View Full Version : News item: Hoping your vote counts
DrSmellThis
08-09-2004, 09:49 PM
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLI
TICS/08/08/international.observers/index.html (http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/08/08/international.observers/index.html)
Jeez, I hope all that somehow helps...
Today, to beat
the 100 degree heat here in Oregon, I bought some ice cold grapefruit juice at my neighborhood supermarket with a
credit card. Three separate pieces of paper were handed to me to document the purchase. (The clerk, I assume,
documented it thoroughly for the store as well.) I was looking at the paper, thinking "God, think about the
deforestation caused by all of everybody's purchases, from as small as a pack of gum. I wonder whether all this
paper is really necessary for every trivial purchase? Then, it struck me -- this is three more pieces of
paper than will document 1/3 of the votes in the upcoming presidential election!" :think:
Currently, it looks
like about two thirds of our total votes will be merely counted by computer, while roughly 1/3 of our total
votes (about half of the 2/3) will be recorded and entered electronically as well. So although the
first portion is certainly vulnerable to fraudulent counting in a variety of ways, the latter portion will leave
no paper trail whatsoever. Therefore there will be no way to truly trace, verify or recount the votes.
I
sure hope the four private e-voting corporations involved will be ethical about all this! :angel: (The stated
corporate guiding behavior principle of "maximizing shareholder wealth" exactly = everyday human ethics anyway,
right?) Two have documented ties with the Republican party, and the other two have had problems with malfunctions in
elections before (e.g., in California).
Mtnjim
08-10-2004, 08:41 AM
"Two have documented ties with the
Republican party, and the other two have had problems with malfunctions in elections before (e.g., in
California)."
Guess GW is in, no need to continue the "campaign"!!
Holmes
08-10-2004, 11:24 AM
I sure hope the
four private e-voting corporations involved will be ethical about all this! :angel: Two have documented ties with
the Republican party, and the other two have had problems with malfunctions in elections before (e.g., in
California).
No need to worry about ethics, then.
Ah well. F the
vote (http://www.fthevote.com).
DrSmellThis
08-10-2004, 11:51 AM
*For further information and
reference, see The Nation, August 15, 2004.
Mtnjim
08-10-2004, 01:50 PM
From "Risks Digest":
Kolwicz kicked out for submitting real election tests
Al
Kolwicz, official representative to Boulder County's test of its new vote counting system, was asked by County
Clerk, Linda Salas, to leave the test.
When asked what happened, Kolwicz said, "we submitted sample ballots to
test the security and accuracy of the county's new vote counting system."
The sample ballots included tests
such as - (1) what happens if a voter
circles the box rather than filling in the entire box with a black pen,
and
(2) what happens if a voter marks over the ballot serial number in hopes that this will make the ballot
secret. (Boulder County's new ballots are
not secret.)
Salas consulted with the Secretary of State,
Donetta Davidson's office, by phone. Following their private conversation, Salas asked Kolwicz to
leave.
Kolwicz left immediately and went outside of the building to record some notes. Deputy P. Dunphy, who was
in the room where the testing was being conducted, came out to find Kolwicz on a bench. He told Kolwicz that he was
not to return to the building. "It looks like a sham is being foist upon the public", said Kolwicz. The tests
prepared by Kolwicz are limited to things that can happen in this year's primary election.
Al Kolwicz,
CAMBER - Citizens for Accurate Mail Ballot Election Results
2867 Tincup Circle, Boulder, CO 80305, 303-494-1540
AlKolwicz@qwest.net
www.users.qwest.net/~alkolwicz
http://coloradovoter.blogspot.com
belgareth
08-10-2004, 03:53 PM
I'd worry about the ethics
whether they had affiliations with any party or not because corporations have shown us that they are not to be
trusted. Seems like most high level executives are up for the highest bidder. Is anybody in power honest any more?
A well constructed counting system should have all sorts of checks and balances built in, including redundant
machines located miles apart. It's probably safer than paper in reality. I don't know how they are building the
data bases but know it can be done in such a way as to be very difficult to screw with, at least as hard as paper
votes.
As a slight degression, between his statements about pulling out of Iraq and stem cell research I feel
like Kerry has a better grasp of real needs than Bush. The big question is whether he'll keep his word if
elected.
DrSmellThis
08-10-2004, 11:34 PM
The Nation article
indicated that one of the university scientists who built one of the e-voting applications did remark that it would
take one month to rig for one candidate or the other and get away with it; but that this would not be difficult for
election officials to arrange.
But we unfortunately don't know how the database program was built. As it turns
out, all the program code is being kept secret from the public, "to protect voter privacy." :rolleyes:
I'm extremely relieved to hear that my government is suddenly so concerned about my privacy!
:rofl:Nonetheless, some mistrustful citizens think they have a right to know how their votes are being counted; or
whether in fact they are. Silly conspiracy theorists!
belgareth
08-11-2004, 02:30 AM
ANYTHING, any system can be
rigged. There's ample evidence that paper votes have been rigged time and again. The fact that there is evidence
also helps to confirm the theory that something that big cannot be hidden for long. I read somewhere that when a
conspiracy gets as many as three people the odds are even that one of the conspirators will talk about it. Then you
have to figure out if they are telling the truth or just playing their own game.
In the case of computer votes,
how many of us would really understand how the votes are counted and kept secure even if they told us? Certainly not
me and I work with computers. I doubt most would. A general overview yes, but not the important details that confirm
the security arrangements. If the details are released, those that are qualified to understand them also would have
more details about how to get through the security. You can't have it both ways and it isn't likely to remain in
hardcopy, which isn't secure either, for much longer.
DrSmellThis
08-11-2004, 11:17 AM
Paper votes can be rigged, but
it's easier to monitor than e-voting. There would have to be some kind of independent screen capture and "keystroke
recorder" or something to monitor e-votes. I doubt seriously the necessary checks and balances will be in place, but
I hope I'm wrong.
Not to be paranoid, but I also don't trust political polls these days. They can't have the
polls saying one thing and the voting machines saying the other, if you get my drift. For example, it's extremely
hard for me to believe that Kerry didn't gain anything in July-Aug, with F-9/11 and the successful convention
happening.
DrSmellThis
09-30-2004, 03:13 AM
http://michaelmoore.com/words/index.php?id=175
"...some basic international requirements for a fair election are missing in Florida. The most significant of
these requirements are:
* A nonpartisan electoral commission or a trusted and nonpartisan official who will be
responsible for organizing and conducting the electoral process before, during and after the actual voting takes
place... Florida voting officials have proved to be highly partisan, brazenly violating a basic need for an unbiased
and universally trusted authority to manage all elements of the electoral process.
* Uniformity in voting
procedures, so that all citizens, regardless of their social or financial status, have equal assurance that their
votes are cast in the same way and will be tabulated with equal accuracy...
Four years ago, the top election
official, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, was also the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney state campaign
committee. The same strong bias has become evident in her successor, Glenda Hood, who was a highly partisan elector
for George W. Bush in 2000. Several thousand ballots of African Americans were thrown out on technicalities in 2000,
and a fumbling attempt has been made recently to disqualify 22,000 African Americans (likely Democrats), but only 61
Hispanics (likely Republicans), as alleged felons.
The top election official has also played a leading role in
qualifying Ralph Nader as a candidate, knowing that two-thirds of his votes in the previous election came at the
expense of Al Gore. She ordered Nader's name be included on absentee ballots even before the state Supreme Court
ruled on the controversial issue.
Florida's governor, Jeb Bush, naturally a strong supporter of his brother, has
taken no steps to correct these departures from principles of fair and equal treatment or to prevent them in the
future.
It is unconscionable to perpetuate fraudulent or biased electoral practices in any nation. It is
especially objectionable among us Americans, who have prided ourselves on setting a global example for pure
democracy. With reforms unlikely at this late stage of the election, perhaps the only recourse will be to focus
maximum public scrutiny on the suspicious process in Florida."
-- Former President Jimmy Carter, world's
foremost expert on fair, democratic elections.
DrSmellThis
10-07-2004, 06:16 AM
It's sad and embarrassing for America, but it has come to this:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLIT
ICS/10/07/election.observers.ap/index.html (http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/10/07/election.observers.ap/index.html)
David MacDonald, a Canadian member of a team organized
by the San Francisco human rights group Global Exchange, said observers were shocked to find that partisan officials
run U.S. elections.
Requiring election officers to be nonpartisan "is as close as you can get in democratic or
electoral terms to a universal norm," MacDonald said after visiting Missouri, where Secretary of State Matt Blunt, a
Republican, is the chief electoral officer and a candidate for governor. "There are some very serious problems that
need to be addressed."
... The report said touch-screen machines that don't print paper ballots for use during
a possible recount could delay the election outcome beyond November 2 and create more, not less, controversy.
It
faulted procedures with absentee and provisional ballots, cited reports of voter intimidation and
disenfranchisement, and criticized moves by a few states to allow overseas and military voters to fax rather than
mail completed ballots.
The report also noted that many of the reforms envisioned by an election assistance law
enacted after the disputed 2000 presidential election won't be in place by Nov. 2, and raised concerns that the
right to vote "may not be evenly applied or protected throughout the country."
DrSmellThis
10-14-2004, 04:20 AM
* More
voting corruption news, this time from Nevada and Oregon, both swing states:
Nevada:
http://www.klas-tv.com/Global/story.asp?S=2421595
Oregon:
http://w
ww2.kval.com/x30530.xml?ParentPageID=x2649&ContentID=x47627&Layout=kval.xsl&AdGroupID=x30530 (http://www2.kval.com/x30530.xml?ParentPageID=x2649&ContentID=x47627&Layout=kval.xsl&AdGroupID=x30530)
Recent
anti-voting corruption has also been reported in the swing states of Ohio (where its secretary of state, Mr.
Blackwell, has recently limited voting to within precinct instead of county-wide as it has been, and has pushed to
disqualify ballots printed on thinner paper; making it harder to vote) and Wisconsin (where critical inner
city ballot shortages exist in Milwaukee); but I could not produce working links.
Holmes
10-14-2004, 06:59 AM
http://www.klas-tv.com/Global/story.asp
?S=2421595 (http://www.klas-tv.com/Global/story.asp?S=2421595)
http
://www2.kval.com/x30530.xml?ParentPageID=x2649&ContentID=x47627&Layout=kval.xsl&AdGroupID=x30530 (http://www2.kval.com/x30530.xml?ParentPageID=x2649&ContentID=x47627&Layout=kval.xsl&AdGroupID=x30530)
Quelle surprise.
(Thanks for the links!)
DrSmellThis
10-15-2004, 04:13 PM
Keep the dream of Democracy
alive!
Elk Dreamer
10-20-2004, 09:10 PM
I had a friend vote with a
Franklin County Ohio ballot today. It was a complicated procedure with a punch card and pad. Three chads hung up and
had to be removed with a kitchen knife. She required assistance and became frustrated with the procedure and the
wording of the written ballots enclosed. There was a seperate paper explaining why Nader wasn't on the ballot but
it looked like the other paper explanations except for color. It will be easy to file these absentee ballots in a
circular file. Ohio voting is still pretty shakey folks.
Elk :frustrate
a.k.a.
10-26-2004, 07:39 PM
"Via chicagoprogressive at Dailykos,
we have this report in the Albuquerqe Journal:
Kim Griffith voted on Thursday— over and over and
over.
She's among the people in Bernalillo and Sandoval counties who say they have had trouble with
early voting equipment. When they have tried to vote for a particular candidate, the touch-screen system has said
they voted for somebody else.
It's a problem that can be fixed by the voters themselves— people can
alter the selections on their ballots, up to the point when they indicate they are finished and officially cast the
ballot.
For Griffith, it took a lot of altering.
She went to Valle Del Norte Community Center
in Albuquerque, planning to vote for John Kerry. "I pushed his name, but a green check mark appeared before
President Bush's name," she said.
Griffith erased the vote by touching the check mark at Bush's name.
That's how a voter can alter a touch-screen ballot.
She again tried to vote for Kerry, but the screen
again said she had voted for Bush. The third time, the screen agreed that her vote should go to Kerry.
She faced the same problem repeatedly as she filled out the rest of the ballot. On one item, "I had to vote five or
six times," she said.
Michael Cadigan, president of the Albuquerque City Council, had a similar
experience when he voted at City Hall.
"I cast my vote for president. I voted for Kerry and a check mark
for Bush appeared," he said.
He reported the problem immediately and was shown how to alter the
ballot.
Cadigan said he doesn't think he made a mistake the first time. "I was extremely careful to
accurately touch the button for my choice for president," but the check mark appeared by the wrong name, he
said.
Bernalillo County Clerk Mary Herrera said she doesn't believe the touch-screen system has been
making mistakes. It's the fault of voters, she said Thursday.
Cadigan, for example, could have "leaned
his palm on the touch screen and it hit the wrong button," she said.
In Sandoval County, three Rio Rancho
residents said they had a similar problem, with opposite results. They said a touch-screen machine switched their
presidential votes from Bush to Kerry.
Bureau of Elections Manager Eddie Gutierrez also said he doesn't
believe there are problems with the machines.
But Gutierrez did replace one after someone complained—
even though he found nothing wrong with it.
"He (the voter) felt so strongly about it, that I shut it
down," Gutierrez said.
Herrera said she's heard stories from Democrats and Republicans. In some cases,
when people have tried to vote a straight ticket, the screen has given their votes to every candidate in the
opposite political party, she said.
She believes it's a people problem. "I have confidence in the
machines," she said. "They are touch screens. People are touching them with their palms, or leaning their hand. ...
They're hitting the wrong button."
It is outrageous to simply blame the people for this. e-Voting machines
have long shown problems and this is a threat to
democracy."
http://vote2004.eriposte.com/
also a nice compilation of voter fraud (so
far):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/markosmoulitsas/story/0,15139,1331610,00.html
DrSmellThis
10-27-2004, 11:35 AM
Thanks. You beat me to it. :)
I was going to post the same thing.
DrSmellThis
10-28-2004, 03:19 AM
Postal Experts Hunt for Missing Ballots in Florida
By Michael Christie /
[
color=#0000ff]Reuters[/color] (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&ncid=564&e=2&u=/nm/20041027/ts_nm/campaign_florida_dc_2)
MIAMI (Reuters) - U.S. Postal Service investigators on Wednesday were trying
to find thousands of absentee ballots that should have been delivered to voters in one of Florida's most populous
counties, officials said.
The issue evoked memories of the polling problems that bedeviled the Florida election
in 2000 and which the state has been trying to address before next Tuesday's presidential election, which is again
expected to be a very tight race.
Broward deputy supervisor of elections Gisela Salas said 60,000 absentee
ballots, accounting for just over 5 percent of the electorate in the county north of Miami, were sent out between
Oct. 7 and Oct. 8 to voters who would not be in town on election day.
While some had begun to be delivered, her
office had been inundated with calls from anxious voters who still had not received their ballots.
"It's
really inexplicable at this point in time and the matter is under investigation by law enforcement," Salas told
Reuters.
"It was basically our first major drop of the absentee ballots," Salas said. She said postal service
officials had assured Broward elections supervisor Brenda Snipes that the ballots had moved out of the post office
to which they had been taken by the elections office.
U.S. Postal Service Inspector Del Alvarez, whose federal
agency is independent from the U.S. Postal Service, said it had yet to be determined if the ballots reached the post
office.
"It's highly unlikely that 58,000 pieces of mail just disappeared," he said. "We're looking for it,
we're trying to find it if in fact it was ever delivered to the postal service."
In 2000 the race in Florida,
on which the national presidential contest ultimately depended, was so close it prompted five weeks of lawsuits and
recounts.
The U.S. Supreme Court eventually halted the recounts, handing President Bush a 537-vote victory in
Florida and the White House, and infuriating Democrats who insist their candidate Al Gore (news - web sites) won the
popular vote in the state.
The punch card ballots that were at the heart of the disputed 2000 election have
been replaced by touchscreen voting machines in 15 of Florida's 67 counties, and just over half the state
electorate will use them. The other counties will use optical scanning machines to read paper ballots.
But poll
watchers still fear another legal maelstrom if the race in Florida, or any other critical swing state, is close and
there are suspicions that some voters were denied a ballot.
Salas said the missing absentee ballot forms did
not yet represent a major election problem because people had the option of voting early before next Tuesday, when
Bush is being challenged by Democratic Sen. John Kerry.
Poll workers will be able to cross-check through lap
top computers hooked up to a central database whether voters had already sent in absentee ballots. On election day
itself, those who requested absentee ballots will only be able to vote in person if they bring the blank absentee
forms with them.
"A lot of people are very concerned because they think that just because they requested an
absentee ballot, now they're stuck in a limbo situation where they don't have their ballot and they can't vote,"
Salas said.
"So most definitely we want to get the message out that yes they can go to an early voting site and
cast their ballot and that's what we would encourage them to do," she said.
DrSmellThis
10-28-2004, 03:25 AM
...And a significant victory
for voters in Ohio:
http://www.us
atoday.com/news/politicselections/state/ohio/2004-10-27-voter-registration_x.htm (http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/state/ohio/2004-10-27-voter-registration_x.htm)
DrSmellThis
10-29-2004, 05:07 AM
Judge temporarily halts
hearings on Ohio voter registration challenges
COLUMBUS (AP) — One voter picks up letters at the post office
because trucks kept hitting his mailbox. Another serves in Iraq. Hundreds more are homeless, listing shelters as
permanent addresses.
http://images.usatoday.com/_common/_images/clear.gifhttp://images.usatoday.com/news/_photos/2004/1
0/28/inside-ohio-vote.jpghttp://images.usatoday.com/_common/_images/clear.gifThe Republican Party
is challenging Mary Sullivan's voter registration because she used to be
homeless.http://images.usatoday.com/_common/_images/clear.gifBy Jay LaPrete, AP
All are among the
35,000 whose eligibility has been challenged by the Ohio Republican Party. Since mail came back undelivered, the GOP
says, those registrations could be fraudulent. Democrats say the GOP is trying to keep poor and minorities, who move
more often, from voting.
A federal judge put a temporarily halt to the challenges Wednesday, ruling in favor of
Democrats who said the GOP was targeting new voters registered by political groups supporting Sen. John Kerry, the
Democratic challenger to President Bush. U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott ruled that six county elections boards
should stop hearings scheduled this week in Ohio, a hotly contested state in the presidential election.
In
southwest Ohio, Republicans challenged the registration of Surjo Panerjee, a fact his brother found unusual.
Panerjee, 40, is an Army sergeant who is now in Fallujah in Iraq.
Panerjee, also a veteran of the first Gulf
War, uses his brother's house in Centerville as a permanent address even though he has lived around the world, said
his brother, Dr. Partha Banerjee.
"He would laugh it off," Banerjee said. "He would say, 'I never get picked
for anything nice — why can't they give me a car or something?'"
Republicans withdrew all 2,319 challenges in
Montgomery County, including the one against Panerjee, after acknowledging several mistakes in its mailing.
In
suburban Franklin County, the registration of Raven Shaffer was wrongly challenged because he gets mail at a post
office box, according to the federal lawsuit filed Tuesday by Democrats. The "family's mailbox has been repeatedly
hit by delivery trucks," the lawsuit said.
Also in Franklin County, 291 homeless people are being questioned out
of the 2,370 total challenges, according to an analysis of the challenges by the Coalition on Homelessness and
Housing in Ohio. In Cuyahoga County, 757 people of the 17,717 total being challenged are homeless.
"We're very
concerned that people that have chosen to participate in our democratic process, who took a big step in registering
to vote and who were poised to go to the polls on Nov. 2, are going to be disenfranchised, and we may never get them
back," said Bill Faith, COHHIO executive director.
Mary Sullivan, 57, looked for work for a year after losing
her job as a receptionist and prescription filler for a local drug maker in August 2003. She was evicted from her
apartment after her money ran out this past June and spent two months at Friends of the Homeless, a shelter on
Columbus' east side.
"My vote has to be counted," Sullivan said. "Just because you're homeless doesn't mean
you're stupid."
Sullivan got a job caring for a 77-year-old widow at her suburban Columbus home in August. She
had no idea her registration had been challenged.
"I've been voting for presidents since I was old enough to
vote," said Sullivan, a Kerry supporter. "Now they're taking away my constitutional right."
It isn't just
Kerry supporters who've had their registrations challenged. Roy Bottiggi, a 31-year-old registered Republican who
plans to vote for President Bush, was confused when he got a call about a challenge to his registration. He has been
a registered voter for 13 years, has lived in the same house for five years and voted in every election, general and
primary, during that time.
"I was a little bothered by it," Bottiggi, a resident of Willoughby in northeast
Ohio, said Wednesday. "I never really had a problem until now."
The Republican party withdrew its challenge
after the Lake County Board of Elections documented his registration.
Dlott, appointed by former President
Clinton in 1995, said her temporary order would remain in effect until further rulings in the case. She scheduled a
hearing in her Cincinnati court for Friday morning.
DrSmellThis
10-30-2004, 03:32 PM
Gov. Bush: Poll watchers
can, should challenge voters
His remarks come amid concerns that excessive scrutiny may put a
damper on the election.
By JONI JAMES and TAMARA LUSH
Published October 28,
2004
TALLAHASSEE - Gov. Jeb Bush said Wednesday he would have no problem if Republican poll watchers
challenge the eligibility of voters before they cast ballots on Election Day, despite growing concern that it could
create gridlock and scare away qualified voters.
"I don't think it will cause problems," Bush said. "I do think
that people who are not eligible to vote shouldn't and the people who are should."
The Florida Republican Party
has not decided whether to instruct poll watchers to challenge voters Tuesday, spokeswoman Mindy Fletcher
said.
But Democrats say a GOP list of 2,663 newly registered voters in Duval County who appear to have incorrect
addresses indicates Republicans are planning such a strategy.
"It's despicable," Florida Democratic Party
chairman Scott Maddox said. "Their goal is to harass people enough that they'll give up their right to vote or not
go to the polls."
Fletcher said the Duval list will not be used to challenge voters but to revise the
Republicans' mailing list.
Republicans and Democrats have signed up thousands of poll watchers who will be
inside precincts to monitor voters. A rarely used provision of state law allows poll watchers to challenge an
individual's qualifications to vote by writing a sworn affidavit. The challenge is resolved on the spot by election
workers, or by having the voter cast a provisional ballot.
In Pinellas County, for example, 275 Republicans and
339 Democrats will work as poll watchers. In Hillsborough County, there will be 277 Republicans and 496 Democrats.
In Pasco County, there will be 55 Republicans and 64 Democrats.
"My big concern is that you are going to have
people sitting in these polling places with their finger on a hair trigger because they want some action," said
Pasco Elections Supervisor Kurt Browning, a Republican. "I would hope and pray that both parties think this thing
through."
Hillsborough Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson met with a John Kerry lawyer this week to discuss
how to handle challenges from Republican lawyers.
"We are hopefully going to rely on civility, and beyond that,
we are going to rely on law enforcement," Johnson said.
The concept of challenging voters isn't restricted to
Florida. In Ohio, Republicans already have challenged the eligibility of 35,000 of Ohio's 800,000 newly registered
voters.
Florida Democrats on Wednesday released a memo sent to state and local election officials insisting such
challenges should be rare, accompanied by irrefutable proof and not disruptive to other voters.
The Democratic
Party and Kerry's campaign said it will have 7,000 poll watchers in Florida on Election Day, including 1,500
lawyers.
"We made sure we are prepared for ugly tactics," said Christine Anderson, spokeswoman for the combined
Democratic campaign. "It seems to us the Republicans are making a very proactive and blatant strategy to discourage
turnout and deny citizens the right to vote."
Republicans say they want to ensure that illegally cast votes do
not dilute the power of legally registered voters.
"What we're doing is looking at making sure that the law is
enforced," Fletcher said. "We are in the process of looking at the (challenge) process and making sure we know what
is the best way to make sure legal votes aren't disenfranchised by illegal votes."
The GOP built its list of
newly registered Duval voters who appear to have incorrect addresses by recording returned mail from a broad mailing
the party sent out. Tucker Fletcher said the mailing was sent to all newly registered voters, regardless of
party.
The British Broadcasting Corp., which reported the list included voters in predominantly black precincts
in Duval, suggested the list would be used to challenge voters.
But Fletcher said that account was
inaccurate.
"The information created from this mailing will not be used in any way, shape or form to challenge,"
Fletcher said. The Democrats find "anything they can and try to accuse us of intimidating or trying to suppress
black voters, and it's just not true."
In Jacksonville, where leaders of the African-American community
successfully lobbied the county to increase the number of early voting sites, Pastor James B. Sampson was concerned
that voters might be challenged at the polls.
"Who would have ever thought that we would still be fussing and
fighting, still be going through all this drama about voting in America?" asked Sampson.
But Bush expressed
frustration about the attention focused on election procedures.
"These are all marginal issues. ... I hope people
would keep it in the proper perspective: 99.9 percent of the people that are voting have already voted before in
other elections," he said, "and every vote will be counted and it will be done fairly."
Among other
election-related issues Wednesday:
* Bush said he has recused himself from the Election Canvassing Commission,
which certifies the state's final vote.
* In Broward County, officials searched for 58,000 ballots that have not
been returned. Officials said they sent 126,220 absentee ballots on Oct. 7-8, yet half of those have not been
received by elections officials. The U.S. Post Office denied any responsibility, and the Florida Department of Law
Enforcement said its investigation found no criminal violations. Elections officials planned to send new ballots by
overnight mail to any voter requesting a new form.
* In Pinellas County, officials acknowledged that nearly 300
St. Petersburg voters received absentee ballots that were missing the second of two pages.
Supervisor Deborah
Clark's office mailed the missing page to affected voters along with an explanation and a postage-paid
envelope.
* State elections officials urged county supervisors to post signs or put up ropes to ensure privacy
for voting booths after reports of campaigning at early voting sites.
* Computers used to check voter
registrations were slow or malfunctioning in Broward, Duval and Hillsborough counties. On Tuesday, Hillsborough
County's registration network went down for about 30 minutes. Workers used the telephone to verify
registrations.
* Long lines at early voting precincts were reported throughout the Tampa Bay area and the state.
Hillsborough reported 43,000 early voters as of Tuesday. Early voters in Pinellas reported lines of more than two
hours in some locations.
- Times staff writers Steve Bousquet and David Karp and researcher Deirdre Morrow
contributed to this report, which used information from the Associated Press.
DrSmellThis
10-30-2004, 03:35 PM
http://www.cleveland
.com/election/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/news/1099042757252190.xml (http://www.cleveland.com/election/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/news/1099042757252190.xml)
Holmes
11-01-2004, 08:10 AM
Therein lies the message (http://static.vidvote.com/movies/bushuncensored.mov).
Pancho1188
11-01-2004, 08:37 AM
I hope that doesn't catch
on...the "one-fingered victory salute" would completely ruin a thing called 'sportsmanship' and 'diplomacy' in
sports and international politics, respectively.
DrSmellThis
11-01-2004, 10:49 AM
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS
/11/01/ohio.challengers.ap/index.html (http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/11/01/ohio.challengers.ap/index.html)
DrSmellThis
11-01-2004, 11:46 AM
Therein lies the
message (http://static.vidvote.com/movies/bushuncensored.mov).:lol: Those who burn out the most brain cells are too often those who can least afford to.
DrSmellThis
11-02-2004, 02:45 AM
http://www.cnn.c
om/2004/ALLPOLITICS/11/01/ohio.challengers.ap/index.html (http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/11/01/ohio.challengers.ap/index.html)Oops! Not so fast...
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITIC
S/11/02/ohio.challengers.ap/index.html (http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/11/02/ohio.challengers.ap/index.html)
DrSmellThis
11-05-2004, 06:21 PM
Thirty-three percent of the 2004 vote was cast in electronic form.
Thirty-four states used Diebold (an Ohio company with deep Republican ties) or ESS machines (whose former CEO won a
Republican senate seat using his own machines in the election). At the beginning of this thread, before the
election, we considered whether this might end up being a problem. Sadly, now that the "election" is over, it is
starting to look like it was. Check out this breaking news from CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS
/11/05/voting.problems.ap/index.html (http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/11/05/voting.problems.ap/index.html)
On November 2, 2004 in Ohio 5000 extra votes were "mistakenly"
recorded for Bush, despite the fact that there were only 650 available voters in that area. This was not the only
such incident. Despite the gentlemanly concession from Kerry, there may well be a huge scandal brewing. Here is a
web site at the center of the developing e-voting scandal:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
This organization is sending out
the largest freedom of information request ever, for the e-voting logs. They are also requesting the government to
do the audit, and have documented quite a few abuses so far. They need donations to fund the audit. This is not
trivial. So far, they already found a patch in the Diebold software for the State of Georgia that redirects
votes. The name of the folder was "robgeorgia"! Diebold's website was hacked to get this information. Democrat
Max Cleland (the amputee) apparently lost the senate race because of this patch in 2002. It was called "votergate"
at the time. Here is a free documentary for download that addresses the Georgia "incident:"
http://www.votergate.tv/
In response, Democrats in Congress introduced a
bill requiring a paper trail for votes. Republican Tom Delay blocked the bill.
Florida (gambling measure) and
North Carolina lost significant numbers of e-votes. And this is vague, but reports have it that there was a dropoff
in Florida in votes counted based on Democratic locations. There have also been reports of relatively fewer voting
terminals in known Democratic locations. I'll post more specific information as I get it.
Over 1000
problems have been reported to the voter hotline (of course the actual number of problems would be higher) with
touch screen voting, including numerous incidents where voters selected Kerry and saw Bush selected on the
confirmation screen, apparently too many incidents to suggest voter mistakes. College campuses, which typically
vote democratic, were typically understocked with machies (booths), causing extremely long lines of several hours.
If you do that at enough places it has a cumulative effect.
Alaska, a traditionally Republican state, was
trending toward Kerry, but Bush won. The same thing happened in Ohio and Florida. In general, exit polling in areas
where paper balloting was used tended to match the ultimate results; whereas exit polls in e-voting areas
tended to conflict with eventual results, or be "innacurate".
Corporate America now owns voting!
Therefore, corporations own democracy, and own all our rights, all of which depend on the right to vote. Should we
trust these corporations with such precious and sacred parts of our lives?
In Ohio, Diebold is the e-voting
company. Their CEO Wally O'Dell promised in a letter to Republicans to "deliver Ohio" for Bush. (here is a link
addressing the incident:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.htm
) One machine in Ohio read "negative 25 million votes" at one point on Tuesday. Similarly, in Florida a machine read
"negative 12 votes," after being in operation for a while. Experts suggest that typical voter fraud software patches
would instruct counters to start going backwards when the undesired candidate's tally reached a certain
percentage.
ESS Systems CEO Chuck Hegel manufactured and sold e-voting machines, then left his position. He then
beat an incumbent Democratic governor in Nebraska in a tremendous upset (unseating an incumbent Democratic
governor in 1996), in an election where his own machines were used. He had been expected to lose.
I'm
glad we got this thread going before the election. I don't know how much evidence will be recoverable, but America
deserves answers on this.
One of the prominent authors and authorities in this area is Bev Harris. She has a
great book on black box voting. Here is an excellent article by her that demonstrates in detail how voter fraud can
occur, and did occur in Georgia:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00065.h
tm (http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00065.htm)
Ralph Nader is being solicited by blackboxvoting.org to spearhead this investigation, since he is
extremely good at this sort of thing. If you want to request him to "challenge the election results", please fax
him at 202-265-0092. Blackbox voting is asking all citizens to do this. Tell him you are requesting this
as a "blackboxvoting.org activist". He will do it if enough people show interest. New Hampshire was particularly
suspect, according to the blackboxvoting people. If they succeed in forcing an audit in New Hampshire, they can most
probably do it in all 34 states. Americans deserve this information, be they Democrat or Republican. Even if you are
Republican, is winning the election in the short term worth destroying your own democracy? I am outraged by the
appearance of this.
As all this is breaking news, I don't know how it will play out. But it might snowball into
a scandal of historic proportions -- laying bare a profoundly serious felonious assault on America and her
Democracy. Randi Rhodes, who has an evening show on Air America radio is actively following this body of
news.
a.k.a.
11-06-2004, 03:23 PM
"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."
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm
DrSmellThis
11-06-2004, 03:55 PM
To a statistician, that is
some significant data, if true.
belgareth
11-06-2004, 04:19 PM
I've been puzzling over a
point related to this and hope some of you can shed some light on it. According to numerous articles I've read,
minorities and young people registered and voted in droves this election. Normally, both groups tend to vote
democratic. Just due to populations that should have been most noticable in large metropolitan areas but should have
swung an equal percentage across the board. So, what happened? Did more of them vote republican than would be
expected or did all their votes get lost in both rural and metro regions or did the influx of other voters outweigh
them or were their votes really reflected in the outcome which would have been more heavily weighted towards Bush?
I'm not offering opinions but find it difficult to explain.
Holmes
11-06-2004, 04:40 PM
Did more of them
vote republican than would be expected or did all their votes get lost in both rural and metro regions or did the
influx of other voters outweigh them or were their votes really reflected in the outcome which would have been more
heavily weighted towards Bush?
Probably all of the above, although I can't believe that more
of them voted republican, what with all of the whining that was going on about how things
sucked.
Hoping your vote counts
Obviously it didn't. Not for shit.
belgareth
11-06-2004, 05:16 PM
Obviously it
didn't. Not for shit.
I'm not sure how obvious it is.
I've been puzzling
over a point related to this and hope some of you can shed some light on it. According to numerous articles I've
read, minorities and young people registered and voted in droves this election. Normally, both groups tend to vote
democratic. Just due to populations that should have been most noticable in large metropolitan areas but should have
swung an equal percentage across the board. So, what happened? Did more of them vote republican than would be
expected or did all their votes get lost in both rural and metro regions or did the influx of other voters outweigh
them or were their votes really reflected in the outcome which would have been more heavily weighted towards
Bush?
I'm not offering opinions but find it difficult to explain.
There were an equal
number of people over the age of 45 voting for the first time. So it didn't make a difference.
DrSmellThis
11-07-2004, 08:17 PM
On the face of it, not
as many young registered people voted as hoped, but young voters voted solidly democratic by 10 points or so. Again,
on the face of it, Bush got a higher percentage of blacks, women and hispanics as compared to 2000, though
still trailed with all three populations.
But I'm not convinced we can conclude much from the resulting
numbers in this election. The whole process needs to be independently audited to verify that the results matched
what voters chose, and at least reformed for the next election. If it was "on the up and up", let the audit results
show it. You can't have avowed, politically active partisans both running the elections and designing the
"black boxes" that invisibly tally the votes, as it is today; much less without a paper trail. To put it mildly,
therein is a historic disaster just (no longer?!!) waiting to happen. The many suspicious irregularities in the
results of the election just completed underscores that. All our rights depend on our voting rights, and there is no
democracy without legitimate voting.
DrSmellThis
11-08-2004, 02:34 AM
Mr. Nader has begun to respond
to the black box voting scandal:
http://www.votenader.org/media_press/index.php?cid=4
00 (http://www.votenader.org/media_press/index.php?cid=400)
Ralph may not be as compelling of a presidential candidate as he could be; but he has always been
excellent at fighting the corporate abuse of America.
belgareth
11-08-2004, 08:40 AM
I would welcome a non-partisan
audit for a good many reasons. It was obvious long before the election that no matter which side won, the other
would cry foul. Hopefully, Mr Nader will be able to sort out what really happened and do away with all the inuendo,
though I suspect that whatever he says will be disbelieved by whichever party is on the losing end. There is reason
to be concerned about his perspective too. Reading the site linked above, he is making several mistatements. If the
computer code can be accessed, flaws and fraud can be detected in it. There's a whole field of programming
specialty dedicated to just that. A court order allowing the inspection of the functioning code should not be that
difficult to obtain and I'd imagine there are lawyers working on that right now.
