We have an ELECTRONIC VOTE FRAUD CRISIS - November 2, 2004

The computer technology is in place to enable the greatest vote fraud in
American history.

Computer experts at major universities have been warning of this crisis
ever since the 2000 election, but many elections officials and most
citizens have closed their eyes to the danger.

Warnings of potential vote tampering and fraud has come from David Dill,
systems expert of Stanford University
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0216-01.htm

as well as Ted Selker, a professor at MIT who co-directs the Caltech/MIT
Voting Technology Project. http://www.vote.caltech.edu/

Beverly Harris, author of Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st
Century has done the most thorough examination of the potential for
election fraud. http://www.blackboxvoting.org

Beverly Harris discovered that the Diebold Elections Systems' AccuVote
is able to read totals from an untraceable bogus vote set within its
software. This manipulation technique in their central vote tabulator
enables anyone to enter a 2-digit code in a hidden location and change
the outcome of any election.

Many of the people who are responsible for protecting the democratic
election process have closed their eyes to the warnings from Beverly
Harris and all the other computer experts.

We are enclosing this article by Tom Flocco as a last minute warning of
how the 2004 election can be stolen. NOTE: All three of the major
companies producing and installing electronic voting machines are owned
by Republicans.

Lincoln B. Justice and Rachel A. Garner

talltrees@kearney.net

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HACKING THE PRESIDENCY

A dishonest presidential election sets aside the future economic,
social and military will of the American people.

There is substantial evidence that electronic voting machine
corporations and political forces in some states could turn aside
the electoral wishes of the U.S. populace on November 2
by means of election fraud.

by Tom Flocco

Philadelphia -- October 30, 2002 -- TomFlocco.com --

A series of curious election upsets in 2002, allegedly linked
to untraceable vote fraud,
could well have set the stage for another November presidential
legal conundrum.

This, as certain proprietary software secrets inherent in electronic
voting machine technology--
supervised in some cases by a criminal element,
are engendering a growing public outcry for enforceable 'paper-trails,'
properly certified software,
but also a complete separation of campaign contributions
and private investment ties from those companies
that count American votes.

According to Beverly Harris, author of Black Box Voting:
Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century, a manipulation technique
she found in Diebold Elections Systems' AccuVote central vote tabulator
is able to read totals from an untraceable bogus vote set
within its software.

"By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes
is created; and this set of votes can be changed in a matter of seconds,
so that it no longer matches the correct votes," said the voting
activist.

Election industry officials say their voting systems are secure because
they are protected by passwords and tamperproof audit logs;
but Harris says the passwords can easily be bypassed and the audit logs
can be changed--even without the county election supervisor knowing
about it.

Covering up vote fraud?

Harris appeared before the California Voting Systems Panel (CVSP)
on April 21, 2004, presenting a smoking gun Diebold internal memo
proving the company had not corrected Diebold's Global Election Systems
(GEMS) software flaws even though it had updated and upgraded the GEMS
program.

She also showed Democrat Howard Dean how to fraudulently alter
the GEMS system on CNBC-TV.

In a convened August 11, 2004 CVSP meeting, member Jim March formally
requested a demonstration of the double set of books in GEMS; and while
the short 3-minute demonstration had been scheduled, the panel refused
to watch it and would not look at Harris' presentation.

Curiously, the panel met privately afterwards with Diebold
officials--but without informing the public or issuing a report about
the potential for vote fraud this fall.

Harris and her associate director Andy Stephenson, along with computer
security expert Dr. Hugh Thompson and former King County, Washington
elections supervisor Julie Anne Kempf, met with members of CVSP and the
California Attorney General's office to demonstrate the double set of
books in the GEMS system.

The Secretary of State's office stopped the meeting, called in the
general counsel for their office and a defense attorney from the
California Attorney General's office--refusing to allow Harris and
Stephenson to videotape their own GEMS demonstration, while also
prohibiting any audiotape and specifying that no notes of the meeting
could be requested in public records (Freedom of Information
Act--F.O.I.A.) requests.

