By Mark Crispin Miller
The Washinton Spectator
Monday 15 October 2006

The GOP Playbook: How to steal the vote.

From the start, George W. Bush has pointedly refused to ask that we make any national sacrifice to help us win the "war on terror." Soon after 9/11 he urged us not to curb our appetites in any way, although to do so would have made much sense, and makes sense now. After all, it's oil, in part, that U.S. troops are fighting for, and oil that indirectly pays for all the guns and bombs now blowing those troops, and countless others, to shreds. The patriotic thing would therefore be to lessen our national dependency on fossil fuels, by driving less (or not at all), and turning off the air conditioners, by buying fewer disposables, and otherwise deferring to the greater good. Bush, however, will have none of that, asserting that the best thing we can do to help win this war is just go shopping.

Yet in one respect it's not exactly right to say that our president has asked nothing of us. Since 9/11, Bush has made astonishing demands on all his fellow citizens, asking us to swallow more baloney than the U.S. government has ever fed the people of this country. He and his team have asked us to believe that 9/11 came as a complete surprise, that Saddam Hussein was part of it, and that Iraq would soon be lobbing atom bombs, poison gas, and lethal pathogens at Tel Aviv and Disney World. They also asked us to believe that the Iraqi people would bestrew our troops with flowers, then that the "mission" had been "accomplished," then that those friendly natives had been overrun by "foreign terrorists" intent on wrecking the "democracy" that we were there to build. And now Bush asks us to believe that things aren't half as bad in Iraq (not to mention Afghanistan), as they appear, and that his team can win this war.

That most Americans do not believe a word of it, and therefore will not vote Republican, attests to the diffusive power of truth, which in this country still resonates despite the efforts of both government and media to bury it. Bush's big lies have prevailed not just because his regime has so doggedly promoted them. For too long, those howlers also had the benefit of a compliant press that simply echoed them.

But the truth about Iraq could not be spun away as more and more Americans encountered it, traumatically, in their own lives, and as the word spread ever further through the Internet and other unofficial channels - an arduous process of enlightenment that the press has only recently begun to help along. (The Democrats have mostly sat there mute.) And so the White House's claims about Iraq - and about 9/11, Afghanistan, Katrina, the economy, the public schools, the global climate and the GOP's respect for "family values" - strike millions of Americans as utter hooey.

Terrorism and Turnout - Of all the crackpot views pervading BushCo's faith-based universe, there's one that still pervades the real world, too: the myth of the two T's. "Terrorism and turnout," as the New York Times puts it, "were the 'two t's' that have been credited with GOP dominance in the last three [sic] elections." And as they'd swept BushCo to victory twice before, so will the two T's shortly benefit the GOP again - or so Karl Rove allegedly believes.

This year, AP reported recently, "the White House will reprise the two T's of its successful campaign strategy since 2002: terrorism and turnout." In other words, the Bush Republicans expect to win again through (a) fear itself, aroused by the eternal aftershock of 9/11; and (b) by mobilizing the expansive legions of their Christianist supporters.

That sounds plausible - until you think about it. There's no evidence that either terrorism or the Christian right decided the 2004 election. A Pew poll published on November 11 of that year found that the terror threat had driven only 9 percent of the electorate. There were no sudden multitudes of "NASCAR dads" and "security moms" supporting Bush in 2004 - and there was no electoral tsunami of right-wing evangelism either.

For all the big talk by the leaders of the Christian right, Bush was not re-elected by the faithful, as there were nowhere near enough of them to pull it off. Nationwide, there were 4 million evangelicals who hadn't voted for Bush/Cheney in 2000, and Karl Rove wooed them. Even if he got them all, however, that triumph would not explain the miracle of Bush's picking up 11 million more votes than he'd allegedly won against Al Gore. This insufficiency is clearer still when we recall the incumbent's record disapproval ratings. Hovering in the high mid-40s, Bush's negatives were worse than Lyndon Johnson's in 1968 and Jimmy Carter's in 1980. On the other hand, Democrats were extraordinarily united. At registering new voters, they trounced the GOP by as much as 5 to 1 in big swing states. By contrast, Bush's party was divided, with many eminent Republicans, both moderates and hardcore conservatives, either coming out for Kerry or for neither one.

