Election Fraud Blog

At their lowest points of popularity, do you recall anyone who claimed that Presidents’ Carter and Nixon stole their elections or that they didn’t win fair and square? Did any analysts or activist groups clam massive election fraud in the elections that brought these ultimately very unpopular presidents to office?

How confident are you that George Bush really won the 2004 presidential election? If you are a typical American voter and you have doubts, how did those doubts arise? A mid August Zogby Poll of 1018 likely voters answered the first of these two very important questions (The author was a contributing sponsor for the survey.)

How confident are you that George W. Bush really won the 2004 presidential election?

Very confident that Bush won fair and square…….. 45.2%

Somewhat confident that Bush won fair and square… 20.0%

Not at all confident that he won fair and square…… 32.4%

Other/not sure………………………………………. 2.4%

This is a remarkable result. Nearly two years into the second term of his presidency, less than half of those polled think that the 2004 election victory was “fair and square.” 20% say they are “somewhat” confident, which is hardly an endorsement of legitimacy. Webster’s defines “somewhat” as follows: “…in some degree or measure: SLIGHTLY.“ This does not exactly qualify as an endorsement of a critical democratic process. The 32% who are “not at all confident” represent a major portion of the population holding the belief that Bush failed to win without cheating. Combining “not at all confident” with “somewhat” “slightly”, according to Webster’s, produces a category of 52% who “doubt” the legitimacy of the election. Altogether, these results are a clear vote of no confidence.

Combining “not confident at all” and “somewhat” (“in some degree measure: SLIGHTLY”) produces a category of “Doubts.” This gives a clear picture on legitimacy versus illegitimacy issue.

Survey Excel file available here.

Those who doubt: Not at all confident that he won fair and square – 32%

Fifty nine percent of Democrats, 5% of Republicans, and 34% of independents comprise the group with no confidence in a Bush win. Dividing the group by race shows that 54% of Asians and 71% percent of African Americans have serious doubts in the legitimacy of the election, along with 25% of whites and 37% of Latinos. Thus, a majority of Asian and African American voters lack confidence in the president’s legitimacy to rule while significant numbers of whites and Latinos do as well.

Groups thought to be in the hip pocket of the Republican administration show no confidence at a significant rate. NASCAR fans doubt the election results at a rate of 28% and born again Christians at 25%. Those in rural areas and the suburbs show some real doubt with rates of 28% and 29% respectively demonstrating a significant level of doubt. Members of the armed forces were right at the survey average with 32% questioning the legitimacy of the election.

The geographical distribution of no confidence was mildly surprising: East, 44%; South 30%; Central States/Great Lakes 24%; and West35%. Given the strength of the Republican Party in the South and relative strength of Democrats in the Central States/Great Lakes, this outcome stands out.

Those who without doubt: Very confident that Bush won fair and square – 45%

Fifteen percent of Democrats, 80% of Republicans, and 39% of independents comprise the group that is very confident that Bush won fair and square. Dividing that group by race shows that 39% of Asians and 9% percent of African Americans are very confident in the legitimacy of the election, along with 51% of whites and 38% of Latinos. Central States/Great Lakes comprise 54% of this group with the South at 46%. The West comprises 42% with the East accounting for just 32% of likely voters.

Whites, 51%, born again Christians, 58%, and people with household incomes over $100,000 are at the top of those very confident in a legitimate election. Only 54% of the rural population was very confident in a legitimate election. This may reflect the significant decrease in rural support for Bush in 2004 when compared to the 2000 election. All of these figures in the low fifties indicate that even among core constituencies, there are barely a majority of voters with a high degree of confidence that the election was legitimate.

Those in between: Somewhat confident that Bush won fair and square – 20%

Democrats and Independents, at 24% and 22% respectively, out number Republicans at 14%. Those who said that they were “somewhat confident” in the legitimacy of the election were evenly distributed around the country with only 3% separating the lowest reporting region, the South at 19%, and the West at 21%, which was the highest. Born again Christians come in at 15% percent, while non sectarians report at a rate of 19%.

The “in betweens” show less difference than the “very confident” and the “not confident at all” responders among the various subgroups polled.

The Importance of this Survey

Why are these results important? The notion of legitimacy is central to political systems and central to the ability of an elected leader to rule effectively (although a low level of legitimacy can allow a ruler to stay in power for a period). The vast majority of the public, regardless of political leanings, needs to confer legitimacy through a belief that those elected were elected fair and square. Significant numbers doubting basic legitimacy create major problems for those “elected” and for stability in the system. The result of only 45% trusting the system arises in a news environment in which the main stream media simply refuses to doubt the fairness or the 2004 election and studiously avoids any charges of outright election fraud and a corrupted result.

How the doubts arose will require more research. The response to other Zogby Poll questions in the same survey provides a major hint. 60% of American voters believe that tampering with only one machine can alter the outcome of an entire election. Nearly 80% oppose the use of secret, vendor-only computer code to run voting machines. Plus an amazing 92% of respondents said that they want the right to watch votes being counted and the right to make inquires of election officials regarding vote counting. They want that right because it belongs to them but also, I argue, because they doubt the process and the checks and balances. These doubts about the election occur at the same time there is doubt about the outcome and interact to reinforce each other.

Grave doubts exist about the 2004 presidential election in Ohio and elsewhere. Questions are asked primarily by mathematicians who cannot tolerate a seeming suspension of the laws of mathematics for one day only, November 2, 2004, voting rights activists who witnessed voter suppression and election irregularities at an extraordinary rate, and ordinary citizens whose civic concern was awakened by the 2000 Supreme Court selection and the 2004 election that defied all logic.

Despite the productivity of election fraud researchers and voting rights advocates, very little attention has been given to questions of election fraud by the corporate media. The significant vote of no confidence expressed by a representative sample of 1018 likely voters was driven by several factors: from information gained through channels other than corporate media outlets or due to a general distrust of the President based on his behavior and actions or a combination of these and other influences.

What does this mean? Some preliminary thoughts.

This survey elaborates another Zogby Poll conducted in Pennsylvania and sponsored by OpEdNews.com. In that survey, 39% of Pennsylvania residents indicated that they thought that 2004 Presidential election was stolen. In the current survey, a middle category was created to capture those with doubts, only “somewhat confident” that Bush won fair and square. By creating that category in this national poll of likely voters, those who doubt legitimacy increased 13 percentage points to 52% while those likely to share the sentiment that 2004 was stolen, dropped from the Pennsylvania 39% to the national sample of 32%.

At this point, the Bush Presidency is an illegitimate one, lacking in the necessary consensus to rule with any degree of confidence by the people. We have entered the Potemkin Village of democracy where the façade of legitimacy is nothing more than a Hollywood back lot. This is the inescapable conclusion from this poll of likely voters.

Combining “not at all’ and “somewhat” responders, over half of American voters have doubts about the election, with a third of the total survey expressing serious doubts about the outcome of the election. Despite what the script writers at ABC and the other networks weave into the nightly network indoctrination, there is a vast distrust of this president and this administration; a distrust so profound that it includes a belief that the president wasn’t even re-elected in 2004.

Corporate Media: Asleep at the Switch

There won’t be much discussion of this Zogby poll by corporate media reporters and pundits. If it occurs, it might go something like this: “Most Americans confident in 2004 Election;” “Bush Still Solid with the People;” “Core Groups Support Outcome of 2004 Election.” Of course, none of those headlines will appear. For one or a multitude of reasons, the American corporate media has studiously ignored any controversy concerning election 2004. To discuss questions of legitimacy in public would entail raising the question of a stolen election. It won’t happen but it should. .

If we assume that this data is actually discussed by the corporate media, a dismissal strategy is available. The headlines would read: “Doubt in Legitimacy of 2004 Presidential Election Based on Attitude toward Bush Performance” or, for certain news organizations, “Complainers Doubt 2004 Outcome.” Those who think the country is headed in the right direction comprise 79% of those who are very confident in 2004 results. They comprise only 8% of the “not confident at all” group. Those who think the country is headed in the wrong direction represent 26% of the very confident responders and 47% of the not confident at all group.

Of course, President Carter’s popularity dropped below 30%, a majority of Americans were positive we were headed in the wrong direction. You will be very hard pressed to find one single voice rose to challenge Carter’s popular vote victory, even though his victory margin was narrow. The hypothesized right-wrong explanation of this exceptionally low level of confidence in the system is not a particularly good argument but it will not be needed.

There is a uniform failure to address the legitimacy of the 2004 election. It is not the fault of the public. From these results, it is easy to imagine a robust dialogue followed closely by an intense public debate on the real questions that lead those who do to doubt the legitimacy of the 2004 presidential election. With such a debate, the numbers “not at all confident” would rise even higher. What a shame it would be if the information managers win yet again.

Copyright. Permission to reproduce in whole or part with attribution to the author, Michael Collins, a link to “Scoop,” and attribution of polling results to Zogby International.

Michael Collins is a writer who focuses on clean elections and voting rights. He is the publisher of the web site, www.ElectionFraudNews.com. His articles in “Scoop” Independent News can be found here.

MichaelCollins @ electionfraudnews.com

***APPENDIX***

The Zogby poll was conducted from August 11 through 15, 2006. 1018 adult voters were interviewed by phone. The sample of people interviewed reflects the demographic and regional diversity of the United States. Due to the size, it has a 3.1 % (+/-) margin of error. 95% of Zogby’s political polls have come within a 1% margin of accuracy in predicting election outcome. The survey was commissioned and sponsored by election rights and business law attorney Paul Lehto of Everett, Washington. This author, Michael Collins, was a contributing sponsor, along with Democracy for New Hampshire.

END

By Michael Collins for Scoop Independent News, Sept. 25th 2006

By Michael Parenti

The 2004 presidential contest between Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry and the Republican incumbent, President Bush Jr., amounted to another stolen election. This has been well documented by such investigators as Rep. John Conyers, Mark Crispin Miller, Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman, Bev Harris, and others. Here is an overview of what they have reported, along with observations of my own.

Some 105 million citizens voted in 2000, but in 2004 the turnout climbed to at least 122 million. Pre-election surveys indicated that among the record 16.8 million new voters Kerry was a heavy favorite, a fact that went largely unreported by the press. In addition, there were about two million progressives who had voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 who switched to Kerry in 2004.

Yet the official 2004 tallies showed Bush with 62 million votes, about 11.6 million more than he got in 2000. Meanwhile Kerry showed only eight million more votes than Gore received in 2000. To have achieved his remarkable 2004 tally, Bush would needed to have kept all his 50.4 million from 2000, plus a majority of the new voters, plus a large share of the very liberal Nader defectors.

Nothing in the campaign and in the opinion polls suggest such a mass crossover. The numbers simply do not add up.

In key states like Ohio, the Democrats achieved immense success at registering new voters, outdoing the Republicans by as much as five to one. Moreover the Democratic party was unusually united around its candidate-or certainly against the incumbent president. In contrast, prominent elements within the GOP displayed open disaffection, publicly voicing serious misgivings about the Bush administration’s huge budget deficits, reckless foreign policy, theocratic tendencies, and threats to individual liberties.

Sixty newspapers that had endorsed Bush in 2000 refused to do so in 2004; forty of them endorsed Kerry.