Harris told us that Diebold knew about the problem too--or should have
known--because the company issued a "cease and desist" action against
her website when she originally reported the problem in 2003. Harris
also offered to show the problem to Marvin Singleton, Diebold's damage
control expert and other Diebold executives; however she said they
refused to look at it.

The state of Maryland commissioned its own report regarding Diebold's
system from Science Application International Corporation (SAIC) of
California, with Diebold allowing SAIC to examine the system using its
touch-screen source code.

Consistent with Black Box Voting assertions of election accuracy risk,
SAIC also said the Diebold system was subject to "several high risks of
vulnerabilities."

Curiously, Maryland went ahead anyway and purchased $55 million worth of
the Diebold electronic touch-screen machines--despite the evidence in
their own report.

The state's recently hired computer experts have been able to hack the
Diebold machines with ease; and they were able to change the vote counts
directly on precinct machines--but also by using a modem. Again, these
machines count 50% of the presidential vote in 37 states! And there are
still no legal challenges regarding the vulnerability of the machines.

In a move with likely far-reaching ramifications for the whole country,
the presidential battleground state of Ohio cited the same security
risks that Maryland found. But curiously, Ohio also gave its counties
the ok to purchase electronic systems, despite the demonstrated ease of
vote fraud: Diebold (40 counties), ES&S (11), Hart InterCivic (7), and
Sequoia (4). Again, no one has promulgated litigation--despite prior
evidence and knowledge of voting security risks.

Stealing a presidential election?

"The Diebold Global Elections System voting software, which runs on a
Microsoft Access database, can read election vote totals from a false
vote set," says Harris, who added that Diebold purchased Texas-based
GEMS in 2002.

GEMS stores the votes in a ledger built in Microsoft Access; but while
accounting firms have programs which only allow one set of books,
Diebold's GEMS system contained three sets of "books," according to
Harris' findings.

The Founder of Black Box Voting explained further: "The elections
official never sees the three sets of books. All that is seen are the
reports that can be run, such as election summary (county-wide totals)
or a statement of votes cast (totals for each precinct)," adding, "the
official has no way of knowing the GEMS system uses a different set of
data for the detail report (used to spot-check) than it does for the
election totals."

Why? "Because the GEMS interface draws its data from an Access database
which is hidden," said Harris, offering further, "On the programs we
tested, the Election summary (totals, county-wide) come from the vote
ledger 2 instead of vote ledger 1; and ledger 2 can be altered so it may
or may not match ledger 1."

Harris continued, "The Access database, which contains the hidden set of
votes, can't be seen unless you know how to get in the back door--which
takes only seconds. Two sets of books can easily allow fraud to go
undetected, especially if the two sets of books (votes) are hidden from
the user."

"Using Diebold's GEMS system, one can type in a two-digit code into a
hidden location and decouple the books so that the voting system will
draw information from a combination of the real votes and a set of fake
votes, which can be altered any way one sees fit," she said.

Harris expanded her short lesson in potential November vote fraud by
revealing, "when you put a two-digit code into a secret location, you
can disengage the vote tables, so the tampered totals table doesn't have
to match precinct by precinct results. This way, it will pass a spot
check--even with paper ballots--but it can still be rigged."

The Black Box founder clarified the issue: "You want the report to add
up on the actual votes. But unbeknownst to the election supervisor,
votes can be added and subtracted from vote ledger 2. Official reports
come from vote ledger 2, which has been disengaged from vote ledger 1.
If someone asks for a detailed report for some precincts, though, the
report comes from vote ledger 1. Therefore, if you keep the correct
votes in vote ledger 1, a spot-check of detailed precincts (even if you
compare voter-verified paper ballots) will always be correct.

Harris also deals with the issue of bypassing the passwords: "The manual
on Diebold's "ftp" website tells that the default password in a new
installation is "GEMSUSER." Anyone who downloaded and installed GEMS can
bypass the passwords in elections. One can overwrite the "admin"
password with another, copied from another GEMS installation."

