A Glimpse Into The Real Election Fraud

By now, everyone paying attention has figured out that Republican attacks on ACORN are themselves fraudulent, and that the primary intent probably is to throw the November 4 election results into dispute. Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media culture and communication at New York University, appeared on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! on October 22 to talk about voter fraud. Although he spoke mostly about another issue of voter fraud, he stated that the investigation of ACORN began when the Las Vegas office turned into the Nevada office of the Secretary of State some suspicious registration forms. The official, Miller states, seized on the idea of voter fraud occurring and the political hype jumped to Missouri and Ohio, followed by the leak that the FBI is investigating ACORN.

According to ABC News, David Becker "was a lawyer for the Bush administration until 2005, in the Justice Department's voting rights section, which was part of the administration's aggressive anti-vote-fraud effort." He is now project director of project director of the "Make Voting Work" initiative for the Pew Charitable Trusts and notes "The Justice Department really made prosecution of voter fraud of this sort a big priority in the first half of this decade, and they really didn't come up with anything." And Lorraine Minnite, a political science professor at Barnard College in New York who has researched voter fraud and fraud claims for most of the past decade, says "We're chasing these ghosts of voter fraud, like chickens without a head." She says that the Justice Department has averaged seven or eight convictions a year for any and all sorts of voter fraud and vote tampering.

Voter suppression, however, poses a far greater threat to American democracy. Miller describes a kind of architecture called "man in the Middle," which "involves shunting election returns data through a separate computer somewhere else." It seems a guy named Stephen Spoonamore, a conservative Republican who is a renowned expert at the detection of computer fraud, has provided testimony that election returns in Ohio in 2004 went from the website of "Karl Rove's computer guru," Mike Connell, to a computer in a basement in Chattanooga, Tenneseee, "under the control of Sponamore and a guy with another private company." The data then was "shunted through" that computer and back to the computer of Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, a conservative Republican activist. Consequently, a RICO lawsuit has been filed in Ohio and Connell subpoenaed, though Republican lawyers have fought back.

Miller contends also that a team headed by Ohio researcher Richard Hayes Phillips took more than 30,000 digital photographs while scrutinizing every ballot cast in eighteen Ohio counties. It found 200,000 votes cast for John Kerry that were taken from him in a state (which proved pivotal) which was won by George W. Bush by 118,000 votes. Various methods were employed:

Of the variously altered, mutilated ballots, yes. Ballots with stickers placed over the square that people had blacked in for Kerry/Edwards; somebody else blacks in Bush/Cheney. Thousands and thousands of ballots that were pre-marked before they were distributed, so that people would mark different boxes on them, and then they would be invalidated.

And following the research, the boards of election in 55 Ohio counties defied a court order by destroying all or some of their ballots. And beware: Stephen Spoonamore says

the GOP wanted e-voting to steal elections but now foreign governments will be hacking and the winner will be determined by the best hackers. He says that if the GOP wins the hacking competition, McCain will win 51.2 percent with three electoral votes over Obama, and it will be a stolen election.