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PHILIPPINE PUBLIC EDUCATION – A SITUATIONER
The Philippine public education system is in crisis!
Was the 2004 Election Stolen?
By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Rolling Stone
Thursday 01 June 2006
Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted - enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.
The complete article, with Web-only citations, follows. For more, see exclusive documents, sources, charts and commentary.
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 in Ohio, 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 was Pat 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 Ohio recorded 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. A name="193a" href="http://adrian.i.ph/blogcms/admin/index.php#a193">[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]
Dear Adrian
In this Newsletter …
- A MESSAGE TO THE BETRAYED SPOUSE
- A MESSAGE TO THE UNFAITHFUL SPOUSE
MESSAGE TO THE BETRAYED SPOUSE
Dear Betrayed Spouse,
My heart goes out to you. Truly I understand how utterly devastated
and broken-hearted you feel.
It is normal to feel like life just isn’t worth living anymore, but
you must will yourself on. You can and will get through this, one day
at a time. If you have children, you need to be strong for them. They
need you.
You can survive this and come out happier and stronger on the other
side, but it takes effort.
Certainly you can forgive your spouse in time. Trusting them again is
something entirely different. They need to earn trust from you by
changing their behavior and continuing to act in a trustworthy manner
over a period of time. You should not trust your spouse if he/she is
not worthy of your trust. It is one thing to forgive a person who has
wronged you, but that does not mean you should allow that person to
continue to hurt you.
Whatever you choose to do from this point forward is your decision.
No one else is living your life, and your friends and family members
who may be quick to tell you, "just leave that loser," are not the
ones who will live with the consequences of those decisions, so you
must make the right decisions for you.
When I discovered my husband’s affair, I was given advice from people
I chose to confide in. Some of that advice was helpful, and some of
it stunk. Beware of advice that stinks. Feel free to avoid people
that give you advice that isn’t helpful. Right now you need to do
whatever it takes to get yourself through this, and if that means
avoiding unhelpful people, so be it.
On one of the first days after discovering My Husband’s Affair, while
I was packing my bags to leave him forever, (which seemed like a
logical thing to do since he told me he was choosing the other woman
over me), someone did give me some very good advice, advice that
saved my marriage. It was this:
"You can leave this marriage if you want. You have every right to do
so, and no one would blame you. Even though it doesn’t seem like it,
I believe your spouse loves you. I don’t understand what’s happening
right now either, but I encourage you: Do not make a final decision
about something as important as your marriage while you’re in the
emotion of the moment. WAIT AT LEAST 3 MONTHS BEFORE MAKING ANY MAJOR
DECISONS."
The first thing you need to do to survive this trauma is
TAKE CARE OF YOU, so that in the future you will be thinking straight
to make the best possible decisions for yourself.
Do something for yourself today, just to survive the day. Go to the
spa, buy a new outfit, go for a walk in a nice park, or do all three.
You are wise to seek outside support. Your journey to survival will
largely involve educating yourself. You can do this through reading
books that will help you understand affairs, what it takes to have
a good marriage, and how to be a strong and emotionally healthy
person. I recommend starting by reading my book, "My Husband’s Affair
Became the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me," because it will help
you to know that you’re not alone, and you’re not going crazy after
all. It will encourage you, and it will help you to avoid some
mistakes.
http://www.beyondaffairs.com/books_about_affairs.htm
A list of other recommended books is provided on the
beyondaffairs.com website.
http://www.beyondaffairs.com/resources_recovering_from_affairs.htm#books
You can learn to be happy and have a great life, no matter what
decisions your spouse makes. And as you grow as a person, your
spouse will be faced with his/her own choice. He/she will either
choose to grow into a better person also, or you’ll leave him/her
behind in the dust (even if you choose to stay in the marriage).
Here’s an article to help you get started on this journey to
survival:
http://www.beyondaffairs.com/articles/surviving_infidelity.htm
#######################################################
MESSAGE TO THE UNFAITHFUL SPOUSE
Dear Unfaithful Spouse,
If your spouse just found out about your affair, reach out and find
a trustworthy friend or counselor who you can discuss your situation
with. You need someone to listen to your feelings. I know you feel
confused, that’s why you need some sensible input. Your affair
partner is not the trustworthy friend you need at the moment, because
they are not neutral.
You are being faced with some of the biggest decisions you will ever
make in your life, which will have far reaching implications on your
future for years to come. You better make sure you are making
informed decisions, not emotional decisions. One way to make
informed decisions is to educate yourself about affairs by reading
books.
