U.S. Attorneys: Asleep at the Switch |
By Michael Collins
Created Apr 4 2007 - 8:13am
How About Election Fraud?
Michael Collins [1]
Washington, DC April 2, 200
First Published in “Scoop” Independent News [2]
The sacked eight, as we’ll call the fired federal prosecutors, are a hot topic nationwide. Their inauspicious Dec. 7, 2006 firing became a major controversy when New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias caused a furor in early March by actually objecting to his firing. It seems his former sponsor for that position, the intense Senator Pete Domenici, (R-NM) had called attorney Iglesias and implied (as in insisted) that that he prosecute some Democrats before the midterm elections.
Senator Domenici is not amused [3].
Why? We can only guess but as things look now, the prosecutions would have benefited Domenici’s heir apparent, Cong. Heather Wilson, (R-NM). Seems Heather was in a fix. She’d been accused of sequestering [4] a file that New Mexico Department of Children, Youth and Families had on her husband. There was bad publicity with the implication of nepotism [5] (Wilson was head of the department at the time).
This meant that her tight race was going to be even tighter. Democratic challenger Patricia Madrid had any number of things going for her: a comfortable lead in the polls, the support of a popular governor, and high name recognition. Heather couldn’t count on the same breaks got from the state’s voting machines in 2004 [6]. This was a real fight.
Wilson won which by just under 900 votes. This raises some questions. First, what if Iglesias had charged the two Democrats Domenici fingered? Would the Wilson margin have been greater? Second, were there any election irregularities or machine malfunctions worth looking into? That’s a pretty tight margin for a race with over 210 thousand votes. Madrid’s pre election polling alone should have triggered at least a look see. In the late breaking polls, Madrid lead Wilson 53% to 46%. Was there a Wilson surge or could it be…
Heather’s happy.
<!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]-->There were controversies in New Mexico’s 2004 elections. . Greg Palast [7] investigated and found thousands turned away from voting due to restrictive voter identification laws (just the type encouraged by the “voter fraud” prevention program). He also noted:
Last year, I flew to New Mexico to investigate the 33,981 cast but not counted ballots of that state in the 2004 race. George Bush "won" New Mexico by 5,988 votes. Or did he? I calculated that, of the all the ballots rejected and "spoiled," 89% were cast by voters of color. Who won New Mexico? Kerry won--or he would have, if they had counted the ballots.
U.S. Attorney Iglesias didn’t do much prosecuting for “voter fraud” in 2004, nor did he do much election fraud investigating and prosecuting either. Voter fraud occurred at a rate of 24 cases between 2002 and 2006 [8]. This type of fraud is an individual act and, in the aggregate, is a non event impacting an immeasurably small fraction of the vote. U.S. Attorney’s, some even trained on vote fraud by Iglesias, spend a lot of time studying this super microscopic fictional crime wave, thus legitimizing it. They spend exactly no time studying and investigating “election fraud,” the theft of hundreds of thousands of votes.
<!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]-->Sounds like there was something very wrong in 2004? And not just in New Mexico. Any Problems in 2006? Let’s Ask the U.S. Attorneys.
To my knowledge, there has been no federal investigation by any official body into election fraud in the 2004 election. An Ohio special prosecutor [9] convicted Cuyahoga County election workers of rigging the 2004 recount, however. With all the talk of how abused the U.S. Attorneys are, which of them looked into any of these incidents ripe for investigation:
Investigating Election Fraud A Ground Breaking Study [10] Attorney Paul Lehto was a poll watcher in 2004, Snohomish County, Washington State. This detailed and empirically based report shows a multitude of potential to outright manipulations mostly favoring Bush. Did a U.S. Attorney every look into this? Did a U.S. Attorney ever read it?
The Conyers Report, Ohio 2004: Preserving Democracy [11] Cong. John Conyers, (R-MI) did his own investigation of the Ohio 2004 race right after the election. He was the ranking minority member but got no support from influential Ohio Republican Cong. Robert New (R-OH), now convicted of bribery and corruptions and serving time. Conyers documented the likely loss of tens of thousands of votes in Ohio due to election policies that suppressed the minority vote. Did a U.S. Attorney every look into this? Did a U.S. Attorney ever read it?
The Declaration or Richard Hayes Phillips [12] documented numerous incidents of lost Kerry votes by examining actual ballots. James Q. Jacobs [13] documents how Kerry votes were switched to Bush in a detailed analysis. Michael Keefer wrote a detailed summary of the various forms of election fraud and voter suppression in Ohio, The Strange Death of American Democracy. End Game in Ohio [14]. Did a U.S. Attorney every look into any of this? Did a U.S. Attorney ever read these articles?
Ron Baiman [15], TruthIsAll [16], Steve Freeman, and Jonathan Simon [17] all produced extensive mathematical and statistical studies which repeatedly showed problems with the over all vote count.
Project Censored [18] (sponsored by eminent journalists) chose stolen election 2004 as one of the most important stories not covered by the corporate media. Any U.S. Attorneys out there buy the best selling book of the same name?
In Ohio’s 2006 election, award winning investigative reporter, attorney and activist Bob Fitrakis [19] unearthed problem after problem, including obvious missing votes. To date, from what we know about the 2006 midterm elections nationwide, there were over 200 press stories [20] alone and a likely tens of thousands of voters who experienced e-voting machine irregularities of all types, including vote switching. The Election Defense Alliance published a detailed report Major Miscount in 2006 Election: Were 3 Million Votes "Misplaced"? [21] This was confirmed by TruthIsAll [22] in his own exhaustive analysis which also found likely missing votes in the millions.
Did any U.S. Attorney every look into this 2006 evidence of election fraud? Did any U.S. Attorney ever read it?
Preoccupied with the fiction of “voter fraud” at a rate of six to eight cases a year, U.S. Attorneys participated in a grand fiction that not only enabled restrictive voter identification laws and other forms of voter suppression, they apparently ignored citizen generated primary and analytic evidence of election fraud in 2004 and 2006.
Is this any way to handle the voting rights of citizens?
END
Permission to reprint with a link to this article in “Scoop” and attribution of authorship.
_______
Michael Collins
www.electionfraudnews.com
Links:
[1] http://electionfraudnews.com
[2] http://www.scoop.co.nz/
[3] http://flickr.com/photos
[4] http://tinyurl.com/k9ncf
[5] http://tinyurl.com/y5w9gy
[6] http://tinyurl.com/yw7ayy
[7] http://www.gregpalast.com/how
[8] http://tinyurl.com/2ee4uo
[9] http://tinyurl.com/2ovndj
[10] http://electionfraudnews.com
[11] http://electionfraudnews.com
[12] http://electionfraudnews.com
[13] http://jqjacobs.net/politics
[14] http://globalresearch.ca
[15] http://electionarchive.org
[16] http://www.geocities.com
[17] http://electionfraudnews.com
[18] http://www.projectcensored.org
[19] http://www.freepress.org
[20] http://www.votersunite.org
[21] http://tinyurl.com/y5fk4r
[22] http://tinyurl.com/2pbar9