Please review these 18 items and share them with
others. You are not alone.
The LNS has ceased daily distribution and posting, but
we will communicate with you as warranted and post
these supplements from time to time…
DEFIANCE and RAGE are appropriate…Concession and
acquiescence are not…
1. William Rivers Pitt: Bev Harris, who has been
working tirelessly since the passage of the Help
America Vote Act to inform people of the dangers
present in this new process, got a chance to
demonstrate how easy it is to steal an election on
that central tabulation computer while a guest on the
CNBC program 'Topic A With Tina Brown.' Ms. Brown was
off that night, and the guest host was none other than
Governor Howard Dean. Thanks to Governor Dean and Ms.
Harris, anyone watching CNBC that night got to see
just how easy it is to steal an election because of
these new machines and the flawed processes they use…
A poster named 'TruthIsAll' on the
DemocraticUnderground.com forums laid out the
questionable results of Tuesday's election in succinct
fashion: "To believe that Bush won the election, you
must also believe: That the exit polls were wrong;
that Zogby's 5pm election day calls for Kerry winning
Ohio and Florida were wrong (he was exactly right in
his 2000 final poll); that Harris' last-minute polling
for Kerry was wrong (he was exactly right in his 2000
final poll); that incumbent rule #1 - undecideds break
for the challenger - was wrong; That the 50% rule - an
incumbent doesn't do better than his final polling -
was wrong; That the approval rating rule - an
incumbent with less than 50% approval will most likely
lose the election - was wrong; that it was just a
coincidence that the exit polls were correct where
there was a paper trail and incorrect (+5% for Bush)
where there was no paper trail; that the surge in new
young voters had no positive effect for Kerry; that
Kerry did worse than Gore against an opponent who lost
the support of scores of Republican newspapers who
were for Bush in 2000; that voting machines made by
Republicans with no paper trail and with no software
publication, which have been proven by thousands of
computer scientists to be vulnerable in scores of
ways, were not tampered with in this election."
Perhaps this can all be dismissed. Perhaps rants like
the one posted by 'TruthIsAll' are nothing more than
sour grapes from the side that lost. Perhaps all of
the glitches, wrecked votes, unprecedented voting
trends and partisan voting-machine connections can be
explained away. If so, this reporter would very much
like to see those explanations. At a bare minimum, the
fact that these questions exist at all represents a
grievous undermining of the basic confidence in the
process required to make this democracy work.
Democracy should not ever require leaps of faith, and
we have put the fate of our nation into the hands of
machines that require such a leap. It is unacceptable
across the board, and calls into serious question not
only the election we just had, but any future election
involving these machines.
Representatives John Conyers, Jerrold Nadler and
Robert Wexler, all members of the House Judiciary
Committee, posted a letter on November 5th to David
Walker, Comptroller General of the United States. In
the letter, they asked for an investigation into the
efficacy of these electronic voting machines.
2. International Herald Tribune: The global
implications of the U.S. election are undeniable, but
international monitors at a polling
station in southern Florida said Tuesday that voting
procedures being used in the extremely close contest
fell short in many ways of the best global practices.
The observers said they had less access to polls than
in Kazakhstan, that the electronic voting had fewer
fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the ballots were
not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that
no other country had such a complex national election
system. "To be honest, monitoring elections in Serbia
a few months ago was much simpler," said Konrad
Olszewski, an election observer stationed in Miami by
the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe.
3. Ruth Lopes, Buzzflash Reader: Within a few short
hours of Kerry's concession speech, the left wing
focus shifted to how we will win next time. Next time.
This pathetic mewl of defiance completely falls within
the definition of insanity: repeating the same
behavior and expecting different results…
The next election will be less of an election than
this election. Oh, we'll get little victories here and
there, enough to make this Matrix-like reality
significantly believable for the millions of us who
would truly like to believe that our votes count and,
if they didn't, we really would do whatever it takes,
but, oh well, we came so close. Next time we'll do it.
Next time.
There will be no next time on those terms. This
country is now headed inexorably down a road that will
take a generation or more to get off of, If we even
can. If America as we know it even survives.
Nations do go crazy sometimes, and the progression of
symptoms we've been exhibiting here in the Good Ol'
USA has entered rubber room territory. We are a people
in dangerous denial. Don't participate in it by
accepting this insanity as your reality. Even as
everyone around you buys into the comfort zone of
'next time', stay strong by never acknowledging it as
your truth. Whatever else you do, for God's sake, at
least see this for what it really was.
4. Erin Miller, Evening Leader: In a letter dated Oct.
21, Ken Nuss, former deputy director of the Auglaize
County Board of Elections, claimed that Joe McGinnis,
a former employee of Election Systems and Software
(ES&S), the company that provides the voting system in
Auglaize County, was on the main computer that is used
to create the ballot and compile election results,
which would go against election protocol. Nuss claimed
in the letter that McGinnis was allowed to use the
computer the weekend of Oct. 16.
Nuss, who resigned from his job Oct. 21 after being
suspended for a day, was responsible for overseeing
the computerized programming of election software,
according to his job description. His resignation is
effective Nov. 11.
5. Thom Hartmann, www.commondreams.org: When I spoke
with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06,
2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of
Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he
was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has
evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election
was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just
this year, he said, but that these same people had
previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002
so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet
Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead
against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.
6. Bob Fitrakis, Free Press: Why did a voting machine
in Republican Gahanna, Ohio report 4,258 votes for
George W. Bush when only 638 people cast votes at the
New Life Church polling site?
Buried on page A6 of the Columbus Dispatch, the story
also reported that the computerized e-voting machine
recorded 0 votes in a race between Franklin County
Commissioners Arlene Shoemaker and Paula Brooks.
Kerry conceded on Nov. 3 before some troubling
election irregularities have surfaced in Ohio.
Investigative reporter Gregory Palast has pointed out
that there are more than 92,000 “spoiled” ballots in
Ohio, mostly in Democratic wards that could easily be
hand counted, 155,000 uncounted provisional ballots,
uncounted overseas military ballots and some uncounted
absentee ballots.
Despite the comments of Kerry’s running mate, Senator
John Edwards, that every vote should be counted,
Kerry’s concession makes that promise unlikely. In
Ohio, an estimated 14.6% of the votes are cast on
e-voting machines, known for their glitches and
susceptibility to hacking and fraudulent manipulation.
Just this year, four Ohio counties purchased voting
machines from the notoriously partisan Diebold
corporation, whose CEO, Columbus resident and Bush
fundraiser Wally O’Dell, pledged to help “Ohio deliver
its electoral votes to the President.”
7. Bev Harris, Black Box Voting: "We are working now
to compile the proof, based not on soft evidence --
red flags, exit polls -- but core
documents obtained by Black Box Voting in the most
massive Freedom of Information action in history. "
8. Ray Beckerman, Beldock Levine & Hoffman LLP: "I
worked for 3 days, including Election Day, on the
statewide voter protection hotline run by the Ohio
Democratic Party in Columbus, Ohio. I am writing
this because the media is inexplicably whitewashing
what happened in Ohio, and Kerry's concession was
likewise inexplicable. Hundreds of thousands of
people were disenfranchised in Ohio."
9. Straight Talk: "A Seattle-based nonprofit
organization has
announced that it is conducting the largest
freedom-of-information action in U.S. history to
examine computer voting in the November 2 U.S.
election. Bev Harris, a founder of
www.blackboxvoting.org/, told the Straight that her
group plans to file requests for the internal audit
logs of all computerized voting machines used across
the country."
