_______________________________________________________________
 |
 |  Primer on the year 2000 U.S. election fraud
 |  http://uscrisis.lege.net/election/
 |
 |  Source:  http://votermarch.org/
 |  (
 |  http://votermarch.org/PDF%20Files/The%20Unelected%20President%20Stolen%20Election%202000.pdf
 |  )
 |
 |
 |  The Unelected President by Tammy Ballard, Sept. 30, 2002.  A
 |  60 page Primer [originally] in pdf format.  An expose on the
 |  Stolen Election 2000, including the felon Black voter purge,
 |  the Palm Beach butterfly ballot, Republican Miami mob riots,
 |  fraudulent Republican overseas absentee ballots,  media
 |  complicity, and the illegal Bush-Cheney 2000 Recount
 |  Committee.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |  The Unelected President
 |  By Tammy Ballard
 |
 |
 |  Introduction:  Part I
 |
 |
 |  The Honorable President William Jefferson Clinton endured
 |  every kind of slander spewing from the American right wing
 |  "press" imaginable throughout the full eight years of his
 |  presidential terms.
 |
 |  When the "news breaking" story regarding a sexual scandal
 |  involving Monica Lewinsky occurred, I laughed, "yeah, right.
 |  Like President Clinton is the only guy in the Oval Office
 |  that has ever engaged in an extra-marital affair."
 |
 |  I was not condoning his behavior, but, since when was that a
 |  crime?"
 |
 |  I remember having the uneasy sense that someone was going to
 |  try to make it a crime because the "press" was making every
 |  effort to make sure that we the people knew every little
 |  sordid detail.
 |
 |  It certainly was not our business to know, just as it never
 |  has been in past administrations.
 |
 |  I was astounded at the astronomical amount of  "news
 |  coverage" this insignificant incident received.
 |
 |  I realize this was not an insignificant incident to Hillary,
 |  but it surely should have been insignificant to us.
 |
 |  After all we have our own everyday problems to hurdle.
 |
 |  Why would we feel the need or the inclination to be
 |  concerned with the president's sex life?
 |
 |  Every hour of everyday, "breaking news updates" on the
 |  sexual habits of our president was shoved down American
 |  throats.
 |
 |  Why?
 |
 |  I found this distasteful coverage of our president not only
 |  to be ridiculous but, the longer this out of control "press"
 |  expounded mindless accusations, the more dangerous this
 |  folly became.
 |
 |  Why did our "news media" make such a big deal out of an
 |  incident that was not threatening the safety or the
 |  sovereignty of our nation?
 |
 |  Then my mind wandered back further to Hillary's health care
 |  plan.
 |
 |  What was wrong with Hillary trying to develop a better
 |  health care plan for American's?
 |
 |  She did nothing different than past administrations have
 |  done.
 |
 |  Obscure terms started popping out of my television set.
 |
 |  "Corporate America, Corporate Media."
 |
 |  I don't know how long this terminology floated through the
 |  airwaves before I took note of it, but my ears were full
 |  standing on 12-12-2000 when five US Supreme Court Justices
 |  allowed George Bush to take up residence at 1600
 |  Pennsylvania Avenue without being elected.
 |
 |
 |
 |  Introduction:  Part II
 |
 |
 |  The reason I have titled this primer The Unelected President
 |  is because many studies of the uncounted and disputed
 |  ballots from Election 2000 have taken place.
 |
 |  We now know these studies have revealed that Al Gore was
 |  indeed elected by about 500,000 more votes then Bush.
 |
 |  We now know that if the ballots had been counted as required
 |  by law, the electoral dispute would not have been necessary.
 |
 |  Only one candidate can be elected to the presidency in
 |  America. Up until December 12, 2000 the elected candidate
 |  was the candidate that received the majority of votes.
 |
 |  That candidate was Al Gore.
 |
 |
 |
 |  Introduction:  Part III
 |
 |
 |  In the 50's and through the 60's the evening news meant just
 |  that.
 |
 |  Settling in for the evening, families gathered around their
 |  brand new, high tech, round screened black and white
 |  television sets to listen to and watch the national events
 |  of the day.
 |
 |  Some parents fixed the kids a bowl of popcorn and handed
 |  them a bottle of White Rock soda to keep them quiet.
 |
 |  Television was a new and exciting innovation.
 |
 |  It did not take much to entertain Americans in those days.
 |
 |  Just the fact that we could see someone on our screen in
 |  Portland, Oregon that was in Hollywood California or
 |  Washington D.C. was miraculous in and of itself.
 |
 |  The news anchors monologue was generally read from a
 |  prepared report, which he read word for word in a monotone
 |  manner.
 |
 |  He offered no personal opinions and he did not change his
 |  facial expression throughout the whole newscast.
 |
 |  This would be a gruesomely boring news hour in terms of
 |  today's demand for entertainment, but it was all very
 |  entertaining and fascinating to us.
 |
 |  Not only was it extraordinary at the time, but we were
 |  listening to the real news of the day.
 |
 |  No punditry or fanfare was involved.
 |
 |  The anchorman was merely doing his job.
 |
 |  He was informing the public.
 |
 |  I think we now know that there was a lot that we were not
 |  told, but at least we were not lied to about what we were
 |  told.
 |
 |  I think they had it right.
 |
 |  News anchors could either inform the public, or not inform
 |  the public, but at least they did not lie to us.
 |
 |  The spin and fantasy that flows out of today's networks has
 |  turned the phrases investigative journalism and news anchor
 |  almost into a joke.
 |
 |  I will often use the terms "press" and mainstream "media" in
 |  quotation marks.
 |
 |  In general, I am referring to some network and radio
 |  broadcast pundits, although, I cannot ignore the fact that a
 |  certain amount of the propagandist punditry that is so
 |  prolific in America has also found a place in print as well.
 |
 |
 |  Please Note:
 |
 |  All the articles that are mentioned in this primer were
 |  acquired from The Internet.
 |
 |
 |
 |  Introduction:  Part IV
 |
 |
 |  The informed reader will watch the events of election 2000
 |  unfold before their eyes, just as I did, off of the
 |  Internet.
 |
 |  Although my message is delivered on paper, The reader will
 |  view excerpts and highlights from the very articles that
 |  have been keeping me informed for almost two years.
 |
 |  Rather then to weigh this primer down with footnotes, I
 |  chose instead to bring the source to the reader.
 |
 |  So, sit back, relax and behold some of the most ruthless
 |  characters that comprise our very own American populace.
 |
 |
 |
 |  The Unelected President
 |
 |  Chapter 1
 |
 |
 |  I thought I was the only American that felt unease during
 |  The Presidential Campaign of 2000.
 |
 |  George Bush ran the worst Presidential Campaign that I ever
 |  had the misfortune to behold.
 |
 |  Insincerity blatantly flowed from him with such obvious
 |  ease.
 |
 |  He called himself a "uniter not a divider."
 |
 |  Who did he think was divided that called for a "uniter?"
 |
 |  I guess we now know that America is very much divided, but I
 |  did not know that until I realized that many Americans
 |  rejoiced on Stolen Election 2000.
 |
 |  I thought that all Americans were united in the belief in
 |  the democratic process.
 |
 |  The democratic process, the right to vote and the right to
 |  free speech were very old and fundamental values in America
 |  up until Election 2000.
 |
 |  Bush's followers gave me the eerie sensation that they
 |  thought they were cheering for a football team rather then a
 |  National Presidential Election that would shape the future
 |  of America and the world for the next four years.
 |
 |  Watching them cheer for him with such aggressiveness gave me
 |  the uneasy sense that there was something about this
 |  Republican crowd that was quite different from crowds that
 |  had been televised during past Presidential Elections.
 |
 |  If you looked real close, you could see blood in their eyes.
 |
 |  They were that part of American Society that had been
 |  Limbaughed to their very core.
 |
 |  Some of us were fighting for democracy while they were
 |  fighting for the legitimacy of the installation of this
 |  individual into The People's White House.
 |
 |  Bush had gotten his slogan backwards.
 |
 |  He should have told us he was a "divider and not a uniter."
 |
 |  He had blood boiling on both sides.
 |
 |  He called himself a "Compassionate Conservative".
 |
 |  What is a "Compassionate Conservative?"
 |
 |  Is he implying that a regular conservative will bomb folks
 |  with a thermonuclear weapon and a "Compassionate
 |  Conservative" will only use an M16?
 |
 |  The term "Compassionate Conservative" is not only a glossy
 |  phrase used for hype and effect, but it is a term that is
 |  seemingly used for defense.
 |
 |  Defense of what?
 |
 |  It seemed to me that he was using this obscure term to gloss
 |  over something far deeper, maybe something erroneous or
 |  cynical.
 |
 |  In other words, what is wrong with being a regular
 |  conservative?
 |
 |  During the debate, Bush avoided questions instead of
 |  answering them.
 |
 |  His empty rhetoric set off red and yellow lights in my mind.
 |
 |  The "fuzzy math" remark during the debate was the most
 |  profound statement I had ever heard flow from the mouth of
 |  any politician.
 |
 |  Al Gore was explaining his economic policies to the American
 |  people in a rational manner.
 |
 |  He eloquently explained his economic formula in a way that
 |  should have made sense to all of us.
 |
 |  I noticed the wrinkle over W's brow, as if he was puzzled.
 |
 |  And then, it flowed from his mouth.
 |
 |  It was amazing.
 |
 |  He shook his head in frustration and said something to the
 |  effect that Al's formula was just "fuzzy math."
 |
 |  I could not believe he had made such a ridiculous statement.
 |
 |  How could he call Al's formula "fuzzy math?"
 |
 |  After all, it made sense to me and I am not an Einstein or a
 |  mathematician.
 |
 |  After reading about Enronomics, I can now understand why a
 |  sensible economic formula would not compute with W.
 |
 |  The Al Gore formula was based on real numbers or projected
 |  numbers.
 |
 |  W's concept of real numbers must be figures that have been
 |  depleted and then inflated with the push of a pencil.
 |
 |  I could not believe the applause that Bush received from
 |  American "media" for his backward performance during that
 |  presidential debate.
 |
 |  That is when I noticed it loud and clear, without question,
 |  the American "press" wanted Bush to win.
 |
 |  There was a matter of alcohol and drug abuse that was
 |  shrugged off, even after public admission of alcohol abuse
 |  on the part of Bush himself.
 |
 |  The "media" rode well with his ridiculous buzz-words and
 |  sound bytes like a seasoned cowboy riding on a horseback.
 |
 |  I listened to mindless "news casters" tell me how smart Bush
 |  was and what a wonderful campaign he was running.
 |
 |  Were they stupid?
 |
 |  Were they just not paying attention to his meaningless
 |  rhetoric?
 |
 |  Were they just trying to feed Americans propagandist lies?
 |
 |  As I observed my local "media" twist and turn Al Gore's
 |  words, not only totally obliterating what Al had really
 |  said, but at some point accusing Al of lying, I opted for
 |  the latter.
 |
 |  American  "news media" was feeding propaganda to Americans.
 |
 |  Why?
 |
 |  The daily lies coming from American "media" was mind
 |  boggling.
 |
 |  I could not have been the only viewer to notice.
 |
 |  Anyone that heard what Al had to say and then witness the
 |  "media" spin it's spin had to notice how indiscrete the
 |  "media" was in blatant lying.
 |
 |  Did they think we did not notice?
 |
 |  Maybe they did not care if we did notice.
 |
 |  It was probably a little of both analogies.
 |
 |  Some Americans not only did not notice, some sadly did not
 |  care.
 |
 |  Election Day finally came.
 |
 |  At last, American's could air our views at the polls.
 |
 |  American's could put this ridiculous "media" spin to rest
 |  and elect Al.
 |
 |  Then, without notice, sleaze oozed from Florida.
 |
 |  First the network called Florida for Al, no, it was Bush,
 |  no, it was for Gore, no, it was for Bush.
 |
 |  A box of cast ballots from Broward County had disappeared.
 |
 |  That is when the helicopters full of attorneys for both
 |  sides emerged.
 |
 |  The Florida State Supreme Court ruled to count the ballots.
 |
 |  The GOP flew a mob to Dade County to stop the counting of
 |  cast ballots there.
 |
 |  Scalia said the decision of The Florida Supreme Court would
 |  hurt Bush and called The Florida State Supreme Court wrong.
 |
 |  The US Supreme Court interfered with Florida Law and stopped
 |  the counts.
 |
 |  Our ballots were put on hold.
 |
 |  My solution was simple.
 |
 |  If Florida was incapable of running a legal election their
 |  votes should be excluded.
 |
 |  Not so fast says The US Supreme Court.
 |
 |  American Votes will be excluded and Bush will reside in Our
 |  White House and we will be forced to acknowledge him as a
 |  President.
 |
 |  I was dumbfounded.
 |
 |  Democracy had been stolen from America with the stroke of
 |  the pen from five felonious Judges.
 |
 |  My first reaction was to turn on the computer to try to make
 |  sense out of what had just happened.
 |
 |  It was plastered all over the net.
 |
 |  "A Corporate Coup had just occurred in America."
 |
 |  Those obscure terms, Corporate America and Corporate Media
 |  loomed in front of me like a big bright balloon.
 |
 |  Republicans spoke the words "get over it," Democrats said
 |  "NEVER."
 |
 |  Now I knew what he meant by  "Compassionate Conservative."
 |
 |  They had performed a coup via the ballot box and not via the
 |  military.
 |
 |  A bloodless coup was a compassionate coup.
 |
 |  I read on.
 |
 |  Big donors to Bush and The Republican Party: Enron, Exxon,
 |  Unocal, GE, and many others.
 |
 |  I read on.
 |
 |  Bush and Family had their Big CEO hands in everything from
 |  Big Oil to Baseball Teams.
 |
 |  A Baseball Stadium obtained in a somewhat shady deal
 |  involving tax money.
 |
 |  An oil deal with a guy named Baath that involved the Bin
 |  Laden Family and Arabian Oil.
 |
 |  Was that Arbusto (Bush in Spanish) or Harken?
 |
 |  The list went on and on.
 |
 |  Shady deals insolvent businesses.
 |
 |  Neil Bush was involved in the Silverado S&L Scandal.
 |
 |  Reagan, Bush Sr. and Iran-Contra.
 |
 |  Cheney and Halliburton.
 |
 |  Each story I read had been well documented at one time or
 |  another during this family's public history.
 |
 |  Poppy Bush, an ex CIA agent.
 |
 |  Osama Bin Laden, an ex CIA agent.
 |
 |  Poppy Bush, The Bin Laden Family and The Carlyle Group.
 |
 |  Poppy, Saddam and an oil pipeline that was built through
 |  Iraq.
 |
 |  Bush Jr. gave the Taliban 4 million dollars in American tax
 |  money.
 |
 |  This appeared to be a gift to a "religious" group that was
 |  halting the growth of poppy in Afghanistan.
 |
 |  I read on.
 |
 |  No, it was not just a gift after all.
 |
 |  Bush delivered this "gift" with a message to the Taliban.
 |
 |  The message went something like this: We intend to build a
 |  pipeline through The Afghan Mountains.
 |
 |  You will comply.
 |
 |  We will either give you a carpet of gold or a carpet of
 |  bombs.
 |
 |
 |
 |  The Unelected President
 |
 |  Chapter 2
 |  Stolen Election 2000
 |
 |
 |  A Presidential Election had just been hijacked in America
 |  right under our noses.
 |
 |  Since when was it ok for The US Supreme Court to tell
 |  Americans that our votes don't count?
 |
 |  Why wasn't the outrage and audacity of their decision
 |  plastered in our "news" headlines and national "news media?"
 |
 |  Why was this outrage so readily accepted by American
 |  "mainstream media?"
 |
 |  Other nagging questions still loomed.
 |
 |  Why did American "media" spend eight years smearing our last
 |  Elected President?
 |
 |  Why did American "media" use public airwaves to produce an
 |  uninformed electorate?
 |
 |  Why did American "media" smear Vice President Al Gore?
 |
 |  Perhaps the most troubling question of all was why did
 |  American "media" spend exhaustive hours trying to hide W's
 |  blunders and bad grammar with puff pieces, photo ops and
 |  excuses?
 |
 |  Why weren't the following articles in mainstream "media?"
 |
 |
 |  Greg Palast of gregpalast.com is an investigative reporter.
 |
 |  Some of his stories have aired in The UK on BBC News.
 |
 |  He wrote extensively on the subject of election 2000.
 |
 |  The following is a sample of what he has written regarding
 |  the subject:
 |
 |
 |  "THE GREAT FLORIDA EX-CON GAME"
 |  "How the `felon' voter-purge was itself felonious"
 |  Harper's Magazine
 |
 |  Friday, March 1, 20 by Greg Palast
 |
 |  "In November the U.S. media, lost in patriotic reverie,
 |  dressed up the Florida recount as a victory for President
 |  Bush. But however one reads the ballots, Bush's win would
 |  certainly have been jeopardized had not some Floridians been
 |  barred from casting ballots at all.
 |
 |  Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida
 |  secretaries of state -- Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris,
 |  both protégées of Governor Jeb Bush -- ordered 57,700
 |  `ex-felons,' who are prohibited from voting by state law, to
 |  be removed from voter rolls. (In the thirty-five states
 |  where former felons can vote, roughly 90 percent vote
 |  Democratic.) A portion of the list, which was compiled for
 |  Florida by DBT Online, can be seen for the first time here;
 |  DBT, a company now owned by Choice-Point of Atlanta, was
 |  paid $4.3 million for its work, replacing a firm that
 |  charged $5,700 per year for the same service.
 |
 |  If the hope was that DBT would enable Florida to exclude
 |  more voters, then the state appears to have spent its money
 |  wisely."
 |
 |
 |  The following are a few paragraphs from an article that was
 |  written by Greg Palast and Julian Borger:
 |
 |
 |  "Inquiry into new claims of poll abuses in Florida" (by
 |  Julian Borger and Gregory Palast) the Guardian (London)
 |  Saturday, February 17, 2001 by Greg Palast
 |
 |  "The US civil rights commission was yesterday investigating
 |  allegations by the BBC's Newsnight that thousands of mainly
 |  black voters in Florida were disenfranchised in the November
 |  election because of wholesale errors by a private data
 |  services company.
 |
 |  Information supplied by the company, Database Technologies
 |  (DBT), led to tens of thousands of Floridians being removed
 |  from the electoral roll on the grounds that they had
 |  felonies on their records.
