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New Ohio Vote Tallies Question Legitimacy of Election
Oil-for-Food Scandal: U.S.-Led Attack on the UN or Proof
of Corruption That Could Take Down Kofi Annan?
Growing Up in the Weather Underground: A Father and Son Tell
Their Story
New Ohio Vote Tallies Question Legitimacy of Election
Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily
News investigates vote totals in Cleveland to reveal how possibly
thousands of votes meant for John Kerry somehow ended up in
the tallies of the two independent candidates.
Published Tuesday, November 30, 2004 by the New
York Daily News
Ohio Tally Fit for Ukraine
by Juan Gonzalez
It has been a month now and we still don't have a clear count
of the votes for our own presidential race from the state
of Ohio.
For those who may have forgotten, Ohio supposedly assured
George W. Bush a second term in the White House - only the
most important job on the planet.
The morning after the election, we were told Bush was ahead
of John Kerry in that state's unofficial count by 139,000
votes, or 2.5%.
At the time there were 155,000 uncounted provisional ballots
and an unknown number of overseas ballots, but Kerry concluded
they would not produce enough of a margin to erase his deficit,
so he promptly conceded.
At the same time, given the bitter Democratic memories of
the 2000 Florida fiasco, he assured his supporters he would
fight to have every vote properly counted this time.
Within a few days, other problems began to show up in Ohio's
preliminary tally.
We learned, for example, that an additional 93,000 voters
had gone to the polls yet machines had registered no preference
of theirs for President. Only a manual recount can tell us
for sure what happened to those 93,000 ballots.
Then, red-faced election officials in Franklin County admitted
a computer error on Election Night had tallied 4,258 votes
for Bush in a precinct where only 638 people voted. That correction
alone will drop Bush's margin by 3,620.
And now Daily News reporter Larry Cohler-Esses and I have
uncovered some more unusual vote totals, this time in black
neighborhoods of Cleveland. Those results are from the precinct-by-precinct
tallies released by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections,
where Cleveland is located.
In the 4th Ward on Cleveland's East Side, for example, two
fringe presidential candidates did surprisingly well.
In precinct 4F, located at Benedictine High School on Martin
Luther King Jr. Drive, Kerry received 290 votes, Bush 21 and
Michael Peroutka, candidate of the ultra-conservative anti-immigrant
Constitutional Party, an amazing 215 votes!
That many black votes for Peroutka is about as likely as
all those Jewish votes for Buchanan in Florida's Palm Beach
County in 2000.
In precinct 4N, also at Benedictine High School, the tally
was Kerry 318, Bush 21, and Libertarian Party candidate Michael
Badnarik 163.
Back in 2000, the combined third-party votes in those two
precincts - including the Nader vote - was 8. Cuyahoga, like
most of Ohio's 88 counties, uses punch-card balloting.
"That's terrible, I can't believe it," said City
Councilman Kenneth Johnson, who has represented the 4th Ward
since 1980. "It's obviously a malfunction with the machines."
But Peroutka and Badnarik polled unusually well in a few
other black precincts. In the 8th Ward's G precinct at Cory
United Methodist Church, for instance, Badnarik tallied 51
votes - nearly three times better than Bush's 19. And in I
precinct at the same church, Peroutka was the choice on 27
ballots, three times more than Bush's 8. In 2000, independent
candidates received 9 votes from both precincts.
The same pattern showed up in 10 Cleveland precincts in which
Badnarik and Peroutka received nearly 700 votes between them.
In virtually all those precincts, Kerry's vote was lower
than Al Gore's in 2000, even though there was a record turnout
in the black community this time, and even though blacks voted
overwhelmingly for Kerry.
If this same pattern held true in other cities around Ohio,
then quite possibly thousands of votes meant for Kerry somehow
ended up in the tallies of the two independent candidates.
So far, however, precinct-by-precinct results have not been
posted by boards of elections in other counties, but by Thursday
all official results are due.
