Thursday, July 02, 2009

What Do YOU Do when You Know Your Democracy Is Being Stolen?



OOPS! We rigged the Iran/Florida-Ohio vote count AGAIN!!
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
June 23, 2009

Iran's Ayatollahs have just admitted that in some 50 cities there were as many as 3 million more votes cast than there were voters in the recent presidential election.

But, they say, that's not enough to change the outcome. So, like Florida in 2000 and Ohio 2004, there will be no total recount and no new election. Election theft should be opposed, whether it's sanctioned by a supreme Ayatollah or the U.S. Supreme Court.

It's as if the Iranian government is being advised by Ohio's former Imam J. Kenneth Blackwell, who, as Ohio's 2004 Secretary of State, purged hundreds of thousands of voters, and stole, switched and disappeared enough votes to put George W. Bush in the White House for a second term. The dubious Iranian tallies look very similar to the inflated Bush outcomes in 12 Republican southwest Ohio counties, most notably Warren, Clermont and Butler. They are reminiscent of the vote counts in two precincts in Perry County that reported turnouts of 121% and 118% of registered voters.

The chief difference between Iran 2009 and Ohio 2004---and Florida 2000----is in the opposition. Iran's Mir Hussein Moussavi has vowed martyrdom.

John Kerry, trailing in Ohio by just 130,000 votes with more than 250,000 yet to be counted, walked away less than 12 hours after exit polls showed him a clear victor.

Gore fought a little, but instead of embracing martyrdom, opted for boredom, and for making sure there was no challenge in the US Senate to the votes stolen.

Nationwide, Bush's alleged 3 million-vote nationwide margin in 2004, and 600 votes in Florida 2000, were as fictional as those ballots the Ayatollahs now admit should not exist.

Moussavi believes he has a date with destiny. But Kerry apparently had one on the golf course. Gore's failure to effectively respond in Florida 2000 remains an inconvenient truth.

Blackwell, Florida's Jeb Bush and Iran's Revolutionary Guard used registration tampering, disinformation, intimidation and fraud to disenfranchise millions of eligible voters before the balloting.

Blackwell and Bush then used a lethal mix of black box machines, faulty scantrons and hijacked ballots to finish the job. Blackwell worked with Diebold, ES&S, Triad, and other electronic magicians that let him disappear or switch all the votes he needed with a few keystrokes at around 2am election night. His high-tech IT henchman, Michael Connell, has since died in a mysterious plane crash.

The Times seems to finally understand the problem. In their June 22 editorial, "How to Trust Electronic Voting," they argued the following: "In paperless electronic voting, voters mark their choices, and when the votes have all been cast, the machine spits out the results. There is no way to be sure that a glitch or intentional vote theft – by malicious software or computer hacking – did not change the outcome. If there is a close election, there's also no way of conducting a meaningful recount."

Saddled with paper ballots that may or may not still exist, the Iranian authorities have simply trashed the whole election. "I don't think they actually counted the votes," one observer told the New York Times.

Because the American people did not take to the streets in the Iranian model, our democracy was subverted.

Thanks to Kerry and Gore, the public follow-up in Ohio and Florida was ineffective. As in Iran, the primary reporting has been largely limited to the Internet. The results---8 years of George W. Bush---speak for themselves.

But in the US, a nationwide election protection movement has arisen that protected the results in 2008, and that could make all the difference for the future of American democracy.

The Iranian people are speaking for themselves, and for the finest principles of democracy. For confirmation and inspiration, they need only look at America 2000-8 to see the consequences of unelected executives.

--
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection. Bob's FITRAKIS FILES are at FreePress.org, where this article first appeared. HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE U.S. is atwww.harveywasserman.com.

4 comments:

Mark E. Smith said...

The only problem here is that Ahmadinejad really won the Iranian election.

The overwhelming majority of the Iranian people prefer to keep control of their oil, rather than selling out to Israel and the U.S. as Mousavi would have done.

Having endured one U.S.-backed dictator, the Shah, and being right next door to Iraq, Iranians know exactly what Mousavi's proposed closer ties to the U.S. and Israel would have brought them--poverty, destruction, and lawlessness.

There certainly was electoral fraud in the Iranian election, but it was the opposite of what Burson-Marsteller would have us believe. Millions were spent to make it appear as if the U.S.-backed candidate, Mousavi, had more votes and more support than he did.

Fitrakis and Wasserman have been in the election integrity field long enough to know that if the U.S. government and the mainstream media talk about election fraud, something is fishy. Our CIA has been rigging elections and overthrowing democratically elected leaders in other countries for decades. Just because they may also illegally meddle in elections here, doesn't mean they've stopped doing it elsewhere.

Unknown said...