Bush's evangelical advantage was further diminished by the heavy national turnout on Election Day: 60.7 percent, the highest in thirty-six years (and it was no doubt even higher, as there were thousands of reports of Democrats who couldn't vote because their names had somehow vanished from the rolls). High turnout tends to favor Democrats. In any case, the Christianists' peculiar brand of "moral values" drove few voters to the polls: Pew found that only 3 percent had been incited by the specter of gay marriage, while only 9 percent named "moral values" as their main concern.

A Credible Pretext - In short, Bush/Cheney was not swept to re-election by a national surge of theocratic zeal. And yet Bush's most fanatical supporters were essential to his "victory," which they enabled by providing a persuasive-sounding rationale for it. Because there was, and is, no reasonable explanation for that win, it was efficiently explained away as having been effected by the non-existent multitude of True Believers. Providentially, their votes came pouring forth late on Election Day, especially in Ohio - a propaganda line without a shred of evidence to back it up. (The late-day turnout in Ohio's rural districts was, in fact, quite light.) And yet that notion soon became gospel, as the media, and the Democrats, mechanically echoed the mere say-so of the Bush team and the Christianists themselves.

For the subversion of democracy, some such convincing rationale is just as crucial as computers, ballot "spoilage," Jim Crow laws and party goons - and the regime now needs a sturdy pretext more than ever, as the Republicans have reached new lows in popular esteem. Thus the two T's are now all-important; and, to complicate Karl Rove's project even further, only one of them remains as feasible as both appeared to be in 2004. Since then Bush's Christian-right support has been eroded by the war and the economy, BushCo's accommodationist stance on immigration, the party's failure to stamp out abortion, same-sex marriage and "obscenity," and, not least, the low farce of Foleygate.

"Terrorism" is now the one and only argument whereby the ravaged GOP might arguably validate their next amazing win. This explains why Rove has had the White House stick so closely to the "terrorism" script, even though the White House has itself conceded that this script is not so credible: Bush admits that there's no evidence of links between Al Qaeda, 9/11 and Saddam Hussein - and yet he continues yawping at the links between them, most startlingly in his anniversary speech a few weeks ago on September 11.

That oration kindled broad astonishment at the psychotic fixity of its key thesis: i.e., that U.S. troops are in Iraq to halt the spread of global terror (and not themselves a major stimulus thereto, as Bush's own intel establishment has bluntly noted). That line has been disdained not only by the media but also by the GOP's top pundits and Congressional candidates, more and more of whom, the New York Times reported on September 3, "are disregarding Mr. Rove's advice."

That Rove won't give it up attests to its essential function as pre-propaganda: Bush et al. shout of "terrorism" not because they think it will win votes. They don't care whether people vote for them or not. Rather, they've been hammering at "terrorism" in the hope that it will fly as a convincing reason why the GOP retained its grip on Congress, even though the party has no mass support. The strategy reflects, in part, on the immense credulity (and, to some extent, complicity) of the political establishment, which cannot, will not, does not want to see that this regime has never even been elected.

Such terror-obsessed pre-propaganda also tragically portends an imminent "surprise" deployed, before Election Day, to make Bush's empty, crazy argument seem suddenly believable. Whether it's a second 9/11, or a huge "defensive" strike against Iran, or a paralyzing combination of the two, a move like that would serve to make the recent Bush/Cheney line on "terror" sound prophetic rather than insane.

"Counting" the Vote - However they may seek to validate the electoral fraud, the Bush bunch are now in a superb position to effect it. First of all, computerized voting and vote-counting are today far more extensive than they were two years ago, thanks to the relentless efforts of the GOP, the e-voting manufacturers and not a few compliant Democrats.

