Honest Elections Campaign

America’s founders did everything within their power to prevent what is now happening. But they are no longer with us, so we will have to stop it ourselves.

In order to make it close to impossible for one political faction to control all of the government they gave us federalism, so that essential government functions would be performed by the states. And within the national government they gave us three branches with checks and balances between them. They feared that if a single political faction controlled too much of the nation’s political life it would try to eliminate genuine political competition and render it impossible for citizens to rule through free and fair elections.

Three modern innovations have overrun the obstacles to one party government that America's founding fathers put in place. First, our founders did not anticipate modern political parties, which institutionalize the corruption of our political system and make it seem legitimate. The party of government finances itself by selling access to powerful decision-makers and influence over legislation, and this dynamic appears immune from reform. Second, the founders could not have anticipated that the public sphere itself could be compromised. An ever shrinking number of companies control an ever increasing share of the audience and as a result an ever diminishing range of opinions are permitted to be expressed, which removes our most urgent political questions from the public debate. Finally, the fantastic sums our government spends to build and maintain our worldwide military empire gives huge incentives for buying influence. The money spent purchasing government decisions is rewarded a thousandfold with profits, leading to more corruption.

We support the efforts to achieve better laws and safeguards through legislation and proposed amendments to the Constitution. But we also know that power concedes nothing without a forceful challenge and that those in power now see no need to compromise. Our failure to pursue criminal sanctions for the misuse of state funds in Florida in 2000 led directly to the subversion of the 2002 elections in Georgia, in which the state government ceded to a private contractor with distinct partisan leanings the operation of the state's electoral machinery. Our inability to secure any criminal investigation, indictments or convictions of the perpetrators of these crimes against democracy led in 2004 to the massive proliferation of vote suppression, fraud in the casting of the votes and fraud in the counting of the votes in Florida, Ohio, New Mexico and Nevada.

To give but a few examples from 2004, no one will ever be able to know with certainty how many citizens voted in Seminole County Florida because the voter registries that people use to sign in have been destroyed by the public authorities in direct violation of the law. In Ohio the Secretary of State requested and received approximately $40M from the Federal government to implement the Help America Vote Act, then failed to spend it to make improvements in the electoral process because it permitted him to leave tens of thousands of voter registration forms unprocessed until after election day and to carefully ration out a limited number of voting machines. New Mexico's astronomically high percentage of ballots in the presidential race for which no vote for president was recorded remains unexamined and unexplained, despite the slender 6,000 vote victory margin Bush was credited with. And in Nevada and seven other states Voter Outreach America, a firm that received at least $500,000 from the Republican National Committee, misrepresented itself as "America Votes" in order to secure voter registration forms from new voters, only to discard those from people who did not register as Republicans. The investigation was turned over to the FBI which apparently has quietly dropped the matter.

Left unchallenged, the Republicans will pioneer more hidden ways to subvert the popular will and make our elections into empty and meaningless rituals, as our national political conventions have become.

The Honest Elections Campaign Fund is a Federal political action committee. Its purposes are to organize and pursue lawsuits to bring the perpetrators of election fraud to justice, to pursue and to publish the investigative work to bring these shine the bright light of public awareness on these activites, to help raise money for the elected officials who stand with us in our fight and to lend our mobilization support to legislative lobbying and constitutional reform efforts that are being pursued by our allies.

If we are successful and receiving funding we will pursue a claim in Federal District Court in D.C. to recover of funds secured by Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell and then not used for the purposes for which they were requested. Blackwell secured the funds in is role as an officer of the State of Ohio and then did not spend them as promised because he wanted to keep thousands of new voter registration forms from being acted upon, just as he preferred to allocate scarce voting machines to having enough of them to permit everyone to vote efficiently. This will force out into the open the scandalous manipulation of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio.

If we generate the funds necessary we have secured the services of a well-known investigative journalist who will prepare for publication a book tentatively entitled "The Making of the President 2004: How Bush Stole the Presidency and How We Get it Back." It will set out the indictment against Bush and the Republican Party for its efforts to subvert fair elections in multiple states and agitate for the continuation of the investigations that have been discontinued by the FBI and other law enforcement authorities.

A hyper-partisan one party state that carefully rations how much truth the nation needs is not what America’s founders intended. We ask you to join us in our fight to make our country a place, in Ben Franklin’s words, where liberty dwells.

Stand by for the coming launch of www.honestelections.org

The Honest Elections Campaign
PO Box 65075
Washington, DC 20035
202 966 0040