Florida 2000 Election Coup

Gore won, but he was a lousy candidate
Nader inadvertantly exposed Florida fraud

Gore's best moment in the campaign was withdrawing his concession on sElection night - but it was followed by the "Standdown" of the Democrats

 

The Supreme Court did not select Bush
Congress Did by Ratifying the Electoral College

While the Supreme Court received much publicity for its notorious Bush v. Gore ruling regarding the rigged 2000 Presidential Election, the Supreme Court did not actually select George Bush as Resident of the White House. That decision was actually made by the US Congress on January 6, 2001, when they performed the Ratification of the "Certificates of Ascertainment" in the Electoral College. The rules state that one Senator and one Representative are needed to begin a debate on the legitimacy of any State's slate of Electors - and while about two dozen Members of the Congressional Black Caucus argued that the Florida Electors were picked fraudulently (for many reasons, including the deliberate disenfranchisement of African-American citizens), no Senator supported them. Not one. This was particularly perverse, since on January 6, the new Senate had already been sworn in - and the balance was 50 Democrats, 50 Republicans, and Vice President Al Gore presiding as President of the Senate (and tie-breaker, if need be). In other words, a Democratic controlled Senate voted 100 to zero to confirm George Bush as President! Perhaps future historians will reveal what behind the scenes machinations occurred to enable the loser of the election to be selected with Democratic complicity: bribes, threats, the de facto merging of the two parties, the probable selection of Bush as President by the nation's elites long before the actual election ...

"Homeland Security" as a term started under Clinton I, not Bush II.

Edward Herman co-authored a book nearly two decades ago titled "Demostration Elections" about phony elections in US client states (El Salvador, Vietnam, etc). These rituals were intended to legitimize US military support for the dictatorships under the guise of helping our democratic allies. Perhaps a sequel could be written about the US - since we do not have legitimate elections in our own country.

For future "elections," assuming that this ritual will be maintained to preserve the illusion of democracy, it is incumbent upon progressive Democrats (now just another Third Party), Greens, Republicans with consciences, compassionate Libertarians and independents to focus on unity beyond the political parties, which ignore the myriad ways that elections are not free and fair: electronic voting machines that are made by Republicans, the role of the secret government (CIA, etc) and other related issues in addition to campaign finance reform.

Bush's confirmation by Congress as winner of the Electoral College -- despite blatant vote fraud -- was the logical extension of his poor scholastic record in regular college (where he was not allowed to flunk out due to his family ties). Bush may have gotten C's at Yale (because he wasn't allowed to be flunked) but he got an A from the Electoral College (a stolen grade, not earned fairly).

 

Final Florida Recount Establishes That Al Gore Won The Election
 On October 9th [2001], the Miami Herald published the results of the final, and universally recognized as the most accurate, recount of Florida votes in the 2000 election. The BDO Seidman manual recount established that Al Gore won the state of Florida by 662 votes.
Do not waste a second asking if things would have been different under a Gore Administration. Ask yourself instead if the now illegitimate Bush Administration can afford not to complete its seizure of power.
-- Mike Ruppert
www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/oct152001.html

Gore won the 2000 election
 www.consortiumnews.com/2001/111201a.html

"when it comes to the policies they believe will keep Americans employed and the nation prosperous, they could just as well be running on the same ticket."
-- USA Today, June 26, 2000, "When it comes to economics, the differences are hard to find" (front page article with photo of Gore and Bush's faces merging into a single image)

"Agricultural biotechnology will find a supporter occupying the White House next year, regardless of which candidate wins the election in November..."
Monsanto's electronic newsletter www.monsanto.com Oct. 6, 2000


a billboard company in North Carolina claimed that they made a mistake

 

Florida 2000

"This is totalitarianism! It has nothing to do with Democrat or Republican. These five Supreme Court Justices belong behind bars!"
-- Vincent Bugliosi, May 2001, author of The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution.

"It seems to me the rulers of the Cherokees have sufficient intelligence to see the utter imbicility of placing any further reliance upon the Supreme Court."
-- Governor Wilson Lumpkin, Georgia 1831

Within American politics there is now such a similarity between the two parties that in elections the race is usually close enough to permit almost any single bloc to swing it one way or the other.
-- Malcolm X, 1964

In the 1940s movie, "Key Largo", with Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson, Robinson, playing the gangster, makes an interesting speech to Humph:

"Let me tell you about Florida politicians. I make them. I make them outta whole cloth just like a tailor makes a suit. I get their name in the newspaper, I get them some publicity and get them on the ballot. Then after the election we count the votes and if they don't turn out right, we re-count them and re-count them again until they do."

"The only difference [between Gush and Bore] is the velocity with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock at the door."
-- Ralph Nader

After 9/11, a lot of people questioned whether this claim was still true. But most of those who urged Greens to vote for Gore to defeat Bush (Bush didn't win anyway) have been strangely reluctant to probe into the deeper issues of 9/11. If one looks closely at 9/11 and the preparations for it, it is likely that a Gore administration would not have been much different regarding 9/11 - and is a moot question, anyway.

First, the powers-that-be clearly decided that Bush was the annointed one, regardless of whether he won or not (Gore won the election, even in Florida). The Supreme Court and the Congressional ratification of the Electoral College (fraud) is an affirmation of this. Gore's decision to go along with the fraudulent outcome is evidence for this, too.

The original WTC attack in 1993 occured shortly after Clinton and Gore came into office. Like 911/2001, it could have been prevented, if the FBI had wanted to. It was allowed to happen, despite the warnings of an informant in the group that perpetrated it.