10. AlterNet: "Hundreds of angry Ohio residents
marched through
the streets of Columbus—Ohio’s Capital—this evening
and stormed the Ohio State House, defying orders and
arrest threats from Ohio State Troopers. "O-H-I-O !
suppressed democracy has got to go,"they chanted.
After troopers pushed and scuffled with people, nearly
a hundred people took over the steps and entrance to
the State’s giant white column capital building and
refused repeated orders to disperse or face arrest.
People prepared for arrests, ready to face
jail—writing lawyers phone numbers on their arms,
signing jail support lists and discussing
non-cooperation and active resistance (linking arms,
but not fighting back)."
11. Robert Parry: "During the day, even Bush’s aides
informed the president that he was losing the election by about
three percentage points, according to a source with
access to information inside the White House. But
Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove reportedly voiced
confidence that the vote would turn around. By
evening, Bush was displaying a cool confidence that he
would prevail."
12. Robert Parry: "As liberals and Democrats sort
through what went
wrong in Election 2004, they should put at the top of
their list the dangerous imbalance that now exists in
the national news media.
Over the past quarter century, the
conservatives/Republicans have built a huge, permanent
media machine – a vertically integrated structure that
puts out the conservative message on TV, with
newspapers, through magazines, over radio stations, in
books and via the Internet.
Through all these forms of communication, in large
cities and small towns, the Right’s media is there for
its listeners, readers and viewers every day, year
round, not just during election cycles. Its impact is
especially important in rural areas that don’t have
easy access to the variety of media found in urban
centers."
13. Sidney Blumenthal, Salon: "Now, without
constraints, Bush can pursue the dreams he campaigned
for - the use of U.S. military
might to bring God's gift of freedom to the world,
with no more "global tests," and at home the enactment
of the imperatives of "the right God." The
international system of collective security forged in
World War II and tempered in the Cold War is a thing
of the past. The Democratic Party, despite its best
efforts, has failed to rein in the radicalism sweeping
the country. The world is in a state of emergency but
also irrelevant. The New World, with all its power and
might, stepping forth to the rescue and the liberation
of the old? Goodbye to all that.
14. William Rivers Pitt: "If despair and despondency
still color your world after the election, remember
this: Every second-term President since Eisenhower has
met with a blizzard of shame and disgrace before they
left office. Nixon didn't get to finish his term and
needed Ford to keep him out of prison, Reagan needed
Bush Sr. to pardon a whole mob of cretins to kill the
Iran/Contra scandal, and Clinton was impeached for
lying about consensual sex."
15. The Nation: People really are confused and
manipulated (we have a mainstream media that continues
to focus on irrelevant stories - Swift Boat,
Rathergate and all the rest - abrogating its
responsibility to focus on what's important and
significant; and too much of it keeps giving head
instead of keeping its head.) This makes an expansion
of the progressive media echo chamber all the more
important; And,
Neoliberalism is broken beyond repair and people
need to be offered a real alternative not just despair
at this point. This is truly a non-violent Civil War
between those who think government is basically
screwed up and that they're on their own, and those
who believe....what exactly? We've got to be much
clearer on the latter...
As progressives, we will need to marshal at least as
much dedication, purpose, strategic focus and tactical
ruthlessness, and The Nation is one of the few places
that will have earned the trust of over 40 percent of
the American people who were against Bush and all his
works from the beginning.
16. Salon: I'm sorry to pour salt on raw wounds, but
isn't that what Tom Daschle did? He even ran ads
showing himself hugging the president! But South
Dakotans refused to embrace this lily-livered tactic.
Because, ultimately, copycat candidates fail in the
way "me-too" brands do.
Unless the Democratic Party wants to become a
permanent minority party, there is no alternative but
to return to the idealism, boldness and generosity of
spirit that marked the presidencies of FDR and JFK and
the short-lived presidential campaign of Bobby
Kennedy.
Otherwise, the Republicans will continue their
winning ways, convincing tens of millions of
hardworking Americans to vote for them even as they
cut their services and send their children off to die
in an unjust war.
17. Thom Hartman, www.commondreams.org: Why have we
let corporations into our polling places, locations so
sacred to democracy that in many
states even international election monitors and
reporters are banned? Why are we allowing corporations
to exclusively handle our vote, in a secret and
totally invisible way? Particularly a private
corporation founded, in one case, by a family that
believes the Bible should replace the Constitution; in
another case run by one of Ohio's top Republicans; and
in another case partly owned by Saudi investors?
18. Michael Moore: Bush's victory was the NARROWEST
win for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson in
1916.
Full texts and URLs follow...
Save the Republic!
Worse Than 2000: Tuesday's Electoral Disaster
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Report
Monday 08 November 2004
Everyone remembers Florida's 2000 election
debacle, and all of the new terms it introduced to our
political lexicon: Hanging chads, dimpled chads,
pregnant chads, overvotes, undervotes, Sore Losermans,
Jews for Buchanan and so forth. It took several weeks,
battalions of lawyers and a questionable decision from
the U.S. Supreme Court to show the nation and the
world how messy democracy can be. By any standard,
what happened in Florida during the 2000 Presidential
election was a disaster.
What happened during the Presidential election of
2004, in Florida, in Ohio, and in a number of other
states as well, was worse.
Some of the problems with this past Tuesday's
election will sound all too familiar. Despite having
four years to look into and deal with the problems
that cropped up in Florida in 2000, the 'spoiled vote'
chad issue reared its ugly head again. Investigative
journalist Greg Palast, the man almost singularly
responsible for exposing the more egregious examples
of illegitimate deletions of voters from the rolls,
described the continued problems in an article
published just before the election, and again in an
article published just after the election.
Four years later, and none of the Florida problems
were fixed. In fact, by all appearances, they spread
from Florida to Ohio, New Mexico, Michigan and
elsewhere. Worse, these problems only scratch the
surface of what appears to have happened in Tuesday's
election. The fix that was put in place to solve these
problems - the Help America Vote Act passed in 2002
after the Florida debacle - appears to have gone a
long way towards making things worse by orders of
magnitude, for it was the Help America Vote Act which
introduced paperless electronic touch-screen voting
machines to millions of voters across the country.
At first blush, it seems like a good idea. Forget
the chads, the punch cards, the archaic booths like
pianos standing on end with the handles and the
curtains. This is the 21st century, so let's do it
with computers. A simple screen presents
straightforward choices, and you touch the spot on the
screen to vote for your candidate. Your vote is
recorded by the machine, and then sent via modem to a
central computer which tallies the votes. Simple,
right?
Not quite.
Is there any evidence that these machines went
haywire on Tuesday? Nationally, there were more than
1,100 reports of electronic voting machine
malfunctions. A few examples:
• In Broward County, Florida, election workers were
shocked to discover that their shiny new machines were
counting backwards. "Tallies should go up as more
votes are counted," according to this report. "That's
simple math. But in some races, the numbers had gone
down. Officials found the software used in Broward can
handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the
system starts counting backward."
• In Franklin County, Ohio, electronic voting machines
gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in one precinct alone.
"Franklin County's unofficial results gave Bush 4,258
votes to Democratic challenger John Kerry's 260 votes
in Precinct 1B," according to this report. "Records
show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.
Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County
Board of Elections, said Bush received 365 votes
there. The other 13 voters who cast ballots either
voted for other candidates or did not vote for
president."
• In Craven County, North Carolina, a software error
on the electronic voting machines awarded Bush 11,283
extra votes. "The Elections Systems and Software
equipment," according to this report, "had downloaded
voting information from nine of the county's 26
precincts and as the absentee ballots were added, the
precinct totals were added a second time. An override,
like those occurring when one attempts to save a
computer file that already exists, is supposed to
prevent double counting, but did not function
correctly."
