Vote Rigging

[Shaggy Hiker]

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)

[Shaggy Hiker]

(Continuation)

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, 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 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)

(Continued)

[Shaggy Hiker]

(Continuation)

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."

[Cander]

I cant say one way or the other, but the problem with this is its very 1 sided. Before this election started, people were already set aside to see if Bush cheated to win. They werent looking for voter irregularities, just ones involving Republicans coming out on top. This is just something I noticed and saw coming before the election.

Now it could very well be true, but that point has to be taken into consideration.

Personally I find it very hard to believe that 3 companies producing voting tools and/or multiple state/county officials were all involved in some huge conspiracy and no one has stepped forward and the only evidence is exit poll irregularities.

I have heard mutliple theories. There doesnt seem to be any unified complaint. 1 was the story Shaggy posted. Another was minority vote spoilage gave Bush the win. Another that Diebold systems just plan counted extra votes with no hacking, etc,etc.

I mean for me to believe, I would have to see studies from previous elections of number of irregularities for all states/counties and who they favored. If you see similar patterns across the board for Rep and Dem, well then it can be chalked up to the fact that we have a faulty election system(which we do when every state has inconsistant rules and precincts in those states vary thos rules as well). Otherwise if the patterns are only recent, well then I can possibly believe it.

Again, its hard for me to make any concrete decision on the validity of this when I know there were groups that were planning to go through this.

(Remeber I voted Kerry)

[Shaggy Hiker]

That's why I posted it. Is this just sour apples, or more?

There are investigations into Republican voter irregularities in five swing states: NH (Bush/Cheney head indicted w/ Bush/Cheney NE chief listed as unindicted co-conspirator), OH (voter intimidation and improper de-registration, several lawsuits in progress and pending), NV (I know little of this, but it has something to do with registration drive members throwing out Democratic registrations), SD (minor, but a court ordered the removal of republican vote monitors after they were found to be engaged in intimidation in one county. Several other counties their actions were not found to be intimidating), and FL (Jeb up to his old tricks. Vote rigging in FL is as old as the state, so this is both likely and unsurprising).

On the Democratic side, the republicans have collected a few items, but they all involve over-registering of voters which the republicans themselves apparently describe as being meaningless since you can't vote more than once just because you registered more than once.

[CORONA BEER]

http://www.rense.com/general59/WIN.HTM

[Cander]

I just dont know what to think. We may never REALLY know. I just as human nature groups will always show facts that support their claim but ignore the rest. So for now I just have to believe its sour grapes.

Like I said, it is just so hard to believe a conspiracy involving so many people could be kept quiet by those involved..

[Shaggy Hiker]

Ok, that covers the raving paranoia angle.

I've always been a bit amused by folks like that. Even if there was some huge conspiracy, they are wasting their time. The soldier doesn't fight for his country, nor the lover love for future generations. Each is living in their own very personal moment, and are motivated by their own very personal motivations. These motivations have been shaped by experience, biology, parasites (yes, they can alter behavior dramatically), and chemical experiences. In short: Nature and Nurture. The course of the world is the sum total of all these little wavelets. Nobody can predict them, nor can anybody control them. If there were an Illuminati, they would live in constant terror because people, en masse, tend to careen through the world like a bunch of berzerk cows in a pasture.

There may be some great and momentus things occuring in my life. Some, like global warming, I could affect in some small way by altering my lifestyle and activities (I do). Other momentus things will continue, and I shall live my life unable or unwilling to influence them in any way. I shall feed the worms long before there is peace in the middle east, an end to starvation in America (it happens), or the world-wide acceptance of Monopoly games as the source of all money.

All-in-all, I hope to contribute, but if not, then at least I intend to go hiking.

[Cander]

You can certianly expect people will be writting books on how this election was 'stolen'. As usual, someone is there to profit off it. Want to see more conspiracy fun and raving paranoia. Check www.enterprisemission.com and then check the Richard Hoagland debunking section at www.badastronomy.com. Its really funny stuff.


Truthfully, I would like to see this actually to turn out true. Not to oust Bush, but to give the government a shake up. If there is a conspiracy, despite being the president, I would bet he is a non existant factor in it. Its like the Iraq war and people saying Bush lied to us. No, the CIA lied to us. Whoever it is manipulating and playing with intelligense lied to us. Bush got handed a bad hand of cards from stuff that has building up for years as far as I am concerned.

[CORONA BEER]

Originally posted by Shaggy Hiker
If there were an Illuminati, they would live in constant terror

Sadly there ahead of the game, and are using terror against us.

[Cander]

Steve Jackson's game Illuminati is a fun game though...

[Xanith]

The election in Florida was probably one of the most watched elections this year only because of what happened in the 2000 presidential election, by both sides. Your source for the numbers seems a bit suspicious only because it seems to be putting forth a anti-Bush agenda rather than a non-partisan statistical site. If there were such anomalies in the voting in Florida I believe we would have heard about it by now from more reputable sources, only because the Democrats and Kerry had legions of lawyers ready to pounce on any inconsistencies found in the voting in Florida.