I agree that it is imperative
to have a reliable and accurate voting system but I don't believe either major party is all that interested in it
being so. My bet is that if they are able to fully audit the system, both sides will be shown to have cheated. If
that is demonstrated, then what?
DrSmellThis
11-08-2004, 12:14 PM
I think that what Nader should
have said is that finding the corrupt patch within a program with many thousands of lines of code would be
exceedingly difficult, rather than impossible, even if you had the original code in pristine form. Disguising things
is pretty easy these days. You could have a well hidden "bug" in the program that would only be detectible or active
under certain rare conditions, and would serve as a portal for a malicious process to be called in from God knows
where. Micrsoft is still dicovering bugs in Windows '98 for godssakes, and there is no reason that planned
idiosyncracies would be much easier to detect, IMHO.
Moreover, last night I talked to an experienced computer
programmer that designs systems for the telecommunications industry about black box voting. He had tested fraudulent
patches in complex telecommunications systems just to see how easy it would be. He said that any corruption would be
possible to discover only if the criminal programmer made a mistake; such as leaving something on the hard drive, or
leaving a hard copy somewhere. For example, you could easily program the voter-fraud patch to elimenate itself after
completing its duty. Or if you know the system in question well you could most probably elimenate the specific
evidence with a two minute cell phone call from anywhere in the world, five minutes after the patch had performed
its dirty work.
For now I believe it will be possible to confirm suspicions, and conclude shenanigans happened
beyond a reasonable doubt. But nailing the offending network of felons will be next to impossible. For the record,
I'd not be suprised at all if Rove was behind it.
So to answer your question, I think it would be reasonable at
least to hope for reforms to occur before the next round of elections in 2006, to prevent cheating from either side.
Even that would require a lot of work between now and then.
I know historically there has been evidence
regarding both sides cheating (e.g., Kennedy, Chicago, 1960). Both sides have some dishonest people, of course. But
thus far, I've seen evidence regarding only one side cheating in this election, and lots of it. Clearly, the
Democrats have been the ones pushing for reform in the process, and the Republicans (e.g., Tom Delay) have resisted
it. But no matter. I'd hope that anyone of any affiliation fucking with our election would be busted and
prosecuted. That is one serious crime, amounting to treason in my book for higher degrees of interference.
The
best case scenario would be to just throw out the election results altogether and hold another one,
minus the protracted campaign. The government takes our tax money and owes us a democracy. The American people have
a right to a legitimate election. Give people two weeks to prepare for it. Then you just live with the results, win
or lose.
belgareth
11-08-2004, 12:22 PM
The best
case scenario would be to just throw out the election results altogether and hold another one, minus the
protracted campaign. The government takes our tax money and owes us a democracy. The American people have a right to
a legitimate election. Give people two weeks to prepare for it. Then you just live with the results, win or
lose.
Gee, Doc! Something we can agree on. :cheers:
I'd certainly go for it in a minute but would
want to give them less time to prepare.
Since elections are controlled by 50
different entities, I don't think the vunerablities in the system will go away for quite a while. There's never
any accountability in goverment anyway, but that is partly because of the people.
DrSmellThis
11-08-2004, 05:08 PM
Several investigations are underway to determine why the results from
electronic voting machines favor Bush above and beyond what exit polls and party registrations would predict.
News reports on this issue are tracked here:
www.democraticunderground.com (http://www.democraticunderground.com/). Among informal findings so far
include:
* Results indicated reversals of various historical, statistical
election precedents or "laws", where: 1) incumbents never do better than their approval numbers; 2) undecideds
always break for the challenger; 3)and the Harris polls are fundamentally successful predictors. All of these
precedents were violated. This does not prove anything, of course, but they collectively add to the picture that is
forming.
* Kathy Dopp analyses indicate unexpectedly high results for Bush in counties
with e-voting. For example in Holmes County 72.7% of voters registered Democrats. Only 21.3% registered Reps. Yet
77% of the votes reported were for Bush. This mirror image result was typical. Franklin County and Holmes county
were identical in this respect with the scarily precise mirror inverse nature of the results. You can check out
these types of results in the smaller counties yourself, as well as performing your own analysis, via the links
below. Compare for yourself the official Florida registration, with the Florida results. A caveat: Charles Smith,
Chairman of the Democratic Party in Holmes County said that it does not surprise him that the majority of people in
the county voted for Bush even though they registered Democratic because it is extremely right wing. The only reason
they registered as Democratic is because until recently it was a "one party county" and folks had to register as
Democrats if they wanted to vote in the primary. People are checking with other counties to see if they have a
similar story. In 1996 Holmes county elected Dole over Clinton at 3248 votes to 2310. But they had 9698 registered
Democrats and 854 registered Republicans.
http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm
http://election.dos.state.fl.us/voterreg/pdf/2004/2004genParty.pdf (http://election.dos.state.fl.us/voterreg/pdf/2004/2004genParty.pdf)
http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm (http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm)
* Result from paper ballots match
closely with exit polls. But the results from the un-verifiable e-voting machines gave Bush a 5% boost.
http://www.newstarget.com/002076.html
* Greg Palast reports that an inordinate number of minority ballots were "spoiled". If taken
into account Kerry would have won Ohio by 136,483 votes.
* Franklin County's
unofficial results gave Bush 4,258 votes to Democratic challenger John Kerry's 260 votes in Precinct 1B. Records
show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct. [AP, linked previously in this thread, at top of large post]
Curiously, none of the 638 people who "generated" these 4258 votes cast votes for the county commissioner
race. No votes for that race were recorded in Franklin county.
* BlackBoxVoting
reports various security breaches and other suspicious activity related to electronic voting machines on election
day. The central tabulating nodes for the Diebold machines used Windows and an Excel-type spread sheet program,
without any special security measures. Supposedly anyone could have hacked in.
* A
“bug” in Palm Beach voting machines causes tally to go backwards, as was mentioned before in this thread! Palm Beach
county also logged 88,000 more votes than voters. That's an 88,000 vote swing for Bush!
http://www.washingtondispatch.com/spectrum/archives/000715.html (http://www.washingtondispatch.com/spectrum/archives/000715.html)
http://www.pal
mbeachpost.com/politics/content/news/epaper/2004/11/05/a29a_BROWVOTE_1105.html (http://www.palmbeachpost.com/politics/content/news/epaper/2004/11/05/a29a_BROWVOTE_1105.html)
* And in
North Carolina, a Craven County district logged 11,283 more votes than voters and actually overturned the results of
a regional race.
http://www.democra
ticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2626456 (http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2626456)
* Apparently the
plan to recount has been accepted by the secretary of State in New Hampshire, according to a blackboxvoting
associate. NH has a mixture of hand counted paper, ESS and Diebold, so will be good for multidimensional comparison.
The Diebold votes were grossly out of sync with exit polls there.
* Here
are two other sites that call attention to the possible fraud and advocate change in the system:
http://verifiedvoting.org (http://verifiedvoting.org/)
http://www.counterbias.com/152.html
* Here is a blog
entry by Bev Harris suggesting ways we can take action:
http://www.democra
ticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2636130 (http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2636130)
This is a grave
problem for America and democracy regardless of your party affiliation! I hope everyone can realize this.
DrSmellThis
11-08-2004, 07:57 PM
I've been
puzzling over a point related to this and hope some of you can shed some light on it. According to numerous articles
I've read, minorities and young people registered and voted in droves this election. Normally, both groups tend to
vote democratic. Just due to populations that should have been most noticable in large metropolitan areas but should
have swung an equal percentage across the board. So, what happened? Did more of them vote republican than would be
expected or did all their votes get lost in both rural and metro regions or did the influx of other voters outweigh
them or were their votes really reflected in the outcome which would have been more heavily weighted towards Bush?
I'm not offering opinions but find it difficult to explain. It is interesting that, although a few to
several million extra young people between 18-22 registered to vote; suggesting a passion for current events;
results show no increase in counted votes for them as compared to 2000! Hmmm... How could that be?? :think:
I saw one Democratic analyst (in Pancho's post elsewhere) get mad at young adults for this, telling them they
"suck". Well, I'm not so sure they didn't do their best. I'm a bit disturbed that progressives are so quick to
attack each other already.
The theory is, they just went to the
social events where registration was taking place, whether it be concerts or college campus thingys.
More
young people did vote, as did middle aged people, so I don't think young people failed the country like some are
making it out to be.
DrSmellThis
11-08-2004, 08:10 PM
More young people
did vote, as did middle aged people. Really, what numbers did you see?
a.k.a.
11-08-2004, 09:49 PM
Thanks Doc. That washingtondispatch
bit was especially interesting. (Greg Palast carries a lot of credibility with me.)
Democracy Now had a nice
piece on e-voting fraud in today's radio report.
Here's couple of excerpts, which include and interview
with Bev Harris who wrote "Black Box Voting" and is in the process of filing the nation's largest FOI request in
history (best of luck to her):
"Even though Kerry has stopped fighting for the presidency, serious questions
abound about the use of electronic voting machines. Take this story: In a voting precinct in Ohio's Franklin
County, records show that 638 people cast ballots. Yet, George W Bush got 4,258 votes to John Kerry's 260. In
reality, Bush only received 365 votes. That means Bush got nearly 3,900 extra votes. And that's just in one small
precinct. This in a state that Bush officially won by only 136,000 votes. Elections officials blamed electronic
voting for the extra Bush votes.
Meanwhile, a number of Congresspeople are asking the General Accounting
Office to investigate electronic voting and the 2004 election and the nonprofit group Blackbox Voting has begun the
process of filing the largest Freedom of Information Act request in history. "
...
"AMY GOODMAN:
There's been serious questions raised about New Mexico, but does it hurt trying to find out the ultimate counts
that John Kerry and John Edwards so immediately conceded, despite the fact that Edwards had said as they promised
during the campaigns, making references to Al Gore squelching protests four years ago, that they would make sure
that the votes were counted?
BEV HARRIS: Oh yes, they conceded very prematurely. As I was saying in Ohio,
they don't even know if they won or lost in Ohio, really. They are basing this on, I think, a verbal okay from
someone in the Secretary of State's office that said, that they were being assured there was only 150,000
provisional ballots. Well I said, where is the source data on that? What auditing do they have on those? They
couldn't tell me. You see, I don't understand how you would concede anyway without even beginning the canvassing,
because with these voting machines, we don't have adequate auditing in place, but we have some. The full auditing
we have does -- it does find some anomalies that are quite big and sometimes they flip elections. So, you know, why
not just wait a couple of days. The other thing I'm seeing is that in some parts the media gave a huge push to
hurry, hurry, hurry, certify. This was happening in New Mexico. They're saying -- they're putting tremendous
pressure on Governor Bill Richardson to hurry and certify the election. Well why? You have x-number of days to
certify the election. One would think you would want it to be right, and you’d think would you want to go through
and you want to check out the information. And understand, a lot of this is already election procedures. We keep
saying that election procedures are what really save us from the insecure and mysterious machines, and that the
election procedures would catch anomalies. Understand, that they have not done the election procedures yet in most
cases. They have chosen to go ahead and call elections without doing the very procedures that they say protect the
system. "
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/08/1513252
The whole show can be
downloaded at:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/08/1513234
koolking1
11-08-2004, 10:25 PM
there's also Bev's site,
WWW.BlackBoxVoting.Org. Be careful as there's also the same name at .com. You can donate money and
offer to help at her site if you are interested in free and fair elections.
DrSmellThis
11-08-2004, 10:31 PM
And Broward County Florida
joins the fracas, with -- suprise! --- backwards vote counting. This time the other main "black box" manufacturer,
ES&S Systems, was the culprit:
http://www.pal
mbeachpost.com/politics/content/news/epaper/2004/11/05/a29a_BROWVOTE_1105.html (http://www.palmbeachpost.com/politics/content/news/epaper/2004/11/05/a29a_BROWVOTE_1105.html)
I was looking for that
story for a while, after hearing talk about it, and was glad to find it. Sorry about the high velocity of posting,
but the news has been coming in fast and furious, and I'm willing to be faulted for overkill on this. ;)
November 5th, 2004 5:34 pm
Software Flaw Found in Florida Vote Machines
By Eliot Kleinberg /
Palm
Beach Post (http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/shared/news/politics/stories/11/05flavote.html)
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — It had to happen. Things were just going too smoothly.
Early Thursday, as Broward County elections officials wrapped up after a long day of canvassing votes, something
unusual caught their eye. Tallies should go up as more votes are counted. That's simple math. But in some races,
the numbers had gone ... down.
It turns out the software used in Broward County can handle only 32,000 votes
per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward. Why a voting system would ever be designed to vote
backward was a mystery to Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman. It had her on the phone late Wednesday with
Omaha-based Elections Systems and Software.
Bad numbers showed up only in running tallies through the day, not
the final one. Final tallies were reached by cross-checking machine totals and officials are confident they are
accurate.
The glitch affected only the 97,434 absentee ballots, Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda
Snipes said. They were all placed in their own precinct and optical scanners totaled votes, which were then fed to a
main computer. That's where the counting problems surfaced. They only affected votes for constitutional amendments
4 through 8, because they were the only page that was exactly the same on all county absentee ballots.
The same
software is used in Martin and Miami-Dade counties; Palm Beach and St. Lucie counties use different companies.
The problem cropped up in the 2002 election. Lieberman said that ES&S told her it sent the Florida Secretary of
State's office software upgrades, but that office kept rejecting the software. The state says that's not true.
Broward elections officials said they had thought the problem was fixed.
Secretary of State spokeswoman Jenny
Nash said all counties using this system had been told that such problems will occur if a precinct is set up in a
way that would allow votes to get above 32,000. She said Broward County should have split the absentee ballots into
four separate precincts to avoid that and that a Broward County elections employee has since admitted to not doing
that. But Lieberman said later, "No election employee has come to the canvassing board and made the statements that
Jenny Nash said occurred."
Late Thursday, ES&S issued a statement reiterating it learned of the problems in
2002 and said the software upgrades will be submitted to Hood's office next year. It said it was working with the
counties it serves to make sure ballots don't exceed capacity again and said no other counties reported similar
problems.
"While the county bears the ultimate responsibility for programming the ballot and structuring the
precincts, we ... regret any confusion the discrepancy in early vote totals has caused," the statement said.
After several calls to the company during the day were not returned, an ES&S spokeswoman said late Thursday she
did not know whether ES&S contacted the Florida Secretary of State two years ago or whether the software is designed
to count backwards.
While the problem surfaced two years ago, it was under a different Broward elections
supervisor and a different secretary of state. Snipes said she had not known about the 2002 snafu.
Later,
Lieberman said, "I am not passing judgments and I'm not pointing a finger." But she said that if ES&S is found to
be at fault, actions might include penalizing ES&S or even defaulting on its contract.
"I want to fix this
before the 2006 election," she said.
Really, what
numbers did you see?
I can't remember, it was millions more, a 20 increase or something. Like I
said on another thread though, their were a record number of people voting over 45.
As an indirect
result, that young people's vote made up the same percentage of all votes as in the 2004 election.
DrSmellThis
11-08-2004, 10:37 PM
Note Florida's
Columbia, Calhoun and DeSoto counties were also potentially problematic: (Mid page link shows bar graphs for
them)
November 6th, 2004 6:53 pm
Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked
by Thom
Hartmann / Common Dreams (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm)
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[
/url], 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
[url="http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm"]http://ustogether.org/election04/Florida
DataStats.htm (http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm), and
www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm
(http://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 poll results: 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 (http://www.thehill.com/morris/110404.aspx), 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 (http://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 (http://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."
DrSmellThis
11-08-2004, 11:08 PM
Another news report:
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercuryn
ews/business/10121628.htm?1c (http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/10121628.htm?1c)
DrSmellThis
11-08-2004, 11:33 PM
...And this, from
Jacksonville, NC. Note that early votes, which tended to be for Kerry, were the ones lost; and that the fault lay
with the e-voting company, one I'm not familiar with; which gave incorrect information on storage limits (Lord
knows why you'd not have enough storage if you knew the population ahead of time!):
***
November
5th, 2004 5:27 pm
Computer Loses More Than 4,000 Early Votes
Associated Press (http://www.wsoctv.com/news/3892151/detail.html)
Jacksonville, N.C. -- More than 4,500 Carteret County votes have been lost because officials believed a computer
that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did.
Scattered other problems may change
results in local races around the state.
Carteret officials said UniLect Corp., the maker of the county's
electronic voting system, said each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes.
When they tried to store more than 7,500 early votes in the unit, some 4,530 were lost.
Jack Gerbel,
president and owner of Dublin-Calif.-based UniLect, told The Associated Press on Thursday that the county's
elections board was given incorrect information.
There is no way to retrieve the missing data, he said.
"That is the situation and it's definitely terrible," he said.
In a letter to county officials, he blamed
the mistake on confusion over which model of the voting machines were in use in Carteret County.
But he also
noted that the machines flash a warning message when there is no more room for storing ballots.
"Evidently,
this message was either ignored or overlooked," he wrote.
County election officials were meeting with State
Board of Elections Executive Director Gary Bartlett and other state elections officials on Thursday and did not
immediately return a telephone call seeking comment.
Expecting the greater capacity, the county only used one
unit during the early voting period.
"If we had known, we would have had the units to handle the votes," said
Sue Verdon, secretary of the county election board.
The loss of the votes didn't appear to change the outcome
of the county races, but that wasn't the issue for Alecia Williams of Beaufort, who voted on one of the final days
of the early voting period.
"The point is not whether the votes would have changed things, it's that they
didn't get counted at all," Williams said.
Two statewide races remained undecided Thursday.
The
candidates for superintendent of public instruction are divided by about 6,700 votes out of 3.2 million cast.
Candidates for agriculture commissioner are separated by just hundreds of votes, according to unofficial figures.
The state deadline for official totals is Tuesday.
Still, it would be hard to say what affect those races
might feel from changes in individual counties.
The deputy director of the State Board of Elections, Johnnie
McLean, said Thursday that the state still must tally 73,118 provisional ballots, plus those from four counties that
have not yet submitted their provisionals.
belgareth
11-09-2004, 02:12 AM
A couple things in the
preceeding articles bothered me and I am going to play devil's advocate. The were talking about the GEM program and
demonstrating that the database could be opened with Excel. First, Excel is not a database prgram, it is a
spreadsheet and is such is two dimensional where a database is three. In the case of having no security, some
database tables might be opened in excel but you will only see one aspect of it not the true 3D file. Changes in a
single table of a database could potentially corrupt the entire database making the changes obvious. Even the most
rudimentory security would inhibit even that. I have to ask then, which was hacked, the database or the GEM program
used on the televised demonstration?
A database can be pretty bulky but it seems strange that so few votes could
be tallied on a single machine. That implies a lot of stored data per vote. If it was a flat file as implied
regarding the GEM machine, you could store all the votes in a couple megabytes. A more complex database, even
something as simple as MySQL which is commonly used for Internet transactions, would take up more space but would
not be as easily tampered with.
It is mentioned that the computers upload their data to a central machine. Any
computer is subject to hacking but I'd hope that some basic precautions were taken. For instance, who had physical
access to the tabulation computer? Was the OS secured through use of passwords? How was the data transferred: direct
dial up, VPN? What type of encryption was used, if any?
If there is a real concern that data was modified on
the tabulation computer, why haven't they gone back to the voting machines and re-tabulated the results? There is
no reason to assume that data has been lost. Fraud would be easy to detect through a relatively simple process.
I am sceptical of both sides of this debate and would like to see some real answers. But I doubt a final version
will ever come out. Rather I expect there will be several conflicting versions argued over for years and the only
people who will be sure are the ones who decided what the 'Truth' was before the election.
Pancho1188
11-09-2004, 06:36 AM
The question is...if there's
evidence of foul play, what happens? After all, the electoral college doesn't formally vote until December. In
addition, the election isn't set in stone yet as much as the world would like to think (remember in the 1800's
that it took forever to count votes, etc...not 4 hours). Of course, everyone would flip out if the election turned
out to be rigged and it probably wouldn't get Bush out of office, anyway. I noticed that most people are focusing
on fixing the system and not just trying to redo the election. That's a good way to look at it because I don't
think you can overturn the election despite the fact that technically it hasn't happened yet and nothing is
"guaranteed"...I find it funny that if people don't know who's president by the end of Nov. 2, they get mad. They
should really just not publically announce the results of an election until when the electoral college meets in Dec.
Then every state would have a whole month to guarantee accuracy. "Sh--- pipe dreams," as 'Red' would say...
DrSmellThis
11-09-2004, 12:07 PM
Here is some more analysis of
the Florida results and disparities from another prominent and topical website.
http://www.truthisbetter.org/Florida_Election.htm
http://www.ustoget
her.org/database/ObjSubPg.php?info_category=all&topic=elections_voting (http://www.ustogether.org/database/ObjSubPg.php?info_category=all&topic=elections_voting)
belgareth
11-09-2004, 12:14 PM
http://www.truthisbetter.org/Florida_El
ection.htm (http://www.truthisbetter.org/Florida_Election.htm)
That is interesting. It seems to indicate that there is a greater likelhod that something
is flakey on the optiscan machines rather than the black box. To tell the truth, I'm not really surprised.
DrSmellThis
11-09-2004, 01:11 PM
A couple
things in the preceeding articles bothered me and I am going to play devil's advocate. The were talking about the
GEM program and demonstrating that the database could be opened with Excel. First, Excel is not a database prgram,
it is a spreadsheet and is such is two dimensional where a database is three. In the case of having no security,
some database tables might be opened in excel but you will only see one aspect of it not the true 3D file. Changes
in a single table of a database could potentially corrupt the entire database making the changes obvious. Even the
most rudimentory security would inhibit even that. I have to ask then, which was hacked, the database or the GEM
program used on the televised demonstration?
A database can be pretty bulky but it seems strange that so few
votes could be tallied on a single machine. That implies a lot of stored data per vote. If it was a flat file as
implied regarding the GEM machine, you could store all the votes in a couple megabytes. A more complex database,
even something as simple as MySQL which is commonly used for Internet transactions, would take up more space but
would not be as easily tampered with.
It is mentioned that the computers upload their data to a central machine.
Any computer is subject to hacking but I'd hope that some basic precautions were taken. For instance, who had
physical access to the tabulation computer? Was the OS secured through use of passwords? How was the data
transferred: direct dial up, VPN? What type of encryption was used, if any?
If there is a real concern that
data was modified on the tabulation computer, why haven't they gone back to the voting machines and re-tabulated
the results? There is no reason to assume that data has been lost. Fraud would be easy to detect through a
relatively simple process.
I am sceptical of both sides of this debate and would like to see some real answers.
But I doubt a final version will ever come out. Rather I expect there will be several conflicting versions argued
over for years and the only people who will be sure are the ones who decided what the 'Truth' was before the
election.* You're right to be skeptical, and examine this data. I appreciate that. Were you reading the Bev
Harris article? The person I heard talk about "Excel" said it was "Excel-type", but not necessarily not literally
Excel. It probably is a database program. I'm not a computer expert (I thought you could open databases with Excel)
and neither are many of the people talking about this. Experts are being brought in, however, and some are able to
talk professionally about that part of it. I have just heard consistently that security was woefully inadequate, but
we are correct to ask exactly what it was. I know that Bev Harris hacked into GEMS quite easily on Diebold's
website.
* Your idea that the fraud would be easy to detect is interesting. What makes you think it would be so
easy, with all the ways people have of covering their tracks, and my other post about it?
* Within the next week
I think we will indeed see some successful movement toward recounting, though I don't have enough training to tell
whether it will be meaningful. Several states have been approached, and I have heard some optimism from
blackboxvoting people. Maybe you need a subpoena to get the boxes. I don't know the legal aspects. But I wouldn't
count on Republican election leadership (e.g., in Ohio, Florida) or Republican e-voting corporations to cooperate
without being required to.
* I don't know any answers myself yet, obviously. I am refraining from "scientific
or judicial conclusions" on this data, and am identifying my intuitions as such so far. I'm suspicious about the
election results. Other than the pile of accumulating data about this election in the foreground, I am biased by the
historical background of administration deceit and their consistent pattern of corruption involving elections. The
last presidential election was that way, as were Bush's victories over McCain and Anne Richards. Biases can be
reasonable or unreasonable, and that is a reasonable bias. Go see Bush's Brain, the documentary on Karl
Rove, for more information on this, or pick up the book with the same name. Dirty elections are boring old hat, and
are just presumed with Rove.
You too have presuppositions -- correct me if I'm wrong, but one is
apparently something like -- "both sides of any political conflict or position are equally and predominantly
wrong; and always will be able to be reduced to mere, mutually conflicting, unreasonable opinions" (from your
history). And your "devil's advocate character" is apparently imposing this "cynical" presupposition on this
data, as well as the "years later" future of it, based on a very few things that "bother him" or don't make sense
yet. Not that it's a big deal. :) Devil's advocates are usually valuable. But it's early. Things aren't expected
to make sense or be clear yet, and needn't be bothersome in that way. This is the question forming and
info-gathering stage, and I urge everyone to avoid making premature conclusions that match their own
presuppositions. I will humbly try to do the same. My goal is to get the preliminary information out right now, and
to advocate for investigation. Later it will be to draw conclusions. It's unnecessary to do so now anyway.
I do
know that scandals of this grand of stature are hard to pin on anybody. A realistic goal is election reform that
would benefit the American people regardless of their leanings. That is reason enough to pursue this tenaciously. It
remains to be seen for now whether throwing out the election results and having another go at it will be a
reasonable goal.
DrSmellThis
11-09-2004, 01:53 PM
It seems to
indicate that there is a greater likelhod that something is flakey on the optiscan machines rather than the black
box. I think the analysis there was not so much what you are saying, but was that the more
scrutinized black boxes from high profile areas weren't so problematic, while the less scrutinized ones were;
(implying a certain sneakiness), but that the optiscans were also problematic. But I'll look at it more
thoroughly.
DrSmellThis
11-09-2004, 02:26 PM
Here is a site for "elections
forensics" people who are being enlisted to help. They would be most likely to have their shit together about the
technical aspects:
http://www.eff.org/
Pancho1188
11-09-2004, 02:27 PM
If they find the possibility
of a scandal, are they actually going to do anything about it (redo the election, etc.)?
DrSmellThis
11-09-2004, 02:34 PM
http://radtimes.blogspot.com/ (http://radtimes.blogspot.com/)
by
Susan Truitt, Co-founder, CASE Ohio, Citizens' Alliance for Secure
Elections
From:
ILCAoNline
Saturday, November 06, 2004
Thank you all for your supportive responses to the
allegations of
election fraud in the 2004 presidential election. Here are some concrete
actions that you
can take that will make a difference.
Please keep your indignation alive and use that energy to raise
the
issue publicly until the mass media can use the "F" word - fraud.
Please keep the energy
going to help educate the public regarding the
devastating truth that our electoral process is broken and
is being
taken over by right wing zealots and privatization.
Send financial donations to: Black Box
Voting, Bev Harris' site. She is
doing a world of good with her tenacious and brave work. She sent
out
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to every county in the
country, and that type of effort requires
funds. Read Black Box Voting,
by Bev Harris, available on the web, to arm yourself with the sad facts
of a broken
electoral process.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org (http://www.blackboxvoting.org/)
Also,
send donations to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The
Electronic Frontier Foundation has been
instrumental in all litigation
across the country relating to e-voting (electronic
voting).
http://www.eff.org (http://www.eff.org/)
Send donations to
VerifiedVoting < http://www.verifiedvoting.org (http://www.verifiedvoting.org/)
>and
VotersUnite <
http://www.votersunite.org (http://www.votersunite.org/) > and BallotIntegrity
<
http://www.ballotintegrity.org (http://www.ballotintegrity.org/) >. These
organizations have done a lion's
share of getting the word out about what is wrong in this country's
electoral
process.
Contact TrueMajority <
http://www.TrueMajority.org (http://www.truemajority.org/) > and MoveOn
<
http://www.moveon.org (http://www.moveon.org/) > and CommonCause <
http://www.commoncause.org (http://www.commoncause.org/) >
and tell them to help
pursue a post-election challenge to the vote
tallies. Donate money to these organizations.
Write to
your local newspapers to inform the public at large what is
going on. Tell them to cover the election
debacle and tell them to use
the "F" word liberally.
FAX Ralph Nader, 202-265-0092, and tell him to
file for recounts and
reexaminations of the tally in the states in which he was on the ballot.
Write to John Conyers (D - Mich), Ranking Member of the House Judiciary
Committee on the
Constitution, who has requested a Congressional Hearing
on the 2004 election. Tell him you support the request and
that you want
him to push for the hearing to be held as soon as possible.
Contact Information for John
Conyers:
* Washington DC E-Mail Address:
john.conyers@mail.house.gov (john.conyers@mail.house.gov)
* Washington DC Web
Address: http://www.house.gov/conyers (http://www.house.gov/conyers);
*
Washington DC Web Mail
Address:
http://www.house.gov/conyers/letstalk.htm[
/color] (http://www.house.gov/conyers/letstalk.htm);
* Washington DC Web Mail Address:
http://www.house.gov/writerep (http://www.house.gov/writerep);
Washington DC Address
2426 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515-2214
Phone:
202-225-5126
Fax: 202-225-0072
District Address - Detroit
Federal Building, Room 669
231
West Lafayette Boulevard
Detroit, MI 48226-2766
Phone: 313-961-5670
Fax: 313-226-2085
District
Address - Southgate
DCC Building
15100 Northline Road, Suite 257
Southgate, MI 48195
Phone:
734-285-5624
Fax: 734-285-5943
Campaign Address
19512 Livernoise
Detroit, MI 48221
Phone:
313-864-3671
Write to George Soros and ask him to help fund litigation in Ohio and
Florida to
challenge the vote tallies.
c/o Open Society Institute--New York
888 7th Avenue
New York,
N.Y. 10106
United States of America
Telephone: +1-212-757-2323
Fax: +1-212-974-0367
E-mail:
osnews@sorosny.org (osnews@sorosny.org)
Web:
http://www.soros.org/gsbio.html (http://www.soros.org/gsbio.html);
Write to the DNC and ask why Senator Kerry capitulated so quickly -
before the information on
the vote tallies was even beginning to come
in. Tell them that Senator Kerry needs to take back his
concession.
Democratic National Committee, 430 South Capitol St SE, Washington, DC
20003. Their phone number is
202-863-8000. Their web-site is:
www.democrats.org (http://www.democrats.org/).
Contact the Kerry campaign and tell them that he has done a great
disservice to the American
people by capitulating so quickly - before
information could be gathered. Tell him to reconsider in light of
all
that is coming to the surface.
Contact National Headquarters
Kerry-Edwards 2004,
Inc.
P.O. Box 34640
Washington, DC 20043
202-712-3000
202-712-3001 (fax)
202-336-6950 (TTY)
Stay in
touch with [color=#0000ff]CASE_OH@yahoogroups.com (CASE_OH@yahoogroups.com) and CaseOhio
.<
http://www.caseohio.org (http://www.caseohio.org/) >
belgareth
11-09-2004, 02:47 PM
My idea that any fraud would be
easy to detect was based on the assumption that auditors would have access to the voting machines. Data should still
be stored on them, if the numbers don't match with the tabulator you have a good idea that somebody was playing
around.
My assumption or presuppositions is that both sides are equally capable of deceit and fraud, not that
they are predominantly wrong. I haven't seen any reason the believe otherwise. It seems a lot safer and more
realistic to start from that presumption. As an example not an accusation, why couldn't the democrats tweak the
results in some of the smaller precents in order to be able to claim cheating by the other side? It certainly
wouldn't be the first time that tactic had been used. They did lay a lot of groundwork for that claim prior to the
election. Frankly, if I was a republican considering cheating, after all the noise the democrats made about the
possibility prior to the elections, I would have found some other method less likely to be scrutinized. It was
pretty obvious that this would be looked at carefully and the slightest irregularity would be called. Neither of us
believes the republicans are honest, but I don't assume they are stupid.
Without trying to offend you and I
apologize in advance if I do, you come across as extremely biased. So long as Bush won, I don't believe you would
have accepted any results without claiming fraud. Nor do I believe you will agree that the democrats are just as
capable of fraud. Your every comment has seemed to be an attempt to demonize that one group while implying the other
is pristine and pure. I don't accept that.
I don't believe the majority of what I have heard so far, much of
it falls under "Me thinks he protests too much" philosophy. I would very much like to see an unbiased audit done of
the entire election process. But to do that you'd have to bring people in from another country, IMHO. If we can
manage an honest audit, I would like to see every person who had a hand in decieving the public in prison,
regardless of their reasons or political affiliation or the office they hold. Tampering with an election is one of
the worst possible crimes against an entire country.
Pancho1188
11-09-2004, 03:52 PM
I think that people who
experienced the bad side of Bush are wondering what the hell the rest of the country was thinking. (please ignore
the following grammatical debacle) I can guarantee to you that no homosexual woman with family of victims in the
9/11 attacks, with family of soldiers in the Iraq war, who lost her job in the last four years, who wasn't afraid
of terrorism, and with no religious affiliation voted for Bush.
I think that people who had no problems under
Bush are satisfied with the result (listed typical profile in another post).
It just goes to show you the,
"Yeah, but how does it affect me?" principle is the only one that matters. "Who cares if the administration
lies, the economy sucks, the deficit is enormous, there were wars in two different countries and our nation was
attacked? I have a job, no one is hurting me, I want to prevent those gay people from marrying because that law
doesn't harm me (a heterosexual) but saves me the uncomfort of having those types of people freely forming
families within my community, terrorists will never attack my area and if they even tried Bush would smash them to
hell beforehand, and I got a tax break! Hell, I'm better off than I was four years ago!"
People are
self-centered (can be a good and bad thing). When you look at it the way I described it above, I'm not even sure
I'm surprised he won anymore...sure, the world hates us and we're ruining democracy, but has that done a damn
thing to drastically harm 51% of the population individually? Not really.
As much as the above paragraph
sickens me, I have to admit that my life hasn't changed much, either. I don't think that means that the president
did a good job, however...
belgareth
11-09-2004, 03:55 PM
Doc,
Your right, they did
say "Like Excel". Excel is a spreadsheet program, it is not a database. There is a huge difference. A spreadsheet
could be viewed as a single table within a database except that it does not have all the linkages to other tables.
That is important because a database can have hundreds or even thousands of tables that are either directly or
indirectly dependent on one another. Almost all databases require you to log into them as well. There wasn't
anything about a log in in the article. It is possible that they used flat files in the GEM program but I'd be
surprised with the large number of database programs available. I think it equally possible that the demonstration
was a hoax. It wouldn't be all that hard to do, but can't prove it either way.
Another point is they keep
mentioning a Windows PC, like it's something bad or somehow flawed. Nothing could be further from the truth,
especially if they are using Wndows 2000 or later and I can't imagine them using an earlier version. A good example
are ATM machines. Many of them are Windows based, when was the last time you heard of an ATM being hacked? It can
and has been done but it is rare. Don't make the mistake of comparing the tabulators with a personal PC just
because they both use Windows. There's a world of difference.