• In Carteret County, North Carolina, "More than 4,500
votes may be lost in one North Carolina county because
officials believed a computer that stored ballots
electronically could hold more data than it did. Local
officials said UniLect Corp., the maker of the
county's electronic voting system, told them that each
storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit
was actually 3,005 votes. Officials said 3,005 early
votes were stored, but 4,530 were lost."
• In LaPorte County, Indiana, a Democratic stronghold,
the electronic voting machines decided that each
precinct only had 300 voters. "At about 7 p.m.
Tuesday," according to this report, "it was noticed
that the first two or three printouts from individual
precinct reports all listed an identical number of
voters. Each precinct was listed as having 300
registered voters. That means the total number of
voters for the county would be 22,200, although there
are actually more than 79,000 registered voters."
• In Sarpy County, Nebraska, the electronic touch
screen machines got generous. "As many as 10,000 extra
votes," according to this report, "have been tallied
and candidates are still waiting for corrected totals.
Johnny Boykin lost his bid to be on the Papillion City
Council. The difference between victory and defeat in
the race was 127 votes. Boykin says, 'When I went in
to work the next day and saw that 3,342 people had
shown up to vote in our ward, I thought something's
not right.' He's right. There are not even 3,000
people registered to vote in his ward. For some
reason, some votes were counted twice."
Stories like this have been popping up in many of
the states that put these touch-screen voting machines
to use. Beyond these reports are the folks who
attempted to vote for one candidate and saw the
machine give their vote to the other candidate.
Sometimes, the flawed machines were taken off-line,
and sometimes they were not. As for the reports above,
the mistakes described were caught and corrected. How
many mistakes made by these machines were not caught,
were not corrected, and have now become part of the
record?
The flaws within these machines are well
documented. Professors and researchers from Johns
Hopkins performed a detailed analysis of these
electronic voting machines in May of 2004. In their
results, the Johns Hopkins researchers stated, "This
voting system is far below even the most minimal
security standards applicable in other contexts. We
identify several problems including unauthorized
privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography,
vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software
development processes. We show that voters, without
any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes
without being detected by any mechanisms within the
voting terminal software."
"Furthermore," they continued, "we show that even
the most serious of our outsider attacks could have
been discovered and executed without access to the
source code. In the face of such attacks, the usual
worries about insider threats are not the only
concerns; outsiders can do the damage. That said, we
demonstrate that the insider threat is also quite
considerable, showing that not only can an insider,
such as a poll worker, modify the votes, but that
insiders can also violate voter privacy and match
votes with the voters who cast them. We conclude that
this voting system is unsuitable for use in a general
election."
Many of these machines do not provide the voter
with a paper ballot that verifies their vote. So if an
error - or purposefully inserted malicious code - in
the untested machine causes their vote to go for the
other guy, they have no way to verify that it
happened. The lack of a paper ballot also means the
end of recounts as we have known them; now, on these
new machines, a recount amounts to pushing a button on
the machine and getting a number in return, but
without those paper ballots to do a comparison, there
is no way to verify the validity of that count.
Worst of all is the fact that all the votes
collected by these machines are sent via modem to a
central tabulating computer which counts the votes on
Windows software. This means, essentially, that any
gomer with access to the central tabulation machine
who knows how to work an Excel spreadsheet can go into
this central computer and make wholesale changes to
election totals without anyone being the wiser.
Bev Harris, who has been working tirelessly since
the passage of the Help America Vote Act to inform
people of the dangers present in this new process, got
a chance to demonstrate how easy it is to steal an
election on that central tabulation computer while a
guest on the CNBC program 'Topic A With Tina Brown.'
Ms. Brown was off that night, and the guest host was
none other than Governor Howard Dean. Thanks to
Governor Dean and Ms. Harris, anyone watching CNBC
that night got to see just how easy it is to steal an
election because of these new machines and the flawed
processes they use.
"In a voting system," Harris said on the show,
"you have all the different voting machines at all the
different polling places, sometimes, as in a county
like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a
single county. All those machines feed into the one
machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course,
if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a
voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it
to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and
deal with all of them at once? What surprises people
is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what
you and I use. It's just a regular computer."
Harris then proceeded to open a laptop computer
that had on it the software used to tabulate the votes
by one of the aforementioned central processors.
Journalist Thom Hartman describes what happened next:
"So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS tabulation
software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop,
click on the 'My Computer' icon, choose 'Local Disk
C:,' open the folder titled GEMS, and open the
sub-folder 'LocalDB' which, Harris noted, 'stands for
local database, that's where they keep the votes.'
Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that
folder titled Central Tabulator Votes,' which caused
the PC to open the vote count in a database program
like Excel. 'Let's just flip those,' Harris said, as
Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the
other. Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and
said, 'We just edited an election, and it took us 90
seconds.'"
Any system that makes it this easy to steal or
corrupt an election has no business being anywhere
near the voters on election day.
The counter-argument to this states that people
with nefarious intent, people with a partisan stake in
the outcome of an election, would have to have access
to the central tabulation computers in order to do
harm to the process. Keep the partisans away from the
process, and everything will work out fine. Surely no
partisan political types were near these machines on
Tuesday night when the votes were counted, right?
One of the main manufacturers of these electronic
touch-screen voting machines is Diebold, Inc. More
than 35 counties in Ohio alone used the Diebold
machines on Tuesday, and millions of voters across the
country did the same. According to the Center for
Responsive Politics, Diebold gave $100,000 to the
Republican National Committee in 2000, along with
additional contributions between 2001 and 2002 which
totaled $95,000. Of the four companies competing for
the contracts to manufacture these voting machines,
only Diebold contributed large sums to any political
party. The CEO of Diebold is a man named Walden
O'Dell. O'Dell was very much on board with the Bush
campaign, having said publicly in 2003 that he is
"committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes
to the president next year."
So much for keeping the partisans at arm's length.
Is there any evidence that vote totals were
deliberately tampered with by people who had a stake
in the outcome? Nothing specific has been documented
to date. Jeff Fisher, the Democratic candidate for the
U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th
District, claims to have evidence that the Florida
election was hacked, and says further that he knows
who hacked it and how it was done. Such evidence is
not yet forthcoming.
There are, however, some disturbing and compelling
trends that indicate things are not as they should be.
This chart displays a breakdown of counties in
Florida. It lists the voters in each county by party
affiliation, and compares expected vote totals to the
reported results. It also separates the results into
two sections, one for 'touch-screen' counties and the
other for optical scan counties.
Over and over in these counties, the results,
based upon party registration, did not come close to
matching expectations. It can be argued, and has been
argued, that such results indicate nothing more or
less than a President getting cross-over voters, as
well as late-breaking undecided voters, to come over
to his side. These are Southern Democrats, and the
numbers from previous elections show that many have
often voted Republican. Yet the news wires have been
inundated for well over a year with stories about how
stridently united Democratic voters were behind the
idea of removing Bush from office. It is worth
wondering why that unity did not permeate these
Democratic voting districts. If that unity was there,
it is worth asking why the election results in these
counties do not reflect this.
Most disturbing of all is the reality that these
questionable Diebold voting machines are not isolated
to Florida. This list documents, as of March 2003, all
of the counties in all of the 37 states where Diebold
machines were used to count votes. The document is 28
pages long. That is a lot of counties, and a lot of
votes, left in the hands of machines that have a
questionable track record, that send their vote totals
to central computers which make it far too easy to
change election results, that were manufactured by a
company with a personal, financial, and publicly
stated stake in George W. Bush holding on to the White
House.