She continued: "The password will appear encrypted; no worries, just cut
and paste. We saved the old "admin" password so we could replace it
later and delete the evidence that we'd been there. An intruder can
grant himself administrative privileges by putting zeros in the other
boxes, following the example in "admin."

According to Black Box Voting's website, "(Microsoft) Access encourages
those who create audit logs to use auto-numbering, so that every logged
entry has an un-editable log number. Then if one deletes audit entries,
a gap in the numbering sequence will appear. However, we found that this
feature was disabled, allowing us to write in our own log numbers. We
were able to add and delete from the audit without leaving a trace."

On August 26, 2004, Beverly Harris wrote that "some locations removed
the Microsoft Access software from their GEMS computer, leaving the back
door intact, but essentially removing the ability to easily view and
edit the file."

"However, you can easily edit the election, with or without Microsoft
Access installed on the GEMS computer. As computer security expert Hugh
Thompson demonstrated at the August 18, 2004 California Secretary of
State meeting, you simply open any text editor, like 'Notepad,' and type
a six-line Visual Basic Script, and you own the election," said Harris.

Harris also discussed the issue of hacking the election results on the
GEMS central tabulator through telephone lines: "Mohave County, Arizona,
for example, has six modems attached to its GEMS computer on election
night. King County, Washington state has up to four dozen modems
attached at once," she said, adding, "most counties say they do not hook
up GEMS to the internet--they remove the disk from the GEMS computer and
physically take it to another computer from which the internet feed
comes."

But Harris clarifies: "You can access a computer through phone lines as
well as through the internet. If you have dial-in number, it's possible
to get at GEMS computers from anywhere, using RAS. The dial-in protocols
are given to poll workers, many people in Diebold have them, lots of
temp workers have them, and the configurations have been sitting on the
internet for several years."

"We asked who was allowed to access the central tabulator, after it was
already turned on, and who is given a password and permission to sit at
the terminal," Harris continued, "Several officials told us they don't
keep a list. Those who did gave us the names of too many people--county
employees, Diebold employees, and county database technicians all get
access to GEMS. Print-shops who do the ballots also have some access."

"Whether one votes by absentee ballot, touch-screens or
'fill-in-the-bubble' optical scanning machines, all votes are ultimately
brought to the 'mother ship,' the central tabulator at the county level,
which adds them up and creates a results report," said Harris.

"The central tabulator is far more vulnerable than the touch-screen
terminals," she said, adding, "if you were going to tamper with an
election, would you rather tamper with 4,500 individual voting machines,
or with just one machine, the central tabulator which receives votes
from all the machines in the county."

The accurate vote crusader says "at present, not a single location in
the United States has implemented security measures to fully mitigate
the risks."

Diebold's 'GEMS' found in most states

Since 1,000+ of Diebold's 'GEMS' software systems are currently used in
electronic voting machines in 37 states--each of which will count up to
two million votes at once--questions can be raised as to the
vulnerability and accuracy of Tuesday's presidential vote tally--let
alone Senate, House and local races.

Harris told TomFlocco.com, "Much of this information has been
corroborated by formal studies and by 13,000 internal Diebold memos and
emails written by the company's own programmers."

The memos were leaked to Harris in September, 2003, revealing that a top
Diebold engineer had been aware of security flaws for a lengthy period
of time.

Andy Stephenson visited the Washington state attorney general's office
in February, 2004 to inform them of the problem; but nothing has been
done to inform that state's election officials, and safeguards have not
been implemented.

Interestingly, Governor Arnold Swarzenegger (R-CA) recently froze funds
allocated by Secretary of State Kevin Shelley which would have paid for
increased scrutiny of the voting system in California, according to
Harris.

