| "Sean McBride" <smcbride2@y...>
Date: Mon Nov 8, 2004 9:48 am |
||
----- Original Message -----
From: Misty
Sent: Monday, November 08, 2004 7:26 AM http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=58708 The Rumor Mill News Reading Room http://www.rumormillnews.com RIGGED ELECTION SEEMING EVER MORE LIKELY Posted By: billym <Send E-Mail> Date: Sunday, 7 November 2004, 1:52 p.m. Electronic Vote Fraud Seems Likely Integrity of Voting System Rising as a Huge Issue I am actually rather amazed today at the huge volume of articles appearing about the apparent hacking of the electronic vote counting. A great many people are now looking into this, studying the data, gathering evidence, and it is a surprise to me. This is very good, I think, because the idea of having an election without a definite physical paper object existing for each vote was completely insane in the first place. Were we crazy to allow this? I am glad to see this intense investigation going on because we must absolutely make significant changes to the voting process or else no one is ever again going to believe any election result in the future. That would be extremely demoralizing to our society, a society in which the idea of the people voting plays an extremely important part. Today I wanted to compile some excerpts and links to just a few of the many articles about the electronic voting that are appearing now on the Net and coming in via email. The fact that this issue is arising so strongly is a very optimistic sign to me, because, regardless of who supposedly won or lost, the Vote of 2004 has offered up a huge lesson for us. The integrity of the voting process has been lost, and we absolutely must restore that integrity within the next two years. I KNEW that this would be a huge issue when I first heard about these voting machines. Being an amateur programmer I am keenly aware of the kinds of things you can do with computers. What I did not realize, however, was that this was going to be a huge public issue AFTER the elections, not before. The latest article I've got about the electronic vote fraud just came into my email an hour ago from the TruthOut site. It's actually an article from CommonDreams.Org, and is written by Thom Hartmann . This article was also linked by somtum today , and here are few clips from it: Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked By Thom Hartmann CommonDreams.org Saturday 06 November 2004 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 some believe evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004. http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/110804Z.shtml PAPER VS. PAPERLESS Hartmann goes on to describe a number of anomalies. Much of the investigation of the electronic voter fraud has to do with the comparison between electronic machines which had a verifiable paper trail system, and those machines which did not. In most cases it is being found that the machines which had no verifiable paper trail the vote is found to be skewed in favor of Bush by about 5%. Investigators are comparing the number of registered Democrats vs. actual results, and comparing that between the paper-trail machines and the no-paper-trail machines. Obviously, if you are electronically hacking the vote, you want to do it where there is no paper trail that can be examined. By comparing the paper and paperless area the anomalies show up. The mathematics of statistics comes into play. Now I don't expect that the election results are ever going to be overturned by these investigations, I guess we have crossed that bridge already. But the importance of these investigations is far greater than the results of any particular election. It is VITAL that we determine if vote-hacking was done, and to demostrate for history how easily it CAN be done. The investigations going on now will affect every future election we ever have. So it should be in the interests of even Republicans to dig into this deeply and reveal any fraud that may have occurred. The same hacking methods and deception could easily be used against Republicans themselves at some future date. We have to clean up this system. If it isn't fool proof, throw it out and go back to pure paper ballots, the simple and fair method used throughout most of Europe. RESULTS VS. EXIT POLLS Another primary focus of the vote fraud investigations, beside the discrepancies between the paper and paperless areas, is the discrepancy between the vote results and the exit polls. Unless a lot of people were lying about who they voted for (why would they?) this is another clue that the electronic vote machines were used to stuff the ballots. I remember having a brief period of unexpected joy when I saw the first exit polls coming out on election night. The whole future seemed suddenly possibly brighter for a while, that is until the "actual" results started appearing. Now it seems there is a very big difference between who the people said they voted for and who the machines said they voted for. Red alert! There is of couse a margin of error to be expected here, but the margin we are seeing is way, way