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Evidence Mounts That The Vote Was Hacked

By Thom Hartmann, commondreams.org

When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.

"It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.

And evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.

The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.

While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios matched the Kerry/Bush vote, and so did the optically-scanned paper ballots in the larger counties, in Florida's smaller counties the results from the optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking - seem to have been reversed.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the smaller counties where, it was probably assumed, the small voter numbers wouldn't be much noticed. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.

Yet in the larger counties, where such anomalies would be more obvious to the news media, high percentages of registered Democrats equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry.

More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm.

And, although elections officials didn't notice these anomalies, in aggregate they were enough to swing Florida from Kerry to Bush. If you simply go through the analysis of these counties and reverse the "anomalous" numbers in those counties that appear to have been hacked, suddenly the Florida election results resemble the Florida exit pollresults: Kerry won, and won big.

Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever since Election Day.

Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.

But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal states.

Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were rigged.

Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an article for The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.

"Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state."

He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."

Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states the election was called for Bush.

How could this happen?

On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.

That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.

"In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?"

Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer."

"So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?"

Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software.

Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.

"Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program.

But, it's running on a Windows PC.

So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel.

In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.

"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger."

They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election."

As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.

Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."

On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.)

Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide.

Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to cause people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since the networks would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry. But the networks didn't do that, and had never intended to. It makes far more sense that the exit polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that the vote itself was hacked.

And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this hit him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national office in the most-hacked swing states.

So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this story was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit polls had failed.

But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."

http://www.rastafarispeaks.com/community/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=25

Each passing day makes clearer that the last US presidential  election was a fraud.. I have no doubt about Ohio and Florida cheating. So, we can't prove Kerry lost, and we can't prove Bush won. All we have are numbers, electronic data that are incessantly manipulable. Are the media starting to pay attention to things that have happened before? Computers can pull 4 million votes out of nowhere when they are completely un-audited. It's important to get an accurate count. People need to complain and care for a recount.

B.K

In Philadelphia, the Republican Party hired local people including down-and-out addicts as neighborhood poll watchers, paid the poll watchers to challenge their neighbors' voting, and sent visiting teams of burly enforcers in window-tinted vans in a mixed strategy of intimidation, pay and misinformation to suppress voting on November 2, according to a Brooklyn law student who worked as a poll monitor.

full article.... (http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/111204Burns/111204burns.html)

This poll is very good Ayinde, and the results will even be more interesting. I think many of us will disagree about what a democracy really look like, but we know that a campaign for a recount of the presidential ballots is an important component of the integrity of the democratic process. Most of us know democracy has always been subject to manipulation. So it is theorically possible this election was tainted by intimidation that was necessary so that Bush win enough legitimate votes to win, but still stole a few hundred thousand around the country just to be on the safe side. When the mainstream media (or the Supreme Court for that matter) won't ever give this issue a fair hearing, whatever you have is not democracy.

B.K

Game Boy

(http://www.rastafarispeaks.com/bp/floyd2.jpg)

By Chris Floyd
Published: November 12, 2004

We said it here over and over, going back to 2003: If the U.S. presidential election was close enough to be gamed, it damn sure would be gamed. And the chunks of evidence now rolling in -- like so many cracked shells of fact in a high tide of pompous drivel -- increasingly indicate that millions of votes were indeed monkeyed with on the way to amassing George W. Bush's teeny-tiny one percent majority last week.

It seems we were all a bit too quick to concede the reality of Li'l Pretzel's "mandate." For example, in county after county, state after state, unprecedented discrepancies between the exit polls and the final result turned up -- in areas that used electronic voting, that is, usually without a recountable paper trail. In almost every such case, exit poll leads for John Kerry -- sometimes very substantial leads, beyond the realm of statistical error -- were converted in the end to narrow victories for Bush. Yet strangely enough, in those areas that relied on paper ballots -- utterly tangible records of voter intent -- the exit polls and final counts were in virtual lockstep. Of course, for decades exit polls have been phenomenonally successful in gauging the actual electoral outcome -- until the advent of national elections involving Bush and his political puppeteer, Karl Rove.

 
There was also the wild imbalance between party identification in voter registration and the actual vote in key counties across the nation, particularly in Florida. In the latter, counties where Democrats comprise more than 70 percent of the voters suddenly showed Bush winning 50, 60, even 70 percent of the total. In Calhoun County, for example, an 82 percent Democratic registration somehow morphed into a 63 percent Bush vote. To be sure, an incumbent in wartime, running on a campaign of wild fearmongering and deliberately stoked (or is it stroked?) sexual panic might peel away a few of the other party's voters. Yet every single measure of the electorate this year showed that partisanship was extraordinarily high and remarkably solid: Only a sliver of party-identified voters crossed the line to vote for the other side. So where did they come from, these astounding registration reversals that produced, in discrete packets here and there, hundreds of thousands of extra Bush votes that no one had expected?

