The following is mirrored from its source at:
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/112004Waldman/112004waldman.html.
Hyperlinks and footnotes contributed by the ratitor.
How the Grinch stole the White House . . . again
by Alan Waldman
Online Journal
20 November 2004
* The Smell of a Rat
* Media Muzzled
* The 2004 Election Fraud:
Its Scope and Nature
* The Felonious Four
* All Early Tuesday Indicators
Predicted a Kerry Landslide
* All Exit Polls Showed Kerry Won
--Until They Were Altered
* Election Fraud Came in Many Flavors
* Florida Fiasco
* The Ohio Outrage
* Election Fraud in 39 States and Israel
* The Election Was Clearly Stolen
* Footnotes
In 10 states where there were verifiable paper trails -- or no
electronic machines -- the final results hardly differed from
the initial exit polls. Exit polls and final counts in
Missouri, Louisiana, Maine and Utah, for instance, varied by 1
percent or less. In non-paper-trail states, however, there
were significant differences.
Despite corporate media attempts to kill or ridicule away the story, Talk
Radio and the Internet are abuzz with considerable evidence that John Kerry
was elected president on November 2, but that Republican election officials
made it difficult for millions of Democrats to vote while employees of four
secretive, GOP-bankrolling corporations rigged electronic voting machines
and then hacked central tabulating computers to steal the election for
George W. Bush.
Florida's 2000 election problems -- votes spoiled by chads, overvotes,
undervotes, exclusion of minority voters, etc. -- were never repaired and
both worsened and spread to many other states, exacerbated by new and more
devious abuses. The Bush administration's "fix" of the 2000 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. In 2004, employees
of the four Republican-connected firms that dominate the business allegedly
hacked electronic machines and the op-scan tabulating computers that count
votes from paper ballots to steal the election by adding GOP votes and
reducing Democratic tallies.
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."[1] AP/ABC
observes that some of the first 1100 problem machines were taken off-line --
but many others were not.
University of Pennsylvania researcher Dr. Steven Freeman, in his November
2004 paper "The Unexplained Election Poll Discrepancy," concludes: "The odds
of 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," so the unavoidable hypothesis is that
they were caused by "systematic fraud or manipulation."[2]
Here's a shocking fact. The reason it was so easy to steal this election is
that, unlike the situation in Europe, where citizens count the ballots,
employees of a highly secretive Republican-leaning company, ES&S, totally
managed every aspect of the 2004 U.S. election. That included everything
from voter registration, printing of ballots, the programming of the voting
machines, tabulation of votes (often with armed guards keeping the media and
members of the public who wished to witness the count at bay) and the first
reporting of 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. "Any
actual counting of votes by citizens is very rare in the U.S., except for a
few counties in Montana and other states, where paper ballots are still
hand-counted," Bollyn explains.[3]
The below mountain of evidence will demonstrate that the 2004 election
fiasco had way too many "irregularities" for the late-Tuesday shift from
Kerry (seen winning by 3 percent and more in exit polls and many other data)
to Bush to possibly be an innocent coincidence.
This election is not the first to be hacked. In November 2002, Georgia
Democratic Governor Roy Barnes led by 11 percent and Democratic Senator Max
Clelland 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.[4] In Minnesota, Democrat Walter Mondale
(replacing beloved Senator Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash), lost
in an amazing last moment 11 percent vote swing recorded on electronic
machines. Convenient glitches in Florida aided Jeb Bush in the general
election and defeated Janet Reno in the primary election. There is also
reason to believe that North Carolina's Senate race may have been hacked.
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 -- in strongly Democratic California.
Actually, the first example of electronic machine fraud was probably
recorded in 1996, when Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel was CEO of ES&S whose
voting machines recorded his long-shot first US Senate victory -- and then
his re-election in 2002.[5]
The Smell of a Rat
Realizing that the 2004 election results are highly questionable, many
prominent people and groups have begun to demand action. Recently, six
important congressmen, including three on the House Judiciary Committee --
Nadler (NY), Wexler (FL), Conyers (MI), Holt (NJ), Scott (VA) and Watt (NC)
-- asked the U.S. comptroller general to investigate the efficacy of new
electronic voting devices, because of numerous reports of lost votes across
the country.[6]
Black Box Voting (BBV) -- 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. We base this on hard evidence, documents, inside information and
other data indicative of manipulation of electronic voting systems."