After reading my book, "My Husband’s Affair Became the Best Thing
That Ever Happened to Me," you need to read, "Not Just Friends" by
Shirley Glass. It is neutral, enlightening, informative, and
practical.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743225503/passionatelif-20/002-1726459-8024051
Keep this thought in mind: WRONG REACTIONS MAKE A BAD SITUATION WORSE.
I’ve seen far too many lives destroyed not because of an
affair, but because of doing the wrong things after the affair is
disclosed.
The biggest mistake spouse’s who’ve had affairs make is withholding
information, minimizing facts, and telling more lies. Do not attempt
to lessen the blow for your spouse by covering up the real truth with
more dishonesty! When the emotions of the moment subside and rational
thinking returns to your spouse, in the final end it will not be the
affair or the sex with the other person that has hurt them the most.
It will be the lies.
What you need to realize is that you have already hurt your spouse
as much as it is possible to hurt a human being. There is only one
way you can hurt them more now, and that’s by telling more lies,
after you claim to be telling the truth. I’m not saying you should
tell your spouse more details then they are asking for, but whatever
questions they do ask, you better tell the whole truth. You’ve got
to come clean.
Trust me. They are going to find out, sooner or later, and if it’s
later, it’s going to be really bad for you.
Sincerely,
Anne
Passionate Life Seminars, PO Box 162, Abbotsford, British Columbia V2S
4N8, CANADA
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Subject: The TRIPLE FILTER TEST
One day the great philosopher came upon an acquaintance who ran up to him excitedly and said, "Socrates, do you know what I just heard about one of your students?"
"Wait a moment," Socrates replied. "Before you tell me I’d like you to pass a little test. It’s called the Triple Filter Test."
"Triple filter?"
"That’s right," Socrates continued. "Before you talk to me about my student, let’s take a moment to filter what you’re going to say."
"No," the man said, "actually I just heard about it and…"
"All right," said Socrates. "So you don’t really know if it’s true or not."
"No, on the contrary…"
"So," Socrates continued, "you want to tell me something bad about him, even though you’re not certain it’s true?"
The man shrugged, a little embarrassed.
Socrates continued. "You may still pass the test though, because there is a third filter -
the filter of Usefulness. Is what you want to tell me about my student going to be useful to me?""No, not really…"
"Well," concluded Socrates, "if what you want to tell me is neither True nor Good nor even Useful, why tell it to me at all?"
The man was defeated and ashamed.
This is the reason Socrates was a great philosopher and held in such high esteem…
by Anne Bercht
Brian Bercht of Abbotsford , BC found himself alone in a motel room after eighteen years of marriage to a woman he loved deeply. He’d had an extramarital affair, something he never imagined he was capable of doing, something he was both morally and intellectually opposed to. His wife was devastated. How could this have happened?
Since then Brian and Anne have rebuilt their marriage and are sharing their story, so that what happened in their marriage doesn’t have to happen in yours, so you can learn the lessons they did without having to go through the tremendous pain and grief. Here is an excerpt from their new book, My Husband’s Affair Became the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me .
One of the biggest lessons we learned is that affairs happen to good people in good marriages. They are not merely the problem of an unlucky few, who just weren’t really committed to each other or who were having serious marriage problems.
According to marital affairs expert Peggy Vaughan in her book, The Monogamy Myth , conservative estimates are that 60 percent of men and 40 percent of women will have an extramarital affair. If even half of the women having affairs (or 20 percent) are married to men not included in the 60 percent having affairs, then at least one partner will have an affair in approximately 80 percent of all marriages.
Brian and I have often asked ourselves, Why did this have to happen to us? How could we have avoided it? Couldn’t someone have gotten our attention in some other way?
For me, the problem was that I was so sure that I had a great marriage, I’m not sure what could have gotten my attention. If someone had said to me, “You need to listen to your husband,” I would have thought, Yes, I’m doing that. If someone had said, “You need to spend recreational time together ,” I would have thought, We are. If someone had said, “You need to have fun in your life,” I would have thought, For the most part we are. We have extra responsibilities right now and that’s the way life is sometimes. You just have to make sacrifices.
I was confident in Brian’s commitment to me and mine to him. I don’t think any “how-to” books could have awakened me to the dangers that were lurking in my relationship. But here are some things which could have helped.
It doesn’t matter how much you know if you are unable to be real with yourself and ask yourself questions such as: Why do I feel this way? Why am I unhappy? Why do I feel attracted to this other person? Why don’t I share the truth of how I feel with my mate?
