From The Orlando Weekly, 11/18/04:
http://www.orlandoweekly.com/news/Story.asp?ID=4688
By Alan Waldman
Despite mainstream media attempts to kill the story, talk radio and
the Internet are abuzz with suggestions that John Kerry was elected
president on Nov. 2 -- but Republican election officials made it
difficult for millions of Democrats to vote while employees of four
secretive, GOP-bankrolled corporations rigged electronic voting
machines and then hacked central tabulating computers to steal the
election for George W. Bush.
The Bush administration's "fix" of the 2000 election debacle (the Help
America Vote Act) made crooked elections considerably easier, by
foisting paperless electronic voting on states before the bugs had
been worked out or meaningful safeguards could be installed.
Crying foul this time around isn't just the province of whiny
Democrats.
Consider that The Wall Street Journal recently revealed that "Verified
Voting, a group formed by a Stanford University professor to assess
electronic voting, has collected 31,000 reports of election fraud and
other problems."
University of Pennsylvania researcher Dr. Steven Freeman, in his
November 2004 paper "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy," says that
the odds that the discrepancies between predicted [exit poll] results
and actual vote counts in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania could have
been due to chance or random error are 250 million to 1.
"Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature conclusion," writes
Freeman, "but the election's unexplained exit poll discrepancies make
it an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is the responsibility of the
media, academia, polling agencies, and the public to investigate."
Unlike Europe, where citizens count the ballots, in the United States
employees of a highly secretive Republican-leaning company, ES&S,
managed every aspect of the 2004 election.
That included everything from registering voters, printing ballots and
programming voting machines to tabulating votes (often with armed
guards keeping the media and members of the public who wished to
witness the count at bay) and reporting the results, for 60 million
voters in 47 states, according to Christopher Bollyn, writing in
American Free Press.
Most other votes were counted by three other firms that are snugly in
bed with the GOP.
This election is not the first suspicious venture into electronic
voting.
In Georgia, in November 2002, Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes led by 11
percent and Democratic Sen. Max Cleland was in front by 5 percent just
before the election -- the first ever conducted entirely on
touch-screen electronic machines, and counted entirely by company
employees, rather than public officials -- but mysterious election-day
swings of 16 percent and 12 percent defeated both of these popular
incumbents.
In Minnesota, Democrat Walter Mondale (replacing beloved Sen. Paul
Wellstone, who died in a plane crash), lost in an amazing last-moment
11 percent vote swing recorded on electronic machines.
Then, in 2003, what's known as "black box voting" helped Arnold
Schwarzenegger -- who had deeply offended female, Latino and Jewish
voters -- defeat a popular Latino Democrat who substantially led in
polls a week before the election.
A RAT IS SMELLED
Realizing that the 2004 election results are suspect, many prominent
people and groups have begun to demand action.
Recently, six important Congressmen, including three on the House
Judiciary Committee, asked the U.S. Comptroller General to investigate
the efficacy of new electronic voting devices.
Black Box Voting -- the nonprofit group which spearheaded much of the
pre-election testing (and subsequent criticism) of electronic machines
that found them hackable in 90 seconds -- is filing the largest
Freedom of Information Act inquiry in U.S. history.
The organization's Bev Harris claims, "Fraud took place in the 2004
election through electronic voting machines."
Florida Democratic congressional candidate Jeff Fisher charged that he
has and will show the FBI evidence that Florida results were hacked;
he also claims to have knowledge of who hacked it -- in 2004 and in
the 2002 Democratic primary (so Jeb Bush would not have to run against
the popular Janet Reno).
Fisher also believes that most Democratic candidates nationwide were
harmed by GOP hacking and other dirty tactics -- particularly in swing
states.
The Green and Libertarian Parties, as well as Ralph Nader, are
demanding an Ohio recount, because of voting fraud, suppression and
disenfranchisement.
Recounts are also being sought in New Hampshire, Nevada and
Washington.
Although the Internet is full of stories of election fraud, and major
media in England, Canada and elsewhere have investigated the story,
you'll find almost nothing in the major U.S. media.
"I have been told by sources that are fairly high up in the media --
particularly TV -- that there is now a lockdown on this story," says
Harris.
"It's officially 'Let's move on' time."
On Nov. 6, Project Censored Award-winning author Thom Hartmann said,
"So far, the only national 'mainstream' media outlet to come close to
this story was Keith Olbermann, when he noted that it was curious that
all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seemed 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."