In Volusia County, Florida, BBV has already discovered two sets of voting
total tapes: the first being much more favorable to Kerry.[7]
Florida Democratic congressional candidate Jeff Fisher charged that he has
and will show the FBI evidence that Florida results were hacked; he claims
to also have knowledge of who hacked them in 2004 and in the 2002 Democratic
primary (so Jeb Bush would not have to run against popular Janet Reno).
Fisher also believes that most Democratic candidates nationwide were harmed
by GOP hacking and other dirty tactics -- particularly in swing states.[8]
Citizens for Legitimate Government recently called for an investigation of
discrepancies in the 2004 election and may demand prosecution of those who
carried out the second bloodless American coup d' etat in four years.
On November 18, a New Hampshire recount requested by Ralph Nader began. If
it finds the totals were altered, recounts requests in Florida and Ohio are
certain to follow. The Green and Libertarian parties have already requested
an Ohio recount, because of voting fraud, suppression and
disenfranchisement. Recounts are also being sought in Nevada and Washington.
Greens 2004 presidential candidate David Cobb charged, "It's Florida all
over again. Except this time it's Ohio, where the person responsible for
counting the votes is chair of the state Bush campaign. Once again there are
widespread reports of intimidation, mismarked ballots and targeted
disenfranchisement of African American voters. It's very possible the
election has been stolen for the second time in a row. Again Democrats have
conceded, rather than standing up for the right for people's votes to
count."
The Indiana Recount Commission impounded election materials for a recount in
the 9th District, where three-term incumbent Democratic Congressman Baron
Hill lost by 1,485 votes -- and machines were suspected of misrecording
votes. In nearby Franklin County, a recount proved that a tabulation error
had given 600 straight-Democratic party votes to the Libertarian party.
Leading academics have also joined the fray, calling for widespread
investigations. NYU Professor Troy Duster called for a full-scale probe,
because "the data suggest that even if Bush won, he didn't win by the kind
of margins that are out there. We have a crisis here of potential
legitimacy, and the way to deal with it is to do the research."
Media Muzzled
Although the Internet is chock-a-block with stories of election fraud -- and
there are numerous stories about this crime in England, Canada and
elsewhere, it is virtually nonexistent in the major U.S. media. Bev Harris
reveals, "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. It's
officially `lets move on' time. I am very concerned about that, because it
looks like we're going to have to go to places like BBC to get the real
story out."[9] So far, the only mainstream media outlet has been Keith
Olbermann's November 5 MSNBC Countdown show.
On November 6, Project-Censored Award-winning author Thom Hartman 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."[10]
The 2004 Election Fraud: Its Scope and Nature
In May 2004, Johns Hopkins researchers performed a detailed analysis of the
major types of electronic voting machines. They concluded:
"The voting system is far below even the most minimal security
standards applicable in other contexts. We identify several
problems, including . . . vulnerabilities to network threats. We
show that voters, without any insider privileges, can cast
unlimited votes without being detected. Furthermore, we show that
even the most serious of our outsider attacks could have been . .
. executed without access to the source code. Worries about
insider threats are not the only concerns; outsiders can do the
damage. We conclude that this voting system is unsuitable for use
in a general election."[11]
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 make wholesale changes to election totals
without being found out.
On a CNBC cable TV program, Black Box Voting executive Bev Harris showed
guest host Howard Dean how to alter vote totals within 90 seconds. "By
entering a two-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes can
replace the original totals -- in a matter of seconds," Harris explains.
Harris declared at a late-September press conference, "We are able to use a
hidden program for vote manipulation , which resides on Diebold's election
software. It is enabled by a two-digit trigger. This is not a `bug' or
accidental oversight; it is there on purpose."
Some wonder why Democrats weren't bright enough to hack the election for
Kerry. Well, it has been recently learned that at least one of the four
firms slyly utilized an old source code -- rather than its current code --
to escape donkey party detection.