Holmes
11-09-2004, 03:58 PM
It just goes to
show you the, "Yeah, but how does it affect me?" principle is the only one that matters. "Who cares if the
administration lies, the economy sucks, the deficit is enormous, there were wars in two different countries and our
nation was attacked? I have a job, no one is hurting me, I want to prevent those gay people from marrying because
that law doesn't harm me (a heterosexual) but saves me the uncomfort of having those types of people freely
forming families within my community, terrorists will never attack my area and if they even tried Bush would smash
them to hell beforehand, and I got a tax break! Hell, I'm better off than I was four years
ago!"
That's about the size of it.
DrSmellThis
11-09-2004, 04:44 PM
I believe I have a good cause
and I am doing a positive thing by advocating for it. It has been a lot of work to bring all this to one place from
all over the internet. If there were indeed corruption, it would not be "extremely biased," in the negative way you
are saying it, to call attention to it. Somebody needs to do this for the process to work. Any belief is a bias, but
it is also rational to be suspicious, given all this information. As I said, but as you ignored, I am not concluding
anything.
No offense intended from me either, Belgareth, but you said you don't like democrats or
liberals in general, and have made that consistently clear. That is a bias, and a generalization. You have in the
past also acknowledged you like to scoff a little bit, and that is also a bias. These biases seem reflected here:
Apparently, you consequently choose to "disbelieve" most of what is posted here without having good reason to
believe it is false. You may be having unrealistic expectations of polished scientific rigor from a first wave of
exploding information in its first hours, from people who are just starting to put 2 and 2 together. I don't think
you are helping democracy any by just proclaiming you "don't believe most of that stuff" in a blanket fashion. You
could always look at all the data and provide your own balanced analysis rather than find two or three unclear
things from a mountain of new information and chuck it all out because of that.
Others can judge for themselves.
My primary concern is to get information out that otherwise would not come out. This is suspicious information that
deserves light, and I am bringing it to light in whatever form it exists on the web. It comes from the left, but it
sure as hell wouldn't be coming from the right, would it? What do you expect? It is just information. People are
are free to interpret it however they want to.
The numbers themselves aren't made up, though, as far as I can
tell. They are coming from official records. It is ridiculous of you to say I would have reacted this way anyway,
given the amount of information that has exploded. My first post on it was full of information, not something out of
my head. The scandal is not suprising, as the information at the beginnning of the thread attests.
As I've
said many times, my bias is not against Republicans in general, or fiscal conservatives, but I have little faith in
the current administration. I believe they are corrupt in a historic sense and you disagree. Regarding the
big picture of corruption, I believe there has not been anything comparable from Democrats in general, or even other
Republicans in general, despite your frequent unsupported assertions that it is all the same. To me that's a cop
out. But I'm also not interested in defending all Democrats per se, and never said they were "pristine". You've
got the wrong guy on that one. I don't know where you are getting that idea. I agree both parties have some
systemic, process-related corruption. You don't know me that well, outside of my negative responses to the Bush
administration, which is based on hundreds of mountains of information and a stark difference in philosophy. There
have never been close to this many horribly negative books and documentaries written about a sitting
president (and/or his administration), much less one that doesn't read books or watch documentaries. And no
American administration has ever been anywhere near this hated on this planet. Sorry, but to me this "biased"
is just having a grip.
DrSmellThis
11-09-2004, 04:48 PM
Doc,
Your
right, they did say "Like Excel". Excel is a spreadsheet program, it is not a database. There is a huge difference.
A spreadsheet could be viewed as a single table within a database except that it does not have all the linkages to
other tables. That is important because a database can have hundreds or even thousands of tables that are either
directly or indirectly dependent on one another. Almost all databases require you to log into them as well. There
wasn't anything about a log in in the article. It is possible that they used flat files in the GEM program but I'd
be surprised with the large number of database programs available. I think it equally possible that the
demonstration was a hoax. It wouldn't be all that hard to do, but can't prove it either way.
Another point is
they keep mentioning a Windows PC, like it's something bad or somehow flawed. Nothing could be further from the
truth, especially if they are using Wndows 2000 or later and I can't imagine them using an earlier version. A good
example are ATM machines. Many of them are Windows based, when was the last time you heard of an ATM being hacked?
It can and has been done but it is rare. Don't make the mistake of comparing the tabulators with a personal PC just
because they both use Windows. There's a world of difference.These are valid issues to keep in mind. You
are correct to wonder about all this. These are unanswered questions. However, I have no a priori reason to
believe Bev Harris, a prominent, and respected expert and author on e-voting, just made up her demonstration in some
dishonest, deceptive way. Maybe she was illustrating something (I'll have to go look at it again -- too much
information all at once.).
A lot of computer people do believe Windows is a notoriouly insecure OS -- I see
this assertion on the web all the time. Hackers, virus writers, and other malicious folk usually target Windows in
developing their malicious technology. I just saw an article today asserting that even Mac is safer because of that,
to date.
Having said that, I'm not a computer expert. This all is just one aspect of the picture that could
take various forms without changing the larger picture much.
DrSmellThis
11-09-2004, 08:06 PM
My mother, a registered Republican in the swing state of Ohio, voted for Kerry. I was under the impression that
this was not unusual. Tonight I heard on Air America that, in 47 Florida counties, a full 100% of the Republicans
were recorded as voting for Bush.
If the votes were indeed recorded in that way, what do you all think are the
odds that not a single registered Republican in those swing state counties voted for Kerry, Nader, or any
other independent candidate?
***
News item: Congressmen Conyers, Holt, Wechsler, and three others have
just requested a GAO review of the voter fraud scandal. Nader is continuing his audit requests in other states
besides NH. (I guess they all believe Elvis shot JFK too. ;)) More news will be posted as available.
belgareth
11-09-2004, 11:48 PM
These are
valid issues to keep in mind. You are correct to wonder about all this. These are unanswered questions. However, I
have no a priori reason to believe Bev Harris, a prominent, and respected expert and author on e-voting, just
made up her demonstration in some dishonest, deceptive way. Maybe she was illustrating something (I'll have to go
look at it again -- too much information all at once.).
A lot of computer people do believe Windows is a
notoriouly insecure OS -- I see this assertion on the web all the time. Hackers, virus writers, and other malicious
folk usually target Windows in developing their malicious technology. I just saw an article today asserting that
even Mac is safer because of that, to date.
Having said that, I'm not a computer expert. This all is just one
aspect of the picture that could take various forms without changing the larger picture much.In almost 100%
of all hacks, spyware, malware etc. attacks the attacking software is essentially invited onto the computer in one
way or another. I can find examples of non-invitational attacks but they are very rare. By invitational I mean that
through some medium, either clicking on a web link or opening an e-mail or some other means, a file was allowed to
run on a computer. But that gate had to be opened first. That's also why I was asking how the data was transferred,
it is important.
While I don't claim to be an expert on all computer technology, it is what I have done most of
my working life. I am an MCSE (Microsoft Certified System Engineer), a certified Oracle database administrater and
have worked some with Delphi. It doesn't make me an expert but my questions are to the point.
You may not like
what I said about how you come across but the points were valild. You either chose to put your own interpretation on
my point of view or badly misunderstand me and posted it. I replied by giving you an honest assessment of how you
sound from here. At no time did I say I disliked democrats or liberals. I said I would not vote for one under any
conditions because I do not believe in their message. That's a decision based on experience and observation with no
intended emotional context. You have displayed a solid dislike for all things republican yourself. You have also
completely avoided addressing my arguments, both public and private, of why I do not believe in the liberal or
progressive agenda which includes, in almost every case, higher taxes.
The democrats and the republicans both
have a long history of deceiving the public. For a good example read the book "The Cuban Missile Crises". It
outlines the deadly games Kennedy and his people played that nearly started a nuclear war. It was required reading
in a PolySci class in a liberal college. There are other examples but that is a scary one. Yes, I am guilty of
expecting the worst from all politicians but am rarely disappointed. I also assume a gun is loaded and any dog can
bite. That's called prudence and being careful. I don't assume anybody is giving me the whole truth when it comes
to politics because, like you and me both, they have agendas of their own. Is there something wrong with questioning
every assumption? Personally, I am not interested in bashing either party, I am interested in knowing the truth. The
only way to get to the truth is to question every portion of all side's actions both pre-election and during the
election and not taking anything at face value. I'd be just as happy as can be to see Bush behind bars if he is
guilty of the crimes you accuse him of. At the same time, I'd be just as happy to see Kerry behind bars if he is
guilty of crimes. But I don't convict anybody on hearsay.
One thing I am very puzzled by is Kerry's quick
concession and not a word since.
DrSmellThis
11-10-2004, 04:48 AM
Much of that has been covered.
Nobody is convicting anybody on heresay. Let the investigations show what they will. I hope mainly for reform.
Republicans will benefit just as much from that. How could anyone argue against legitimate voting?
A lot of
people are puzzled and disappointed by Kerry's rolling over like a bi-otch and prostrating himself so quickly,
despite having promised to fight to the death for every vote. Edwards clearly didn't have this submissive
predilection, but Kerry insisted, the man that he is. He is trying to be all things to all "mainstream"
people, maybe; but true progressives (No, this term has little or nothing to do with raising taxes, as the right
wing cliche you propagate nevertheless goes. This should give you a clue as to why I don't respond.) have as little
patience for this as they had for Mr. Nader's self absorbed stunts. Unlike mainstream Democrats, progressives have
balls and aren't afraid to be unpopular. Kerry is sitting around trying to figure out how he can come across as
harsher against gays to appease the right. He's probably wearing a pink nightie right now, and Teresa is sodomizing
him with a Heinz Ketchup bottle. Though Kerry wants to run again, he is finished with his roots. I broke down crying
during his concession speech, but it wasn't because he lost. I have a lot of information here, but am not posting
it so as to avoid distraction.
Pancho1188
11-10-2004, 07:07 AM
and Teresa
is sodomizing him with a Heinz Ketchup bottle. You can insult Teresa and Bush and Kerry and whoever
else...but I'll be damned if I sit here while you insult Heinz Ketchup! :smite: (Spoken like a true Pittsburgher)
Seriously, though, Kerry conceded because:
1. He lost the popular vote and was down in every state that was
debatable
2. Republicans would've taken shots at him again and again until his credibility was stripped away, just
like Al Gore. Bush said himself, "I'm not going to comment until Kerry has time to let the election results set in
(aka has time to realize he lost)."
3. The media and public wanted an answer of who won because they are impatient
and stupid...everyone wants an answer right now...no, patience is not a virtue in this country...they
would've hung Kerry out to dry, too...
A rigged election is the easiest thing to get away with in this country.
Everyone wants an answer and forgets about it once it's over. Even if you question the results, no one is going to
go back once it's over...and there's not enough solid evidence to give reason to redo the election. People will
shrug you off as a conspiracy theorist. They'll say they'll make it better next time, but it's always just as
bad.
I'm not surprised Kerry conceded so early. Al Gore will go down in history as the sore loser...would you
want that stigma for the rest of your life?
I still say they shouldn't announce the winner for at least a month
after the election to ensure an answer. People are too impatient.
belgareth
11-10-2004, 08:34 AM
It's easy to write off a
genuine concern of higher taxes as right wing cliche buts lets deal with facts instead of misleading and evasive
labels. No matter how you structure any program, it has a price tag. That price tag is paid for out of tax money.
Since government programs are inefficient, all government programs end up costing far more than they should and with
far less of that cost going to those who really need it. The net result is a greater burden on the economy and
bigger government. As I understand it, the progressive plan is to use a greater tax on higher income earners to help
those in need, and that is a worthy cause on the face of it. The unfortunate part is that it doesn't work very
well, costing too much, serving to few and all too often abused.
Lowering the tax burden on the backbone of this
country, the small business, would have far greater, further reaching and longer term benefits. A reduction of just
5% would put thousands to work because the small business owner would be more able to afford the additional
employees. That in turn would generate more tax dollars while it reduced the number of people needing the benefits.
With more people earning money, they will have more to spend, save and invest which in turn again helps everybody by
generating more revenue. Increase the tax burden the same amount to pay for another program and you will see exactly
the opposite effect. I've over-simplified the concept but it really does work that way.
Personally, I would
support a non-partisan audit of the entire election from begining to end. But at the end of it, I would expect every
person shown to be involved in election fraud to be brought up on federal charges and prosecuted to the full extent
of the law for two reasons.
1. We pride ourselves on being a nation of laws. If our leaders aren't required to
obey those laws, how can the people be expected too?
2. Failure to enforce the law breeds contempt for all laws.
We should not have laws that are not enforced or are unenforcable as it breeds anarchy.
The electoral process
and our government as a whole needs to be cleaned up. It will never be honest until we as a nation start holding our
elected representatives' feet to the fire for their behavoir. These people are supposed to be working for and
representing us. Is this how you want to be represented?
DrSmellThis
11-10-2004, 01:01 PM
I think that what you are
doing, precisely, is using misleading labels. You just used "evasive", another totally unnecessary label. (This will
not lead to "fun debate" any time soon, unless you enjoy provoking people. If so please give it a rest for
now where I am concerned. It's been a bad week.) You continue with your unidimensional labeling of progressives as
being essentially all about high taxes. This is a pretty serious misrepresentation of progressive politics, IMHO. I
often read progressive literature, and raising taxes is not often listed at the top of anyone's concerns, or even
mentioned very much, that I see. Maybe AKA would disagree with me on this one, as I think he considers himself
progressive, and no one in the progressive movement is asking me to speak for them. But I believe you can be very
progressive without favoring high taxes. It's what you do with the money you have. In fact, you can be progressive
in the ways you use tax cuts to encourage progressive causes, such as developing alternate energy sources,
reusing materials, developing "sustainable" businesses, working for peace and justice; or building community. Not
lowering taxes, rolling back tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals, or not going to a flat tax is not the
same as raising taxes. Some might want to temporarily to help get us out of debt, but the reality is that we have an
obscene debt thanks to Bush (not the "damn tax and spend liberals", who gave us a historic surplus), and we need to
do something about it. It's easy for you to say that government programs are useless, that we should take
that money and give it to the rich; as you might not need those programs. Honestly, though I have way more training
in taxation (and economics) than most people (I have a finance degree and once was a financial consultant for Lehman
Brothers, whose 102nd floor headquarters went down with the WTC), I find it too complex, boring to study, and cannot
claim to be an expert on it. I don't doubt that tax cuts would benefit your own business in various ways, and I
believe you when you say that you'd use a radical tax cut to hire one or two people; but you are not the same as
America. Bush's tax cuts have not increased employment, and it is hard to show it's the answer. Here in Oregon
they have completely gutted health care, welfare, social services and education. The Oregon Health Plan, long
considered a model success, is now basically defunct. I can't begin to tell you the level of crisis. It sucks for
people who aren't wealthy, but the rich are getting much richer here (and everywhere in the U.S.) The homeless here
are filling the streets without services (so many they built their own city near Portland called "Dignity Village,"
from recycled materials, until it lost its land recently) and the emergency rooms (now the poor's primary source of
health care, and mental health care -- talk about inefficiency!) are jammed to the point of insanity. They are
emptying jails. Many of the unemployed can't get unemployment, as the funds are dry. That is where Bush's tax cuts
have gotten us. Nothing personal, but I love that rich conservatives think that too high taxes for the rich is the
worst problem for America. Very telling. I'm sure everything can be solved through trickle down economics. But can
we take the tax talk to another thread, please?
DrSmellThis
11-10-2004, 01:03 PM
http://www.solarbus.
org/stealyourelection/articles/CuyahogaCounty-OhioVotingResults.pdf (http://www.solarbus.org/stealyourelection/articles/CuyahogaCounty-OhioVotingResults.pdf)
DrSmellThis
11-10-2004, 02:24 PM
http://www.zogby.com/Soundbites/ReadClips.dbm?ID=1038
5 (http://www.zogby.com/Soundbites/ReadClips.dbm?ID=10385)
Mtnjim
11-10-2004, 02:46 PM
" Bush's tax cuts have not
increased employment, and it is hard to show it's the answer."
Bush isn't planning on tax cut creating
jobs, it'll be his "training programs" that he emphasized in the "debates"!
You know, training computer
programmers whose jobs have been "outsourced" to India how to say "you want fries with that?".
belgareth
11-10-2004, 02:56 PM
No, I don't like provoking
people but will not stand for being misrepresented either. Labelling my belief about taxes a right wing cliche was
provoking, baseless, untrue and evaded the real issues. Saying or implying that I promoted tax cuts or giving tax
dollars to the richest was utterly untrue. Nor did I say that raising taxes was included in progressive liturature.
What I said was that programs cost money and have to be paid for. The only way for the government to pay for those
programs is with tax dollars, unless somebody has managed to make money grow on trees or materialize out of thin
air. I did not say or in any way refer to trickle down economics either. But if you are going to use tax incentives
for one program, you are going to get the tax money from somewhere else or you are going to get into deficit
spending which is something I don't believe this country can afford any more of.
You have a degree in
economics? Then you probably know as well as I do how long it takes government policy to have a large scale effect
on the economy, enough to reduce the deficit by any significant degree. If you know all that, why are you giving the
credit to the democrats? There have also been several comments that the deficit reduction was mostly paper shuffle
in the first place. I don't know enough about that to be sure but it is something I am trying to learn more about.
I hope you understand about the stock market bubble, where it came from, how long it took to build and the surety of
it's bursting. That debacle grew under Clinton and was a disaster just waiting to happen.
I used my business as
an example but in fact it applies to numerous small and medium businesses. No small business owner with half a brain
would turn down the opportunity to grow their business and that means hiring people, buying goods, etc. That is good
for the economy and will generate tax revenues for in excess of the tax reductions.
So, the rich get richer and
the poor get poorer in your progressive state? And it is strictly the fault of conservative federal politics?
Probably the funniest part of all this is you keep telling me that my politics are conservative republican while
me friends here keep calling me a liberal democrat for saying the same things. I know I've said that before but the
humor in it gives me a chuckle every time you or one of my friends here make a comment like that.
DrSmellThis
11-10-2004, 03:19 PM
I again ask you as a moderator
to show some respect for the issue we are discussing in this thread.
belgareth
11-10-2004, 03:24 PM
" Bush's tax
cuts have not increased employment, and it is hard to show it's the answer."
Bush isn't planning on tax cut
creating jobs, it'll be his "training programs" that he emphasized in the "debates"!
You know, training
computer programmers whose jobs have been "outsourced" to India how to say "you want fries with that?".
Now there is a possible source of revenue. Stop giving these huge tax breaks and incentives to companies that
outsource offshore. That is a problem that has been growing for a long time and is pervasive in my industry as well
as many others. In the Dallas/Fort Worth area there are thousands of highly skilled technical people out of work due
to outsourcing. It's something both parties have allowed to go on for far too long and is killing our technical
industries. That was one of the key issues for me this election and I never heard either candidate say anything
worthwhile about how to stop it.
belgareth
11-10-2004, 03:27 PM
I again ask
you as a moderator to show some respect for the issue we are discussing in this thread.
You hadn't asked
me in the first place so I am not sure what you mean by again. And in every case, my posts were responding to you.
DrSmellThis
11-10-2004, 03:50 PM
Here is a really excellent televised report on Votergate by MSNBC news. The video is excellent,
free, lengthy, and I encourage everyone to enjoy it! I was jealous of bjf who told me it was on, because he has
cable and I don't; but then found it free for download. :)
http://home.comcast.net/~hugh.moore/coun
tdown_on_voting_irregs.wmv (http://home.comcast.net/~hugh.moore/countdown_on_voting_irregs.wmv)
You have to love the part about Homeland Security and the "terrorist threat" in
Warren County.
koolking1
11-10-2004, 03:53 PM
A black ribbon (like the
yellow you sometimes see people wearing) signifies "Election Mourning".
belgareth
11-10-2004, 04:07 PM
Here is a
really excellent televised report on Votergate by MSNBC news. The video is excellent, free, lengthy, and I
encourage everyone to enjoy it! I was jealous of bjf who told me it was on, because he has cable and I don't; but
then found it free for download. :)
http://home.comcast.net/~hugh.moore/coun
tdown_on_voting_irregs.wmv (http://home.comcast.net/~hugh.moore/countdown_on_voting_irregs.wmv)
You have to love the part about Homeland Security and the "terrorist threat" in
Warren County.F***ing disgusting slimeballs! No matter what else, election fraud is unacceptable!
I
don't know much about the GAO, can they operate without interference from the rest of the government? We deserve to
know who the real president is. Nobody has the right to screw with our votes. If the accusations are true some
people need to hang!
Thanks for posting it, Doc. And BJF for making it available.
DrSmellThis
11-10-2004, 05:08 PM
I'm sure it's a coincidence, and they're not in cahoots. ;)
[url="http://www.la.indymedia.org/news/2004/11/118589.php"]http://www.la.indymedia.org/news/2004/11/118589.php[/ur
l]
DrSmellThis
11-10-2004, 05:15 PM
Again, a great link to a ton
of information, compellingly presented:
http://www.solarbus.org/stealyourelection/
Are you all
keeping up with the information? ;)
belgareth
11-10-2004, 05:18 PM
Maybe I'm not the only one
with suspicions this direction. This paragraph caught my attention, especially the last two sentences.
Once
again we are witness to an “eyes closed, hands off” approach to protecting America. The 2004 election rests in the
private hands of the Urosevich brothers, who are financed by the far-out right wing and top donors to the Republican
Party. The Democrats are either sitting ducks or co-conspirators. I don't know which.
F***ing disgusting
slimeballs! No matter what else, election fraud is unacceptable!
I don't know much about the GAO, can they
operate without interference from the rest of the government? We deserve to know who the real president is. Nobody
has the right to screw with our votes. If the accusations are true some people need to hang!
Thanks for
posting it, Doc. And BJF for making it available.
I didn't post the video, just told doc about
it when it was on tv.
The representative interviewd there can be emailed at
john.conyers@mail.house.gov as dst pointed out in one of his many lengthy posts, highlighting all
the info in the video and more.
Best thing for any of us to do is not to just read this stuff, but rather to
"pass it along" to our friends and family via email so the word can spread. Otherwise, we're not doing much
good.
belgareth
11-10-2004, 05:22 PM
The best thing we can do is
pass it along and encourage everybody to write asking for a full investigation.
Mtnjim
11-10-2004, 05:30 PM
" The Democrats are either sitting
ducks or co-conspirators. I don't know which."
Depends if they got enough $$$ or not.
I'm not
usually a "conspiracy theorist", but has anyone noticed the growing influence of the major international
corporations in the running of the government. Not only that, but the well paying jobs in business and manufacturing
are being "outsourced" off shore and a few major companies are buying up of forcing competitors out of business
insuring less competition.
Combined with the "concessions" being given major corporations by the government...
unpaid or undercosted oil leases, failure of BLM to collect fees from the logging companies for removing timber from
government land etc. WELL, ... :hammer:
DrSmellThis
11-10-2004, 09:36 PM
News Update from Citizens for Legitimate Government
November 10,
2004
http://www.legitgov.org/
(http://www.legitgov.org/)
http://www.legitgov.org
/index.html#breaking_news (http://www.legitgov.org/index.html)
Diebold Source Code!!! --by ouranos
(dailykos.com) "Dr. Avi Rubin is
currently Professor of Computer Science at John Hopkins University. He
'accidentally' got his hands on a copy of the Diebold software
program--Diebold's source code--which runs
their e-voting machines. Dr.
Rubin's students pored over 48,609 lines of code that make up this
software.
One line in particular stood out over all the rest:
#defineDESKEY((des_KEY8F2654hd4" All commercial programs
have provisions to
be encrypted so as to protect them from having their contents read or
changed by anyone
not having the key... The line that staggered the Hopkins
team was that the method used to encrypt the Diebold
machines was a method
called Digital Encryption Standard (DES), a code that was broken in 1997
and is NO
LONGER USED by anyone to secure programs. F2654hd4 was the key to
the encryption. Moreover, because the KEY was
IN the source code, all
Diebold machines would respond to the same key. Unlock one, you have then
ALL
unlocked. I can't believe there is a person alive who wouldn't
understand the reason this was allowed to
happen. This wasn't a mistake by
any stretch of the imagination."
DrSmellThis
11-10-2004, 09:42 PM
More for you computer people:
http://avirubin.com/vote.pdf
DrSmellThis
11-12-2004, 12:32 AM
http://www.indystar.com/articles/3/193880-4433-102.h
tml (http://www.indystar.com/articles/3/193880-4433-102.html)
Nine percent of the vote was counted as Libertarian in Indiana. I don't know what Bush won by in that
state, but it wasn't anywhere near nine percent.
Doesn't it seem that the pile of suspicious irregularities is
starting to get pretty high?
It's like the Mount St. Helens lava dome, which is growing at the rate of one
dumptruck full per second.
Only more explosive. :)
DrSmellThis
11-12-2004, 12:50 AM
Now almost all the candidates except Kerry and Bush are demanding
recounts; and none of them have much personal at stake.
Yesterday (Thursday) Green Party candidate David Cobb
and Libertarian Michael Bednarik filed a demand for an Ohio recount. Someone apparently discovered an obscure law on
the Ohio books, that provides the right to demand a recount, given certain easily met conditions (like 5 complaints
or something). They expect to raise the required $110,000 to pay for it within the next 48 hours. So it won't be
official for a couple days.
They are also calling on Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, the official who
administered voting in Ohio, to disqualify himself from the process.
Blackwell was also Ohio Chair of the
Bush/Cheney reelection campaign. (Could someone explain to me why this is allowed in America?)
Readers of
earlier posts in this thread may recall that Blackwell had spearheaded two controversial efforts that effectively
made it more difficult to vote in Ohio.
http://blog.democrats.com/ohio-recount
well spaced and easily readable.
:drunk:
DrSmellThis
11-12-2004, 09:21 AM
Um, you had to be there.
DrSmellThis
11-12-2004, 01:20 PM
This site
seems to be pretty up to date with things...just trying to have all the major sources of information on this in one
place.
http://derelection2004.org/
Mission statement from the
Cursor, Inc. site:
"Cursor, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity that educates the public on the
relationship between media and society through two free Web sites, Cursor.org, and MediaTransparency.org. These
sites are useful to media practitioners, students, researchers, and the general public -- adding context to the
mainstream media's output by illuminating the structures and methods employed, as well as by providing an ongoing
library of links to the best media education, research and commentary available on the Internet. We supplement this
with our own original research and commentary."
koolking1
11-12-2004, 02:41 PM
"and none of them have much
personal at stake". But, do they? Maybe. What if it's determined that Bush did not win due to fraud (not him of
course, just well-meaning underlings) and since Kerry has already conceded - just a nice thought on my part! Go
Nader!!!!
The report on fox news was similar to
this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/politics/12theory.html?oref=login&8br
DrSmellThis
11-12-2004, 04:57 PM
The report on fox
news was similar to this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/p
olitics/12theory.html?oref=login&8br (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/politics/12theory.html?oref=login&8br)
Login was required. How was it?
DrSmellThis
11-12-2004, 05:16 PM
"and none of
them have much personal at stake". But, do they? Maybe. What if it's determined that Bush did not win due to fraud
(not him of course, just well-meaning underlings) and since Kerry has already conceded - just a nice thought on my
part! Go Nader!!!!Maybe the internet can play a bigger role in keeping candidates both more independent and
viable, sometime in the not too distant future. It almost worked for Howard Dean, I guess, though he's not exactly
indy. Oops, didn't mean to get us off track there.
DrSmellThis
11-13-2004, 02:04 PM
Here is a
progress report and a clear encapsulation from one of the attorneys
involved:
[url="http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111304V.shtml"]http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111304V.shtml[/url
]
At this point it's just a matter of raising an additional $80,000. Upon recount, if Kerry wins Ohio, he is
president. It is unclear whether that is a likelihood.
In further news, Ohio Secretary of State, voting czar,
and Republican chairman, Blackwell, just introduced an initiative to disqualify ballots where registration
birthdates are missing.
Login was
required. How was it?
By TOM ZELLER Jr.
Published: November 12, 2004
The e-mail
messages and Web postings had all the twitchy cloak-and-dagger thrust of a Hollywood blockbuster. "Evidence mounts
that the vote may have been hacked," trumpeted a headline on the Web site CommonDreams.org. "Fraud took place in the
2004 election through electronic voting machines," declared BlackBoxVoting.org.
In the space of seven days,
an online market of dark ideas surrounding last week's presidential election took root and multiplied.
But
while the widely read universe of Web logs was often blamed for the swift propagation of faulty analyses, the
blogosphere, as it has come to be known, spread the rumors so fast that experts were soon able to debunk them,
rather than allowing them to linger and feed conspiracy theories. Within days of the first rumors of a stolen
election, in fact, the most popular theories were being proved wrong - though many were still reluctant to let them
go.
Much of the controversy, called Votergate 2004 by some, involved real voting anomalies in Florida and
Ohio, the two states on which victory hinged. But ground zero in the online rumor mill, it seems, was Utah.
"I love the process of democracy, and I think it's more important than the outcome," said Kathy Dopp, an
Internet enthusiast living near Salt Lake City. It was Ms. Dopp's analysis of the vote in Florida (she has a
master's degree in mathematics) that set off a flurry of post-election theorizing by disheartened Democrats who
were certain, given early surveys of voters leaving the polls that were leaked, showing Senator John Kerry winning
handily, that something was amiss.
The day after the election, Ms. Dopp posted to her Web site,
www.ustogether.org, a table comparing party registrations in each of Florida's 67 counties, the method of voting
used and the number of votes cast for each presidential candidate. Ms. Dopp, along with other statisticians
contributing to the site, suggested a "surprising pattern" in Florida's results showing inexplicable gains for
President Bush in Democratic counties that used optical-scan voting systems.
The zeal and sophistication of
Ms. Dopp's number crunching was hard to dismiss out of hand, and other Web users began creating their own bar
charts and regression models in support of other theories. In a breathless cycle of hey-check-this-out, the theories
- along with their visual aids - were distributed by e-mail messages containing links to popular Web sites and Web
logs, or blogs, where other eager readers diligently passed them along.
Within one day, the number of visits
to Ms. Dopp's site jumped from 50 to more than 500, according to site logs. On Nov. 4, that number tipped 17,000.
Her findings were noted on popular left-leaning Web logs like DailyKos.com and FreePress.org. Last Friday, three
Democratic members of Congress - John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Robert Wexler of
Florida - sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office seeking an investigation of voting machines. A link
to Ms. Dopp's site was included in the letter.
But rebuttals to the Florida fraud hypothesis were just as
quick. Three political scientists, from Cornell, Harvard and Stanford, pointed out, in an e-mail message to a Web
site that carried the news of Ms. Dopp's findings, that many of those Democratic counties in Florida have a long
tradition of voting Republican in presidential elections. And while Ms. Dopp says that she and dozens of other
researchers will continue to analyze the Florida vote, the suggestion of a link between certain types of voting
machines and the vote split in Florida has, at least for now, little concrete support.
Still, as visitors to
Ms. Dopp's site approached 70,000 early this week, other election anomalies were gaining traction on the Internet.
The elections department in Cleveland, for instance, set off a round of Web log hysteria when it posted turnout
figures on its site that seemed to show more votes being cast in some communities than there were registered voters.
That turned out to be an error in how the votes were reported by the department, not in the counting.
And
the early Election Day polls, conducted for a consortium of television networks and The Associated Press, which
proved largely inaccurate in showing Mr. Kerry leading in Florida and Ohio, continued to be offered as evidence that
the Bush team somehow cheated.
But while authorities acknowledge that there were real problems on Election
Day, including troubles with some electronic machines and intolerably long lines in some places, few have suggested
that any of these could have changed the outcome.
"There are real problems to be addressed," said Doug
Chapin of Electionline.org, a clearinghouse of election reform information, "and I'd hate for them to get lost in
second-guessing of the result."
It is that second-guessing, however, that has largely characterized the
blog-to-e-mail-to-blog continuum. Some election officials have become frustrated by the rumor mill.
(Page 2
of 2)
"It becomes a snowball of hearsay," said Matthew Damschroder, the director of elections in
Columbus, Ohio, where an electronic voting machine malfunctioned in one precinct and allotted some 4,000 votes to
President Bush, kicking off its own flurry of Web speculation. That particular problem was unusual and remains
unexplained, but it was caught and corrected, Mr. Damschroder said.
"Some from the traditional media have
called for an explanation," he said, "but no one from these blogs has called and said, 'We want to know what really
happened.' "
Whether that is the role of bloggers, Web posters and online pundits, however, is a matter of
debate.
Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in the interactive telecommunications program at New York
University, suggests that the online fact-finding machine has come unmoored, and that some bloggers simply "can't
imagine any universe in which a fair count of the votes would result in George Bush being re-elected president."
But some denizens of the Web see it differently.
Jake White, the owner of the Web log
primordium.org, argues that he and other election-monitoring Web posters are not motivated solely by partisan
politics. "While there are no doubt large segments of this movement that are being driven by that," he said in an
e-mail message, "I prefer to think of it as discontent over the way the election was held."
Mr. White also
quickly withdrew his own analysis of voting systems in Ohio when he realized the data he had used was
inaccurate.
John Byrne, editor of an alternative news site, BlueLemur.com, says it is too easy to condemn
blogs and freelance Web sites for being inaccurate. The more important point, he said, is that they offer an
alternative to a mainstream news media that has become too timid. "Of course you can say blogs are wrong," he said.
"Blogs are wrong all the time."
For its part, the Kerry campaign has been trying to tamp down the conspiracy
theories and to tell supporters that their mission now is to ensure that every vote is counted, not that the
election be overturned.
"We know this was an emotional election, and the losing side is very upset," said
Daniel Hoffheimer, the lead lawyer for the Kerry campaign in Ohio. But, he said, "I have not seen anything to
indicate intentional fraud or tampering."
A preliminary study produced by the Voting Technology Project, a
cooperative effort between the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
came to a similar conclusion. Its study found "no particular patterns" relating to voting systems and the final
results of the election.
"The 'facts' that are being circulated on the Internet," the study concluded,
"appear to be selectively chosen to make the point."
Whether that will ever convince everyone is an open
question.
"I'd give my right arm for Internet rumors of a stolen election to be true," said David Wade, a
spokesman for the Kerry campaign, "but blogging it doesn't make it so. We can change the future; we can't rewrite
the past."
Ford Fessenden and John Schwartz contributed reporting for this article.
For the
Record: Nov. 13, 2004, Saturday
A front-page article yesterday about the rise of conspiracy theories on the
Internet regarding the presidential election referred incorrectly to FreePress.org, which carried some of them. It
is the Web site for The Free Press, a community newspaper in Columbus, Ohio; it is not a blog.
DrSmellThis
11-13-2004, 03:24 PM
Thanks for the post.
That's a mediocre representation of the "other side" on this issue. I can also see how Fox would carry something
like that. Most all of the "debunking" in that article was pretty vague, along the lines of "that's all just
wishful thinking with little basis in fact," or "those theories have been proven wrong". I consider that sort of
thing "scoffing" rather than rational argument, and this issue deserves better, even from a newpaper article. All
that scoffing shows is that there are some people who don't believe the criticisms of the voting process. No
suprise or new information there! Obviously, Ohio election officials are going to scoff. And it's probable that the
Kerry people think they can't touch this if he wants to remain a commercially viable candidate. So it's hard to
come away from that reading with my critical thinking enhanced. The "caveat" issue of "dixiecrat" (Democrats
traditionally voting Republican) Florida counties they mentioned was introduced earlier in this thread too, with
regard to one county, but it is unclear, to say the least, whether this factor could possibly account for the very
high number of overwhelmingly Democratic counties overwhelmingly voting for Bush. I thought that was their strongest
argument, however. Their point that it was a matter of misreporting rather than miscounting in Ohio is confusing,
and may be irrelevant, if the mistakes affected final results. At this point there are 6 congressmen, one major news
network, and three former presidential candidates (with no chance to win, regardless) who are taking these
irregularities seriously. We will see how NH, Ohio, and the GAO respond in the near future.
