[USA] Evidence of Vote Fraud -- 2004 Presidential Election

rescath

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http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2004/1103grouptalli.html

Group tallies more than 1,100 e-voting glitches
By Grant Gross
IDG News Service, 11/03/04

U.S. voters calling in to a toll-free number had reported more than 1,100 separate incidents of problems with electronic voting machines and other voting technologies by late Tuesday during the nationwide election.

In more than 30 reported cases, when voters reviewed their choices before finalizing them, an electronic voting machine indicated they had voted for a different candidate.

E-voting backers called the number of reported problems minor in the context of almost 50 million U.S. voters projected to use e-voting machines on Tuesday.

In a majority of cases where machines allegedly recorded a wrong vote, votes were taken away from Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, or a Democratic candidate in another race, and given to Republican President George Bush or another Republican candidate, said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

As of 8:30 p.m. Eastern Time Tuesday, the U.S. presidential race was too close to call.

In all the cases of misrecorded votes reported to Voteprotect.org, the voters were able to change their votes back to the candidates they wanted before casting the final ballot, Cohn said. But in some cases, voters had to correct their ballots multiple times, and in other cases, voters may not have noticed that their votes were miscast, Cohn said.

"We're only hearing from people who caught it," Cohn said during a press conference hosted by a coalition of nonpartisan groups that have questioned the security of e-voting machines. "It gives us this uneasy feeling we're seeing the tip of the iceberg."

The reports of misvoting happened on a variety of brands of e-voting machines, Cohn said. In some cases, e-voting machines may have misread voter intentions when the voter accidentally brushed the computer touch screen, she said.

The Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), representing e-voting machine vendors, called the number of reported e-voting problems insignificant compared to the millions of voters using the systems during Tuesday's election.

Unlike with some other voting systems, such as paper ballots, voters using e-voting machines were able to catch misvotes before casting their ballots, said Bob Cohen, senior vice president at ITAA. "The machines helped them catch the error," Cohen said in response to the reports. "With other forms of equipment, that probably can't happen. It's a great credit to the technology."

Most complaints during Tuesday's election referred to long lines and other problems not related to e-voting technology, Cohen added. Most reports "have very little to do with the performance of the voting machines themselves," he said.

Among the problems reported Tuesday were e-voting machines not booting in Orleans Parish, La., which caused polls to open several hours late, Cohn said. The EFF and other groups filed a lawsuit in Louisiana Tuesday to keep the polls there open later, she said.

Reports of late poll openings came from six to eight precincts in Orleans Parish, Cohn said.

Multiple telephone calls to the Orleans Parish Board of Elections were not answered late Tuesday, and the telephone line to the Louisiana Secretary of State's Office was busy. A representative of Sequoia Voting Systems, the vendor of the e-voting machines in Orleans Parish, didn't immediately return a telephone call.

Elsewhere, 21 ES&S iVotronic machines in Broward County, Fla., failed during the day, said Gisela Salas, deputy supervisor of elections for the county, which was at the center of a presidential election controversy in 2000. However, the county had 5,283 iVotronic machines in place, and the county was prepared for a small number of malfunctions, Salas said. The votes on the malfunctioning machines were recovered, she added.

"There's nothing truly wrong with the machines," Salas said. "We have not lost any votes."

Not all of the more than 1,100 technology-related incidents reported to Voteprotect.org as of 8:30 p.m. Eastern Time were related to e-voting machines. Some related to optical scanners or other technologies, said Will Doherty, executive director of the Verified Voting Foundation.

But Doherty and other e-voting critics watching the growing number of incidents suggested that only a small fraction of voters with problems reported them to Voteprotect.org. It may be a number of days before e-voting critics know the extent of the problems, said Ed Felten, a Princeton University computer science professor.

Voters may not know for days about problems such as voting machine numbers not matching the number of voters counted at a precinct, Felten said. E-voting critics may file open-records requests after the election to look for those types of problems, Cohn said.

"The problems I, for one, worry about are the problems that are not yet evident," Felten said.
 

rescath

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http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=388

Exit polls and ‘actual’ results don’t match; Evoting states show greater discrepancy

An analysis of the original AP exit polling, which showed Kerry with a tighter margin and leading in myriad states, raises serious questions about the authenticity of the popular vote in several key states, RAW STORY has learned.

Since the actual outcome of the votes have been called, AP has changed nearly all of their exit polling to tighten the margin. A reason has not been given.

The analysis, first conducted by a poster at the popular Democratic Underground, suggests possible voter fraud in states that do not have electronic voting receipts.

RAW STORY has placed an inquiry with the media contact for the six-network exit polling consortium at NBC News. The site hopes to have a reply late this afternoon.

An exit poll involves asking someone after they walk out of the election booth who they voted for. While not a guide for proving results, it can be a mechanism for ensuring voting accuracy and flagging potential fraud. Exit polls were recently used in Venezuela to ensure the vote was accurate and legitimate.

Perhaps more importantly, while exit polling is unreliable, the odds of President Bush having gaining an advantage from every exit poll in swing states is an extremely improbable coincidence.

In Florida, Bush led exit polling by CNN of more than 3 million voters by just 5355 votes. Yet he led by 326,000 in the end result. This morning, CNN changed their exit polling to favor Bush, saying that had overweighted African American voters.

In Wisconsin, where exit polls put Kerry up seven percent, Bush has a lead of one percent, an unexplained difference of eight percent.

In New Mexico, Kerry led Bush by 3.8 percent, yet Bush leads Kerry by 3 percent in actual reported voting.

In Minnesota, where a new law sharply restricts reporters’ access to polls, Kerry led 9.6 percent in exit polling. Actual voting counts found that Bush trailed by 5 percent, with a 5 percent discrepancy favoring Bush.

Ohio, which does have paper trail, and some electronic voting, exits showed Kerry and Bush in a dead heat; in the near-final results, Bush led by three percent.

Exit polls put Kerry up by 8 percent in Michigan; actual results show Bush trailing by just 3 percent.

Two states with mandated paper trails for electronic voting were within 0.1 percent margin of error.

New Hampshire, which has electronic voting but provides verified receipts, exit polling is within 0.1 percent of the actual vote. Kerry led by 3 percent in exit polling, and 2.9 percent in the actual vote.

Nevada, which also has electronic voting and mandated paper trails, had a variance of 0.1 percent as well. Kerry led the actual vote by 1.3 percent; the exit polls had him up by 1.2 percent.

Kerry does not gain by any significant margin in actual voting in any state for which analysis has been conducted, RAW STORY found.

Exit polling accurately predicted the results in most states with very little error. Where there were discrepancies, they were significant in the +5 percent range, and always favored Bush.
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=614477&section=news

U.S. voters report computer problems
Wed November 03, 2004 01:50 AM ET

By Andy Sullivan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Voters across the United States have reported problems with electronic touch-screen systems in what critics say could be a sign that the machines used by one-third of the population are prone to error.

Voters calling in to an election-day hotline reported more than 1,100 problems with the ATM-like machines, from improperly tallied choices to frozen screens that left their votes in limbo.

Voters in Maryland said congressional candidates were left off ballots, while some in Florida told hotline volunteers that their ballots had already been filled out when they stepped up to vote, watchdogs said.

Machines in New Orleans, Miami and suburban Philadelphia failed to start punctually in the morning, leading to long lines at polling places and prompting some to turn away from the polls, according to activists with the Election Protection Coalition.

The nonpartisan group said it had received 1,166 complaints as of late evening involving a wide array of machines.

"It gives us the uneasy feeling that we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg," said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a technology-policy group involved in the coalition.

Officials with voting-systems companies said most problems could be traced to human error, rather than the equipment.

"Everything we see and hear and talking to our members who are in turn in touch with election officials seems to be very positive," said Bob Cohen, a spokesman with the Information Technology Association of America, which counts voting-system vendors such as Diebold Inc. among its members.

About 45 million registered voters are expected to cast a ballot on touch-screen systems, which have been touted by election officials as a way to avoid a repeat of the messy recount battle touched off by antiquated punch-card systems in Florida four years ago.

Computer scientists say the machines are prone to the glitches and security holes all too familiar to home-computer users.

The controversy has prompted some states to postpone upgrades until after the election, even though the federal government has earmarked $3.9 billion for that purpose.

The most common complaint was that machines had recorded votes improperly. Most said they were able to go back and fix the problem, a feature that ITAA's Cohen said did not exist in paper-based systems.

But Cohn of the EFF said nobody knew how many votes were cast improperly without the voter noticing.

In Palm Beach County, Florida, some voters found that ballots had already been filled out when they logged in, said Matt Zimmerman, an EFF attorney who is observing the election there.

A spokesman for the company that makes the machines said that was probably because the previous voter had walked away before finishing the ballot. Depending on local regulations, poll workers will finish the process or cancel it, he said.

"Voters do some amazing things. It's not a frailty of the system or the equipment," said Alfie Charles, spokesman for Sequoia Voting Systems Inc.

In Maryland, voters have complained that Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski, Democratic Rep. Albert Wynn and Republican Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger did not appear on ballots, said Linda Schade, co-founder of the activist group TrueVoteMD.
 

rescath

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http://www.opednews.com/thoreau_110404_diebold.htm

Never Say Die-bold: So You Don’t Think the Bush Campaign Stole This Election? Think Again

By Jackson Thoreau

opEdNews.com

If you’re looking for one word to sum up the way the Bush-Cheney campaign stole another election Tuesday besides obvious ones like “cheated,” try this one: Diebold.

An election judge where I voted Tuesday in a heavily Democratic precinct in Maryland knows what that means and wasn’t adverse to sharing his opinion of the Republican-owned company. As I was about to vote with the electronic system, I asked this judge if they had a way to check people’s votes through a paper backup.


The official said no, and then in a low voice so no one else would hear, added, “And that really makes us nervous, with Diebold as the owner of that system.”


Goodbye, hanging chads. Hello, computer fraud that leaves no trace, no chads hanging.

Diebold Inc. of North Canton, Ohio, supplied scores of machines and counted millions of votes Tuesday, while reportedly discarding many votes for Democrat John Kerry, according to British investigative reporter Gregory Palast. Walden O’Dell, chief executive of Diebold and a top fundraiser for the Bush campaign, wrote in a fund-raising letter last year that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”


That he did.


Software errors involving the system can change results, computer scientists say. Since the majority of touch screens in the United States do not produce paper records, the machines could alter ballots without anyone noticing.

“What has most concerned scientists are problems that are not observable, so the fact that no major problems were observed says nothing about the system,” David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, told the Associated Press. “The fact that we had a relatively smooth election yesterday does not change at all the vulnerability these systems have to fraud or bugs.”

Some 8.2 percent of touch-screen votes in senatorial elections between 1998 and 2000 were lost, according to an MIT/CalTech study. That was more than any other system except lever machines, which lost 9.5 percent of votes.

Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting and the BlackBoxVoting.com web site, has documented numerous cases of electronic disasters. One occurred in Volusia County, Fla., in 2000 in which county election officials hand recounted more than 184,000 paper ballots used to feed the computerized system, after the central ballot-counting computer showed a Socialist Party candidate receiving more than 9,000 votes and Al Gore getting minus 19,000. Another 4,000 votes were received for Bush that should not have been there.

Election officials eventually tallied Gore beating Bush by 97,063 votes to 82,214. But the wrong numbers had already been sent to the media, which were used by FOX and other networks to erroneously call the election for Bush and swing the public relations part of the recount battle in his favor.