On Monday, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell will certify
Ohio's results and then a manual recount will be requested
by the Green and Libertarian parties.
The Badnarik and Peroutka surge was not the only unusual
occurrence in Cleveland.
Also unusual was the drop in the Democratic vote in scores
of precincts compared to 2000. But more on that next time.
Oil-for-Food Scandal: U.S.-Led Attack on the UN or
Proof of Corruption That Could Take Down Kofi Annan?
We host a debate on the United Nations oil-for-food scandal,
a controversy that has been brewing for months. Some say it's
part of the US-led attack on the integrity of the United Nations
as retribution for its stance on the invasion of Iraq; others
say it shows corruption in the UN that reaches all the way
up to the secretary general.
It is a controversy that has been brewing for months. Some
say it's part of the US-led attack on the integrity of the
United Nations as retribution for its stance on the invasion
of Iraq; others say it shows corruption on the part of an
institution that the US has termed soft on dictators and an
obstruction to US policy. President Bush Thursday called for
what he termed a "full and open" accounting of the
U.N. oil-for-food program. But he would not say whether he
thought U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan should resign.
Earlier this week, Republican Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota
called on Annan to resign. Coleman is investigating corruption
in the now defunct oil-for-food program. He said former Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein reaped some $21 billion from the
program because of Annan's lack of oversight. But Coleman's
estimate is higher than some others. A State Department official
was quoted by Reuters as saying the calls for Annan's resignation
were "premature." Here is some of what President
Bush had to say on Thursday.
- President Bush, speaking on December 2, 2004.
At issue is a $64 billion program for Iraq, administered
by the United Nations and supervised by the 15-nation Security
Council. For months, accusations of corruption within the
program have been consistently launched at Annan and other
UN officials.
In one of the more complicated twists in the story, Kofi
Annan's son, Kojo, worked for a Swiss firm that inspected
goods under the program and is under investigation. On November
29, UN spokesperson Fred Eckhardt had this to say.
- Fred Eckhardt, UN Spokesman speaking on November 29,
2004.
Here is what Annan himself had to say about his son and the
oil for food controversy.
- Kofi Annan, U.N. Secretary-General.
To discuss this issue, we are joined now by two people who
have been following this story very closely.
- Joy Gordon, professor of philosophy at Fairfield
University. She is currently working on a book on the
Iraq sanctions to be published by Harvard University Press.
Growing Up in the Weather Underground: A Father and
Son Tell Their Story
We take a look at one American family's tradition of resistance
in a new book titled the Radical Line: From the Labor Movement
to the Weather Underground, One Family's Century of Conscience
written by Thai Jones, son of Jeff Jones, a former member
of the Weather Underground movement. [includes rush
transcript]
Today an unusual family story: From the Labor Movement to
the Weather Underground, we take a look at one American family's
tradition of resistance in a new book titled the "Radical
Line." The author, Thai Jones used multiple aliases before
he reached the age of four. In 1981, heavily armed agents
of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and New York Police
Department swept into his family's New York apartment and
arrested his parents, fugitive leaders of the Weather Underground
movement. First let's go back some 35 years to the days of
the Vietnam War.
- "The Weather Underground" - Excerpt of documentary.
- Thai Jones, author of the new book A Radical Line: From
the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family's
Century of Conscience (Free Press).
For a copy of today’s program, call 1 (800) 881 2359.
Our website is www.democracynow.org.
Our email address is mail@democracynow.org.
Democracy Now! is produced by Mike Burke, Sharif Abdel Kouddous,
Ana Nogueira, Elizabeth Press, Jeremy Scahill and Parvez Sharma.
Mike Di Filippo is our engineer.
Thanks also to Uri Galed, Angela Alston, Orlando Richards,
Simba Russeau, Johnny Sender, Rich Kim, Joe Murgio, John Randolph,
Chris Zucker, Karen Ranucci, Denis Moynihan, Eric Rweyemamu,
Jenny Filipazzo and Isis Phillips.
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