SEQUOIA TOUCH-SCREEN VOTING MACHINES HACKED, FOUND VULNERABLE TO VOTE-FLIPPING BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY!

Posted in Black Box (Electronic) Voting, General on February 13th, 2007
New Jersey Attorney to Ask Judge for Decertification of Company’s ‘AVC Advantage’ System After Machines Found Untested by State
Princeton Professor Paid $86 For Online Purchase of 5 Machines That a NJ County Paid $40,000 for…

Guest Blogged by John Gideon, with additional reporting by Brad Friedman

“We can take a version of Sequoia’s software program and modify it to do something different — like appear to count votes, but really move them from one candidate to another. And it can be programmed to do that only on Tuesdays in November, and at any other time. You can’t detect it,” Princeton’s Professor of Computer Science Andrew Appel explains in New Jersey’s Star-Ledger today.

Like Diebold’s touch-screen machines before them, Sequoia’s voting machines have now been found to be hackable in seconds by a Princeton University professor who says the systems could be “easily…rigged to throw an election.” Someone may wish to let the folks in Riverside County, CA, know since County Supervisors there recently issued a “thousand to one” bet that their Sequoia voting systems couldn’t be manipulated.

In the same report, it was revealed that an attorney has filed suit, claiming the Sequoia AVC Advantage Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines used in 18 of New Jersey’s 21 counties were never reviewed by the state before they were improperly certified for use and that Princeton’s Appel was able to acquire five Sequoia voting machines for only $86. The same machines were recently purchased by the state for $8,000 apiece.

According to the Star-Ledger

[Attorney Penny] Venetis filed legal papers Friday claiming the state never certified some 10,000 Sequoia AVC Advantage machines as secure or reliable as required by law.

“There is zero documentation — no proof whatsoever — that any state official has ever reviewed Sequoia machines,” Venetis, co-director of the Rutgers Constitutional Litigation Clinic, said in an interview. “This means you cannot use them. … These machines are being used to count most of the votes in the state without being tested in any way, shape or form.”

Venetis argues that the state certification is in violation of NJ state law which says such systems must “correctly register and accurately count all votes cast,” be “of durable construction” to be used “safely, efficiently, and accurately.”

The lack of documentation and testing, however, is hardly the only problem, as reported by the paper today. “Had the machines been tested,” Election Integrity advocates have found, “they would have proved to be a hacker’s dream.”

Princeton Computer Science Professor Andrew Appel revealed that he bought 5 of the Advantage voting machines from an on-line government equipment clearinghouse for a total of $86. Virtually identical machines were bought in 2005 by Essex County New Jersey for $8,000 per machine.

“Appel had to submit only minimal personal information and a cashier’s check to close the deal,” the Star-Ledger reports. He and his team then put the 5 machines to good use…

A Princeton student picked one machine’s lock “in seven seconds” to access the removable chips containing Sequoia’s vote-recording software, Appel said.

“We can take a version of Sequoia’s software program and modify it to do something different — like appear to count votes, but really move them from one candidate to another. And it can be programmed to do that only on Tuesdays in November, and at any other time. You can’t detect it,” Appel said last week.

And what does Sequoia systems vaunted crisis-management team have to say for itself?


Citing more than a century in the election business, Sequoia Voting Systems asserts on its Web site that “our tamperproof products, including … the AVC Advantage, are sought after from coast to coast for their accuracy and reliability.”

While promising to look into Appel’s claims, Sequoia’s Michelle Shafer asserted that hacking scenarios are unlikely. “It’s not just the equipment. There are people and processes in place in the election environment to prevent tampering and attempts at tampering,” she said.

Appel counters:

But Appel said voting machines often are left unattended at polling places prior to elections. He is confident his students and other recent buyers of 136 Sequoia machines sold on GovDeals.com — where bidders also can find surplus coffins, locomotives and World War I cannons — will crack Sequoia’s code.

Then, he said, it will be fairly simple for anyone with bad intentions and a screwdriver to swap Sequoia’s memory chips for reprogrammed ones.

Of course, this is not the first time that Sequoia’s “tamperproof products” have been found to be highly tamperable.

In March of 2006, just prior to the Pennsylvania’s Primary Election, Carnegie Mellon University’s Dr. Michael Shamos, — a long-time advocate of electronic, touch-screen voting — accidentally “hacked” a Sequoia system during a demonstration of the system’s “invulnerability” to tampering. Shamos was in charge of testing systems for the state.

As well, last November, just days before the General Election, in a stunning report by The BRAD BLOG we revealed the “yellow button” on the back of every Sequoia touch-screen machine which, when pressed once in a simple sequence, places the machine into “manual mode,” allowing anybody to cast as many votes as che or she wishes on that machine.

In Riverside County, CA, just before the end of last year, County Supervisor Jeff Stone challenged Election Integrity advocates during a public, video-taped meeting to bring a hacker in to try and manipulate the county’s Sequoia voting systems. Riverside was the first county in the country to move to touch-screen voting in the late 90’s. Election Integrity advocates on the ground there have been challenging that decision ever since.

Though noted computer security expert Harri Hursti, who has hacked several Diebold systems, quickly agreed to meet Stone’s “thousand to one” challenge, Stone has been balking ever since. So far, he has failed to allow Hursti and the Election Integrity advocates from DFA-Temecula Valley to take him up on his ill-considered challenge, citing unsubstantiated concerns about state law and universally attempting to establish “ground rules” which have been dismissed as unrealistic by both Hursti and a number of internationally recognized computer scientists and security experts.

We suspect there will be much fallout from this latest chapter in New Jersey. Stay tuned…

UPDATE: Princeton Professor Appel has described the act of purchasing the Sequoia Advantage machines and what he found on opening the machines and the actions that students are taking in his blog “How I bought used voting machines on the Internet”. His blog includes the following:

I was surprised at how simple it was for me to access the ROM memory chips containing the firmware that controls the vote-counting. Contrary to Sequoia’s assertions in their promotional literature, there were no security seals protecting the ROMs. Indeed, I found that certain information in the “AVC Advantage Security Overview” (from Sequoia Voting Systems, Inc., 2004) was untrue with respect to my machine. Sequoia’s document states,

“The vote counting instructions in each voting machine are written into integrated circuit chips during the manufacturing process. These chips are incorporated into each machine’s circuit boards. Access to the machine should be limited by administrative procedures and is also limited by the physical design of the machines. Design features include door locks and a numbered seal on the CPU cover.”

