Blackwell, Ken

==

1 23 CAP chair

see stack judge 6 25

6 22 primary on trump coup fake electors

capt 917 rename 2 11/17 zombie

zombie 2004 tag

transition?

nb: AA thus renta-tom?

xian?

see big lie trump coup

see cnp hub ginni groundswell

see FRC perkins klukowski

bak 11 22

aha AA keynote speak perfect cover for voter suppression of POC

---

rww

06/03/2025

by

Peter Montgomery

The Conservative Action Project, an offshoot of the secretive and influential right-wing Council for National Policy, released a statement Monday signed by a rogues' gallery of right-wing figures demanding faster Senate confirmation of President Donald Trump’s nominees, claiming that his agenda, aka Project 2025, will suffer unless Senate Republicans step up the pace.

In 2020, the Conservative Action Project energetically promoted Trump’s false claims about the election and participated in his efforts to stay in power after losing the election. The group’s current chair, notorious voter suppression activist Kenneth Blackwell, was involved in behind-the-scenes lobbying to convince then-Vice President Mike Pence to abuse his power and interfere with congressional affirmation of state-certified Electoral College votes.

The new statement is further evidence of how closely the right-wing movement is aligned with, or maybe in the pocket of, Trump and his inner circle. More than 100 MAGA and religious-right movement leaders signed the statement, including Christian nationalists, voting restriction activists, leaders of anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ political groups, right-wing gadfly/power player Ginni Thomas, MAGA judicial activist Mike Davis, and disgraced former southern Baptist leader Paige Patterson.

Also among the signers is Cleta Mitchell, who joined the infamous phone call on which Trump tried to bully Georgia’s Republican secretary of state into “finding” enough votes to overturn Trump’s loss in the state. Mitchell, who now runs right-wing so-called “election integrity” efforts at the Conservative Partnership Institute, recently appeared on dominionist Jim Garlow’s podcast, where she said House passage of the SAVE Act was a result of God telling her to work on the (largely imaginary) “threat” of non-citizen voting.

The Conservative Action Project is one of many right-wing coalitions formed in reaction to the election of former President Barack Obama, and now includes representatives of MAGA groups created in the wake of Trump’s 2020 loss, like the Center for Renewing America. In 2022 it mobilized an unsuccessful effort to defeat the Respect for Marriage Act, which offers legal protections to same-sex couples whose rights would be threatened if the Supreme Court overturns its 2015 marriage equality ruling.

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1/ 23

CAP open ltr usual suspect?  ~ kevin

...

All organizations listed for IDENTIFICATION purposes only.

rww 11 22

after right-wing predictions of a “red wave” or “red tsunami” were defeated by voters, some right-wing leaders are predictably calling for new restrictions on early voting and mail-in ballots, both of which have increased access to the ballot and expanded as safe ways for people to vote during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Among those calling for limiting early and mail-in voting is the Family Research Council’s Ken Blackwell, a notorious voter suppresser during his tenure as Ohio secretary of state, who in 2020 participated in former President Donald Trump’s scheme to get Vice President Mike Pence to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power after Trump’s loss.

An article published Tuesday by FRC’s “news” outlet, The Washington Stand, said Blackwell called it “crazy” to depend on vote by mail and said he would end early voting if he could. In a conversation with FRC’s Tony Perkins two days after the election, Blackwell declared himself “a 21st Century Luddite” and said he wanted to ditch voting machines for paper ballots and restrict voting to Election Day itself.

Blackwell and Perkins agreed that voting by mail and longer election periods create greater ballot security challenges and more opportunities for human error. “The Democrats want that type of a process,” Perkins claimed. Blackwell agreed, saying, “What they figure is that if you have enough confusion, if you have tight margins, you get vote counts in what I call the area of litigation.” In reality, election experts and studies have shown that vote by mail is safe and reliable.

While making insinuations about Democratic motives, Perkins and Blackwell said that there were fewer reports of “shenanigans” this year, thanks in part, they said, to having additional observers at the polls.

Perkins said the two political parties have worldviews that are 180 degrees apart, claiming that “Our freedoms, our abilities to raise our families, to teach our children to love the Lord and to know him and to live that faith out in the broader society is at risk in every election.” Blackwell agreed, adding, “We know that the difference between our constitutional republic is that God is at the center, is central to it, and all of the totalitarian states that I have ever visited, they tried to run God and faith out of the public square, crush the family, and make people more dependent, not free citizens but subjects.”

Speaking about the midterm elections, Blackwell said that it may not have been a red tsunami, but there were major victories for right-wing candidates. “We cannot let the devil steal our joy,” he said. Perkins responded by quoting or paraphrasing Pastor Gary Hamrick: “Hey, we sawRoeoverturned, and we didn’t expect some kind of backlash from the devil?”

“I think the reason people are opposed to very practical procedures such as a photo ID is because they want to cheat the system,” Perkins said. “They want to be able to manipulate it.”

“They want confusion,” Blackwell added, “They don’t want clarity.”

To be fair, Perkins and Blackwell know something about cheating the system and creating confusion. Both energetically embraced and promoted Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. In December 2020, they signed a letter falsely claiming, “There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect.” The letter called on state legislatures in six battleground states won by Biden to appoint pro-Trump electors anyway. At the end of that month, both Perkins and Blackwell signed another letterurging Senate Republicans to contest electors from five states.

As mentioned earlier, Blackwell was also involved in the scheme to pressure Pence to overturn the election. On Dec. 28, 2020, Blackwell sent an email to several right-wing insiders urging that Pence and his staff get a briefing from “John and Ken”—that is,John Eastman and Ken Klukowski. Eastman, a lawyer who pushed illegal schemes to keep Trump in power, has had a long professional association with Klukowski, a former director of FRC’s Center for Religious Liberty who after Trump’s loss was parachuted into the Justice Department office of Jeffrey Clark, who was plotting to drag the DOJ into Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.

Two days before the Capitol insurrection, Blackwell tweeted a video message using the “Stop the Steal” hashtag and urging activists to demand that members of Congress address “election irregularities and illegalities” on Jan. 6. “This is not a time for sideline sitters or backbenchers,” he said. “You must do what you can with what you have where you are. Our republic demands it.”

Under Perkins’ leadership, FRC last year launched the Center for Biblical Worldview, which it said would help activists “see the spiritual warbehind the political war.” Pollster and Center for Biblical Worldview senior fellow George Barna told religious right activists at FRC’s “Pray Vote Stand” summit last yearthat it is their duty to try to indoctrinate other people’s children into a “biblical worldview.”

Tags: Ken Blackwell Kenneth Blackwell Tony Perkins Capitol Insurrection Donald Trump Election 2020 Election 2022 Stop the Steal voter suppression Voting Rights Family Research Council

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/coup-plotters-reunion-ginni-thomas/

an 11 22 badash

Political experts are warning about a group of nearly 60 far-right wing politicos including **Ginni Thomas**, **Matt Schlapp**, and **Cleta Mitchell** who reportedly will issue a letter calling for the House and Senate to delay votes on leadership positions including Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader.

Axios’ Jonathan first reported the news, posting at least part of the letter and the list of signatories (below).

Some of the other more recognizable names on the letter include **Mark Meadows**, the former Trump White House chief of staff; **Cleta Mitchell**, the attorney who The New York Times calls the “architect of Donald J. Trump’s failed efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election”; former Trump attorney **Jenna Ellis**; former U.S. Senator and former Heritage Foundation president **Jim DeMint** (R-SC); former Trump deputy campaign manager **David Bossie**, the right wing activist and head of the organization responsible for the **Citizens United** Supreme Court lawsuit that made countless billions of dark money in political elections legal.

READ MORE: ‘Heist’: Ginni Thomas Tells J6 Committee Election Was Stolen, Says She Never Discussed Efforts to Overturn With Spouse

Also, white supremacist and disgraced former U.S. Congressman **Steve King** (R-IA); convicted felon and disgraced former U.S. Congressman **Steve Stockman** (R-TX), right-wing religious extremist **Kenneth Blackwell** of the **Family Research Council**, which is on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of anti-LGBTQ hate groups, and others....

http://www.motherjones.com/documents/739865-redacted-groundswell-mtg-notes-3-20-2012-google

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/**2013/07/**groundswell-ginni-thomas-**war-karl-rove/**

groundswell, the recently created coalition of prominent right-wing activists and journalists, gathers weekly to coordinate messaging and plot strategy for “a 30 front war seeking to fundamentally transform the nation.” These sessions usually fixate on how best to battle the president, congressional Democrats, and progressive groups. But their 30-front war also includes something of a civil war: a fierce crusade against the Republican establishment and Karl Rove, the GOP strategistand Fox News pundit.

Rove is a regular topic of discussion—and frustration—at Groundswell’s Wednesday morning meetings, according to the documents obtained by Mother Jones. At these sessions, and in messages shared by participants on Groundswell’s Google group page, Groundswellers often gripe that the GOP’s inside-the-Beltway crowd wants to marginalize the party’s ideological die-hards and recruit, promote, and support political candidates deemed less strident and more electable. Rove especially ticked off tea-party-minded conservatives in February when the super-PAC he advises, American Crossroads, announced it was launching the Conservative Victory Project, which would try to block far-right candidates from blowing key races, as Missouri’s Todd Akin and Indiana’s Richard Mourdock did in Senate contests last year.

Yet as Rove kicked off this project, Groundswellers, in closed-doors meetings, initiated an effort to crush Rove, who they believed had helped shape a post-election post-mortemby the Republican National Committee that called on the party to temper its message to appeal to a broader swath of voters.

At the group’s March 20 meeting, Groundswell participants reviewed the details of this vigorous anti-Rove endeavor, according to notes prepared after the session. This memo referred to a “two front war” to tear down the prominent GOP strategist who engineered the political triumphs of George W. Bush. Under the subject head “ROVE PROJECT,” the memo reported:

Rove is still actively networking and building his financial capabilities, an indication that we are not yet being effective. His associates have quietly contributed to the drafting of the RNC document, Autopsy. The Autopsy Report…has drawn fire from the Tea Party, social conservatives and conservatives in general. It undermines the RNC platform…

The Two Front War: The two front war covers finances and reputation. Rove has relationships built over the last two decades. He must become toxic among the grass roots and among his base. His effectiveness has been called into question on Sunday talk shows and at CPAC. Regarding financing, the donors to his Crossroads [super-PAC] are public. They must be educated to the fact, Rove is not a conservative and his efforts are not effective.

Rove’s position as party spokesperson was established as a result of the Bush election. Rove gained the title and the credit for being the “great architect.” Fox has given Rove a platform and just renewed his contract. In truth, Rove no more represents conservatives then Jessie Jackson or Al Sharpton represent all Blacks.

The memo cautioned that smashing Rove would take time: “Rove has been building his power base for decades. Change requires time and patience.” It suggested “powerful messaging points” to use against him: “Rove does not speak for GOP like Sharpton does not speak for black community” and “Who put you in charge?”

“Rove has relationships built over the last two decades. He must become toxic among the grass roots and among his base.”

The Rove Project was a key agenda item at other Groundswell get-togethers. At a February 20 meeting, Groundswell participants talked about how best to “continue efforts to educate conservatives to this real and present danger to our future success”—meaning Rove—and attendees were informed thatKen Blackwell, a former Ohio secretary of state now affiliated with the Family Research Council, was identifying donors to conservative causes who “need specific attention.” That is, Blackwell was compiling a list of conservative funders to pressure to boycott Rove.

During a March 6 meeting, it was announced that the Rove Project would be one of Groundswell’s 10 working groups. (Others included national security, messaging, ground game, immigration, and Benghazi.) Sandy Rios, a fellow Fox News contributor, was put in charge of the campaign to discredit Rove. Weeks later, though, a Groundswell memo noted that the Conservative Action Project—a coalition of more than 100 right-wing organizations that is chaired by former Attorney General Edwin Meese—would be “taking the lead” on the Rove Project.

Rove did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, one of the leading members of Groundswell and the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Through Groundswell’s Google group, members were asked in February to sign a letter organized by Diana Banister, a Groundsweller and a partner at the Shirley & Banister PR firm, demanding the firing of Jonathan Collegio, American Crossroads’ communications director. Collegio’s sin: He had called Brent Bozell, a conservative media critic, a “hater” in an interview. (Collegio had been reacting to Bozell’s attack on Rove’s plan to oppose unelectable conservative Republican candidates.) The letter, addressed to American Crossroads president Steven Law, proclaimed, “You obviously mean to have a war with conservatives and the Tea Party.”

The Groundswellers certainly seem to believe they are engaged in all-out combat with Rove and GOP insiders. In February,Blackwell posted an article on Groundswell’s Google group page and stated, “War has been declared on the conservative movement.” The article was about Rove’s effort to back credible GOP candidates.

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-family-research-councils-insurrection-connections/

theFamily Research Council, a major player in the religious-right political movement, was deeply involved in former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election—a fact made all the more apparent by revelations during the June 23 public hearing of the House select committee investigating the conspiracy that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

We had already known that FRC publicly supported Trump’s schemes to unlawfully stay in power. FRC President Tony Perkins and other leaders connected with the secretive Council for National Policy had signed a letter in mid-December 2020falsely claiming, “There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect.” That letter called on state legislatures in six battleground states won by Joe Biden to “appoint clean slates of electors to the Electoral College to support President Trump.” It urged the House and Senate to reject pro-Biden electors from those states.

FRC Executive Vice President Jerry Boykin also signed that letter, as did Kenneth Blackwell, FRC’s senior fellow for human rights and constitutional governance. Blackwell, a notorious voter suppresser who abused the power of his office when he was Ohio’s secretary of state, was all-in on Trump’s election lies from the earliest days of the so-called “Stop the Steal” movement. Just days after the election, Blackwell used wildly false and inflammatory language in support of Trump’s claims, denouncing Pennsylvania’s governor, who defended his state’s election results from false claims of voter fraud, and “his legion of darkness.”

Blackwelland Perkins signed a second open letter at the end of December 2020 urging Senate Republicans to contest the votes from five battleground states.

Two days before the insurrection at the Capitol, Blackwell tweeted a video message using the “Stop the Steal” hashtag. “This is not a time for sideline sitters or backbenchers,” he said. “You must do what you can with what you have where you are. Our republic demands it.”

It turns out that Blackwell was busy behind the scenes, too.

At the Jan. 6 committee’s June 23 hearing, Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney revealed the contents of a Dec.28, 2020, email from Blackwell that read in part, “As I stated last week, I believe the VP and his staff would benefit greatly from a briefing by John and Ken.”

“John” would be John Eastman, the far right-wing lawyer who doggedly pushed illegal schemes to keep Trump in power based on false claims of election fraud and bogus theories about the vice president’s power to single-handedly decide who would become the next president. “Ken” referred to Ken Klukowski, a religious-right lawyer and pundit, longtime associate of Blackwell, and former director of FRC’s Center for Religious Liberty.

Blackwell’s email was sent to Ed Corrigan, a former Heritage Foundation vice president who served as part of the leadership team of Trump’s transition and now heads up the Conservative Partnership Institute,which promotes voter suppression in the name of “election integrity.**”**It also went to Rep. Louis Gohmert’s chief of staff Connie Hair,whose promotion of Big Lie conspiracies about the election was quoted by Ginny Thomas in her post-election emails to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows. Completing the circle, Meadows is now a “senior partner” at the Conservative Partnership Institute, which received $1 million from Trump’s PACshortly after the Jan. 6 committee was created.

Klukowski had joined the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget in the fall of 2019. After the 2020 election, Klukowski was parachuted into the Justice Department office of Jeffrey Clark, who was scheming to drag the DOJ into Trump’s efforts to overturn the election in key battleground states. Blackwell clearly seemed to recognize the bad optics of Klukowski’s involvement, urging in his email, “As I also mentioned, make sure we don’t overexpose Ken given his new position.”

Clark has unwillingly played a starring role in the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation, which has painstakingly exposed his effort to get Trump to name him acting attorney general. Clark and others had originally planned to send a letter to Georgia legislators—a letter that Klukowski helped Clark write—falsely claiming that the DOJ had identified major election problems in the state and encouraging them to convene a special session to consider naming a pro-Trump Electoral College slate. When Clark’s DOJ superiors blocked his scheme, Trump seriously considered making Clark acting attorney general so he could carry it out, abandoning the plan only after other top Justice Department officials threatened a massive leadership resignation that would swamp news of the letter and define Trump’s legacy.

As Rep. Cheney concluded, “This email suggests that Mr. Klukowski was simultaneously working with Jeffrey Clark to draft the proposed letter to Georgia officials to overturn their certified election and working with Dr. Eastman to help pressure the vice president to overturn the election.”

In other words, while a battle raged between principled White House and Justice Department officials who were committed to upholding the election results and facilitating a peaceful transfer of power and the defeated president and his power-at-all-costs supporters, current and former FRC leaders were in the trenches with Trump and the would-be election overthrowers.

Their collusion on Trump’s attempt to overturn the election is far from the firstBlackwell-Klukowski collaboration.They co-authored numerous partisan diatribes in the form of op-eds and books, including “Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency” and “Resurgent: How Constitutional Conservatism Can Save America.” In 2016, Klukowksi guest-hosted FRC’s “Washington Watch” radio program and had Blackwell on as a guest.

At FRC’s October 2021 Pray Vote Stand conference—the rechristened activist gathering known for years as the Values Voter Summit—Blackwell slammed federal voting rights legislation and backed new voting restrictions being put in place by Republican state legislators.

The revelations of the Family Research Council’s all-out effort to help Trump stay in power despite his rejection by voters makes it even more appalling to learn from ProPublica that FRC has successfully petitioned the IRS to change its official classification to that of an association of churches, a tactic that Right Wing Watch has reported has been used by other religious-right groups like Focus on the Family and Liberty Counsel to evade public scrutiny and accountability.

Tags: Connie Hair Ed Corrigan Jeffrey Clark Jerry Boykin Ken Blackwell Ken Klukowski Kenneth Blackwell Mark Meadows Tony Perkins Capitol Insurrection House select committee on Jan. 6 Conservative Partnership Institute Council for National Policy Family Research Council

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Klukowski has held pivotal positions at anti-LGBT organizations since graduating from George Mason University’s law school in 2008and doing a law clerkship for Judge Alice Batchelder of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

He was a research fellow at the ultra-conservative Liberty University School of Law and also the director of the Center for Religious Liberty for the Family Research Council (FRC), an anti-LGBT hate group.

He has co-authored two books with FRC senior fellow Ken Blackwell, the former Ohio secretary of state known for his anti-LGBT rhetoric. One of the books accused Barack Obama of trying to subvert the Constitution and “build an imperial presidency,” while the other claimed that constitutional conservatism can “save America.”

Anti-LGBT First Liberty Institute hired Klukowski in 2015 as senior counsel and director of strategic affairs “to litigate cases involving the First Amendment and freedom of belief and expression.” Anti-LGBT hate group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) referred to Klukowski in 2017 as an ally at First Liberty, andKlukowski has said he has participated in ADF legal trainings, according to The Nation.

Klukowski served on the Trump transition team with Blackwell,who was domestic policy chair. According to a HuffPost report, Blackwell said that Klukowski “structured” the draft of the controversial “religious freedom” order. A draft was leaked in early 2017 and included exemptions for people and organizations claiming religious objections to abortion, premarital sex, transgender rights and same-sex marriage. Trump later signed an executive order in May 2017 to “enhance religious freedom and freedom of speech.” This version did not include language from the earlier draft that would have allowed federal contractors to discriminate against LGBT employees on the basis of religion.

Klukowski’s appointment is “another example of the increasingly cozy relationship between this administration and elements of the far-right,” said Gillian Branstetter, media relations manager at the National Center for Transgender Equality, in an email to Hatewatch. “Entrusting implementation of administration policies to someone with Mr. Klukowski’s track record will further pave the way for this administration to endanger the rights of transgender people to live, labor, and learn as who we are.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/23/5-takeaways-jan-6-hearing-trumps-doj-plot/

wapo

June 23, 2022

In the Jan. 6 committee hearing on June 23, witnesses described how President Donald Trump pressured the Justice Department to investigate election fraud. (Video: JM Rieger/The Washington Post, Photo: Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)

The Jan. 6 committee on Thursday held its fifth major hearing, this one focused on President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign on the Justice Department to help him overturn the election.

The plot was spearheaded within the department by an official named Jeffrey Clark, whose home federal agents searched Wednesday in a significant development that reflects the increasing legal jeopardy faced by Trump’s allies and perhaps Trump himself. Trump at one point considered installing Clark as acting attorney general to further the plot — which prompted mass resignation threats....

The Jan. 6 committee on Thursday held its fifth major hearing, this one focused on President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign on the Justice Department to help him overturn the election.

The plot was spearheaded within the department by an official named Jeffrey Clark, whose home federal agents searched Wednesday in a significant development that reflects the increasing legal jeopardy faced by Trump’s allies and perhaps Trump himself. Trump at one point considered installing Clark as acting attorney general to further the plot — which prompted mass resignation threats.

Timeline: Trump's pressure on the Justice Department to overturn the election

Below, some takeaways from the hearing.

1. The pardon picture, filled out

In a video presented on June 23, Trump White House officials said that at least five House Republicans asked President Donald Trump for pardons. (Video: The Washington Post, Photo: Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

The committee has repeatedly previewed evidence that certain key players in Trump’s plot soughtpardons. Last week, one of them was revealed to be Trump lawyer John Eastman, who asked to be put on “the pardon list.” The implication from that email was that there was indeed a list that seemingly might have other names.

The committee built out its own list Thursday, adding several House Republicans to it. Here are the names and the evidence:

Reps. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) — In a Jan. 11 email from Brooks, he said he and Gaetz were suggesting pardons for everyone who objected to the election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. White House lawyer Eric Herschmann also said he believed that Gaetz had requested a pardon. White House aide John McEntee said Gaetz told him he asked for one from White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Meadows, also testified to the effort by Brooks and Gaetz, saying that Gaetz had been seeking a pardon “since early December” and that he reached out to her personally.

Days after the Capitol attack and the final attempt to overturn the election, Members of Congress requested pardons.

Five days after the attack on the Capitol, Representative Mo Brooks requested pardons for himself, Representative Gaetz, and others. pic.twitter.com/f0xLm5SKtT

— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) June 23, 2022

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) — Hutchinson testified that he requested a pardon.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) — Hutchinson testified that he requested a pardon.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — Hutchinson said that she had heard that Greene had asked the White House counsel’s office for a pardon from deputy counsel Pat Philbin but that Greene hadn’t asked her personally.

Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) — Hutchinson testified that he requested a pardon.

Perry has flatly denied seeking a pardon, calling it “a shameless, soulless lie,” but Hutchinson said he talked to her directly about it.

Hutchinson also said that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), whom House Republicans tried to put on the committee before Democrats objected, talked with the White House about congressional pardons but that she was unaware of him asking for one.

What John Eastman and ‘the pardon list’ means

Asking for a pardon doesn’t equal admitting guilt,[but in applying you must tell what you did? negates exec priv] and Eastman in particular argued that his request was meant as a precaution. But given how far-fetched this plot was and how often those involved were told their plot was illegal, that fact that people were trying to cover their backsides on the way out is important.

And crucially, some of these requests came even before the plot failed on Jan. 6.

2. A new link between Trump and Justice Dept. plotters?

At another point, the committee indicated for apparently the first time that there might have been coordination in the plotting between Trump’s legal team and certain members of the Justice Department.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) shared a Dec. 28 email from longtimeOhio Republican Party politician Ken Blackwellrecommending a briefing for Vice President Mike Pence from Eastman and former Trump aide Kenneth Klukowski, who had recently joined the Justice Department. The email added that “we want to make sure we don’t overexpose Ken, given his new position.”

Klukowski has already been implicated in helping draft Clark’s draft letter seeking to have the Justice Department legitimize Trump’s false voter-fraud claims. This would indicate more of a link between that Justice Department effort and the Trump legal team.

“This email suggests that Mr. Klukowski was simultaneously working with Jeffrey Clark to draft the proposed letter to Georgia officials to overturn their certified election and working with Dr. Eastman to help pressure the vice president to overturn the election,” Cheney said.

The Jan. 6 committee connects two strands of Trump’s effort to retain power

We know elements of Trump’s legal team and the Justice Department plotted in different ways. But this suggests there might have been more coordination in the entire plot than we know. That’s particularly remarkable, given how much this effort within the Justice Department wasn’t sanctioned by superiors and how it would amount to government lawyers working with political aides to subvert democracy.

Stay tuned to this space.

3. Clark was warned about illegality, too

Justice Department officials recalled how President Donald Trump discussed replacing acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen days before the Jan. 6 attack. (Video: The Washington Post, Photo: Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

Yet again, we have been presented with evidence that those involved in this plot were told they would be breaking the law — and by no less than their own colleagues and allies.

This time, it was Clark.

Early in the hearing, the committee again played video of Herschmann’s testimony. In the clip, Herschmann said he offered a vulgar response when Clark laid out his plan to have the Justice Department intervene in the election dispute.

“When he finished discussing what he planned on doing, I said: … ‘Congratulations, you’ve just admitted your first step you’d take as attorney general would be committing a felony and violating Rule 6(e). You’re clearly the right candidate for this job.’”

Precisely which portion of Clark’s plan this referred to or why Herschmann thought it would break the law wasn’t clear, which is relevant. (Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e) prohibits a government attorney from disclosing matters occurring before a grand jury.)

But yet again, we know of people who might otherwise be sympathetic to Trump telling those involved in the plot that what they were advocating was illegal.

Herschmann previously said Rudy Giuliani admitted that their plan probably wouldn’t hold up in court. And Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R) testified that he told Giuliani that Giuliani was asking him to violate the law by overturning Arizona’s results. There is also a volume of evidence that Eastman also knew what he was advocating was illegal, including by his own admission.

All of this plays into efforts to argue that this plot was “corrupt,” which is a key element of the law the Jan. 6 committee has focused on.

4. Another Justice Dept. official testified he debunked fraud claims to Trump

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) on June 23 described President Donald Trump's pressure to find an attorney general to back his election lies. (Video: The Washington Post, Photo: Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

The other key element that the committee has keyed on while trying to prove corruption is how much Trump was told his voter-fraud claims were false. The committee has shown extensive evidence that Attorney General William P. Barr and Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue told him that — both broadly and when it came to multiple specific claims Trump made.

