final certificaiton.

Before doing so, the Election Board heard two hours of testimony concerning the 8,552 provisional ballots (34% of the total) which were rejected. Witnesses also testified that due to the questions about these ballots and other "systematic problems", the certification was being completed too quickly.

After the rejected ballots were tossed, remaining provisional ballots showed a 9,242 vote gain in Kerry's margin over Bush in the states largest county.

The Plain Dealer described some of the testimony about the questionable rejections of a number of those provisional ballots as detailed in a three-part analysis by Dr. Norman Robbins of Case Western Reserve University who also served as a volunteer with the Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition:

Vu also mentioned that he plans a study of the 6,000 voter registrations delivered by a different Get-Out-The-Vote group after the registration deadline had passed. Voters, in that case, likely went to the polls on Nov. 2nd assuming they were properly registered.

(In regards to that last item --- and really all of them! --- I'd be pleased if someone could explain to me why it is that we do not have same-day voter registration at the polls in the country. At least in the majority of states.)

Perhaps running on recount-juju from their soon-to-be-recounted-Ohio efforts, the heroes (and real American patriots!) of the Green and Libertarian Parties are moving West!

As announced earlier today on Green Party Presidential Candidate David Cobb's website, the two parties have now filed for full recounts in both Nevada and New Mexico!

There has been some strange numbers in both of those states as well as the oft-reported anomalies in Florida, Ohio and elsewhere. So I'll try and do a better job of covering the oddities in NV and NM soon.

In the meantime, feel free to stop by and say thanks for the continuing heroic efforts with a Green Donation at their website, where --- for their current graphic alone --- they deserve a few bucks!

As I mentioned this morning when I beat up on Olbermann a bit, he had a very good report today on his blog about the latest goings on over the weekend in Ohio. He mentions a bit of the potential "news" that Jesse Jackson may or may not have made at a news conference in Columbus on Saturday when he mentioned that "John Kerry supports a full investigation...I talked with John Kerry last night, and he supports the investigation."

And a further nugget, one of several from the report, was this:

(Note to Mr. Olbermann: It's a blog you're now writing. So please be kind enough to link to the stories you cite so they can be easily and independently perused. Thank you.)

The number mentioned by Jackson above also reminded me of a piece of recent email I received from someone in Warren "Lock Down" County. Here's the relevant passage:

To verify the general 28% figure used above, here are the Warren County vote totals for 2000 and 2004 directly from the website of Ohio Sec. of State J. Kenneth Blackwell (who --- did I mention? --- was also completely coincidentally the Co-Chair of Ohio's Bush/Cheney Re-Election Committee):

2000 Bush: 48,318 Gore: 19,142
2004 Bush: 66,523 Kerry: 25,399

Yup, nothing to see here...Keep moving, New York Times and all the others...Much Christmas shopping to get done...

Perhaps the singular best expression against Post-Election Pussy-whip that I've seen since November 2nd. Please go read it. Especially if you're one of those namby-pamby, whining, hand-wringing, "oh, where did we go wrong" Democrats who have played into your opposition's abusive victimization culture.

I ain't playing that game (in case you haven't noticed) and neither should you. For any number of reasons as expressed on this blog over the last month.

Here's the closer, but I really recommend you read the whole thing:

Help stop the abuse. Stop playing the victim. If that's what you're doing. (Not that any true BRAD BLOG readers would ever fall into such a pathetic little trap of a mindset. Leave that to the pussies over at the DNC...and get back to work! We've got a democracy to save here dammit!)

"You can't be chairman of the Bush campaign and then be the chief umpire in the seventh game of the World Series."
-- Jessie Jackson, Columbus, Ohio, 11/28/04.

First off (with apologies to Bill Maher)...NEW RULE: Media accounts referring to Ohio's Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the man responsible for ensuring a fair election and accurate vote count in Ohio, must always be identified as well by his other job description --- Co-Chair of the Ohio Bush/Cheney '04 Re-Election Campaign.

Any story or writer that refers to the currently and appropriately besieged Mr. Blackwell at this point, without pointing out that not-trivial fact is being misleading in their coverage. I would include myself guilty as well at that and will endeavor to improve in the future.

That said, AP refreshingly updates its Ohio coverage today with an update on Jesse Jackson's rallies there over the weekend along with other late related items from the Buckeye State. That report, surprisingly enough, is being re-run by the bulk of the major media outlets! Good for them!

