By Terrence McNally, AlterNet
Posted on January 27, 2006, Printed on January 27, 2006
For GOP voters, the 2004 presidential election was little short of miraculous: Behind
in the Electoral College even on the afternoon of the vote, the Bush-Cheney ticket
staged a stunning comeback. Usually reliable exit polls turned out to be wrong by
an unprecedented 5 percent in swing states. Conservatives argued, and the media
agreed, that "moral values" had made the difference.
In his latest book, Fooled Again: How The Right Stole The 2004 Election, And Why
They'll Steal The Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them), Mark Crispin Miller argues
that it wasn't moral values which swung the election -- it was theft.
TERRENCE McNALLY: You're a professor of media studies. According to your bio,
you write about "film, television, propaganda, advertising and the culture industries
…" Why did you write this book?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Out of a sense of civic emergency. I believe that "Fooled
Again" makes the case quite persuasively that there is actually no convincing
evidence that Bush and Cheney won re-election.
This is a civic story of the utmost importance. It has to do with the dire need for
election reform in the United States. But it's also a story about the colossal failure
of the American press to do precisely the kind of job that the framers had in mind
when they wrote the First Amendment. What they had in mind was that the press
would function as a reliable check on executive power. It would keep the people
informed about what their government was up to, and it would keep them politically
engaged in national debate.
The newspapers, as limited and defective as they were in the 18th century, did
perform that function, and I believe they performed that function for much of our
history. We now have a corporate media system that is not answerable to the
people nor concerned about the people, but [is] in the service of its pay masters.
And it is far too close to the government for the health of anything like a
democratic system.
One of the points of "Fooled Again" is that this is a story of tremendous
importance, as far as a democracy is concerned. Yet the press has for the most
part ridiculed those who have come up with very solid evidence of fraud. They've
been in the business less of talking about the situation than of preventing anybody
else from talking about it. And this includes some of the progressive media as well.
In fact, the most hostile reviews that I've received have been in Mother Jones and
Salon.
TM: I read the transcript of you on Democracy Now! with Mark Hertsgaard, a
progressive journalist who has been fairly dismissive of those questioning Bush's
victory. By the end he seemed to be agreeing that everything should be more fully
investigated.
I would think that the 2004 election story, if tracked and broken, would be huge for
whoever breaks it. Any other thoughts about why it's so ignored?
MCM: We have to understand that for some decades the press has served basically
an establishmentarian function. They have the reputation, and they certainly have
the self-image, of being terribly skeptical, prone to disrespectful questions, probing
dark matters that authority would just as soon have them leave alone. That's a
very flattering view of the press but completely undeserved. The press will not deal
with any story that goes beyond a particular scandal to cast doubt on the very
viability of the entire system. The press in this country will studiously ignore any
story that too violently rocks the boat, whose implications are too shattering.
This is not new. Watergate was a story that the press avoided for months and
months. Only the Washington Post pursued that story; everybody else made fun of
it. Now we look back on Watergate with tremendous nostalgia and self-
congratulation, telling ourselves the press saved the system. But since Watergate
the press has preferred to deal with meaningless and trivial scandals like the Clinton
scandals. They will not talk about 9/11, they will not talk about the theft of the last
three elections.
TM: You also include the 2002 congressional election. That one also broke too
consistently against predictions?
MCM: That's exactly right. In Colorado, in Minnesota, in Georgia, and in a couple of
other states -- there was what we might call "Diebold magic" everywhere. In all
these states, you had far-right-wing politicians predicted to lose by pre-election
newspaper polls and by exit polls, and all of them won.
TM: Why do you believe the two successive Democratic candidates have given in so
easily?
MCM: I think basically Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry this last time are far too
concerned with establishment opinion, far too worried that they'll seem to be sore
losers, conspiracy theorists, etc. They have therefore refused to go public with
what they actually believe. Kerry told me personally on October 28th at a
fundraising party that he believes the election was probably stolen.
TM: He then disavowed that in the press, didn't he?
MCM: Exactly -- a few hours after the story broke. The Democratic Party is as much
a part of the problem as the Republican Party.
TM: Are there exceptions among the ranks of mainstream politicians? I think of
Barbara Boxer and John Conyers. Any others?
MCM: Tom Daschle has told me he thinks very highly of the book and has given me
permission to quote him to that effect. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, Rush Holt. There
are growing numbers of Democratic politicians who are willing to take the risks of
facing the truth on this issue.