The first step to avoiding affairs is being able to understand and be honest with yourself. You cannot be honest with your mate until you have learned to be honest with yourself.
Most people who have had affairs never thought they would. They were people who meant their wedding vows one hundred percent and were totally committed to their marriages and to monogamy. How can an affair happen then?
In Brian’s case, the affair happened in part because he wasn’t being introspective “pre-affair.” He did not even understand how unhappy he actually was. He was “sweeping it under the rug,” “sucking it up” and “just dealing with it.”
During the process of our healing one day Brian asked me, “Remember when I told you that the reason that you never had an affair was because I had been a good husband, and the reason why I had an affair was because you were a bad wife?”
I remembered, clearly.
“Well, I was wrong,” he said. “It was easy for me to be a good husband because you understood yourself and were able to communicate your needs to me clearly. You never stood a chance of being a good wife, because I was not able to communicate my needs to you.”
So even though I had read invaluable books such as Willard Harley’s His Needs, Her Needs , I was unable to apply the principles to our unique relationship, because Brian didn’t recognize and understand his needs. Therefore he couldn’t communicate his specific needs to me or how I could meet them. Although one can identify common emotional needs all husbands and wives have, meeting those needs is not accomplished in the same way for every person. It doesn’t matter how many books you read, spouses can’t meet each others needs unless they are both talking, to each other.
If someone had asked me (or I had asked myself), “What baggage from your past or childhood are you bringing into this relationship that could be affecting you in a negative way?” I believe that could have helped me to wake up. If I had received some counseling focused around this poignant question. My problems were not marriage problems; they were personal problems, which were affecting my marriage negatively.
My biggest contribution to our relationship breakdown was one I was completely unaware of. It was the insecurities I had within myself. The “I’m unlovable” tape in my subconscious mind, made it difficult for me to receive love and honest communication (including constructive criticism). Simply put, I was too insecure. If you are carrying around baggage from your past, you are not really whole as a person and you don’t have what it takes to really be a great spouse.
Most people have relatively little accurate knowledge about affairs. Most people are very uncomfortable discussing the topic, so they don’t. Contrary to the popular saying, what you don’t know does hurt you. You must be informed. By reading responsible educational information about affairs (not the sensationalism often presented in the media), you can learn from the mistakes of others and avoid them in your own life.
If you plan to stay married to the same person for a lifetime, it is unrealistic to think that neither one of you will ever be attracted to anyone else. Attractions will come. The question is what will you do with those attractions when they come?
Affairs need secrecy to happen. If we are unable to share temptations with our spouse because they punish us for doing so (by crying, getting depressed for days or getting angry), then the secrecy ingredient remains. Secrecy is to affairs, what sunlight and water is to plants. It helps them grow. Without it they die.
On the other hand if a man, for example, were able to come home and say to his wife, “I was attracted to a woman at work today,” and instead of being angry the wife is able to say, “Why did you feel that way? Tell me about it. Do you think she might have been meeting one of your needs that I’m not right now?” The couple would be able to discuss their relationship, identify needs, change and meet each other’s needs, and by so doing, remove potential vulnerability to affairs.
Most couples are actually far from honest with one another. They are honest about subjects that aren’t difficult, but dishonest about the things that really matter, the difficulties, frustrations and hurts in their relationship.
Here is an example: Let’s assume a wife has gained over twenty-five percent of her body weight since marriage. She’s not healthy, less energetic and quite honestly doesn’t look that good. It’s bothering her husband. It’s happened gradually and she is not really aware how much it is affecting her. Her husband is careful to choose the right time, and is sensitive in his choice of words. He approaches her honestly.
“Honey, you are gaining weight and it really doesn’t look so good. I’m concerned about your health, and it’s bothering me.” How many wives would be able to answer, “You know, you are right. Thank you for being honest with me. I’ll start exercising and work on eating healthier.”
Instead, how many of us would burst into tears, get depressed for several days, accuse our husbands of not loving us and tell them they were wrong for being so concerned about weight. Doing this would be punishing them for honesty, and sending a message not to be honest about potentially upsetting matters (like a future attraction to another woman).
Living with this kind of dishonesty in a relationship is living in a fairytale. One day you may be forced to wake up from the dream. Genuine, open, honest communication includes the ability to give and to receive constructive criticism.
It was true. I was not really listening to Brian. I never realized that when I became defensive when he shared things, rather than validating his feelings, I was in essence telling him that he was wrong.
