| Topic: |
Religions > Bible |
| User: |
"T for Truth Jefferson" |
| Date: |
04 Nov 2004 11:18:24 AM |
| Object: |
PROOF OF DIEBOLD ELECTION FRAUD! |
An Election Day filled with unexpected twists ended with a familiar
question: What went wrong with the network exit polls?
Polls consistently showed a lead for Democratic presidential nominee
John F. Kerry in the national survey that persisted until late in the
evening.
In two instances on election night -- the results for Virginia and South
Carolina -- the networks held off projecting a winner when voting ended
because exit polls showed that the races were too close to call, only to
see President Bush win easily in both states.
"The exit polls got it flat wrong," asserted Charles Gibson yesterday on
ABC's "Good Morning America."
That is wrong, countered Joe Lenski of Edison Media Research, which
conducted Tuesday's exit poll with Mitofsky International for the
National Election Pool, a consortium of the major television networks
and the Associated Press. "No wrong projections [of winners] were made;
the projections were spot on," he said.
Successive waves of the national exit poll in the afternoon and evening
reported that Kerry had a two- or three-percentage-point lead over Bush
nationally and in several key states, including Ohio.
It was only after the polls had closed in most states and the vote count
was well underway in the East that it became clear that Bush was in a
stronger position in several key battlegrounds, including Ohio, than
early exit polls suggested.
The Theft of Your Vote Is Just a Chip Away
Are computerized voting machines a wide-open back door to massive voting
fraud? The discussion has moved from the Internet to CNN, to UK
newspapers, and the pages of The New York Times. People are cautiously
beginning to connect the dots, and the picture that seems to be emerging
is troubling.
"A defective computer chip in the county's optical scanner misread
ballots Tuesday night and incorrectly tallied a landslide victory for
Republicans," announced the Associated Press in a story on Nov. 7, just
a few days after the 2002 election. The story added, "Democrats actually
won by wide margins."
Republicans would have carried the day had not poll workers become
suspicious when the computerized vote-reading machines said the
Republican candidate was trouncing his incumbent Democratic opponent in
the race for County Commissioner. The poll workers were close enough to
the electorate – they were part of the electorate – to know their county
overwhelmingly favored the Democratic incumbent.
A quick hand recount of the optical-scan ballots showed that the
Democrat had indeed won, even though the computerized ballot-scanning
machine kept giving the race to the Republican. The poll workers brought
the discrepancy to the attention of the County Clerk, who notified the
voting machine company.
"A new computer chip was flown to Snyder [Texas] from Dallas," County
Clerk Lindsey told the Associated Press. With the new chip installed,
the computer then verified that the Democrat had won the election. In
another Texas anomaly, Republican state Senator Jeff Wentworth won his
race with exactly 18,181 votes, Republican Carter Casteel won her state
House seat with exactly 18,181 votes, and conservative Judge Danny
Scheel won his seat with exactly 18,181 votes – all in Comal County.
Apparently, however, no poll workers in Comal County thought to ask for
a new chip.
Startling Results
The Texas incidents happened with computerized machines reading and then
tabulating paper or punch-card ballots. In Georgia and Florida, where
paper had been totally replaced by touch-screen machines in many to most
precincts during 2001 and 2002, the 2002 election produced some of the
nation's most startling results.
USA Today reported on Nov. 3, 2002, "In Georgia, an Atlanta
Journal-Constitution poll shows Democratic Sen. Max Cleland with a
49%-to-44% lead over Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss." Cox News Service,
based in Atlanta, reported just after the election (Nov. 7) that,
"Pollsters may have goofed" because "Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss
defeated incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Cleland by a margin of 53 to 46
percent. The Hotline, a political news service, recalled a series of
polls Wednesday showing that Chambliss had been ahead in none of them."
