Democrat says he is providing FBI with evidence, including
whodunit:
> http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm
More:
> http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/03/1520249
> http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE411A.html
A source that provides pretty detailed raw information as it
breaks:
> http://www.legitgov.org/index.html#breaking_news
Very odd data from Florida (these charts don't lay out properly
in FireFox):
> http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm
Screenshots of modified exit polls:
> http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=1290765&mesg_id=1325948&page=
Two additional articles:
> http://www.spectrumz.com/z/fair_use/2004/11_04.html
> http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/11/05/loc_warrenvote05.html
(Text for articles above follows. -- Seth)
---
> http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm
Evidence Mounts That The Vote Was Hacked
by Thom Hartmann
Published on Saturday, November 6, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
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.
The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county
record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party
affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state
information into a table, available at
http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something
startling.
While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed
to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican
ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties
using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a
central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking – the results
seem to contain substantial anomalies.
In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters,
69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote
was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what
is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats
largely voted for Kerry.
In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them
Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959
people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.
The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the
counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3%
registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7%
registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.
Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have
been more vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages
of registered Democrats generally equaled high percentages of
votes for Kerry. (I had earlier reported that county size was a
variable – this turns out not to be the case. Just the use of
touch-screens versus optical scanners.)
More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://us
together.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and
www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm. Note the trend line
– the only variable that determines a swing toward Bush was the
use of optical scan machines.
One possible explanation for this is the "Dixiecrat" theory, that
in Florida white voters (particularly the rural ones) have been
registered as Democrats for years, but voting Republican since
Reagan. Looking at the 2000 statistics, also available on Dopp's
site, there are similar anomalies, although the trends are not as
strong as in 2004. But some suggest the 2000 election may have
been questionable in Florida, too.
One of the people involved in Dopp's analysis noted that it may
be possible to determine the validity of the "rural Democrat"
theory by comparing Florida's white rural counties to those of
Pennsylvania, another swing state but one that went for Kerry, as
the exit polls there predicted. Interestingly, the Pennsylvania
analysis, available at
http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm, doesn't show
the same kind of swings as does Florida, lending credence to the
possibility of problems in Florida.
Even more significantly, Dopp had first run the analysis while
filtering out smaller (rural) counties, and still found that the
only variable that accounted for a swing toward Republican voting
was the use of optical-scan machines, whereas counties with
touch-screen machines generally didn't swing - regardless of
size.
Others offer similar insights, based on other data. A professor
at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in
Florida the vote to raise the minimum wage was approved by 72%,
although Kerry got 48%. "The correlation between voting for the
minimum wage increase and voting for Kerry isn't likely to be
perfect," he noted, "but one would normally expect that the gap -
of 1.5 million votes - to be far smaller than it was."
While all of this may or may not be evidence of vote tampering,
it again brings the nation back to the question of why several
states using electronic voting machines or scanners programmed by
private, for-profit corporations and often connected to modems
produced votes inconsistent with exit poll numbers.
Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever
since Election Day.
Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV,
one of the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and,
just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio
News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen
Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that
he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was
winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the
AP report.
But then the computers reported something different. In several
pivotal states.
Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls
were rigged.
Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first
Clinton campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News
regular, wrote an article for The Hill, the publication read by
every political junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a
couple of brilliant points.
"Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They
eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by
correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they
will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual
observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of
different parts of the state."
He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example,
Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado,
Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state
the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the
president won by 10 points."
Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry
sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the
various states the election was called for Bush.
How could this happen?
On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months
ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His
guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started
www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that
regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts,
only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real
"counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan
machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in
the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the
machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases
the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.
That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.
"In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national
television, "you have all the different voting machines at all
the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like
mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All
those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the
votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you
shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do
it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal
with all of them at once?"
Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What
surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like
what you and I use. It's just a regular computer."
"So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a
central tabulator?"
Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a
program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and
effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. "This is
the official program that the County Supervisor sees," she said,
pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with
Diebold's software.
Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a
test election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary
Report" and waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes
from all the various precincts," and then saw that in this faux
election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and
Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.
"Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted.
Diebold wrote a pretty good program.
But, it's running on a Windows PC.
So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to
the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon,
choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the
sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local
database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean
double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator
Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database
program like Excel.
In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in
one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had
gotten 400.
"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the
numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added
magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger."
They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS
software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and
you're checking on the progress of your election."
As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris
said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes,
Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner,
was now the loser.
Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited
an election, and it took us 90 seconds."
On live national television. (You can see the clip on
www.votergate.tv.) And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris
said, noting that it would be nearly impossible for the election
software – or a County election official - to know that the vote
database had been altered.
Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that
had Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the
election in a landslide.
Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage"
to cause people in the western states to not bother voting for
Bush, since the networks would call the election based on the
exit polls for Kerry. But the networks didn't do that, and had
never intended to.
According to congressional candidate Fisher, it makes far more
sense that the exit polls were right - they weren't done on
Diebold PCs - and that the vote itself was hacked.
And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks
this hit him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for
national office in the most-hacked swing states.
So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to
this story was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November
5th, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting
machine irregularities so far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In
the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going
through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the
exit polls had failed.
But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large
part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his
final paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be
as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I
suspect foul play."
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored
Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally
syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann .com His
most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight,"
"Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the
Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back
America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."
Also See:
Florida Secretary of State Presidential Results by County
11/02/2004 (.pdf)
(http://election.dos.state.fl.us/pdf/canvassing1.pdf)
Florida Secretary of State County Registration by Party 2/9/2004
(.pdf)
(http://election.dos.state.fl.us/voterreg/pdf/2004/2004pppParty.pdf)
---
> http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/03/1520249
We speak with investigative reporter Greg Palast and Barbara
Arnwine of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law
about voting problems in Florida, Ohio and New Mexico. [includes
rush transcript] President Bush won Florida along with its 27
electoral votes four years after the Supreme Court stopped the
recount and put him in the White House.
With 99% of precincts reporting, Bush won 52 percent of the votes
and John Kerry 47 percent. Independent presidential candidate
Ralph Nader won less than 1 percent.
Hundreds of thousands of people across the state took advantage
of early voting, which started 15 days ago. By the time the polls
opened on Nov. 2nd, more than 2 million voters had cast ballots.
But in heavily Democratic Broward County, thousands of voters
never received their absentee ballots in time.
Broward elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes came under fire over
the weekend for losing track of as many as 58,000 ballots that
were allegedly given to the Postal Service earlier in the month.
County officials moved to get the ballots sent out in time for
voters to return them by November 2nd as required by state
election rules. According to the U.S. Postal Service, after mail
carriers had left on Saturday, both Broward County and Palm Beach
County dropped off more than 8,000 absentee ballots for mailing.
Many of the ballots arrived unsealed, forcing postal employees to
take the time to seal envelopes. In a video press release from
the US Postal Service, spokesperson Gerald McKiernan described
the situation.
* Gerald McKiernan, U.S. Postal Service Spokesman speaking in
Broward County, FL on October 30.
US Postal Service, spokesperson Gerald McKiernan. The American
Civil Liberties Union has now filed a lawsuit against Secretary
of State Glenda Hood and elections supervisors in Miami-Dade and
Broward counties, asking that completed absentee ballots mailed
in the U.S. be subject to the same Nov. 12 deadline as overseas
votes. State law required those ballots to reach county offices
by Tuesday night. As the ACLU was preparing to file the suit,
Glenda Hood addressed the issue to reporters.
* Glenda Hood, Florida Secretary of State speaking on
November 2.
# Barbara Arnwine, Executive Director of the Lawyers" Committee
for Civil Rights Under Law.
# Greg Palast, investigative reporter with the BBC and author of
the books "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" and "Democracy and
Regulation." RUSH TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is available free of charge, however donations
help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of
hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous
contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...