Although some victories have been won for democratic practice through tireless bipartisan citizen activism, most notably in Colorado, North Carolina and New Mexico, such grassroots triumphs have been overshadowed by the juggernaut's immense success at reddening blue America. In 2004, 23 percent of the electorate cast their votes on "direct-recording electronic" (DRE) machines. Today, according to Election Data Services, it's over 39 percent. And nearly 41 percent will have their votes counted by computerized scanners - a method preferable to using DRE machines, as it allows for paper ballots, but a risky practice nonetheless. Thus over 80 percent of next month's vote will be counted secretly, by private vendors closely tied to Bush's party.

The GOP has also furthered mass disenfranchisement by passing Jim Crow laws of startling brazenness (yet that have gone largely unnoticed by the press). The Ohio legislature has passed a law that quadruples the price of recounts, makes machine audits near-impossible, hinders registration of new voters, tightens partisan control of the election work-force and requires all voters to bring IDs to the polls. Photo IDs, effectively a poll tax, are now required in Indiana and Florida - where, moreover, it is now illegal to hand-count paper ballots once they have been "counted" by machine. Through such laws - and epidemic lawlessness - the party will control the vote throughout the nation on November 7.

Brazen Behavior - While the party has pre-empted innumerable votes below the radar, it has also shown a steely willingness to thwart the voters openly, if they should dare resist the party's will. Take, for example, last summer's special race in San Diego to fill the empty seat of the felonious Randy Cunningham, a former Republican congressman who is now doing time for accepting bribes. Although leading in the pre-election polls, the Democrat, Francine Busby, lost to Brian Bilbray of the GOP; and then it came out that the party's poll workers had been ordered to take the e-voting machinery home with them for several days before the vote.

At the news of this jaw-dropping wrong (it being a very simple task to fiddle with the gadgets' memory cards and thereby fix the final count), San Diegans called for an investigation and a new election. A week after the election - and seventeen days before the vote was even certified - Bilbray flew to Washington, where he was summarily sworn in by House Speaker Dennis Hastert. In late August that amazing move was, still more amazingly, approved by Superior Court Judge Yuri Hofmann, who argued that the state of California had no jurisdiction once the Speaker of the House had made the people's choice.

If Dennis Hastert can choose Brian Bilbray for that seat, irrespective of the will of the electorate, why bother having House elections anywhere? Indeed, why bother with elections? Why not just have Congress's membership decided by the Speaker of the House - or by President Bush himself? Maybe that imperial arrangement would amuse the press as much as it appeals to Bush & Co. Otherwise there might have been some coverage of the scandal by the news media, which has largely disregarded it (while Hastert's role in Foleygate is a huge story).

Eleventh-Hour Plan - Such journalistic silence makes it all the likelier that the Republicans will get away with it again - although it's also possible, of course, that they will somehow fail to steal it on Election Day. Chance, accident, imperial over-reaching and/or popular resistance can thwart the best-laid plans. If that should happen, though, the party has a plan to fix the problem; and the press's eerie silence on the danger of election fraud could help that strategy succeed.

If the GOP should lose the House or Senate, its troops will mount a noisy propaganda drive accusing their opponents of election fraud. This is no mere speculation, according to a well-placed party operative who lately told talk radio host Thom Hartmann, off the record, that the game will be to shriek indignantly that those dark-hearted Democrats have fixed the race. We will hear endlessly of Democratic "voter fraud" through phantom ballots, rigged machines, intimidation tactics, and all the other tricks whereby the Bush regime has come to power. The regime will, in short, deploy the ultimate Swift Boat maneuver to turn around as many races as they need so as to nullify the will of the electorate.

Of course, the Democrats themselves have a rich history of election fraud, but there's no evidence of much, if any, since Bush came upon the scene; and yet with very few exceptions, they have doggedly refused to speak about the growing danger of such fraud, so that the GOP - the very perpetrators of that fraud - will be the first to make an issue of it. The press too has ignored the issue, other than to bleat, from time to time, that such malfeasance has been common "on both sides." Thus this besieged democracy appears now to have no defenders but ourselves. But we can do that vital work if we will only face what's happening and spread the word, and stand united not as party members, or as liberals, moderates and conservatives, but as Americans.