VOTE STEALING 101
Votes collected by electronic machines (and by optical scan equipment
that reads traditional paper ballots) are sent via modem to a central
tabulating computer, which counts the votes on Windows software.
Therefore, anyone who knows how to operate an Excel spreadsheet and
who is given access to the central tabulation machine can, in theory,
change election totals.
On a CNBC cable TV program, Black Box Voting exec Harris showed guest
host Howard Dean how to alter vote totals within 90 seconds, by
entering a two-digit code in a hidden program on Diebold's election
software.
Harris declared, "This is not a 'bug' or accidental oversight; it is
there on purpose."
A quartet of companies control the U.S. vote count.
Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia and SAIC are all hard-wired into the Bush
campaign and power structure.
Diebold chief Walden O'Dell is a top Bush fund-raiser.
According to "online anarchist community" Infoshop.org, "At Diebold,
the election division is run by Bob Urosevich.
Bob's brother, Todd, is a top executive at 'rival' ES&S.
The brothers were originally staked by Howard Ahmanson, a member of
the Council For National Policy, a right-wing steering group stacked
with Bush true believers.
Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist Christian
Reconstruction Movement, which advocates the theocratic takeover of
American democracy."
Sequoia is owned by a partner member of the Carlyle Group, which is
believed to have dictated foreign policy in both Bush administrations
and has employed former President Bush for quite a while.
All early Tuesday indicators predicted a Kerry landslide.
Zogby International (which predicted the 2000 outcome more accurately
than any national pollster) did exit polling which predicted a
100-electoral vote triumph for Kerry.
He saw Kerry winning crucial Ohio by 4 percent.
Princeton professor Sam Wang, whose meta-analysis had shown the
election to be close in the week before the election, began coming up
with dramatic numbers for Kerry in the day before and day of the
election.
At noon EST on Monday, Nov. 1, he predicted a Kerry win by a 108-vote
margin.
In the Iowa Electronic Markets, where "investors" put their money
where their mouths are and wager real moolah on election outcome
"contracts," Bush led consistently for months before the election --
often by as much as 60 percent to 39 percent.
But at 7 p.m. CST on Nov. 2, 76.6 percent of the last hour's traders
had gone to Kerry, with only 20.1 percent plunking their bucks down on
Bush.
They knew something.
As the first election returns came in, broadcasters were shocked to
see that seemingly safe Bush states like Virginia, Kentucky and North
Carolina were being judged as "too close to call."
At 7:28 EST, networks broadcast that both states favored Kerry by 51
percent to 49 percent.
In his research paper, Steven Freeman reports that exit polls showed
Kerry had been elected.
He was leading in nearly every battleground state, in many cases by
sizable margins.
But later, in 10 of 11 battleground states, the tallied margins
differed from the predicted margins -- and in every one the shift
favored Bush.
In 10 states where there were verifiable paper trails -- or no
electronic machines -- the final results hardly differed from the
initial exit polls.
In non-paper-trail states, however, there were significant
differences.
Florida saw a shift from Kerry up by 1 percent in the exit polls to
Bush up by 5 percent at close of voting.
In Ohio, Kerry went from up 3 percent to down 3 percent.
Exit polls also had Kerry winning the national popular vote by 3
percent.
In close Senate races, changes between the exit poll results and the
final tallies cost Democrats anticipated seats in Kentucky (a 13
percent swing to the GOP), Alaska, North Carolina, Florida, Oklahoma,
South Dakota and possibly Pennsylvania -- as well as enough House
seats to retake control of the chamber.
Centre for Research on Globalization's Michael Keefer states, "The
National Election Pool's own data -- as transmitted by CNN on the
evening of November 2 and the morning of November 3 -- suggest very
strongly that the results of the exit polls were themselves fiddled
late on November 2 in order to make their numbers conform with the
tabulated vote tallies."
How do we know the fix was in?
Keefer says the total number of respondents at 9 p.m. was well over
13,000 and at 1:36 a.m. it had risen less than 3 percent -- to 13,531
total respondents.
Given the small increase in respondents, this 5 percent swing to Bush
is mathematically impossible.
In Florida, at 8:40 p.m., exit polls showed a near dead heat but the
final exit poll update at 1:01 a.m. gave Bush a 4 percent lead.
This swing was mathematically impossible, because there were only 16
more respondents in the final tally than in the earlier one.
FLORIDA FIASCO II
Kathy Dopp's eye-opening examination of Florida's county-by-county
record of votes cast and people registered by party affiliation
(http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm) suggests systematic and
widespread election fraud in 47 of the state's 67 counties.