The article made a
good point in that it's important to not focus on overturning the election as the primary issue, when at this point
it's mostly about ensuring that we can all live in a Democracy where the right to vote is taken seriously. The fact
that most of the irregularities identified would benefit Republicans can be put on the back burner if the audits and
recounts happen. On the other hand, if the Ohio recount favors Kerry, he's in. Otherwise we can reform the system
to benefit all sides of the political spectrum.
On the other hand, here is the link to the Voting Technology
Project report referenced in the article. I am at least happy that it is detailed. I intend to look at it more
closely.
http://www.vote.caltech.edu/Election2004.html
koolking1
11-13-2004, 04:08 PM
We should take the high
road for sure. If people ask why you are questioning the voting practices in the last election your answer should
have nothing to do with your candidate losing but only to do with wanting to be sure that there are free and fair
elections in this country. That's our way, if someone wins fair and square, so be it. If not, well, we'll see.
koolking1
11-13-2004, 04:39 PM
from the Bev Harris
site:
"You may have seen recent stories in the media (ABC News, Salon.com), and at other voting integrity Web
sites like VerifiedVoting.org, telling you there is no reason to believe suspicions of fraud in the 2004 election.
In fact, no member of the media nor any organization has done any real forensic auditing to determine whether there
was or was not fraud. Trust in our electoral process is critical to our democracy. We need the right kind of
investigation into anomalies, using appropriate methods.
"Feel-good" statements, dismissive of real concerns
into voting integrity, are not responsible. The truth is what it is. We might see something very uncomfortable
unfold during these investigations. Or, maybe not. It's still too early to tell, but the evidence is mounting."
DrSmellThis
11-13-2004, 04:48 PM
A prelimentary read of the first section of the Voter Technology Project, the one that considers
exit poll discrepancies, suggests a suprising misunderstanding of statistics on their part.
It's hard to
believe that comes from a university.
You can't have overall statististical significance based on a large
population difference, and then go back and argue against that by splitting the population apart; to show failure of
statistical significance in sub-groups, as they tried to do!
That appears to be bad math. Here's how you're
supposed to do it:
The first step is to demonstrate overall statistical significance difference in a population,
which demonstrates that there must be statistical significance somewhere in the micro portions of it. Then you
"probe" the results to find out where, with special tests. You must do it this way; in order to conclude that
any differences you find in sub populations were not just due to a "sampling error" of sorts.
So if there's
not a difference in the whole population, you can say nothing about your sub-population results. If there is a
population difference, then there must be differences within some of the sub populations.
I hope this is making
sense to you stats laypeople.
It's mathematically impossible that the micro groups -- in this case, the states
-- would all turn out insignificant. I learned this in the second of my 7 graduate courses in stats.
So
mathematically, they were looking at it backwards, and in fact demonstrated an overall statistically significant
difference between exit polling and vote tallies in favor of Bush. They then effectively left out of their
"analysis" the sources of the difference.
Even though they mentioned three states with the largest differences,
it is doubtful they used the correct statistical tests to comment on the statistical significance of State results,
since they were mathematically wrongheaded to begin with. They weren't recognizing the issue that would have
allowed them to pick the correct subtests. You would have to pick a different allowance for sampling error than they
did, given preexisting information about a population difference, which would give you greater confidence in state
differences.
Translation: So chances are good that more of the differences in state exit polls versus vote
tallies would be more meaningful than they calculated, given that we already know the national difference is
meaningful. In other words, the national population difference is more like the "true difference", the knowledge of
which gives you much greater confidence in any differences you observe in the states, than you would have
otherwise.
But hardly anyone in the public who read that report would pick that out, I guess. I wonder who
their statistician was.
koolking1
11-13-2004, 04:52 PM
I've heard informally that
Gillespie, RNC, wants exit polls banned from here on out "not accurate".
DrSmellThis
11-13-2004, 05:15 PM
The Zogby post in this thread
addressed that fallacious assertion.
DrSmellThis
11-15-2004, 11:55 PM
Blackboxvoting.org has been
extremely busy initiating fraud investigations all over the U.S., including Nevada, Ohio, Florida, Arizona, New
Hampshire, New Mexico, and Georgia. These are separate from the recounts that seem likely to happen in at least
three states. You can find updates here:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
Unfortunately, since the
investigations are in progress, the flow of information has slowed. I'm willing to wait if it helps the truth come
out.
DrSmellThis
11-16-2004, 12:12 AM
From blackboxvoting.org:
SUNDAY Nov. 7 2004: We’re awaiting independent analysis on some
pretty crooked-looking elections. In the mean time, here’s something to chew on.
Your local elections officials
trusted a group called NASED -- the National Association of State Election Directors -- to certify that your voting
system is safe.
This trust was breached.
NASED certified the systems based on the recommendation of an
“Independent Testing Authority” (ITA).
The ITA reports are considered so secret that even the California
Secretary of State’s office had trouble getting its hands on one. The ITA refused to answer any questions about what
it does. Imagine our surprise when, due to Freedom of Information requests, a couple of them showed up in our
mailbox.
The most important test on the ITA report is called the “penetration analysis.” This test is supposed
to tell us whether anyone can break into the system to tamper with the votes.
“Not applicable,” wrote Shawn
Southworth, of Ciber Labs, the ITA that tested the Diebold GEMS central tabulator software. “Did not test.”
</FONT>This is Shawn Southworth, in his office in Huntsville, Alabama.
He is the man who
carefully examines our voting software.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/southworth.jpe
Shawn
Southworth “tested” whether every candidate on the ballot has a name. But we were shocked to find out that, when
asked the most important question -- about vulnerable entry points -- Southworth’s report says “not reviewed.”
Ciber “tested”whether the manual gives a description of the voting system. But when asked to
identify methods of attack (which we think the American voter would consider pretty important), the top-secret
report says “not applicable.”
Ciber “tested” whether ballots comply with local regulations, but when Bev Harris
asked Shawn Southworth what he thinks about Diebold tabulators accepting large numbers of “minus” votes, he said he
didn’t mention that in his report because “the vendors don’t like him to put anything negative” in his report. After
all, he said, he is paid by the vendors.
Shawn Southworth didn’t do the penetration analysis, but check out
what he wrote:
“Ciber
recommends (http://www.blackboxvoting.org/Diebold-smallciber.pdf) to the NASED committee that GEMS software version 1.18.15 be certified and assigned NASED
certification number N03060011815.”
Was this just a one-time oversight?
Nope. It appears to be more
like a habit. Here is the same Ciber
certification section for VoteHere (http://www.blackboxvoting.org/Votehere-ciber.pdf); as you can see, the critical security test, the “penetration
analysis” was again marked “not applicable” and was not done.
Maybe another ITA did the penetration
analysis?
Apparently not. We discovered an even more bizarre Wyle Laboratories report. In it, the lab
admits the Sequoia voting system has problems, but says that since they were not corrected earlier, Sequoia could
continue with the same flaws. At one point the Wyle report omits its testing altogether, hoping the vendor will do
the test.
Computer Guys: Be your own ITA certifier.
Here is a copy of the full Ciber report (part
1 (http://www.blackboxvoting.org/DieboldCiberReport1.PDF),
2 (http://www.blackboxvoting.org/DieboldCiberReport2.PDF),
3 (http://www.blackboxvoting.org/DieboldCiberReport3.PDF),
4 (http://www.blackboxvoting.org/DieboldCiberReport4.PDF)) on GEMS 1.18.15. Here
is a zip file download for the GEMS 1.18.15
program (http://www.blackboxvoting.org/GEMSIS-1-18-15.zip). Here is a real live
Diebold vote
database (http://www.blackboxvoting.org/coloradospringscityelection.mdb). Compare your findings against the official testing lab and see if you agree with what Ciber
says. E-mail us your findings.
</FONT>TIPS: The password for the vote database is
“password” and you should place it in the “LocalDB” directory in the GEMS folder, which you’ll find in “program
files.”
Who the heck is NASED?
They are the people who certified this stuff.
You’ve
gotta ask yourself: Are they nuts? Some of them are computer experts. Well, it seems that several of these people
suddenly want to retire, and the whole NASED voting systems board is becoming somewhat defunct, but these are the
people responsible for today's shoddy voting systems.
If the security of the U.S. electoral system depends on
you to certify a voting system, and you get a report that plainly states that security was “not tested” and “not
applicable” -- what would you do?
Perhaps we should ask them. Go ahead. Let's hold them accountable for the
election we just had. (Please, e-mail us their answers) They don't make it very easy to get their e-mail and fax
information; when you find it, let us know (Bev@blackboxvoting.org) and we'll
post it here.
NASED VOTING SYSTEMS/ITA ACCREDITATION BOARD
(You can find some contact info at
this site (http://www.co.rock.wi.us/departments/CntyClerk/state_election.htm))
Thomas R. Wilkey, Executive Director, New York State Board of Elections;
twilkey@elections.state.ny.us, phone 518 474-8100, fax 518 473-8315
David Elliott, (former) Asst. Director of Elections, Washington State -- (note from Black Box Voting: he has
left and we have been unable to find his home number. We are very interested in David Elliott, for a number of
reasons. If you can locate his addess, e-mail it to us privately.)
James Hendrix, Executive Director, State
Election Commission, South Carolina;
Jreynold@scsec.state.sc.us (Jreynold@scsec.state.sc.us), phone, 803 734-9060;
FAX 803 734-9363
Denise Lamb, Director, State Bureau of Elections, New Mexico; phone (505) 827-3620 FAX (505)
827-8403 FAX (505) 827-3634
denise.lamb@state.nm.us (http://www.blackboxvoting.org/denise.lamb@state.nm.us)
Sandy Steinbach, Director of Elections, Iowa; phone, (515) 281-5823 FAX (515) 281-7142
sandy@sos.state.ia.us (sandy@sos.state.ia.us)
Donetta Davidson, Secretary
of State, Colorado;
donetta.davidson@state.co.us (donetta.davidson@state.co.us); phone, 303
894-2680 x301 - Fax 303 894-7732
Connie Schmidt, Commissioner, Johnson County Election Commission, Kansas; Fax:
913.791.1753 schmidt@jocoks.com (schmidt@jocoks.com)
(the late) Robert
Naegele, President Granite Creek Technology, Pacific Grove, California
Brit Williams, Professor, CSIS Dept,
Kennesaw State College, Georgia; brit@kennesaw.edu (brit@kennesaw.edu)
770)423-6422
Paul Craft, Computer Audit Analyst, Florida State Division of Elections Florida
pcraft@mail.dos.state.fl.us (pcraft@mail.dos.state.fl.us)
Steve Freeman,
Software Consultant, League City, Texas;
svfreemn@ix.netcom.com (svfreemn@ix.netcom.com)
Jay W. Nispel, Senior
Principal Engineer, Computer Sciences Corporation Annapolis Junction, Maryland
Yvonne Smith (Member Emeritus),
Former Assistant to the Executive Director Illinois State Board of Elections, Illinois; phone (312) 814-6468 FAX
(312) 814-6485 ysmith@elections.state.il.us (ysmith@elections.state.il.us)
Penelope Bonsall, Director, Office of Election Administration, Federal Election Commission, Washington, D.C.;
"pbonsall@fec.gov (pbonsall@fec.gov) Committee Secretariat: The Election
Center, R. Doug Lewis, Executive Director Houston, Texas, Tele: 281-293-0101
electioncent@pdq.net (http://www.blackboxvoting.org/electioncent@pdq.net) Cell 713
516-2875 - Fax 281-293-0453
a.k.a.
11-18-2004, 10:33 PM
Well... So far it’s pretty obvious
that there was widespread voter supression in Ohio, there’s growing evidence of fraud in Florida, and there’s
reasonable cause for doubt in New Hampshire.
So the next logical question is, where the hell are John
“reporting for duty” Kerry and his sidekick, “every vote will be counted” Edwards?
Isn’t it ironic that the
battle for democracy is now being waged by independent candidates (in Ohio and New Hampshire) and independent
journalists in Florida. Not to mention that they’ve had to scramble for donations while Kerry’s sitting on $51
million unspent campaign donations.
If this isn’t an object lesson in what’s wrong with our two party
system, I don’t know what is.
In a perfect world, Kerry’s already conceded, Bush should be disqualified
and there should be a run-off between the Greens, the Libertarians and Ralph Nader.
Now THAT’s an election I
could get excited about.
belgareth
11-19-2004, 12:39 AM
In a perfect
world, Kerry’s already conceded, Bush should be disqualified and there should be a run-off between the Greens, the
Libertarians and Ralph Nader.
Now THAT’s an election I could get excited about.
That would be
interesting, wouldn't it?
Pancho1188
11-19-2004, 06:06 AM
Well... So far
it’s pretty obvious that there was widespread voter supression in Ohio, there’s growing evidence of fraud in
Florida, and there’s reasonable cause for doubt in New Hampshire.
So the next logical question is, where the
hell are John “reporting for duty” Kerry and his sidekick, “every vote will be counted” Edwards?
Isn’t it
ironic that the battle for democracy is now being waged by independent candidates (in Ohio and New Hampshire) and
independent journalists in Florida. Not to mention that they’ve had to scramble for donations while Kerry’s sitting
on $51 million unspent campaign donations.
If this isn’t an object lesson in what’s wrong with our two party
system, I don’t know what is.
In a perfect world, Kerry’s already conceded, Bush should be disqualified and
there should be a run-off between the Greens, the Libertarians and Ralph Nader.
Now THAT’s an election I could
get excited about.
If you concede an election and it turns out you actually won, wouldn't you still win?
Who cares what he said if the voters really said he won...right? I don't know politics that well, though, so maybe
conceding means even if you somehow won you'd still lose.
That said, I already addressed your second paragraph
in another post. Nobody likes a sore loser, and Gore will have that stigma for life. I don't think Kerry wants to
humiliate the Democratic party again by saying there must be something wrong if he lost.
a.k.a.
11-19-2004, 07:18 AM
Nobody likes a
sore loser, and Gore will have that stigma for life. I don't think Kerry wants to humiliate the Democratic party
again by saying there must be something wrong if he lost.
Hmmm. I haven't seen the polls, so I
don't know how Gore and the Democrats stand in the image wars.
In my mind, Gore will always be a wuss and the
Democrats are appearing to be more and more of a hot air Party.
But I wasn't really talking about image. I
was trying to make a point about substance.
Pancho1188
11-19-2004, 08:54 AM
Hmmm. I haven't
seen the polls, so I don't know how Gore and the Democrats stand in the image wars.
In my mind, Gore will always
be a wuss and the Democrats are appearing to be more and more of a hot air Party.
But I wasn't really talking
about image. I was trying to make a point about substance.
I don't think there were polls. I'm going on
the election reports that roughly stated, "nobody wants a dragged out election decision like in 2000 when Gore
contested the election and delayed the results in a court battle that lasted for weeks."
Kerry's actions show
that he cares more about keeping the country together than winning the election. "Now we can begin the healing."
Contesting the election would cause controversy and only divide the red vs. blue sentiment further. I don't think
he wants to be the man to do it. That's why he's not saying anything, in my opinion. I'm just using image as an
example of why one wouldn't want to contest the election. I think the third parties are doing the right thing.
They know that Kerry really can't do much because he was the 'big loser' in the election so to speak, so they are
doing what they can. If Kerry and the Democrats step in, it's because they are sore losers. If third parties step
in, it looks less like a desperate effort to overturn a loss and more of a movement to seek the truth.
Image can
control and overshadow substance in some cases.
a.k.a.
11-19-2004, 02:34 PM
Kerry's actions
show that he cares more about keeping the country together than winning the election. "Now we can begin the
healing." Contesting the election would cause controversy and only divide the red vs. blue sentiment
further.
What's so bad about controversy? And who is the real injured party here? Kerry or his
constituency? How is letting things slide supposed to heal the people that weren't allowed to vote or had their
votes stolen?
I don't think he wants to be the man to do it.
I don't
think he's man enough to do it if he wanted to. And that's why I regret not voting for
Nader.
Image can control and overshadow substance in some cases.
Which would you rather have? The image of fair and democratic elections, or the real deal?
And who do you have
more respect for? Candidates that project an image on national unity, while Black voters are being systematically
disenfranchised? Or people that raise a ruckus?
But if image is that important...Which would you rather see?
Four years of Bush operating on an evangelical mandate? Or four years of Bush stigmatized by illegitimacy?
By refusing to get involved Kerry and the Democratic leadership are helping to sustain the image that Bush has a
strong popular base, while concerns over voter fraud are just the ravings of a bunch of fringe crackpots.
DrSmellThis
11-21-2004, 05:55 PM
That would be
interesting, wouldn't it?I have to admit I find that idea quite attractive as well as amusing. Without Bush
in the picture, I'd love to see everybody else get a chance. Pancho was right that Kerry was thinking about the
next election and how it would look.
But when you see the all independents making a stand on this, it is
heartening. Good for them.
DrSmellThis
11-21-2004, 06:03 PM
Bev Harris has been showing up
at various places to audit the voting records, under the freedom of information request; and being given falsified
ones. She's found the real ones in dumpsters a couple times, and is now reviewing them. Lots of things are
happening.
belgareth
11-21-2004, 07:37 PM
I have to
admit I find that idea quite attractive as well as amusing. Without Bush in the picture, I'd love to see everybody
else get a chance. Pancho was right that Kerry was thinking about the next election and how it would look.
But
when you see the all independents making a stand on this, it is heartening. Good for them.
AKA's comment
that I was referring to took both Bush and Kerry out of it, not just Bush. Kerry left in it alone would not be any
real benefit to anybody and would not be a contest.
DrSmellThis
11-21-2004, 07:49 PM
Got that. I agree. If an indy
got in that would be historic for the country, especially if the person did well. It would lend more legitimacy to
the idea of an expanded system. Oh well, never hurts to dream.
belgareth
11-21-2004, 08:01 PM
The obvious thing it would do
is put this country on a different course, at least temporarily.
The really amusing things it would do would be
the mass apopolexy of thousands of officious democrats and republicans...right before they sent hordes of attornies
to every court in the land filing an almost infinite number of cases resulting in the worst paper shortage we've
seen in a century. Comedians would have fresh material for the next sixty years.
belgareth
11-24-2004, 02:03 PM
GAO to Investigate Voting Irregularies
By LARRY MARGASAK, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON -
Congress' investigative agency, responding to complaints from around the country, has begun to look into the Nov. 2
vote count, including the handling of provisional ballots and malfunctions of voting machines.
The presidential results won't change, but the studies could lead
to changes.
The Government Accountability Office usually begins
investigations in response to specific requests from Congress, but the agency's head, Comptroller General David
Walker, said the GAO acted on its own because of the many comments it received about ballot counting.
GAO officials said the investigation was not triggered by a request
from several House Democrats, who wrote the agency this month seeking an investigation. The effort, led by senior
Judiciary Committee Democrat John Conyers of Michigan, was not joined by any Republicans.
Walker said in a statement that some of the election work is under
way. The probe will cover voter registration, voting machine problems and handling of provisional ballots, which
were given to voters who said they were eligible to cast votes although their names were not on the rolls.
He cautioned that the GAO cannot enforce the law if voting
irregularities are found, noting that state officials regulate elections and the Justice Department prosecutes
voting rights violations and election fraud.
Conyers said in an
interview Wednesday that several House Democrats "want the widest, most impartial investigation that can be had.
Whether they (GAO investigators) want to go as far as we want to go, we're not certain. We're at first base. Where
do we go from here?"
The congressman said he plans to meet with
Walker and key Republicans to see whether Congress should take action to improve election systems.
He said he would like the investigation to include allegations that
insufficient numbers of voting machines were sent to some Democratic areas.
The study also should cover how election officials responded to problems they encountered, he said.
Thousands of complaints have poured in to Congress and appeared on
Internet sites about problems with the elections, the Democrats said.
In make-or-break Ohio, where Bush won 20 electoral votes, voters cast 155,337 provisional ballots. They are
under review by state elections officials, who count them if registration is confirmed. About 78 percent of the
ballots counted so far have been deemed valid.
Meanwhile, election
officials in two Ohio counties have discovered possible cases of people voting twice in the presidential election,
and a third county found about 2,600 ballots were double-counted.
Groups checking election results have overwhelmed Ohio county boards of election with requests for
information, and a statewide recount of the presidential vote appears inevitable after a pair of third-party
candidates collected enough money to demand one.
Other examples of
problems cited by Conyers and other House Democrats:
_In Columbus,
Ohio, an electronic voting system gave President Bush nearly 4,000 extra votes.
_An electronic count of a South Florida gambling ballot initiative
failed to record thousands of votes.
_In Guilford County, N.C., vote
totals were so large that the tabulation computer didn't count some votes, and a recount awarded an additional
22,000 votes to Democrat John Kerry.
_In San Francisco, a glitch in
voting machine software left votes uncounted.
_In Youngstown, Ohio,
voters who tried to cast ballots for Kerry on electronic machines saw their votes recorded for President Bush
instead.
_In Sarpy County, Neb., a computer problem added thousands
of votes to the county total. It was not clear which presidential candidate benefited from the error in the
overwhelmingly Republican state.
___
On the Net:
GAO: http://www.gao.gov
DrSmellThis
11-24-2004, 05:47 PM
I so loved the White House's
condemnation today of the hotly contested Ukrainian presidential election as "fraudulent".
Get this: The
White House cited "compelling" and "substantive" information of voter fraud in the Ukraine, namely, discrepancies
between exit polls and vote tallies; and areas where more votes than voters were recorded!
Sound familiar??
To anyone who has been reading this thread, it should. These were some of the same problems encountered in our
own elections.
The in your face hypocrisy of the Bush administration here is just amazing, isn't it?
belgareth
11-25-2004, 02:19 AM
I was not really amussed by it
myself. We have no business interfering with their elections in the first place and there was too much wrong with
ours to be able to say anything about theirs.
DrSmellThis
11-25-2004, 06:40 PM
Prominent Republicans have
joined in expressing their moral outrage over the Ukrainian election. Another thing they cited is a
shortage of voting booths per capita, causing people to have to wait in line for several hours! :eek: (3 for 3 so
far)
Imagine that! Voter fraud, in this day and age...Tsk Tsk. Join the freakin
twenty-first century, Ukraine!
But those Republicans should be commended for having the courage to
stand up about it, Belgareth. It's particularly offensive when it happens in the Ukraine, isn't it?
Some day they'll learn from us how to run their democracy right.
To wit: There,
in the Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of people are now protesting in the cold, windy, rainy streets over
this. The opposing candidate is absolutely defiant. And some of their prominent journalists are on hunger strikes
about it.
Here? Most everyone is quiet and compliant in Congress, the general public, and the
mainstream press (where a gag order is reportedly in force for now). Kerry folded the morning after election night.
But them "Russkies" need to learn some real democracy from us! :rofl:
DrSmellThis
11-28-2004, 02:51 PM
http://www.cleveland.
com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/110155142862570.xml (http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/110155142862570.xml)
DrSmellThis
11-29-2004, 12:55 PM
... Bush sure to follow suit! ;)
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/11/29/uk
raine/index.html (http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/11/29/ukraine/index.html)
DrSmellThis
11-30-2004, 04:37 AM
Jesse Jackson seeks voting probe
------------------------------------------------------------------------
From staff and wire reports
The
Rev. Jesse Jackson says Ohioans should not stand
for the way elections were run in Ohio Nov. 2, and he
planned to bring his message directly to Cincinnati
today.
Jackson was expected to speak at a rally this
morning
at Integrity Hall in Bond Hill, calling for an
investigation of the voting process in Ohio. He
said
the rally this morning and one Sunday night in
Columbus were to serve as "a kind of statewide sharing
of experiences" that would mobilize citizens and
result in "collective state action.
"We are pulling
people together from around the
state," Jackson, president of the Rainbow/PUSH
Coalition said in a telephone
interview Sunday. "The
Ohio race has not yet been (decided) because of so
many irregularities 26 days after
the election."
Jackson on Sunday called for a recount of votes and
said the Ohio Supreme Court should
consider setting
aside President Bush's victory Nov. 2. Jackson and
others are complaining about uncounted
punch-card
votes, disqualified provisional ballots, discrepancies
between exit polling and results, and too
many votes
counted for President Bush in Ohio. Bush defeated
Democrat John Kerry in Ohio by 136,000 votes,
according to unofficial results.
Jackson also said that there was a disparity in voting machinery used in
suburban and urban neighborhoods.
"The suburban communities had ample machines," he
said. "In inner cities,
we had people (waiting) five
or six hours in line. That was no doubt targeted."
Kerry has already conceded
the race. Jackson said he
thought it was possible a recount could change the
outcome of the election, but
said it was more
important to get votes counted.
"This is about the integrity of the vote. This is not
about the Kerry campaign," said Jackson, who supported
Kerry.
On the morning of Nov. 3, less than 12
hours after
Ohio's final votes were cast, Kerry called Bush to
congratulate him on his victory. His
campaign figured
he would not get enough of the 155,000 provisional
ballots, or those cast by voters whose
registrations
could not be confirmed at polling places, to overtake
Bush's total.
The counting of
provisional ballots and wide gaps in
vote totals for Kerry and other Democrats on the
ballots in certain
counties have raised too many
questions to let the vote stand without further
examination, Jackson said.
"We can live with winning and losing. We cannot live
with fraud and stealing," Jackson said.
Attorney
Cliff Arnebeck, who has represented political
activist groups, said he would ask the Ohio Supreme
Court,
probably on Wednesday, to take a look at the
election results. If the court decides to hear the
case, it can
declare a new winner or throw the results
out.
Since the election, several complaints have surfaced:
o
The Green and Libertarian parties asked a U.S.
District Court judge to order an immediate recount.
The judge
agreed with the state that a recount cannot
begin until Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell
certifies the
statewide vote, sometime between Dec. 3
and 6. The two parties are raising the $113,600, or
$10 per precinct
statewide, needed to force a recount.
o People for the American Way, a national watchdog
group, is
trying to stop the Cuyahoga County Board of
Elections in Cleveland from rejecting 8,099 of the
24,472
provisional ballots cast there. The ballots
were thrown out because voters did not properly
complete them or
cast them at polling places that were
not their own.
o An error was detected in an electronic voting
system, giving President Bush 3,893 extra votes in
suburban Columbus. Elections officials caught the
glitch and the votes will not be added to the official
tally. Some groups also have complained about
thousands of punch-card ballots that were not tallied
because officials in the 68 counties that use them
could not determine a vote for president. Votes for
other offices on the cards were counted.
The Ohio
Democratic Party believes every effort should
be made to get an accurate count, but it is not
planning legal
action of its own, spokesman Dan Trevas
said.
Tim Burke, chairman of the Hamilton County Board of
Elections and of the county's Democratic party, said
the county party supports any effort that leads to
more efficient elections.
Publication Date: 11-29-2004
Full Coverage
More
about
U.S. Elections
Related News Stories
o One Month Later, Fight Over Ohio Continues AP via
Yahoo!
News (Nov 29, 2004)
o Recount to Start on Alabama Amendment AP via Yahoo!
News (Nov 28, 2004)
o Suit
Seeks Provisional Ballots Re-Examined AP via
Yahoo! News (Nov 26, 2004)
Opinion & Editorials
o Step
Toward Election Standards at The Los Angeles
Times (reg. req'd) (Nov 29, 2004)
o Florida Northwest at Wall
St. Journal (Nov 29, 2004)
Feature Articles
o Electronic Voting 1.0, and No Time to Upgrade at The
New
York Times (reg. req'd) (Nov 28, 2004)
o The race for governor that simply won't end at
Christian Science
Monitor (Nov 22, 2004)
Related Web Sites
o Federal Election Reform Network
o National Commission on
Federal Election Reform Final
Report
o Follow the Money
How to Help
o GlobalGiving: Nonpartisan
Election Information from
Smart Voter
News Resources
Providers
· AP
· Presidential Elections
· Congressional Elections
· State & Local Elections
------------------------------------------------------------------------
More Politics | All Feeds
Presidential Elections - AP
Nearly a Month Later, Ohio Fight Goes On
Mon Nov 29, 6:18 PM ET
By
JOHN McCARTHY, Associated Press Writer
COLUMBUS, Ohio - Nearly a month after John Kerry (news
- web sites)
conceded Ohio to President Bush (news -
web sites), complaints and challenges about the
balloting are
mounting as activists including the Rev.
Jesse Jackson (news - web sites) demand closer
scrutiny to ensure
the votes are being counted on the up-and-up.
AP Photo
Latest Headlines:
· Nearly a
Month Later, Ohio Fight Goes On
AP - Mon Nov 29, 6:18 PM ET
· Correction: Texas Exit Poll Glance
AP -
Mon Nov 29, 5:13 PM ET
· Edwards to End Term With Farewell Tour
AP - Mon Nov 29, 1:57 PM ET
------------------------------------------------------------------------
All Election Coverage
Jackson has been holding rallies in Ohio in recent
days to draw attention to the vote, and another critic
plans to ask the state Supreme Court this week to
decide the validity of the election.
Ohio
essentially decided the outcome of the
presidential race, with Kerry giving up after
unofficial results
showed Bush with a 136,000-vote
lead in the state.
Since then, there have been demands for a recount
and complaints about uncounted punch-card votes, disqualified provisional ballots and a ballot-machine error that
gave hundreds of extra votes to Bush.
Jackson said too many questions have been raised to
let the
vote stand without closer examination.
"We can live with winning and losing. We cannot live
with
fraud and stealing," Jackson said Sunday at Mount
Hermon Baptist Church.
An attorney for a political
advocacy group on
Wednesday plans to file a "contest of election." The
request requires a single Supreme
Court justice to
either let the election stand, declare another winner
or throw the whole thing out. The
loser can appeal to
the full seven-member court, which is dominated by
Republicans 5-2.
Jackson
said he agreed with the court filing planned
by lawyer Cliff Arnebeck, who has represented the
Boston-based
Alliance for Democracy in other cases.
"The integrity of our election process is on trial,"
Jackson
said Monday in Cincinnati.
Elections officials concede some mistakes were made
but no more than most
elections.
"There are no signs of widespread irregularities,"
said Carlo LoParo, a spokesman for
Secretary of State
Kenneth Blackwell.
Blackwell, a Republican, has until Dec. 6 to certify
the
vote. The Green and Libertarian parties are
raising money to pay for a recount that would be held
once the
results are certified.
Other critics have seized on an error in an electronic
voting system that gave
Bush 3,893 extra votes in a
suburban Columbus precinct where only 638 people
voted. The extra votes are part
of the current
unofficial tally, but they will not be included in the
official count that will be certified
by the secretary
of state.
Some groups also have complained about thousands of
punch-card ballots
that were not counted because
officials in the 68 counties that use them could not
determine a vote for
president. Votes for other
offices on the cards were counted.
Jackson said Blackwell, who along with
other statewide
GOP leaders was a co-chairman of Bush's re-election
campaign in Ohio, should step down from
overseeing the
election process.
"You can't be chairman of the Bush campaign and then
be the
chief umpire in the seventh game of the World
Series (news - web sites)," Jackson said.
Blackwell's
office responded by saying the state has a "bipartisan and transparent system that provides valuable checks and
balances."
"The problem seems to be that Rev. Jackson's candidate
didn't win," said Carlo
LoParo, a Blackwell spokesman.
___
On the Net:
Ohio Secretary of State:
[u]http://www.sos.state.oh.us[/u
rl]
DrSmellThis
11-30-2004, 02:07 PM
[url="http://www.thenation.com/edcut/index.mhtml?pid=2034"]http://www.thenation.com/edcut/index.mhtml?pid=2034[/url
]
DrSmellThis
11-30-2004, 02:27 PM
Maybe we
know something about doing democracy after all... :)
http://www.votersunite.org/takeaction/bbbal
lot-porttownsend.htm (http://www.votersunite.org/takeaction/bbballot-porttownsend.htm)
DrSmellThis
12-03-2004, 11:36 PM
This looks interesting, important, and informative. I hope everyone interested can check it
out:
Pacifica to Webcast Ohio Elections Forum
On Saturday
December 4 Pacifica Radio will Webcast a community forum from Columbus, Ohio focusing on gross irregularities and
improprieties which occurred in that state during the November 2 presidential election. Featured speakers include
Rev. Jesse Jackson, journalist Greg Palast, Ohio elected officials and attorneys who have filed suit charging voter
fraud in Ohio. The Internet broadcast will be from 6--9 pm (Eastern time) and will be streamed on Pacifica's
Internet station at
http://www.wbai.org/tuner/html (http://www.wbai.org/tuner/html)
Dan Coughlin,
Pacifica's Executive Director
DrSmellThis
12-08-2004, 03:09 PM
Finally some mainstream
coverage, but boy is this article crappy!
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/12/08
/ohio.vote.ap/index.html (http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/12/08/ohio.vote.ap/index.html)
The article missed the point talking about how the independent candidates could
never win, and deemphasizes the real reasons -- the election fraud -- which we have detailed and linked here in this
thread.
And the unnamed Bush campaign spokesperson that said it's a "waste of time and taxpayer
money" (to insure that there is democracy!)? Ohio election czar Kenneth Blackwell, the same person who
just proclaimed Bush the winner! Can we say "conflict of interest"?! I'm still wondering: Why is it legal for one
presidential candidate's campaign chief to also run the election??
There's going to be a freakin recount of
the presidential vote in Ohio, after all that nasty controversy in 2000, and the story is just now
mentioned; -- not as one of the headlines, mind you -- and the write up skirts and distorts the issues.
So know
that there is a gag order in place in the mainstream press! That in itself is a sad state of affairs for a
democracy to be in, is it not?
There is also a video here (I just copied the link, but don't know how you'd
access it from the partial url given):
javascript:LaunchVideo('/politics/2004/12/07/oppenheim.ohio.election.cnn.','300k');
I didn't want to
download their spyware so I could watch it.
DrSmellThis
12-08-2004, 03:21 PM
This is also a great site for
information:
http://www.pdamerica.org/
They have form letters you can
send your representatives and press members, as well as the addresses/urls, if you want to support recount
efforts.
DrSmellThis
12-10-2004, 06:44 PM
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITI
CS/12/10/unsettled.election.ap/index.html (http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/12/10/unsettled.election.ap/index.html)
DrSmellThis
12-13-2004, 10:04 PM
Today was a big day in Ohio:
www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1213-10.htm (http://www.commondreams.org)
DrSmellThis
12-14-2004, 02:00 AM
...again too big for CNN to
ignore:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPO
LITICS/12/13/ohio.electoralcollege.ap/index.html (http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/12/13/ohio.electoralcollege.ap/index.html)
May the truth come out for all to see!