I am still working on becoming a better listener. Listening does not mean I am just quiet, while Brian talks. It means I do not spend my time formulating my next response in my head while Brian (or anyone else) is speaking. I listen to what Brian is saying. I try to get into his skin. I listen for the understandable part without having to necessarily agree with him.
I ask myself, What is he really saying? What is going on for him? And when I feel that I do understand I say, “So what you’re saying is …?” Many times it turns out I still haven’t understood.
Most of all, I am careful not to interrupt and not to tell him that he is wrong, even if I disagree with what he is saying. Instead, I say things like, “I respect your opinion and I can understand why you feel that way. Right now I’m feeling …”
As my husband, Brian needs to feel that I value and respect his opinions and advice.
Before the affair, I often came to him with a problem. He would present a solution, but I would not give it much weight unless another friend gave me the same advice. In this way, I was indirectly communicating to him that I didn’t really hold his opinion to be of value, but rather the opinions of others to be of a greater value. This was disrespectful.
A month before Brian’s affair began, we had joined a local gym together. Brian had asked me to come and lift weights with him. The gym also offered a long distance running club. I preferred long distance running, so I joined this group instead of lifting weights with my husband.
I had no idea what a mistake I was making. I didn’t realize this was not about fitness preferences. This was about my husband’s need for recreational companionship.
According to Willard Harley, in his book His Needs, Her Needs , recreational companionship is one of a man’s top five needs within a marriage.
I also made a big mistake in the area of sports. Not only did I not join Brian, but I actually was guilty of criticizing him for watching sports. Now I sit and watch sports with Brian sometimes, because he enjoys my company while he watches. And guess what? I really do like hockey now! I’ve learned to understand the game and I’m genuinely interested.
Fun is not an option, rather a necessity. We had fallen into the trap that so many families do: work, work, work.
Midlife is a particularly vulnerable time for affairs because couples are dealing with aging parents on the one hand, unruly teenagers on the other, and their financial demands are the highest they’ve ever been. Their lives have become all about responsibility.
They are on a mundane treadmill, acting like martyrs. You cannot live this way no matter how strong you think you are. We have learned to revamp our budget and our time to include fun. And we make sure we don’t do the same old things over and over, rather we make an effort to try new and different things together. This is what keeps life exciting. We have an affair … with each other.
The friendship that Darrell provided for Brian was invaluable. In fact, had they been close before the affair, it may not have happened. If couples desire to strengthen their relationship and prevent affairs, this is one important step they can take: develop and maintain close same-sex friendships.
Women tend to do this more naturally. Most men have to make extra effort to develop these friendships. Friendships don’t happen by accident. They happen on purpose. We create them. We have to initiate them and continually put energy into cultivating them.
Brian had many friends and acquaintances. Anyone who knew him before would have thought he had lots of friends, and he did. The problem was he wasn’t completely open and honest with his friends. He kept them at a certain distance. He did not discuss things that really mattered to him, like his hopes and dreams, as well as his disappointments and failures. His friends did not discuss things such as how well their marriages were or weren’t going; neither did they create mutual accountability. Instead they usually discussed only non-personal topics, such as work, sports and vehicles.
Couples need to realize that there’s no "one-time" promise or event that can guarantee monogamy; it’s an ongoing process of honest communication that allows you to really know each other, and thus not deceive each other. The attitude, “an affair could never happen in our marriage,” makes couples vulnerable. We need to realize that no marriage is immune. Therefore we need to be aware, educate ourselves and pay close attention to our marriage relationships. Recognizing what doesn’t work and what is more likely to work in preventing affairs can go along way to ensuring monogamy in a marriage.
What doesn’t work:
-Repeating the marriage vows doesn’t prevent affairs.
-Love doesn’t prevent affairs.
-Being the "perfect" partner doesn’t prevent affairs.
-Threats don’t prevent affairs.
-Simple promises don’t prevent affairs.
-Getting caught doesn’t prevent affairs.
What is more likely to work:
-Awareness that no one is immune to having an affair.
-Discussion and agreement about your commitment to monogamy.
-Regular renewal of your commitment.
-Ongoing, honest communication about all important issues.
Once a person has had an affair (and it has been discovered/exposed), what happens next can be an indicator of whether or not an affair is likely to occur again.
If the person who had the affair never really deals with it–meaning they don’t take responsibility, don’t sever contact with the third party, don’t answer questions, don’t talk through it, don’t commit to ongoing honesty, don’t hang in through the long process of rebuilding the marital connection–then there is still a risk that it might happen again.
