News item: Hoping your vote counts

[DrSmellThis]

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]

"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]

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]

*For further information and

reference, see The Nation, August 15, 2004.

[Mtnjim]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

* 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]

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]

Keep the dream of Democracy

alive!

[Elk Dreamer]

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.]

"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]

Thanks. You beat me to it. :)

I was going to post the same thing.

[DrSmellThis]

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]

...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]

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]

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]

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]

Therein lies the message (http://static.vidvote.com/movies/bushuncensored.mov).

[Pancho1188]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.]

"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]

To a statistician, that is

some significant data, if true.

[belgareth]

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]

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]

Obviously it

didn't. Not for shit.
I'm not sure how obvious it is.

[bjf]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[bjf]

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]

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]

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.

[bjf]

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]

More young people

did vote, as did middle aged people. Really, what numbers did you see?

[a.k.a.]

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]

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]

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.

[bjf]

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]

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]

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]

...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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

If they find the possibility

of a scandal, are they actually going to do anything about it (redo the election, etc.)?

[DrSmellThis]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

http://www.solarbus.

org/stealyourelection/articles/CuyahogaCounty-OhioVotingResults.pdf (http://www.solarbus.org/stealyourelection/articles/CuyahogaCounty-OhioVotingResults.pdf)

[DrSmellThis]

http://www.zogby.com/Soundbites/ReadClips.dbm?ID=1038

5 (http://www.zogby.com/Soundbites/ReadClips.dbm?ID=10385)

[Mtnjim]

" 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]

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]

I again ask you as a moderator

to show some respect for the issue we are discussing in this thread.

[belgareth]

" 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]

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]

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]

A black ribbon (like the

yellow you sometimes see people wearing) signifies "Election Mourning".

[belgareth]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[bjf]

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]

The best thing we can do is

pass it along and encourage everybody to write asking for a full investigation.

[Mtnjim]

" 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]

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]

More for you computer people:



http://avirubin.com/vote.pdf

[DrSmellThis]

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]

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

[bjf]

well spaced and easily readable.

:drunk:

[DrSmellThis]

Um, you had to be there.

[DrSmellThis]

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]

"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!!!!

[bjf]

election>>><<<

[bjf]

The report on fox news was similar to

this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/politics/12theory.html?oref=login&8br

[DrSmellThis]

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]

"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]

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.

[bjf]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

I've heard informally that

Gillespie, RNC, wants exit polls banned from here on out "not accurate".

[DrSmellThis]

The Zogby post in this thread

addressed that fallacious assertion.

[DrSmellThis]

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]

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.]

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]

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]

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.]

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]

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.]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

... 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]

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]

[url="http://www.thenation.com/edcut/index.mhtml?pid=2034"]http://www.thenation.com/edcut/index.mhtml?pid=2034[/url

]

[DrSmellThis]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Today was a big day in Ohio:



www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1213-10.htm (http://www.commondreams.org)

[DrSmellThis]

...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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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)

[DCW]

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]

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.

[DCW]

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]

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.

[DCW]

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]

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]

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]

(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]

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]

http://www.suntimes.com/output/jesse/cst-edt-jesse

04.html (http://www.suntimes.com/output/jesse/cst-edt-jesse04.html)

[DrSmellThis]

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/20

05/1065 (http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1065)

[a.k.a.]

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]

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]

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]

http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=528

[DrSmellThis]

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]

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]

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]

...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]

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]

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]

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]

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.]

...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]

'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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Intimidation to silence

critics!!!:POKE:

[DrSmellThis]

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0126-28.htm

[DrSmellThis]

I hadn't heard about this method before, but it's not suprising:



http://rawstory.com/news/2005/index.php?p=7

[DrSmellThis]

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/index.php?p=9

[DrSmellThis]

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/WO0502/S00036.ht

m (http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/WO0502/S00036.htm)

[DrSmellThis]

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]

http://capwiz.com/pdamerica/issues/alert/?

alertid=6942056&type=CO (http://capwiz.com/pdamerica/issues/alert/?alertid=6942056&type=CO)

[DrSmellThis]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Hey, I can go to the first

one! :) (not that I would...but I could!)

[DrSmellThis]

...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]

Yes...in fact my cell phone

reception is scrambled by the Russians. ;) Bastards.

[DrSmellThis]

They have quite the embassy.

[DrSmellThis]

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]

The veteran

Chicago election official
Now does that tell us anything??:angel:

[DrSmellThis]

Now does that

tell us anything??:angel::rofl:..........

[DrSmellThis]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

I'd take that kind of

failure right now if we could only have it.

[DrSmellThis]

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]

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]

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]

http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002015.htm

[DrSmellThis]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

http://www.cleveland.com/images/printer/cleveland_bw.gif

http://ads13.udc.advance.net/RealMedia/ads/adstream_lx.ads/www.cleveland.com/printer/printer.ssf/1793157192/Spo

nsorRight/CLEVELANDLIVE/SPACER_MJX_CL11/Spacer_SpanMJX.html/34373236393533323434333832353830?_RM_EMPTY_&/base/cuyaho

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




&#169; 2006 The Plain Dealer &#169; 2006 cleveland.com All Rights

Reserved

[DrSmellThis]

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]

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]

"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!