DrSmellThis
12-16-2004, 03:29 AM
December 15th, 2004 4:34 pm
Proof of Ohio Election Fraud Exposed
By William Rivers Pitt /
t r u t h o u t (http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/121604Z.shtml)
Among
activists and investigators looking into allegations of vote fraud in the 2004 Presidential election, the company
always mentioned was Diebold and its suspicious electronic touch-screen voting machines. It is Diebold that has
multiple avowed Republicans on its Board of Directors. It was Diebold that gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to
Bush’s election campaign. It was Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell who vowed to deliver Ohio’s electoral votes to Bush.
As it turns out, everyone was looking the wrong way. The company that requires immediate and penetrating scrutiny
is Triad Systems.
Triad is owned by a man named Tod Rapp, who has also donated money to both the Republican
Party and the election campaign of George W. Bush. Triad manufactures punch-card voting systems, and also wrote the
computer program that tallied the punch-card votes cast in 41 Ohio counties last November. This Triad company
graphic displays the counties where their machines are used:
http://www.truthout.org/imgs.art_01/oc_sm.jpg</IMG>
Given the ubiquity of the Triad
voting systems in Ohio, the allegations that have been leveled against this company strike to the heart of the
assumed result of the 2004 election.
Earlier this week, the allegations against triad were first raised by
Green Party candidate David Cobb, who testified at a hearing held in Columbus, Ohio by Rep. John Conyers of the
House Judiciary Committee. In his
testimony (http://www.votecobb.org/press/2004/dec/pr2004-12-13b.php), Cobb stated:
Mr. Chairman, though our time is limited, I must bring to
the committee's attention the most recent and perhaps most troubling incident that was related to my campaign on
Sunday, December 12, about a shocking event that occurred last Friday, December 10.
A representative from
Triad Systems came into a county board of elections office un-announced. He said he was just stopping by to see if
they had any questions about the up-coming recount. He then headed into the back room where the Triad supplied
Tabulator (a card reader and older PC with custom software) is kept. He told them there was a problem and the system
had a bad battery and had "lost all of its data". He then took the computer apart and started swapping parts in and
out of it and another "spare" tower type PC also in the room. He may have had spare parts in his coat as one of the
BOE people moved it and remarked as to how very heavy it was. He finally re-assembled everything and said it was
working but to not turn it off.
He then asked which precinct would be counted for the 3% recount test, and the
one which had been selected as it had the right number of votes, was relayed to him. He then went back and did
something else to the tabulator computer.
The Triad Systems representative suggested that since the hand count
had to match the machine count exactly, and since it would be hard to memorize the several numbers which would be
needed to get the count to come out exactly right, that they should post this series of numbers on the wall where
they would not be noticed by observers. He suggested making them look like employee information or something
similar. The people doing the hand count could then just report these numbers no matter what the actual count of the
ballots revealed. This would then "match" the tabulator report for this precinct exactly. The numbers were
apparently the final certified counts for the selected precinct.
Triad is contracted to do much of the
elections work in this county and elsewhere in Ohio. This included programming the candidates into the tabulator,
and coming up with the rotation of candidates in the various precincts (that is, the order of which candidate is
first changes between precincts). They also have a technician in the office on election night to actually run the
tabulator itself.
Triad also supplies the network computers on which all of the voter registration information
and processing is kept for the county.
It was unusual for the computers to be taken apart. At least one member
of the Board of Elections was told the tabulator was in pieces when he called to check on the office.
The
source of this report believes that the Triad representative was "making the rounds" of visiting other counties also
before the recount. This person also stated they would not pass on the suggestion of the "posted" hidden totals, and
would refuse to go along with it if it were suggested by the others in the office at the time.
The source of
this information believes they could lose their job if they come forward.
The source of this
information is named Sherole Eaton, Hocking County deputy director of elections. She has since written and signed an
affidavit describing her experience with the Triad representative, the text of which is here:
AFFIDAVIT (http://www.truthout.org/mm_01/5.121004.Robersondep.pdf)
December 13, 2004 Sherole Eaton Re: General Election 2004 - Hocking County, TriAd Dell Computer about 14 years old -
No tower
On Friday, December 10 2004, Michael from TriAd called in the AM to inform us that he would be in
our office in the PM on the same day. I asked him why he was visiting us. He said, "to check out your tabulator,
computer, and that the attorneys will be asking some tricky questions and he wanted to go over some of the questions
they maybe ask." He also added that there would be no charge for this service.
He arrived at about 12:30PM. I
hung his coat up and it was very heavy. I made a comment about it being so heavy. He, Lisa Schwartze and I chatted
for a few minutes. He proceeded to go to the room where our computer and tabulation machine is kept. I followed him
into the room. I had my back to him when he turned the computer on. He stated that the computer was not coming up. I
did see some commands at the lower left hand of the screen but no menu. He said that the battery in the computer was
dead and that the stored information was gone. He said that he could put a patch on it and fix it. My main concern
was - what if this happened when we were ready to do the recount. He proceeded to take the computer apart and call
his offices to get information to input into our computer. Our computer is fourteen years old and as far as I know
had always worked in the past. I asked him if the older computer, that is in the same room. could be used for the
recount. I don't remember exactly what he said but I did relay to him that the computer was old and a spare. At
some point he asked if he could take the spare computer apart and I said "yes". He took both computers apart. I
don't remember seeing any tools and he asked Sue Wallace, Clerk, for a screwdriver. She got it for him. At this
point I was frustrated about the computer not performing and feared that it wouldn't work for the recount. I called
Gerald Robinette, board chairman, to inform him regarding the computer problem and asked him if we could have Tri Ad
come to our offices to run the program and tabulator for the recount. Gerald talked on the phone with Michael and
Michael assured Gerald that he could fix our computer. He worked on the computer until about 3:00 PM and then asked
me which precinct and the number of the precinct we were going to count. I told him, Good Hope 1 # 17. He went back
into the tabulation room. Shortly after that he (illegible) stated that the computer was ready for the recount and
told us not to turn the computer off so it would charge up.
Before Lisa ran the tests, Michael said to turn the
computer off. Lisa said, " I thought you said we weren't supposed to turn it off." He said turn it off and right
back on and it should come up. It did come up and Lisa ran the tests. Michael gave us instructions on how to explain
the rotarien, what the tests mean, etc. No advice on how to handle the attorneys but to have our Prosecuting
Attorney at the recount to answer any of their legal questions. He said not to turn the computer off until after the
recount.
He advised Lisa and I on how to post a "cheat sheet" on the wall so that only the board members and
staff would know about it and and what the codes meant so the count would come out perfect and we wouldn't have to
do a full hand recount of the county. He left about 5:00 PM.
My faith in Tri Ad and the Xenia staff has been
nothing but good. The realization that this company and staff would do anything to dishonor or disrupt the voting
process is distressing to me and hard to believe. I'm being completely objective about the above statements and the
reason I'm bringing this forward is to, hopefully, rule out any wrongdoing.
Further buttressing
Eaton’s claim is an addendum to a previous affidavit filed by Evelyn Roberson who, you may recall, was involved in
the Greene County recount action that was summarily shut down by Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell. Her addendum
reads as follows:
Addendum to Declaration of Evelyn Roberson dated December 12, 2004
Re:
Incidents of December 10, 2004
This is to add to the approximately 1 :15 p.m. portion of the visit with the
Deputy Director of Elections Lyn McCoy with respect to the following comment:
"She said they would have their
computer technician check over their computers on Monday in case they has been tampered with."
the addition is
that Lyn McCoy also mentioned to me at the same time that her computer technician was with Triad.
I declare
under penalty of perjury the forgoing is true and correct.
Dated: December 14, 2004
Evelyn Roberson
Original versions of these documents should be available later on Wednesday on the website of Rep. Conyers.
Conyers, upon hearing these allegations, sent a letter to both the FBI Special Agent in Charge in Ohio and the
Hocking County Prosecutor. The text of that letter is as follows:
December 15, 2004
As part of the
Democratic staff's investigation into irregularities in the 2004 election and following up on a lead provided to me
by Green Party Presidential Candidate, David Cobb, I have learned that Sherole Eaton, a Deputy Director of Board of
Elections in Hocking County, Ohio, has first hand knowledge of inappropriate and likely illegal election tampering
in the Ohio presidential election in violation of federal and state law.
I have information that similar
actions of this nature may be occurring in other counties in Ohio. I am therefore asking that you immediately
investigate this alleged misconduct and that, among other things, you consider the immediate impoundment of election
machinery to prevent any further tampering.
On December 13, my staff met with Ms. Eaton who explained to them
that last Friday, December 10, Michael Barbian, Jr., a representative of Triad GSI unilaterally sought and obtained
access to the voting machinery and records in Hocking County, Ohio, modified the computer tabulator, learned which
precinct was planned to be the subject of the initial test recount and made further alterations based on that
information, and advised the election officials how to manipulate the machinery so that the preliminary hand recount
matched the machine count. Ms. Eaton first relayed this information to Green Party representatives, and then
completed, signed and notarized an affidavit describing this course of events, a copy of which is attached.
The
Triad official sought access to the voting machinery based on the apparent pretext that he wanted to review some
"legal questions" the officials might receive as part of the recount process. At several times during this visit,
Mr. Barbian telephoned into Triad's offices to obtain programming information relating to the machinery and the
precinct in question. I have subsequently learned that Triad officials have been, or are in the process of
intervening in several other counties in Ohio - Greene and Monroe, and perhaps others (see attached).
There are
several important considerations you should be aware of with respect to this matter. First, this course of conduct
would appear to violate several provisions of federal law, in addition to the constitutional guarantees of equal
protection and due process. 42 U.S.C. §1973 provides for criminal penalties against any person who, in any election
for federal office, "knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to defraud the residents of a State of
a fair and impartially conducted election process, by . . . the procurement, casting, or tabulation of ballots that
are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the
election is held." 42 U.S.C. § 1974 also requires the retention and preservation, for a period of twenty-two months
from the date of a federal election, of all voting records and papers and makes it a felony for any person to
"willfully steal, destroy, conceal, mutilate, or alter" any such record. Further, any tampering with ballots and/or
election machinery would violate the constitutional rights of all citizens to vote and have their votes properly
counted, as guaranteed by the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution.
Second, the course of conduct would also appear to violate several provisions of Ohio law. No
less than 4 provisions of the Ohio Revised Code make it a felony to tamper with or destroy election records or
machines.1 Clearly, modifying election equipment in order to make sure that the hand count matches the machine count
would appear to fall within these proscriptions.
Moreover, bringing in Triad officials into other Ohio Counties
would also appear to violate Ohio Revised Code § 3505.32 which provides that during a period of official canvassing,
all interaction with ballots must be "in the presence of all of the members of the board and any other persons who
are entitled to witness the official canvass," given that last Friday, the Ohio Secretary of State has issued orders
to the effect that election officials are to treat all election materials as if they were in a period of
canvassing,2 and that "Teams of one Democrat and one Republican must be present with ballots at all times of
processing."
Third, it is important to recognize that the companies implicated in the wrongdoing, Triad and its
affiliates, are the leading suppliers of voting machines involving the counting of paper ballots and punch cards in
the critical states of Ohio and Florida. Triad is controlled by the Rapp family, and its founder Tod A. Rapp has
been a consistent contributor to Republican causes.4 A Triad affiliate, Psephos corporation, supplied the notorious
butterfly ballot used in Palm Beach County, Florida, in the 2000 presidential election.
Sincerely,
John
Conyers, Jr.
Enclosures
cc: The Honorable F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr.
The New
York Times published a report on the matter late Tuesday night:
Lawmaker Seeks Inquiry Into Ohio
Vote
By Tom Zeller Jr.
The New
York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/15/politics/15ohio.html)
Wednesday 15 December 2004
The ranking Democratic member of the House Judiciary
Committee, Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, plans to ask the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a
county prosecutor in Ohio today to explore "inappropriate and likely illegal election tampering" in at least one and
perhaps several Ohio counties.
The request for an investigation, made in a letter that was also provided to The
New York Times, includes accounts from at least two county employees, but is based largely on a sworn affidavit
provided by the Hocking County deputy director of elections, Sherole Eaton.
Among other things, Ms. Eaton says
in her affidavit that a representative of Triad Governmental Systems, the Ohio firm that created and maintains the
vote-counting software in dozens of Ohio counties, made several adjustments to the Hocking County tabulator last
Friday, in advance of the state's recount, which is taking place this week.
Ohio recount rules require that
only 3 percent of a county's votes be tallied by hand, and typically one or more whole precincts are selected and
combined to get the 3 percent sample. After the hand count, the sample is fed into the tabulator. If there is no
discrepancy, the remaining ballots can be counted by the machine. Otherwise, a hand recount must be done for the
whole county.
Ms. Eaton contends that the Triad employee asked which precinct Hocking County planned to count
as its representative 3 percent, and, upon being told, made further adjustments to the machine.
County
officials decided to use a different precinct when the recount was done yesterday. No discrepancies were found.
"This is pretty outrageous," Mr. Conyers said. "We want to pursue it as vigorously as we can."
But Brett
Rapp, the president of Triad, said that although it would be unusual for an employee to ask about a specific
precinct, preparing the machines for a recount was standard procedure and was done in all 41 counties where Triad
handles vote counts. He added that he welcomed any investigation.
"I've been doing this since 1985, and in all
my experience this is the first time that we have had any complaints whatsoever," Mr. Rapp said.
DrSmellThis
12-16-2004, 03:37 AM
Of
course, if fraud is proven, the recount itself will not have provided the crucial information. Still, it is
important:
December 15th, 2004 7:07 pm
Ballot After Ballot Examined in Hushed Rooms as Campaigns
Watch
By JOHN NOLAN,
A
ssociated Press (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/12/15/national1552EST0624.DTL)
In a scene reminiscent of Florida circa 2000, two teams of Republican and
Democratic election workers held punch-card ballots up to the light Wednesday and whispered back and forth as they
tried to divine the voters' intent from a few hanging chads.
Observers for the presidential campaigns of John
Kerry, President Bush and Green Party candidate David Cobb kept watch from chairs a few feet away.
The scene is
being repeated statewide this week in a recount in the state that put Bush over the top in the election last month.
Officially, Bush beat Kerry by 119,000 votes in Ohio, but two third-party candidates collected the required
$113,600 for a recount they claim will show serious irregularities. The Kerry campaign is supporting the recount,
though it has acknowledged it will not change the outcome.
The recounts began this week. At least 35 of Ohio's
88 counties had completed their recounts or were starting Wednesday, according to a survey by The Associated Press.
Some of the tallies will not be complete until next week.
"It takes a lot of work, a lot of hours," said Kerry
campaign observer Jeannette Harrison, 63, a real estate agent. "This is a job that has to be done."
In
Cincinnati, the Hamilton County workers grimaced in concentration as they examined the ballot holes up close -- a
scene that called to mind the five weeks of recounts in Florida that made the terms "pregnant chad" and "butterfly
ballot" famous.
Statewide, about 92,000 ballots cast in last month's presidential election failed to record a
vote for president, most of them on punch-card systems.
Hamilton County workers wrote their results on tally
sheets as they counted ballots from 30 precincts randomly selected from the county's 1,013 -- a total of about
13,000 of 433,000 ballots cast in November in the county.
Under Ohio law, workers must hand-count 3 percent of
ballots. If the results match the certified results exactly, all other ballots can be recounted by machine. If the
totals are off, all ballots must be counted by hand, adding days or weeks to the process.
Also Wednesday, Rep.
John Conyers, D-Mich., a senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, urged the FBI to investigate possible
election tampering in Hocking County involving an employee of TRIAD Governmental Systems Inc., the company that
wrote the voting software used in 41 of Ohio's 88 counties.
According to a sworn statement from Sherole Eaton,
the county's deputy director of elections, a TRIAD representative told her on Friday he wanted to inspect the
county's tabulating machine. She said the employee then told her that "the battery in the computer was dead and
that the stored information was gone."
"He proceeded to take the computer apart and call his office to get
information to input into our computer," Eaton said.
Conyers said similar TRIAD visits have been reported in
other Ohio counties.
Brett Rapp, president of TRIAD, told The New York Times that preparing machines for a
re-count was standard procedure and said he welcomed any investigation.
In a separate action, a federal judge in
Akron on Tuesday rejected a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union alleging the punch-card voting
system is error-prone and ballots are more likely to go uncounted than votes cast in other ways.
The ACLU also
claimed Ohio violated the voting rights of blacks, a large number of whom live in punch-card counties.
However,
U.S. District Judge David D. Dowd Jr. disagreed, saying, "No one is denied the opportunity to cast a valid vote
because of their race."
The Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Massachusetts-based Alliance for Democracy are backing a
request on behalf of 40 voters asking the Ohio Supreme Court to reconsider the election results, accusing the Bush
campaign of "high-tech vote stealing."
Jackson said activists noticed Bush generally received more votes in
counties that use optical-scan voting machines, raising suspicions that the machines were calibrated to record votes
for the president.
The activists also claim there were disparities in vote totals for Democrats, too few voting
machines in Democratic-leaning precincts and organized campaigns directing voters to the wrong polling place.
DrSmellThis
12-16-2004, 03:42 AM
This is the same type of problem that they had in the Ukraine:
December 15th,
2004 5:52 pm
Several Factors Contributed to Lost Voters in Ohio
By Michael Powell and Peter
Slevin / Washington
Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64737-2004Dec14?language=printer) (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64737-2004Dec14?language=printer)
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Tanya Thivener's is a tale of two voting precincts in Franklin County.
In her city neighborhood, which is vastly Democratic and majority black, the 38-year-old mortgage broker found a
line snaking out of the precinct door.
She stood in line for four hours -- one hour in the rain -- and watched
dozens of potential voters mutter in disgust and walk away without casting a ballot. Afterward, Thivener hopped in
her car and drove to her mother's house, in the vastly Republican and majority white suburb of Harrisburg. How
long, she asked, did it take her to vote?
Fifteen minutes, her mother replied.
"It was . . . poor planning,"
Thivener said. "County officials knew they had this huge increase in registrations, and yet there weren't enough
machines in the city. You really hope this wasn't intentional."
Electoral problems prevented many thousands of
Ohioans from voting on Nov. 2. In Columbus, bipartisan estimates say that 5,000 to 15,000 frustrated voters turned
away without casting ballots. It is unlikely that such "lost" voters would have changed the election result -- Ohio
tipped to President Bush by a 118,000-vote margin and cemented his electoral college majority.
But similar
problems occurred across the state and fueled protest marches and demands for a recount. The foul-ups appeared
particularly acute in Democratic-leaning districts, according to interviews with voters, poll workers, election
observers and election board and party officials, as well as an examination of precinct voting patterns in several
cities.
In Cleveland, poorly trained poll workers apparently gave faulty instructions to voters that led to the
disqualification of thousands of provisional ballots and misdirected several hundred votes to third-party
candidates. In Youngstown, 25 electronic machines transferred an unknown number of votes for Sen. John F. Kerry
(D-Mass.) to the Bush column.
In Columbus, Cincinnati and Toledo, and on college campuses, election officials
allocated far too few voting machines to busy precincts, with the result that voters stood on line as long as 10
hours -- many leaving without voting. Some longtime voters discovered their registrations had been purged.
"There isn't enough to prove fraud, but there have been very significant problems in running elections in Ohio
this year that demand reform," said Edward B. Foley, who is director of the election law program at the Ohio State
University law school and a former Ohio state solicitor. "We clearly ended up disenfranchising people, and I don't
want to minimize that."
Franklin County election officials -- evenly split between Republicans and Democrats --
say they allocated machines based on past voting patterns and their best estimate of where more were needed. But
they acknowledge having too few machines to cope with an additional 102,000 registered voters.
Ohio is not
particularly unusual. After the 2000 election debacle, which ended with a 36-day partisan standoff in Florida and an
election decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002. The intent was to
help states upgrade aging voting machines and ensure that eligible voters are not turned away. To a point, it has
had the desired effect.
"Viewed dispassionately, the national elections ran much more smoothly than in 2000,"
said Charles Stewart III, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a specialist in voting
behavior and methodology. Because of improved technology "nationwide, we counted perhaps 1 million votes that we
would have lost four years ago."
But much work remains. Congress imposed only the minimal national standards and
included too few dollars. Tens of thousands of machines -- including 70 percent of Ohio's machines -- still use
punch-card ballots, which have a high error rate. A patchwork quilt of state rules governs voter registration and
provisional ballots. (Provisional ballots are given to voters whose names do not appear on registration rolls --
studies show that minorities and poor voters cast a disproportionate number of such ballots.) Ohio recorded 153,000
provisional ballots. But in Georgia, one-third of the election districts did not record a single provisional ballot
in 2004.
In Florida, ground zero for 2000's election meltdown, professors and graduate students from the
University of California at Berkeley studied this year's voting results, contrasting counties that had electronic
voting machines with those that used traditional voting methods. They concluded, based on voting and population
trends and other indicators, that irregularities associated with machines in three traditionally Democratic counties
in southern Florida may have delivered at least 130,000 excess votes for Bush in a state the president won by about
381,000 votes. The study prompted heated critiques from some polling experts.
Stewart of MIT was skeptical, too.
But he ran the numbers and came up with the same result. "You can't break it; I've tried," Stewart said. "There's
something funky in the results from the electronic-machine Democratic counties."
Berkeley sociologist Michael
Hout, who directed the study, said the problem in Florida probably lies with the technology. (Florida's
touch-screen machines lack paper records.) "I've always viewed this as a software problem, not a corruption
problem," he said. "We'd never tolerate this level of errors with an ATM. The problem is that we continue to do
democracy on the cheap."
A Heated
Run-Up
By October, the Bush and Kerry campaigns knew that this midwestern state was
a crucial battleground. Each side assembled armies of 3,000 lawyers and paralegals, and unaffiliated organizations
poured in thousands more volunteers. Both parties filed lawsuits challenging rules and registrations.
Two
decisions proved pivotal.
Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who was co-chairman of the Bush
campaign in Ohio, decided to strictly interpret a state law governing provisional ballots. He ruled that voters must
cast provisional ballots not merely in the county but in the precise precinct where they reside. For cities such as
Cleveland and Cincinnati, where officials long accepted provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct, the ruling
promised to disqualify many voters. "It is a headache to take those ballots, but the alternative is
disenfranchisement," said Michael Vu, director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, which includes Cleveland.
Earlier this year, state officials also decided to delay the purchase of touch-screen machines, citing worries
about the security of the vote. That left many Ohio counties with too few machines. County boards are split evenly
between Republicans and Democrats, and control the type of machines and their distribution. In Cuyahoga County,
officials decided to quickly rent hundreds of additional voting machines.
Other counties decided to muddle
through. At Kenyon College, a surge of late registrations promised a record vote -- but Knox County officials
allocated two machines, just as in past elections. In voter-rich Franklin County, which encompasses the state
capital of Columbus, election officials decided to make do with 2,866 machines, even though their analysis showed
that the county needed 5,000 machines.
"Does it make any sense to purchase more machines just for one election?"
asked Michael R. Hackett, deputy director of the Board of Elections. "I'll give you the answer: no."
On
Election Day, more than 5.7 million Ohioans voted, 900,000 more voters than in 2000.
In Toledo, Dayton, Columbus
and Akron, and on the campuses at Ohio State and Kenyon, long lines formed on Election Day, and hundreds of voters
stood in the rain for hours. In Columbus, Sarah Locke, 54, drove to vote with her daughter and her parents at a
church in the predominantly black southeast. It was jammed. Old women leaned heavily on walkers, and some people
walked out, complaining that bosses would not excuse their lateness.
"It was really demeaning," Locke said. "I
never remembered it being this bad."
Some regular voters filed affidavits stating that their registrations had
been expunged. "I'm 52, and I've voted in every single election," Kathy Janoski of Columbus said. "They kept
telling me, 'You must be mistaken about your precinct.' I told them this is where I've always voted. I felt like
I'd been scrubbed off the rolls."
Aftermath of Nov.
2
After the election, local political activists seeking a recount analyzed how
Franklin County officials distributed voting machines. They found that 27 of the 30 wards with the most machines per
registered voter showed majorities for Bush. At the other end of the spectrum, six of the seven wards with the
fewest machines delivered large margins for Kerry.
Voters in most Democratic wards experienced five-hour waits,
and turnout was lower than expected. "I don't know if it's by accident or design, but I counted a dozen people
walking away from the line in my precinct in Columbus," said Robert Fitrakis, a professor at Columbus State
Community College and a lawyer involved in a legal challenge to certifying the vote.
Franklin County officials
say they allocated machines according to instinct and science. But Hackett, the deputy director, acknowledged the
need to examine the issue more carefully. "When the dust settles, we'll have to look more closely at this," he
said.
In Knox County, some Kenyon College students waited 10 hours to vote. "They had to skip classes and skip
work," said Matthew Segal, a 19-year-old student.
In northeastern Ohio, in the fading industrial city of
Youngstown, Jeanne White, a veteran voter and manager at the Buckeye Review, an African American newspaper, stepped
into the booth, pushed the button for Kerry -- and watched her vote jump to the Bush column. "I saw what happened; I
started screaming: 'They're cheating again and they're starting early!' "
It was not her imagination.
Twenty-five machines in Youngstown experienced what election officials called "calibration problems." "It happens
every election," said Thomas McCabe, deputy director of elections for Mahoning County, which includes Youngstown.
"It's something we have to live with, and we can fix it."
As expected, there were more provisional ballots, and
officials disqualified about 23 percent. In Hamilton County, which encompasses Cincinnati and its Ohio suburbs,
1,110 provisional ballots got tossed out because people voted in the wrong precinct. In about 40 percent of those
cases, voters found the right polling place -- which contained multiple precincts -- but workers directed them to
the wrong table.
In Cleveland, officials disqualified about one-third of the provisional ballots. Vu, the
election board chief, said that some poll workers may have also mixed up their punch-card styluses -- that would
account for why a few overwhelmingly Democratic precincts recorded large numbers of votes for conservative
third-party candidates.
Still, state officials saw little to apologize for, particularly in the case of
provisional ballots. A recent count of provisional ballots sliced 18,000 votes off Bush's margin in Ohio. "In
Washington, D.C., a voter who casts a ballot in the wrong precinct cannot have that ballot counted," said Carlo
LoParo, a spokesman for Blackwell. "Yet in Ohio, it was 'voter suppression' and 'voter disenfranchisement.' "
In the days after the election, as voters swapped stories, anger and talk of Republican conspiracies mounted. "A
lot of folks who, having put an enormous amount of energy into this campaign and having believed in the
righteousness of their cause, can't believe that we lost," said Tim Burke, chairman of the Hamilton County election
board.
Most senior state officials, Republican and Democratic alike, tend to play down the anger. National
Democrats -- including the chief counsel for Kerry's campaign in Ohio -- say they expect the recount to confirm
Bush's victory.
But that official view contrasts sharply with the bubbling anger heard among rank-and-file
Democrats. While some promote conspiratorial theories, most have a straightforward bottom line. "A lot of people
left in the four hours I waited," recalled Thivener, the mortgage broker from Columbus. "A lot of them were young
black men who were saying over and over: 'We knew this would happen.'
"How," she asked, "is that good for
democracy?"
DrSmellThis
12-16-2004, 03:48 AM
It's been a big news week so far; so this is my fourth major
post today!
Lawmaker Seeks Inquiry Into Ohio Vote
By Tom Zeller Jr. /
New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/15/politics/15ohio.html?adxnnl=1&oref=login&adxnnlx=1103142082-Fdj5EPetlECU9IOO
b5uTtw)
The ranking Democratic member of the House Judiciary Committee,
Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, plans to ask the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a county
prosecutor in Ohio today to explore "inappropriate and likely illegal election tampering" in at least one and
perhaps several Ohio counties.
The request for an investigation, made in a letter that was also provided to The
New York Times, includes accounts from at least two county employees, but is based largely on a sworn affidavit
provided by the Hocking County deputy director of elections, Sherole Eaton.
Among other things, Ms. Eaton says
in her affidavit that a representative of Triad Governmental Systems, the Ohio firm that created and maintains the
vote-counting software in dozens of Ohio counties, made several adjustments to the Hocking County tabulator last
Friday, in advance of the state's recount, which is taking place this week.
Ohio recount rules require that
only 3 percent of a county's votes be tallied by hand, and typically one or more whole precincts are selected and
combined to get the 3 percent sample. After the hand count, the sample is fed into the tabulator. If there is no
discrepancy, the remaining ballots can be counted by the machine. Otherwise, a hand recount must be done for the
whole county.
Ms. Eaton contends that the Triad employee asked which precinct Hocking County planned to count
as its representative 3 percent, and, upon being told, made further adjustments to the machine.
County
officials decided to use a different precinct when the recount was done yesterday. No discrepancies were found.
"This is pretty outrageous," Mr. Conyers said. "We want to pursue it as vigorously as we can."
But Brett
Rapp, the president of Triad, said that although it would be unusual for an employee to ask about a specific
precinct, preparing the machines for a recount was standard procedure and was done in all 41 counties where Triad
handles vote counts. He added that he welcomed any investigation.
"I've been doing this since 1985, and in all
my experience this is the first time that we have had any complaints whatsoever," Mr. Rapp said.
DrSmellThis
12-16-2004, 03:54 AM
Post number six today: Jesse
Jackson interview
http://airamericarad
io.com/layout.asp?baseurl=LauraFlanders/12-12-04/LauraFlanders.wma (http://airamericaradio.com/layout.asp?baseurl=LauraFlanders/12-12-04/LauraFlanders.wma)
In Houston voting was done at one of
the Catholic churches, a priest (I said priest) removed the voting signs and only after one of the officials
complained and call the authorities that he put them back up.
They were airing the Bush/Kerry documentary a
day before the election and when the sequence came up that showed Bush in a Negative light we lost the feed for
approx 15 minutes and when it came back it started at the point that showed Kerry attacking the Vietnam war
(nice).
Coincidence??
DCW
DrSmellThis
12-16-2004, 12:02 PM
Hard to say from that
incident. Nothing would suprise me.
In Ohio, it now appears there is an overwhelming mountain of evidence
of tampered votes/results at every level of the process; all of it biased toward Bush, to the extent it's
biased.
With this latest round of evidence (scores upon scores of sworn testimonies, documents, statistical
analyses; etc.) presented all day Monday, I can no longer harbor any doubts that there was election fraud by the
Bush people/Republican leadership in the 2004 presidential election. We'll see whether the Ohio Supreme Court has
sufficient integrity and balls to respond.
Ohio is just an example that we chose to study in detail, though,
since it turned out to be the pivotal, critical state. In no way is it unique.
It sucks to think it,
obviously -- but this is looking to be the biggest, most organized/coordinated election fraud in world history.
The corporate/political leaders who orchestrated this are among some of the most corrupt, dangerous people in the
world, in destroying democracy at its roots for the country that was supposedly a beacon of democracy.
At
present, you'd have to say we are among the least democratic, democracies-by-name-only in the world. We're
certainly the most corporatized. Even protesting has been rendered impotent; since it's only talk without the vote
to back it up. Look where the massive, continual protests in every town regarding Iraq got us.
The silver lining
in all this is that it's so bad, maybe it will wake people up, mentally and physically. I'd love to see the
election overturned; if only for the hard dose of reality it would give us (Kerry doesn't seem to want to be
president any more). We would start to have to deal a little bit.
Not a damn thing is going to happen.
People will continue to workship fake celebrities and watch their share of TV and listen to Talk Radio book
salesmen.
DCW
DrSmellThis
12-16-2004, 11:32 PM
Speaking of which, something very much like this is
what John Kerry needs to do for himself and the country right now:
1. Go on the highest profile TV news show
with John Edwards and both your wives; also rent ad time on a major network with your leftover campaign money. Speak
to a live TV audience, but ask them to hold their applause until you're finished, and cut most of the applause off
at the end.
2. Say, essentially:
"First, thank you to the great Americans -- and here I'm speaking
of civilians -- who are fighting for Democracy in Ohio and elsewhere. You have inspired me with your courage, love
of Country and integrity. Let me also apologize to the American people for my delay in assuming a higher profile of
activity in this... I am asking your forgiveness, and will hear you all out on this as best I can as to what America
needs from me.
"Since November, a virtual mountain of evidence has accumulated that is suggesting that the
American people were denied a chance to choose elected officials on Nov 2, including president of the United States.
"In a spirit of patriotic cooperation, to preserve relationships and mutual trust among my colleagues in public
service, and out of plain faith in our system, I have really tempered my reaction to some of this emerging news.
Many of you have asked me and taken me to task on this, and rightly so.
"I now believe I tempered it a bit too
much, in particular, in conceeding the election results as quickly and unequivocally as I did. This is simply
because it is clear to me that one of the roles of a challenger for president is to represent his supporters should
they become disenfranchized from their democracy due to a fatally flawed election. And though I am under no illusion
that accepting such a role should necessarily be personally advantageous to me as a politician, accept it I must.
Frankly, otherwise I'm not sure I could think of myself as much of a man as I could be -- or indeed as much of an
American as I could be -- as much as the brave Americans such as congressman Conyers, Ralph Nader, and the Rev,
Jesse Jackson, who are already holding their government accountable on this. In particular, I would like to thank
John Edwards for lending his voice so immediately on election night in support of the right of every American to
have their vote count...
"As you may know, John Edwards and I are already doing <this and this>. In adding to
these initiatives I am announcing <such and such>.
"With your permission, fellow Americans, John Edwards and I
intend to take on the leadership responsibilities inherent to the role of challenger to the best of our abilities.
We humbly ask for your blessing here, to be of service in the best, most appropriate, and only right way in this
situation.
"Indeed, what this means is that -- should the current legal process with the Ohio supreme court
result in the 2004 presidential election being overturned -- we are committing anew -- I -- to being the best
President of the United States I know how to be. John Edwards will say a few words for himself shortly -- But I want
to assure you my fellow Americans that myself and Senator Edwards are as passionate and commited to public
leadership as we ever were.
"Is it flip flopping? Maybe. Maybe it was caution. Maybe it was reticence. At least
I'm not reading about a goat, and I'm not rigging an election. I'm righting a little bit of a wrong here, and
have no problem swallowing my helping of humble pie. But ultimately, doing the right thing adds to your integrity,
not subtracts from it. And I have no right to abandon the American people until every vote is counted, and moreover
-- every voice is heard.
"So now, I have the priviledge to introduce the best canditate for vice president ever,
Senator John Edwards, who will speak from his own heart and mind....<blah blah blah>"
3. Then just go with the
flow, dude! We might take you back and we might not. But you won't really hurt yourself, and it might well help a
huge amount. Plus you'll be seen as a goddamned MAN -- maybe not right away, but eventually.
4. John Kerry,
it's time to climb back on the Swiftboat of life! Have some virtual balls courtesy of Mr. Wizard! :smite:
Otherwise, grow a Gore-beard and get the hell out of presidential politics for good. We need you, and you're
acting like a goddamned bitch! You can't be a pussy in the face of all this reality stuff. It just won't work in
the long term; and isn't helping anyone in the public, you public servant, you.
I was about to ask the same thing,
why is Kerry so quiet?
He's too concerned about his image so he has Jessie doing his dirty work.
The whole
Democratic party are a bunch of pussies at least Bush had the balls to steal the election not once but
twice.
I'm not worried I have my escape plan it's called Canadian Citizenship and it come with a passport.
DCW
DrSmellThis
12-22-2004, 01:03 PM
December 22nd, 2004 1:19 pm
Michigan Congressman Seeks Exit Poll Data
By Seth Sutel /
Associated Press (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519&ncid=703&e=3&u=/ap/20041222/ap_on_re_us/election_poll_data
)
NEW YORK - The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee has
asked The Associated Press and five broadcast networks to turn over raw exit poll data collected on Election Day so
that any discrepancies between the data and the certified election results can be investigated.
