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AMY GOODMAN: Just days after reports that six early voters in at least
two West Virginia counties claimed their votes were switched from Democrat to Republican, a couple in
Nashville, Tennessee reported similar problems with paperless voting machines. In West Virginia, one voter said, "I hit Obama,
and it switched to McCain. I am really concerned about that. If McCain wins, there was something wrong with the machines."
In Tennessee, a filmmaker couple also had difficulties casting their vote for the Democratic candidate, the Brad
Blog reports. They had to hit the Obama button several times before it actually registered, and in one case it momentarily
flipped from Obama to Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney. Patricia Earnhardt said, "The McKinney button was located five
rows below the Obama button." The couple in Nashville were using machines made by the same company as those in the counties
in West Virginia—by Election Systems and Software.
Meanwhile, there are reports of long lines at early voting
sites in several other states, including some counties in Texas, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico.
Mark Crispin
Miller is a media critic who's been focused on voter problems and election fraud in this country. He's a professor at New
York University, author of several books. Most recently he edited Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy,
2000-2008. His previous book, Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too.
Mark Crispin Miller now joins us in the firehouse studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!
MARK CRISPIN MILLER:
Great to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: What are your concerns right now, Mark?
MARK
CRISPIN MILLER: Well, you've referred to a couple of them already. We now see a burst of vote flipping by machines, electronic
voting machines in a couple of states. This is something that we saw in at least eleven states in the 2004 election, hundreds
and hundreds of people coming forward to say, "I pushed the button for Kerry, and the button for Bush lit up." So, clearly,
this was a systematic programming decision by the people in charge of the machines, which in that case and this one is the
Republican Party. We're also seeing systematic shortages of working voting machines in Democratic precincts only. This is
also something that did not happen only in Ohio in 2004, but happened nationwide. That election was, in fact, stolen.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you know that?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, I know because there's been
an audit of the vote in eighteen counties of Ohio by a researcher named Richard Hayes Phillips, who had his team literally
scrutinize every single ballot that was warehoused in eighteen Ohio counties. They took over 30,000 digital photographs. This
is not speculation, Amy. This is a meticulous, careful, specific and conclusive demonstration that John Kerry actually won
some 200,000 votes in those eighteen counties only that were taken away from him. Bush's official victory margin, you may
recall, was about 118,000. So there is no question about it. Ohio was stolen.
AMY GOODMAN:
When they—OK, so they have the pictures of all these—
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Pictures, there's a CD
with this book that you can—
AMY GOODMAN: But they have the pictures of the ballots.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: 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.
Even more chilling is the fact that after Phillips did his research, the boards of elections in fifty-five Ohio
counties destroyed all or some of their ballots in defiance of a court order. So we have criminal behavior here of a kind
of grand and systematic kind. But the point is—not to engage in what Sarah Palin calls finger-pointing backwards, the
point here is to note that we're dealing with a consistent pattern of subversive behavior by the Republican Party since 2000
and extending all the way up to the present. What we're seeing now is an especially brazen and diverse range of dirty tricks
and tactics that are being used both to suppress the vote and also to enable election fraud.
AMY
GOODMAN: Ohio has been very much in the news this past week, not around the issue of voter suppression, but around
the issue of fraudulent registration forms, the concern about them being handed in by the organization ACORN.
MARK
CRISPIN MILLER: Yeah, the whole ACORN thing is a first-class propaganda drive. ACORN has done nothing wrong. ACORN has, however,
been guilty of trying to register low-income citizens to vote. Because they've been in the sights of the Republican Party
for several years now, they've always been extremely scrupulous about checking the registration forms that they garner from
their volunteers.
You know, they pay people, basically, to register other voters. So, naturally, from time to
time, some volunteer who wants the money will fill out a registration form, you know, with Mickey Mouse or the names of the
Dallas Cowboys, something like that. Precisely because that is an ever-present possibility, the people at ACORN have always
scrupulously checked the forms before submitting them.
And ten days ago, what they did was, in Las Vegas, their
office in Las Vegas, they found a number of these suspicious forms, handed them over directly to the Secretary of State in
Nevada, and his response was to turn around and say, "Aha! Here is evidence that you're conspiring to commit voter fraud."
Now, that effort, that drive went from Nevada to Missouri to Ohio, and now we hear that the FBI is investigating ACORN.
The
important point here, Amy, is that voter fraud is practically nonexistent. Several studies have taken a close look at this
and found that there really is no voter fraud of this kind.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Greenwald
of Brave New Films has put out a new short film about ACORN and the attacks against them. Let me play an excerpt.
SEN.
JOHN McCAIN: We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama's relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe
perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.
GOV.
SARAH PALIN: John and I are calling on the Obama campaign to release communications it has had with this group and to do so
immediately.