AMY GOODMAN: In a video press release from the U.S. Postal
Service, spokesperson Gerald McKiernan described the situation.
GERALD MCKIERNAN: Well, incredibly here on Saturday
afternoon at 2:00, we received 2,467 more ballots to be sent out,
even though Dr. Snipes said she finished her work yesterday, and
that was Friday. Sadly, some of the ballots are going to Atlanta,
Georgia. This one's going to Little Rock, Arkansas. I'm not sure
we can do this. We'll deliver the local ones. We'll do the best
we can. We'll get out as many as we can and hopefully get them
returned.
AMY GOODMAN: U.S. Postal Service spokesperson Gerald McKeirnan.
The American Civil Liberties Union (A.C.L.U.) has now filed a
lawsuit against the Secretary of State, Glenda Hood and elections
supervisors in Miami, Dade, and Broward counties asking that
completed absentee ballots mailed in the U.S. be subject to the
same November 12th deadline as overseas votes. State law required
those ballots to reach county offices by Tuesday night. As the
A.C.L.U. is preparing to file the suit, Glenda Hood addressed the
issue to reporters.
REPORTER: The A.C.L.U. has already said they are going to
sue over the issue of absentee ballots in South Florida, and
accepting them, having them count past today if they're
postmarked today. I mean, are you all prepared to defend that,
and to defend the state law on that, and not have the ballots
count?
GLENDA HOOD: We will always follow State Law, and State Law
requires that absentee ballots be turned in at a certain time.
With the exception of overseas ballots, and those must be in the
Supervisor's of Elections hands by November 12th.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenda Hood, Florida's Secretary of State. We're
joined now to address this issue as well as issues around the
country of voting and problems voters faced, by Greg Palast,
investigative reporter with the B.B.C., author of the book The
Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Also, Barbara Arnwine joins us
again, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil
Rights Under Law. We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Greg
Palast, your response?
GREG PALAST: Wow. I hate to say it again, they're going to say
that I'm a spoilsport. Who shoplifted? In New Mexico and Ohio,
when I was last on your program, we called the fence and we hit
it over. We said that if this thing is going to be taken, it'll
be Florida, it'll be New Mexico, it'll be Colorado, Ohio. Florida
is, I think, suspect, but Bush may have it. Colorado is
definitely a Bush turf. New Mexico, this is the big game. This is
where. The reason why Bush may get those electoral votes, and the
White House again, and Ohio is not the count, but the non-count.
We have something in America called spoilage. I'm looking at
these CNN numbers and they all add up very neatly to 100%.
Doesn't happen. Especially the two worst states in America, in
terms of votes simply not counted for technical reason, are Ohio
and New Mexico. And guess whose votes don't get counted? In Ohio,
it's black votes. In New Mexico, it's brown and Native American
votes. I'm looking at suspect numbers out of Dona Ana, Las
Cruces. The vote numbers just came in, and you have a tremendous
non-count of Hispanic votes, 3-4 % of the entire vote there just
doesn't get counted. McKinley, you have a problem that about 8-9%
of the votes in the machines, that’s a Native American area
outside the Navajo reservation. Rio Arriba, again Hispanic votes
under counted. You get weird numbers, like two to one for Bush in
Chavez County, heavily Hispanic. It's an area called Little Texas
that republicans control. It's a suspect vote. If you take the
votes out of the garbage can in New Mexico, I have no doubt that
it was Kerry by a slim majority.
AMY GOODMAN: Barbara Arnwine.
BARBARA ARNWINE: Yes, I think what we're seeing is fascinating.