A poster named 'TruthIsAll' on the
DemocraticUnderground.com forums laid out the
questionable results of Tuesday's election in succinct
fashion: "To believe that Bush won the election, you
must also believe: That the exit polls were wrong;
that Zogby's 5pm election day calls for Kerry winning
Ohio and Florida were wrong (he was exactly right in
his 2000 final poll); that Harris' last-minute polling
for Kerry was wrong (he was exactly right in his 2000
final poll); that incumbent rule #1 - undecideds break
for the challenger - was wrong; That the 50% rule - an
incumbent doesn't do better than his final polling -
was wrong; That the approval rating rule - an
incumbent with less than 50% approval will most likely
lose the election - was wrong; that it was just a
coincidence that the exit polls were correct where
there was a paper trail and incorrect (+5% for Bush)
where there was no paper trail; that the surge in new
young voters had no positive effect for Kerry; that
Kerry did worse than Gore against an opponent who lost
the support of scores of Republican newspapers who
were for Bush in 2000; that voting machines made by
Republicans with no paper trail and with no software
publication, which have been proven by thousands of
computer scientists to be vulnerable in scores of
ways, were not tampered with in this election."
In short, we have old-style vote spoilage in
minority communities. We have electronic voting
machines losing votes and adding votes all across the
country. We have electronic voting machines whose
efficiency and safety have not been tested. We have
electronic voting machines that offer no paper trail
to ensure a fair outcome. We have central tabulators
for these machines running on Windows software,
compiling results that can be demonstrably tampered
with. We have the makers of these machines publicly
professing their preference for George W. Bush. We
have voter trends that stray from the expected
results. We have these machines counting millions of
votes all across the country.
Perhaps this can all be dismissed. Perhaps rants
like the one posted by 'TruthIsAll' are nothing more
than sour grapes from the side that lost. Perhaps all
of the glitches, wrecked votes, unprecedented voting
trends and partisan voting-machine connections can be
explained away. If so, this reporter would very much
like to see those explanations. At a bare minimum, the
fact that these questions exist at all represents a
grievous undermining of the basic confidence in the
process required to make this democracy work.
Democracy should not ever require leaps of faith, and
we have put the fate of our nation into the hands of
machines that require such a leap. It is unacceptable
across the board, and calls into serious question not
only the election we just had, but any future election
involving these machines.
Representatives John Conyers, Jerrold Nadler and
Robert Wexler, all members of the House Judiciary
Committee, posted a letter on November 5th to David
Walker, Comptroller General of the United States. In
the letter, they asked for an investigation into the
efficacy of these electronic voting machines. The
letter reads as follows:
November 5, 2004
The Honorable David M. Walker
Comptroller General of the United States
U.S. General Accountability Office
441 G Street, NW
Washington, DC 20548
Dear Mr. Walker:
We write with an urgent request that the Government
Accountability Office immediately undertake an
investigation of the efficacy of voting machines and
new technologies used in the 2004 election, how
election officials responded to difficulties they
encountered and what we can do in the future to
improve our election systems and administration.
In particular, we are extremely troubled by the
following reports, which we would also request that
you review and evaluate for us:
In Columbus, Ohio, an electronic voting system gave
President Bush nearly 4,000 extra votes. ("Machine
Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes," Associated Press,
November 5)
An electronic tally of a South Florida gambling ballot
initiative failed to record thousands of votes. "South
Florida OKs Slot Machines Proposal," (Id.)
In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes
were lost because officials mistakenly believed a
computer that stored ballots could hold more data that
it did. "Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes,"
(Id.)
In San Francisco, a glitch occurred with voting
machines software that resulted in some votes being
left uncounted. (Id.)
In Florida, there was a substantial drop off in
Democratic votes in proportion to voter registration
in counties utilizing optical scan machines that was
apparently not present in counties using other
mechanisms.
The House Judiciary Committee Democratic staff has
received numerous reports from Youngstown, Ohio that
voters who attempted to cast a vote for John Kerry on
electronic voting machines saw that their votes were
instead recorded as votes for George W. Bush. In South
Florida, Congressman Wexler's staff received numerous
reports from voters in Palm Beach, Broward and Dade
Counties that they attempted to select John Kerry but
George Bush appeared on the screen. CNN has reported
that a dozen voters in six states, particularly
Democrats in Florida, reported similar problems. This
was among over one thousand such problems reported.
("Touchscreen Voting Problems Reported," Associated
Press, November 5)
Excessively long lines were a frequent problem
throughout the nation in Democratic precincts,
particularly in Florida and Ohio. In one Ohio voting
precinct serving students from Kenyon College, some
voters were required to wait more than eight hours to
vote. ("All Eyes on Ohio," Dan Lothian, CNN, November
3)
We are literally receiving additional reports every
minute and will transmit additional information as it
comes available. The essence of democracy is the
confidence of the electorate in the accuracy of voting
methods and the fairness of voting procedures. In
2000, that confidence suffered terribly, and we fear
that such a blow to our democracy may have occurred in
2004.
Thank you for your prompt attention to this inquiry.
Sincerely,
John Conyers, Jr., Jerrold Nadler, Robert Wexler
Ranking Member, Ranking Member, Member of Congress
House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on the
Constitution
cc: Hon. F. James Sensenbrenner, Chairman
"The essence of democracy," wrote the Congressmen,
"is the confidence of the electorate in the accuracy
of voting methods and the fairness of voting
procedures. In 2000, that confidence suffered
terribly, and we fear that such a blow to our
democracy may have occurred in 2004." Those fears
appear to be valid.
John Kerry and John Edwards promised on Tuesday
night that every vote would count, and that every vote
would be counted. By Wednesday morning, Kerry had
conceded the race to Bush, eliciting outraged howls
from activists who were watching the reports of voting
irregularities come piling in. Kerry had said that
10,000 lawyers were ready to fight any wrongdoing in
this election. One hopes that he still has those
lawyers on retainer.
According to black-letter election law, Bush does
not officially get a second term until the electors
from the Electoral College go to Washington D.C on
December 12th. Perhaps Kerry's 10,000 lawyers, along
with a real investigation per the request of Conyers,
Nadler and Wexler, could give those electors something
to think about in the interim.
In the meantime, soon-to-be-unemployed DNC
chairman Terry McAuliffe sent out an email on Saturday
night titled 'Help determine the Democratic Party's
next steps.' In the email, McAuliffe states, "If you
were involved in these grassroots activities, we want
to hear from you about your experience. What did you
do? Did you feel the action you took was effective?
Was it a good experience for you? How would you make
it better? Tell us your thoughts." He provided a
feedback form where such thoughts can be sent.
Use the form. Give Terry your thoughts on the
matter. Ask him if those 10,000 lawyers are still
available. It seems the validity of Tuesday's election
remains a wide-open question.
________________________________________
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and
international bestseller of two books - 'War on Iraq:
What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and 'The
Greatest Sedition is Silence.'
-------
http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2004/11/02/news/observe.html
Global monitors find faults
By Thomas Crampton International Herald Tribune
Wednesday, November 3, 2004
MIAMI The global implications of the U.S. election are
undeniable, but international monitors at a polling
station in southern Florida said Tuesday that voting
procedures being used in the extremely close contest
fell short in many ways of the best global practices.
The observers said they had less access to polls than
in Kazakhstan, that the electronic voting had fewer
fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the ballots were
not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that
no other country had such a complex national election
system. "To be honest, monitoring elections in Serbia
a few months ago was much simpler," said Konrad
Olszewski, an election observer stationed in Miami by
the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe.