But look closer.

The same AP story is re-run under the headings "Challenges to Ohio ballots mount" in the version at CNN.com, "Nearly a Month Later, Ohio Fight Goes On" at The NY Times website, at MyWay.com, and at Yahoo. And finally, "Ohio Election Still Contested" at the Fox News website.

Guess which one of those sites alone decided to leaves out the critical final paragraphs that referred to Blackwell as Ohio's co-chair for Bush/Cheney!

All but the Fox News versions include these last four telling grafs:

Over at Fox News, however, their online reprint of the exact same AP story conveniently drops those final paragraphs from the story!

Clearly it wasn't a space issue. There are no other stories on the webpage, so an extra few paragraphs wouldn't have cost anything or have otherwise been a problem.

It was --- rather obviously, even for Fox --- an editorial issue from the continually Republican "Fair and Balanced" Fox News Network. How pathetic.

If you're interested in the substance of the story itself --- and I hope you are --- please click on one of the more reliable of the link options I've given you above.

UPDATE: The headline of CNN's posting of the AP story changed last night at some point from the "Challenges to Ohio ballots mount" that I previously noted, to "Activists continue to challenge Ohio ballots". You "activists" out there are welcome to make of that what you might.

UNRELATED SIDE NOTE: This is the 1000th BRAD BLOG item posted since starting up on Jan. 24, 2004. Not sure why that fact matters, but I thought I'd mention it. My fingers are not yet tired.

I'm happy to admit, along with everyone else on this particular beat these days, that we're all glad to see Keith Olbermann, currently the virtual-sole voice in the corporate media, willing to seriously follow the troubling stories of voting irregularities in Election 2004.

That said, while he's been doing a fine job of helping to keep the story out there, I believe he has largely screwed the proverbial pooch when it came to his blog story on Saturday in regards to the reporting of Wayne Madsen.

Madsen, "a self-styled investigative journalist", as self-styled investigative journalist Olbermann referred to him, has claimed in two different articles, so far, (Here, then with a few more specifics here) that there was an extensive and sophisticated vote rigging operation at play in Election '04.

The operation, Madsen alleges, was funded by Saudi and other overseas interests via a sophisticated web of Bush-friendly banks, trusts, holding companies and corporations. The starting point for all of this, he reports, is a $29.6 million check of which Madsen claimed to have been given a copy.

On the ground, the scheme is reported to have included the use of retired FBI agents posing as active FBI and/or Homeland Security Dept. agents in Ohio, Florida, Texas and California supplying false security/terror-related information to local election officials leading to "lock downs". These "lock downs" supposedly then allowed the "agents" and/or cyber technicians unfettered access to central tabulating computers where vote tallies could then be goosed to achieve the desired outcome. The goal in Ohio and Florida, of course, being to take the states for Bush and in Texas and California to prop up Bush's number to receive the popular majority that would supply the "broad national mandate" you have likely heard the Bush Administration wildly overstating at various times in the last four weeks or so.

Despite having been sent many notes about Madsen's articles over the last several days, I have yet to mention them on this blog at all until now. I've been attempting to get independent verification or confirmation for such stories before I add them to what I consider to be a rather solid body of evidence here indicating "electile dysfunction" of various possible magnitudes. In other words, I've been trying to confirm these stories as well as possible before reporting on them here, since so many have come to use this blog as a trusted reference source over the weeks since November 2nd.

Madsen's public reporting so far had, to my mind, contained a few too many vagaries as of yet to be added to the preponderance of evidence being compiled here. At least not until I was able to either get more specifics, or speak to him directly with some of my questions. That's precisely what I did yesterday in a thirty-minute or so phone call...

As The NY Times finally did yesterday, Newsweek follows in-step today by covering the problems with E-Voting and it's lack of paper audit trails, etc.

It's encouraging for the much-needed election reform movement that such articles are finally making their way into the Corporate Media. Yet I find it still somewhat beguiling that these organizations are finally willing to report on the lack of verifiability at the root of our country's democracy, how easy it may be to tamper with the results and how the end result is a lack of confidence in the outcome --- Yet with all of those acknowledged problems, the same Corporate Media still proves wholly unwilling to actually investigate the enormous body of data recently gathered via such troubling means a mere three weeks ago!