off. So there is this second big clue that the votes were electronically tampered with. "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." Dick Morris, the famous pollster, had this to say: "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 <http://www.thehill.com/morris/110404.aspx>, 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?" INSECURE SYSTEMS Hartmann then goes into a technical description of how the Diebold centralized vote tabulation and counting occurs. It is all done on an ordinary PC using the Windows operating system. His description points out that the database which contains the vote numbers is just an ordinary database which can be opened up and changed with the Microsoft Excel program by anyone having access to that particular PC. By simply going outside the official Diebold program and running Excel, one can load the file of votes, make any changes one wants, and then save the official now-edited file! One can even imagine a scene in some future movie thriller where some thugs get into that room with that all-powerful ordinary PC, render the operator unconscious, and throw the election to their guy in a matter of minutes, and then sneak out again. This is a secure system? Even I know how to use the Excel program, it's child's play really. So that is a third area of the electronic vote fraud investigation in addition to the paper/paperless comparisons and the exit poll/official count anomalies. Combine all these, add an administration proven to be deceitful, and one's confidence in the official election results goes out the window. I feel I should point out again that this is a totally non-partisan issue, not just a grumpy response on the part of the losers of this election. The issue is whether we can EVER again trust an election. If these problems are not faced and fixed it will be very demoralizing to the populous and result in the feeling that the last vestige of "democracy" has been killed in this nation. The controlled mainstream media is, of course, not likely to feature many stories about the electronic vote hacking. It is up to us with Internet access to focus on it so that a hack-proof system results in the coming two years. Hartmann finishes up his article with these words: "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.'" Let's look at some clips from some other of the surprisingly large number of articles that are now appearing about this field of custom made electronic elections. I mentioned one by Christopher Bollyn in an earlier post which you can read here . This described the proverbial and conpiratorial "back room" in Chicago with the central tabulator, a room which no one was allowed to enter except for employees of the vote machine manufacturer, Election Systems & Software. Jeff Rense is giving the issue good coverage with a number of featured articles. Perhaps the biggest news there is that a group of Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on the Constitution has asked the GAO to investigate the use of electronic voting machines and the anomalies being seen in the 2004 election. They wrote the following to the General Accounting Office: "We write with an urgent request that the Government Accountability Office immediately undertake an investigation of the efficacy of voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election, how election officials responded to difficulties they encountered and what we can do in the future to improve our election systems and administration... " Rense lists, as source for this, a very interesting website called "Citizens for Legimate Government," which has a great deal of information about the voting anomalies. Greg Palast has written a piece called "Kerry Won - Here Are The Facts" in which he wryly says: "So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, 'Who did you vote for?' Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, 'Was your vote counted?' The voters don't know." Palast talks about what is called "vote spoilage" which refers to votes which, for one reason or another, are simply voided, thrown out. This is typically about 3% in ANY election. One would expect this 3% to be randomly distributed, but he says it is not. "And not all votes spoil equally. Most of those votes, say every official report, come from African-American and minority precincts. "We saw this in Florida in 2000. Exit polls showed Gore with a plurality of at least 50,000, but it didn't match the official count. That's because the official, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, excluded 179,855 spoiled votes "Whose cards were discarded? Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black folks. " http://www.rense.com/general59/kery.htm In going through all the many articles on the issue of electronic vote fraud I'm afraid I can't blame anyone for losing interest, because the material is fairly filled with numbers and statistics and rarely makes for an easy read. I find myself getting confused trying to sort it out. But we can't let the complexity and math content of it turn us away because the very guts of our system of government is vitally at stake. It will be enough if we can convince ourselves that this method of voting is to be eschewed in the future. It's enough if we can just understand how easy it has become for unscrupulous men to steal our votes wholesale. We must return to a system of voting in which one vote means one actual physical piece of paper. Pieces that can counted and recounted if necessary to ensure that the outcome is legitimate. As of this day in 2004 the actual will of the people is still very much in doubt, and that doubt undermines the whole system. Wayne Nash, in an article called "More Evidence The Vote Was Rigged," gives us a couple links to sites dealing with electronic vote fraud issue: The Open Voting Consortium has a lot of information and is advocating a new system in which a verifiable recountable piece of paper is produced for each vote cast. "On November 2nd, millions of invisible ballots created with secret software were counted. Or were they? Ask for a recount and someone will push a button and get the same number. The vast majority of computer scientists say we should not entrust democracy to these voting machines (called Direct Record Electronic or 'DRE')." http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/ Fixing the system is not all that hard. All that is needed, really, is a paper backup system. Every machine would print out a paper ballot of that person's vote, a kind of vote receipt, which the voter would then drop into a ballot box. The could examine this piece of paper, make sure it is correct, and then put it in the box. If a recount were required, everyone's paper ballot would be there. It is as simple as that to make the current system as reliable as the European system of paper ballots. At another website called "Electoral Vote" you can actually download an Excel file with the official vote results. You could then, as described above, practice rigging an election yourself! Just in case you ever managed to get into that secretive corporate back room! Click here to download election data in Excel format! In Nash's article, linked above, he says simply: "If we go to computerized voting without a paper trail and the machines can be set up to cheat, that is the end of our democracy." He highlights several points: * SoCalDem has done a statistical analysis... ...on several swing states, and EVERY STATE that has EVoting but no paper trails has an unexplained advantage for Bush of around +5% when comparing exit polls to actual results. * In EVERY STATE that has paper audit trails on their EVoting, the exit poll results match the actual results reported within the margin of error. * Analysis of the polling data vs actual data and voting systems supports the hypothesis that evoting may be to blame in the discrepancies. * The media was a bit taken aback that the results didn't match the exit polls AT ALL. Most of the commentators were scratching their head in disbelief at the results. The media has gracefully claimed they "just got it wrong." In another short clip a Stanford University computer expert points out that basically we are expected to simply have blind faith that the voting machines are not crooked. Blind faith? You ask them about the hardware. "Secret." The software? "Secret." What's the cryptography? "Can't tell you because that'll compromise the secrecy of the machines." Federal testing procedures? "Secret" Results of the tests? "Secret" Talk about corporate takeover of government! Corporations completely taking over the semi-sacred voting process? Blind faith in corporations? The result of 200 years of democracy comes down to blind faith in big corporations? How did THAT happen? As I look through the huge mass of articles addressing the electronic vote fraud issue I must confess I am getting a little overwhelmed. This issue is HUGE and the response is far more than I had imagined would occur. There are so many articles describing so many anomalies that I realize it simply can't be summarized or dealt with in a single post like this. So I will add some more links to the bottom of this and go back to sifting through the material. But I want to leave off with the thought that this huge amount of material, stories, data, investigation, analysis, already - less than a week after the election - is an extremely optimistic sign. And a number of thoughts come to mind. I now realize how important it is for people to really know how everyone really voted. To be stuck with completely false and hacked results in one's mind distorts one's very sense of the world. Accuracy and honesty in tabulating the votes is a psychological necessity for our well being. If Bush was really elected I want to know that. It is important to my view of the world. To have one's head stuffed with false information due to faulty and fraudulent system is not good for my mental health. If the vote was rigged, I can live with that, okay we live in a kind of dictatorship of the corporations, okay we must deal with that somehow, but I want to know the truth! It also occurs to me that in 2004 two amazing situations came together. The technology of