Voter fraud in the 2004 election

There’s several stories like this, this year (as well as previous years *cough* Gore) and this is something that should anger any voter, regardless of party line. Of course, those that fall on the side of the favored are quiet, until it happens to their candidate.

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad3 never received their ballots — or received them too late to vote4 — after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations5. A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states6, was discovered shredding Democratic registrations7. In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes8, malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots9. Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment — roughly one for every 100 cast10.

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush’s victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count11.

The full article (it’s long so print it out):
Rolling Stone: Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

UPDATED (11/29/2009: sorry the link was wrong on the original post)

Political bitch slap…


Czech’s health care minister and an adviser to President Vaclav Klaus got into a fist fight in a confrontation captured by TV cameras.

The fight happened Saturday in front of a group of dentists.

Former Vice Prime Minister Miroslav Macek, a dentist by profession who was invited to moderate a discussion of Czech dentists with David Rath, slapped Rath on the back of his head in front of the perplexed audience — and TV cameras — saying he was settling a private matter with him. Rath called Macek a coward, and the two exchanged punches.

The fight made it to all Czech prime-time television news programs Saturday.

General elections are to be held June 2-3, and Rath — the leading candidate for the governing Social Democrats in the Prague district — has alleged the attack was politically motivated.

Macek, a member of the center-right Civic Democratic Party, denied any political motives, saying Rath had insulted his wife.

In a newspaper interview earlier this month, Rath was quoted as saying Macek had always dated young women but then married an older woman for money.

“It was a purely private matter,” the daily Mlada Fronta Dnes quoted Macek as saying.

The Civic Democratic Party said Macek should consider resigning from the party because of the incident.