 

www.politicalstrategy.org/2003_09_23_weblog_archive.php

ELECTION THEFT 2000! A NEW BOMBSHELL!: A Diebold Voting Machines in Volusia County, Florida Tallied a Vote-Count of -16,022. That's NEGATIVE 16,022: When will this all-important story break out in the US mainstream press? When will the Democrats confront the issue? What is at stake here is the future of democracy.
Diebold Internal Support Memos
[The original article to which this post refers was originally published on November 29, 2000 in USA Today by Philip Meyer. When I did a search for the article on the www.usatoday.com website I came up with this page which clearly provides the details of the article and even offers a link to a free preview of the article. However, when you click on the link, it gives you a page void of the article. What happened to it? One can only speculate. Nevertheless, I have obtained the original article and am printing it here (below the post) in its entirety as a matter of public record.]
A remarkable exchange concerning Diebold's voting machines in Volusia County, Florida. On January 17, 2001, Lana Hines, a county elections official sends out an inquiry as to how Al Gore ended up with a vote-count of -16,022. That's NEGATIVE 16,022—which just happens also to have been the total number of votes cast for various independent and third-party candidates who also ran. (It was the largest number of such votes cast in Volusia County's history.)
Pay close attention to the final entry, from "Tab"—that is, Talbot Iredale, Vice President of Research & Development at Global/Diebold. The most troubling of his statement is in bold below. Iredale writes:
...the error could only occur in one of four ways:
1.Corrupt memory card. This is the most likely explaination for the problem but since I know nothing about the 'second' memory card I have no ability to confirm the probability of this.
2.Invalid read from good memory card. This is unlikely since the candidates['] results for the race are not all read at the same time and the corruption was limited to a single race.There is a possib[ili]ty that a section of the memory card was bad but since I do not know anything more about the 'second' memory card I cannot validate this.
3.Corruption of memory, whether on the host or Accu-Vote. Again this is unlikely due to the localization of the problem to a single race.
4.Invalid memory card (i.e. one that should not have been uploaded). There is always the possib[i]lity that the 'second memory card' or 'second upload' came from an un-authorised source.
And that's only the tip of the iceberg.
When will this all-important story break out in the US mainstream press?
When will the Democrats confront the issue? What is at stake here is their future as a party--and ours as a democracy. -

Original USA Today Article
Glitch Led to 'Bush Wins' Call
By Philip Meyer

Democrats have been on the defensive ever since Fox News Channel declared George W. Bush the Florida ballot winner in the wee hours of Nov. 8 and the other networks fell into line like baby ducks, prompting Al Gore's premature concession.
From then on, nothing Democrats could do would overcome the appearance that they were trying to steal the election on technicalities. And nothing Republicans could say would overcome the suspicion that they had planned the whole thing. That a cousin of George W. Bush was working the Fox decision desk added fuel to the conspiracy theories.
But the fact is a computer glitch and a failure to get the word out in time are what caused the trouble.
Deanie Lowe, Volusia County elections supervisor, spotted the problem. In her county, an Accu-Vote system uses a scanner to read a voter's mark - made with a pen, not a punch - and advances a counter in an electronic storage device. Results are sent to county headquarters by modem.
Precinct 216 had modem trouble, so workers fed its memory card into the headquarters' central computer. "Gore just went backward," an election watcher said.
"You're tired," Lowe replied. "You must be seeing things." Then another observer chimed in: Gore's count had gone backward.
Lowe ordered all of the precincts reviewed. At 1:24 a.m., the review showed that 412 of 585 registered voters in Precinct 216 had cast ballots - but that they had given 2,813 votes to Bush! Gore had a negative vote: minus 16,022. Ralph Nader's negative vote was even greater. The problem was traced to an error in the memory card.
Bad information means bad call
Meanwhile, the decision desks of the five networks and The Associated Press, owners of Voter News Service (VNS), were looking at models that included the negative Gore count. "That contributed to a statewide number that made it look like Bush was more than 50,000 ahead of Gore, with 97% reported and about 180,000 votes still to be counted," recalls Warren Mitofsky, who headed the CNN/CBS decision desk. "You can't make up 50,000 out of 180,000. I would have made that call without hearing anybody else's call."
Mitofsky is the dean of election-night estimators. His moves are watched by the other decision desks. "Warren is just so knowledgeable, you do take that into consideration," says Paul J. Lavrakas, who has been an election consultant for VNS.
But what none of the decision-makers knew was that Bush's lead then really was closer to 30,000. The estimation model correctly was forecasting it would drop by 30,000, so the right number would have projected a tie - which in fact it did later in the morning after the Volusia error was fixed.
The real vote in Precinct 216 was 22 for Bush and 193 for Gore. Nader got one.
Not all made the call
The VNS side of this story has yet to be told. VNS' head, Murray Edelman, gave a previously scheduled talk after the election to the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research, but would not discuss the case. That's a pity, because both VNS and the AP deserve credit for never jumping on that early morning Bush bandwagon. We'd all like to know what they saw that the networks missed.
When they created VNS, the networks intended it to do everyone's calls. But in 1994, the AP and ABC jumped ship, with each doing its own projecting from the pooled data. The others followed - at the cost of disconnecting analysts from their data.
Networks do check each other. But they all feel the same pressure: If viewers are scanning channels, who are they watching? The anchor with the winner's name or the one who admits he hasn't figured it out yet? With a system like that, we don't need a conspiracy theory.
Philip Meyer, who holds the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina, is a USA TODAY consultant and member of its board of contributors.