On the other hand, if the person who had the affair does take responsibility, severs contact with the third party, answers their spouse’s questions, talks through it, commits to ongoing honesty, and hangs in through the long process of rebuilding the marital connection–then it is highly unlikely to happen again.
Obviously, there are no "guarantees" that there will never be a repeat (just as there are no guarantees that a spouse won’t have an affair in the first place). But the above guidelines are very strong indicators of whether or not it will again.
Anne Bercht is a certified trainer with over 12 years of experience in public speaking, workshop facilitation and curriculum development. In her Passionate Life Seminars, she inspires others to unleash their full potential and pursue life with passion. Having overcome major personal and business obstacles, she teaches others how to do the same, turning life’s challenges into opportunity. For more information or to purchase her book My Husband’s Affair Became the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me, visit www.passionatelife.ca .
Bringing courtship back into your marriage - by Rick
> Warren
>
>
> Did you know that God intended for your marriage to
> be full of romance,
> physical affection, sex, fun, and playfulness? It’s
> true. When God
> planned your marriage, he planned for the two of you
> to enjoy each other.
>
> Some people think that courtship ends with the
> exchanging of rings. But
> that’s wrong. Proverbs 5:19 tells us to, "Let your
> mate’s affection fill
> you at all times with delight." Note the words "at
> all times." That
> means you’re to be affectionate before the wedding,
> during the wedding,
> and after the wedding-at all times. You’re to
> continually work to keep
> the courtship alive. If there was more courting
> in marriages, they’d be fewer marriages in court.
> The problems come when
> you stop doing the things you did in the beginning
> to win your mate’s
> love. Those were the things that drew your mate, and
> those are the things
> that will keep your love alive. If you want romance
> in your marriage,
> you’ve got to keep on dating
> your mate.
>
> Ladies, it might help for you to understand a little
> bit about the nature
> of men. By design, men are achievement-oriented.
> They naturally set
> goals. That’s what they did when they saw you: they
> decided they wanted
> you in their life, they set a goal to win you, and
> then they plotted and
> enacted their strategy, which included a lot of
> activities foreign to
> men. They wooed you with flowers, candy, maybe a
> trip to the opera-all
> sorts of things they would never do unless they were
> in the midst of a
> strategic operation. But the moment the two of you
> married, they
> subconsciously thought, "Mission accomplished! Now
> it’s on to the next
> goal." The next goal is usually, "How can I provide
> for this woman I
> love and the family we’re going to raise?" At that
> point, the man takes
> all the energy he used to expend on wooing you, and
> uses it to become a
> success at his job. In his
> mind, he’s providing for his family. It seems like
> a natural choice to
> him.
>
> But wives don’t see it that way. Wives don’t
> understand the sudden turn
> of events. "What happened?" she wonders. "Where did
> my knight in shining
> armor go? Where’s my candy, my kisses? Now all I get
> is burps and gas.
> What on earth happened?" While the man is thinking,
> "See how much I love
> you?" the wife is suffering from intense feelings of
> rejection.
>
> It’s obvious that we don’t think alike. But that
> doesn’t change the fact
> that a marriage that’s lacking in romance is a
> marriage that will
> ultimately suffer.
>
>
> Part of the problem with romance is that husband and
> wives tend to see
> each other during the absolute worst parts of the
> day. They see each
> other in the morning when there’s a big rush to get
> dressed, eat a quick
> bite, and get out the door. That can be a stressful
> time-and that’s the
> last impression you leave on each other before going
> your separate ways.
> Then, at the end of the work day, you come back
> together again. Now
> you’re both exhausted, with nothing left to give
> each other. You’ve given
> your best all day. In essence, all you have to offer
> the most important
> person in your life is whatever energy you have left
> over after
> you’ve given your best to others. That’s not fair.
> It’s not fair to
> either of you.
>
> Something has to change. Ecclesiastes 9:9 tells us
> plainly that we’re to
> "Enjoy life with your mate whom you love." In the
> Hebrew, that literally
> says, "with
> your wife," but I think it applies both ways. We
> need to date our mate.
> We need to make that relationship a priority. You
> do this by becoming
> best friends with
> one another and making the effort to have fun
> together. Too often, what
> happens between couples is that the longer you’re
> married, the more you
> tend to share the chores and the less you tend to
> share the joys. If you
> don’t reverse that tendency and develop common
> interests together, your
> relationship could easily become boring.