I found this to be incorrect, with respect to the machines delivered to me. I did not have to remove any seals, whether of tape, plastic, or wire. The sheet-metal panel covering the computer circuit board is the only component I found that could possibly be described as a “CPU cover”, and it had no numbered seal. (If there ever was a numbered seal holding the CPU cover down, then Buncombe County’s technicians would have to remove it and replace it every time they change the four AA batteries on the motherboard!)

The AVC Advantage can be easily manipulated to throw an election because the chips which control the vote-counting are not soldered on to the circuit board of the DRE. This means the vote-counting firmware can be removed and replace with fraudulent firmware. Under the sheet-metal panel (the “CPU cover”), I found the circuit board containing computer chips, other electronic chips, and four chips that–unlike most of the chips on the circuit board which are soldered in place–are mounted in sockets so that they can be removed and replaced. These are ROM (read-only memory) chips that hold the computer program (firmware) that operates the voting logic. These chips are not held in place by any seals. They can be removed using an ordinary screwdriver and they (or other ROM chips containing other firmware) can be replaced simply by pressing them into place. You can see the ROM chips in the picture above; they have the white labels pasted onto them, and you can see me in the process of prying one loose with a screwdriver.

Like the purchasers of all the other lots sold by Buncombe County, I am now at leisure to examine the contents of the firmware on the ROM chips, and to modify it. If I had the inclination to cheat in an election (which I do not) I could prepare a modified version of the firmware that subtly alters votes as the votes are cast, with no indication of the alteration made visible to the voter. I would write this modified firmware onto new ROM chips. Then, if I had access to one of New Jersey’s voting machines (for example, in an elementary school or firehouse where it is left unattended the night before an election), I could open the door of the machine, unscrew 10 screws, replace the legitimate ROM chips with my own fraudulent ones, reinstall the cover panel with its 10 screws, and close the door of the machine.



by John Gideon for The BRAD BLOG 

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Report: Group Says Exit Polls Show ‘Landslide Denied’ Democrats In Last Week’s Election!

Posted in '06 Election, Brad Blog, Exit Polls, General on November 17th, 2006
Election Defense Alliance Says ‘Major Miscount In U.S. Election’ Cost Dems 3 Million Votes Nationwide!
National Exit Poll Once Again Adjusted to Match Vote Totals, Report Says

Guest blogged by Emily Levy of Velvet Revolution for The BRAD BLOG


Election Defense Alliance (EDA), a national election integrity organization, issued a press release yesterday announcing their new report, “Landslide Denied: Exit Polls vs. Vote Count 2006.”

According to EDA, the Edison-Mitofsky National Exit Poll, conducted by a consortium of news organizations, showed at 7 p.m. on Election Night an 11.5% vote margin in favor of Dems nationwide. But by 1:00 p.m. on the following day, according to EDA, “[T]he Edison-Mitofsky poll had been adjusted, by a process known as ‘forcing,’ to match the reported vote totals for the election.” The adjusted exit polls showed “a 7.6 percent margin exactly mirroring the reported vote totals.”

It was EDA co-founder Jonathan Simon whose foresight in downloading the Edison-Mitofsky exit polls on Election Night 2004 before those polls were adjusted made the discovery of the now-infamous “red shift” possible. Analysis of the original exit polls from 2004 became one of the most compelling bodies of evidence to suggest that the 2004 election was stolen on behalf of George W. Bush.


Now EDA reveals evidence of similar manipulation of this year’s election. In his story Clear Evidence 2006 Congressional Election Hacked, executive editor of OpEdNews Rob Kall quotes Simon as saying:

We see evidence of pervasive fraud, but apparently calibrated to political conditions existing before recent developments shifted the political landscape…so ‘the fix’ turned out not to be sufficient for the actual circumstances….”When you set out to rig an election, you want to do just enough to win. The greater the shift from expectations, (from exit polling, pre-election polling, demographics) the greater the risk of exposure–of provoking investigation. What was plenty to win on October 1 fell short on November 7.

The BRAD BLOG wishes to point out the difference between election “hacking” and “rigging.” Hacking can be done by outsiders armed with such difficult-to-obtain weapons as a hotel mini-bar key (in the case of the Diebold TSx) or a finger (in the case of the Sequoia touchscreen machines). Rigging would be done by an insider such as someone working for an electronic voting machine company or a department of elections. The evidence of skewed results in the 2006 Congressional election doesn’t specifically prove whether hacking or rigging or both occurred, but certainly magnifies the call for further investigation into irregularities in the 2006 elections. Will this new report help the newly-elected-but-apparently-robbed-of-its-landslide Democratic Majority Congress understand the importance of revamping our election system before 2008?

The next phase of Election Defense Alliance’s work will be to analyze results of specific Congressional races. This work will include analysis of exit polls commissioned by Velvet Revolution (of which The BRAD BLOG is a co-founder) and other independent organizations. Perhaps then we will find out how many Democratic (or even Republican) candidates who have been declared losers actually won their races.


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The Stolen Election of 2004

Posted in Disenfranchisement, Exit Polls, General, State by State on September 26th, 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

 

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CANDIDATES: WAIT TO CONCEDE!

Posted in '06 Election, Black Box (Electronic) Voting, General, Parallel Elections, TAKE ACTION!, Video on August 22nd, 2006





Don’t be a Sitting Duck for the Secret Ballot



V
erify 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),  VoterGateThe 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. 




QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS:

  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:

     

  2. Has anyone confessed to rigging voting machines?  Yes.

    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

17. But, wouldn’t it take a vast number of people to rig an election?  Not with today’s technology.  One programmer working at either ES&S or Diebold could write code that could manipulate votes across the country.  If a voting machine has computer components, it can be rigged or accessed through the firmware, software, wireless, modem, telephone, and simple electricity.  Main tabulating computers can be rigged in a similar fashion. Lever voting machine are also easily rigged, although it would be more labor intensive. Still, anyone with the keys to the county warehouse where the machines are stored could rig the machines. Labels can be switched, gears shaved, odometers preset, or printouts preprinted.

18. Can’t we detect vote fraud through exit polls?  Exit polling is conducted by one organization that is hired by the major news networks and the Associated Press.  Since they first started “projecting” election night winners in 1964, the major news networks have never provided any ‘hard’ evidence that they actually conducted any exit polls, at all.  The late authors of the book, VoteScam: The Stealing of America, concluded that some of the major news networks, including the polling organization that they hire for election night reporting, have been complicit in vote fraud. see: exit polls

19. 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. http://www.ecotalk.org/BevHarrisBook2.pdf (page 45)

20. Aren’t you just a conspiracy theorist?  No. In the words of Greg Palast, “I’m a conspiracy expert.”  Election officials have outsourced and privatized a uniquely public function. Corporations have gained near total control over the process of voting. Corporations also control the process of reporting exit polls.   Both processes are completely non-transparent.

by Lynn Landes for EcoTalk.org

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The Stolen Election of 2004

Posted in General on July 13th, 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.

