When I was attending the National Election Reform Conference in Nashville back in April of 2005, I happened to overhear a conversation between two other attendees that went something like this:
Attendee 1: I wonder why Paul Krugman doesn’t write anything about all the evidence for election fraud.
Attendee 2: I know someone who knows Krugman, and he asked him that very question.
Attendee 1: What was his answer?
Attendee 2: Well, he went completely silent until the subject changed...
My interpretation of his silence: The owners of the New York Times (part of the crowd that owns all of the “mainstream media”) told him that in the event that he ever turns in such a column (a) it wouldn’t be published and (b) he would be fired.
At that same Nashville meeting I happened to meet Jonathan Simon, who at his home in Cambridge, Mass., on the night of the 2004 Election had downloaded from the CNN web site the unadjusted Edison-Mitofsky exit-poll predictions for 46 states, showing a Kerry win by 4.6% nationally, versus the official count (and the soon-thereafter “adjusted” exit polls) showing a Bush win by 2.4% — an unprecidented swing of 7%!
N.B. For the full story of Jonathan’s screen captures, together with the statistical analyses that he and others applied to these data showing extremely high probabilities of election fraud in all battleground states, I highly recommend the scholarly, very readable, and still timely book “Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?: Exit Polls, Election Fraud and the Official Count.”
As it turns out, just today I received the following broadcast e-mail from Jonathan, which I reproduce here as though an article, using his first sentence as the title:
My comment in response to Krugman's excellent open letter
All very brilliant by Paul Krugman, but he pays little attention to the POLITICAL obstacles bound to be strewn in any progressive path Obama chooses to take. In particular, Krugman fails to consider the impact of the continued ownership and operation of America's electoral apparatus by rank right-wing partisan corporations Diebold/Premier, ES&S, etc.
How crazy is it that the radicals of one side count the votes in secret? It brought us eight years of Bush and a right-wing Congress and Court--too much, at last, for Americans to stomach. BUT you can't expect to win every election by a landslide, just to eke out a narrow victory. Nor can you expect to be abetted by unexpected incidents such as the outing of Congressman Mark Foley (2006) or THE CRASH (2008) to outstrip the rig set in the machines.
We found more evidence of that rig in 2008, but for most Americans, even the normally astute, it's "Obama won, everything must be OK." It's not. Not only does the right maintain a chokehold over Senate business (and hence appointments as well as legislation), but Diebold and ES&S are in position to "take it all back" in 2010 and 2012. How then is President Obama to enact the bold program that Krugman wisely, but naively, recommends?
Until we repair the breached vote-counting system in the United States--which means counting the ballots for the federal contests (there are only three, at most, per election) by hand in the open--few of the policy decisions of our government will escape the cynical and toxic stamp of the corporate and religious right that has brought us so low in the Bush years, and not coincidentally in the time since partisan-programmed computers began to tally our votes.
--Jonathan Simon, Election Defense Alliance
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