As far as the exit polls are concerned I don’t know if they were rigged or not. Some Republicans say they were to depress the vote in certain key states to swing the election to Kerry, while some Democrats say that the exit polls were correct and Kerry should have won big and that there was some conspiracy to rig the voting to allow Bush to win. I personally believe that the exit polls were just wrong only because pre-election polls were pretty much in line with the actual vote count was and how this election closely mirrored the presidential election in 2000 with no huge changes in any state. Had the exit polls been correct you would have to believe there was large scale vote fraud in a great number of states. So far there hasn’t been any evidence to even point to small scale fraud let alone the large scale fraud necessary to pull off such a multi-state skewing of votes in favor of Bush.

On the issue with how easy it is to tamper with vote tallies from touch screens, if we are to believe that votes from touch screens are so venerable to tampering remember that the counties that installed such machines (Miami-Dade and Broward counties) in Florida are run and overseen by Democrats. If such tampering existed one would have to assume that such tampering would likely be skewed in the favor of Kerry rather than Bush.

I personally believe the Democrats are searching for a reason why they lost the presidency again and continue to lose ground in both the House and the Senate. I have talked to liberals who are still in a state of shock and cant believe that Bush is in the White House again. This conspiracy theory concocted by those in the Michael Moore wing of the Democratic party is just one way of dealing with what they saw as an impossibility.

X

[Cander]

A point to add about exit polls. They talk abou how accurate exit polls have always been. but what of the possiblity that alot of people just lied. There is always the possiblity that some people voted for Bush for ones reason or another but were embarrassed to say that did.

Of course we have no way to really gauge this.

[CORONA BEER]

[Shaggy Hiker]

Xanith, I tend to agree with your analysis, but not about why we haven't heard of it. There's alot that I haven't heard about, and I'm pretty well informed. One thing that surprised me in the 911 movie was the clip of Bush's limo being egged. I'm amazed that I never heard about that until the movie, though I don't doubt it happened.

Sometimes things SHOULD be swept under the carpet. A certain amount of voting irregularity goes on every election simply because of the complexity of the process. As long as roughly equal numbers occur in both directions, the outcome remains roughly accurate if not precisely accurate. That's why I don't believe exit polls could be skewed by spontaneous voter lying. To assume that sufficient numbers would all spontaneously choose to lie in the same direction is rather beyond reason.

Frankly, the one indictment (in NH) I heard about was pretty much ignored nationwide. Maybe it should be. If one guy in either camp decides to deliberately rig the vote, then they should pay the price, but the vote itself, or at least the public perception of the system of the vote, should be left in tact simply because it is a powerful symbol of democracy. However, if somebody does rig the vote, THEY should be held accountable. If a systematic rigging effort was made, that should be exposed. Not to revile a party, but to clean them out. Corruption of any sort cannot withstand the spotlight.

[Xanith]

I agree if there was any voter fraud it should be investigated and brought to light. The people demand a fair election and everything should be done to ensure that.

X

[seismicweasel]

If there is any doubt about the reliability of the electronic voting systems then there needs to be a full investigation into what's going on.

One issue that's been raised is THIS where a vote counting machine started to count backwards when it hit 32767 votes counted.

Even if there are no issues about vote rigging in the election, there are a huge number of problems with electronic voting and the lack of trust in both the machines and the corporations who manufacture them.

How difficult is it to write a secure programme that simply adds up?

[demotivater]

Originally posted by seismicweasel

How difficult is it to write a secure programme that simply adds up?

That's what I was thinking. Like any project, I'm sure there are things that come up that weren't expected, or in the original specs, but come on. Press a button, count + 1.

[nemaroller]

My god, how pressed is a voting machine for memory it can't store a 4 -byte integer???

32,768 seems like the most votes any precinct could get, so let's make it a 2-byte integer. (NOT EVEN A POSITIVE INTEGER, a regular integer).

[seismicweasel]

Just seen this posted at blackboxvoting.org

-------------------------------------------------------------

County election records just got put on lockdown

Dueling lawyers, election officials gnashing teeth, Votergate.tv film crew catching it all.

Here's what happened so far:

Friday Black Box Voting investigators Andy Stephenson and Kathleen Wynne popped in to ask for some records. They were rebuffed by an elections official named Denise. Bev Harris called on the cell phone from investigations in downstate Florida, and told Volusia County Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe that Black Box Voting would be in to pick up the Nov. 2 Freedom of Information request, or would file for a hand recount. "No, Bev, please don't do that!" Lowe exclaimed. But this is the way it has to be, folks. Black Box Voting didn't back down.

Monday Bev, Andy and Kathleen came in with a film crew and asked for the FOIA request. Deanie Lowe gave it over with a smile, but Harris noticed that one item, the polling place tapes, were not copies of the real ones, but instead were new printouts, done on Nov. 15, and not signed by anyone.

