Letter to Bush

Dear Mr. President:

… In your re-election, God has graciously granted America — though she doesn’t deserve it — a reprieve from the agenda of paganism. You have been given a mandate. We the people expect your voice to be like the clear and certain sound of a trumpet. Because you seek the Lord daily, we who know the Lord will follow that kind of voice eagerly.

Don’t equivocate. Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ. Honor the Lord, and He will honor you.

Had your opponent won, I would have still given thanks, because the Bible says I must (I Thessalonians 5:18). …

Pull out all the stops and make a difference. If you have weaklings around you who do not share your biblical values, shed yourself of them. Conservative Americans would love to see one president who doesn’t care whether he is liked, but cares infinitely that he does right.

Best wishes.
Sincerely your friend,
Bob Jones III
President
Bob Jones University

PS: … On occasion, Christians have not agreed with things you said during your first term. Nonetheless, we could not be more thankful that God has given you four more years to serve Him in the White House, never taking off your Christian faith and laying it aside as a man takes off a jacket, but living, speaking, and making decisions as one who knows the Bible to be eternally true.

Seattle Weekly: News: When It Doesn’t Add Up by Rick Anderson

Burton, the Ohio University prof, helped conduct an Election Day voter survey in Las Vegas. Nevada is the only state to use voter-verified paper ballot printers that issue receipts showing, in code, how a person voted and allowing subsequent online verification that the vote was counted. More than 81 percent of 362 Nevada voters said they favored the ATM-style receipt to take home with them, Burton says. Thirty percent also said they’d use it to check their vote on the Web. “As unhealthy as Florida 2000 was, it does have the effect to bring change,” says Burton. “We weren’t thinking about this before. I expect we’re going to see a more robust debate.”

CBS News | Picking The President By Mail | November 16, 2004 14:37:26 by James K. Galbraith

[I]t is an injustice, an outrage and a scandal — a crime, really — that American citizens should have to wait for hours in the November rain in order to exercise the simple right to vote.

The remedy is voting by mail, the system now in place in the state of Oregon. In Oregon, there are no election day problems, because there is no election day. Instead, ballots are mailed to voters at their registered address, filled out and returned, with a signature verification. Participation rates are high — 63 percent of the voting age population this year, against a national average of 53 percent. Fraud is virtually nil. And as the ballots are paper (they are read by a scanning machine), there is a verifiable paper trail.

The Writings of Greg Palast

Most voters in Ohio cast their ballots for John Kerry, which should, in accordance with Mrs. Gordon’s civics lessons from sixth grade, have given Kerry the Electoral College majority and the White House. Trouble is, those votes won’t be counted.

So where are these uncounted, but winning, votes? When I went to sleep the night of Nov. 2, Kerry was down in Ohio by 136,000 votes. But over a quarter million ballots had yet to be counted. Those abandoned ballots, overwhelmingly Democratic, sit in two piles, one called “spoiled” and the other “provisional.”

The ugly, secret shame of American democracy is that 2 million votes are “spoiled” in presidential elections — tossed away untallied as “unreadable.” And the nasty part is that roughly half are cast by African-Americans. To learn of this astonishing Jim Crow thumb on the U.S. electoral scales, you have to hunt through the appendixes of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission report on the Florida 2000 race. The government’s demographers concluded that of the 179,855 votes “spoiled” in Florida that year, 54 percent were cast by blacks. All other credible studies tell us that Florida is horribly typical of the nation.

High-Tech Jim Crow: Stealing Ohio’s Vote

Verified Voting: Our Position on Fraud in the 2004 Presidential Election
by Verified Voting Foundation
November 15th, 2004

In the aftermath of the Nov. 2 election, many people have promoted theories and statistical evidence of major fraud or errors. Our position on this is being distorted and misinterpreted, so we would like to take this opportunity to clarify it.

We do not believe that there is any more reason to look for problems in this election than in previous elections, but auditing of all elections should be routine. Citizens should be able to do some of these audits.

The way to encourage trust in a system is to have independent checks on a system. The best way to encourage trust is to make that system so open that anyone can check it.

We advocate the publication of detailed election statistics on the Internet, and the analysis of those statistics by members of the public. In the long run, this will result in a much healthier election system.

The current high level of scrutiny of the election is a very healthy thing.

Nationwide Election Incidents – EIRS 1.0.5

Nationwide Election Incidents [interactive map]

.Election Protection 2004.

Economist.com | American values

In 2000, 15m evangelical Protestants voted. They accounted for 23% of the electorate, and 71% of them voted for Mr Bush. This time, estimates Luis Lugo, the director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, they again accounted for about 23% of the electorate—which means that evangelicals did not increase their share of the vote. But overall turnout was much higher, and 78% of the evangelicals who voted, voted for Mr Bush. That works out at roughly 3.5m extra votes for him. Mr Bush’s total vote rose by 9m (from 50.5m in 2000 to 59.5m), so evangelical Protestants alone accounted for more than a third of his increased vote.

Thus, the election revealed that though the evangelical share of the electorate has not increased, evangelicals have become much more important to the Republican Party. According to a study for the Pew Forum by John Green of the University of Akron, Ohio, the proportion of evangelicals calling themselves Republicans has risen from 48% to 56% over the past 12 years, making them among the most solid segments of the party’s base.

This close association between party and evangelicals took a lock-step forward during the campaign. Mr Bush’s chief policy adviser and campaign chairman held weekly telephone conversations with prominent evangelical Christians, such as Jim Dobson, the head of Focus on the Family, and the Rev Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention. Ralph Reed, formerly the executive director of the Christian Coalition, became the campaign’s regional co-ordinator for the south-east—a move that encapsulates the integration of evangelical voters into the party.

Hitherto, evangelical Protestants have been the objects of Republican outreach. This time, they took the initiative themselves, asking for and distributing voter registration cards and collecting the signatures required to put anti-gay-marriage initiatives on the ballot. As the church organisers tell it, the Republican Party was left playing catch-up. …

Remember, too, that the religious right and religious America are far from being the same things; Mr Bush’s moral majority depended on the votes of other religious groups as well. Catholics, with 27% of voters, are more numerous than evangelicals, and, unusually this year, the Republican candidate won a majority of the Catholic vote (52% against 47%).

Though Mr Bush did especially well among white Catholics and those who attended Mass regularly, he also increased his share of the Hispanic Catholic vote from 31% in 2000 to 42%. This alone accounts for the inroads he made into the Hispanic vote, which has traditionally gone to Democrats by two to one. In all, calculates Mr Lugo, 3.5m more Catholics voted for Mr Bush in 2004 than in 2000. Thus, they were as important to his increased majority as evangelical Protestants were.

This points to another new development. The election seems to have consolidated the tendency of the most observant members of any church, regardless of denomination, to vote Republican.