On Thursday, Barr’s successor as acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, said he told Trump much the same thing on his first day on the job in late December 2020.

“He thought the election had been stolen or was corrupt and that there was widespread fraud,” Rosen said. “And I had told him that our reviews had not shown that to be the case.”

Donoghue, who testified in person, also said Clark was told that his allegations — specifically, on foreign interference — were baseless and that he was briefed on that by the director of national intelligence.

But he said Clark pressed ahead with trying to get the draft letter sent anyway.

“We thought perhaps once it was explained to him that there was no basis for that part of his concern, that he would retreat,” Donoghue said. “But instead he doubled down and said: ‘Well, okay, so there’s no foreign interference. I still think there are enough allegations out there that we should go ahead and send this letter.’ Which shocked me even more than the initial one, because you would think after a couple of days of looking at this, he like we would have come to the same conclusion that it was completely unfounded.”

Donoghue has said he repeatedly told Clark that what he was doing was tantamount to having the Justice Department meddle in the presidential election. Donoghue said Clark responded, “I think a lot of people meddled in this election.”

Again, all of this comes back to corrupt intent — that those involved knew what they were saying was false and even illegal, and pressed forward anyway.

5. Everyone hates Jeff Clark

Richard Donoghue, former acting deputy attorney general, criticized former justice department official Jeffery Clark's qualifications in a video on June 23. (Video: The Washington Post, Photo: Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)

It’s already been a bad week for Clark, and it got no better Thursday. In addition to having his role in the plot detailed so extensively and having his home searched, it became clear how little regard his fellow government lawyers had for him.

Herschmann said in a video clip: “I thought Jeff’s proposal was nuts. I said, at a certain point, ‘Listen, the best I can tell is the only thing you know about environmental and elections challenges is they both start with E. And based on your answers tonight, I’m not even sure if you know that.’ ”

Donoghue recalled a meeting that involved both Trump and Clark:

And so I said, ‘Mr. President, you’re talking about putting a man in that seat who has never tried a criminal case, who’s never conducted a criminal investigation. He’s telling you that he’s going to take charge of the department — 115,000 employees, including the entire FBI, and turn the place on a dime and conduct a nationwide criminal investigations that will produce results in a matter of days? It’s impossible. It’s absurd. It’s not going to happen. It’s going to fail. He has never been in front of a trial jury, a grand jury. He’s never even been to [FBI Director Christopher] Wray’s office.’ … ‘It’s not going to happen. He’s not competent.’

Donoghue was asked whether anyone in the room thought Clark had the appropriate background or supported Clark as acting attorney general. He responded: “No one.”

The picture painted was of a dilettante being completely out of his depth and striving for power by any means necessary.

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oops morton

https://newrepublic.com/article/165984/10-people-destroying-democracy

Anne Nelson/April 18, 2022

10 People You’ve Never Heard of Who Are Destroying Democracy

They’re sowing disruption and disinformation, and they have their eyes on 2024.

Democracy in Peril

    [Will the Democrats Fight to Save Democracy?

    10 People You’ve Never Heard of Who Are Destroying Democracy

    The Six States That Could Determine Whether Republicans Steal the 2024 Election

    View All ]

In recent years, America’s democracy has faced countless challenges. Some seemed to materialize out of thin air, but many have been the fruit of secretive networks such as the 40-year-old Council for National Policy. Here are 10 individuals who have sown the seeds of disruption and disinformation—and who are setting their sights on the 2024 presidential election.

Larry Arnn

President, Hillsdale College

For decades, Michigan-based Hillsdale has served as an academic partner for the religious right. The college has had a close relationship to the Council for National Policy, the secretive Christian right umbrella organization that directs so much right-wing activism, through Arnn and his predecessor, George Roche III (who left in a cloud of scandal). Hillsdale’s major donors have constituted a who’s who of the radical right, including the Koch network and leading figures from the CNP. Arnn has expanded Hillsdale’s role as a platform for the CNP’s network of megadonors, fundamentalist activists, and media outlets, providing their policy prescriptions with a thin veneer of academic respectability. The college enrolls around 1,500 students, but its leaves an outsize footprint in political messaging. Its highly politicized publication Imprimis is sent to more than six million recipients. Hillsdale operates the Kirby Center in Washington, D.C., where it has groomed young conservatives at the Capitol Hill Staff Training School, run by the Leadership Institute (see Morton Blackwell, below). Hillsdale is also playing a role in the current disruption of public education, which has been used for political leverage in Virginia and beyond. In 2020, Donald Trump appointed Arnn chair of the 1776 Commission, to promote a “patriotic” rebuttal to the 1619 Project’s racially inclusive approach to U.S. history. Hillsdale has led an ongoing campaign to politicize public schools, promoting anti–critical race theory campaigns and assisting in the launch of “affiliate” charter schools in 11 states.

Joe Seales

CEO, Right Side Broadcasting Network

RSBN serves as the equivalent of a Trump-specific C-SPAN that has carried nearly every Trump speech, rally, and town hall since July 2015, as well as full coverage of the pro-Trump Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). It also broadcasts a show called The Right View, with Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump. On January 6, it livestreamed Trump’s speech inciting the march on the Capitol, and it gave live coverage to the Florida “Freedom Rally to Show Support for President Trump and January 6th Political Prisoners” a year later. In July 2021, RSBN was temporarily suspended by YouTube, but the network looked to its own app and the new pro-Trump platform Rumble to continue to carry Trump’s rallies. The radical right has been assiduously constructing a parallel media system in recent decades. RSBN, Rumble, and Trump’s new Truth Social platform complement other media initiatives, ranging from traditional fundamentalist broadcasters like American Family Radio to social sites like Gettr and Parler, in the ongoing construction of an alternate political reality for millions of followers. In March 2022, after the height of the Ottawa truckers’ protests, RSBN promoted a truckers’ convoy roundtable hosted by Representatives Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and it has offered ongoing amplification of Trump’s false election fraud claims. We can be sure that whatever Trump fabricates for future news cycles, RSBN will be repeating it.

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Neil Patel

Co-founder and publisher of The Daily Caller

The Caller website was launched in 2010 by Patel and Tucker Carlson, his college roommate, with a $3 million investment from Patel’s fellow CNP member Foster Friess. (Carlson served as editor in chief until 2016 and left the publication in 2019, when Patel bought him out.) The site claims more than 20 million monthly readers, and the Daily Caller News Foundation licenses its content free of charge to almost 300 outlets. Patel has used the site as a platform for voices of the radical right, including Jason Kessler, the white supremacist who organized the Charlottesville rally, as well as climate denial and disinformation, such as a falsified “nude” photo of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The site favors members of the CNP, including Supreme Court spouse Ginni Thomas (a Caller “special correspondent”) and Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk. The Daily Caller has recently launched a Facebook video platform called American Voices, with three million followers, that partners with media platforms of the religious right. It also boosts Carlson’s Fox News broadcasts. The Caller’s YouTube channel features additional Carlson content, comedy and sports programming, as well as regular attacks on Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci, and CNN. It has given ample space to Trump’s false claims of election fraud, and positive coverage of voter suppression legislation.

Jenny Beth Martin

Co-founder and CEO, Tea Party Patriots

Martin launched the Tea Party Patriots in March 2009 in collaboration with Amy Kremer and Mark Meckler, with funding from FreedomWorks, a “grassroots service center” founded with Koch backing. The Tea Party Patriots spent the Obama administration organizing various “spontaneous” anti-government, anti-tax rallies. Martin, Meckler, and Kremer also joined the CNP; by 2020, Martin had risen to the executive committee and Meckler to the status of Gold Circle member. Martin’s Tea Party Patriots became the meeting ground for the secular Koch brothers and the Christian nationalist CNP. She became the go-to woman for organizing campaigns, including political canvassing and public protests. Martin was a key point person for the CNP in Trump’s reelection campaign. In April 2020, she organized “100 Business Executives” in support of Trump, along with fellow CNP members Adam Brandon of FreedomWorks and Lisa Nelson of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Trump acknowledged Martin by name in his speech before the CNP on the eve of the 2020 GOP convention. On November 4, 2020, Martin announced that her organization was going to hold “Protect the Vote” rallies in swing states. On December 30, she tweeted that she would be speaking at the January 6 Stop the Steal rally: “We must demand Congress to challenge the Electoral College votes and fight for President Trump!” (Martin was present at the rally, but didn’t end up speaking.) Most recently, Martin has spoken out in support of the Canadian truckers’ protest. “We are all truckers now,” she told The Hill in February.

Simone Gold

Founder, America’s Frontline Doctors

Gold was an emergency physician in Los Angeles who was tapped by the CNP leadership to serve as a point person for a massive Covid disinformation campaign. The plan was advanced on a conference call in May 2020, while the pandemic was first raging, and after Trump held his increasingly erratic press conferences that included CNP president William Walton and Trump aide Mercedes Schlapp. The goal was to use physicians to persuade the public that the economy could be opened up in time to benefit the Trump campaign. Gold began a series of appearances on media platforms run by CNP members, disparaging the idea that Covid was a “huge medical crisis,” pushing the false hydroxychloroquine “cure,” and attacking Anthony Fauci.

On July 27, 2020, Jenny Beth Martin introduced Gold and a dozen colleagues standing before the U.S. Supreme Court building, repeating a litany of falsehoods about the virus. Their statements, livestreamed by Breitbart News, quickly went viral, and the video was enthusiastically retweeted by Donald Trump. On January 6, Gold joined the mob that breached the Capitol. She was recorded in the Rotunda denouncing the Covid vaccine as “an experimental biological agent deceptively named a vaccine.” She was charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct (she pleaded guilty in March and will be sentenced in June). Over 2021, she appeared in a series of “Health and Freedom Conferences” across the country, sharing the bill with Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, and Mike Lindell. In 2020, she set up a profitable online prescription service for bogus Covid “cures.”

Morton Blackwell

Founder and president, the Leadership Institute

Blackwell, Paul Weyrich, and Richard Viguerie were young Goldwater activists when they joined forces in the 1960s. Together, they helped to create a constellation of conservative groups, including the CNP umbrella organization and its partner CPAC. Blackwell took on the task of training future generations of right-wing political candidates and activists. His Leadership Institute, launched in 1979, claims that it has trained more than 200,000 people over its history, many of them in county- and state-level sessions in battleground districts. The courses include fundraising, speechwriting, social media, and candidate development. Graduates of the institute include Mike Pence, Representative Jim Jordan, and Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe. The institute’s training is ongoing, especially in contested states. In 2021, the GOP, noting that it needed to net only five congressional districts to take the House, targeted 47 districts, five of them in Texas. That year, the Leadership Institute blanketed Texas, scheduling around 40 training workshops between March and November 2021—many months before the midterm elections. The national Democrats, in contrast, have tended to enter the state campaign arenas a few months or even weeks before the elections, offering minimal training on the ground, limited digital campaign tools, and poorly coordinated data. The institute’s menu of courses reflects the right’s current initiatives, including School Board Campaign Training and a School Board Activist Workshop.

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Cleta Mitchell

Attorney}:

Mitchell is a longtime member of the CNP board of governors. More recently, she appeared on panels at 2020 CNP meetings speaking on “Election Integrity: Securing the Ballot Box” and “Election Integrity: Action Steps.” Mitchell also serves on the board of directors of the Bradley Foundation, run by fellow CNP board member Richard Graber. Following Biden’s victory, Mitchell tweeted that the Georgia recount was “A FAKE!!!” She traveled to Georgia as a volunteer legal adviser for Trump’s campaign and helped to file a December 2020 lawsuit challenging the returns. According to The Washington Post’s Robert O’Harrow Jr., “On December 30, Mitchell wrote to [then–White House chief of staff] Mark Meadows and offered to send some 1,800 pages of documents purporting to support claims of election fraud.” On January 2, Mitchell took part in Trump’s infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, of whom Trump famously demanded, “I just want to find 11,780 votes.” The call was leaked, and when Mitchell’s role was disclosed, she was obliged to resign from her position at the Foley & Lardner law firm. But Mitchell continues her work through her strategy sessions at the CNP, her board membership at the Bradley Foundation, her Apple podcast Who’s Counting?, and her November 2021 appointment to the Board of Advisors of the federal Election Assistance Commission, which certifies voting systems—including voting machines—and advises local officials on compliance with federal regulations.

Richard Graber

CEO, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation

This Milwaukee foundation has assets of some $900 million. Graber is a member of the board of governors of the CNP, while CNP election strategist Cleta Mitchell is one of the foundation’s 11 board members. The Koch network and the DeVos family philanthropies may have received more attention, but the Bradley Foundation’s strategic, longtime focus on state-level politics has allowed it to make a major impact, using its home state of Wisconsin as a laboratory. In 2012 to 2013, the foundation spent more than $8 million on a network of groups promoting a right-to-work law also supported by then-Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (a fellow CNP board member) and attacking Wisconsin trade unions. The resulting right-to-work law crippled the unions and contributed to Wisconsin’s shift from a Democratic to a swing state. In 2021, the Bradley Foundation earmarked $600,000 for the American Legislative Exchange Council’s voter management campaign software and other activities, bringing its ALEC contributions to $5.4 million over the previous decade. In 2020 and 2021, the foundation gave $200,000 to the Claremont Institute. Claremont has played a critical role in the radical right’s promotion of false claims of fraud and the efforts to rewrite voting laws in advance of the 2024 elections; John Eastman, who drafted the infamous six-point memo used by Trump to challenge the Electoral College on January 6, is a Claremont senior fellow. The foundation also contributed $300,000 to the Public Interest Legal Foundation (chaired by Cleta Mitchell) and $175,000 to the Heritage Foundation’s election law initiative, both of which promoted Trump’s false claims of fraud.

Lisa Nelson

CEO, American Legislative Exchange Council

Nelson came to ALEC in 2014 after previous stints on Newt Gingrich’s staff and at GOPAC, the Republican state and local political training organization. ALEC was co-founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, also a co-founder of the CNP. ALEC convenes corporate sponsors and Republican state legislators to “collaborate” on model bills—including legislation to oppose environmental regulation and gun control. In April 2020, The Washington Post reported that Nelson, Jenny Beth Martin, and Adam Brandon were leading an effort to organize a group of businesspeople to help Trump “jump-start” the economy in the depths of the Covid epidemic. Nelson continued her efforts over 2020 and doubled down after the Biden’s victory. From December 2 to 4, 2020, ALEC hosted a secret “process working group” for Republican state legislators, election commissioners, and attorneys to develop strategies on election oversight and redistricting. In July 2021, ALEC hosted and financed an “academy” under the rubric of the “Honest Elections Project” in conjunction with its annual meeting, with panels featuring Cleta Mitchell and other CNP strategists. Nelson offered a preview of their project to rewrite election laws at the CNP’s May 2021 meeting: “We’ve been targeting our efforts on those states that have had issues—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Florida to a certain degree.” Currently, Republicans control 30 state legislatures, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. If successfully implemented, the independent state legislature initiative could determine the outcome of the 2024 elections, regardless of the popular vote.

Daniel J. Schultz

Attorney and founder, Precinct Strategy

Schultz was an early proponent of the idea that Republican-controlled legislatures could overturn election results—later promoted as the “independent state legislature doctrine.” In some interpretations, Republican-controlled state legislatures could nullify the popular vote and send their own electors to put Trump in office. The key to his strategy? Purging from the Republican Party inconveniently ethical officials like Brad Raffensperger, starting at the precinct level. “We can take over the party if we invade it,” Schultz told Steve Bannon on his podcast in February 2021. Over the following months, there was a surge in candidates for precinct chairman positions across the country. Schultz has pointed to the strategy’s success in Arizona as a model. ProPublica reported that in one Maricopa district, the precinct roster grew by 63 percent in less than six months. Schultz’s website asks: “Can we get 3/10 of 1% of the 74 M Trump America Firsters to Become Republican Precinct Committeemen? To TAKE OVER The Republican Party? To Save the Republic?” He points out that precinct committeemen are the ones who elect the state party leaders and are the only ones who can vote to endorse primary candidates; in some states, they are the only ones who can nominate candidates to fill vacancies in state legislatures. The logic is that full slates of pro-Trump precinct chairs could guarantee pro-Trump candidates on the Republican state-level ballots in 2022, who could be activated to enact the independent state legislature doctrine in 2024—subject to judicial review. Donald Trump approves. On February 27, 2022, he issued a statement endorsing ­Schultz’s project.

Anne Nelson @anelsona

Anne Nelson is the author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. She has taught at Columbia University for over 20 years and is currently a research scholar at Columbia’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies.

Read More: Magazine, May 2022, Politics, The Soapbox, Feature, Democracy, January 6, Republican Party, Donald Trump, Right Wing Extremism

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2022/03/11/revealed-new-leaders-of-council-for-national-policy-set-extremist-agenda/

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at its first meeting of 2022, the secretive Council for National Policy (CNP) laid out its plans for influencing this year’s midterm elections, abolishing abortion rights, defunding the left, limiting China’s influence, and countering a topic of great concern to Republicans: “wokeness.”

According to an agenda obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), the CNP meeting took place the last weekend in February at the posh Ritz-Carlton in Dana Point, California. The agenda reveals  changes in leadership and current priorities of the influential group, which is closelytied to Trump and the Republican Party.

Kevin Roberts, a CNP board member and president of the Heritage Foundation, kicked the event off with a speech on “how the Conservative Movement can go on the offense to promote America’s founding principles across the country.”

CNP is known for “connecting the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of Western plutocrats and the strategy of right-wing Republican political operatives,” as Columbia University Professor Anne Nelson describes the group in her definitive book :{:{Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{Secret Hub :(style="background-color:#ff9900;"):}::{of the Radical Right:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:.

Leadership Changes Elevate Voter Suppression Advocates 

The program for the February meeting offers the first glimpse of the secretive group’s high-level members and leaders since CMDpublished its September 2020 Membership Directory, provided by open source intelligence researcher Brent Allpress.

The group’s Executive Committee is headed by Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who has taken over from William Walton as CNP’s president. Judicial Watch’s “Election Integrity Project” has pushed for voter roll purges and promotes the myth that voter fraud is widespread in the U.S.

At the August 2020 CNP meeting, Fitton facilitated two panels on “election integrity,” CMDreported. “We need to stop those [vote-by-mail] ballots from going out, and I want the lawyers here to tell us what to do,” Fitton told meeting attendees, according to videos obtained by The Washington Post.

Another lifelong advocate of voter suppression now serves as CNP’s vice president: J. Kenneth Blackwell, a former secretary of state in Ohio and member of Trump’s failed voter fraud panel, the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. He currently chairs the Center for Election Integrity at the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a nonprofit spin-off of the Trump administration.

In May 2021, Blackwell facilitated an “Action Session” at CNP’s 40th anniversary meeting on how to combat the national voting rights effort, featuring U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), who voted against certifying the 2020 presidential electoral college results, and GOP lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who has promoted Trump’s Big Lie and advised him on his infamous call pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes for the former president to win the state.

At its February meeting, CNP hosted a screening of the film:{**Capitol Punishment**:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: with director Chris Burgard, which promotes the claim that, “Everything that we are being told [about the insurrection] is a lie and Americans are being persecuted to support that lie.” CNP has extensive ties to #StoptheSteal and the violent insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, CMD reported.

Others joining the CNP executive committee this year include Jerry A. Johnson (treasurer), former president of the National Religious Broadcasters; William G. Boykin, retired Army lieutenant general and executive vice president of theFamily Research Council; Chad Connelly, president of Faith Wins; and Millie Hallow, managing director of executive operations at the National Rifle Association.

Blackwell is also listed as president of the board of directors for CNP Action, and Fitton is a new director of the affiliate.

The Gold Circle Members list is largely similar to the September 2020 directory, with many of the new additions representing shifts from lower membership tiers. Notable new members include Ashland University President Carlos Campo; Lynn Friess, widow of GOP megadonor Foster Friess;and Ryan Helfenbein, executive director of the Standing for Freedom Center and a vice president at Liberty University.

Politicizing Covid

“The pandemic led to unprecedented government mandates, the erosion of civil liberties, and an outright assault on freedom,” CNP’s agenda booklet argues. “Americans have seen and experienced what unchecked government power can do, and they have had enough.”

CNP has been instrumental in the relentless push from the right to ignore public health guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during the deadly Covid-19 pandemic. It played a leading role in the anti-lockdown coalition known as “Save Our Country,” with members making up half of its leadership counciland organizing weekly conference calls to coordinate response tactics.

In May 2020, CMD also revealed that CNP Action, CNP’s 501(c)(4) affiliate, organized a call to discuss a plan for recruiting “extremely pro-Trump” doctors to campaign against Covid public health restrictions.

CNP’s February meeting featured a general session on the state of the pandemic in the U.S. led byDr. Jay Bhattacharya, a leading advocate for herd immunity who has advised Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) on his controversial anti-mask policies.

Focus on Elections 

Despite being a tax-exempt organization barred from engaging in electoral politics, CNP is focusing heavily on elections this year, according to the agenda for its February meeting.

Dave Bossie, president of Citizens United, led things off at the Gold Circle Dinner with a presentation on “the most pressing political battles in DC and their impact on the Conservative Movement.”

A general session titled “Virginia 2021: Lessons Learned” featured Chad Connelly, founder and president of Faith Wins; Mark Campbell, campaign manager for Glenn Youngkin, the Republican who won the 2021 governor’s race in Virginia; Victoria Cobb, president of The Family Foundation of Virginia; and Chris Wilson, CEO of WPA Intelligence sharing “their analyses of the Virginia race” and “what it means for 2022.”

After not winning a statewide race in more than a decade, in 2021 Republicans in Virginia won the offices of governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general, while also recapturing the majority in the state House.

Former Virginia Secretary of Natural Resources Becky Norton Dunlop, a past president of CNP,  joined the four “Lessons Learned” panelists for a CNP Action session “to chart the course to success nationwide in November.”

In his capacity as CNP Action chairman, Blackwell also hosted “Candidate Introductions” for attendees. While candidates were not listed on the program, CMD obtained a flier for Drew Montez Clark, a Republican candidate for Florida’s 25th district seat in the U.S. House, that was circulated at the meeting.

Clarkreportedly co-organized two buses carrying 100 Floridians to the Jan. 6 rally in DC that led to the violent insurrection at the Capitol. He also spoke at a far-right “America First” rally in April 2021 headlined by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).

Supreme Court Takes Center Stage

“This term of the Supreme Court could be one of the most consequential ever, and CNP Members have been central to some of the landmark cases being decided,” the CNP’s February meeting program notes. Speakers at a general session on the subject included Alan Sears, founder of the Christian right litigation powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom; Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser; and First Liberty President Kelly Shackelford.

“CNP has been strategizing to dominate the Supreme Court for decades,” CNP expert Anne Nelson told the Associated Press in Oct 2020. “They have worked through the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Rifle Association, all run by members of the CNP.”

Dannenfelserwas among 14 other CNP members to attend the Sept. 26, 2020, Rose Garden ceremony at the White House where Amy Coney Barrett accepted the nomination for the Supreme Court, solidifying the far-right’s hold on the nation’s highest court.

The agenda notes that Dannenfelser “will provide an update on the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case that could result in completely gutting or overturning Roe v. Wade,” the 1973 Supreme Court decision guaranteeing women in America the constitutional right to an abortion.

Mississippi’s Speaker of the House Phillip Gunn (R-Miss.), the 2020 chair of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), touted the Dobbs v. Jacksoncase and its prospects for leading to a decision to overturn Roe v. Wade during a panel at the CNP meeting last May, CMD reported.

“We think that’s going to be a landmark case. All of us know that the United States Supreme Court composition has changed… in a way that is more pro-life,” Gunn told meeting attendees last spring. “They say that Amy Coney Barrett is one of the most active, pro-life people in America, so we believe that she brings a new dynamic to that court. We think our case, our law that we passed in 2018, will be transformative in the arena in abortion. We’re proud of that.”

Dannenfelser then led a CNP Action panel “on how the Conservative Movement can be best equipped for the impending Supreme Court decision on Dobbs” and to “strategize on messaging, state legislation, and more with attendees.”

One of the panelists,Mike Thompson, is a senior vice president with CRC Advisors. Leonard Leo,who played an integral role in Trump’s effort to pack the federal judiciary with right-wing judges, founded CRC Advisors in 2020 with Greg Mueller to “funnel big money and expertise across the conservative movement.” As of September 2020, Leo was aBoard of Governors member of CNP....

Pushing Back Against China, the Left, and a “Woke” Military 

Placing China “at the heart of the greatest challenges facing the United States in recent years”—from Covid to currency manipulation, climate policies, and “undue influence over American corporations”—Economic War Room host Kevin Freeman led a discussion titled “The 21st: An American or Chinese Century?”

Freeman was joined in the panel by Beau Brunson, Consumers’ Research Director of Policy and Regulatory Affairs. Consumers’ Research has committed millions in dark money to fight environmental, social, and corporate governance concerns (ESG) and “woke” capitalism, where BlackRock has emerged as a top target of its campaign for its “hypocritical” investments in China.

CMD recently exposed Consumers’ Research as one of the largest sponsors of the State Financial Officers Foundation, a group of Republican treasurers, auditors, and staff from 16 states, which has  also prioritized fighting the ESG movement and “woke” capitalism.

Also on the panel were Pete Hoekstra, former ambassador to the Netherlands under Trump, and Steve Milloy, a FoxNews contributor and paid advocate for Phillip Morris, ExxonMobil, and other corporations.

The three also participated in a CNP Action panel on “Countering China,” where they collectively worked “on ways to combat the increasing and pervasive threat China poses to the United States and American life.”

Leading an CNP Action panel discussion on “Defunding the Left,”**Buckeye Institute** President and CEO Robert Alt facilitated a tutorial on how to cut off contributions to “left-wing causes” by targeting public employee unions, trial lawyers, and investment management firms. O.H. Skinner, executive director of Alliance for Consumers, and Bridgett Wagner, vice president of policy promotion at the Heritage Foundation, joined the discussion.

New CNP Executive Member Boykin led a panel discussion focused on the question: “Can a Woke Military Address Future Threats?” with Mike Berry, First Liberty’s general counsel, and Keith Kellogg, retired Army lieutenant general and co-chair of AFPI’s Center for American Security. The three talked about “extreme policies [that] have been implemented through the Department of Defense” and “how woke ideologies have influenced our armed services.”

