-Caveat Lector-
RadTimes # 111 November, 2000
An informally produced compendium of vital irregularities.
"We're living in rad times!"
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
QUOTE:
"VOTE -- The instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to
make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country."
--Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contents:
---------------
--Imagine That...
--The Death of Democracy -- Or -- May the Best Hacker Win
--GOP staff took in hundred of ballots
--The Bush campaign and the rise of the political underworld
Linked stories:
*Bush camp claims recount fraud
*Florida's Election Day Vote Could Be Irrelevant
*If Anyone Should Concede, It Should Be Bush, Not Gore
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Begin stories:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Imagine That...
by Ken Homer
1. Imagine that we read of an election occurring anywhere in the third
world in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former prime
minister and that former prime minister was himself the former head of that
nation's secret police (CIA).
2. Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote but won
based on some old colonial holdover (electoral college) from the nation's
pre-democracy past.
3. Imagine that the self-declared winner's 'victory' turned on disputed
votes cast in a province governed by his brother!
4. Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of one district, a district
heavily favoring the self-declared winner's opponent, led thousands of
voters to vote for the wrong candidate.
5. Imagine that that members of that nation's most despised caste,
fearing for their lives/livelihoods, turned out in record numbers to vote
in near-universal opposition to the self-declared winner's candidacy.
6. Imagine that hundreds of members of that most-despised caste were
intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under the
authority of the self-declared winner's brother.
7. Imagine that six million people voted in the disputed province and
that the self-declared winner's 'lead' was only 327 votes. Fewer,
certainly, than the vote counting machines' margin of error.
8. Imagine that the self-declared winner and his political party opposed
a more careful by-hand inspection and re-counting of the ballots in the
disputed province or in its most hotly disputed district.
9. Imagine that the self-declared winner, himself a governor of a major
province, had the worst human rights record of any province in his nation
and actually led the nation in executions.
10. Imagine that a major campaign promise of the self-declared winner was
to appoint like-minded human rights violators to lifetime positions on the
high court of that nation.
None of us would deem such an election to be representative of anything
other than the self-declared winner's will-to-power. All of us, I imagine,
would wearily turn the page thinking that it was another sad tale of
pitiful pre- or anti-democracy peoples in some strange elsewhere.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Death of Democracy -- Or -- May the Best Hacker Win
By Christopher Bollyn
Subtitle paragraphs, in italics in the original: "American elections are
a fraud and a scam" is the stern verdict of Pat Buchanan and a deeply
disturbing comment on the state of democracy in America.
The pervasive use of ballot-counting computers equipped with internal
modems compromises the integrity of elections and has effectively
usurped the democratic franchise from the American people.
(Body of the article):
Cook County, IL Across the United States, in precincts from coast to
coast, ballot-counting computers equipped with cellular telephony and
two-way modems have counted the votes of the American people. These
ballot-counting machines, designed and operated by private companies,
and the laws that ushered in their use have essentially disenfranchised
citizen election judges from the vote-counting process and relegated
them to insignificant roles as public servants working for private
business on election night.
Computer programmers leave no fingerprints inside a computer, what
happens inside it cannot be seen, and its records, and printouts can be
fixed to conceal whatever an operator wants to keep secret. However,
here and in other key jurisdictions around the nation, election judges
have signed off on tally tapes of computer-generated vote counts without
any actual verification on their part that the tally is correct.
OFFICIAL INDIFFERENCE
Some officials concerned with elections have pondered the unthinkable;
namely, the stealing of a presidential election by computer fraud in the
metropolitan areas of key states. Steve White, former assistant
attorney general of California, said, " Given the importance of the
national election, sooner or later it will be attempted. There is a
real reluctance to concede the gravity of the problem."
Officials at the Illinois State Board of Elections, the agency that
approves the voting machines used in the state was contacted and asked
about how the integrity of the elections could be safeguarded; each and
every official interviewed was indifferent to the threat of computer
vote fraud. Rick Fulle, Assistant Director of voting systems and
25-year veteran of the board said, "You can't secure any computer
system."
When asked if election judges were permitted by law to do a manual
recount of the votes to verify the accuracy of the computer tally
the officials invariably replied, "You do not do a hand count," although
Fuller added, "nothing would stop them."
A hand count of the votes by the election judges at the precinct level,
before posting the results, is the only way to ensure that the machine
tally is correct and that no computer fraud has been perpetrated.