All through election day 2004, exit polls showed Kerry ahead by 53 to 47 percent, giving him a nationwide edge of about 1.5 million votes, and a solid victory in the electoral college. Yet strangely enough, the official tally gave Bush the election. Here are some examples of how the GOP “victory” was secured.

—In some places large numbers of Democratic registration forms disappeared, along with absentee ballots and provisional ballots. Sometimes absentee ballots were mailed out to voters just before election day, too late to be returned on time, or they were never mailed at all.

—Overseas ballots normally reliably distributed by the State Department were for some reason distributed by the Pentagon in 2004. Nearly half of the six million American voters living abroad—a noticeable number of whom formed anti-Bush organizations—never received their ballots or got them too late to vote. Military personnel, usually more inclined toward supporting the president, encountered no such problems with their overseas ballots.

—Voter Outreach of America, a company funded by the Republican National Committee, collected thousands of voter registration forms in Nevada, promising to turn them in to public officials, but then systematically destroyed the ones belonging to Democrats.

— Tens of thousands of Democratic voters were stricken from the rolls in several states because of “felonies” never committed, or committed by someone else, or for no given reason. Registration books in Democratic precincts were frequently out-of-date or incomplete. —Democratic precincts—enjoying record turnouts—were deprived of sufficient numbers of polling stations and voting machines, and many of the machines they had kept breaking down. After waiting long hours many people went home without voting. Pro-Bush precincts almost always had enough voting machines, all working well to make voting quick and convenient.

—A similar pattern was observed with student populations in several states: students at conservative Christian colleges had little or no wait at the polls, while students from liberal arts colleges were forced to line up for as long as ten hours, causing many to give up.

—In Lucas County, Ohio, one polling place never opened; the voting machines were locked in an office and no one could find the key. In Hamilton County many absentee voters could not cast a Democratic vote for president because John Kerry’s name had been “accidentally” removed when Ralph Nader was taken off the ballot.

—A polling station in a conservative evangelical church in Miami County, Ohio, recorded an impossibly high turnout of 98 percent, while a polling place in Democratic inner-city Cleveland recorded an impossibly low turnout of 7 percent.

—Latino, Native American, and African American voters in New Mexico who favored Kerry by two to one were five times more likely to have their ballots spoiled and discarded in districts supervised by Republican election officials. Many were given provisional ballots that subsequently were never counted. In these same Democratic areas Bush “won” an astonishing 68 to 31 percent upset victory. One Republican judge in New Mexico discarded hundreds of provisional ballots cast for Kerry, accepting only those that were for Bush.

—Cadres of rightwing activists, many of them religious fundamentalists, were financed by the Republican Party. Deployed to key Democratic precincts, they handed out flyers warning that voters who had unpaid parking tickets, an arrest record, or owed child support would be arrested at the polls—all untrue. They went door to door offering to “deliver” absentee ballots to the proper office, and announcing that Republicans were to vote on Tuesday (election day) and Democrats on Wednesday.

—Democratic poll watchers in Ohio, Arizona, and other states, who tried to monitor election night vote counting, were menaced and shut out by squads of GOP toughs. In Warren County, Ohio, immediately after the polls closed Republican officials announced a “terrorist attack” alert, and ordered the press to leave. They then moved all ballots to a warehouse where the counting was conducted in secret, producing an amazingly high tally for Bush, some 14,000 more votes than he had received in 2000. It wasn’t the terrorists who attacked Warren County.

—Bush did remarkably well with phantom populations. The number of his votes in Perry and Cuyahoga counties in Ohio, exceeded the number of registered voters, creating turnout rates as high as 124 percent. In Miami County nearly 19,000 additional votes eerily appeared in Bush’s column after all precincts had reported. In a small conservative suburban precinct of Columbus, where only 638 people were registered, the touchscreen machines tallied 4,258 votes for Bush.

—In almost half of New Mexico’s counties, more votes were reported than were recorded as being cast, and the tallies were consistently in Bush’s favor. These ghostly results were dismissed by New Mexico’s Republican Secretary of State as an “administrative lapse.”

Exit polls showed Kerry solidly ahead of Bush in both the popular vote and the electoral college. Exit polls are an exceptionally accurate measure of elections. In the last three elections in Germany, for example, exit polls were never off by more than three-tenths of one percent.

Unlike ordinary opinion polls, the exit sample is drawn from people who have actually just voted. It rules out those who say they will vote but never make it to the polls, those who cannot be sampled because they have no telephone or otherwise cannot be reached at home, those who are undecided or who change their minds about whom to support, and those who are turned away at the polls for one reason or another.

Exit polls have come to be considered so reliable that international organizations use them to validate election results in countries around the world.

Republicans argued that in 2004 the exit polls were inaccurate because they were taken only in the morning when Kerry voters came out in greater numbers. (Apparently Bush voters sleep late.) In fact, the polling was done at random intervals all through the day, and the evening results were as much favoring Kerry as the early results.

It was also argued that pollsters focused more on women (who favored Kerry) than men, or maybe large numbers of grumpy Republicans were less inclined than cheery Democrats to talk to pollsters. No evidence was put forth to substantiate these fanciful speculations.

Most revealing, the discrepancies between exit polls and official tallies were never random but worked to Bush’s advantage in ten of eleven swing states that were too close to call, sometimes by as much as 9.5 percent as in New Hampshire, an unheard of margin of error for an exit poll. In Nevada, Ohio, New Mexico, and Iowa exit polls registered solid victories for Kerry, yet the official tally in each case went to Bush, a mystifying outcome.

In states that were not hotly contested the exit polls proved quite accurate. Thus exit polls in Utah predicted a Bush victory of 70.8 to 26.4 percent; the actual result was 71.1 to 26.4 percent. In Missouri, where the exit polls predicted a Bush victory of 54 to 46 percent, the final result was 53 to 46 percent.

One explanation for the strange anomalies in vote tallies was found in the widespread use of touchscreen electronic voting machines. These machines produced results that consistently favored Bush over Kerry, often in chillingly consistent contradiction to exit polls.

In 2003 more than 900 computer professionals had signed a petition urging that all touchscreen systems include a verifiable audit trail. Touchscreen voting machines can be easily programmed to go dead on election day or throw votes to the wrong candidate or make votes disappear while leaving the impression that everything is working fine.

A tiny number of operatives can easily access the entire computer network through one machine and thereby change votes at will. The touchscreen machines use trade secret code, and are tested, reviewed, and certified in complete secrecy. Verified counts are impossible because the machines leave no reliable paper trail.

Since the introduction of touchscreen voting, mysterious congressional election results have been increasing. In 2000 and 2002, Senate and House contests and state legislative races in North Carolina, Nebraska, Alabama, Minnesota, Colorado, and elsewhere produced dramatic and puzzling upsets, always at the expense of Democrats who were ahead in the polls.

In some counties in Texas, Virginia, and Ohio, voters who pressed the Democrat’s name found that the Republican candidate was chosen. In Cormal County, Texas, three GOP candidates won by exactly 18,181 votes apiece, a near statistical impossibility.

All of Georgia’s voters used Diebold touchscreen machines in 2002, and Georgia’s incumbent Democratic governor and incumbent Democratic senator, who were both well ahead in the polls just before the election, lost in amazing double-digit voting shifts.

This may be the most telling datum of all: In New Mexico in 2004 Kerry lost all precincts equipped with touchscreen machines, irrespective of income levels, ethnicity, and past voting patterns. The only thing that consistently correlated with his defeat in those precincts was the presence of the touchscreen machine itself.

In Florida Bush registered inexplicably sharp jumps in his vote (compared to 2000) in counties that used touchscreen machines.

Companies like Diebold, Sequoia, and ES&S that market the touchscreen machines are owned by militant supporters of the Republican party. These companies have consistently refused to implement a paper-trail to dispel suspicions and give instant validation to the results of electronic voting. They prefer to keep things secret, claiming proprietary rights, a claim that has been backed in court.

Election officials are not allowed to evaluate the secret software. Apparently corporate trade secrets are more important than voting rights. In effect, corporations have privatized the electoral system, leaving it easily susceptible to fixed outcomes. Given this situation, it is not likely that the GOP will lose control of Congress come November 2006. The two-party monopoly threatens to become an even worse one-party tyranny.

Michael Parenti’s recent books include The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), Superpatriotism (City Lights), and The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press). For more information visit: www.michaelparenti.org.

from ZNet

In his 2006 book “Stealing Democracy,” Spencer Overton illustrates historical and current flaws related to America’s voting system, including an overview of most states. Check the status of your home state below.

Also, find the latest rules in your state regarding:

• The Redistricting Process
  
• Electronic Voting Machines and Paper Trails
  
• Ex-felon Disenfranchisement
  
• Voter Identification

Alabama

• 2004: Residents of Asian ancestry account for one-third of the population of Bayou La Batre, and despite intimidation of Asian Americans at the voting polls, Phuong Tan Huynh becomes the first Asian American councilman in Bayou La Batre by fewer than 100 votes.
• 1996: In Bayou La Batre, despite a sizeable Asian American community, only 15 of the town’s 800 votes were cast by Asian Americans.
• 1995-2004: Alabama is among the top 15 states in voting rights objections and claims per capita, most federal observers sent to monitor elections per capita, largest disparities between citizens of color and statewide elected officials of color, least party competition for voters of color, and largest minority group.
• 1960s: Dallas County has a voting-age population estimated at 29,500, just over half of whom are black. However, politicians ensure that the rolls include only one percent of its black residents by requiring that applicants for registration pass and oral exam about the U.S. Constitution and possess “good character.”

Alaska

• 1995-2004: Alaska is among the top 15 states with the largest low-English proficient populations.

Arizona

• 1995-2004: Arizona ranks among the top 15 states in voting rights objections and claims per capita, most federal observers sent to monitor elections per capita, largest disparities between citizens of color and statewide elected officials of color, largest racial disparities in voter turnout, largest minority group, and largest low-English-proficient population.

Arkansas

• 1995-2004: Arkansas is among the top 15 states for largest disparities between citizens of color and statewide elected officials of color, the least competition for voters of color, and the largest minority group.

