WIDE AWAKE in a TURDBLOSSOM NIGHTMARE
by Sheri Leigh Myers , Wake Up And Save Your Country
Here's how it happened. It was a hot and clammy North Carolina night, even at two a.m. I was resentfully awake, sweating over an update for the re-print of "Cheated!."
"Cheated!" is a non-fiction graphic novel that narrates what happened in Ohio during the 2004 presidential election: the too-long
lines, malfunctioning voting machines, the sudden upswing in Bush's numbers after the polls closed.
"Cheated!" reports what happened after the election - inspiring history that a lot of Americans don't know - that some ordinary heroes did not concede the election, but fought tooth and nail in Ohio for a fair recount. A month after the election, no mainstream media bothered to show
up for the Conyers hearings in Columbus. But I was there, and heard the collective gasp from the audience as Clint Curtis revealed under oath that he'd been hired by Rep. Tom Feeney of Florida to write vote-stealing software in October of 2000. Hours
of shocking testimony of election fraud were barely reported. No wonder people still think Bush won Ohio in 2004!
Americans should know that when the late, great Representative Stephanie Tubbs-Jones declared that she would formally object before Congress to Ohio's electoral votes on January 6, 2005, thousands of citizens rallied to support her. I joined
fifty disenfranchised Ohio voters and activists who traveled from Columbus to Washington, D.C. The Winter Freedom Bus
Riders, led by Reverend Bill Moss, packed a bus and rode 400 miles to urge a Senator to stand with Rep. Tubbs-Jones. Here's Wil b at the D.C. rally, singing our theme song.
Nearly forty years before, Winter Freedom bus rider Cheryl had marched from Selma to Montgomery with Martin Luther King. Now, she needed a cane to get around, but she was fiercely determined to get in the face of power, and tell them how
it felt to be denied a proper ballot. Cheryl wasn't on the 2004 voter rolls at her precinct. How could that be? She
never missed an opportunity to vote! Can you imagine caring so much about your vote, that you are physically sick when
you can't? Cheryl told me she felt violated. Actually, she said "raped."
So, on that sleepless night, with the crickets clicking sweetly and the humidity gathering on my forehead, I was
updating the book and thinking of Cheryl. I was reading about the EAC - Election Assistance Commission - the federal agency charged with overseeing elections. What exactly were they doing to straighten out the mess that we experienced in 2004?
Voting Problems in Several Swing States is a CNN.com report that the Election Assistance Commission has not notified election officials across the country about "electronic voting
machine failures and registration glitches." "Glitches" is misleading. We are not looking at temporary hiccups here and
there, we are peering down into big black holes in the database into which hundreds of thousands, if not millions of voters will fall. Maybe you. Maybe me. Maybe Cheryl from Ohio.
Again. Here's more bad news...
Common Cause and the Century Foundation find that 10 very vital swing states have had significant voting problems that
have not been addressed since the last election. In some cases, the problems are worse than in 2004. And who exactly has not addressed these problems? The Election
Assistance Commission.
Perhaps it was my ancestors breathing down my neck that night, adding to the heat. In the 1600's they'd sailed fitfully
over a vast sea because they could not bear living under the tyranny of a willful, unjust king. They grew generations of
New Englanders who farmed and taught school and sent their husbands and sons off to war, who participated in the matters
of their villages, because they felt a duty to speak fully and freely and run their own country. They were proud to be
Americans. Now, in the dark and the damp, they were outraged and demanded that something be done.
You see, on that sleepless, hot Carolina night two years ago, my look at the Election Assistance Commission eventually
led to Texas in the 1980's, where a Plan was put into play to corrupt our election system and destroy our democracy.
That's why we are in such danger this November. The Plan has come to fruition.
Harry Bridges, the famed union organizer was fond of saying, "I may be wrong, but I don't think so." Here's what I've
deduced from my two years of obsessive research:
The first stage of The Plan involved the take-over of the elections industry. Certain people knew full well that the
machines could be hacked; computer scientists had already presented studies warning of security dangers. This 1972 New
Yorker article, "Six Ways Your Vote can be Stolen" (A) warned that "Skilled technicians can trigger a computer to switch
a candidate tally on every tenth or twentieth ballot." Ronnie Dugger, founding editor of The Texas Observer, described
the spread of computerized voting and the dangers in his profoundly researched Annals of Democracy, first published in the New Yorker Magazine in 1988.