>
> Some will argue, "That’s impossible! We have nothing
> in common!" Of
> course you don’t. What do you think attracted you
> to each other? It was
> all the differences you saw in each other. Before
> marriage, opposite
> attract. After marriage, opposites attack. All
> those things you thought
> were unique and cute and interesting-all those
> things that caught your
> attention-now irritate the socks off you, because
> you’re around them all
> the time.
>
> When you look at your relationship and conclude that
> you have nothing in
> common with your mate, then the answer is to create
> common interests.
> Find something you can enjoy together. Develop a
> common interest
> around something that seems interesting to you. Make
> a list of fun things
> that you could learn to do together. Maybe it’s
> scuba diving. Maybe it’s
> photography, or sailing, or just a simple art class.
> It takes a tiny bit
> of effort to settle on a new
> common interest, but it’s worth that effort. If you
> don’t do it, your
> marriage could very likely go stale. You must
> intentionally develop
> interests and activities that you both will like to
> do-things you can do
> together that will be enjoyable to you both.
>
> The healthiest thing you could do for your marriage
> is to evaluate
> yourself on how well you court your mate. If, after
> looking over your
> relationship, you say,
> "Courtship is non-existent in my marriage. I’m just
> too busy to work at
> putting fun and romance in our relationship," give
> yourself a 1. If,
> however, you say, "I still write love notes to my
> husband/wife," give
> yourself an 8. If you say "We schedule a weekly
> date away from the
> children" give yourself a 10.
>
> You can start this week. Start right now. Today is
> the perfect
> opportunity to bring the spice and zest back into
> your marriage.
>
> Let the courtship begin!
May Newsletter
WORKING TOGETHER TO CREATE AN ABUSE-FREE FUTURE
5/26 /06
Publisher: Beverly Engel
www.beverlyengel.com
Hello everyone,
Thank you everyone who has emailed me to say they liked (and in some cases loved) my new book, Healing Your Emotional
Self. I appreciate your feedback so much!
I missed writing last month’s e-zine because I was busy finishing yet another book: The Jekyll and Hyde Syndrome: When
You or Someone You Love Seems Like Two Different People (which will be out next year). I was also busy traveling.
First I went to Dillon, Montana to teach a course in Emotional Abuse for the University of Montana-Western. I had a
wonderful time there, especially with the Psychology students and other professionals who took my course. Thank you so
much Denise for your efforts to get me there and your wonderful hospitality.
I was so impressed with the openness of our young people, how willing they are to share their feelings and to support
one another. They especially liked the experience of meeting in circles and plan on continuing their circle. Some of
the psychology students also plan on going out to the high schools and offering the information I shared with them on
emotional abuse. I think that is a wonderful idea! Unfortunately, many young women, in particular, are being
emotionally abused by their boyfriends.
I then went on to Helena, Montana where I presented two workshops at the 2006 Annual Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect
Conference. Finally, I went to Sedona, Arizona for a much-needed vacation.
Since many of you will also be traveling this summer, this month’s article is on travel — namely how it affects those
who have an abusive history.
In the News from Beverly segment I include announcements. Please feel free to send me announcements you feel readers
will find of interest. I cannot guarantee I can include them all but I will do my best to include what I feel is
relevant. I will also announce my own upcoming workshops and books. I ask that you order books directly from
www.Amazon.com or www.BarnesandNoble.com as I do not sell individual books directly to readers. If you would like to
attend a workshop, feel free to email me directly at beverly@beverlyengel.com.
Please forward this e-zine to anyone you know who is interested in preventing or healing childhood emotional, physical
or sexual abuse or emotional, physical or sexual abuse in adult relationships. If you are receiving this issue as a
forward, and would like your own no-cost subscription please follow the instructions at the end of this newsletter.
PRIVACY POLICY: I will never rent, sell or trade your name to anyone for any reason. Thank you for trusting me with
your personal information.
THE PAIN AND JOY OF TRAVELING
"A good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude…"
–Rainer Maria Rilke
Traveling can be especially difficult for those who had an abusive or neglectful childhood. At the same time,
traveling can often be a wonderful way to discover and develop one’s true self. Think about your traveling
experiences. Would you say that traveling brings out the best or the worst in you?
