Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried

Off hand, I'm not sure if this is realiable information. A lot of unsupported conclusions.. But I'll post it for those who want to dig.

Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried

They note that Kathy Dopp's www.ustogether.org table comparing party registrations in each of Florida's 67 counties, the method of voting used and the number of votes cast for each presidential candidate, blaming optical scans, was easy to disprove - as was the elections department in Cleveland posting of turnout figures on its site that seemed to show more votes being cast in some communities than there were registered voters - which was caused by the clumping of absentee ballots into only one line problem. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/politics/12theory.htm... Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried By TOM ZELLER Jr. And the early Election Day polls, conducted for a consortium of television networks and The Associated Press, which proved largely inaccurate in showing Mr. Kerry leading in Florida and Ohio, continued to be offered as evidence that the Bush team somehow cheated. Jake White, the owner of the Web log primordium.org, argues that he and other election-monitoring Web posters are not motivated solely by partisan politics. "While there are no doubt large segments of this movement that are being driven by that," he said in an e-mail message, "I prefer to think of it as discontent over the way the election was held." A preliminary study produced by the Voting Technology Project, a cooperative effort between the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came to a similar conclusion. Its study found "no particular patterns" relating to voting systems and the final results of the election. "The 'facts' that are being circulated on the Internet," the study concluded, "appear to be selectively chosen to make the point." AGAIN THE CAL TECH STUDY USED FINAL EXIT POLLS THAT HAD BEEN ADJUSTED FOR MAXIMUM FIT TO ACTUAL VOTES!!!!!!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x982927

Avi Ruben Finds Security Hole In Diebold Source Code

Avi Ruben Finds Security Hole In Diebold Source Code

This is very important news for unraveling the fraud in the 2004 elections! I'm hoping more comes out today on this...Computer Scientist and E-Vote Activist Ruben and his students are working on it right now. His short discovery announcement to KOS is <Dr. Rubin's students pored over 48,609 lines of code that make up this software. One line in partictular stood out over all the rest: #defineDESKEY((des_KEY8F2654hd4" All commercial programs have provisions to be encrypted so as to protect them from having their contents read or changed by anyone not having the key..The line that staggered the Hopkin's team was that the method used to encrypt the Diebold machines was a method called Digital Encryption Standard (DES), a code that was broken in 1997 and is NO LONGER USED by anyone to secure prograns.F2654hd4 was the key to the encryption. Moreover, because the KEY was IN the source code, all Diebold machines would respond to the same key. Unlock one, you have then ALL unlocked. I can't believe there is a person alive who wouldn't understand the reason this was allowed to happen. This wasen't a mistake by any stretch of the imagination. This was a fixed election, plain and simple. This second coup d'etat is either stopped now or America ceases to be.>> At http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/10/1172/9052 some responders had the expertise to see the significance of his discovery. Avi may have "accidentally" got the source code when he worked in the 2004 election in Baltimore county. He may be looking for a way to describe the "accident" that doesn't get him in legal hot water. Diebold has been so secretive that it took a bit of a spy operation to get ahold of that code!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x980652

BBV Maker Admits ITA Certification a Sham

BBV Maker Admits ITA Certification a Sham

(Mods: This is a transcript from an interview and had no headline on the site) http://www.wishtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1647598&nav=0R... Amazing candor followed by lying about political donations. A year ago when I called BBV "faith-based voting" I had no idea that even members of the industry view it that way. Excerpts: What has increased scrutiny of the BBV industry done for the end user (voter)? What has that done for the end user? Not a whole lot. Aren’t there federal standards to ensure that voting systems are accurate, reliable and secure? Unfortunately the ITA (independent testing authority) has a limited scope in what they can test and check on the system. It is based on time and economics. So what do ITAs not test? (Picks up electrical cord.) UL says that this will not shock you and it will not catch fire. They don’t tell you that it actually works. That’s beyond the scope of UL testing. Absolutely nothing will you see in the FEC requirements that this (puts hand on DRE voting machine) has to work. It has to have these functions. But it doesn’t have to work. State Testing? We've been somewhat loosely monitored by the states. There's a lot of trust that the vendors are out for the best interest of the local jurisdictions. Maybe it's just the leap of faith that the states feel that the federal testing authorities have done an adequate job... Local testing? Local council, local commissioners typically don't get involved in the evaluation of equipment. And that's not a bad thing. The core security foundation of BBV I guess it's just a leap of faith and understanding that what we're doing is what we're presenting to the county. So there is a bit of uncertainty there. There has to be faith in their local election boards. It's one of those areas of a leap of faith. That you really do have to have a faith in your local jurisdiction, that they are conducting equitable elections in the best faith of the voters. The larger the jurisdiction, the more scrutiny should exist. Partisan politcal ties? I don't get involved in political donations. We have records that show, Jim (Sr.), that you made political contributions to State Representative Kathy Richardson, a Republican who first began purchasing MicroVote equipment in 1990 when she was Hamilton County clerk. We understand she also serves as Hamilton County Election Administrator and plans to purchase more MicroVote equipment. (According to Federal Election Commission records, the senior Ries also made a $1,000 donation to Republican John R. Price’s 1997 campaign run for the U.S. Senate. Price was MicroVote’s attorney for the Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, lawsuit and appeal.) How does the voter know that his or her vote is counted correctly?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x978142

Florida E-Vote Fraud? Unlikely

By Kim Zetter

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65665,00.html

02:00 AM Nov. 10, 2004 PT

Since the election, liberal blogs and discussion sites have been raising a ruckus over an analysis of Florida voting results that's been spreading on the internet, which shows President Bush received a much higher number of votes than the number of registered Republicans in many counties.