Mark Crispin Miller has authored many books, including Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order and The Bush Dyslexicon, and is a professor of culture and communication at New York University.
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Part I: The Elephant in the Polling Booth

By Mark Crispin Miller
The Washington Spectator

Sunday 01 October 2006

To say that this election could go either way is not to say that the Republicans have any chance of winning it. As a civic entity responsive to the voters' will, the party's over, there being no American majority that backs it, or that ever would. Bush has left the GOP in much the same condition as Iraq, Afghanistan, the global climate, New Orleans, the Bill of Rights, our military, our economy and our national reputation. Thus the regime is reviled as hotly by conservatives as by liberals, nor do any moderates support it.

So slight is Bush's popularity that his own party's candidates for Congress are afraid to speak his name or to be seen with him (although their numbers, in the aggregate, are even lower than his). It seems the only citizens who still have any faith in him are those who think God wants us to burn witches and drive SUVs. For all their zeal, such theocratic types are not in the majority, not even close, and thus there's no chance that the GOP can get the necessary votes.

And so the Democrats are feeling good, and calling for a giant drive to get the vote out on Election Day. Such an effort is essential - and not just to the Democrats but to the very survival of this foundering Republic. However, such a drive will do the Democrats, and all the rest of us, more harm than good if it fails to note a certain fact about our current situation: i.e., that the Democrats are going to lose the contest in November, even though the people will (again) be voting for them. The Bush Republicans are likely to remain in power despite the fact that only a minority will vote to have them there. That, at any rate, is what will happen if we don't start working to pre-empt it now.

Even though this election could go either way, neither way will benefit the Democrats. Either the Republicans will steal their "re-election" on Election Day, just as they did two years ago, or they will slime their way to "victory" through force and fraud and strident propaganda, as they did after Election Day 2000. Whichever strategy they use, the only way to stop it is to face it, and then shout so long and loud about it that the people finally perceive, at last, that their suspicions are entirely just - and, this time, just say no.

An Inconvenient Truth - That Bush/Cheney stole their "re-election" is not a "theory" but a fact that has by now been proved beyond the shadow of a doubt. The case was made, first, by the House Judiciary Committee - or rather by its Democratic members, who conducted a meticulous inquiry into the debacle in Ohio. (The Republicans boycotted the investigation, and obstructed it.) Its findings were released on January 5, 2005, in the so-called Conyers Report, after Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), the committee's ranking Democrat. The Republicans attacked it, and the press and leading Democrats ignored it; yet that report was sound, its major findings wholly accurate.

In July of that year the Democratic National Committee came out with its own study of Ohio, which offers still more evidence of fraud - before concluding, weirdly, that there was no fraud but rather much "incompetence" (all of which somehow helped only the GOP). Despite its stated contradiction of the House report, the DNC analysts disprove not one of Conyers's findings.

A few months later, the House report was bolstered by a thick volume of evidence compiled by the investigators who had helped the Democrats conduct their research in Ohio: Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman and Steve Rosenfeld. Their book How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election and Is Rigging 2008 reconfirms the House report with rich documentation, and evidences further fraud as well. Although the book went largely unreviewed, its findings proved unassailable; as did my essay in the August 2005 issue of Harper's, "None Dare Call It Stolen" (this was the first time any major medium addressed the issue).

While such works dealt only with Ohio in 2004, others soon appeared, demonstrating that Team Bush, that year, defrauded the electorate nationwide. My book Fooled Again documented the ultra-rightist crime wave that undid countless votes not only in Ohio but in Florida, Pennsylvania, Oregon, New York, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, South Dakota, Iowa, New Jersey, Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi and the Carolinas. It also detailed the interference of Bush/Cheney with the votes of millions of Americans abroad.

Despite a national media blackoutno reviews in any major U.S. dailies or newsmagazines, no interviews on network TV or radio, or on NPR or PBSFooled Again eventually found a large readership through the Internet, C-SPAN, Air America, and broad local radio coverage.

This past June, the case against the Bush regime was expanded by three major works. Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss's Was the 2004 Election Stolen? devastates the fiction that the exit polls conducted on Election Day were wrong. Despite Freeman's scrupulous research, that book too went unreviewed. Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse dissects the huge fraud(s) whereby the Bush/Cheney ticket "won" New Mexico despite the strongly Democratic inclination of the state's Hispanic voters, who turned out in record numbers to dump Bush. (Somehow, over 17,000 of them cast no vote for president, according to the e-voting machines deployed in Democratic precincts.)

