After watching the film, I came across a report on touch screen voting by Dan Rather on his HDNet news show that provided new information that I had never before seen reported: the paper ballots that led to thousands of disqualified votes had been altered by Sequoia Voting Systems to cause them to malfunction and create “hanging chads.” The shocking story comes at around forty minutes into the broadcast, as employees of the company explain how they were instructed to “short” the ballots for Palm Beach county to account for “humidity,” which was then demonstrated to create problems like hanging chads.

After considering the information in this account, and a review of the facts provided by the docu-drama “Recount,” the chain of events looks like this:

• Pre-election polling indicated that the race would be very close and that a victory in one swing state could decide the election.
• the brother of the Republican candidate for President, Jeb Bush, was the governor of Florida, and the state co-chair of the Bush Presidential campaign, Katherine Harris, was the official in charge of overseeing the election
• months before the election, Katherine Harris disenfranchised tens of thousands of democratic-leaning voters, by hiring ChoicePoint, a Republican-owned data company, to purge voter registration lists of all names that were remotely similar to lists of people who had been convicted of felonies.
• paper ballots were manufactured below normal standards to ensure that chaos would reign in certain (democratic-leaning) districts, throwing the election into the hands of state officials.
• the FOX News employee responsible for looking at data and making the official call to award a state to a candidate was named Bush, and was the cousin of the candidate. FOX called Florida for Bush, the other networks immediately followed, and Gore was on the defensive for the next 30 days fighting the perception of being a “sore loser”
• the US Supreme Court stepped in to halt the Florida court-ordered vote count, and Republican appointees to the court wrote the only decision in the entire history of the court that was not meant to set precedent or ever be referred to again effectively handing power to the son of the man who was either Vice President or President when 5 of them were appointed.
• when the votes were later counted and totaled by a consortium of news organizations, Gore was shown to have won the state of Florida

coup d’état:

(Merriam-Webster) a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics.

(American Heritage) The sudden overthrow of a government by a usually small group of persons in or previously in positions of authority.

(Wikipedia) the coup d’état is a type of political engineering, generally violent (hence “strike”, “blow”; French “coup”), but not always, yet differing from a revolution (by a larger, armed group to effect violent, radical change to the political system) in that the change is to the government, not the form of government.

ASK YOURSELF: Do you believe that the people of a nation are accountable for the atrocities committed by their leaders in their names

IF YES: Are you okay with the fact that the United States tortures so-called enemy combatants? Are you okay with the fact that our constitution, which gives this country its sense of moral authority, only applies to US Citizens, itself a designation subject to revocation by our government

IF NO: Are you okay with the fact that an estimated 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed because the US didn’t like their government? Are you okay with the fact that thousands of Afghani civilians (no organization has been able to accurately count) have been killed as a result of the armed conflict against The Taliban

ASK YOURSELF: Have you expressed your opinion to your government? If you haven’t contacted your Congressman or Senator because you don’t think they care, you should know that they haven’t done anything about it because they don’t think you care

Who Represents Me? – Congress.org

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Nothing shakes trust in the mainstream news like actually being an eyewitness to a story. It became very clear just how inadequate most television and newspaper reporting is when I returned to my hometown in to Ohio to volunteer for MoveOnPAC’s Get-Out-The-Vote operation during the 2004 Election. On that rainy and dreary election day my sister and I stood shivering beneath umbrellas, the requisite 100 feet away from the entrance to the lonely rural public library where voting was taking place. As we checked off the names of people that we were expecting to show up, a pickup truck with out-of-state plates screeched into the parking lot and pulled up right in front of us. Three burly white men hopped out and ran over and started yelling at us. They were practically screaming: we were standing too close to the polling place, they were going to call the police, or worse, they might have to handle it themselves. I tried to maintain my cool and explain that we had carefully measured our distance from the polling place entrance, while one of the guys walked off his own estimate. They surrounded us and forced us to move back by about five feet, which we did. Within about five minutes, and after a lot more shouting, they got in their trucks and left as suddenly as they had arrived. It was an incredibly threatening and scary experience, and even though none of them had laid a hand on us or made any direct threats, I felt as though we had been attacked.