I've been watching a number of these elections, and obviously,
it's very interesting. The quotes that you played from Glenda
Hood, the Secretary of State of Florida was very telling because
she says that she will always follow state law yet they didn't
send the ballots on time as required by state law. I mean, it's a
very interesting double standard that we're still seeing out
there, governments that are failing to comply with their own
procedures and then holding voters accountable for their errors
that have been made by the government. It's a fascinating
situation. What I find interesting, I have been watching the
coverage, and one thing is obvious, that most of the news anchors
do not understand our current electoral system. The fact that
people are saying they had 100% of the count in when they hadn't
even counted provisional ballots. We have not yet counted
absentee ballots in certain states or overseas ballots, military
ballots. It's really bizarre. I mean, I think this rush to
judgment that the press has wanting to, you know, post figures
and declare victors so prematurely is part of the problem. I was
fascinated to watch Tom Brokaw and others this morning, the
station where they were saying that they didn't understand what a
provisional ballot was, some of the anchors were saying. It was
very obvious that they didn't. And it's just, I think that we
need, you know, massive education, but at least those covering it
need to be much more informed and stop talking about 100% of the
count being in when it's not. If you have not counted 176 or
whatever the count is, 276,000 ballots in Ohio, how in the world
can say that you have 100% of the count in? You don't. All you
know is that you are trying to get your count correct. I think
this whole thing has been fascinating. I also think the other
unexplored story from this election has been New Orleans. No one
is talking about what went wrong in New Orleans, how many polls
were down for so long. You know, during the day and how that
affected what everyone's been talking about instead, which is
the, they say the overwhelming unexpected victory for the
senatorial Republican, Republican senatorial candidate there. I
think that has something to do with the fact that New Orleans
had, most of their polls down for a good part of the day. So, I
think that there's, you know, a lot that's unexplored. I'm kind
of sad to see the whitewash that has been given to this election
by the media in general saying that it was, you know, it had a
few flaws, long lines, basically a good election. That's just not
true.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain provisional ballots, and what they
are when, for example, right now the issue comes down to Ohio's,
what both the Secretary of State there, Ohio's Ken Blackwell, as
well as the democrats are saying is some 250,000 provisional
ballots?
BARBARA ARNWINE: Yes. A provisional ballot is required by the
help America Vote Act. It is a particular special kind of ballot
that is used for any voter for whom an election official cannot
determine immediately whether or not that person is actually
eligible or entitled to vote, and that includes people who show
up without what may be called proper identification. It includes
people who, quote, may be in the wrong precinct. It includes, you
know, people who show in their, they registered to vote, but the
registration officials have a backlog of registrations and have
never entered their name into the system. It includes all kinds
of voters of that nature. So, you have no idea within the
provisional ballot universe, you know, who is really entitled to
vote and who actually, whose vote will ultimately be counted. So,
I think it's a fascinating, you know, procedure, but the reason
why provisional ballots exist is because in 2000, there was such
a misadventure by Florida, and failure to administer their
elections in a fair and honest way, that we, you know, the Help
America Vote Act was passed to make sure that all voters would at
least, if they showed that the polls have a right to cast a
ballot and not be turned home. What, however, what has happened
in Ohio in particular, the lawyers committee and the election
protection coalition. We have taken hundreds of calls from voters
who are complaining because in Ohio, they were turned away. They
were not even allowed to cast a provisional ballot. They were
not, you know, allowed this right, which they're entitled to
under federal law. So, we have a lot of problems all over the
state of Ohio with complaints from people upset about the fact
that they weren't even given a provisional ballot, not to talk
about the fact that they haven't been counted.
AMY GOODMAN: Greg Palast, your expose last week about a so called
caging list in Florida that was sent to instead of the
georgewbush.com website, well, you got your hands on it.
GREG PALAST: Right, we got our hands on it. And what that was
this turned out to be what was obviously a list of voters that
they wanted to challenge in Florida, the Republicans. This was,
they went to the head of the Bush campaign in Florida yesterday
during, while the polls were open, I got 12 more of these lists.