The analysis has led lawyers for the Democratic Party to look into allegations of fraud, and was cited in a letter sent by Democrats in the House of Representatives last week to the Government Accountability Office requesting an election investigation.

But academics at several universities, who received a flood of e-mail urging them to look into the matter, say the results are due to high numbers of Democrats in rural areas voting across party lines, and to independent voters who chose Bush in higher proportions to Sen. John Kerry.

The academics say the intense scrutiny has been good for democracy and has highlighted the need for instituting mandatory election audits that would help catch anomalies with voting machines and restore voter confidence in results. But Stanford University professor of government Jonathan Wand said the analysis can be harmful if done improperly.

"It's important that when allegations are made that people bring to bear the correct evidence and statistical analysis to actually back it up," Wand said. "What is destructive is when the allegations are made and they are misconceived or implausible. That's not helping anything. But the general process of people paying attention is a very good one."

It all began last week when a voter posted a chart online showing that in 47 of 67 Florida counties, Bush received more votes than there are registered Republicans. In 15 counties, Bush received two times more votes than the number of registered Republicans, and in four counties, he received more than three times the number of registered Republicans. In Dixie County, for example, 9,676 people registered to vote. Nearly 78 percent of them were registered Democrats while 15 percent were registered Republicans. Yet Bush received 4,433 votes, while Kerry received only 1,959. Overall, Bush received about 20,000 more votes than there are registered Republicans in the state.

Activist Sam Parry called the numbers "so statistically stunning" that they bordered on the unbelievable.

The counties with suspicious results all used optical-scan machines, made by various manufacturers such as Diebold Election Systems and Election Systems & Software. Ironically, in counties using touch-screen voting machines -- which activists predicted would be the source of fraud this year -- Bush's votes were more proportionate to the number of registered Republicans.

The optical-scan results could be explained if many so-called third-party voters -- such as those registered for the Green Party or those who registered independent -- voted for Bush. But Bush's votes exceeded the number of Republicans and third-party registrants in many counties, meaning that a large number of Democrats voted for Bush.

Activists and progressive commentators reject the notion that large numbers of Democrats voted for Bush, because the Democrats put a lot of effort into increasing turnout for their man, Kerry. And early exit polls showed that Bush would receive only about 14 percent of the Democratic vote in Florida (a figure that lines up with the 13 percent Bush received in 2000). The polls also showed Kerry winning Florida's independent votes 57 percent to 41 percent.

The discussion in online forums and on activist news sites suggests that the optical-scan machines may have been rigged or possessed glitches that gave Kerry votes to Bush. Parry wrote, "If Bush's totals weren't artificially enhanced, they would represent one of the most remarkable electoral achievements in U.S. history."

Activists have been calling for a manual recount of optical-scan paper ballots, which they say would show whether the computer-counted tallies match the paper ballots. They are urging presidential candidate Ralph Nader to request a recount in Florida, as he recently did in New Hampshire.

Although the 20,000 non-Republican votes for Bush would not change the election outcome -- Bush won Florida by about 350,000 votes -- activists say the optical-scan anomaly, combined with other problems in the state (such as touch-screen machines that registered votes for Bush when voters pressed the screen for Kerry) should be examined.

But according to academics, the internet pundits are reading the data out of context. Demographic figures and vote trends over several years show the numbers to be consistent with previous elections. According to University of California at Berkeley political scientist Henry Brady, the Republican vote share has been going up in Florida's rural optical-scan counties for years.

"If you look at a trend line, what you got in 2004 is what you'd expect. There's nothing odd going on there," Brady said. "We're not unwilling to entertain the idea that screw-ups occurred. But to just use 2004 as your basis is not the best way to do analysis."

Three professors of government also examined the numbers after being pressured by many people, including lawyers for the Democratic Party, and concluded the same thing.

Walter Mebane of Cornell University, Jasjeet Sekhon of Harvard University and Jonathan Wand of Stanford did extensive analysis of the 2000 election, and concluded that Vice President Al Gore should have won the presidential election. But this time Bush won.

"I don't believe Bush really won in 2000," Sekhon said. "So people think our bias should be that Bush didn't win again. But that's not what we've found from this data."

Sekhon said most of the Florida counties in question are small, rural Florida Panhandle counties. The area has a high percentage of registered Democrats, but they're primarily elderly white voters who have been increasingly voting Republican without changing their party affiliation. Indeed, results for the optical-scan counties in 2000 showed the same disproportionate number of votes going to Bush.