However, election officials discourage any manual audit saying that
there are too many choices on the ballot and that a manual count would
take too long.
In Switzerland, arguably the most democratic nation, all major political
decisions are put before the people as referenda and polling with
hand-counted paper ballots is conducted at least four times a year.
Switzerland is not a member of the United Nations due simply to the fact
that the Swiss people have rejected UN membership at the polls.
NOBODY CARES
Tests of computer vote-counting systems used in Illinois from 1983-1987,
which tested tens of thousands of ballots, revealed significant errors
in the computer counting in more than twenty percent of the tests.
Fulle said that in Illinois today there is "a 16 percent error rate"
with ballot-counting machines. He expected numerous problems on
election night saying "equipment will fail across the state."
"I don't understand why nobody cares," Michael L. Harty, former Illinois
director of voting systems and standards said, "At one point, we had
tabulation errors in twenty-eight percent of the systems tested, and
nobody cared."
The indifference of election officials, the people ultimately
responsible for the integrity of the elections, proves a point made by a
former president of the University of Chicago, Robert M. Hutchins, who
said, "The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from
ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and
undernourishment."
Officials from the Illinois Board of Elections said that election judges
are only required to verify that the number of ballots tabulated by the
machine matches the number of ballots counted by the judges as if
voters are only voting for one candidate. Fulle added, "Nothing in the
law [Illinois] requires that the count be accurate." In this way the
basic role of election judges -- to count and verify the accuracy of the
vote -- has been usurped and compromised by election machines operated
by private companies.
PUBLIC ELECTIONS ARE PRIVATE BUSINESS
Whether it was the Precinct Ballot Counter 2100 (PBC), the Optech Eagle
III, the Model 100 Optic Mark Reader (OMR), or the Votronic touch-screen
system that counted your vote, these machines have something in common:
they are all designed and operated by Elections Systems & Software, Inc.
(ES&S) -- and they each contain a two-- way modem, allowing them to
communicate - and be communicated with - while they are in operation.
What is particularly troubling about these machines is the fact that
they contain an internal modem, which enables anyone with a
modem-equipped computer, -- from hackers and vendors to telephone
company personnel and politicians, -- to potentially access and alter
the computer's tally of the votes.
ES&S is "the largest company in the world focusing solely on automating
the election process." The company "provides specialized systems and
software to automate the entire election process for local, state, and
national governments worldwide." ES&S is a reorganized company that was
given a new name in November 1997 after combining two of the largest
election machine companies: Business Records Corp. (BRC, formerly part
of Cronus Industries) and American Information Systems, Inc. (AIS).
ES&S is a privately held company owned by unknown investors and headed
by Aldo Tesi, who refers to the democratic franchise as "the election
industry." The company is headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska and supplies
"thousands and thousands of machines being used across the country" to
more than 2,200 U.S. jurisdictions in 49 states.
Cook County bought nearly 5,000 PBC machines from ES&S at a cost of $25
million for the suburbs and the city of Chicago in what a company
spokesman called a "huge contract."
ES&S FIASCO IN VENEZUELA
ES&S supplied Model 100 ballot-counting machines (through a Madrid-based
company called Indra Note the use of pagan deity names) for the
elections in Venezuela.
It was reported (in the Omaha World Herald, whose publisher, John
Gottschalk is one of the directors of ES&S) that the head of Venezuela's
National Elections Council, Etanislao Gonzalez, placed the blame for the
technical difficulties during the election on the Nebraska-based ES&S.
Gonzalez said, "the firm flagrantly failed to meet its commitments and
the failure had destabilized the country's electoral process."
A Venezuelan air force jet flew to Omaha to fetch experts to "salvage"
the election. It was reported that more than 6 percent of the 7,000
voting machines broke down during the Venezuelan election and that there
were major "technical glitches". ES&S said that the rate of failure in
the Venezuela election was "slightly higher than we would expect."
EASY ACCESS ANYTIME
The PBC machines contain an internal Expedite modem made by Novatel
Wireless, an international company based in San Diego, a "spin-off" of
two Canadian companies: NovAtel, Inc. of Calgary, a company specializing
in satellite communications and global positioning systems, and an
internationally owned oil company in Alberta.
"You certainly run the risk of somebody hacking into these
[vote-counting] machines," a spokesman for Novatel Wireless said, "The
machine can be accessed anytime it is plugged in," if one knows the
computer's IP (Internet Protocol) address. "Internet voting scares me,"
he added, "it puts us in the same situation as a third-world country."
