Jack's posts with tag: election 2004
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by Thom Hartmann | | |
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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 9,676 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."
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 The Ohio Vote Debacle
By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, AlterNet
Posted on March 2, 2006, Printed on March 3, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/33006/
While life goes on during the Bush2 nightmare, so does the research on
what really happened in Ohio in 2004 to give George W. Bush a second
term. Pundits
throughout the state and nation -- many of them alleged Democrats --
continue to tell those of us who question Bush's second coming that we
should "get over it," that the election is old news. But things get curiouser and curiouser. In our 2005 compendium "How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008,"
we list more than a hundred different ways the Republican Party denied
the democratic process in the Buckeye State. For a book of documents to
be published Sept. 11 by the New Press entitled "What Happened in Ohio," we are continuing to dig. It
turns out, we missed more than a few of the dirty tricks Karl Rove, Ken
Blackwell and their GOP used to get themselves four more years. In an
election won with death by a thousand cuts, some that are still hidden
go very deep. Over the next few weeks we will list them as they are
verified. One of them has just surfaced to the staggering tune of
175,000 purged voters in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), the traditional
stronghold of the Ohio Democratic Party. An additional 10,000 that
registered to vote there for the 2004 election were lost due to
"clerical error." As we reported more than a year ago, some
133,000 voters were purged from the registration rolls in Hamilton
County (Cincinnati) and Lucas County (Toledo) between 2000 and 2004.
The 105,000 from Cincinnati and 28,000 from Toledo exceeded Bush's
official alleged margin of victory -- just under 119,000 votes out of
some 5.6 million the Republican Secretary of State. J. Kenneth
Blackwell deemed worth counting. Exit polls flashed worldwide on
CNN at 12:20 am Wednesday morning, Nov. 3, showed John Kerry winning
Ohio by 4.2 percent of the popular vote, probably about 250,000 votes.
We believe this is an accurate reflection of what really happened here. But
by morning Bush was being handed the presidency, claiming a 2.5 percent
Buckeye victory, as certified by Blackwell. In conjunction with other
exit polling, the lead switch from Kerry to Bush is a virtual
statistical impossibility. Yet John Kerry conceded with more than
250,000 ballots still uncounted, though Bush at the time was allegedly
ahead only by 138,000, a margin that later slipped to less than 119,000
in the official vote count. At the time, very few people knew
about those first 133,000 voters that had been eliminated from the
registration rolls in Cincinnati and Toledo. County election boards
purged the voting registration lists. Though all Ohio election boards
are allegedly bipartisan, in fact they are all controlled by the
Republican Party. Each has four seats, filled by law with two Democrats
and two Republicans. But all tie votes are decided by the
secretary of state, in this case Blackwell, the extreme right-wing
Republican now running for governor. Blackwell served in 2004 not only
as the man in charge of the state's vote count, but also as co-chair of
the Ohio Bush-Cheney campaign. Many independent observers have deemed
this to be a conflict of interest. On election day, Blackwell met
personally with Bush, Karl Rove and Matt Damschroder, chair of the
Franklin County (Columbus) Board of Elections, formerly the chair of
the county's Republican Party. The Board of Elections in Toledo
was chaired by Bernadette Noe, wife of Tom Noe, northwestern Ohio's
"Mr. Republican." A close personal confidante of the Bush family, Noe
raised more than $100,000 for the GOP presidential campaign in 2004. He
is currently under indictment for three felony violations of federal
election law, and 53 counts of fraud, theft and other felonies in the
"disappearance" of more than $13 million in state funds. Noe was
entrusted with investing those funds by Republican Gov. Robert Taft,
who recently pled guilty to four misdemeanor charges, making him the
only convicted criminal ever to serve as governor of Ohio. The
rationale given by Noe and the Republican-controlled BOE in Lucas and
Hamilton counties was that the voters should be eliminated from the
rolls because they had allegedly not voted in the previous two federal
elections. There is no law that requires such voters be
eliminated. And there is no public verification that has been offered
to confirm that these people had not, in fact, voted in those elections. Nonetheless,
tens of thousands of voters turned up in mostly Democratic wards in
Cincinnati and Toledo, only to find they had been mysteriously removed
from the voter rolls. In many cases, sworn testimony and affidavits
given at hearings after the election confirmed that many of these
citizens had in fact voted in the previous two federal elections and
had not moved from where they were registered. In some cases, their
stability at those addresses stretched back for decades. The
problem was partially confirmed by a doubling of provisional ballots
cast during the 2004 election, as opposed to the number cast in 2000.