Re-Posted from ZNet

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Democracy Crisis – Election 2006: Will All Votes Count?

Posted in General on July 13th, 2006

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

A. Disenfranchisement: Suppress the Vote!
Information in this section, except where noted, is from Greg Palast’s “Armed Madhouse”Over 3 million votes were cast but never counted in the 2004 presidential election. Millions more were lost because voters were prevented from casting their ballots – including those illegally denied registration or wrongly purged from the registries. The new black boxes played their role… but the principal means of the election heist – voiding ballots, overwhelmingly of the poor and Black, Native Americans and Hispanics – went unexposed, unreported and most importantly, uncorrected and ready to roll out on a grander scale in 2008. (All information on this page, except where noted, is from Greg Palast’s “Armed Madhouse”).Provisional Ballots Rejected: About 1.1 million. Provisional ballots are given if there are problems with the voter’s registration or ID, if there is an error in the voter rolls or if they are “challenged” by GOP. Provisional ballots should be counted unless there is evidence the voter was lying – which is extremely rare.

Spoiled Ballots: About 1.4 million punch-card, optical scan, and e-vote ballots were cast but not counted. About ¾’s of a million African-American votes were not counted, about ¼ of a million Hispanic and Native American votes were not counted. Remaining 400,000+ uncounted votes belonged overwhelming to the poor.

In New Mexico the margin of victory for the Presidential race was 5,988 votes. E-voting machines in Kerry-leaning precincts failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.

Absentee Ballots Rejected: Over half a million in 2004. In swing states, absentee ballot shredding was pandemic. (Florida conveniently labels the voter’s party on the ballot envelope).

In Arapahoe County, Colorado, three times more absentee ballots mailed to Democrats “failed to return” as compared to Republican ballots. Voters from Kerry precincts were 265% more likely to have their absentee ballots tossed out when they did arrive at the clerk’s office.

Voters Barred from Voting: Incompetence and trickery that prevented people – primarily racial minorities, low-income voters, and Democratic voters – from voting included: Destroying voter registrations * Failing to process registrations in a timely manner * Illegally re-registering Democrats as Republicans
* Illegal purges of voter rolls * GOP challenges to voter registrations via ‘caging’ * Voter intimidation and misinformation campaigns * Forgot to mail absentee ballots in Florida, Ohio, and to nearly 3 million Americans living abroad * Phone-jamming Democratic candidate lines provided to help voters having problems on election day * Creating impossibly long lines at the polls as a result of GOP challenges to voters; too few functioning voting machines; changing polling station locations; merging polling stations to save money * GOP volunteers ‘picked up’ absentee ballots from Democratic voters.

In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, 1 in every 4 Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls. (Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., “Did Bush Steal the 2004 Election?” Rolling Stone)

B. E-Voting Problems: Many Different Systems, Different States, Different Elections.
Dozens and dozens of instances of electronic voting machine malfunctions & instances of malfeasance have occurred and are catalogued at VotersUnite.Org and VoteTrustUSA.org. Just a few are listed here:1. New Elections Needed after Electronic Voting Failures.A memory limitation on paperless Unilect Patriot voting machines caused 4,438 votes to be permanently lost in North Carolina (2004).1

AVS WINVote computers at some polling places failed to start up, others overheated and broke down during the election in Mississippi (2003).1

2. “Phantom” Votes Added by Electronic Voting Machines.

After the 2004 General Election, phantom votes (more votes than voters) were reported in Florida, Nebraska, New Mexico, Ohio, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Washington. In North Carolina Microvote DREs showed nearly 3,000 more votes than voters; in New Mexico Sequoia AVC Edge DREs showed over 2,700 early voting phantom votes.1

Hart Intercivic machines in Tarrant County, Texas recorded an additional 100,000 votes that were never actually cast in 2006 Primary Election (Formal challenge to results has been filed).1

3. Bugs!

ES&S vote-tallying software counted to 32,767 and then counted backwards in November 2004 elections: 70,000 votes temporarily disappeared in Broward County, Florida; 8,400 votes in Orange County, Florida; and 22,000 votes in North Carolina.1

4. Votes Jump to the Opponent on the Screen

In the November 2004 hundreds of votes jumped from Bush to Kerry in New Mexico (Sequoia), Maryland (Diebold) and elsewhere. Some voters could correct the problem, some did not.1

5. DRE’s Present Incorrect Ballots to Voters

In March 2004, the US Senate contest in Maryland was omitted from ballots in three counties.1

6. Negative Votes Added to Tally

In Volusia County, Florida in 2000, Al Gore’s count dropped by 16,022 votes, while an obscure Socialist candidate picked up 10,000 votes at 10:30 PM on election night. Global Election Systems explained that two memory cards had been uploaded; there should have only been one memory card uploaded; the second card caused the problem. (BlackBoxVoting.org).

7. DREs Pass Pre-Election Testing, Fail on Election Day

In Mercer County, Pennsylvania all 250 UniLect Patriot machines had been checked and rechecked. On election day some machines never operated, some offered only black screens.1

8. Programming Errors Give Votes to the Wrong Candidate (Vote Switching)

Ballot programming determines how a touch on a screen or marks on a ballot are translated into votes counted by the machine. In November 2000, 67,000 absentee and early-voting ballots were counted incorrectly by a Diebold optical scan machine in New Mexico. ES&S machines miscounted votes in North Carolina in 2004; in New Mexico in 2002; in Kansas in 2002.1

9. Voting Machines Present a Default Candidate (Electronic Version of a Pre-Marked Ballot).

Election officials in Travis County (Austin) Texas, set up Hart Intercivic eSlate DREs so that voters who voted straight party Democratic ticket and pressed ‘enter’ on the next screen – caused their Kerry/Edwards vote to be changed to the default candidate -> Bush/Cheney.1

10. Voting Machines Do Not Count Some Votes

Voters claimed that machines failed to register votes for incumbent school-board member, Rita S. Thompson ( R ), who lost an election in Fairfax, Virginia by 1,662 votes. Election officials observed that one of the questionable machines appeared to subtract a vote from Thompson for about one out of every 100 attempts to vote for her.2

1. VotersUnite.Org: “Facts About Electronic Elections”
PDF File: http://www.votersunite.org/info/Electron…

2. Common Cause: “Election Reform: Malfunction and Malfeasance”

C. What You Can Do 1. VOTE! GET ALL ELIGIBLE VOTERS YOU KNOW TO VOTE! We are most likely to detect malfunction or malfeasance if there is massive voter turnout. Let’s top the turnout from 2004!2. Contact election officials in your county or state by email, phone, private letter or LTTE to tell them your concerns and to tell them what you want.