Dear Mr. Mark Smith,

First of all I want to appreciate the fact that you are one of the people who criticize his own government. That takes some courage that many people don’t have that. However, we have different opinions about Iran’s election. I think the reason is that it is difficult for the people living in US to imagine the situation in a country like Iran. I should mention that until 5 years ago, I lived in Iran and since then I have had close connection with the people living there.
First of all, I want to emphasize the fact that Ahmadinezhad never won the election. In fact the existing polls and evidence strongly suggest that he had less than 15% of the votes. He definitely cheated; not by adding some ballots to the boxes, but by announcing completely fake results. The evidence are overwhelming: the counting of the votes was impossibly fast; the distribution was blatantly unrealistic; the announced results was absolutely unexpected; he is extremely hated in Iran’s society even in the villages; one of the candidates who is very outspoken and is quite popular had about 0.5% of the votes, much less than the circulation of his daily news paper; there were no wrong ballots; one of the officials of Ahmadinezhad’s interior ministry announced the actual results in which Ahmadinezhad had the expected 13% of the votes but he was killed in a car accident immediately after that; the system was completely ready for announcing a fake result: immediately after the election they surrounded the office of the main reformist candidate;…. I don’t know where to stop; there are hundreds of these evidences. Here are some supporting websites:
http://www.juancole.com/2009/06/chatham-house-study-definitively-shows.html
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/06/the-coup-detat-in-iran.html
Second, Ahmadinezhad and the very radical clerics backing him are much more dangerous than what most people think. Again the words can’t explain it enough. Their main theology course is that all the efforts of the pious should be in the direction to expedite the appearance of the Shiite Messiah (Imam Mahdi). One of the preconditions that they should focus their efforts towards is making the world chaotic. They persecute Iranians in the most brutal ways; they kill protesting students and torture them in the harshest ways; they take their social, political, and even private freedom to the limits you can’t even imagine: They don’t allow any connection between opposite sex, they search the houses for traces of alcohol; they don’t even tolerate music… They haven’t yet been completely successful in forcing their ways because there have been liberal figures in Iran’s government up to this point. But now they are all being removed. To summarize, I should tell you that Iran is going to be run by Taliban like people. You can imagine how much that can be dangerous to Iranians first and to the world as well.
Third, well maybe Iran has not been very compliant to US and Israel. However, the government in Iran is strongly dependent on Russia. Russia sells weapons to them, helps them in their nuclear facility, and supports them in the world. But let me remind you that Russians have been much more dangerous to the world than US has been.

Mark E. Smith said...

Mir, you can repeat the right-wing propaganda all you wish, but while I never lived in Iran, I've been there and I lived right next door in Afghanistan for five years, so you can't frighten me with the fear of fundamentalist Islamists--I know of fundamentalist Jews and Christians who are even worse.

Nobody is dumb enough to imagine that the Iranian people would want another U.S.-sponsored dictator after so many years of the Shah, that they would approve of U.S. foreign policies like torture and wars of aggression, or that they don't want control of their own oil, and anyone who tries to make it appear that they do is an astroturfer working for the CIA or for Burson-Marsteller.

It is the U.S. that does not have honest elections, but even if we had, we have only corporate candidates to vote for and nobody who might represent the American people has any chance of winning. Believe it or not, despite what our government does, most Americans are not rich, and do not feel that the millionaires and billionaires in Washington D.C. represent our interests. That's why half of us don't even bother to vote.

The dollar is not a stable currency, and nobody who doesn't have to would tie their future to it. It is backed by nothing at all except debt, recklessness, negligence, deregulation, lack of oversight, and exorbitant spending on military expansionism.

Our CIA trained the generals responsible for the recent coup in Honduras, and they wouldn't have kidnapped their President without first getting the green light from the U.S. ambassador and our chief of station. If any further proof is needed that we were responsible for the coup, the fact that the Obama administration won't call it a coup and refuses to cut funding to the illegitimate government should suffice.

Honduras, however, is a banana republic. Iran is not. The U.S. spent a fortune trying to meddle in the Iranian election and failed. Since it cannot invade Iran with any hope of doing any better than it has been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and apparently cannot kidnap Ahmadinejad, our government may give Israel (or may have already given Israel) the green light to nuke Iran.

There are always elements in any government who want to sell their country out, but that is never the will of the people.

I don't care how many stories the CIA and Burson-Marsteller planted in the media to support their attempted "color revolution" in Iran, it is typical of U.S. meddling and intervention and anyone who knows anything of history will recognize it for what it is.

Your claim that the Russians have been more dangerous to the world than the U.S. is very strange. Do the Russians have more nukes or do we? Which country used nukes on civilian populations? Do the Russians have more military bases in foreign countries or do we? Which country has started more wars of aggression?

By being the only developed country in the world that ignored the health of its own people, our government managed to spend a fortune threatening the USSR militarily, and they went broke trying to mount defenses against our aggression. Now they no longer have health care and they are now ruled by mobsters and gangsters just like we are.

The cold war's over, Agent Mir. We won. And the price we paid was that we could no longer pretend that we were merely anti-Communist, and had to expose ourselves to ourselves and to the world as the fascists we are. The Soviet Union doesn't have the biggest gulag in the world, we do.

But go right ahead and remind me, Mir. When and where have the Russians been a greater danger to the world than the U.S., other than in the falsified reports of corrupt U.S. intelligence agencies trying to justify military budgets?

Unknown said...
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