Hey folks, weigh in on this. I'm looking for some cites pro and con regarding this, especially from the right wing like Xanith. One thing I've learned from this site is that more brains on the topic produce more perspectives.


November 6th, 2004 6:53 pm
Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked


by Thom Hartmann / Common Dreams


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, 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
http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.h
tm, and 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.


(continued)