Rep. John
Conyers Jr. of Michigan said in a letter released Tuesday in Washington that the polling firms that conducted the
polls on behalf of the news organizations, Mitofsky International and Edison Media Research, had declined to share
the information with the committee.
"Without the raw data, the committee will be severely handicapped in its
efforts to show the need for serious election reform in the United States," Conyers said in the letter.
The AP
and the five television outlets — ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox — formed a consortium called the National Election
Pool to conduct exit polls for this year's election after disbanding a previous exit poll group called the Voter
News Service, which had problems in both the 2000 and 2002 elections.
Edie Emery, a spokeswoman for the
National Election Pool and a CNN employee, said the poll data were still being analyzed and that the group's board
would decide how to release a full report on the data early next year. "To release any information now would be
incomplete," she said.
Several Web logs carried accounts on the afternoon of Nov. 2 of what they said were
leaked information from the exit polls showing that Kerry, a Massachusetts senator, was leading Bush in several
battleground states, including Ohio, and poised for victory.
But Bush, a Republican, beat Kerry by about
119,000 votes in Ohio, winning that state's 20 electoral votes and putting him over the top in the race. Bush won
re-election with 286 electoral votes to Kerry's 252.
Conyers' letter said the exit poll information could
help determine whether there is evidence "of voting irregularities that occurred as a result of poor election
practices and intentional voter disenfranchisement."
The exit polling was conducted for the AP and for ABC, a
unit of The Walt Disney Co.; CBS, a unit of Viacom Inc.; NBC, a unit of General Electric Co.; CNN, a unit of Time
Warner Inc.; and Fox News, owned by News Corp.
"Like Congressman Conyers, we believe the American people
deserve answers," said Jack Stokes, a spokesman for the AP. "We want exit polling information to be made public as
soon as it is available, as we intended. At this time, the data is still being evaluated for a final report to the
National Election Pool."
Officials from ABC and NBC referred calls for comment to the National Election Pool,
where CNN's Emery responded for the group. A CBS spokeswoman declined to comment, and officials at Fox could not be
reached.
Earlier this month Kerry asked county election officials in Ohio to allow his witnesses to inspect the
92,000 ballots cast in the state in which no vote for president was recorded.
Despite improvements since 2000,
when the presidential outcome was delayed for weeks by problems counting ballots in Florida, the nation's voting
system remains a locally administered patchwork whose lack of national uniformity distinguishes the United States
from many other democracies.
Most complaints have come from Democrats and third-party candidates, but
Republicans and bipartisan groups have acknowledged problems. The Government Accountability Office is investigating
election problems. Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio and chairman of the House Administration Committee, will oversee an inquiry
next year.
The U.S. Election Assistance Commission, created in 2002, is also scrutinizing the outcome. It plans
to publish in January the government's first report on the voting, which will serve as the basis for congressional
recommendations and reforms.
DrSmellThis
12-22-2004, 01:15 PM
There are
a ton of good articles accessible below, for those of you who are concerned about Democracy in the US:
December 21st, 2004 1:02 pm
Ohio: A Crime Against Democracy
By Stuart Comstock-Gay /
Tom Paine (http://www.tompaine.com/articles/ohio_a_crime_against_democracy.php)
The Bush electors in Ohio have cast
their votes (http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/986), even though the bitterly contested ballots that allegedly gave them standing as electors
have not been recounted. When asked, the mainstream media will admit that there were rampant problems with this
election. But there's no juicy story for them to cover because they don't believe a recount would change the
outcome of the election. Thus, they neglect what's happening in Ohio. Here Comstock-Gay explains why it matters.
For the best of TomPaine.com's coverage of the problems with election 2004,
click
here (http://www.tompaine.com/articles/best_of_tompaine_election_2004_irregularities.php) .
Stuart Comstock-Gay is executive director of the
National Voting Rights Institute (http://www.nvri.org/).
Electoral
votes have been submitted by all states and the national news media has moved on, but a test of U.S. voting
rights continues in Ohio. After the Ohio delegation to the Electoral College cast its votes for President Bush last
week, election officials in Ohio counties began the recount of votes cast in the election. Concerns about the
integrity of the 2004 election continue to surface. Something's wrong with this picture.
We at the National
Voting Rights Institute—on behalf of Green Party Candidate David Cobb and Libertarian Party candidate Michael
Badnarik—are providing legal representation in the recount effort. We also want to find out what went wrong. Because
clearly things went wrong. And whether in the end they are serious enough to change the outcome of the election,
they create a cloud over the elections of 2004.
Too many commentators continue to claim the recount effort is
the result of bad losers. Some have even gone so far as to say that if the Republicans lost, there would be no
recount—that Republicans “play fair.” In fact, concern about "fairness" is in part what is driving the recount.
These commentators overlook the fact that this effort is not only about verifying the outcome of the vote. More
importantly, it’s about ensuring accountability of a highly fallible elections process.
As long as any votes
are miscounted, misplaced or misdirected, our elections cannot be said to be properly working. And with an electoral
system that provides no consistency in how votes are counted—and some election officials hostile to a full
accounting— there remains work to be done to restore voters' faith in the system.
What Went Wrong On Nov.
2
The number of complaints in Ohio numbers thousands upon thousands—lines into the hours at polling places;
shortages of poll workers and machines; electronic voting machines that malfunctioned; voters being required to show
identification even though they were not first-time mail-in registrants; erroneous purges of voters from the voter
rolls; and voters who requested absentee ballots but never received them and were nevertheless barred from voting in
person. In one precinct in Franklin County, Ohio, an electronic voting system gave George W. Bush 3,893 extra votes
out of a total of 638 votes cast. In addition, approximately 93,000 ballots were not counted and Ohio election
officials may have improperly disqualified thousands of 155,000 provisional ballots cast.
Now the problems are
escalating. In Hocking County, Ohio, Deputy Elections Director Sherole Eaton describes a troubling incident on
December 10, three days before the recount was to begin. An employee of the Tri Ad company came into the office to
check out the tabulator and computer and prepare voting officials for the recount, so that “the count would come out
perfect and we wouldn’t have to do a full hand recount of the county.” He asked which precincts would be recounted,
and made sure to focus on them. Voting machine expert Doug Jones from the University of Iowa believes this threatens
the integrity of the entire recount. Now Congressman John Conyers has asked the FBI to investigate this incident.
What’s Going Wrong With The Recount
But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. With the recount underway,
we learn that counties are handling the process in different ways, depending on the whims of county officials. Every
county was instructed by the Secretary of State to do a recount of 3 percent of the votes, followed by a hand
recount of every vote if there any discrepancy appears. Some counties, however, have said they would do their
recounts by machine only, and not by hand. Some have made space for observers, and allowed them to review voting
polls and other materials. Some counties have kept observers—whether from the Green Party, Libertarian Party, DNC or
Republican Party—out of the counting rooms entirely.
And this only after some elections officials tried to stop
the recount in its tracks. Delaware County sued NVRI, Cobb and Badnarik, seeking to stop the recount, even though
the law was followed. He said the recount was too expensive and frivolous. Delaware County has finally decided to
conduct a recount, but only after a series of hearings.
On January 5, Congress will receive the votes of the
electoral college votes and the election—for all intents and purposes—will be considered concluded.
Meanwhile
the Ohio recount will continue well into January. As of this writing, results are not in, but we expect full
recounts in most counties.
It is shocking that the cherished right to vote, which should be a major issue in
this country, has become an invisible one. Even in the Ukraine, there will be a new election because of widespread
irregularities in the presidential election. As the Supreme Court stated over a century ago, the right to vote is "a
fundamental political right, because preservative of all rights." Now, more than ever, we must fight for this
right.
DrSmellThis
12-22-2004, 01:30 PM
(This is the third post here today, for those trying to sort new stuff from old.)
http://www.suntimes.com/output/jesse/cst-edt-jess
e30.html (http://www.suntimes.com/output/jesse/cst-edt-jesse30.html)
DrSmellThis
12-22-2004, 01:41 PM
And the fourth post for today,
a very recent excerpt from the Laura Flanders Show on Air America Radio. Laura has been one of a handful of
adequately patriotic reporters who have the courage to cover the story.
http://airamericarad
io.com/layout.asp?baseurl=LauraFlanders/12-19-04/LauraFlanders.wma (http://airamericaradio.com/layout.asp?baseurl=LauraFlanders/12-19-04/LauraFlanders.wma)
DrSmellThis
01-04-2005, 10:22 PM
http://www.suntimes.com/output/jesse/cst-edt-jesse
04.html (http://www.suntimes.com/output/jesse/cst-edt-jesse04.html)
DrSmellThis
01-04-2005, 10:26 PM
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/20
05/1065 (http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1065)
a.k.a.
01-05-2005, 07:54 AM
I guess tomorrow (1/6) we’ll see if
all this leads to a challenge of the Bush “mandate”.
Rep John Conyers has vowed to challenge the Ohio
delegation to the Electoral College. All he needs is one Senator to join him in the challenge and this will mandate
an official inquiry under the constitution.
For those of us that saw “Fahrenheit 9/11” this process was
dramatically illustrated during the beginning of the movie when minority representative after minority
representative stepped up to the podium to challenge the 2000 Florida elections. Not one Senator stepped up and each
congressperson’s challenge was struck “out of order”.
Let’s hope tomorrow isn’t another rerun.
DrSmellThis
01-05-2005, 01:36 PM
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/20
05/1067 (http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1067)
Here's looking forward to the upcoming book and documentary from freepress. :cheers:
DrSmellThis
01-05-2005, 01:55 PM
I guess tomorrow
(1/6) we’ll see if all this leads to a challenge of the Bush “mandate”.
Rep John Conyers has vowed to challenge the
Ohio delegation to the Electoral College. All he needs is one Senator to join him in the challenge and this will
mandate an official inquiry under the constitution.
For those of us that saw “Fahrenheit 9/11” this process was
dramatically illustrated during the beginning of the movie when minority representative after minority
representative stepped up to the podium to challenge the 2000 Florida elections. Not one Senator stepped up and each
congressperson’s challenge was struck “out of order”.
Let’s hope tomorrow isn’t another rerun.If even Kerry
alone supports this, the whole debate process moves forward! In effect, Gore singlehandedly killed the process by
refusing to challenge in 2000.
It would be truly remarkable if not a single senator would support having a
debate this time around. Tomorrow will be a remarkable day in any case (even if it wasn't my birthday ;)).
DrSmellThis
01-05-2005, 03:03 PM
http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=528
DrSmellThis
01-05-2005, 03:05 PM
I posted earlier that they were investigating. Here is their report, a sound thrashing of the
Ohio election process:
http://rawstory.rawprint.com/105/final_c
onyers_ohio_report_105.php (http://rawstory.rawprint.com/105/final_conyers_ohio_report_105.php)
The next step is to have the debate in congress over the electorial vote
certification. We'll know about that tomorrow.
Update: The suit to overthrow the Ohio vote results based on
fraud is currently and still in front of the Ohio Supreme Court.
DrSmellThis
01-05-2005, 03:19 PM
January 5th, 2005 3:48 pm
Seven key reasons why the vote must be challenged at the electoral college
By
Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition /
Free Press (http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1066)
1.
Exit Polls Did Not Match Actual Vote in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida
The gulf between the exit polls and
counted votes was glaring. The Zogby Poll and the media consortium poll (including CNN and AP) had Kerry winning an
electoral landslide with 53% and 51% respectively in Ohio. Why did exit polls match the actual vote in the nation –
EXCEPT for Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania?
Exit polls are considered the most accurate measurement of the vote.
Exit polls were responsible for calling for a revote in the Ukraine. The odds of the exit polls being outside the
margin of error in these three battleground states are about 155 million to one. The exit poll data has never been
released. There must be an investigation of the exit poll disparities.
2. Voting machines owned by private,
partisan companies subject to manipulation
Voting machine tampering occurred throughout the state. In
Mahoning County, votes “hopped” from Kerry to Bush. In Franklin County, votes for Kerry “faded” away. In Lucas
County, Diebold machines froze up and rejected ballots in pro-Kerry precincts.
There were 16 precincts in
Cleveland where votes intended for Kerry were shifted to other candidates.
Triad technicians re-programmed vote
tabulating computers to Hocking County election officials. In Lucas County, Diebold employees re-programmed vote
machines in preparation for the recount. Election officials in that county, including the executive director, are
resigning.
Diebold and Triad are led by executives who aggressively supported Bush. Private companies should
not be allowed to control voting machines and secret software, which are highly susceptible to hacking and
manipulation. There must be a full investigation of the voter machines.
Private owned machines, that leave no
audit trail, with owners with a vested interest in the outcome, is offensive to our sensibilities.
3.
Uncounted and Provisional Ballots disproportionately affected African American voters
There are 92,672
uncounted ballots in Ohio, concentrated in precincts that voted overwhelmingly for Kerry. As many as 36,000 votes
might swing to Kerry if these votes are counted. Nearly 25,000 provisional ballots statewide were rejected and went
uncounted.
In Cleveland there are 65 precincts where 4% or more of the ballots went uncounted. These precincts
voted overwhelmingly for John Kerry, by a margin of 12 to 1. No one has ever looked at these punch cards to
determine the intent of the voters.
There were 24,788 provisional ballots issued in Cuyahoga County, nearly 16%
of the statewide total, more than in any other county in Ohio. 7,450 provisional ballots from Cuyahoga County were
rejected, reaching as high as 51% in some African American precincts/wards.
4. Inexplicable Vote disparities
The Connally Anomaly: In 13 Southern Ohio counties a under funded, African American municipal court judge
from Cleveland, Connally received more votes than John Kerry. In Butler County, Bush got 109,000 votes to Kerry’s
56,000 – but Connally received 61,000 and her republican opponent got 68,000.
In Warren County, election
officials declared a Homeland Security threat on Election Day, locked out the press and observers and secretly
counted the vote. Bush received an unusually high differential, 68,035 to 26,043.
In three counties - Butler,
Warren and Clermont Counties – voter disparities were glaring – Bush’ margin was 132,685 (his statewide margin was
118,775).
In Perry County, the Secretary of State certified two precincts with 124% voter turnout.
In
Miami County, a precinct was certified with a 98.55 % turnout – all but ten eligible voters. But a canvass of less
than half of this precinct has already located 25 voters that did not vote. An additional 19,000 votes were reported
after 100% of the precincts had reported (with the exact percentage as the earlier “100% reported vote”), with Bush
adding 6,000 votes to his margin.
In heavily Democratic Cleveland districts, where Kerry was winning 98% of the
vote, officials certified a highly improbable 7.85% turnout in one precinct. This precinct was not subject to the
recount.
There were 30 precincts in Cleveland with inexplicable voter turnout of below 40%.
In Cuyahoga,
two voters gave affidavits swearing they received punch card ballots already punched for Bush.
5. Voting
Rights Act Violations
In 42 predominantly African American precincts in Franklin County, there were fewer
machines utilized than in the primary. An inner city precinct with 1600 voters had just three machines, while a
suburban precinct with 300 voters had three machines. The state guideline is 1 machine per 100 voters.
At the
pro-Kerry Kenyon campus, students had just two machines – one which broke down on numerous occasions - and waited up
to ten hours until 4:00am to vote.
Districts that voted 60-80% democratic lost machines; precincts with 60-80%
voting republicans lost no machines.
There were 700,000 new registrations in Ohio, but in the highest areas of
new registration there were no additional voting machines.
77 machines broke down in Franklin County.
Voters in inner city precincts waited in the rain for up to 6 hours to vote, while at least 68 machines stayed dry
in the warehouse. A canvas of one of the precinct showed that 20% of voters attempted to vote but left due to time
constraints.
Hispanic voters in Cleveland were forced to vote at precincts where all of the ballots were in
English, and poll workers did not speak Spanish.
6. The Recount did not Recount the Votes
Only 3%
of the precincts were subject to a hand count. Most were not selected randomly as required by law, but hand-picked
by partisan election officials. Vote machines in at least two counties were re-programmed by Triad or Diebold
officials after the “sample 3%” precincts were selected. Throughout the state, private vendors supervised or
monitored the machine or hand recount.
Secretary of State Blackwell and county election officials have a vested
interest in delivering Ohio to Bush, a clear conflict of interest.
There was a full hand count of all ballots
in just one of Ohio’s 88 counties. Differences in the original count and the “recount” – which should have triggered
full hand count of the entire county - were routinely ignored.
7. Challenge at January 6 Joint Session of
Congress
ALL of these “glitches” fell in Bush’s favor. The systematic bias and potential for fraud is
unmistakable. An in-depth investigation is vital. On January 6, Congressman Conyers and members of the House will
step up and challenge the voter irregularities in Ohio. To force that debate, they need only one member of the
Senate to join them, and Democratic Senators should join them.
If America is to be a champion of democracy
abroad, it must clean up its elections at home. If it is to complain of fraudulent and dishonest election practices
abroad, it cannot condone them at home. But more important, if our own elections are to be legitimate, then they
must be honest, open, with high national standards. We need national standards for voting, an end to partisan
control of the election process by state officials, accompanied by a constitutional amendment to guarantee the right
to vote for all Americans.
belgareth
01-06-2005, 04:42 AM
I don't know if this link has
been posted before but don't remember seeing it. The site is full of interesting , well written articles that do a
fairly good job of reviewing facts without bias. I spent quite a bit of time in the archives last night and learned
many things I hadn't known before. http://www.factcheck.org/
DrSmellThis
01-06-2005, 01:39 PM
...thanks to Senator Barbara Boxer, the Democrat from California, who demonstrated courage to the
abstaining and wimpy, John "Get on the Swift Boat of life" Kerry.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/01/
06/electoral.vote/index.html (http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/01/06/electoral.vote/index.html)
It was a good day for democracy. Now at least there will be a two hour debate
before congress.
Here's hoping all the astounding information we have examined here gets into the public
consciousness! :cheers:
DrSmellThis
01-06-2005, 02:01 PM
I don't know
if this link has been posted before but don't remember seeing it. The site is full of interesting , well written
articles that do a fairly good job of reviewing facts without bias. I spent quite a bit of time in the archives last
night and learned many things I hadn't known before.
http://www.factcheck.org/ You gotta love the spirit of truth behind
the site. But I can understand why they have not covered the particular subject matter of this thread.
It would
be difficult for factcheck to maintain their image of objectivity were they to regard this pivotal crisis in
democracy as worthy of consideration.
To merely consider the facts of this case would be to do something
most in our government and media paint as "biased, taboo and extreme"; even though today's CNN flash poll
indicated 70% of respondents want the matter investigated, regardless of what they are being told.
belgareth
01-06-2005, 03:09 PM
You gotta
love the spirit of truth behind the site. But I can understand why they have not covered the particular subject
matter of this thread.
It would be difficult for factcheck to maintain their image of objectivity were they to
regard this pivotal crisis in democracy as worthy of consideration.
To merely consider the facts of this
case would be to do something most in our government and media paint as "biased, taboo and extreme"; even
though today's CNN flash poll indicated 70% of respondents want the matter investigated, regardless of what they
are being told.
That's hardly the case here. They haven't posted anything since the end of October.
There's no reason to believe any other motive besides their statement from 11/2/04 that they are re-thinking and
re-designing the site.
DrSmellThis
01-06-2005, 03:20 PM
Yep. They did say to expect
posts after the election every week or so, but they're slow to get back to work. We'll see if they cover it. I
doubt they will, for the reason I mentioned -- too controversial. I hope I'm wrong.
belgareth
01-06-2005, 03:44 PM
You can assume that or you can
assume a number of other reasons. I don't know and am not going to make assumptions without knowing the people
running the show and their situation.
a.k.a.
01-06-2005, 06:08 PM
...thanks to
Senator Barbara Boxer, the Democrat from California, who demonstrated courage to the abstaining and wimpy, John "Get
on the Swift Boat of life" Kerry.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/0
1/06/electoral.vote/index.html (http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/01/06/electoral.vote/index.html)
It was a good day for democracy. Now at least there will be a two hour
debate before congress.
Here's hoping all the astounding information we have examined here gets into the
public consciousness! :cheers:
Amen.
I'm glad to say this took me completely by surprise (maybe
I'm getting too cynical in my old age.)
I heard a radio spot where Barbara Boxer said that, back in 2000, she
was trying to respect Al Gore's "leadership". But, since then she's come to see the broader picture. So this time
she didn't wait around for Kerry to make the decission.
I think there's a moral to this story.
DrSmellThis
01-07-2005, 03:43 PM
'Why I Must Object' --
Statements by Senator Barbara Boxer
Senator Boxer /
t r u t h o u t (http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/010705V.shtml)
Statement
on her objection to the certification of Ohio's electoral votes.
For most of us in the Senate and the
House, we have spent our lives fighting for things we believe in - always fighting to make our nation better.
We have fought for social justice. We have fought for economic justice. We have fought for environmental justice.
We have fought for criminal justice.
Now we must add a new fight - the fight for electoral justice.
Every
citizen of this country who is registered to vote should be guaranteed that their vote matters, that their vote is
counted, and that in the voting booth of their community, their vote has as much weight as the vote of any Senator,
any Congressperson, any President, any cabinet member, or any CEO of any Fortune 500 Corporation.
I am sure
that every one of my colleagues - Democrat, Republican, and Independent - agrees with that statement. That in the
voting booth, every one is equal.
So now it seems to me that under the Constitution of the United States, which
guarantees the right to vote, we must ask:
Why did voters in Ohio wait hours in the rain to vote? Why were
voters at Kenyan College, for example, made to wait in line until nearly 4 a.m. to vote because there were only two
machines for 1300 voters?
Why did poor and predominantly African-American communities have disproportionately
long waits?
Why in Franklin County did election officials only use 2,798 machines when they said they needed
5,000? Why did they hold back 68 machines in warehouses? Why were 42 of those machines in predominantly
African-American districts?
Why did, in Columbus area alone, an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 voters leave polling
places, out of frustration, without having voted? How many more never bothered to vote after they heard about this?
Why is it when 638 people voted at a precinct in Franklin County, a voting machine awarded 4,258 extra votes to
George Bush. Thankfully, they fixed it - but how many other votes did the computers get wrong?
Why did Franklin
County officials reduce the number of electronic voting machines in downtown precincts, while adding them in the
suburbs? This also led to long lines.
In Cleveland, why were there thousands of provisional ballots
disqualified after poll workers gave faulty instructions to voters?
Because of this, and voting irregularities
in so many other places, I am joining with Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones to cast the light of truth on a
flawed system which must be fixed now.
Our democracy is the centerpiece of who we are as a nation. And it is
the fondest hope of all Americans that we can help bring democracy to every corner of the world.
As we try to
do that, and as we are shedding the blood of our military to this end, we must realize that we lose so much
credibility when our own electoral system needs so much improvement.
Yet, in the past four years, this Congress
has not done everything it should to give confidence to all of our people their votes matter.
After passing the
Help America Vote Act, nothing more was done.
A year ago, Senators Graham, Clinton and I introduced legislation
that would have required that electronic voting systems provide a paper record to verify a vote. That paper trail
would be stored in a secure ballot box and invaluable in case of a recount.
There is no reason why the Senate
should not have taken up and passed that bill. At the very least, a hearing should have been held. But it never
happened.
Before I close, I want to thank my colleague from the House, Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones.
Her letter to me asking for my intervention was substantive and compelling.
As I wrote to her, I was
particularly moved by her point that it is virtually impossible to get official House consideration of the whole
issue of election reform, including these irregularities.
The Congresswoman has tremendous respect in her state
of Ohio, which is at the center of this fight.
Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones was a judge for 10 years.
She was a prosecutor for 8 years. She was inducted into the Women's Hall of Fame in 2002. I am proud to stand with
her in filing this objection.
DrSmellThis
01-08-2005, 04:01 AM
January 8th, 2005 6:29
am
Debate begins on how to fix nation's voting system
By Malia Rulon /
Associated Press (http://www.ohio.com/mld/beaconjournal/news/state/10593226.htm)
WASHINGTON - While Congress this week officially certified President Bush as the winner of the 2004 election,
effectively ending weeks of challenges in Ohio, the debate over how to fix the nation's voting system has just
begun.
The way in which elections are conducted has came under intense scrutiny, first in 2000 when the focus
was on Florida's hanging chads, and now in Ohio, which was the deciding state in the presidential race and has
become ground zero for election irregularities.
A deeply divided electorate, coupled with Thursday's rare
objection in Congress of the Electoral College outcome, add fuel to the debate of what changes should be made. In
Congress and at the state level, proposals are being made that could change how people donate to political groups,
register to vote and cast ballots.
"Let's now separate the debate from 2004. That's over. What we are talking
about is how do we improve our election system?" said Herb Asher, an Ohio State University political scientist. "It
really should be a bipartisan agenda. We'll see if it really is."
House Administration Chairman Bob Ney plans
to hold hearings to examine election issues, including the growth of tax-exempt political groups that aren't
regulated by the Federal Election Commission. He also plans to investigate reports of voter disenfranchisement,
problems with provisional ballots and long lines at polling stations.
"Let's get some hearings out there, talk
to some people and then decide if we need to tweak it (election law) or not," Ney, a St. Clairsville Republican,
said Friday, adding that he expects to announce details about the hearings in the next week.
Former
presidential candidate John Kerry, a senator from Massachusetts, has said he plans to introduce legislation "to
reform our election system, ensuring transparency and accountability" so that everyone can vote and "have their vote
counted."
Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, a Cleveland Democrat, and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., led the challenge
of Ohio's electors on the floor of Congress on Thursday. Their effort forced the House and Senate to debate the
issue for hours, but ultimately failed. Bush was certified the winner.
Still, they said they would introduce
legislation to make election changes. Details weren't immediately available.
Meanwhile, Democratic Reps. Gene
Green of Texas, Brian Baird of Washington and Bill Delahunt of Massachusetts have advanced a plan to abolish the
Electoral College, and Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., wants to establish Election Day as a national holiday, expand
early voting options, and create national standards for voter registration, voting hours and ballot recounts.
"Congress will be under a lot of pressure to at least make some modest reforms," said Thomas Mann, a political
analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "How much gets done depends on whether the Republican majority
is feeling very confident or shaky in terms of moving other agenda items."
Ney, whose committee has oversight
on election issues, said that while he supports holding congressional hearings, he hasn't decided whether new
election legislation is needed.
On the state level, discussions are underway in Ohio to expand absentee and
early voting options, and require voters to provide identification at polls. The state already is required by
federal law to replace all punch card machines by November of this year.
"We did have a lot of successes in
Ohio that we need to sustain. We had a million more voters participate in the process," said Carlo LoParo, spokesman
for Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who plans to hold an elections summit in March to discuss reforms.
In the Ohio Senate, Republican Jeff Jacobson of Dayton plans to push for a law that would require Ohio voters to
produce an identification card to vote while Democrat Teresa Fedor of Toledo wants to create standards for voting
machines that would require a paper trail. She also wants to prohibit Ohio's secretary of state from holding a
campaign office.
Blackwell and Florida's secretary of state in 2000, Katherine Harris, now a congresswoman,
have been criticized for also holding positions in Bush's campaign.
"I don't have sour grapes, I just want to
do our job and improve our system," Fedor said.
DrSmellThis
01-08-2005, 06:27 AM
January 7th, 2005 11:49
pm
In Defeat, a Victory?
The Dems' latest challenge of the 2004 election result may have seemed futile.
But those involved see it as a win for
morality
http://www.michaelmoore.com/_images/splash/voteconyersbig.jpg</IMG>
By Daren Briscoe /
Newsweek (http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6800367/)
Jan. 7 - When Americans flocked to
theaters to see Michael Moore's controversial film "Fahrenheit 9/11" last year, many were surprised to see footage
of a riveting political drama they didn't even know had taken place. During the official tally of Electoral
College votes for the 2000 presidential election, several black members of Congress stood to deliver wrenching,
emotional pleas for a senator, any senator, to vote in support of their plan to challenge the election results.
None did, including Senate president Al Gore, shown in the film stoically reading the Electoral College results that
sealed his defeat.
As a similar scene played out on the House floor yesterday, critics dismissed it as another
exercise in futility. With the House and Senate both firmly in Republican hands, and many Democrats leery of being
seen as sore losers, President George W. Bush's second official certification as the nation's president was a
foregone conclusion. As expected, the challenge was defeated in both the House (267-31) and the Senate (74-1). But
this time around, there was one important difference. Thirty-one congressional Democrats were joined in their
challenge by Sen. Barbara Boxer, forcing both houses of Congress to hear debate and to vote on the issue. As only
the second time since 1877 that Congress has been forced to consider such a challenge, the protest did more than
stall certification of the Electoral College vote. It also marked Jan. 6, 2005, as a historic day. "We've
breached the silence that has always prevented us from employing this statute," said Rep. John Conyers.
For
Conyers and the 13 other members of the Congressional Black Caucus who held a news conference after the vote, that
made the challenge, even in defeat, a victory of sorts. As members of a caucus sometimes referred to as “the
conscience of the Congress,” CBC members are no strangers to wringing moral victories out of what others see as lost
causes. While the 43-member caucus took no official position on the challenge, 21 of the 31 House votes cast in its
favor came from CBC members. The civil-rights era is a touchstone for many CBC members, and the protection of
voting rights remains one of their premier concerns. Long before Election Day, caucus members worried that some
blacks might be disenfranchised, and some spent months involved in voter-education and voter-turnout drives.
Yesterday's protest was formally lodged when Ohio Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, a CBC member, objected to the
counting of the state’s electoral votes on the ground that they were not “regularly given,” a shorthand reference to
a litany of complaints about Election Day problems in Ohio. Many of those problems, from inexplicable shortages of
polling machines to aggressive Republican challenges of thousands of voters’ eligibility, echo complaints raised
after the 2000 presidential election, prompting some critics to suggest the protest was motivated by lingering
resentment over that bitter contest. That may have played a role—some of Bush's most persistent and harshest
critics are also CBC members—but Conyers and his colleagues insist that the true purpose of their protest was to
call attention to the need for nationwide election reform. Illinois Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. said that the problems
are rooted in a system that allows each state, county and electoral jurisdiction to set its own Election Day rules.
“We keep having these problems because our voting system is built on the constitutional foundation of ‘states’
rights’—50 states, 3,067 counties and 13,000 different election jurisdictions, all separate and unequal,” Jackson
said.
DrSmellThis
01-10-2005, 10:54 AM
January 9th, 2005 4:42
pm
Letter From Election Chief In Ohio Sought Illegal
Funds
Associated
Press (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59572-2005Jan8.html)
COLUMBUS, Ohio, Jan. 8 -- The state's chief elections officer, accused of mishandling the
presidential vote in November, sent a fundraising letter for his 2006 gubernatorial campaign that was accompanied by
a request for illegal contributions.
A pledge card with the letter from Secretary of State J. Kenneth
Blackwell, a Republican who co-chaired the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign in Ohio, said "corporate & personal
checks are welcome."
Corporate donations are illegal in Ohio.
His spokesman, Carlo LoParo, said Saturday
that any corporate donations will be returned.
Blackwell said the request sent to GOP donors and activists was
an oversight. His campaign's fundraising coordinator, Jeff Ledbetter, blamed a printer for the mistake, saying it
used a template for an issue committee, which is allowed to accept corporate donations.
Ledbetter told the
Columbus Dispatch that no corporate donations had been received in response to the letter.
Blackwell's letter
also praises Republicans for helping deliver Ohio to President Bush.
Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), who
prepared a report on election problems in Ohio, said the letter supports suspicions that Blackwell's actions as
secretary of state during the election "stemmed from partisan political motivations" to help Bush.
DrSmellThis
01-12-2005, 01:56 PM
http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/0
1/12/vote.challenge.ap/index.html (http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/01/12/vote.challenge.ap/index.html)
If all you have is moral victory, you might as well make it the best
moral victory you can.
The lack of tenacity here is puzzling.
I thought the point was forcing judges to
consider the evidence and place a "coherent legal opinion" on record -- unlike what congressional Republicans
did with their their mere "tin-foil hat" scoffing in response to the mountain of evidence -- not only to win the
suit and overturn the election. That is one of the good things about the judicial branch.
Bottom line: Extensive
evidence of voter fraud has now been submitted to two branches of our government, but never really acknowledged,
considered or meaningfully discussed. :sick:
Will voting reform ever happen on this administration's watch?
Regardless, virtuous men and women will never give up the fight for democracy.
DrSmellThis
01-13-2005, 04:09 PM
This is a really excellent, preliminary investigative summary; a must read for fans of
democracy:
Preserving Democracy:
What Went Wrong in Ohio
Status Report of the House
Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff
Wednesday 05 January 2005
Executive Summary
Representative John
Conyers, Jr., the Ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, asked the Democratic staff to conduct an
investigation into irregularities reported in the Ohio presidential election and to prepare a Status Report
concerning the same prior to the Joint Meeting of Congress scheduled for January 6, 2005, to receive and consider
the votes of the electoral college for president. The following Report includes a brief chronology of the events;
summarizes the relevant background law; provides detailed findings (including factual findings and legal analysis);
and describes various recommendations for acting on this Report going forward.
We have found numerous,
serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election, which resulted in a significant
disenfranchisement of voters. Cumulatively, these irregularities, which affected hundreds of thousand of votes and
voters in Ohio, raise grave doubts regarding whether it can be said the Ohio electors selected on December 13, 2004,
were chosen in a manner that conforms to Ohio law, let alone federal requirements and constitutional
standards.
This report, therefore, makes three recommendations: (1) consistent with the
requirements of the United States Constitution concerning the counting of electoral votes by Congress and Federal
law implementing these requirements, there are ample grounds for challenging the electors from the State of Ohio;
(2) Congress should engage in further hearings into the widespread irregularities reported in Ohio; we believe the
problems are serious enough to warrant the appointment of a joint select Committee of the House and Senate to
investigate and report back to the Members; and (3) Congress needs to enact election reform to restore our people's
trust in our democracy. These changes should include putting in place more specific federal protections for federal
elections, particularly in the areas of audit capability for electronic voting machines and casting and counting of
provisional ballots, as well as other needed changes to federal and state election laws.
With
regards to our factual finding, in brief, we find that there were massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and
anomalies in Ohio. In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior,
much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in
Ohio.
First, in the run up to election day, the following actions by Mr. Blackwell, the Republican
Party and election officials disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens, predominantly minority
and Democratic voters:
The misallocation of voting machines led to unprecedented long lines that
disenfranchised scores, if not hundreds of thousands, of predominantly minority and Democratic voters. This
was illustrated by the fact that the Washington Post reported that in Franklin County, "27 of the 30 wards with the
most machines per registered voter showed majorities for Bush. At the other end of the spectrum, six of the seven
wards with the fewest machines delivered large margins for Kerry." (See Powell and Slevin, supra). Among
other things, the conscious failure to provide sufficient voting machinery violates the Ohio Revised Code which
requires the Boards of Elections to "provide adequate facilities at each polling place for conducting the
election."
Mr. Blackwell's decision to restrict provisional ballots resulted in the disenfranchisement of
tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of voters, again predominantly minority and Democratic voters. Mr.
Blackwell's decision departed from past Ohio law on provisional ballots, and there is no evidence that a broader
construction would have led to any significant disruption at the polling places, and did not do so in other
states.
Mr. Blackwell's widely reviled decision to reject voter registration applications based on paper
weight may have resulted in thousands of new voters not being registered in time for the 2004
election.