Early warnings of national vote fraud

At the outset of her crusade, Beverly Harris said she was intrigued by
an article written by freelance investigative reporter Lynn Landes which
said direct-recording electronic voting systems (DRE's) had become hot,
but also highly profitable commodities in the wake of the controversial
2000 presidential vote recount in Florida and the push for 'chad-free'
elections, according to Vanity Fair (April, 2004).

The vote activist thought Landes' DRE findings were troubling; and after
some research, Harris found a disturbing pattern of Republican election
upsets as well as instances of malfunctioning software and machines
related to certain brands.

The Vanity Fair piece recounts a series of curious Senate races which
Harris questioned as highly suspicious:

1. In the fall of 2002, Georgia became the first state to replace all
its voting machines with DRE electronic models. A poll by the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution put Democratic Senate incumbent Max Cleland five
points ahead of his Republican challenger Saxby Chambliss--just two days
before the election. Chambliss won by 7 percent--a 12-point shift in 48
hours!

Rob Behler, a short-term Diebold employee from the ABSS Temp firm,
shared some staggering inside information about the 2002 Georgia
election to Beverly Harris in a phone interview ( "Georgia--on
California's mind" )

2. In another 2002 senate race, Minnesota Democrat Walter Mondale led in
two of three polls on election day in a state using many optical
scanning electronic voting machines where paper ballots are read and
recorded electronically. But Republican Norm Coleman won by 3 percent
that day.

3. Colorado Republican senate incumbent Wayne Allard was running neck
and neck with Democrat Tom Strickland in 2002, but won by 5 percent on
election day--helping to turn power of the U.S. Senate, all committee
chairmanships and control of the America's political agenda over to
Republicans.

4. Seven Republicans competed for a vacant state representative seat in
the spring of 2004 when Connie Mack IV resigned to run for Congress.
Nebraska's Election Systems & Software (ES&S) touch-screen electronic
voting machines were used by the county to tally the votes. 10,000
Broward citizens signed in at the polls; but the electronic touch-screen
voting machines indicated that 134 of them failed to vote after showing
up at the polls to sign in. This is important because the individual who
came in second in the race only lost by 12 votes! Florida's touch-screen
machines have no paper trail, so there was no way to facilitate a
recount to validate the election. Case closed. 134 votes just turned up
missing.

5. In November, 2002 Democratic governor Roy Barnes lost to Republican
challenger Sonny Perdue--the first time in 134 years that a Republican
had won the governor's seat. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll had
shown Barnes leading Perdue by 11 points just two days before the
election: a 11%+ shift in 48 hours! Another victory for electronic
touch-screen machines?

Vanity Fair said Diebold wiped clean the machines used to tally
Georgia's upset votes, raising questions as to whether the company was
covering up evidence of election tampering. But no one complained or
brought litigation to subpoena either public testimony or evidence.

Such examples indicate a serious omen for the Bush-Kerry election--not
to mention critical senate, house and gubernatorial races; and this time
Democrats may not roll over and concede so easily "for the good of the
country" if President Bush is reelected to a second term--given the 2000
Florida recount fiasco and Supreme Court litigation.

Thieves, thieves -- tramps and thieves?

Harris traced the implementation of the double set of books to October
13, 2000, not long after embezzler Jeffrey Dean became Diebold's senior
programmer. Dean was hired as Vice President of Research and Development
in September, 2000, adding that Dean's access to the company's programs
is well documented through internal memos from Diebold.

Immediately after Dean joined Diebold, according to corporate memos,
another Diebold programmer, Dmitri Papushin, flagged bogus votes
appearing in vote tables; but after a dozen changes before the November
2000 election, all the changes retained the new hidden vote tables! And
this has continued up to the present, according to Harris, who says
anyone can use or sell the information.

BlackBoxVoting.org's associate director Andy Stephenson obtained the
court records of Jeffrey Dean which noted that the King County,
Washington prosecutor was after him for over $500,000 in restitution.