3. Watch videos and/or read more about election malfunction and malfeasance (& how to ensure free and fair elections) on the excellent websites & books listed at the end of this document. Educate your family and friends. Print out the best material and take it to your local political party, candidates, and progressive groups and activate them!

4. Check for organizations that may already be active in your area and join them! In Indiana: NAACP, People for the American Way, Common Cause, and League of Women Voters should all be working to enfranchise eligible voters and make sure all votes are counted.

5. Contact your local political party and local progressive organizations to educate and activate them!

6. Help register eligible citizens to vote and educate them about their rights & responsibilities.

7. Participate in elections as a poll-worker or poll-monitor.

8. Conduct exit polls or parallel elections.

9. Learn about election laws and policies in your county and state. Then collaborate with/challenge election supervisors in your county/state to ensure that voters are not disenfranchised, and to ensure that votes are cast and counted accurately.

10. BE PREPARED TO TAKE ACTION AFTER ELECTIONS. If our government truly derives its power from the consent of the governed, then we the people must not allow the results of tainted elections to stand. Elections are not about profit and loss; they are not about which party or candidate wins or loses; they are about the essence of democracy. There are lives in the balance.

D. Voting Systems: Election integrity requires openness & transparency.Election integrity cannot be assured without openness & transparency. Yet, computerized voting systems prevent even election supervisors from observing all aspects of an election.What do we want?
VVPBs (Voter-Verified Paper Ballots) & MMRAs (Mandatory Manual Random Audits)!

Paper Ballots, Hand Counted: The gold standard for openness and transparency! A 2001 CalTech/MIT study concluded that hand-counted paper ballots have the lowest average incidence of spoiled, uncounted, and unmarked ballots. While this sounds like going back to the dark ages – it may be the most realistic option for November 2006 for all counties that have electronic voting machines without paper trails.

Precinct-Count Optical Scan Systems: Once voters mark their paper ballots, they insert them into the optical scanner at their precinct. Ballots that cannot be read are rejected and the voter gets a fresh ballot, virtually eliminating spoiled ballots. Votes are counted in the scanner’s (computer) memory. Ballots are stored in an attached, locked metal box, available for automatic, random audits to check for programming and tallying accuracy and recounts.

Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) Voting Machines with VVPB: A voter’s choice is captured both internally, in electronic form, and printed on a paper ballot. The ballot can be checked by the voter before being submitted. The paper ballots would count as the actual votes, taking precedence over any electronic counts and would be available for audits and recounts. (Warning: About 1/3 of voters do not check the printed ballots, assuming that they must be accurate. Not true!)

“Direct Recording Electronic” (DRE) Voting Machines without VVPB: The ballot appears on a display screen and votes are captured and stored electronically. An election without Voter-Verified Paper Ballots cannot be open and transparent. When election officials state that they are satisfied with the accuracy and reliability of DRE voting systems, they are able to do so only because there is virtually no way to detect errors or deliberate election-rigging without VVPBs.

E. The Elephant in the RoomThe history of elections in the U.S. not a source of pride. To learn more, read “Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America” or “Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, an American Political Tradition 1742-2004”.1If we had a color scheme to express how dirty elections have been over time, I would argue that right now we are experiencing a CODE RED, because a small, fanatical group of Republicans, spread out across the U.S., encouraged by right-wing think tanks, is using economic and racial discrimination to get away with disenfranchising millions of voters and neglecting or manipulating the voting systems to steal elections.

Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and the Free Congress Foundation was taped while speaking in private, at a church, to Republican activists: “How many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome? Good government! They want everybody to vote! I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as voting populace goes down.” 2

Mr. Weyrich sounds different in an article entitled “Easy Voting Brings Low Participation”: “Former Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter have come up with a series of recommendations aimed at increasing participation in national elections. Among the proposals the former presidents have put forth are (a) to hold elections on a national holiday, such as Veterans Day; (b) to make convicted felons eligible to vote after they have served time; (c) to permit people who aren’t on the voter rolls on Election Day to vote, sorting out their eligibility in the days after the election…. I am glad that Pres. Bush’s reaction has been lukewarm…. The truth is simply this: The easier we have made it to vote, the lower the voter participation.” 3

Jeff Horwitz reports: “One recent Sunday, at Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute, a dozen students meet…. All are earnest, idealistic and as right wing as you can get. They take careful notes as instructor Paul Gourley teaches them how to rig a campus mock election. “Can anyone tell me,” asks Gourley, “why you don’t want the polling place in the cafeteria?” Stephen, a shy antiabortion activist sitting toward the rear of the class, raises his hand: “Because you want to suppress the vote?” The students, strait-laced kids from good colleges, seem unconvinced. The lesson — that with sufficient organization, the act of voting becomes less a basic right than a tactical maneuver — doesn’t sit easy with some students at first. Gourley, a charismatic senior from South Dakota and the treasurer of the College Republican National Committee, assures them: “This is not anti-democracy. This is not shady. Just put somewhere where you might have to put a little bit of effort into voting.” The rest, Gourley explains, is just a matter of turnout. Yet Blackwell’s foundation, the Leadership Institute, is not a Republican organization. It’s a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) charity… Despite its legally required “neutrality,” the institute is one of the best investments the conservative movement has ever made. Its walls are plastered with framed headshots of former students — hundreds of state and local legislators sprinkled with smiling members of the U.S. Congress…. Thirty-five years ago, Blackwell dispatched a particularly promising 17-year-old pupil named Karl Rove to run a youth campaign… Over the last 25 years, more than 40,000 young conservatives have been trained at the institute ” 4

Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita: “It is difficult to say exactly why Americans are so apathetic about voting. Some suggest that the processes of registering and voting are too difficult or confusing. I disagree. In recent years, the acceptance of procedures such as early voting and voting by mail have made it even more accessible to Americans. But an increase in the promotion and use of these techniques has not been followed by an increase in voter turnout. Just the opposite is true.” 5

1. Read a condensation of Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, an American Political Tradition 1742-2004. http://www.bloomingtonwilpf.org/agenda.h…

2. Audio played on The Thom Hartmann Radio Show, syndicated by Air America Radio

3. Easy Voting Brings Low Participation – http://www.freecongress.org/commentaries…

4. My Right-Wing Degree – http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/…

5. IN SoS Press Release 9/5/04 – http://www.in.gov/sos/press/old/09052004…

F. Common Cause Recommends…I’ve abbreviated the Common Cause recommendations about Free & Fair Elections. If you are going to fight the battle about securing the voting machines you need to read much more about the systems at VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.org…TO ENSURE FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS, Common Cause recommends:

Reduce Partisanship and Conflict of Interest in Election Administration.