The Felonious Four
More than 35 Ohio counties used electronic voting machines from Diebold,
whose CEO Warren O'Dell declared in 2003 that he was "committed to helping
Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president (Bush)" in 2004.[12] Up
to 50,000 Diebold touch-screen machines and 20,000 scanners of paper ballots
were used in 38 states during the November 2004 election.
Four major companies control the U.S. vote count: Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia and
SAIC [Science Applications International Corporation]. All of them are
hard-wired into the Bush campaign and power structure. The Bush government
gave them millions to roll out computerized voting machines. Diebold chief
O'Dell is a top Bush fundraiser. Diebold's Election division is headed by
Bob Urosevich, whose brother Todd is a top exec at "rival" ES&S. The
brothers were originally staked by Howard Ahmanson,[13] bagman for the
extremist Christian Reconstruction Movement, which advocates the theocratic
takeover of American government.[14] Sequoia is owned by a partner member
of the Carlyle Group, which has dictated foreign policy in both Bush
administrations and which had employed former President Bush for quite a
while. The State of California recently received a settlement of $2.6
million in its lawsuit against Diebold for lying about the security of its
voting machines in Alameda County.
Wayne Madsen, a Washington-based investigative reported, recently wrote,
"There has to be a way . . . to sue Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell and Diebold
board member W.R. Timken for conspiring to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to
Bush. O'Dell and Timken are top fund raisers for Bush -- so-called
`Pioneers.' They should be the subjects of criminal investigations."[15]
Diebold gave at least $195,000 to the GOP between 2000 and 2002.
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 Prof. 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.[16] At noon, Eastern
Standard Time, on Monday, Nov. 1, he predicted a Kerry win by a 108-vote
margin. In the 23 closest states, Wang predicted Kerry's win chances in the
following states to be: Florida 90 percent, Ohio 95 percent, Pennsylvania
100 percent, Hawaii 99 percent, Iowa 96 percent, Wisconsin 91 percent,
Nevada 72 percent, Maine 100 percent, Michigan 100 percent, Minnesota, 100
percent, Oregon 100 percent, Washington 100 percent, Wisconsin 91 percent,
New Mexico 60 percent, Arkansas 48 percent, Colorado 47 percent, Missouri 34
percent, New Mexico 20 percent, West Virginia 13 percent, Virginia 12
percent, Arizona 10 percent, Tennessee 8 percent and North Carolina 1
percent.
In the Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM), 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. At 1 p.m. CST on Election Day,
however, before vote counting began anywhere, IEM had 51.9 percent of
investors putting their money on a Bush win. Then something extraordinary
happened: over the next six hours there was suddenly a massive shift to
Kerry. At 3 p.m. CST, Kerry shot into the lead, with 60 percent of the
hour's investors banking on his victory. At 5 p.m. a mind-blowing 79.5
percent were betting on Kerry. And when the final sale was made, at 7 p.m.,
76.6 percent of the last hour's traders had gone to Kerry, with only 20.1
percent plunking their bucks down on Bush. These people 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 by the National Election Pool (NEP) as "too close too call."
Then, at 7:28 EST, before the Ohio and Florida results were hacked, networks
broadcast that both states favored Kerry by 51 percent to 49 percent.
All Exit Polls Showed Kerry Won -- Until They Were Altered
In his research paper, Steven Freeman reports, "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.
Exit polls and final counts in Missouri, Louisiana, Maine and Utah, for
instance, varied by 1 percent or less. In non-paper-trail states, however,
there were significant differences. Florida saw a shift from Kerry +1
percent in the exit polls to Bush +5 percent at evening's end. In Ohio,
Kerry went from +3 percent to -3 percent. Other big discrepancies in key
states were: Minnesota (from +10 percent to +4 percent), New Mexico (+4 to
-1), Nevada (+1 to -3), Wisconsin (+7 to +0.4), Colorado (-2 to -5), North
Carolina (-4 to -13), Iowa (+1 to -1), New Hampshire (+14 to +1) and
Pennsylvania (+8 to +2). 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 fiddled
final tallies cost Democrats anticipated seats in Kentucky (a 13 percent
swing to the GOP), Alaska (9 percent), North Carolina (9 percent), Florida,
Oklahoma, South Dakota and possibly Pennsylvania -- as well as enough House
seats to retake control of the chamber.