Just as amazing was the Georgia governor's race. "Similarly," the Zogby
polling organization reported on Nov. 7, "no polls predicted the upset
victory in Georgia of Republican Sonny Perdue over incumbent Democratic
Gov. Roy Barnes. Perdue won by a margin of 52 to 45 percent. The most
recent Mason Dixon Poll had shown Barnes ahead 48 to 39 percent last
month with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 points."
Almost all of the votes in Georgia were recorded on the new touchscreen
computerized voting machines, which produced no paper trail whatsoever.
And nobody thought to ask for a new chip, although it was noted on Nov.
8 by the Atlanta Constitution-Journal that in downtown Atlanta's
predominantly Democratic Fulton County "election officials said Thursday
that memory cards from 67 electronic voting machines had been misplaced,
so ballots cast on those machines were left out of previously announced
vote totals." Officials added that all but 11 of the memory cards were
subsequently found and recorded.
Similarly, as the San Jose Mercury News reported in a Jan. 23, 2003
editorial titled "Gee Whiz, Voter Fraud?" "In one Florida precinct last
November, votes that were intended for the Democratic candidate for
governor ended up for Gov. Jeb Bush, because of a misaligned
touchscreen. How many votes were miscast before the mistake was found
will never be known, because there was no paper audit." ("Misaligned"
touchscreens also caused 18 known machines in Dallas to register
Republican votes when Democratic screen-buttons were pushed: it's
unknown how many others weren't noticed.)
Apparently, nobody thought to ask for new chips in Florida, either.
In Minnesota, the Star Tribune reported just a few days before the
election (Oct. 30, 2002) that, "Dramatic political developments since
Sen. Paul Wellstone's death Friday have had little effect on voters'
leanings in the U.S. Senate race, according to a Star Tribune Minnesota
Poll taken Monday night. Wellstone's likely replacement on the ballot,
former Vice President Walter Mondale, leads Republican Norm Coleman by
47 to 39 percent – close to where the race stood two weeks ago when
Wellstone led Coleman 47 to 41 percent."
When the computerized machines were done counting the vote a few days
later, however, Coleman had beat Mondale by 50 to 47 percent. If Mondale
had asked for new chips, would it have made a difference? We'll never
know.
One state where Republicans did ask for a new chip was Alabama. Fox News
reported on Nov. 8, 2002 that initial returns from across the state
showed that Democratic incumbent Gov. Don Siegelman had won the
governor's race. But, overnight, "Baldwin County took center stage when
election officials released results Tuesday night showing Siegelman with
19,070 votes – enough for a narrow victory statewide. Later, they
recounted and reduced Siegelman's tally to 12,736 votes – enough to give
Riley the victory."
What produced the sudden loss of about 6,000 votes? According to the Fox
report: "Probate Judge Adrian Johns, a member of the county canvassing
board, blamed the initial, higher number on 'a programming glitch in the
software' that tallies the votes." All parties were not satisfied with
that explanation, however. Fox added: "The governor claimed results were
changed after poll watchers left."
It turns out the "glitch in the software" in Alabama was discovered by
the Republican National Committee's regional director Kelley McCullough,
who, according to a story in the conservative Daily Standard, "logged
onto the county's municipal website and confirmed that [incumbent
Democratic Governor] Siegelman had actually only received 12,736 votes –
not the 19,070 the Associated Press projected for him. A computer glitch
had caused the error. The erroneous tally would have put Siegelman on
top by 3,582 votes, but the corrected one gave Riley a 2,752-vote edge."
As the Murdoch-owned Daily Standard noted, "If it hadn't been for one
woman, the Republican National Committee's regional director Kelley
McCullough, things might have gone terribly wrong for [Republican
Gubernatorial candidate] Riley."
Similarly, in Davison County, South Dakota, the Democratic election
auditor noticed the machines double counting votes (it's not noted for
which side) and had a "new chip" brought in.
Hacking Democracy?
This is just the tip of the iceberg of '00 and '02 election
irregularities, as reported by www.votewatch.us. Either the system by
which democracy exists broke that November evening, or was hacked, or
American voters became suddenly more fickle than at any time since
Truman beat Dewey.
