AMY GOODMAN: Harvey Wasserman, I wanted to switch gears—
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —and ask you about voting. Ohio’s top election official, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, announced on Friday the voting systems that decided the 2004 election in Ohio were rife with “critical security failures.†You and Bob Fitrakis have reported extensively on the 2004 presidential vote in Ohio, your most recent book, What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election. Your response to the report? What did you think was most important in her findings?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, our initial response was “Yippee!†I mean, they finally, after all these years of us banging our—you know, we’re local boys. We live in Ohio, in Columbus. And we saw the election of 2004 stolen right in front of our faces. And we reported it extensively, and everybody laughed at us. And they said, “Oh, this couldn’t happen in America.†And we documented it in How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election and Is Rigging 2008. We documented scores of ways that this election was stolen. And we pointed out a myriad flaws that we saw right in our own neighborhoods, of what was done to keep people of color and young people from voting and to rig the vote count.
I mean, the servers for the computation of the Ohio vote count were in the same basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee that houses servers for the Republican National Committee. The programmers who did the stuff for Ken Blackwell, the Republican Secretary of State, were Republicans who did websites for the Bush administration. I mean, it’s amazing.
[…]
But the 2004 election was stolen. There is absolutely no doubt about it. A 6.7% shift in exit polls does not happen by chance. And, you know, so finally, we have irrefutable confirmation that what we were saying was true and that every piece of the puzzle in the Ohio 2004 election was flawed.
Although the Democratic victories in ’06 prove that whatever power corrupt Republicans have to steal elections is not nationwide, or is not significant enough to steal races that aren’t fairly close to begin with….
yet.
I was amazed how the conversation at the time was so easily turned into, “Wow…I can’t believe how biased the exit polls were!”
Ed, this goes hand in hand with the voting machines. Have you been following the stories about the phone jamming scandal and the targeted robo calls?
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/004957.php
Here’s something I’ve been thinking about lately…
A site where people could submit robocalls related to elections, giving commentary about what that robocall is supposed to do in that election.
I’ve received some calls I wish I’d held on to.
That book looks like a REALLY interesting read.