Let's put it less dogmatically. All right, maybe I haven't proven that the election was
stolen, but I am completely confident that I've provided ample grounds for a
serious investigation of what went on last year. It seems to me that any Democrat
who refuses to even go for that kind of inquiry is really failing his or her
constituency.
TM: -- and failing the voters. As a citizen, it bothers me that we leave it to a Gore
or a Kerry, who's thinking about his future reputation or his future career, to stage
the protest. I don't care about their careers. I care about my vote getting counted
or discounted.
What's the statement that you're willing to make in "Fooled Again" about the 2004
election: stolen? worthy of investigation? evidence clearly shows in six states …?
MCM: The evidence in Ohio, as anyone who followed the story knows, is copious.
Bush allegedly won that state by 118,000 votes. As I point out -- and this part of
the book is largely based on John Conyers' report to the House Judiciary Committee
-- the various stratagems, tricks and tactics used to prevent people from
registering, to prevent them from voting, to throw away provisional ballots -- all
these add up to a number far greater than 118,000.
TM:: That's news to me. Many people have said, yes, there were long lines, yes,
there was disproportionate distribution of voting machines, yes, there was trouble
with provisional ballots, yes, there was intimidation -- but the margin was 120,000.
You're saying that they add up to over 120,000?
MCM: Oh easily, easily. It was in the urban parts of Ohio that most of this stuff
went down. All the urban centers in Ohio were Democratic. If people want to get a
strong sense of what was happening at the grassroots level coast to coast last
year, go to a website called the Election Incident Reporting System, EIRS. Then
type in the name of a state or a county, and you'll get a transcript of all the
complaints that were lodged that day by people who called 1-866-MY-VOTE.
Now a lot of them couldn't get through because it was understaffed, but those who
did get through left messages. You can find copious firsthand evidence of what the
average person had to go through to try to vote against Bush. This didn't happen
only in Ohio. Electronic touchscreen machines flipped Kerry votes into Bush votes in
at least 11 states.
TM: You say similar practices (and occasionally worse ones) were applied in several
other key states -- Florida, Oregon, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and
even New York?
MCM: In New Mexico, for example, we're told that Bush won by some 7,000 votes.
We know of over 17,000 Democratic voters who were unable to cast a vote for
president because the touchscreen machines in their districts refused to record a
vote for president.
These 17,000-plus New Mexicans turned out to vote in Democratic areas, and they
didn't record a vote for president. Seventeen thousand is 10,000 more than 7,000.
That glitch alone can account for the ostensible victory margin of Bush over Kerry in
New Mexico. Greg Palast's new book will have a whole chapter on New Mexico. It's
hair-raising stuff, and we haven't heard a word about it. The same kind of thing
happened in Iowa, where Bush supposedly won by under 10,000 votes.
Tom Daschle was supposedly beaten in South Dakota by 4,500 votes. There was
so much chicanery going on there, that it's easy to argue that John Thunes should
not have won. I know Daschle believes he was robbed.
This isn't only a matter of the White House, it's also a matter of the Congress. I
don't believe that this government represents the people of this country. The
people of this country, however frightened some of them may be by terrorism, are
essentially not theocratically inclined. They don't want a Christian republic. They
were not happy with the way the government dealt with the Terry Schiavo case.
Americans basically believe in the American system of government. Checks and
balances, the separation of church and state.
The press kept telling us after the election that a huge outpouring of religious
voters account for Bush's miraculous victory. Well that's nothing more than a
talking point that the religious right itself put out after the election. There is no
statistical evidence whatsoever that there was any increase in the number of
religious voters.
TM: The big thing that people seized on was one particular exit poll in which people,
when given a choice of a few things, said moral values was the No. 1 reason for
their vote. More people answered moral values in 1996 and in 2000 than in 2004.
There was actually a drop in the number of people who attributed their vote to
moral values in 2004, not a rise.
Let me check a couple of things with you. I've heard that exit polls were most
inaccurate -- by a big margin -- in those areas that used electronic voting machines
with no paper trail. True?
MCM: That's basically true, and it was particularly noticeable in five swing states.
There's a lot of stuff floating around out there in cyberspace about the exit polls.