 |
 |  However, a Guardian investigation in December confirmed by
 |  Newsnight found that the list was riddled with mistakes that
 |  led to thousands of voters -- a disproportionate number of
 |  them black -- being wrongly disenfranchised.
 |
 |  The scale of the errors, and their skewed effect on black,
 |  overwhelmingly Democratic voters, cost Al Gore thousands of
 |  votes in Florida in an election that George Bush won by just
 |  537 votes.
 |
 |  Moreover the Florida state government, where Mr Bush's
 |  brother Jeb is governor, did nothing to correct the errors,
 |  and may have encouraged them.
 |
 |  Under DBT's contract, seen by Newsnight, the company was
 |  obliged to check its data by `manual verification using
 |  telephone calls and statistical sampling'.
 |
 |  DBT was paid $4.3m for its purge of the voters' roll, but
 |  company officials confirmed that they did not call voters
 |  they had included on their list to check if they had
 |  identified the right person."
 |
 |
 |  The following is more from Greg Palast on the subject:
 |
 |
 |  "Florida's `Disappeared Voters': Disfranchised by the GOP"
 |  The Nation
 |  Monday, February 5, 2001 by Greg Palast
 |
 |  "In Latin America they might have called them votantes
 |  desaparecidos, `disappeared voters.'
 |
 |  On November 7 tens of thousands of eligible Florida voters
 |  were wrongly prevented from casting their ballots some
 |  purged from the voter registries and others blocked from
 |  registering in the first instance.
 |
 |  Nearly all were Democrats, nearly half of them
 |  African-American.
 |
 |  The systematic program that disfranchised these legal
 |  voters, directed by the offices of Florida Governor Jeb Bush
 |  and Secretary of State Katherine Harris, was so quiet,
 |  subtle and intricate that if not for George W.
 |
 |  Bush's 500-vote eyelash margin of victory, certified by
 |  Harris, the chance of the purge's discovery would have been
 |  vanishingly small."
 |
 |
 |  In the following article, Greg Palast and tompaine.com point
 |  out that the UK was very much aware of Florida's hanky
 |  panky.
 |
 |  Why weren't Americans being told?
 |
 |
 |  "SILENCE OF THE MEDIA LAMBS:"
 |  "The Election Story Never Told"
 |  www.tompaine.com
 |  Thursday, May 24, 2001
 |
 |  "Here's how the president of the United States was elected:
 |  In the months leading up to the November balloting, Florida
 |  Governor Jeb Bush and his Secretary of State, Katherine
 |  Harris, ordered local elections supervisors to purge 64,000
 |  voters from voter lists on the grounds that they were felons
 |  who were not entitled to vote in Florida.
 |
 |  As it turns out, these voters weren't felons, or at least,
 |  only a very few were.
 |
 |  However, the voters on this `scrub list' were, notably,
 |  African-American (about 54 percent), while most of the
 |  others wrongly barred from voting were white and Hispanic
 |  Democrats.
 |
 |  Beginning in November, this extraordinary news ran, as it
 |  should, on Page 1 of the country's leading paper.
 |  Unfortunately, it was in the wrong country: Britain.
 |
 |  In the United States, it ran on page zero -- that is, the
 |  story was not covered on the news pages.
 |
 |  The theft of the presidential race in Florida also was given
 |  big television network coverage.
 |
 |  But again, it was on the wrong continent: on BBC television,
 |  London."
 |
 |
 |  In the following article Greg Palast and salon.com try to
 |  inform Americans that 173,000 names had been purged from
 |  Florida voter rolls as follows:
 |
 |  "Florida's flawed `voter-cleansing' program" -- Salon.com's
 |  politics story of the year www.Salon.com [
 |  http://www.salon.com/ ] Monday, December 4, 2000
 |
 |  "If Vice President Al Gore is wondering where his Florida
 |  votes went, rather than sift through a pile of chads, he
 |  might want to look at a `scrub list' of 173,000 names
 |  targeted to be knocked off the Florida voter registry by a
 |  division of the office of Florida Secretary of State
 |  Katherine Harris.
 |
 |  A close examination suggests thousands of voters may have
 |  lost their right to vote based on a flaw-ridden list that
 |  included purported `felons' provided by a private firm with
 |  tight Republican ties.
 |
 |  Early in the year, the company, Choice-Point, gave Florida
 |  officials a list with the names of 8,000 ex-felons to
 |  `scrub' from their list of voters.
 |
 |  But it turns out none on the list were guilty of felonies,
 |  only misdemeanors. The company acknowledged the error, and
 |  blamed it on the original source of the list -- the state of
 |  Texas.
 |
 |  Florida officials moved to put those falsely accused by
 |  Texas back on voter rolls before the election.
 |
 |  Nevertheless, the large number of errors uncovered in
 |  individual counties suggests that thousands of eligible
 |  voters may have been turned away at the polls."
 |
 |
 |  All of the stories mentioned above can be found at
 |  gregpalast.com.
 |
 |
 |  Robert Parry of Consortiumnews.com reveals the following in
 |  an article entitled:
 |
 |  "Gore's Victory" by Robert Parry (November 12, 2001)
 |
 |  "So Al Gore was the choice of Florida's voters -- whether
 |  one counts hanging chads or dimpled chads.
 |
 |  That was the core finding of the eight news organizations
 |  that conducted a review of disputed Florida ballots. By any
 |  chad measure, Gore won."
 |
 |
 |  This article further states as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "With Bush rejecting a full recount and media pundits
 |  calling for Gore to concede, Gore opted for recounts in four
 |  southern Florida counties where irregularities seemed
 |  greatest.
 |
 |  Those recounts were opposed by Bush's supporters, inside
 |  Gov. Jeb Bush's administration and in the streets by
 |  Republican hooligans flown in from Washington. (For more
 |  details, see consortiumnews.com stories from (Nov. 24, 2000
 |  [ http://www.consortiumnews.com/2000/112400a.html ] and Nov.
 |  27, 2000 [ http://www.consortiumnews.com/2000/112700a.html
 |  ])
 |
 |  Stymied on that recount front, Gore carried the fight to the
 |  state courts, where pro-Bush forces engaged in more delaying
 |  tactics, leaving the Florida Supreme Court only days to
 |  fashion a recount remedy.
 |
 |  Finally, on Dec. 8, facing an imminent deadline for
 |  submitting the presidential election returns, the state
 |  Supreme Court ordered a statewide recount of `under-votes.'
 |
 |  This tally would have excluded so-called `over-votes' --
 |  which were kicked out for supposedly indicating two choices
 |  for president.
 |
 |  Bush fought this court-ordered recount, too, sending his
 |  lawyers to the U.S. Supreme Court.
 |
 |  There, five Republican justices stopped the recount on Dec.
 |  9 and gave a sympathetic hearing to Bush's claim that the
 |  varying ballot standards in Florida violated constitutional
 |  equal-protection requirements.
 |
 |  At 10 p.m. on Dec. 12, two hours before a deadline to submit
 |  voting results, the Republican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court
 |  instructed the state courts to devise a recount method that
 |  would apply equal standards, a move that would have included
 |  all ballots where the intent of the voter was clear.
 |
 |  The hitch was that the U.S. Supreme Court gave the state
 |  only two hours to complete this assignment, effectively
 |  handing Florida's 25 electoral votes and the White House to
 |  Republican George W. Bush."
 |
 |  http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/111201a.html
 |
 |
 |  "So Bush Did Steal the White House" (Nov 22, 2001)
 |  By Robert Parry
 |
 |  "George W. Bush now appears to have claimed the most
 |  powerful office in the world by blocking a court-ordered
 |  recount of votes in Florida that likely would have elected
 |  Al Gore to be president of the United States."
 |
 |
 |  "A document, revealed by Newsweek magazine, indicates that
 |  the Florida recount that was stopped last year by five
 |  Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court would have taken into
 |  account so called "overvotes" that heavily favored Gore.
 |
 |  If those "overvotes" were counted, as now it appears they
 |  would have been, Gore would have carried Florida regardless
 |  of what standard of chad -- dimpled, hanging,
 |  punched-through -- was used in counting the so-called
 |  `undervotes,' according to an examination of those ballots
 |  by a group of leading news organizations."
 |
 |
 |  Parry explains as follows:
 |
 |
 |  Bush lost the national popular vote by more than a half
 |  million ballots.
 |
 |  The article states that Bush "would have lost the key state
 |  of Florida and thus the Presidency, if Florida's authorities
 |  had been allowed to count the votes that met the state's
 |  legal requirement of demonstrating the clear intent of the
 |  voter."
 |
 |
 |  The Newsweek disclosure is a memo.
 |
 |  Parry reveals more about Newsweek Magazine's discovery as
 |  follows:
 |
 |  The presiding judge in the state recount sent a memo to a
 |  county canvassing board.
 |
 |  The memo shows that the judge was instructing the county
 |  boards to collect "overvotes" that had been rejected for
 |  indicating two choices for president when, in reality, the
 |  voters had made one clear choice.
 |
 |
 |  Judge Lewis was assigned by the Florida Supreme Court to
 |  oversee the statewide recount.
 |
 |  Judge Lewis writes as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "If you would segregate `overvotes' as you describe and
 |  indicate in your final report how many where you determined
 |  the clear intent of the voter."
 |
 |  "I will rule on the issue for all counties."
 |
 |  Lewis' memo was written to the chairman of the Charlotte
 |  County canvassing board.
 |
 |  The memo was written on Dec. 9, 2000.
 |
 |  Within hours after Judge Lewis' memo was written, Bush
 |  succeeded in getting five conservative justices on the U.S.
 |  Supreme Court to stop the Florida recount.
 |
 |
 |  Parry states as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Lewis has said in more recent interviews that he might well
 |  have expanded the recount to include those `overvotes.'
 |
 |  Indeed, it would be hard to imagine that he wouldn't count
 |  those legitimate votes once they were recovered by the
 |  counties and were submitted to Lewis.
 |
 |  The `overvotes' in which voters marked the name of their
 |  choice and also wrote in his name would be even more clearly
 |  legal votes than the so-called `undervotes' which were
 |  kicked out for failing to register a choice that could be
 |  read by voting machines."
 |
 |
 |  Parry describes media mis-information as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Misguided Articles"
 |
 |  "This new information indicates that the wrong presidential
 |  candidate moved into the White House.
 |
 |  It also makes a mockery of the Nov. 12 front-page stories of
 |  the New York Times, the Washington Post and other leading
 |  news outlets.
 |
 |  All of which stated that Bush would have won regardless of
 |  the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling."
 |
 |  "Those stories were based on the hypothetical results if the
 |  state-ordered recount had looked only at `undervotes.' The
 |  news organizations assumed, incorrectly."
 |
 |  "In going with the `Bush Wins' headlines, the news
 |  organizations downplayed their more dramatic finding that
 |  Gore would have won if a full statewide recount had been
 |  conducted in accordance with state law.
 |
 |  Using the clear-intent-of-the-voter standard, Gore beat Bush
 |  by margins ranging from 60 to 171 votes, depending on what
 |  standard was used in judging the `undervotes.'"
 |
 |
 |  Parry compares different news versions of the recount story.
 |
 |  The New York Times wrote the following:
 |
 |
 |  "A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots
 |  reveal that George W. Bush would have won even if the United
 |  States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual
 |  recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had
 |  ordered to go forward.
 |
 |  Contrary to what many partisans of former Vice President Al
 |  Gore have charged, the United State Supreme Court did not
 |  award an election to Mr. Bush that otherwise would have been
 |  won by Mr. Gore."
 |
 |
 |  Parry writes more on the Times article.
 |
 |  The Times notes as follows:
 |
 |
 |  The examination of all rejected ballots "found that Mr. Gore
 |  might have won if the courts had ordered a full statewide
 |  recount. ... The findings indicate that Mr.
 |
 |  Gore might have eked out a victory if he had pursued in
 |  court a course like the one he publicly advocated when he
 |  called on the state to `count all the votes.'"
 |
 |
 |  Parry reveals as follows:
 |
 |  "Bush rejected Gore's early proposal for a full statewide
 |  recount.
 |
 |
 |  Bush also waged a relentless campaign of obstruction that
 |  left no time for the state courts to address the
 |  equal-protection-under-the-law concerns raised by the U.S.
 |  Supreme Court in its final ruling on Dec. 12, 2000."
 |
 |
 |  The article tells us that the Times front-page headline on
 |  Nov. 12 stated as follows:
 |
 |  "Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not
 |  Cast the Deciding Vote."
 |
 |
 |  Following are the headlines from the Washington Post:
 |
 |  "Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush."
 |
 |
 |  Parry offers insight to the media spin as follows:
 |
 |  "Spreading Confusion"
 |
 |  "The pro-Bush themes in the headlines and stories were
 |  repeated over and over by television and other newspapers,
 |  creating a widespread belief among casual news consumers
 |  that Bush had prevailed in the full statewide recount,
 |  rather than only in truncated recounts based on dubious
 |  hypotheses."
 |
 |
 |  Parry points out that Judge Lewis's memo indicates it is not
 |  clear that the state-ordered recount would have proclaimed
 |  Bush the winner.
 |
 |  "It also appears likely that the interference by the U.S.
 |  Supreme Court was decisive.
 |
 |  Based on the new evidence, the major newspapers look to be
 |  wrong on both these high-profile points."
 |
 |  The media all but ignored the fact that Gore lost thousands
 |  of unrecoverable ballots because of flawed ballot designs
 |  and the Florida voter purge in several Democratic counties.
 |
 |
 |  Parry reveals more about the Times report as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "The New York Times also reported that Bush achieved a net
 |  gain of about 290 votes by getting illegally cast absentee
 |  votes counted in Republican counties while enforcing the
 |  rules strictly in Democratic counties."
 |
 |  "The new recount tallies did not include any adjustments for
 |  these irregularities.
 |
 |  The news organizations estimated that Gore lost tens of
 |  thousands of votes from these disparities."
 |
 |
 |  Parry correctly states as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "For months, the leading news organizations have been
 |  bending over backwards to protect Bush's fragile legitimacy,
 |  possibly out of concern for the nation's image in a time of
 |  crisis. Yet, whatever the motivation for trying to make Bush
 |  look good, the evidence is now overwhelming that Bush
 |  strong-armed his way, illegitimately, to the presidency."
 |
 |  "Bush obstructed a full-and-fair recount in Florida, even
 |  dispatching hooligans from outside the state to intimidate
 |  vote counters.
 |
 |  Gore pressed for recounts in the courts.
 |
 |  Bush sent in lawyers to prevent the tallies.
 |
 |  Then, after losing before the Florida Supreme Court and the
 |  federal appeals court, Bush ultimately got a friendly
 |  hearing from five political allies on the U.S. Supreme
 |  Court."
 |
 |  (For more on studies about the election results, see
 |  Consortiumnews.com stories of May 12 [
 |  http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/051201a.html ], June 2 [
 |  http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/060201a.html ], July 16 [
 |  http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/071601a.html ] and Nov.
 |  12 [ http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/111201a.html ].)
 |
 |  http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/112101a.html
 |
 |
 |  More on the "mob" in Dade County as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Mob Rule Wins for W"
 |  (November 24, 2000)
 |
 |  "Texas Gov. George W. Bush appears to have sealed his claim
 |  to the White House through a premeditated mob action that
 |  influenced the Dade County decision to halt a crucial
 |  recount.
 |
 |  Egged on by Republican phone banks and heated rhetoric over
 |  Cuban-American radio, a pro-Bush mob of about 150 people
 |  descended on the Dade County canvassing board Wednesday as
 |  it was preparing to evaluate 10,750 disputed ballots.
 |
 |  `Republican volunteers shouted into megaphones urging
 |  protest,' The New York Times reported in today's editions.
 |  `A lawyer for the Republican Party helped stir ethnic
 |  passions by contending that the recount was biased against
 |  Hispanic voters.'
 |
 |  The protestors carried anti-Gore signs, including one that
 |  read: `Rotten to the Gore.' The demonstration then turned
 |  violent as the canvassing board sought to go into closed
 |  session to begin examining the ballots."
 |
 |  http://www.consortiumnews.com/2000/112400a.html
 |
 |
 |  The following Robert Parry article was published on November
 |  27, 2001 as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "W's Triumph of the Will" by Robert Parry (November 27,
 |  2001)
 |
 |  "Texas Gov. George W. Bush has claimed the mantle of
 |  president of the United States after one of the most brazen
 |  -- and effective -- power grabs in political history."
 |
 |  "The loser of the national popular vote by about 337,000
 |  votes and apparently not even the favorite of the six
 |  million Floridians who went to the polls, Bush assured his
 |  victory by deploying Republican foot soldiers to Florida and
 |  revving up the powerful conservative propaganda machine
 |  across the country.
 |
 |
 |  According to the Wall Street Journal, Bush even called to
 |  offer words of encouragement to GOP operatives who had
 |  physically intimidated the Dade County canvassing board
 |  before it abruptly reversed its decision to count disputed
 |  ballots and instead cast those 10,750 ballots aside. (For
 |  details, see below.) Now, barring an unlikely court ruling
 |  in the weeks ahead, the result of Bush's bare-knuckle
 |  strategy appears to be that the will of the American voters
 |  has been overturned for the first time in 112 years. The
 |  first popular-vote loser since Benjamin Harrison will ascend
 |  to the presidency.
 |
 |  In Bush's victory, the Republican Party also cast aside any
 |  remaining shreds of the notion that logical consistency has
 |  any place in modern politics."
 |
 |  http://www.consortiumnews.com/2000/112700a.html
 |
 |
 |  More from consortiumnews.com as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "W's Bogus `Election'" (June 2, 2001)
 |
 |  "In a better-late-than-never look at the mess that was the
 |  Florida vote count, The Washington Post discovered what
 |  critics of George W. Bush's `victory' have long alleged --
 |  that his 537-vote margin benefited from a host of
 |  irregularities, many traceable to his brother's
 |  administration or to post-election Republican maneuvering."
 |
 |  "The Post's most important new discovery might be evidence
 |  that Bush's side padded its lead with scores of absentee
 |  votes that were cast after Election Day or did not meet
 |  legal standards.
 |
 |  Those votes were counted in heavily Republican counties --
 |  though not in Democratic strongholds -- after the Bush
 |  campaign rallied its supporters and the national news media
 |  to condemn Al Gore's campaign for initially demanding that
 |  legal requirements be followed."