Provisional ballots have been traditionally used in Ohio as a stopgap
for people whose voting procedures are somehow compromised at the
polls, but who are nonetheless valid registrants. Prior to the
2004 election, Blackwell made a range of unilateral pronouncements that
threw the provisional balloting process into chaos. Among other things,
he demanded that voters casting provisional ballots provide their birth
dates, a requirement that was often not mentioned by poll workers.
Eyewitnesses testify that many provisional ballots were merely tossed
in the trash at Ohio polling stations. To this day, more than
16,000 provisional ballots (along with more than 90,000 machine-spoiled
ballots) cast in Ohio remain uncounted. The secretary of state refuses
to explain why. A third attempt by the Green and Libertarian parties to
obtain a meaningful recount of the Ohio presidential vote has again
been denied by the courts, though the parties are appealing. Soon
after the 2004 election, Damschroder announced that Franklin County
would eliminate another 170,000 citizens from the voter rolls in
Columbus. Furthermore, House Bill 3, recently passed by the
GOP-dominated legislature, has imposed a series of restrictions that
will make it much harder for citizens to restore their names to the
voter rolls, or to register in the first place. All this,
however, pales before a new revelation just released by the board of
elections in Cuyahoga County, the heavily Democratic county surrounding
Cleveland. Robert J. Bennett, the Republican chair of the
Cuyahoga Board of Elections, and the chair of the Ohio Republican
Party, has confirmed that prior to the 2004 election, his BOE
eliminated -- with no public notice -- a staggering 175,414 voters from
the Cleveland-area registration rolls. He has not explained why the
revelation of this massive registration purge has been kept secret for
so long. Virtually no Ohio or national media has bothered to report on
this story. Many of the affected precincts in Cuyahoga County
went 90 percent and more for John Kerry. The county overall went more
than 60 percent for Kerry. The eliminations have been given
credence by repeated sworn testimony and affidavits from long-time
Cleveland voters that they came to their usual polling stations only to
be told that they were not registered. When they could get them, many
were forced to cast provisional ballots which were highly likely to be
pitched in the trash, or which remain uncounted. Ohio election
history would indicate that the elimination of 175,000 voters in
heavily Democratic Cleveland must almost certainly spell doom for any
state-wide Democratic campaign. These 175,000 pre-2004 election
eliminations must now be added to the 105,000 from Cincinnati and the
28,000 from Toledo. Therefore, to put it simply: at least 308,000
voters, most of them likely Democrats, were eliminated from the
registration rolls prior to an election allegedly won by less than
119,000 votes, where more than 106,000 votes still remain uncounted,
and where the GOP secretary of state continues to successfully fight
off a meaningful recount. There are more than 80 other Ohio
counties where additional pre-November 2004 mass eliminations by
GOP-controlled boards of elections may have occurred. Further
"anomalies" in the Ohio 2004 vote count continue to surface. In
addition, it seems evident that the Democratic Party will now enter
Ohio's 2006 gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races, and its 2008
presidential contest, with close to a half-million voters having been
eliminated from the registration rolls, the vast majority of them from
traditional Democratic strongholds, and with serious legislative
barriers having been erected against new voter registration drives. Stay tuned.
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of "How the GOP Stole
America's 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008," available via Free Press. They are co-editors, with Steve Rosenfeld, of "What Happened in Ohio?
 Watchdog Group Questions 2004 Fla. Vote
By Brian Skoloff / Associated Press
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - An examination of Palm Beach County's
electronic voting machine records from the 2004 election found possible
tampering and tens of thousands of malfunctions and errors, a watchdog
group said Thursday.
