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James Collier, author of Votescam: The Stealing of America (web site archived by the Wayback Machine here) discusses in the above interview from 1996 methods of vote rigging in U. S. elections which have been used since the 1970′s. James and his brother, Kenneth, discovered extensive electoral anomalies and high-level government corruption while doing research for a book they were writing about running for political office without spending money. The 2000 election saw the installation of George W. Bush as U. S. President after hotly contested election results in Florida. “Unprecedented” details some of the processes by which many eligible Florida voters were wrongly purged from the voter rolls, by which many Florida voters’ ballots were discarded and by which post-election legal processes hampered the various recount initiatives which were undertaken, some automatic and some by request. This was election tampering of a highly visible sort which saw, among other things, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris in a massive conflict of interest, serving both as election overseer and as George Bush’s campaign manager. Similar dynamics arose yet again in 2004, as documented in several features including Free for All and “Uncounted – The New Math of American Elections” and by more decentralized efforts such as Video the Vote. This time, the spotlight was on Ohio, where Secretary of State Ken Blackwell served as the head of George Bush’s reelection campaign. In the above lecture, NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller, author of Loser Take All: Election Fraud and The Subversion of Democracy, 2000 – 2008, describes a broad range of tactics used to suppress Democratic votes in 2004, including vote machine shortages which created excessively long lines, sometimes with a two or more hour wait time, vote machines recording votes for Kerry as votes for Bush, and up to ten to twenty percent of Democratic voters being told at the door that they were not on the roster and therefore unable to vote. In many of these cases, voters were reduced to casting provisional ballots instead of a traditional ballot, many of which were not included in the final count. Many Americans put in a lot of effort to try to defeat Bush that election in the hope of putting America on at least a marginally less apocalyptic trajectory, holding their noses to vote for “the lesser of two evils” despite their conscience telling them that Kerry was simply, as the saying went, “Bush Lite,” and the Kerry team’s thanks was to roll over silently on November 3rd despite overwhelming evidence of a crooked election. According to the lecture above, John Kerry told Miller at a party that he agreed that there had probably been a misvote but that high-ranking Democrats including Christopher Dodd told him not to pursue the topic. (Incidentally, Miller also notes that “alternative left media” outlets including Mother Jones, The Nation and Salon all went out of their way to write against the possibility of election fraud. A similar situation was encountered by 9/11 skeptics with these same publications.) A 2008 supplement to Crispin’s UC talk on Democracy Now! is above in which he discusses a legal case involving Republican computer guru Michael Connell, who had worked with both the George W. Bush and John McCain Presidential campaigns. Connell was subpoenaed in December 2008 with regard to the alleged vote fraud in Ohio but, like Iraq war opponent former Senator Paul Wellstone, met an untimely fate in a plane crash after only one deposition. Here, in an interview with Velvet Revolution, Stephen Spoonamore, a computer security professional who is involved with the Ohio vote fraud case with which Connell had been connected, provides technical details about the situation. In the sense that Democratic Party leadership has not made electoral integrity much of a public issue, this is a non-partisan issue. However, as Spoonamore notes, the active conspirators in the above cases are all closely connected with the Republican Party. [END] Permalink: The Integrity of American Political Elections