Green Candidate Urges Vote Probe

David Cobb, the Green Party’s 2004 presidential candidate, is among those calling for an investigation into voting irregularities in last week’s election.

“It's Florida all over again,” Cobb said. “Except this time, it’s Ohio where the person responsible for counting votes is chair of the state Bush campaign.”

He pointed to reports of voter intimidation, mismarked ballots and the targeted disenfranchisement of blacks. A nonprofit voting rights group called Count Every Vote 2004 documented hundreds of voting irregularities affecting poor and minority voters in seven Southern states, including North Carolina.

"Pure and simple: there needs to be an investigation,” Cobb said.

Last week, three Democratic members of Congress called on the Government Accountability Office to look into problems with electronic voting equipment.

Though the corporate media have largely ignored the story, independent reporters continue to raise questions about what happened Tuesday. Writing for CommonDreams.org, Thom Hartman reports that Jeff Fisher, Democratic candidate for U.S. House in the Florida’s 16th District, claims to have shared with the FBI evidence of hacking in Florida’s election, though no details have been publicly released.

In addition, an analysis of Florida’s results by Kathy Dopp show a curious pattern: While touch-screen voting machines produced results in which the Republican/Democrat ratio closely matched the Bush/Kerry vote, that was not the case in counties using optically scanned paper ballots, the results of which are tabulated by a centralized computer vulnerable to hacking.

In Dixie County, for example, there are 9,676 registered voters – 77.5 percent of them Democrats and 15 percent Republicans. But according to the election results, 4,433 of the county’s voters cast their ballot for Bush and only 1,959 for Kerry. This surprising pattern repeats itself time and again – but only in counties with optical scanners.

Fisher is calling on citizens to contact their representatives in Congress and demand a national revote. “The Electoral College makes the final decision on whom the next President of the United States will be,” he writes on his Web site. “We must be vigilant and act now as our founding fathers did against King George III.”