Dean told prosecutors (whose offices were on the ninth floor of the King
County courthouse) that he was unemployed, when in fact he was working
for Diebold who afforded him with 24-hour access to Diebold's King
County. Washington GEMS central tabulator, according to Stephenson.
(Dean worked on the GEMS tabulator on the fifth floor of the same King
County courthouse!)

Unfortunately, New York Attorney General Elliott Spitzer is not employed
by the state of Washington.

Stephenson says that Jeffrey Dean (by his own admission) is subject to
blackmail; but more critically, his embezzlement charges in the police
record indicate he was involved in " 'sophisticated' manipulation of
computer accounting records," and that "he was embezzling in order to
pay blackmail over a fight he was involved in, in which a person died."

"So now we have someone who's admitted that he's been blackmailed over
killing someone, who pleaded guilty to 23 counts of embezzlement, who is
given the position of senior programmer of the (Diebold) GEMS central
tabulator system that counts approximately 50 cercent of the votes in
the (Bush-Kerry) election, in 30 states, both paper ballot and touch
screen," said Stephenson.

Harris and Stephenson talked to Jeffrey Dean's partners and others who
worked with the embezzler: "we got descriptions such as 'sophisticated,
cunning, very bright, highly skilled and a con man,' " the two said.

The Diebold internal memos leaked to Harris and Stephenson also revealed
that "Dean was sent the passwords to the GEMS 1.18x files months after
Diebold took over the election company. Diebold clearly did not examine
the GEMS program before selling it, or, if it did, chose not to correct
the flaws. And after exposing this problem in 2003, Diebold still failed
to correct it," according to both activists.

Before Diebold purchased Texas-base GEMS, one of its directors, Michael
K. Graye, was arrested in 1996 in Canada on tax-fraud and
money-laundering charges that involved $18 million; but before he was
sentenced, the U.S. indicted him for stock fraud, after which he spent
18 months in Canadian and U.S. prisons before pleading guilty to tax
fraud in Canada, according to Vanity Fair.

Harris found out that Jeffrey Dean's friend John Elder--a convicted
cocaine trafficker who served nearly five years in the same prison where
Dean was incarcerated--joined Dean at Diebold's GEMS operation not long
after Dean signed on with the company.

Diebold's newest ex-con came aboard to oversee the printing of paper
ballots and punch cards produced for elections in several states; and
Dean had by this time become a consultant.

Diebold says Dean is no longer with the company; but as of April, 2004,
John Elder remains with Diebold as manager of the company's
printed-products division.

Good men coming to the aid of their party?

Diebold Election Systems, based in the key battleground state of Ohio,
is headed by Chairman and CEO Walden O'Dell, a George W. Bush pioneer,
raising more that $100,000 for Dubya's election war chest.

Wide reports also reveal that O'Dell helped organize and raise $600,000
for Bush-Cheney 2004 at a fund-raiser attended by the Vice-President on
June 30, 2003. Shortly thereafter, the Diebold CEO sent a letter to Ohio
Republicans, reiterating his commitment to "help Ohio deliver its
electoral votes to the president next year."

In 2001 and 2002, Diebold, Inc. gave nearly $100,000 to the Republican
National Committee and zero to the Democrats. This, while Diebold
director W. R. Timken Jr. raised $200,000 for Bush-Cheney and 11 other
Diebold executives gave added $22,000 to Timken's beneficence--according
to the New York Times. That's over $1 million from Diebold to
Republicans--if anyone is counting.

We ran into Harvard computer scientist and acknowledged electronic vote
expert Rebecca Mercuri at a presentation in Philadelphia last year.
Mercuri was adamant about making secret proprietary software available
for public inspection since "the country has so much riding on an honest
vote count."

Mercuri added that all e-voting machine companies refuse to open up
their software for public viewing, while the certification of their
machines is also kept secret. When combined with substantial campaign
contributions to one party by a company that counts 50% of the votes in
37 states, many citizens could ask whether a fix could be in for
November 2--especially if the vote is as close as expected.