We returned home that night to trade stories with our mother, who was working as a volunteer for the county Democratic Party. She was helping to coordinate information between the hundreds of lawyers who had come to Ohio to observe the election and the local Party Headquarters. She told me story after story of the chaos and disarray that she had witnessed in the largely African-American precincts to which she had been assigned. Voting machines were locked in classrooms until late in the afternoon (effectively keeping the polls closed in that precinct for most of election day), number 2 pencils were mysteriously missing from entire buildings preventing anyone from marking the Diebold ballots, lines stretched out in long waits for too few voting machines, and Republican lawyers challenged the legitimacy of nearly everyone who tried to vote while Democratic lawyers acted powerless to do anything about it. Meanwhile, the out-of-state election observers standing outside were screaming bloody murder, unable to do anything because their non-resident status did not allow them any official status other than to literally observe. The Ohio Bar members representing the Democrats seemed to shrug and say, “what can we do?” There were multiple reports of bands of thugs with out-of-state license plates driving all over the county intimidating people, just as we had experienced. My mother witnessed two poll-watchers from Boston argue with a small and angry crowd over being too close to the polling entrance, the same charge we had faced. The Bostonians stood their ground against the mob, which resulted in them being arrested and sent to jail. All of these reports from these heavily-Democratic districts sharply contrasted with my parents’ own experiences voting at an all-white and predominantly Republican precinct where things were smooth and orderly all day, no lines, and no voters challenged.

The first-hand experiences that my mother, my sister and I had, combined with local news reports about the thousands of provisional ballots that were cast and not counted, as well as plenty of anecdotal evidence of fraud, led me to believe that four years after the weeks-long 2000 election debacle, a razor-thin margin of victory in the state that decided the whole race seemed to demand at least another day to figure out what all went wrong in Ohio. But I woke up the next morning to John Kerry giving a very gentlemanly concession speech and not a word about the irregularities in the papers or on TV. I felt angry, depressed, and betrayed. I scoured the web for information, anything that would confirm my own experiences and prove that something was amiss. And eventually I found it, but not in the news sections of mainstream daily newspapers.

I found Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman of the Columbus (Ohio) Free Press , who were devoting themselves to uncovering evidence of what was turning out to be a well-funded and coordinated campaign of disenfranchising Democratic voters. I discovered that Brad Friedman at BradBlog and Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org had been tirelessly collecting information on the irregularities around electronic voting. And while I kept reading The New York Times and The Washington Post waiting for the story to break, I was eventually disappointed to read that they decided that my concerns were the conspiracy theories of the lunatic fringe.

My point here is not to argue that Kerry won that election, or to claim certainty that the election results in Ohio would have gone the other way if the vote had been conducted fairly. My point about this all is that the the mainstream media largely ignored a big story, and were dismissive and derisive to bloggers and independent journalists who were putting in real investigative work. The irregularities surrounding this particular election were are particularly troubling; the overall case for fraud was laid out very comprehensively in a 2006 Rolling Stone article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr and makes for good reading.

Admittedly, it can be difficult to report news when evidence is circumstantial and facts don’t add up. WIthout a whistle-blower or the proverbial “smoking gun,” circumstances that can’t possibly be coincidental often still leave rational investigative journalists unable to make the leap to solve a mystery. Most often, events occur to favor those in power and systems reward those who are already in control, so there need not be a phone call or clandestine meeting to have caused something to occur. Dick Cheney may not have ever had to have lifted a finger or let a single word escape his lips in support of his company Halliburton winning hundreds of no-bid contracts from the Pentagon. The mere fact of his having been the CEO of the company can allow people to make assumptions, which may be true or false, about the rewards that may lay ahead for helping his company profit from war, disaster and the functions of government. This is not a conspiracy, but deserves investigation and critical reporting.

The other massive problem that leads to the proliferation of conspiracy theories is the often woefully inadequate official story. At this point we are so conditioned to the government withholding information from us that we are immediately suspicious when some parts of an official story don’t add up. There is more than enough evidence to put serious holes in The Warren Commission report on the Kennedy assassination or the 9/11 Commission’s report on the Attacks on the United States. But there is an enormous gulf between recognizing inconsistencies in the official story and some of the more outlandish theories floating around about these two events. But not in the mainstream media. Anything that deviates from the official story and can’t be proven and is labeled a conspiracy, to the great detriment of the truth.

If I am seeming to suggest that the mainstream media lower its journalistic standards in order to report on stories without hard evidence then please forgive me. The media already does that – in an ingenious cycle perfected by The Drudge Report and Fox News. The way that it works is that Drudge will report a rumor and then Fox reports about the rumors on the blogs. Then the rest of the media follows suit because the sex- or scandal-ridden story always attracts ratings. So when we’re talking about an election campaign and charges that Barack Obama might be a Muslim that fly around on the internet, these rumors are reported, repeated, and carefully examined for why they seem to stick around. But let it be an organized campaign of voter disenfranchisement or something that takes more than a couple of words to explain and you can bet that there aren’t enough facts to make it “newsworthy.” Which leaves the mainstream media missing large and important chunks of information about what is going on in the world.

