Votergate BART Alert! Thousands of volunteers needed in Ohio and elsewhere...

Votergate BART Alert!

San Francisco, Powell & Market
Thursday, Nov. 18, 5 pm

Contact: lawland [at] pacbell.net

The Democracy Defense Committee will:

Host a speak-out by witnesses to voter suppression,

Document the evidence to be presented to election protection activists,

And march through the city to make it clear that THE ONLY MANDATE IS TO STOP WAR, RACISM, AND VOTER SUPPRESSION.

A neutral body must conduct the recount - not Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State.

A presidential recount will happen in Ohio. Green candidate David Cobb and Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik have requested it and raised the money. (http://www.votecobb.org)
Thousands of volunteers from Ohio and nationwide are sought as observers. 70% of Ohio’s votes are by punch cards, which historically disenfranchise African Americans and people of color. Ralph Nader is doing the same in 11 selected precincts in New Hampshire that used Diebold optical scanners and the percentages favor Bush by 5-15% higher than normal.

Ohio has been the center of voter suppression tactics, with Columbus and the surrounding Franklin County as ground zero. Bob Fithrakis of the Columbus Free Press (http://www.freepress.org) reports that the Republican elections director held back voting machines to African American precincts and dispersed many of the other machines to affluent suburbs in Franklin County.

Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell (co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign) must be taken off the count. Among other stunts, Blackwell has attempted to destroy thousands of new voter registrations because they were not printed on the “proper” 80-pound card stock. Three dozen “caging lists” (http://www.gregpalast.com) reveal spreadsheets listing names and addresses of voters to be blocked on any pretext. Every single address was in African American majority precincts.

More than 700 attended public hearings near Columbus on November 13 and 15, offering testimony of too few machines, standing in line for many hours, and cars being towed from a polling site. Similar tactics were used throughout the state, including Kenyon College. As one student said, “We don’t want praise. We want people to know how angry we are.”

Voting machines are under challenge - call for a voter-verified paper ballot receipt.

These hearings were held at the New Life Church, the location of the polling station in the Republican suburb of Gahanna where a faulty electronic voting machine cartridge tabulated 4000 extra votes for President Bush. The race is on to find out how many similar errors have occurred in Ohio or elsewhere. www [at] blackboxvoting.org is vote auditing in Ohio and elsewhere.

Based on the released exit polls, former MIT professor David Anick finds that the odds of Bush making an average gain of 4.15% in each one of the 16 states included in the media’s 4 pm exit polling is one in 50,000. (www [at] bluelemur.org, Nov. 8) U. Penn professor Steve Freeman calculates 250 million to one. (www [at] ilcaonline.freeman.pdf) Activists call for the release of the full exit polling for all states by county, as the above data is the only data made public by the networks (who own it). County exit polls would be the best evidence in testing for fraud.