We're talking 25,000- 30,000 people, almost all African American
voters they intended to challenge, but after we broke the story
on BBC, the democrats went to court, pushed against the
Republicans, sent out letters to supervisors warning about this
stuff, and they backed down in Florida. However, they didn't back
down in Ohio, where unlike the secret lists of Florida, they were
up front causing massive problems as Barbara was speaking about
in particular, just holding up the lines, making challenges
against basically African American voters. You know this is
against the law. We had in 1965 Voting Rights Act, the whole
point of that was to stop states from using so-called legal means
of impeding the black vote, profiling black voters and saying
that "you cannot vote." Give them a provisional ballot, which for
the most part is thrown out. I'm looking in Ohio, just as I said
in New Mexico. In Ohio, you've got a tremendous problem again
with non-count of the vote. Barbara is right. When they talk
about 100% of the vote counted. Not so. They never count 100% of
the vote in Ohio it is one of the worst states in terms of
non-counts of the vote, and most of the non-count occurs in
African American areas. That's your margin. I'm sorry, if you
count all of the votes that should be counted it's not that close
of a race. It's a blue state.
BARBARA ARNWINE: Yes. I mean, it's fascinating. You know,
obviously, from a non-partisan vantage point, I mean, I find it
just absolutely fascinating that we still are talking about yet
another election in which we cannot say with any certainty that
the African American voting population was treated fairly. In
fact, we could say very clearly that there were several, several
horrible incidents that remind us that our system is not racially
neutral. For example, everything from not only the challenges,
which were very racial in their orientation, but also, you know,
the fact that in many of the precincts where African Americans
were voting, that's where people were the most adamant about, I
would say, using dual standards. For example, we got a lot of
complaints from voters who were made in African American
precincts to show double identification, but then when a white
voter would come in, they would not make them show the same
identification. They were much less stringent. These kinds of
problems. We also had the dirty tricks that we have no idea how
many people they discouraged or kept from the polls by, as we
reported last night, the recording that was going on in
Philadelphia, the automated recording that was going to African
American homes with an actor, apparently very good actor, who was
imitating Bill Clinton's voice telling African American voters
don't worry about the long lines, you can always come back and
vote on November 3.
AMY GOODMAN: Greg Palast, ten seconds.
GREG PALAST: They're also not letting people register. Black
registrations were thrown out in the Cleveland area by the tens
of thousands. Tens of thousands. I'm telling you it was not
close.
AMY GOODMAN:How do you know that?
GREG PALAST: This was an analysis by Democracy Now! Excuse me, by
Democracy South of the registration forms, which are just tossed
in the garbage, in fact.
AMY GOODMAN: Barbara Arnwine and Greg Palast, we'll leave it
there as we end today's program with the outcome of the
presidential election remaining very much in the air. A number of
groups are beginning mobilizing some against what happened
yesterday, others aimed at continuing the anti-war movement.
Early this morning as we broadcasting, the war resistors' league
held a procession that began at ground zero where the towers of
the World Trade Center once stood and headed to Wall Street.
VICKY REVERE: I live on the Lower East Side of Manhattan,
two miles from Ground Zero. I'm out here because I'm a pacifist.
I believe that war is a crime against humanity. I think this war
is worse than a lot of others in that it was totally unnecessary,
and I'm just devastated that it's going to continue on a day --
AMY GOODMAN: And thanks to Daniel Cashin for recording this
protest this morning here in New York.
To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click
here for our new online ordering or call 1 (800) 881-2359.
---
> http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE411A.html
Footprints of Electoral Fraud:
The November 2 Exit Poll Scam
by Michael Keefer
www.globalresearch.ca 5 November 2004
Republican electoral fraud in the 2004 presidential election
was widely anticipated by informed observers--whose warnings
about the opportunities for fraud offered by "black box" voting
machines supplied and serviced by corporations closely aligned
with Republican interests (and used to tally nearly a third of
the votes cast on November 2) have been amply borne out by the
results.1
One of the clear indicators of massive electoral fraud was
the wide divergence, both nationally and in swing states, between
exit poll results and the reported vote tallies. The major
villains, it would seem, were the suppliers of touch-screen
voting machines. There appears to be evidence, however, that the
corporations responsible for assembling vote-counting and exit
poll information may also have been complicit in the fraud.