When asked about the ownership of Novatel Wireless, he said, "I've no
idea who owns the company."
Roy Saltman, a computer consultant at the National Institute of
Standards and Technology's Computer Systems Laboratory wrote a report
for the U.S. Commerce Dept. in 1988 entitled, "Accuracy, Integrity, and
Security in Computerized Vote-Tallying", in which he documented many
instances of vote mistabulation and the inherent vulnerability of U.S.
voting systems to error and fraud. Among the possible methods he listed
by which "unknown persons may perpetrate undiscoverable frauds" were
"fraudulent alterations in the computer program or in control cards that
manipulate the program" and "introduction of false voting summaries
through changes in data stored in removable data storage units of
precinct-located, vote-counting devices."
Herb Deutsch, who works in the technical department of ES&S in Rockford,
IL, where the PBC was designed has worked with election software and
hardware for 25 years having formerly worked for BRC. Deutsch defended
the PBC saying that its ballot tabulation program is "generic" and that
its computer code has been "certified."
CONTROL CARDS
However, each PBC machine is programmed and run by a pre-programmed
512-K memory card. According to Deutsch, "the memory card can be used
for lots of purposes" and contains the coded instructions that
"essentially tell the machine what to do" when it is turned on. These
cards are programmed at the company offices of ES&S in Chicago. The
card is removed by the election judges and turned in to headquarters
when the polls close.
Vikant Corp., a Chicago area company owned by Alex Kantarovich of Minsk,
Belorussia, supplied the control cards to ES&S. When asked where Vikant
cards are produced, Kantarovich said, "I cannot disclose where the cards
are made," but admitted that they are not made in America.
Mr. Kantarovich said that he has been in America for 11 years but
declined to discuss his employment prior to running Vikant Corp.,
saying, "I don't want to disclose that information."
Kantarovich said he had obtained his degree in the Soviet Union and
initially refused to answer questions about how his product was chosen
for the ES&S voting equipment saying that it was "inside information
that I cannot disclose." Kantarovich said later that his firm was chosen
over larger firms like IBM and Panasonic because Vikant was uniquely
able to meet the specific requirements of ES&S and provide the cards on
short notice. He added, however, that there had been "some problems"
with the cards from other suppliers.
Kantarovich said, "To tell you the truth, I have no idea how these vote
counting machines work. We are just the supplier of one particular
product."
"NO ONE IS SAFE"
Deutsch said that he trusted that the election computers were safe from
hackers on the very day that it was reported that Microsoft's computers
and source code had been "hacked" for a week. Teenagers have
demonstrated that breaking into the most secure computer networks in the
world is "child's play," but serious questions about the security of the
national election computer network are dismissed as preposterous.
Security experts say the attack on Microsoft shows that no one is safe -
it was reported that the information stolen from Microsoft was sent to
Russia, although this could be a front for people anywhere on the net.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GOP staff took in hundred of ballots
Published Wednesday, November 15, 2000, in the Miami Herald
BY JOSEPH TANFANI <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> AND FRANCES ROBLES
Despite tough rules designed to keep absentee ballots
out of the hands of campaign operatives, Republican
Party workers obtained hundreds of them from voters
during their aggressive drive to increase turnout for
George W. Bush.
An estimated 500 to 600 completed ballots were
collected by Bush volunteers or dropped off at
campaign offices in Little Havana, Westchester and
Hialeah, according to GOP campaign officials in charge
of the absentee vote.
Volunteers put on stamps and rushed them into the
mail, even sending some overnight to make sure they
arrived on time. ``I remember putting stamps on them
myself,'' said Miami Commissioner Joe Sanchez, who was
heading the Bush Little Havana operation on Coral Way.
But Miami-Dade Elections Supervisor David Leahy says
he does not like campaign operatives knocking on doors
and picking up absentee ballots, saying that increases
the chances of election chicanery.
``If a voter needs help, they can call us. They don't
have to be asked if they need help by campaigns,'' he
said. ``That's beyond what they should be doing.''
The Bush campaign officials said they were meticulous
about following new rules put in place after the
fraud-plagued 1997 Miami mayoral election.
``At no time were our workers able to manipulate
absentee ballots,'' said Maria de la Milera, a
longtime Republican Party worker who supervised Bush's
Miami-Dade absentee operation. ``We ran a clean
campaign.''
With the outcome of the White House hinging on
Florida, both Democrats and Republicans ran frenzied
get-out-the-vote campaigns that focused largely on
generating thousands of absentee ballots.