 |
 |  GOP operatives and biased media pundits condemned Gore for
 |  insisting that these ballots be dealt with in accordance to
 |  legal standards.
 |
 |  Many of these ballots came from American soldiers stationed
 |  overseas.
 |
 |  The GOP and biased pundits said Gore was unpatriotic.
 |
 |  Gore's side relented.
 |
 |
 |  The article tells us that the post wrote as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "The result was a rout of the Democrats in the northern
 |  counties, where Bush picked up 176 votes that lacked
 |  postmarks and other required features." The Post study found
 |  that Bush operatives used a different strategy in counties
 |  of south Florida with high numbers of African-American,
 |  Hispanic and Jewish voters.
 |
 |
 |  The Post reported as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Elsewhere, particularly in Democratic counties, canvassing
 |  boards saw things the opposite way -- as did the Bush
 |  forces, who demanded that strict state rules be followed."
 |
 |  "In overwhelmingly Democratic Broward County, elections
 |  officials rejected 304 overseas ballots for various
 |  technical reasons, including 119 because they lacked
 |  postmarks. Miami-Dade invalidated about 200; Volusia threw
 |  out 43 and Orange 117. All three counties voted Democratic."
 |
 |
 |  The article continues as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Other Findings"
 |
 |  "In the two-part series (May 31 and June 1, 2001), the Post
 |  also reported that:
 |
 |  --At least a couple of thousand voters were improperly
 |  removed from Florida's voting rolls under an extraordinary
 |  effort by Gov. Jeb Bush's administration to purge ex-felons.
 |  State officials specifically ordered that `false positives'
 |  -- meaning voters whose names and other personal data did
 |  not match those of actual felons -- still be put in lists
 |  sent to county canvassing boards.
 |
 |  --Irregularities from this felon purge and from
 |  malfunctioning voting machines fell disproportionately on
 |  African-American voters, who favored Gore by 9-to-1."
 |
 |  Bush lawyer James A. Baker III complained that Florida's
 |  ballots were repeatedly recounted.
 |
 |
 |  The article points out that the Post study revealed the
 |  following:
 |
 |
 |  "18 of the state's 67 counties `never recounted the ballots
 |  at all,' only rechecking the tallies of the original
 |  results.
 |
 |  `To this day, more than 1.58 million votes (or about
 |  one-quarter of Florida's total) have not been counted a
 |  second time,' the Post said.'" "Some county officials blamed
 |  the divergent recount procedures on Katherine Harris.
 |
 |  Harris is a Bush loyalist.
 |
 |  Harris provided no guidance on how to proceed.
 |
 |  Gore `likely lost about 6,500 votes' in Palm Beach because
 |  of the poorly designed `butterfly ballot' that confused many
 |  elderly Jewish voters, according to the Post's analysis.
 |
 |  In other counties, many more ballots were despoiled by
 |  confusion resulting from a `wraparound' ballot developed by
 |  Harris' office, the Post said.
 |
 |  Though the Post series took pains to note that `no one has
 |  proven intent to disenfranchise any group of voters,' the
 |  study made clear that the cumulative impact of official
 |  decisions made both before and after Election Day benefited
 |  the Bush campaign, in large part by depressing the
 |  African-American vote."
 |
 |
 |  "The Purge"
 |
 |  "Following up on groundbreaking work by BBC reporter Greg
 |  Palast about the felon purge, the Post concluded that
 |  `hundreds, perhaps thousands, of non-felons in Florida' were
 |  removed from Florida's voting rolls. `The effort was so
 |  riddled with errors that a more precise tally will probably
 |  never be possible,' the Post said.
 |
 |  `But it is clear that at least 2,000 felons whose voting
 |  rights had been automatically restored in other states were
 |  kept off the rolls and, in many cases, denied the right to
 |  vote,' the Post added."'
 |
 |
 |  The article continues as follows:
 |
 |
 |  Florida requires ex-convicts to petition for their
 |  restoration of voting rights.
 |
 |  This is an expensive and time-consuming process.
 |
 |  "The Post also noted that `the impact of this botched felon
 |  purge fell disproportionately on black Floridians and, by
 |  extension, on the Democratic Party, which won the votes of
 |  nine out of every 10 African-American voters, according to
 |  exit polls.'" Emmett Mitchell was Governor Bush's aide.
 |
 |  Mitchell headed the Florida State purge effort.
 |
 |
 |  In March 1999 Mitchell sent the following e-mail to Database
 |  Technologies, the contractor hired to assemble the list:
 |
 |
 |  "Obviously, we want to capture more names that possibly
 |  aren't matches and let the [county elections] supervisors
 |  make a final determination rather than exclude certain
 |  matches altogether." Database Technologies complied with
 |  this state order.
 |
 |  "The contractors expressed concern about the obvious danger
 |  that the state's approach would remove non-felons from the
 |  voting rolls.
 |
 |  `We warned them,' James E. Lee, spokesman for Database
 |  Technologies, told the Post.
 |
 |  The list `was exactly what the state wanted.'"
 |
 |
 |  The article continues as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Corroboration"
 |
 |  "The Los Angeles Times reached similar conclusions in a
 |  separate report that it published on May 21, 2001.
 |
 |  `A review by the Times of thousands of pages of records,
 |  reports and e-mail messages suggests the botched effort to
 |  stop felons from voting could have affected the ultimate
 |  outcome,' the Times reported. `The reason: those on the list
 |  were disproportionately African-American.
 |
 |  Blacks made up 66 percent of those named as felons in
 |  Miami-Dade, the state's largest county, for example, and 54
 |  percent in Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa.'"
 |
 |
 |  The article continues as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Blocked Recounts"
 |
 |  A study performed by Miami Herald and USA Today indicate
 |  that Gore still might have come out on top, even with the
 |  vote suppression, if a full statewide recount had been
 |  conducted.
 |
 |  "The Miami Herald and USA Today concluded in May that if
 |  `overvotes,' were tallied along with `undervotes' that
 |  showed voter intent with partially punched chads and
 |  indentations in multiple voting categories -- indicating a
 |  malfunctioning machine -- Gore would have prevailed by 242
 |  votes.
 |
 |  Gore's lead would have been higher if indentations only for
 |  president were counted, too.
 |
 |  Bush would have prevailed in a recount only if all ballots
 |  with indentations were thrown out, the newspapers
 |  concluded."
 |
 |  (Miami Herald/USA Today, May 11, 2001)
 |
 |  A comprehensive recount was never allowed.
 |
 |  George Bush's campaign, aided by Harris and Governor Bush's
 |  subordinates, blocked any chance for such a recount.
 |
 |  "The last chance for a meaningful official recount came on
 |  Dec. 8, when the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide
 |  examination of `undervotes' that had been rejected by
 |  vote-counting machines.
 |
 |  But Bush dispatched his lawyers to the U.S. Supreme Court
 |  and secured an unprecedented order from five Republican
 |  justices on Dec. 9 stopping the vote count. On Dec. 12, the
 |  same five justices prevented a resumption of the count or
 |  any other steps that might have reduced the inequities in
 |  the tally."
 |
 |
 |  "Election Through Suppression"
 |
 |  "Bush claimed his `victory' and a mandate for his
 |  conservative agenda although he had lost the national
 |  popular vote by more than a half million ballots and
 |  obviously was not the choice of a plurality of Floridians
 |  who went to the polls on Election Day."
 |
 |  http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/060201a.html
 |
 |
 |  Robert Parry reveals more as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "The Media Is the Mess" by Robert Parry (July 17, 2001)
 |
 |  "The belated discovery that George W. Bush's campaign
 |  applied two disparate standards for counting overseas
 |  ballots in Florida -- liberal for Bush strongholds and
 |  stringent for counties carried by Al Gore -- underscores
 |  again the huge advantage that the well-funded conservative
 |  news media gives the Republicans.
 |
 |  By having a powerful media of its own -- from TV networks to
 |  nationwide talk radio, from news magazines to daily
 |  newspapers -- the conservative movement can give its stamp
 |  to events during the crucial few days when the public is
 |  paying attention.
 |
 |  By the time, the truth comes out -- if it does -- it's often
 |  too late to change the outcome."
 |
 |  http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/071601a.html
 |
 |
 |  All of the articles mentioned above can be found at
 |  consortiumnews.com
 |
 |
 |  Since the time of Mr. Parry's writings, it has become
 |  publicly known that Al Gore was elected President of the
 |  United States of America in the year 2000.
 |
 |  Using data from revised state totals, the FEC now has the
 |  definitive official results of Election 2000.
 |
 |  In the popular vote, Gore beat Bush 50,999,897 to
 |  50,456,002, a margin of 543,895.
 |
 |  Gore had the second highest vote total in history, behind
 |  Reagan in 1984.
 |
 |  http://fecweb1.fec.gov/pubrec/2000presgeresults.htm
 |
 |
 |  On April 30, 2001 the Nation magazine ran an article
 |  entitled "How the GOP Gamed the System in Florida" by John
 |  Lantigua.
 |
 |  The article begins with an interesting anecdote as follows:
 |
 |  On July 10, 2000 during his campaign, Bush addressed the
 |  national NAACP convention in Baltimore.
 |
 |  He denounced such "new forms of racism" as racial profiling
 |  and redlining.
 |
 |  But, while Bush was speaking to the NAACP, the
 |  disenfranchisement of eligible voters, especially black
 |  voters, was taking place.
 |
 |  Florida State election officials had hired data crunchers.
 |
 |  They used computers to hone in on thousands of voters.
 |
 |  Many voters were purged from the voter rolls for no reason.
 |
 |  Because of a chaotic electoral system, thousands of votes
 |  were thrown out because of error prone voting machines and
 |  inferior ballots.
 |
 |  About 200,000 Floridians were either not permitted to vote
 |  in election 2000, or their ballots were discarded and not
 |  counted.
 |
 |  Most of these disenfranchised voters were black.
 |
 |
 |  Lantigua writes as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights conducted two hearings
 |  in Florida in January and February to determine why so many
 |  Floridians were denied the right to vote.
 |
 |  In a preliminary assessment the commission noted that the
 |  Voting Rights Act of 1965 `was aimed at subtle, as well as
 |  obvious, state regulation and practices' that could deny
 |  citizens the right to vote because of their race."
 |
 |  The commission found evidence of "prohibited discrimination"
 |  in the state's polling process.
 |
 |
 |  On January 10, 2001 The NAACP and others filed suit against
 |  Harris and other Florida officials, charging them with
 |  violating the 14th amendment and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
 |
 |  The suit demands reforms in the Florida electoral system.
 |
 |
 |  Lantigua enlightens us on some Florida history as follows:
 |
 |
 |  The stage for the election 2000 debacle was set by Jeb
 |  Bush's unsuccessful run for governor in 1994.
 |
 |  During a debate in Tampa on July 27, 1994 a journalist asked
 |  Bush what he would do for Florida's black community if
 |  elected.
 |
 |  Bush replied "probably nothing."
 |
 |  Bush said that he favored "equality of opportunity" for all
 |  Floridians.
 |
 |  Four years later he ran again.
 |
 |  He was backed by only 10 percent of Florida's black voters.
 |
 |
 |  Lantigua enlightens us on the subject of Governor Bush and
 |  his policies as follows:
 |
 |
 |  Bush eliminated most affirmative action programs that
 |  benefited women and minorities.
 |
 |  He designed a plan he called the One Florida Initiative.
 |
 |
 |  Lantigua tells us about Governor Bushs, initiative as
 |  follows:
 |
 |
 |  "That program ended guaranteed minority and female
 |  set-asides in state hiring, in the awarding of state
 |  contracts (only 1 percent of state spending for merchandise
 |  and services went to minority owned firms as it was,
 |  according to the Miami Herald) and in university admissions.
 |
 |  Polls had shown that such a move would be popular with the
 |  white majority in the state.
 |
 |  Black and feminist leaders called it a betrayal."
 |
 |  Bush would not meet with these leaders to discuss his
 |  policy.
 |
 |
 |  Lantigua tells us more as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Two black state legislators staged a 20 hour sit in at
 |  Bush's suite of offices."
 |
 |
 |  Lantigua continues as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "The sit in attracted statewide support from black's,
 |  women's groups and other Floridians, forcing Bush to accept
 |  a series of public hearings."
 |
 |  Thousands of citizens crowded the sessions in opposition to
 |  Bush and his One Florida Initiative.
 |
 |  Black student movements took place.
 |
 |
 |  The GOP majority in the legislature and conservative
 |  Democrats passed Bush's One Florida Initiative.
 |
 |  Senator Meek and other African-Americans called for a
 |  statewide voter registration campaign.
 |
 |  Their aim was to defeat their political enemies, starting
 |  with the Governor's brother.
 |
 |
 |  A spokesman for the movement stated as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "We didn't need George W. doing to the whole nation what Jeb
 |  was doing to Florida."
 |
 |
 |  Lantigua explains that the stage was now set for election
 |  2000 as follows:
 |
 |
 |  The black vote went from 10 percent in 1996 to 16 Percent.
 |
 |  About 300,000 more Black Americans voted in 2000 than had
 |  voted four years earlier.
 |
 |  Those figures only include those that were allowed to vote.
 |
 |  But, while Black Floridians were registering to vote, state
 |  officials were removing other blacks from the voting rolls.
 |
 |
 |  Lantigua continues as follows:
 |
 |
 |  After the 97 Miami mayoral race, the Miami Herald discovered
 |  that 105 people had voted despite having felonies on their
 |  records.
 |
 |  These people had never received clemency thus according to
 |  Florida law they were ineligible to vote.
 |
 |  The election was overturned because of voter fraud.
 |
 |  In the process of the voter investigation, it was discovered
 |  that 71 percent of the felons on the Miami County voter
 |  rolls were Democrats.
 |
 |  The GOP Legislature passed a sweeping voter fraud bill.
 |
 |  County election supervisors tried to block the bill.
 |
 |  The supervisors said the bill would unfairly thwart citizens
 |  from voting and discourage voter turnout.
 |
 |  The bill called for enforcement of an 1868 law that deprived
 |  voting rights to all former prisoners who had not received
 |  clemency.
 |
 |
 |  Lantigua continues as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Florida is one of only fourteen states that do not
 |  automatically restore civil rights to former prisoners who
 |  have completed their sentence and parole."
 |
 |  In order to restore their civil rights Florida's former
 |  prisoners are required to petition the Office of Executive
 |  Clemency.
 |
 |  The governor and three other members of the Cabinet
 |  determine the final decision.
 |
 |  They are all partisan politicians.
 |
 |
 |  Before the voter fraud bill passed, a Democratic African
 |  American legislator proposed a bill that would automatically
 |  restore civil rights after completion of the sentence and
 |  parole.
 |
 |  The proposed bill never made it out of committee.
 |
 |
 |  The article points out as follows:
 |
 |
 |  That lawmaker had reason to worry.
 |
 |  Blacks bore the brunt of the voter purge.
 |
 |
 |  Senator Jones of Miami states the following:
 |
 |
 |  "And every year the Florida legislature is trying to make
 |  more crimes felonies."
 |
 |  "Why? So they can eliminate more people from the voter
 |  rolls."
 |
 |
 |  The senator makes the following argument:
 |
 |
 |  In 2000 a GOP legislator proposed a bill that would have
 |  increased the sentence of an individual from 365 to 366
 |  days.
 |
 |  What was this individual's crime?
 |
 |  Taking 2 welfare checks after becoming employed.
 |
 |  The bill was defeated.
 |
 |  "What does one more day accomplish? It makes it a felony,
 |  and you take one more person off the voter rolls. That's
 |  what. Its been going on in Tallahassee for years."
 |
 |
 |  Lantigua states as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "By April 1998 the laws and political will were in place to
 |  perform a definitive purge of voter rolls."
 |
 |  The Florida purge list included people who had died, been
 |  judged mentally unstable, moved and registered in more than
 |  one county or state or had ever been convicted of a felony
 |  but had not had their rights restored by Florida's Cabinet
 |  members.
 |
 |  The first purge list was compiled by a company known as
 |  Professional Analytical Services and Systems.
 |
 |  They used state database.
 |
 |  Their list was error ridden.
 |
 |  The Florida Office of Executive Clemency had no database.
 |
 |  Many former prisoners who had their rights restored appeared
 |  on the list of felons who could not vote.
 |
 |  On August 19, 1998 the director of the Division of Elections
 |  said that the list was confidential.
 |
 |  She directed county election supervisors not to release that
 |  list to the press.
 |
 |  If they had released the list to the press the many errors
 |  therein probably would have been uncovered.
 |
 |
 |  In November of 98 the state hired DBT which has merged with
 |  Choice Point.
 |
 |  DBT compiled one list in 99 and a second list in 2000.
 |
 |  Most of the people on those lists were African American.
 |
 |  DBT received complaints.
 |
 |  Some DBT employees were miffed when confronted by people who
 |  had unjustly had their right to vote threatened.
 |
 |  More than a year before election 2000 the list contained
 |  thousands of names of Floridians who had never been
 |  convicted of a felony or any other crime.
 |
 |  Some conviction dates were in the future.
 |
 |  Thousands of angry voters complained to county supervisors
 |  of elections.
 |
 |
 |  The vice president of Choice Point/DBT explained as follows:
 |
 |
 |  A person could be on the list if his or her name, social
 |  security number or date of birth closely approximated with a
 |  felon.
 |
 |  The vice president said that the problems were caused by
 |  loose parameters set by the search.
 |
 |  Emmett Mitchell IV was the point man of the project for the
 |  state.
 |
 |  DBT recommended that the parameters of the search be
 |  changed.
 |
 |  Mitchell made no substantial changes.
 |
 |
 |  A spokesman for Choice Point/DBT stated as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "After submitting them (changes in search parameters) they
 |  were not acted on by the state."
 |
 |
 |  The spokesperson made an interesting observation as follows:
 |
 |
 |  As election 2000 came nearer, the state asked that the
 |  parameters be loosened.
 |
 |  Florida's state officials asked DBT to use its national
 |  database to provide the names of felons from other states
 |  who might have moved to Florida and registered.
 |
 |  Some of those names came from the 36 states that
 |  automatically restore civil rights to former prisoners.
 |
 |  More than 2,000 of those individuals were on Florida's purge
 |  list.
 |
 |  Following public attention to this situation after the
 |  election, the state quietly changed its policy.
 |
 |  Lantigua suggests the reading of Gregg Palast article
 |  "Florida's Disappeared Voters" February 5.