Two other CNP meetings are scheduled for this year, May 18–20 in McLean, VA, and September 15–17 in Frisco, TX.

big bad code so no lnx

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2021/11/16/alec-academy-featured-a-whos-who-of-voter-suppression-leaders/

an “Academy” for state lawmakers on voter suppression strategies run by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in July featured a veritable who’s who of the right-wing leaders behind this year’s disinformation campaign about voter fraud and assaults on voting rights across the country, documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) show.

While the July 26-28 session was ostensibly led by the dark money group Honest Elections Project, it was organized, hosted, and bankrolled by ALEC, despite repeated claims by its CEO, Lisa Nelson, that the group does not work on voting issues.

Nelson provided the formal welcome at the conference’s opening session, ALEC staff organized turnout, and ALEC provided two nights of accommodations at the five-star Grand America Hotel, five meals, and a $450 travel reimbursement for attendees. ALEC’s annual meeting was held at the same hotel immediately after the Academy.

An invite published by CMD in July stated that “13 legislators from across the country” would be in attendance, but the materials acquired by CMD do not include an attendance list.

Rather than email materials to ALEC lawmakers that may be subject to open records laws, ALEC distributed hard copies of the agenda at registration along with a “zip drive containing a resources document and a one-pager on your state’s election policies,” according to an email from Sarah Wall, ALEC’s manager of legislative outreach and coalitions, obtained by CMD. Wall’s email also lists Michael Bowman, president of ALEC Action, as a key contact for the event.

Nelson tipped her hand about ALEC’s voter suppression subterfuge in May at a meeting of the far-right Council for National Policy. Video of the event obtained by CMD shows Nelson speaking frankly about ALEC’s work on voting and revealing its plans to outsource model policy on the controversial topic to avert the spotlight. “We don’t have model policy. We will be developing that at the Honest Elections Project [Academy], through them,” Nelson said.

Honest Elections Project, the group ALEC chose to carry the ball on its voting agenda, is a dark money operation formed in February 2020 to push for voting restrictions and spread baseless and dangerous claims about election fraud, laying the groundwork for Trump’s attempt to overturn the election. It is a project of The 85 Fund, the new legal name for the Judicial Education Project, a group linked to Leonard Leo that played a central role in Trump’s effort to pack the federal judiciary with right-wing judges.

Speakers at the Academy featured many of the key strategists and leaders on the Right spreading misinformation around voter fraud, promoting Trump’s lies around the 2020 election, and pushing sweeping new voting restrictions.

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita gave the keynote address. A proponent of Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen, Rokita recently testified in front of the U.S. Senate against strengthening the federal Voting Rights Act.

Rokita was one of only four state attorneys general to not sign a National Association of Attorneys General letter condemning the Jan. 6 violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and is a member of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA). RAGA was a member of the “March to Save America” coalition that organized the Jan. 6 rally, and its policy arm, Rule of Law Defense Fund, sent out robocalls urging supporters to “march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal.”

Agenda Focused on Election Legislation

Most of the Academy sessions focused on legislation, giving legislators a chance to discuss bills to restrict voting that have already been introduced and passed in their states this year and hear from Republican-aligned leaders about what more they think needs to be done.

By the time ALEC held its voter suppression Academy in July, 18 states had already passed 30 laws this year making it harder to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

The Honest Elections Project’s Executive Director Jason Snead, who worked with ALEC to organize the event, laid out “priorities for election integrity across the states” and polling results in a breakfast session and appeared on another panel on how to “shore up” legislative control over election processes with Jason Torchinsky and Lee Goodman.

The Honest Elections Project has aggressively promoted a radical legal theory called the “independent state legislatures doctrine,” which holds that state courts don’t have the authority to review state election laws and would empower heavily gerrymandered state legislatures to determine election outcomes.

Republican legislators have already introduced and passed bills in 2021 “interfering with nonpartisan local election administration and consolidating power to administer and determine elections results themselves,” the Voting Rights Lab reported.

Snead is a former senior policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation where he developed its Election Fraud Database, which the Brennan Center for Justice says “grossly exaggerated” the extent of voter fraud.

Torchinsky is general counsel for the National Republican Redistricting Trust and has been defending ALEC against CMD’s state complaints alleging that ALEC illegally gave sophisticated voter management campaign software linked to the Republican National Committee to its legislative members.

Goodman is an elections attorney and a former Republican chairman and commissioner of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) between 2013 and 2018.

Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action, and Ken Blackwell, executive director of the MAGA voter suppression center at America First Policy Institute led another legislative session on “securing absentee ballots.”

Anderson bragged to Heritage donors in April that policies, “severely restricting mail ballot drop boxes” and “preventing election officials from sending absentee ballot request forms to voters” were among recommendations Heritage gave Georgia for its massive voter suppression bill.

Blackwell’s Center for Election Integrityrecently published a “Top 25 Common-Sense State Election Integrity Reforms” fact sheet that includes these Heritage recommendations alongside other extreme voter suppression wish-list items, such as eliminating no-excuse absentee ballots and requiring an affidavit for absentee applications.

Blackwell also moderated a panel at the Academy with state legislators “discussing election challenges they’ve faced in their own states.”

Another panel over breakfast covered “things to consider with implementation of laws” related to election day voter registration, “election observer protections,” and organizing seniors to work the polls. Chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission Donald Palmer, a Trump appointee, and Cleta Mitchell, chair of the Conservative Partnership Institute’s Election Integrity Network, led the session.

Mitchell is a Big Lie fueler and Trump legal advisor who lost her job at Foley & Lardner following news that she participated in a January call in which Trump asked Georgia election officials to “find” enough votes to make him the winner of the state’s electoral votes.

“On Dec. 30, Cleta Mitchell wrote to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and offered to send some 1,800 pages of documents purporting to support claims of election fraud,” The Washington Post Magazine reported. Meadows is now a colleague of Mitchell’s at the Conservative Partnership Institute.

Three Republican secretaries of state, Tennessee’s Tre Hargett, Kentucky’s Michael Adams, and West Virginia’s Mac Warner, spoke on a panel about “what policies the states need to employ to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”

“Easier to vote and harder to cheat” has been a favored talking point of Republicans in recent years.

All three are active in the Republican Secretaries of State Committee (RSSC), with Hargett serving as chair and Adams as vice chair. Republican secretaries of state produced a report on “Best Practices for Making It Easier to Vote and Harder to Cheat” for the Republican State Leadership Committee, obtained by CMD.

The RSSC holds monthly calls that Commissioner Palmer often attends. Secretary Warner and Palmer also participated in an “off-the-record” Election University session on June 21 as part of the U.S. House GOP’s “Faith in Elections Project,” as first reported by CMD.

ALEC Lawmakers Consider Litigation

ALEC’s Academy featured two panels on litigation. The first dealt with “anticipating challenges to the Voting Rights Act in Arizona,” legal challenges mounted by Democratic voting rights attorney Marc Elias, and redistricting fights, and was led by with Republican lawyers Torchinsky, Michael Thielen, and Brian Barnes.

Thielen is the executive director of the Republican National Lawyers Association and served on the national board of Lawyers for Trump in 2020. Barnes was involved in legal challenges to changes in voting procedures in North Carolina and Pennsylvania last fall.

Goodman and Utah’s former Solicitor General Tyler Green led the second panel on “operationalizing litigation challenges.” Noted in the description of the panel are “ways to challenge the scope of litigation attacks on new election integrity legislation (defense) as well as advance the ball on election integrity (offense).”

As of Oct. 3, “at least 43 voting cases have been filed in 12 states, and Georgia and Texas lead the way with ten new lawsuits each in 2021,” the Brennan Center reports.

Training Sessions on “the Left”

Two trainings focused on “the Left” filled out the remaining agenda at the ALEC Academy. Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow and manager of the Heritage Foundation’s “Election Reform Initiative,” and Ken Cuccinelli, former Trump staffer and chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative, led a session focused on “the Left’s attack on our election system” through “state-level attacks on election integrity legislation” and HR 1, the sweeping voting rights and campaign reform bill pending in Congress....Spakovsky, who was appointed by Trump to his voter fraud myth from the Right for well over a decade.president of the  Scott Walter gave the keynote for a “Mapping the Left Lunch.” Walter and CRC received funding from the Bradley Foundation... ;inspired by CMD’s SourceWatch, called “Influence Watch.” The site was “constructed in partnership with Berman and Company,” run by PR spin doctor Richard Berman, and in collaboration with ALEC.

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/pence-to-speak-to-secretive-council-for-national-policy-friday-cnp-members-involved-in-saturdays-stop-the-steal-rally/

no twt

As the results of the 2020 presidential election came rolling in, Vice President Mike Pence was notably out of sight ​and had even planned a Florida vacation for this week. But with ​the ratcheting up of Trump’s campaign to contest the outcome of the election, CNN reported that Pence canceled his getaway, remaining inside the Beltway ​to address the Council for National Policy, a highly secretive organization that includes some of the most powerful conservatives in the country.

As Pence stands at the podium before marquee names in conservative politics Friday, pro-Trump, far-right activists are making their way to Washington, D.C., for a rally organized and supported by some of the very right-wing leaders likely sitting in that room.

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his InfoWars network are leading a caravan of Trump supporters to D.C.,Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers militia has promised to station his armed men outside of the District borders should Trump call on them, and the Proud Boys hate group has encouraged its members to to the nation’s capital, with leader Enrique Tarrio declaring Trump’s “Standby order has been rescinded.” 

They, along with other ​conspiracy theorists, far-right groups and other Trump loyalists, have all promised to go to the Saturday event that goes by three names​: Million MAGA March, March for Trump, and Stop the Steal—to push a false narrative that voter fraud cost Trump the election. The event has been promoted by Fox News personalities Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham.

GOP operative Ali Alexander,who organized the gathering, was clear on the rally’s demands in a ​Nov. 10 Periscopepost. “We’re going down to the Supreme Court,​” he said, “and we’re telling our government that this election and the counting will be transparent, or we’ll get a new election. One or another.”

And they wouldn’t be on their way without​ the leadership and support of current and past Council for National Policy members for the Stop the Steal campaign. ​The CNP, which has been around since the Reagan administration, holds closed-door meetings, tells members not to speak to the press about the council, and has tried to keep membership rolls private, but its members’ names have leaked over the years.

Notable CNP members include Ginni Thomas, the influential wife of Clarence Thomas, and Tony Perkins, a former president of the organization and the current president of the Family Research Council, according to a 2020 membership directory published by Documented. CNP has also welcomed far-right figures like neo-Confederate Christian Reconstructionist Michael Peroutka, a major funder of former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore’s advocacy and political career.

CNP ​also counts among its members Ed Martin of ​Phyllis Schlafly Eagles,Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who has allied himself with dominionists and Christian nationalists in the past year—all of whom have pushed ​Stop the Steal messaging since Alexander launched the campaign and called on them to join it. 

Martin has led sparsely attended D.C. rallies and blasted Phyllis Schlafly Eagles’ email list with Stop the Steal talking points, while Kirk attended a rally in Phoenix and took to conservative media to promote it. Though it does not appear Fitton has used the #StoptheSteal hashtag, he has echoed the campaign’s language, alleged an “electoral coup,” accusedstates of voter fraud, and called for votes to stop being counted in others.

Amy Kremer, who was listed as a member in a 2014 membership directory obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is organizing in the state of Georgia for Stop the Steal events.Even Ali Alexander, who formerly went by Ali Akbar, is listed twice by both names as a signee on a 2017 letter from CNP to Donald Trump obtained by the Christian Post. David Armiak of the Center for Media and Democracy has also reported on some of these connections.

On Nov. 4, as Americans ​awoke to see Trump’s election night lead overtaken by the counting of mail-in ballots, which came in record numbers for Joe Biden, Alexander was expressed dismay. On Twitter, he suggested that the Republican Party should have adopted his 2018 Stop the Steal operation, which he had launched with ​the help of Trump confidant and since convicted felon Roger Stone​ during the recount of Florida’s 2018 U.S. Senate race. 

​On the day after the 2020 election, Alexander said he had no intention of rebooting it, but about an hour later, he suggested the only way he would restart the operation would be if a few key players were on board—among them, Tom Fitton, Amy Kremer, and Ed Martin. By around 2 p.m. that day, he’d added Charlie Kirk and others to the list.

"he’s decided only to do it under certain conditions and those conditions seem to be CNP support,” ​said Stephanie Lamy, a French information warfare researcher with Danaides who flagged the series of tweets​. “That’s very clear from this tweet by the people he mentions.”

And there’s good reason to ​seek CNP support given its power and its expertise in ​advancing unsubstantiated voter fraud narratives.

Last month, The Washington Post’s Robert O’Harrow got ​his hands on videos from an Aug. 21 CNP conference held at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City. Fitton, who Alexander called on to be in charge of the legal aspect of the ​Stop the Steal campaign, zeroed in on mail-in voting.“We need to stop those ballots from going out, and I want the lawyers here to tell us what to do,” Fitton said. “But this is a crisis that we’re not prepared for. I mean, our side is not prepared for.”

J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, also attacked mail-in voting at that meeting, telling activists, “Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re a racist and so forth.” Adams, a known voter suppressor, was also part of Trump administration’s short-lived “Commission on Election Integrity,” which folded after findingno evidence to support claims of widespread voter fraud. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Adams’ legal organization has issued two lawsuits since Nov. 4 claimingvoter fraud.

Current CNP Treasurer Kenneth Blackwell has promoted Stop the Steal on Twitterand Facebook and, as Right Wing Watch’s Peter Montgomery reported, baselessly charged Monday that “the Democrat-run Pennsylvania executive government only wants votes counted that support their agenda and their candidates.”

Trump himself has addressed CNP members—as recently as the Aug. 21 meeting and in the beginning of his campaign in 2015. According to The National Review, of the six Republican presidential candidates who addressed CNP in 2015, Trump was the “star attraction.”

Tags: Ali AkbarAli Alexander Amy Kremer Charlie Kirk Donald Trump Ed Martin Ginni Thomas J Christian Adams Ken Blackwell Michael Peroutka Mike Pence Tom Fitton Tony Perkins Disinformation Stop the Steal  Voter Fraud  Council for National Policy

rww nOVEMBER 10, 2020

Notorious Vote-Suppressor Kenneth Blackwell Denounces Pennsylvania Governor and His ‘Legion of Darkness’

Right-wing activist Ken Blackwell, a former Ohio Secretary of State criticized for voter suppression practices and an adviser to the Trump-Pence campaign, pulled out all the rhetorical stops in an attack on Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf published by theAmerican ThinkerMonday under the headline, “Governor Wolf and his legion of darkness must be stopped in Pennsylvania.”

Here’s how Blackwell’s diatribe began:

What is happening in Pennsylvania is a dark moment for America. Under the leadership of Governor Wolf and hisliberal regime,the Pennsylvania elections system has been completely compromised. It has become clear the leadership in this state is anti-democratic, does not value our Constitution, and is engaged in an outright attack on the legal votes that have been cast by the good, hardworking people of the Commonwealth.

In reality, there is no evidence to support Blackwell’s—or the Trump campaign’s—charges of massive voter fraud in Pennsylvania. Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania told the TODAY show last  Friday that it was “hard to watch” President Donald Trump’s lie-filled remarks last Thursday, saying, “The president’s charges of large-scale fraud—there’s no evidence here.” Trump has publicly charged that Republican poll watchers were prevented from observing counting in Pennsylvania, but Republican lawyers admittedin federal court that charge was not true.  

On Monday, the Trump campaign sued to stop the certification of the election results in Pennsylvania; the Associated Press noted, “The 85-page lawsuit itself contained no evidence of voter fraud, other than a smattering of allegations.” 

“Pennsylvania is going to fight every single attempt to disenfranchise voters,” Wolf’s office said Monday. “We will protect this election and the democratic process. Pennsylvania will count every vote, and we will protect the count of every vote.” 

But Blackwell, a member of Trump’s 2016 transition team and a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, claimed that Pennsylvania Democrats desired to “conduct this election in the dark,” citing a Bible verse that says “people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.”

“It could not be clearer that the Democrat-run Pennsylvania executive government only wants votes counted that support theiragenda and their candidates,” Blackwell charged. He alleged, without substantiation, that the Wolf administration intends “to slant the vote for their candidates” in what he called “the most egregious abuse of power I have ever witnessed in my decades of working on elections.”

Blackwell cited his own experience as Ohio’s top election official to lend credibility to his claims that “actions taken this cycle by the Pennsylvania executive government are abnormal, unethical, and downright corrupt.”

“Thankfully, President Trump and Republicans across America are fighting back, and will not allow this election to be stolen by the partisan hacks who have shown themselves to be enemies of a free and fair election process,” Blackwell wrote. “The people of Pennsylvania deserve to have every legal vote counted. In my days as Secretary of State in Ohio, this would never have been a question.”

But advocates for ballot access would hardly describe Blackwell’s tenure as Ohio’s Secretary of State as characterizing a nonpartisan approach to fairness. Far from it.

“Blackwell showed no inclination for fair voting practices while he was Ohio Secretary of State, and there is no indication he has had a change of heart,” noted the Ohio ACLU’s Katrice Williams in 2017, when Blackwell was appointed to Trump’s farcical and short-lived “election integrity” commission. The commission folded having “uncovered no evidence to support claims of widespread voter fraud,” the AP reported. At the time, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law characterized Blackwell as one of the “four horsemen of voter suppression” named to the “sham” commission.

One of Blackwell’s most notorious moves was his instruction to elected officials not to accept voter registrations unless they were printed on very heavy paper. Williams documented other notable efforts at voter suppression during Blackwell’s tenure.

Blackwell’s machinations were widely publicized at the time.

“Every significant decision that Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell made regarding the 2004 presidential election benefited George W. Bush,” wrote City Beat reporter Pete Shuler after the 2004 elections. He noted that Blackwell was honorary co-chair of Bush’s 2004 Ohio campaign and served as an election expert spinning the Bush campaign’s line to the media during the ballot recounts in Florida that ensued after the 2000 campaign.

Blackwell ran for governor in 2006 but was soundly defeated by Democrat Ted Strickland. In 2011, when he was pondering a run for the U.S. Senate, Mother Jones noted that in 2004 Blackwell “was accused of throwing the presidential vote in that crucial swing state in favor of George W. Bush and overseeing ‘massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies’ that disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters.”

The American Thinker, where Blackwell’s article was published this week, has been known to publish commentary from white nationalists

Tags: Ken Blackwell Election 2020 Donald J Trump for President Family Research Council

mma 8/19?

https://www.mediamatters.org/national-rifle-association/nra-board-member-shares-extremist-militia-branded-meme-blames-shootings

In the wake of two mass shootings in Texas and Ohio over the weekend that left more than 30 people dead, National Rifle Association board member Ken Blackwell shared a meme that blamed gun violence on a lack of prayer in school and lack of discipline at home.

Blackwell, former Ohio secretary of state, has served on the NRA’s public affairs committee and urban affairs committee in his capacity as a board member, and he was the keynote speaker at the NRA’s National Prayer Breakfast at its 2019 annual meeting. He is also a senior fellow at anti-LGBTQ group Family Research Council.

On Sunday night, Blackwell posted a meme on his Facebook page that read: “The problem is not guns, it’s hearts without God, homes without discipline, schools without prayer, and courtrooms without justice.

[twt pix clint w/ rifle]

the meme also depicted the Roman numeral III over a “Punisher” skull logo -- a common reference to the anti-government Three Percenter militia movement. The Southern Poverty Law Center describes the Three Percenters as “a loosely organized movement of gun owners” who believe that that gun safety laws should be opposed “with force if necessary.”

Following a 2014 mass shooting in Isla Vista, CA, Blackwell blamed that shooting on gay marriage.

==

ohio nuke fight

https://www.ideastream.org/news/dark-money-in-the-spotlight-in-heated-nuclear-bailout-referendum-campaign

hmmn, seems legit

The controversial U.S. Supreme Court decision *Citizens United v FEC* almost a decade ago helped bring in hundreds of millions of dollars into political campaigns – and the groups that get some of it don’t have to disclose where it came from.

Dark money gets a lot of attention at the federal level, but it’s hard at work in Ohio right now.

The proposal to overturn the state’s new nuclear power plant bailout isn’t even on the ballot. But the group that’sgathering signatures to put it there has launched.

“If someone approaches you with a petition to allow you to vote on corporate bailouts, sign it,” the ad copy reads.

This comes in response to a campaign working against the potential ballot issue. It’s estimated to have spent $3.5 million on its own petition supporting the bailout, though it does nothing beyond that, along with mailers featuring vivid images invoking the Chinese flag, and ads including a new one, featuring the line: “They’re bringing in outsiders into our state to roam our neighborhoods with petitions, and they’re asking for your personal information.”

Bradley Smith is a professor at Capital University Law School near Columbus and a former chair of the Federal Elections Commission. And he’s fascinated.

“To me, what's really interesting is that they're doing this all this just to keep the petition from even qualifying for the ballot and that's what I don't recall saying before. Is somebody coming forward and trying to spending a large amount of money just to get the issue from even being placed on the ballot,” Smith said.

Smith uses that word “somebody” because nobody knows exactly who is Ohioans For Energy Security, the group behind those commercials and fliers. And spokesman Carlo LoParo says that’s the way it will stay.

“It's not that we won't disclose our donors. It's that we're following the law, and the law allows us free speech. And we're exercising that free speech right,” LoParo said.

To be fair, the group trying to overturn the bailout law, Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts, is also not revealing its donors. But the law requires that group as a ballot issue PAC, to file financial disclosure forms within 30 days of filing its petitions to put the law before voters next year – which they have to do by October 21.

But its spokesman Gene Pierce said his group is made up of those who opposed the bailout law when it was House Bill 6. “You're talking about consumer groups, business groups, renewable energy advocates and people who want to offer more competitive pricing and the electricity marketplace in Ohio.”

LoParo said that group also includes natural gas companies, and that a Chinese government-owned bankhas invested in those companies. Pierce saysit’s ridiculous to tie the referendum group to the Chinese. And he pointed to FirstEnergy Solutions, the owner of the state’s two nuclear power plants, and its former parent company FirstEnergy as likely donors to the bailout opposition.

There is little known about that opposition. Ohioans For Energy Security is alimited liability corporation, and there’s little information in its filing with the Secretary of State’s office. Carlo LoParo is a longtime Statehouse PR figure, having worked for, among others,Republican former Secretary of State and candidate for governor Ken Blackwell – who also employed Gene Pierce.

LoParo also spoke for the Ohio Clean Energy Jobs Alliance, which advocated for passing the bailout law, along with Generation Now, another dark money group. That group is sending people it’s calling monitors out to share the pro-bailout side with people being asked to sign petitions to get the bailout to the ballot. And there have beenclashes between circulators and monitors.

Groups including the League of Women Voters and Common Cause Ohiohave called for more financial disclosure of the groups involved in this referendum. Ohio State University Moritz College of Law professor Dan Tokaji said it’s simple....

==

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/14573946/ns/politics/t/kerry-revives-election-allegations/

e-mail will be sent to 100,000 Democratic donors Tuesday asking them to support U.S. Rep. Ted Strickland for governor of Ohio. The bulk of the e-mail criticizes Strickland's opponent, GOP Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, for his dual role in 2004 as President Bush's honorary Ohio campaign co-chairman and the state's top election official.

"He used the power of his state office to try to intimidate Ohioans and suppress the Democratic vote," said Kerry's e-mail.

Kerry, D-Mass., conceded the election when he lost Ohio and its 20 electoral votes. A recount requested by minor-party candidates showed Bush won by about 118,000 votes out of 5.5 million cast. But Kerry's e-mail says Blackwell "used his office to abuse our democracy and threaten basic voting rights."

2004 challenge still pendingMultiple lawsuits by outside groups were unsuccessful in challenging Ohio's 2004 election. One case filed by the League of Women Voters is still in U.S. District Court in Toledo. It claims Ohio's election system discriminates against minority voters.

Blackwell, who is black, says the election was run fairly, citing 1 million more votes cast than in 2000 and record turnout among black voters.

"People will say anything for money," said Blackwell campaign spokesman Carlo LoParo. "Fortunately, the historical record contradicts Senator Kerry."

hmmn 2004

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2005/8/13/138132/-

questions about exit polls, recounts and voting machines (esp in Ohio?)

==

http://www.latimes.com/politics/washington/la-na-essential-washington-updates-ken-blackwell-was-controversial-as-1499624226-htmlstory.html

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-pol-blackwell-voter-commission-20170709-story.html

no link

Former Ohio official who accidentally released Social Security numbers is on Trump's voter fraud panel

Ken Blackwell

Ken Blackwell's appointment to President Trump's voter fraud commission has drawn increased scrutiny to his tenure as Ohio secretary of state, during which millions of voters' Social Security numbers were accidentally released. (Mary Altaffer / Associated Press)

Kurtis Lee Contact Reporter

The Republican gubernatorial primary was just weeks away, and then-Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell had his sights set on securing the nomination.

Blackwell had served as mayor of Cincinnati and state treasurer before becoming Ohio’s top elections official, so a bid for governor in 2006 seemed a logical next step in his political career.

But in March of that year, his office caused a stir: The full Social Security numbers of 1.2 million Ohio voters were posted accidentally on the secretary of state’s website.

A month later, in a separate incident, Blackwell’s office inadvertently distributed voter lists with the Social Security numbers of 5.7 million voters. The numbers, by law, are supposed to remain private.

“It wasn’t good at all,” said former Ohio Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland in an interview. “Sloppy … that’s what it was.”

While the two blunders didn’t prevent Blackwell from securing the nomination that May, he went on to lose the governor’s contest to Strickland. That contest and the Social Security debacle combined to make Blackwell well-known — at least briefly — outside Ohio. Now, it appears he’s about to step into the national spotlight again.

Blackwell, 69, has been tapped to serve on the Trump administration’s bipartisan voter fraud commission, an endeavor election officials nationwide have called a waste of time.

The panel, officially called the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, asked secretaries of state nationwide to provide voters’ personal information, including names, addresses and the last four digits of Social Security numbers. The commission has faced intense pushback from both Democrats and Republicans, while a watchdog group has filed a lawsuit arguing the commission’s request breaches privacy laws.

Here's why a growing number of states are pushing back against Trump's voter fraud commission

Blackwell’s appointment to the committee — which is scheduled to hold its first meeting July 19 in Washington — has now drawn increased scrutiny to his tenure as secretary of state. For years, Blackwell has voiced concerns about voter fraud, while some have alleged he worked to suppress the vote in Ohio.