Republican consultant and Fox News regular Dick Morris wrote after the
election, "Exit polls are almost never wrong. They eliminate the two major
potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters
from those who pretend they will cast ballots . . . and by substituting
actual observation from guesswork. According to ABC-TV's exit polls, Kerry
was slated to win Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa --
all of which Bush ultimately carried."
Center for Research on Globalization's Michael Keefer (a Professor at the
University of Guelph) 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
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. At 8:50 p.m. EST, CNN showed Bush leading
by a massive 11-point margin and by 9:06 p.m., the incumbent had a
9 percent lead. However, at 9:06 p.m., exit polls showed Kerry
leading by nearly 3 percent."[17]
This 12 percent gap caused embarrassment at NEP -- the six broadcast
networks' official polling, counting and reporting entity. Keefer continues:
"One can surmise that instructions of two sorts were issued. The
election-massagers working for Diebold, ES&S and the other suppliers of
black box voting machines may have been told to go easy on their
manipulations of back-door `Democrat-delete' software. And the number
crunchers at NEP may have been asked to fix up those awkward exit polls. Fix
them they did. When the national exit polls were last updated at 1:36 a.m.
EST, there was a 5 percent swing to Bush."
How do we know the fix was in? Keefer explains, "Because 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."
Keefer adds: "In Florida, the exit polls appear to have been tampered with
in a similar manner. 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." Again,
the number of respondents made this swing mathematically impossible --
because there were only 16 more respondents in the final tally than in the
earlier one. The major TV networks glibly blamed the discrepancies between
the original (untampered) exit poll results and the final official tallies
on faulty exit polls.
Election Fraud Came in Many Flavors
* Spoilage.
Investigative journalist Greg Palast, writing in the United Kingdom's
Guardian, said, "The election in Ohio was decided . . . by spoilage.
Typically, in the U.S., about 3 percent of the vote is voided. Most of
these votes, say every official report, [are] in African American and
minority precincts. In Florida in 2000, Katherine Harris excluded
179,855 spoiled votes. Most `lost' votes in Florida then and Ohio now
were cast on punch cards where the hole wasn't punched through
completely, leaving a `hanging chad.' The majority of the two million
votes tossed out in Tuesday's election will be cast by minority
citizens."
* Challenges.
Palast continues: "First and foremost, Kerry was had by chads. But
there were also the `challenges,' -- the Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida
Republican parties' Supreme-Court supported use of an old Ku Klux Klan
technique to block voters of color from voting."
* Provisional ballots that may or not be counted.
In New Mexico, according to Albuquerque journalist Renee Blakely, "They
were handing provisional ballots out like candy." About 20,000 iffy
provisional ballots were given out, mostly to Native Americans and
Latinos, who tend to vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Santiago Juarez,
who runs the "Faithful Citizenship" program for the Catholic
Archdiocese of New Mexico, reported that his poor Hispanic voters were
given provisional rather than countable ballots "almost religiously,"
as they were questioned about their identification. Juarez added that
some Hispanics were simply turned away. This activity was carried out
in numerous minority communities across the country.
Florida Fiasco
Kathy Dopp's eye-opening examination of the State of Florida's
county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered, by party
affiliation, reveals systematic and widespread election fraud (in 47 of the
state's 67 counties).[18] Interestingly, 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 counties, had
G.O.P. registrants voted Republican, Democratic registrants gone for the
Kerry and everyone registered showed up to vote, Bush would have received
1,337,242 votes in the op-scan counties. 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).