We've often spoken here of the fact that more than one-third of all American votes were counted this year on machines owned, programmed, installed -- and in some cases even inspected -- by private companies whose bosses are major Bush financial donors and campaign officials. Some of the main players in the virtual-vote game were originally bankrolled by a single Bushist tycoon, Howard Ahmanson, who spent decades pushing "Christian Reconstructionism" -- i.e., complete theocratic rule of society and government by Christian mullahs who advocate, among other delights, death by stoning for homosexuals. Studies by leading scientists at Stanford, Johns Hopkins and other bastions of the "reality-based community" showed that these corporate e-vote systems are eminently -- even laughably -- hackable, either from the inside, by the Bushist companies themselves, or from the outside, by, say, "information warfare" specialists at the CIA or Pentagon, as investigative journalist Robert Parry notes. Nor would this hackery require placing gremlins in the thousands of voting machines operated by the Bushist firms; the final tabulations are actually made by a handful of central computers drawing together totals from outlying precincts, as analyst Thom Hartmann reports. Thus one little aptly placed "worm" could poison the well of an entire state.

Meanwhile, legions of phantom voters stalked polling booths across the land. In one key Ohio county alone -- carried by Bush -- the number of votes cast outstripped the number of actual registered voters by 93,000 -- a pattern repeated in numerous e-voting precincts. Yet another Ohio county sealed its vote count from public scrutiny after Bush's Homeland Security commissars told terrified local officials that their suburban area had suddenly become a terrorist target of "the highest order," MSNBC reports.

Bush's limp mandate was also engorged with a double dose of electoral Viagra: voter purges and voter suppression. As intrepid investigator Greg Palast notes, key states controlled by Bushist officials conducted mass purges of qualified voters from the rolls, utilizing an array of arcane laws, obscure regulations and -- as in Florida 2000 -- race-specific lists of supposed convicted felons, drawn up by private corporations using deliberately vague criteria that guaranteed false "matches" with legitimate voters, disenfranchising thousands of people -- the majority of them law-abiding African-Americans. Meanwhile, an unprecedented voter suppression operation flooded low-income areas with bogus "official" letters and phone calls warning the poor they could be imprisoned for voting if they had unpaid bills or outstanding debts.

Even when these targeted minorities were able to get to the polls, they had to run a gauntlet of antiquated machinery that produced a massive amount of "spoiled" votes by mangling ballots, leaving those infamous chads unpunched and otherwise failing to register the voter's choice. Official U.S. government studies confirm that the majority of this "spoilage" does indeed occur in minority precincts; in 2000, for example, more than 1 million African-American votes were simply thrown in the trash. With this year's higher turnout straining the thin resources of such precincts, experts say the spoilage rate will be even higher.

Of course, given Bush's strong support among the vast Deluded-American community, he might have won the election anyway, even without all this criminal katzenjammer. But now we'll never know. His "mandate" -- miniscule as it is -- will be forever tainted by doubt, smeared with the vicious sleaze and contempt for democracy that has marked every aspect of his malevolent reign.

http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2004/11/12/120.html

Media Accused of Ignoring Election Irregularities

by Mark Jurkowitz
 
Two weeks after Election Day, explosive allegations about a media coverup are percolating.

There's the widely circulated e-mail about a CBS producer who complained that a news industry "lock-down" has prevented journalists from investigating voting problems that cropped up on Nov 2. There's the rumor that MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who has devoted serious air time to discussing Election Day irregularities, was fired for broaching the topic. There's the assertion by Bev Harris, executive director of Black Box Voting Inc., that she had received calls from network employees saying they had been told to lay off the sensitive subject of voting fraud.

In the days after Nov. 2, the Internet was abuzz with charges from partisans that voting irregularities might have cost John F. Kerry the White House.

With some media outlets moving swiftly to debunk the notion that the election had been stolen by the Republicans, the press itself has come under scrutiny, accused of everything from a conspiracy of silence to a collective passivity about pursuing voting irregularities.

"The mainstream media is not treating this as an important story overall," said Steve Rendall, senior analyst at the liberal media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting."The mainstream media has largely treated the story as some crazy Internet story." At the same time, Rendall acknowledged: "There has been excess in the way stuff has flown around the Internet and e-mail lists."