In 2004, two years before the incidents with the Social Security numbers, Blackwell ordered that county clerks not accept voter registrations turned in on anything less than 80-pound stock paper — the thickness of a postcard.

County clerks called the requirement unnecessary, and voting rights advocates alleged he was attempting to suppress the vote in a key swing state during a presidential election year. Under the intense criticism, Blackwell pulled back his order.

That same year, Blackwell ordered clerks to throw out provisional ballots if a person voted in the wrong precinct. A federal appeals court ultimately upheld Blackwell’s directive, though critics called it another attempt to suppress voting.

To one Ohio resident, Darrell Estep, the most troubling part from Blackwell’s time as secretary of state was the handling of Social Security numbers.

In 2006, Estep, a trucker who hauls automobiles around the country, was among those whose personal information landed on the secretary of state’s website. It remained on the site for several weeks.

“This was my privacy, and it was hindered,” Estep said Saturday from his home in Mount Orab, Ohio, about 40 miles east of Cincinnati. At the time, he filed a lawsuit against Blackwell and his office. In a quickly reached settlement, Blackwell agreed to remove the numbers from the website.

A month later, in April 2006, Blackwell’s office accidentally distributed voter lists — on 20 CDs to, among others, campaign consultants— that had the full Social Security numbers of 5.7 million voters. The disks were eventually returned to Blackwell’s office.

As for the Social Security numbers posted on the website, technical issues delayed their removal for almost a year.

Estep said he’s now concerned that Blackwell is on a commission seeking personal voter data.

“His office was so nonchalant about making my information public,” he said. “That wasn’t right.”

Blackwell did not respond to requests for comment. But Monty Lobb, who served as Blackwell’s assistant secretary of state, said his former boss is a man of integrity.

“In fact, the highest of integrity,” Lobb said. “When we realized there was an issue with the Social Security numbers, we quickly sought to fix it.”

He said Blackwell, among other things, helped speed up the process for Ohioans to get business licenses and never allowed his political beliefs to get in the way of decision making.

“He wants what’s best for the people,” Lobb said.

The commission on which Blackwell serves has seen plenty of pushback in recent days.

Its vice chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, sent the letter requesting personal voter information on June 28. To date, 21 states and the District of Columbia have declined to provide any data, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice. Others, citing state law, will provide some, but not all of the data requested.

Last week, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit research group, filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge in Washington, D.C., to block the commission’s requests for voter data. A decision could come this week.

The formation of the committee came about after President Trump alleged in January — without evidence — that between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes were cast in last year’s presidential election. (Trump prevailed in the electoral college, but lost the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes.)

Over the years, Blackwell, who was a member of Trump’s transition team, has expressed concerns about voter fraud.

In a 2008 New York Post op-ed, Blackwell warned of a “possibility for voter fraud on a scale never before seen in this country.”

This month Blackwell said on MSNBC the commission’s efforts will be to, among other things, gather “information that will give us a greater sense right now of what our exposure is as a collective system” to voter fraud.

Asked why the commission was necessary, he replied, “Any bad actor, whether foreign or domestic, any action that corrupts the integrity of our system, should be fair game for our exploration.”

Even so, Strickland said, the commission’s cause is not legitimate.

“There is not widespread voter fraud,” he said. “There just isn’t.... This commission is not legit, and Ken Blackwell definitely does not give it legitimacy.”

http://www.alternet.org/activism/trump-has-whos-who-vote-suppressors-working-keep-gop-majority-2018

On Wednesday, some of the most notorious Republican voter suppressors will be sworn in by Vice President Mike Pence for the White House’s ludicrously named Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.

“It is hard to imagine a list of people less credible on the issue of the extent of voter fraud in the United States, and who have done more to raise the scourge of voter fraud as a means to advocate for laws to make it harder for people to register and to vote,” wrote Rick Hasen on ElectionLawBlog.org on July 10. “This is not a list meant to inspire bipartisan cooperation on fixing election administration. It is assembling a rogues’ gallery of vote suppression.”

This gallery begin with the panel’s vice-chair, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has worked on limiting voting rights of non-whites almost as long as he has helped white supremacists draft anti-immigrant laws, starting a decade ago in Arizona. His anti-voter obsessions include pushing states to require new voters to submit paper documents proving U.S. citizenship when registering, as opposed to signing an oath under penalty of perjury. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law estimates 7 percent of the electorate doesn’t readily have such paper proof. (In Kansas, he passed this law, disenfranchising tens of thousands.)

Kobach also specializes in using shoddy data mining to try to identify people illegally voting more than once. Actual occurrences of this are so rare—less than one in a million voters—and infinitesimally small compared to the margins that determine who wins and loses. But Kobach’s operations, called the Interstate Crosscheck program, have identified hundreds of thousands of false positives in states like Georgia and North Carolina. That’s allowed Republicans to launch fabricated-but-hyped “voter fraud” investigations, and to not expeditiously process registrations from voter drives from groups tied to known Democratic constituencies.

He’s joined by Hans von Spakovsky, who recently was Heritage Foundation fellow but is most notoriously known for being a Justice Department appointee in the George W. Bush administration who was part of the cabal that fired seven federal prosecutors for failing to prosecute voter fraud. (They didn’t prosecute cases because what they found was so small time it wasn’t worth the government’s while.) Nonetheless, Heritage keeps producing its reports pretending voter fraud is a national scourge, such as this one, which lists 492 cases and 733 convictions of false voter registrations, non-citizen voting, fraudulent use of absentee ballots and duplicate voting from 1984 through 2017. What’s omitted in those fulminations is that’s one case for every 2 million presidential election voters, if you add up the numbers from 1984 to 2016 (approximately 980,000,000 votes).

Then there’s Ohio Republican ex-Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell,who did everything possible in 2004 in Ohio to disadvantage Democrats and ensure Bush’s re-election. Blackwell issued dozens of directives aimed at the fine print of election law to disenfranchise anyone not voting Republican, from requiring voter registration forms be printed on a certain weight paper stock—which was not what grassroots new voter drives were using—to disqualifying ballots if they were turned in at the wrong table in polling places—the so-called right church, wrong pew problem. He also disqualified multi-thousands of ballots and aggressively purged voters in blue epicenters.

There’s also J. Christian Adams, who left the Justice Department early in the Obama years because he said higher-ups would not allow him to go after voter fraud and Black Panthers in Philadelphia who were intimidating white voters. He has been a fixture on the right-wing talk circuit encouraging Tea Party spinoffs like True the Vote to try to recruit polling place vigilantes to challenge the credentials of suspicious-looking voters. He’s also made a career out of suing small counties for failing to maintain their voter lists—saying such bloated and outdated directories could become a conduit for illegal voting.

Now, there are some sober-minded and clear-eyed people on Trump’s commission, such as New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner—who has had that job since the late 1970s, and scoffed when top White House aides like Stephen Miller last winter said the president lost in New Hampshire because busloads of illegal voters came into the state. Former Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap is another reasonable longtime official.

However, nobody should have any illusions about what the Pence-Kobach crew is up to. In a March 28 letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions signed by two-dozen GOP anti-voter activists, including Kobach, Spakovsky and Adams, they laid out the classic Republican agenda of seeking to shrink the electorate outside the GOP’s aging white wealthy base, and make voting harder not easier.

Using the bland language of election lawyers, they sought an end to enforcing civil rights laws and want the federal government to allow states to add additional requirements to receiving a ballot—such as specific state-issued photo ID cards, even though not one state election laws lists such pieces of plastic as a requirement to be an eligible voter.  Numerous studies have found restrictive voter ID laws shave two-to-three points off Democratic turnout, with even higher percentages among non-whites. Ending early voting option also reduced turnout.

Their March letter urged a “return to race-neutral Voting Rights Act enforcement,” “an end to politically-driven pursuits against state photo voter identification requirements, citizenship verification in voter registration, and common-sense adjustments to early voting periods,” and “return to enforcing Section 8” of the National Voter Registration Act (or Motor Voter law), which governs voter purges. They ended hyperbolically, declaring, “The American electorate is crying out to see protections against political enforcement of the law.” (As if these suggestions were not political.)

Already, Kobach’s commission—Pence is the titular head—has gotten into hot water by demanding states turn over their statewide voter files within two weeks, including private data that states do not routinely share or in some cases need legislative authority to do so. Dozens of states have balked, but that allowed Trump to tweet that states must be hiding something—these are the same states where he lied that millions voted illegally to yield Hillary Clinton a 2.9 million popular vote majority. They are not hiding anything, but Kobach knows that. It’s all a setup to create a pretext to newly police the process.

While presidential commissions had a long record of producing reports that are put on shelves and only gather dust, this commission could do great harm. That’s because even if Congress fails to adopt anything it suggests, elections are primarily run by the states. There are now red super-majority legislatures in Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Ohio—all states that could rubber stamp anything Kobach suggests to further suppress Democratic voters and preserve their party’s power.

==

==

trump voter fraud: “If there’s no such thing as voter fraud, or voter fraud is insignificant, then the commission will be able to confirm that,” Mr. Kobach said in an interview. “What are they afraid of? Why do they not want to know these numbers?”

Ms. Sanders said the commission would also include the Republicans Connie Lawson, the secretary of state of Indiana, and Kenneth Blackwell, who formerly held that post in Ohio, as well as two top Democratic election officials: William M. Gardner of New Hampshire and Matthew Dunlap of Maine. Christy McCormick, a Republican member of the nonpartisan U.S. Election Assistance Commission appointed by President Barack Obama, has also been selected to serve on the panel.

==

mark braden rnla?

==

this is CAP? conway?

The Right Lines Up Behind Blackwell for RNC Chair

Submitted by Kyle Mantyla on Monday, 1/5/2009 12:25 pm

Over the weekend, a gaggle of Right Wing powerbrokers came out in support of Ken Blackwell’s candidacy to become the next chairman of the Republican National Committee, announcing that they “intend to contact grassroots conservatives across the country and ask them to urge the three RNC members from each state and U.S. territory to vote for Ken Blackwell for RNC chairman.”  The list of those endorsing Blackwell is a veritable who’s who of the Religious Right and conservative movements, including James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Phyllis Schlafly, Tim LaHaye, Pat Toomey:

Gary Aldrich, Chairman, CNP Action Inc.

Morton C. Blackwell, Virginia Republican National Committeeman

Robert B. Bluey, Contributing Editor, RedState

L. Brent Bozell, Founder and President, Media Research Center

Kellyanne Conway, CEO and President, the polling company, inc./WomanTrend

T. Kenneth Cribb Jr., Former Domestic Adviser to President Reagan

James C. Dobson, Ph.D., Founder and Chairman, Focus on the Family

Becky Norton Dunlop, President, Council for National Policy

Stuart W. Epperson, Chairman, Salem Communications Corp.

Steve Forbes, Chairman & CEO, Forbes Media

Dr. Ronald Godwin, Vice Chancellor, Liberty University

Rebecca Hagelin, Author and Conservative Columnist

Colin Hanna, President, Let Freedom Ring

David Keene, Chairman, American Conservative Union

Tim LaHaye, Founder and President, Tim LaHaye Ministries

Ed Meese, Past President, Council for National Policy

James C. Miller, Past President, Council for National Policy

Tony Perkins, President Family Research Council

Ken Raasch, Chairman & CEO, Creative Brands Group

Alfred S. Regnery, Publisher, The American Spectator

Phyllis Schlafly, President, Eagle Forum

Pat Toomey, President, Club for Growth

Richard Viguerie, Chairman, ConservativeHQ.com

Interestingly, one name that doesn’t appear on the list is Rod Parsley who, as we’ve noted before, has a deep and very public connection to Blackwell.  Perhaps Parsley is a little gun-shy about issuing endorsements considering that the last time he did so, it ended with his humiliating rejection.

Filed Under

Organizations:

RedState, Club for Growth, Family Research Council, American Spectator

People:

Brent Bozell, James Dobson, Ken Blackwell, Phyllis Schlafly, Tim LaHaye, Tony Perkins, Colin Hanna, Kellyanne Conway

Topics:

Media, Politics, Right Wing, Virginia, endorsements, vote, union

==

2006

Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry jumped back into the 2004 presidential race this week with a scathing letter accusing Ken Blackwell, Ohio's Republican secretary of state, of using "the power of his state office to try to intimidate Ohioans and suppress the Democratic vote" in the 2004 election.

The letter was sent to 100,000 Democratic donors, asking them to send money to U.S. Rep. Ted Strickland, who is running against Blackwell for governor. But it focused on Blackwell as a Republican who must be defeated.

Blackwell, who was co-chair of Bush's 2004 campaign in Ohio, "used his office to abuse our democracy and threaten basic voting rights," Kerry said in the letter. "His legacy as secretary of state? Putting partisanship ahead of the electorate's fundamental right to vote."

Although Kerry was careful not to suggest that Blackwell and the Republicans manipulated the Ohio vote to cost him the presidential election, he shoved a stick into a very angry hornets' nest. It was George Bush's narrow victory in Ohio that secured his re-election, and livid Democrats and the liberal end of the blogosphere have challenged those numbers since election day.

The issue erupted again in June whenRobert Kennedy Jr. wrote an article in Rolling Stone magazine asking "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" In the piece, he echoed much of the Democratic and progressive left when he said Kerry should be in the White House today.

"After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004," Kennedy said in the article.

Kerry isn't going nearly that far, said Amy Brundage, a spokesperson for the senator.

If the question is whether Kerry is saying that the 2004 election was stolen, "obviously not," she said. "The issue is whether Ohio should have a governor who abuses the right to vote."

Still, bringing up the 2004 Ohio vote is an easy way to pull in contributions from hard-core Democrats, who have been angry ever since Bush beat Democrat Al Gore in 2000 after a five-week legal battle over the vote count in Florida. In Ohio, Kerry lost by about 118,000 votes out of 5.5 million cast and saw the state's 20 electoral votes put Bush over the top.

==

helped take out ACORN?

In addition to registering voters directly, ACORN has worked to remove systemic obstacles to voter registration. In 2006, it brought a lawsuit in federal court in Ohio against the Ohio Secretary of State, at that time Ken Blackwell, and the Director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. ACORN alleged that, during the period that included the 2004 United States election voting controversies, the defendants had committed multiple violations of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. The district court dismissed the case, but that decision was reversed in 2008 by the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.[38] After extensive fact discovery in 2009, the parties agreed to a settlement, under which the defendants agreed to implement several measures to facilitate registration of low-income voters.[39][40][41] The Dayton Daily News characterized the settlement as "accepting the thrust of [ACORN's] complaint."[42]

=

==

Why is the man who stole Ohio campaigning with a white supremacist?

by Bob Fitrakis

by Harvey Wasserman

OCTOBER 9, 2006

J. Kenneth Blackwell, the man who stole Ohio’s 2004 presidential election, was out campaigning October 4, 2006 with a man widely viewed as one of America’s leading white supremacists. Blackwell is an African-American.

He is also the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio. As Secretary of State, he was the GOP point man for stealing the 2004 presidential vote that gave George W. Bush a second term. As co-chair of the state’s Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, Blackwell engineered a complex strategy of confusion, disenfranchisement and theft that mirrored what was done by Katherine Harris in Florida 2000. Harris was rewarded with a safe Congressional seat, and is now the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate. Polls show Blackwell trailing between 12-20 points in his gubernatorial race, but few Ohio insiders doubt his ability to steal the necessary votes, if he can get away with it. Currently, Blackwell operatives are stressing that he’s “only 12 points down” and that they believe the race will tighten significantly by Election Day.

Blackwell toured the state with Larry Pratt, author of ARMED PEOPLE VICTORIOUS, which advocates the creation of militant right-wing militias. Pratt has spoken and shared platforms in the past with Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi Aryan Nation members. He was forced to take a leave of absence from Pat Buchanan’s 1996 presidential campaign over charges of white supremacist and anti-semitic views. Pratt’s 150,000-member Gun Owners of America is proudly to the right of the National Rifle Association.

According to the Columbus Dispatch, Pratt says he couldn’t be a racist because he is campaigning with Blackwell, an African-American. Blackwell is “our kind of guy,” says Pratt, in reference to Blackwell’s support of gun owners’ rights.

Blackwell campaign spokesperson attorney Eric Seabrook, conceded on Sunday, October 8 to the Khari Enaharo show listeners on 98.9FM radio that Pratt was a white supremacist but, he stressed “it was all about the gun rights issue.”

But this is not the first time Blackwell has lined up with extreme right-wing backers boasting racist and anti-semitic roots. Earlier this year Blackwell posted on his website a picture of himself addressing the Council for National Policy. The CNP has deep “neo-fascist” and Ku Klux Klan ties according to Chip Berlet of the Boston-based Political Research Associates. In addition to right wing extremists such as Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly and Pat Robertson, the CNP embraces a broad spectrum of powerful, reactionary bigots.

Among them are members of the Ahmanson family, major funders of extremist publications and electronic voting machines. The Ahmanson’s financial and political ties are thoroughly intertwined with both ES&S and Diebold, mainstays of the electronic hardware used to steal the Ohio vote. Among their associates are Bob and Todd Urosevich, whose executive and programming work has helped shape the two voting machine companies.

Others associated with the CNP include:

Richard Shoff, a former Ku Klux Klan leader in Indiana.

John McGoff, an ardent supporter of the former apartheid South African regime.

R.J. Rushdoony, the theological leader of America's "Christian Reconstruction" movement, which advocates that Christian fundamentalists take "dominion" over America by abolishing democracy and instituting Old Testament Law. Rushdoony's Reconstructionalists believe that "homosexuals . . . adulterers , blasphemers, astrologers and others will be executed," along with disobedient children.

Reed Larson, head of anti-union National Right to Work Committee.

Don Wildmon, TV censorship activist and accused anti-Semite.

Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North, Major General John K. Singlaub and other principals from theIran-Contra Scandal.

After a public uproar, Blackwell pulled his CNP photo off his website. But he has thus far made no similar backtrack on Larry Pratt. “We’re happy to have his support,” says a campaign spokesman, reported the Dispatch.

Blackwell supporters continue to predict he will make a “last-minute surge” to win the governor’s race. Making no visible moves toward the mainstream, Blackwell may well be banking on two bottom lines in Bush-era electoral politics: loaded guns and rigged voting machines.

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors, with Steve Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO?, just published by the New Press. Fitrakis is an independent candidate for governor of Ohio, endorsed by the Green Party.

==

boss rove

govtech sec of state ohio fallover site; blackwell evangelical

diebold ez hack; gave 195K gop;  eo pledge to deliver votes; gop state sen asked to not use diebold but blackwell did anyway 88 (40 of 88 counties in 2004

==

CINCINNATI, OHIO - Family Research Council Senior Fellow Ken Blackwell, former Ohio secretary of state and former Cincinnati mayor, strongly disagreed with today's announcement by Federal Judge Timothy Black that he will force the state to recognize out-of-state same-sex "marriages." Ohio voters overwhelmingly passed their state's marriage amendment in 2004, 62 percent to 38 percent. Homosexual activists also failed this week to gain enough signatures to put same-sex "marriage" on the Ohio ballot in November. frc bs

==

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/8/28/ex_ohio_secretary_of_state_ken

A recent study by the Brennan Center estimates that new voter ID laws could disenfranchise more than five million people across the country in November, including voters in swing states such as Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Virginia and Wisconsin. On Monday, Democracy Now! producer Mike Burke spoke with a prominent supporter of the new voter IDs laws, Ken Blackwell, vice chair of the Republican National Committee’s platform committee and the former Republican secretary of state in Ohio. In 2008, Blackwell oversaw the election process for Ohio while serving as state co-chair of the committee to re-elect George W. Bush. His role in the Ohio election, which saw George W. Bush narrowly beat John Kerry, remains controversial to this day, making him the target of over a dozen lawsuits. [includes rush transcript]

bbb:

OH ken blackwell hired MR ppl to scrape chads, not qual to testify 203; reject ballots wrong thickness; 94K spoiled votes, often chads; margin of vic 2000 and 2004 204.

post KH black caucus demanded way for purged to vote, so we get provis; but did not get insur that it wd be CTed;

Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell,

For many, President Obama and the Democratic Party are among these "demonic forces." This has real world consequences.

In 2006 former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris told thousands of cheering Christian Right activists that beating the Democrats in the upcoming elections was a battle against "principalities and powers," which many in the audience would hear as a Biblical reference to the struggle with the demonic agents of Satan. Harris (who played "ballot bowling" in Florida to elect George W. Bush in 2000) told the audience at the annual Values Voter Summit in Washington DC that she had studied religion in Switzerland with the godfather of the Christian Right, theologian Francis A. Schaeffer. Her speech there, which I witnessed and wrote about, qualifies her as a Dominionist.

In 2004 Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, anotherDominionist, oversaw the election apparatus giving his favored candidate George W. Bush a boost into the Oval Office....

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/9/4/8954/17253

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=J._Kenneth_Blackwell

J. Kenneth Blackwell is the former Ohio Secretary of State and former Ohio gubernatorial candidate. Blackwell and former Republican House Majority Leader **Tom DeLay**co-foundedthe Coalition for a Conservative Majority (CCM) in November 2007 as a "new grass-roots organization [to] help conservatives better convey their message to voters and take back control of Congress."^[1]

In mid-March 2007, Blackwell "hired on as a Senior Fellow for Family Empowerment at Washington's premiere right-wing religious lobbying outfit," the Family Research Council.^[2]

In the 2006 congressional election, Blackwell ran against Rep. Ted Strickland, 6th Congressional District Democratic incumbent who was giving up his seat to run for Ohio governor. Strickland defeated Blackwell by 23 percentage points.^[3]

Despite allegations of widespread vote rigging in his state and an ongoing lawsuit over the same, in December 2008, Blackwell wrote to the Republican National Committee (RNC) "after prayerful consideration," asking to be considered for the chairmanship of the RNC.^[4]

2004 election controversy

Ohio voters sued Blackwell[acorn?] on August 31, 2006 in a case called King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell in which individual voters and three voters' rights groups alleged that, in his capacity as Secretary of State, Blackwell "allocated [2004] election resources in a racially discriminatory manner and instituted racially discriminatory procedures for provisional voting, purging voters from the statewide voter registration database, and maintaining the chain of custody of ballots. The complaint alleged that these actions led to the dilution and/or cancellation of plaintiffs' vote due to ballot cancellation and tampering, long poll lines, mechanical difficulties with voting machines, and unclear precinct boundaries." The complaint claims that plaintiffs reasonably feared these problems would recur in the November, 2006, election, and asked the court to appoint a special master to perform Blackwell's election administration duties in that election.^[5]

A Canton, New York resident named Richard Hayes Phillips who worked with the Ohio Honest Elections Campaign said he examined thousands of punch-card ballots cast in Ohio's heavily Democratic inner-city precincts that were tossed out because of over- or under-voting in the 2004 presidential race. Phillips said he found that on more than 1,900 ballots in six urban counties, there was a vote for President Bush or Senator John Kerry, and a second vote for one of the two independent candidates. In cases such as these, no presidential vote is counted. Philips noted that the problem was unusually prevalent, and appeared to be concentrated in every fifth precinct, and concluded the ballots in the urban areas must have been pre-punched, disproportionately affecting Kerry votes. ^[6]

Blackwell is the focus of many allegations regarding the U.S. presidential election, 2004, vote count controversy while serving as Ohio Secretary of State.

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman reported^[7] prior to the election the followingabuses of his powerin the weeks leading up to the vote, consisting mostly of a series of rulings that favored President Bush's side:

• "Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell has reversed a long-standing Ohio practice and is barring voters from casting provisional ballots within their county if they are registered to vote but there's been a mistake about where they are expected to cast their ballot. In this year's spring primaries, Blackwell allowed voters to cast provisional ballots by county, even if they were in the wrong precinct. But this fall, such voters will have to leave the wrong precinct and find their way to the right one. Blackwell hopes to succeed Republican Bob Taft as governor, and has labored hard to install e-voting machines with no paper trail, to give the statewide contract to Diebold, and to take a long series of steps apparently designed to help hand Ohio to George W. Bush. Blackwell is being widely compared to the infamous Katherine Harris, who handed Florida to George W. Bush in 2000 and was rewarded with a safe Congressional seat."

• "The Columbus Dispatch (which has endorsed Bush) and WVKO Radio have both documented phone calls from people impersonating Board of Elections workers and directing registered voters to different and incorrect polling sites. One individual was falsely told not to vote at the polling station across the street from his house, but at a 'new' site, four miles away. Under Blackwell's new rules, such a vote would not be counted."

• "Secretary of State Blackwell ruled that any voter registration form on other than 80-pound weight bond paper would not be accepted. This is an old law left over from pre-scanning days. Many voters who had registered on lighter paper, had their registration returned, even though the forms had been officially sanctioned by local election boards."

On November 13, 2004, blackboxvoting.org alleged that Blackwell was responsible for "failure to properly account for provisional ballots, and refusing to allow citizens to see the pollbooks." This as part of the Help America Audit - an electoral fraud audit based on forensic audit techniques - that Bev Harris has initiated in parallel with the U.S. presidential election, 2004, Ohio vote recount by David Cobb of the Green Party of the United States and Michael Badnarik of the Libertarian Party of the United States.

Another obvious but apparently unnoticed conflict of interest may have stemmed from Blackwell's involvement with conservative Christian broadcasting media giant Salem Communications Corporation and its Salem Radio Network. Jon Rappaport wrote November 3, 2004:

"Mr. Blackwell is a member of the national advisory boards of Youth for Christ and was formerly a domestic policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. Mr. Blackwell has held the nation's highest security clearance. He is a contributing commentator for Salem Communications, delivering commentaries on Salem's more than 90 [Christian] radio stations nationwide."

Rappaport concluded his article "Enter, Mr. Blackwell: Was He Bush's Trump-Card in Ohio" with:

"I'm not making the point that Blackwell is bad because he's a Republican. I'm illustrating that this is a very ambitious man who's positioned as a Republican FOR BUSH and for what Bush believes, right down to his shoes. A man who campaigned resolutely for Bush and THEN oversaw the state election which handed Bush a second term. A man who is a player in the Republican party, who knows the score, who can give favors and then ask for favors back, as he pushes his own career upward."Is this a conflict of interest that could have led Blackwell to improperly set the conditions for a Bush triumph? Is the Pope Catholic?"