In Baker, Bradford, Calhoun, Dixie, Franklin and 16 other counties -- where
60 percent to 88 percent of voters registered Democratic, Bush won the
reported vote. The Texan also won in 21 other op-scan counties where
Democrats had a majority or plurality of registered voters. In Franklin
County, 77.3 percent registered Democratic, but 58.5 percent of voters went
for Bush. In Holmes County, the 72.7 percent Democratic voters went 77.3
percent for Bush. Bradford County had 61.4 percent Democratic registration
but voted 69.6 percent for Bush; Calhoun County had 82.4 percent Democratic
registration, but voted 63.4 percent for Bush. One egregious example: in
Polk county, 42.6 percent registered as Democrats and 39 percent registered
as Republicans. Yet the final vote count was: Bush 129,487 to Kerry's
85,923. It has been suggested, that in some counties, the presidential
candidates' vote totals may simply have been switched.
Colin Shea of Zogby International analyzed and double-checked Dopp's figures
and confirmed that op-scan counties gave Bush 16 percent more votes than he
should have. "This 16% would have not been strange if it were spread across
counties more or less evenly," Shea explains, "[but] it is not. In 11
different counties, the `actual' Bush vote was at least twice higher than
the expected vote. . . . In one country, where 88 percent of voters are
registered Democrats, Bush got nearly two-thirds of the vote [emphasis in
original] -- three times more than predicted by my model. . . . in 21
counties, more than 50 percent of Democratic votes would have to have
defected to Bush to account for the county result -- in four counties, at
least 70 percent would have been required. These results are absurdly
unlikely."[19]
Interestingly, eight of the 15 touch-screen counties showed voters moving
toward Kerry and away from Bush (as compared to the numbers of registered
Democrats and Republicans), which indicates that an honest statewide count
would have shown a Kerry win, rather than the stunning 5 percent Bush
victory.
In 47 of 67 Florida counties, the number of presidential votes exceeded the
number of registered voters.[20] 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).
The number and range of election complaints in Florida are mind-boggling.
Here are but a few instances. Broward Country electronic voting machines
counted up to 32,500 and then started counting backwards.[21] The problem
which existed in the 2002 election, but which 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. Throughout Florida, as in most
tossup states, poll monitors saw prospective voters leaving because of long
lines. There were numerous reports of sub-par facilities and faulty
equipment in minority neighborhoods.
According to Canada's November 3 Globe and Mail newspaper, "several dozen
voters in six states -- particularly Democrats in Florida -- said the wrong
candidate appeared on their touch-screen machine's checkout screen (i.e.
they voted one way and the result which appeared was the opposite).
Despite the registration of 20 times more Democratic new voters in Florida
than Republican new voters (and 10 times as many in Ohio -- as reported in
The New York Times), final voting totals nationwide indicated that Bush must
have gained 9 million new voters in 2004 -- to Kerry's 4 million. One
million of those alleged new GOP voter were reported to be in Florida -- a
highly dubious prospect.
Republicans have argued that the Florida counties which had majority
Democratic registration but voted overwhelmingly for Bush were all
"Dixiecrat" bastions in Northern Florida that are traditionally very
conservative -- and that all the reported votes were accurate. The facts do
not bear this assumption out. Keith Olbermann illustrated on MSNBC's
Countdown program that many of these crossover states were voting Republican
for the first time. Olbermann poked another hole in the Dixicrat theory when
he said, "On the same Florida Democratic ballots where Bush scored big,
people supported highly Democratic measures -- such as raising the state
minimum wage $1 above the federal level. This indicates that only the
presidential voting was rigged; they didn't rig the rest of the voting
form." The final stake in the heart of the Dixiecrat theory, however, is
that 18 switchover counties were not in the panhandle or near the Georgia
border, but were scattered throughout the state. For instance, voters in
Glades County (Everglades region) registered 64.8 percent Republican but
cast 38.3 percent more votes for Bush than for Kerry. Hardee County (between
Bradenton and Sebring) registered 63.8 percent Democratic but officially
gave Bush 135 percent more votes than Kerry -- a ludicrous result.
