Back to that day in November of 2004

"Kerry Won" was the latest in a series coming out of a five-year investigation, begun in November 2000, for BBC Television Newsnight and Britain's Guardian papers, dissecting that greasy sausage called American electoral democracy.

On November 11, a week after TomPaine.com put the report out on the 'Net, I received an email from the New York Times Washington Bureau. Hot on the investigation of the veracity of the vote, the Times reporter asked me pointed questions:

Question #1: Are you a "sore loser"?

Question #2: Are you a "conspiracy nut"?

There was no third question. Investigation of the vote was, apparently, complete. The next day, their thorough analysis of the evidence yielded a front-page story, "VOTE FRAUD THEORIES, SPREAD BY BLOGS, ARE QUICKLY BURIED."

Here's a bit of what the Paper of Record failed to record.

In June 2004, well before the election, my co-author of "Jim Crow" Rev. Jesse Jackson brought me to Chicago. We had breakfast with Vice-Presidential candidate John Edwards. The Reverend asked the Senator to read my report of the "spoilage" of Black votes-one million African Americans who cast ballots in 2000 but did not have their votes register on the machines.

Edwards said he'd read it over after he'd had his bagel. Jackson snatched away his bagel. No read, no bagel. A hungry Senator was genuinely concerned-these were, after all, Democrats whose votes did not tally, and he shot the information to John Kerry. A couple of weeks later, Kerry told the NAACP convention that one million African-American votes were not counted in 2000, but in 2004 he would not let it happen again.

But he did let it happen again. More than a million votes in 2004 were cast and not counted.

This is a very interesting and seemingly well-researched account. It gives strength to the impression I got immediately after the Presidential election in 2004 - namely, that Bush likely did not really win it:

I hesitate to deliver a verdict just yet, but it is increasingly starting to look like this election was stolen using techniques not entirely dissimilar from those used in 2000 in Florida. Reports are starting to trickle in.

I vividly remember my surprise with Kerry's quick surrender on November 3, 2004. I still don't know what was behind that. But given the 2000 experience and the very real possibility of a repeat use of the same fraudulent techniques by Bush & Co in 2004 it had to be an absolute fallacy to believe the true results of the election that happened only the day before could have been reliably known that soon.

Palast is mostly concentrating on the racial aspect of the picture. I would like to ask a more general question: what happened to the democratic process in this country if we don't even care that our votes may well be manipulated and that candidates might cut some behind the scenes agreements with the competition and concede defeat exactly when the struggle is only heating up? Is that really how we want it to be?

tags: bush  election2004  kerry  media  election2000  coverup  palast  fraud