Bob Poe, executive director of the Florida Democratic
Party, said the party sent pre-printed forms
requesting absentee ballots to likely absentee voters.
The ballot request forms already had key information
-- name, voter I.D. number -- filled out.
``All they had to do is sign it and mail it,'' Poe
said.
But when the dust cleared, Republicans were more
successful than Democrats at garnering absentee votes.
Republicans in Dade cast 24,000 absentee ballots,
Democrats about 17,000.
Those votes played a key role in handing Bush a
razor-thin victory in Florida's vote count. In
Miami-Dade, for example, Gore beat Bush handily at the
polls, winning 53 to 46 percent. But Bush won the
absentee vote 58 to 41 percent, piling up a 7,411-vote
advantage.
Under strict new county rules, campaigns could not
request absentee ballots for voters by phone, then
collect them and turn in bagfuls at the elections
office. In an effort to reduce opportunities for
fraud, the county required voters to mail their
ballots directly to County Hall or drop them off.
Both campaigns found ways to skirt the rules. They
flooded the state with tens of thousands of
pre-printed absentee request forms to make sure
ballots got into voters' hands, telling voters they
merely had to sign them and turn them in. Campaigns
tracked which ones returned their envelopes, then
telephoned the holdouts.
Despite the mail-in-only rule, Bush campaign workers
say voters turned in ballots to campaign offices
instead of the elections department. Why? ``Because
they wanted to vote for us,'' Sanchez said.
However, late in the campaign, volunteers started
picking up request forms and ballots at voters' homes,
De la Milera said. If voters wanted to know which
holes to punch, volunteers would give them cards
listing GOP candidates.
``They would punch the numbers, they would do the
sealing, everything,'' she said. In 1998, state
legislators passed a tough new law adding anti-fraud
measures to absentees. One rule would have made
absentees list the last four digits of their Social
Security numbers.
But most of those new restrictions were frozen by the
U.S. Justice Department.
One rule that survived -- requiring voters to list
their voter registration numbers when they ask for a
ballot -- apparently is being widely ignored.
In Miami-Dade and Broward, absentee ballot requests
were honored without the number.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Bush campaign and the rise of the political underworld
<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/nov2000/elec-n15.shtml>
By Patrick Martin
15 November 2000
The events which have taken place in the past week in the US
presidential election, beginning with Election Night itself, have
cast light on a political phenomenon of immense significance: the
rise to the pinnacle of the American political system of elements of
a gangster character.
These extreme-right elements, who now control the Republican Party,
know very well that they cannot take control of the American
government by democratic means, because there is widespread popular
opposition to their policies. Entrenched in the Republican
congressional leadership and the judiciary, they are now seeking to
seize control of the presidency through what amounts to a political
putsch.
The right-wing cabal includes operatives for the Bush campaign and
the Republican Party, steeped in the method of political "dirty
tricks"; media spokesmen like the Wall Street Journal, the New York
Post and an array of talk-radio hosts, for whom no lie is too brazen
or absurd; and the network of extreme-right lawyers, like the
sinister Theodore Olson [see "Profile of a right-wing conspirator:
the case of Theodore Olson"], who played central roles in the Paula
Jones lawsuit and the impeachment and trial of President Clinton.
The main weapon of the right-wing is the Big Lie. They operate by the
principle laid down by Adolf Hitler: the bigger the lie and the more
insistently it is repeated, the more easily it will be believed. And
a complacent and cowardly American media treats even the most
grotesque and flagrant lies as though they deserved credibility.
Thus Bush recount observer James Baker declares that a machine count
is more reliable than a hand count, because machines aren't
Democratic or Republican, when everyone knows that the hand count
will simply legitimize valid votes that the machine scanners were
unable to read.
Thus Bush press spokeswoman Karen Hughes repeats endlessly that Bush
has already won Florida once, twice or three times, and no press
representative dares to call her a liar and point out the simple
truth: no one has won Florida yet, and to claim otherwise is to
preempt the democratic process.
The purpose of these lies is to keep the country so inundated with
misinformation that public opinion is disoriented and even poisoned.
The goal is to cover up the elementary truth that a Bush victory
requires the suppression of votes cast in Florida by tens of
thousands of people. That is why the Bush campaign opposes a hand
recount or any other measure which would result in a more accurate
recording of the actual wishes of the Florida electorate.