Maybe it's true that the citizens of Georgia simply decided that
incumbent Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a wildly popular war veteran,
was, as Republican TV ads suggested, too unpatriotic to remain in the
Senate, even though his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss, had sat
out the Vietnam war with a medical deferment.
Maybe, in the final two days of the race, those voters who'd pledged
themselves to Georgia's popular incumbent Governor Roy Barnes suddenly
and inexplicably decided to switch to Republican challenger Sonny
Perdue.
Maybe George W. and Jeb Bush, Alabama's new Republican governor Bob
Riley, and a small but congressionally decisive handful of other
long-shot Republican candidates around the country really did win those
states where conventional wisdom and straw polls showed them losing in
the last few election cycles, but computer controlled voting or
ballot-reading machines showed them winning.
Perhaps, after a half-century of fine-tuning exit polling to such a
science that it's now used to verify if elections are clean in Third
World countries, it really did suddenly become inaccurate in the United
States in the past few years and just won't work here anymore. Perhaps
it's just a coincidence that the sudden rise of inaccurate exit polls
happened around the same time corporate-programmed, computer-controlled,
modem-capable voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots.
But if any of this is true, there's not much of a paper trail from the
voters' hand to prove it.
You'd think in an open democracy that the government – answerable to all
its citizens rather than a handful of corporate officers and
stockholders – would program, repair and control the voting machines.
You'd think the computers that handle our cherished ballots would be
open and their software and programming available for public scrutiny.
You'd think there would be a paper trail of the actual hand-cast vote,
which could be followed and audited if there was evidence of voting
fraud or if exit polls disagreed with computerized vote counts.
You'd be wrong.
Upsets In Nebraska
It's entirely possible that Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel – who left
his job as head of an electronic voting machine company to run as a
long-shot candidate for the U.S. Senate – honestly won all of his
elections.
Back when Hagel first ran for the U.S. Senate in 1996, his own company's
computer-controlled voting machines showed he'd won stunning and
unexpected victories in both the primaries and the general election. The
Washington Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel's "Senate victory against an
incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the
November election." According to Bev Harris, author of "Black Box
Voting," Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many
largely black communities that had never before voted Republican. Hagel
was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska.
Six years later Hagel ran again, this time against Democrat Charlie
Matulka in 2002, and won in a landslide. As his Website says, Hagel "was
re-elected to his second term in the United States Senate on November 5,
2002 with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest political victory
in the history of Nebraska." What the site fails to disclose is that
about 80 percent of those votes were counted by computer-controlled
voting machines put in place by the company affiliated with Hagel: built
by that company; programmed by that company; chips supplied by that
company.
"This is a big story, bigger than Watergate ever was," said Hagel's
Democratic opponent in the 2002 Senate race, Charlie Matulka
(www.lancastercountydemocrats.org/matulka.htm). "They say Hagel shocked
the world, but he didn't shock me."
Is Matulka the sore loser the Hagel campaign paints him as, or is he
democracy's proverbial canary in the mineshaft? Between them, Hagel and
Chambliss' victories sealed Republican control of the Senate. Odds are
both won fair and square, the American way, using huge piles of
corporate money to carpet-bomb voters with television advertising. But
either the appearance or the possibility of impropriety in an election
casts a shadow over American democracy.
"The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which
all other rights are protected," wrote Thomas Paine over 200 years ago.
"To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery.."
That slavery, according to Hagel's last opponent Charlie Matulka, is at
our doorstep. "They can take over our country without firing a shot,"
Matulka said, "just by taking over our election systems."
Revolution by control of computer chips? Is that really possible in the
USA?
Who's Counting the Votes?
"Imagine it's Election Day 2004," says U.S. Congressman Rush Holt, also
a scientist with a Ph.D. in physics who knows more than a little bit
about both politics and computers. "You enter your local polling place
and go to cast your vote on a brand-new touchscreen voting machine. The
screen says your vote has been counted. As you exit the voting booth,
however, you begin to wonder. How do I know if the machine actually
recorded my vote?"