On Tuesday, Election Protection, a program of People for the American Way, had more than 15,000 calls to its hotline about ballot problems, voter intimidation and other
situations.


The Institute for Public Accuracy also outlined various problems. Susan Truitt, co-founder of the Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections, was quoted on its site saying that seven counties in Ohio had electronic voting machines without paper trails, and scientific exit polls showed Kerry with the lead. But verifying votes was impossible, she said.

“A recount without a paper trail is meaningless; you just get a regurgitation of the data,” Truitt said. “A poll worker told me [Wednesday] morning that there were no tapes of the results posted on some machines; on other machines the posted count was zero, which obviously shouldn’t be the case.”

Other problems include Ohio’s version of Katherine Harris

There were many other problems in Ohio. Like in Florida, the Ohio secretary of state, Ken Blackwell, made decisions on what could be counted and other important matters even as he shilled for Bush as a co-chair of his campaign. This raised serious conflict-of-interest concerns, said Ohio state Senator Teresa Fedor.

“There is a pattern of voter suppression; that’s why I called for Blackwell’s resignation more than a month ago,” she said. “Blackwell, while claiming to run an unbiased elections process, was also the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio. Additionally, he was the spokesperson for the anti-business, anti-family constitutional
amendment ‘Issue 1,’ and a failed initiative to repeal a crucial sales-tax revenue source for the state. Blackwell learned his moves from the Katherine Harris playbook of Florida 2000, and we won’t stand for it.”


The Ohio tally also included a version of the Florida butterfly ballot, said Bob Fitrakis, an attorney with Election Protection. The absentee ballots were misleading in Franklin County,” he said. “Kerry was the third line down, but you had to punch number four to vote for him. Bush was getting both his votes as well as Kerry’s.”


There were also far fewer machines in the inner-city districts than in the suburbs, Fitrakis said. “I documented at least a dozen people leaving because the lines were so long in African-American areas,” he said. “Blackwell did a great deal of suppressing before the election - like attempting to refuse to process voter registration forms.”

I heard a report that one Ohio voter had to wait in line 15 hours to vote. In one of the busiest precincts in Columbus, Blackwell only supplied it with three voting
machines. How many people gave up and did not vote there?

Dirty tricks by Republicans on the rise

A few days before the 2004 election, the Washington Post published an article detailing increasing dirty tricks, mostly by Republicans.

In Lake County, Ohio, some people received a memo on bogus Board of Elections letterhead informing voters who registered through Democratic and NACCP drives that they could not vote.

In Leon County, students at Florida State and Florida A&M universities who signed petitions to legalize medical marijuana or impose stiffer penalties for child molesters unknowingly had their party registration switched to Republican and their addresses
changed. The latter would affect their ability to vote since they would not be registered at the proper site. The media traced the source to a group hired by the Florida Republican Party.

In Allegheny County, Pa., fliers on a bogus county letterhead were handed out and mailed, saying that “due to immense voter turnout expected on Tuesday,” the election had been extended. Republicans should vote Tuesday, while Democrats should vote on Wednesday – the wrong day.


In some Milwaukee black neighborhoods, a flier warned people that they could not vote in that election if they had already voted in another election that year. “If you
violate any of these laws, you can get ten years in prison and your children will get taken away from you,” the flier said.

In Charleston County, S.C., a fake letter supposedly from the NAACP threatens
voters who have outstanding parking tickets or have failed to pay child support with arrest. A similar flier was distributed in Baltimore in 2002.

Such tricks are not new. There are famous examples like the 1971 break-in of Democratic National Committee headquarters by Nixon. There are also many lesser known examples. In 2002, Ron Kirk, a former Dallas mayor who ran as a Democrat for U.S. Senate, reported a bogus automated phone message dialed to voters in Austin and other cities. The message asked voters to support Kirk because he supported same-sex marriages and gay adoptions. Kirk said he didn’t support either issue and blamed more Republican pre-election dirty tricks. His Republican opponent, John Cornyn, denied being behind the false phone bank.

U.S. has a long history of rigged elections

The U.S., of course, is no stranger to rigged elections, even well before Tuesday’s and the one in 2000. A famous case was the controversial way that the late President Lyndon B. Johnson won a U.S. Senate seat in 1948 in Texas on his way to the White House that reportedly involved votes from dead people. What some overlook in this case was how LBJ had lost an election in a similar disputed fashion seven years before.

Another lesser known case involved the 1984 landslide presidential election of the late Republican Ronald Reagan. In Dallas, where both Bush and Cheney lived at one time, there were 217 ballots cast in a precinct that had zero registered voters. That would not affect the election, but it demonstrates that fraud has existed for a long time.

As early as 1986, Michael Shamos, a Pennsylvania computer scientist, testified during a Texas hearing that the computer hardware and software used to tabulate voters’ ballots could easily be manipulated.

“Computers can be manipulated remotely, by wire or radio, or by direct physical input,” Shamos said. “The memories on which these computers operate can easily fit into a shirt pocket and can be substituted in seconds. The software can be set to await the receipt of a special card, whose presence will cause all the election counters to be altered. This card could be dropped into the ballot box by any confederate. The possibilities for this type of tampering are endless, and virtually no detection is possible once tabulation has been completed....Even if the software is not altered, there is no reason to believe that it is correct. Many tests performed on such programs have revealed faulty logic and wildly incorrect results.”

Suzan Kesim, then-vice president of a security consulting firm in South Bend, Ind., also testified in 1986 that “many of the computer auditing procedures used by the banking industry that have been tried and true could easily be modified or used as they are for auditing elections....Fraud possibilities include ‘hidden programs’.”

Texas even had its own voter purge almost two decades before Florida attempted to strike some 60,000 voters from the rolls with false accusations of felony convictions. In 1982, lists were provided to Texas election officials that made mostly false accusations of felony convictions against voters. The accused included public officials who successfully sued for slander. The state also hired armed officers at minority voter precincts and posted signs warning voters against casting illegal ballots. Charles Knutson pointed out in a Democrats.com report that the Texas purge probably involved Bush mastermind Karl Rove, who worked for then-Texas Republican Gov. Bill Clements in 1982.

Another odd case involved a West Texas county where the system’s optical scanners misread ballots and at first reported landslide wins for two Republican commissioners in 2002. But the next day, after alert poll workers became suspicious of the wide margins of supposed victory, they discovered a defective computer chip in the scanner system. After two hand recounts and another count with a replacement scanner chip, officials announced that Democrats Jerry House and Chloanne Lindsey actually won by wide margins.

“It was hard to believe that that type of mistake had happened,” Robbie Floyd, one of the Republicans who lost, said in one press report.

So could Kerry have been ripped off by a defective computer chip in Ohio and Florida, where scientific exit polls indicated Kerry wins? We will never know since, unlike the Texas machines in 2002, the Diebold machines in Ohio and Florida have no paper trail.

How convenient.

Popular vote fixed?

With all the former and current Republicans supporting Kerry – even a long-time Texas Republican friend of mine voted for a Democrat for the first time for president on Tuesday – it’s hard to believe that Bush got about 3.5 million more votes than Kerry and 8 million more than he received in 2000.

There can’t be that many new devil worshippers or Christian fundamentalists.

A larger turnout – Tuesday’s 60 percent turnout was the largest since 1968 – has favored Democrats in the past. But about 6 million of those votes have not been counted.

Some said that exit polls were accurate in states that had paper trails, but not in ones without the paper trails for e-voting.

Even though Kerry conceded, groups like the International Labor Communications Association refused to follow suit. The group is waging a campaign to count all the votes in Ohio.

Kerry’s concession was really strange and disappointing. Would Howard Dean have conceded so fast to Bush? Gore fought Bush harder than Kerry. I don’t get it since Kerry even had Bruce Springsteen play “No Retreat, No Surrender” at a campaign appearance and used that song during other events. John Edwards also pledged to make sure votes were counted. Then they surrendered without putting up a fight in the overtime phase. That was most disappointing, more so than Gore’s concession in 2000.

Did Skull and Bones members blackmail Kerry into conceding without a real fight?


Perhaps Kerry simply foresaw the inevitable result, but he still could have seen the counting of provisional ballots through to the end. It would have raised some more awareness about the problems with Diebold and possibility of vote tampering. It would have shown Bush-Cheney that Democrats weren’t backing down, especially with so many questions about vote reliability and reports of Republican voter suppression and dirty tricks.

But Kerry called for unity with the Evil Empire. Why is it that Democrats are always trying to call for unity and compromise with Republicanazis? As Carolyn Kay with MakeThemAccountable.com said, we have to completely remake the Democratic Party. We have to learn from right wingers to “take a licking and come back kicking. It is absolutely essential that as soon as possible we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and start working to take over the Democratic Party. It has lost its moorings, and because of that it is losing elections, over and over and over again.”

Sure, the deck was stacked against Kerry. Perhaps the last week of bad news for Bush, the Washington Redskins loss, the exit polls, and other omens that seemed to spell a Kerry victory were mere ploys by Rove to make his side work harder and our side slack off a bit.

One thing I know: We have to keep fighting these cheating thieves, not try to make peace with them. And I hope many people on our side won’t move away – though I realize moving out of the country is the ultimate protest and I understand that choice. We all have to figure out what is the best path to take for ourselves.

As for me, I’m staying in the belly of the beast, in the shadow of the Evil Empire, to continue to sucker punch it in its bloated, bullshit-filled gut. Starting now, just as many conservatives boycotted France for its correct stance against the Iraqi invasion, I’m boycotting the state of Texas, where I lived for 40 years before moving to friendlier and more progressive confines last year. Bush got his political start in Texas, where the Republicanazis imposed a redistricting scheme that made that far-right state even more Republican. Every statewide official is a Republican there. The Texas Republican Party platform reads like a nazi playbook, even calling for getting out of the UN, abolishing numerous federal agencies, making homosexuality a crime and teaching the Bible in public schools.

Enough is enough. **** Texas and the horses that Bush and Cheney rode in on.

And **** Diebold, too.

As for you, Sen. Kerry, I appreciate your hard work, your intelligence, your dedication to this campaign, although I was disappointed by your finish. But, with all due respect, you know where you can stick your call for unity…..
 
Are they suggesting they just misfunction for the Democrats only?

If not, maybe Bush won by a larger margin then reported. I used an electronic machine and voted Bush. Should I worry?
 

truthseeker

Membership Revoked
With the record amount of turnout it was bound to throw the polls off. If you reviewed the last week of polling for election, every state fell where it was thought too. Pa and FL were close, but pa was expected to go to kerry and did, Fl was expected to go for Bush and did. OH kept flip-flopping and most people knew going into tuesday Ohio was going to be the deciding factor. Thats why so many showed up there and waited hours to vote.
 

rescath

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http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won_.php

Kerry Won. . .
Greg Palast
November 04, 2004

Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided—known as “spoilage” in election jargon—because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Palast’s investigation suggests that if Ohio’s discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots.

Greg Palast, contributing editor to Harper's magazine, investigated the manipulation of the vote for BBC Television's Newsnight. The documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes," based on his New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has been released this month on DVD .

Kerry won. Here's the facts.

I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.

Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.

So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know.

Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, "An Election Spoiled Rotten," November 1.]

Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.

The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called "spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49 percent, don't you believe it ... it has never happened in the United States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The television totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote.

And not all vote spoil equally. Most of those votes, say every official report, come from African American and minority precincts. (To learn more, click here.)