The Ohio Republican Party's decision to engage in preelection "caging" tactics,
selectively targeting 35,000 predominantly minority voters for intimidation had a negative impact on voter
turnout. The Third Circuit found these activities to be illegal and in direct violation of consent decrees
barring the Republican Party from targeting minority voters for poll challenges.
The Ohio Republican
Party's decision to utilize thousands of partisan challengers concentrated in minority and Democratic areas likely
disenfranchised tens of thousands of legal voters, who were not only intimidated, but became discouraged by the long
lines. Shockingly, these disruptions were publicly predicted and acknowledged by Republican officials: Mark
Weaver, a lawyer for the Ohio Republican Party, admitted the challenges "can't help but create chaos, longer lines
and frustration."
Mr. Blackwell's decision to prevent voters who requested absentee ballots but did not
receive them on a timely basis from being able to receive provisional ballots 6 likely disenfranchised thousands, if
not tens of thousands, of voters, particularly seniors. A federal court found Mr. Blackwell's order to be
illegal and in violation of HAVA.
Second, on election day, there were numerous unexplained anomalies
and irregularities involving hundreds of thousands of votes that have yet to be accounted for:
There were widespread instances of intimidation and misinformation in violation of the Voting
Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, Equal Protection, Due Process and the Ohio right to vote. Mr.
Blackwell's apparent failure to institute a single investigation into these many serious allegations represents a
violation of his statutory duty under Ohio law to investigate election irregularities.
We learned of
improper purging and other registration errors by election officials that likely disenfranchised tens of thousands
of voters statewide. The Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition projects that in Cuyahoga County
alone over 10,000 Ohio citizens lost their right to vote as a result of official registration
errors.
There were 93,000 spoiled ballots where no vote was cast for president, the vast majority of which
have yet to be inspected. The problem was particularly acute in two precincts in Montgomery County which had
an undervote rate of over 25% each - accounting for nearly 6,000 voters who stood in line to vote, but purportedly
declined to vote for president.
There were numerous, significant unexplained irregularities in other
counties throughout the state: (i) in Mahoning county at least 25 electronic machines transferred an unknown
number of Kerry votes to the Bush column; (ii) Warren County locked out public observers from vote counting citing
an FBI warning about a potential terrorist threat, yet the FBI states that it issued no such warning; (iii) the
voting records of Perry county show significantly more votes than voters in some precincts, significantly less
ballots than voters in other precincts, and voters casting more than one ballot; (iv) in Butler county a down ballot
and underfunded Democratic State Supreme Court candidate implausibly received more votes than the best funded
Democratic Presidential candidate in history; (v) in Cuyahoga county, poll worker error may have led to little known
thirdparty candidates receiving twenty times more votes than such candidates had ever received in otherwise reliably
Democratic leaning areas; (vi) in Miami county, voter turnout was an improbable and highly suspect 98.55 percent,
and after 100 percent of the precincts were reported, an additional 19,000 extra votes were recorded for President
Bush.
Third, in the post-election period we learned of numerous irregularities in tallying provisional
ballots and conducting and completing the recount that disenfanchised thousands of voters and call the
entire recount procedure into question (as of this date the recount is still not complete):
Mr.
Blackwell's failure to articulate clear and consistent standards for the counting of provisional ballots resulted
in the loss of thousands of predominantly minority votes. In Cuyahoga County alone, the lack of guidance and
the ultimate narrow and arbitrary review standards significantly contributed to the fact that 8,099 out of 24,472
provisional ballots were ruled invalid, the highest proportion in the state.
Mr. Blackwell's failure to
issue specific standards for the recount contributed to a lack of uniformity in violation of both the Due Process
Clause and the Equal Protection Clauses. We found innumerable irregularities in the recount in violation of
Ohio law, including (i) counties which did not randomly select the precinct samples; (ii) counties which did not
conduct a full hand court after the 3% hand and machine counts did not match; (iii) counties which allowed for
irregular marking of ballots and failed to secure and store ballots and machinery; and (iv) counties which prevented
witnesses for candidates from observing the various aspects of the recount.
The voting computer company
Triad has essentially admitted that it engaged in a course of behavior during the recount in numerous counties to
provide "cheat sheets" to those counting the ballots. The cheat sheets informed election officials how many
votes they should find for each candidate, and how many over and under votes they should calculate to match the
machine count. In that way, they could avoid doing a full county-wide hand recount mandated by state
law.
Note that this was just a summary of the 100 page report linked in a post above; wherein more detail
regarding the evidence can be found.
Is it not absurd that so many in Congress and the media could just
dismiss all this as crazy conspiracy theories, and refuse to discuss it substantively??
At the very
least, it should be obvious that election reform is needed, now and not later: Do we want this kind of controversy
every other November? Do we want Americans to vote -- to believe that their vote will count; or to stay home in
passive droves, out of a feeling of helplessness?
Voting is the basis of democracy.
DrSmellThis
01-17-2005, 03:03 PM
January
17th, 2005 4:18 pm
Kerry Criticizes Election
Outcome
[c
olor=#0000ff]Associated Press[/color] (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=703&e=1&u=/ap/20050117/ap_on_re_us/mlk_day_kerry)
BOSTON - Sen. John Kerry, in some of his most pointed public
comments yet about the presidential election, invoked Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy on Monday as he criticized
President Bush and decried reports of voter disenfranchisement.
The Massachusetts Democrat, Bush's challenger
in November, spoke at Boston's annual Martin Luther King Day Breakfast. He reiterated that he decided not to
challenge the election results, but "thousands of people were suppressed in the effort to vote."
"Voting
machines were distributed in uneven ways. In Democratic districts, it took people four, five, eleven hours to vote,
while Republicans (went) through in 10 minutes — same voting machines, same process, our America," he said.
In
his comments, Kerry also compared the democracy-building efforts in Iraq with voting in the U.S., saying that
Americans had their names purged from voting lists and were kept from casting ballots.
"In a nation which is
willing to spend several hundred million dollars in Iraq to bring them democracy, we cannot tolerate that too many
people here in America were denied that democracy," Kerry said.
Voting irregularities in Ohio drove primarily
Democratic challenges to the Nov. 2 election, but Congress eventually affirmed President Bush the winner by a slim
electoral vote count of 286-251 — plus a single vote cast by a Minnesota elector for Kerry's running mate, former
Sen. John Edwards.
DrSmellThis
01-19-2005, 04:58 PM
January 19th, 2005 3:29
pm
Ohio AG Seeks To Sanction Attorneys Over Vote
Challenge
Associated Press (http://www.nbc4i.com/politics/4107410/detail.html)
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro has asked the Ohio Supreme Court to sanction four lawyers who
handled a legal challenge, later withdrawn, to last year's presidential election in Ohio.
The motion targeting
Clifford Arnebeck, Robert Fitrakis, Susan Truitt and Peter Peckarsky was filed Tuesday on behalf of Secretary of
State Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio's top elections official, said Kim Norris, spokeswoman for Petro.
The motion
said the 37 protesters filed a "meritless claim" for "partisan political purposes" and said "a contest proceeding is
not a toy for idle hands."
"Instead of evidence, (the lawyers) offered only theory, conjecture, hypothesis, and
invective," Petro's office wrote. It said the challenge was filed "only for partisan political purposes."
Arnebeck called the motion frivolous. He said his clients "put in a great deal of evidence in the form of
affidavits and sworn testimony."
He accused Blackwell of "stonewalling" and refusing to answer questions as
requested in his December court filings.
The challenge was withdrawn last week, with those contesting the
election saying it was clear they would be dismissed as moot with Bush set to be inaugurated Thursday.
Ohio's
20 electoral votes went to Bush, who won the state by 118,000 votes over Democratic Sen. John Kerry.
Mtnjim
01-19-2005, 05:05 PM
Intimidation to silence
critics!!!:POKE:
DrSmellThis
01-27-2005, 03:44 PM
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0126-28.htm
DrSmellThis
01-28-2005, 03:17 PM
I hadn't heard about this method before, but it's not suprising:
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/index.php?p=7
DrSmellThis
01-28-2005, 03:22 PM
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/index.php?p=9
DrSmellThis
02-01-2005, 01:57 PM
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/WO0502/S00036.ht
m (http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/WO0502/S00036.htm)
DrSmellThis
02-09-2005, 02:01 PM
Hmmmm... What could he be doing? This brings a whole new
meaning to the word, "transparent" regarding the elections process. -- DST
February 9th, 2005 3:45
pm
Ohio Officials Begin Voting Machine Fight
By Joe Danborn /
Associ
ated Press (http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050209/ap_on_re_us/ohio_voting_machines_1)
COLUMBUS, Ohio - Ohio's attorney general and its secretary of state launched a dispute
over voting machines on Tuesday, the day before counties are required to submit their machine choices.
Attorney
General Jim Petro issued a written opinion Tuesday saying Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell did not have the
authority to order counties to use one type of voting machine. Petro said the choice is up to the counties.
Blackwell said the statement Tuesday contradicted what Petro told him in the past. Carlo LoParo, a spokesman for
the secretary of state, said Blackwell's order last month requiring elections officials in Ohio's 88 counties to
pick between two types of optical-scan machines "carries the weight of law, and he expects that to be complied
with."
Blackwell and Petro are seeking the Republican nomination for governor.
Forty-three counties had
submitted their voting machine choice as of Tuesday. Blackwell will send staff to the counties that do not comply by
Wednesday, and those that can't decide on a machine will have one chosen for them, LoParo said.
Petro said the
federal law phasing out punch-card ballots allows county elections officials to choose between optical-scan
machines, which read marks on paper ballots, and electronic touch-screen systems that create paper receipts for
voters.
Blackwell has said optical scan is the only affordable option to meet the paper receipt requirement,
but Petro said Blackwell "can't substitute his judgment for the county boards' authority."
Franklin County,
which uses touch-screen machines, asked Petro whether Blackwell had the right to issue the order.
County
elections officials expressed frustration with the conflicting messages. "It seems like we're kind of mired down in
this debate over who has authority, and meanwhile the clock keeps ticking," said Keith Cunningham, director of the
Allen County elections board.
DrSmellThis
02-10-2005, 03:33 PM
http://capwiz.com/pdamerica/issues/alert/?
alertid=6942056&type=CO (http://capwiz.com/pdamerica/issues/alert/?alertid=6942056&type=CO)
DrSmellThis
02-10-2005, 03:49 PM
February 10th, 2005 3:54 pm
No-Shows Annoy Group Probing 2004 Election
By Malia Rulon /
[
color=#0000ff]Associated Press[/color] (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=512&ncid=703&e=7&u=/ap/20050210/ap_on_go_co/election_reform)
WASHINGTON - Starting on a sour note, lawmakers holding the first
congressional review of the 2004 vote were upset by the absence of top election officials from Ohio and Florida,
states with many balloting complaints.
The chairman of the House Administration Committee said he would hold
hearings away from Washington and continue to seek testimony from Ohio's secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, and
Florida's Glenda Hood.
"I am disappointed that they are not here," said Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio. "We can have
disagreements, but you can't run and you can't hide."
Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald of California, the top
Democrat on the committee, said "the arrogance of these secretaries of state to not be here today is an affront."
Blackwell was in the capital, where he led a meeting of the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute. He said he
already had agreed to attend that meeting before the House committee asked him to appear.
"I don't know why
there would be any hand wringing or foot stomping. The Ohio story is probably the most widely told story in the
country," Blackwell said. He pledged that someone from Ohio — though not necessarily him — would go before the
committee, which oversees election issues.
Hood had a previously scheduled speech before the British-American
Chamber of Commerce of Central Florida on Wednesday, which the committee was told about, spokeswoman Jenny Nash
said. Hood "welcomes any opportunity to discuss Florida's success during the 2004 election," Nash said.
The
hearing was intended to examine the successes and failures of a law passed after Florida's disputed voting in the
2000 presidential election. The law created the Election Assistance Commission to distribute money to states and
oversee election standards.
The commission found many successes from the past election, such as more voters
using provisional ballots and electronic voting machines. But it also says more money is needed to complete voter
databases, buy voting machines and perform other upgrades by 2006.
Secretaries of state from Indiana, Kansas,
New Mexico and Iowa said their states registered record numbers of voters, expanded voter education programs and
poll worker training, made more polling places accessible to the disabled and replaced old voting machines.
"Our system, certainly, is not perfect," said Kansas Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh, a Republican. "But,
overall, last November's election was successful. The reforms are working."
The officials took issue with
legislation that would standardize elections. Over the weekend, the National Association of Secretaries of State
passed a resolution over the weekend asking Congress to dissolve the new election commission after it finishes its
work.
"I was shocked, surprised, just because I didn't see it coming and don't agree with it," Ney said. "I
understand your motivation. It's a horrific balance."
Already, the commission has distributed $2.2 billion of
$3 billion set aside for states. The money helped some states install new electronic or optical scan machines before
the Nov. 2 election.
The hearing came as congressional investigators, responding to complaints from around the
country, look into the malfunctions of voting machines and handling of provisional ballots during last year's
Lawsuits over provisional voting were filed in at least five states, most notably Ohio, Michigan and Missouri.
DrSmellThis
02-10-2005, 03:56 PM
February 10th, 2005 4:06
pm
FBI checking Clermont voting; Congressman claims tampering
By Reid Forgrave /
Cincin
nati Enquirer (http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050209/NEWS01/502090415/-1/back01)
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is interviewing members of the Clermont County
Board of Elections because of a Democratic Congressman's claim of vote-tampering during the presidential
election.
The allegations stem from white oval-shaped stickers, about the size of an M&M, placed on fewer than
100 ballots.
Poll workers used them on Election Day to correct mistaken votes and determine intent on the
optical scan ballots. Some voters, for example, marked their vote, but also etched a small mark in the space for
another candidate, which threw off the machines.
Michael Brooks, a spokesman with the FBI's office in
Cincinnati, confirmed Tuesday that the agency is conducting preliminary interviews with Clermont elections
officials. The bureau hasn't yet decided to open a formal investigation.
The FBI is responding to a letter from
Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., requesting an investigation "of vote-tampering if not outright fraud" based on
recount observers' statements.
Clermont Republicans, as well as the elections board director, dismissed the
allegations as a ploy by some Democrats to "muddy the waters" of President Bush's victory in Ohio - where a
118,599-vote victory over Sen. John Kerry sealed Bush's second term.
"It's a farce," said Tim Rudd, chair of
the Clermont County Republican Party and member of the bipartisan elections board. "I don't know what they're
trying to do here. What we did see (during the state-mandated recount) was a couple of white ovals used to correct
ballots for the voters' intent. What they didn't see was 50,000 adhesive ovals on these ballots."
Critics
admit the alleged discrepancy wouldn't affect the outcome, but they say every vote count is a matter of
principle.
"I don't think anyone would be foolish enough to say the election was stolen," said Bob Drake, a
University of Cincinnati professor and Green Party recount observer. "It has nothing to do with the outcome of the
election. We simply want the count to be accurate.
Board of Elections Director Dan Bare said elections are never
perfect. He denied that there was any election fraud and said he welcomed the FBI scrutiny of the counting process,
which includes one Republican and one Democrat through every step.
Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., sent a
letter dated Jan. 28 asking the FBI to open an investigation into election irregularities during the presidential
election in Ohio. A link to his letter is available at
www.house.gov/conyers (http://www.house.gov/conyers).
DrSmellThis
03-26-2005, 12:36 PM
WASHINGTON
(Reuters (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=584&e=1&u=/nm/20050325/pl_nm/election_usa_carter_dc)) - Former President Jimmy Carter will lead a bipartisan commission to examine problems
with the U.S. election system, American University's Center for Democracy and Election Management said on Thursday.
Carter, a Democrat whose Carter Center has monitored more than 50 elections around the world, will co-chair the
private commission with Republican James Baker, who served as Secretary of State under President George H. W. Bush.
Former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, a Democrat who lost his seat in the 2004 election, will also
participate.
"I am concerned about the state of our electoral system and believe we need to improve it," Carter
said in a statement. He said the group will assess "issues of inclusion" in federal voting and propose
recommendations to improve the process.
"We will try to define an electoral system for the 21st century that
will make Americans proud again," he said.
Though disputes over recounts and voter eligibility marred the 2000
U.S. presidential election, international monitors in place in November 2004 reported the polls were mostly fair.
Still, concerns emerged about exceedingly long lines that kept voters from the polls in several states including
Ohio, whose 20 electoral college votes ultimately decided the election in President Bush's favor.
The Center
for Democracy and Election Management, which will organize the work of Carter's commission, said the group would
hold two public hearings -- the first on April 18 at American University in Washington and the second at Houston's
Rice University in June. The Commission on Federal Election Reform aims to produce a report to Congress on its
findings by September.
DrSmellThis
03-26-2005, 12:43 PM
This is good news. Apparently
consciousness has been raised to some extent -- not enough, but some is better than nothing.
My sincere hope is
that the bipartisan report will provide substantive recommendations and be taken seriously this September.
Pancho1188
03-26-2005, 12:56 PM
Hey, I can go to the first
one! :) (not that I would...but I could!)
DrSmellThis
03-26-2005, 01:44 PM
...and why wouldn't you?!
:whip:
I stayed at American University one summer. Cool area, close to Georgetown and all the embassies. Are
you in that area?
Pancho1188
03-26-2005, 03:39 PM
Yes...in fact my cell phone
reception is scrambled by the Russians. ;) Bastards.
DrSmellThis
03-31-2005, 05:04 PM
They have quite the embassy.
DrSmellThis
04-01-2005, 04:47 PM
MIAMI, Florida (AP) -- The
elections chief of a key South Florida county has resigned amid revelations of voting problems in six
elections.
Miami-Dade Elections Supervisor Constance Kaplan resigned Thursday. Her chief deputy, Lester Sola,
will take over temporarily.
The veteran Chicago election official came on board in Miami in June 2003 to fix
problems from the 2000 presidential election.
The county was heavily criticized after 28,000 mostly punchcard
ballots went uncounted. President Bush won the state -- and thus the presidency -- by 537 votes.
County Manager
George Burgess said he questioned Kaplan about a special election on slot machines in which there were a high number
of ballots with no recorded votes -- known as undervotes.
Kaplan blamed a software fluke, he said.
Officials
later identified elections in West Miami, Bay Harbor Island, Surfside, Golden Beach and Cutler Ridge with high
undervotes.
Kaplan said the uncounted votes would not have changed any results, but pari-mutuel industry
officials -- who lost a bid to install slot machines at tracks and jai alai frontons -- have asked for a new
election.
Burgess said Kaplan's explanations for the problems were inadequate.
Mtnjim
04-01-2005, 05:30 PM
The veteran
Chicago election official
Now does that tell us anything??:angel:
DrSmellThis
04-02-2005, 09:06 PM
Now does that
tell us anything??:angel::rofl:..........
DrSmellThis
04-11-2005, 02:32 PM
Associated
Press (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42424-2005Apr10.html)
BOSTON, April 10 -- Many would-be voters in last year's presidential election were denied
access to the polls through trickery and intimidation, former Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry told
the Massachusetts League of Women Voters on Sunday.
Kerry cited examples of how people were duped into not
voting. "Leaflets are handed out saying Democrats vote on Wednesday, Republicans vote on Tuesday. People are told in
telephone calls that if you've ever had a parking ticket, you're not allowed to vote," he said. Kerry has never
disputed the outcome of the election, saying voting irregularities did not involve enough votes to change the
result. President Bush won the pivotal state of Ohio by 118,000 votes, giving him enough electoral votes to win
reelection.
DrSmellThis
04-11-2005, 02:36 PM
Group says chance of exit polls being so wrong in '04 vote is one-in-959,000
By Stephen
Dyer / Akron Beacon Journal (http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/news/11284237.htm)
There's a one-in-959,000 chance that exit polls could have been so wrong in predicting the outcome of the 2004
presidential election, according to a statistical analysis released Thursday.
Exit polls in the November
election showed Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., winning by 3 percent, but President George W. Bush won the vote count by
2.5 percent.
The explanation for the discrepancy that was offered by the exit polling firm -- that Kerry voters
were more likely to participate in the exit polling -- is an "implausible theory,'' according to the report issued
Thursday by US Count Votes, a group that claims it's made up of about two dozen statisticians.
Twelve --
including a Case Western Reserve University mathematics instructor -- signed the report.
Instead, the data
support the idea that "corruption of the vote count occurred more freely in districts that were overwhelmingly Bush
strongholds.''
The report dismisses chance and inaccurate exit polling as the reasons for their discrepancy
with the results.
They found that the one hypothesis that can't be ruled out is inaccurate election results.
"The hypothesis that the voters' intent was not accurately recorded or counted... needs further
investigation,'' it said.
The conclusion drew a yawn from Ohio election officials, who repeated that the
discrepancy issue was settled when the polling firms Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International disavowed its
polls because Kerry voters were more likely to answer exit polls -- the theory Thursday's report deemed
"implausible.''
Ohio has been at the center of a voter disenfranchisement debate since the election.
"What are you going to do except laugh at it?'' said Carlo LoParo, spokesman for Ohio Secretary of State J.
Kenneth Blackwell, who's responsible for administering Ohio's elections and is a Republican candidate for
governor. "We're not particularly interested in (the report's findings). We wish them luck, but hope they find
something more interesting to do.''
The statistical analysis, though, shows that the discrepancy between
polls and results was especially high in precincts that voted for Bush -- as high as a 10 percent difference.
The report says if the official explanation -- that Bush voters were more shy about filling out exit polls in
precincts with more Kerry voters -- is true, then the precincts with large Bush votes should be more accurate, not
less accurate as the data indicate.
The report also called into question new voting machine technologies.
"All voting equipment technologies except paper ballots were associated with large unexplained exit poll
discrepancies all favoring the same party, (which) certainly warrants further inquiry,'' the report concludes.
However, LoParo remained unimpressed. "These (Bush) voters have been much maligned by outside political forces who
didn't like the way they voted,'' he said. "The weather's turning nice. There are more interesting things to do
than beat a dead horse."
DrSmellThis
04-11-2005, 02:41 PM
You
gotta love the arrogant and patronizing response from Blackwell's office! :)
This is the exact same type of
exit poll discrepancy that was taken by the international community to indicate election fraud in the Ukraine. That
election was subsequently overturned.
DrSmellThis
04-25-2005, 09:22 AM
Check it out, folks! You have to admire all those patriots who waited in line for
several hours to vote.
http://www.commoncause.org/Nove
mber2ndVideo (http://www.commoncause.org/November2ndVideo)
DrSmellThis
09-23-2005, 01:40 AM
I too am struck by Carter's
honesty. He's the president in my lifetime that I would invite to dinner (even though there was little to
distinguish him from a Republican by the end of his term).
He certainly knows elections, and knows the last two
were stolen. (This is not whining, as the right wingers characterize it. It is rather calling a spade a spade.)
InternationalPlayboy
09-23-2005, 11:11 AM
and
in the opinion of many, the only honest President we've had in years!!!
I think that's why Carter
failed as a President. He was too honest for the job.
koolking1
09-23-2005, 11:15 AM
I'd take that kind of
failure right now if we could only have it.
DrSmellThis
09-23-2005, 12:27 PM
I
think that's why Carter failed as a President. He was too honest for the job.Maybe he was also too humble.
He really comes across as a great guy. Maybe he's perceived as weak, since he doesn't act like a stereotyical
"alpha". Right wing alpha wannabees sure love to beat on him for his "failed policies." Anyway, thanks for the post.
His opinion on elections means something.
koolking1
11-09-2005, 03:58 PM
From Los
Angeles Times... [emphasis added]
Schwarzenegger Hits Snag at Polling Place
SACRAMENTO -- Gov.
Arnold Schwarzenegger showed up to his Brentwood neighborhood polling station today to cast his ballot in the
special election — and was told he had already voted.
Elections officials said a Los Angeles County poll
worker had entered Schwarzenegger's name into an electronic voting touch screen station in Pasadena on Oct. 25. The
worker, who was not identified, was testing the voting machine in preparation for early voting that began the next
day.
...
Schwarzenegger's aides were informed of the problem when they arrived this morning to survey the
governor's polling station. The poll worker told the governor's staff he would have to use a "provisional" ballot
that allows elections workers to verify if two votes were made by the same person. McCormack said the poll worker
did the correct thing.
The governor, however, was allowed to use a regular ballot.
...
"This is someone
who breached our protocol and was playing around in advance of the election," she said.
Tom Hiltachk, the
governor's attorney, said: "I have no reason to believe anything nefarious occurred.
But Kim Alexander,
president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation, said the problem highlights the need for better
verification of electronic voting.
"If the governor is going to have a mix-up on his ballot," she said, "it
will make other voters wonder what is going to happen with their ballots."
(Thanks to John Gideon of
www.votersunite.org for alerting us about this one!)
koolking1
11-10-2005, 03:14 PM
and if
you believe the author (I do) then your votes in the last two presidential elections didn't matter much other than
for your own sake.
from CounterPunch:
"
November 10, 2005
How Much Does Fitzgerald Really
Know?
Why Did Libby Lie?
By LAWRENCE R. VELVEL
In the I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby case I shall assume that
the matter is as the indictment charges. As Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said, of course, perhaps Libby will be
found innocent of the charges [obstruction of justice, making false statements, perjury] at a trial. Or, perhaps
more likely, there could be the de facto equivalent of the Scotch verdict of "not proven," i.e., a jury might return
a "not guilty" verdict because, while it thinks Libby is guilty, it doesn't think this beyond a reasonable doubt.
Be all this as it may, it shall be assumed here that the charges are true. The grand jury testimony by Libby that
Fitzgerald quoted near the end of the indictment is a dramatic illustration that this assumption is not crazy. To
the contrary.
Assuming the truth of the indictment, the question immediately arises of why did Libby, vice
president Cheney's chief of staff, do it? Why did he invent an easily pierced cock and bull story, and why did he
think he could get away with it?
His reason for thinking he could get away with it could well be the supposed
existence of a reporter's privilege not to reveal confidential sources, and reporters' felt duty to protect their
sources. One would guess that Libby felt that the big shot reporters whom he told about Valerie Plame--Tim Russert
of NBC, Judith Miller of the Times, and Matthew Cooper of Time -- would never talk to the prosecutor because of the
presumed reporters' privilege. He may also have felt -- it would have been logical to feel -- that the prosecutor
would never take on these reporters about their invocation of privilege, especially because they were part of large
organizations which had the deep pockets necessary to fight the prosecutor in court and totally thwart or at least
lengthily delay him -- a scenario that eventually occurred.
But this does not answer all the questions. It
tells us only why Libby felt he could get away with his cock and bull story, either completely or, at minimum, for a
considerable period of time. But why did he do it in the first place? What motivated him?
The answers here
would seem to be fairly obvious. Libby is a sophisticated lawyer, it is said. If I remember correctly, he even
headed the Washington office of a significant national law firm for a while. For a guy like him to make up a cock
and bull story that could land one in jail for decades, the stakes had to be pretty high, high enough so that he
would risk falling on his sword. Sure, if the reporters never talked, he would be home scot free. But if they did
ultimately talk, he was in big trouble. Yet he took the risk, because the stakes were high.
The stakes must
at least have involved the continuing viability of Dick Cheney. Cheney's office was trying to smear and discredit
Joseph C. Wilson IV, whose report had itself discredited the story about Niger uranium. Lots of people in Cheney's
office were told of and were discussing Valerie Plame Wilson. Cheney himself knew about her early-on in the game.
There was also the mysterious airplane conversation about her among Cheney and his staff on the way back from
Norfolk -- a discussion whose contents are still publicly undisclosed. Cheney discussed her with Libby. And Cheney
supposedly did not know what was going on, did not know that his people were trying to discredit Joseph Wilson by
getting at his wife? Gimme a break. It's not as if Dick Cheney is a nice guy rather than a savage partisan, you
know.
So, at minimum, Libby, a guy who has thus far shown the uncompromising if totally misguided loyalty of
a Gordon Liddy, was protecting Dick Cheney. He may also have been protecting George Bush. Bush's name has not yet
figured much in the story. Conceivably it never will, unless much more becomes known than is currently public. The
man is very good at having others take the fall for what he must have known about and must have approved because he
thought it useful -- as the torture debacle proves in spades. Also, Bush and Cheney talk a lot (and Libby too was
part of Bush's close inner circle, was someone to whom Bush often talked). The idea that Bush knew from nothing
about all of this stuff that bore on his false justifications for war, and on the effort of Cheney's people to
prevent one of his false justifications from successfully being ripped apart, sounds just a little precious to me.
(It may sound that way to some others too, since one lengthy news report took the trouble to interject that, on
Friday, October 28, the day he announced the indictments, Fitzgerald had been seen outside the office of the
apparently secretive Washington lawyer whom Bush has hired to represent him in this matter, the mysterious James
Sharp.)
And then there is also the matter of the 2004 election, a point made by the columnist Tom Oliphant
(an unabashed Democratic partisan who nonetheless seems to have hit upon something here). Fitzgerald said -- one did
not take him literally, but the point probably is broadly true -- that were it not for Libby's lies, he would have
brought a case not in October 2005, but in October 2004. But a prosecution in September or October 2004 would have
been based on the substantive criminal act of outing Valerie Plame Wilson. Remember, we are assuming that Libby --
and nobody else either, I would add -- did not lie, so the prosecution would not have been one for perjury and false
statements, but one for the substantive crime of outing a CIA officer. This does not exactly comport with
Fitzgerald's failure to charge a substantive crime against Libby , but it was what Libby would have had to fear had
he not lied (and it could still happen, a point to which we return below).
A prosecution against members of
this administration for outing Plame Wilson -- a prosecution that possibly could have been against Cheney too, not
just against Libby, and possibly against Rove also, and maybe even against Bush as well -- would have been
disastrous for Bush's reelection campaign. It likely would have spelled defeat for Bush and victory for Kerry. This
result, Libby would have figured, had to be avoided at all costs. So he stonewalled by lying to the FBI and to the
grand jury. By stonewalling through lying, he would defeat even the possibility of a prosecutorial action, or at
least would delay any such possible action until long after the election, as occurred. The election, and the return
to office of Bush, Cheney and company, was indeed a stake worth falling on one's sword for. Moreover, even if Libby
were convicted long after the election, if Bush won there was always a possibility of a subsequent corrupt pardon
(ala Bill Clinton and ala Reagan's pardon of Casper Weinberger, who covered up for that Administration, including
the first George Bush). The possibility of such a pardon was hardly diminished when Bush spoke glowingly of Libby
after the indictment.
So, when one asks why Libby lied, what motivated him to make up his cock and bull
story, the likely answers do not seem so hard to fathom. Libby was covering up for Cheney, may well have been
covering up for Bush too (whose small inner circle he was a part of), and very likely was saving the election for
Bush, Cheney and company. These were stakes worth the candle. One should note, moreover, that if Libby lied in order
to ward off a Kerry victory, this would mean that Bush was elected the first time by the Supreme Court and the
second time because of lies and perjury. This would not speak well for our system, would it?
Which leads, of
course, to the question of what does Fitzgerald know about the underlying motivations behind what
happened.
Fitzgerald repeatedly said at his press conference that he was saying nothing and charging nothing
about the underlying crime (or not) of outing Valerie Plame Wilson. Yet, both at his press conference and in his
press release he kept stressing that, before charging a crime here (or anywhere, I take it), the prosecutor needs to
know why something was done, what was the purpose of it. Of course, one might say -- Fitzgerald would and in effect
did say -- that purpose is irrelevant to the charges of false statements and perjury; those acts are in and of
themselves culpable because, as Fitzgerald said, they prevent the prosecutor from learning the underlying purpose
behind the substantive acts.
Yet surely Fitzgerald knows something, must indeed know quite a bit, about such
underlying purpose -- the whole damn country understands the purpose of discrediting Joe Wilson by letting it be
known that his wife was a CIA officer and was behind his trip (a point I shall return to later) -- and as a citizen
Fitzgerald knows that much. Does he also know a lot more in his role as a prosecutor (though he refused to say)? His
people have conducted god know how many interviews (including interviews even with the vice president and
president), and have gotten documents. Did every administration interviewee stonewall? Did every one of them lie?
Did nobody concede that they had discussed how to discredit Joseph Wilson's report, and Joseph Wilson himself, and
that one way this was attempted was by trying to discredit Joe Wilson by outing his wife? Did no one concede they
were mad as hell at the CIA because of its refusal to give unqualified support to the Administration's phony
reasons for war, and were trying to discredit the CIA? A universal cover-up of this nature is an idea a little hard
to swallow.
So, unless there were some such universal cover-up, Fitzgerald must know a good deal, in his role
as a prosecutor, about what the underlying purpose of the outing was, what its basic motivation was. And now that
Libby has been indicted, the pressure will be on him to cut a deal to shorten his sentence, and possibly to avoid a
second indictment on the underlying substantive charge, by revealing more. There will also be pressure on other
Administration figures who are involved to cut a deal in order to avoid the possibility that they may be indicted
(or listed as unindicted co-conspirators). (One thinks of people like Rove, conceivably David Addington, who is
known to be ferociously savage to those who oppose his view, or conceivably John Hannah.) All of this remains in the
bosom of the future, of course. But if Fitzgerald was telling the truth about the need to learn underlying purposes
during an investigation -- and so far he has given the impression of being one of the few involved in high level
Washington matters who does not prevaricate or lie -- then there is bound to be more to come. As the reporters say,
stay tuned."
Lawrence R. Velvel is the Dean of Massachusetts School of Law. He can be reached at
velvel@mslaw.edu.
DrSmellThis
11-15-2005, 01:36 PM
http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002015.htm
DrSmellThis
12-15-2005, 06:39 PM
New tests fuel doubts about
vote machines
A top election official and computer experts say computer hackers could easily change election
results, after they found numerous flaws with a state-approved voting-machine in Tallahassee.
BY MARC CAPUTO
AND GARY FINEOUT
mcaputo@herald.com
TALLAHASSEE - A
political operative with hacking skills could alter the results of any election on Diebold-made voting machines --
and possibly other new voting systems in Florida -- according to the state capital's election supervisor, who said
Diebold software has failed repeated tests.
Ion Sancho, Leon County's election chief, said tests by two
computer experts, completed this week, showed that an insider could surreptitiously change vote results and the
number of ballots cast on Diebold's optical-scan machines.
After receiving county commission approval Tuesday,
Sancho scrapped Diebold's system for one made by Elections Systems and Software, the same provider used by
Miami-Dade and Broward counties. The difference between the systems: Sancho's machines use a fill-in-the-blank
paper ballot that allows for after-the-fact manual recounts, while Broward and Miami-Dade use ATM-like touchscreens
that leave no paper trail.
''That's kind of scary. If there's no paper trail, you have to rely solely on
electronic results. And now we know that they can be manipulated under the right conditions, without a person even
leaving a fingerprint,'' said Sancho, who once headed the state's elections supervisors association.
The
Leon County test results are likely to further fuel suspicions that the new electronic voting systems in Florida, in
place since the 2002 elections, are susceptible to manipulation.
When the debate hit fever pitch before last
year's presidential election, many conservatives said questions about the machinery were a liberal ploy to
undermine confidence in the voting system.
Elections chiefs in Broward and Miami-Dade said Wednesday they have
good security and are not particularly concerned -- though both have had ''glitches'' that have been tough to
explain.
Sancho agrees that good security is key, but said he's not sure he won't also have problems with the
$1.3 million ES&S system, which he'll also test.