Traveling can be extremely stressful for many people. Leaving one’s comfortable home environment, the pressure of
having to catch planes or trains on time, being in unfamiliar settings — all these things can cause us to become
anxious, tense, and insecure. For others, traveling can be more than simply stressful. It can be disorienting and can
even cause a person to become emotionally fragile or explosive. For example, those who have borderline personality
disorder (BPD) or borderline traits often have a lot of difficulty adjusting to a new environment. Change of any kind
can be stressful since they do not have a strong sense of self — an internal awareness of who you are and how you fit
into the world. In addition, those with BPD or borderline tendencies (an estimated 6 million people in the United
States alone) tend to walk around with a great deal of anxiety anyway. Add the stress of packing, leaving home, having
to operate on someone else’s timetable and you have a situa
tion that can be extremely trying for someone with BPD.
Unfortunately, those with BPD or BPD traits do not tend to look inside themselves in order to discover why they are
feeling so anxious or uncomfortable. Instead, they tend to look outside themselves and to blame those who are closest
to them for their discomfort. This is often why many couples fight so much when they are on vacation. One or both
people is feeling anxious and stressed out and they take it out on each other. I remember that when I was in my early
twenties I always fought with boyfriends whenever we went on vacation together. My tendency to feel unhappy on
vacations and to pick fights with my partners was a clear sign of my own borderline tendencies at the time.
Do you tend to have arguments with those you are traveling with, especially in the beginning of the trip, en route to
your destination, and when you first arrive? If so it may be because you are anxious about being away from home and
your usual routine. You may even feel a bit disoriented since home and routine tend to ground us.
Some who suffer from BPD become depressed when they travel. I’ve had many clients who consistently find that they feel
sad, afraid, withdrawn and even shut down when they first get to a new environment. For this reason I recommend that
they try to make as few changes of environment as possible when they travel. Instead of moving around from hotel room
to hotel room they find that they feel much more secure staying in one location and exploring from there. That way
they have fewer changes to adjust to.
Some people find fault in their traveling companion because they are anxious about spending a concentrated amount of
time with someone. This may involve a fear of engulfment or entrapment. If you find that you have a pattern of
becoming irritable and critical of your partner when you travel, you may suffer from this unconscious fear. Some pick
a fight in an unconscious attempt to get some distance from their partner, while others withdraw in silence. Instead
of falling into this pattern, recognize your irritability, withdrawal and tendency to be critical for what they are –
indications that you need time and distance from the relationship. Tell your partner you need some time to yourself
and then take it. Go for a walk or go into another room and write in your journal. Unless your partner is terribly
insecure or is a control freak, he or she will respect your need and you will get a chance to regain your sense of
self.
It is important that you set aside time when you travel to connect with yourself. We experience surroundings
differently when we are alone versus when we are sharing the experience with someone else. When we are with another
person we can become distracted by his or her reactions to the environment, we can get involved in conversation and
miss things, or we can focus so much on our partner that we lose the awareness of our own reaction. Get up early some
morning and take a walk alone when you travel. Let your walk become a moving meditation, a time to clear your head and
connect with your emotions and your spirit. As you take in the fresh air allow your mind to clear from all the
superfluous chatter and minutiae of your daily life. Notice the colors and textures, the smells and sounds around you.
If you tend to lose yourself in relationships spending time alone will help you regain or establish a stronger sense
of self. You need time alone to discover who you really are, to learn to rely on yourself, to learn to like your own
company, and to break your tendency to merge with others. (For more help on ways to stop losing yourself in your
relationships, refer to my book, Loving Him without Losing You).
Traveling can force people together in ways that can become uncomfortable. Familiarity can indeed breed contempt if
one or both partners has a tendency to lose themselves in a relationship and then to suffer from a fear of engulfment.
If you suspect that the reason your partner is irritable, critical or withdrawn is because he or she needs some space
from the relationship, suggest that he or she take a walk or offer to do so yourself. Instead of participating in an
argument that you suspect is merely a distancing tactic, get away from your partner for a short time until he or she
cools off or gets needed space.
On the other hand, for some people, traveling can be a prescription for growth and healing. For example, those who
were raised by narcissistic parents find that they benefit greatly from traveling. I have always found this to be
true. As I wrote in Healing Your Emotional Self, today I am at my best when I travel, especially when I travel alone.
I feel excited and open and independent. My personality takes on a subtle but profound change. I’m more friendly than
I am at home. I am more open to meeting and talking to strangers. I feel more energy and I take greater risks.