So the real conspiracy seems to be the use of the word “conspiracy” by mainstream media outlets to label anything that challenges their hold on power by pointing out their role as mere stenographers to power who often fail to meaningfully report the truth. I doubt that the editors and publishers of The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time Magazine and CNN have ever sat down in a room to agree to this plan. They didn’t have to – their interests are aligned and their behaviors reinforce one another. So it’s not a technically a conspiracy – but it is true.

There is nowhere else to turn but bloggers and independent journalists if you want to get real information about what is going on in the world. If you limit yourself to the establishment press, you will always be surprised by predictable events. When Condoleeza Rice said “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into The World Trade Center,” despite multiple intelligence reports warning that terrorists were planning to use planes as missiles, and despite the fact that the building had already been the site of a terrorist attack eight years earlier, she must have been referring to people who received information only from the mainstream media, for they are truly in the dark.

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ABC News’ polling director published a fascinating analysis this week about why Nader’s 2000 candidacy really really didn’t throw the election to Bush. Among the points that he makes is that there were as many (or more) 3rd party candidates on the right “stealing” votes from Bush as Nader may have siphoned from Gore.

But perhaps the most significant reason that we should all be embracing, rather than rejecting Nader’s candidacy, is that the Democratic and Republican parties are both beholden to the same corporations and lobbyists. There is a lot of talk about “change” in this election, but what kind of change is truly possible remains to be seen. Ralph Nader is a persistent critic of corporate power and his candidacy gives him a platform to raise these critical issues that deserve public airing.

There are a fast-growing number of anti-Nader groups on Facebook, including one called “If you Vote for Ralph Nader I’ll Kill You” and while I don’t want to read too much political significance into a Facebook group, I do think it nicely sums up the attitude that moderate to liberal Democrats have towards far-left independents and radicals. Often times liberals believe that they’re making incremental progress on issues until radicals take some drastic action that angers people on the right and allegedly set the whole cause back by years. But the history of change in this country is the story of controversial actions taken by radicals that have given cover and impetus to the moderates who then legislated those changes.

The most common recitation about Nader from otherwise intelligent, left-leaning people is that he’s an “egomaniac” who is more interested in his own fame than the issues that he used to stand for years ago. Leaving aside the fact that everyone who runs for President probably has a powerful ego, there is no support for this idea other than the commonly held and deeply cynical belief that only self-interest or money can influence politics and politicians. Examples of politicians standing on “principle” on an issue that doesn’t benefit them are few and far between.

The major difference between Nader the consumer activist of years ago and Nader the Presidential candidate of today is his success at effecting the changes he advocates. When he led a campaign against the “unsafe at any speed” Chevrolet Corvair, it resulted in General Motors fixing the lethal design flaws of one of its cars. But his Presidential bids have been campaigns against corporatism, which have gotten little coverage in the corporate press, and little support from natural allies who believe in the cause but are invested in the power structures he is decrying. Nader barely has detractors on the right, the vociferous hatred of him comes mostly from Democrats. The Democratic party manufactured the whole idea in the first place that a vote for Nader was “thrown away” and would cost Gore the election in the weeks before the 2000 election.

Meanwhile on the right, in that same close election, no Republican was attacking Buchanan voters that year for taking votes away from Bush. As the chorus of ever-more-rightward views expanded on that side of the political spectrum, Democrats were attacking their own. The Republicans understood the function of the most radical voices of intolerance on their fringe: simultaneously rallying a loyal base of voters and making their candidate seem even more mainstream and centrist. The Democrats would do well to take notes: the louder the voices at your more radical edge, the more the entire debate shifts towards your side, and your so-called mainstream candidates don’t have to shift away from you to find the center ground.

Ralph Nader has chosen as his 2008 running mate a rising star in Matt Gonzalez, a former San Francisco Supervisor who ran on the Green party ticket for Mayor in 2003 and was narrowly defeated by Gavin Newsom. Any rational person should be heartened to have this charismatic young progressive on a national ticket, gaining prominence and attention.

Ralph Nader is once again highly unlikely to win the Presidency this year but hopefully he will raise critical issues in this campaign and force a reckoning of his issues by the other candidates. Perhaps his presence and voice will help put brakes on the media’s lazy habit of falsely referring to John McCain as a moderate. Whomever the Democratic nominee ends up being, he or she will surely need help keeping new voters excited and winning the battle of ideas. Ralph Nader can only help this discussion and he deserves respect and attention rather than scorn and mockery.