"They have one national election law and use the paper
ballots I really prefer over any other system,"
Olszewski said.
Olszewski, whose democratic experience began with
Poland's first free election in 1989, was one of 92
observers brought in by the Vienna-based organization,
which was founded to maintain military security in
Europe at the height of the cold war.
Two-member observer teams fanned out across 11 states
and included citizens of 36 countries, ranging from
Canada and Switzerland to Latvia, Kyrgyzstan, Slovenia
and Belarus.
Formation of the U.S. election mission came after the
State Department issued a standard letter on June 9
inviting the group to monitor the election. All 55
states in the organization have, since 1990, agreed to
invite observation teams to their national elections.
The decision to observe a U.S. presidential election
for the first time was made because of changes
prompted by controversy over the U.S. elections in
2000, involving George W. Bush and Al Gore.
"Our presence is not meant as a criticism," said Ron
Gould, Olszewski's team partner and the former
assistant chief electoral officer for Elections
Canada. "We mainly want to assess changes taken since
the 2000 election."
Speaking as voting began at 7 a.m. in the
Firefighter's Memorial Hall for precincts 401 and 446
of Miami-Dade County, the observers drew sharp
distinctions between U.S.-style elections and those
conducted elsewhere around the world.
"Unlike almost every other country in the world, there
is not one national election today," said Gould, who
has been involved in 90 election missions in 70
countries. "The decentralized system means that rules
vary widely county by county, so there are actually
more than 13,000 elections today."
Variations in local election law not only make it
difficult for election monitors to generalize on a
national basis, but also prohibit the observers from
entering polling stations at all in some states and
counties. Such laws mean that no election observers
from the organization are in Ohio, a swing state
fraught with battles over voter intimidation and other
polling issues.
As for electronic voting, Gould said he preferred
Venezuela's system to the calculator-sized touchpads
in Miami.
"Each electronic vote in Venezuela also produces a
ticket that voters then drop into a ballot box," Gould
said. "Unlike fully electronic systems, this gives a
backup that can be used to counter claims of massive
fraud."
Venezuela had trouble implementing the system, Gould
added, because the ticket printers kept breaking down.
The United States is also nearly unique in lacking a
unified voter registration system or national identity
card, Gould said, adding that he would ideally require
U.S. voters to dip a finger in an ink bowl or have a
cuticle stained black after voting.
"In El Salvador, Namibia and so many other elections,
the ink was extremely important in preventing
challenges to multiple voting," Gould said. "In
Afghanistan it didn't work so well, because they used
the dipping ink for the cuticles, so it wiped right
off."
To observe elections in Florida, Gould and his partner
first stopped to meet state election officials in
Tallahassee.
Their visit to Miami included failed attempts to
witness election preparations at two polling stations
on Monday evening. After a two-hour drive through
heavy traffic, the observers found both polling
stations deserted.
"In Venezuela we drove around to all the polling
stations ahead of time to make sure this didn't
happen," Gould said. "Here we consider studying the
system more important than looking at actual voting."
Indeed, the team left the Miami polling station little
more than half an hour after voting began to make a
live interview scheduled on CNN. Media relations has
become a major part of their mission, with reporters
mobbing the monitors at every stop in Florida and a
Japanese television crew from NTV tailing them across
the state since Friday.
"There is a lot of interest in Japan where this
election observation is seen as a kind of satire,"
said Fumi Kobayashi, the New York-based correspondent
for NTV. "So strange to imagine Europeans coming to
monitor elections in the U.S., don't you think?"
A selection of voters and election officials who were
questioned as they left the Miami polling station said
they mainly found the monitors reassuring.
"The United States has long been a model for the
world," said Richard Williams, a poll watcher
officially designated by the Democratic party. "If we
allow international observers, we will continue to
have a leading role."
Not everyone agrees. Jeff Miller, a Republican
congressman from Florida, considers the monitors an
insult and has publicly urged them to leave. "Get on
the next plane out of the United States to go monitor
an election somewhere else, like Afghanistan," he
said.
Copyright © 2004 The International Herald Tribune |
www.iht.com
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/04/11/con04489.html
“Nations do go crazy sometimes, and the progression of
symptoms we've been exhibiting here in the Good Ol'
USA has entered rubber room territory”
A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Ruth Lopez
Yeah, I know the drill: I'm supposed to 'get over it'.
Well, I will not pretend to act like this is fine.
That the system worked. That we did what we could,
that they won honestly, or, even if they didn't, that
it's time to move on.
No, I am devastated and I weep for my country. But I
am also as angry as I am heartsick.
I am devastated because this time Bush really was
elected. Not by the vote count; oh no, voter fraud was
rampant. What the Republicans did in Florida in 2000,
they refined in Georgia in 2002, and they got down to
a science this time around, especially in Ohio and,
yes, Florida. This fraud wasn't so "in your face" all
across the country that it cried out for us to rise up
and do something about it, nope, it was just enough
for that precious 50% + 1 of the vote. Enough to
declare victory.
As for us rising up and doing something about it -
2004 proved what 2000 merely hinted at: we are not
rising up. We are not going to. We are sad but we will
do nothing except make vague threats about next time.
Next time we'll get them. Next time.
That has sealed it. This is what has elected Bush. It
is the complacent acceptance that has elected him.
Everyone, from Kerry on down, has said, "Ok, time to
move on". That is Bush's real mandate. We all just
rolled over, and now we're lying in pathetic little
blue puddles of our despair, trying to pull ourselves
up by our metaphorical bootstraps by promising
ourselves that we really will show 'em next time.
Meanwhile, Bush can do whatever he wants. Who's going
to stop him? Not us. We're going back to work, back to
real life; paying bills, buying groceries, catching up
on the latest update on whatever the murder trial du
jour is, or whatever reality show is out there;
debasing the human spirit for 'entertainment' and
commercial revenues. We're busy, we're tired, we'll
fight next time.
Within a few short hours of Kerry's concession speech,
the left wing focus shifted to how we will win next
time. Next time. This pathetic mewl of defiance
completely falls within the definition of insanity:
repeating the same behavior and expecting different
results. We are like the poor weak little kid lying in
the snow, bruised and bloodied and nose snotty and
bleeding and who can't find his glasses. As soon as
the bully who did it and his friends are around the
corner, the kid issues a feeble cry, "I'm gonna get
you next time! I'll really kick your butt then!" And
then the hot tears really start. I understand the need
for defiance, but why should we believe for a minute
that in two years it will be different? That there
will be no voter fraud, no cheating, no dirty tricks?
That they won't use these next two years to get better
at controlling elections than they are now? How insane
is it to pat ourselves on the back and say, "Gosh,
look, we came so close! Next time we'll do it; next
time, yeah, next time"? Wake up, this was the time,
and we took a licking and said thank you. There won't
be a next time, not as long as we lie to ourselves.
While we're sitting around sniveling and dreaming of
our revenge, the bully and his friends are going to
get bigger and stronger. These people dream of world
domination. The American electoral process is a minor
impediment to them. Ignoring this reality is the road
to insanity and failure.
It's a bitter pill to swallow, but I say at least be
big enough to see this for what it is.
The next election will be less of an election than
this election. Oh, we'll get little victories here and
there, enough to make this Matrix-like reality
significantly believable for the millions of us who
would truly like to believe that our votes count and,
if they didn't, we really would do whatever it takes,
but, oh well, we came so close. Next time we'll do it.
Next time.
There will be no next time on those terms. This
country is now headed inexorably down a road that will
take a generation or more to get off of, If we even
can. If America as we know it even survives.