In other words, they acknowledge that possible trouble exists with the technology, but they are seemingly unwilling to expend any resources to determine if such trouble did exist in the November 2nd election! Newsweek even goes so far as to title their piece "Four More Years to Finally Get It Right". As if to say, nothing to see last November 2nd, but let's look ahead to '08.

In any case, here's a few key grafs from Steven Levy's Newsweek piece.

On those of us who have been dubious about what went on in Election 2004 and our refusal to take the questionable results lying down...

Really? Glad you've admitted that, but wouldn't you do even better by investigating if that may have actually happened?!

And then Levy closes by pointing to the concerns that those of us pushing for Election Reform have been pointing out for a while. He aptly mentions that the concerns are not only with E-Voting itself and finishes (ironically enough) by spanking those who don't yet seem to get it...

The sentiment is much appreciated. But what Levy fails to point out here is that the "2000 debacle" is what put these "leaders" in power in the first place! It's small wonder then that they'd wish to tamper with that easily-gamed system.

Levy quickly mentions "legislation that would have mandated such protections in 2004 was bottled up in Congress," but he conveniently or lazily doesn't mention that the "bottled up" legislation was "bottled up" by the Republican leadership in both the House and Senate (specifically by Hastert and Delay) who wouldn't allow these bills to even come up for a vote!

But let's not hold any actual feet to any actual fires. We wouldn't want to piss off our well-earned sources now would we?

Both this piece and the Times piece I pointed out yesterday are indeed encouraging and bode well (hopefully) for reform in '06 and/or '08 to a certain extent. But one would have thought the even more-obviously outrageous 2000 election would have kept us from being where we are today at all.

So while the emerging willingness of these Corporate Media outlets to finally acknowledge that these issues even exist, they would be far better off investigating whether any of the items they warn about actually occurred in this go-round. There's certainly ample evidence to look into if they decide to actually leave their offices and look into it!

Without attention and hard news reporting on the matter from such outlets, I see no reason why Election '04 will offer any greater incentive to force lawmakers to reform the system. If the well-reported-upon debacle of 2000 didn't do the trick, why would the picture the media has now succeeded in painting of a "relatively trouble-free" 2004 election encourage anybody to change anything?!...Especially with even more of those lawmakers --- the ones who were able to gain from the dubious system --- now entrenching themselves in the same halls of power that decided not to correct the problems last time?!

CONTACTS...(Please be polite!)
Steven Levy, Newsweek Columnist: steven.levy@newsweek.com
Mark Whitaker, Newsweek Editor: mark.whitaker@newsweek.com
...Or, TheBradBlog@cville.com&Subject=Please Investigate and Report On Voter Irregularity, Mistabulation and Fraud in Election 2004!">Email both at the same time with a BCC to me so I can track numbers!

The New York Times deems to recognize that it just might not be such a great idea to rely on so many untested electronic voting machines created by private, partisan companies using uninspected software with no way to validate the results.

Appropriately enough for The Times their James Fallows column is found on their "Business Section - YOUR MONEY - TECHNO FILES" page of tomorrow's paper.

Not much new offered, just the fact itself that The Times is willing to talk about these issues at all is what's most notable here. A sample...

Very good. Now what are you willing to do, NY Times, to check-and-balance what these computers did not in this year's election? Anything more than simply talking about it?

managing-editor@nytimes.com; executive-editor@nytimes.com; national@nytimes.com; editorial@nytimes.com; oped@nytimes.com; public@nytimes.com; letters@nytimes.com; magazine@nytimes.com; QandA@nytimes.com; washington@nytimes.com; TheBradBlog@cville.com?Subject=Investigate and Report On Voter Irregularity, Mistabulation and Fraud NOW!">Click here to send an email asking them to do so if you haven't already!

(Thanks Desi for the link!)

"There's just a lot of allegations of vote fraud that placed their election, the validity of their elections, in doubt."
-- George W. Bush, 11/26/04. In regard to the U.S. position of not recognizing the validity of Ukraine's recent election.

If anyone sees a guy in a big top hat run by screaming "I'm late! I'm late! I'm late!" do not be alarmed.

(See Colin Powell's equally appalling ironic quote from a few days ago here on the same topic.)

I dare you to read this entire Columbus Free Press article and then explain to me why Ohio's election shouldn't be entirely invalidated and re-held!

Here's the first graf...

Now go read the rest and get back to me.

(Hat tip to John of Crooks & Liars for the link!)

