Bernie Sanders"what we have to conclude,some people may not want to hear this,Bush won the election

[J_J_]

In terms of the vote situation, I'm not sure that there will be a senator who will challenge the vote. I think the key state where there has been controversy is the state of Ohio and the people who I know in Ohio have been outraged by a number of situations where voting lines, for example, were much, much too long because voting machines were not properly allocated in Democratic issues, in Democratic areas. But none of them, to my knowledge, believe that that would have resulted in the kind of votes to enable Kerry to have won. So I'm not sure how far that challenge is going to go.

[Thom Hartmann] Yeah. So you're pessimistic that a senator will stand up on this.

[Bernie Sanders] Yeah, I don't think so, and frankly, I think what we have to conclude, some people may not want to hear this, Bush won the election.
- See more at: http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2004/12/transcript-congressman-bernie-sanders-dec-31st-2004#sthash.Yq9OYoxj.dpuf

So many Bernie Sanders Fans wanting him to run for president, but if there is election fraud yet again, he seems to have no clue.

How many people remember what happened in 2004?

The exit polls exact opposite of results...so obvious something was going on.

The fraud was even being brought to trial before the key witness Karl Rove's IT guy died in a small plane crash,.

Conyers pretended to be looking into it, had everyone buy his book...but then dropped it shortly afterward.

During Conyers congressional hearing on this, Bernie Sanders was the one to stand up and tell everyone to shut up about it.

He was really quite rude.

I really like what he has to say about almost everything, however, I don't trust him because of this.

I think he is/was just as much as the dog and pony show as Conyers is/was.

[Initech]

1. The thought of another Bush as president makes me physically sick to my stomach.

[grahamhgreen]

2. Where do you work?

[Bluenorthwest]

3. Two things, Bernie was not a Senator at that time and as we all know, it takes a Senator to

challenge the vote. As you might recall in 2000 not one Senator would join the Black Caucus and allow that vote to be challenged. Lots of people objected in the House, but they needed one crumby Senator and not one of them would stand up.
To me, he sounds like he knew the Senate he was looking at. The Senate of which he was not a part. He had no power to challenge the vote, and no one in the House did without a Senator joining them. That's what Bernie is saying.
I'm not even sure what you find troubling about this.

[KingCharlemagne]

18. Gore had already conceded at that point, IIRC. So while I obviously would have liked a

Senator to have accepted the challenge from the House, were Senators supposed to in the face of Gore's concession? In Gore's and the Senators' defense, I don't think anyone understood how bad it was going to get having as President a guy you'd like to have a beer with. We would soon find out, but no one understood then what was on its way.

IIRC, Bernie was in the House at the time (not the Senate), so I take your point about his point.

[hfojvt]

34. the OP is about 2004, not 2000

[KingCharlemagne]

37. Yes, but the post to which I was responding mentioned the 2000 election in its

first paragraph. FWIW, I happen to share Sanders' view of 2004. There were massive election irregularities in Ohio, but not outright election fraud (at least none that has been demonstrated to me). I will say that the discrepancy between exit polling and final vote tallies gives me pause but I remember there were some fairly sophisticated explanations of that discrepancy that did not involve fraud necessarily.

Hope that satisfies your concern.

[elehhhhna]

24. but hil supporteed gore strongly at that time

No wait.

[bluestateguy]

4. I have always acknowledged that Bush legitimately won in 2004

As for 2000, I will go to my grave knowing that Al Gore won Florida and the election.

[dawg]

6. I agree.

Osama came out of the woodwork with a *scary* video, just in time to frighten enough voters back into the arms of the war party.

[marym625]

5. There were counties in Ohio that had

More votes for Bush than there were people in the county. Bullshit there wasn't fraud.

[Recursion]

9. Which ones?

I hear that a lot, but nobody can ever seem to point to them.

[marym625]

11. Oh my!

I am going to have to do some research. It's been so long! But yes, it happened. Black box voting took a vote for Kerry then actually turned it to a vote for Bush and, in some cases then took a vote away from Kerry.

I will come back with it when I find it

[Recursion]

13. Thanks! I looked for weeks when I first heard that, but that was a decade ago or so (nt)

[marym625]

14. I have to run

But here's some of it. This also links to Greg Palast who is the best place to get truth, especially about voter fraud. I will have to look at it later if it specifically addressed the county we're talking about

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/2004votefraud_ohio.html

[marym625]

15. Actually, check Greg Palast's website

I am sure he has tons of information. He wrote books on voter fraud.


http://www.gregpalast.com/

[Adam051188]

7. stolen elections can cause a stir.

john kerry would have been no different from bush.

why do you think saddam is dead? usually leaders get golden parachutes. leaders of anything getting caught doing anything, it doesn't matter, the leader gets a golden parachute, that's how global fascism works. so why did saddam die? where did iraq's chemical weapons go? there's your answer.

american democracy is very very very easy to manipulate and control in you've got the economic reigns, that's what the electoral college is all about.

a very serious problem in this country is that no one here knows or understands anything when it comes to large scale economic and government systems. these are the people who thought "trickle down economics" was really a thing that existed....mucho problemo senor....