California

• 2004: All of the incumbent state legislators or U.S. House members who run retain their seats.
• 2004: Ventura County, where 33 percent of the population is Latino and where 26,000 Spanish speaking U.S. citizens have limited English skills, is charged with failing to provide enough bilingual poll workers and voting materials. In response, the county agrees to provide its first Spanish-language ballot and offers bilingual county employees the day off with pay plus a stipend to ensure that 300 of the county’s 1,300 poll workers could speak both Spanish and English.
• 2004: Los Angeles County provides ballots in more languages than any other area in the nation – including English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog, and Vietnamese. Of the 22,000 poll workers in the county leading up to the 2004 election, almost 5,000 said they were bilingual.
• 2002: Democrat Michael Case decides not to make another run against Republican U.S. House incumbent Elton Gallegly where redistricting inflated registered Republicans from 39 to 46 percent and deflated registered Democrats from 40 to 35 percent of the district’s voters.
• 2002: As a result of redistricting, only one of the fifty-three California U.S. House races is competitive.
• 2002: No more than 17 of the 153 U.S. House, State Senate, and State Assembly seats at stake in California in 2002 are considered competitive, compared with 44 competitive seats following the 1991 redistricting.
• 2002: Following the new U.S. house map, which removes Latino voters from Berman’s district and puts them in an adjacent district represented by another white Democrat, Berman’s voting constituency is reduced from 45 percent Latino to 31 percent.
• 2002: In the November election, 100 percent of the incumbents who run win reelection. The padding of districts ensures that most races are not close. The average incumbent wins with 69 percent of the vote.
• 2001: The California state legislature draws three new maps that assign a total of 173 districts: fifty-three U.S. House seats, forty State Senate seats, and eighty State Assembly seats. State Democrats effectively control the process and pay a consultant $1.36 million to draw the State Senate districts, and incumbent Democratic members of Congress collectively pay the consultant about $600,000 ($20,000 each) to draw the U.S. House map. The new maps protect almost all Republican and Democratic incumbents.
• 1998: In the Democratic primary election, the Latino mayor of San Fernando, Raul Godinez, challenges Congressman Berman. Although three out of four Latinos votes for Godinez, Berman wins handily by receiving nine out of ten white votes.
• 1996: Los Angeles County reports costs of $1.1 million to provide language assistance in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Tagalog at more than 5,600 polling places ($196 per poll).
• 1995-2004: California is among the top 15 states for most federal observers sent to monitor elections per capita, , largest disparities between citizens of color and statewide elected officials of color, largest disparities between citizens of color and officials of color in all elected positions, largest disparities in voter turnout, largest minority group, and largest low-English-proficient population.

Colorado

• 1995-2004: Colorado is among the top 15 states with the largest racial disparities in voter turnout, and the largest low-English-proficient populations.

Connecticut

• 1995-2004: Connecticut is among the top 15 states with the largest disparities between citizens of color and officials of color in all elected positions, the largest racial disparities in voter turnout, and the largest low-English-proficient population.

Florida

• 2004: In anticipation of the 2004 election, the office of Florida Republican Secretary of State Glenda Hood compiled a list of “felons” to be omitted from voting rolls and refused to disclose the list to the public. After a court ordered the list’s release, journalists discovered that it improperly included 2,100 former prisoners who had successfully applied for a restoration of their voting rights. Due to another “computer error” about 22,000 African Americans were incorrectly included on the list.
• 1995-2004: Florida is among the top 15 states with the largest disparities between citizens of color and statewide elected officials of color, largest disparities between citizens of color and all elected officials of color, least party competition for voters of color, largest racial disparities in voter turnout, and largest low-English-proficient populations.
• Florida is one of only four democratic systems in the world that ban voting by all former offenders for life.
• 2000: Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore tires to design a ballot with large type so that it can be read by her county’s large senior population. The confusing ballot is never tested on sample voters, and in the real election it causes thousands in Palm Beach County to mistakenly vote for Pat Buchanan, costing Al Gore an estimated 6,607 Florida votes and the presidency.
• 2000: Had former felons who had completed their sentences been allowed to vote, Al Gore would have won Florida (and thus the presidency) by about 31,000 votes.

Georgia

• 2006: A photo ID requirement would exclude Americans of all backgrounds, but the elderly are some who would bear the greatest burden. According to the Georgia chapter of the AARP, 36 percent of Georgians over age seventy-five do not have a driver’s license.
• 2005: A photo ID requirement would exclude Americans of all backgrounds, but people of color are some who would bear the greatest burden. Only one of the ten Georgia counties with the highest percentage of blacks had an office that issued state IDs, and no such office existed in Atlanta.
• 2005: Secretary of State Cathy Cox states that she cannot recall one documented case of voter fraud relating to the impersonation of a registered voter at the polls during her ten-year tenure as secretary of state or assistant secretary of state.
• 2005: Georgia reduces its list of acceptable identification from seventeen (including non-photo ID such a bank statement, utility bill, or government paycheck) to six forms of state-issued photo ID in an attempt to prevent “fraud.” But at the same time, Georgia scrapped its old law that limited absentee voting to people who met narrow requirements (such as being older than 75 or disabled) anyone who applies. The double standard is particularly disturbing because absentee ballots are widely acknowledged to be more susceptible to fraud than ballots cast at the polls. Further, whites are much more likely than African Americans to vote absentee.
• 1995-2004: Georgia is among the top 15 states in voting rights objections and claims per capita, largest disparities between citizens of color and statewide elected officials of color, largest disparities between citizens of color and all elected officials of color, least party competition for voters of color, and largest minority group.
• 1996-2006: Within the last ten years, politicians in Georgia have used Confederate-flag debates to polarize voters along racial lines.

Hawaii

• 1995-2004: Hawaii is among the top 15 states with the largest minority group, and the largest low-English-proficient populations.

Idaho

• 1995-2004: Idaho is among the top 15 states with the largest low-English-proficient populations.

Illinois

• 1995-2004: Illinois is among the top 15 states for most federal observers sent to monitor elections per capita, and largest disparities between citizens of color and officials of color in all elected positions.

Indiana

• 1995-2004: Indiana ranks among the top 15 states for most federal observers sent to monitor elections per capita, and largest racial disparities in voter turnout.

Kentucky

• 1998: Because former felons are denied their right to vote, U.S. Republican Senator Jim Bunning ekes out a narrow victory, winning by only 6,766 votes (Kentucky banned 94,584 former offenders from voting).
• Kentucky is one of only four democratic systems in the world that ban voting by all former offenders for life.
• 1984: Had former felons who had completed their sentences been allowed to vote, U.S. Republican Senator Mitch McConnell would likely have lost the tightly contested Senate race.

Louisiana

• 1995-2004: Louisiana is among the top 15 states in voting rights objections and claims per capita, most federal observers received to monitor elections, largest disparities between citizens of color and statewide elected officials of color, largest disparities between citizens of color and all elected officials of color, least party competition for voters of color, and largest minority group.
• 2002: Despite attempts at voter suppression, black turnout jumps to 27.1% of the electorate, effectively ensuring that Democrat Mary Landrieu beats Republican Suzanne Terrell for U.S. Senate.
• 2003: whites who voted against Democrat Landrieu cross party lines to vote for white Democrat Kathleen Blanco over South Asian Bobby Jindal.
• 2003: The African-American population in Ville Platte jumped from about 25 percent of the town’s population in 1980 to 56.6 percent in 2000. In 2003, city officials suggest a redistricting plan that reduces the African-American population in one of its six council districts from 55.1 to 38.1 percent, shifting many African Americans within this district to another district that was already 78.8 percent African American, thereby reducing the number of predominantly African-American council districts from four to three.
• 1888-1910: The 1888 voter registration rolls contained the names of 127,923 African Americans and 126,884 whites, but by 1910 only 730 African Americans remained registered.

Maryland

• 1995-2004: Maryland is ranks among top 15 states in largest disparities between citizens of color and statewide elected officials of color, largest disparities between citizens of color and officials of color in all elected positions, least party competition for voters of color, and largest minority group.

Massachusetts

• 2005: Latinos hold two of the seven school-committee seats and four of the nine city-council seats.
• 1995-2004: Massachusetts is among the top 15 states in voting rights objections and claims per capita, the largest racial disparities in voter turnout, and the largest low-English-proficient population.
• 2001: As a result of the voting-rights lawsuit, grassroots registration efforts, and more convenient voter-registration requirements, Latinos, who comprise more than 60 percent of Lawrence residents, make up 43.7 percent of the city’s registered voters.
• 1999: Following settlement of a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice for violation of the Voting Rights Act, city officials agree to provide bilingual voting information, ballots and poll workers, and to disseminate election information through local Spanish-language media and community groups.
• 1990: Though approximately 70 percent of the students in Lawrence Public Schools are Latino, no one on the seven-member school committee is Latino.
• 1990: Latinos increase to 25 percent of Lawrence’s voting-age-citizen population, but they comprise only 11 percent of registered voters.

Michigan

• 1995-2004: Michigan is among the top 15 states in most federal observers sent to monitor elections per capita, and least competition for voters of color.
• 2001: Republicans control all three branches of Michigan’s government and draft legislative maps that expand their party’s power in both chambers.

Mississippi

• 1996-2006: Within the last ten years, politicians in Mississippi have used Confederate-flag debates to polarize voters along racial lines.
• 1995-2004: Mississippi is among the top 15 states in voting rights objections and claims per capita, most federal observers received to monitor elections, largest disparities between citizens of color and statewide elected officials of color, largest disparities between citizens of color and all elected officials of color, least party competition for voters of color, and largest minority group.
• 2003: African Americans cast 94 percent of their votes for incumbent Democratic Governor Ronnie Musgrove, but their turnout is not large enough to offset the 77 percent of white voters who favor former National Republican Party Chair Haley Barbour, who Musgrove by fewer than 61,000 votes.
• 2001: In the town of Kilmichael, where the number of African-Americans has grown to over 52 percent of the town’s population, there were several African-American candidates qualified for the mayoral and board races and a very strong possibility that African-American candidates would win most of the municipal offices. However, three weeks before the general election, the incumbent, all-white board of alderman voted unanimously to cancel the election.
• 1965: Following passage of the Voting Rights Act, African American registration increased from less than 6.7 percent in 1965 to 60 percent in 1968.

Minnesota

• 1998: Minnesota’s same-day registration allowed 250,000 new voters to mobilize around and elect as governor political newcomer Jesse Ventura, who won by under 57,000 votes.

Montana

• 1995-2004: Montana is among the top 15 states in voting rights objections and claims per capita.

Nebraska

• 2006: As a result of grass roots efforts promoting campaign finance reform, almost all of Nebraska’s state legislative candidates voluntarily agree to limit their spending to $75,000 in order to receive public funds.

New Jersey

• 1995-2004: New Jersey is among the top 15 states in voting rights objections and claims per capita, most federal observers sent to monitor elections per capita, largest disparities between citizens of color and all elected officials of color, largest racial disparities in voter turnout, and largest low-English-proficient population.

New Mexico

• 1995-2004: New Mexico is among the top 15 states in voting rights objections and claims per capita, most federal observers sent to monitor elections per capita, largest racial disparities in voter turnout, largest minority group, and largest low-English-proficient populations.

New York

• 1990-2003: In the early 1990s, up to 70 percent of residents in New York’s Chinatown spoke little English and only about 30 percent of eligible Chinatown voters were registered. In 1996, after the city added Chinese voting materials and oral assistance, an estimated 30 percent of the Chinese-American voters in the city relied on the Chinese ballots, the cost of which accounted for under 4 percent of the city’s total $16 million election budget.
• In New York City, which has no photo-ID requirement, a study showed that poll workers illegally asked one in six Asian Americans for identification at the polls.
• 1995-2004: New York is among the top 15 states for most federal observers sent to monitor elections per capita, largest disparities between citizens of color and statewide elected officials of color, largest disparities between citizens of color and officials of color in all elected positions, least party competition for voters of color, largest racial disparities in voter turnout, largest low-English-proficient populations.

North Dakota

• 1995-2004: North Dakota ranks among the top 15 states in voting objections and claims per capita.
• 1995-2004: North Carolina is among the top 15 states in voting rights objections and claims per capita, largest disparities between citizens of color and statewide elected officials of color, least party competition for voters of color, and largest minority group.