Harris asked to see the real ones, and they said for "privacy" reasons they can't make copies of the signed ones. She insisted on at least viewing them (although refusing to give copies of the signatures is not legally defensible, according to Berkeley elections attorney, Lowell Finley). They said the real ones were in the County Elections warehouse. It was quittin' time and an arrangment was made to come back this morning to review them.

Lana Hires, a Volusia County employee who gained some notoriety in an election 2000 Diebold memo, where she asked for an explanation of minus 16,022 votes for Gore, so she wouldn't have to stand there "looking dumb" when the auditor came in, was particularly unhappy about seeing the Black Box Voting investigators in the office. She vigorously shook her head when Deanie Lowe suggested going to the warehouse.

Kathleen Wynne and Bev Harris showed up at the warehouse at 8:15 Tuesday morning, Nov. 16. There was Lana Hires looking especially gruff, yet surprised. She ordered them out. Well, they couldn't see why because there she was, with a couple other people, handling the original poll tapes. You know, the ones with the signatures on them. Harris and Wynne stepped out and Volusia County officials promptly shut the door.

There was a trash bag on the porch outside the door. Harris looked into it and what do you know, but there were poll tapes in there. They came out and glared at Harris and Wynne, who drove away a small bit, and then videotaped the license plates of the two vehicles marked 'City Council' member. Others came out to glare and soon all doors were slammed.

So, Harris and Wynne went and parked behind a bus to see what they would do next. They pulled out some large pylons, which blocked the door. Harris decided to go look at the garbage some more while Wynne videotaped. A man who identified himself as "Pete" came out and Harris immediately wrote a public records request for the contents of the garbage bag, which also contained ballots -- real ones, but not filled out.

A brief tug of war occurred, tearing the garbage bag open. Harris and Wynne then looked through it, as Pete looked on. He was quite friendly.

Black Box Voting collected various poll tapes and other information and asked if they could copy it, for the public records request. "You won't be going anywhere," said Pete. "The deputy is on his way."

Yes, not one but two police cars came up and then two county elections officials, and everyone stood around discussing the merits of the "black bag" public records request.

The police finally let Harris and Wynne go, about the time the Votergate.tv film crew arrived, and everyone trooped off to the elections office. There, the plot thickened.

Black Box Voting began to compare the special printouts given in the FOIA request with the signed polling tapes from election night. Lo and behold, some were missing. By this time, Black Box Voting investigator Andy Stephenson had joined the group at Volusia County. Some polling place tapes didn't match. In fact, in one location, precinct 215, an African-American precinct, the votes were off by hundreds, in favor of George W. Bush and other Republicans.

Hmm. Which was right? The polling tape Volusia gave to Black Box Voting, specially printed on Nov. 15, without signatures, or the ones with signatures, printed on Nov. 2, with up to 8 signatures per tape?

Well, then it became even more interesting. A Volusia employee boxed up some items from an office containing Lana Hires' desk, which appeared to contain -- you guessed it -- polling place tapes. The employee took them to the back of the building and disappeared.

Then, Ellen B., a voting integrity advocate from Broward County, Florida, and Susan, from Volusia, decided now would be a good time to go through the trash at the elections office. Lo and behold, they found all kinds of memos and some polling place tapes, fresh from Volusia elections office.

So, Black Box Voting compared these with the Nov. 2 signed ones and the "special' ones from Nov. 15 given, unsigned, finding several of the MISSING poll tapes. There they were: In the garbage.

So, Wynne went to the car and got the polling place tapes she had pulled from the warehouse garbage. My my my. There were not only discrepancies, but a polling place tape that was signed by six officials.

This was a bit disturbing, since the employees there had said that bag was destined for the shredder.

By now, a county lawyer had appeared on the scene, suddenly threatening to charge Black Box Voting extra for the time spent looking at the real stuff Volusia had withheld earlier. Other lawyers appeared, phoned, people had meetings, Lana glowered at everyone, and someone shut the door in the office holding the GEMS server.

Black Box Voting investigator Andy Stephenson then went to get the Diebold "GEMS" central server locked down. He also got the memory cards locked down and secured, much to the dismay of Lana. They were scattered around unsecured in any way before that.

Everyone agreed to convene tomorrow morning, to further audit, discuss the hand count that Black Box Voting will require of Volusia County, and of course, it is time to talk about contesting the election in Volusia.

-------------------------------------------------------------

When did the US turn into a banana republic?

[dglienna]

I saw election results that were punched into cards going into a card reader. the operators would say the program had crashed, and that they had just restarted it, except that they only scanned the remaining cards. funny how their candidate always won...

I had them implement TOTALS. They used to use just WINNER, and the percentages. Ever since, those elections were much fairer.

I'd like to see the ballots have a code number. The vote wouldn't count until the voter called one of two telephone numbers (D or R) and gave his code.

Wouldn't be great for anything other than one per ballot, but, if there was a descpency, that voter could be contacted to 'come in and vote again'