There have been many reports since Nov. 2nd, of provisional ballots in Ohio being rejected because they were cast at the "wrong precinct" after Ohio Sec. of State J. Kenneth Blackwell issued a directive requiring provisionals be cast at the voters' own precinct.

In many of those cases, where polling places had been shut down and consolidated in urban minority areas to make way for E-Voting --- which was then cancelled at the last minute, even though the polling places remained closed and consolidated --- several different precincts were combined into a single polling place.

Where that took place, there were different tables that represented the different precincts. Many poll workers, however, were reportedly unaware that provisional ballots had to be cast at the voters specific "precinct" (or in such cases, table) which meant that some voters who were forced to fill out a provisional were told they could simply leave the ballot at "Table B", when their actual precinct was at "Table A" --- in the same building!

Such ballots are now being rejected for having been cast at the "wrong precinct"!

A Cincinnati Post report today describes how that happened in just one of Ohio's counties:

A lawsuit has now been filed in one county (Cuyahoga) against Blackwell and the State of Ohio arguing that such rejected provisional ballots should indeed be counted in Ohio!

From the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Voter disenfranchisment in America. Just another topic worth less coverage from our major news media than shoppers buying DVD players at Wal-Mart on the day after Thanksgiving.

Make no mistake, the cash register is the real voting booth these days in these dis-United States of America.

UPDATE: Columbus Free Press has an affidavit from Neil F. Schoenwetter, Jr., a Democratic "challenger" at the polls on Election Day in Ohio, who gives specific details of Election Supervisors and Poll Workers instructing voters that "ANY PROVISIONAL BALLOT THAT WAS CAST IN THE COUNTY WOULD BE COUNTED; THEY DID NOT HAVE TO BE CAST AT ANY PARTICULAR PRECINCT." See the link for the entire sworn account.

A Pentagon-appointed advisory panel has issued a harsh report on America's failing middle-east policies and "urged the creation of a 'strategic communication' apparatus within the White House and an overhaul of public diplomacy, public affairs and information dissemination efforts by the Pentagon and State Department."

The report, made available by the Pentagon just weeks after the U.S. Election, charges what so many of us have been charging for some time; namely, that the "US is losing the war of ideas" in the middle-east and the Islamic world in general. From The Australian's article on the report:

Duh...do ya think?!

Warren Mitofsky, head of the consortium which gathers and publishes the exit poll data for all of the major networks and newspapers, has been claiming of late that those who relied on and/or published his exit polling data during the course of Election Day were mistaken to have done so. The reason being, Mitofsky recently emailed Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, is because those raw numbers, leaking out when they did, are more aptly compared to "the score at half time at a football game" rather than information to be used to judge against the final election results.

I believe Joseph Cannon gets it exactly right, however, when he responded yesterday with this thought:

Of course, without the raw data from the exit pollsters, everyone is largely guessing. So I will associate myself with pollster John Zogby's sage demand on MSNBC last Wednesday wherein he said, "I think that the gentlemen who are responsible for the exit polls should be fully transparent, release their data, discuss their methodology. Let us see what exactly it is that happened, and why it happened...I'll take this opportunity right now to say I think that it's in the interest of healing this country and restoring some unity to this country for us to have a thorough investigation of what happened both to the election and with the exit polls."

Hear, hear, Mr. Zogby!...

A week or two ago I wrote an item here entitled "Why It Matters" which pointed to an article in the Russian PRAVDA Online discussing our election irregularities here in greater detail than we've seen from the bulk of the United States' own media.

My point in highlighting the article was that the world is watching carefullly what happens in the United States, perhaps now more than ever as we are attempting --- as claimed by the Administration, anyway --- to spread democracy around the globe.

Apparently I was more prescient that even I had imagined at the time in pointing out that particular article. Take a look at what PRAVDA Online now has to say about the U.S.'s recent objections to the election results in Ukraine:

Any other questions?

If we can't get democracy right in our own country or even show an interest in the fairness and transparency of same by the bulk of our controlling governmental bodies and corporate media, then one can hardly expect the rest of the world to follow an example which we're not particularly interested in applying to our own democracy.

Expect the international influence of the American Empire to continue to crumble in country after country, region after region as we here at home continue to fiddle even while worldwide democracy burns as a direct result of our own apathy for maintaining the health of our own once-fervently held democratic principles.