Ohio

• 2004: Voters at the polls wait in for as long as 5 hours due to large voter turnout and too few voting machines.
• 2004: In Franklin County, 102,000 new voters were added to the registration rolls, but because too few voting machines are provided, there are 170 voters per machine and up to a five-hour wait to cast a ballot.
• 2004: Four years after Florida’s hanging-chad fiasco, only 13.1 percent of American voters use punch-card machines, but more than 70 percent of Ohio voters use such machines.
• 2004: Ohio punch-card machines produce more than 76,000 spoiled ballots in the November presidential election (a smaller number than President Bush’s 118,600-vote margin of victory over Senator Kerry).
• 2004: A federal court in Ohio found that during the 2004 presidential election, Republicans deployed their poll monitors so that only 14 percent of new voters in predominantly white precincts would face a Republican challenger, while fully 97 percent of new voters in African-American precincts would face one.
• 2002 and 2004: A statewide survey found four instances of ineligible persons voting or attempting to vote in 2002 and 2004, out of 9,078,728 votes cast – a rate of 0.00004%.

Oklahoma

• 1995-2004: Oklahoma is among the top 15 states with the largest racial disparities in voter turnout.

Pennsylvania

• 1995-2004: Pennsylvania is among the top 15 states for most federal observers sent to monitor elections per capita, and least party competition for voters of color.

Rhode Island

• 1995-2004: Rhode Island is among the top 15 states with the largest low-English-proficient populations.
• 1996: Central Falls, Rhode Island reports that it spent $100 in printing costs for Spanish materials used at nine polling places (just over $11 per poll).

South Dakota

• 2003: Though many American Indians in South Dakota do not drive cars and lack driver’s licenses, and though several tribes do not issue photo-identification cards, the Republican-controlled South Dakota legislature instigates a photo-identification provision, requiring voters to now show poll workers a South Dakota driver’s license, a state-issued photo ID, a tribal photo ID, or a state university ID.
• 1995-2005: South Dakota ranks among the top 15 states in the most voting objections and claims per capita.
• 2004: Data from the first election covered by the photo ID law indicate that a disproportionately large number of American Indian voters did not bring photo IDs to the polls.
• 2004: In lieu of photo ID, affidavits were signed by under 2 percent of voters statewide, but in each of the predominantly American Indian counties, 5.3 percent to 16 percent of voters signed affidavits.

South Carolina

• 1996-2006: Within the last ten years, politicians in South Carolina have used Confederate-flag debates to polarize voters along racial lines.
• 2005: Based on government pay scales, the state annually pays out less than $18,300 in salaries devoted to compliance with Section 5, averaging under $458 per submission in a year with forty submissions. By contrast, incumbent politicians on the Charleston County Council spent more than $1.5 million of taxpayer funds fighting a single voting rights lawsuit against the Justice Department.
• 1995-2004: South Carolina is among the top 15 states in voting rights objections and claims per capita, most federal observers received to monitor elections, largest disparities between citizens of color and statewide elected officials of color, largest disparities between citizens of color and all elected officials of color, least party competition for voters of color, and largest minority group.
• 2003: In the early 1990s a number of African Americans living southeast of the town of North’s boundary petition to become a part of North, but officials reject the petition with no explanation. If officials had accepted the petition, African Americans would have become the majority of the town’s population. Curiously, in September 2003, the town of North approves a petition to annex a small group of white voters into their town.

Tennessee

• 1995-2004: Tennessee is among the top 15 states with the least party competition for voters of color.

Texas

• 2004: By redrawing districts that snake hundreds of miles across various counties, Republicans inflate their power so that following the 2004 election they control 66 percent of the Texas congressional seats.
• 1995-2004: Texas is among the top 15 states in voting rights objections and claims per capita, largest disparities between citizens of color and statewide elected officials of color, largest disparities between citizens of color and all elected officials of color, largest racial disparities in voter turnout, and largest low-English-proficient population.
• 2003: Enforcement of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act prevents Waller County district attorney, Republican Oliver KItzman, from denying students at Prairie View A&M University, a historically black college, the right to register or to vote.
• 2002: 53 percent of Texas voters cast their ballots for Republican congressional candidates, but Republicans control only 47 percent of the Texas congressional seats.
• 2001: Incumbent Democrat Lee Brown, Houston’s first African-American mayor, increases African-American turnout by 30 percent to narrowly defeat Republican Orlando Sanchez by one percentage point.
• 1974: Vilma Martinez, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, testifies before Congress that election officials in Uvalde County, Texas, refused to name Latinos as deputy registrars, removed registered Latino voters from voting polls, and refused to aid Spanish speakers who spoke little English.

Utah

• 1995-2004: Utah ranks among the top 15 states in most federal observers sent to monitor elections per capita.

Virginia

• 1995-2004: Virginia is among the top 15 states in voting rights objections and claims per capita, largest disparities in voter turnout, and largest minority group.
• Virginia is one of only four democratic systems in the world that ban voting by all former offenders for life. P.

Washington

• 2004: Though seventy percent of the state turns out to vote in the election for governor, only 57 percent of the Asian Americans, who largely support the democratic candidate Christine Gregoire, go to the polls. As a result, Gregoire wins by a mere 128 votes out of more than 2.9 million cast.
• 1995-2004: Washington is among the top 15 states for most federal observers sent to monitor elections per capita.
• 2004: An extensive investigation following the 2004 election uncovered less than one case of double voting or voting in the name of another for every 100,000 ballots cast.

Wisconsin

2004: In Milwaukee, half the city’s residents are white and more than a third are African-American. In a non-partisan mayoral race featuring two democratic candidates, white candidate Tom Barrett beats African-American candidate Marvin Pratt. Polls show that 92 percent of African-Americans voted for Pratt, while 83 percent of white voters cast ballots for Barrett.

Originally posted on PBS.org

Don’t be a Sitting Duck for the Secret Ballot



Verify Election Results

Run Parallel Elections

Collect Voter Affidavits

CONGRESS! BAN Voting by Secret Ballot, Voting Machine, Internet, Absentee, Early, or Carrier Pigeon.

Others’ videos: GOT DEMOCRACY, Help America Vote On Paper, (from eon3), The Right To Count,  Invisible Ballots(2004),  VoterGate,  The Big Fix 2000

another must watch: 911 Cover Up

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5946593973848835726&q=genre%3Adocumentary&hl=en

“...our elections are easy to rig because of how we vote.  It wasn’t always this way.   Prior to the Civil War, voting was a completely observable process.  It was only after the Civil War, as the right to vote expanded to African Americans, that the voting process itself began to recede from public view and meaningful oversight.  It started with absentee voting by the military in the 1870’s, the use of secret ballots in the 1880’s, and voting by machine in the 1890’s.  Today, approximately 30% of all voting is conducted early or by absentee, 95% of all votes are processed by machines, and 100% of all ballots are secret and anonymous.”  Lynn Landes

PARTIAL “The Fix Is In” TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

(VIDEO CLIP)  “The election is over. We won.” (Reporter’s voice – “How do you know that?”)  “It’s all over, but the counting.  And we’ll take care of the counting.”

That was Republican Congressman Peter King of New York.  He made those remarks just BEFORE the 2004 presidential election. 

Hi.  I’m Lynn Landes.  I’m a freelance journalist and publisher of the website, EcoTalk.org.  I want to thank you for taking the time to watch this brief video.

Our elections are in deep trouble.  Many Americans no longer believe that voting results are accurate. More and more voters are learning first-hand that voting machines are completely unreliable and that many of our election officials are untrustworthy.  But what’s at the core of this crisis?  The secret ballot.

Any ballot in America can be easily miscounted either by accident or design, regardless of whether it’s a paper ballot or electronic vote. That’s because modern Americans vote by secret ballot.  A secret ballot is an anonymous ballot, which means it can’t be traced to the voter.  We’ve been told that’s a good deal for us, that it protects us against harassment and vote selling.  But, it’s a much better deal for those who want to rig elections and not get caught.  It’s time we scrap the secrecy and go public with our votes.

In this video you’ll hear a startling admission from a voting company representative, I offer some practical advice on how to verify or challenge election returns through the collection of voter affidavits, And I make the case for a return to total transparency in voting, what I call “Open Voting”

The fact is our elections are easy to rig because of how we vote.  It wasn’t always this way.   Prior to the Civil War, voting was a completely observable process.  It was only after the Civil War, as the right to vote expanded to African Americans, that the voting process itself began to recede from public view and meaningful oversight.  It started with absentee voting by the military in the 1870’s, the use of secret ballots in the 1880’s, and voting by machine in the 1890’s.  Today, approximately 30% of all voting is conducted early or by absentee, 95% of all votes are processed by machines, and 100% of all ballots are secret and anonymous.

Worse yet, most of the voting process in America has been privatized and outsourced to a handful of domestic companies and multi-national corporations.  One company, Sequoia, is foreign-owned.  And just two companies (ES&S and Diebold) process 80% of all votes in the United States.  These companies make, sell, and service both ballot scanners and touchscreen machines. 

Although most of the debate over security issues has been framed to target suspicion on outside hackers and backdoors, it is in fact company insiders who have the keys to the front door and complete access to the electronic ballot box. For all practical purposes, voting machine companies are self-regulating, and as such, their employees are in a perfect position to rig elections nationwide.   But even if these companies were regulated, it is virtually impossible to guard against insider vote fraud, as you will see.

The following are video clips of an examination of the Danaher voting system by Pennsylvania state authorities in November of 2005. 

(VIDEO CLIP)

Notice, the Danaher representative assured state officials that the company would not be able to rig elections because their programmers would have to know well in advance all the candidates names and their positions on the ballot.  But that’s ludicrous.  There’s nothing to stop programmers from using secret company code to manipulate votes for a particular candidate.  This can be done while making a service call before, during, or after an election.  It could be accomplished remotely via the Internet, modem, or through wireless technology.  And it can be done without the knowledge of election officials. 

But, setting that issue aside, what if it is not a specific candidate the company wants to rig an election for, but a particular party instead? 

(VIDEO CLIP)

The Danaher representative just admitted that their computer program includes a party identifier next to each candidate’s name.  Therefore, the company can easily write a program that shifts a certain percentage of votes from one party’s candidates to another party before the machines ever leave the factory floor.  That shift could make the difference in tight races.

Most voting machine companies have close ties to the Republican Party and most voting machine irregularities appear to favor Republicans, but I must emphasize, that is not always the case.  Even in Republican and Democratic primaries, where the race is between members of the same party, voting machines are exhibiting suspicious irregularities.  Meanwhile, the Democratic Party and the Green Party’s measured response to the gravity of this situation makes one wonder. 

Pending congressional legislation that would require ballot printers for paperless voting machines is a woefully inadequate response to the threat these machines represent, as a long history of equipment malfunctions and failures can attest.  But, even more disturbing are the actions of some candidates, particularly Democratic candidates, who are conceding extremely close races without waiting for all the absentee and provisional ballots to be counted.  It appears that the fix may be in across the political spectrum.

What’s the solution?  Perhaps voters should support candidates that have no party affiliation.  But, regarding the voting process itself, Congress should return to a policy of open and transparent elections and ban voting by machine, absentee, early, and by secret ballot.  Until that day, we must go public with our votes.  We must provide candidates with hard evidence of how we voted so that election results can be verified, or challenged, if necessary.  Exit polls do not constitute hard evidence.  Only voter affidavits can provide that.  It’s time voters sign up and be counted. 