We saw this in Florida in 2000. Exit polls showed Gore with a plurality of at least 50,000, but it didn't match the official count. That's because the official, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, excluded 179,855 spoiled votes. In Florida, as in Ohio, most of these votes lost were cast on punch cards where the hole wasn't punched through completely—leaving a 'hanging chad,'—or was punched extra times. Whose cards were discarded? Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black folks. (To read the report from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, click here .)

And here's the key: Florida is terribly typical. The majority of ballots thrown out (there will be nearly 2 million tossed out from Tuesday's election) will have been cast by African American and other minority citizens.

So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again. Because unlike last time, Democrats aren't even asking Ohio to count these cards with the not-quite-punched holes (called "undervotes" in the voting biz). Nor are they demanding we look at the "overvotes" where voter intent may be discerned.

Ohio is one of the last states in America to still use the vote-spoiling punch-card machines. And the Secretary of State of Ohio, J. Kenneth Blackwell, wrote before the election, “the possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state’s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity.”

But this week, Blackwell, a rabidly partisan Republican, has warmed up to the result of sticking with machines that have a habit of eating Democratic votes. When asked if he feared being this year's Katherine Harris, Blackwell noted that Ms. Fix-it's efforts landed her a seat in Congress.

Exactly how many votes were lost to spoilage this time? Blackwell's office, notably, won't say, though the law requires it be reported. Hmm. But we know that last time, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a democracy-damaging 1.96 percent. The machines produced their typical loss—that's 110,000 votes—overwhelmingly Democratic.

The Impact Of Challenges

First and foremost, Kerry was had by chads. But the Democrat wasn't punched out by punch cards alone. There were also the 'challenges.' That's a polite word for the Republican Party of Ohio's use of an old Ku Klux Klan technique: the attempt to block thousands of voters of color at the polls. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, the GOP laid plans for poll workers to ambush citizens under arcane laws—almost never used—allowing party-designated poll watchers to finger individual voters and demand they be denied a ballot. The Ohio courts were horrified and federal law prohibits targeting of voters where race is a factor in the challenge. But our Supreme Court was prepared to let Republicans stand in the voting booth door.

In the end, the challenges were not overwhelming, but they were there. Many apparently resulted in voters getting these funky "provisional" ballots—a kind of voting placebo—which may or may not be counted. Blackwell estimates there were 175,000; Democrats say 250,000. Pick your number. But as challenges were aimed at minorities, no one doubts these are, again, overwhelmingly Democratic. Count them up, add in the spoiled punch cards (easy to tally with the human eye in a recount), and the totals begin to match the exit polls; and, golly, you've got yourself a new president. Remember, Bush won by 136,483 votes in Ohio.

Enchanted State's Enchanted Vote

Now, on to New Mexico, where a Kerry plurality—if all votes are counted—is more obvious still. Before the election, in TomPaine.com, I wrote, "John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not one ballot has yet been counted."

How did that happen? It's the spoilage, stupid; and the provisional ballots.

CNN said George Bush took New Mexico by 11,620 votes. Again, the network total added up to that miraculous, and non-existent, '100 percent' of ballots cast.

New Mexico reported in the last race a spoilage rate of 2.68 percent, votes lost almost entirely in Hispanic, Native American and poor precincts—Democratic turf. From Tuesday's vote, assuming the same ballot-loss rate, we can expect to see 18,000 ballots in the spoilage bin.

Spoilage has a very Democratic look in New Mexico. Hispanic voters in the Enchanted State, who voted more than two to one for Kerry, are five times as likely to have their vote spoil as a white voter. Counting these uncounted votes would easily overtake the Bush 'plurality.'

Already, the election-bending effects of spoilage are popping up in the election stats, exactly where we'd expect them: in heavily Hispanic areas controlled by Republican elections officials. Chaves County, in the "Little Texas" area of New Mexico, has a 44 percent Hispanic population, plus African Americans and Native Americans, yet George Bush "won" there 68 percent to 31 percent.

I spoke with Chaves' Republican county clerk before the election, and he told me that this huge spoilage rate among Hispanics simply indicated that such people simply can't make up their minds on the choice of candidate for president. Oddly, these brown people drive across the desert to register their indecision in a voting booth.

Now, let's add in the effect on the New Mexico tally of provisional ballots.

"They were handing them out like candy," Albuquerque journalist Renee Blake reported of provisional ballots. About 20,000 were given out. Who got them?

Santiago Juarez who ran the "Faithful Citizenship" program for the Catholic Archdiocese in New Mexico, told me that "his" voters, poor Hispanics, whom he identified as solid Kerry supporters, were handed the iffy provisional ballots. Hispanics were given provisional ballots, rather than the countable kind "almost religiously," he said, at polling stations when there was the least question about a voter's identification. Some voters, Santiago said, were simply turned away.

Your Kerry Victory Party

So we can call Ohio and New Mexico for John Kerry—if we count all the votes.

But that won't happen. Despite the Democratic Party's pledge, the leadership this time gave in to racial disenfranchisement once again. Why? No doubt, the Democrats know darn well that counting all the spoiled and provisional ballots will require the cooperation of Ohio's Secretary of State, Blackwell. He will ultimately decide which spoiled and provisional ballots get tallied. Blackwell, hankering to step into Kate Harris' political pumps, is unlikely to permit anything close to a full count. Also, Democratic leadership knows darn well the media would punish the party for demanding a full count.

What now? Kerry won, so hold your victory party. But make sure the shades are down: it may be become illegal to demand a full vote count under PATRIOT Act III.

I used to write a column for the Guardian papers in London. Several friends have asked me if I will again leave the country. In light of the failure—a second time—to count all the votes, that won't be necessary. My country has left me.
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
dimensiondancer said:
Are they suggesting they just misfunction for the Democrats only?

If not, maybe Bush won by a larger margin then reported. I used an electronic machine and voted Bush. Should I worry?

Nope. The Republicans control the electronic voting machines. If you voted for Kerry on the machines, then you might be concerned.
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
truthseeker said:
With the record amount of turnout it was bound to throw the polls off. If you reviewed the last week of polling for election, every state fell where it was thought too. Pa and FL were close, but pa was expected to go to kerry and did, Fl was expected to go for Bush and did. OH kept flip-flopping and most people knew going into tuesday Ohio was going to be the deciding factor. Thats why so many showed up there and waited hours to vote.

Exit polls are extremely accurate. So much so that, in the past, networks used the results of exit polling to call elections. They had Kerry leading in Ohio by a sizeable margin of 52%-48%. No amount of turnout would throw the exit polls off. In fact, the more people you sample, the better the accuracy of the polling. It's basic statistics.
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/03/03_200.html

Diebold's Political Machine

Political insiders suggest Ohio could become as decisive this year as Florida was four years ago. Which is why the state's plan to use paperless touch-screen voting machines has so many up in arms.

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman

March 5, 2004

Soccer moms and NASCAR dads come and go, but swing states are always in fashion. And this year, Ohio is emerging as the most fashionable of the bunch. Asked recently about the importance of Ohio in this year's presidential campaign, one veteran of Buckeye State politics told Salon, "Ohio is the Florida of 2004."

That label sounds ominously accurate to the many who are skeptical of computerized voting. In addition to being as decisive as the 2000 polling in Florida, they worry this year's vote in Ohio could be just as flawed. Specifically, they worry that it could be rigged. And they wonder why state officials seem so unconcerned by the fact that the two companies in line to sell touch-screen voting machines to Ohio have deep and continuing ties to the Republican Party. Those companies, Ohio's own Diebold Election Systems and Election Systems & Software of Nebraska, are lobbying fiercely ahead of a public hearing on the matter in Columbus next week.

There's solid reason behind the political rhetoric tapping Ohio as a key battleground. No Republican has ever captured the White House without carrying Ohio, and only John Kennedy managed the feat for the Democrats. In 2000, George W. Bush won in the Buckeye State by a scant four percentage points. Four years earlier, Bill Clinton won in Ohio by a similar margin.

In recent years, central Ohio has been transformed from a bastion of Republicanism into a Democratic stronghold. Six of Columbus' seven city council members are Democrats, as is the city's mayor, Michael Coleman. But no Democrat has been elected to Congress from central Ohio in more than 20 years, and the area around Columbus still includes pockets where no Democrat stands a chance. One such Republican pocket is Upper Arlington, the Columbus suburb that is home to Walden "Wally" O'Dell, the chairman of the board and chief executive of Diebold. For years, O'Dell has given generously to Republican candidates. Last September, he held a packed $1,000-per-head GOP fundraiser at his 10,800-square-foot mansion. He has been feted as a guest at President Bush's Texas ranch, joining a cadre of "Pioneers and Rangers" who have pledged to raise more than $100,000 for the Bush reelection campaign. Most memorably, O'Dell last fall penned a letter pledging his commitment "to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President."

O'Dell has defended his actions, telling the Cleveland Plain Dealer "I'm not doing anything wrong or complicated." But he also promised to lower his political profile and "try to be more sensitive." But the Diebold boss' partisan cards are squarely on the table. And, when it comes to the Diebold board room, O'Dell is hardly alone in his generous support of the GOP. One of the longest-serving Diebold directors is W.R. "Tim" Timken. Like O'Dell, Timken is a Republican loyalist and a major contributor to GOP candidates. Since 1991 the Timken Company and members of the Timken family have contributed more than a million dollars to the Republican Party and to GOP presidential candidates such as George W. Bush. Between 2000 and 2002 alone, Timken's Canton-based bearing and steel company gave more than $350,000 to Republican causes, while Timken himself gave more than $120,000. This year, he is one of George W. Bush's campaign Pioneers, and has already pulled in more than $350,000 for the president's reelection bid.

While Diebold has received the most attention, it actually isn't the biggest maker of computerized election machines. That honor goes to Omaha-based ES&S, and its Republican roots may be even stronger than Diebold's.

The firm, which is privately held, began as a company called Data Mark, which was founded in the early 1980s by Bob and Todd Urosevich. In 1984, brothers William and Robert Ahmanson bought a 68 percent stake in Data Mark, and changed the company's name to American Information Services (AIS). Then, in 1987, McCarthy & Co, an Omaha investment group, acquired a minority share in AIS.

In 1992, investment banker Chuck Hagel, president of McCarthy & Co, became chairman of AIS. Hagel, who had been touted as a possible Senate candidate in 1993, was again on the list of likely GOP contenders heading into the 1996 contest. In January of 1995, while still chairman of ES&S, Hagel told the Omaha World-Herald that he would likely make a decision by mid-March of 1995. On March 15, according to a letter provided by Hagel's Senate staff, he resigned from the AIS board, noting that he intended to announce his candidacy. A few days later, he did just that.

A little less than eight months after steppind down as director of AIS, Hagel surprised national pundits and defied early polls by defeating Benjamin Nelson, the state's popular former governor. It was Hagel's first try for public office. Nebraska elections officials told The Hill that machines made by AIS probably tallied 85 percent of the votes cast in the 1996 vote, although Nelson never drew attention to the connection. Hagel won again in 2002, by a far healthier margin. That vote is still angrily disputed by Hagel's Democratic opponent, Charlie Matulka, who did try to make Hagel's ties to ES&S an issue in the race and who asked that state elections officials conduct a hand recount of the vote. That request was rebuffed, because Hagel's margin of victory was so large.

