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Voters in this country do not elect the president. That is handled by the Electoral College, who have no obligation to follow the popular vote whatsoever. In the past, traditionally, the college has (or so we've been lead to believe). But there's nothing, even in the Constitution (which establishes the college), that states they must follow the popular vote. This debate is moot.

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Originally posted by PsycoJoe:
(Not sure if this should be in 'Political Distrust', or left here.)

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What actually happened on Nov. 2?

WARNING: The articles that you are about to read will convey a sobering portrayal of the status of democracy in this country. Your first reaction might be to discredit them as simply conspiracy theories, but the facts don't lie, and the facts that are slowly emerging about what actually happened on Nov. 2 are pointing to an ominous conclusion: the election was stolen, but this time it was done covertly and silently using electronic voting machines.

I was watching ABC's special 2004 election coverage when they called Florida for Bush. Naturally, I was shocked. "What, that's it? No uproar, no scandal, nothing? What about all those black community leaders from Ohio and Florida I heard on the radio this morning yelling about how excited they were that so many people showed up at the polls?" Despair sunk in as I started to get the feeling that we might lose. There was still hope though, because Ohio would decide the election and Kerry had been a number of points ahead in the polls there for a couple of days.

While I was waiting to see what was going to happen with Ohio, I went to CNN.com to check out their up to the minute information as more and more precincts reported in results. The interesting thing about that website was that the exit polls, at the same time that the actual results were counting Bush 52% to Kerry 48%, showed that 53% of women and 51% of men voted for Kerry. I took a screenshot at about 1:00 am just because I had a feeling something might be going on. It looks like I wasn't the only one who took a screenshot, because there are pictures of CNN's website all over the internet showing an odd discrepancy... at 1:41 am, the exit polls on CNN.com suddenly changed; now, according to them, 52% of males and 50% of females voted for Bush. The plot thickens.

The Ultimate Felony Against Democracy
Thom Hartmann is on this story and he's uncovering more and more everyday, but he's also smart enough not to make outrageous claims before all the evidence is in. So he brings our attention to the larger issue at hand: why do we even need to ask ourselves if the election results were tampered with? And how the hell did private corporations all of a sudden become our democracy's vote-counters?
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1104-38.htm

Evidence Mounts That The Vote Was Hacked
This is another one from Thom, but now it is about whether or not the election actually was stolen, and it seems that there is an accumulating amount of evidence being collected to prove it. I mean, who would have thought that good 'ol Holmes County, a small county in Florida with 72.7% of the population registered as Democrats, would go 77.25% for Bush, while in larger counties where a discrepancy like that would have definitely been noticed, high percentages of registered Democrats meant high percentages of votes for Kerry. This is just a taste, it gets worse.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm

Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes
The Associated Press is discovering very odd patterns in Ohio, too. Apparently, "an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus" and in a small precinct in Franklin County, Bush received 4,258 votes to Kerry's 260 votes, but, funny thing is, ONLY 638 VOTERS CAST BALLOTS IN THAT PRECINCT. Keep in mind that this article is from the Associated Press on YAHOO! News.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041105/ap_on_el_pr/voting_problems

CNN just changed their Ohio exit poll page
This is the graph that was changed on CNN.com.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x1293911

Exit polls and ‘actual’ results don’t match; Evoting states show greater discrepancy
The inconsistencies of exit polling with actual results were not limited to Ohio, but they were not found in all states either. For some reason, the states with the greatest discrepancies between exit polling and actual results all had one thing in common: they used electronic voting machines. The shocking chart that they've posted on this website reveals that the scale of this fraud is potentially so massive that Kerry may have even won the popular vote.
http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=388
The shocking chart:
http://bluelemur.com/images/stories/evotingbig.gif

Surprising Pattern of Florida's Election Results
This chart compares, county by county, the numbers of registered voters for each party, predicted voter turnouts, and "actual" results. Counties with E-touch voting systems were generally consistent with expected results, but counties using Op-Scan machines "officially" experienced devastating declines in Democratic voter turnout and massive increases in Republican turnout. In Liberty County, a county with 7.9% registered Republicans and 88.3% registered Democrats, the number of Republicans who voted was 712% higher than expected while the Democratic turnout was 59.9% lower! This voting pattern was experienced by almost all small counties using Op-Scan machines, but only Op-Scan machines, and only small counties where it wouldn't be so easily noticed.
http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm
If your into graphs, they did some interesting stuff with this data (check out the last one especially):
http://ustogether.org/election04/florida_vote_patt.htm

You might be tiring of all this data, but if you try to talk to anybody about this, YOU ARE GOING TO NEED IT. Most people in this country believe we are living in a democracy, and when you show them that even our right to vote has been sacrificed to the power of the corporate machine, and that the American people don't actually get to elect their representatives anymore, they will most likely not believe you or simply write you off as a loony conspiracy theorist. Hard facts are our only option, and even then, most people still won't believe what you're telling them.

None the less, the American public is entitled to know the truth about their government, their political parties, and their votes. This is a crisis of democracy, regardless of whether or not the election was stolen, but especially if it was, and that is increasingly appearing to be the case. It is no wonder that George W. Bush's second term would start with a crisis of democracy. If he came to power by disenfranchising the American people, I can only imagine what's in store for us in these next four years. We must respond.

Please forward this newsletter to anyone who might be interested, Oakwood Student or not.
To be added to the mailing list send an e-mail to news@ospr.org with the word "subscribe" in the subject field. You may also write that address with any suggestions (articles, ideas, etc.) you would like to give OSPR. Thank you.

Sincerely,
Josh Nuni

  

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