Specifically, candidates or activists need to conduct a Parallel Election, of sorts.  They need to collect affidavits from voters or, at the very least, get signed statements that include the voter’s name, signature, address, and for whom they voted.  These can be collected in three ways: 1) on Election Day as voters leave the polls, 2) door to door after the election, or 3) by asking voters, particularly absentee voters, to mail-in affidavits or signed statements immediately after they mail in their ballot.  If manpower is a problem, then target only a few polling places or precincts.  Keep in mind that a list of those who voted is a matter of public record.  Most precincts have about 500 voters and most voters don’t vote. 

So, for many races we’re not talking about contacting a lot of people.  Naturally, you want to first contact voters that belong to the same party as your candidate.  Depending on your results, that may be sufficient to challenge election returns.  You don’t need 100% participation from voters.  Any number of signatures collected that exceeds the official vote count is an indicator of a miscount.  

Something similar to this idea was put into practice last winter in North Carolina.  A Republican candidate gathered more than 1400 affidavits from voters in precincts where voting machines malfunctioned and lost thousands of votes.  On the basis of those affidavits his Democratic opponent conceded.

Last year I wrote my first article calling for Parallel Elections. See – http://www.ecotalk.org/ParallelElections.htm  A few activists around the country did just that.  On the basis of signed statements collected at 11 polling places in a California election, a recount was granted.  Unfortunately by the time the recount was held, there was plenty of opportunity for election officials to minimize the miscount. So, be careful about asking for a recount when what’s actually needed is a new election that’s free from voting machines at the very least.  And remember, even a new election needs a Parallel Election to serve as a check. 

If no one is organizing a Parallel Election, then voters can on their on initiative send the candidate of their choice a card or letter indicating that they voted for them.  That might spur more candidates to action. You may not win an election challenge in a court of law, but the court of public opinion is more important in the long run.

If we want a real democracy we must take our elections out of the corporate boardroom and back into the public square.  We cannot continue to hide behind the secret ballot.  Remember John Hancock’s large and flamboyant signature on the Declaration of Independence?  He did that in the face of certain hardship and possible death.  It’s now our turn to sign up and be counted. 

I’m Lynn Landes.  And thanks for watching. 

1. Is there any evidence that voting machines have been rigged?  Yes. Lots of it.  An extensive history of voting machine irregularities can be found in the following:
   
    
   • Election 2004-Voters Unite.org
   • The Conyers Report – Read Excerpts
   • Black Box Voting, Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century (Chapter II) by Bev Harris (2003)
   • Accuracy, Integrity, and Security in Computerized Vote-Tallying, by Dr. Roy Saltman (1988)
   • my own list
   • Check out Florida in 2004 – does anyone really believe that so many Democrats crossed over to vote for George Bush?
     
      
2. Has anyone confessed to rigging voting machines?  Yes.
   • http://www.justaflyonthewall.com/ Also see: Programmer Built Vote Rigging Prototype at Florida Congressman’s Request– Clint Curtis affidavit
   • Conyers Report excerpts – how Triad technicians reset computers to cheat a recount of votes

   • Cincinnati Bell security supervisors ordered wire-taps installed on county computers before elections in the late 1970s and early 1980s that could have allowed vote totals to be altered, a former Bell employee says in a sworn court document. Leonard Gates, a 23-year Cincinnati Bell employee until he was fired in 1986, claims in a deposition filed Thursday in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court to have installed the wire-taps. (1989) Pandora’s Black Box & http://www.votefraud.org/expert_strunk_report.htm (contains case number)

   The easiest way to rig elections nationwide is for voting machine company-insiders to program the firmware (permanently installed software in touchscreens and ballot scanners) to favor one political party over another. That way they don’t need to know the candidates’ names nor their position on the ballot. They can even rig the top of the ticket only, in which case the winning candidate can claim a crossover vote in a opposing party’s district, as may have happened in Florida 2004 – See Lynn’s data table
   
    

3. Don’t some voters need these machines, such as non-English language voters and disabled voters?  No.  Voters who want a ballot in their own language should be able to order such a ballot in advance of any election.  Secondly, voting machines present the same violation of voting rights for disabled voters.  And contrary to popular belief, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) does not require election officials to purchase electronic voting machines.  Besides, anecdotal evidence suggests that these machines are difficult for the disabled to use.  Election officials and voting machine companies admit that it takes the sight-impaired voters ten times longer to use a touchscreen machine than able-bodied voters.  However, there is a way for the sight-impaired to vote privately and independently.  They can use tactile paper ballot with audio assistance.  Tactile ballots are used around the world and in some states such as Rhode Island.  Unfortunately, many disabled voters are unaware of these kinds of ballots.  That may not be an accident.  Two organizations for the blind, The American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) and The National Federation of the Blind (NFB), are ardent supporters of paperless touchscreen voting machines.  They also have received over $1 million dollars from the voting machine industry, according to news reports.
   
    
4. Can you conduct Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) using paper ballots?  First, I do not support IRV or proportional voting because they are unnecessary, complicated, and cannot be easily observed.  But, yes,  Britain, Ireland, and Australia have used paper ballots to conduct Instant Run-Off Voting.  However, some advocates of IRV are aggressively promoting the idea that voting machines are necessary. Regarding proportional voting, it is the wrong answer to the obvious problem presented by “at-large” elections where the winners take all.  Instead, political entities (such as townships) should be divided into voting districts (which many already are), thereby allowing the development of Democratic, Republican, etc. strongholds which could result in more equitable representation.
   
    
5. Aren’t machines faster than a hand count and isn’t that important?  They should be, but often they’re not.  Machines breakdown routinely, thereby taking longer to report election results.  In Maryland in the 2004 election, 9% of machines observed by a voting rights group, broke down.  Essentially, a speedy hand count is based on a sufficient number of poll workers per number of registered voters and the length of the ballot.  Canada uses 2 election officials per approximately 500 registered voters.  In addition, election officials don’t need to depend on volunteers.  Citizens can be drafted to work at the polls on Election Day, as is done routinely with jury duty.  The right to direct access to a ballot and meaningful public oversight of the process supersedes the perceived convenience of voting machines. 
   
    
6. What about states that have really long ballots, including initiatives and referendum?  Most countries keep their ballots brief.  For instance, in America state and local judges could be elected by legislative bodies instead of the voters. But, there are other issues.  The initiative/referendum movement is called Direct Democracy.  However, it is really an end-run around the legislature.  Some activists think this is a good idea, but others disagree.  California’s ballot has become a nightmare.  Clearly, those with the money get their issues on the ballot. And consider this.  The initiative/referendum movement allows those who control the voting machines to also control which candidates win and what legislation gets passed. 
   
    
7. Aren’t voting machines more accurate than a hand count?  There is no way to know. There is no way to test the accuracy of voting machines during the actual voting process on Election Day.  Citizens vote in secret.  The machines count those votes in secret.  If ballot scanners are used, then election officials can run an audit to check accuracy.  But, few states require audits.  Even with an audit, election officials decide where and when the audits occur.  Public participation and oversight is not meaningful. Any test done prior or after an election cannot ensure that during the election the machine did not manipulate votes, either by accident or design.  The accuracy of voting machines is often correlated with the number of overvotes and undervotes it records.  One could have nothing to do with the other.  There is no way to know the intention of the voter, or if a voting machine is filling in votes that the voter deliberately left blank. Although a lever and touchscreen machine can prevent overvotes, all in all, “The difference between the best performing and worst performing technologies is as much as 2 percent of ballots cast. Surprisingly, paper ballots—the oldest technology—show the best performance.” This is the finding of two Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) political science professors, Dr. Stephen Ansolabehere and Dr. Charles Stewart III, in a September 25, 2002 study entitled, Voting Technology and Uncounted Votes in the United States.
   
    
8. Which is more expensive, voting by machine or paper?  For legitimate elections, expense can never be a consideration.  That said, paper is cheap and requires no special servicing, storage, or trained personnel, while a single voting machines can cost thousands of dollars and require servicing, storage, and trained personnel.  Furthermore, election officials never need to rely on volunteers to staff the polls.  Citizens can always be drafted as they are for jury duty, at little or no cost to the tax payer. 
   
    
9. Shouldn’t we allow absentee voting for overseas military at least?  No.  Again, think in terms of jury duty.  There are certain rights and responsibilities of citizenship that require your personal appearance.  In addition, the polling place provides the voter protection from intimidation and allows poll watchers the opportunity to detect vote fraud or system failure.
   
    
10. If someone wins by a large enough margin, isn’t that a sign that the election wasn’t rigged?  No. It only stands to reason that if someone is going to rig an election, it will be done by a sufficient number of votes to avoid triggering a recount. Otherwise, this could happen: In August of 2002, in Clay county Kansas, Jerry Mayo lost a close race for county commissioner, garnering 48% of the vote, but a hand recount revealed May won by a landslide, earning 76% of the vote.
    
     
11. If the voting machines are being used at my polling precinct, is it better to vote by absentee?   Most absentee ballots are not counted by hand, but instead scanned by computers. The same corporations (ES&S, Diebold, Sequoia, etc) that dominate the touchscreen market, also control the ballot scanners.  In addition, some counties, like King County Washington, have even outsourced the mailing of their absentee ballots to private industry. 
    
     
12. Can’t elections be rigged by stuffing ballot boxes, as well?  Yes, but it is a detectable kind of vote fraud, whereas voting by machine, early or absentee is nearly impossible to detect.  The problem of stuffed ballot boxes may be more fiction than fact.  In his book, The Right To Vote, The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, Alexander Keyssar, of the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, writes, “…recent studies have found that claims of widespread corruption were grounded almost entirely in sweeping, highly emotional allegations backed by anecdotes and little systematic investigation or evidence. Paul Kleppner, among others, has concluded that what is most striking is not how many, but how few documented cases of electoral fraud can be found. Most elections appear to have been honestly conducted: ballot-box stuffing, bribery, and intimidation were the exception, not the rule.”
    
     
13. Doesn’t the federal government regulate the voting machine industry?  No. There is no federal agency charged with regulatory oversight of the elections industry. There are no restrictions on who can count our votes. Anyone from anywhere can count our votes. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) doesn’t even publish a complete list of all the voting technology companies whose business it is to count Americans’ votes.   see: voting companies info
    
     
14. Can a voting machine company be owned by foreigners and run by felons?  Yes. Sequoia is the third largest voting machine company in America and is owned by a British-based company, De La Rue. Diebold is the second largest voting machine company in the country. It counts about 35% of all votes in America.  Diebold employed 5 convicted felons as senior managers and developers to help write the central compiler computer code that counted 50% of the votes in 30 states. Jeff Dean, Diebold’s Senior Vice-President and senior programmer on Diebold’s central compiler code, was convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree. Dean was convicted of planting back doors in his software and using a “high degree of sophistication” to evade detection over a period of 2 years. see: fraud & irregularities
    
     
15. Isn’t that a threat to national security? Yes.
    
     
16. What was the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) all about? It established the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to distribute billions of dollars to the states to upgrade their voting systems, but failed to mandate any meaningful standards.  http://www.eac.gov/law_ext.asp 
    
     
17. Doesn’t the federal government certify the voting machines?  No. The federal government has a loose set of technical guidelines for voting machines that are voluntary and may be actually harmful.  The Federal Voting Systems Standards (FVSS) used by the three NASED’s approved Independent Test Authorities (ITA) to “certify” companies are outmoded guidelines and voluntary, and not all states have adopted them.  According to industry observers, the FVSS guidelines allow one in ten machines to fail.  There is no enforcement of these guidelines, such as they are. 
    
