From Democracy Now—Amy Goodman Interviews Harvey Wasserman:
AMY GOODMAN: —and ask you about voting. Ohio’s top election official, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, announced on Friday the voting systems that decided the 2004 election in Ohio were rife with “critical security failures.” You and Bob Fitrakis have reported extensively on the 2004 presidential vote in Ohio, your most recent book, What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election. Your response to the report? What did you think was most important in her findings?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, our initial response was “Yippee!” I mean, they finally, after all these years of us banging our—you know, we’re local boys. We live in Ohio, in Columbus. And we saw the election of 2004 stolen right in front of our faces. And we reported it extensively, and everybody laughed at us. And they said, “Oh, this couldn’t happen in America.” And we documented it in How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election and Is Rigging 2008. We documented scores of ways that this election was stolen. And we pointed out a myriad flaws that we saw right in our own neighborhoods, of what was done to keep people of color and young people from voting and to rig the vote count.
I mean, the servers for the computation of the Ohio vote count were in the same basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee that houses servers for the Republican National Committee. The programmers who did the stuff for Ken Blackwell, the Republican Secretary of State, were Republicans who did websites for the Bush administration. I mean, it’s amazing.
So, here we have—finally we have a Democratic Secretary of State, who took—spent $1.9 million of state money, hired Battelle, which is not exactly a progressive organization, to study it, and found that every single method of voting, pretty much, except for, you know, marking paper ballots, was corrupted in the 2004 election. They, you know—
AMY GOODMAN: Coming up with opposite results?
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Any—basically what she says was, you could have manipulated the 2004 election results with a Blackberry. You know, the Conyers report basically said all you had to do was drive by with a Wi-Fi. And she comes up and says there are very simple ways the 2004 election could have been flipped just like that. And that’s what we said since 2004. Look, this election could have—
We are guaranteed certain that John Kerry won Ohio in 2004. The election—the exit polls showed him winning. There was a flip of 6.7% in the exit polls from the official vote count. You know, my favorite, in Youngstown and in Franklin County in Columbus, in the inner city, people went in, and they hit touch-screen machines, and they pushed “Kerry,” and “Bush” lit up. How do you invent that? How do you make that up? We had votes that were taken away in a county in southeastern Ohio. They proclaimed a Homeland Security alert. Nobody knows where this came from. The FBI, the Homeland Security agency, they never called a Homeland Security alert, but suddenly—
AMY GOODMAN: You mean, they locked down the place.
HARVEY WASSERMAN: They locked down. They kept out the media. Suddenly the ballots disappeared. .