Enforce Laws Prohibiting Voter Suppression/Intimidation: State and local governments need to make strong statements about protecting the rights of voters and to enforce existing laws and prosecute illegal activities. Establish transparent, fair, statewide standards for challenges, including penalties for partisan or otherwise frivolous challenges.

Voter Education: Voters should receive written information about their voting rights and location of their polling place prior to Election Day or any early voting period. New registrants should receive timely notification of their registration status after registering to vote. Correction of errors in registration should be allowed up to and including Election Day. Poll-workers should be trained thoroughly so that they provide accurate information to voters.

ID Requirements and the Voter Databases: The process of establishing and maintaining the databases must be open to the public. A voter cannot be purged from voting rolls unless there is direct communication from the voter, the registrar of another state, or from the courts. Voters should easily be able to confirm their presence on the voter rolls by phone or on the Internet.

Develop Uniform Statewide Provisional Ballots Standards: Every provisional ballot cast by an eligible voter should be counted and the HAVA-required notification system should be implemented.

Fix, Replace, Test and Maintain Voting Machines Ballot definition files are not independently tested prior to the election. Extensive pre-testing could reduce the possibility of malfunction or malfeasance.

TO ENSURE SECURE AND RELIABLE VOTING MACHINES, Common Cause recommends:

The US Congress should immediately pass HR550, “The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2005” and/or states should pass laws or adopt regulations that: (1) require all voting systems to produce a VVPB, (2) mandate that the VVPB is the ballot of record, (3) establish a requirement for mandatory manual audits in at least 2% of randomly-selected precincts, and (4) establish funding to implement VVPB voting systems. (5% to 10% precinct audits would be better!)

State election officials should, wherever possible: immediately retrofit DREs with printing systems to produce a VVPB, and use those ballots in audits – OR – decertify DREs that cannot provide VVPB and turn to other voting systems such as optical scan machines for the November elections.

Election officials should take necessary steps to safeguard machines prior to Election Day.

Voters should be encouraged to vote on paper whenever possible. If facing the prospect of voting on paperless DREs in November, they should advocate for change with local election officials well before the election. If that does not work, where possible, voters should vote by absentee ballot / early voting.

Regardless of the voting equipment in a jurisdiction, citizens should VOTE. While there is a chance that a vote won’t be counted if cast on a paperless DRE, not voting at all will assure that it is not.

G. Online Videos & InteractiveVotergate: The Movie
http://www.votergate.tvCNN’s Lou Dobbs’ coverage of e-voting
http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?op…

Catherine Crier – CourtTV
Defending Our Democracy I
Defending Our Democracy II

Mark Crispin Miller speaks at U. Mass.
http://www.archive.org/details/mark_cris…

ACLU Freedom Files: Voting Rights
http://www.aclu.tv

ACLU Virtual Voting Booth
http://www.aclu.tv/votinggame

Democracy’s Ghosts
http://www.democracysghosts.org

I. The BEST Websites & Online ResourcesVotersUnite.org http://www.votersunite.org
E-VOTING 2006: The Approaching Train Wreck * Excellent Reports: Mythbreakers: Facts About Electronic Elections * Voting system failures by vendor * Vote-Switching and Ballot Definition ProblemsVoteTrustUSA.org http://www.votetrustusa.org
Daily News * State-by-State News Archive * Election Integrity Weekly Newsletter * Poll Monitors’ and Poll Workers’ Guide to E-Voting

VerifiedVoting.org http://www.verifiedvoting.org
Resolution on Electronic Voting * Election Administration Project: Best Practices for Reliable Election Systems. * Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS) * Election Protection Questionnaires: Local & State Election Officials, Pre-Election Testing

Common Cause http://www.commoncause.org
Excellent report: “Election Reform. Malfunction and Malfeasance – A report on the electronic voting machine debacle.” Vote for America, a non-partisan voter education and mobilization program.

People for the American Way: Civic Participation http://www.pfaw.org
Election Protection Program offers: volunteer poll monitors; civil rights lawyers and advocates who expose and prevent voter intimidation; work with election officials to identify and solve problems with voting machines, technology and ballot forms.

League of Women Voters: Election Reform http://www.lwv.org
American Democracy at Risk: Agenda for Renewal and Repair includes recommendations for election reform and advocates nonpartisan redistricting, safeguarding civil liberties.

Brennan Center for Justice http://www.brennancenter.org
Excellent reports: “The Machinery of Democracy: Protecting Elections in an Electronic World” & “Verification Processes for Voter Registration”

Voter Action http://www.voteraction.org
Provides strategic and legal support to ensure verifiable, accurate and transparent voting systems. Has supported lawsuits in Arizona, California, Colorado, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania.

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How to Keep Democrats From Blowing the November Election

Posted in General, TAKE ACTION! on May 9th, 2006
Posted by CrisisPapers in Editorials & Other Articles
Tue May 09th 2006, 05:09 AM
| Bernard Weiner |

I know it doesn’t make much sense, given how the Republicans seem to be imploding every day in new scandals and corruptions and reckless policies — and with the Administration’s approval numbers about to head into the 20s — but I can’t shake the fear that somehow Bush&Co. will keep both houses of Congress in the November election.

This anxiety was heightened the other day when, in a local supermarket, I ran into Stephen Rosenfeld, one of the key electoral-integrity activists in this country.

Since he had been examining electoral chicanery in the 2004 balloting for more than a year-and-a-half, I asked Rosenfeld if he was close to finishing up his research.

My simple question released a torrent of information from him about how the Republicans were able to steal the election in Ohio, and thus the Electoral College vote that elongated the HardRight’s hold on power, with Bush as their front man.

Customers who were reaching around us to get to the bread and cookies were party to the rush of facts about how and why pundits are not now analyzing the presidency of John Kerry — but I don’t want to diminish Rosenfeld’s thunder by listing the details here, since he (with co-author Bob Fitrakis) has a book on the subject coming out in the Fall.

Suffice it to say that the information he laid on me, along with what has been picked up from other electoral-fraud experts — Mark Crispin Miller, Ernest Partridge, Steven Freeman, Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman, Brad Friedman, Alastair Thompson, Bev Harris, John Conyers, et al. — makes it clear that Kerry was robbed. In some states, it’s likely that the Republican vote-counting corporations massaged the numbers to create a Bush "victory." But it’s equally clear that, in key locales around the country, the GOP might not have needed to fiddle with the computer software since enough votes were stolen from the Democrats by other slimy methods.