The Bush campaign was developing backup plans to hijack the election
even before the November 7 vote. As was reported November 1 by the
New York Daily News, Bush aides were preparing to launch an anti-
constitutional effort to overturn a Gore victory in the Electoral
College if Bush succeeded in winning the popular vote. This was to
center on the use of right-wing talk-radio and other media attacks to
generate a "popular uprising" and pressure Gore electors to switch
their support to Bush. These methods are now being employed, under
differing circumstances, in an effort to stampede public opinion.
Typical of the method of the Big Lie, Bush and his media allies
accuse their victims of precisely the crime which they are attempting
to carry out—the New York Post, for instance, headlined one
commentary, "The Hijacking of the Presidency."
Such provocative language has an additional function. It legitimates
in advance whatever outrage may be committed by deranged right-wing
elements, the Timothy McVeighs who exist in significant numbers on
the fringes of the Republican Party. Their violence could potentially
be directed against anyone who opposes Bush's usurpation of power.
There is another sinister aspect of the whole affair. What is taking
place today in the United States bears many of the hallmarks of the
actions taken by US intelligence agencies to rig elections and topple
governments around the world. George W. Bush is unlikely to be
anything more than the front man for such an affair. His father,
however, was once head of the CIA, as well as commander-in-chief
during the Gulf War, and there is no question that the CIA and
Pentagon brass are heavily for Bush.
The case of John Ellis
Even while the ballots were being cast on November 7, the Bush
campaign was working to preempt the democratic decision of the
American people and steal the election. George W. Bush and his
campaign aides worked with allies and right-wing operatives in the
media to reverse the voting projections based on exit polls in
Florida.
The case of John Ellis is only the most visible example of the behind-
the-scenes conspiracy to rig the elections. Ellis is the first cousin
of the presidential candidate and his brother Jeb, governor of
Florida. He was hired by Fox News only a month before the vote to
head the network's "call desk", which handled the state-by-state exit
poll results reported by Voters News Service, a consortium of the
five major networks, and decided when to declare a state for Bush or
Gore.
In that capacity, according to an article in the New Yorker magazine,
confirmed by other press reports, Ellis leaked confidential exit poll
information to the Bush camp during the night of November 7, speaking
personally to George W. Bush and to Jeb Bush on several occasions. At
2:16 a.m. the morning of November 8, Fox became the first network
to "call" Florida for Bush, an action which triggered similar
declarations by the other networks—none of them justified by the
figures reported by VNS. Within 15 minutes, Vice President Gore was
on the phone offering a concession statement which he reversed soon
afterwards, after Florida Democrats called Gore headquarters to alert
him that the vote totals in the state were still extremely close.
The example of John Ellis demonstrates the critical role which media
manipulation has played in the election. It is now clear that the
initial exit polls finding Gore the winner in Florida were accurate—
they were based, after all, on what voters in Palm Beach County and
elsewhere thought they had done in the voting booth, which was to
give Gore a small but comfortable majority, likely in the range of
100,000 votes or more in that state.
The Bush campaign reacted feverishly to the initial projections of a
Gore victory in Florida because they had planned a much different
result based on a systematic assault on the rights of voters likely
to be pro-Gore, especially black and minority workers. Hundreds of
reports have since surfaced of intimidation and suppression of the
vote in minority districts, both in urban centers and in heavily
black rural areas in the northern panhandle. Both black and white
voters reported incidents in which election officials demanded photo
IDs of blacks while making no such demand of whites, in an effort to
frustrate black participation in the vote.
One of the most flagrant examples involves Duval County, which
includes the Jacksonville metropolitan area. This county reported a
staggering 27,000 spoiled ballots, nearly as many as the 29,000
recorded in Palm Beach County. According to a report in the online
magazine Salon, nearly half the spoiled ballots came in just four of
the 14 districts of Duval County, those comprising the largely black
areas which voted heavily for Gore.
The overall rate of spoiled ballots in Duval County was 7.5 percent,
compared to less than 2 percent nationally. This figure rose to a
staggering 31 percent in some predominately black precincts. When
controversy mounted over the Florida vote, the Democratic county
chairman called the county election supervisor, a Republican, to ask
how many ballots had been thrown out for double-punching in Duval. He
was told that only a few hundred were disqualified—the actual figure
was 22,000.
Vote fraud, and its perpetrators
Duval County does not use the butterfly ballot, and there were few
calls from confused voters to the election authorities, even though
nearly one in ten voters supposedly mispunched their ballots, a rate
as high as in Palm Beach. This strongly suggests that the double-
punching was the result, not of voter error, but of systematic fraud.