 |
 |
 |  Lantigua writes as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "In May 2000 the process went totally awry."
 |
 |  About 8,000 names, most of them former Texas prisoners who
 |  were on the purge list had been convicted of misdemeanors,
 |  not felonies.
 |
 |
 |  Lantigua writes as follows:
 |
 |
 |  In the end, out of 4,847 people who appealed, 2,430 were
 |  judged not to be convicted felons."
 |
 |  Upon its contract with Florida on August 14, 1998 DBT
 |  promised the state that the lists would be checked,
 |  including "telephonic verification of random records."
 |
 |  This promise was omitted from the contract and Florida did
 |  not refute the omission.
 |
 |
 |  In 1999, Emmett Mitchell IV told county supervisors not to
 |  phone listed individuals, but to send them a letter instead.
 |
 |  Many of these individuals never received a notice that they
 |  were on the list.
 |
 |
 |  The Madison County Supervisor commented as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Mr. Mitchell said we shouldn't call people on the phone, we
 |  should send letters."
 |
 |  "The best and fastest way to check these matters was by
 |  phone, personal contact, but he didn't want that."
 |
 |  "We shouldn't have had to do any of this. Election
 |  Supervisors are not investigators, and we don't have
 |  investigators. It wasn't our responsibility at all."
 |
 |
 |  Lantigua explains that Mitchell offered his rationale for
 |  the loose standards used in assembling the purge lists as
 |  follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Just as some people might have been removed from the list
 |  who shouldn't have been, some voted who shouldn't have."
 |
 |  Mitchell said that former head of the Division of Elections
 |  Ethel Baxter gave her approval of the loose parameter
 |  standards used to compile the purge list after she consulted
 |  with Secretary of State Katharine Harris.
 |
 |
 |  The article continues as follows:
 |
 |
 |  Purging wasn't the only method used to thwart the Democratic
 |  vote.
 |
 |  Lantigua explains as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "An under-funded election resulted in poor equipment being
 |  used in many counties and ill trained and sometimes ill-
 |  informed poll workers also kept voters from casting their
 |  ballots."
 |
 |  Months before election 2000 county supervisors had been
 |  sending lists of newly registered voters to Tallahassee.
 |
 |  It was very possible that a large turnout would emerge,
 |  especially in the black community.
 |
 |  There was chaos in many polling places in every corner of
 |  the state.
 |
 |  With about 6,000 polling places in the state, the number of
 |  disenfranchised voters is significant.
 |
 |
 |  The article ends as follows:
 |
 |
 |  Florida leaders deny they committed any wrongs themselves.
 |
 |  Florida leaders said they would fix Florida's electoral
 |  system.
 |
 |  The lawsuit filed by NAACP "demands that federal examiners
 |  oversee elections in specific counties in Florida for the
 |  next ten years, including the next two presidential
 |  contests, so another election isn't hijacked."
 |
 |  Writes Lantigua.
 |
 |
 |  The following article is from World Socialist Web site and
 |  can be viewed at URL
 |  http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/may2001/flor-m28.shtml:
 |
 |
 |  "Florida ballot review shows voters preferred Gore"
 |
 |  "Media slants results to favor Bush"
 |
 |  By Fred Mazelis
 |
 |  May 28, 2001.
 |
 |  The article is based on a study that was organized by USA
 |  Today, the Miami Herald and Knight-Ridder newspaper chain.
 |
 |  Following is a review of the article:
 |
 |
 |  171,908 ballots were examined.
 |
 |  60,647 ballots were under-votes.
 |
 |  Under-votes are ballots that registered no presidential vote
 |  in machine tabulation.
 |
 |  111,261 were over-votes.
 |
 |  Over-votes are those ballots that were disqualified because
 |  they were marked for more than one presidential candidate.
 |
 |  Like the reports that were released in February and April,
 |  for the most part, these reports are presented in the news
 |  media as legitimizing the installation of Bush.
 |
 |  The media has ignored the fact that Bush lost the popular
 |  vote by a significant margin nationwide.
 |
 |
 |  Mazelis writes as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "The widespread voter disenfranchisement that took place in
 |  Florida continues to be obscured beneath an avalanche of
 |  minutiae about various methods of ballot counting."
 |
 |  The article tells us that USA Today points to four possible
 |  standards for judging the validity of punch card votes.
 |
 |  Punch cards were used in 25 of Florida's counties in the
 |  2000 election.
 |
 |  According to USA Today Bush would have won under the two
 |  standards most widely used.
 |
 |  If at least two corners of a chad must be detached to
 |  validate a vote, Bush's lead would have dropped from the
 |  official 537 to 407.
 |
 |  This tally would still have awarded him Florida's 25
 |  electoral votes and the election.
 |
 |  By requiring a completely clean punch for the vote to be
 |  counted, Bush's lead would have dwindled to 152.
 |
 |
 |  Mazelis writes as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Under two looser standards, in which `dimpled' but not
 |  detached chads are counted, Gore would have won the state by
 |  a margin of between 242 and 332 votes.
 |
 |  These figures were used to manufacture headlines suggesting
 |  that Bush's occupancy of the presidency was valid and
 |  reasonable."
 |
 |
 |  Mazelis gives us a sample of the headlines as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Bush Would Win Recount of Disputed Ballots," said Reuters.
 |
 |  "Bush Still Wins Florida," reported CNN.com.
 |
 |  "Vote Analysis: Bush Wins, Again," ABCnews.com declared.
 |
 |  Some reports acknowledged continuing doubt.
 |
 |  "No Clear Florida Winner," said the Associated Press.
 |
 |  The New York Times ran its story on its inside pages with a
 |  one-column headline that said: "Second Review of Florida
 |  Presidential Vote is Inconclusive."
 |
 |  None of the headlines stated what was already pretty obvious
 |  before the recount and was in fact confirmed by their own
 |  study.
 |
 |  Gore received more votes than Bush in Florida.
 |
 |  The cover up was in.
 |
 |  They did not include over-votes in their analysis.
 |
 |
 |  Mazelis explains as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Most of the stories grudgingly acknowledged, well into the
 |  text, that if the over-votes had been counted, Gore would
 |  have won between 15,000 and 25,000 additional votes, leading
 |  to a substantial margin of victory in the state.
 |
 |  In most reports this fact was added almost as an
 |  afterthought, along with the suggestion that this is of only
 |  academic concern, since the Gore campaign never requested a
 |  review of these ballots.
 |
 |  The recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court and halted
 |  by the 5-4 decision of the US Supreme Court on December 12
 |  called only for a review of under-votes.
 |
 |  To the extent that the media was forced to acknowledge the
 |  huge number of uncounted Gore votes, this was reported in
 |  such a way as to blame the individual voters.
 |
 |  `Florida Voter Errors Cost Gore the Election,' was the USA
 |  Today headline.
 |
 |  Once again, only deep inside the article did the newspaper
 |  acknowledge that these errors were largely the result, not
 |  of voter indifference or negligence, but of faulty ballot
 |  design and instructions that, intentionally or not, had the
 |  effect of disenfranchising less experienced and
 |  sophisticated voters."
 |
 |
 |  Mazelis points to a study of voter patterns as follows:
 |
 |
 |  Anthony Salvanto of the University of California studied the
 |  56,000 "over-votes."
 |
 |  His study revealed that more Democratic voters were led to
 |  make errors that rendered their votes invalid.
 |
 |
 |  Mazelis writes as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Voters who marked Bush or Gore on over-vote ballots (i.e.,
 |  who marked another candidate as well as Bush or Gore)
 |  usually voted for the same party's candidates in other
 |  races.
 |
 |  Some 83 percent of over-voters who voted for both Gore and a
 |  third-party candidate voted Democratic in the US Senate
 |  race, for example.
 |
 |  Only 6 percent of those who over-voted in the presidential
 |  race made the same mistake in the Senate election, which was
 |  next on the ballot."
 |
 |  Gore's name was included on 84,197 of the over-voted
 |  ballots.
 |
 |  Bush's name was included on 37,731 of the over-voted
 |  ballots.
 |
 |
 |  Mazelis adds the following:
 |
 |
 |  "The numbers add up to more than 111,261 over-vote ballots
 |  because some ballots included the names of both Bush and
 |  Gore.
 |
 |  The reason for the disqualified Gore votes was design and
 |  instruction.
 |
 |  In Duval County, for instance, including the major city of
 |  Jacksonville, voters were shown the first five presidential
 |  candidates on one page and another five candidates on a
 |  second page.
 |
 |  After the first page they were instructed in writing to
 |  `turn page to continue voting.'
 |
 |  At the same time, a sample ballot distributed by election
 |  officials instructed them to `vote every page.'
 |
 |  As a result, there were 21,188 over-votes in Duval County.
 |
 |  This one county had more than one-fifth of the state total
 |  of over-votes.
 |
 |  Some 55 percent of the Duval County over-votes included just
 |  two candidates, one from the first ballot page and one from
 |  the second, indicating that the confusing instructions were
 |  the cause.
 |
 |  Most of these invalidated ballots were for Gore."
 |
 |  Salvanto said, `The Duval County ballot alone likely cost
 |  Gore the election.'" The Palm Beach County "butterfly
 |  ballot" also had a confusing design.
 |
 |
 |  Mazelis describes it as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "The names of the presidential candidates appeared on two
 |  facing pages, and the ballot was designed in such a way that
 |  Gore, who was the second candidate listed, was the third
 |  hole to punch.
 |
 |  The second hole was assigned to extreme right-wing spokesman
 |  Patrick Buchanan, which resulted in a total of 5,237
 |  over-votes for Gore and Buchanan."
 |
 |  "Once again, a fair vote in Palm Beach County would by
 |  itself have given the state's electoral votes to Gore.
 |
 |  A recent study indicated that the butterfly ballot cost Gore
 |  at least 3,400 votes because of double punches, and another
 |  2,400 votes that were mistakenly cast for Buchanan.
 |
 |  Even if the ballot review were confined to under-votes, the
 |  number of under-vote ballots produced by officials in most
 |  counties did not match the totals reported by these same
 |  counties immediately after election day.
 |
 |  The numbers matched in only 8 of 67 counties."
 |
 |  Democrats carried a slim majority in Orange County.
 |
 |  Orange County reported 966 under-votes.
 |
 |  This tally decreased to 639 when the Miami Herald consortium
 |  recounted the votes.
 |
 |
 |  Mazelis finishes the article as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "The issues relating to under-votes and over-votes are only
 |  half of the story of Florida and the 2000 election.
 |
 |  The vote recounts do not consider the variety of other ways
 |  in which citizens were denied the right to vote.
 |
 |  Black voters made numerous complaints of intimidation and
 |  harassment on Election Day itself.
 |
 |  Tens of thousands of qualified voters, many of them black,
 |  were unlawfully purged from the rolls on the false grounds
 |  that they were felons.
 |
 |  (Twenty-four percent of Florida's black men of voting age
 |  are, under state law, permanently denied the right to vote
 |  because they are felons, even though many have completed
 |  their sentences and are no longer on parole).
 |
 |  The network exit polls on Election Day were not mysteriously
 |  wrong in Florida, while correct everywhere else.
 |
 |  They accurately forecast that Gore would carry the state,
 |  because they did not -- and could not -- take into account
 |  the enormous number of ballots that would be invalidated."
 |
 |
 |  On July 13, 2001 Paul Lukasiak
 |
 |  Makes his case in an article entitled Evidence suggests
 |  ballot tampering in Florida's Escambia County.
 |
 |  The following article was based on a study performed by the
 |  Miami Herald:
 |
 |
 |  The Herald's data shows that out of 21,500 absentee ballots
 |  cast in Escambia County, not one voter over-voted on any of
 |  the ballots by placing marks next to the names of two
 |  presidential candidates.
 |
 |
 |  According to the data, 296 absentee voters did place three
 |  or more marks on their presidential ballot.
 |
 |
 |  The article makes the following point:
 |
 |
 |  The odds against this occurring naturally are so high that
 |  the word "astronomical" is an understatement.
 |
 |  The Escambia County canvassing Board duplicated more than
 |  2,400 absentee ballots that were originally read by machine
 |  as over-votes and under-votes.
 |
 |
 |  Lukasiak makes the following observation:
 |
 |
 |  The only rational conclusion is that the duplicate ballots
 |  that Escambia created did not reflect what was on the
 |  absentee ballots themselves.
 |
 |  The Orlando Sentinel reported that over 10,000 ballots were
 |  duplicated in 26 Florida Counties because they were "damaged
 |  or defective."
 |
 |  This included ballots with under-votes and over-votes where
 |  "voter intent" could be determined.
 |
 |  Nearly 1/4 of these duplicated ballots came from Escambia
 |  County.
 |
 |  Those duplicated ballots represented more than 11 percent of
 |  the absentee ballots cast in Escambia.
 |
 |  The Sentinal reported that "Escambia's duplicating team of
 |  more than a dozen poll workers went to great lengths-
 |  working until 2 a.m.-to make sure their absentee voters got
 |  a second or third look to have a mistaken ballot corrected
 |  and duplicated."
 |
 |  The Sentinal reported that the duplication was done "with no
 |  outside scrutiny."
 |
 |  The laws concerning duplicated ballots require that when
 |  ballots are duplicated it must be done "in the presence of
 |  witnesses."
 |
 |  An optically scanned ballot with marks for two different
 |  candidates is not uncommon.
 |
 |  They do occur less frequently on absentee ballots than on
 |  ballots cast at the polls when there is no "voter
 |  protection" at the polls.
 |
 |  Various factors can influence the rate at which such ballots
 |  are cast.
 |
 |  The make up of the absentee pool of voters and ballot design
 |  are two such factors.
 |
 |  Even allowing for these factors, the complete lack of
 |  "double marked" over-votes is highly suspicious and warrants
 |  an investigation.
 |
 |  In most counties there are more "double marked" over-votes
 |  than over-votes with three or more marks.
 |
 |  Over-voted ballots in Escambia were exclusively marked three
 |  or more times.
 |
 |  Other Florida counties show results that warrant
 |  investigations, but Escambia County is unique in that its
 |  absentee over-votes were exclusively from ballots that were
 |  marked three or more times.
 |
 |  Escambia County spent more than $500,000 on precinct based
 |  optical scanning equipment that had the ability to provide
 |  voters with over-vote and under-vote protection.
 |
 |
 |  They did not turn on voter protection at the polls.
 |
 |  They said they did not turn on the protection because they
 |  wanted to save money on replacement ballots, which cost .23
 |  each.
 |
 |  That explains why over-vote protection was turned off, but
 |  does not explain why under-vote protection was turned off.
 |
 |  There is no cost for new ballots with under-voted ballots.
 |
 |  The ballot would have been handed back to the voter and they
 |  could mark the ballot in a way that the machine could read
 |  it.
 |
 |  It would have cost less than $750 for replacement ballots
 |  for the 3,201 people that over-voted in the presidential
 |  race.
 |
 |  They spent over $550 on duplicating more than 2,400 absentee
 |  ballots.
 |
 |  That does not include associated labor costs.
 |
 |  24.1 percent of Escambia's citizens are African American.
 |
 |  16.6 percent of Escambia's registered voters were black.
 |
 |  Blacks make up 30 percent of the registered Democrats in
 |  Escambia and 2 percent of the Republicans.
 |
 |  86 percent of the black voters in Escambia are registered
 |  Democrats and 6 percent are registered as Republicans.
 |
 |  During election 2000 there was more than a 10- point
 |  difference in the Bush/Gore margin between poll cast and
 |  absentee votes.
 |
 |  This is an indication that there were a significantly lower
 |  percentage of blacks among absentee voters than among those
 |  who cast their votes at the poll.
 |
 |  The Escambia County Canvassing Board knew this.
 |
 |
 |  Lukasiak ends the article with the following argument:
 |
 |  The decision by Escambia County to turn off voter protection
 |  at the polls while duplicating over-voted and under-voted
 |  ballots must be recognized as a conscious effort to
 |  disenfranchise a disproportionate number of black voters.
 |
 |
 |  Charts from the Lukasiak article can be viewed at the back
 |  of this primer.
 |
 |
 |  On July 14, 2001 Reuters released an article entitled,
 |  "Florida Counted Flawed Absentee Ballots-Newspaper."
 |
 |  The article is based on the New York Times study of
 |  Florida's absentee ballots.
 |
 |  Following are some excerpts from that article:
 |
 |
 |  The article tells us that the New York Times reported that
 |  Florida election officials were pressured by Republicans
 |  after election 2000 to accept hundreds of overseas absentee
 |  ballots that did not comply with Florida's election laws.
 |
 |  The Times studied 2,490 overseas ballots.
 |
 |  680 of the ballots the Times studied were questionable.
 |
 |  The flawed ballots included ballots without postmarks, or
 |  postmarked after the election.
 |
 |  Some lacked witness signatures.
 |
 |  Some were mailed from the USA.
 |
 |  Some of the flawed ballots were received from voters who
 |  voted twice.
 |
 |
 |  The article points out that the Times investigation gathered
 |  copies of most of the overseas ballot-envelopes that arrived
 |  after Nov. 7, 2000.
 |
 |  They stored the information in a database for analysis.
 |
 |  The article explains that "thousands of pages of election
 |  documents and canvassing board meeting transcripts were
 |  examined.
 |
 |  More than 300 voters in 43 countries were interviewed, the
 |  report said."
 |
 |
 |  The article continues as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "SIMILAR DEFECTS TREATED DIFFERENTLY"
 |
 |
 |  The Times report stated as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Bush counties were four times as likely as Gore counties to
 |  count ballots lacking witness signatures and addresses."
 |
 |
 |  The Reuters article continues as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Of the 680 flawed ballots, 344 were found to lack evidence
 |  they were cast on or before Election Day and instead had
 |  late, illegible or missing postmarks, while183 ballots
 |  carried US postmarks.
 |
 |  There were 96 ballots that lacked the required signature or
 |  address of a witness, while169 ballots were cast by
 |  unregistered voters, were unsigned or had not been
 |  requested, as required by federal law. Five ballots were
 |  received after the Nov. 17 Florida State deadline and 19
 |  voters cast two ballots, both of which were counted."
 |
 |  Many of the ballots had multiple flaws.
 |
 |
 |  "GOP FOCUS ON COUNTIES WITH MILITARY VOTERS"
 |
 |  The article explains that according to the study, the GOP's
 |  aim "was to count the maximum number of overseas ballots in
 |  counties won by Bush, particularly those with a high
 |  concentration of military voters, while seeking to
 |  disqualify overseas ballots in counties won by Gore."