Activists say this means the fraud was going on for years, but Sekhon points out that much of Kerry's campaign money in Florida came from cities, whereas Bush's money came from rural areas like the optical-scan counties. Activists say the results still should not have happened because the Democrats had done extensive voter registration in Florida.

But Sekhon said this assumes that Republican and Democratic voters are the same. Although Democratic and Republican registrations increased this year, the two parties went after different types of voters, which affected the turnout and results. Republicans went after occasional voters -- voters who went to polls inconsistently -- while Democrats went after people who had never voted. Of the two groups, the latter were less likely to cast ballots on Election Day, because they were less committed to voting.

"It's better to target marginal and sometime voters, rather than people who have never voted," Sekhon said.

Furthermore, although Democratic registrants increased more than Republican registrants this year, the largest increase in registration numbers was among independent voters, who tend to vote Republican. Sekhon said despite the increased registration numbers for Democrats, Democratic registration in Florida had gone down overall in the last decade -- from 89 percent of total registration to 69 percent, a fact activists ignored.

Walter Mendane of Cornell said just because they didn't find fraud in Florida "doesn't mean that nothing went wrong in this election. It just means this particular thing is not what went wrong. It may be that if one looks at the election results overall, you may still find other surprising things."

The academics said they don't expect the rumors to disappear. Sekhon said because state laws vary about which votes get counted and how states audit elections, voters are mistrustful, especially when election officials fail to follow state laws, as in Florida recently where the secretary of state ruled that counties using touch-screen machines wouldn't have to recount votes if anyone contested an election -- a violation of state law.

Sekhon said it's reasonable for people to think that something was amiss in this election.

"We know something really bad happened in 2000," Sekhon said, "so why is it unreasonable to think that in 2004 the same thing happened?"

Questions about election results won't go away, he said, until the government mandates a system for routinely auditing elections nationwide as Canada does. Although California has a mandatory 1 percent manual recount law -- which often catches glitches that occurred with optical-scan machines and other equipment -- other states do not. The rumors in Florida could disappear, for example, if election officials recounted a percentage of the optical-scan ballots. But unless Nader or someone else requests it, it won't happen.

- - -

Joanna Glasner contributed to this story. To read Wired News' complete coverage of e-voting, see the Machine Politics section.

Who Counts in Ohio?

Who Counts in Ohio?
By Steve Weissman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Thursday 11 November 2004

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111104A.shtml

Is Team Bush stealing the presidential election in Ohio? And, if it is, can the rest of us do anything to save our embattled democracy?

For those watching American TV or reading the dailies, and nothing more, my questions probably sound loopy, straight from the conspiracy theorists I so often criticize. For those surfing the Internet or scanning this week's flood of round-robin emails, the questions point to one of history's great crimes. The truth, as far as I can see it, falls betwixt, between, and beyond.

Nearly three months ago, I predicted that the Bush campaigners would, in fact, try to steal the election. They would, I argued, do it the old-fashioned American way - with "a massive effort to keep as many as three million pro-Democratic Afro-Americans, Native Americans, and non-Cuban Hispanics from voting."

Nowhere did the GOP try harder to keep minorities from voting - or having their votes counted - than in Ohio, as I'll show in a moment. Just hold in mind that, barring unexpected defections, Ohio's 20 electoral votes will prove decisive on December 13 when the Electoral College meets in the various state capitols to cast their ballots. If the present tally holds, Kerry and Edwards will get 252 votes against 286 for Bush and Cheney. Were the Buckeye State to switch from red to blue, Kerry-Edwards would win 272 to 266. As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.

Could Ohio still change its vote?

Yes, it could, but don't bet on it. The Kerry-Edwards campaign, the White House, and the major media have already awarded victory to Bush and Cheney, taking the public spotlight off Ohio election officials. But, as with so much else in our Rube Goldberg version of democracy, wiggle room remains. Concession speeches, no matter how moving, can be retracted, which - to quote a colleague - would be the mother of all flip-flops. Nor, unless I missed something, do claims of victory from Karl Rove or Peter Jennings have the force of law.

The news, then, is that Ohio is still counting. According to Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the chief election official, Bush presently leads Kerry by 136,483 votes. This includes domestic absentee ballots and those from civilians abroad, but not from overseas military, which will keep coming in until Friday, November 12.

Bush's lead will likely become smaller as Secretary Blackwell and bi-partisan County Election Boards sort out errors in the election night result. Most famously, Franklin County - which includes Columbus, the state capital - has reported a malfunction on a touch-screen voting system in one precinct. According to officials, the precinct gave Mr. Bush nearly 4,000 votes than he actually received. All of Ohio's 88 counties have reportedly been asked to look for similar cock-ups.

Against Bush's 136,483-vote lead, officials have in hand nearly 250,000 uncounted ballots. Some 155,428 are provisional ballots, where voters were initially challenged or other problems came up. Another 93,000 are "spoiled ballots," which - according to officials - showed either no vote for president or votes for more than one candidate. These are paper punch cards like the ones with the hanging, dimpled, and pregnant chads that in Election 2000 made my home state of Florida a national laughing stock.