Bev Harris, founder of BlackBoxVoting.org, said the findings
call into question the outcome of the presidential race. But county
officials and the maker of the electronic voting machines strongly
disputed that and took issue with the findings.
Voting problems would have had to have been widespread across
the state to make a difference. President Bush won Florida — and its 27
electoral votes — by 381,000 votes in 2004. Overall, he defeated John
Kerry by 286 to 252 electoral votes, with 270 needed for victory.
BlackBoxVoting.org, which describes itself as a nonpartisan,
nonprofit citizens group, said it found 70,000 instances in Palm Beach
County of cards getting stuck in the paperless ATM-like machines and
that the computers logged about 100,000 errors, including memory
failures.
Also, the hard drives crashed on some of the machines made by
Oakland, Calif.-based Sequoia Voting Systems, some machines apparently
had to be rebooted over and over, and 1,475 re-calibrations were
performed on Election Day on more than 4,300 units, Harris said.
Re-calibrations are done when a machine is malfunctioning, she said.
"I actually think there's enough votes in play in Florida that
it's anybody's guess who actually won the presidential race," Harris
added. "But with that said, there's no way to tell who the votes should
have gone to."
Palm Beach County and other parts of the country switched to
electronic equipment after the turbulent 2000 presidential election,
when the county's butterfly ballot confused some voters and led them to
cast their votes for third-party candidate Pat Buchanan instead of Al
Gore. The Supreme Court halted a recount after 36 days and handed a
537-vote victory to Bush.
Palm Beach County election officials said the
BlackBoxVoting.com findings are flawed, and they blamed most of the
errors on voters not following proper procedures.
"Their results are noteworthy for consideration, but in a
majority of instances they can be explained," said Arthur Anderson, the
county's elections supervisor. "All of these circumstances are valid
reasons for concern, but they do not on face value substantiate that
the machines are not reliable."
Sequoia spokeswoman Michelle Shafer disputed the findings,
saying the company's machines worked properly. Sequoia's machines are
used in five Florida counties and in 21 states.
"There was a fine election in November 2004," Shafer said.
She said many of the errors in the computer logs could have
resulted from voters improperly inserting their user cards into the
machines. The remaining errors would not affect the vote results
because each unit has a backup system, she said.
Jenny Nash, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of State,
which oversees elections, said she was not aware of the report and had
no comment.
Harris said one machine showed that 112 votes were cast on Oct.
16, two days before the start of early voting, a possible sign of
tampering. She said the group found evidence of tampering on more than
30 machines in the county.
However, Harris said it was impossible to determine what information was altered or if votes were shifted among candidates.
 December 15th, 2005 5:22 pm
New tests fuel doubts about vote machines
A top election official and computer experts say computer
hackers could easily change election results, after they found numerous
flaws with a state-approved voting-machine in Tallahassee.
By Marc Caputo and Gary Fineout / Miami Herald
TALLAHASSEE - A political operative with hacking skills could alter the
results of any election on Diebold-made voting machines -- and possibly
other new voting systems in Florida -- according to the state capital's
election supervisor, who said Diebold software has failed repeated
tests.
Ion Sancho, Leon County's election chief, said tests by two
computer experts, completed this week, showed that an insider could
surreptitiously change vote results and the number of ballots cast on
Diebold's optical-scan machines.
After receiving county commission approval Tuesday, Sancho
scrapped Diebold's system for one made by Elections Systems and
Software, the same provider used by Miami-Dade and Broward counties.
The difference between the systems: Sancho's machines use a
fill-in-the-blank paper ballot that allows for after-the-fact manual
recounts, while Broward and Miami-Dade use ATM-like touchscreens that
leave no paper trail.
''That's kind of scary. If there's no paper trail, you have to
rely solely on electronic results. And now we know that they can be
manipulated under the right conditions, without a person even leaving a
fingerprint,'' said Sancho, who once headed the state's elections
supervisors association.
The Leon County test results are likely to further fuel
suspicions that the new electronic voting systems in Florida, in place
since the 2002 elections, are susceptible to manipulation.