CARMEN ARIAS: These attacks on ACORN are part of a pattern of voter suppression that the GOP has
been carrying on for a long time.
PAUL WEYRICH: They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections
are not won by a majority of people. They never have been, from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter
of fact, our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.
ANDREW SULLIVAN:
The McCain campaign has now two camps. And one of them is already assuming that he's lost, and he's aiming for the post-election
warfare in the Republican Party, and part of that is the ACORN strategy, which is trying to delegitimize the result in advance,
if Obama were to win, by saying it was rigged by minority voters. That's what this is about.
SEN. JOHN McCAIN:
Someone here keeps yelling "ACORN, ACORN." Now, let me just say to you, there are serious allegations of voter fraud in the
battleground states across America. They must be investigated.
NATHAN HENDERSON-JAMES: Let's look at North Carolina.
We turned in 28,000 applications in North Carolina, and there are investigations into four of them right now. Over 95 percent
of the cards we turned in were error-free. So we're talking about an extremely small percentage of the overall 1.3 million
cards collected. To suggest that this is some kind of widespread criminal conspiracy is just absurd.
MONTAGE OF
NEWSCASTERS: ACORN. ACORN. ACORN—is a left-wing—radical—extremist community group.
CARMEN ARIAS:
This is hardly the first time that these Rove-style tactics have been used to suppress low-income minorities.
NATHAN
HENDERSON-JAMES: They did it in 2000.
GREG PALAST: Voters were being removed from the
registries by the Secretary of State, Katherine Harris.
NATHAN HENDERSON-JAMES: They did it in 2004.
UNIDENTIFIED:
Evidence has emerged that in the last presidential election the Republican Party organized efforts to suppress the votes of
active-duty military, low-income and minority voters by challenging their registrations. The Republicans put in motion a plan
to hold down the Democratic vote in key battleground states. Many are convinced that Republican officials broke the law.
NATHAN
HENDERSON-JAMES: And they're doing it again right now.
CARMEN ARIAS: Suppressing the low-income minority voters
can swing an entire election. A handful of improperly filled-out voter registration cards cannot.
AMY
GOODMAN: That, an excerpt of a piece by Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films. Professor Mark Crispin Miller?
MARK
CRISPIN MILLER: Yeah, well, I think he hit the nail right on the head. The important point to get here is that the party that
is itself engaging in disenfranchisement on a massive scale, the deliberate, systematic disenfranchisement of arguably millions
of Americans, is clouding the issue by accusing—essentially accusing its victims of doing the same thing. OK?
Voter
fraud—I want to repeat this—is virtually nonexistent. There have been several academic studies of this notion
of whether individuals actually stuffed ballot boxes or show up at polling places pretending to be somebody else. There's
actually not a single known case of any such type of voter fraud being prosecuted by the Department of Justice. And yet, that
notion of voter fraud is used as the pretext for taking steps that do demonstrably result in tens of thousands of people being
unable to vote, you see? It's a really masterful strategy. And I only wish that the Democratic
Party had all this time been aggressive in pointing out that the Republicans are the party engaged in disenfranchisement.
AMY GOODMAN: Mark Crispin Miller, we have to break. When we come back, I want to ask
you about a man named Stephen Spoonamore—
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Right.
AMY
GOODMAN: —a prominent expert, supposedly, on computer fraud, and what he has to say. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media, culture and communication at
New York University is our guest. His most recent book, Loser Take All. Who is Stephen Spoonamore?
MARK CRISPIN
MILLER: Stephen Spoonamore is a conservative Republican, a former McCain supporter and, most importantly, a renowned and highly
successful expert at the detection of computer fraud. That's his profession. He works for major banks. He works for foreign
governments. He works for the Secret Service. Those are his clients.
He knows personally the principal players
in Bush-Cheney's conspiracy to subvert our elections through electronic means since 2000, and he has named these principal
players. Specifically, he has named a man named Mike Connell. Mike Connell, according to Spoonamore, is Karl Rove's computer
guru. This is the guy who has helped Bush-Cheney fix election results through computers since Florida 2000, in Ohio in 2004,
also in the stolen re-election of Governor Don Siegelman in Alabama in 2002, also in the stolen re-election of Senator Max
Cleland in Georgia in 2002.
AMY GOODMAN: How?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well,
basically, they use a kind of architecture that's called Man in the Middle, and it involves shunting election returns data
through a separate computer somewhere else. This is something that computer criminals do all the time with banks. Spoonamore
explains that the Man in the Middle setup is extremely effective and basically undetectable as a way to change election results.
Now, the scariest thing is that Connell told Spoonamore that the reason why he has helped Bush-Cheney still these
elections for the last eight years has been to save the babies. See? We have to understand that there's a very powerful component
of religious fanaticism at work in the election fraud conspiracy. We saw a little bit of that in Greenswald's film, where
Paul Weyrich was talking about how we don't want people voting.