As might be expected, Hagel has been generously supported by his investment partners at McCarthy & Co. -- since he first ran, Hagel has received about $15,000 in campaign contributions from McCarthy & Co. executives. And Hagel still owns more than $1 million in stock in McCarthy & Co., which still owns a quarter of ES&S.

If the Republican ties at Diebold and ES&S aren't enough to cause concern, argues election reform activist Bev Harris, the companies' past performances and current practices should be. Harris is author of Black Box Voting, and the woman behind the BlackBoxVoting.com web site.

The rush to embrace computerized voting, of course, began with Florida. But, in fact, one of the Sunshine State's election-day disasters was the direct result of a malfunctioning computerized voting system; a system built by Diebold. The massive screwup in Volusia County was all but lost in all the furor over hanging chads and butterfly ballots in South Florida. In part that's because county election officials avoided a total disaster by quickly conducting a hand recount of the more than 184,000 paper ballots used to feed the computerized system. But the huge computer miscount led several networks to incorrectly call the race for Bush.

The first signs that the Diebold-made system in Volusia County was malfunctioning came early on election night, when the central ballot-counting computer showed a Socialist Party candidate receiving more than 9,000 votes and Vice President Al Gore getting minus 19,000. Another 4,000 votes poured into the plus column for Bush that didn't belong there. Taken together, the massive swing seemed to indicate that Bush, not Gore, had won Florida and thus the White House. Election officials restarted the machine, and expressed confidence in the eventual results, which showed Gore beating Bush by 97,063 votes to 82,214. After the recount, Gore picked up 250 votes, while Bush picked up 154. But the erroneous numbers had already been sent to the media.

Harris has posted a series of internal Diebold memos relating to the Volusia County miscount on her website, blackboxvoting.com. One memo from Lana Hires of Global Election Systems, now part of Diebold, complains, "I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16,022 [votes] when it was uploaded." Another, from Talbot Ireland, Senior VP of Research and Development for Diebold, refers to key "replacement" votes in Volusia County as "unauthorized."

Harris has also posted a post-mortem by CBS detailing how the network managed to call Volusia County for Bush early in the morning. The report states: "Had it not been for these [computer] errors, the CBS News call for Bush at 2:17:52 AM would not have been made." As Harris notes, the 20,000-vote error shifted the momentum of the news reporting and nearly led Gore to concede.

What's particularly troubling, Harris says, is that the errors were caught only because an alert poll monitor noticed Gore's vote count going down through the evening, which of course is impossible. Diebold blamed the bizarre swing on a "faulty memory chip," which Harris claims is simply not credible. The whole episode, she contends, could easily have been consciously programmed by someone with a partisan agenda. Such claims might seem far-fetched, were it not for the fact that a cadre of computer scientists showed a year ago that the software running Diebold's new machines can be hacked with relative ease.

The hackers posted some 13,000 pages of internal documents on various web sites – documents that were pounced on by Harris and others. A desperate Diebold went to court to stop this "wholesale reproduction" of company material. By November of last year, the Associated Press reported that Diebold had sent cease-and-desist letters to programmers and students at two dozen universities, including the University of California at Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The letters were ignored by at least one group of students at Swarthmore College, who vowed an "electronic civil disobedience" campaign.

Equally troubling, of course, is the fact that the touch-screen systems Diebold, ES&S, and the other companies have on the market now aren’t designed to generate a polling place paper trail. While ES&S says it is open to providing voter receipts, and has even designed a prototype machine that does so, the company isn’t going to roll that prototype into production until state and federal elections officials make it mandatory.

Lawmakers in Congress and the Ohio legislature are scrambling to do just that. In Ohio, State Sen. Teresa Fedor of Toledo has proposed a bill requiring a "voter verified paper audit trail" for all elections in the state. Congressman Rush Holt of New Jersey is pushing a similar measure in Washington. But the efforts are being fought by Republicans in both places. In Ohio, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell has already signed $100 million in agreements to purchase voting machines. The bulk of the purchases would go to Diebold and ES&S, and Blackwell insists there is no need for paper receipts. Considering the political opposition and the companies’ wait-and-see approach, it’s almost certain that voters using touch-screen machines in November will walk away from their polling places without ever seeing a printed record of their choices.

At a trade fair held recently here in Columbus, a wide range of companies seeking to fill that void demonstrated technologies that could easily and cheaply provide paper receipts for ballots. One such product, called TruVote, provides two separate voting receipts. The first is shown under plexiglass, and displays the choices made by a vote on the touch screen. This copy falls into a lockbox after the voter approves it. The second is provided to the voter. TruVote is already attracting fans, among them Brooks Thomas, Tennessee's Coordinator of Elections. "I've not seen anything that compares to [the] TruVote validation system." Georgia's Assistant Secretary of State, Terrell L. Slayton, Jr., calls the device is the "perfect solution." But Blackwell argues the campaign for a paper ballot trail for Ohio is an attempt to "derail" reform. He says he'll comply with the demand only if Congress mandates it.

Meanwhile, in Upper Arlington, a ‘lower profile' Wally O'Dell and his wife recently petitioned the city to get permission to serve liquor at future fundraisers and political gatherings.
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news_politics&Number=293073148

Bloggers Cry 'Foul:' Widespread Allegations of Election Fiction

News/Comment; Posted on: 2004-11-03 13:39:41

Experimental "Black Boxes" called faith-based voting machines - With no hard copy, electronic information can be changed with one swift click, permanently.

As Kevin Alfred Strom wrote in National Vanguard: "Don't even bother going by the voting booth unless it's on time you would have spent relaxing and unwinding anyway, unwinding from the truly important work you have to do."

Predictably, widespread and severe election irregularities have already surfaced nationwide on samizdat sites online. If only some of these reports hold water, it will not matter how anyone votes ever again; electronic hacking leaves little, if any, trace -- and there is no hard copy. Although reports are flooding in online, it appears that the mass media have only reported a few cases of "flipping votes." A Black Box blackout?

Ask yourself, if you bank online, do you make frequent printouts and screenshots, or do you trust your account balance to strangers? Do you keep receipts from the ATM? With the stakes of a national election so much higher, why should it be different?

At Black Box Voting, massive reports of election fraud and tampering, from coast to coast are already being documented. "The number one complaint coming in from the field to various BBV observer groups is flipping votes, [ie, machines actually changing votes while the voter watches]. BBV companies and election officials blame voters, instead of poorly designed machines." With new electronic "Black Box" machines, need a President ever fear an election again?

At the same site, one online blogger, Brian Nicks on Wednesday, November 03 @ 05:23:14 CST, writes: "Want to know what this image (pictured) is? It's a picture I took with my cellphone-camera of an electronic voting machine screen. I took it today when I went down to vote for the next President of the Unites States in Santa Clara California.

"The screen says "Vote Save Error #9. Use the Backup Voting Procedure." A news crew was on hand to film Californians using the voting machines. I pointed to this particular screen and said "There's your story - right there. I just took a picture of the screen and plan to share it with 6.4 billion of my closest friends on the Internet tonight. I suggest you do the same." To my astonishment, the cameraman did shoot some footage of the screen, though I don't know what was shown later on television.

"Now that I've told you the story behind the picture, I need not mention the maelstrom of thoughts that go through my head whenever I look at it -- the picture is testament enough. The next revolution will not be televised. The next revolution will be blogged.

"This says it all."

Widespread complaints, with documentation surface of Black Box malfunction, and "reprogramming of machines" with a swift click. For example, in Houston, TX, five of the eleven machines "went down." "They still looked to be powered on. Someone came out and started looking at them, but they were still not fixed when I finished voting," writes eSlate on Tuesday, November 02, 22:57:20 CST. What happened to the "votes?"

According to leftist Indymedia.com:

As early as November 1, the day before the "election," "new information indicates that hackers may have targeted the central computers counting votes. It appears that such an attack may already have taken place, in a primary election six weeks ago in King County, Washington.

"Voters from around the country have reported on their experiences at the polls. The League of Pissed Off Voters, a network doing national voter-organizing out of New York City, compiled a preliminary list of reports of voting irregularities in New Orleans, LA; St. Petersburg, FL; Toledo, OH; Columbus, OH; Beloit, WI; and Milwuakee, WI. Other reported voting problems posted to IMCs include Felton, CA; Nashville, TN; Michigan and Ohio; Portland, OR; Boston, MA; Pittsburgh, PA; Florida and Pennsylvania; St. Louis, MO; Tulsa, OK; Manhattan, NY; Urbana, IL; Brooklyn, NY; and elsewhere.

"Protests have been organized throughout the US. A nationwide Beyond Voting movement, sponsored by a broad coalition of anti-war/anti-empire/global justice organizations, is planning for street demonstrations in over 30 cities TODAY (Wednesday, Nov. 3), the day after the election."
 

Lone Eagle Woman

Veteran Member
Now I wouldn't pass that by with considering the criminal Bush Gang.
I have been wondering that they had stolen the election from Kerry.
This doesn't surprise me onebit. Anyway i don't Trust any of them
in Washington anymore. And will be heading to the deep wilds to
live. And for those that think George Bush is some Godly Saint, or Kerry
for that matter then how deluded are you. Our Goose was
cooked long ago and any of them in Washington, except for maybe
Ron Paul, do NOT have our best interests at heart. All they are are
pupputs for the NW Corporate Order. Soon it will be ......

Sieg Hiel! Sieg Hiel! Sieg Hiel Bush!
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/

Tomorrow the Bush Regime Will Steal the Election
Posted November 1, 2004 thepeoplesvoice.org

By: the editor

Well Americans if you think we are going to choose a new president tomorrow you are sadly mistaken. The republicans have been busily stealing millions of democratic registration forms over the past four years and rigging the entire election process. Tomorrow the Bush regime will steal the election in front of the world and there is not one damn thing we can do to stop it.

Reports are already coming in across the country of efforts to confuse, intimidate, and discourage democratic voters from going to the polls. Ion Sancho, the supervisor of elections in Leon County in Florida, told the Washington Post, "In my 16 years as an election administrator I've never seen anything like this." In Florida thousands of students have learned that not only was their party registration switched to Republican but their home address was changed without their knowledge. This means that when they show up to vote at their local precinct their names won't appear on the voting rolls.

In Pittsburgh, fliers were handed out on what looked like county letterhead that claimed voting had been extended an extra day, "due to immense voter turnout expected on Tuesday." The fliers said Republicans should vote on Tuesday and Democrats should vote on Wednesday.

In Wisconsin fliers purportedly from the a group calling itself the "Milwaukee Black Voters League", told voters, "If you've already voted in any election this year, you can't vote in the presidential election. If you violate any of these laws, you can get ten years in prison and your children will get taken away from you."

In Georgia's Atkinson County, the Republicans challenged the voting eligibility of 78 percent of the county's registered Latino voters based solely on race.

In South Carolina, a letter purportedly from the NAACP warned voters they can not vote if they have outstanding parking tickets or have failed to pay child support. Meanwhile in Ohio, Republicans will be challenging the eligibility of voters at the polls tomorrow, based on a law dating back to the Jim Crow era that was originally aimed at disenfranchising black voters.

According to Elliot Mincberg of the People for the American Way Foundation reports are that an organization that has been funded by the Republican National Committee to conduct voter registration, in both Nevada and Oregon has collected and destroyed untold thousands of democratic registration forms.