Next step of The Plan was made under cover of a private, "nonprofit" "nonpartisan" organization called The Election Center that served as a nexus for the voting machine vendors and election officials. A core group from the Election Center
seized control of the testing and certifying of the voting machines and spawned another private, "nonprofit"
"nonpartisan" organization called NASED, the National Association of State Election Directors.
(SEE "The Scoop on Turdblossom" PDFs 1A - 25 below)
In one fell swoop, NASED took away American voters' ability to oversee our own elections. Under NASED, source code - the keys to the electronic kingdom - became proprietary. The secret vote-counting software now belonged to the voting
machine vendors who would pay for the testing and certifying of their own software and hardware. And how convenient and
suspicious that the first NASED-certified voting systems - Microvote and AIS - were repped by ex-Election Center director Gary Greenhalgh. Another key Election Center/NASED
election official who left "public service" to hawk NASED-certified systems was Deborah Seiler, (see Kudzu List #16) who became a sales director for Diebold, then Sequoia (PDF B).
Greenhalgh (PDF 1A) founder of The Election Center, is presently VP of ES. That's Election Systems and Software, the largest election services company in the world.
I think it is correct to point directly to Karl Rove as the mastermind behind this successful Plan to corrupt America's democratic process. Rove's m.o. is always to do his
dirty work through a surrogate. A cut-out.
Both Karl and Carol Garner, the Republican operative who became director of The Election Center after Greenhalgh, (PDFs
10 & 11) worked on the 1978 Clements campaign for Governor of Texas (PDF 12). After Clements' election, Rove was hired as
Chief of Staff to the Governor. Garner continued her work for the Governor in "Ballot Security."
In this 1989 letter (PDFs 17A & B) Garner proposed that the Election Center take over from the FEC the task of managing the testing and certifying of
the voting machines. And incredibly, the FEC agreed. Another indication that Rove might have been pulling these strings,
is the appointment of Tom Harrison as the first Executive Director of NASED in 1990 (PDF 19). At the time, Harrison was "special assistant for elections"
to Rove's client, Governor Clements. In 1991, Harrison worked to bring the newly-certified DREs to Texas, (PDF 20) and
establish national Voting System standards that recommended that all certified software "should not be public
information." (PDF 21) Under Harrison, NASED established once and for all that vendors had ownership over secret
voting-counting software - dealing a terrible blow to our democracy.
( Two excellent articles on Bradblog and VoteTrustUSA address the ongoing failures of NASED that could have disastrous results this election.)
If only we had been awake in 1988, when the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, urged the creation of a testing system where "vendors would be required to provide software that could be readily
analyzed."
Just a thought... Maybe there's another reason why "genius" Karl was able to turn Texas from blue to red in such a short
time. Not only was Harrison in Austin working in the Secretary of State's office to bring DREs to Texas, but Election
Center operatives were "counting" the vote on hackable voting machines in key Texas cities: Connie McCormack in Dallas, (Kudzu List #11 & pdf 25) and Beverly Kaufman in Houston (see Kudzu List #9).
Another link between Karl, the Election Center and The Plan is Doug Lewis, (see Kudzu List #10) who took over from Carol Garner as director of the The Election Center in 1994 - the same year that GW Bush was
"elected" Governor of Texas. In 1978, when Rove rolled into Houston to work for Bush Sr, Lewis was raising money for
John Connally Citizen's Forum. Two Republican operatives raising money in Houston, I've got to imagine their paths
crossed...