When the debate hit fever pitch before last year's presidential
election, many conservatives said questions about the machinery were a
liberal ploy to undermine confidence in the voting system.
Elections chiefs in Broward and Miami-Dade said Wednesday they
have good security and are not particularly concerned -- though both
have had ''glitches'' that have been tough to explain.
Sancho agrees that good security is key, but said he's not sure
he won't also have problems with the $1.3 million ES&S system,
which he'll also test.
DIEBOLD USERS
Twenty-nine counties, including Monroe, use different versions
of paper-ballot voting systems manufactured by Diebold, a leading
manufacturer of security systems and voting machines. One county uses
Diebold touchscreens.
A spokesman for Diebold Election Systems Inc. could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
Sancho said Diebold isn't the only one to blame for hacker-prone
equipment. The Florida secretary of state's office should have caught
these problems early on, he said, and the Legislature should scrap a
law severely restricting recounts on touch-screen machines and equip
them with the means of producing a paper trail.
A spokeswoman for the secretary of state's office said any faults Sancho found were between him and Diebold.
''If Ion Sancho has security concerns with his system, he needs to discuss them with Diebold,'' spokeswoman Jenny Nash said.
Sancho first clashed with Diebold in May, when he teamed up with
a nonprofit election-monitoring group called BlackBoxVoting.org, which
has made a crusade of showing that electronic voting machines are
subject to fraud. BlackBox hired Herbert Thompson, a computer-science
professor and strategist at Security Innovation, which tests software
for companies such as Google and Microsoft.
Thompson couldn't hack into the system from the outside. So
Sancho gave him access to the central machine that tabulates votes and
to the last school election at Leon County High.
Thompson told The Herald he was ''shocked'' at how easy it was
to get in, make the loser the winner and leave without a trace. The
machine asked for a user name and password, but didn't require it, he
said. That meant it had not just a ''front door, but a back door as big
as a garage,'' Thompson said.
From there, Thompson said, he typed five lines of computer code -- and switched 5,000 votes from one candidate to another.
''I am positive an eighth grader could do this,'' Thompson said.
After BlackBox and Sancho announced the results, Diebold's
senior lawyer, Michael Lindroos, wrote Sancho, Leon County and the
state of Florida questioning the results and calling the test ''a very
foolish and irresponsible act'' that may have violated licensing
agreements.
Over the past few months, computer expert Harri Hursti tried to
manipulate election results with the memory card inserted into each
Diebold voting machine. The card records votes during an election, then
at the end of the day is taken to a central location where results are
totaled.
Hursti figured out how to hack into the memory card by using an
agricultural scanning device easily available on the Internet, said
BlackBox founder Bev Harris. He learned how to hide votes, make losers
out of winners and leave no trace, she said.
Hursti couldn't be reached for comment.
With some variation, both Miami-Dade and Broward use these
cartridge-like cards to record votes and report election results.
Experts like Thompson say they believe the counties could be subject to
electronic ballot-rigging -- which would be hard to detect and correct
without a paper trail.
FINAL TEST
Sancho said he tried to discuss the problems with Diebold, but
met with resistance. On Monday, he did one final test with Hursti at
the Leon County supervisor's office, Hursti hacked the memory card to
spit out seven ''yes'' votes on an issue and one ''no'' vote.
Then, six ''no'' votes and two ''yes'' votes were cast into the
machine the same way voters would. Those results didn't show up in the
final tally -- just the ones hacked into the card.
Officials for ES&S, which makes the systems used in
Miami-Dade and Broward counties, couldn't be reached for comment
Wednesday.
Seth Kaplan, a spokesman for the Miami-Dade elections office,
said officials continually monitor the quality and security of their
machines.
''The problem of election fraud predates current technology by
hundreds of years. We have people we trust and in our case we have
checks to reconcile the results,'' Kaplan said.
But Broward's election supervisor, Brenda Snipes, said she's at
least intrigued. She, too, vouches for her office's security, but says
there's a need to remain vigilant.
''Is hacking possible? We think we have a secure system. With
technology, those people who have that level of expertise, I guess that
could be possible,'' Snipes said. ``We need to see what Ion did. He
tries a lot of things. He's always analyzing things.''