The Ohio Outrage
A court decision allowed Republican intimidators to trash tens of thousands
of Ohio votes and force hundreds of thousands of other voters to cast
provisional ballots that may or may not be counted. In Gahana, Ohio, Bush
was caught with a reported 4,258 votes . . . from only 638 voters.[22] The
two top election officials in quiet, rural Warren County lied to the press,
claiming the FBI and Homeland Security Department told them they had a high
terrorism risk, which made theirs the only Ohio county to bar media and
other observers from the vote counting process. Staunchly Republican chief
elections official J. Kenneth Blackwell arranged for ample voting booths in
G.O.P. areas and a shortage in liberal college towns and minority precincts
that caused hours-long lines in the pouring rain (and a consequent loss of
many discouraged voters). Despite the huge increase in new voter
registration (91 percent of which was Democratic), Blackwell provided fewer
total voting machines than were used in 2000. A Toledo precinct opened 40
minutes late (causing 50 prosepective voters to leave) and then halted
voting later because it had "run out of pencils" (causing another 100
departures).
Lawyer Ray Beckerman reported,
"Hundreds of thousands of people were disenfranchised in Ohio.
People waited in line for as long as 10 hours. It appears to have
only happened in Democratic-leaning precincts . . . Touch-screen
voting machines in Youngstown were registering `George W. Bush'
when people pressed `John F. Kerry' ALL DAY LONG. This was
reported immediately after the polls opened, and reported over and
over again throughout the day, and yet the bogus machines were
inexplicably kept in use THROUGHOUT THE DAY. Countless other
frauds occurred, such as postcards advising people of incorrect
polling places, registered Democrats not receiving requested
absentee ballots, duly registered young voters being forced to
file provisional ballots even though their names and signatures
appeared in the voting rolls, longtime active voting registered
voters being told they weren't registered, bad faith challenges by
Republican `challengers' in Democratic precincts, and on and on
and on."[23]
In 29 Cayuhoga County (Cleveland) precincts, there were 93,136 more votes
recorded than there were registered voters (at a time when minority voters
were consistently harassed and many others were discouraged by 5-10 hour
voting lines). One Cayuhoga precinct with only 1,000 registered voters cast
4,000 ballots for Bush. Lake County voters received bogus letters on
official letterhead telling them they could not vote.
As in Florida, fraud is obvious because in many cases Kerry votes were
mysteriously switched to Bush, while votes on other Democratic issues and
candidates remained intact.
Officially, Kerry was trailing by 136,483 votes, before between 155,000 and
500,000 provisional ballots were examined and some overseas absentee ballots
were to be examined and possibly counted.
Election Fraud in 39 States and Israel
Voters Unite! details 385 specific election problems (recorded through
November 24) in 39 states and Israel. These include 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 outrages in four
states where votes were changed onscreen. In addition, the Voters Unite!
site 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, cases of double-voting for
Bush in Texas and 15 states victimized by a range of miscellaneous voting
problems. And this list does not count the millions of votes that were
hacked in more than half the states.
On November 10, Keith Olbermann reported that computerized balloting in
North Carolina was so thoroughly messed up that all statewide voting may
have to be recounted. A Craven County, NC, district recorded 11,283 more
votes than there were voters, overturning the results of a regional race.
In Chicago, journalist Christopher Bollyn discovered stacks of boxes
containing "pre-punched ballots," printed by ES&S, for the different
precincts in Cook County.
The Election Was Clearly Stolen
It is not credible that Bush could have legitimately won the 2004 election.
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 and 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 99-1 mathematical odds in winning the election.
Zogby pollster Colin Shea, after thoroughly testing the discrepancies among
total registration, turnout, party registration and the official tallies in
Florida and Ohio, concluded,
"The facts . . . defy all logical explanations save one -- massive
and systematic voter fraud. We cannot accept the result of the
2004 presidential election as legitimate until these discrepancies
are rigorously and completely explained. From the Valerie Plame
case to the horrors of Abu Ghraib, George Bush has been reluctant
to seek answers and assign accountability when it does not suit
his purposes. But this is one time when no American should accept
not getting a straight answer. Until then, George Bush is still,
and will remain, the "Accidental President" of 2000. One of his
many enduring and shameful legacies will have been that of seizing
power through two illegitimate elections conducted on his
brother's watch, and engineering a fundamental corruption at the
heart of the greatest democracy the world has known."[19]
Election results are not final until electors vote on Dec. 13. There is
still time to investigate, to find the truth and to swear in legitimately
elected President John F. Kerry.