DIEBOLD USERS
Twenty-nine counties, including
Monroe, use different versions of paper-ballot voting systems manufactured by Diebold, a leading manufacturer of
security systems and voting machines. One county uses Diebold touchscreens.
A spokesman for Diebold Election
Systems Inc. could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
Sancho said Diebold isn't the only one to blame for
hacker-prone equipment. The Florida secretary of state's office should have caught these problems early on, he
said, and the Legislature should scrap a law severely restricting recounts on touch-screen machines and equip them
with the means of producing a paper trail.
A spokeswoman for the secretary of state's office said any faults
Sancho found were between him and Diebold.
''If Ion Sancho has security concerns with his system, he needs to
discuss them with Diebold,'' spokeswoman Jenny Nash said.
Sancho first clashed with Diebold in May, when he
teamed up with a nonprofit election-monitoring group called BlackBoxVoting.org, which has made a crusade of showing
that electronic voting machines are subject to fraud. BlackBox hired Herbert Thompson, a computer-science professor
and strategist at Security Innovation, which tests software for companies such as Google and Microsoft.
Thompson couldn't hack into the system from the outside. So Sancho gave him access to the central machine that
tabulates votes and to the last school election at Leon County High.
Thompson told The Herald he was
''shocked'' at how easy it was to get in, make the loser the winner and leave without a trace. The machine asked
for a user name and password, but didn't require it, he said. That meant it had not just a ''front door, but a
back door as big as a garage,'' Thompson said.
From there, Thompson said, he typed five lines of computer
code -- and switched 5,000 votes from one candidate to another.
''I am positive an eighth grader could do
this,'' Thompson said.
After BlackBox and Sancho announced the results, Diebold's senior lawyer, Michael
Lindroos, wrote Sancho, Leon County and the state of Florida questioning the results and calling the test ''a very
foolish and irresponsible act'' that may have violated licensing agreements.
Over the past few months,
computer expert Harri Hursti tried to manipulate election results with the memory card inserted into each Diebold
voting machine. The card records votes during an election, then at the end of the day is taken to a central location
where results are totaled.
Hursti figured out how to hack into the memory card by using an agricultural
scanning device easily available on the Internet, said BlackBox founder Bev Harris. He learned how to hide votes,
make losers out of winners and leave no trace, she said.
Hursti couldn't be reached for comment.
With
some variation, both Miami-Dade and Broward use these cartridge-like cards to record votes and report election
results. Experts like Thompson say they believe the counties could be subject to electronic ballot-rigging -- which
would be hard to detect and correct without a paper trail.
FINAL TEST
Sancho said he tried to
discuss the problems with Diebold, but met with resistance. On Monday, he did one final test with Hursti at the Leon
County supervisor's office, Hursti hacked the memory card to spit out seven ''yes'' votes on an issue and one
''no'' vote.
Then, six ''no'' votes and two ''yes'' votes were cast into the machine the same way
voters would. Those results didn't show up in the final tally -- just the ones hacked into the card.
Officials
for ES&S, which makes the systems used in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, couldn't be reached for comment
Wednesday.
Seth Kaplan, a spokesman for the Miami-Dade elections office, said officials continually monitor the
quality and security of their machines.
''The problem of election fraud predates current technology by
hundreds of years. We have people we trust and in our case we have checks to reconcile the results,'' Kaplan
said.
But Broward's election supervisor, Brenda Snipes, said she's at least intrigued. She, too, vouches for
her office's security, but says there's a need to remain vigilant.
''Is hacking possible? We think we have
a secure system. With technology, those people who have that level of expertise, I guess that could be possible,''
Snipes said. ``We need to see what Ion did. He tries a lot of things. He's always analyzing things.''
But
Sancho said the time for passive monitoring is over. The Diebold problems show that simple tests haven't been done
on at least one major voting system, he said.
''These were sold as safe systems. They passed tests as safe
systems,'' Sancho said. ``But even in the so-called safe system, if you don't follow the paper ballots, there is
a way to rig the election. Except it's not a bunch of guys stuffing ballots in a precinct. It's possibly one
person acting in secret changing thousands of votes in a second.'
Mtnjim
12-16-2005, 10:40 AM
From:GTC California Report - Special
05.12.16
States and Localities Prepare for Jan. 1 HAVA and Electronic Voting Deadline
December 2, 2005
By Wayne Hanson
Last year Washington state experienced what State Elections Director Nick Handy termed "the mother
of all recounts," during the closest governor's race in U.S. history. "2.8 million people voted and we counted the
ballots three times," he said. Thirty-eight of the state's 39 counties had been tallied, and the state waited,
electrified, for the final county's results. The reason? The candidates were only eight votes apart.
Nick
Handy
While such a narrow margin between candidates may be unusual, it points out the importance of accuracy in
the process and confidence by the public that voting -- the very heart of any democracy -- works as it is intended.
That confidence was severely tested in the 2000 presidential election which came down to a few hundred votes in
Florida amid charges of irregularities in vote counting. Finally, the Supreme Court stopped the recounts and George
W. Bush was declared president. In an essentially adversarial political environment, that is a complete recipe for
discontent and suspicion.
This coming January, as the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) goes into effect, and
states and counties transition to computerized voting systems, the need for absolute accuracy is paramount to regain
the public's trust and confidence.
Handy, however, is more concerned about human error than voting
system glitches or fraud. As he explained in Sacramento earlier this week at the Voting Systems Testing Summit,
about 80 percent of Washington's voters vote by mail, and the voting systems are selected by the counties and
certified by the state. The state has "a very active recount process," said Handy. Machine and manual recounts are
done randomly in the state's six yearly elections, and there is a state requirement that allows any political party
to request a manual recount of a certain number of precincts.
"These recounts were 99.99 percent accurate," said
Handy. The inaccuracies, he said, were due to human error in interpreting the voter's intent: "instead of filling
in the oval, they put a little note that says 'I like this guy here,' or put a circle around the oval, or an X in
the oval." Also, he said, election workers in the past have sometimes failed to account for all the ballots.
As
a result, said Handy, he would suggest putting more attention on training of voters and poll workers, "and not as
much energy on the actual voting system devices and workings of hardware and software."
California's Best
Practices Blueprint
Bruce McPherson
"We are entering a new era of voting systems technology," said California
Secretary of State Bruce McPherson in his introductory remarks at his summit in Sacramento. Among the challenges
facing voting officials, he explained are the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) as well as building voter confidence and
accessibility.
HAVA, said McPherson, requires voting systems that are free of "hanging chads" and that remove
barriers of disability and language. HAVA came into being because of "conditions that raised questions" in voting,
and now, the voting process is on everyone's radar. This is not a bad thing, said McPherson, as states are now
beginning to share experiences and pool resources. Conference attendees included representatives from 23 states and
18 California counties and showed the extent of interest in collaboration.
The conference is part of a process
to develop a "Best Practices Blueprint for state testing of voting systems," said McPherson. Last month, the
Secretary of State's Office created the Office of Voting System Technology Assessment for voting system testing and
certification. "For the first time," said McPherson, "California will have a strict and clearly articulated list of
benchmarks that voting systems and their manufacturers will need to meet in order to be certificated for use in
California. Those requirements will be codified into state regulations, not simply be implied or arbitrary,
scattered among memos and outdated written procedures."
McPherson said that interested parties are encouraged to
offer written comments and reports until Mid-December. Prior to the final blueprint, McPherson will hold a public
meeting on the summit's recommendations, most likely in February.
The Federal View
Paul DeGregorio
HAVA,
the Help America Vote Act, will take effect Jan. 1, said Paul DeGregorio, of the federal Election Assistance
Commission (EAC) which was created by HAVA. The purpose of HAVA, says the Act, is: "To establish a program to
provide funds to states to replace punch card voting systems, to establish the Election Assistance Commission to
assist in the administration of federal elections and to otherwise provide assistance with the administration of
certain federal election laws and programs, to establish minimum election administration standards for states and
units of local government with responsibility for the administration of federal elections, and for other
purposes."
HAVA, said DeGregorio, will take voting accessibility requirements "to a new level," and will carry
new requirements that include provisional voting, complaint procedures, and statewide voter registration lists. $3.1
billion in federal equipment funds have been distributed to states, territories and to Washington, D.C., he
said.
The first set of voting system guidelines, said DeGregorio, were developed in 1990 by the Federal Elections
Commission. In 2002 the guidelines were updated to include some new technologies, such as direct electronic
recording machines. Under HAVA, he said, EAC has a mandate to update the guidelines again, and although states can
decide whether to adopt them or not, most will probably do so.
The National Association of State Elections
Directors (NASED) had a voluntary voting system qualifications procedure, said DeGregorio, and under HAVA, the EAC
will take over this function. A note on the NASED Web site directs inquiries about "previously or currently
certified equipment or the testing process to Brian Hancock at bhancock@eac.gov or (866)
747-1471."
What the federal government is doing has implications beyond the United States, said DeGregorio. "I
was in Moscow last week, and testing and guidelines have international implications. People are following what we
are doing. India and Brazil are using e-voting, and European countries are moving toward it."
State View
Sandy
Steinbach
Sandy Steinbach, chair of the NASED Voting Systems Board, and director of elections for the Iowa
Secretary of State, said voting systems qualification is not a new process. "We've had computerized voting since
the 1960s and 70s," she said, "including computerized voting machines, punch cards, optical scan, and optical scan
central count." But voting system failures create tension, she said. Back in 1975, a National Bureau of Standards
(now NIST) report said that lack of technical skill at state and local levels were the primary cause of computer
related problems. Congress responded in 1984 -- nine years later -- to develop voluntary national standards, and six
years later, in 1990, the FEC issued the performance and test standards for punchcard, marksense, and direct
recording systems. Then in 2002, the FEC issued the revised standards currently in effect, which are the basic
standards incorporated into HAVA, explained Steinbach. "They are in effect until they are replaced by the
EAC."
State certification varies greatly state to state, said Steinbach. "Some have no standards, some have
rigorous standards." She said the biggest difference is likely to be the redefinition of what a voting system is.
Instead of "a box to put your ballot in that counted it," the definition now includes everything, from a definition
of ballots to the record-keeping process, instructions, forms and more.
Some states feel that the new guidelines
will make everything obsolete, said Steinbach, but that's not necessarily true. The standards are voluntary, and
state legislatures will make the decision whether to act on them or not.
Paul Craft
Paul Craft of the Florida
Secretary of State's Office, said the Florida Legislature decided to set standards without waiting for the new
federal standards to come out. He said that standards should be clear, understandable, consistent and reasonable,
and not "include stuff that hasn't been invented yet."
"We provide a third-tier technical assistance to counties
for acceptance testing, and system integrity, or if a system is challenged in court ... We require each county to
use approved security and operational procedures, and those must be filed with the state office and approved." Last
session, said Craft, ballot accounting rules were upgraded, since during the 2004 elections the state discovered
some counties were not doing ballot accounting.
Florida also requires a "conduct of election" report, said
Craft, so that problems that occur comes to the state's attention, and a solution can be worked out with vendors.
"There's no good reward for reporting problems," he said. "You made a choice of systems, and then if you admit a
problem exists, it hits the papers, and you are likely to be attacked for it." The press, the public, and the
marketing people from competing vendors all jump in, he said.
And finally, said Craft, beginning in January,
distribution of uncertified systems is a felony in Florida.
Brit Williams
"Texas is the only state that has
more counties than we have," said Dr. Brit Williams of Georgia. "I'm not sure that's anything to brag about." He,
like Washington's Nick Handy, said that errors in vote tallying were because of human error. "We had 4,000 ballot
scanners for the 2002 election, and not a single glitch was attributed to the voting system."
Williams said that
initially, there was concern about elderly voters using the technology, but said it didn't cause a problem. "But we
liked the system," he joked. He said that DeKalb and Fulton counties were the first in the country to use computers
for voting. But if changes are necessary, it takes four months to get to all 159 counties and costs millions of
dollars.
Of all the security threats, said Williams -- attempted election fraud, intentional or accidental
disruptions -- accidental disruption is most common, as when a lightning strike cut the power. However, he said,
from time to time, there were some people who thought they could use the absentee ballot procedure to alter a local
election.
Williams said that no extraneous software is allowed on the servers which are locked up and have no
network connectivity of any kind. A simple-to-use hash program checks for any alterations in the code.
Local
Concerns
Connie Schmidt
Connie Schmidt, former election commissioner of Johnson County Kansas, said many small
counties don't even have computers, and rely on vendors to set up for elections. "There may be no budgets for them
to attend conferences like this," said Schmidt, "how do we even know what is certified? Do we know what we received
is the certified version? Should we perform our own testing? How do we stay informed about new version releases? How
do we educate our voters and election officials?
Some counties in Western Kansas, she explained, have 3x5 cards
for voter lists, no optical scans, everything is paper-based. "They need our help," she said, "to go to such things
as a statewide computerized database."
Vendors need to routinely notify their customers of current decertified
software and hardware, and communicate regarding new version releases, said Schmidt. "States should maintain a list
of all state-certified systems, including specific software and hardware components." She said Electionline.org is
helpful, but only after the news hits the media.
Standard operating procedure, she said, should include
distribution of all test lab operating procedures and reports, and vendor requests for state certification should
routinely include distribution of such reports. State certification reports should be communicated to local
elections officials.
Voting is like banking, said Schmidt. "Votes are like dollar bills -- you don't want to
lose any, and the books have to balance." There are lots of security concerns, but the systems should be simple and
straightforward "like a big bank vault," because elections won't wait. And the bottom line, she said, is "if people
don't trust the system, they won't vote."
belgareth
12-21-2005, 08:16 PM
19 States to Miss Fair Vote Law Deadline Wed Dec 21,
2005
WASHINGTON -
Nineteen states will miss the Jan. 1 deadline for complying with the federal law ensuring accurate and honest
elections, but most should be ready when votes are cast in 2006.
The
National Association of Secretaries of State surveyed the states on compliance with the 2002 law that helps or
requires states to replace outdated voting equipment, establish statewide voter registration databases, require
better voter identification and provide provisional ballots so qualified voters can make their
choices.
The association received responses from 43 states and
released the results Wednesday. The organization provided only numbers and did not identify the specific states,
part of the agreement to ensure that states participated in the survey.
However, during a conference call with reporters, association officials said California and Illinois won't
have voter registration databases ready for the elections. Vermont would be in compliance; Washington would miss the
Jan. 1 deadline but be ready for voting.
Sam Reed, Washington's
secretary of state and the president of the association, said the states that will miss the deadline are working
closely with the Justice Department. He added, "I know of no state in the country that the Department of Justice
is planning to sue over noncompliance."
The association found that 24
states will be in compliance with the Help America Vote Act, the law that emerged from the disputed 2000
presidential election, which was marked by hanging chads, butterfly ballots and accusations of uncounted
votes.
The 19 states that will miss the Jan. 1 deadline cited
problems completing the voter registration database or getting voting equipment in place, or
both.
Congress has provided some $3.9 billion for states to comply
with the law.
Mtnjim
12-23-2005, 01:47 PM
From the SANS Newsbites newsletter:
"--California Sec. of State Refuses to
Approve Diebold Electronic Voting
Machines, Asks Company to Submit Code for Federal Review
(21 December
2005)
California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson has refused to approve the
use of thousands of touch-screen
and optical scanning electronic voting
machines. There are "unresolved significant security concerns" with
memory
cards that store votes in the machines. McPherson's office has
asked that Diebold, the maker of the voting
machines in question, submit
the machines' source code to the Federal Independent Testing Authorities
for review.
Dave Byrd, Diebold VP of business operations, said the
company is happy to comply with the
request.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/13455648.htm?template=contentModules/printst
ory.jsp
http://news.com.com/2102-1028_3-6004615.html?tag=st.util.print
[Editor's Note (Schultz):
Diebold's up-front cooperation with the state
of California represents a major shift in Diebold's
posture--a
much-welcomed change for the better when it comes to assuring integrity
in eVoting systems.]"
DrSmellThis
02-09-2006, 06:01 AM
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060207/ap_on_g
o_ot/election_reforms (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060207/ap_on_go_ot/election_reforms)
By JIM ABRAMS, Associated Press WriterTue Feb 7, 5:11 PM ET
With the midterm elections just nine months away, many states are lagging
behind in meeting requirements under a 2002 election reform law that they modernize voting machines, create voter
databases and establish ID systems, according to a report released Tuesday.
Controversies over the need for
paper trails and the legality of ID requirements were among the reasons that states missed the Jan. 1 deadline for
complying with the Help America Vote Act, said Electionline.org., a nonpartisan project that does analysis of
election reform.
"The lack of progress in nearly half of the states throws into doubt whether HAVA goals can be
achieved in time for the November 2006 election," the project's president, Doug Chapin, said in a statement.
HAVA was enacted in response to the disputed 2000 presidential election, and Chapin said that despite the glitches,
the election system is undergoing significant change. Two years ago voters had never heard of voter-verified paper
audit trails; now states are deciding whether to use them in recounts, and states that once debated the need for IDs
are now debating whether IDs should be issued free of charge, he said.
Among the findings:
_Most punch-card
and lever voting machines are being replaced, but electronic machines deployed in Florida, North Carolina, Indiana,
Maryland and California have been plagued with certification, security and other problems, including questions about
the reliability and accuracy of paperless ballots.
_More than one-third of states haven't met the requirement
that each polling place have at least one machine available for people with disabilities.
_In 2000, only 11
states required all voters to show IDs. In 2006, the number had doubled to 22. The law says that all first-time
voters who register by mail must show one of a number of forms of ID at their polling place. Georgia's law, which
requires a state-issued photo ID, has been blocked by a federal judge.
_As of Jan. 1, more than 20 percent of
states do not yet have compliant voter registration databases. The report quoted New York state officials as saying
that its databases won't be ready until mid-2007, and noted that the Justice Department is considering suing the
state for noncompliance.
_Before 2000, 18 states, including Florida, the epicenter of the Bush-Gore dispute, had
no recourse for voters turned away at the polls. Under HAVA almost every state has provisional ballots available at
federal elections.
The report concluded that the center of gravity for carrying out reform has shifted to the
states. But two of the key authors of HAVA, Reps. Bob Ney, R-Ohio and Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said the federal
government also needs to do more.
Under the act, Washington approved spending of $3.9 billion to upgrade the
election system, but so far it has allotted only $3 billion. Ney said Congress has approved $5 billion to build
democracies overseas, so it's only fair that it grant the full $3.9 bill here at home. "That's what we promised to
do."
Hoyer, in a statement, said he was disappointed that President Bush's budget proposal for 2007 didn't
come through with the money to meet HAVA's obligations. The remaining funds are essential, he said in a statement,
if states are to "successfully implement HAVA in what promises to be the most significant midterm election in over a
decade."
DrSmellThis
02-25-2006, 01:17 PM
Watchdog Group Questions
2004 Fla. Vote
By BRIAN SKOLOFF, Associated Press WriterThu Feb 23, 3:53 PM ET
An examination of Palm Beach County's electronic voting machine
records from the 2004 election found possible tampering and tens of thousands of malfunctions and errors, a watchdog
group said Thursday.
Bev Harris, founder of BlackBoxVoting.org, said the findings call into question the outcome
of the presidential race. But county officials and the maker of the electronic voting machines strongly disputed
that and took issue with the findings.
Voting problems would have had to have been widespread across the state
to make a difference. President Bush won Florida — and its 27 electoral votes — by 381,000 votes in 2004. Overall,
he defeated John Kerry by 286 to 252 electoral votes, with 270 needed for victory.
BlackBoxVoting.org, which
describes itself as a nonpartisan, nonprofit citizens group, said it found 70,000 instances in Palm Beach County of
cards getting stuck in the paperless ATM-like machines and that the computers logged about 100,000 errors, including
memory failures.
Also, the hard drives crashed on some of the machines made by Oakland, Calif.-based Sequoia
Voting Systems, some machines apparently had to be rebooted over and over, and 1,475 re-calibrations were performed
on Election Day on more than 4,300 units, Harris said. Re-calibrations are done when a machine is malfunctioning,
she said.
"I actually think there's enough votes in play in Florida that it's anybody's guess who actually
won the presidential race," Harris added. "But with that said, there's no way to tell who the votes should have
gone to."
Palm Beach County and other parts of the country switched to electronic equipment after the turbulent
2000 presidential election, when the county's butterfly ballot confused some voters and led them to cast their
votes for third-party candidate Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore. The Supreme Court halted a recount after 36 days
and handed a 537-vote victory to Bush.
Palm Beach County election officials said the BlackBoxVoting.com findings
are flawed, and they blamed most of the errors on voters not following proper procedures.
"Their results are
noteworthy for consideration, but in a majority of instances they can be explained," said Arthur Anderson, the
county's elections supervisor. "All of these circumstances are valid reasons for concern, but they do not on face
value substantiate that the machines are not reliable."
Sequoia spokeswoman Michelle Shafer disputed the
findings, saying the company's machines worked properly. Sequoia's machines are used in five Florida counties and
in 21 states.
"There was a fine election in November 2004," Shafer said.
She said many of the errors in the
computer logs could have resulted from voters improperly inserting their user cards into the machines. The remaining
errors would not affect the vote results because each unit has a backup system, she said.
Jenny Nash, a
spokeswoman for the Florida Department of State, which oversees elections, said she was not aware of the report and
had no comment.
Harris said one machine showed that 112 votes were cast on Oct. 16, two days before the start of
early voting, a possible sign of tampering. She said the group found evidence of tampering on more than 30 machines
in the county.
However, Harris said it was impossible to determine what information was altered or if votes
were shifted among candidates.
On the Net:
BlackBoxVoting:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org
DrSmellThis
02-25-2006, 01:29 PM
For those of
you who want to keep abreast of citizen voting rights, blackbox.org (http://www.blackboxvoting.org) has
come a long way in the past year. Check it out, and you'll never view our elections in the same way again!
Bev
Harris and crew have been working tirelessly since the 2004 election, auditing election results in many of the fifty
States. Their website now has tons of enlightening articles on various important happenings across the country.
It really is the preeminent website for voter rights issues in the country, a true friend of Democracy.
Mtnjim
03-24-2006, 05:01 PM
From Thursday's "Risks" digest (From the ACM):
Court-at-law recount
suspended; Electronic machines not providing all info
Paul A. Anthony, 21 Mar 2006
On orders from the Texas
Secretary of State's office, the recount for the
Tom Green County Court-at-Law No. 2 race has been suspended
midway through
its second day. About 1:30 p.m. today, county Republican Chairman Dennis
McKerley stopped the
recount after workers found discrepancies of as much as
20 percent between what was counted Monday and what was
reported Election
Night. "We're having some trouble with the electronic equipment," McKerley
said. Apparently,
McKerley said, new electronic voting machines provided by
vendor Hart InterCivic are not printing ballots for every
vote cast on the
machines. During recounts, which must be done by hand, the machines are
designed to print out
separate ballots for every
vote.
http://www.sanangelostandardtimes.com/sast/news_local/article/0,1897,SAST_4956_4559073,00.html
PHP 87
04-07-2006, 06:24 PM
You partisan ideologues never fail
to amuse - you cherry-pick articles while ignoring exculpatory evidence, and even cherry-pick from the least
credible, lunatic-fringe sources like Michaelmoore.com, moveon.org, commondreams, buzzflash etc...that damage your
credibility.
Same goes for those on the far-right.
You're just different sides of the same coin.
DrSmellThis
04-08-2006, 02:06 PM
http://www.cleveland.com/images/printer/cleveland_bw.gif
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ga/1144312870224340.xml&coll=2
http://www.cleveland.com/images/spacer.gif
http://www.cleveland.com/images/news/plaindealer.gif
Workers accused of fudging ’04 recount
Prosecutor says Cuyahoga skirted rules
Thursday, April 06, 2006Joan Mazzolini
Plain Dealer Reporter
After the 2004 presidential election,
Cuyahoga County election workers secretly skirted rules designed to make sure all votes were counted correctly, a
special prosecutor charges.
While there is no evidence of vote fraud, the prosecutor said their efforts were
aimed at avoiding an expensive - and very public - hand recount of all votes cast. Three top county elections
officials have been indicted, and Erie County Prosecutor Kevin Baxter says more indictments are possible.
Michael Vu, executive director of the Cuyahoga County elections board, said workers followed procedures that had
been in place for 23 years. He said board employees had no objection to doing an exhaustive hand count if needed,
meaning they had no motive to break the law.
Internet bloggers have cried foul since 2004 about election results
in Ohio, one of the key states in deciding the election. They have been tracking Baxter's investigation with online
posts about the indictments.
Baxter's prosecution centers on Ohio's safeguards for ensuring that every vote is
counted.
Baxter charges that Cuyahoga election workers - mindful of the monthlong Florida recount in 2000 - not
only ignored the safeguards but worked to defeat them during Ohio's 2004 recount.
Candidates for president from
the Green and Libertarian parties requested the Ohio recount. State laws and regulations specify how a recount
works.
Election workers in each county are supposed to count 3 percent of the ballots by hand and by machine,
randomly choosing precincts for that count.
If the hand and machine counts match, the other 97 percent of the
votes are recounted by machine. If the numbers don't match, workers repeat the effort. If they still don't match
exactly, the workers must complete the recount by hand, a tedious process that could take weeks and cost hundreds of
thousands of dollars.
But the fix was in at the Cuyahoga elections board, Baxter charges.
Days before the
Dec. 16 recount, workers opened the ballots and hand-counted enough votes to identify precincts where the machine
count matched.
"If it didn't balance, they excluded those precincts," Baxter said.
"The preselection
process was done outside of any witnesses, without anyone's knowledge except for [people at] the Board of
Elections."
On the official recount day, employees pretended to pick precincts randomly, Baxter says. Dozens of
Cuyahoga County election workers sat at 20 folding tables in front of dozens of witnesses and reporters.
They
did the hand and machine count of 3 percent of the votes 34 of the 1,436 precincts and when the totals matched, the
recount was completed by machines.
The recount gave Kerry 17 extra votes and took six away from Bush.
But
observers suspected that the precincts were not randomly chosen and asked a board worker about it, said Toledo
attorney Richard Kerger. The worker acknowledged that there had been a precount.
Kerger wrote a letter to
Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason, complaining and asking for an investigation. Mason recused himself, and
Baxter was appointed special prosecutor. He brought elections workers before a grand jury to find out what happened.
"They screwed with the process and increased the probability, if not the certainty, that there would not be a
full countywide hand count," Baxter said.
Everyone expected the recount to "be conducted in accordance of the
law," he said.
Vu said the precincts were chosen as they had been in the past, by a Democrat and a Republican in
the ballot department.
Because of Baxter's investigation, Vu declined to comment on whether the board's
longtime procedures involve precounting precincts before the recount.
Vu acknowledged that the selection of
precincts was not completely random because precincts with 550 votes or fewer were not used.
Nor were precincts
counted where the number of ballots handed out on Election Day failed to match the number of ballots cast.
Vu
said the board also had asked for legal opinions from the prosecutor's office before and after the election to
ensure all rules were followed.
Kathleen Martin, who headed the civil division at the prosecutor's office and
worked with the board on the issues, has since died.
"If Kathleen Martin was still alive, she could put so much
light on this," Vu said.
Regardless, he said, the board was prepared for a full hand recount.
"Why do all
that work to prepare for the election, conduct it, audit it, canvass and then not meet this last obligation?" Vu
said.
"Our plan was to regroup after Christmas and just work through it."
Baxter has said he can't
understand why the three people indicted all managers - continue to work at the election office. None has the same
duties they had in 2004.
Kathleen Dreamer was manager of the board's ballot department. Rosie Grier was
assistant manager. Jacqueline Maiden was Elections Division director and its third-highest-ranking employee. All
have been charged with misdemeanor and felony counts of failing to follow the state elections law.
A May 8 trial
date is set for Dreamer and Grier, but Baxter wants to combine all three cases, including Maiden's, who was
indicted later.
Kerger said he was surprised by the charges.
"We wrote, not to have any criminal charges,
but just to find out what happened," he said. "The special prosecutor has the ability to conduct an investigation
and not file any charges."
Kerger said he believes there are two reasons, generally, why an elections board
would precount before a recount. The first is to change the results of the vote, which he does not believe happened.
The second, he speculated, was that "the workers were so tired and didn't want to hassle with doing a hand
recount."
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
jmazzolini@plaind.com, 216-999-4563
© 2006 The Plain Dealer © 2006 cleveland.com All Rights
Reserved
DrSmellThis
04-08-2006, 02:59 PM
You partisan
ideologues never fail to amuse - you cherry-pick articles while ignoring exculpatory evidence, and even cherry-pick
from the least credible, lunatic-fringe sources like Michaelmoore.com, moveon.org, commondreams, buzzflash
etc...that damage your credibility.Thanks for your feedback. You are entitled to your opinion and
inaccurate, offensive namecalling, but I disagree. I also doubt the other posters consider themselves "partisan
idealogues."
Most of the articles posted here were from AP, Reuters, NY Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times, and
any number of mainstream newspapers from around the country.
There have been some from commondreams, etc., but
those were largely reprints from mainstream press, other than maybe a couple editorials by people like Jimmy Carter,
who is perhaps the world's leading expert on democratic elections. Here I am speaking only for myself.
I check
many sources of news every day, including the alternate/independent press, BBC, CNN, MSN, Yahoo, and lots of
others, depending on the day. When I'm around a TV I even watch Fox just for the amusement value, and to find out
what the right wing is thinking. Most of the major news sources, especially TV news (newspapers are much better,
IMHO) are beholden to those in government who regulate them (and their profits), and the few mega-multinational
corporations that own them, with their corporate interests. So you need to watch the alternative press to get
closer to the truth, IMO. You seem to equate anything from the left, progressive or alternate press to "lunatic
fringe", which mostly says a lot about you.
If you want to post "exculpatory evidence" you are welcome to. What
have you contributed to this thread?
I don't recall seeing anything in the mainstream press that was really
exculpatory (in general articles were few and far between from any angle, as the mainstream press supressed the
whole story, as I documented in this thread.), but you're welcome and encouraged to post whatever you have.
IMHO there is no exculpatory evidence to counter the mountain of stuff posted here, and that is why it cannot be
posted. I'm not seeing detailed responses to hardly anything.
Mostly what you see from the right leaning press
is empty charges like "lunatic fringe" (like you say), "sour grapes", and people just ignoring it.
I doubt very
much you have read the extremely detailed Conyers report. If you had, I believe you would be utterly incapable of
countering the evidence point by point, or finding any kind of detailed, substantive response from the right at all
to the mountain of evidence contained in it.
Recently it was asserted that some of the numbers of machine
miscounted votes quoted in the Conyers report were not as high as originally thought in one or two counties, but it
was a drop in the bucket. I don't recall seeing an article about it in the mainstream press, or any resolution of
the numbers, but that is the only "exculpatory" evidence I have seen lately (it changes nothing in terms of overall
conclusions in the report). I am willing to allow that those particular numbers may have been mistaken.
Just
above I posted news from the Cleveland plain Dealer of real indictments/prosecutions that are now happening in Ohio.
Do you think that is made up?
To me anyone that is not deeply concerned about voting rights here in the U.S. is
just not paying attention to the facts, or is blinded by their own political bias. I have documented and supported
why I believe that in massive detail in this thread, whereas you make empty charges, and have no substantive
commentary or analysis to offer. You just dismiss the mountain of reports and evidence in this thread, leading me
to believe you probably have your own political agenda, other than a drive to learn the truth or facts.
I of
course have my own personal beliefs about elections in this country. I am not now neutral on this issue, even
though I was previously naive. The difference is I supported my beliefs in detail, posting mountains of information
that no one had specific rebuttals for; whereas you offer nothing except labels and namecalling.
This is about a
desire for democracy in this country, not politics. Democrats under LBJ were also apparently involved in toying with
election results, for example in Chicago. If Hillary Clinton or some Democrat gets elected and rigs elections, I
will hold her feet to the fire as well. I never imagined I would see our country degenerate to this bad of a
state. I feel very strongly that we need to restore democracy to this country, in many ways. If we do that the
politics will tend to take care of themselves.
PHP 87
04-08-2006, 09:01 PM
Ironic that you see Fox News as
right wing, but not the LA Times, NY Times, CBS etc... as left-wing.
Look at the recent polls being run by
the AP, where they oversample Democrats by double-digits, or how CBS broadcast forged documents a month before the
election in order to influence an election.
Or how a newspaper in the UK conducted a campaign urging it's
readers to write letters to Ohio residents to vote for Kerry.
Maybe Fox News only seems right wing in
contrast to the rest of the media, which BTW, donates 68% of their campaign cash to the Democrats.
The media
tends to ignore wrongdoing by the Dems due to their inherent bias.
And yes, the Dems are just as crooked as
the Republicans, only the media and people like yourself tend to turn a blind eye to their wrongdoings.
And
yes, I tend to avoid these types of threads because facts, evidence and logic don't matter to the "Bush stole the
election and was responsible for 9-11" conspiracy theory crowd.
It's pointless to debate people whose minds
are already made up, and who refuse to believe anything other than their own pre-conceived notions, no matter how
much evidence is posted.
Mtnjim
09-07-2006, 05:07 PM
"Stealing Democracy: the New Politics of Voter Suppression" by Spencer
Overton. (W. W. Norton & Company,
2006).
http://www.powells.com/partner/24075/biblio/2-0393061590-1
This is a wonderful read both for
political season junkies and those who
would like to take a peek behind the curtain of our nation's
most
fundamental democratic institution--the public election. The book's
first chapter is an eye-opening tour of
the election process that will
dissuade you of any notion that "one person, one vote" has ever been the
goal of
public elections. Beyond just the messy conclusion of the 2000
Florida presidential election, "Stealing Democracy"
instills a greater
appreciation of the efforts of inside political partisans to prevent
change from happening, and
the monumental efforts that voting rights
advocates have made to expand the franchise to minorities, women,
youth,
and new residents.
By the end of Professor Overton's book you will have a better
understanding of why
Florida was not an isolated event, and why things
have not improved much since that election. The book does do
something
that may surprise the reader, though: it is humorous, hopeful,
insightful, balanced, and intuitive about
the conflicting arguments
surrounding redistricting, voter ID requirements, felon voting rights,
the cost of
election administration, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act,
and the role of federal, state, and local government
in election
administration.
For example, Professor Overton details the delicate mating ritual that
takes place
during the drawing of new district lines following each
decennial census. The process is controlled from beginning
to end by
partisan powers-that-be seeking to maintain the status quo. Every
possible tactic is deployed to keep
the language and tone of the process
such that no one will question the assumption that this is the
only
acceptable method for drawing the lines for elected offices.
Professor Overton also points out the little
discussed problems of
administering public elections: cost and shortages of election workers.
Neglect of election
administration meant voting systems became
antiquated or left in disrepair, and poll workers who, although
much
appreciated, were little more than volunteers. He concedes that the
process of election related
decision-making will likely always be
political, but he insists that it can be fair, provided there is a
national
discussion about a formula that would encompass federal, state,
local, and citizen roles to provide an appropriate
level of checks and
balances for public election administration.
According to Professor Overton, the
machinations behind our elections
serve to keep in power those who are currently in power by any means
available.
The book makes valuable observations and offers some
foundations to begin a national discussion on reforming our
most
cherished democratic institution. Public elections should not be a
matter of making sure that one party wins,
but that every voter wins the
right to equal access to participate in public elections. Now that would
be a new
experience. Happy Political Season!
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