More noticeably, Rolling Stone ran Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s, comprehensive study of Ohio, "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?"a piece the media could not ignore because its author was too famous. Thus Kennedy appeared on some shows that had been closed to all us other analysts, although his piece relied explicitly on our research; and even he was treated like a fantasist, or a felon, by the likes of Neil Cavuto, Tucker Carlson, Wolf Blitzer and Charlie Rose. Aside from those interrogations (and a decent head-to-head with Stephen Colbert, who let him finish several sentences), Kennedy too was disrespected by the media, which either blacked him out or put him down.

In short, the awful truth about 2004 has been denied by right and left alikeand, strange to say, more loudly on the left. Indeed, whereas the right has largely chosen to avoid the issue, the only journalists who have purported to "debunk" the "theory" of Bush and Cheney's stolen re-election have been liberals and progressive (and, ordinarily, excellent reporters): Mark Hertsgaard at Mother Jones; Russ Baker at TomPaine.com; David Corn at The Nation; and, above all, Farhad Manjoo at Salon.

Their "refutations" of the case are largely based on the mere exculpatory say-so of a few unconscious (or complicit) Democrats. And yet, although the work of these debunkers has itself been thoroughly debunked (and Manjoo, therefore, quietly assigned to other topics), it has done much to propagate the myth that there's "no evidence" that Bush & Co. subverted our democracy. Such denials have been persuasive not because they are well argued but because the truth is terrifying, and a lot of people (including those reporters) very badly need a reason to believe that all is well. Such wishful thinking has kept "the liberal media" from dealing with the direst threat that our democracy has ever faced.

And yet most of our fellow citizens sense that threat. A Zogby poll in August found that only 45 percent of the American people felt "very confident" that Bush was re-elected "fair and square," while the rest either doubted it or were "not at all confident" about it. The numbers of the blithe have been decreasing as the people have learned more and more about BushCo's fascistic antics in 2004 - and, as well, about the fatal flaws in the e-voting systems that the Republicans have been aggressively promoting since 2000. (Some Democrats have abetted them.)

The flaws of such systems have been exposed repeatedly by activists like Bev Harris, Brad Friedman, Clint Curtis, Lynn Landes, Earl Katz and Bruce O'Dell, and have also been solemnly detailed in many academic studiesfrom, among others, NYU's Brennan Center for Justice; Princeton's Center for IT Policy; RABA Technologies; SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation); the U.S. Government Accountability Office; and a cohort of computer scientists at Johns Hopkins, Rice and Stanford universities. (See previous issues of the Washington Spectator, here and here.)

Read together, all those exposés and studies tell of a close and wholly illegitimate relationship between the corporate vendors of those voting systems and Bush/Cheney's GOP. Three of the four firms that sell those systemsDiebold, ES&S and Hart InterCivichave tight links with the party. The fourth, Sequoia, has also tended to malfunction in Bush/Cheney's favor.

Now we have strong evidence of a covert partnership between those interests that "count" some four-fifths of U.S. votes and the party that controls our government. In a follow-up piece for Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., quotes the shocking testimony of a Diebold whistle-blower who, along with other employees, took part in the surreptitious placement of a software "patch" in the company's machines in Georgia (whose electoral system had, just weeks before, been privatized through a secret contract with the Secretary of State). The order came directly from Bob Urosevich, president of Diebold's e-voting machine division. "We were told not to talk to county personnel about it," says Chris Hood, a consultant to the company. And what about that patch? "We were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn't do," Hood noted. "The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done."