For adult children of narcissistic parents, experiences such as travel confront what we are taught to believe. Travel
teaches us how people can live in non-narcissistic ways. . As Elan Golomb so eloquently wrote in her classic book,
Trapped in the Mirror: Adult Children of Narcissists in Their Struggle for Self: "Children of narcissists benefit from
stepping into the unknown of any type, be it people, reading, growing things, experimenting, playing instruments. It
can be a trip to a place so far from parental judgment that it makes you feel beyond your parent’s reach, so far that
you can try out different ways of being."
As you continue to work on yourself you will find that traveling becomes easier and easier. I was pleasantly surprised
at how much more enjoyable my most recent traveling experiences have been and how much better I handled even stressful
situations. I could really see my growth. In the past I often felt uncomfortable unless there was a conversation going
on when I had a travel companion. Looking back I think I must have talked way too much and tired out my partner. In
time I learned that silence was not as frightening as I had imagined. As I developed a stronger sense of self to fill
up the emptiness inside, I found that silence was a welcome opportunity to connect with myself and my feelings. In the
past I also tended to feel trapped while traveling with a companion. I’d begin to notice their faults and find that I
was growing more and more impatient with the person, causing me to become more distant (it is a common paradox for
those with borderline tendencies to feel both a
fraid of abandonment and entrapment, sometimes at the same time). During my recent trip to Sedonna with a friend I
noticed that I did not experience either fear — I welcomed silence but could also be patient when my companion
needed to talk, even when I could have welcomed more silence. I took time alone when I needed it and took
responsibility for any anxiety that I felt.
I was also quite proud of myself when I went to India and Nepal in December of 2004. While many on the tour became
irritable with one another or gossiped about each other I was able to stay connected to myself enough to manage my own
anxiety instead of projecting it onto others. I flowed naturally between connecting with others and connecting inside
myself.
I hope your travels go well this summer. Don’t forget to take time for yourself and to continue your recovery work,
whatever form it takes. We can’t afford to take a vacation from our work on ourselves.
———————————————————–
"How do we find what is important for us?
It is not enough for children of narcissists to follow
the marked trail that others lay before them.
Strength develops out of fighting with our handicaps.
We evolve from struggling to cope with our difficulties."
–Elan Golomb, Trapped in the Mirror
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BEVERLY’S NEWS
LOOK FOR MY NEW BOOK EMOTIONAL HEALING: A POWERFUL PROGRAM TO HELP YOU RAISE YOUR SELF-ESTEEM, QUIET YOUR INNER
CRITIC AND OVERCOME YOUR SHAME COMING OUT THIS MONTH!
"Emotionally abusive parents are indeed toxic parents, and they cause significant damage to their children’s
self-esteem, self-image, and body image. In this remarkable book, Beverly Engel shares her powerful Mirror Therapy
program for helping adult survivors to overcome their shame and self-criticism, become more compassionate and
accepting of themselves, and create a more positive self-image. I strongly recommend it for anyone who was abused or
neglected as a child."
–Susan Forward, Ph.D., author of Toxic Parents
"In this book, Beverly Engel documents the wide range of psychological abuses that so many children experience in
growing up. Her case examples and personal accounts are poignant and powerful reminders that as adults, many of us are
still limited by defenses we formed when trying to protect ourselves in the face of the painful circumstances we found
ourselves in as children. Engel’s insightful questionnaires and exercises provide concrete help in the healing
process, and her writing style in lively and engaging. This book is destined to positively affect many lives."
–Joyce Catlett, M.A., coauthor of Fear and Intimacy
WORKSHOPS AND SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS
Our first One-Day Retreat Honoring Women’s Spirituality, "Gather the Women and Save the World" in San Luis Obispo, CA
was a big success. Feedback on the event was overwhelmingly positive and we were able to raise about $4000 for the
Women’s Press. Because of this success we have decided to continue to offer workshops on a monthly basis, our first
workshop being one led by myself on "How to Create and Sustain a Women’s Circle." For more information and specific
dates go to www.womenspress-slo.org or call (805)-801-8168.
For those professionals reading this e-zine, I highly recommend The American Psychotherapy Association’s 2006 National
Conference in Orlando, Florida, Sept. 21-23rd. For more information call (800) 205-9165
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I hope you enjoyed this issue of Working Together to Create an Abuse-Free Future.
–Beverly Engel
To find out more about Beverly Engel, go to http://www.beverlyengel.com
Working Together, copyright, Beverly Engel. All rights reserved.
Excerpts from this e-zine may be distributed or reproduced as long as you include the author, the copyright and the
sentence, "Beverly Engel is the author of Working Together to Create an Abuse-Free Future. You can sign up for her
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