"To believe that Bush won the election, you must also believe:"
by Mark Ritchie

1- That the exit polls were WRONG...(remember - they have been used for over a decade and considered reliable)

2- That Zogby's 5pm election day calls for Kerry winning OH, FL were
WRONG. He was within a less than 1/2 % point margin of error in his 2000 final poll and previous polls for other elections.

3- That Harris Poll last minute polling for Kerry was WRONG. They were also within a 1/2% point margin of error in their 2000 final poll.

4- The Incumbent Rule #I (that undecideds primarily break at the end for the challenger)was WRONG.

5- The 50% Rule was WRONG (that an incumbent doesn't do better than his final polling)

6- The Approval Rating Rule was WRONG (that an incumbent with less than 50% approval will most likely lose the election)

7- That Journalist Greg Palast was WRONG when he said that even before the election, 1 million votes were stolen from Kerry. He was the ONLY reporter to break the fact that 90,000 Florida blacks were disnfranchised in 2000.

8- That it was just a COINCIDENCE that the exit polls were CORRECT where there WAS a PAPER TRAIL and INCORRECT (+5% for Bush) where there was NO PAPER TRAIL.

9- That the surge in new young voters had NO positive effect for Kerry, even though it was the largest number of youth voters 18-29 ever and a huge jump from 2000 and they were over 55% in favor of Kerry.

10- That Bush BEAT 99-1 mathematical odds in winning the election.

11- That Kerry did WORSE than Gore against an opponent who LOST the support of SCORES of Republican newspapers who were for Bush in 2000.

12- That Bush did better than an 18 national poll average which showed him tied with Kerry at 47. In other words, Bush got 80% of the undecided vote to end up with a 51-48 majority - when ALL professional pollsters agree that the undecided vote ALWAYS goes to the challenger.

13- That Voting machines made by Republicans with no paper trail and with no software publication, which have been proven by thousands of
computer scientists to be vulnerable in scores of ways, were NOT tampered with in this election.

Some Examples: (There are many more, but I won't list them all here - this is to give you an idea)

- The City of Gahanna in Ohio discovered a discrepancy that gave 4,000 votes to George Bush. After media scrutiny, city officials have admitted to an electronic "glitch" that caused the problem.

- In Broward County, FL, errors in software code caused a referendum on gambling to be completely overturned. The error caused totals to count backwards after reaching a ceiling of 32,500 votes. The problem existed in the 2002 election as well however the issue was never resolved by the manufacturer of the electronic voting machine.

- In North Carolina, a Craven County district logged 11,283 more votes than voters and actually overturned the results of a regional race.

For more info, go to:

http://www.blackboxvoting.org

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1106-30.htm

There are key people right now working behind the scenes on this...but meanwhile, we the people at a a grassroots level need to start making the corporate media pay attention to the "Real Story" not the "Moral Values" headlines and stories being featured on the news currently including the "Boy Genius - Karl Rove" Cover stories on CNN and Fox. We need to support those that are pursuing this issue to reveal the truth and get an inquiry going. If any of you remember Michael Moore's movie Fahrenheit 9/11, you'll remember the scene where the Black Congressional Caucus members stood up in a joint session of Congress in 2000 and asked for a single Senator to back them in an investigation of "Voter Fraud and Disenfranchisement". Many who saw the film felt ashamed at that moment and many didn't even know this had happened. Well, its happening all over again....History has a funny way of repeating itself if we don't pay attention and learn. Currently there are several members of Congress and the House Judiciary Committee that have requested the GAO (General Accounting Office) to implement an inquiry into computer voting machine problems
http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/
gaoinvestvote2004ltr11504.pdf

There are also folks across the country at the grassroots level filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to investigate these problems immediately. One of the biggest driving individuals behind this effort is a woman by the name of Bev Harris from Seattle, WA. (her site
is <http://www.blackboxvoting.org. I became familiar with Bev Harris when I saw her on MSNBC give a demonstration to Howard Dean on how easy it was to "hack" the central tabulator computer for these computer voting systems and change the results. She did it in less than 2 minutes and in a way that no one monitoring the system could tell. I later saw her demonstrate this at a presentation here in Marin County this year. Sadly, no one seemed to pay attention, including in the Democratic Party and now, here we are after one of the biggest elections of our lifetime and
with problems surfacing all over the place with no answers or accountability. Worse is that no one is covering what is perhaps the biggest story of all - the fraud involved in this election.

This is not the "Dems" being sore losers...this is real stuff folks.
Real problems. If this issue and fraud isn't addressed, our democracy and our votes in the future are dead. Won't even be a point in voting.

'Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.'
--Josef Stalin