 |
 |  Judge Ann Kaylor is the chairwoman of the Polk County
 |  canvassing board.
 |
 |
 |  The article writes as follows:
 |
 |
 |  (Kaylor) "Told the Times the combination of GOP pressure and
 |  court rulings caused it (Polk County) to count some ballots
 |  that would probably have been considered illegal in past
 |  years."
 |
 |
 |  Kaylor makes the following remarks:
 |
 |
 |  "I think the rules were bent." `Technically, they were not
 |  supposed to be accepted. Any canvassing board that says they
 |  weren't under pressure is being less than candid.'"
 |
 |
 |  On July 15, 2001 the Los Angeles Times ran an article that
 |  had been published in The Nation entitled "Absentee Vote Did
 |  it for Bush."
 |
 |  Richard A. Serrano, Times Staff Writer
 |
 |  Following are excerpts from that article:
 |
 |
 |  "Election: Gov. Jeb Bush's letter helped provide the edge.
 |  But critics cry foul over its `comfort' message and an image
 |  of the Florida State seal."
 |
 |
 |  Florida's Governor Bush wrote a letter to Republicans,
 |  urging them to "vote from the comfort of your home."
 |
 |  The article tells us that the letter "was superimposed over
 |  what appeared to be an image of the state seal."
 |
 |  The article points out that a study showed that about
 |  700,000 Floridian's voted absentee.
 |
 |  The article explains that George Bush received about 125,000
 |  more absentee votes than Al Gore.
 |
 |  The Democrats say the letter "took unfair advantage of both
 |  the governor's office and the absentee voting process," the
 |  article says.
 |
 |  Florida law specifies that the only time voters can vote
 |  absentee is if they can't get to the polls.
 |
 |  The governor's letter did not mention that but the absentee
 |  ballot application that came with it did.
 |
 |  Florida's law forbids using the state seal for partisan
 |  purposes.
 |
 |
 |  The article continues as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Two civil suits were filed challenging the Republican
 |  absentee voter drive. Both were dismissed, and one of the
 |  judges suggested that criminal prosecution might have been
 |  more appropriate. Local prosecutors took no such action."
 |
 |  "Florida's GOP spent $500,000 producing the letter and mass
 |  mailing it to Republican voters. The envelopes urged voters
 |  `Please open immediately....Important message from Governor
 |  Jeb Bush enclosed.' Next to that was the headline `Vote by
 |  Mail'; next to that, a picture of a mail box.
 |
 |  The letter over Jeb Bush's signature was titled: `From the
 |  Desk of Governor Jeb Bush; Vote From the Comfort of Your
 |  Home.'"
 |
 |
 |  Statements made by Governor Bush in his letter as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Dear Fellow Republican."
 |
 |  "It has been an exciting year in the state of Florida."
 |
 |  "You may vote early by requesting a mail-in ballot by using
 |  the request card attached."
 |
 |  The card informed the voter that the undersigned could not
 |  go to the polls on Election Day.
 |
 |
 |  "Simply sign the card, provide the last four digits of your
 |  Social Security number, as required by law and mail it in
 |  today."
 |
 |  "Within a few weeks you will receive your ballot material.
 |  You may then vote from the comfort of your own home."
 |
 |  On Oct 20, 2000 The Democrats filed suit.
 |
 |  They said the governor misused the state seal.
 |
 |  They wanted the governor to apologize.
 |
 |  On Nov. 3, 2000 a Leon County judge dismissed the suit.
 |
 |  The judge said that citizens did not have a right to
 |  disenfranchise other voters.
 |
 |  The judge suggested that a criminal law might have been
 |  broken because of the illegalities of using the state seal
 |  for political purposes.
 |
 |  Bush aides said that Bush did not know that the state seal
 |  would be used.
 |
 |  An attorney defending Governor Bush (who later defended
 |  George Bush during the recount) said it was not the real
 |  state seal.
 |
 |  A Florida citizen filed suit on Nov. 22, 2000.
 |
 |
 |  The citizen stated as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "It made me mad on a hundred levels."
 |
 |  "When I got the governor's little brochure, with the gold
 |  tint on the seal, I was just kind of turning in circles."
 |
 |  The plaintiff wanted all absentee votes in county in Bay
 |  County thrown out.
 |
 |  Another Leon County judge dismissed that case too.
 |
 |  That judge also suggested that a criminal complaint be
 |  better pursued.
 |
 |
 |  The judge made the following remarks:
 |
 |
 |  "That violation can be prosecuted by the proper public
 |  officials of this state."
 |
 |  "And if there was any violation of the law for misstating
 |  the Florida law regarding absentee voting, that violation
 |  can also be prosecuted by public officials."
 |
 |  The citizen appealed to the state Supreme Court.
 |
 |  The state Supreme Court called the case moot after the U.S.
 |  Supreme Court ended the recount.
 |
 |  Governor Bush's attorney said that if either lawsuit had
 |  succeeded The GOP would not have been able to take their
 |  case to federal court because the cases would have been
 |  considered state matters.
 |
 |  The GOP figured that many overseas ballots were still
 |  outstanding as the election neared.
 |
 |  They figured that many of those overseas votes were military
 |  votes that would benefit Bush.
 |
 |  GOP operatives called each election supervisor in Florida's
 |  67 counties for information on counting how many ballots had
 |  been sent out, who had requested them and how many had been
 |  returned.
 |
 |  The GOP tracked the ballots daily.
 |
 |
 |  The article tells us that "Republican members of Congress
 |  lobbied the Defense Department to do everything it could to
 |  make sure the mail was delivered in time for Florida's Nov.
 |  17 deadline for military ballots."
 |
 |
 |  The article discusses the New York Times study, which has
 |  been covered in depth on these pages.
 |
 |  The article ends with some interesting highlights as
 |  follows:
 |
 |
 |  GOP operatives knew on election night that absentee voters
 |  had not participated in the exit polls that television
 |  networks were using to determine which presidential
 |  candidate won Florida.
 |
 |
 |  A bush consultant made the following remark:
 |
 |
 |  "That was a large part of the reason I didn't think the
 |  election was over on election night."
 |
 |
 |  On July 17, 2001 The Washington Post ran an article entitled
 |  "Dirty Pool in Florida" by E.J. Dionne Jr.
 |
 |  The article is based on the study from the New York Times.
 |
 |  The article states as follows: Please note that the words in
 |  single quotation marks are from the Florida's Supreme Court
 |  decision ordering recounts: "The Times story provides yet
 |  more evidence that the presidential election was decided not
 |  by `a careful examination of the votes of Florida's
 |  citizens,' but `by strategies extraneous to the voting
 |  process.'" The U.S. Supreme Court quickly overturned the
 |  Florida Supreme Court's decision by a vote of 5-4.
 |
 |  The article points out that America "allowed an election
 |  outcome to be determined by clever lawyering. Bush's
 |  lieutenants were willing to use one argument one day and
 |  exactly the opposite argument the next, depending on what
 |  served their candidate's interests."
 |
 |
 |  The article continues as follows:
 |
 |
 |  Gore's lawyers figured that military ballots "would be cast
 |  disproportionately for Bush."
 |
 |  Gore's lawyers tried to throw out "all overseas votes that
 |  did not meet the basic requirements of state law."
 |
 |  Gore was accused of not living up to his motto "count every
 |  vote."
 |
 |  The Bush campaign called Democrats unpatriotic and said they
 |  were not fit to lead the country.
 |
 |  Ironically, it was Gore who served in Vietnam, not Bush.
 |
 |  Karen Hughes said "no one who aspires to be commander in
 |  chief should seek to unfairly deny the votes of the men and
 |  women he would seek to command."
 |
 |
 |  Mark Racicot said "I am very sorry to say, but the vice
 |  president's lawyers have gone to war, in my judgement,
 |  against the men and women who serve in our armed forces."
 |
 |  The article tells us that we now know "that the Bush
 |  campaign was not defending all military ballots. It was
 |  defending them selectively, depending on whether they were
 |  cast in Republican or Democratic counties."
 |
 |  The Times reported that on one day, "in three South Florida
 |  counties, Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach, boards
 |  rejected as illegal 362 of 572 overseas ballots."
 |
 |  The Times added: "Most -- including many military ballots --
 |  were thrown out without a word of protest from Mr. Bush's
 |  lawyers."
 |
 |  The article states we now know that "Bush wasn't defending
 |  military voters. He was defending Republican voters."
 |
 |  The law requires that all overseas ballots must have either
 |  postmarks or dated signatures that prove they were mailed on
 |  or before Election Day.
 |
 |  62 percent of the ballots with no postmarks or dated
 |  signatures were counted in counties carried by Bush.
 |
 |  18 percent of these ballots were counted in counties carried
 |  by Gore.
 |
 |  The article further reveals that "while the Bush campaign
 |  was complaining about an `equal protection' in the recount
 |  of regular votes, it was busy creating one with the overseas
 |  ballots."
 |
 |
 |  The article continues as follows:
 |
 |
 |  The article tells us that the Times has uncovered more
 |  evidence that Harris used her office as "an outpost for the
 |  Bush campaign and altered her statements and rulings on the
 |  overseas ballots to fit every new twist in the Bush
 |  strategy."
 |
 |
 |  The article ends by stating that: "If Bush wanted to avoid
 |  four years of questions about how he `won' Florida, he never
 |  should have pursued such scorched earth strategy."
 |
 |
 |  On August 18, 2001 Eric Alterman wrote a piece that was
 |  published on the msnbc.com web site.
 |
 |  Alterman's article is based on the study of the New York
 |  Times.
 |
 |  The article is entitled "Fundamentally Corrupt?"
 |
 |  "Evidence mounts that GOP used every trick in the book."
 |
 |  Following are some highlights of the article:
 |
 |
 |  "In the tense weeks after Election Day, lawyers for each
 |  candidate argued over how to count votes, as GOP attorney
 |  Fred Bartlit did over military ballots.
 |
 |  Evidence is mounting that GOP operatives used aggressive
 |  pressure tactics -- in court and out -- to boost the Bush
 |  vote and depress the Gore vote."
 |
 |  The times conducted a six-month investigation.
 |
 |  24 reporters interviewed more than 300 voters in 43
 |  countries.
 |
 |  They examined thousands of pages of documentation.
 |
 |
 |  The Times discovered evidence of unequal treatment of
 |  overseas ballots in Florida on behalf of Bush.
 |
 |
 |  Alterman writes as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "The Republicans dominated the public relations battle, the
 |  behind the scenes political struggle, and ultimately the
 |  fateful Supreme Court decision that handed them tarnished
 |  victory."
 |
 |
 |  Following is a statement from Fleischer
 |  Regarding the revelations from the Times:
 |
 |
 |  "This election was decided by the voters of Florida a long
 |  time ago. And the nation, the president and all but the most
 |  partisan Americans have moved on."
 |
 |
 |  Alterman writes as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "The Times has uncovered yet another example of the Bush
 |  team's efforts to undermine the integrity of the Florida
 |  count, as they fought, successfully in many instances to
 |  include illegal military ballots for their man on the one
 |  hand and to exclude fully legal Gore ballots on the other,
 |  making precisely contradictory accusations in each case."
 |
 |  Alterman points out that pundits were quick to undermine the
 |  Times report.
 |
 |  Alterman refers to conservative Republican partisan Paul
 |  Gigot of the Wall Street Journal as an example.
 |
 |  Alterman explains that Paul Gigot mocked the New York Times.
 |
 |
 |  Alterman writes as follows:
 |
 |
 |  Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal mocked the Times "for
 |  devoting so much attention to a report that, by itself
 |  failed to prove that Gore would have won the election with a
 |  proper vote count."
 |
 |
 |  Alterman responds as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "But the fact that the Times failed to prove that the
 |  overseas ballots alone might not have tipped the balance is
 |  secondary when placed in the larger context of what we know
 |  about the election.
 |
 |  That Al Gore won the national vote by a considerable margin
 |  -- more than either Kennedy in 1960 or Nixon in 1968 -- is
 |  indisputable.
 |
 |  That he won the votes of Floridians using the `voter intent'
 |  standard outlined in the state's election laws is also
 |  indisputable."
 |
 |  Alterman points out that GOP lawyers fought against the use
 |  of this standard except in cases that would have
 |  disqualified overseas military ballots in favor of Bush.
 |
 |
 |  Alterman explains as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Illegally excluded `over-votes' also would likely have
 |  given Gore a substantial margin of victory."
 |
 |
 |  Alterman explains Harris' role as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Now throw in the fact that Katharine Harris arbitrarily
 |  excluded 215 votes from Palm Beach County because they
 |  arrived 2 hours late.
 |
 |  Add to these factors the deliberate theft of many of his
 |  (Gore's) legitimate overseas votes and the illegal inclusion
 |  of hundreds of Republican votes and, once again, it becomes
 |  harder and harder to conclude that the right man is sitting
 |  in the Oval Office, no matter what standard one chooses."
 |
 |
 |  The article explains as follows:
 |
 |
 |  The GOP victoriously masked the fact that they were seeking
 |  to undermine the recount process behind the scenes as they
 |  convinced a complacent media to play along.
 |
 |  The media said the votes had been counted and recounted and
 |  Bush had won every-time.
 |
 |
 |  Alterman writes as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Few reporters were interested or able to penetrate into
 |  this fog of misleading rhetoric to determine just how this
 |  `counting and recounting' was taking place."
 |
 |
 |  The article explains that the Times discovered the
 |  following:
 |
 |
 |  Harris made numerous attempts to certify the election for
 |  Bush.
 |
 |  Harris co-chaired the Bush campaign.
 |
 |  Harris allowed GOP operatives to set up a "war room" in her
 |  office.
 |
 |  The operatives drafted her statements and influenced her
 |  strategy.
 |
 |  Harris played quietly along.
 |
 |
 |  Alterman writes the following in regards to the Times
 |  discoveries:
 |
 |
 |  "In Washington, Republicans on the House Armed Services
 |  Committee helped the campaign obtain private contact
 |  information for military voters, violating the tradition of
 |  impartiality of the military and directly involving Congress
 |  in a partisan hunt for pro-Bush votes.
 |
 |  The Supreme Court, in ruling on the necessity of `equal
 |  protection' for all voters, deliberately ignored the fact
 |  that this standard was wholly ignored by those canvassing
 |  boards that the Republicans convinced to include illegal
 |  overseas ballots in favor of Bush, while excluding many
 |  legally cast votes in favor of Gore."
 |
 |
 |  Following are a few highlights from an article at
 |  www.wsws.org [ http://www.wsws.org/ ] (world socialist web
 |  site):
 |
 |
 |  "New York Times documents military role in theft of 2000
 |  election"
 |  By Barry Grey
 |  19 July 2001
 |
 |  "In an extensive report published July 15, the New York
 |  Times shed new light on the methods employed by the Bush
 |  campaign to hijack the 2000 presidential election.
 |
 |  The report, entitled `How Bush Took Florida: Mining the
 |  Overseas Absentee Vote,' was the product of a six-month
 |  investigation by the Times into Florida officials' handling
 |  of ballots mailed from outside the US.
 |
 |  These overseas votes became a focal point in the struggle
 |  between Bush and Democratic candidate Al Gore over the
 |  disputed Florida election."
 |
 |
 |  Grey tells us that the Times study revealed how Florida
 |  officials handled their overseas absentee ballots.
 |
 |  The Times study revealed how the GOP used legal and
 |  propaganda offensives to pressure canvassing board officials
 |  in GOP districts to count illegal overseas ballots.
 |
 |  Bush lawyers pressured canvassing boards in Democratic
 |  counties to reject overseas ballots with identical flaws.
 |
 |
 |  Grey explains as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "This effort to illegally increase Bush's vote centered on
 |  hundreds of ballots from military personnel stationed
 |  overseas.
 |
 |  The Republicans enlisted the aid of the military brass to
 |  increase the number of military ballots.
 |
 |  They also pressed local election boards to validate military
 |  ballots that lacked postmarks, bore postmarks later than the
 |  November 7 Election Day, or failed to meet other legal
 |  requirements.
 |
 |  As a result, 680 of the 2,490 overseas ballots that were
 |  counted as legal votes after Election Day -- more than one
 |  out of every four such ballots -- were defective.
 |
 |  Of these, 288 were ballots that canvassing boards initially
 |  rejected on November 17, the deadline for receiving overseas
 |  ballots, but subsequently accepted under pressure from the
 |  Bush campaign, the military and the media."
 |
 |
 |  Grey adds the following information:
 |
 |
 |  "Bush's official margin of victory in Florida was 537 votes.
 |
 |  Citing the Florida Department of State's web site, the Times
 |  reports that without the overseas ballots counted after
 |  Election Day, Gore would have won Florida, and thus the
 |  White House, by 202 votes."
 |
 |
 |  Governor Bush and other Florida officials were able to
 |  engineer systematic violations of Florida's election laws
 |  for the Bush campaign.
 |
 |  The GOP did not treat all overseas ballots equally, which
 |  minimized the credibility of the GOP's argument that the
 |  lack of specific and uniform criteria for judging disputed
 |  ballots in different counties violated the equal protection
 |  clause of the US Constitution.
 |
 |  Grey reminds us that if consistently applied, this idea
 |  would invalidate elections at every level in the United
 |  States, where election laws differ from state to state and
 |  rules and procedures vary from county to county across the
 |  country.
 |
 |  The right-wing Republican majority on the US Supreme Court
 |  based its 5-4 ruling on this supposed violation of the equal
 |  protection principle, which was concocted by GOP lawyers.
 |
 |  The US Supreme Court halted manual recounts and thereby
 |  handing the presidency to Bush.
 |
 |
 |  Grey explains that the Times legitimized its account of
 |  fraud and criminality with the following statement:
 |
 |  Grey writes: "The article stated, without explanation, that
 |  the Times found `no evidence of vote fraud by either party.'
 |
 |  It went on to say that its investigation `found no support
 |  for the suspicions of Democrats that the Bush campaign had
 |  organized an effort to solicit late votes.'
 |
 |  At a later point the article declared, `There is no evidence
 |  that the Pentagon knowingly delivered ballots cast illegally
 |  after Election Day.'"
 |
 |
 |  The article points out how the Times contradicts its own
 |  findings as follows:
 |
 |
 |  Military regulations require all mail to be postmarked.
 |
 |  The Times study discovered that 17 percent of military
 |  overseas ballots from Florida voters arrived without
 |  postmarks.