HOW TO HIJACK AN ELECTION

As many have noted, the Bush campaign was aided enormously in this thievery because their campaign co-chairs in key states were also the Secretaries of State — that is, the officials in charge of conducting elections and certifying the vote results: Katherine Harris in Florida in 2000 (with brother Gov. Jeb Bush overseeing her work), and, in 2004, Kenneth Blackwell in Ohio, Terry Lind in Michigan, Matt Blunt in Missouri, Glenda Hood in Florida, et al.

It has been widely documented that nefarious techniques were employed in key states to aid Bush’s "victory," such as: removing hundreds of thousands of likely Democratic voters from the voting rolls; rejiggering the precincts so that when those voters went to their usual polling place, they were told they had to go vote elsewhere and when they got to the new place, they had to vote by Provisional Ballots (in Ohio, thousands of those ballots apparently are still uncounted!); making sure the voting machines in heavily Democratic wards were out of commission or malfunctioning or too few in number for the crowds who wanted to vote, thus forcing working-class citizens to stand in line for many hours, with the result that many gave up and went back to their jobs; thousands of unstamped ballots that were moved around to various precincts; locked warehouses in which various electoral irregularities were carried out; dirty tricks to keep likely Democratic voters from showing up (supplying them with the wrong voting date, telling them that anybody with unpaid parking tickets would be arrested at the polls, that sort of thing); not always catching that e-votes for Kerry automatically, either deliberately or because of technical malfunctions, were being switched into the Bush column, etc. etc.

With several hundred thousand voters kept from casting their ballots in Ohio, for example, the ultimate conclusion is that Kerry would have won that key state, and other close states, had the election been conducted honestly, absent the dirty tricks and fraud. But, of course, before any serious recounting could take place, Kerry, despite his promise to fight, quickly threw in the towel, as had Al Gore four years earlier, which haste and timidity permitted Bush&Co. to continue on their corrupt, incompetent, deadly ways.

These were shameful, cowardly Dem retreats by the candidates in the face of fire. Only now are Gore and Kerry starting to behave and speak out the way they should have during their campaigns, at least about the environment and civil liberties and the war in Iraq, leading one to believe that those two are readying themselves for another go in 2008.

TIMID DEMS ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL

And where were the rest of the Democrats during all this electoral thievery? Lost and asleep at the wheel, as usual.

One can’t escape the conclusion that even five years out, the Democrats in general just don’t know how to respond to cutthroat aggressiveness and criminality on the part of the Republicans. They never knew what hit them in Florida in 2000, in Ohio in 2004 and don’t really have their oppositional act together now in 2006, with the midterm election just six months away.

On occasion the Dems display a bit more starch in their spines, but in general liberals remain locked in a more naive frame of mind, from an earlier era, when elections, no matter what their deficiencies, were more or less on the up-and-up and fair-mindedness was the operational mode for politicians: Elections were held and the declared winners got to rule, but they governed by taking into account the legitimacy of the opposition minority. Those days are long gone, thanks to Rove’s bullyboy tactics.

The Democrats just don’t want to deal with, or don’t know how to deal with, the reality that in the Bush/Cheney/Rove era the Republican leadership has a singular goal in mind — to win, by whatever means necessary — and that it has a meticulously worked-out system for victory that violates every rule and tradition set up in years’ past. The lasting legacy of Karl Rove.

And yet the Dems are planning their first weeks in office post-November, as if all they need to do is to watch the GOP sink further in the polls and then waltz into control of the House and/or Senate.

PERMANENT CAMPAIGN, PERMANENT WAR

Why am I so snarky here about the Dems? Because there is a too-long history of Democrats tending to gear up once every two and four years for an election campaign, refusing to face the fact that the Republicans are in campaign mode every minute of every day, with the goal of decimating and destroying their political opposition. It’s the permanent campaign which, not coincidentally, ties in to their permanent war ("the war on terrorism," a war against a tactic) that serves as the underpinning for their domestic and foreign agenda.

The end result has been an increasing slide into a homegrown kind of American fascism: a desire by the HardRightists for one-party rule; Bush’s fondness for dictatorial governance; his 750 "signing statements," where he asserts that he can override laws passed by Congress whenever he so chooses (see Charlie Savage’s mostly-ignored Boston Globe story, "Bush Challenges Hundreds of Laws: President Cites Powers of His Office"; and Bob Egelko’s "How Bush Redefines the Intent of the Law"); his conviction that he has a blank-check to initiate wars of choice; his authorization of torture; his ordering the NSA to spy on millions of American citizens; his attempts at neutering the Legislative and Judicial branches of government, etc. etc.

And permitting all this to pass beneath the public radar is a cowed, cooperative mass-media, whose reporters serve mostly as stenographers rather than as true journalists holding government officials’ feet to the fire. Clearly, if a Democratic President had behaved himself as Bush and Cheney have done — lying in order to foment a war, breaking the law on innumerable occasions, leaking classified information for political reasons, authorizing torture, etc. etc. — he would have been impeached and removed from office with extreme haste before he could do any more damage to the Republic.

WHAT ORDINARY CITIZENS CAN DO

So, if all this is true, with Karl Rove (assuming he’s not indicted shortly for perjury and obstruction of justice in the Plamegate case) unleashing his campaign and foreign-policy "surprises" during the next six months, what do we ordinary citizens do about the situation? Specifically, what can we do about the reality of a corrupted election system?

Thankfully, many citizens and public-interest groups have become involved in the electoral-integrity issue, both on the national level and in various key states, challenging the reliability and transparency of e-voting machines and vote-tallying procedures, suing voting officials in civil courts when honest elections and verified means for re-checking the votes are not satisfactory, etc.

But angry citizens are ignoring another powerful avenue to counteract election fraud, and the increasing chances for more such illegality: They should demand that their state attorneys general and local district attorneys bring criminal charges in their jurisdictions against the GOP, Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia, et al. Were this to happen, the "discovery" process might well yield an abundance of incriminating documents that would have an enormous impact on national politics. Example: the phone-bank sabotage case in New Hampshire, where GOP officials with ties to the White House were convicted of interfering with the Democrats’ phone system in that state just prior to the 2004 election.

But whether all these good-government moves will be enough to guarantee honest elections in November is up in the air, especially with many Bush-appointed judges on the federal appeals courts. The point is that by and large these legal moves are being initiated by citizens and organized groups, not by the Democratic Party.