Most pundits agree that Ohio's spoiled and provisional ballots came overwhelmingly from Democratic, heavily African-American precincts, while the far smaller number of overseas military ballots will likely break toward Bush.

The election boards are currently verifying the eligibility of voters throughout the state who cast provisional ballots. This Saturday, November 13, the boards should begin to count those from voters they deem legitimately registered. In past elections, officials have disqualified some 10% of provisional ballots, which would reduce the number to just under 140,000.

We should know by Saturday how many provisional ballots officials have accepted and how many overseas military ballots they have received.

To trigger an automatic recount, which would reconsider the "spoiled ballots," Kerry needs to reduce Bush's lead to some 19,000 votes, according to Democratic Party officials. Given the current tally, this would require winning over 90% of 140,000 qualified provisional ballots, and half of the overseas military absentees, or a comparable mix. Not likely, even to a Red Sox fan.

Otherwise, the Kerry camp would have to request a recount, which they will not do unless the provisional votes reduce Bush's lead sufficiently to make the "spoiled ballots" look irresistible.

To make Kerry's odds even tougher, the man running the game - Secretary of State Ken Blackwell -also co-chairs the Ohio committee to re-elect George Bush. A former mayor of Cincinnati, Undersecretary of HUD, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Blackwell is one of the national GOP's most prominent African-American officials and a leading candidate to replace Bob Taft as Governor of Ohio. More to the point, he publicly spearheaded Republican efforts in the state to reduce the number of his fellow African-Americans whose votes would go to the Democrats

In some cases, the courts over-ruled him, and - much to their credit - most black voters stood up his harassing tactics. But Blackwell never stopped trying.

As chief election officer, he decreed that voters, if challenged, could cast provisional ballots only at their correct precinct. Previously, they could vote anywhere in the county in which they were registered. When a lower court over-ruled him, he appealed the decision and got his restriction reinstated. This might, in part, explain why Ohio now has some 100,000 fewer provisional ballots than many Democrats expected.

Less successfully, Blackwell tried to enforce an outdated rule that polling stations could recognize voter registrations only if printed on heavy bond paper, even though local election boards had officially approved lighter-weigh forms. Had the courts not stopped him, this would have kept thousands of newly registered Democrats from voting.

Similarly, Blackwell refused a request from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to inform former felons that, according to Ohio law, they had every right to vote.

He presided over efforts to send massive numbers of poll-watchers into predominantly African-American precincts to challenge prospective voters. Again a Federal Court curtailed the effort, which looked calculated to slow down the process so much that prospective voters would turn away in frustration.

He failed to provide African-American precincts with sufficient voting machines, which added to the incredibly long lines waiting to voting. Many people stood for hours, and no one knows how many walked away.

Finally, he made the decision to keep the punch card voting, which everyone in America knew deprived people - most often minorities - of their right to vote.

Now the fox guarding the hen house, Ken Blackwell presides over his own sordid success.

---

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he writes for t r u t h o u t.

Latest Conspiracy Theory -- Kerry Won -- Hits the Ether

Latest Conspiracy Theory -- Kerry Won -- Hits the Ether

By Manuel Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating

Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, November 11, 2004; Page A02

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41106-2004Nov10.html

MIAMI, Nov. 10 -- The e-mail subject lines couldn't be any bigger and bolder: "Another Stolen Election," "Presidential election was hacked," "Ohio Fraud."

Even as Sen. John F. Kerry's campaign is steadfastly refusing to challenge the results of the presidential election, the bloggers and the mortally wounded party loyalists and the spreadsheet-wielding conspiracy theorists are filling the Internet with head-turning allegations. There is the one about more ballots cast than registered voters in the big Ohio county anchored by Cleveland. There are claims that a suspicious number of Florida counties ended up with Bush vote totals that were far larger than the number of registered Republican voters. And then there is the one that might be the most popular of all: the exit polls that showed Kerry winning big weren't wrong -- they were right.

Each of the claims is buoyed by enough statistics and analysis to sound plausible. In some instances, the theories are coming from respected sources -- college engineering professors fascinated by voting technology, Internet journalists, election reform activists. Ultimately, none of the most popular theories holds up to close scrutiny. And the people who most stand to benefit from the conspiracy theories -- the Kerry campaign and the Democratic National Committee -- are not biting.

"At this point the number of irregularities brought to our attention is not going to change the outcome of the election," said DNC spokesman Jano Cabrera. "The simple fact of the matter is that Republicans received more votes than Democrats, and we're not contesting this election."

The Ohio vote-fraud theory appears to stem from the curious ways of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. During even-numbered years the county's canvassing board posts vote totals that include the results from outside the county from congressional districts that spill over Cuyahoga's borders. The quirk made it look as if the county had 90,000 more votes than voters.

The disparities were spotted, and urgent mass mailings began: "Ohio precincts report up to 1,586% turnout . . . 30 Precincts in Ohio's Cuyahoga County report 'over' 100% turnout!" Later, the county added a disclaimer to its Web site in an attempt to explain the numbers.

"It takes me about three times to explain" why the fraud allegation is untrue, said Kimberly Bartlett, community outreach specialist for the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. "You have to ask them why no top Democrat is making these charges."