 |
 |  In the rest of the nation, less than 1 percent of all
 |  military overseas mail arrived without postmarks during
 |  election 2000.
 |
 |  Grey tells us that "the Times reported that Pentagon
 |  officials it interviewed `could not fully explain why so
 |  many ballots were arriving without postmarks.'
 |
 |  One obvious explanation, however, is that there was a
 |  concerted effort to solicit late votes from military
 |  personnel and ship them without postmarks so as to conceal
 |  the fact that they were illegal."
 |
 |
 |  Grey explains as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "The involvement of the military brass in the Florida
 |  impasse assumed a public form after Friday, November 17.
 |
 |  On that day two critical events occurred. County canvassing
 |  boards in Florida rejected nearly a third of the overseas
 |  ballots received after Election Day, including hundreds of
 |  ballots from military personnel.
 |
 |
 |  The certified total of overseas ballots increased Bush's
 |  official margin by hundreds of votes.
 |
 |  Even with the numbers packed by military overseas ballots,
 |  the Bush campaign still lacked the cushion it deemed
 |  necessary to overcome the additional votes expected to go to
 |  the Gore camp if GOP attempts to halt hand recounts in south
 |  Florida failed."
 |
 |  The Florida Supreme Court stalled Harris' plan to preempt
 |  the manual recounts and declare Bush as the winner in
 |  Florida on Saturday, November 18.
 |
 |  The GOP responded by launching a witch-hunting attack on
 |  Gore.
 |
 |  The GOP accused Democrats of performing an anti-American
 |  attack on the military because Democrats were trying to
 |  eliminate illegal military ballots.
 |
 |  On November 18 GOP Governor Racicot called a press
 |  conference and declared, "the vice president's lawyers have
 |  gone to war, in my judgment, against the men and women who
 |  serve in the armed forces."
 |
 |  Norman Schwarzkopf denounced Gore for denying servicemen
 |  their right to vote.
 |
 |  Schwarzkopf reminded military personnel that if Gore won in
 |  Florida, he would be their new commander in chief, a subtle
 |  statement that could lead to incitement to insubordination.
 |
 |  In order to force local election officials to validate
 |  military ballots they had rejected on November 17, the GOP
 |  filed suit against 14 canvassing boards in GOP counties.
 |
 |  They accused certain canvassing board members of violating
 |  federal law by rejecting military ballots without postmarks
 |  or other legal requirements.
 |
 |  These suits had no merit.
 |
 |  All of the suits were dismissed, but they intimidated
 |  canvassing boards into complying with their demands.
 |
 |
 |  Grey explains a GOP propaganda tactic as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "On the propaganda front, the GOP at both national and state
 |  levels obtained, through the good graces of the military
 |  brass, the names and e-mail addresses of military personnel
 |  stationed abroad whose ballots had been rejected.
 |
 |  They solicited statements from sailors and Navy pilots
 |  denouncing Gore and the Democrats, which were then fed to a
 |  compliant media."
 |
 |  Lieberman appeared on a television program on Sunday,
 |  November 19, in which he publicly stated that he would give
 |  "the benefit of the doubt" to military ballots, and
 |  suggested that Florida election officials "go back and take
 |  another look" at ballots that had been rejected.
 |
 |
 |  The article continues as follows:
 |
 |
 |  Gore rejected the advice of campaign strategists who urged
 |  him to challenge the illegal ballots.
 |
 |  The Times quotes Joe Sandler, who was the Democratic
 |  National Committee's general counsel.
 |
 |  Sandler remembers how Gore explained his position.
 |
 |
 |  "I can give you his exact words. `If I won this thing by a
 |  handful of military ballots, I would be hounded by
 |  Republicans and the press every day of my presidency and it
 |  wouldn't be worth having.'" Another Gore aide is quoted as
 |  saying, "Gore got very stuck on the notion that if he became
 |  president it was not in the national interest that he have a
 |  relationship characterized by his mistrust of the military."
 |
 |
 |  Grey makes the following observations:
 |
 |
 |  "These are extraordinary statements.
 |
 |  They amount to the acceptance of a military veto over the
 |  outcome of a national election and the occupant of the White
 |  House.
 |
 |  The subordination of the military to civilian rule is a
 |  cardinal principle of the US Constitution.
 |
 |  The fact that this cornerstone of democracy has become so
 |  eroded is a stark indication of the decay of bourgeois
 |  democratic institutions in the US.
 |
 |  The Times report confirms the analysis of the 2000 election
 |  made by the World Socialist Web Site: it was a watershed
 |  event, marking a decisive break with the traditional forms
 |  of rule of American capitalism.
 |
 |  The details revealed in the Times exposé underscore the
 |  enormous dangers facing the working class.
 |
 |  Its basic rights are threatened by a political system moving
 |  inexorably in the direction of authoritarian rule.
 |
 |  The absence of any serious opposition within the political
 |  establishment to the right-wing attack on democratic rights
 |  is reflected in the media response to the Times' report.
 |
 |  Consistent with their complicity in both the impeachment
 |  conspiracy and the theft of the 2000 election, the major
 |  networks have given virtually no coverage to the Times
 |  articles and the issues they raise.
 |
 |  The Democrats have remained similarly silent.
 |
 |  The last thing they want is a public airing of the
 |  criminality that underlies the Bush administration.
 |
 |  Nevertheless, the very fact that this story has appeared in
 |  a leading publication of the establishment has far-reaching
 |  objective significance.
 |
 |  The Times report is only one example of a growing genre of
 |  political post mortems on the stolen election of 2000.
 |
 |  In recent weeks numerous reports have appeared documenting
 |  the widespread disenfranchisement of working class and
 |  minority voters in Florida.
 |
 |  Books have begun to appear indicting the Supreme Court for
 |  its role in flouting democratic rights and handing the
 |  election to Bush.
 |
 |  These publications reflect a deep-going crisis of political
 |  rule in the US, a crisis that has been exacerbated by the
 |  installation of a government by anti-democratic means. Seven
 |  months after Bush's inauguration, the political
 |  establishment is unable to put to rest questions about the
 |  legitimacy of his administration.
 |
 |
 |  Within the ruling elite there is a gnawing fear that the
 |  breach with democratic methods is discrediting the entire
 |  political system and paving the way for the radicalization
 |  of broad layers of the working population."
 |
 |
 |  In the following article, the New York Times explains how
 |  the overseas absentee ballots in Florida were examined:
 |
 |
 |  July 15, 2001, Sunday
 |  "EXAMINING THE VOTE;"
 |  "How the Ballots Were Examined"
 |  By JOSH BARBANEL (NYT)
 |
 |  "To analyze the treatment of overseas absentee ballots, The
 |  New York Times obtained photocopies of 3,704 overseas
 |  absentee ballot envelopes that were received by Florida's 67
 |  election supervisors after Election Day 2000."
 |
 |  The article explains that in order "to guarantee privacy,"
 |  the canvassing board staff examined postmarks and printed
 |  information on the envelopes so they could determine whether
 |  these overseas absentee ballots met legal requirements, then
 |  the overseas absentee ballots were separated from their
 |  envelopes.
 |
 |
 |  The Times writes as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "From November 17 to November 26 the canvassing boards
 |  accepted and counted 2,490 ballots."
 |
 |  "All information contained on each ballot envelope was
 |  entered into a database by a firm hired by the Times,
 |  Quality Data Systems Inc. of Crofton Md.
 |
 |  The ballots were then matched against voter registration
 |  records to verify eligibility and add information about
 |  individual voters to the database.
 |
 |  Each ballot was then checked against a list of specific
 |  flaws as detailed in Florida election law.
 |
 |  Anyone flaw would have been sufficient to invalidated a
 |  ballot."
 |
 |
 |  The Times explains more as follows:
 |
 |
 |  The Times explains that when the copies were illegible,
 |  Times reporters or county election officials re-examined the
 |  original.
 |
 |  The Times was unable to obtain 35 overseas absentee ballots
 |  that were cast in four counties because officials could not
 |  find them.
 |
 |  Most such ballots were cast in Broward County.
 |
 |  Gary King is a non-partisan professor of government who was
 |  hired by the Times.
 |
 |  King wrote a book entitled "A Solution to the Ecological
 |  Inference Problem."
 |
 |  King developed a statistical method to analyze individual
 |  voting behavior based on group voting patterns.
 |
 |  The article ends by explaining King's participation in the
 |  study.
 |
 |
 |  On the next day, the Times tells us more about their study
 |  in the following article:
 |
 |
 |  July 16, 2001, Monday
 |  Florida's Flawed Ballots
 |
 |
 |  The Times writes as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Overseas ballots were judged by vastly different standards,
 |  depending on where they were counted."
 |
 |  "The Republicans pursued these votes with aggressive
 |  precision, tailoring their legal arguments to suit the
 |  different political leanings of various counties, while the
 |  Democrats were hobbled by indecision and contradictory
 |  strategies."
 |
 |  The New York Times conducted a six- month investigation of
 |  Florida's overseas ballots.
 |
 |  The Times discovered that Florida's ballot laws were applied
 |  unevenly.
 |
 |  The Times study emphasizes the importance of uniform
 |  standards in all states.
 |
 |  Out of 2,409 overseas ballots that were counted as legal
 |  after Election Day, the Times found 680 that were
 |  questionable.
 |
 |  Among the questionable ballots were ballots without
 |  postmarks or ballots without witness signatures.
 |
 |
 |  The Times writes as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Had the state laws been strictly enforced, all of these
 |  ballots would have been thrown out."
 |
 |  The Times discovered that counties that were carried by the
 |  GOP were more apt to count flawed overseas ballots then
 |  counties that were carried by the Democrats.
 |
 |  These differences were partly because of GOP aggression.
 |
 |  When they knew that overseas ballots could be the deciding
 |  factor as to which candidate would be the winner, Bush
 |  lawyers scurried to Florida's 67 canvassing boards to get as
 |  many ballots counted possible in GOP counties.
 |
 |  Bush lawyers used another set of standards in order to
 |  challenge Democratic counties.
 |
 |  Assuming that Bush had more flawed overseas ballots than
 |  Gore, the Democrats tried to challenge all questionable
 |  overseas ballots.
 |
 |  A memo that revealed the Democratic strategy was discovered.
 |
 |  The GOP accused the Democrats of trying to disenfranchise
 |  overseas military voters.
 |
 |  Senator Lieberman announced on television that election
 |  officials should give military ballots "the benefit of a
 |  doubt," thus the Democrats abandoned their strategy
 |  concerning overseas ballots.
 |
 |
 |  The Times article ends as follows:
 |
 |
 |  Lieberman's announcement "was a responsible gesture, but the
 |  same standards should have been applied to all absentee
 |  ballots from abroad, not just those in Republican-dominated
 |  counties."
 |
 |
 |  On April 24, 2001 the Washington Post ran an article
 |  entitled "Bush Recount Fund Violates New Law, Democrats
 |  Charge"
 |  "DNC Chairman Asks IRS to Probe Unreported Spending"
 |  by George Lardner Jr.
 |
 |
 |  Following are highlights from that article:
 |
 |
 |  "The Democratic National Committee yesterday accused the
 |  Bush/Cheney-vote recount fund of evading a new law aimed at
 |  unreported political spending and called for an IRS
 |  investigation of the fund's failure to publicly disclose its
 |  contributions and expenditures."
 |
 |  The post tells us that DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe wrote a
 |  letter to the IRS Commissioner.
 |
 |  In his letter regarding the Bush/Cheney recount operation,
 |  McAuliffe wrote the recount fund amounted to "the biggest
 |  `stealth PAC'" ever created.
 |
 |  In his letter, McAuliffe pointed out that according to a new
 |  law passed in 2000 (which requires secretive tax exempt
 |  groups to reveal their finances) the Bush/Cheney recount
 |  fund was supposed to register with the IRS.
 |
 |  Recount fund officials said they were exempt from the law
 |  because it was an arm of the Bush/Cheney campaign that was
 |  exempt from reporting its finances.
 |
 |  The Post tells us that the new law covers secretive
 |  nonprofit political groups organized under section 527 of
 |  the Internal Revenue Code.
 |
 |  The law requires these groups to disclose their political
 |  activities and who pays for them in order to maintain their
 |  tax-exempt status.
 |
 |  A counsel to Bush's recount fund said the Bush recount fund
 |  was exempt from disclosure because they were "an FEC recount
 |  committee."
 |
 |  A DNC legal counsel said the recount committee is not
 |  required to report to the FEC, but under the new law, they
 |  are required to report to the IRS.
 |
 |
 |  The article tells us more about McAuliffe's letter.
 |
 |  McAuliffe wrote as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "It is difficult to understand how the millions of dollars
 |  received for the recount are exempt from tax at all...Either
 |  the Bush Cheney committee is guilty of violating the new law
 |  or it is engaging in a massive scheme of tax evasion."
 |
 |  The Post tells us that he Bush/Cheney recount fund posted a
 |  voluntary web site, but it listed individual contributions
 |  only.
 |
 |
 |  On July 26, 2002 Public Citizen ran an article on their web
 |  site entitled "Bush-Cheney Campaign Violated Soft Money
 |  Disclosure Law, Soft Money Fund for Recount Narrowly Escapes
 |  $7 Million Fine by Filing Disclosure Statements Hours Before
 |  Deadline; Forms Still Not Publicly Available"
 |
 |
 |  The whole article reads as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The recount fund created by the
 |  Bush-Cheney 2000 presidential campaign evaded a soft money
 |  campaign finance disclosure law for 18 months and did not
 |  file required forms until the last day of an Internal
 |  Revenue Service (IRS) `amnesty' program for
 |  out-of-compliance groups, Public Citizen has discovered.
 |
 |  The Bush-Cheney 2000, Inc-Recount Fund, a 527 political
 |  group created shortly after the November 2000 election to
 |  pay for the legal and political activities in Florida and
 |  other contested areas, apparently did not file at least four
 |  -- and perhaps as many as six -- required disclosure forms
 |  until 3:25 p.m. on July 15, 2002 -- meeting the deadline to
 |  avoid millions of dollars in potential fines by less than
 |  nine hours.
 |
 |  `On its contribution form, the Bush-Cheney recount fund
 |  promised full disclosure, but trustees have evaded the soft
 |  money law for 18 months and just narrowly escaped nearly $7
 |  million in fines,' said Joan Claybrook, president of Public
 |  Citizen. `The 527 disclosure law was designed to shed light
 |  on this type of `stealth PAC' but the recount fund trustees
 |  flouted that law and didn't begin to comply until the last
 |  possible moment.'
 |
 |  Republican National Committee (RNC) official Jim Dyke
 |  confirmed to Public Citizen that the recount fund is a 527
 |  group that first filed its statement of organization and
 |  contribution and expenditure reports with the IRS just
 |  before the amnesty program ended. However, the information
 |  has not yet appeared on the IRS Web site, and the IRS has
 |  not confirmed to Public Citizen that that the Bush-Cheney
 |  recount fund's contribution and expenditure forms have been
 |  filed. IRS spokesman Tim Harms told Public Citizen that if
 |  the group submitted its forms by July 15, as the recount
 |  fund claims, it would be `in compliance' and would not be
 |  subject to fines.
 |
 |  Public Citizen's investigation found that:
 |
 |
 |      *  The recount fund was required by law to submit a
 |  statement of organization to the IRS within 24 hours of the
 |  group's formation (believed to be Nov. 10, 2000) and file at
 |  least four -- and perhaps as many as six -- periodic reports
 |  detailing contributors and expenditures under a `527 group
 |  disclosure' law passed in July 2000 (PL 106-230). The
 |  recount fund's statement of organization was filed on July
 |  15, 2002 -- 18 months late. The RNC official said
 |  contributions and expenditures forms were also filed around
 |  this time.
 |
 |
 |      *  The IRS announced a 527 group amnesty and compliance
 |  program on May 2, 2002, and said that failure to file by
 |  July 15 could result in `the assessment of taxes, penalties
 |  and interest.' The financial penalties for 527 groups that
 |  do not comply with the disclosure law can total 35 percent
 |  of a group's total contributions and expenditures. Based on
 |  that percentage, fines of $6.92 million could have been
 |  levied against the recount fund had it not submitted its
 |  reports in time.
 |
 |
 |      *  While the recount fund did voluntarily make a list of
 |  contributors to the recount fund available online, the
 |  information is incomplete and possibly misleading. Recount
 |  fund trustees failed to provide information that is required
 |  from 527 groups such as expenditures, the employer and
 |  occupation of contributors who gave more than $200, the full
 |  address of contributors, summary data on total contributions
 |  and expenditures, and the fund's address, connected
 |  committees and directors.
 |
 |
 |  Public Citizen has been stymied in its attempts to obtain
 |  the contribution and expenditure disclosure reports. The law
 |  requires that disclosure forms be made available for public
 |  inspection during normal business hours, but the fund has
 |  not complied with Public Citizen's request to review the
 |  documents.
 |
 |  `For several days, the Bush-Cheney campaign and
 |  administration figures have stonewalled our requests to
 |  review the disclosure forms they claim to have filed,' said
 |  Frank Clemente, director of Public Citizen's Congress Watch.
 |  `This is unacceptable. From Harken Energy and the attempt to
 |  hide Reagan-Bush presidential records to the Cheney energy
 |  policy consultations and the Bush-Cheney recount fund, there
 |  appears to be a pattern of failing to disclose what the law
 |  requires.'"
 |
 |  www.citizen.org [ http://www.citizen.org/ ]
 |
 |
 |  Public citizen gives us more on their findings as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Review of the Bush-Cheney 2000 Recount Fund and 527
 |  Disclosure Law"
 |  As of July 26, 2002
 |  Click Here for the Press Release [
 |  http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/release.cfm?ID=1170 ]
 |
 |  "The Bush-Cheney 2000, Inc-Recount Fund, created shortly
 |  after the November 2000 election to pay for the campaign's
 |  legal and political activities in Florida and other
 |  contested areas, evaded a soft money campaign finance
 |  disclosure law for 18 months. The recount fund's trustees
 |  did not file required disclosure forms until 3:25 p.m. on
 |  July 15, 2002 -- meeting the deadline for an Internal
 |  Revenue Service (IRS) `amnesty' program to avoid millions of
 |  dollars in potential fines by less than nine hours.