Until recently, the major American corporate infomedia
networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and AP) relied on a consortium
known as the Voter News Service for vote-counting and exit poll
information. But following the scandals and consequent
embarrassments of the 2000 and 2002 elections, this consortium
was disbanded. It was replaced in 2004 by a partnership of Edison
Media Research and Mitofsky International known as the National
Election Pool.
The National Election Pool’s own data—as transmitted by CNN
on the evening of November 2 and the early morning of November
3—suggest very strongly that the results of the exit polls were
themselves fiddled late on November 2 in order to make their
numbers conform with the tabulated vote tallies.
It is important to remember how large the discrepancy was
between the early vote tallies and the early exit poll figures.
By the time polls were closing in the eastern states, the
vote-count figures published by CNN showed Bush leading Kerry by
a massive 11 percent margin. At 8:50 p.m. EST, Bush was credited
with 6,590,476 votes, and Kerry with 5,239,414. This margin
gradually shrank. By 9:00 p.m., Bush purportedly had 8,284,599
votes, and Kerry 6,703,874; by 9:06 p.m., Bush had 9,257,135, and
Kerry had 7,652,510, giving the incumbent a 9 percent lead, with
54 percent of the vote to Kerry’s 45 percent.
At the same time, embarrassingly enough, the national exit
poll figures reported by CNN showed Kerry as holding a narrow but
potentially decisive lead over Bush. At 9:06 p.m. EST, the exit
polls indicated that women’s votes (54 percent of the total) were
going 54 percent to Kerry, 45 percent to Bush, and 1 percent to
Nader; men’s votes (46 percent of the total) were breaking 51
percent to Bush, 47 percent to Kerry, and 1 percent to Nader.
Kerry, in other words, was leading Bush by nearly 3 percent.
The early exit polls appear to have caused some concern to
the good people at the National Election Pool: a gap of 12 or 14
percent between tallied results and exit polls can hardly inspire
confidence in the legitimacy of an election.
One can surmise that instructions of two sorts were issued.
The election-massagers working for Diebold, ES&S (Election
Systems & Software) and the other suppliers of black-box voting
machines may have been told to go easy on their manipulations of
back-door ‘Democrat-Delete’ software: mere victory was what the
Bush campaign wanted, not an implausible landslide. And the
number crunchers at the National Election Pool may have been
asked to fix up those awkward exit polls.
Fix them they did. When the national exit polls were last
updated, at 1:36 a.m. EST on November 3, men’s votes (still 46
percent of the total) had gone 54 percent to Bush, 45 percent to
Kerry, and 1 percent to Nader; women’s votes (54 percent of the
total) had gone 47 percent to Bush, 52 percent to Kerry, and 1
percent to Nader.
But how do we know the fix was in? Because the exit poll data
also included the total number of respondents. At 9:00 p.m. EST,
this number was well over 13,000; by 1:36 a.m. EST on November 3
it had risen by less than 3 percent, to a final total of 13, 531
respondents—but with a corresponding swing of 5 percent from
Kerry to Bush in voters’ reports of their choices. Given the
increase in respondents, a swing of this size is a mathematical
impossibility.
The same pattern is evident in the exit polls of two key
swing states, Ohio and Florida.
At 7:32 p.m. EST, CNN was reporting the following exit poll
data for Ohio. Women voters (53 percent of the total) favoured
Kerry over Bush by 53 percent to 47 percent; male voters (47
percent of the total) preferred Kerry over Bush by 51 percent to
49 percent. Kerry was thus leading Bush by a little more than 4
percent. But by 1:41 a.m. EST on November 3, when the exit poll
was last updated, a dramatic shift had occurred: women voters had
split 50-50 in their preferences for Kerry and Bush, while men
had swung to supporting Bush over Kerry by 52 percent to 47
percent. The final exit polls showed Bush leading in Ohio by 2.5
percent.
At 7:32 p.m., there were 1,963 respondents; at 1:41 a.m. on
November 3, there was a final total of 2,020 respondents. These
fifty-seven additional respondents must all have voted very
powerfully for Bush—for while representing only a 2.8 percent
increase in the number of respondents, they managed to produce a
swing from Kerry to Bush of fully 6.5 percent.