There also have been reports of more votes counted than voters in some counties in Florida and North Carolina. Steve Ansolabehere of the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project said the preliminary results do not add up. "We'll see if there's anything dramatic or widespread once we see the full certifications come in," he said.

The Florida case is more nuanced than the Ohio voting battle. Numerous bloggers have noted that President Bush's vote totals in 47 Florida counties were larger -- in some cases much larger -- than the number of registered Republican voters in the same counties. A widely distributed piece on Consortiumnews.com said the results "are so statistically stunning that they border on the unbelievable."

The article's main numbers are correct. But the central premise -- that there is something suspicious about Bush getting more votes than the number of registered Republicans in rural counties, which use paper ballots -- may not be suspicious at all.

It is does not account for thousands of independents or for voters who do not list party affiliation. It is also common for Florida Democrats, particularly the "Dixiecrats" in the northern reaches of the state and the Panhandle, to vote for Republicans, a pattern that is repeated in much of the Deep South.

"Florida has always been the land of the Dixiecrats," said Walter R. Mebane Jr., a professor of government at Cornell University who specializes in voting issues. "In Florida, as you go north, you go south."

Despite its apparent flaws, the Florida theory raises some interesting questions. For instance, a further look at Florida voting patterns shows that the number of counties with more Bush votes than registered Republicans jumped from 32 in 2000 to 47 in 2004. Bush's improved performance might be explained by Al Gore, a southern moderate, having had more appeal to Dixiecrats four years ago than Kerry, who is from Massachusetts, did in this election.

The theories on exit polls are even more slippery. Because the early exit polls that were leaked and caused so much excitement among Democrats are not publicly distributed, the criticisms have not been based on statistics. Instead there are comments such as those from Zvi Drezner, a professor at the California State University at Fullerton business and economics school, who wrote that "the exit polls did not 'lie' " and described "a gut feeling that the machines did not report the correct count."

Many voting experts say the theory that the exit polls were correct is deeply flawed because the polls oversampled women. MIT political scientist Charles Stewart III also has said focusing solely on the early polls favoring Kerry in Ohio and Florida is the wrong approach because exit polls in some Democratic-leaning states tilted toward Bush, evening out the national picture.

The U.S. Justice Department, which handles complaints fielded by a bipartisan commission formed after the 2000 election chaos, said the allegations of vote buying and voter-registration fraud were no different than the pattern of previous elections. But other sources are documenting huge numbers of complaints. 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, but nothing that would overturn the Nov. 2 outcome.

Still, messages posted on the aptly named Quixotegroup discussion cluster -- which takes its name from the literary figure Don Quixote who used his lance to tilt against windmills -- urged members to send fraud evidence to the law firm of Kerry's brother, Cameron Kerry, to persuade the Democratic candidate to "unconcede."

A high-ranking Democrat, mindful of balancing respect for the complainers and a desire to move on, summed up the conspiracy theorists with a line from Alexander Pope: "Hope springs eternal in the human breast."

Keating reported from Washington. Staff writers Paul Farhi and Susan Schmidt in Washington contributed to this report.

http://english.pravda.ru/mailbox/22/101/399/14556_ballots.html

Did Bush fix the elections?