 |
 |  The recount fund [
 |  http://eforms.irs.gov/pac_list.asp?irs_pac_key=742966394 ]
 |  was required by law to file a statement of organization
 |  (known as an 8871 form) and make at least four and perhaps
 |  as many as six periodic filings detailing contributions and
 |  expenditures (8872 forms) under a `527 group disclosure' law
 |  passed in July 2000 (PL 106-230). 527 groups, named after
 |  the section of the Internal Revenue Code that governs them,
 |  can raise unlimited amounts of soft money and primarily
 |  exist to influence elections.
 |
 |  As of July 25, 2002, a statement of organization was
 |  available on the IRS disclosure website [
 |  http://eforms.irs.gov/ ] but no 8872 forms were online, as
 |  it can take the agency a month or more to post reports. IRS
 |  spokesman Tim Harms told Public Citizen that if the recount
 |  fund disclosed all its forms by July 15, as the Bush-Cheney
 |  group claims, they would be `in compliance' and would not be
 |  subject to fines. As of July 25, Harms could neither confirm
 |  nor deny that the Bush-Cheney recount fund had submitted all
 |  the necessary disclosure reports before the amnesty
 |  deadline.
 |
 |
 |  IRS Law Requires Recount Fund to File Disclosure Reports
 |
 |
 |      *  Republican National Committee (RNC) official Jim Dyke
 |  confirmed to Public Citizen on July 24, 2002 that the
 |  Bush-Cheney recount fund is a 527 group and has filed its
 |  8871 and 8872 forms with the IRS. "They are a 527 ... just
 |  like the Democrats [Gore-Lieberman Recount Committee [
 |  http://eforms.irs.gov/pac_list.asp?irs_pac_key=912084026 ]]
 |  were a 527," Dyke told Public Citizen.
 |
 |      *  According to press reports, the Bush-Cheney recount
 |  fund was created around November 10, 2000. The IRS requires
 |  groups to submit a statement of organization (form 8871)
 |  within 24 hours of a group's formation, but the recount fund
 |  failed to file a statement of organization until July 15,
 |  2002 at 3:25 p.m. -- 18 months later.
 |
 |      *  The recount fund also failed to file at least four
 |  different periodic disclosure reports, and perhaps as many
 |  as six, detailing contributions and expenditures. The 2000
 |  and 2001 reports and due dates are: post-election 2000 due
 |  30 days after the general election; year-end 2000 due
 |  January 31, 2001; mid-year 2001 due July 31, 2001; and
 |  year-end 2001 due January 31, 2002. Two additional reports
 |  may have been required if the recount fund continued
 |  operations in 2002; they are the first quarterly 2002 report
 |  due April 15, 2002 and the second quarterly 2002 report due
 |  July 15, 2002.
 |
 |      *  The Gore-Lieberman Recount Committee filed a
 |  statement of organization with the IRS on November 11, 2000.
 |  Subsequently, it filed six disclosure reports with the IRS
 |  during the last year-and-a-half, which detail $3.7 million
 |  in contributions and $3.2 million in expenditures.
 |
 |
 |  Amnesty Program Saves Recount Fund Large Potential Fines
 |
 |      *  The IRS announced the amnesty and compliance program
 |  on May 2, 2002. In a news release describing the program [
 |  http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-news/ir-02-57.pdf ] the IRS said
 |  that failure to file by July 15 could result in `the
 |  assessment of taxes, penalties and interest.'
 |
 |      *  Financial penalties for 527 groups that do not comply
 |  with the disclosure law can equal 35 percent of a group's
 |  total contributions and expenditures.
 |
 |  According to IRS guidance documents (Instructions for Form
 |  8872 [ http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i8872.pdf ]), `A
 |  penalty will be imposed if the organization is required to
 |  file Form 8872 and it fails to file the form by the due date
 |  or files the form but fails to report all the information
 |  required ... The penalty is 35 percent of the total amount
 |  of contributions and expenditures to which a failure
 |  relates.'
 |
 |      *  On the Bush campaign website, the fund disclosed $9.9
 |  million in contributions and according to press reports it
 |  spent all but $270,000 on recount activities and gave the
 |  remaining money to the RNC. Because the Bush-Cheney recount
 |  fund failed to meet the reporting deadlines, it could have
 |  been fined 35 percent of the $9.9 million in contributions,
 |  which is $3.46 million. Fines could also have been levied on
 |  the expenditures -- another $3.46 million -- bringing the
 |  total possible penalties to $6.92 million.
 |
 |
 |  Flaunting Law, Recount Fund Does not Provide Disclosure
 |  Reports
 |
 |      *  As of July 26, 2002, no Bush-Cheney recount fund 8872
 |  forms detailing contributions and expenditures were
 |  available online. But the 527- disclosure law requires
 |  groups to make all disclosure forms available for public
 |  inspection during normal business hours `at the
 |  organization's principle office and at each of its regional
 |  or district offices having at least three paid employees.'
 |
 |      *  The fund's principle office is in Austin, Texas. Four
 |  attempts to contact David Herndon, the fund's contact
 |  person, by phone on July 24 and 25 and two attempts to
 |  contact him in person on July 25, to obtain copies of the
 |  8872 reports were unsuccessful. Herndon's secretary Lisa
 |  Couvillon said Herndon was not available and that we should
 |  leave a voice mail message. Later, on July 26, Couvillon
 |  told Public Citizen that Herndon was on his way to Europe
 |  and that we should contact attorney Ben Ginsberg in
 |  Washington for further information. Couvillon also told
 |  Public Citizen that the office, which is located at 515
 |  Congress Avenue Suite 2300, did not have the forms. When
 |  informed by Public Citizen on July 24, 2002 that the recount
 |  fund was required by law [26 USC 6104(d)] to have the forms
 |  and make them available for public inspection, Couvillon
 |  said she would look into the matter.
 |
 |      *  RNC official Dyke said the reports could be retrieved
 |  by contacting the fund's custodian, Michael Koroluk, but
 |  because his only available contact information is a
 |  Washington, D.C. post office box (with an incorrect zip code
 |  on the disclosure form), the documents could only be
 |  received in writing and not for immediate public inspection
 |  -- delaying the request by as much as a month. (The law
 |  provides groups with 30 days to respond to written requests
 |  for disclosure reports.) Dyke further said that the RNC has
 |  nothing to do with the Bush-Cheney recount fund, but he said
 |  the fund would respond to a written request within a month.
 |
 |      *  The IRS can levy fines on groups that do not comply
 |  with requirements to make forms accessible. `Responsible
 |  persons of a tax-exempt organization who fail to provide the
 |  documents as required may be subject to a penalty of $20 per
 |  day for as long as the failure continues,' states IRS
 |  guidance documents. `There is a maximum penalty of $10,000
 |  for each failure to provide a copy of an annual information
 |  return.'
 |
 |
 |  Incomplete Voluntary Disclosure Is No Substitute
 |
 |      *  While the recount fund did voluntarily make a list of
 |  its contributors available online, the information is
 |  incomplete and possibly misleading.  For instance, the
 |  recount fund failed to provide required information such as
 |  expenditures, the employer and occupation of contributors
 |  who gave more than $200, the full address of contributors,
 |  summary data on total contributions and expenditures and
 |  organization information about the fund's address, connected
 |  committees and directors. Also, the IRS could not review the
 |  fund's activities as part of its enforcement and compliance
 |  mission because the agency had no record of the group's
 |  existence prior to July 15, 2002.
 |
 |
 |  Recount Fund Skirts Self-Imposed Limits Along with Soft
 |  Money Law
 |
 |      *  527 groups are not bound by contribution limits and
 |  can accept contributions directly from corporations and
 |  unions, but the Bush-Cheney recount fund set a self-imposed
 |  limit of $5,000 per person and also said it would not accept
 |  PAC or corporate contributions. Nonetheless, a database of
 |  contributions provided by the Bush-Cheney campaign show 10
 |  donors who gave more than $5,000 and two contributors who
 |  gave $10,000. Also, the American Coal Co. PAC gave $5,000,
 |  Ohio Valley Coal Co. PAC contributed $5,000 and the
 |  Independent Oil Producers PAC gave $750.
 |
 |
 |  The Recount Fund's Staff
 |
 |  The recount fund's form 8871 statement of organization lists
 |  the following directors and staff:
 |
 |      *  Michael Koroluk, custodian of records, who is listed
 |  at a post office box in Washington, D.C. We have no other
 |  information about him.
 |
 |      *  David Herndon, the fund's treasurer and contact
 |  person, is of counsel to the law firm Graves, Dougherty,
 |  Hearon & Moody in Austin, Texas.
 |
 |  Herndon contributed $15,500 to Bush's guvernatorial
 |  campaigns, according to Texans for Public Justice.
 |
 |      *  Alan `Bud' Shivers, Jr., a director of the fund, is
 |  president of Texans for Quality Health Care and has been
 |  called a "Pioneer" by George W. Bush -- a title given to
 |  those who raised at least $100,000 for Bush's presidential
 |  campaign.
 |
 |      *  C. Patrick Oles is a director of the fund.
 |
 |      *  Tim Beall is the fund's assistant treasurer."
 |
 |  http://www.citizen.org/congress/campaign/legislation/section527/articles.cfm?ID=8077
 |
 |
 |  Public Citizen released the following report on august 1,
 |  2002:
 |
 |
 |  Public Citizen press release
 |  August 1, 2002
 |
 |  "Thousands of Errors and Omissions Plague Bush-Cheney
 |  Recount Fund Disclosure Forms"
 |  "Recount Fund May Face $850,000 in Fines"
 |
 |  "WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Bush-Cheney recount fund, which
 |  evaded soft money disclosure laws for 18 months, filed
 |  disclosure reports with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
 |  containing thousands of errors and omissions and could be
 |  fined $850,000, Public Citizen has determined.
 |
 |  The Bush-Cheney 2000, Inc-Recount Fund, a 527 political
 |  group created after the November 2000 election, filed
 |  disclosure reports with the IRS on July 15, 2002. The
 |  reports were submitted at 3:25 p.m. on the last day of an
 |  IRS amnesty program that allowed out-of-compliance groups to
 |  turn in reports and avoid millions of dollars in potential
 |  fines.
 |
 |  But the Bush-Cheney recount fund disclosure reports are
 |  incomplete, and the group could be subject to IRS fines in
 |  the thousands of cases where it did not disclose the
 |  employer and occupation of individual contributors and
 |  recipients of expenditures. Also, the recount fund
 |  apparently did not disclose to the IRS more than 600 donors
 |  that it listed on the Bush campaign's Web site. In a letter
 |  to IRS Commissioner Charles O. Rossotti, Public Citizen
 |  urged the IRS to `use the Bush-Cheney recount fund as an
 |  example to send a strong signal to other 527 groups that
 |  violations of the law will not be tolerated.' Click here to
 |  view the letter, which was sent today.
 |
 |  `It is unacceptable for the Bush-Cheney recount fund to
 |  dodge disclosure for 18 months and then arrogantly suggest,
 |  as did the fund's lawyer when speaking recently to
 |  reporters, that the law does not apply to them,' said Joan
 |  Claybrook, president of Public Citizen. `They must take
 |  responsibility for the tardy filings and they owe the public
 |  an apology, not lame excuses.'
 |
 |  Findings from Public Citizen's examination of the disclosure
 |  reports include:
 |
 |      *  The Bush-Cheney recount fund did not list the
 |  employer and occupation for 2,456 contributors who gave more
 |  than $200, as required by law. This information is critical
 |  to understanding which special interests were attempting to
 |  influence the election process and carry favor with Bush.
 |
 |  These omissions totaled $2 million; the IRS can fine the
 |  fund 35 percent of these disclosure failures. Potential IRS
 |  fines for these omissions total $711,000.
 |
 |      *  The fund's disclosure reports filed with the IRS show
 |  6,806 contributors who gave more than $200. But a database
 |  of contributors provided on the Bush-Cheney campaign Web
 |  site lists 7,421 contributors who gave more than $200. If
 |  the Web site is accurate, this leaves a disparity of 615
 |  contributors that the fund apparently did not report to the
 |  IRS. The IRS can assess fines of 35 percent for these
 |  undisclosed contributors; this fine could reach $43,000 if
 |  each contributor gave the $200 minimum.
 |
 |      *  The Bush-Cheney recount fund did not list the
 |  employer and occupation for individual recipients of 143
 |  expenditures greater than $500 and totaling $272,050 -- as
 |  required by the IRS. The IRS can levy fines of 35 percent on
 |  these disclosure omissions, which could total $95,000.
 |
 |      *  The Bush-Cheney recount fund failed to file five
 |  disclosure reports during the 18-month period. Ultimately,
 |  the fund reported $10.2 million in contributions and $13.8
 |  million in expenditures. Fines for 527 groups that do not
 |  comply with the disclosure law can total 35 percent of a
 |  group's total contributions and expenditures. Based on that
 |  percentage, fines of $8.47 million could have been assessed
 |  against the group had it not filed with the IRS on the last
 |  day of the amnesty program.
 |
 |      *  The public can see how the recount fund spent $13.8
 |  million in the battle over Florida's 25 electoral votes
 |  (clickhere [
 |  http://eforms.irs.gov/pac_list.asp?irs_pac_key=742966394 ]).
 |  These expenditures include money to Enron ($28,281),
 |  Halliburton ($2,407) and Reliant Energy ($1,724) for use of
 |  their private jets. All three companies are under
 |  investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for
 |  cooking their books.
 |
 |
 |  The fund continues to brazenly dismiss the disclosure rules.
 |  Benjamin Ginsberg, a lawyer for the fund, told The
 |  Washington Post on July 27, 2002, `We don't think we have an
 |  obligation to file this. We still think we are exempt, but
 |  the truth is: Why not take the issue off the table.'
 |
 |  In fact, the 527 group disclosure rules are clear: The
 |  Bush-Cheney recount fund was required to file disclosure
 |  reports with the IRS. The law clearly states that a 527
 |  political organization must file if it was created
 |  `primarily for the purpose of directly or indirectly
 |  accepting contributions or making expenditures . . . to
 |  influence the selection, nomination, election, or
 |  appointment of any individual to any Federal, State, or
 |  local public office . . . or the election of Presidential or
 |  Vice-Presidential electors' [26 U.S.C. 527(e)(1) & (2)].
 |
 |  Despite more than a thousand disclosure errors, it is
 |  possible the IRS will not penalize the Bush-Cheney recount
 |  fund for the compliance failures. The IRS has yet to create
 |  a compliance program for 527 groups and may not be equipped
 |  to investigate or fine any 527s, including those affiliated
 |  with a presidential campaign.
 |
 |  `The Bush-Cheney campaign had 18 months to comply with the
 |  law, and the IRS has had two years to create a compliance
 |  program,' said Frank Clemente, director of Public Citizen's
 |  Congress Watch. `Neither has met its obligation to the law
 |  and the public.'"
 |
 |  www.citizen.org [ http://www.citizen.org/ ] for more info go
 |  to:
 |  http://eforms.irs.gov/pac_list.asp?irs_pac_key=742966394
 |
 |
 |  On July 30, 2002 The Daily Enron published the following
 |  story entitled "Florida Recount Funded by Enron/Halliburton"
 |  "Bush's Magical Mystery Tour"
 |
 |
 |  The following is the article:
 |
 |
 |  "JULY 30: If George W. Bush were cast as a TV sitcom
 |  character he would have to be modeled after ad man Darrin of
 |  Bewitched or Astronaut Roger of I Dream of Jeannie - a
 |  hapless fellow whose success hinges almost entirely on the
 |  extraordinary powers of others.
 |
 |  And so it was when the presidency hung by a thread in
 |  Florida during the last election. A contentious recount was
 |  underway and the genies that had gotten Bush so far
 |  assembled en masse to assure his victory over Al Gore.
 |
 |
 |  Only now are those last-minute efforts fully becoming known.
 |  According to papers filed with the IRS on July 15, nearly
 |  $14 million magically poured into the Bush/Cheney Florida
 |  recount effort - four times the amount raised by the
 |  Gore/Lieberman camp.
 |
 |  The money flowed in so fast, and in such enormous chunks,
 |  that Bush campaign officials - unaccustomed to Bush's
 |  perennial good fortune - were dumbfounded. `I think we were
 |  a little bit stunned by the amount we received,' Benjamin
 |  Ginsberg, a Bush attorney for the recount, told USA Today.
 |
 |
 |  According to IRS documents, the Bush campaign took in $13.8
 |  million, most in large contributions. Listed among those
 |  large contributors were Bush and Cheney's two most reliable
 |  genies - Enron and Halliburton.
 |
 |  While the Gore/Lieberman campaign filed its IRS disclosures
 |  of their Florida recount expenditures months ago, the Bush's
 |  recount fund filed the required forms at the very last
 |  moment allowed by law. July 15 was the final day of an IRS
 |  amnesty program for groups that hadn't already complied with
 |  the law.
 |
 |  `They obviously begrudgingly disclosed, and did it way after
 |  the fact,' said Larry Noble, executive director of the
 |  Center for Responsive Politics. `It's better than nothing,
 |  but it would have been better to have disclosed it when the
 |  money was coming in.'
 |
 |  The filings show that as soon as a recount was announced,
 |  Bush forces moved quickly. Money was no object. They
 |  dispatched over 100 lawyers to Florida and Texas, booking
 |  hundreds of plane tickets, rental cars and hotel rooms.
 |
 |  Among the expenditures listed was a payment of $13,000 to
 |  Enron Corp. and $2,400 to Halliburton Co. for the use of
 |  their corporate jets and other unspecified services.
 |
 |  `Eighteen months after the election, we find that the (Bush)
 |  administration literally flew into office on the Enron
 |  corporate jet,' said Jennifer Palmieri, press secretary for
 |  the Democratic National Committee. `The administration's
 |  close ties with unscrupulous corporations like Enron and
 |  Halliburton prevent it from showing real leadership on
 |  corporate reform.'
 |
 |  Former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay and his wife also donated
 |  $5,000 apiece, according to the filings."
 |
 |  This story and more can be found at URL
 |  http://www.thedailyenron.com/documents/20020730085550-68379.asp
 |
 |
 |  The following article from bloomberg.com explained more on
 |  the subject:
 |
 |
 |  "Bush Campaign Flew Enron, Halliburton Jets During 2000
 |  Recount
 |  By Laura Smitherman Aug.2, 2002"
 |
 |  The article can be purchased at www.bloomberg.com [
 |  http://www.bloomberg.com/ ] in their archives.
