EVAN DAVIS
SUSAN TRUITT
Co-founder of the Citizens’ Alliance for Secure Elections (CASE), Truitt said today: “The Citizens’ Alliance for Secure Elections has organized a rally to demand that every vote be counted accurately from the November 2 election. We demand a full recount of Ohio’s votes and a thorough investigation of all reported irregularities and discrepancies and charges of voter disenfranchisement throughout the state. The right to vote is a civil right and in a democracy no abridgement of that right can be tolerated. The rally will be held on Saturday, December 4 at 1 p.m. at the Ohio statehouse lawn in Columbus.” Evan Davis works with CASE and is helping coordinate the rally.
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ROBERT PARRY
Author of the just-released book Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, he said today. “One of the striking things was that immediately after the Ukraine election, many major news organizations in the U.S. began demanding that the official results be thrown out because of questions about their legitimacy. The reasons cited included the fact that exit polls had shown the opposition candidate prevailing while the official results came in the opposite way, that there had been complaints from voters about harassment and that there had been efforts apparently to bully the vote in certain directions toward the government. … Ironically, of course, some similar facts existed for the U.S. election on November 2. The exit polls had shown John Kerry winning. There were complaints especially in Ohio about efforts to hold down the minority votes and to put the important electoral votes into George Bush’s camp. His own political supporters controlled the apparatus in both Ohio and Florida, two of the key states. … Instead of the unvarnished truth being the primary concern, the idea of national unity at a time of crisis became the preeminent concern.”
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JAMES K. GALBRAITH
Galbraith teaches at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He said today: “The [Ukraine] election was stolen. That’s not in doubt. Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted it. The National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute both admitted it. … In Washington, former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski demanded that the results be set aside and a new vote taken, under the eye — no less — of the United Nations. … Personally, I don’t know whether the Ukrainian election was really stolen. … But if the Ukraine standard were applied in Ohio — as it should be — then the late lamented U.S. election certainly was stolen. In Ohio, the secretary of state in charge of the elections process was co-chairman of the Bush campaign in the state. He obstructed the vote count systematically — for instance, by demanding that provisional ballots without birth dates on their envelopes be thrown out, even though there is no requirement for that in state law. He also required that provisional ballots be cast in a voter’s home precinct, ensuring that there would be no escape from long lines. Republicans fielded thousands of election challengers to Democratic precincts, mainly to try to intimidate black voters and to slow down the voting process. A recount, demanded and paid for by the Green and Libertarian parties, has been stalled in court, so that it won’t possibly upset the certification of Ohio’s electoral votes. In Franklin County, Ohio, there was rampant abuse, with voting machines added in Republican precincts and taken away in Democratic ones, as documented by the Columbus Dispatch. The result was a crippling pileup at the polls; many thousands did not vote because they simply could not afford to wait. I witnessed this with my own eyes.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167