Tag Archives: Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Was the 2002 Georgia Election Stolen?

Robert F Kennedy’s new article in Rolling Stone is a must read for anyone concerned about election integrity and democracy in America. I urge that you read his full article.

The following excerpt is what a former Diebold consultant said happened in Georgia in 2002. After reading it tell me why a Grand Jury should not be convened to investigate whether or not Georgia’s election was stolen.

“Chris Hood remembers the day in August 2002 that he began to question what was really going on in Georgia. An African-American whose parents fought for voting rights in the South during the 1960s, Hood was proud to be working as a consultant for Diebold Election Systems, helping the company promote its new electronic voting machines. During the presidential election two years earlier, more than 94,000 paper ballots had gone uncounted in Georgia –almost double the national average – and Secretary of State Cathy Cox was under pressure to make sure every vote was recorded properly.
Hood had been present in May 2002, when officials with Cox’s office signed a contract with Diebold – paying the company a record $54 million to install 19,000 electronic voting machines across the state. At a restaurant inside Atlanta’s Marriott Hotel, he noticed the firm’s CEO, Walden O’Dell, checking Diebold’s stock price on a laptop computer every five minutes, waiting for a bounce from the announcement.

Hood wondered why Diebold, the world’s third-largest seller of ATMs, had been awarded the contract. The company had barely completed its acquisition of Global Election Systems, a voting-machine firm that owned the technology Diebold was promising to sell Georgia. And its bid was the highest among nine competing vendors. Whispers within the company hinted that a fix was in.
The Diebold executives had a news conference planned on the day of the award,” Hood recalls, “and we were instructed to stay in our hotel rooms until just hours before the announcement. They didn’t want the competitors to know and possibly file a protest” about the lack of a fair bidding process. It certainly didn’t hurt that Diebold had political clout: Cox’s predecessor as secretary of state, Lewis Massey, was now a lobbyist for the company. The problem was, Diebold had only five months to install the new machines – a “very narrow window of time to do such a big deployment,” Hood notes. The old systems stored in warehouses had to be replaced with new equipment; dozens of state officials and poll workers had to be trained in how to use the touch-screen machines. “It was pretty much an impossible task,” Hood recalls. There was only one way, he adds, that the job could be done in time – if “the vendor had control over the entire environment.” That is precisely what happened. In late July, to speed deployment of the new machines, Cox quietly signed an agreement with Diebold that effectively privatized Georgia’s entire electoral system. The company was authorized to put together ballots, program machines and train poll workers across the state – all without any official supervision. “We ran the election,” says Hood. “We had 356 people that Diebold brought into the state. Diebold opened and closed the polls and tabulated the votes. Diebold convinced Cox that it would be best if the company ran everything due to the time constraints, and in the interest of a trouble-free election, she let us do it.”

Then, one muggy day in mid-August, Hood was surprised to see the president of Diebold’s election unit, Bob Urosevich, arrive in Georgia from his headquarters in Texas. With the primaries looming, Urosevich was personally distributing a “patch,” a little piece of software designed to correct glitches in the computer program. “We were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn’t do,” Hood says. “The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done.”

Georgia law mandates that any change made in voting machines be certified by the state. But thanks to Cox’s agreement with Diebold, the company was essentially allowed to certify itself. “It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state,” Hood told me. “We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from Urosevich. It was very unusual that a president of the company would give an order like that and be involved at that level.”

According to Hood, Diebold employees altered software in some 5,000 machines in DeKalb and Fulton counties – the state’s largest Democratic strongholds. To avoid detection, Hood and others on his team entered warehouses early in the morning. “We went in at 7:30 a.m. and were out by 11,” Hood says. “There was a universal key to unlock the machines, and it’s easy to get access. The machines in the warehouses were unlocked. We had control of everything. The State gave us the keys to the castle, so to speak, and they stayed out of our way.” Hood personally patched fifty-six machines and witnessed the patch being applied to more than 1,200 others.
The patch comes on a memory card that is inserted into a machine. Eventually, all the memory cards end up on a server that tabulates the votes – where the patch can be programmed to alter the outcome of an election. “There could be a hidden program on a memory card that adjusts everything to the preferred election results,” Hood says. “Your program says, ‘I want my candidate to stay ahead by three or four percent or whatever.’ Those programs can include a built-in delete that erases itself after it’s done.”

It is impossible to know whether the machines were rigged to alter the election in Georgia: Diebold’s machines provided no paper trail, making a recount impossible. But the tally in Georgia that November surprised even the most seasoned political observers. Six days before the vote, polls showed Sen. Max Cleland, a decorated war veteran and Democratic incumbent, leading his Republican opponent Saxby Chambliss – darling of the Christian Coalition – by five percentage points. In the governor’s race, Democrat Roy Barnes was running a decisive eleven points ahead of Republican Sonny Perdue. But on Election Day, Chambliss won with fifty-three percent of the vote, and Perdue won with fifty-one percent.

Read Kennedy’s full article at Rolling Stone.

Daily Kos comments on Kennedy’s article

Link now to Robert Kennedy Jr’s article on Republican’s Stealing Ohio’s 2004 Vote

Was the 2004 Election Stolen?
Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House. BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

The Rolling Stone Article is now on the web.

See the article on Rolling Stone

Robert Kennedy Jr. – Ohio Election Fraud story update-

Brad Blog has just posted an excerpt from the Robert Kennedy Jr. story. See more on Brad Blog.
I’m including a quote taken from BradBlog written by Kennedy to whet your appetite . I think these are charges by a reputable, respected person that can no longer be ignored.

“The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush’s victory in the Electoral College. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count. …

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I’ve become convinced that the president’s party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election.

Go to BradBlog to catch more of the story.

Breaking Story Robert Kennedy Jr 350,000 Votes Stolen in Ohio in 2004!

Brad Blog has posted that Robert Kennedy, Jr has written a 10 page documented feature article for Rolling Stone Magazine alleging that Ohio’s vote in the 2004 Presidential election was stolen. We’ve heard all the rumors. At some point rumors either die or they become fact. I’m looking forward to reading the actual article. I also have a personal interest – I grew up in Ohio.

Brad Blog says “Evidence shows high-level Republicans suceeded in scheme to steal election in Ohio!” The on-line version will be posted soon and the print edition of Rolling Stone will hit the newstands on Friday.

Kennedy’s article is headlined on the front page of the Rolling Stone, “Did Bush Steal the 2004 Election- How 350,000 Votes Disappeared in Ohio” Brad Blog says that in the article Kennedy asserts that a concerted effort by high level officials was made to steal the election for Bush and that they were successful. Kennedy confirms to BradBlog that the Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell was “certainly in on” the scheme. Additionally Bradblog says that there are indications of links to the White House. My guess , our friend (Fiend) Karl Rove, from his past history, would be someone to check out.