This did not occur so much in the touch-screen counties, where public
scrutiny would naturally be focused, but in counties where optically
screened paper ballots were fed into a central tabulator PC, which is
highly vulnerable to hacking.
In these optical-scan counties, had GOP registrants voted Republican,
Democratic registrants gone for Kerry and everyone registered showed
up to vote, Bush would have received 1,337,242 votes.
Instead, his reported vote total there was 1,950,213!
That discrepancy (612,971) is nearly double Bush's winning margin in
the state (380,952).
Colin Shea of Zogby International analyzed and double-checked Dopp's
figures and confirmed that optical-scan counties gave Bush 16 percent
more votes than he should have gotten.
"This 16 percent would not be strange if it were spread across
counties more or less evenly," Shea explains, but it is not.
In 11 different counties, the "actual" Bush tallies were 50-100
percent higher than expected.
In one county, where 88 percent of voters are registered Democrats,
Bush got nearly two-thirds of the vote -- three times more than
predicted by his statistical model.
In 47 Florida counties, the number of presidential votes exceeded the
number of registered voters.
Palm Beach County recorded 90,774 more votes than voters and
Miami-Dade had 51,979 more, while relatively honest Orange County had
only 1,648 more votes than voters.
Overall, Florida reported 237,522 more presidential votes (7.59
million) than citizens who turned out to cast ballots (7.35 million).
There were thousands of complaints about Florida voting.
Broward County electronic voting machines counted up to 32,500 and
then started counting backward.
This glitch, which existed in the 2002 election but was never fixed,
overturned the exit-poll-predicted results of a gambling referendum.
In several Florida counties, early-morning voters reported ballot
boxes that already had an unusually large quantity of ballots in them.
In Florida and five other states, according to Canada's Globe and
Mail, "the wrong candidate appeared on their touch-screen machine's
checkout screen" after the person had voted.
Republicans have argued that the Florida counties with majority
Democratic registration that voted overwhelmingly for Bush were all
conservative "Dixiecrat" bastions in northern Florida, and that all
the reported totals were accurate.
But Olbermann demonstrated that many of these crossover states voted
Republican for the first time.
He poked another hole in the Dixiecrat theory when he noted that in
Democratic counties where Bush scored big, people also supported
highly Democratic measures -- such as raising the state minimum wage
$1 above the federal level.
Moreover, 18 switchover counties were not in the Panhandle or near the
Georgia border, but were scattered throughout the state.
For instance, Hardee County (between Bradenton and Sebring) registered
63.8 percent Democratic but officially gave Bush 135 percent more
votes than Kerry.
WIDESPREAD PROBLEMS
Voters Unite! detailed 303 specific election problems, including 84
complaints of machine malfunctions in 22 states, 24 cases of
registration fraud in 14 states, 20 abusive voter challenge situations
in 10 states, U.S. voters in 18 states and Israel experiencing
absentee ballot difficulties, 10 states with provisional ballot woes,
22 cases of malfeasance in 13 states, 10 charges of voter intimidation
in seven states, seven states where votes were suppressed, seven
states witnessing outbreaks of animosity at the polls, six states
suffering from ballot printing errors and seven instances in four
states where votes were changed on-screen.
In addition, the Voters Unite! website cites four states with early
voting troubles, three states undergoing ballot programming errors,
three states demonstrating ballot secrecy violations, bogus ballot
fraud in New Mexico and double-voting for Bush in Texas.
Kerry's victory was predicted by previously extremely accurate Harris
and Zogby exit polls, by the formerly infallible 50 percent rule (an
incumbent with less than 50 percent in the exit polls always loses;
Bush had 47 percent -- requiring him to capture an improbable 80
percent of the undecideds to win) and by the Incumbent Rule
(undecideds break for the challenger, as exit polls showed they did by
a large margin this time).
Nor is it credible that the surge in new young voters (who were
witnessed standing in lines for hours, on campuses nationwide)
miraculously didn't appear in the final totals; that Kerry did worse
than Gore against an opponent who lost support; and that exit polls
were highly accurate wherever there was a paper trail and grossly
underestimated Bush's appeal wherever there was no such guarantee of
accurate recounts.
Statisticians point out that Bush beat 99 to 1 mathematical odds in
winning the election.
Election results are not final until electors vote on Dec. 12.
There is still time to find the truth.
___________________________________________________________
Harry
.
|