Nations do go crazy sometimes, and the progression of
symptoms we've been exhibiting here in the Good Ol'
USA has entered rubber room territory. We are a people
in dangerous denial. Don't participate in it by
accepting this insanity as your reality. Even as
everyone around you buys into the comfort zone of
'next time', stay strong by never acknowledging it as
your truth. Whatever else you do, for God's sake, at
least see this for what it really was.
The extreme right-wing of the Republican party has not
only sealed a majority rule in this election, they now
have carte blanche for the next two years to further
consolidate their hold on everything that truly
fosters democratic participation: the media, the
Supreme Court, voting machines, gerrymandered
Republican districts that guarantee majority
re-election indefinitely. You name it, their iron fist
is now wrapped around it. Even the Internet.
Never forget: by rolling over as we all collectively
just did, we have kept in office the man who granted
himself the power to take any of us, declare us
enemies of the state, strip us of our citizenship,
torture us and jail us indefinitely, with no due
process. Just because they've only done it so far to
swarthy looking men who don't really look 'American'
to Bush's supporters doesn't mean the rest of us are
exempt. All the warm fuzziness of network anchor
assurances do not change that.
We have given Bush two completely unobstructed years
to enhance and consolidate those powers before facing
the electorate again. By that time, the electoral
process will be more akin to some bizarre national
obsessive compulsive ritual than any kind of real
participatory process: voting will become useless
repetitive behavior compulsively acted out to relieve
national anxiety with no reality based connection.
We'll vote in record numbers again, the votes will be
manipulated, and our TV pundits will console us with
meaningless explanations. More insane behavior. But
don't think about it now. The kids have soccer
practice to get to. Gotta’ get gas. There's a new
terrorist threat. We voted, what else are we supposed
to do? We're busy. Besides, things aren't really that
bad here. Look at how we turned out the vote. We came
so close. Next time we'll do it. Next time.
When the 2006 elections come around, and we're out
there plugging away, we'll still come soooo close,
just not quite close enough. We'll win a few, but
we'll lose more. But there's always next time, right?
We'll do it next time. Next time.
Americans used to be so smug about Soviet elections.
What a joke they were. Not like us. Well, welcome to
the new America. We'll all go vote on our shiny new
privately owned electronic machines, machines that
will be everywhere by the next national 'election',
with votes that will be counted by privatized vote
counters. Don't worry your little heads about paper
trails or accountability. To question is to undermine
confidence in our leadership. Good citizens don't do
that. Go home and turn on your privately owned
corporate media outlets who will soothingly tell you
that everything is all right. A few malcontents may
have to be put down, but the people will have spoken:
the Great Leader can continue his Holy Mission. God
loves us, we're Americans.
And the next election will be even less of an election
than the previous election. And the election after
that even less. But they will look great on TV.
Why are we taking this so complacently? I mean,
seriously, what is it going to take? When will enough
be enough? Are we waiting for someone to tell us what
to do? Are we waiting for someone to do it for us? Or
are we so afraid to lose what we have that we will
trade what we should value most for it?
I think of the men who formed this nation. They were a
tiny minority, but they didn't wait for someone to
tell them it was time for a revolution. They thought;
long, deep and hard, and then they acted. One of those
men said, "Any man willing to trade liberty for
security will have neither." I don't think most of us
can even conceive of the true depth of that concept.
These men, our founding fathers, weren't poor. They
had a lot to lose. Some of them lost everything. Some
of those signatures on your Declaration of
Independence are names of men who started out their
fight wealthy men of property and who died broken and
penniless by the time it was over. But they believed
that freedom was more important than their wealth and
comfort. These weren't slaves fighting for their
freedom, with nothing to lose but a life of slavery.
These were men who led comfortable middle and upper
class lives. Could that happen now? Who among us
really has the stomach for that? We are so
comfortable. We are shackled by our comfort and so
terrified of losing it that we ignore the price we are
paying with our humanity, and our sanity. Never mind.
Turn on the TV, we'll fight next time. Next time.
The most important thing to be done right now, at the
very least, is to face the truth. Whatever else we do,
and as hard as it is, at least face this honestly.
Acknowledge what we really know happened. Think, for
God's sake. What have we become? We just had a second
sham election and we did nothing about it except talk
about next time. We're killing tens of thousands of
people who are no threat to us. Our children are
cannon fodder for the profits of the ultra wealthy.
Too many of us think this is a good way to be because
it is God's will. This really is who America is right
now. Refusing to see that while dreaming about 'next
time' borders on pathological behavior. Don't do it.
In Robert Heinlein's classic book "Stranger in a
Strange Land", there was a character who was a 'Fair
Witness'. A Fair Witness was trained to be a
scientifically objective witness, so objective that
their testimony in a court of law was automatically
accepted as Truth, unaffected by any subjectivity,
emotion, or bias. We need to be our own Fair Witnesses
to this time in our country. Be rigorously honest with
yourself about this.
In WW II Germany, the good German citizens of towns
downwind of Auschwitz and Dachau swore that they never
knew what was being done by their government. As
hundreds and hundreds of thousands of bodies were
incinerated not even a few miles upwind of them, they
swore they never noticed the smell that was horribly
obvious to the liberating soldiers. They didn't want
to know and therefore they didn't. Perhaps they did it
out of misguided nationalism, or fear for their very
lives, but they did it. They were as insane as the
Nazis. Ignoring the truth is the road to insanity and
failure.
We have to be like the few in Germany who held on to
the truth and their humanity through the darkest
times. Like those who worked in the resistance. Who
hid Jews at their own peril, because it was the right
thing, the sane thing, to do. Who looked at the truth
head on and survived with their sanity and their
humanity bruised but intact. We have to be Fair
Witnesses to the truth around us, never giving in to
the easy and comfortable propaganda that let's us off
the hook. That starts with a brutally honest look at
what just happened.
When madness is all around, like a turbulent,
relentless sea, the only thing worth hanging onto is a
hard, unflinching grasp of the truth.
No matter what happens now, at least hang on to the
truth.
Ruth Lopez
Florida
A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
http://www.theeveningleader.com/articles/2004/11/06/news/news.01.txt
Board awaits state followup
By ERIN MILLER
WAPAKONETA -- Auglaize County Board of Election
members say they have not heard any more from the
state regarding a possible investigation after
receiving notice of being placed on administrative
oversight last week.
"Absolutely nothing," board member Diana Hausfeld said
in a telephone interview Wednesday afternoon when
asked if the board had received any information about
the investigation.
Election Board Director Jean Burklo, in her office
Wednesday morning, said she has not received any
information from Secretary of State J. Kenneth
Blackwell's office since notice of the board being
placed on administrative oversight arrived late on
Oct. 30.
James Lee, spokesperson for the secretary of state's
office, said last week the specific conditions of the
administrative oversight and reasons for the oversight
were available after Tuesday's election. Lee said
Wednesday afternoon the Secretary of State's office
was focusing its efforts on assisting county elections
boards with processing and counting provision ballots.
"These other issues will be addressed in the coming
weeks," Lee said.
In a letter dated Oct. 21, Ken Nuss, former deputy
director of the Auglaize County Board of Elections,
claimed that Joe McGinnis, a former employee of
Election Systems and Software (ES&S), the company that
provides the voting system in Auglaize County, was on
the main computer that is used to create the ballot
and compile election results, which would go against
election protocol. Nuss claimed in the letter that
McGinnis was allowed to use the computer the weekend
of Oct. 16.