The Ohio Secretary of State republican, Ken Blackwell, just decided that thousands of democratic voter registrations that were streaming into the county offices around the state, brought in by groups like America Coming Together, would be rejected. They came in on paper that was less than 80 pound weight -- a thick paper similar to a wedding invitation. Although there is an ancient election rule dating back to a time when county officials used index card boxes to sort and store registrations, today the actual registration information is stored on computers and the old wooden index card boxes are no longer used.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Bush administration lawyers are at this moment attempting to overturn decades of legal precedence by claiming that under the Help America Vote Act which was passed after the 2000 election, only Attorney General John Ashcroft -- and not the voters - has a right to ask federal courts to enforce voting rights. Veteran voting rights lawyers say this would overturn decades of legal precedent and could eliminate any legal challenge to Tuesday's election. According to the paper, since the civil rights era of the 1960s, individuals have gone to federal court to enforce their right to vote, often with the support of groups such as the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, the League of Women Voters.

The Neocon election rigging juggernaut lurches forward unstoppable. Three Republican dominated corporations control over 80% of the vote count in the United States: Sequoia Voting Systems Inc; Electronic Systems & Software Inc. (ES&S); and Diebold" Inc. As this transition has taken place a pattern of election upsets which overwhelmingly favors Republican candidates is obvious. The Neocons have determined that elections can be manipulated easily with the new touch screen voting systems and when accompanied by a media pounding of lies the public will accept the rigged election results as fact. The greatest advantage of the new touch screen voting scam is the removal of a paper trail and the blockage of access to the inner workings of the software.

When a voter touches the screen to select a candidate there is no confirmation that the machine has actually registered the correct selection. In the old punch-card and fill-in-the-circle paper systems, voters could see their choice marked on the ballot. In the event of any question a record of the vote existed and a recount was possible. Since the new electronic systems leave no paper trail there can be no recount and the results must be accepted as fact. Attempts to examine the code used by the machines in Florida were blocked in the courts by the GOP citing, "proprietary/trade secrecy" protections under a law, which made it impossible for the DNC to ascertain how the machines tabulated votes.

It would be admirable if the American people could resist this rigged presidential election as they did the scam of 2000. Of course the ‘Supreme Court five’ will uphold the "proprietary/trade secrecy" protections and the bogus election results will be ruled as legitimate. This election fraud has been so well planned that it probably won’t make it into the courts. With the help of the media, the Neocons will deliver the deathblow to democracy at the touch screen voting terminals.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

An Election Spoiled Rotten
Posted November 1, 2004 thepeoplesvoice.org

By: Greg Palast

It's not even Election Day yet, and the Kerry-Edwards campaign is already down by a almost a million votes. That's because, in important states like Ohio, Florida and New Mexico, voter names have been systematically removed from the rolls and absentee ballots have been overlooked—overwhelmingly in minority areas, like Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, where Hispanic voters have a 500 percent greater chance of their vote being "spoiled." Investigative journalist Greg Palast reports on the trashing of the election.

Greg Palast, contributing editor to Harper's magazine, investigated the manipulation of the vote for BBC Television's Newsnight. The documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes," based on his New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has been released this month on DVD .

John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not one ballot has yet been counted. He's also losing big time in Colorado and Ohio; and he's way down in Florida, though the votes won't be totaled until Tuesday night.

Through a combination of sophisticated vote rustling—ethnic cleansing of voter rolls, absentee ballots gone AWOL, machines that "spoil" votes—John Kerry begins with a nationwide deficit that could easily exceed one million votes.

The Urge To Purge

Colorado Secretary of State Donetta Davidson just weeks ago removed several thousand voters from the state's voter rolls. She tagged felons as barred from voting. What makes this particularly noteworthy is that, unlike like Florida and a handful of other Deep South states, Colorado does not bar ex-cons from voting. Only those actually serving their sentence lose their rights.

There's no known, verified case of a Colorado convict voting illegally from the big house. Because previous purges have wiped away the rights of innocents, federal law now bars purges within 90 days of a presidential election to allow a voter to challenge their loss of civil rights.

To exempt her action from the federal rule, Secretary Davidson declared an "emergency." However, the only "emergency" in Colorado seems to be President Bush's running dead, even with John Kerry in the polls.

Why the sudden urge to purge? Davidson's chief of voting law enforcement is Drew Durham, who previously worked for the attorney general of Texas. This is what the former spokeswoman for the Lone Star state's attorney general says of Mr. Durham: He is, "unfit for public office... a man with a history of racism and ideological zealotry." Sounds just right for a purge that affects, in the majority, non-white voters.

From my own and government investigations of such purge lists, it is unlikely that this one contains many, if any, illegal voters.

But it does contain Democrats. The Dems may not like to shout about this, but studies indicate that 90-some percent of people who have served time for felonies will, after prison, vote Democratic. One suspects Colorado's Republican secretary of state knows that.

Ethnic Cleansing Of The Voter Rolls

We can't leave the topic of ethnically cleansing the voter rolls without a stop in Ohio, where a Republican secretary of state appears to be running to replace Katherine Harris.

In Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), some citizens have been caught Registering While Black. A statistical analysis of would-be voters in Southern states by the watchdog group Democracy South indicates that black voters are three times as likely as white voters to have their registration requests "returned" (i.e., subject to rejection).

And to give a boost to this whitening of the voter rolls, for the first time since the days of Jim Crow, the Republicans are planning mass challenges of voters on Election Day. The GOP's announced plan to block 35,000 voters in Ohio ran up against the wrath of federal judges; so, in Florida, what appear to be similar plans had been kept under wraps until the discovery of documents called "caging" lists. The voters on the “caging” lists, disclosed last week by BBC Television London, are, almost exclusively, residents of African-American neighborhoods.

Such racial profiling as part of a plan to block voters is, under the Voting Rights Act, illegal. Nevertheless, neither the Act nor federal judges have persuaded the party of Lincoln to join the Democratic Party in pledging not to distribute blacklists to block voters on Tuesday.

Absentee Ballots Go AWOL

It's 10pm: Do you know where your absentee ballot is? Voters wary about computer balloting are going postal: in some states, mail-in ballot requests are up 500 percent. The probability that all those votes—up to 15 million—will be counted is zip.

Those who mail in ballots are very trusting souls. Here's how your trust is used. In the August 31 primaries in Florida, Palm Beach Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore (a.k.a. Madame Butterfly Ballot) counted 37,839 absentee votes. But days before, her office told me only 29,000 ballots had been received. When this loaves-and-fishes miracle was disclosed, she was forced to recount, cutting the tally to 31,138.

Had she worked it the other way, disappearing a few thousand votes instead of adding additional ones, there would be almost no way to figure out the fix (or was it a mistake?). Mail-in voter registration forms are protected by federal law. Local government must acknowledge receiving your registration and must let you know if there's a problem (say, with signature or address) that invalidates your registration. But your mail-in vote is an unprotected crapshoot. How do you know if your ballot was received? Was it tossed behind a file cabinet—or tossed out because you did not include your middle initial? In many counties, you won't know.

And not every official is happy to have your vote. It is well-reported that Broward County, Fla., failed to send out nearly 60,000 absentee ballots. What has not been nationally reported is that Broward's elections supervisor is a Jeb Bush appointee who took the post only after the governor took the unprecedented step of removing the prior elected supervisor who happened be a Democrat.

A Million Votes In The Electoral Trash Can

"If the vote is stolen here, it will be stolen in Rio Arriba County," a New Mexico politician told me. That's a reasoned surmise: in 2000, one in 10 votes simply weren't counted—chucked out, erased, discarded. In the voting biz, the technical term for these vanishing votes is "spoilage." Citizens cast ballots, but the machines don't notice. In one Rio Arriba precinct in the last go-'round, not one single vote was cast for president—or, at least, none showed up on the machines.

Not everyone's vote spoils equally. Rio Arriba is 73 percent Hispanic. I asked nationally recognized vote statistician Dr. Philip Klinkner of Hamilton College to run a "regression" analysis of the Hispanic ballot spoilage in the Enchanted State. He calculated that a brown voter is 500 percent more likely to have their vote spoiled than a white voter. And It's worse for Native Americans. Vote spoilage is epidemic near Indian reservations.

Votes don't spoil because they're left out of the fridge. It comes down to the machines. Just as poor people get the crap schools and crap hospitals, they get the crap voting machines.

It's bad for Hispanics; but for African Americans, it's a ballot-box holocaust. An embarrassing little fact of American democracy is that, typically, two million votes are spoiled in national elections, registering no vote or invalidated. Based on studies by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and the Harvard Law School Civil Rights project, about 54 percent of those ballots are cast by African Americans. One million black votes vanished—phffft!

There's a lot of politicians in both parties that like it that way; suppression of the minority is the way they get elected. Whoever is to blame, on Tuesday, the Kerry-Edwards ticket will take the hit. In Rio Arriba, Democrats have an eight-to-one registration edge over Republicans. Among African Americanvoters...well, you can do the arithmetic yourself.

The total number of votes siphoned out of America's voting booths is so large, you won't find the issue reported in our self-glorifying news media. The one million missing black, brown and red votes spoiled, plus the hundreds of thousands flushed from voter registries, is our nation's dark secret: an apartheid democracy in which wealthy white votes almost always count, but minorities are often purged or challenged or simply not recorded. In effect, Kerry is down by a million votes before one lever is pulled, card punched or touch-screen touched.
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.htm

Published on Thursday, August 28, 2003 by the Cleveland Plain Dealer
Voting Machine Controversy
by Julie Carr Smyth

COLUMBUS - The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.

O'Dell attended a strategy pow-wow with wealthy Bush benefactors - known as Rangers and Pioneers - at the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month. The next week, he penned invitations to a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser to benefit the Ohio Republican Party's federal campaign fund - partially benefiting Bush - at his mansion in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington.

The letter went out the day before Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, also a Republican, was set to qualify Diebold as one of three firms eligible to sell upgraded electronic voting machines to Ohio counties in time for the 2004 election.

Blackwell's announcement is still in limbo because of a court challenge over the fairness of the selection process by a disqualified bidder, Sequoia Voting Systems.

In his invitation letter, O'Dell asked guests to consider donating or raising up to $10,000 each for the federal account that the state GOP will use to help Bush and other federal candidates - money that legislative Democratic leaders charged could come back to benefit Blackwell.

They urged Blackwell to remove Diebold from the field of voting-machine companies eligible to sell to Ohio counties.

This is the second such request in as many months. State Sen. Jeff Jacobson, a Dayton-area Republican, asked Blackwell in July to disqualify Diebold after security concerns arose over its equipment.

"Ordinary Ohioans may infer that Blackwell's office is looking past Diebold's security issues because its CEO is seeking $10,000 donations for Blackwell's party - donations that could be made with statewide elected officials right there in the same room," said Senate Democratic Leader Greg DiDonato.

Diebold spokeswoman Michelle Griggy said O'Dell - who was unavailable to comment personally - has held fund-raisers in his home for many causes, including the Columbus Zoo, Op era Columbus, Catholic Social Services and Ohio State University.

Ohio GOP spokesman Jason Mauk said the party approached O'Dell about hosting the event at his home, the historic Cotswold Manor, and not the other way around. Mauk said that under federal campaign finance rules, the party cannot use any money from its federal account for state- level candidates.

"To think that Diebold is somehow tainted because they have a couple folks on their board who support the president is just unfair," Mauk said.

Griggy said in an e-mail statement that Diebold could not comment on the political contributions of individual company employees.