Books

• With Jerome Corsi, Rebuilding America: A Prescription for Creating Strong Families, Building the Wealth of Working People, and Ending Welfare, WND Books, May 2006 (Hardcover), ISBN 1581825013.

Resources

Related SourceWatch articles

• Republican 'culture of corruption'

References

1. ↑ Eric Pfeiffer, "DeLay founds coalition to polish GOP message," Washington Times, November 16, 2007.
2. ↑ "Ken Blackwell Joins FRC as Senior Fellow for Family Empowerment", Family Research Council, March 14, 2007.
3. ↑ Ohio Governor Election Results, CNN.com, Accessed March 15, 2008.
4. ↑ Joe Hallett, Columbus, Ohio Dispatch Blackwell wants to head up RNC Sweeping changes needed, not being proposed, he says Sunday, December 7, 2008.
5. ↑ Ohio State University, Election Law@Moritz King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell Web site, updated December 23, 2008. Accessed December 25, 2008
6. ↑ Jim Siegel, the Columbus DispatchNew lawsuit alleges ballot tampering in 2004 election; Group says ballots in Democratic precincts were pre-punched, negating Kerry votes Friday, September 1, 2006
7. ↑ Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, "Twelve ways Bush is now stealing the Ohio vote," Free Press, October 27, 2004.

General information

• Articles from TruthOut.org
• Articles from CrisisPapers.org
• Articles from FreePress.org
• Articles from FromTheWilderness.com
• Articles from ePluribusMedia.org (and scoop.ePluribusMedia.org

External articles

• Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, "Twelve ways Bush is now stealing the Ohio vote," Free Press, October 27, 2004.
• Joe Sudbay, "Losing very badly, Blackwell is very deperate and playing very dirty politics," AMERICAblog, October 18, 2006.
• Joe Hallett, "Blackwell fans far-right flames. Conservative talk-show hosts’ innuendo about Strickland’s sexuality may backfire, experts say," The Columbus Dispatch, October 20, 2006.
• Harvey Wasserman, "Will Ken Blackwell find the ways to steal Ohio 2006 as he did in 2004?" OpEdNews, October 26, 2006.
• luaptifer and ePluribusMedia.org investigators, "Ken Blackwell Outsources Ohio Election Results to GOP Internet Operatives, Again," ePluribusMedia Community, November 7, 2006.
• intranets, "Ohio's election website still sent real-time results to GOP mirror server," ePluribusMedia Community, November 9, 2006.
• Bill Berkowitz, "Ken Blackwell, Ohio's defeated GOP gubernatorial candidate, lands in D.C. Despite former secretary of state's role in multiple election mishaps, he signs on with Tony Perkins," WorkingForChange, May 24, 2007.

Categories: Elections (U.S.) | Politics (U.S.) | Political dirty tricks | Scandals

John Kenneth Blackwell (born February 28, 1948) is an American politician and activist who served as the mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio from 1979 to 1980 and Ohio Secretary of State from 1999 to 2007. A Republican, he was the first African-American to be the candidate for governor of a major party in Ohio. In 2006, Blackwell was the Republican candidate for the seat of Governor of Ohio. He is currently Vice Chairman of the Republican National Committee's Platform Committee and was a candidate for chairman of the RNC.^[1] Additionally, he currently serves as senior fellow for family empowerment at the Family Research Council.

Blackwell gained national prominence for his dual roles as Chief Elections Official of Ohio and honorary co-chair of the "Committee to re-elect George W. Bush" during the 2004 election. Allegations of conflict of interest and voter disenfranchisement led to the filing of at least sixteen related lawsuits naming Blackwell. Regarding voter disenfranchisement, a federal appellate court ruled, in agreement with Blackwell, that provisional ballots cast in the wrong polling location should not be counted in the election, but the court overturned his directive to poll workers that they refuse to issue provisional ballots unless satisfied as to the voter's residence. Blackwell was also named in a 2006 lawsuit related to his office's public disclosure of the Social Security numbers of Ohio residents.

A staunch conservative, Blackwell successfully led the campaign for the 2004 Ohio Constitution Amendment banning state recognition of same-sex marriage and civil unions,^[2] despite opposition from many other Republican leaders.^[3] He is a proponent of gun ownership rights, and has stated that he is against abortion except in order to protect the life of the mother. He was defeated by Ted Strickland in the 2006 Ohio gubernatorial election.

Early years

Blackwell was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to George (a meatpacker) and Dana (a part-time nurse) Blackwell. He has two brothers, Carl and Charles. He married his wife Rosa in 1969 while he was in college. They have three children, Kimberly, Rahshann (a Denver resident and Ohio Northern Law School graduate) and Kristin.

Blackwell attended Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio on a football scholarship. Blackwell received a Bachelor of Science degree in psychology from Xavier in 1970 and his Master of Education degree, also from Xavier, in 1971. He taught at Xavier from 1974 to 1991 and has served as a trustee of Wilberforce University and Wilmington College. After college, he was invited to the Dallas Cowboys' training camp; he gave up football when he was told he would have to convert from linebacker to offensive lineman.^[4]

Political career

From 1979 to 1980, Blackwell served as Mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio. Earlier, he had been a member of the Cincinnati city council.

One of the first orders of business of Blackwell's administration as mayor of Cincinnati was the establishment of a crowd control task force stemming from the deaths of 11 concert fans at a concert by the British rock group The Who at Riverfront Coliseum on December 3, 1979.

Blackwell was a member of the Charter Party, Cincinnati's third party, which is generally supported by left-leaning voters. However, when he began to consider statewide and national offices, he became a Republican.

Blackwell served in the administration of President George H. W. Bush as undersecretary in the Department of Housing and Urban Development from 1989 to 1990. He returned to Cincinnati to run for the first district seat in the United States House of Representatives being vacated by Tom Luken. Blackwell lost to Luken's son, Charlie Luken, by a narrow 51% to 49% margin. Following his close defeat, President Bush appointed Blackwell ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Blackwell served in that post from 1992 to 1993.

Blackwell was appointed Ohio State Treasurer by then-Gov. George Voinovich in 1994 to complete the term of Mary Ellen Withrow, who was appointed U.S. treasurer by President Bill Clinton. Blackwell was elected treasurer in 1994 and was elected Ohio Secretary of State in 1998. That year, Blackwell considered a run for governor, but Ohio Republican Party chairman Robert T. Bennett persuaded Blackwell to run for secretary of state instead, leaving the governorship open to Bob Taft.^{[citation needed]} Blackwell was national chairman of longtime friend Steve Forbes' presidential campaign in 2000.^[5] Blackwell was re-elected secretary of state in 2002.

Blackwell, a strict fiscal and social conservative, has become a vocal critic of the moderate wing of the Ohio Republican Party, including Taft, for adopting tax increases in the face of budget shortfalls in recent years.^{[citation needed][when?]} He has also demanded the resignation of Ohio House of Representatives Speaker Larry Householder, a Republican, whose staff became embroiled^[when?] in fund-raising scandals.^{[citation needed]}

He was also^[when?] the most prominent Republican to support adding an amendment to the state constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage.^{[citation needed]} The state's Republican U.S. Senator George Voinovich and then-Senator Mike DeWine opposed the amendment's broad language, fearing it could bar not only same-sex marriage but also civil unions, domestic partnerships, and possibly wills and any legal contracts for homosexuals.^{[citation needed]} Taft later^[when?] also came out against the amendment, expressing his concern that its ambiguous language would have unintended consequences and leave the state open to a number of lawsuits.^{[citation needed]} During the campaign Blackwell lobbied hard for this measure and was widely credited^{[by whom?]} with attracting many conservative evangelical African Americans to the polls to vote for the measure and for Bush's re-election. The amendment passed with the approval of 61.64% of the voters.

Ohio Secretary of State

Involvement in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election

As Secretary of State of a hotly contested swing state, Blackwell played a prominent role in the 2004 national election. As Secretary of State, Blackwell held the position of Chief Elections Officer, overseeing Ohio's elections process. In Congressional testimony, Blackwell stated that every Republican holder of statewide office in Ohio was named an honorary "co-chair" of the Bush campaign, that the position carried no responsibilities, and that previous Ohio Secretaries of State from both parties had held similar honorary positions.^[6]

Blackwell also announced he would enforce an Ohio State election law decreeing that any person who appeared at a polling place to vote but whose registration could not be confirmed would be given only a provisional ballot; if it were later determined that the person had attempted to vote in the wrong precinct, then their provisional ballot would not be counted. He also directed poll workers to refuse to distribute provisional ballots unless they were satisfied as to the voter's residence. The Democratic party promptly filed a lawsuit claiming that the policy was "intended to disenfranchise minority voters" and in violation of federal election law, specifically section 302 of the**Help America Vote Act** (HAVA).^[7]

On October 21, 2004, U.S. District Court Judge James G. Carr issued an order rejecting Blackwell's policy.^[8] Blackwell said that he would go to jail rather than comply.

Blackwell appealed the decision to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. On October 26, 2004, the Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed in part and reversed in part. The court agreed with the plaintiffs and the District Court that Blackwell's directive violated HAVA to the extent that it empowered poll workers to withhold a provisional ballot based on their "on-the-spot determination at the polling place." The court also ruled, however, that if a subsequent review concluded that the voter was not entitled to vote in that precinct, then the provisional ballot would not be counted. (pdf)(pdf) In accordance with the Court of Appeals ruling, provisional ballots cast in the wrong precincts were not counted in Ohio's 2004 elections.

Democratic members of the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary asked Blackwell to explain irregularities in the Ohio electionin two letters, (pdf) (pdf) and requested his presence at a Public Congressional Hearing. (pdf) He did not attend the hearing, but responded to the first letter, refusing to comply with their requests for explanation, noting that he was already responding to requests from the Government Accountability Office and the Department of Justice. (pdf)

Keith Olbermann interviewed Blackwell regarding the 2004 U.S. presidential election controversy.^[9]

On December 27, 2004, Blackwell requested a court order to protect him from being interviewed in the Moss v. Bush case, a challenge of the presidential vote, and fought a subpoena, arguing that the litigation was frivolous.^[10]

List of legal suits and rulings

As Ohio Secretary of State, Blackwell has been a party to many election-related lawsuits.^[11] Some of these include:

• Moss v. Bush; Dismissed at request of plaintiff after certification of electoral votes
• Beacon Journal Publishing Company, Inc. and Charlene Nevada v. J. Kenneth Blackwell and the Board of Elections; Ohio was ordered to permit reporters to enter polling places during the Fall 2004 election, notwithstanding ORS § 3501.35.(pdf)
• Lucas County Democratic Party et al. v. Blackwell^[12]
• The Sandusky County Democratic Party v. J. Kenneth Blackwell; Blackwell was forced to pay nearly $65,000 in legal fees to the Sandusky County Democratic party.^[13][14]
• The League of Women Voters of Ohio et al. v. Blackwell^[15]
• Miller et al. v. Blackwell et al.^[16]
• Spencer v. Blackwell^[17]
• Summit County Democratic Central and Executive Committee et al. v. Blackwell et al.^[18]
• American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. et al. v. Blackwell^[19]
• State of Ohio Ex Rel. Matthew Wolf, et al. v. Blackwell^[20]
• Sarah White v. J. Kenneth Blackwell and the Board of Elections of Lucas County, Ohio^[21]
• Nader et al. v. Blackwell^[22]
• Schering v. Blackwell^[23]
• Ohio Democratic Party v. Blackwell; Upheld in federal appeals court in favor of Blackwell^[23]
• Anita Rios et al. v. Blackwell^[24]
• State ex. rel David Yost et al. v. National Voting Rights Institute et al.^[24]

Release of Ohio Social Security numbers

On March 1, 2006 Blackwell's office accidentally published a list of 1.2 million Social Security numbers of Ohio citizens on a website along with their business filings. A Federal class-action lawsuit was filed by Darrell Estep who claimed that the release of the data had caused his Social Security number to appear three times on the website.^[25] The lawsuit was settled on March 28, 2006 after the numbers were removed from the website, a registration process was enacted to view the data and Blackwell's office agreed to make monthly progress reports to the court.^[26] The data was part of a centralized voter database, required by Federal law. At that time, Blackwell promised to only retain the last four digits of the Social Security number in the database to prevent future problems.^[27]

However, on April 26, 2006, Blackwell's office disclosed Ohio Social Security numbers again, mailing out computer disks containing the names, addresses, and the Social Security numbers of 5.7 million registered voters in Ohio (80% of all registered voters in the state).^[28] The list was released as a standard practice under the Freedom of Information Act and Help America Vote Act. Blackwell's office apologized, indicating that the release of the Social Security numbers was accidental and attempted to recall all 20 of the disks. At least one recipient of the disks has refused to comply.

Jim Petro, then Republican Attorney General of Ohio, has launched an investigation into the disclosure, citing a legal requirement to "investigate any state entity where there may be a risk of a loss of private data." Blackwell stated that he considered the issue to be closed, but Petro disagreed, saying that he will use "maximum due diligence" to ensure that the data was not copied before it was returned. Ohio law requires that individuals be notified if their Social Security numbers are compromised.^[29][30]

Diebold controversies

Ohio State Senator Jeff Jacobson asked Blackwell in July 2003 to disqualify Diebold Election Systems' bid to supply voting machines for the state, after security problems were discovered in its software,^[31] but was refused.^{[citation needed]} Blackwell had ordered Diebold touch screen voting machines, reversing an earlier decision by the state to purchase only optical scan voting machines which, unlike the touch screen devices, would leave a "paper trail" for recount purposes.^{[citation needed]}

On April 4, 2006, the Columbus Dispatch reported that Blackwell "owned stock [83 shares, down from 178 shares purchased in January 2005] in Diebold, a voting-machine [and ATM] manufacturer, at the same time his office negotiated a deal" with the company. After discovering the stock ownership, Blackwell promptly sold the shares at a loss.^[32] He attributed the purchase to an unidentified financial manager at Credit Suisse First Boston who he said had, without his knowledge, violated his instructions to avoid potential conflict of interest.^[33]

When Cuyahoga County's primary was held on May 2, 2006, officials ordered the hand-counting of more than 18,000 paper ballots after Diebold's new optical scan machines produced inconsistent tabulations, leaving several local races in limbo for days and eventually resulting in a reversal of the outcome of one race for state representative. Blackwell ordered an investigation by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections; Ohio Democrats demanded that Blackwell, due to his prior role in acquiring the Diebold equipment as well as his status as the Republican gubernatorial candidate in this election, recuse himself from the investigation due to conflicts of interest, but Blackwell did not do so.^[34]

2006 Ohio gubernatorial campaign

Main article: Ohio gubernatorial election, 2006

Campaign and national significance

Blackwell was the Republican candidate for Governor of Ohio in 2006. He beat state Attorney General Jim Petro in the 2006 Republican primary. (The then current governor, Republican Bob Taft, could not run because of term limits.) Blackwell's opponents in the general election were Democratic Congressman Ted Strickland, Libertarian professor emeritus Bill Peirce and Green Bob Fitrakis. Blackwell chose Ohio State Representative Tom Raga to be his running mate. Blackwell was the first African-American to be nominated as a candidate for the Ohio governorship by either major political party.

There had been increased national attention on the ability of the Republican party to maintain control in Ohio. On a national level, The New York Times went so far as to suggest that the results of the election would be a "bellwether" for the 2008 US presidential election.^[35]

Blackwell faced an uphill battle; according to a broad survey reported by The Plain Dealer on April 30, 2006, Ohio voters would "prefer to see a Democrat occupy the governor's mansion."^[36][37] Still, he had his supporters. John Stemberger, president and general counsel for the Florida Family Policy Council, was quoted as saying that Blackwell could "potentially be president of the United States someday, and the first black president at that."^[38] Blackwell's campaign relied heavily on accusations that Ted Strickland was not a resident of Ohio, and later that Ted Strickland was gay.^[39] Both of these accusations played heavily in campaign literature that failed to resonate with Ohio voters. Due to his poor management of this campaign, Blackwell's ability to compete on a national stage was called into question.

On November 7, 2006 Ted Strickland was elected Governor, defeating Blackwell by a 24% margin.^[40]

Conservative platform

Blackwell has taken some very conservative positions. In 2005, he supported keeping Terri Schiavo on life support indefinitely, saying, "I really do think that life is sacred, no matter how painful." When asked on Hardball with Chris Matthews if he would keep her on life support for 30 years, Blackwell said he would.

In his 2002 campaign for re-election to the post of Secretary of State, Blackwell took the position that he would favor abortions in the case where the life of the mother was at stake. He has since taken a more conservative position of opposing abortions even in the case where the mother's life is at risk.^[41]

May 2 primary

Blackwell won the Republican Primary on May 2, 2006 against Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro with 56% of the vote.^[42] Blackwell's strongest support came from his home town of Cincinnati and much of rural Ohio.^[43] The run up to the primaries was dominated by strongly critical television ads that Blackwell and his opponent Jim Petro ran against one another.^[44]

Blackwell was criticized by Petro, for declining to engage in three planned debates which had been organized by the Dayton Daily News and the City Club of Cleveland. The debate at the City Club of Cleveland occurred on April 25, 2006, despite Blackwell's absence. The event was originally scheduled to be broadcast on public television around Ohio. According to the Columbus Dispatch, "Blackwell said he has 'shared plenty of forums' with Petro and that he wants to focus on talking to Republicans in the final days of the campaign." ^[45]

On April 29, the Hamilton County Democrats publicly demanded that Ken Blackwell pull radio ads which urged unregistered Democrats to ask for Republican primary ballots on May 2, 2006 (rather than the issues only ballot which unregistered voters normally get) and thereby become registered Republicans. The Democrats argued that the ads are using "illegal and unethical political tactics."^[46]

Campaign finance

During the primary, Blackwell led the Republican candidates in his ability to raise significant amounts of money for his campaign. He raised $1.09 million between January 31, 2006 and April 12, 2006, from approximately 12,000 individuals and businesses. This was nearly $800,000 more than his main competition, Jim Petro, but less than the $1.1 million raised by his main Democratic competition, Ted Strickland.^[47][48] Blackwell, along with 14 other candidates, (including Petro and Strickland) were accused by the Ohio Citizen Action group of failing to meet Ohio's campaign contribution law which requires best efforts to disclose the names, addresses, employment status, employer, and place of employment of individuals who donate $100 or more to a political campaign. Blackwell, Petro, and Strickland all received a "B letter grade" from the group for their levels of disclosure.^[49]

On April 16, 2006, the**Toledo Blade**reported that Blackwell had accepted more than $1 million dollars in campaign contributions from "employees of firms seeking business with the statewide offices he's held over the past 12 years."Furthermore, the same organizations donated $1.34 million dollars to the Ohio Republican Party, $1.29 million of which was forwarded directly to Blackwell's campaign fund. Several of the firms which have been awarded contracts from Blackwell's office have also been hired on to his gubernatorial campaign. The investigators argue that the suggestion of quid pro quo based on the actions of contributors raise an issue of a serious conflict of interest. Petro has responded by demanding that a law which bans political contributors from being awarded state contracts. Blackwell has stated that no illegal activity took place. In response to Petro's call for reform, Blackwell stated "If you are asking me ... 'Am I advocating for campaign spending limits?' No. Never have. Never will." ^[50]

After winning their respective primaries, both Blackwell and his Democratic opponent were able to raise record sums, in part because of the national attention paid to the race. As of September 9, 2006, Strickland led Blackwell, $11.2 million to $10 million.^[51]

Support from religious groups

Blackwell had been well supported by many religious leaders in Ohio both politically and financially; according to campaign filings, Blackwell has received $25,031 from clergy and more than 27 times as much as Strickland.^[52]

However, on January 16, 2006, a group of 31 pastors, led by Rev. Eric Williams, pastor of North Congregational Church (United Church of Christ) in Columbus, Ohio wrote a 13-page letter to the IRS alleging that Blackwell has enjoyed "special treatment" by two Ohio "mega-churches," World Harvest Church and Fairfield Christian Church. In the letter, the pastors accused the two organizations of sponsoring at least nine events with Blackwell as the sole invited politician, "partisan voter-registration drives," and distribution of biased voting guides. Rev. Russell Johnson, pastor of the Fairfield Christian Church in Lancaster, Ohio defended his actions by saying that the event in question was not a "meet the candidate forum," but rather he was giving Blackwell "an award for courageous leadership." ^[53] Blackwell later called the group of 31 pastors "bullies." ^[54]

On April 19, 2006, e-mails sent on behalf of the Blackwell campaign by Johnson on Easter Sunday, April 16, 2006, came to light in the Columbus Dispatch.^[55] Both the Blackwell campaign and Russell Johnson, on behalf of Fairfield Christian Church, denied all wrong-doing. The e-mails in question subsequently emerged on various online media outlets, clearly showing that the e-mails had been sent from within Johnson's church office on the evening of Easter Sunday to Church personnel and employees of the church-owned Fairfield Christian Academy.^[56]

On May 7, 2006, the members of the Lord of Life Lutheran church in Columbus, Ohio publicly complained that Blackwell's campaign workers placed fliers on the windshields of those attending the church service on April 30, two days before the May 2 primary. The church pastor, Rev. Jim Wilson, stated "the tactic was offensive and suggested the church was endorsing Blackwell." Wilson said that he had tried to contact the Blackwell campaign in response to the incident but did not get a "satisfactory response." When questioned, Blackwell's campaign said the practice was "standard... for Republicans and Democrats." ^[57]

On Wednesday, May 14, 2007, Ken Blackwell was appointed a senior fellow at the well-known conservative religious, political group Family Research Council.^[58]

As the organizations are 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, not-for-profit organizations, they are explicitly barred from campaigning for, endorsing candidates or "becoming involved in any activity which is beneficial or harmful to any candidate." ^[59][60] Johnson and Rev. Rod Parsley, pastor of World Harvest church have argued that the investigation is politically motivated and violates their constitutional right to free speech. Mark Everson, commissioner of the IRS responded "you don't have an automatic or constitutional right to a tax exemption, and that's where the line has been drawn." ^[61]

Support from pro-gun organizations

Ken Blackwell has earned an "A" rating from the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) Political Victory Fund. Blackwell is also endorsed by the Ohio Gun Collectors Association, Ohioans for Concealed Carry and Gun Owners of America.

"I unequivocally support the Second Amendment right of every law-abiding Ohioan to keep and own firearms for hunting, personal protection and any other lawful purpose," said Blackwell. "I am proud to receive the NRA’s highest rating and will be an unflinching advocate for gun owners as governor."

RNC Chairman Election

Blackwell announced his intentions to run in the 2009 RNC Chairmanship Election, but withdrew after the 4th round of voting. He won early endorsement from the state chairmen in Louisiana (Roger F. Villere, Jr.), Texas (Tina Benkiser), and Oklahoma (Gary Jones).^{[citation needed]}

^------^

^2012:

Ohio's Secretary of State Subverts Voting Rights

Ari Berman on October 9, 2012 - 2:34 PM ET

Once again, political experts are predicting that the 2012 presidential election could be decided in the battleground state of Ohio, like it was in 2004.

Remember what happened that year? George W. Bush won the state by a narrow 118,000 votes in an election marred by widespread electoral dysfunction. “The misallocation of voting machines led to unprecedented long lines that disenfranchised scores, if not hundreds of thousands, of predominantly minority and Democratic voters,” found a post-election report by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee. According to one survey, 174,000 Ohioans, 3 percent of the electorate, left their polling place without voting because of massive lines in urban precincts and on college campuses. Ohio’s Secretary of State that year was **Ken Blackwell**, co-chairman of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign.

Ohio’s GOP secretary of state in 2012, Jon Husted, is proving to be a worthy successor to Blackwell. He has banned early voting hours on nights and weekends in Ohio, when it is most convenient for most Ohioans to vote, has fired Democratic election commissioners who challenge his voting restrictions, and is now appealing a court decision reinstating early voting on the three days prior to the election—which the GOP eliminated except for members of the military—to the US Supreme Court. Early voting has already begun in Ohio, but four weeks out until the election, Husted is doing his damndest to confuse the hell out of Ohio voters and undermine their voting rights.

Early voting emerged as a popular reform in Ohio in response to the 2004 election. Nearly 30 percent of Ohioans voted early in 2008. It was only after Barack Obama built a huge lead among early voters in 2008 that Republicans decided to curtail early voting following the 2010 election.

One hundred and forty-eight thousand votes were cast in 2008 during early voting hours eliminated by Husted and the Ohio GOP. The restrictions on early voting disproportionately harm African-American voters, who just so happen to be Obama’s strongest supporters in the state. African-Americans comprise 21 percent of the population in Franklin (Columbus) and Montgomery (Dayton) counties, 24 percent in Hamilton County (Cincinnati) and 28 percent in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) but accounted for 31 percent, 52 percent, 42 percent and 56 percent of early voters in the respective counties in 2008. (Nearly half of early voters in Franklin County in 2008 cast ballots on nights or weekends.) “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban—read African-American—voter-turnout machine,” Franklin County Republican Chair Doug Preisse infamously told the Columbus Dispatch in August. Black voters in Cuyahoga County used in-person early voting at a rate twenty-six times greater than whites in 2008, according to a new study by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights.

97,000 votes were cast in Ohio in 2008 during the last three days of the election, which Husted and the Ohio GOP want to eliminate (except for Republican-learning members of the military), and two courts recently reinstated. “The majority (57 percent) of these 97,000 votes were cast in thirteen larger counties, disproportionately affecting African-Americans and low-income voters,” found a report from the Northeast Ohio Voter Advocates. The Obama campaign argued in court that it made no sense to allow early voting for members of the military but no one else in Ohio, which the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit recently agreed with. By appealing the ruling to the Supreme Court, Husted is restricting the right of all voters, military voters included.

Director of 4-Day Old Group Called as Expert Witness along with Blackwell in U.S. House Hearings Yesterday.

By Brad Friedman on 3/22/2005, 12:50pm PT

Yesterday, in Columbus, OH, the U.S. House Committee on House Administration held a hearing on the mess otherwise known as the 2004 Presidential Election in Ohio.

Unlike the previous hearings last December in Columbus run by Democratic members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, this committeee, led by Ohio Republican Congressman Bob Ney was given a hearing room in Ohio's State Capitol building. (The Judiciary Committee member's hearings last year had been originally scheduled to take place in the statehouse, until "someone" decided they were not welcome there. But we digress.)