It's a question that probably hasn't occurred to many Americans, even
those who used the touchscreen machines particularly notable in states
where there were "upsets" and "glitches" in the 2002 election. But it
occurred to Congressman Holt, and after looking at the law, the voting
machines and the companies that produce them, he concluded that, "The
fact is, you don't [know if the machine actually recorded your vote]."
Bev Harris has studied the situation in depth and thinks both
Congressman Holt and candidate Matulka may be on to something. The
company with ties to Hagel even threatened her with legal action when
she went public about the company having built the machines that counted
Hagel's landslide votes.
In the meantime, exit-polling organizations have quietly gone out of
business, and the news arms of the huge multinational corporations that
own our networks are suggesting the days of exit polls are over.
Virtually none were reported in 2002, creating an odd and unsettling
silence that caused unease for the many voters who had come to view exit
polls as proof of the integrity of their election systems.
As all this comes to light, many citizens and even a few politicians are
wondering if it's a good idea for corporations to be so involved in the
guts of our voting systems. The whole idea of a democratic republic was
to create a common institution (the government itself) owned by its
citizens, answerable to its citizens and authorized to exist and
continue existing solely "by the consent of the governed."
However, the recent political trend has moved us in the opposite
direction, with governments turning administration of our commons over
to corporations answerable only to profits. The result is the enrichment
of corporations and the appearance that democracy in America has started
to resemble its parody in banana republics.
Further frustrating those concerned with the sanctity of our vote, the
corporations selling and licensing voting machines and voting software
often claim Fourth Amendment rights of privacy and the right to hide
their "trade secrets" – how their voting software works and what
controls are built into it – from both the public and the government
itself.
Secret Software
"If you want to make Coca-Cola and have trade secrets, that's fine,"
says Harvard's Rebecca Mercuri, Ph.D., one of the nation's leading
experts on voting machines. "But don't try to claim trade secrets when
you're handling our votes."
The window into who owns whom among the various companies – most of
which are not publicly traded – is equally opaque. One voting machine
company was partially funded at startup by wealthy Republican
philanthropists who belong to an organization that believes the Bible
instead of the Constitution should govern America. Another is partly
owned by a defense contractor. Even the reincarnation of a company that
helped Enron cook their books has gotten into the act.
"There are several issues here," says reporter Lynn Landes, who has
written extensively about voting machines. "First, there's the issue
that the Voting Rights Act requires that poll watchers be able to
observe the vote. But with computerized voting machines, your vote
vanishes into a computer and can't be observed."
To solve this, many are calling for a return to paper ballots that are
hand-counted. It may be slower, but temp-help precinct workers may even
cost less than electronic voting machines (which are a
multi-billion-dollar boon for corporate suppliers), and will ensure that
real humans are tabulating the vote.
"Second," says Landes, "there's the issue of who controls the
information. Of all the functions of government that should not be
privatized, handling our votes is at the top of the list. This is the
core of democracy, and must be open, transparent, and available to both
the public and our politicians of all parties for full and open
inspection."
Although Rush Holt is suggesting there be stringent standards, he hasn't
gone so far as to say corporations shouldn't process our votes. But why
not? Most government functions – from our courts to our fire departments
– run fairly smoothly, despite carping from the extreme right wing.
Increasingly, people across America are demanding that – like in other
democracies around the world – our system of voting should be publicly
owned.
Another point Dr. Rebecca Mercuri raises is that the Help America Vote
Act (HAVA) – passed after the 2000 election – calls for the President to
appoint, as the Act states, "with the advice of the Senate," members to
"an independent entity, the Election Assistance Commission." The
commission is then to create "the Election Assistance Commission
Standards Board, the Election Assistance Commission Board of Advisors
.... and the Technical Guidelines Development Committee" to establish
standards and oversee compliance of the law by voting machine companies.