11/09/2004 10:54

Why did Kerry throw in the towel so soon? The appearance of Osama bin Laden bang on cue was suspicious, to say the least, as is now the increasing evidence pointing toward election fraud in the United States of America on November 2nd. Exit polls in sensitive districts just don't add up to the official figures. Did Bush fix it? In Ohio, for instance, the sensitive state which gave Bush the 20 electoral college votes he needed, CNN exit polls among women awarded Kerry the vote by 53 to 47% and among men by 51 to 49%. The question was "Who did you vote for" but the point is were the votes counted? Let us examine the various complaints against the official result on November 2nd and let us see in how many ways the Bush regime could have influenced the vote, through ballot tricks. Absence of Control Russian observer Aleksei Ostrovsky declared that he was shocked by what he saw. "It is enough to say 'I am Mr. Smith' and (the person) is allowed to vote. The same person can exit one polling station and vote again using the same procedure". Spoilage These votes belong principally to African Americans, Hispanics or ethnic minorities, who have not been properly instructed how to vote and more interestingly, would be more inclined to vote for the Democratic Party. On average, these votes account for 3% of the total and can be excluded from the count arbitrarily, or included, depending on the whim of the Secretary of State in the State concerned. For example, in 2000, Secretary of State Kate Harris in Florida decided to arbitrarily exclude the counting of 179,855 votes, the so-called hanging chads. It was worthwhile: Ms. Harris got a seat in Congress and Bush won the state. In Ohio, 2000 the spoiled vote accounted for 1,96% of the total, 110.000 votes. Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell stated shortly before the 2004 election, "the possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state's primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity". The Ultra-right Blackwell would therefore have been well prepared for what was going to ensue. In New Mexico, uncounted spoiled votes in 2000 accounted for 2,68% of the total, translated into 18.000 votes. Bush won the state by 11.620. The Challenge In some states, including Ohio, the Republicans adopted the Challenge, in which Republican watchdogs manned the doors of the polling stations and challenged those they thought might be ineligible to vote - mostly African Americans and Hispanics, who would be more likely to vote Democrat. The idea is to block the line, forcing people to lose patience and go away. Provisional votes Provisional ballots are often handed to African Americans and Hispanics, rather than the type of vote that will be counted. Provisional and absentee ballots are not always counted and it is the decision of the Secretary of State of the State concerned to decide whether to count them or not. Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. There were between 175,000 and 250,000 uncounted votes. Turning away voters Santiago Juarez, of the "Faithful Citizens' Program" in New Mexico, stated that voters were turned away from some polling stations. In Ohio, at the Glenwood Elementary station in Toledo, over 200 people left the station because it opened late and then ran out of pencils - this being in a primarily Democratic district. Voter Suppression Before the election, the Baltimore Chronicle reported, "Through a combination of sophisticated vote rustling, ethnic cleansing of voter rolls, absentee ballots gone AWOL, machines that 'spoil' votes, John Kerry begins with a nationwide deficit that could easily reach one million votes". In Ohio, Ken Blackwell tried to force through legislation requiring that registration applications not posted on the correct weight of paper should be discounted, then he sought to suppress the provisional ballots, challenging the validity of 35.000 new voter applications. Manipulation of votes and results In Florida, 13 counties reported more votes than voters, these accounting for 39.4% of the vote. In Ohio, at the Gahana 1 Precinct, Bush received 6,253 votes, Kerry 1,916 votes, and the others, 23. This totals 8,192 votes, which is strange, since only 4,346 people voted. At another Precinct in Gahana, Ohio, 4,258 votes were cast for Bush and only 260 for Kerry, while only 638 people were registered as having voted. Electronic vote and rigged machines Hernando Country recorded 0 votes. In Ohio, 14,6% of votes cast were by e-voting machines, which are susceptible to hacking and fraudulent manipulation and the Republicans had worked hard to exclude the possibility of there being a paper trail to provide any proof. In Florida, electronic scan machines registered a gain of 128.45% for Bush and a decrease of 21% for Kerry, whereas in some places a gain of 400% was recorded for the Republicans and in Liverty County, 700%. Strange. Ohio purchased e-voting machines from the Diebold Corporation, whose CEO Wally O'Dell is a Bush fundraiser, who promised "to help Ohio deliver its votes to the President". What a good professional he appears to have been. Fewer machines were placed in Democrat areas in many Precincts, causing long queues to form and people to turn away, frustrated. In Ohio, Blackwell held back the distribution of 2000 machines. Electoral fraud In Franklin County, Ohio, Ron O"Brien, County prosecutor declared to 10TV that "people are being paid to register new voters". One man who died in February was registered to vote and in another case, 25 applications belonged to the same person. In Chaves County, New Mexico, which has an enormous Hispanic, African American and Native American population (who traditionally vote Democrat), Bush won by 68% to 31%. ?? Lost votes In a county in North Carolina, 4.500 votes went missing due to software problems - the computer had run out of memory. Not very impressive, especially for a country that likes to stick its unwanted nose into the electoral affairs of other nations and then to make snide remarks. On the basis of this evidence, the USA had better not ever again make any statement whatsoever about fair voting procedures, anywhere. In conclusion, does this surprise anyone? Not really, since Bush and his regime have spent four long years telling lies and cooking up tall stories. The question remains, why did John Kerry throw in the towel so soon, since all this was taking place. Didn't he know? Wasn't he informed? Or did something more sinister happen? Or, could something else be behind both Messrs. Bush and Kerry, such as the neo-conservative clique orchestrated by Cheney, a form of supra-political party eminence grise which really pulls the strings in the USA and dictates Washington's foreign and domestic policy?

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

California settles electronic voting lawsuit against Diebold

California settles electronic voting lawsuit against Diebold

http://www.kesq.com/global/story.asp?s=2549709&ClientType=Printable

SAN FRANCISCO California Attorney General Bill Lockyer has announced a two-point-six (m) million dollar settlement with Diebold (DEE-bohld) -- resolving a lawsuit alleging that the company sold shoddy voting equipment in the state.

Some critics are characterizing the settlement as a slap on the wrist.

Diebold also agreed to pay an undisclosed sum to partially reimburse Alameda, San Diego and other counties for the cost of paper backup ballots, ink and other supplies in last week's election.

California's secretary of state banned the use of one type of Diebold machine in May, after problems with the machines disenfranchised an unknown number of voters.

Internet buzz on vote fraud is dismissed(Boston Globe/ABCNote says silly!)

Internet buzz on vote fraud is dismissed(Boston Globe/ABCNote says silly!)