In Florida, the exit polls appear to have been tampered with
in a similar manner. At 8:40 p.m. EST, CNN was reporting exit
polls that showed Kerry and Bush in a near dead heat. Women
voters (54 percent of the total) preferred Kerry over Bush by 52
percent to 48 percent, while men (46 percent of the total)
preferred Bush over Kerry by 52 percent to 47 percent, with 1
percent of their votes going to Nader. But the final update of
the exit poll, made at 1:01 a.m. EST on November 3, showed a
different pattern: women voters now narrowly preferred Bush over
Kerry, by 50 percent to 49 percent, while the men preferred Bush
by 53 percent to 46 percent, with 1 percent of the vote still
going to Nader. These figures gave Bush a 4 percent lead over
Kerry.
The number of exit poll respondents in Florida had risen only
from 2,846 to 2,862. But once again, a powerful numerical magic
was at work. A mere sixteen respondents—0.55 percent of the total
number—produced a four percent swing to Bush.
What we are witnessing, the evidence would suggest, is a
late-night contribution by the National Elections Pool to the
rewriting of history.
It is possible that at some future moment questions about
electoral fraud in the 2004 presidential election might become
insistent enough to be embarrassing. The pundits, at that point,
will be able to point to the NEP’s final exit poll figures in the
decisive swing states of Florida and Ohio—and to marvel at how
closely they reflect the NEP’s vote tallies.
The Ohio Fifty-Seven (is there a Heinz-Kerry joke embedded in
the number?) and the Florida Sixteen will have done their bit in
ensuring the democratic legitimacy of the one-party imperial
state.
Michael Keefer, an Associate Professor of English at the
University of Guelph, is a former president of the Association of
Canadian College and University Teachers of English. His writings
include Lunar Perspectives: Field Notes from the Culture Wars
(Anansi) and the edited collection War Against Iraq: Critical
Resources (http://www.uoguelph.ca/~mkeefer ).
Note
1. Among the warnings, see Bev Harris, Black Box Voting:
Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century (Talion Publishing/Black Box
Voting; free internet version available at
www.BlackBoxVoting.org); Infernal Press, "How George W. Bush Won
the 2004 Presidential Election" (Infernal Press, 25 June 2003);
Steve Moore, "E-Democracy: Stealing the Election in 2004" (Global
Outlook, No. 8, Summer 2004); and Greg Palast, "An Election
Spolied Rotten" (www.TomPaine.com, 1 November 2004). Early
assessments of the election include Greg Palast, "Kerry Won… Here
are the Facts" (www.TomPaine.com, 4 November 2004); and Wayne
Madsen, "Grand Theft Election" (www.globalresearch.ca, 5 November
2004).
---
> http://www.spectrumz.com/z/fair_use/2004/11_04.html
November 4, 2004
Ohio Whitewash
Basic report from Columbus
>From a lawyer who was in there in Ohio. A database of voter
irregularities is reportedly being assembled, and hopefully there
will be web sites devoted to documenting what really happened.
I worked for 3 days, including Election Day, on the statewide
voter protection hotline run by the Ohio Democratic Party in
Columbus, Ohio. I am writing this because the media is
inexplicably whitewashing what happened in Ohio, and Kerry's
concession was likewise inexplicable. Hundreds of thousands of
people were disenfranchised in Ohio.
People waited on line for as long as 10 hours. It appears to have
only happened in Democratic-leaning precincts, principally (a)
precincts where many African Americans lived, and (b) precincts
near colleges. I spoke to a young man who got on line at 11:30 am
and voted at 7 pm. When he left at 7 pm, the line was about 150
voters longer than when he'd arrived, which meant those people
were going to wait even longer. In fact they waited for as much
as 10 hours, and their voting was concluded at about 3 am. The
reason this occurred was that they had 1 voting station per 1000
voters, while the adjacent precinct had 1 voting station per 184.
Both precincts were within the same county, and managed by the
same county board of elections. The difference between them is
that the privileged polling place was in a rural, solidly
Republican, area, while the one with long lines was in the
college town of Gambier, OH.