As Turdblossom explains in his "secret" online lecture, once the "hanging chad" charade played out in Florida in 2000 with Election Center officials in key supervisory positions, (PDF 26) Doug Lewis and his
gang were center stage calling for an overhaul of our "broken" election system. Lewis bragged in his alma mater's
magazine, Spotlight of Emporia State:
" Few could have been more relieved by the relative success of Election 2004 than R. Doug Lewis (BA 1968). As head of
the Election Center, a non-partisan, non-profit organization that works with election administrators to improve the
voting process, Lewis found himself in the spotlight in 2000. In the 24-hour period after the election, he had requests
for more than 200 interviews, and found himself granting 30 or 40 a day. CNN. C- SPAN. The Today Show. They all wanted to know - what went wrong
Congress turned to Lewis and the Election Center for assistance in evaluating Election 2000. The two-year report
resulted in the Help America Vote Act, which reforms the election process with $3.5 billion in Federal funding to
modernize the process, from voting equipment to policies and procedures."(#23 p.12)
Why do we have a badly broken election system in America? I'll bet that Rove and his operatives pushed for the passage
of HAVA, in order to install unreliable, hackable voting machines across the country. And, that once HAVA created the
Election Assistance Commission, the same anti-democracy operatives packed the Advisory Board, the Voting Systems
Standards Board and the four-person Commission. (See The Kudzu Effect Chart)
The EAC has failed to contact election officials around the country about the voting machine failures, failed to
safeguard our democracy, because that's The Plan. I've got to conclude that my hero Cheryl in Ohio is not any better off
in 2008 than she was in 2004. In fact, it's looking a lot worse for a lot more of us.
I was writing a book with all this research, but I really worried that the people I needed to reach, the young voters,
would never read it. So, we created a short animated film to grab them for six minutes and urge them to protect their
vote. Of course, the film is for everyone. But, I really worry (right now, I worry A LOT) that if this election is
swiped out from under their noses, our country will lose a generation of hopeful young citizens.
We cannot let Turdblossom call this election!
After you watch the movie, PLEASE read our "Count Me In" Voters Guide, get informed and engaged. Don't leave it to
someone else!! This election needs ALL of us out there on election day, (and on the days following) eyes wide open,
taking back our country.
Our ancestors will be proud.
Onward, to a true democracy,
Sheri Leigh Myers
"In the end, our only goal is the creation of the beloved community." MLK
To find out what to do for election protection and to help us complete Part 2 of the Turdblossom Lectures please visit
our show support page!
Now, more than ever, we must urge Congress to hold Rove in contempt for failing to appear before the House Judiciary
Committee... Please take a minute to support ex-Governor Siegelman's courageous campaign:
Thanks to Tim Howard, who assisted with the research and Dan Moore, the true hero of this project and love of my life
who supports this work in every which way.
A NOTE TO RESEARCHERS, journalists, investigators, bloggers, and elected officials:
Bev Harris, Jim March, Brad Friedman, John Gideon, Michael Richardson, Nancy Tobie, Mark Crispin Miller, Steve Freeman,
Steve Rosenfeld, Richard Hayes Phillips, Paddy Shaffer, Lynn Landes, Fitrakis and Wasserman, and a number of dedicated
election integrity researchers are hard at work, unearthing important material about the corruption of our election
system. You have led the way. My contribution, I hope, is to connect more dots. In the days to come, I will organize and
upload as much of my research as I can, so that any and all can make use of it.
So y'all know....I had the great, good fortune of obtaining (through the Freedom of Information Act) the 1985 - 91
correspondence between The Election Center and Jim Douglas, the Secretary of State of Vermont. I've linked to some of
the material in my missive above, but there's a good deal more in the Research Compendium below.
"The Scoop on Turdblossom"
Election Center - early history pdfs:
(for the Center on Election Law and Administration through the BSSR)
(also contains letters of recc. from RNC heavies)
NASED - early history pdfs
B EC / NASED / VENDOR PROXIMITY
#22 CSPR RESPONDS TO SALTMAN
#22B NASED/FRANK_ITAs & VENDORS
OTHER DOCUMENTS:
#25 McCormack oversees Fraud in Dallas
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Wake Up and Save Your Country is a group of creative individuals (writers, designers and film makers) committed to
making sure that every American citizen is given the opportunity to vote and ensuring that every one of those votes
count!