If the polls keep certifying the presidential race as deadlocked, it
would follow that Americans may likely be more inclined to accept a
close win by either Bush or Kerry--say 51-52% to 49-48%--despite clear
evidence of possible vote fraud.

Elections Systems and Software (ES&S), a Nebraska-based touch-screen
company whose machines counted the Spring, 2004 Broward-Palm Beach
primary election which could not account for 134 missing votes in a race
won by only 12 tallies, used to be American Information Systems (AIS)
whose former chairman was none other that current two-term Republican
U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel.

Hagel won a surprise victory--one of the country's major 1996 upsets for
the Republican party; but curiously, his AIS electronic optical-scan
machines counted some 85% of the votes in his senate race--what some
would consider an outrageous conflict of interest.

Vanity Fair said throughout his first senate term, Hagel retained an
indirect investment of at least $1 million in AIS through the McCarthy
Group; but since AIS became ES&S, McCarthy kept its minority interest in
the newly named company, and Senator Hagel still has his share in the
McCarthy Group.

In another incredible conflict of interest, if not bravado, McCarthy's
chairman, Michael McCarthy, also served as Hagel's treasurer in his 2002
U.S. Senate re-election as Congress looked the other way, permitting
Hagel's campaign treasurer to own the company which counted most of
Senator Hagel's electi0on votes!

Some would consider it strange that both GEMS and Austin-based Hart
InterCivic are both based in the Lone Star state. But not when one
considers that Hart is backed by wealthy Republican Texas investor Tom
Hicks of Stratford Capital Partners.

Hicks' primary investment company Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst coordinated
the 1998 purchase of Major League Baseball's Texas Rangers from George
W. Bush and his partners, in which Dubya pocketed a $14.9 million profit
from his original but controversial $1 million Harken Energy stock sale
just days before Gulf War I hostilities commenced.

A common thread running through most electronic voting machine companies
seems to be total and all-out secrecy regarding software--despite
multiple protective U.S. intellectual property laws, but also large
financial contributions to the Republican Party--from backers,
owners--and a U.S. senator tied to the same e-voting corporations.

But no one ever institutes litigation to test the laws regarding
political conflicts of interest related to holding public office while
retaining a financial interest in the company which counts the
candidate's votes. How is it that U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) is
permitted to hold office--encumbered with such a brazen conflict?

Beverly Harris offers some final thoughts as to what the American people
might expect during the 2004 Bush-Kerry election: "We found that you can
melt down an election is six seconds, simply by using the menu items in
GEMS. You can destroy all data with two mouse clicks, and with four
mouse clicks, you can destroy the configuration of the election, making
it very difficult to reload the original data."

"According to testimony given before the Cuyahoga Elections Board, the
Microsoft Access database design used by Diebold's GEMS program
apparently becomes unstable with high volume output. This problem,
according to Diebold, resulted in thousands of votes being allocated to
the wrong candidate in San Diego County in March, 2004.

For her part, the Founder of Black Box Voting warns candidates: "Don't
concede the election. Make a statement about voting without auditing.
Hold off on your concession until the canvass is done. Wait until audits
and records can be examined. If your county melts down into litigation,
hold officials accountable if they chose to ignore warning and failed to
mitigate risks with preventive actions--like disconnecting all telephone
modems."

Harris warns election officials: "Disconnect those modems NOW. If you
don't. You have to be replaced." For reporters: "Some election officials
will lie to you. Show your kids what bravery looks like. Be courageous.
Report the truth."

As public awareness and more knowledge generates increased activism
during November--perhaps in the form of multiple protracted lawsuits,
the American people may ultimately ask to go "home where we belong,"
i.e. elections with carefully certified and audited paper ballot trails.

A dishonest, fraudulent election is nothing more than a coup d' etat--a
non-violent overthrow of the United States government. Traceable,
certifiable paper ballots are much safer and will cost far less in the
long run when an election necessitates a vote recount. But dare we vote
on it first?

Beverly Harris and Andy Stephenson may be contacted at

www.BlackBoxVoting.org