(I have been following the suggestion of Ernest Partridge and others: I return solicitation letters to Democratic Party headquarters with a strong note saying I will send no money until the Democrats decide to fight like an opposition party should for honest, transparent, verifiable elections. No action, no donation. Similarly, many progressives are telling MoveOn.org much the same thing: stop being so timid; electoral integrity and confronting electoral fraud needs to be front and center for progressives. We can have all the good candidates and popular policies in the world, but if the opposition is running the vote-counting mechanism, goodbye honest elections and the chance to defeat the GOP and begin to restore America’s traditional values to our political system.)

DIEBOLD MACHINES DANGEROUSLY VULNERABLE

New revelations about electoral integrity and fraud, both good and bad, keep breaking all the time. As I write this, more states have become aware of built-in problems with computer-voting systems and are being forced, at least temporarily, to consider more secure methods for voting and ballot-tabulation. Brad Friedman reports:

"We’ve now been able to gather a great deal of additional information concerning details about the story we first posted yesterday on the official Pennsylvania state warning issued about the new ‘security vulnerability’ discovered in all Diebold touch-screen electronic voting machines.

"That warning, which has now brought a lock-down on all Diebold systems in PA, where early voting is about to begin prior to their upcoming May 16th primary election, was reported by the Morning Call yesterday. The warning says the serious security vulnerability could allow ‘unauthorized software to be loaded on to the system’."

ADVICE FOR DEMOCRATS

Many liberal pundits and thinkers are out there, many based on the internet, with solid ideas and suggestions for how the Dems might position themselves for victory in November and in 2008; for just one, see the new book "Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics," by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga ("Kos") and Jerome Armstrong. But it’s not clear if the party establishment is open to what its base is telling them. If such blindness and deafness continues, this ignorance and timidity will guarantee a continuing series of losses at the polls, despite recent public-opinion surveys indicating how poorly the Republicans are viewed in the country, including, most importantly, by those calling themselves conservatives.

Perhaps the worst crime of the Democrats these days is their failure to recognize that ordinary citizens, including many of those moderate Republicans and independents, are way ahead of them in wanting a quick exit from Iraq and in approving impeachment hearings. That Dem timidity does not give evidence of a robust opposition party, willing to fight for what is best for the country; many moderate Republicans and independents may choose to vote for the devil they know than one about which they’re uncertain and apprehensive.

So what can you and I do to alter this picture of Democratic lassitude and possible defeat in November?

As with BuzzFlash.com’s handy list, "What You Can Do," the first and most important task is for all of us to educate ourselves on what’s going on, and then spread the word, light fires of activism in our friends and neighbors, organize ourselves politically (whether running yourself or becoming active in the campaigns of Dem or third-party candidates), relentlessly demand that our elected representatives stand up for the Constitution and not roll over when the Administration continues its illegal rampaging at home and abroad, constantly call the mass media on their biases and deficiencies of investigatory coverage of the Bush Administration, and support the nation’s largest and most effective alternative press: the progressive websites and bloggers on the internet.

GOP IS COLLAPSING FROM WITHIN

Finally, realize the import of a good share of the conservative Republican movement abandoning the extremism of the Bush Administration. All those conservative generals and Bill Buckley are just the tips of the iceberg of resentment and appalled anger at what Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rove are doing to the once-respected Republican Party and to this country in terms of our stalled economy, the humongous deficits being racked up, the unending wars of choice our young troops are dying in (with Iran fast coming up as the next reckless-insanity theater of war), the ever-expanding levels of corruption in the Republican Party, the outsourcing and privatization of so much of traditional, established government functions — outsourcing even to potential enemies abroad!

These moderate and conservative Republicans are ripe for making alliances with progressives, populists and libertarians in opposing the dangerous, reckless policies of the Bush Administration. Smart Democratic policy would devise ways to lure those folks into the impeachment camp.

But, if the kinds of changes discussed above are not made, and the Dems lose both houses of Congress in November and still no radical changes are made in how to approach the 2008 presidential election, it may well be time for serious consideration of a third-party alliance. In short, 2006 may be the Dems’ last reasonable shot and they’d better not blow it. Let’s put our activism into hyperdrive in the next six months and make sure they don’t.

— BW

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An Appearance of Guilt

Posted in General on March 8th, 2006

March 7, 2005

By Ernest Partridge, The Crisis Papers

The accumulated weight of evidence of election fraud – statistical, circumstantial, and anecdotal – has failed to move the mainstream media to report or investigate this evidence, or the Democratic party to acknowledge and protest the apparent Republican control of our elections.

This essay is not yet another account of that evidence, which I have spelled out extensively and which I firmly believe to be compelling.

Instead, I wish to deal with another indicator that our national elections no longer represent the will of the voters, but rather are manipulated to produce the outcome desired by the "winning" candidates and party. This indicator is the behavior of those who manufacture, program, and operate the paperless, unauditable machines (direct recording electronic: "DRE"), and those who benefit from this technology.

Perhaps this new electronic voting technology is as honest and reliable as the private election industry and the winning candidates tell us it is. However, they simply do not behave as if this were the case.

My contention might be illustrated by this parable:

Suppose that a drug-sniffing dog at an airport identifies a suspicious piece of luggage. The customs officer then locates the individual whose name is on the tag, and orders him to open it. Now suppose further that this person then proceeds to do one or more of the following:

a) He denies that the luggage is his.

b) He calls his lawyer who presents an injunction against further inspection of the luggage.

c) He claims that he is a diplomat, and thus not subject to luggage inspection.

d) He offers a bribe to the inspector if he will "forget the whole thing."

Might one not suspect that the traveler was trying to hide something?

The dog then gets back to work, and soon identifies another bag, and the owner of this parcel is identified and ordered to open the luggage for inspection. He does so willingly and without qualm, having packed the bag himself and thus knowing that there is no contraband therein. He is also aware that the dog has a record of 30% false positives.

Which of these two responses more closely resembles the behavior of the DRE manufacturers (Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia), of the Republican Congress, and of the Republican National Committee? Are the DRE manufacturers and the Republicans acting in a manner consistent with their claims that "e-voting" is both honest and accurate? Or are they behaving as if they have something to hide?

