IT'S NOW OFFICIAL-- BUSH LOST 2004 ELECTION. AS WE KNEW ALL ALONG OHIO VOTES WERE RIGGED BY DIELBOLD AND BLACKWELL

How bizarre that the corporate mass media has given virtually no play-- and, frankly, I don't know what compelled me to stick "virtually" in there just now-- to a massive report by the Government Accounting Office (GAO) that supports the contention that the 2004 presidential election was stolen. It has taken the American public-- including most, though not all, elected Democrats, to realize that Bush is a liar and that his regime is toxic. How long will it take the country to also come to terms with the fact that he isn't and never has been a legitimate president?

Right after the 2004 election, the House Judiciary Committee was flooded with nearly 60,000 complaints of specific vote tampering. Congressman John Conyers, the senior Democrat on the committee, asked the non-partisan GAO (the government's lead investigive agency with an unblemished record for unassailable integrity and reality-based analysis) to investigate.

As I mentioned a few days ago, the evidence is all there for anyone who wants to look at it. Yesterday
Online Journal.com reported that the GAO report stated that “some of [the] concerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes.”

There are no other democracies-- societies that depend on vote counts-- that allow private, partisan companies to count and tabulate electoral votes, not just in secret, but using privately-held software. These companies are all owned by conservative Republicans. And, as everybody knows the CEO of Diebold, a major Republican contributor, publicly vowed in the run-up to the 2004 election to deliver Ohio's crucial electoral votes, and the presidency, to Bush.

Diebold's machines' count, which was overseen by crooked Ohio Secretary of State/BushCheney Ohio Campaign Chairman Ken Blackwell-- a more biased person would be impossible to find anywhere unless, maybe Lynn Cheney was counting the ballots-- gave Bush a 119,000 lead (out of 5,600,000 votes cast). There was nothing straight forward about the counting and tabulating-- and nothing public! The GAO report finds that the machines were designed in a way to facilitate tampering (and tampering without detection) with ballots and system audit logs. The GAO found that the Diebold machines can easily alter tabulations in a way to count votes for one candidate (or, as they did in last week's R.O.N. election, for one proposition) even though the voter voted for the other candidate. That would explain how consistently and overwhelmingly Democratic districts recorded overwhelming vote counts for Bush. The Diebold machines registered gigantic margins for Bush, way out of proportion with vote tabulations that didn't come from Diebold machines.

The GAO also found that access to the whole voting network was simple to compromise because a design flaw in the supervisory function that left the network unprotected by password and completely vulnerable. Rigging the election did not take a “widespread conspiracy”-- just a coopertaive Secretary of State and the cooperation of a small number of-- even just one or two-- operators with the ability to tap into the networked machines. Vote totals were altered at will. It was not a big task for just one single programmer to flip vote numbers to give Bush, say... 119,000 votes. This has something to do with Democracy? Maybe the kind of "democracy" BushCo has in mind for Iraq!

And if you don't want to believe-- for some reason that is beyond me-- that Blackwell and Diebold's O'Dell didn't do this themselves, the GAO report finds that even amateur hackers could have gotten into the network and changed the vote. Now who would ever think of something like that? Surely not Karl Rove. I mean what motivation would he have? And is this in character with his past?