Harvey Wasserman on Democracy Now! covers the gamut of issues in Ohio and the implications of the Ohio Report on top of reporting and research over the last several years. <listen> The Ohio Report adds to the overwhelming evidence from the Brennan Center for Justice, The Carter-Baker Commission, the Conyers Report, California Reports, and from Dr. Shvartsman of the University of Connecticut.
How can the Secretary of the State, Susan Bysiewicz , members of the legislature, and registrars continue to consider rolling back manual recounts and audits? How long can the Hartord Courant insist that “no one appears to have figured out how to tamper with the machines” while it calls for independent auditing of electric meters?
Perhaps the most frustrating and dangerous of all is the failure of any prosecution for the blatant destruction of the evidence in the majority of Ohio counties. If we do not require that the law be followed, if there is not penalty for blatant error on the part of election officials, what hope do we have?
Update:Â Transcript now available excerpts below <read>
  We live in Ohio, in Columbus. And we saw the election of 2004 stolen right in front of our faces. And we reported it extensively, and everybody laughed at us. And they said, “Oh, this couldn’t happen in America.†And we documented it in How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election and Is Rigging 2008. We documented scores of ways that this election was stolen. And we pointed out a myriad flaws that we saw right in our own neighborhoods, of what was done to keep people of color and young people from voting and to rig the vote count.
I mean, the servers for the computation of the Ohio vote count were in the same basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee that houses servers for the Republican National Committee. The programmers who did the stuff for Ken Blackwell, the Republican Secretary of State, were Republicans who did websites for the Bush administration. I mean, it’s amazing…We are guaranteed certain that John Kerry won Ohio in 2004. The election—the exit polls showed him winning. There was a flip of 6.7% in the exit polls from the official vote count…
I am party to a lawsuit. We filed a civil rights lawsuit. We won. The federal election law says the ballots were supposed—had to be protected, under federal law. We got an overlapping decision from a federal judge to preserve, for our civil rights suit, the preservation of these ballots. Fifty-six of eighty-eight counties in Ohio destroyed their election ballots, destroyed all their election records, or most of them, making a pure recount impossible. This is in direct violation of a federal court injunction and standing federal law. So far, nobody has been prosecuted. What kind of country are we living in? …
John Kerry should have been president or—well, he won. And Al Gore won in 2000.