Here are a few indicators. Because there are so many, I will be brief. For details and documentation, follow the links:

  • First and foremost: DRE machines use secret software and produce no separate record of the voting to allow auditing and validation of the votes. Thus, by design, it is impossible either to prove or disprove directly the accuracy of the vote totals of a DRE machine or the neutrality of the software. (However, there is abundant indirect evidence of e-voting fraud: statistical, anecdotal and circumstantial evidence. But that’s another topic).
  • The manufacturers and programmers of DREs (all of whom have close ties with the Republican Party) insist that their software ("source codes") must be kept secret – for no apparent and defensible reason. (They claim to be concerned about copyright infringement. But music, essays, fiction, drama, etc., all are public by nature, and yet all are protected by copyright).
  • The e-voting manufacturers also make ATM machines and automated gas pumps, both of which produce paper receipts. Yet they steadfastly resist demands that their "touch screen" voting machines produce printouts, which might then serve to validate the accuracy of the votes.
  • DRE manufacturers will not allow "test hacks" of randomly selected machines. (Unauthorized hacks have proven DREs to be extremely vulnerable to fraudulent manipulation. So too a recent report by the non-partisan Government Accountability Office: a report that has been virtually ignored by the mainstream press).
  • A bill by Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) that would require validated printed paper receipts of the votes and random inspection of the DRE machines has been locked up in committee by the Congressional Republicans. A discharge petition, which would allow a vote on the bill, is unavailing, due to insufficient support by the Republicans.
  • In 2000, computer programmer Clinton Curtis was asked by a GOP congressional candidate, Tom Feeney, to create a software program that would alter vote counts in favor of the Republicans. Curtis testified to this under oath, signed an affidavit, and took a polygraph test. Of course, Feeney, now a congressman, denies Curtis’ allegations, but unlike Curtis, Feeney refuses to state his denial under oath or to submit to a polygraph.
  • In California, Stephen Heller, a temporary employee of Diebold Election Systems, obtained copies of memos indicating that Diebold may have used uncertified voting systems in the 2004 primary and suggesting that thousands of voters might be disenfranchised in subsequent elections. Heller’s "reward" for blowing this whistle? He was charged with three felony counts and, if convicted, could serve more than three years in state prison.
  • In 2004, California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley decertified Diebold DRE machines. In a special recall election, Republican Arnold Schwarznegger replaced Democrat Gray Davis. Kevin Shelley was then harassed and forced out of office and replaced by Republican Bruce McPherson, who "conditionally" recertified the Diebold machines. (These are two types of machines: Optical scan with paper ballots, and "TSX" with touch-screens and no paper record. It is the paperless TSX machines that are especially vulnerable to undetectable manipulation and fraud." There is a heated debate within the election reform community as to whether Optical Scanning is an acceptable improvement over DREs, or whether, on the other hand, only hand counted paper ballots will do. But that’s a topic for another essay).
  • The Alaska "flip-flop." The Republican state government of Alaska refused to release to the Alaska Democrats the Diebold database files from the 2004 election on the grounds that it was "a company secret." (These were records of a public election, mind you). After persistent requests, the state relented albeit under very restrictive conditions. But then, just two weeks ago, the state again denied the request, claiming that it was a "security risk" to the state of Alaska.
  • December 20, 2005: Rather than obey a North Carolina law requiring that source codes be made public, Diebold withdrew its machines from the state elections.

There is much more, which you might find here and here. But this much suffices to make my point.

What we find, then, is an industry and a political party which, on the one hand, insists that the totals from electronic voting machines are entirely accurate and honest, though these same machines are so designed that they preclude any independent evidence to support these claims. On the other hand, this same industry and party steadfastly resist any and all attempts to introduce reliable methods of validation, much less the most reliable system of all: hand counted paper ballots.

Persistent suspicion and charges of fraud are damaging to the industry and the GOP. If they are as innocent as they claim to be, why don’t they just eliminate these damaging suspicions by offering proof, and then allowing, and even encouraging, paper records, independent audits, and exit polls?

Despite a near-total embargo by the mainstream media of news, analysis, investigation and commentary on ballot security and allegations of fraud, combined with an astonishing indifference to the issue on the part of the Democrats and their allies, public doubts about the security and accuracy of elections and hence of the legitimacy of the Republican control of the White House and the Congress, simply will not go away. In fact, these concerns appear to be increasing and will likely continue to increase, as the credibility and public approval of the Bush regime continues to drop.

Here’s a thought experiment for those who insist, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the past three elections were above reproach and doubt. Put this confidence aside for a moment and just imagine, hypothetically, that the elections of 2000, 2002, and 2004 were all fixed, and that the coming election of 2006 will be fixed. Then ask yourself: if this were so, how would the behavior of the industry and the GOP be in any way different from what it is now?

Then ask, if the elections are honest and accurate, why don’t the industry and the Republicans act like it? In short, if they are innocent, why do they willingly persist in appearing guilty?

These questions must be asked by the Democrats, loudly and persistently, for as Karl Rove and the GOP propaganda machine knows so well, repetition is the key to successful persuasion of the public. Satire and ridicule are also very much in order. We must "pile it on" until continuing silence by the GOP and by the compliant mainstream media becomes unendurable.

And if the e-voting establishment – party and industry – are ever forced, however reluctantly, to enact reforms consistent with their protestations of innocence, what might they do?

Here is a list of proposals that any honest voting machine industry and political party should be willing to endorse:

a) Publish the source codes. (The copyrights can be fully protected.)

b) Include printers with all machines. Stipulate by law that in case of recounts, the paper receipts are to be the official ballots of record.

c) Require independent audits – of local balloting, and of regional compiling of election returns.

d) Allow examination and "test hacks" of machines, selected randomly.

e) Outlaw all data inputs (by direct line, wireless, or UV) to voting machines and compilers with the exception, of course, of the "inputs" by the voters.

f) Rigorously enforce and prosecute election fraud laws.

If the industry and the Republicans won’t agree to these assurances, then they must present a plausible explanation as to why they decline to do so. Absent that explanation, we citizens of this alleged democracy under an alleged rule of law must demand that every vote be counted and verified, and we must be supplied with proof that this has been accomplished. Furthermore, every individual who has engaged in election fraud must be tracked down and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. We are entitled to no less than this.

Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics and Public Policy. He publishes the website, The Online Gadfly and co-edits the progressive website, The Crisis Papers. He is at work on a book, Conscience of a Progressive, which can be seen in-progress here. Send comments to: crisispapers@hotmail.com.

Crisis Papers Archive

Re-posted from Democratic Underground

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2004 Election Theft.com: State by State

Posted in 2004ElectionTheft.com, General on January 28th, 2006

(AK AZ CA CO FL GA IL IN IA MD MN MO NE NV NH NJ NM NC OH PA TX UT VA VT WA WI WY)

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2004 Election Theft.com: Electronic Voting & Tabulating

Posted in 2004ElectionTheft.com, Black Box (Electronic) Voting, General on January 28th, 2006

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