Blackwell said Diebold is not the only company with political connections - noting that lobbyists for voting-machine makers read like a who's who of Columbus' powerful and politically connected.

"Let me put it to you this way: If there was one person uniquely involved in the political process, that might be troubling," he said. "But there's no one that hasn't used every legitimate avenue and bit of leverage that they could legally use to get their product looked at. Believe me, if there is a political lever to be pulled, all of them have pulled it."

Blackwell said he stands by the process used for selecting voting machine vendors as fair, thorough and impartial.

As of yesterday, however, that determination lay with Ohio Court of Claims Judge Fred Shoemaker.

He heard closing arguments yesterday over whether Sequoia was unfairly eliminated by Blackwell midway through the final phase of negotiations.

Shoemaker extended a temporary restraining order in the case for 14 days, but said he hopes to issue his opinion sooner than that.

© 2003 The Plain Dealer
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
http://www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR110304.htm

Was the Ohio Election Honest and Fair?

TERESA FEDOR, [via Greg Lestini, glestini@maild.sen.state.oh.us]
Ohio State Senator Teresa Fedor said today: "There was trouble with our elections in Ohio at every stage. It's been a battle getting people registered to vote, getting to the ballot on voting day and getting that vote to count. There is a pattern of voter suppression; that's why I called for [Ohio Secretary of State] Blackwell's resignation more than a month ago. Blackwell, while claiming to run an unbiased elections process, was also the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio. Additionally, he was the spokesperson for the anti-business, anti-family constitutional amendment 'Issue 1,' and a failed initiative to repeal a crucial sales-tax revenue source for the state. Blackwell learned his moves from the Katherine Harris playbook of Florida 2000, and we won't stand for it."

BILL MOSS, bmoss@hbcuconnect.com
Executive vice president of HBCU Connect, which works to connect historically black colleges and universities, Moss said today: "I stayed in line two and a half hours. I've never seen anything like this in my life. There were fewer voting machines in the highly concentrated black areas, creating the long lines so as to frustrate the voters. But we knew the Republicans -- many of whom became Republicans because they opposed equal rights for blacks -- would try to drive down black turnout. ... [Ohio Secretary of State] Blackwell was confusing things by raising issues like the paper weight of cards."

SUSAN TRUITT, susan.truitt@lexisnexis.com, www.caseohio.org
Co-founder of the Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections, Truitt said today: "Seven counties in Ohio have electronic voting machines and none of them have paper trails. That alone raises issues of accuracy and integrity as to how we can verify the count. A recount without a paper trail is meaningless; you just get a regurgitation of the data. Last year, Blackwell tried to get the entire state to buy new machines without a paper trail. The exit polls, virtually the only check we have against tampering with a vote without a paper trail, had shown Kerry with a lead. ... A poll worker told me this morning that there were no tapes of the results posted on some machines; on other machines the posted count was zero, which obviously shouldn't be the case."

DAN WALLACH, dwallach@cs.rice.edu, www.cs.rice.edu/~dwallach, www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR062104.htm
Wallach is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Rice University in Houston specializing in building secure and robust software systems for the Internet. Along with colleagues at Johns Hopkins, Wallach co-authored a groundbreaking study that revealed significant flaws in electronic voting systems. He appeared on an Institute for Public Accuracy news release in June entitled "Electronic Voting -- Danger for Democracy."

BOB FITRAKIS, rfitraki@cscc.edu
An attorney who monitored the election with the Election Protection Coalition, Fitrakis said today: "There were far fewer machines in the inner-city districts than in the suburbs. I documented at least a dozen people leaving because the lines were so long in African-American areas. Blackwell did a great deal of suppressing before the election -- like attempting to refuse to process voter registration forms. The absentee ballots were misleading in Franklin County. Kerry was the third line down, but you had to punch number four to vote for him. Bush was getting both his votes as well as Kerry's."

HARVEY WASSERMAN, windhw@aol.com, www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/810
Senior editor of FreePress.org, an Ohio-based web site, and co-author with Fitrakis of the recent article "Twelve Ways Bush is Now Stealing the Ohio Vote," Wasserman said today: "There was a huge fight around ensuring that the electronic voting machines had paper trails and there was resistance by the secretary of state, so there is no paper trail. There were some victories to ensure a paper trial -- by 2006. There were limited numbers of voting machines in African-American districts. Some people had to wait up to eight hours, far more than in predominantly white areas."

BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT:

On November 9, 2003, the New York Times reported: "In mid-August, Walden W. O'Dell, the chief executive of Diebold Inc., sat down at his computer to compose a letter inviting 100 wealthy and politically inclined friends to a Republican Party fund-raiser, to be held at his home in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. 'I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year,' wrote Mr. O'Dell, whose company is based in Canton, Ohio. That is hardly unusual for Mr. O'Dell. A longtime Republican, he is a member of President Bush's 'Rangers and Pioneers,' an elite group of loyalists who have raised at least $100,000 each for the 2004 race. But it is not the only way that Mr. O'Dell is involved in the election process. Through Diebold Election Systems, a subsidiary in McKinney, Tex., his company is among the country's biggest suppliers of paperless, touch-screen voting machines. Judging from Federal Election Commission data, at least 8 million people will cast their ballots using Diebold machines next November. ... Some people find Mr. O'Dell's pairing of interests -- as voting-machine magnate and devoted Republican fund-raiser -- troubling."
www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/business/yourmoney/09vote.html

On November 3, 2004, Reuters reported: "Voters across the United States reported problems with electronic touch-screen systems on Tuesday in what critics said could be a sign that the machines used by one-third of the population were prone to error.... "
www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1103-03.htm

On October 24, 2004, the Palm Beach Post reported: "A federal judge on Monday rejected U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler's claim that paperless electronic voting violates the constitutional rights of Floridians...."
www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/news/epaper/2004/10/26/c1a_wexler_1026.html

On November 3, 2004, Thomas Crampton wrote in the 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...."
www.iht.com/articles/2004/11/02/news/observe.html
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
http://inn.globalfreepress.com/modules/news/index.php?storytopic=27

What went wrong in Cuyahoga?-
Did they count 90.000 votes in time?

November 3, STAFF

At around 1:00 AM this morning, we reported, that the Mayor of Columbus, Ohio, which is Michael B. Coleman, reported, that though Bush is leading with 100.000 votes, 190.000 Kerry Votes are "coming now from Cuyahoga".

We followed here religiously the county votes on the website of Ohio.
They had only 79.78% Precincts Reporting at that time, while CNN claimed already 87%.
CNN, Ohio 1:00 a.m. ET : BUSH 51% KERRY 49 (Reporting: 87%)

Bush was then constantly leading with between 100.000 and 119.140 votes.
This morning the total was 2,796,147 (Kerry had 2,659,664), which means 136.483 leading.

ToddWiley.Blogspot seems to have noticed the same:

"..At one point, the Fox talking heads were arguing about Cuyahoga county in Ohio putting Kerry back into the race, but with a few clicks, I could see that Cuyahoga was already 90% in, and there simply wasn't enough votes left to make a difference..."
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
http://stolenelection2004.com/Florida.htm

Surprising Pattern in FL counties by voting machine type
by Kathy Dopp, Nov. 3, 2004

Please look at the FL county percent change numbers below.

I am a math type and I found some very surprising results in Florida
counties by doing some fairly simple examination of Florida's county
results by voting machine types - not AT ALL what I expected to find,
in fact just the opposite!

Is it possible to rig op-scan voting systems? Or is there another
plausible explanation?

Source for this info is Verified Voting - Florida Election Equipment and Florida Dept of State - Division of Elections

I calculated "percent change" comparisons of election results by
county with voter party registration by county, so I compared voter party
registration rates in each county with election results by party in
each county in Florida, and look (below) what I found!!

I calced "differences" between expected votes based on voter
registration for dems and repubs in each Florida county times the actual total
vote counts, divided by "expected" results based on voter registration
proportion times actual vote counts in each county.

There is a striking difference in patterns with a HUGE percent change
that Republicans picked up in op-scan counties that is amazingly larger
than in DRE counties.

Even given possible demographic differences, I would never have
expected such a huge difference in percent change based on voting machine
type.

Please take a look. It might be interesting to determine why the
pattern in Florida's op-scan counties are so amazingly different than one
would normally expect to find.

COUNTIES USING DRE ES&S TOUCHSCREEN:

County REP DEM
Broward 29% 27%
Charlotte 24% 35%
Collier 22% 40%
Hillsborough 51% 11%
Indian River 17% 30%
Lake 27% 14%
Lee 24% 34%
Martin 9% 51%
Miami-Dade 32% 25%
Nassau 48% -29%
Palm Beach 20% 35%
Pasco 35% 19%
Pinellas 27% 31%
Sarasota 12% 45%
Sumter 43% -11%


COUNTIES USING PRECINCT OP-SCAN SYSTEMS:
REP DEM
Alachua 259% -15%
Baker 312% 12%
Bay 126% 82%
Bradford 253% 13%
Brevard 123% 58%
Calhoun 741% -23%
Citrus 141% 46%
Clay 77% 197%
Columbia 219% 19%
DeSoto 293% -2%
Dixie 565% -11%
Duval 171% 25%
Escambia 128% 60%
Flagler 145% 34%
Franklin 529% -24%
Gadsden 793% -64%
Gilchrist 229% 20%
Glades 303% -11%
Gulf 276% -2%
Hamilton 571% -30%
Hardee 274% 9%
Hendry 225% 4%
Hernando 142% 36%
Highlands 125% 53%
Holmes 369% 6%
Jackson 355% -14%
Jefferson 382% -39%
Lafayette 656% -11%
Leon 276% -35%
Levy 262% 5%
Liberty 1173% -28%
Madison 571% -36%
Manatee 126% 71%
Marion 132% 47%
Monroe 159% 36%
Okaloosa 75% 214%
Okeechobee 236% -2%
Orange 185% 24%
Osceola 205% 29%
Polk 157% 38%
Putnam 256% 2%
Santa Rosa 79% 175%
Seminole 124% 80%
St. Johns 88% 105%
St. Lucie 174% 40%
Suwannee 273% 11%
Taylor 429% -16%
Union 447% -4%
Volusia 178% 18%
Wakulla 313% -14%
Walton 100% 99%
Washington 293% 6%
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
http://stolenelection2004.com/Florida2.htm

Florida numbers vs 2000 - something is wrong
by BuckMulligan
Wed Nov 3rd, 2004 at 02:22:13 PST

2000 2004
Bush 2,912,790 Bush 3,836,216
Gore 2,912,253 Kerry 3,459,293
Nader 97,421 Nader 32,035
Other 40,193 Other 28,382

= 7,355,296 (2004) - 5,963,657 (2000) = 1,392,639 new voters (99%
precincts counted, no provisionals or absentees).

So, we have 1.39 million new voters, and Kerry loses by 376,923 votes?
Thus, he lost an overwhelming majority of them, or he lost an overwhelming
majority of regular voters - much, much more than Gore lost.

We have 77,197 fewer third party votes, but Kerry loses the vast
majority of these?

Exit polling numbers show that Kerry had more Hispanic and Cuban
support than Gore did, and Kerry lost?

Most exit polls in Florida showed Kerry leading, yet he loses by a
massive 5%?

Diaries :: BuckMulligan's diary ::

All this after an incredibly failed presidency?

After looking at these numbers, I can come to only one conclusion. The
Diebold machines were rigged.