widespread electronic computerized voting occurred at the very same time that the most lying, unscrupulous, deceitful administration in American was up for re-election. If we did not already have four years worth of proof of the deceitfulness of the adminstration the hackability of the voting machines might not have assumed such gigantic importance. To complete the equation we needed an administration which nearly everyone would concede is unscrupulous enough to try to rig an election. This was the necessary evil element required to make the electronic vote fraud issue one of the most important issues of all in the coming years. We needed a criminal gang of men who would go for the bait and give it a go, and apparently we had that. So a huge gigantic black hole in our system of things has been exposed baldly in the light of day. Ironically, evil men were necessary to test the system! What an irony! One is left thinking "Thank God we had a totally dishonest administration so that the full dangers of electronic voting could be demonstrated." Had two honest groups been contesting we would never have realized the danger to democracy that exists. My hope is that these investigations and analysis will continue and go deep. If there was fraud and hacking we want to know it. It would be a lot easier to bear the coming four years of Bush & Gang if one could be certain that electorate had actually rejected him, and I think the whole world would feel a lot better about the American people if it could be proven that Bush regime and the corporations had actually rigged the election. They might laugh at us for tolerating such a faulty despotic system, but at least they might not regard the people themselves as being as belligerent and lawless and cold-hearted as they appeared to be on Nov. 3. Here are just a few links to other resources concerning the looming issue of electronic voting fraud. It barely scratches the surface of an issue that is becoming more and more important with every passing day. Black Box Voting - one of the main websites dealing with this issue http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ Palm Beach County Logs 88,000 More Votes Than Voters http://www.washingtondispatch.com/spectrum/archives/000715.html BOOK by Bev Harris http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-1.pdf Citizens for Legitimate Govenment http://www.legitgov.org/ On The Front Lines in Florida http://www.legitgov.org/essay_front_lines_in_florida_110704.html Historic vote count is over http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/10112736.htm Computer glitch still baffles county clerk http://www.michigancityin.com/articles/2004/11/04/news/news02.txt Election Protection Report from New Mexico http://www.ansiblegroup.org/furtherleft/index.php?option=content&task=view&i d=51 ES&S Operative Had Access to Ohio Ballot Computer http://www.theeveningleader.com/articles/2004/11/06/news/news.01.txt Evidence Mounts That The Vote Was Hacked http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm Evidence of a Second Bush Coup? http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/110604.html Voting System Error Gives Bush Extra Votes in Ohio http://edition.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/11/05/voting.problems.ap/index.html Really? Voting Problems In Ohio Set Off Alarm http://nytimes.com/2004/11/07/politics/campaign/07elect.html Broward machines count backward http://www.palmbeachpost.com/politics/content/news/epaper/2004/11/05/a29a_BR OWVOTE_1105.html Never say Die-bold: So you don't think the Bush campaign stole this election? Think again http://onlinejournal.com/evoting/110505Thoreau/110505thoreau.html Grand Theft Election: Karl Rove's turd droppings all over this one http://onlinejournal.com/evoting/110504Madsen/110504madsen.html The stolen election of 2004: welcome back to hell http://onlinejournal.com/evoting/110504Chin/110504chin.html Something amiss in Ohio http://onlinejournal.com/evoting/110504Quirk/110504quirk.html House Dems Seek Election Inquiry http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65623,00.html?tw=rss.TOP Should America Trust the Results of the Election? http://www.washingtondispatch.com/article_10500.shtml Electronic Miscounts Multiply http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/110704V.shtml Machine Error Gave Bush Extra Ohio Votes http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/110604W.shtml BLACK BOX VOTING WEBSITE Password: Messages In This Thread RIGGED ELECTION SEEMING EVER MORE LIKELY (views: 581) billym -- Sunday, 7 November 2004, 1:52 p.m. YES, BUT RIGGED AT WHAT LEVEL? ...IT'S BRIGHT IN HERE.. (views: 373) Esclarmonde -- Sunday, 7 November 2004, 2:11 p.m. OATH OF LOYALTY TO SKULL & BONES TRUMPED ALL? (views: 355) billym -- Sunday, 7 November 2004, 2:27 p.m. CLOSER THAN YOU THINK (views: 262) buzzard -- Sunday, 7 November 2004, 4:58 p.m. REFLECTIONS ON A LOST ELECTION - W.R. PITT (views: 201) billym -- Sunday, 7 November 2004, 5:17 p.m. The Octopus In Memoriam: Danny Casolaro Jim Keith Ron Bonds William Cooper Graham Birdsall the_octopus@yahoogroups.com |