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/TheNote/story?id=156238 ABCNOTE SAYS "All you need to know about the status of the Boston Globe and the Massachusetts Democratic Party, the Boston Globe and the national Democratic Party, and the Boston Globe and Senator Kerry can be summed up in today's paper: a front-pager on the resignation of the state party chair, a front-pager on how the Internet silliness about the election being fixed is, well, Internet silliness, and an inside wire story chronicling the return of John Kerry to the Hill and public life." http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/articles/... / Internet buzz on vote fraud is dismissed By Rick Klein, Globe Staff | November 10, 2004 WASHINGTON -- President Bush recorded 4,258 votes to Senator John F. Kerry's 260 in one suburb of Columbus, Ohio -- where only 638 ballots were cast. Across Ohio, some 76,000 punch-card ballots did not register votes for president, and officials have only begun to comb through 155,428 provisional ballots. In Holmes County, Florida, though nearly three-quarters of registered voters are Democrats, Bush wiped out Kerry, 6,410 to 1,810, in results that mirrored those in several other counties where optical-scan paper ballots were used. And in Florida's Broward County, after the first 32,000 absentee ballots were fed into the computer system, a software glitch caused additional ballots to be subtracted from vote totals, rather than added. Kerry campaign officials and a range of election-law specialists agree that while machines made errors and long lines in Democratic precincts kept many voters away, there's no realistic chance that Kerry actually beat Bush. Still, with reports swirling on the Internet, six Democratic members of Congress have asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate. Leading academics have joined the fray as well, saying that the integrity and future of the nation's voting system demand a vetting of all claims. ''I think it's safe to say that on the votes that were cast in Ohio, Bush won," said Dan Tokaji, a law professor at Ohio State University who is working with the ACLU to challenge Ohio's use of punch-card ballots. ''If the margin had been 36,000 rather than 136,000, we would have seen another post-election meltdown." As for the exit polls, they remain subject to sampling errors and limitations in data gathering. The polls sponsored by a consortium of media companies had margins of error of roughly 3 percent, and in closely contested states shown to be leaning toward Kerry, narrow Bush wins were actually within the expected range. Florida's margin was larger than expected, but poll takers reported problems getting close enough to voting places to collect adequate samples, and said they feared they were not getting Bush voters to be as forthcoming with their choice as Kerry voters. Globe correspondent Alan Wirzbicki contributed to this report. Rick Klein can be reached at rklein@globe.com .

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x976168

Voter fraud uncovered in New Mexico

Porpaganda alert -- this is from the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's conservative UPI/Washington Times. Moon is a close friend of the Bush family.

Voter fraud uncovered in New Mexico

http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20041109-010659-3448r.htm

Washington, DC, Nov. 9 (UPI) -- Observers watching the counting of New Mexico's 2004 provisional and absentee ballots have uncovered evidence of voter fraud, Opinion Journal said Tuesday.

O.J. political diarist John Fund said the Bernalillo County clerk "told media outlets that observers had discovered instances of voter fraud" during the attempt to qualify 18,000 provisional and absentee ballots cast in last week's presidential election.

"In counting the first 5,000 provisional ballots," Fund reported, "observers turned up 53 instances of individuals voting more than once. They also found four voters who were dead and dozens of felons attempting to vote. In two cases, the same individual tried to vote three times: early, absentee and on Election Day."

The issue is not likely to die a quiet death. New Mexico Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron asked the state supreme court Monday to overturn a lower court ruling allowing Republican observers into the polls in Sandoval and Dona Ana counties. Vigil-Giron, a Democrat and elected official, is also seeking permission to evict the observers the Bernalillo County clerk allowed in to watch the counting, contending that New Mexico law does not provide for observers to be part of the review process.

President Bush currently leads in New Mexico, a state he lost by 366 votes in 2000 after a disputed vote count. In the 2004 count, Bush is ahead by 8,300 votes, or about 1 percent.

Bush's 'Incredible' Vote Tallies

Bush's 'Incredible' Vote Tallies
By Sam Parry
Consortium News

Tuesday 09 November 2004

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111004W.shtml

George W. Bush's vote tallies, especially in the key state of Florida, are so statistically stunning that they border on the unbelievable.

While it's extraordinary for a candidate to get a vote total that exceeds his party's registration in any voting jurisdiction - because of non-voters - Bush racked up more votes than registered Republicans in 47 out of 67 counties in Florida. In 15 of those counties, his vote total more than doubled the number of registered Republicans and in four counties, Bush more than tripled the number.

Statewide, Bush earned about 20,000 more votes than registered Republicans.

By comparison, in 2000, Bush's Florida total represented about 85 percent of the total number of registered Republicans, about 2.9 million votes compared with 3.4 million registered Republicans.

Bush achieved these totals although exit polls showed him winning only about 14 percent of the Democratic vote statewide - statistically the same as in 2000 when he won 13 percent of the Democratic vote - and losing Florida's independent voters to Kerry by a 57 percent to 41 percent margin. In 2000, Gore won the independent vote by a much narrower margin of 47 to 46 percent.

[For details on the Florida turnout in 2000, see http://www.msnbc.com/m/d2k/g/polls.asp?office=P&state=FL. For details on the 2004 Florida turnout, see http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/FL/P/00/index.html.]

Exit Poll Discrepancies

Similar surprising jumps in Bush's vote tallies across the country - especially when matched against national exits polls showing Kerry winning by 51 percent to 48 percent - have fed suspicion among rank-and-file Democrats that the Bush campaign rigged the vote, possibly through systematic computer hacking.