[Cha]

26. Sorry, bullshite.. "Kerry would have been no different than bush". You really have to have your

head in the sand to come up with that one.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

8. Bush won 2004 fairly.

Kerry was a bad candidate. Dean would've been a spectacular candidate, but the media was too focused on his voice cracking while he was hyping a crowd, and he slowly was pushed away. Dean was popular with the youth (as I was at that time), and his quote about the Fugees was classic.

Now, 2000... I was in basic training during the whole ordeal, so I missed a LOT of the aftermath as it happened (I also didn't vote in it, as I was quite apolitical at the time, and being in basic, had no idea who to vote for). In my OPINION, Bush won 2000 by a CLOSE margin. Wether or not there was any chicanery, I can't say.

[Recursion]

10. Dean's campaign faltered because he got less than half as many delegates as Kerry in Iowa

He never had broad support in the party outside of the netroots, and the problem was never the scream. He actually performed better in NH, right after it.

[KingCharlemagne]

20. He and Kucinich were the only two willing to tell the (mostly) unvarnished truth

about Iraq. So much for honesty and the American electorate.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

23. Maybe I don't remember it as well...

But he was my pick for the primaries.

[KingCharlemagne]

19. All the print media chains did exhaustive analyses of the Florida vote and ballots after Bush

was inaugurated in 2001 and found unanimously that Gore won Florida, no matter what system was used to count the ballots. The Supreme Court stopped all the votes from being counted. Bush DID NOT win 2000 by a close margin; he was installed via a bloodless SCOTUS coup that left the corpse of American democracy on the table.

http://www.factcheck.org/2008/01/the-florida-recount-of-2000/

[Dr Hobbitstein]

22. From your link.

A: Nobody can say for sure who might have won. A full, official recount of all votes statewide could have gone either way, but one was never conducted.

[KingCharlemagne]

25. That is the general answer at the top of my source. The devil, as always, lies in the details (or in

the weeds). A different article by Robert Parry of Consortium News puts the matter more bluntly:

So Al Gore was the choice of Florida’s voters -- whether one counts hanging chads or dimpled chads. That was the core finding of the eight news organizations that conducted a review of disputed Florida ballots. By any chad measure, Gore won.
Gore won even if one doesn’t count the 15,000-25,000 votes that USA Today estimated Gore lost because of illegally designed “butterfly ballots,” or the hundreds of predominantly African-American voters who were falsely identified by the state as felons and turned away from the polls.

Gore won even if there’s no adjustment for George W. Bush’s windfall of about 290 votes from improperly counted military absentee ballots where lax standards were applied to Republican counties and strict standards to Democratic ones, a violation of fairness reported earlier by the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Put differently, George W. Bush was not the choice of Florida’s voters anymore than he was the choice of the American people who cast a half million more ballots for Gore than Bush nationwide. [For more details on studies of the election, see Consortiumnews.com stories of May 12, June 2 and July 16.]

https://consortiumnews.com/2001/111201a.html (Emphasis added)

[Dont call me Shirley]

31. Bush lost 2000. He actually lost Fla after the real count was finished. The USSC appointed bush.

[mmonk]

12. Then trust the corporations. They care about you

[Iggo]

16. Tryin' something, are ya?

[Dont call me Shirley]

32. +1

[Doctor_J]

35. I usually try to figure out why a particular op is made

This one is...confusing

[brooklynite]

17. Amazing: Bernie Sanders agrees with me -- and with all the Ohio pols I've asked about this...

...not one candidate, campaign manager or Party leader says that the losses in 2004, 2010 and 2014 were due to election machine fraud (and isn't it funny that the same voting machines let us win in 2006, 2008 and 2012?).

[KingCharlemagne]

21. For once, you and I agree. (Whew!) Just out of curiosity, have any of your contacts explained

to your satisfaction the seeming discrepancy between exit polling that showed Kerry narrowly squeaking out a win and actual results that had Bush narrowly winning Ohio? I remember reading that Bush voters may have deliberately lied to the pollsters, but can't remember now for sure. IIRC, the lies to pollsters were all part of some elaborate Rove-inspired ratfucking plot.

[Cha]

27. SCOTUS called it for bush.. that's not winning. Months later below the fold in the NYT Gore did

get more votes.

[arcane1]

29. Gore got more votes in 2004 than Bush did?

[Cha]

30. Sorry, I jumped in thinking about bush didn't win from the get-go.. he never would have been

squaring off against Kerry in the first place. Kerry probably wouldn't have run against President Gore. We wouldn't be having this conversation!

[arcane1]

28. Oh give me a fucking break already.

Nice try

[MADem]

33. Well, Bush "won" the first one five to four....after that, with all the voter suppression and

polling place switching and fucking with the electorate, it doesn't matter if he recorded more votes--he prevented people who should have been able to vote from voting, and he cheated in that fashion.

Stealing the right to vote from someone is the same, to my mind, as ballot fraud.

Selected Not Elected.

[reddread]

36. WWHD?