Lines of 4 and 5 hours were the order of the day in many
African-American neighborhoods.
Touch screen voting machines in Youngstown OH were registering
"George W. Bush" when people pressed "John F. Kerry" ALL DAY
LONG. This was reported immediately after the polls opened, and
reported over and over again throughout the day, and yet the
bogus machines were inexplicably kept in use THROUGHOUT THE DAY.
Countless other frauds occurred, such as postcards advising
people of incorrect polling places, registered Democrats not
receiving absentee ballots, duly registered young voters being
forced to file provisional ballots even though their names and
signatures appeared in the voting rolls, longtime active voting
registered voters being told they weren't registered, bad faith
challenges by Republican "challengers" in Democratic precincts,
and on and on and on.
I was very proud of the way so many Ohioans fought so valiantly
for their right to vote, and would not be turned away. Many,
however, could not spend the entire day and were afraid of losing
their jobs, due to the severe economic depression hitting Ohio.
I do not understand why Kerry conceded and did not fight to
ensure that all Ohioans would have a chance to vote, and for
their vote to be counted.
Ray
Ray Beckerman
Beldock Levine & Hoffman LLP
99 Park Ave (Ste 1600)
New York, NY 10016
---
> http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/11/05/loc_warrenvote05.html
Friday, November 5, 2004
Warren's vote tally walled off
Alone in Ohio, officials cited homeland security
By Erica Solvig
Enquirer staff writer
LEBANON - Citing concerns about potential terrorism, Warren
County officials locked down the county administration building
on election night and blocked anyone from observing the vote
count as the nation awaited Ohio's returns.
County officials say they took the action Tuesday night for
homeland security, although state elections officials said they
didn't know of any other Ohio county that closed off its
elections board. Media organizations protested, saying it
violated the law and the public's rights. The Warren results,
delayed for hours because of long lines that extended voting past
the scheduled close of polls, were part of the last tallies that
helped clinch President Bush's re-election.
"The media should have been permitted into the area where there
was counting," Enquirer attorney Jack Greiner said. "This is a
process that should be done in complete transparency and it
wasn't."
Warren County Emergency Services Director Frank Young said he had
recommended increased security based on information received from
the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau
of Investigation in recent weeks.
Commissioners made the security decisions in a closed-door
meeting last week, but didn't publicize the restrictions that
were made until after polls closed.
"If we were going to make a judgment, we wanted to err on the
side of caution," Commissioner Pat South said Thursday. "...
Hindsight is 20-20. There was never any intent to exclude the
press.
"We were trying to protect security."
WCPO-TV (Channel 9) News Director Bob Morford said he's "never
seen anything like it." When he first heard about Warren County's
building restrictions, he said he understood concerns that too
many people could make the counting process "a circus." But he
said it's never been a problem in the past, and that the county
could have set up a security checkpoint and had people show
identification.
"Frankly, we consider that a red herring," Morford said of the
county's "homeland security" reason. "That's something that's put
up when you don't know what else to put up to keep us out."
James Lee, spokesman with the Ohio Secretary of State's Office in
Columbus, said Thursday he hasn't heard of any situations similar
to Warren County's building restrictions. He said general
security concerns are decided at the local levels.
Other counties, such as Butler County, let people watch ballot
checkers through a window.
Typically, the Warren County commissioners' room is set up as a
gathering place for people to watch the votes come in. But that
wasn't done this year.
And despite being told that there would be an area with
telephones set up for the media, those who tried to get into the
building on Justice Drive were stopped by a county employee who
stood guard outside. After journalists challenged the
restriction, reporters were allowed into the building's lobby -
two floors below the elections office.
A representative of The Associated Press, which had stringers at
every Ohio board of elections site, said no such election-night
access problems were reported outside of Warren County.
County Prosecutor Rachel Hutzel said commissioners "were within
their rights" to restrict building access.
Having reporters and photographers around could have interfered
with the count, she said.
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