Republican pollster Dick Morris said the Election Night pattern of mistaken exit polls favoring Kerry in six battleground states - Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa - was virtually inconceivable.

"Exit polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries. … To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here."

But instead of following his logic that the discrepancy suggested vote tampering - as it would in Latin America, Africa or Eastern Europe - Morris postulated a bizarre conspiracy theory that the exit polls were part of a scheme to have the networks call the election for Kerry and thus discourage Bush voters on the West Coast. Of course, none of the networks did call any of the six states for Kerry, making Morris's conspiracy theory nonsensical. Nevertheless, some Democrats have agreed with Morris's bottom-line recommendation that the whole matter deserves "more scrutiny and investigation." [The Hill, Nov. 8, 2004]

Erroneous Votes

Democratic doubts about the Nov. 2 election have deepened with anecdotal evidence of voters reporting that they tried to cast votes for Kerry but touch-screen voting machines came up registering their votes for Bush.

In Ohio, election officials said an error with an electronic voting system in Franklin County gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, more than 1,000 percent more than he actually got.

Yet, without a nationwide investigation, it's impossible to know whether those cases were isolated glitches or part of a more troubling pattern.

If Bush's totals weren't artificially enhanced, they would represent one of the most remarkable electoral achievements in U.S. history.

In the two presidential elections since Sen. Bob Dole lost to Bill Clinton in 1996, Bush would have increased Republican voter turnout nationwide by a whopping 52 percent from just under 40 million votes for Dole to just under 60 million votes for the GOP ticket in 2004.

Such an increase in voter turnout over two consecutive election cycles is not unprecedented, but has historically flowed from landslide victories that see shifting voting patterns, with millions of crossover voters straying from one party to the other.

For example, in 1972, Richard Nixon increased Republican turnout by 73.5 percent over Barry Goldwater's performance two elections earlier. But this turnout was amplified by the fact that Goldwater lost in 1964 to Lyndon Johnson by about 23 percentage points and Nixon trounced George McGovern by 23 percentage points.

What's remarkable about Bush's increase over the last two elections is that Democrats have done an impressive job boosting their own voter turnout from 1996 to 2004. Over this period, candidates Al Gore and John Kerry increased Democratic turnout by about 18 percent, from roughly 47.5 million votes in 1996 to nearly 56 million in 2004.

What this suggests is that Bush is not so much winning his new votes from Democrats crossing over, but rather by going deeper than many observers thought possible into new pockets of dormant Republican voters.

Bush's Gains

But where did these new voters come from, and how did Bush manage to accelerate his turnout gains at a time when the Democratic ticket was also substantially increasing its turnout?

While the statistical analysis of these new voters is only just beginning, Bush's ability to find nearly 9 million new voters in an election year when his Democratic opponent also saw gains of about 5 million new voters is the story of the 2004 election.

Exit polls also suggest that voters identifying themselves as Republicans voted as a greater proportion of the electorate than in 2000 and that Bush won a slightly greater percent of the Republican vote.

The party breakdown in 2000 was 39 percent Democrats, 35 percent Republicans, and 27 percent independents. In 2000, Bush won the Republican vote by 91 percent to 8 percent; narrowly won the independent vote by 47 percent to 45 percent and picked up 11 percent of the Democratic vote compared with Gore's Democratic turnout of 86 percent. [See http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/epolls/US/P000.html for details.]

According to exit polls this year, the turnout broke evenly among Democrats and Republicans, with about 37 percent each. Independents represented about 26 percent of the electorate. Kerry actually did better among independents, winning that group of voters by a narrow 49 percent to 48 percent margin.

However, Bush did slightly better among the larger number of Republican voters, winning 93 percent of their vote, while matching his 2000 performance by taking about 11 percent of the Democratic vote.

Registration Up

While this turnout might strike many observers as unusual in an election year that witnessed huge voter registration and mobilization efforts by Democrats and groups aligned with Democrats, the increased GOP turnout does seem to fit with the campaign strategy deployed by the Bush team to run to the base.

From the start of the 2004 campaign, political strategist Karl Rove and the Bush team made its goals clear - maximize Bush's support among social and economic conservatives - including Evangelicals and Club for Growth/anti-government conservatives - and turn them out by driving up Kerry's negatives with harsh attacks questioning Kerry's leadership credentials.

This strategy emerged from Rove's estimate after the 2000 election that 4 million Evangelical voters stayed home that year. The Bush/Rove strategy in 2004 rested primarily on turning out that base of support.

But, even if one were to estimate that 100 percent of these Evangelical voters turned out for Bush in 2004 and that 100 percent of Bush's 2000 supporters turned out again for him, this still leaves about 5 million new Bush voters unaccounted for.

Altogether, Bush's new 9 million votes came mainly from the largest states in the country. But nowhere was Bush's performance more incredible than in Florida, where Bush found roughly 1 million new voters, about 11 percent all new Bush voters nationwide and more than twice the number of new voters than in any other state other than Texas.