Alan Waldman is a multiple-award-winning Los Angeles journalist and blogger.
Copyright © 2004 Alan Waldman
Copyright © 2004 Online Journal
Reprinted for Fair Use Only.
Footnotes
1. As of 24 November 2004, the top of verifiedvoting.org has a link
stating "EIRS: 34,000+ Election Incident Reports" that links off to
voteprotect.org's Election Indident Reporting System: 1-866-OUR-VOTE.
2. This paper is a work-in-progress. As of 24 November 2004, Steven
Freeman has released a new versiion, "The Unexplained Exit Poll
Discrepancy: Part I in which he states at the beginning:
Note on this revision: The thesis of the initial drafts of
this paper that were widely circulated on the Internet, was
that exit poll discrepancy could not have been due to chance
or random error. My purpose was to raise as a legitimate
question, What caused it? In this version, I begin to try to
answer that question. I'm releasing this paper in two parts,
so as to replace the early drafts as soon as possible ...
that have been posted on the Internet. Part I is to clean up
the previous draft. Part II will be new analysis. Reading
note: To help non-academic readers, I have put in much more
explanatory material than typical, especially in the
statistical analysis sections. My apologies to those for whom
these explanations are superfluous. Just skip over those
sections.
Part I of this paper is available at
http://www.dakotatechnics.com/downloads/Exitpoll_discrep_v00p1_Part_I.pdf.
See http://www.dakotatechnics.com/downloads/ for the latest versions of
this work.
3. See "A Brief History of Computerized Election Fraud in America," by
Victoria Collier, truthout, 25 Oct 2003. Ms. Collier goes to the heart
of the matter where the use of computers to tally any vote count are
concerned:
A vote cast but not counted is meaningless. The only way to
know that your vote is properly counted is to watch the
entire counting process, which is why election law requires
an open, public vote count, and makes secret ballot counting
illegal. However, most voters have eagerly abdicated the
responsibility of overseeing their vote count to a handful of
extremely dubious "experts" and "officials." . . . Recent
history has shown that the most avid political junkies --
even candidates themselves -- have demonstrated a profound
disinterest in how the gears and levers work behind the scene
on election night, or who is controlling them.
It should not surprise us that vote fraud has
flourished in this vacuum of electoral vigilance. Criminals
of every stripe have slithered through the unwatched gates
and into positions of power in America. It has not taken them
long to corrupt the entire electoral process itself, securing
for themselves the gates of power. As I write this article,
America is on the verge of losing the last shreds of its
democracy, with the rise of ballot-less computerized voting
machines. . . .
The bottom line is that a computerized vote count is a
secret vote count --and that's illegal. Technology cannot
supercede the constitutional and mandatory provisions of
election law, which require open and verifiable elections.
There is no way to do a public vote count with computers.
Listen, here's my idea. After the public Touch-Screen
bonfire (we really need more community minded events, don't
you think?), we should march to our Secretary of State's
office and demand the restoration of a hand-counted paper
ballot system.
Picture it. Millions of citizens marching on the gates
of power, demanding their keys back. It would be a quick,
effective, non-violent, American Revolution. And I think it's
long overdue.
The fact is, with a well-designed ballot and
see-through boxes (to prevent stuffing) the paper system can
be simple, user-friendly, and fosters community-based
democratic participation. High school kids, even children,
used to count the ballots in America. We must have a strong,
diverse presence of citizen watchdog groups to oversee the
count, along with poll workers. The only election officials
who are truly independent, who represent the interests of all
parties in an election, are the poll watchers. The count must
be done by hand, in public, video-taped, aired live on
television, and the results posted on the precinct wall--just
like they used to be. Ballots should be counted on the same
day as the voting takes place, making it much more difficult
to alter ballots.