Ney has been a big supporter of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), and has shown an interest on the CHA website in doing everything possible to leave the flawed Help America Vote Act (HAVA), hastily passed in the wake of the 2000 election debacle, in place and unchanged so that things like mandatory paper ballots with every vote cast cannot be amended to the law. HAVA sets asides millions of federal dollars for the purchase of new electronic voting machines from a few select private companies.

Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, tasked with running a free and fair election in the Buckeye state last November --even while he was tasked with being the OH Co-Chair for the Bush/Cheney Re-Elect Committee --- finally decided to show up and take some questions yesterday.

As well, a Republican operative by the name of Mark F. (Thor) Hearne was also called as a "Witness" to discuss Election Reform issues despite fronting an organization, the so-called "American Center for Voting Rights" which suddenly appeared out of nowhere on the web just last Thursday.

Last month, Blackwell had succeeding in displeasing even his theoretical Ohio Republican ally, Ney, by refusing to attend the committee's first such hearings in D.C. Even though Blackwell was already in town.

Yesterday, however, he finally showed up...

In the few reports on the hearings that we've so far been able to collect from the media, it seems that their were quite a few testy moments during Blackwell's questioning. It's being reported that debate became particularly heated between some of the Democrats on the panel, like Ohio Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, who had challenged the Ohio Electoral Vote in a joint-session of Congress on Jan. 6th, and Blackwell.

Here's how The Toledo Blade barely describes some of yesterday's hearing:

COLUMBUS - The battle over the 2004 presidential election raged anew yesterday as a congressional committee questioned Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell over what happened on Election Day and his decisions leading up to that day.

"What you don't want to hear, or what you are not hearing, is that Ohio, whether you're talking about the National Association of Secretaries of State or any other objective measure, had one of the best election administration performances in the country," Mr. Blackwell told the House Administration Committee.

U.S. Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald (D., Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, countered: "Irrespective of that, there have been allegations put out there. Again, you don't want to hear that, but they're out there."

...

"I must speak to the fabrications and exaggerations that some who dislike the fact their presidential candidate lost Ohio keep repeating," Mr. Blackwell said. "Sadly, these fabrications come not only from disappointed partisans talking to each other on the Internet boards, but also from people in responsible positions and people with enough experience in electoral politics to know better."

The "fabrications and exaggerations" that Blackwell would seem to be referring to, are presumably the 102 pages of *confirmed, sourced and verified* "fabrications and exaggerations" (otherwise known as *evidence*) compiled by Rep. John Conyers and U.S. House Judiciary Committee staffers after their exhaustive investigation into thousands of reported Election Day irregularities in the months of November and December 2004.

Those would be the same "fabrications and exaggerations" that Blackwell was unable to respond to when queried in a letter sent by Conyers asking for an explanation. (Blackwell's spokesman had originally promised that Blackwell would respond in full until a few days later they changed their mind and decided they would not answer to the ranking minority member of the U.S. Congressional Judiciary Committee.)

We hope to find more information on yesterday's hearings, of which we are highly dubious. If only because one of the "witnesses" scheduled to testify was to be a member of the American Center for Voting Rights, a Dallas TX group which seems to have sprung up out of nowhere --- just in time for the hearings --- and which is clearly tied to Republican Party operatives.

The ACVR established their website just last Thursday --- 4 days ago --- on March 17th, 2005.

The director of the supposedly non-partisan 501(c)3 organization scheduled to testify as a witness at yesterday's hearing was Mark F. (Thor) Hearne. Hearne is listed on the site as "National Election Counsel to Bush-Cheney '04 and Missouri counsel to Bush-Cheney ?00" amongst other very Republican credentials.

Apparently the voices for real Electoral Reform must be making enough headway that advocates against actual reform find it necessary at this point to set up this sort of Talon "News" like front group as a smoke-screen to murk up the call for true Electoral Reform.

A quick surf of their hastily constructed website reveals that they have no interest in "Voting Rights" as their name would imply, but rather, keeping folks from voting and targeting voter registration activities. Apparently only those groups who may be targetting minority and other potential Democratic voters.

We will attempt hope to learn more, both about this seemingly phony organization, as well as the hearings which were held in Columbus yesterday.

UPDATE: More details now coming in on the "American Center for Voting Rights" to suggest that they are little more than a GOP front group! New article here...

UPDATE 3/23/05: Details, including audio, from Blackwell's extraordinarily arrogant testimony here!

rfk2 2006

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0601-34.htm

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,''(1) and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.''(2)

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)

The reports were especially disturbing inOhio,the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)

Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ''We didn't have one election for president in 2004,'' says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ''We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.''

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)

''It was terrible,'' says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in 2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. ''People waiting in line for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to vote because they were in the wrong precinct -- it was an outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican outcome. I'm terribly disheartened.''

Indeed, the extent of the GOP's effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers of American elections. ''Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,'' Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. ''You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.''

I. The Exit Polls

The first indication that something was gravely amiss on November 2nd, 2004, was the inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote counts. Polls in thirty states weren't just off the mark -- they deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of error. In all but four states, the discrepancy favored President Bush.(16)

Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in which voters are asked to predict their own behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask voters leaving the voting booth to report an action they just executed. The results are exquisitely accurate: Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit polls are almost never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ''so reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.''(18) In 2003, vote tampering revealed by exit polling in the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step down.(19) And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine -- paid for by the Bush administration -- exposed election fraud that denied Viktor Yushchenko the presidency.(20)

But that same month, when exit polls revealed disturbing disparities in the U.S. election, the six media organizations that had commissioned the survey treated its very existence as an embarrassment. Instead of treating the discrepancies as a story meriting investigation, the networks scrubbed the offending results from their Web sites and substituted them with ''corrected'' numbers that had been weighted, retroactively, to match the official vote count. Rather than finding fault with the election results, the mainstream media preferred to dismiss the polls as flawed.(21)

''The people who ran the exit polling, and all those of us who were their clients, recognized that it was deeply flawed,'' says Tom Brokaw, who served as anchor for NBC News during the 2004 election. ''They were really screwed up -- the old models just don't work anymore. I would not go on the air with them again.''

In fact, the exit poll created for the 2004 election was designed to be the most reliable voter survey in history. The six news organizations -- running the ideological gamut from CBS to Fox News -- retained Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International,(22) whose principal, Warren Mitofsky, pioneered the exit poll for CBS in 1967(23) and is widely credited with assuring the credibility of Mexico's elections in 1994.(24) For its nationwide poll, Edison/Mitofsky selected a random subsample of 12,219 voters(25) -- approximately six times larger than those normally used in national polls(26) -- driving the margin of error down to approximately plus or minus one percent.(27)

On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks were briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed, had an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to Bush's 174, with fifty-five too close to call.(28) In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry.(29)

As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states -- including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida -- and winning by a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush's neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina.(30) Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.(31) ''Either the exit polls, by and large, are completely wrong,'' a Fox News analyst declared, ''or George Bush loses.''(32)

But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible disparities -- as much as 9.5 percent -- with the exit polls. In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.(33)

According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all three of those shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000. ''As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible,'' he says, ''it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.'' (See The Tale of the Exit Polls)

Puzzled by the discrepancies, Freeman laboriously examined the raw polling data released by Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. ''I'm not even political -- I despise the Democrats,'' he says. ''I'm a survey expert. I got into this because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have been so wrong.'' In his forthcoming book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman lays out a statistical analysis of the polls that is deeply troubling.

In its official postmortem report issued two months after the election, Edison/Mitofsky was unable to identify any flaw in its methodology -- so the pollsters, in essence, invented one for the electorate. According to Mitofsky, Bush partisans were simply disinclined to talk to exit pollsters on November 2nd(34) -- displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that skewed the polls in Kerry's favor by a margin of 6.5 percent nationwide.(35)

Industry peers didn't buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation's leading pollsters, told me that Mitofsky's ''reluctant responder'' hypothesis is ''preposterous.''(36) Even Mitofsky, in his official report, underscored the hollowness of his theory: ''It is difficult to pinpoint precisely the reasons that, in general, Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters.''(37)

Now, thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky's own data by Freeman and a team of eight researchers, we can say conclusively that the theory is dead wrong. In fact it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were more disinclined to answer pollsters' questions on Election Day. In Bush strongholds, Freeman and the other researchers found that fifty-six percent of voters completed the exit survey -- compared to only fifty-three percent in Kerry strongholds.(38) ''The data presented to support the claim not only fails to substantiate it,'' observes Freeman, ''but actually contradicts it.''

What's more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent -- a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.(39)

''When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that supports the supposition of election fraud,'' concludes Freeman. ''The discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in states where there were the most Election Day complaints. All these are strong indicators of fraud -- and yet this supposition has been utterly ignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party.''

The evidence is especially strong in Ohio. In January, a team of mathematicians from the National Election Data Archive, a nonpartisan watchdog group, compared the state's exit polls against the certified vote count in each of the forty-nine precincts polled by Edison/Mitofsky. In twenty-two of those precincts -- nearly half of those polled -- they discovered results that differed widely from the official tally. Once again -- against all odds -- the widespread discrepancies were stacked massively in Bush's favor: In only two of the suspect twenty-two precincts did the disparity benefit Kerry. The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered ''27,'' in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)

Such results, according to the archive, provide ''virtually irrefutable evidence of vote miscount.'' The discrepancies, the experts add, ''are consistent with the hypothesis that Kerry would have won Ohio's electoral votes if Ohio's official vote counts had accurately reflected voter intent.''(41) According to Ron Baiman, vice president of the archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago, ''No rigorous statistical explanation'' can explain the ''completely nonrandom'' disparities that almost uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he adds, are ''completely consistent with election fraud -- specifically vote shifting.''

II. The Partisan Official

No state was more important in the 2004 election than Ohio. The state has been key to every Republican presidential victory since Abraham Lincoln's, and both parties overwhelmed the state with television ads, field organizers and volunteers in an effort to register new voters and energize old ones. Bush and Kerry traveled to Ohio a total of forty-nine times during the campaign -- more than to any other state.(42)

But in the battle for Ohio, Republicans had a distinct advantage: The man in charge of the counting was Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of President Bush's re-election committee.(43) As Ohio's secretary of state, Blackwell had broad powers to interpret and implement state and federal election laws -- setting standards for everything from the processing of voter registration to the conduct of official recounts.(44) And as Bush's re-election chair in Ohio, he had a powerful motivation to rig the rules for his candidate. Blackwell, in fact, served as the ''principal electoral system adviser'' for Bush during the 2000 recount in Florida,(45) where he witnessed firsthand the success of his counterpart Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state who co-chaired Bush's campaign there.(46)

Blackwell -- now the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio(47) -- is well-known in the state as a fierce partisan eager to rise in the GOP. An outspoken leader of Ohio's right-wing fundamentalists, he opposes abortion even in cases of rape(48) and was the chief cheerleader for the anti-gay-marriage amendment that Republicans employed to spark turnout in rural counties(49). He has openly denounced Kerry as ''an unapologetic liberal Democrat,''(50) and during the 2004 election he used his official powers to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens in Democratic strongholds.In a ruling issued two weeks before the election, a federal judge rebuked Blackwell for seeking to ''accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in 2000.''(51)

''The secretary of state is supposed to administer elections -- not throw them,'' says Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Cleveland who has dealt with Blackwell for years. ''The election in Ohio in 2004 stands out as an example of how, under color of law, a state election official can frustrate the exercise of the right to vote.''

The most extensive investigation of what happened in Ohio was conducted by Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.(52) Frustrated by his party's failure to follow up on the widespread evidence of voter intimidation and fraud, Conyers and the committee's minority staff held public hearings in Ohio, where they looked into more than 50,000 complaints from voters.(53) In January 2005, Conyers issued a detailed report that outlined ''massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio.'' The problems, the report concludes, were ''caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.''(54)

''Blackwell made Katherine Harris look like a cupcake,'' Conyers told me. ''He saw his role as limiting the participation of Democratic voters. We had hearings in Columbus for two days. We could have stayed two weeks, the level of fury was so high. Thousands of people wanted to testify. Nothing like this had ever happened to them before.''

When ROLLING STONE confronted Blackwell about his overtly partisan attempts to subvert the election, he dismissed any such claim as ''silly on its face.'' Ohio, he insisted in a telephone interview, set a ''gold standard'' for electoral fairness. In fact, his campaign to subvert the will of the voters had begun long before Election Day. Instead of welcoming the avalanche of citizen involvement sparked by the campaign, Blackwell permitted election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive purge of their voter rolls, summarily expunging the names of more than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous two national elections.(55) In Cleveland, which went five-to-one for Kerry, nearly one in four voters were wiped from the rolls between 2000 and 2004.(56)

There were legitimate reasons to clean up voting lists: Many of the names undoubtedly belonged to people who had moved or died. But thousands more were duly registered voters who were deprived of their constitutional right to vote -- often without any notification -- simply because they had decided not to go to the polls in prior elections.(57) In Cleveland's precinct 6C, where more than half the voters on the rolls were deleted,(58) turnout was only 7.1 percent(59) -- the lowest in the state.

According to the Conyers report, improper purging ''likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters statewide.''(60) If only one in ten of the 300,000 purged voters showed up on Election Day -- a conservative estimate, according to election scholars -- that is 30,000 citizens who were unfairly denied the opportunity to cast ballots.

III. The Strike Force

In the months leading up to the election, Ohio was in the midst of the biggest registration drive in its history.Tens of thousands of volunteers and paid political operatives from both parties canvassed the state, racing to register new voters in advance of the October 4th deadline. To those on the ground, it was clear that Democrats were outpacing their Republican counterparts: A New York Times analysis before the election found that new registrations in traditional Democratic strongholds were up 250 percent, compared to only twenty-five percent in Republican-leaning counties.(61) ''The Democrats have been beating the pants off us in the air and on the ground,'' a GOP county official in Columbus confessed to The Washington Times.(62)

To stem the tide of new registrations, the Republican National Committee and the Ohio Republican Party attempted to knock tens of thousands of predominantly minority and urban voters off the rolls through illegal mailings known in electioneering jargon as ''caging.'' During the Eighties, after the GOP used such mailings to disenfranchise nearly 76,000 black voters in New Jersey and Louisiana, it was forced to sign two separate court orders agreeing to abstain from caging.(63) But during the summer of 2004, the GOP targeted minority voters in Ohio by zip code, sending registered letters to more than 200,000 newly registered voters(64) in sixty-five counties.(65) On October 22nd, a mere eleven days before the election, Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett -- who also chairs the board of elections in Cuyahoga County -- sought to invalidate the registrations of 35,427 voters who had refused to sign for the letters or whose mail came back as undeliverable.(66) Almost half of the challenged voters were from Democratic strongholds in and around Cleveland.(67)

There were plenty of valid reasons that voters had failed to respond to the mailings: The list included people who couldn't sign for the letters because they were serving in the U.S. military, college students whose school and home addresses differed,(68) and more than 1,000 homeless people who had no permanent mailing address.(69) But the undeliverable mail, Bennett claimed, proved the new registrations were fraudulent.

By law, each voter was supposed to receive a hearing before being stricken from the rolls.(70) Instead, in the week before the election, kangaroo courts were rapidly set up across the state at Blackwell's direction that would inevitably disenfranchise thousands of voters at a time(71) -- a process that one Democratic election official in Toledo likened to an ''inquisition.''(72) Not that anyone was given a chance to actually show up and defend their right to vote: Notices to challenged voters were not only sent out impossibly late in the process, they were mailed to the very addresses that the Republicans contended were faulty.(73) Adding to the atmosphere of intimidation, sheriff's detectives in Sandusky County were dispatched to the homes of challenged voters to investigate the GOP's claims of fraud.(74)

''I'm afraid this is going to scare these people half to death, and they are never going to show up on Election Day,'' Barb Tuckerman, director of the Sandusky Board of Elections, told local reporters. ''Many of them are young people who have registered for the first time. I've called some of these people, and they are perfectly legitimate.''(75)

On October 27th, ruling that the effort likely violated both the ''constitutional right to due process and constitutional right to vote,'' U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott put a halt to the GOP challenge(76) -- but not before tens of thousands of new voters received notices claiming they were improperly registered. Some election officials in the state illegally ignored Dlott's ruling, stripping hundreds of voters from the rolls.(77) In Columbus and elsewhere, challenged registrants were never notified that the court had cleared them to vote.

On October 29th, a federal judge found that the Republican Party had violated the court orders from the Eighties that barred it from caging. ''The return of mail does not implicate fraud,'' the court affirmed,(78) and the disenfranchisement effort illegally targeted ''precincts where minority voters predominate, interfering with and discouraging voters from voting in those districts.''(79) Nor were such caging efforts limited to Ohio: The GOP also targeted hundreds of thousands of urban voters in the battleground states of Florida,(80) Pennsylvania(81) and Wisconsin.(82)

Republicans in Ohio also worked to deny the vote to citizens who had served jail time for felonies. Although rehabilitated prisoners are entitled to vote in Ohio, election officials in Cincinnati demanded that former convicts get a judge to sign off before they could register to vote.(83) In case they didn't get the message, Republican operatives turned to intimidation. According to the Conyers report, a team of twenty-five GOP volunteers calling themselves the Mighty Texas Strike Force holed up at the Holiday Inn in Columbus a day before the election, around the corner from the headquarters of the Ohio Republican Party -- which paid for their hotel rooms. The men were overheard by a hotel worker ''using pay phones to make intimidating calls to likely voters'' and threatening former convicts with jail time if they tried to cast ballots.(84)

This was no freelance operation. The Strike Force -- an offshoot of the Republican National Committee(85) -- was part of a team of more than 1,500 volunteers from Texas who were deployed to battleground states, usually in teams of ten. Their leader wasPat Oxford, (86) a Houston lawyer who managed Bush's legal defense team in 2000 in Florida,(87) where he warmly praised the efforts of a mob that stormed the Miami-Dade County election offices and halted the recount. It was later revealed that those involved in the ''Brooks Brothers Riot'' were not angry Floridians but paid GOP staffers, many of them flown in from out of state.(88) Photos of the protest show that one of the ''rioters'' was Joel Kaplan, who has just taken the place of Karl Rove at the White House, where he now directs the president's policy operations.(89)

IV. Barriers to Registration

To further monkey-wrench the process he was bound by law to safeguard, Blackwell cited an arcane elections regulation to make it harder to register new voters. In a now-infamous decree, Blackwell announced on September 7th -- less than a month before the filing deadline -- that election officials would process registration forms only if they were printed on eighty-pound unwaxed white paper stock, similar to a typical postcard. Justifying his decision to ROLLING STONE, Blackwell portrayed it as an attempt to protect voters: ''The postal service had recommended to us that we establish a heavy enough paper-weight standard that we not disenfranchise voters by having their registration form damaged by postal equipment.'' Yet Blackwell's order also applied to registrations delivered in person to election offices. He further specified that any valid registration cards printed on lesser paper stock that miraculously survived the shredding gauntlet at the post office were not to be processed; instead, they were to be treated as applications for a registration form, requiring election boards to send out a brand-new card.(90)

Blackwell's directive clearly violated the Voting Rights Act, which stipulates that no one may be denied the right to vote because of a registration error that ''is not material in determining whether such individual is qualified under state law to vote.''(91) The decision immediately threw registration efforts into chaos. Local newspapers that had printed registration forms in their pages saw their efforts invalidated.(92) Delaware County posted a notice online saying it could no longer accept its own registration forms.(93) Even Blackwell couldn't follow the protocol: The Columbus Dispatch reported that his own staff distributed registration forms on lighter-weight paper that was illegal under his rule. Under the threat of court action, Blackwell ultimately revoked his order on September 28th -- six days before the registration deadline.(94)

But by then, the damage was done. Election boards across the state, already understaffed and backlogged with registration forms, were unable to process them all in time. According to a statistical analysis conducted in May by the nonpartisan Greater Cleveland Voter Coalition, 16,000 voters in and around the city were disenfranchised because of data-entry errors by election officials,(95) and another 15,000 lost the right to vote due to largely inconsequential omissions on their registration cards.(96) Statewide, the study concludes, a total of 72,000 voters were disenfranchised through avoidable registration errors -- one percent of all voters in an election decided by barely two percent.(97)

Despite the widespread problems, Blackwell authorized only one investigation of registration errors after the election -- in Toledo -- but the report by his own inspectors offers a disturbing snapshot of the malfeasance and incompetence that plagued the entire state.(98) The top elections official in Toledo was a partisan in the Blackwell mold: Bernadette Noe, who chaired both the county board of elections and the county Republican Party.(99) The GOP post was previously held by her husband, Tom Noe,(100) who currently faces felony charges for embezzling state funds and illegally laundering $45,400 of his own money through intermediaries to the Bush campaign.(101)

State inspectors who investigated the elections operation in Toledo discovered ''areas of grave concern.''(102) With less than a month to go before the election, Bernadette Noe and her board had yet to process 20,000 voter registration cards.(103) Board officials arbitrarily decided that mail-in cards (mostly from the Republican suburbs) would be processed first, while registrations dropped off at the board's office (the fruit of intensive Democratic registration drives in the city) would be processed last.(104) When a grass-roots group called Project Vote delivered a batch of nearly 10,000 cards just before the October 4th deadline, an elections official casually remarked, ''We may not get to them.''(105) The same official then instructed employees to date-stamp an entire box containing thousands of forms, rather than marking each individual card, as required by law.(106) When the box was opened, officials had no way of confirming that the forms were filed prior to the deadline -- an error, state inspectors concluded, that could have disenfranchised ''several thousand'' voters from Democratic strongholds.(107)

The most troubling incident uncovered by the investigation was Noe's decision to allow Republican partisans behind the counter in the board of elections office to make photocopies of postcards sent to confirm voter registrations(108) -- records that could have been used in the GOP's caging efforts. On their second day in the office, the operatives were caught by an elections official tampering with the documents.(109) Investigators slammed the elections board for ''a series of egregious blunders'' that caused ''the destruction, mutilation and damage of public records.''(110)

On Election Day, Noe sent a team of Republican volunteers to the county warehouse where blank ballots were kept out in the open, ''with no security measures in place.''(111) The state's assistant director of elections, who just happened to be observing the ballot distribution, demanded they leave. The GOP operatives refused and ultimately had to be turned away by police.(112)

In April 2005, Noe and the entire Board of Elections were forced to resign. But once again, the damage was done. At a ''Victory 2004'' rally held in Toledo four days before the election, President Bush himself singled out a pair of ''grass-roots'' activists for special praise: ''I want to thank my friends Bernadette Noe and Tom Noe for their leadership in Lucas County.''(113)

V. ''The Wrong Pew''

In one of his most effective maneuvers, Blackwell prevented thousands of voters from receiving provisional ballots on Election Day. The fail-safe ballots were mandated in 2002, when Congress passed a package of reforms called the Help America Vote Act. This would prevent a repeat of the most egregious injustice in the 2000 election, when officials in Florida barred thousands of lawfully registered minority voters from the polls because their names didn't appear on flawed precinct rolls. Under the law, would-be voters whose registration is questioned at the polls must be allowed to cast provisional ballots that can be counted after the election if the voter's registration proves valid.(114)

''Provisional ballots were supposed to be this great movement forward,'' says Tova Andrea Wang, an elections expert who served with ex-presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford on the commission that laid the groundwork for the Help America Vote Act. ''But then different states erected barriers, and this new right became totally eviscerated.''