AMY GOODMAN: The conservative
activist.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, because the majority is a majority of unbelievers.
They're pro-choice. They're corrupt. They're evil. They don't get it. It's therefore necessary to fix election results in
order to prevent the unjust and the unrighteous from taking over.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor
Mark Crispin Miller, you keep saying the election was clearly stolen in 2004. This is not a widely held belief. Why do you
think more information is not known about this?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Because the press and the Democratic Party
have steadfastly refused simply to mention, much less discuss, the evidence.
AMY GOODMAN:
You talked to John Kerry.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: I talked to John Kerry. In fact, the last time I was with you,
I was here to talk about that conversation with him. On October 28th, 2005, we met. I gave him a copy of my book Fooled Again,
and we discussed the last election, and he told me, with some vehemence, that he believed it was stolen.
AMY GOODMAN: In Ohio in 2004—and Ohio, key battleground state right now—
MARK
CRISPIN MILLER: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: And we remember at Kenyon, for example, those long,
long lines in 2004, people waiting for hours.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Right.
AMY
GOODMAN: When you talk about the computer setup for 2004, explain further.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, what
happened was, with the election results that were coming into Ken Blackwell's website, right, in real time—
AMY GOODMAN: The former Secretary of State of Ohio.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: The former Secretary
of State.
AMY GOODMAN: The former chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign there.
MARK
CRISPIN MILLER: And co-chair of Bush-Cheney and a big-time election thief and an ardent theocrat, by the way. The election
returns went basically from his website to another computer that was in a basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee, under the control
of Spoonamore and a guy with another private company, another evangelical. The data was shunted through that computer and
then back to the Secretary of State's website.
Spoonamore says that this Man in the Middle setup has only one
purpose, and that is fraud. There's no other reason to do it. And he believes that such a system is still in place in Ohio,
it's in place in a number of other states. And the crucial fact to bear in mind here, since we're talking about John McCain
attacking ACORN and so on, is that Mike Connell is now working for John McCain.
Now, on the strength of Spoonamore's
testimony, right, it's driving a RICO lawsuit in Ohio. On the strength of his testimony, Connell has been subpoenaed. He was
subpoenaed last week for a deposition, so that he can answer questions on the record, under oath, about what he's been up
to. He and a bevy of Republican lawyers have been very, very vigorously fighting this subpoena, because, of course, they don't
want him to testify 'til after Election Day.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Mark Crispin Miller,
the Bradley Effect that is being discussed, explain what it is and how you feel it's being used.
MARK CRISPIN
MILLER: The Bradley Effect is a theory which holds that African American candidates do better in pre-election polls than they
do in elections, because white racists are shy about admitting to pollsters that they wouldn't vote for a black man. So they
will tell pollsters, "Sure, I'll vote for him." Then they sneak into the polling booth and listen to the inner Klansman, you
know, they vote as racists.
Now, the problem with this theory is that there are almost
no examples of its having happened. It's named for Tom Bradley, the mayor of Los Angeles, who ran for the governor of California
and did much better in polls beforehand than he did on Election Day. Well, it turns out, if you study that race, that the
reason why he lost was that a lot of bad news about his tenure in Los Angeles came out just before the election. That's the
reason why people often lose elections. There are only two races that we know of where the Bradley Effect may arguably have
obtained, both in 1989: Doug Wilder's run for the governor of Virginia and David Dinkins's first run for the mayor of New
York, where Dinkins didn't do as well as we thought he would. Well, in his second run, the polls were dead on.
The
point is, we're talking about two races that may form the basis for this idea that Barack Obama, with his enormous lead, may
lose because of millions and millions of closet racists, you know, who will say one thing to pollsters, out of a fear of not
seeming politically correct, and then vote a different way. I'll tell you why I worry about this. Something that you very,
very badly need to steal elections, aside from the apparatus and the volunteers and all the money and everything, is a narrative.
You have to have a convincing rationale to explain an upset victory. Four years ago, the rationale was millions of values
voters materialized on the horizon at the end of the day, and like Jesus with loaves and fishes, they suddenly multiplied
and voted for Bush, and then they disappeared. Well, there's no evidence that that actually happened. But it served as a narrative.
This time, I'm afraid the primary narrative will be racism: Barack Obama actually lost, despite all predictions, because so
many Americans are racist.
I think that this is, first of all, unverifiable. We don't know that it's true, whereas
we do know all the stuff about vote suppression and election fraud. But I'm afraid that people will be encouraged to accept
this line to prevent them from taking a hard look at the real reasons why Obama may have "lost"—and I put "lost" in
quotation marks.
AMY GOODMAN: Mark Crispin Miller, I want to thank you for being with
us. Mark Crispin Miller is a professor at New York University and author of, well, the latest book he edited, this came out
just this summer, Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008. |