 |
 |
 |  What about the Miami Dade mob and other bush operatives that
 |  were in Miami Dade during the election "recount"?
 |
 |  A July 14, 2002 article in The Miami Herald by Carol
 |  Rosenberg brings us up to date on some of them as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Bush recount troops land plum D.C. jobs,"
 |  "Many of the president's appointees fought Gore's bid to
 |  take Florida, White House"
 |  BY CAROL ROSENBERG
 |
 |
 |  Following are some highlights from Rosenbergs' article
 |  regarding some of the Bush operatives:
 |
 |
 |  Rosenberg tells us that John Bolton is now the
 |  undersecretary of state for arms control.
 |
 |  He attempted to stop the recount of Miami-Dade County
 |  ballots by bursting into a Tallahassee library.
 |
 |  Matt Schlapp is the White House special assistant to the
 |  president and deputy director of political affairs.
 |
 |  Rosenberg explains that during the 2000 recount, Schlapp
 |  "was part of the supposedly spontaneous window-pounding
 |  protest at Miami-Dade County Hall that brought to an end the
 |  first recount of Miami-Dade ballots."
 |
 |  Sue Cobb is the U.S. ambassador to Jamaica.
 |
 |  The article tells us that she was not only a generous donor
 |  to the GOP, but she also "volunteered her legal skills to
 |  the Bush-Cheney campaign -- working as part of the legal
 |  team that contested recounts in Miami-Dade."
 |
 |
 |  Rosenberg states as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "They are among more than 50 political appointees found by
 |  The Herald to have served as troops in the frantic Florida
 |  recount battle that followed the Nov. 7, 2000 election."
 |
 |
 |  Rosenberg describes The Heralds' method of investigation as
 |  follows:
 |
 |
 |  "To identify the appointees, The Herald conducted dozens of
 |  interviews and studied White House nominations and
 |  government staff directories -- then matched names to news
 |  accounts, photo captions and several books about the
 |  episode.
 |
 |  In addition, some appointees included their recount roles in
 |  news releases, or accounts in university and law journals."
 |
 |
 |  The full article can be read at
 |  http://www.miami.com/mld/miami/3656186.htm
 |
 |
 |  The plot thickens.
 |
 |  The following article can be found at consortiumnews.com
 |
 |
 |  "Bush's Conspiracy to Riot"
 |  August 5, 2002
 |
 |  "More than three decades apart, two political riots
 |  influenced the outcome of U.S. presidential elections. In
 |  1968, protests at the Democratic National Convention in
 |  Chicago hurt Democrat Hubert Humphrey and helped Republican
 |  Richard Nixon eke out a victory. On Nov. 22, 2000, the
 |  so-called `Brooks Brothers Riot' of Republican activists
 |  helped stop a vote recount in Miami -- and showed how far
 |  George W. Bush's supporters were ready to go to put their
 |  man in the White House.
 |
 |
 |  But the government reaction to the two events was
 |  dramatically different. The clashes between police and
 |  Vietnam War protesters in 1968 led the Nixon administration
 |  to charge seven anti-war radicals with `conspiring to cross
 |  state lines with the intent to incite a riot.' The
 |  defendants, who became known as the Chicago Seven, were
 |  later acquitted of conspiracy charges, in part, because the
 |  protests were loosely organized and because solid
 |  documentary evidence was lacking.
 |
 |  After the Miami `Brooks Brothers Riot' -- named after the
 |  protesters' preppie clothing -- no government action was
 |  taken beyond the police rescuing several Democrats who were
 |  surrounded and roughed up by the rioters. While no legal
 |  charges were filed against the Republicans, newly released
 |  documents show that at least a half dozen of the publicly
 |  identified rioters were paid by Bush's recount committee.
 |
 |  The payments to the Republican activists are documented in
 |  hundreds of pages of Bush committee records -- released
 |  grudgingly to the Internal Revenue Service last month, 19
 |  months after the 36-day recount battle ended. Overall, the
 |  records provide a road map of how the Bush recount team
 |  brought its operatives across state lines to stop then-Vice
 |  President Al Gore's recount efforts.
 |
 |  The records show that the Bush committee spent a total of
 |  $13.8 million to frustrate the recount of Florida's votes
 |  and secure the state's crucial electoral votes for Bush. By
 |  contrast, the Gore recount operation spent $3.2 million,
 |  about one quarter of the Bush total. Bush spent more just on
 |  lawyers -- $4.4 million -- than Gore did on his entire
 |  effort."
 |
 |
 |  "Extended Deadline"
 |
 |  The article explains that the Bush recount committee
 |  acquired an extended deadline for disclosures of soft-money
 |  spending by "527 committees."
 |
 |  527 committees are not directly related to a candidate's
 |  campaign.
 |
 |  The article tells us that according to their records, the
 |  Bush recount committee "spent about $1.2 million to fly
 |  operatives to Florida and elsewhere, and paid for hotel
 |  bills adding up to about $1 million. To add flexibility to
 |  the travel arrangements, a fleet of corporate jets was
 |  assembled, including planes owned by Enron Corp., then run
 |  by Bush backer Kenneth Lay, and Halliburton Co., where Dick
 |  Cheney had served as chairman and chief executive officer."
 |
 |
 |  Some of the Brooks Brothers rioters were publicly
 |  identified.
 |
 |  The article explains that some of the rioters were in
 |  photographs that were published in the Washington Post.
 |
 |
 |  The article gives us more information on the rioters as
 |  follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Jake Tapper's book on the recount battle, Down and Dirty,
 |  provides a list of 12 Republican operatives who took part in
 |  the Miami riot. Half of those individuals received payments
 |  from the Bush recount committee, according to the IRS
 |  records."
 |
 |
 |  The article reveals more about the Miami protesters who were
 |  paid by Bush's recount committee were as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Matt Schlapp, a Bush staffer who was based in Austin and
 |  received $4,276.09; Thomas Pyle, a staff aide to House
 |  Majority Whip Tom DeLay, $456; Michael Murphy, a DeLay
 |  fund-raiser, $935.12; Garry Malphrus, House majority chief
 |  counsel to the House Judiciary subcommittee on criminal
 |  justice, $330; Charles Royal, a legislative aide to Rep. Jim
 |  DeMint, R-S.C. $391.80; and Kevin Smith, a former GOP House
 |  staffer, $373.23."
 |
 |
 |  The article tells us that the Miami Herald reported that
 |  three of the Miami protesters are now members of Bush's
 |  White House staff as follows:
 |
 |
 |  Schlapp is a special assistant to the president.
 |
 |  Malphrus is deputy director of the president's Domestic
 |  Policy Council.
 |
 |  Joel Kaplan is another special assistant to the president.
 |  (See Miami Herald, July 14, 2002)
 |
 |  The article gives us insight into some of the perks that the
 |  rioters received, according to the documents.
 |
 |  After the Miami riot, Bush's recount committee footed the
 |  bill for the hotel. The GOP rioters enjoyed a Thanksgiving
 |  Day party at the Hyatt Regency Pier 66 in Fort Lauderdale,
 |  Fla.
 |
 |  Bush and Cheney phoned the party to thank the rioters.
 |
 |  Wayne Newton sang them a song, "Danke Schoen," German for
 |  thank-you very much.
 |
 |  The article refers the reader to (Wall Street Journal, Nov.
 |  27, 2000; Consortiumnews.com's "W's Triumph of the Will")
 |
 |  The article reports that according to the documents, the
 |  Bush committee paid $35,501.52 to the Hyatt Regency Pier 66
 |  in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
 |
 |
 |  The article explains that there were other expenses incurred
 |  as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "The House of Masquerades"
 |
 |  "Garrett Sound and Lighting in Fort Lauderdale was paid
 |  $5,902; Beach Sound Inc. in North Miami was paid $3,500; and
 |  the House of Masquerades, a costume shop in Miami, had three
 |  payments totaling $640.92, according to the Bush records."
 |
 |
 |  The article explains that the riots changed the course of
 |  the recount as follows:
 |
 |
 |  Before the riots occurred, Bush's lead was dwindling and
 |  Gore was pressing for recounts.
 |
 |  "The riot in Miami and the prospects of spreading violence
 |  were among the arguments later cited by defenders of the
 |  5-to-4 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Dec. 12, 2000, that
 |  stopped a statewide Florida recount and handed Bush the
 |  presidency."
 |
 |
 |  The article reveals the Bush campaign position as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "Backed by the $13.8 million war chest, the Bush operation
 |  made clear in Miami and in other protests that it was ready
 |  to kick up plenty of political dust if it didn't get its
 |  way.
 |
 |  A later unofficial recount by news organizations found that
 |  if all legally cast ballots in Florida had been counted --
 |  regardless of which kinds of chads were accepted, whether
 |  punched-through, hanging or dimpled -- Gore would have won
 |  Florida and thus the presidency."
 |
 |
 |  "Across State Lines"
 |
 |  On Nov. 18, 2000 the Bush campaign appealed to activists to
 |  travel to Florida with an urgent message to Republicans as
 |  follows: "We now need to send reinforcements."
 |
 |  The appeal was delivered with the following promise: "The
 |  campaign will pay airfare and hotel expenses for people
 |  willing to go."
 |
 |  The article refers the reader to Tapper's Down and Dirty.
 |
 |
 |  The article explains the chaos created by the rioters as
 |  follows:
 |
 |
 |  "These reinforcements -- many of them were Republican
 |  staffers from Capitol Hill -- added an angrier tone to the
 |  dueling street protests already underway between supporters
 |  of Bush and Gore. The new wave of Republican activists
 |  injected `venom and volatility into an already edgy
 |  situation,' wrote Tapper.
 |
 |  `This is the new Republican Party, sir!' Brad Blakeman,
 |  Bush's campaign director of advance travel logistics,
 |  bellowed into a bullhorn to disrupt a CNN correspondent
 |  interviewing a Democratic congressman. `We're not going to
 |  take it anymore!'
 |
 |  Around the country, the conservative media apparatus, led by
 |  talk show host Rush Limbaugh and pro-Bush pundits, rallied
 |  the faithful with charges that a hand recount was fraudulent
 |  and amounted to `inventing' votes."
 |
 |  The article explains that Bush was complacent.
 |
 |  He did nothing to persuade the operatives "to respect the
 |  legally sanctioned vote counting.
 |
 |  Instead, Bush's recount representative, James Baker, and
 |  Bush himself denounced the Florida Supreme Court, which had
 |  ordered that recount results be included in the official
 |  vote tallies.
 |
 |  Bush accused the court of abusing its powers in a bid to
 |  `usurp' the authority of the legislature."
 |
 |
 |  The article continues with the following insight:
 |
 |
 |  "The Battle of Miami"
 |
 |  "On Nov. 22, 2000, after learning that the Miami canvassing
 |  board was starting an examination of 10,750 disputed ballots
 |  that had previously not been counted, Rep. John Sweeney, a
 |  New York Republican, called on Republican troops to `shut it
 |  down,' according to Down and Dirty.
 |
 |  Brendan Quinn, executive director of the New York GOP, told
 |  about two dozen Republican operatives to storm the room on
 |  the 19th floor where the canvassing board was meeting,
 |  Tapper reported.
 |
 |  `Emotional and angry, they immediately make their way
 |  outside the larger room in which the tabulating room is
 |  contained,' Tapper wrote. `"The mass of `angry voters' on
 |  the 19th floor swells to maybe 80 people,"' including many
 |  of the Republican activists from outside Florida.
 |
 |  News cameras captured the chaotic scene outside the
 |  canvassing board's offices. The protesters shouted slogans.
 |
 |  They banged on the doors and walls.
 |
 |  The unruly protest kept official observers and members of
 |  the press from reaching the room."
 |
 |  `"Until the demonstration stops, nobody can do anything,"'
 |  said David Leahy, Miami's supervisor of elections.
 |
 |  The canvassing board members later said that they were not
 |  intimidated into stopping the recount. (Down and Dirty)"
 |
 |
 |  The article relays an interesting anecdote on a sample
 |  ballot as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "A Sample Ballot"
 |
 |  "While the siege of the canvassing board office was
 |  underway, county Democratic chairman Joe Geller stopped at
 |  another office seeking a sample ballot.
 |
 |  Geller wanted to demonstrate his theory that some voters had
 |  intended to vote for Gore but instead marked an adjoining
 |  number that represented no candidate.
 |
 |  As Geller took the ballot marked "sample," one of the
 |  Republican activists began shouting `This guy's got a
 |  ballot!'
 |
 |  In Down and Dirty, Tapper writes: `"The masses swarm around
 |  him, yelling, getting in his face, pushing him, grabbing
 |  him. `Arrest him!' they cry. `Arrest him!'
 |
 |  With the help of a DNC aide, Luis Rosero, and the political
 |  director of the Miami Gore campaign, Joe Fraga, Geller
 |  manages to wrench himself into the elevator."'
 |
 |  `"The cops escort Geller back to the 19th floor, so the
 |  elections officials can see what's going on, investigate the
 |  charges. Of course, it turns out that all Geller had was a
 |  sample ballot.
 |
 |  The crowd is pulling at the cops, pulling at Geller.
 |
 |  It's insanity! Some even get in the face of 73-year-old Rep.
 |  Carrie Meek.
 |
 |  Democratic operatives decide to pull out of the area
 |  altogether."' "(Tapper's Down and Dirty)"
 |
 |
 |  The article reminds us that "Bush and his top aides remained
 |  publicly silent about these disruptive tactics."
 |
 |
 |  The article mentions the Wall Street Journal reported some
 |  of these incidents in an issue dated Nov. 27, 2000.
 |
 |
 |  "Upper Hand"
 |
 |
 |  The article tells us more about what Tapper writes on the
 |  subject as follows:
 |
 |
 |  "On Nov. 25, the Bush campaign issued `talking points' to
 |  justify the Miami protest, calling it `fitting and proper'
 |  and blaming the canvassing board for the disruptions. `The
 |  board made a series of bad decisions and the reaction to it
 |  was inevitable and well justified,' the Bush campaign said.
 |  (Down and Dirty)."
 |
 |
 |  The article tells us that recounts in Broward County were
 |  minimizing Bush's lead and Gore was gaining in Palm beach,
 |  "despite the constant challenges from Republican observers."
 |
 |  The article explains GOP tactics to remedy the situation as
 |  follows:
 |
 |
 |  "To boost Bush's margin back up, Republican Secretary of
 |  State Harris allowed Nassau County to throw out its
 |  recounted figures that helped Gore. Then, excluding a
 |  partial recount in Palm Beach and with Miami shut down,
 |  Harris certified Bush the winner by 537 votes."
 |
 |  "Soon afterwards, bush appeared on national television to
 |  announce himself the winner and to call on Gore to concede
 |  defeat.
 |
 |  `Now,' Bush said, `we must live up to our principles. We
 |  must show our commitment to the common good, which is bigger
 |  than any person or any party."'
 |
 |  View the full article at URL http://www.consortiumnews.com/
 |
 |
 |  When the democracy of any country is thwarted, it affects
 |  all people of every nation around the world.
 |
 |  I see it as the domino affect.
 |
 |  If a few powerful special interest groups can thwart
 |  democracy in a large nation, it would be so much easier to
 |  impose the same perverse action on a smaller nation.
 |
 |  It would only be a matter of time before all heads of states
 |  in all nations claimed their seats through some sort of
 |  illicit behavior.
 |
 |  That scenario would be disastrous for all people.
 |
 |  Election 2000 will never be forgotten in America or anywhere
 |  in the world that votes in a free democracy.
 |
 |
 |  Following are a few paragraphs from an editorial written by
 |  CB Hanif of the Palm Beach Post:
 |
 |
 |  "Get over it? Not this filmmaker"
 |  By C.B. Hanif, Palm Beach Post Editorial Writer
 |  Thursday, July 11, 2002
 |
 |  "Even with the presumption of inevitability that many news
 |  organizations deservedly were criticized for promoting, the
 |  record-breaking $100 million that it took to buy the White
 |  House almost wasn't enough. `We have a president who owes
 |  his election more to a dynasty than to democracy,' said
 |  Chairman Julian Bond at the NAACP's 93rd annual convention
 |  this week.
 |
 |  Presidential candidate George W. Bush had wooed that group
 |  before he lost the November 2000 popular election by more
 |  than a half-million votes nationwide.
 |
 |  He would have lost Florida's popular vote -- and the
 |  presidency -- had all the ballots that voters cast been
 |  registered.
 |
 |  For Americans who consider it a patriotic duty to ensure
 |  that every citizen has an equal opportunity to vote and to
 |  have his or her vote counted, restoring confidence in the
 |  electoral process means looking first at Florida. That's
 |  what Faye Anderson has done as producer of Counting on
 |  Democracy. Her documentary about the Florida presidential
 |  election is to air soon on public television. Many South
 |  Florida residents will see it beginning Friday, however,
 |  when Ms. Anderson hosts free screenings arranged by state
 |  Rep. James `Hank' Harper Jr., D-West Palm Beach.
 |
 |  Ms. Anderson, a New York-based writer and former national
 |  vice chairman of the Republican National Committee's New
 |  Majority Council, notes that while there is a clear racial
 |  gap in access to reliable voting systems, the problem of
 |  equal access to the polling place is an American problem. As
 |  she points out, a cross section of Americans, including
 |  seniors, students, the disabled and language minorities,
 |  encountered difficulties in exercising their right to vote
 |  or were discouraged from voting on Election Day 2000."
 |
 |
 |  Film and Speech Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential
 |  Election shown in Tampa as follows:
 |
 |
 |  FILM and SPEECH: UNPRECEDENTED: THE 2000 PRESIDENTIAL
 |  ELECTION
 |  Saturday, September 21st 7:00pm
 |  Falk Theater, University of Tampa
 |  $10 advance, $15 door
 |
 |  The Tampa premier of the new film, with the film's
 |  co-director Joan Sekler (co-founder of The Independent Media
 |  Center) and a speech by BBC investigative journalist Greg
 |  Palast, author of THE BEST DEMOCRACY MONEY CAN BUY.
 |
 |  Palast's speeches on WMNF's Radioactivity programs have
 |  caused a torrent of interest from listeners. The film is the
 |  riveting story about the battle for the presidency in
 |  Florida during the 2000 election. It tells how Republican
 |  political operatives used their access to voting lists to
 |  undermine the black vote.
 |
 |
 |  (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this
 |  material is distributed without profit to those who have
 |  expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
 |  information for research and educational purposes.)
 |
 |______________________________________________________________