4. See "Did E-Vote Firm Patch Election?," by Kim Zetter, Wired News, 13
Oct 2003, and "Georgia's `Faith-Based' Electronic Voting System:
Something's Rotten in the State," by Heather Gray, commondreams.org, 12
Feb 2004
5. See: "Senate Ethics Director Resigns; Senator Hagel Admits Owning
Voting Machine Company," by Bev Harris, Scoop, 31 Jan 2003
6. See also: "Government Accountability Office to Conduct Investigation of
2004 Election Irregularities," Rep. Jerrold Nadler, Press Releases for
the 8th Cong. District of New York, 23 Nov 2004
7. See: "`Stinking Evidence' of Possible Election Fraud Found in Florida,"
by Thom Hartmann, commondreams.org, 18 Nov 2004, and "Summary of
allegations" in the Volusia County, Florida lawsuit filed by Black Box
Voting as well as the Full text of this lawsuit.
8. On www.jefffisherforcongress.com is the text,
"To the legal team at the Democratic National
Committee(Hacking Article)
You need to educate your attorneys about computer hacking Its
simple, when you are sick you see a doctor, when your car
breaks down you see a mechanic, when the law is broken you
seek an attorney, None of these are trained to specialize in
another field. The DNC must wake up and realize that this
election was hacked and their ignorance of computer
programming is no excuse for allowing every American to have
their votes not counted or voided. The proof is not just in
Florida and Ohio. It's in several states. This is not the
2000 election. This crime is a felony."
Accompanying this is a link to "How to Hack the Vote: the Short
Version," (11/10/2004 rev. 11/22/2004) by Chuck Herrin, CISSP, CISA,
MCSE, CEH
9. Eg, see "Letter from Peter Coyote on Black Box Voting," 11/9/04
10. "Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked," by Thom Hartmann,
commondreams.org, 6 Nov 2004
11. Analysis of an Electronic Voting System
by Tadayoshi Kohno, Adam Stubblefield, Aviel D. Rubin, Dan S. Wallach,
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Oakland, CA, May, 2004
12. See, "Voting Machine Controversy," by Julie Carr Smyth, Cleveland Plain
Dealer, 28 Aug 2003
13. See a Biography of Ahmanson listed by the Council For National Policy
of which he is a member. See Also: "Diebold, Electronic Voting and the
Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy," by Bob Fitrakis, Free Press [Columbus,
Ohio], 25 Feb 2004
14. See Christian Reconstructionism, Dominion Theology, and Theonomy:
"Practices:
If they gained control of the US or Canadian federal
government, there would be many changes: The use of the death
penalty would be greatly expanded, when the Hebrew
Scriptures' laws are reapplied. People will be executed for
adultery, blasphemy, heresy, homosexual behavior, idolatry,
prostitution, evil sorcery (some translations say
Witchcraft), etc. The Bible requires those found guilty of
these `crimes' to be either stoned to death or burned alive.
Reconstructionists are divided on the execution method to be
used. . . . It would be logical to assume that the
institution of slavery would be reintroduced, and regulated
according to Biblical laws. Fathers could sell their
daughters into slavery. Female slaves would retain that
status for life. People who owned slaves would be allowed to
physically abuse them, as long as they did not beat them so
severely that they died within three days."
15. Grand Theft Election: Karl Rove's turd droppings all over this one, by
Wayne Madsen, Online Journal, 5 Nov 2004
16. Electoral College Meta-Analysis (election.princeton.edu), by Prof. Sam
Wang, Princeton University. As of 24 November 2004 this site was
continuing to be updated (last entry is 22 November).
17. "The November 2 Exit Poll Scam," by Michael Keefer, Centre for Research
on Globalisation, 5 Nov 2004
18. Presented at: Surprising Florida Presidential Election Results
(USCountVotes.org)
19. "I smell a rat", by Colin Shea, Freezerbox Magazine, 11 Nov 2004
20. "Voting Irregularities - Florida from Voting Fraud in the 2004
Presidential Election.
21. "Broward machines count backward," by Eliot Kleinberg, Palm Beach Post,
5 Nov 2004
22. "Computer error at voting machine gives Bush 3,893 extra votes,"
Associated Press / The Beacon Journal, 5 Nov 2004
23. "Basic report from Columbus," by Ray Beckerman, 4 Nov 2004
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/2004Waldman.html (hypertext)
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/2004Waldman.txt (text only)
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/2004Waldman.pdf (print ready)