There is no way provisional or absentee ballot are going to make up the
376,923 votes - unless a LOT of people were challenged in the urban
areas and had to fill out provisionals.

These Florida numbers JUST DON'T MAKE SENSE!
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
http://www.rense.com/general59/steI.HTM

Fixed - The Stealing Of
Another Election
11-3-4

Democratic Underground.com

Kerry winning Exit Polls - FRAUD LOOKS PROBABLE

SoCalDem has done a statistical analysis...

...on several swing states, and EVERY STATE that has EVoting but no paper trails has an unexplained advantage for Bush of around +5% when comparing exit polls to actual results.

In EVERY STATE that has paper audit trails on their EVoting, the exit poll results match the actual results reported within the margin of error.

So, we have MATCHING RESULTS for exit polls vs. voting with audits

vs.

A 5% unexplained advantage for Bush without audits.

Maybe Dubayah believes God will see him through this, but it's going to take more than blind faith to pull the wool over the data and the facts.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...
Edited on Wed Nov-03-04 12:42 AM by SoCalDemocrat
EDIT:

Analysis of the polling data vs actual data and voting systems supports the hypothesis that evoting may be to blame in the discrepancies. Nevada has evoting but with verified receipts. In that state the Exit Polling matches the actual results within .1% accuracy. However for other swing states Bush has unexplainable leads.

I'm still compiling data. Please help me determine what voting methods are being used in swing states and which are evoting without audit trails. Post your data under the individual state responses below.

-------------------------------------------

Kerry is well ahead in exit polls, but still losing the counts. WTH is going on?

Kerry is well ahead in Exit Polling in Ohio. We're being screwed.

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/O...

Male: 51/49 Kerry 47%
Female: 53/47 Kerry 53%

Dem: 91/8 Kerry 38%
Rep: 94/6 Bush 37%
Ind: 60/39 Kerry 24%


Here is exit polling for Florida (3,824,794 votes for Kerry & Bush)

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/F...

Male: 52/47 Kerry 46%
Female: 52/48 Kerry 54%

Dem: 86/13 Kerry 38%
Rep: 92/7 Bush 39%
Ind: 60/38 Kerry 23%

3,824,794 votes for Kerry & Bush
2065388 Women (54% of total)
1759405 Men (46% of total)

Bush leads male vote by 5% of M = 87970

Kerry leads female vote by 4% of M = 82615

That means Bush is ahead by just 5355 votes in exit polling in FL.

Another odd thing is that there are more Reps then Dems in Florida by 1%, which is not expected. Either there are more voting Republicans in FL than Democrats, a first and not matching known statistics, or more Republicans were exit polled than Democrats. If the exit poll is off by just 1% that's a difference of 382479 more voters who are Democracts.

The results being posted however show Bush ahead 326,000 actual votes. This is simply not possible from the exit polling numbers. Even skewed for a 5% higher Republican vs. Democrat turnout from 2000, it doesn't add up.


WISCONSIN:

Kerry leads Female voters by 7%, Bush leads male voters by 7%. Male vs. Female voter turnout is 47% M, 53% F. That means Kerry statistically has a 7% edge in exit polling in Wisconsin.

Actual results however show Bush ahead by 1%, an unexplained difference of 8%.

NEVADA:

Just checked, same pattern. Kerry leads in the exit polls by a clear margin, but is still behind in the reported results. This state is even closer. Actual is just 1% favor of Bush. Exit polls show Kerry with a wider margin. Women favored Kerry by 8% here out of 52% of total voters. Men favored Bush by just 6% out of 48% of total voters. Actual reported results don't match exit polling AT ALL in Nevada.

*** KERRY leads by 1.3% in exit polls in NV ***

Can someone determine what percentage of precincts are DIEBOLD or electronic voting machines in these swing states? Of those compare the expected voting results from Male vs. Female against the results reported by electronic vs. non-electronic voting places.

My HYPOTHESIS is we will find a discrepancy in the electronic systems vs. the exit polls and the non-electronic systems.

ttp://www.democraticunderground.com
/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&add
ress=132x1295396

How The Election Was Stolen

From Roz Hill
roz_hill_2u@hotmail.com
11-3-4

I watched the election results all night and into this morning. There are some very important issues to share.

One is the surprise expressed by the pundits wherein they acknowledge that the massive voter drives were propelled by discontent. So how did the most hated occupant of the White House manage to exceed his 45% poll average to now claim he has a huge "popular" win.

We are told that 22% voted on "morality" and that Bush took 80% of that 22%, and that is how he won. However, that leaves 78% who were focused on Kerry issues. Why aren,t we told the percentages of the 78%???

The second surprise for the media was that the results didn,t match the exit polls AT ALL. The media has gracefully claimed they "just got it wrong." You remember we didn,t have exit pollsters in 2002. It saved any disagreement with THAT Republican "sweep." In fact, the pollsters have always been 100% accurate, with just 1 to 2% polling data, in legitimate elections. Bush took the Texas governorship from Ann Richards when she had a 70% approval rating. Is it magic?

My "I TOLD YOU SO" is that I have SCREAMED since 2000 that if we don,t get rid of touch-screen "voting" computers, NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING else will matter.

So, here are the numbers (so far): 112,596,922 voters counted in the presidential race. Bush has been consistently polling at 45%, which SHOULD have given him 50,668,614 votes, instead of 58,073,612. This translates into 7,404,998 votes being siphoned off from Kerry votes. Now, how does that magic work???

Taxpayers get hit with a bill for $3600 (or more) for EACH of the touch-screen "voting" computers, which are nothing more than dedicated COUNTERS except that they are marketed by Republicans (who vowed to ensure Bush,s victory); and the American people have not been allowed to examine or certify the software in these units.

Here is how easy it is to "make magic"

-- we need COUNTERS - (B) = Bush; (K) = Kerry; (V) = Vote; (T) = Tally

1. If V = B, add 1 to B
2. If T = 8, add 1 to B; Clear T; Skip 3
3. If V = K, add 1 to K; Add 1 to T

This extremely simple bit of programming would shift 12% of the vote from Kerry to Bush, it would defy exit polls, and it would make it look like Bush had a huge popular win. It is time that the software in these SECRET Republican-owned computers be examined with a deliberate check for instructions that could modify the vote tally.

Al-Qaeda has previously regarded the American people as victims of a crooked election in 2000. Now they regard Americans as responsible for letting this man -- who is regarded as the worst terrorist on the planet continue his tyrannous regime. I doubt that the rest of the world will accept four more years of his lies and looting.

Roz Hill
 

Slydersan

Veteran Member
You are plain and simply wasting your time. Whether or not you want to believe it - the majority of Americans want the election to be over. period. And so when Kerry conceded yesterday - he gave them just what they wanted, Closure.

As far as most people are concerned the election has been decided and you can add billions of more posts and it won't matter. The sheeple have gotten their president and gone back to sleep.
 
Wah, wah, boo hoo...I'm sick to death of the whining about throwing out provisional ballots. If people vote illegaly their votes should not count. Where are the majority of these votes cast? In the inner city or minority areas. Why? Because they are the ones who are willing to do it. They should have their extra votes thrown out and they should be thrown in jail, too!

Computer glitches may be one thing but who here really thought the election was going to be decided by the people? That's naive.
 

SouthernGal

"Don't retreat...reload"
rescath said:
Nope. The Republicans control the electronic voting machines. If you voted for Kerry on the machines, then you might be concerned.


Oh, dear God.

BUSH WON! GET OVER IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



Am I thrilled that Bush won? NO. I didn't like EITHER candidate. But, I care about my country and all this SHIT does is divide us and split us even more.

DON'T LIKE IT? Then get the Democratic party to nominate a moderate next time. I'll tell you this - Hillary Clinton will not stand a snowball's chance in hell of being elected.
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
I'm not pouting about Bush winning. You're just being immature. I can't stand either Bush or Kerry.

I'm trying to open your eyes to the fact that the election was rigged and that our right to vote is being stolen from us.

In response, you guys are simply hurling these juvenile taunts.
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
NO UN said:
BUSH WON! GET OVER IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Am I thrilled that Bush won? NO. I didn't like EITHER candidate. But, I care about my country and all this SHIT does is divide us and split us even more.

DON'T LIKE IT? Then get the Democratic party to nominate a moderate next time. I'll tell you this - Hillary Clinton will not stand a snowball's chance in hell of being elected.

If you cared about your country, you would care about the integrity of the voting system. Get over what? I can't stand Kerry either. I'm NOT a Democrat. I didn't vote for Kerry or Bush. I voted for someone who I knew stood no chance to begin with, so I'm not disappointed that my candidate lost.
 

mbo

Membership Revoked
ha ha ha, you make me laugh

rescath said:


The same CNN that named the jpeg images for Bush on their web site as a**hole.jpg and moron.jpg!!!

Ya know rescath, you should go over to Columbus, Ohio and sit in the middle of the freeway as a protest or some such.

Admit it, if it came down to having a guaranteed system that denied all illegal votes, and was 100% infallible - given the choice the Democrats would refuse it. They know where a big chunk of their votes come from!
 

chi_walker

Inactive
Thank you for all the info, Rescath, this is a sore subject for many of us, but that does not lessen the importance. This just makes me sick to consider this possibility. For years we have been warned about the risks of electronic voting with no paper record/audit, and although there here has been plenty of press and attention, nothing has been done to correct the situation.

Our right to vote is a precious right, our forefathers have *died* to protect these rights, and why more people, -- Dems, Repubs and Independents alike are not more concerned with this I will never understand. In regards to this election, however, it seems the leaders within the Democratic Party are not willing to make this an issue. Their will is just not there it seems. More and more questionable data is coming in, from the vulnerability of the software itself to how these companies are 'in bed' with the Bush/Cheney administration, yet no actions are being taken. I don't know if the Dems have struck a deal, or are just waiting until 2008, but it seems Kerry has rolled over and is not going to question the discrepancies.

I suppose a lot of this might be because they know that, if this were to be really proven, and splashed all across the evening news, that our country would be torn in two. I think even those that supported Bush would be horrified to know that their votes are not safe, and can be controlled without their knowledge. Our nation would become even more divided, the stock market would plummet with the uncertainty, and I am certain that our enemies would use this civil dissention to their advantage to weaken us further.

So, what to do about it now, knowing this? Push the Diebold/voter tampering issue, demand investigation, and be an active participant bringing this information to a head with the likely result being that our country will be pulled apart at the seams,? Or, stifle it, and accept that our votes were most likely tampered with, and accept that this election is over, like it or not, and hope that modifications can be made within this current administration to I can live with. I don't like my choices, and am not sure what to do with this knowledge now, but I am grateful to have it, nonetheless. Thanks again, Rescath.
 

fairbanksb

Freedom Isn't Free
Exit Polls
New Woes Surface in Use of Estimates

By Richard Morin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 4, 2004; Page A29

An Election Day filled with unexpected twists ended with a familiar question: What went wrong with the network exit polls?

In two previous national elections, the exit polls had behaved badly. Premature calls by the networks in Florida led to a congressional investigation in 2000. Two years later, a computer meltdown resulted in no release of data on Election Day.
spacer

On Tuesday, new problems surfaced: a 2 1/2-hour data blackout and samples that at one point or another included too many women, too few Westerners, not enough Republicans and a lead for Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry in the national survey that persisted until late in the evening.

In two instances on election night -- the results for Virginia and South Carolina -- the networks held off projecting a winner when voting ended because exit polls showed that the races were too close to call, only to see President Bush win easily in both states.