The question of the exit polls has been very badly muddied by a lot of disingenuous
argument. Now a lot of people think that it's not a reliable gauge, it doesn't tell us
anything. That's actually the result of propaganda obfuscation. The exit polls'
sudden divergence, sudden wrongness in these five states is really a remarkable
deviation from the norm.
The guy doing the best work on that particular issue is a statistician at the
University of Pennsylvania named Steve Freeman, who will have a book coming out
in a few months primarily about the exit poll question.
Bogus reasons for why the exit polls were so wrong include the reluctant responder
argument, which holds that Bush voters were strangely reluctant to tell exit
pollsters how they voted. Well, Freeman has read the raw data at precinct level and
has discovered that, as a matter of fact, if anyone showed a greater reluctance to
come forward and say honestly who they voted for when confronted with an exit
pollster, it was actually the Democrats. There's no evidence of any numerical kind
that can support the view that somehow Republicans wouldn't fess up.
TM: I would assume that the very ones being referred to as reluctant are the ones
who would be proud to say they voted for God's candidate.
MCM: One of the weirdest things about this whole election business is that one of
the two parties has, for over the last year and longer, been vociferously complaining
about the dangers of election fraud, and that's the Republican party.
TM: Thus the ID card in Georgia, right?
MCM: Exactly. They're the ones who are always screaming about Democratic fraud,
but the Republicans in this last race were really the only ones engaging in election
fraud.
This has to do with the peculiarly paranoid quality of the crusading mindset. I
believe this theft was to a great extent carried out thanks to a kind of crusader
mentality. I've got plenty of evidence in the book that the religious right played an
enormously large role in the theft of the election last year.
TM: I think first of Diebold, I think of the Ken Blackwells or the Kathryn Harrises.
How does the religious right itself play a role beyond mobilizing its own troops?
MCM: That mobilization is significant when you consider that a lot of those troops
have actually become embedded inside the election system.
TM: Local polling officials, that sort of thing?
MCM: One Democratic election judge tried to observe the vote count in Pima
County, Arizona. A roomful of polling personnel who all belonged to the same
evangelical church in the area started to call him a liberal demon, a liberal scum.
TM: When you talk about a crusader mentality, you basically mean that if you do
not support my candidate you are an infidel -- and the ends justify the means?
MCM: Precisely. See, all these crimes that I attest to in the book were committed
with impunity by people who regard their political adversaries as demons. And
that's not an exaggeration. You know, this government is to a great extent
dominated by people who have that metaphysical view of the current political
situation.
It is a very serious mistake I believe to think that all of this is happening only
because of the excessive greed of certain corporate powers. That greed is decisive
It played an enormous role. There is no question about it. But it could not have
succeeded without the vigorous grassroots assistance of a lot of people who are
religious true believers. And I think that they include the likes of Tom DeLay and
others.
TM: I've heard that almost all irregularities worked in Bush's favor. True?
MCM: Absolutely true. I have not yet heard of a single example of a touchscreen
voting machine flipping a Bush vote into a Kerry vote. This does not mean it never
happened. I'm just saying I haven't heard about it if it has.
TM: I've read that in New Hampshire, Ralph Nader's Green Party campaign paid for
an actual recount. They picked the precincts they thought were suspicious, and the
hand recount confirmed the actual vote totals and showed that the exit polls were,
in fact, wrong. What do you say to that?
MCM: Well, the recount that they paid for found no evidence of fraud in that
particular case.
TM: It confirmed the hand recount, showing that the exit polls were in fact wrong.
So how does that fit your analysis of the whole scheme?
MCM: The only thing one can say about that with any scientific certainty is that the
particular hand count that they carried out did not reveal any evidence of fraud.
That does not mean that no fraud was committed. This is a very fine point, but
when we're dealing with questions of electoral honesty and accuracy, I think we
have the right to make fine points. The distinction must be made -- that particular
hand count involved a sample, that sample revealed no fraud, but that does not
mean that we can then sit back and say, well, OK, so the exit polls were wrong.
TM: To the question "What is the point of revisiting the last election?" you point out
that there has never been a great reform that was not driven by a major scandal.
Do you believe that true election reform is not going to happen until the people and
the media finally wake up to this?
MCM: I think it's going to depend on the people. It's going to depend on the people
simply and irresistibly insisting that the media finally deal with this subject. That's
why I wrote the book.
Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7FM, Los Angeles
(streaming at kpfk.org).
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/31217/