In Ohio, Blackwell worked from the beginning to curtail the availability of provisional ballots. (The ballots are most often used to protect voters in heavily Democratic urban areas who move often, creating more opportunities for data-entry errors by election boards.) Six weeks before the vote, Blackwell illegally decreed that poll workers should make on-the-spot judgments as to whether or not a voter lived in the precinct, and provide provisional ballots only to those deemed eligible.(115) When the ruling was challenged in federal court, Judge James Carr could barely contain his anger. The very purpose of the Help America Vote Act, he ruled, was to make provisional ballots available to voters told by precinct workers that they were ineligible: ''By not even mentioning this group -- the primary beneficiaries of HAVA's provisional-voting provisions -- Blackwell apparently seeks to accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in 2000.''(116)

But instead of complying with the judge's order to expand provisional balloting, Blackwell insisted that Carr was usurping his power as secretary of state and made a speech in which he compared himself to Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and the apostle Paul -- saying that he'd rather go to jail than follow federal law.(117) The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Carr's ruling on October 23rd -- but the confusion over the issue still caused untold numbers of voters across the state to be illegally turned away at the polls on Election Day without being offered provisional ballots.(118) A federal judge also invalidated a decree by Blackwell that denied provisional ballots to absentee voters who were never sent their ballots in the mail. But that ruling did not come down until after 3 p.m. on the day of the election, and likely failed to filter down to the precinct level at all -- denying the franchise to even more eligible voters.(119)

We will never know for certain how many voters in Ohio were denied ballots by Blackwell's two illegal orders. But it is possible to put a fairly precise number on those turned away by his most disastrous directive. Traditionally, anyone in Ohio who reported to a polling station in their county could obtain a provisional ballot. But Blackwell decided to toss out the ballots of anyone who showed up at the wrong precinct -- a move guaranteed to disenfranchise Democrats who live in urban areas crowded with multiple polling places. On October 14th, Judge Carr overruled the order, but Blackwell appealed.(120) In court, he was supported by his friend and campaign contributor Tom Noe, who joined the case as an intervenor on behalf of the secretary of state.(121) He also enjoyed the backing of Attorney General John Ashcroft, who filed an amicus brief in support of Blackwell's position -- marking the first time in American history that the Justice Department had gone to court to block the right of voters to vote.(122) The Sixth Circuit, stacked with four judges appointed by George W. Bush, sided with Blackwell.(123)

Blackwell insists that his decision kept the election clean. ''If we had allowed this notion of ?voters without borders' to exist,'' he says, ''it would have opened the door to massive fraud.'' But even Republicans were shocked by the move. DeForest Soaries, the GOP chairman of the Election Assistance Commission -- the federal agency set up to implement the Help America Vote Act -- upbraided Blackwell, saying that the commission disagreed with his decision to deny ballots to voters who showed up at the wrong precinct. ''The purpose of provisional ballots is to not turn anyone away from the polls,'' Soaries explained. ''We want as many votes to count as possible.''(124)

The decision left hundreds of thousands of voters in predominantly Democratic counties to navigate the state's bewildering array of 11,366 precincts, whose boundaries had been redrawn just prior to the election.(125) To further compound their confusion, the new precinct lines were misidentified on the secretary of state's own Web site, which was months out of date on Election Day. Many voters, out of habit, reported to polling locations that were no longer theirs. Some were mistakenly assured by poll workers on the grounds that they were entitled to cast a provisional ballot at that precinct. Instead, thanks to Blackwell's ruling, at least 10,000 provisional votes were tossed out after Election Day simply because citizens wound up in the wrong line.(126)

In Toledo, Brandi and Brittany Stenson each got in a different line to vote in the gym at St. Elizabeth Seton School. Both of the sisters were registered to vote at the polling place on the city's north side, in the shadow of the giant DaimlerChrysler plant. Both cast ballots. But when the tallies were added up later, the family resemblance came to an abrupt end. Brittany's vote was counted -- but Brandi's wasn't. It wasn't enough that she had voted in the right building. If she wanted her vote to count, according to Blackwell's ruling, she had to choose the line that led to her assigned table. Her ballot -- along with those of her mother, her brother and thirty-seven other voters in the same precinct -- were thrown out(127) simply because they were, in the words of Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio), ''in the right church but the wrong pew.''(128)

All told, the deliberate chaos that resulted from Blackwell's registration barriers did the trick. Black voters in the state -- who went overwhelmingly for Kerry -- were twenty percent more likely than whites to be forced to cast a provisional ballot.(129) In the end, nearly three percent of all voters in Ohio were forced to vote provisionally(130) -- and more than 35,000 of their ballots were ultimately rejected.(131)

VI. Long Lines

When Election Day dawned on November 2nd, tens of thousands of Ohio voters who had managed to overcome all the obstacles to registration erected by Blackwell discovered that it didn't matter whether they were properly listed on the voting rolls -- because long lines at their precincts prevented them from ever making it to the ballot box. Would-be voters in Dayton and Cincinnati routinely faced waits as long as three hours. Those in inner-city precincts in Columbus, Cleveland and Toledo -- which were voting for Kerry by margins of ninety percent or more -- often waited up to seven hours. At Kenyon College, students were forced to stand in line for eleven hours before being allowed to vote, with the last voters casting their ballots after three in the morning.(132)

A five-month analysis of the Ohio vote conducted by the Democratic National Committee concluded in June 2005 that three percent of all Ohio voters who showed up to vote on Election Day were forced to leave without casting a ballot.(133) That's more than 174,000 voters. ''The vast majority of this lost vote,'' concluded the Conyers report, ''was concentrated in urban, minority and Democratic-leaning areas.''(134) Statewide, African-Americans waited an average of fifty-two minutes to vote, compared to only eighteen minutes for whites.(135)

The long lines were not only foreseeable -- they were actually created by GOP efforts. Republicans in the state legislature, citing new electronic voting machines that were supposed to speed voting, authorized local election boards to reduce the number of precincts across Ohio. In most cases, the new machines never materialized -- but that didn't stop officials in twenty of the state's eighty-eight counties, all of them favorable to Democrats, from slashing the number of precincts by at least twenty percent.(136)

Republican officials also created long lines by failing to distribute enough voting machines to inner-city precincts. After the Florida disaster in 2000, such problems with machines were supposed to be a thing of the past. Under the Help America Vote Act, Ohio received more than $30 million in federal funds to replace its faulty punch-card machines with more reliable systems.(137) But on Election Day, that money was sitting in the bank. Why? Because Ken Blackwell had applied for an extension until 2006, insisting that there was no point in buying electronic machines that would later have to be retrofitted under Ohio law to generate paper ballots.(138)

''No one has ever accused our secretary of state of lacking in ability,'' says Rep. Kucinich. ''He's a rather bright fellow, and he's involved in the most minute details of his office. There's no doubt that he knew the effect of not having enough voting machines in some areas.''

At liberal Kenyon College, where students had registered in record numbers, local election officials provided only two voting machines to handle the anticipated surge of up to 1,300 voters. Meanwhile, fundamentalist students at nearby Mount Vernon Nazarene University had one machine for 100 voters and faced no lines at all.(139) Citing the lines at Kenyon, the Conyers report concluded that the ''misallocation of machines went beyond urban/suburban discrepancies to specifically target Democratic areas.''(140)

In Columbus, which had registered 125,000 new voters(141) -- more than half of them black(142) -- the board of elections estimated that it would need 5,000 machines to handle the huge surge.(143) ''On Election Day, the county experienced an unprecedented turnout that could only be compared to a 500-year flood,'' says Matt Damschroder,(144) chairman of the Franklin County Board of Elections and the former head of the Republican Party in Columbus.(145) But instead of buying more equipment, the Conyers investigation found, Damschroder decided to ''make do'' with 2,741 machines.(146) And to make matters worse, he favored his own party in distributing the equipment. According to The Columbus Dispatch, precincts that had gone seventy percent or more for Al Gore in 2000 were allocated seventeen fewer machines in 2004, while strong GOP precincts received eight additional machines.(147) An analysis by voter advocates found that all but three of the thirty wards with the best voter-to-machine ratios were in Bush strongholds; all but one of the seven with the worst ratios were in Kerry country.(148)

The result was utterly predictable. According to an investigation by the Columbus Free Press, white Republican suburbanites, blessed with a surplus of machines, averaged waits of only twenty-two minutes; black urban Democrats averaged three hours and fifteen minutes.(149) ''The allocation of voting machines in Franklin County was clearly biased against voters in precincts with high proportions of African-Americans,'' concluded Walter Mebane Jr., a government professor at Cornell University who conducted a statistical analysis of the vote in and around Columbus.(150)

By midmorning, when it became clear that voters were dropping out of line rather than braving the wait, precincts appealed for the right to distribute paper ballots to speed the process. Blackwell denied the request, saying it was an invitation to fraud.(151) A lawsuit ensued, and the handwritten affidavits submitted by voters and election officials offer a heart-rending snapshot of an electoral catastrophe in the offing:(152)

From Columbus Precinct 44D:

''There are three voting machines at this precinct. I have been informed that in prior elections there were normally four voting machines. At 1:45 p.m. there are approximately eighty-five voters in line. At this time, the line to vote is approximately three hours long. This precinct is largely African-American. I have personally witnessed voters leaving the polling place without voting due to the length of the line.''

From Precinct 40:

''I am serving as a presiding judge, a position I have held for some 15+ years in precinct 40. In all my years of service, the lines are by far the longest I have seen, with some waiting as long as four to five hours. I expect the situation to only worsen as the early evening heavy turnout approaches. I have requested additional machines since 6:40 a.m. and no assistance has been offered.''

Precinct 65H:

''I observed a broken voting machine that was not in use for approximately two hours. The precinct judge was very diligent but could not get through to the BOE.''

Precinct 18A:

''At 4 p.m. the average wait time is about 4.5 hours and continuing to increase?. Voters are continuing to leave without voting.''

As day stretched into evening, U.S. District Judge Algernon Marbley issued a temporary restraining order requiring that voters be offered paper ballots.(153) But it was too late: According to bipartisan estimates published in The Washington Post, as many as 15,000 voters in Columbus had already given up and gone home.(154) When closing time came at the polls, according to the Conyers report, some precinct workers illegally dismissed citizens who had waited for hours in the rain -- in direct violation of Ohio law, which stipulates that those in line at closing time are allowed to remain and vote.(155)

The voters disenfranchised by long lines were overwhelmingly Democrats. Because of the unequal distribution of voting equipment, the median turnout in Franklin County precincts won by Kerry was fifty-one percent, compared to sixty-one percent in those won by Bush. Assuming sixty percent turnout under more equitable conditions, Kerry would have gained an additional 17,000 votes in the county.(156)

In another move certain to add to the traffic jam at the polls, the GOP deployed 3,600 operatives on Election Day to challenge voters in thirty-one counties -- most of them in predominantly black and urban areas.(157) Although it was billed as a means to ''ensure that voters are not disenfranchised by fraud,''(158) Republicans knew that the challengers would inevitably create delays for eligible voters. Even Mark Weaver, the GOP's attorney in Ohio, predicted in late October that the move would ''create chaos, longer lines and frustration.''(159)

The day before the election, Judge Dlott attempted to halt the challengers, ruling that ''there exists an enormous risk of chaos, delay, intimidation and pandemonium inside the polls and in the lines out the doors.'' Dlott was also troubled by the placement of Republican challengers: In Hamilton County, fourteen percent of new voters in white areas would be confronted at the polls, compared to ninety-seven percent of new voters in black areas.(160) But when the case was appealed to the Supreme Court on Election Day, Justice John Paul Stevens allowed the challenges to go forward. ''I have faith,'' he ruled, ''that the elected officials and numerous election volunteers on the ground will carry out their responsibilities in a way that will enable qualified voters to cast their ballots.''(161)

In fact, Blackwell gave Republican challengers unprecedented access to polling stations, where they intimidated voters, worsening delays in Democratic precincts. By the end of the day, thanks to a whirlwind of legal wrangling, the GOP had even gotten permission to use the discredited list of 35,000 names from its illegal caging effort to challenge would-be voters.(162) According to the survey by the DNC, nearly 5,000 voters across the state were turned away at the polls because of registration challenges -- even though federal law required that they be provided with provisional ballots.(163)

VII. Faulty Machines

Voters who managed to make it past the array of hurdles erected by Republican officials found themselves confronted by voting machines that didn't work. Only 800,000 out of the 5.6 million votes in Ohio were cast on electronic voting machines, but they were plagued with errors.(164) In heavily Democratic areas around Youngstown, where nearly 100 voters reported entering ''Kerry'' on the touch screen and watching ''Bush'' light up, at least twenty machines had to be recalibrated in the middle of the voting process for chronically flipping Kerry votes to Bush.(165) (Similar ''vote hopping'' from Kerry to Bush was reported by voters and election officials in other states.)(166) Elsewhere, voters complained in sworn affidavits that they touched Kerry's name on the screen and it lit up, but that the light had gone out by the time they finished their ballot; the Kerry vote faded away.(167) In the state's most notorious incident, an electronic machine at a fundamentalist church in the town of Gahanna recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry.(168) In that precinct, however, there were only 800 registered voters, of whom 638 showed up.(169) (The error, which was later blamed on a glitchy memory card, was corrected before the certified vote count.)

In addition to problems with electronic machines, Ohio's vote was skewed by old-fashioned punch-card equipment that posed what even Blackwell acknowledged was the risk of a ''Florida-like calamity.''(170) All but twenty of the state's counties relied on antiquated machines that were virtually guaranteed to destroy votes(171) -- many of which were counted by automatic tabulators manufactured by Triad Governmental Systems,(172) the same company that supplied Florida's notorious butterfly ballot in 2000. In fact, some 95,000 ballots in Ohiorecorded no vote for president at all -- most of them on punch-card machines. Even accounting for the tiny fraction of voters in each election who decide not to cast votes for president -- generally in the range of half a percent, according to Ohio State law professor and respected elections scholar Dan Tokaji -- that would mean that at least 66,000 votes were invalidated by faulty voting equipment.(173) If counted by hand instead of by automated tabulator, the vast majority of these votes would have been discernable. But thanks to a corrupt recount process, only one county hand-counted its ballots.(174)

Most of the uncounted ballots occurred in Ohio's big cities. In Cleveland, where nearly 13,000 votes were ruined, a New York Times analysis found that black precincts suffered more than twice the rate of spoiled ballots than white districts.(175) In Dayton, Kerry-leaning precincts had nearly twice the number of spoiled ballots as Bush-leaning precincts.(176) Last April, a federal court ruled that Ohio's use of punch-card balloting violated the equal-protection rights of the citizens who voted on them.(177)

In addition to spoiling ballots, the punch-card machines also created bizarre miscounts known as ''ballot crawl.'' In Cleveland Precinct 4F, a heavily African-American precinct, Constitution Party candidate Michael Peroutka was credited with an impressive forty-one percent of the vote. In Precinct 4N, where Al Gore won ninety-eight percent of the vote in 2000, Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik was credited with thirty-three percent of the vote. Badnarik and Peroutka also picked up a sizable portion of the vote in precincts across Cleveland -- 11M, 3B, 8G, 8I, 3I.(178) ''It appears that hundreds, if not thousands, of votes intended to be cast for Senator Kerry were recorded as being for a third-party candidate,'' the Conyers report concludes.(179)

But it's not just third-party candidates: Ballot crawl in Cleveland also shifted votes from Kerry to Bush. In Precinct 13B, where Bush received only six votes in 2000, he was credited with twenty percent of the total in 2004. Same story in 9P, where Bush recorded eighty-seven votes in 2004, compared to his grand total of one in 2000.(180)

:{VIII. Rural Counties

Despite the well-documented effort that prevented hundreds of thousands of voters in urban and minority precincts from casting ballots, the worst theft in Ohio may have quietly taken place in rural counties. An examination of election data suggests widespread fraud -- and even good old-fashioned stuffing of ballot boxes -- in twelve sparsely populated counties scattered across southern and western Ohio: Auglaize, Brown, Butler, Clermont, Darke, Highland, Mercer, Miami, Putnam, Shelby, Van Wert and Warren. (See The Twelve Suspect Counties) One key indicator of fraud is to look at counties where the presidential vote departs radically from other races on the ballot. By this measure, John Kerry's numbers were suspiciously low in each of the twelve counties -- and George Bush's were unusually high.}:

Take the case of Ellen Connally, a Democrat who lost her race for chief justice of the state Supreme Court. When the ballots were counted, Kerry should have drawn far more votes than Connally -- a liberal black judge who supports gay rights and campaigned on a shoestring budget. And that's exactly what happened statewide: Kerry tallied 667,000 more votes for president than Connally did for chief justice, outpolling her by a margin of thirty-two percent. Yet in these twelve off-the-radar counties, Connally somehow managed to outperform the best-funded Democrat in history, thumping Kerry by a grand total of 19,621 votes -- a margin of ten percent.(181) The Conyers report -- recognizing that thousands of rural Bush voters were unlikely to have backed a gay-friendly black judge roundly rejected in Democratic precincts -- suggests that ''thousands of votes for Senator Kerry were lost.''(182)

Kucinich, a veteran of elections in the state, puts it even more bluntly. ''Down-ticket candidates shouldn't outperform presidential candidates like that,'' he says. ''That just doesn't happen. The question is: Where did the votes for Kerry go?''

They certainly weren't invalidated by faulty voting equipment: a trifling one percent of presidential ballots in the twelve suspect counties were spoiled. The more likely explanation is that they were fraudulently shifted to Bush. Statewide, the president outpolled Thomas Moyer, the Republican judge who defeated Connally, by twenty-one percent. Yet in the twelve questionable counties, Bush's margin over Moyer was fifty percent -- a strong indication that the president's certified vote total was inflated. If Kerry had maintained his statewide margin over Connally in the twelve suspect counties, as he almost assuredly would have done in a clean election, he would have bested her by 81,260 ballots. That's a swing of 162,520 votes from Kerry to Bush -- more than enough to alter the outcome. (183)

''This is very strong evidence that the count is off in those counties,'' says Freeman, the poll analyst. ''By itself, without anything else, what happened in these twelve counties turns Ohio into a Kerry state. To me, this provides every indication of fraud.''

How might this fraud have been carried out? One way to steal votes is to tamper with individual ballots -- and there is evidence that Republicans did just that. In Clermont County, where optical scanners were used to tabulate votes, sworn affidavits by election observers given to the House Judiciary Committee describe ballots on which marks for Kerry were covered up with white stickers, while marks for Bush were filled in to replace them. Rep. Conyers, in a letter to the FBI, described the testimony as ''strong evidence of vote tampering if not outright fraud.'' (184) In Miami County, where Connally outpaced Kerry, one precinct registered a turnout of 98.55 percent (185) -- meaning that all but ten eligible voters went to the polls on Election Day. An investigation by the Columbus Free Press, however, collected affidavits from twenty-five people who swear they didn't vote. (186)

In addition to altering individual ballots, evidence suggests that Republicans tampered with the software used to tabulate votes. In Auglaize County, where Kerry lost not only to Connally but to two other defeated Democratic judicial candidates, voters cast their ballots on touch-screen machines. (187) Two weeks before the election, an employee of ES&S, the company that manufactures the machines, was observed by a local election official making an unauthorized log-in to the central computer used to compile election results. (188) In Miami County, after 100 percent of precincts had already reported their official results, an additional 18,615 votes were inexplicably added to the final tally. The last-minute alteration awarded 12,000 of the votes to Bush, boosting his margin of victory in the county by nearly 6,000. (189)

The most transparently crooked incident took place in Warren County. In the leadup to the election, Blackwell had illegally sought to keep reporters and election observers at least 100 feet away from the polls. (190) The Sixth Circuit, ruling that the decree represented an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment, noted ominously that ''democracies die behind closed doors.'' But the decision didn't stop officials in Warren County from devising a way to count the vote in secret. Immediately after the polls closed on Election Day, GOP officials -- citing the FBI -- declared that the county was facing a terrorist threat that ranked ten on a scale of one to ten. The county administration building was hastily locked down, allowing election officials to tabulate the results without any reporters present.

In fact, there was no terrorist threat. The FBI declared that it had issued no such warning, and an investigation by The Cincinnati Enquirer unearthed e-mails showing that the Republican plan to declare a terrorist alert had been in the works for eight days prior to the election. Officials had even refined the plot down to the language they used on signs notifying the public of a lockdown. (When ROLLING STONE requested copies of the same e-mails from the county, officials responded that the documents have been destroyed.) (191)

The late-night secrecy in Warren County recalls a classic trick: Results are held back until it's determined how many votes the favored candidate needs to win, and the totals are then adjusted accordingly. When Warren County finally announced its official results -- one of the last counties in the state to do so (192) -- the results departed wildly from statewide patterns. John Kerry received 2,426 fewer votes for president than Ellen Connally, the poorly funded black judge, did for chief justice. (193) As the Conyers report concluded, ''It is impossible to rule out the possibility that some sort of manipulation of the tallies occurred on election night in the locked-down facility.'' (194)

Nor does the electoral tampering appear to have been isolated to these dozen counties. Ohio, like several other states, had an initiative on the ballot in 2004 to outlaw gay marriage. Statewide, the measure proved far more popular than Bush, besting the president by 470,000 votes. But in six of the twelve suspect counties -- as well as in six other small counties in central Ohio -- Bush outpolled the ban on same-sex unions by 16,132 votes. To trust the official tally, in other words, you must believe that thousands of rural Ohioans voted for both President Bush and gay marriage. (195)

IX. Rigging the Recount

After Kerry conceded the election, his campaign helped the Libertarian and Green parties pay for a recount of all eighty-eight counties in Ohio. Under state law, county boards of election were required to randomly select three percent of their precincts and recount the ballots both by hand and by machine. If the two totals reconciled exactly, a costly hand recount of the remaining votes could be avoided; machines could be used to tally the rest.

But election officials in Ohio worked outside the law to avoid hand recounts. According to charges brought by a special prosecutor in April, election officials in Cleveland fraudulently and secretly pre-counted precincts by hand to identify ones that would match the machine count. They then used these pre-screened precincts to select the ''random'' sample of three percent used for the recount.

''If it didn't balance, they excluded those precincts,'' said the prosecutor, Kevin Baxter, who has filed felony indictments against three election workers in Cleveland. ''They screwed with the process and increased the probability, if not the certainty, that there would not be a full, countywide hand count.'' (196)

Voting machines were also tinkered with prior to the recount. In Hocking County, deputy elections director Sherole Eaton caught an employee of Triad -- which provided the software used to count punch-card ballots in nearly half of Ohio's counties (197) -- making unauthorized modifications to the tabulating computer before the recount. Eaton told the Conyers committee that the same employee also provided county officials with a ''cheat sheet'' so that ''the count would come out perfect and we wouldn't have to do a full hand-recount of the county.'' (198) After Eaton blew the whistle on the illegal tampering, she was fired.

(199) The same Triad employee was dispatched to do the same work in at least five other counties. (200) Company president Tod Rapp -- who contributed to Bush's campaign (201) -- has confirmed that Triad routinely makes such tabulator adjustments to help election officials avoid hand recounts. In the end, every county serviced by Triad failed to conduct full recounts by hand. (202)

Even more troubling, in at least two counties, Fulton and Henry, Triad was able to connect to tabulating computers remotely via a dial-up connection, and reprogram them to recount only the presidential ballots. (203) If that kind of remote tabulator modification is possible for the purposes of the recount, it's no great leap to wonder if such modifications might have helped skew the original vote count. But the window for settling such questions is closing rapidly: On November 2nd of this year, on the second anniversary of the election, state officials will be permitted under Ohio law to shred all ballots from the 2004 election. (204)

X. What's At Stake

The mounting evidence that Republicans employed broad, methodical and illegal tactics in the 2004 election should raise serious alarms among news organizations. But instead of investigating allegations of wrongdoing, the press has simply accepted the result as valid. ''We're in a terrible fix,'' Rep. Conyers told me. ''We've got a media that uses its bullhorn in reverse -- to turn down the volume on this outrage rather than turning it up. That's why our citizens are not up in arms.''

The lone news anchor who seriously questioned the integrity of the 2004 election was Keith Olbermann of MSNBC. I asked him why he stood against the tide. ''I was a sports reporter, so I was used to dealing with numbers,'' he said. ''And the numbers made no sense. Kerry had an insurmountable lead in the exit polls on Election Night -- and then everything flipped.'' Olbermann believes that his journalistic colleagues fell down on the job. ''I was stunned by the lack of interest by investigative reporters,'' he said. ''The Republicans shut down Warren County, allegedly for national security purposes -- and no one covered it. Shouldn't someone have sent a camera and a few reporters out there?''

Olbermann attributes the lack of coverage to self-censorship by journalists. ''You can rock the boat, but you can never say that the entire ocean is in trouble,'' he said. ''You cannot say: By the way, there's something wrong with our electoral system.''

Federal officials charged with safeguarding the vote have also failed to contest the election. ''Congress hasn't investigated this at all,'' says Kucinich. ''There has been no oversight over our nation's most basic right: the right to vote. How can we call ourselves a beacon of democracy abroad when the right to vote hasn't been secured in free and fair elections at home?''

Sen. John Kerry -- in a wide-ranging discussion of ROLLING STONE's investigation -- expressed concern about Republican tactics in 2004, but stopped short of saying the election was stolen. ''Can I draw a conclusion that they played tough games and clearly had an intent to reduce the level of our vote? Yes, absolutely. Can I tell you to a certainty that it made the difference in the election? I can't. There's no way for me to do that. If I could have done that, then obviously I would have found some legal recourse.''

Kerry conceded, however, that the widespread irregularities make it impossible to know for certain that the outcome reflected the will of the voters. ''I think there are clearly states where it is questionable whether everybody's vote is being counted, whether everybody is being given the opportunity to register and to vote,'' he said. ''There are clearly barriers in too many places to the ability of people to exercise their full franchise. For that to be happening in the United States of America today is disgraceful.''

Kerry's comments were echoed by Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. ''I'm not confident that the election in Ohio was fairly decided,'' Dean says. ''We know that there was substantial voter suppression, and the machines were not reliable. It should not be a surprise that the Republicans are willing to do things that are unethical to manipulate elections. That's what we suspect has happened, and we'd like to safeguard our elections so that democracy can still be counted on to work.''

To help prevent a repeat of 2004, Kerry has co-sponsored a package of election reforms called the Count Every Vote Act. The measure would increase turnout by allowing voters to register at the polls on Election Day, provide provisional ballots to voters who inadvertently show up at the wrong precinct, require electronic voting machines to produce paper receipts verified by voters, and force election officials like Blackwell to step down if they want to join a campaign. (205) But Kerry says his fellow Democrats have been reluctant to push the reforms, fearing that Republicans would use their majority in Congress to create even more obstacles to voting. ''The real reason there is no appetite up here is that people are afraid the Republicans will amend HAVA and shove something far worse down our throats,'' he told me.

On May 24th, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) tried unsuccessfully to amend the immigration bill to bar anyone who lacks a government-issued photo ID from voting (206) -- a rule that would disenfranchise at least six percent of Americans, the majority of them urban and poor, who lack such identification. (207) The GOP-controlled state legislature in Indiana passed a similar measure, and an ID rule in Georgia was recently struck down as unconstitutional. (208)

''Why erect those kinds of hurdles unless you're afraid of voters?'' asks Ralph Neas, director of People for the American Way. ''The country will be better off if everyone votes -- Democrats and Republicans. But that is not the Blackwell philosophy, that is not the George W. Bush or Jeb Bush philosophy. They want to limit the franchise and go to extraordinary lengths to make it more difficult to vote.''

The issue of what happened in 2004 is not an academic one. For the second election in a row, the president of the United States was selected not by the uncontested will of the people but under a cloud of dirty tricks. Given the scope of the GOP machinations, we simply cannot be certain that the right man now occupies the Oval Office -- which means, in effect, that we have been deprived of our faith in democracy itself.

American history is littered with vote fraud -- but rather than learning from our shameful past and cleaning up the system, we have allowed the problem to grow even worse. If the last two elections have taught us anything, it is this: The single greatest threat to our democracy is the insecurity of our voting system. If people lose faith that their votes are accurately and faithfully recorded, they will abandon the ballot box. Nothing less is at stake here than the entire idea of a government by the people.

Voting, as Thomas Paine said, ''is the right upon which all other rights depend.'' Unless we ensure that right, everything else we hold dear is in jeopardy.

For more, see exclusive documents, sources, charts and commentary.

--

1) Manual Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating, ''Latest Conspiracy Theory -- Kerry Won -- Hits the Ether,'' The Washington Post, November 11, 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41106-2004Nov10.html

2) The New York Times Editorial Desk, ''About Those Election Results,'' The New York Times, November 14, 2004. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70615FA3C5B0C778DDDA80994DC404482&n

=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fSubjects%2fE%2fElection%20Results

3) United States Department of Defense, ''Defense Department Special Briefing on Federal Voting Assistance Program,'' August 6, 2004. http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2004/tr20040806-1502.html

4) Overseas Vote Foundation, ''2004 Post Election Survey Results,'' June 2005, page 11. http://www.overseasvotefoundation.org/downloads/surveys/ovf_survey_01jun2005_

v1.0_usletter.pdf

5) Jennifer Joan Lee, ''Pentagon Blocks Site for Voters Outside U.S.,'' International Herald Tribune, September 20, 2004.