"The exit polls got it flat wrong," asserted Charles Gibson yesterday on ABC's "Good Morning America."

That is wrong, countered Joe Lenski of Edison Media Research, which conducted Tuesday's exit poll with Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool, a consortium of the major television networks and the Associated Press. "No wrong projections [of winners] were made; the projections were spot on," he said. "The members used this data with sophistication and understanding of what data can and cannot be used for."

Election Day 2004 was a roller-coaster ride for the two presidential candidates and for the political press corps. Successive waves of the national exit poll in the afternoon and evening reported that Kerry had a two- or three-percentage-point lead over Bush nationally and in several key states, including Ohio.

Preliminary exit poll results had leaked throughout the day and were posted on a number of Web sites, including the widely viewed Drudge Report site, which added to the confusion and fanned the media frenzy.

To compound the problem further, a server at Edison/Mitofsky malfunctioned shortly before 11 p.m. The glitch prevented access to any exit poll results until technicians got a backup system operational at 1:33 a.m. yesterday.

The crash occurred barely minutes before the consortium was to update its exit polling with the results of later interviewing that found Bush with a one-point lead. Instead, journalists were left relying on preliminary exit poll results released at 8:15 p.m., which still showed Kerry ahead by three percentage points.

It was only after the polls had closed in most states and the vote count was well underway in the East that it became clear that Bush was in a stronger position in several key battlegrounds, including Ohio, than early exit polls suggested.

Some problems are inevitable. A total of 13,047 randomly selected voters were interviewed Tuesday as they left their polling places, and those results were fed into computers. The accumulated results were reported several times over the course of Election Day.

Results based on the first few rounds of interviewing are usually only approximations of the final vote. Printouts warn that estimates of each candidate's support are unreliable and not for on-air use. Those estimates are untrustworthy because people who vote earlier in the day tend to be different from those who vote in the middle of the day or the evening. For instance, the early national sample Tuesday that was 59 percent female probably reflected that more women vote in the day than the evening.

That is why the early leaks anger Lenski. "The basic issue here is the leaking of this information without any sophisticated understanding or analysis, in a way that makes it look inaccurate," he said.

After the survey is completed and the votes are counted, the exit poll results are adjusted to reflect the actual vote, which in theory improves the accuracy of all the exit poll results, including the breakdown of the vote by age, gender and other characteristics.
 

chi_walker

Inactive
I think, in light of this thread, the following iinformation adds important context. This information, the history of Diebold and ES & S and their relationship with Howard Ahmanson is not new, it has been discussed openly since 2000, I just don't know why people are not ringing the warning bell more about the risks here. I would be interested in knowing what others think, once you read more background on Diebold, ES & S, and Sequoia--who backs them, etc. There is a lot of additional info on the web, btw, but be prepared to get pretty upset if you research this....This is way to partisan for my tastes. and makes me very very nervous for our future.
Fair use for educational purposes, etc.

http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=683

Whose Voting Machines
by Doug Pibel

Two of the corporations that provide nearly all of the voting machines in the United States—ES&S and Diebold—are controlled by Republicans with strong ties to the Bush administration. One company is also linked to a far-right fundamentalist Christian movement.

In a recent mailing to Republican donors, Walden O’Dell, CEO of Diebold Inc., one of three companies certified to sell electronic voting equipment to the state of Ohio, stated his commitment “to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”

All of the $195,000 Diebold has given in political contributions since 2000 went to the Republican Party or Republican candidates, as has all of the over $240,000 that the company’s directors and chief officers have donated, according to OpenSecrets.org.

Diebold and ES&S are heavily interconnected. Brothers Todd and Bob Urosevich founded American Information Services (AIS), which became ES&S when AIS merged with Business Records Corporation (BRC). Todd works at ES&S as vice president, while Bob is now president of Diebold. ES&S claims that it counted 56 percent of U.S. votes in the last four presidential elections.

AIS was initially funded by Howard Ahmanson. Ahmanson is a member of the Council for National Policy, a “steering group” linked to the Bush administration, and has holdings in ES&S. Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, former CEO of AIS, had significant AIS holdings when the company counted the votes for his surprise election victory in 1996. Hagel has been scrutinized by the Senate Ethics Committee over his investments in the McCarthy Group. ES&S, which counted the votes when Hagel was re-elected in 2002, is a subsidiary of the McCarthy Group, according to The Hill.

BRC was started with money from Texas billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt. Both Ahmanson and Hunt are large contributors to the Chalcedon Foundation, a think tank for the Christian Reconstruction movement, which advocates literal application of Old-Testament law.

The company hired by the Republican governor of Maryland to analyze Diebold’s computer voting systems, defense contractor SAIC, also has close Republican ties. SAIC reported that security flaws in Diebold’s systems could be fixed.

SAIC board members Admiral Bill Owens (former military aide to Dick Cheney), and ex-CIA chief Robert Gates, who was implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s, also serve on the board of VoteHere, a growing elections software company. SAIC itself is producing electronic voting systems in partnership with Diversified Dynamics.

SAIC has been investigated for fraud and security lapses in its electronic systems, but has received contracts for work in Iraq.
Electronic security and verifiability have become issues in the shift to computerized voting mandated by the Help America Vote Act. Voting expert Rebecca Mercuri, a Bryn Mawr College professor of computer science, argues that computer voting technology is vulnerable to error and manipulation and should not be used unless it includes paper receipts. (See YES!, Spring 2003 and Fall 2003.)
 

Ought Six

Membership Revoked
r:

Thanks for piling all this laughable crap from looney conspiracy theory & leftist websites in one thread, where it can be so easily ignored. :lol:
 

chi_walker

Inactive
How exactly is discussing the potential of biased voting machine technology 'laughable crap'? And how is genuine concern for one of our more fundamental precious rights, to be able to vote, with no fear of fraud or bias a leftist agenda? I for one want all the information, about all topics, and will do my own filtering, thank you. Even those that come from sources I would not normally read. And I think most here feel the same. You are free to ignore this thread, Ought Six, no one is stopping you.
 

Texian

Contributing Member
Shame on you O6, you know you'd rather have this BS tracking up every political thread on the forums like it was yesterday! :D
Rescath, a question for you-Do you work for an electronic voting machine company that lost the bid? It seems you are obsessed with Diebold. I can understand that electronic may malfunction but only to aid Bush? As many party people as there are watching these elections, there is no way. But I agree, it is nice to have them all on one thread, thanks for that. You certainly managed to gather a lot, however the credibility of some of your sources is questionable...Texian
 

chi_walker

Inactive
For those interested, and feel they need more editorial credibility to back up the concerns posted in this thread, there is an excellent article in the April 2004 edition of Vanity Fair, called "Hack the Vote". Below is an excerpt. I don't have a digital copy, unfortunately, but it is worth your while to find it at your library. Some of you might consider Vanity Fair too liberal, fine, ignore any of their conjecture then, but I don't think anyone would question their editorial integrity from a pure fact checking standpoint. I would suggest reading articles like this, arming yourself with the *facts*' and then make up your own minds on the subject.

The article outlines very clearly the inherent fragility within most electronic voting systems. Most of the concerns are based on how the information is uploaded, how the centralized databases used do not have enough security, and how easily the kiosk within the voting booth itself can be hacked. These problems are real, and all Americans should be concerned about this. These problems were not fixed for the 2004 elections.

There have not been enough safe guards built into these systems mostly because congress threw money at the problem, which caused the companies to rush the products to market. That combined with human nature to take advantage when there are no check points, and well, we now have a system that is porous and prone to hacking. What good is your vote, if it isn't logged properly and is subject to hackers of any ideology? This goes way way beyond whether you wanted Bush or Kerry, whether you are a liberal or a conservative, this strikes at the heart of our fundamental constitutional rights as voters to protect our vote and have its integrity ensured. There should be no question when you step up to an electronic voting machine that your vote is safe. And right now, I am sad to say, it is not. It is subject to hacking in a big big way. Arm yourself with facts and hold your congress accountable.

For the record, I think what is best for the country right now is to move on from this, and not drag us through another voter fraud investigation, we DO need to heal. Bush has won, so, let's see what he does. But, I will be watching, for 2008 to see if congress bothers to improve the technology, and so should all of you. Don't trust the government to have your back on this, there is too much big money in this, the potential for fraud is rampant.

And just in case you ask Texian, I don't work for a voting machine company that has lost a bid either, and what I am obsessed with is accountability and accuracy in the voting process. I am not a conspiracy nut anymore than anyone else here would be considered, nor am I all that liberal. I am merely a middle aged housewife who loves her country and hates fraud of any kind, and does not trust the congress or large corporations to act in my interests when billions of dollars are at stake.

Finally, some of you may think someone like me worries too much, and to you I would say this: I would be worrying a lot less if people like some of the posters here were worrying a little more. This is not something to just be flippant about. Your vote matters, *however* you vote. Protect that right, and protect what is in that vote, it is fundamental to all Americans, and a cornerstone of our democracy


An excerpt from the VF article:

In "Hack the Vote," VF probes the partisan politics, murky accountability and lurking felons inside the e-voting systems industry and the government procurement decisions regarding it. As author Michael Shnayerson prefaces it, "this is a story of good intentions gone awry, of Congress bamboozled into thinking the machines were ready when they weren't, of county and state election officials softened over lavish dinners into endorsing one kind of machine over another, with some later induced to take jobs at voting machine companies. And like most American stories its about money -- big money, $3.9 billion, showered on the states to buy the machines, and buy them fast." Vanity Fair, April 2004, p.158.
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
mbo said:
The same CNN that named the jpeg images for Bush on their web site as a**hole.jpg and moron.jpg!!!

Ya know rescath, you should go over to Columbus, Ohio and sit in the middle of the freeway as a protest or some such.

Admit it, if it came down to having a guaranteed system that denied all illegal votes, and was 100% infallible - given the choice the Democrats would refuse it. They know where a big chunk of their votes come from!

You continue to confuse me with a Democrat. Democrats also perpetrate serious vote fraud. Usually, however, their efforts are limited to signing people up multiple times under false names (such as "Jive Turkey" who registered to vote in Cleveland -- true story).
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
mbo said:
The same CNN that named the jpeg images for Bush on their web site as a**hole.jpg and moron.jpg!!!

I believe that was cnn.netscape -- not sure if maintained by the same people. If CNN is anti-Bush, then why would they rig the exit polls in favor of Bush? The charge here is that CNN was covering up the Bush vote fraud.
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
As of 5PM Eastern, Zogby -- the most respected pollster out there -- had Kerry winning the national election with 311 electoral votes. These exit polls have margins of error of roughly 1-2%. Everywhere that paper ballots were used, the final results fell within the mariging of error of the exit polls. Wherever electronic voting was used, the final results shifted 5% towards Bush above what the exit polls were indicating. Just a coincidence?
 

rescath

Membership Revoked
Copter Doctor said:
IMHO a paper copy should accompany all electronic voting. That would NOT prove the machines were rigged.

Absolutely. Why are these companies fighting tooth and nail against having the machines create a paper receipt? Without these, you couldn't do a recount if you wanted to. Nor is there any accountability. These companies won't let anyone see their source code. It's not rocket science involving some proprietary algorithms. Even if if were, they should be forced to open up the code (payed for by taxpayer money and therefore public domain) to independent auditors under a confidentiality agreement. I personally could write the tabulation software in a couple hours.
 
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