It hardly seems possible. Our country has gone through four flawed national election cycles—2000, 2002, 2004, 2006—and still hasn’t managed to correct the systemic problems plaguing our election system. Is this a democracy, if one cannot have confidence that one’s vote will count? Why is this not a central issue for everyone who is actively involved in politics? Why don’t we hear more about it in the media?
It’s not surprising that those who have benefited massively from the system—primarily, but not exclusively, Republicans in recent years—have not been eager to change it. Unpatriotic and deplorable, but not surprising.
What has been more surprising is the passivity and timidity of Democrats. This has been true not only of the Democratic leadership nationally and prominent Democratic candidates (recall John Kerry’s quick concession after the 2004 election in Ohio), but also of most politically active Democrats at the state and local levels.
The lack of action makes more sense, though, when one steps back to look at how the nation’s political agenda is set. By now it has been widely recognized that the conservative movement’s messaging infrastructure has been advancing their agenda very successfully for decades, providing a solid foundation for Republican candidates. Election reform isn’t a topic they’re going to push, if it’s not in their interest to do so. Moderates and progressives, who don’t have a coordinated political infrastructure to advance an agenda, depend by default on the main stream media to set the agenda. We see occasional items in the main stream media about election fraud, but not enough to put the topic high on the political agenda. Not enough to make Democratic politicians willing to risk being called “conspiracy theorists”, and not enough to make grassroots folks rise up in outrage.
In a recent interview on the Killen Report, Ron Wolf, the president of Ascribe Newswire, explained why the press have not been leaders on the topic of election fraud, making four main points:
1. The press has faced diminishing resources and loss of good reporters, secondary to loss of advertising and readership to the Internet.
2. Evidence of vote tampering is hard to compile (hardly surprising).
3. There’s no “advertising constituency” for that kind of investigative reporting—no businesses are going to buy lots of ads to promote a sequence of stories about vote fraud.
AND
4. The press is loath to be in opposition to a political force.
That last one is key. Let me paraphrase what Wolf said. These days, having been battered by years of accusations that they are liberally biased, the press takes cover by quoting the words of this party versus that opposing party. They don’t like stories in which it’s this party against no opposition, as that situation forces the press to be in opposition to a political force. The press does not want to be one of those forces themselves.
Ron Wolf’s advice? THE PRESS HELPS THOSE THAT HELP THEMSELVES. That means that citizens have to put up stiff opposition to election fraud, on a sustained basis, in order to get coverage.
What’s the potential payoff? Media coverage sets the agenda. If the agenda becomes clear enough, the moderate and progressive politicians will be emboldened to take action to prevent election fraud. And then maybe, just maybe, we’ll get our democracy back.
And who, what citizens, should be putting up that opposition? Every one of us. It’s our country. If we want it, we’ll have to fight for it. No one else will do it for us.
Remember—2008 is around the corner.
Comments (2)
Republican Election Fraud new
From: OpEdNews
Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_press_re_070408__22commander__n_thief_22.htm
April 8, 2007
"Commander 'N Thief"- Explosive new documentary presents evidence of fraud in 2004 election
By Press Release
Explosive New Documentary Presents Evidence of Fraud in 2004 Ohio Presidential Election
Investigative journalist Greg Palast, author of the current best-selling Armed Madhouse and of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, introduces the documentary and also provides staggering information in the body of the film about the RNC's purposeful and targeted strategies for disenfranchising millions of minority voters across the United States, including African-American soldiers serving in Iraq.
Others appearing include Congressman John Conyers, Jr.; attorneys Cliff Arnebeck, John Bonifaz, Robert Fitrakis, Joseph Geller, Peter Peckarsky and Susan Truitt; President/CEO of Common Cause Chellie Pingree; computer science expert Professor Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins and Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D., the leading public-advocacy investigator of voting fraud in the 2004 Ohio presidential election; statistical expert Professor Steven Freeman, Ph.D. of the University of Pennsylvania; consumer advocate against electronic voting Bev Harris; Franklin County, Ohio Director of Elections Matthew Damschroeder; and Ohio poll workers, concerned citizens, and community activists.
In addition to the RNC's nationwide campaign to disenfranchise American citizens from targeted minority groups, several other clearly fraudulent activities are identified: 3,600,780 votes were cast for president but never counted; in Ohio, forensic evidence has been uncovered of ballot switching in selected rural precincts and of double punched ballots used to invalidate legitimate votes in specific urban precincts; and there is strong statistical evidence that as many as five million votes nationally were shifted, subtracting five million votes from Kerry and adding five million votes to Bush to produce a swing of up to ten million votes in the officially reported result.
The outcome of this series of sickening schemes is that the wrong candidate was sworn in as President of the United States. The evidence presented in this documentary, "Commander 'N Thief," should be seen as a warning that our democracy is now in peril and that ordinary citizens must act quickly and forcefully to restore honesty, transparency and verifiability to the American electoral system.
The documentary also cites the absence of any comprehensive or sustained media investigation or coverage of the evidence of serious election-day problems and, with the notable exceptions of Greg Palast (BBC, Guardian/Observer) and Keith Olbermann (MSNBC), there has been no significant attention paid to this unsettling story in the national media.
Former U.S. Senator, Ambassador and 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern provides a powerful closing statement for the documentary pointing to the need for citizen action to insure a transparent, accessible, easy-to-use and entirely verifiable voting system that will protect and preserve our democracy over the long future.
http://www.commander-n-thief.com/
Posted by NoFraud![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.commonwealinstitute.org/CIBlog/nav-commenters.gif)
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April 14, 2007 2:20 AM
Posted on April 14, 2007 02:20
"Commander 'N Thief" is one more in a string of privately-produced videos designed to try to awaken the American public to the perilous state of our country. A number of others have come out since 2002, some of the more notable being American Blackout, Unprecedented, Stealing America: Vote by Vote, and Hacking Democracy. The folks making these videos are not in the entertainment business. They are patriots and idealists who have invested substantial time and effort trying to save our democracy, trying to fill the "wake up" role that the American media have abdicated. Watch these films--absorb what they have to say--and then DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
Posted by Kate Forrest![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.commonwealinstitute.org/CIBlog/nav-commenters.gif)
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April 14, 2007 7:36 PM
Posted on April 14, 2007 19:36