But Sancho said the time for passive monitoring is over. The
Diebold problems show that simple tests haven't been done on at least
one major voting system, he said.
''These were sold as safe systems. They passed tests as safe
systems,'' Sancho said. ``But even in the so-called safe system, if you
don't follow the paper ballots, there is a way to rig the election.
Except it's not a bunch of guys stuffing ballots in a precinct. It's
possibly one person acting in secret changing thousands of votes in a
second.''
And the map of 2004 election results by county....
So, who's fighting this war?
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By Peter Phillips
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In the
fall of 2001, after an eight-month review of 175,000 Florida ballots
never counted in the 2000 election, an analysis by the National Opinion
Research Center confirmed that Al Gore actually won Florida and should
have been President. However, coverage of this report was only a small
blip in the corporate media as a much bigger story dominated the news
after September 11, 2001.
New
research compiled by Dr. Dennis Loo with the University of Cal Poly
Pomona now shows that extensive manipulation of non-paper-trail voting
machines occurred in several states during the 2004 election. The facts are as follows:
In
2004 Bush far exceeded the 85% of registered Florida Republican votes
that he got in 2000, receiving more than 100% of the registered
Republican votes in 47 out of 67 Florida counties, 200% of registered
Republicans in 15 counties, and over 300% of registered Republicans in
4 counties. Bush managed these remarkable outcomes despite the fact
that his share of the crossover votes by registered Democrats in
Florida did not increase over 2000, and he lost ground among registered
Independents, dropping 15 points. We also know that Bush "won" Ohio by
51-48%, but statewide results were not matched by the court-supervised
hand count of the 147,400 absentee and provisional ballots in which
Kerry received 54.46% of the vote. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio the number
of recorded votes was more than 93,000 greater than the number of
registered voters.
More
importantly national exit polls showed Kerry winning in 2004. However,
It was only in precincts where there were no paper trails on the voting
machines that the exit polls ended up being different from the final
count. According to Dr. Steve Freeman, a statistician at the University
of Pennsylvania, the odds are 250 million to one that the exit polls
were wrong by chance. In fact, where the exit polls disagreed with the
computerized outcomes the results always favored Bush - another
statistical impossibility.
.
Dennis
Loo writes, "A team at the University of California at Berkeley, headed
by sociology professor Michael Hout, found a highly suspicious pattern
in which Bush received 260,000 more votes in those Florida precincts
that used electronic voting machines than past voting patterns would
indicate compared to those precincts that used optical scan read votes
where past voting patterns held."
There
is now strong statistical evidence of widespread voting machine
manipulation occurring in US elections since 2000. Coverage of the
fraud has been reported in independent media and various websites. The
information is not secret. But it certainly seems to be a taboo subject
for the US corporate media.
Black Box Voting
reported on March 9, 2005 that voting machines used by over 30 million
voters were easily hacked by relatively unsophisticated programs and
audits of the computers would not show the changes. It is very possible
that a small team of hackers could have manipulated the 2004 and
earlier elections in various locations throughout the United States.
Irregularities in the vote counts certainly indicate that something
beyond chance occurrences has been happening in recent elections.
That
a special interest group might try to cheat on an election in the
United States is nothing new. Historians tell us how local political
machines from both major parties have in the past used methods of
double counting, ballot box stuffing, poll taxes and registration
manipulation to affect elections. In the computer age, however,
election fraud can occur externally without local precinct
administrators having any awareness of the manipulations - and the
fraud can be extensive enough to change the outcome of an entire
national election.
There
is little doubt key Democrats know that votes in 2004 and earlier
elections were stolen. The fact that few in Congress are complaining
about fraud is an indication of the totality to which both parties
accept the status quo of a money based elections system. Neither party
wants to further undermine public confidence in the American
"democratic" process (over 80 millions eligible voters refused to vote
in 2004). Instead we will likely see the quiet passing of legislation
that will correct the most blatant problems. Future elections in the US
will continue as an equal opportunity for both parties to maintain a
national democratic charade in which money counts more than truth.
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