Tracking down the sources of the rapidly proliferating online allegations about a media "lock-down" is a daunting task. But the response to them has been unequivocal. "Absolutely untrue," a CBS spokeswoman, Sandy Genelius, said when asked about the report of the whistle-blowing CBS producer. "Absolutely, positively, categorically false. Besides that, it's absurd."

"There are a lot of nervous people out there," said Olbermann, whose disappearance from MSNBC was the result not of being terminated but of taking a vacation. "I'm both amused and a little terrified that I became the subject of an Internet rumor."

In an appearance Nov. 8 on the "Democracy Now!" program, Harris, whose organization is investigating allegations of voter fraud in Florida and Ohio, told host Amy Goodman that sources in television news have told her "there is now a lock-down on this story. It is officially . . . 'Let's move on' time." In an interview with The Boston Globe, she reiterated those potent allegations but declined to reveal her sources. She also appeared to soft-pedal the idea that the media was at fault, saying instead that it was too early in the fraud-investigation process to blame reporters for not being more aggressive.

"I'm not terribly concerned about . . . the media's coverage of it yet," she said. "We're still early. . . . Caution's probably appropriate. [It's] a very sensitive story."

Not all accusations that journalists have not vigorously pursued allegations of voting problems involve speculation that they are being muzzled by their bosses. But several left-leaning critics complain that reporters have lost interest in what is still an important story because the outcome of the 2004 election, unlike in 2000, is not being contested.

Media Matters for America, a liberal media monitoring organization, posted an item on its website recently that cited several stories about faulty voting equipment in Ohio that did not generate much media interest. David Brock, the organization's president, said in an interview: "I haven't seen anything that is suggesting that further probing of the issue would change the results of the election." But he added that "there are some irregularities, and I would imagine some reader and viewer interest. . . . It seems that there should have been somewhat more coverage of this. There was all this pressure and buildup and very little follow-up."

TomPaine.com, a liberal website that collects news and commentary about public policy issues, has posted several analyses arguing that Kerry was hurt in Ohio by a shortage of voting machines, as well as by discarded votes that came disproportionately from minority precincts. The website's executive editor, Alexandra Walker, said her organization leaves the conspiracy theories surrounding the media's behavior to "the blogosphere."

But she also argued that, with the election results not being disputed, "the public interest angle was not enough to keep [voter irregularities] in the sights of political reporters. The horse-race coverage of political campaigns shortchanges readers."

No one has been more engaged in the issue than Olbermann, the host of MSNBC's prime-time "Countdown" program.

"The thing that woke me up was the lock-down in Warren County," he said, referring to a Cincinnati Enquirer report that officials in that Ohio county, citing terrorist threats, barred observers from the vote count. "I began to investigate then or at least raise questions. . . . It turns out there are a lot of valid stories, at least valid stories worth investigating."

Olbermann said there are a number of reasons much of the media have not been pursuing the story as ardently as he is, including "a love-hate [relationship] with the blogs. Whatever new media is appearing, the established news industry tend to look down on it." At the same time, Olbermann flatly denies the blogger-fueled rumor that he was fired for his interest in voting irregularities, pointing out that MSNBC has let him pursue the probe.

"It's still largely a game of telephone on the Net," he said.

© Copyright 2004 Boston Globe

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/articles/2004/11/
17/media_accused_of_ignoring_election_irregularities?mode=PF (http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/articles/2004/11/17/media_accused_of_ignoring_election_irregularities?mode=PF)

peace and hotep,

and welcome to texas, ya'll. our english teacher once told the class that the "low vocabulary belt" of the u.s. and the "bible belt" of the u.s. is the same belt. now, the belt of ignorance, stubbornness and arrogance currently being tightened around the globe is dictated by diebold election systems. it was really orwellian listening to that guy explain just how user friendly the machine (voting) was prior to submitting an 'electronic vote' withe no trail. today, millions of amoricans should feel as used as a kleenex. four more years. four more years. just four more until jeb. for more jeb,

now listen while i tell ya
bout a man named jeb.
rich polictian, never thought
that we'd be led,
but then one day we never
thought that we'd be fooled,
turned into the perpectual
bush school.

bush school that is.
school to the amorica's and the world.

now kinfolk's said herbert
drop your seeds right there
and soon before you know they'll
be dropping bombs everywhere.
they say genetic annihilation is where
they don't wanna be, so they kilt
democracy to preserve a family tree.

family tree that is.
'white' pride and no "killer b's" ....(bees = blacks/non'whites')

[smiley=lipsrsealed2.gif]


http://www.bartcop.com/diebold.htm

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


freedomisahappyslave