6) Meg Landers, ''Librarian Bares Possible Voter Registration Dodge,'' Mail Tribune (Jackson County, OR), September 21, 2004. http://www.mailtribune.com/archive/2004/0921/local/stories/02local.htm

7) Mark Brunswick and Pat Doyle, ''Voter Registration; 3 former workers: Firm paid pro-Bush bonuses; One said he was told his job was to bring back cards for GOP voters,'' Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), October 27, 2004.

8) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election Results for the U.S. President. http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2004/2004pres.pdf

9) Ellen Theisen and Warren Stewart, Summary Report on New Mexico State Election Data, January 4, 2005, pg. 2. http://www.democracyfornewmexico.com/democracy_for_new_mexico/files/

NewMexico2004ElectionDataReport-v2.pdf

James W. Bronsan, ''In 2004, New Mexico Worst at Counting Votes,'' Scripps Howard News Service, December 22, 2004. 10) ''A Summary of the 2004 Election Day Survey; How We Voted: People, Ballots & Polling Places; A Report to the American People by the United States Election Assistance Commission,'' September 2005, pg. 10. http://www.eac.gov/election_survey_2004/pdf/EDS%20exec.%20summary.pdf

11) Facts mentioned in this paragraph are subsequently cited throughout the story.

12) See ''Ohio's Missing Votes.''

13) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election Results for the U.S. President. http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2004/2004pres.pdf

14) Democratic National Committee, Voting Rights Institute, "Democracy at Risk: The 2004 Election in Ohio," June 22, 2005. Page 5 http://a9.g.akamai.net/7/9/8082/v001/www.democrats.org/pdfs/ohvrireport/fullreport.pdf

15) See ''VIII. Rural Counties.''

16) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofksy International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3 http://www.exit-poll.net/election-night/EvaluationJan192005.pdf

17) This refers to data for German national elections in 1994, 1998 and 2002, previously cited by Steven F. Freeman.

18) Dick Morris, "Those Faulty Exit Polls Were Sabotage," The Hill, November 4, 2004. http://www.hillnews.com/morris/110404.aspx

19) Martin Plissner, "Exit Polls to Protect the Vote," The New York Times, October 17, 2004.

20) Matt Kelley, "U.S. Money has Helped Opposition in Ukraine," Associated Press, December 11, 2004. http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041211/news_1n11usaid.html

Daniel Williams, "Court Rejects Ukraine Vote; Justices Cite Massive Fraud in Runoff, Set New Election," The Washington Post, December 4, 2004.

21) Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss, "Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count," Seven Stories Press, July 2006, Page 102.

22) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3. http://www.exit-poll.net/election-night/EvaluationJan192005.pdf

23) Mitofsky International Web site. http://www.mitofskyinternational.com/company.htm

24) Tim Golden, "Election Near, Mexicans Question the Questioners," The New York Times, August 10, 1994.

25) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 59.

26) Jonathan D. Simon, J.D., and Ron P. Baiman, Ph.D., "The 2004 Presidential Election: Who Won the Popular Vote? An Examination of the Comparative Validity of Exit Poll and Vote Count Data." FreePress.org, December 29, 2004, P. 9 http://freepress.org/images/departments/PopularVotePaper181_1.pdf

27) Analysis by Steven F. Freeman.

28) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134

29) Jim Rutenberg, ''Report Says Problems Led to Skewing Survey Data,'' The New York Times, November 5, 2004.

30) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134

31) Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies. U.S. Count Votes. Baiman R, et al. March 31, 2005. Page 3. http://www.electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit_Polls_2004_Edison-Mitofsky.pdf

32) Notes From Campaign Trail, Fox News Network, Live Event, 8:00 p.m. EST, November 2, 2004.

33) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 101-102

34) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4.

35) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 120.

36) Interview with John Zogby

37) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4.

38) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 128.

39) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 130.

40) "The Gun is Smoking: 2004 Ohio Precinct-level Exit Poll Data Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount," U.S. Count Votes, National Election Data Archive, January 23, 2006. http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/OH/Ohio-Exit-Polls-2004.pdf

41) ''The Gun is Smoking,'' pg. 16.

42) The Washington Post, "Charting the Campaign: Top Five Most Visited States," November 2, 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/elections/2004/charting.html

43) John McCarthy, "Nearly a Month Later, Ohio Fight Goes On," Associated Press Online, November 30, 2004.

44) Ohio Revised Code, 3501.04, Chief Election Officer http://onlinedocs.andersonpublishing.com/oh/lpExt.dll?f=templates&fn=main-h.htm&cp=PORC

45) Joe Hallett, ''Blackwell Joins GOP?s Spin Team,'' The Columbus Dispatch, November 30, 2004.

46) Gary Fineout, ''Records Indicate Harris on Defense,'' Ledger (Lakeland, Florida), November 18, 2000.

47) http://www.kenblackwell.com/

48) Joe Hallett, ''Governor; Aggressive First Round Culminates Tuesday,'' Columbus Dispatch, April 30, 2006. http://www.dispatch.com/extra/extra.php?story=dispatch/2006/04/30/20060430-B1-02.html

49) Sandy Theis, ''Blackwell Accused of Breaking Law by Pushing Same-Sex Marriage Ban,'' Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October 29, 2004.

50) Raw Story, "Republican Ohio Secretary of State Boasts About Delivering Ohio to Bush." http://rawstory.rawprint.com/105/blackwell_campaign_letter2_105.php

51) In the United States District Court For the Northern District of Ohio Northern Division, The Sandusky County Democratic Party et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case No. 3:04CV7582, Page 8. http://electionlawblog.org/archives/10-20%20Order.pdf

52) Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff (Rep. John Conyers, Jr.), January 5, 2005. http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/ohiostatusrept1505.pdf

53) Preserving Democracy, pg. 8.

54) Preserving Democracy, pg. 4.

55) The board of elections in Cuyahoga, Franklin and Hamilton counties.

56) Analysis by Richard Hayes Phillips, a voting rights advocate.

57) Fritz Wenzel, ''Purging of Rolls, Confusion Anger Voters; 41% of Nov. 2 Provisional Ballots Axed in Lucas County,'' Toledo Blade, January 9, 2005. http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050109/NEWS09/501090334&SearchID

=73195662517954

58) Analysis by Hayes Phillips.

59) Cuyahoga County Board of Elections

60) Preserving Democracy, pg. 6.

61) Ford Fessenden, ''A Big Increase of New Voters in Swing States,'' The New York Times, September 26, 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/politics/campaign/26vote.html?ex=1254024000&en=

cd9ae70cb6e69619&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt

62) Ralph Z. Hallow, ''Republicans Go ?Under the Radar? in Rural Ohio,'' The Washington Times, October 28, 2004. http://washtimes.com/national/20041027-115211-1609r.htm

63) Jo Becker, ''GOP Challenging Voter Registrations,'' The Washington Post, October 29, 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7422-2004Oct28.html

64) Janet Babin, ''Voter Registrations Challenged in Ohio,'' NPR, All Things Considered, October 28, 2004.

65) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, Amy Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 2. http://fl1.findlaw.com/news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/election2004/mlrblackwell102704ord.pdf

66) Sandy Theis, "Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP?s Blanket Challenge Backfires in a Big Way," Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.

67) Daniel Tokaji, "Early Returns on Election Reform," George Washington Law Review, Vol. 74, 2005, page 1235

68) Sandy Theis, "Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP?s Blanket Challenge Backfires in a Big Way," Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.

69) Andrew Welsh-Huggins, ''Out of Country, Off Beaten Path; Reason for Voting Challenges Vary,'' Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October 27, 2004.

70) Ohio Revised Code; 3505.19

71) Directive No. 2004-44 from J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Sec?y of State, to All County Boards of Elections Members, Directors, and Deputy Directors 1 (Oct. 26, 2004).

72) Fritz Wenzel, ''Challenges Filed Against 931 Lucas County Voters,'' Toledo Blade, October 27, 2004. http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041027/

NEWS09/410270361/-1/NEWS

73) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, Amy Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 4. http://news.corporatecounselcentre.ca/hdocs/docs/election2004/mlrblackwell102704ord.pdf

74) LaRaye Brown, ''Elections Board Plans Hearing For Challenges,'' The News Messenger, October 26, 2004.

75) LaRaye Brown, ''Elections Board Plans Hearing For Challenges,'' The News Messenger, October 26, 2004.

76) Miller v. Blackwell, (S.D. Ohio), (6th Cir. 2004) http://news.corporatecounselcentre.ca/hdocs/docs/election2004/mlrblackwell102704ord.pdf

77) James Drew and Steve Eder, ''Court Rejects GOP Voter Challenge; Some Counties Hold Hearings Anyhow; 200 Voters Turned Away,'' Toledo Blade, October 30, 2004. http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041030/NEWS09/410300450/-1/NEWS

78) United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee, No. 04-4186 http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/litigation/documents/petitionforrehearingenbanc.pdf

79) United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee, No. 04-4186 http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/litigation/documents/petitionforrehearingenbanc.pdf

80) Kate Zernike and William Yardley, ''Charges of Dirty Tricks, Fraud and Voter Suppression Already Flying in Several States,'' The New York Times, November 1, 2004.

Greg Palast, "New Florida Vote Scandal Feared," BBC News, October 26, 2004.

81) Kate Zernike and William Yardley, ''Charges of Dirty Tricks, Fraud and Voter Suppression Already Flying in Several States,'' The New York Times, November 1, 2004.

82) Greg J. Borowski, ''GOP Demands IDs of 37,000 in City,'' Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, October 30, 2004. http://www2.jsonline.com:80/news/metro/oct04/271173.asp

83) "The Disenfranchisement of the Re-Enfranchised; How Confusion Over Felon Voter Eligibility in Ohio Keeps Qualified Ex-Offender Voters From the Polls," Prison Reform Advocacy Center, Cincinnati, Ohio, August 2004. http://www.prisonsucks.com/scans/Ohio%20Felon%20Voting%20Rights%20Paper.pdf

84) Preserving Democracy, 64.

Note: Additional reporting contributed to this paragraph.

85) Gardner Selby, ''Hundreds of Texans Ride Bandwagons Around U.S.; Volunteers Say Election is Too Important Not to Hit the Campaign Trail,'' San Antonio Express-News (Texas), October 15, 2004.

86) ''Down to the Wire,'' Newsweek, November 15, 2004.

87) Lynda Gorov and Anne E. Kornblut, ''Gore to Challenge Results; No Plans to Concede; top Fla. Court refuses to order resumption of Miami-Dade County,'' The Boston Globe, November 24, 2000. http://graphics.boston.com/news/politics/campaign2000/news/Gore_to_challenge_results+.shtml

88) Al Kamen, "Miami ?Riot? Squad: Where are they Now?" Washington Post, January 24, 2005. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31074-2005Jan23.html

89) Al Kamen, "Walking the Talk," Washington Post, April 21, 2006. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/20/AR2006042002067.html

90) Secretary of State Directive, No. 2004-31, Section II, September 7, 2004.

91) Tokaji, pg. 1227 and Voting Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. 1971(a)(2)(B) (2000).

92) Jim Bebbington and Laura Bischoff, ''Blackwell Rulings Rile Voting Advocates,'' Dayton Daily News. 93) Congress of the United States House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, letter from Conyers to Blackwell. http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/ohblackwellfollowupltr12304.pdf

94) Catherine Candisky, ''Secretary of State Lifts Order on Voting Forms; Lighter Paper Now Deemed Acceptable for Registration,'' Columbus Dispatch, September 30, 2004.

95) Analyses of Voter Disqualification, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, November 2004, Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition, updated May 9, 2006, page 14. http://www.clevelandvotes.org/news/reports/Analyses_Full_Report.pdf

96) Analyses of Voter Disqualification, page 5.

97) Analyses of Voter Disqualification, page. 1.

98) Lucas County Board of Elections -- Results of Investigation Following November 2004 General Election, April 5, 2005, Richard Weghorst and Faith Lyon. http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/electionsvoter/lucas/LucasCountyInvestigationReport.pdf

99) "Feds Confirm Investigation of GOP Campaign Contributor," The Associated Press State & Local Wire, April 28, 2005.

100) Mark Naymik, ''Coin Dealer Raised Chunk of Change for Bush,'' Plain Dealer, August 7, 2005.

101) Christopher D. Kirkpatrick, "Noe Indicted for Laundering Money to Bush Campaign," Toledo Blade, October 27, 2005. http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051027/DEVELOPINGNEWS/51027023

Mike Wilkinson and James Drew, "Grand Jury Charges Noe with 53 Felony Counts," Toledo Blade, February 13, 2006. http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060213/BREAKINGNEWS/60213015

102) Lucas County Report, pg. 2.

103) Lucas County Report, pg. 9.

104) Lucas County Report, pg. 10.

105) Lucas County Report, pages 9-10.

106) Lucas County Report, pg. 9.

107) Lucas County Report, pg. 9.

108) Lucas County Report, pg. 18.

109) Lucas County Report, pages 18-19.

110) Lucas County Report, pg. 19.

111) Lucas County Report, pages 4, 6.

112) Lucas County Report, pg. 6.

113) "Remarks by the President at Victory 2004 Rally," Seagate Convention Centre, Toledo, Ohio, October 29, 2004, The White House. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/10/20041029-16.html

note: Bernadette and Tom Noe?s last name is incorrectly spelled "Noy" in the official White House transcript.

114) Help America Vote Act, Title III, Uniform and Nondiscriminatory Election Technology and Administration Requirements, Subtitle A Requirements, Section 302. http://www.fec.gov/hava/law_ext.txt

115) Directive No. 2004-33 from J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Sec?y of State, to All County Boards of Elections 1 (Sept. 16, 2004.).

116) In the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, Western Division, The Sandusky County Democratic Party v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case No. 3:04CV7582, Page 8. http://electionlawblog.org/archives/10-20%20Order.pdf

117) Gregory Korte and Jim Siegel, ''Defiant Blackwell Rips Judge; Secretary Says He?d go to Jail Before Rewriting Ballot Memo,'' Cincinnati Enquirer, October 22, 2004. http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/10/22/loc_blackwell22.html

118) Sandusky County Democratic Party v. Blackwell, (N.D. Ohio), (6th Cir. 2004).

And Tokaji, pg. 1229

119)Tokaji, pg. 1231

120) ''Judge, Blackwell, Spar Over Provisional Ballots,'' The Associated Press, October 20, 2004. 121) In the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio Western Division, The League of Women Voters of Ohio, et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case No. 3:04 CV 7622 http://www.moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/docs/lowv/doc15a.pdf

122) David G. Savage, Richard B. Schmitt, "Bush Seeks Limit to Suits Over Voting Rights," Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2004. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1029-10.htm

123) Judge Julia Smith Gibbons August 2, 2002

Judge John M. Rogers November 27, 2002

Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton May 5, 2003

Judge Deborah L. Cook May 7, 2003

http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov/internet/court_of_appeals/courtappeals_judges.htm

124) Darrell Rowland and Lee Leonard, "Federal Agency Distances Itself from Ohio Official; Blackwell Says Their Provisional-Balloting Positions are the Same," Columbus Dispatch (Ohio), October 20, 2004.

125) David S. Bernstein, "Questioning Ohio," Providence Phoenix, November 12 -18, 2004. http://www.providencephoenix.com/features/other_stories/multi_1/documents/04259695.asp

126) Norma Robbins, ''Facts to Ponder About the 2004 General Election,'' May 10, 2006. http://www.clevelandvotes.org/news/reports/Facts_to_Ponder.pdf

127) Fritz Wenzel, "Purging of Rolls, Confusion Anger Voters; 41% of November 2nd Provisional Ballots Axed in Lucas County," Toledo Blade, January 9, 2005. http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050109/NEWS09/501090334/-1/NEWS

128) Interview with Stephanie Tubbs Jones

129) Democratic National Committee, Voting Rights Institute, "Democracy at Risk: The 2004 Election in Ohio," June 22, 2005. Page 6.

130) Democracy at Risk, pg. 5.

131) Ohio Secretary of State Web site, Provisional Ballots; Official Tabulation, November 2, 2004. http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/ElectionsVoter/results2004.aspx?Section=148

132) Michael Powell and Peter Slevin, "Several Factors Contributed to ?Lost? Voters in Ohio," Washington Post, December 15, 2004.

Christopher Hitchens, "Ohio?s Odd Numbers," Vanity Fair. http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/printables/050214roco05?print=true

Additional analysis by Bob Fitrakis, editor of the Columbus Free Press, and Richard Hayes Phillips.

133) Democracy at Risk, pg. 3.

134) Preserving Democracy, pg. 29.

135) Democracy at Risk, pg. 5.

136) Bernstein, Providence Phoenix 137) U.S. Election Assistance Comm'n, Funding for States, http://www.eac.gov/early_money.asp

and Tokaji, pg. 1222.

138) ''The Battle Over Voting Technology,'' PBS, Online NewsHour, December 16, 2003. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/vote2004/primaries/sr_technology_debate.html

Paul Festa, ''States Scrutinize e-Voting as Primaries Near,'' CNET News.com, December 8, 2003. http://news.com.com/States+scrutinize+e-voting+as+primaries+near/2100-1028_3-5114062.html

139) Preserving Democracy, pg. 27.

140) Preserving Democracy, pg. 30.

141) Matt Damschroder, chairman of Franklin County Board of Elections.

142) Preserving Democracy, pg. 26.

143) Michael Powell and Peter Slevin, "Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters in Ohio," Washington Post, December 15, 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64737-2004Dec14?language=printer

144) Correspondence with Matt Damschroder.

145) Suzanne Hoholik and Mark Ferenchik, "GOP Council Hopes Rising; Party expects ruling on peititions will put its candidate on ballot," Columbus Dispatch, March 26, 2003.

146) Preserving Democracy, pg. 25.

147) Mark Niquette, "GOP Strongholds Saw Increase in Voting Machines," Columbus Dispatch, December 12, 2004. http://www.dispatch.com/news-story.php?story=dispatch/2004/12/12/20041212-A1-03.html&rfr=nwsl

148) Michael Powell and Peter Slevin, "Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters in Ohio," Washington Post, December 15, 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64737-2004Dec14.html

149) Columbus Free Press editor, Bob Fitrakis.

150) "Voting Machine Allocation in Franklin County, Ohio, 2004: Response to the U.S. Department of Justice Letter of June 29, 2005," Walter R. Mebane, Jr., February 11, 2006, Page 13. http://macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/franklin2.pdf

151) Tokaji, pg. 1238.

Ohio Democratic Party v. Blackwell, No. C2 04 1055, (S.D. Ohio Nov. 2, 2004).

http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/docs/ohio/041102LongLinecomplaint.pdf

152) Ohio Democratic Party v. Blackwell, No. C2 04 1055, (S.D. Ohio Nov. 2, 2004). http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/docs/ohio/041102LongLinecomplaint.pdf

153) Ohio Democratic Party v. Blackwell, No. C2 04 1055, slip op. At 1 (S.D. Ohio Nov. 2, 2004). http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/docs/ohio/041102LongLineOrder.pdf

154) Washington Post, "Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters in Ohio," Michael Powell and Peter Slevin, December 15, 2004.

155) Preserving Democracy, pg. 25.

156) Affidavit of Richard Hayes Phillips, December 10, 2004. http://www.yuricareport.com/2004%20Election%20Fraud/AffidavitPhillipsShowsKerryCouldWinOhio.html

157) Mark Niquette, "Finally, It's Time to Vote; U.S. Appeals Court Overturns Ban, Allows Challengers Back in Polling Sites," Columbus Dispatch (Ohio), November 2, 2004.

158) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, Marian A. Spencer, et. al., v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no. C-1-04-738, page 3. http://www.ohsd.uscourts.gov/pdf/Spencer.65.ord.pdf

159) James Dao, "The 2004 Campaign: Ohio, G.O.P. Bid to Contest Registrations is Blocked," The New York Times, October 28, 2004. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20C11FA39590C7B8EDDA90994DC404482

160) Marian A. Spencer, et. al., v. J. Kenneth Blackwell; In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division; Case no. C-1-04-738. http://www.ohsd.uscourts.gov/pdf/Spencer.65.ord.pdf

161) Dan Horn, Howard Wilkinson, and Cindi Andrews, "Supreme Court Justice Allows Challengers," Cincinnati Enquirer. http://www.enquirer.com/midday/11/11032004_News_mday_challengers03.html

162) Tokaji, pages 1237-1238.

163) Democracy at Risk, pg. 20.

164) The Columbus Free Press.

165) "Errors Plague Voting Process in Ohio, Pa." The Vindicator, November 3, 2004, Vindicator Staff Report http://www.vindy.com/basic/news/281829446390855.php

166) Voters Unite catalogues news reports from around the country that give examples of dysfunctional voting machines, among other election stories. http://www.votersunite.org/electionproblems.asp?sort=date&selectstate=ALL&selectproblemtype=Machine+malfunction

167) The Columbus Free Press.

168) Jim Woods, "In One Precinct, Bush's Tally was Supersized by a Computer Glitch," Columbus Dispatch (Ohio), November 5, 2004.

169) Hitchens, Vanity Fair.

170) Letter from J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Secretary of State, to Doug White, President, Ohio Senate 3 (Feb. 26, 2004).

171) Sixty-eight counties used punch card ballots. Thirteen used optical scan machines. Seven used touch-screen technology.

172) Malia Rulon, "Congressman Calls For FBI Investigation Into Ohio Election," The Associated Press State & Local Wire, December 15, 2004.

173) Tokaji, Page 1221.

174) Jim Konkoly, ''Volunteers Complete Local Recount,'' Coshocton Tribune, December 18, 2004.

175) New York Times, "Voting Problems in Ohio Spur Call for Overhaul," James Dao, Ford Fessenden, December 24, 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/24/national/24vote.html?ex=1261544400&en=0e0adbe08ff79c22&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt

176) Ken McCall and Jim Bebbington, ''Two Precincts had High Undercounts, Analysis Shows,''Dayton Daily News, November 18, 2004.

177) Lisa A. Abraham, "Punch-Card Voting is Illegal," Akron Beacon Journal, April 22, 2006. http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/news/14404305.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

178) Analysis by Hayes Phillips.

179) Preserving Democracy, pg. 57.

180) Analysis by Hayes Phillips.

181) Analysis completed by using official tallies on the Ohio Secretary of State Web site.

Official tallies for Kerry:

http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/ElectionsVoter/results2004.aspx?Section=135

Official tallies for Connally:

http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/ElectionsVoter/results2004.aspx?Section=138

182) Preserving Democracy, pg. 55.

183. Analysis conducted through official vote tallies posted on Ohio Secretary of State Web site.

http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/ElectionsVoter/results2004.aspx?Section=135

http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/ElectionsVoter/results2004.aspx?Section=138

184. Letter from Rep. John Conyers to Chris Swecker, assistant director of the Criminal Investigative Division at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. See attached affidavits.

http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/ohelecfbifollowupltr12805.pdf

185. Miami County Board of Elections.

186. Confirmed by Bob Fitrakis of the Free Press

187. Analysis conducted through official vote tallies posted on Ohio Secretary of State Web site.

188. Erin Miller, "Board Awaits State Follow Up," The Evening Leader.

http://www.theeveningleader.com/articles/2004/11/06/news/news.01.txt

189. "Preserving Democracy," pages 58-59.

190. The Associated Press, "News Groups Sue Ohio Elections Chief Over Poll Access," Associated Press, November 2, 2004.

and

Mark Crispin Miller, "None Dare Call It Stolen," Harper's, August 2005.

http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html

191. Incidents in Warren County were catalogued in a series of articles by the Cincinnati Enquirer:

Erica Solving, "No Changes in Final Warren Co. Vote Count; E-mails Released Monday Show Lockdown Pre-planned," Cincinnati Enquirer, November 16, 2004.

http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041116/NEWS01/411160355/1056

Erica Solving, "Warren's Vote Tally Walled Off; Alone in Ohio, Officials Cited Homeland Security," Cincinnati Enquirer, November 5, 2004.

http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/11/05/loc_warrenvote05.html

Erica Solvig and Dan Horn, "Warren Co. Defends Lockdown Decision; FBI denies warning officials of any special threat," Cincinnati Enquirer, November 10, 2004.

Erica Solvig, "Warren Co. Recount Goes Public; After Election Night lockdown, security eases up," Cincinnati Enquirer, December 15, 2004.

192. Erica Solvig, "Warren's Vote Tally Walled Off; Alone in Ohio, Officials Cited Homeland Security," Cincinnati Enquirer, November 5, 2004.

http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/11/05/loc_warrenvote05.html

193. Analysis conducted through official vote tallies posted on the Ohio Secretary of State Web site.

194. "Preserving Democracy," pg. 52.

195. Analysis conducted through official vote tallies posted on the Ohio Secretary of State Web site.

196. Joan Mazzolini, "Workers Accused of Fudging '04 Recount; Prosecutor Says Cuyahoga Skirted Rules," The Plain Dealer, April 6, 2006.

http://www.cleveland.com/election/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/1144312870224340.xml&coll=2

197. Malia Rulon, "Congressman Calls for FBI Investigation Into Ohio election," The Associated Press, December 15, 2004.

198. Affidavit, December 13, 2004, Sherole Eaton, Re: General Election 2004, Hocking County.

http://www.truthout.org/mm_01/5.121004.Robersondep.pdf

199. Jon Craig, "'04 Election in Hocking County; Worker Who Questioned Recount is Asked to Quit," Columbus Dispatch (Ohio), June 1st, 2005.

http://www.dispatch.com/news-story.php?story=dispatch/2005/06/01/20050601-B3-03.html&chck=t

200. "Preserving Democracy," pg. 81.

201. http://www.opensecrets.org

202. "Preserving Democracy," pg. 82.

203. "Preserving Democracy," pg. 83.

204. Ohio Secretary of State's press office.

205. Count Every Vote Act of 2005

http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/dfiles/file_493.pdf

206. Dena Bunis, "Senate Limits Immigration Debate," The Orange County Register, May 24, 2006.

http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/homepage/abox/article_1153484.php

207. Tokaji's blog, Election Law at Moritz, "McConnell's Voter ID Amendment," May 22, 2006.

http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/blogs/tokaji/2006/05/mcconnells-voter-id-amendment.html

208. United States District Court Northern District of Georgia, Rome Division.

http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/blogs/tokaji/Order%20Granting%20Preliminary%20Injunction%20email.pdf