"But the commission has not yet been established," says Mercuri, even
though billions in federal dollars have been distributed under HAVA for
states to buy electronic voting machines and license their software from
private corporations. "As a result," Mercuri says, "there are currently
no meaningful federal standards for voting machines. Many of the
machines used in 2002 were built to industry guidelines that many
question and were established in 1990."
And those standards are problematic. In the course of researching "Black
Box Voting," Harris did a Google search on one of the voting machine
companies, Diebold Election Systems, and found it maintained an open FTP
site on the internet apparently through the 2002 election. In it, she
located computer code used to tabulate elections and, apparently, actual
vote count files that could be downloaded or even replaced by any
visiting hacker.
A website for the New Zealand news publication The Scoop has published
Diebold's files on the Internet, producing lively discussions among
computer enthusiasts and scientists who have apparently (and perhaps
unlawfully) cracked the company's various codes.
The Scoop also performed a statistical analysis comparing American polls
and computer-controlled voting machine results. In many states there
were no variations. In a few, however, they found that "the Republican
Party experienced a pronounced last minute swing in its favour of
between 4 and 16 points. Remarkably this last minute swing appears to
have been concentrated in its effects in critical Senate races (Georgia
and Minnesota) where [the Republican Party] secured its complete control
of Congress."
Purging Voter Rolls
While corporate bungles or the potential for outright vote fraud are a
concern of many opposed to electronic voting machines, another issue of
concern is the concentration of voter rolls in the hands of partisan
politicians instead of civil servants.
In most states, local precincts or counties maintain their own voter
rolls. Florida, however, had gone to the trouble before the 2000
election to consolidate all its voter rolls at the state level, and put
them into the custody and control of the state's elected Secretary of
State, Katherine Harris, who was also the chairman of the Florida
campaign to elect George W. Bush.
As described in disturbing detail in the documentary "Unprecedented" and
in Greg Palast's book "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," Harris spent
millions to hire a Texas company to clean up the Florida list by purging
it of all convicted felons – using a list of felons who lived in the
State of Texas.
One of the legacies of slavery is that a large number of African
Americans share the same or similar names, and sure enough, when the
Texas felon list was compared with the Florida voter list over 94,000
matches or near-matches were found. Those registered Florida voters –
about half of them African Americans (who generally vote Democratic) –
with names identical or even similar to Texas felons were deleted from
the Florida voter rolls, and turned away from the polls when they tried
to vote in 2000 and in 2002.
Now, under HAVA, states across the nation are consolidating their voter
lists and handing them over to Harris's various peers to be cleaned and
maintained.
Another concern is Internet voting, since it's impossible to ensure its
accuracy. Imagine if all the time a voting machine was being used, it
also had its back door open and an unlimited number of technicians and
hackers could manipulate its innards before, during and after the vote.
Activists suggest this is one of the reasons it's dangerous that so many
electronic voting machines today are connected to company-access modems,
but it's an even stronger argument against the very core of democracy –
the vote – being handled out in the public of cyberspace.
Nonetheless, the Pentagon is moving ahead with plans to have a private
corporation conduct Internet voting for overseas GIs in 2004, and many
fear it'll be used as a beta test for more widespread Internet voting
across the nation. While many Americans think the ability to vote from
home or office over the computer would be wonderfully convenient, the
results could be disastrous: even the CIA hasn't been able to prevent
hackers from penetrating parts of its computer systems attached to the
Internet.
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| User: "RichA" |
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| Title: Re: PROOF OF DIEBOLD ELECTION FRAUD! |
04 Nov 2004 06:37:01 PM |
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Yawn. Never say die loser.
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| User: "Jake WK" |
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| Title: Re: PROOF OF DIEBOLD ELECTION FRAUD! |
05 Nov 2004 07:26:45 AM |
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On Thu, 04 Nov 2004 19:37:01 -0500, RichA <none@none.com> wrote:
Yawn. Never say die loser.
Never say Diebold, you mean.......criminal.
Jake
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