     
18. Who, then, certifies the nation’s voting machines? The FEC coordinates with the industry-funded National Association of State Election Directors (NASED), a private non-profit group, to have machines inspected certified by industry-funded private contractors.  NASED selects and approves the testing laboratories. Only prototypes of the machines and software are available for a very superficial inspection.  The inspection is conducted by three private companies who are not themselves subject to any regulation.  Technical Issues & Standards  “An unelected person named R. Doug Lewis runs a private non-profit organization called “The Election Center.”
    

    Lewis is possibly the most powerful man in the U.S., influencing election procedures and voting systems, yet he is vague about his credentials and no one seems to be quite sure who hired him or how he came to oversee such vast electoral functions. Lewis organized the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS, now heavily funded by voting machine vendors); he also organized the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) and, through them, Lewis told (author Bev) Harris he helps certify the certifiers.”  “Wyle Laboratories is the most talked-about voting machine certifier, probably because it is the biggest, but in fact, Wyle quit certifying voting machine software in 1996. It does test hardware: Can you drop it off a truck? Does it stand up to rain? Software testing and certification is done by Shawn Southworth. When Ciber quit certifying in 1996, it was taken over by Nichols Research, and Southworth was in charge of testing. Nichols Research stopped doing the testing, and it was taken over by PSInet, where Southworth did the testing. PSInet went under, and testing functions were taken over by Metamore, where Southworth did the testing. Metamore dumped it, and it was taken over by Ciber, where Southworth does the testing. Here is a photo of Shawn Southworth:” scoop.co.nz

WOULD YOU TRUST THIS MAN WITH YOUR VOTE?

meet Shawn Southworth

the industry guy who “certifies” America’s voting technology

The Electronic Voting Machine Company Qui Tam Cases Explained… ‘Citizen media is replacing mainstream media…and a lot more successfully than anybody dreamed.’

An Exclusive Interview for The BRAD BLOG as Guest Blogged by Joy and Tom Williams…

Mike Papantonio and Bobby Kennedy co-host Ring of Fire on Air America. The two attorneys have filed qui tam lawsuits against the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) companies for defrauding the government. We previously posted an exclusive interview with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. about this case.

Papantonio is a Florida attorney who has already gone after a number of big corporations for the American people. He is named partner and head of the Mass Tort Department at his firm. He has handled many famous cases throughout the nation, including asbestos, breast implants, Dalkon Shield, Fen-Phen, hemophiliac-AIDS, L-Tryptophan, railroad disasters and the Florida Tobacco litigation. He is listed in Best Lawyers in America and Leading American Attorney. He is also the author of In Search of Atticus Finch, A Motivational Book for Lawyers; Clarence Darrow, The Journeyman; Resurrecting AESOP, Fables Lawyers Should Remember and a co-author of Closing Arguments — The Last Battle. In addition to all this, he is a popular lecturer in the legal field.

We would like to say something about what a dynamic and articulate man he is, and how much we think he’s doing for our country, but, really, res ipsa loquitur, the thing speaks for itself, and this is no accident. Mike Papantonio is a hard-working, extremely generous, friendly and personable — and dedicated — man. One would be hard-pressed to find a better duo for the difficult job ahead. The Kennedy/Papantonio alliance is a particularly brilliant one. Mike took the time to talk to us about aspects of the qui tam cases they have set in motion already…

BRAD BLOG: Can you tell us about these qui tam cases?

MIKE PAPANTONIO: What we’re doing with these qui tam cases is really not much different than the approach we used in the national tobacco litigation. We’ve put together that same kind of team, not the same people, but the same kind of people who are used to working with complex litigation. Because of that, there’s a benefit to the U.S. attorney saying, “Well, you know, we don’t know if we really want to do this.” And once they say that, those are the golden words that will allow us to go in and handle the case ourselves. Exactly like we’ve done with tobacco, asbestos, virtually every major pharmaceutical case in the country, it’s always originated with the same kind of lawyers. And those are the kind of lawyers that do fairly complex stuff.

BB: I want to thank you for doing those cases, by the way, Mike.

MP: Thank you for saying that, sometimes it just takes a while to register, to where you say, well you know, I didn’t want to have to do this, but apparently we have to. That’s how I feel about this right now.

BB: How do you feel about the idea that you might be saving our Democracy?

MP: Morris Dees is a civil rights lawyer and a very good friend of mine. As a matter of fact he started the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery. If you talk to someone like Morris, and you ask him, what is it that brought some closure, some beginning for closure to the civil rights movement, he’d say it was really no one event; it was kind of a collection of displaced separate events. That’s always stuck with me, because with anything that’s worth doing, it’s rare that you will accomplish it with one event that you are able to manage, or one success that you are able to gain. It rarely works like that. I think there are some similarities here, just like I thought the same thing with tobacco. When we first started talking about tobacco, everybody thought we were pretty much nuts, because we were taking on some of the biggest corporations in the world. But it wasn’t just our effort, it had been the effort of people who’d gone before us, and all we did was take what they’d already done for us and make it a little bit better — a small reinvention of the wheel, in a way that just helped the wheel roll a little better. It’s the same thing here.

I think of Lowell Finley. Lowell Finley is a great lawyer who’s handled these voter cases a long time, but he’s had to handle them by himself. First of all there’s the economics of it, and if all you are doing is going to court and arguing with some Judge, about the fact that he ought to enjoin the further use of the company, the product, or that he ought to put limitations on how the product’s used, that doesn’t really get you where you need to go, and it costs you instead of the company. The only thing that corporate America understands is when they have to say to their stockholders, or to their partners in their businesses, “Hey, we have to write a big check now and it could put us out of business.” That’s all they respond to. Having done complex litigation for 25 years, I’ve never seen any other formula. You know, in a perfect world we could throw them in jail.

In Japan, for example, if you are following this latest story — I think it has to do with an auto case where they didn’t tell the consumers the truth — the consumer doesn’t really get to sue them the same way they do in the States, but the good news is that they throw them in jail. So that’s where I wish we were. I would gladly give up the multi-million-dollar recoveries from all the pharmaceutical cases, from everything we’ve done, for the last 25 years. If I knew we had a law that said, “Well, you guys can’t really sue them for money but we can have these creeps thrown in jail,” I’d gladly give up every dime. But, unfortunately, in the US, the only avenue we have to punish these companies is to take their money away. And so that’s the method of operation that we’ve used in pharmaceutical cases, in asbestos cases, and tobacco cases, and roll-over cases — all of those consumer cases are only driven by the fact that greed is such a driving force with corporate America that they only react when you take some of their ill-gotten money away from them.

BB: So it’s not only the machine fraud. The Republican Party has been involved with all kinds of methods to disenfranchise voters, from intimidation, to destruction of Democratic voter registrations, and all kinds of other things that result in people not having their votes counted, or not being able to vote. Is there any possibility of a class action lawsuit down the line for the American people because they had their election stolen?

MP: I don’t really see that. I understand class action suits very, very well, and I don’t really see that as a possibility. It’s not likely that you’re going to have a case where you say the same offense that prevented person A from voting also prevented person B and person C, where you can show those three events are exactly the same. And unfortunately in a class action suit there are certain hoops that you have to jump through, like similarity in action, numerosity, all of these things that you really have to be specific about to get to the class action threshold. There may be some small cases, for example, where the Indians are disenfranchised, in a particular area — yes, that has a ring to it. Or where the Hispanics in a certain state are disenfranchised — that has some appeal to it. I don’t think that we are ready to get there yet with these. The trick to any particular litigation is to lay out the best strategy you can with what you have.

When I look at this, the best strategy that I’m able to come up with, and Bobby’s able to come up with, is a strategy that forces us into a room with the people who are making these decisions — so I’m able to sit across the table from those people and ask them some tough questions. That: a.) forces them into committing perjury; and b.) exposes them as being the criminals that they are. I think that the best way to get there, is to do it by way of qui tam lawsuits and I may be wrong, but sometimes you have to stick with your strategy and that’s where we’re headed with it.

BB: Bobby was talking about how widespread this machine tampering is getting. It suggested to me that since these machines don’t tamper themselves, and since the Republicans don’t do things ad hoc, there may be a room filled with high level people who are sitting around analyzing data, plotting strategies, coming up with numbers and giving instructions, and if you could find out who those are wouldn’t you have a massive conspiracy case?

MP: Yes, you would. Tom, I keep hearing of people afraid to say that there’s any design, that everything that happened in Ohio must have just happened to be coincidental, disjointed events. I’m not afraid to say I think there is something that has more of a design to it.

For example, there is no question Feeney, down in Florida, met with people who were trying to put together a system to game voting. Here you have a Republican Congressman, this guy who represents Floridians, who represents Americans, and he’s sitting down trying to figure out how he can defraud Americans of their right to vote. Now, you’ve got to find that here too. Does it all fit together? It might.

[Ed Note: We have been reporting on Florida vote-rigging whistleblower Clint Curtis for the past year and a half. He is the programmer who has alleged Republican Congressman Tom Feeney asked him to create a software prototype to flip votes on electronic voting machines. A summary of our coverage is posted here. Curtis is now running for Congress in Florida’s 24th district in hopes of unseating Feeney this fall. The Clint Curtis for Congress website is here.]

I think for something as critical as this is, you have to have a very methodical approach, just the same kind of an approach I would use if I were going to sue Merck for a defective product for 10,000 people. But that’s not new stuff. If you were to follow me around in a given month, you would see that I use the same methodology almost all the time, because it’s proven methodology, and that’s the way this has to be approached. It’s easy to get your attention pulled in so many directions that you forget that you still have a methodology that you need to follow. So all of these things are issues. You say to yourself, “My God, I know this is happening,” but you have to be patient. You have to say to yourself, “I gotta get there.”

BB: That’s not to say in following your planned strategy you might not turn up a lot of things in the woodwork during the process.

MP: Yes, I think you will. I think we’ll turn up exactly what you’re talking about in the process. And then at some point, that’s something that will become useable. Right now with the way that politics are situated in Washington, if you were to turn up the fact that Dick Cheney, for an example – just for an example – if Dick Cheney and Karl Rove had sat down and said, here is the master strategy that’s even better than Lee Atwater’s Southern Strategy, and here’s how we are going to create this Republican machine that’s never going to go away — if they were to have said that, and I actually had documents to show that they said it, that ordinarily would work…. But with the present environment, with the media that we are confronted with, and with the Justice Department, (not so much the Justice Department, but the people who are running the Justice Department, because we have very good U.S. Attorneys who are career people and they don’t like this anymore than we do) — unfortunately, until we take back Congress and then take back the White House, we could have all the smoking guns you want, but the infrastructure to do anything with it is not there.