Nuss, who resigned from his job Oct. 21 after being
suspended for a day, was responsible for overseeing
the computerized programming of election software,
according to his job description. His resignation is
effective Nov. 11.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm
Published on Saturday, November 6, 2004 by
CommonDreams.org
Evidence Mounts That The Vote Was Hacked
by Thom Hartmann
When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday,
November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the
U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th
District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up.
Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the
Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and
how. And not just this year, he said, but that these
same people had previously hacked the Democratic
primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have
to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat
to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb
beat.
"It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told
me.
And some believe evidence is accumulating that the
national effort happened on November 2, 2004.
The State of Florida, for example, publishes a
county-by-county record of votes cast and people
registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen
Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information
into a table, available at
http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and
noticed something startling.
While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting
machines seemed to produce results in which the
registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched
the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using
results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed
into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to
hacking – the results seem to contain substantial
anomalies.
In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered
voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them
Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and
7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen
everywhere else in the country where registered
Democrats largely voted for Kerry.
In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5%
of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as
Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but
4,433 voted for Bush.
The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in
the counties where optical scanners were used.
Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went
58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered
Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.
Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators
may have been more vigorously looking for such
anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats
generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry.
(I had earlier reported that county size was a
variable – this turns out not to be the case. Just the
use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)
More visual analysis of the results can be seen at
http://us
together.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and
www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm. Note the
trend line – the only variable that determines a swing
toward Bush was the use of optical scan machines.
One possible explanation for this is the "Dixiecrat"
theory, that in Florida white voters (particularly the
rural ones) have been registered as Democrats for
years, but voting Republican since Reagan. Looking at
the 2000 statistics, also available on Dopp's site,
there are similar anomalies, although the trends are
not as strong as in 2004. But some suggest the 2000
election may have been questionable in Florida, too.
One of the people involved in Dopp's analysis noted
that it may be possible to determine the validity of
the "rural Democrat" theory by comparing Florida's
white rural counties to those of Pennsylvania, another
swing state but one that went for Kerry, as the exit
polls there predicted. Interestingly, the Pennsylvania
analysis, available at
http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm,
doesn't show the same kind of swings as does Florida,
lending credence to the possibility of problems in
Florida.
Even more significantly, Dopp had first run the
analysis while filtering out smaller (rural) counties,
and still found that the only variable that accounted
for a swing toward Republican voting was the use of
optical-scan machines, whereas counties with
touch-screen machines generally didn't swing -
regardless of size.
Others offer similar insights, based on other data. A
professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst,
noted that in Florida the vote to raise the minimum
wage was approved by 72%, although Kerry got 48%. "The
correlation between voting for the minimum wage
increase and voting for Kerry isn't likely to be
perfect," he noted, "but one would normally expect
that the gap - of 1.5 million votes - to be far
smaller than it was."
While all of this may or may not be evidence of vote
tampering, it again brings the nation back to the
question of why several states using electronic voting
machines or scanners programmed by private, for-profit
corporations and often connected to modems produced
votes inconsistent with exit poll numbers.
Those exit poll results have been a problem for
reporters ever since Election Day.
Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage
for WDEV, one of the radio stations that carries my
syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during the
12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was
startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes
had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that
he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear:
Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news
stoically," noted the AP report.
But then the computers reported something different.
In several pivotal states.
Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the
exit polls were rigged.
Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the
first Clinton campaign who became a Republican
consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an article for
The Hill, the publication read by every political
junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of
brilliant points.
"Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote.
"They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in
survey research by correctly separating actual voters
from those who pretend they will cast ballots but
never do and by substituting actual observation for
guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different
parts of the state."
He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for
example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New
Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush
carried. The only swing state the network had going to
Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10
points."
Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a
clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers
began to come in from the various states the election
was called for Bush.
How could this happen?
On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several
months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown
as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle
grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from
her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of
how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only
done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the
real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold
Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in
by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners
that read punch cards, or the machines that simply
record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final
tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.
That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.
"In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on
national television, "you have all the different
voting machines at all the different polling places,
sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a
thousand polling places in a single county. All those
machines feed into the one machine so it can add up
all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do
something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it
be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000
machines, or just come in here and deal with all of
them at once?"
Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris
continued. "What surprises people is that the central
tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's
just a regular computer."
"So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can
hack into a central tabulator?"
Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold
uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of
the PC and effectively turns it into the central
tabulator system. "This is the official program that
the County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a
PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's
software.
Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the
results of a test election. They went to the screen
titled "Election Summary Report" and waited a moment
while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the
various precincts," and then saw that in this faux
election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had
500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.
"Of course, you can't tamper with this software,"
Harris noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program.
But, it's running on a Windows PC.
So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go
back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the
"My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the
folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB"
which, Harris noted, "stands for local database,
that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had
Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled
"Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open
the vote count in a database program like Excel.
In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she
found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes
and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.
"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and
pasted the numbers from one cell into the other.
"And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes
to Tiger."
They closed the database, went back into the official
GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county
supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your
election."
As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation,
Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has
only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods
has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.
Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We
just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."
On live national television. (You can see the clip on
www.votergate.tv.) And they had left no tracks
whatsoever, Harris said, noting that it would be
nearly impossible for the election software – or a
County election official - to know that the vote
database had been altered.
Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit
polls that had Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush
that he'd lost the election in a landslide.
Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls
"were sabotage" to cause people in the western states
to not bother voting for Bush, since the networks
would call the election based on the exit polls for
Kerry. But the networks didn't do that, and had never
intended to.
According to congressional candidate Fisher, it makes
far more sense that the exit polls were right - they
weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that the vote itself
was hacked.
And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff
Fisher thinks this hit him and pretty much every other
Democratic candidate for national office in the
most-hacked swing states.
So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come
close to this story was Keith Olbermann on his show
Friday night, November 5th, when he noted that it was
curious that all the voting machine irregularities so
far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the
Washington Post and other media are now going through
single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how
the exit polls had failed.
But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at
least in large part. Wrapping up his story for The
Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, "This was
no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across
the board as they were on election night. I suspect
foul play."
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project
Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of
a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show.
www.thomhartmann .com His most recent books are "The
Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection:
The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human
Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America,"
and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."
###
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/981
Columns
Bob Fitrakis
Did Kerry Concede Too Soon?
November 5, 2004
Why did a voting machine in Republican Gahanna, Ohio
report 4,258 votes for George W. Bush when only 638
people cast votes at the New Life Church polling site?
Buried on page A6 of the Columbus Dispatch, the story
also reported that the computerized e-voting machine
recorded 0 votes in a race between Franklin County
Commissioners Arlene Shoemaker and Paula Brooks.
Kerry conceded on Nov. 3 before some troubling
election irregularities have surfaced in Ohio.
Investigative reporter Gregory Palast has pointed out
that there are more than 92,000 “spoiled” ballots in
Ohio, mostly in Democratic wards that could easily be
hand counted, 155,000 uncounted provisional ballots,
uncounted overseas military ballots and some uncounted
absentee ballots.
Despite the comments of Kerry’s running mate, Senator
John Edwards, that every vote should be counted,
Kerry’s concession makes that promise unlikely. In
Ohio, an estimated 14.6% of the votes are cast on
e-voting machines, known for their glitches and
susceptibility to hacking and fraudulent manipulation.
Just this year, four Ohio counties purchased voting
machines from the notoriously partisan Diebold
corporation, whose CEO, Columbus resident and Bush
fundraiser Wally O’Dell, pledged to help “Ohio deliver
its electoral votes to the President.”
Voting rights activists from Citizen’s Alliance for
Secure Elections (CASE-OH) have already begun to claim
that the voting places with e-voting machines were
sites that did not match scientific exit poll data.