All this happened one sticky day in August 2002. On Election Day, some ten weeks later, the official outcome of the vote baffled everyone: Senator Max Cleland, a Democrat whom polls showed had been leading his opponent, Saxby Chambliss, by five points, lost by seven points. In the race for governor, Democrat Roy Barnes, who had been leading Republican Sonny Perdue by eleven points, lost by five. Both losses were inexplicable, and Cleland's was especially poignant. A war veteran and triple amputee, Cleland was quite popular in Georgia, whereas Chambliss was unknown - and a chickenhawk to boot, a "bad knee" having kept him out of Vietnam. Chambliss's attack ads had cast Cleland as a traitor, because he had voted against establishing the Department of Homeland Security. And now the people of the Peach State had apparently been swayed by their fear of terrorism into believing that those ads were right.

That year there were other such anomalies, induced, perhaps, by what some wags called "Diebold magic," as the company's product figured heavily in those other states where far-right candidates won upset victories: Colorado, where Republican Wayne Allard, down by nine points against Democrat Tom Strickland, won by five points; and New Hampshire, where Republican John Sununu, down by one point against Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, won by four points.

As odd as such reversals seemed, and as conspicuous a role as Diebold evidently played in them, there were no calls for inquiry, as it was easier to say that "terrorism" - or maybe "family values" - had simply grabbed the voters' hearts and minds in Georgia, Colorado and New Hampshire. (Diebold, in fact, had no hand in Republican Norm Coleman's startling victory over Walter Mondale in Minnesota - the born-again New Jerseyite having trailed the favorite son by five points, then winning suddenly by three.) Thus did the Bush Republicans take back the Senate, thereby canceling out the Democratic edge enabled briefly by Jim Jeffords's controversial exit from the GOP.

Saving Our Democracy - We must delve into the recent past, not to quibble over ancient numbers but to find out where we really are today. For what happened in some states four years ago, and in most states two years ago, is still happening now, and in more states than ever: a vast, complex and incremental process of mass disenfranchisement - which is, in fact, the only way the Bush Republicans could ever get "elected," as their program is not conservative but radical, irrational, apocalyptic: i.e., unacceptable to most Americans, liberals and true conservatives alike.

This is why they've gerrymandered Texas and (less visibly) Virginia - and also why they've packed the Supreme Court with comrades disinclined to outlaw gerrymandering (unless it's Democrats who try it). This is why they are dead-set against repealing state laws disenfranchising ex-felons - and also why they've used the "war on drugs" to jail as many likely Democrats as possible. (This would also help explain the post-Katrina diaspora, and especially the out-of-state internment of over 70,000 Louisianans.) And this is why the Bush Republicans push e-voting machines in every state, and program them to flip votes cast by Democrats into votes "cast" for Republicans, and systematically provide too few machines to Democratic precincts, and keep on arbitrarily removing Democrats from voter rolls, and "challenge" would-be voters at the polls, and simply throw out countless ballots of all kinds, and spread disinformation on Election Day. These are just some of the devices that were used not only in Ohio to ensure Bush/Cheney's "re-election," but in every state where they could pull it off - on both coasts, in the Midwest, and throughout the South.

In the next issue of the Spectator, I'll elaborate on the GOP's two likeliest moves in November's mid-term elections. For now, we must do all we can to make everyone aware of what's been going down - and, most important, what is now at stake. As the press and the Democrats have failed to call for any actual reform of the election system, Bush and Co. are now in a superb position to retain their legislative power, regardless of how people vote (or try to vote).

We need a massive turnout in November - but not because it will put Democrats in power. We need the biggest turnout ever, as a protest on behalf of free and fair elections in America. Such a turnout will make it that much harder for the Bush Republicans to spin their victory as legitimate. (This is why the GOP in several states, including Maryland and Colorado, is urging people to vote absentee next month: to make the opposition appear that much smaller.) But more important, such a turnout will prepare people for the crucial fight to come - the effort to save our democracy.

If we get millions out to vote, without informing them they may well "lose" anyway, the blow will devastate them, just as Kerry's abrupt concession did in 2004. It took two years to get Americans mobilized again. If Bush and his allies steal the next election, we won't have years to start resisting. The resistance must start on Day One, just as in Ukraine and Mexico; and so the people must be ready for the fight - and so they need to know enough to wage it, and to win it.
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Mark Crispin Miller has authored many books, including Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order and The Bush Dyslexicon, and is a professor of culture and communication at New York University.