Every time I talk about this Democrats get mad, but it’s just absolutely the truth: Had Bill Clinton gone after and really sustained his investigation into the Iran-Contra affair for the full two years that he was there with a Democratic Congress, had he aggressively gone after the people he needed to, we wouldn’t have had Wolfowitz, we wouldn’t have had Rumsfeld, we wouldn’t have had Richard Perle, we wouldn’t have most of the Neocons that are running things right now. They would be in jail. But he didn’t do it. So the question is, if we can get Congress back one more time, and we can gain control of the infrastructure that puts thugs in jail, then we can have some change, but it has to begin in November, it has to happen.

This is it — 2006 is the test.

But until we have either the House or the Senate, we don’t even have a bully pulpit. We have a press that is a completely dismal failure. And there’s a clear reason why they’re a dismal failure. Want to hear it?

BB: Of course!

MP: In the next 900 days, they have the last opportunity to enhance the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Michael Powell, if you will remember, took a shot at it last year, and he was very close, a lot closer than anybody thought. If they can get there, then what you are going to have is that Viacom, or NBC, or Rupert Murdoch is going come to your home town, and own your newspaper, own your radios, own your televisions, own everything, so that the one message that, say, Rupert Murdoch wants to deliver is delivered on virtually every venue available to you.

BB: That’s so dangerous.

MP: It’s awful. But the corporate media understands that this is it.

THIS IS IT!

Really, they’ll never again have this opportunity to have such a bumpkin President, such a lapdog bunch of Congressmen, and such a bottom-feeding kind of Administration. They’ll never have this again. They are afraid they will lose this opportunity by actually telling the stories, that people like you are telling. They are afraid to tell the story about the fact that 80,000 votes were shifted from John Kerry’s name to George Bush’s name in Ohio; or, that in the same state of Ohio, in one district, there were only 800 people who were registered, but 4000 votes showed up on the ledger.

BB: About qui tam: I understand that when you file, the government has the option of taking the case, instead of the citizen who files. Is that true?

MP: Correct.

BB: Is there any chance that the government might take the case and then go ahead and spike it?

MP: You mean sit on it?

BB: Yes.

MP: Yes, that’s exactly everybody’s fear, and that’s what we are trying to work around right now. The answer is, yes, that could very well happen, and we’re doing the best we can to not allow it to happen. Interestingly enough, within 60 days they have to make a decision, the decision if they are going to take the case, and they have a right to have one extension, they can get one continuance for that decision, so that’s one thing we have to be very conscious of.

BB: That can leave the disclosure until after the election then.

MP: Oh, absolutely. We’re trying to do what we can in that regard too.

BB: It’s too bad it couldn’t have been filed a little bit earlier.

MP: We had to have the facts. You have to have the relator, you have to have the whistleblowers, without those you can’t really do anything.

BB: I want to thank you for doing this. I really appreciate it.

MP: Well thank you, and I appreciate what you’re doing. I’m very optimistic about what you’re doing, because I think there’s a real rise in the citizen media. Citizen media is replacing mainstream media, and I think it’s doing it a lot more aggressively, and a lot more successfully than anybody dreamed. If you look at the numbers right now, 60% of Americans don’t trust the news. 60% say that they don’t even believe that the news can be adequately reported because government or corporations don’t allow it to happen. So what happens out there, is that the market always takes care of itself. There is some truth to that. And the market right now is moving rapidly towards the same kind of citizen media that you’re involved with. It’s one of those events that I talked about earlier, which coalesces with other things that are happening, so citizen media does get a story like this out, and it’s very effective. It’s amazing.

So when you run this story, somebody somewhere might read it and they might say, “Well I have information,” and they call someone or they call us, and you have a whole new dimension to the case that develops. Every day, somebody inside one of these voter corporations is mistreated, becomes disgruntled, finds their conscience, gets fearful that they are going to be arrested — because all those things do happen — and every time another of these key people decides to do the right thing, we have a better chance of getting to the whole story, so what you’re doing has a dramatic effect.

BB: Well I hope so, I just want to save this country.

MP: [Laughing] Well, I thank you for that. I will keep you posted as this story develops. It’s not something that happens right away. I think people may believe things are going to happen so rapidly that it’s going to be a huge flash, it’s more like a smoldering fire. And that’s not such a bad thing.

BB: No, because sometimes a smoldering fire will do a lot more damage in the long run than a flash. I’m hoping that this will actually change the consciousness in America so that when everybody goes to vote they look carefully at what’s going on around them. If we can at least get it out there that these voting machine companies are being sued, then maybe there will be more attention paid during the 2006 election, even if the case hasn’t been concluded.

MP: Joy, let me ask you something. Just put yourself in the position of an insider. The number ten guy with a huge voting machine company. All of a sudden, you understand that we’re already going fairly aggressively against one of your competitors. And you as number ten person in that company have firsthand knowledge that the company is committing fraud, and that the fraud is resulting in people being disenfranchised — just totally being disenfranchised from the right to vote. If you are that number ten guy, and as you listen to the story unfold, there ought to be a certain pucker factor. That fear factor is what you should react to, rather than being somebody that is brought into a lawsuit or a criminal case. The thing to do is to come forward now, and let people know up front that, yes, you know about it, and, yes, you’re willing to help correct it.

BB: And that’s part of the message we need to get out….

MP: That’s it!

BB: You were saying the other day it’s “like the civil rights issue” I think this is the civil rights issue.

MP: Oh yes, it is the civil rights issue; it’s the heart of the civil rights issue. It’s what people were murdered for, why they had to march in lines where they had dogs sic’d on them, and tear gas thrown at them, and bullets shot over their heads, or sometimes into their bodies. There’s no difference from what’s happening here, it’s just that people don’t understand or react to the racial aspect of it. Because it’s not simply a racial issue, it’s a class issue.

BB: Exactly, it’s the poor, as well as minority groups, as well as anyone who might commit the crime of voting while Democrat.

MP: If you think that this is happening in upper middle class neighborhoods, where white people drive 15 minutes to vote, you’re wrong. The problem was in the places where people had to take buses, and walk and take taxicabs to go vote, and then they would have to stand in line for four hours.

BB: And they might not even be in the “right” line in the same polling precinct. In Ohio there were frequently two polling precincts in one place, like a high school gym, and people would get in the wrong line, wait four hours, and then have to go to the end of the other line.

MP: Yes… and, then when they get there, their name isn’t even on the voting roll. So those are the nuances. We have to handle the direct issue right now. The direct issue is, even when they got there, the voting was probably gamed after they voted.

BB: Do you think that ChoicePoint is pulling people’s names off the rolls in 2006 as they did in 2000 in Florida?

MP: Oh, I just don’t know that yet. There’s no way to tell yet.

BB: This whole story is so intricate and so complicated, if they game the system again in 2006, it’s going to be a lot harder to tell because there are so many small races compared to the big major races for President….

MP: You hit a very good point. The point is: What about the developer who wants to have two of his friends put on the county commission so he can build a new high-rise? Nobody wants the high-rise, but, if he can get his friends put on there, my God, he might stand to make $15 million. Isn’t that just as much of a threat? The local issue is not quite as important as the national, but it’s pretty damned important.

BB: And, if the poll workers can take these machines home and have a sleepover with them, you can have one person put in a nasty chip, and change the whole outcome of the race!

MP: And without any evidence at all, so there would be no way to tell.

By Michael Parenti

The 2004 presidential contest between Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry and the Republican incumbent, President Bush Jr., amounted to another stolen election. This has been well documented by such investigators as Rep. John Conyers, Mark Crispin Miller, Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman, Bev Harris, and others. Here is an overview of what they have reported, along with observations of my own.

Some 105 million citizens voted in 2000, but in 2004 the turnout climbed to at least 122 million. Pre-election surveys indicated that among the record 16.8 million new voters Kerry was a heavy favorite, a fact that went largely unreported by the press. In addition, there were about two million progressives who had voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 who switched to Kerry in 2004.

Yet the official 2004 tallies showed Bush with 62 million votes, about 11.6 million more than he got in 2000. Meanwhile Kerry showed only eight million more votes than Gore received in 2000. To have achieved his remarkable 2004 tally, Bush would needed to have kept all his 50.4 million from 2000, plus a majority of the new voters, plus a large share of the very liberal Nader defectors.

Nothing in the campaign and in the opinion polls suggest such a mass crossover. The numbers simply do not add up.

In key states like Ohio, the Democrats achieved immense success at registering new voters, outdoing the Republicans by as much as five to one. Moreover the Democratic party was unusually united around its candidate-or certainly against the incumbent president. In contrast, prominent elements within the GOP displayed open disaffection, publicly voicing serious misgivings about the Bush administration’s huge budget deficits, reckless foreign policy, theocratic tendencies, and threats to individual liberties.

Sixty newspapers that had endorsed Bush in 2000 refused to do so in 2004; forty of them endorsed Kerry.

All through election day 2004, exit polls showed Kerry ahead by 53 to 47 percent, giving him a nationwide edge of about 1.5 million votes, and a solid victory in the electoral college. Yet strangely enough, the official tally gave Bush the election. Here are some examples of how the GOP “victory” was secured.

—In some places large numbers of Democratic registration forms disappeared, along with absentee ballots and provisional ballots. Sometimes absentee ballots were mailed out to voters just before election day, too late to be returned on time, or they were never mailed at all.

—Overseas ballots normally reliably distributed by the State Department were for some reason distributed by the Pentagon in 2004. Nearly half of the six million American voters living abroad—a noticeable number of whom formed anti-Bush organizations—never received their ballots or got them too late to vote. Military personnel, usually more inclined toward supporting the president, encountered no such problems with their overseas ballots.

—Voter Outreach of America, a company funded by the Republican National Committee, collected thousands of voter registration forms in Nevada, promising to turn them in to public officials, but then systematically destroyed the ones belonging to Democrats.

— Tens of thousands of Democratic voters were stricken from the rolls in several states because of “felonies” never committed, or committed by someone else, or for no given reason. Registration books in Democratic precincts were frequently out-of-date or incomplete. —Democratic precincts—enjoying record turnouts—were deprived of sufficient numbers of polling stations and voting machines, and many of the machines they had kept breaking down. After waiting long hours many people went home without voting. Pro-Bush precincts almost always had enough voting machines, all working well to make voting quick and convenient.

—A similar pattern was observed with student populations in several states: students at conservative Christian colleges had little or no wait at the polls, while students from liberal arts colleges were forced to line up for as long as ten hours, causing many to give up.

—In Lucas County, Ohio, one polling place never opened; the voting machines were locked in an office and no one could find the key. In Hamilton County many absentee voters could not cast a Democratic vote for president because John Kerry’s name had been “accidentally” removed when Ralph Nader was taken off the ballot.

—A polling station in a conservative evangelical church in Miami County, Ohio, recorded an impossibly high turnout of 98 percent, while a polling place in Democratic inner-city Cleveland recorded an impossibly low turnout of 7 percent.

—Latino, Native American, and African American voters in New Mexico who favored Kerry by two to one were five times more likely to have their ballots spoiled and discarded in districts supervised by Republican election officials. Many were given provisional ballots that subsequently were never counted. In these same Democratic areas Bush “won” an astonishing 68 to 31 percent upset victory. One Republican judge in New Mexico discarded hundreds of provisional ballots cast for Kerry, accepting only those that were for Bush.