Franklin County Board of Elections Director Matt
Damschroder told the Dispatch that the voting machine
glitches were “why the results on election night are
unofficial.”
Damschroder is the former Executive Director of the
Franklin County Republican Party, and sources close to
the Board of Elections tell the Free Press that
Damschroder and Ohio’s Secretary of State Kenneth
Blackwell met with President Bush in Columbus on
Election Day.
The Dispatch also confirmed a Free Press story, posted
on Election Day, involving far fewer voting machines
in predominantly black Democratic inner-city voting
wards. On page one, under the misleading headline,
“Suburbs were busiest even with more machines,” the
Dispatch reports that: “As seasoned voters in many of
Columbus’ predominantly black neighborhoods waited in
long lines Tuesday, they quickly recognized that the
crush of new voters wasn’t the sole cause of
congestion. There also were fewer voting machines.” In
one precinct, the Free Press reported 12 voters
leaving due to work or because they were handicapped
or elderly.
Prior to Election Day, the Republican Party in Ohio
planned to utilize an archaic Ohio election law to
place Republican poll challengers in every polling
site. The strategy, according to Republican insiders,
was to clog the voting lines in predominantly black
Democratic wards in urban areas, so voters would turn
away in frustration. When that plan came under heavy
media scrutiny, federal courts in Ohio ruled against
it, and a massive Election Protection Coalition
operation was put in place to monitor the polling
sites, Republican Central Committee sources say that
Damschroder instituted “Plan B.”
One Republican Central Committee member told the Free
Press that Damschroder held back up to 2000 machines
and dispersed many of the other machines to affluent
suburbs in Franklin County.
The Free Press has previously documented massive
Republican voter suppression techniques leading up to
this year’s election in an article entitled “Twelve
Ways Bush is now Stealing the Ohio Vote”
(http://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/810).
The growing election irregularities suggest that John
Kerry conceded too soon, and that spoiled ballots,
provisional ballot, e-voting glitches and partisan
manipulation by Republican election officials deprived
the Senator of the victory projected in Zogby and CNN
exit polls. The lesson voters in Ohio take away from
this election is that every vote doesn’t count and
computer glitches count more.
--
Bob Fitrakis is the Editor of the Free Press
(freepress.org), a political science professor, an
attorney, and co-author with Harvey Wasserman of
George W. Bush vs. the Superpower of Peace. He served
as an international observer for the national
elections in El Salvador.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2602324
Help America Audit
Our organization has taken the position that fraud
took place in the 2004 election through electronic
voting machines. We base this on hard evidence,
documents obtained in public records requests, inside
information, and other data indicative of manipulation
of electronic voting systems. What we do not know is
the specific scope of the fraud.
We are working now to compile the proof, based not on
soft evidence -- red flags, exit polls -- but core
documents obtained by Black Box Voting in the most
massive Freedom of Information action in history.
We need: Lawyers to enforce public records laws. Some
counties have already notified us that they plan to
stonewall by delaying delivery of the records. We need
citizen volunteers for a number of specific actions.
We need computer security professionals willing to GO
PUBLIC with formal opinions on the evidence we
provide, whether or not it involves DMCA
complications. We need funds to pay for copies of the
evidence.
There are certainly indications that a sting, or at
least an investigation, is in play right now.
Strong indications that both Florida and Ohio would be
flipped if election manipulations are rolled back.
Some indication that fraud may have occurred in at
least 30 states.
It's okay to use the "F" word. Fraud. You can say it
in public. Pretty soon, they'll be saying it on TV. If
no one else does it first, I'll be saying the "F" word
on TV shortly.
Fraud.
Use the word.
It's okay, you can say it.
Bev Harris
Executive Director
Black Box Voting
http://www.blackboxvoting.org
http://www.spectrumz.com/z/fair_use/2004/11_04.html
November 4, 2004
Ohio Whitewash
Basic report from Columbus
From a lawyer who was in there in Ohio. A database of
voter irregularities is reportedly being assembled,
and hopefully there will be web sites devoted to
documenting what really happened.
I worked for 3 days, including Election Day, on the
statewide voter protection hotline run by the Ohio
Democratic Party in Columbus, Ohio. I am writing
this because the media is inexplicably whitewashing
what happened in Ohio, and Kerry's concession was
likewise inexplicable. Hundreds of thousands of
people were disenfranchised in Ohio.
People waited on line for as long as 10 hours. It
appears to have only happened in Democratic-leaning
precincts, principally (a) precincts where many
African Americans lived, and (b) precincts near
colleges. I spoke to a young man who got on line at
11:30 am and voted at 7 pm. When he left at 7 pm, the
line was about 150 voters longer than when he'd
arrived, which meant those people were going to wait
even longer. In fact they waited for as much as 10
hours, and their voting was concluded at about 3 am.
The reason this occurred was that they had 1 voting
station per 1000 voters, while the adjacent precinct
had 1 voting station per 184. Both precincts were
within the same county, and managed by the same county
board of elections. The difference between them is
that the privileged polling place was in a rural,
solidly Republican, area, while the one with long
lines was in the college town of Gambier, OH.
Lines of 4 and 5 hours were the order of the day in
many African-American neighborhoods.
Touch screen voting machines in Youngstown OH were
registering "George W. Bush" when people pressed "John
F. Kerry" ALL DAY LONG. This was reported immediately
after the polls opened, and reported over and over
again throughout the day, and yet the bogus machines
were inexplicably kept in use THROUGHOUT THE DAY.
Countless other frauds occurred, such as postcards
advising people of incorrect polling places,
registered Democrats not receiving absentee ballots,
duly registered young voters being forced to file
provisional ballots even though their names and
signatures appeared in the voting rolls, longtime
active voting registered voters being told they
weren't registered, bad faith challenges by Republican
"challengers" in Democratic precincts, and on and on
and on.
I was very proud of the way so many Ohioans fought so
valiantly for their right to vote, and would not be
turned away. Many, however, could not spend the entire
day and were afraid of losing their jobs, due to the
severe economic depression hitting Ohio.
I do not understand why Kerry conceded and did not
fight to ensure that all Ohioans would have a chance
to vote, and for their vote to be counted.
Ray
Ray Beckerman
Beldock Levine & Hoffman LLP
99 Park Ave (Ste 1600)
New York, NY 10016
http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=6199
Straight Talk Straight Talk Archives
Electronic-Voting Critics Scrutinizing U.S. Election
By charlie smith
Publish Date: 4-Nov-2004
A Seattle-based nonprofit organization has announced
that it is conducting the largest
freedom-of-information action in U.S. history to
examine computer voting in the November 2 U.S.
election. Bev Harris, a founder of
www.blackboxvoting.org/, told the Straight that her
group plans to file requests for the internal audit
logs of all computerized voting machines used across
the country.
"Any system that is counted by computer has the
vulnerability that some programmer somewhere, who we
don't know, has some sort of proprietary code that we
can't review," she alleged.
Harris, author of Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering
in the 21st Century, said that her group recently
obtained records from the King County primary election
six weeks ago and discovered that three hours had been
deleted from the audit log. "The audit log is like the
black box in an airplane," she said. "It automatically
generates reports of who got access into the system
and the different types of actions they took. So when
you have an audit on election night that has had three
hours deleted, you've got to raise your eyebrows."
She estimated that 20 million votes were counted using
electronic voting machines across the U.S. on November
2. She claimed that one of the biggest risks of
tampering occurs when results are sent by telephone
modem from polling stations to a central election
site.
Harris claimed that it's possible to tamper with
results because voting records are copied and stored
in different repositories inside the program. "We
found that