Kerry may have given up on challenging the theft of yet another election, and I am wondering if his function all along was as political strawman. Fortunately the citizens haven't given up even though the politicians have, and that is perhaps the most important lesson to be learned by this latest exercise in "government by the people for the people."

Bev Harris at www.blackboxvoting.com is continuing to gather evidence, and jumping through all the hoops set up by the Freedom of Information act to get vital public informtion. She needs money so if you have some to spare it's for a good cause.

Discrepencies between exit polls and final results are a major cause of concern. The biggest differences were in those districts that used paper ballots counted by optical scanning equipment (Diebold once again) and the percentages between the voters registered to a party, and the votes that were actually cast, were reversed.

"In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry. In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush."

Another area of concern is that the central computer for tabulating all the votes is a Windows based PC. A video clip at www.votergate.tv shows how easily the data file can be opened with an Excel spreadsheet and the data changed. (I know I'm a cynic but four years ago Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, was the lobbyist for Microsoft to Bush, and we know that the Microsoft monopoloy crisis was resolved, and I'd always thought that this was due to campaign contributions, but now I'm starting to wonder if it might have been software backdoors.)

The complete article by Thom Hartmann is posted below.  More >