—Cadres of rightwing activists, many of them religious fundamentalists, were financed by the Republican Party. Deployed to key Democratic precincts, they handed out flyers warning that voters who had unpaid parking tickets, an arrest record, or owed child support would be arrested at the polls—all untrue. They went door to door offering to “deliver” absentee ballots to the proper office, and announcing that Republicans were to vote on Tuesday (election day) and Democrats on Wednesday.

—Democratic poll watchers in Ohio, Arizona, and other states, who tried to monitor election night vote counting, were menaced and shut out by squads of GOP toughs. In Warren County, Ohio, immediately after the polls closed Republican officials announced a “terrorist attack” alert, and ordered the press to leave. They then moved all ballots to a warehouse where the counting was conducted in secret, producing an amazingly high tally for Bush, some 14,000 more votes than he had received in 2000. It wasn’t the terrorists who attacked Warren County.

—Bush did remarkably well with phantom populations. The number of his votes in Perry and Cuyahoga counties in Ohio, exceeded the number of registered voters, creating turnout rates as high as 124 percent. In Miami County nearly 19,000 additional votes eerily appeared in Bush’s column after all precincts had reported. In a small conservative suburban precinct of Columbus, where only 638 people were registered, the touchscreen machines tallied 4,258 votes for Bush.

—In almost half of New Mexico’s counties, more votes were reported than were recorded as being cast, and the tallies were consistently in Bush’s favor. These ghostly results were dismissed by New Mexico’s Republican Secretary of State as an “administrative lapse.”

Exit polls showed Kerry solidly ahead of Bush in both the popular vote and the electoral college. Exit polls are an exceptionally accurate measure of elections. In the last three elections in Germany, for example, exit polls were never off by more than three-tenths of one percent.

Unlike ordinary opinion polls, the exit sample is drawn from people who have actually just voted. It rules out those who say they will vote but never make it to the polls, those who cannot be sampled because they have no telephone or otherwise cannot be reached at home, those who are undecided or who change their minds about whom to support, and those who are turned away at the polls for one reason or another.

Exit polls have come to be considered so reliable that international organizations use them to validate election results in countries around the world.

Republicans argued that in 2004 the exit polls were inaccurate because they were taken only in the morning when Kerry voters came out in greater numbers. (Apparently Bush voters sleep late.) In fact, the polling was done at random intervals all through the day, and the evening results were as much favoring Kerry as the early results.

It was also argued that pollsters focused more on women (who favored Kerry) than men, or maybe large numbers of grumpy Republicans were less inclined than cheery Democrats to talk to pollsters. No evidence was put forth to substantiate these fanciful speculations.

Most revealing, the discrepancies between exit polls and official tallies were never random but worked to Bush’s advantage in ten of eleven swing states that were too close to call, sometimes by as much as 9.5 percent as in New Hampshire, an unheard of margin of error for an exit poll. In Nevada, Ohio, New Mexico, and Iowa exit polls registered solid victories for Kerry, yet the official tally in each case went to Bush, a mystifying outcome.

In states that were not hotly contested the exit polls proved quite accurate. Thus exit polls in Utah predicted a Bush victory of 70.8 to 26.4 percent; the actual result was 71.1 to 26.4 percent. In Missouri, where the exit polls predicted a Bush victory of 54 to 46 percent, the final result was 53 to 46 percent.

One explanation for the strange anomalies in vote tallies was found in the widespread use of touchscreen electronic voting machines. These machines produced results that consistently favored Bush over Kerry, often in chillingly consistent contradiction to exit polls.

In 2003 more than 900 computer professionals had signed a petition urging that all touchscreen systems include a verifiable audit trail. Touchscreen voting machines can be easily programmed to go dead on election day or throw votes to the wrong candidate or make votes disappear while leaving the impression that everything is working fine.

A tiny number of operatives can easily access the entire computer network through one machine and thereby change votes at will. The touchscreen machines use trade secret code, and are tested, reviewed, and certified in complete secrecy. Verified counts are impossible because the machines leave no reliable paper trail.

Since the introduction of touchscreen voting, mysterious congressional election results have been increasing. In 2000 and 2002, Senate and House contests and state legislative races in North Carolina, Nebraska, Alabama, Minnesota, Colorado, and elsewhere produced dramatic and puzzling upsets, always at the expense of Democrats who were ahead in the polls.

In some counties in Texas, Virginia, and Ohio, voters who pressed the Democrat’s name found that the Republican candidate was chosen. In Cormal County, Texas, three GOP candidates won by exactly 18,181 votes apiece, a near statistical impossibility.

All of Georgia’s voters used Diebold touchscreen machines in 2002, and Georgia’s incumbent Democratic governor and incumbent Democratic senator, who were both well ahead in the polls just before the election, lost in amazing double-digit voting shifts.

This may be the most telling datum of all: In New Mexico in 2004 Kerry lost all precincts equipped with touchscreen machines, irrespective of income levels, ethnicity, and past voting patterns. The only thing that consistently correlated with his defeat in those precincts was the presence of the touchscreen machine itself.

In Florida Bush registered inexplicably sharp jumps in his vote (compared to 2000) in counties that used touchscreen machines.

Companies like Diebold, Sequoia, and ES&S that market the touchscreen machines are owned by militant supporters of the Republican party. These companies have consistently refused to implement a paper-trail to dispel suspicions and give instant validation to the results of electronic voting. They prefer to keep things secret, claiming proprietary rights, a claim that has been backed in court.

Election officials are not allowed to evaluate the secret software. Apparently corporate trade secrets are more important than voting rights. In effect, corporations have privatized the electoral system, leaving it easily susceptible to fixed outcomes. Given this situation, it is not likely that the GOP will lose control of Congress come November 2006. The two-party monopoly threatens to become an even worse one-party tyranny.

Michael Parenti’s recent books include The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), Superpatriotism (City Lights), and The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press). For more information visit: www.michaelparenti.org.

Re-Posted from ZNet

The One-Two Punch: Disenfranchise Voters & Miscount the Votes
A. Disenfranchisement: Suppress the Vote!
B. E-Voting Problems: Many Different Systems, Different States, Different Elections
C. What You Can Do
D. Voting Systems: Election integrity requires openness & transparency.
E. The Elephant in the Room
F. Common Cause Recommends
G. Online Videos & Interactive
H. Books
I. The BEST Websites & Online Resources

Massacre of the Buffalo Soldiers

by Greg Palast

As reported for Democracy Now!

Palast, who first reported this story for BBC Television Newsnight (UK) and Democracy Now! (USA), is author of the New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse.

The Republican National Committee has a special offer for African-American soldiers: Go to Baghdad, lose your vote.

A confidential campaign directed by GOP party chiefs in October 2004 sought to challenge the ballots of tens of thousands of voters in the last presidential election, virtually all of them cast by residents of Black-majority precincts.
Files from the secret vote-blocking campaign were obtained by BBC Television Newsnight, London. They were attached to emails accidentally sent by Republican operatives to a non-party website.

One group of voters wrongly identified by the Republicans as registering to vote from false addresses: servicemen and women sent overseas.

*******
For Greg Palast’s discussion with broadcaster Amy Goodman on the Black soldier purge of 2004, go to http://gregpalast.com/armedmadhouse/palastDN6-14-06.mp3

*******

Here’s how the scheme worked: The RNC mailed these voters letters in envelopes marked, “Do not forward”, to be returned to the sender. These letters were mailed to servicemen and women, some stationed overseas, to their US home addresses. The letters then returned to the Bush-Cheney campaign as “undeliverable.”

The lists of soldiers of “undeliverable” letters were transmitted from state headquarters, in this case Florida, to the RNC in Washington. The party could then challenge the voters’ registration and thereby prevent their absentee ballots being counted.

One target list was comprised exclusively of voters registered at the Jacksonville, Florida, Naval Air Station. Jacksonville is third largest naval installation in the US, best known as home of the Blue Angels fighting squandron.

[See this scrub sheet at http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=160156893&context=set-72157594155273706&size=o ]

Our team contacted the homes of several on the caging list, such as Randall Prausa, a serviceman, whose wife said he had been ordered overseas.

A soldier returning home in time to vote in November 2004 could also be challenged on the basis of the returned envelope. Soldiers challenged would be required to vote by “provisional” ballot.

Over one million provisional ballots cast in the 2004 race were never counted; over half a million absentee ballots were also rejected. The extraordinary rise in the number of rejected ballots was the result of the widespread multi-state voter challenge campaign by the Republican Party. The operation, of which the purge of Black soldiers was a small part, was the first mass challenge to voting America had seen in two decades.

The BBC obtained several dozen confidential emails sent by the Republican’s national Research Director and Deputy Communications chief, Tim Griffin to GOP Florida campaign chairman Brett Doster and other party leaders. Attached were spreadsheets marked, “Caging.xls.” Each of these contained several hundred to a few thousand voters and their addresses.

A check of the demographics of the addresses on the “caging lists,” as the GOP leaders called them indicated that most were in African-American majority zip codes.

Ion Sanco, the non-partisan elections supervisor of Leon County (Tallahassee) when shown the lists by this reporter said: “The only thing I can think of – African American voters listed like this – these might be individuals that will be challenged if they attempted to vote on Election Day.”

These GOP caging lists were obtained by the same BBC team that first exposed the wrongful purge of African-American “felon” voters in 2000 by then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Eliminating the voting rights of those voters — 94,000 were targeted — likely caused Al Gore’s defeat in that race.

The Republican National Committee in Washington refused our several requests to respond to the BBC discovery. However, in Tallahassee, the Florida Bush campaign’s spokespeople offered several explanations for the list.

Joseph Agostini, speaking for the GOP, suggested the lists were of potential donors to the Bush campaign. Oddly, the supposed donor list included residents of the Sulzbacher Center a shelter for homeless families.

Another spokesperson for the Bush campaign, Mindy Tucker Fletcher, ultimately changed the official response, acknowledging that these were voters, “we mailed to, where the letter came back – bad addresses.”

The party has refused to say why it would mark soldiers as having “bad addresses” subject to challenge when they had been assigned abroad.

The apparent challenge campaign was not inexpensive. The GOP mailed the letters first class, at a total cost likely exceeding millions of dollars, so that the addresses would be returned to “cage” workers.

“This is not a challenge list,” insisted the Republican spokesmistress. However, she modified that assertion by adding, “That’s not what it’s set up to be.”
Setting up such a challenge list would be a crime under federal law. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlaws mass challenges of voters where race is a factor in choosing the targeted group.

While the party insisted the lists were not created for the purpose to challenge Black voters, the GOP ultimately offered no other explanation for the mailings. However, Tucker Fletcher asserted Republicans could still employ the list to deny ballots to those they considered suspect voters. When asked if Republicans would use the list to block voters, Tucker Fletcher replied, “Where it’s stated in the law, yeah.”

It is not possible at this time to determine how many on the potential blacklist were ultimately challenged and lost their vote. Soldiers sending in their ballot from abroad would not know their vote was lost because of a challenge.

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For the full story of caging lists and voter purges of 2004, plus the documents, read Greg Palast’s New York Times bestseller, ARMED MADHOUSE: Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf?, Armed Madhouse: Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal ‘08, No Child’s Behind Left and other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War.

RePosted from Greg Palast.com