This suspicion is underscored by reports from many parts of Florida
of voters being given ballots which had already been punched for Bush.
The Duval County case reveals why Bush has adamantly rejected a hand
recount even of the counties with a Republican majority—a position
which has caused perplexed commentary even among right-wing media
pundits. Bush carried Duval County by a 60-40 margin. But the
majority of the ballots excluded in the machine count, which could be
restored in a hand count, were in neighborhoods likely to produce
more votes for Gore.
As for the likelihood of vote fraud, consider the character of the
judges and state officials in Florida whom Bush is relying on to
steal the state. The Palm Beach County judge who initially took the
lawsuit against the butterfly ballot, Stephen Rapp, had to recuse
himself after an affidavit was filed that he had told an attorney in
an elevator that he "doing his part to make sure the Democrats are
run out of the White House."
Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris is a multimillionaire
former real estate broker, elected in 1998, who was a Bush delegate
to the Republican National Convention and is co-chairwoman of the
Bush campaign in Florida. A profile in the Washington Post paints a
picture of a corrupt political hack who traveled at state expense to
Barbados, Brazil and other locations of little relevance to Florida
election law.
Harris's political career flourished despite a scandal involving
illegal campaign contributions to her 1994 state senate campaign by
Riscorp, a Florida insurance company. Five people pleaded guilty,
Riscorp's founder went to prison, and Harris's campaign director was
named an "unindicted co-conspirator." Harris went on to become the
chief election official of the state of Florida.
Acquiescence of the liberals
A right-wing cabal is working deliberately and systematically, using
the media and courts as well as the governmental machinery in the
state of Florida, to take control of the executive branch and usher
in an authoritarian right-wing government. The real strength of these
forces, in terms of genuine popular support, is relatively small.
They can advance only because of the cowardice of their Democratic
Party opponents and the acquiescence of the liberal remnants in the
media.
It is significant that the New York Times and the Washington Post
have barely commented on the John Ellis exposure, drawing no
conclusions about the deliberate attempt to engineer a concession
statement by Gore and preempt the vote count in Florida. The elite
daily newspapers and television networks have worked to conceal the
most elementary fact about the Florida controversy: that, as the Palm
Beach Post observed in its editorial on the election
crisis: "Partisan rhetoric aside, Republicans are arguing to count
fewer votes, while Democrats are arguing to count more."
Working people cannot rely on Gore or the Democratic Party to oppose
the right-wing takeover. They were incapable of conducting a serious
and politically principled fight against the first attempt at a
political coup, in the Clinton impeachment. At best they will make a
rotten compromise, as Clinton did, to hold onto the presidency
through further concessions at the expense of workers' interests. At
worst they will capitulate and legitimize the coming to power of the
most right-wing government in US history.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Linked stories:
********************
Bush camp claims recount fraud
<http://itn.co.uk/news/20001119/world/01election.shtml>
Republicans are stepping up their attack on the manual recount of US
presidential election votes in Florida, saying the process is shrouded in
fraud. After the counting of absentee ballots George W Bush now leads Al
Gore by more than nine hundred votes.
********************
Florida's Election Day Vote Could Be Irrelevant
<http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dorf/20001113.html>
Columbia Law School professor and Vice Dean Michael C. Dorf counters the
oft-heard argument that the Presidential election's disputes should not
be brought to court. However, Professor Dorf also notes that as is
typical in law, a tradeoff between rule-enforcement and justice may have
to occur for these disputes to be resolved.
********************
If Anyone Should Concede, It Should Be Bush, Not Gore
<http://writ.news.findlaw.com/lazarus/20001114.html>
Attorney, author, and FindLaw columnist Edward Lazarus takes the Bush
campaign to task for pushing for a Gore concession. Lazarus argues that
if anyone should concede, it should be Bush, who lost the popular vote
nationally and may win it in Florida by luck alone.
********************
=====================================================
"Anarchy doesn't mean out of control. It means out of 'their' control."
-Jim Dodge
======================================================
"Communications without intelligence is noise;
intelligence without communications is irrelevant."
-Gen. Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
======================================================
"It is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society."
-J. Krishnamurti
______________________________________________________________
To subscribe/unsubscribe or for a sample copy or a list of back issues,
send appropriate email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>.
______________________________________________________________
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A>
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html
<A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html">Archives of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
<A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
