Counting Coup 2004: Track Election Theft Here

The Gun is Smoking - 2004 Ohio Precinct-Level Exit Poll Data Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount

2006-01-22T05:12:00.000-05:00

The Gun is Smoking - 2004 Ohio Precinct-Level Exit Poll Data Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount

The National Election Data Archive (NEDA) is the first mathematical team to release a valid scientific analysis of the precinct-level 2004 Ohio presidential exit poll data. NEDA's analysis provides virtually irrefutable evidence of vote miscount.

(PRWEB) January 17, 2006 -- There is significant controversy about whether the 2004 presidential election was conducted fairly and its votes counted correctly. According to results of the major national election exit poll conducted for the National Election Pool by Edison/Mitofsky (E/M), Kerry won Ohio's pivotal vote, though the official tally gave the state, and thus the presidency, to Bush. The conduct of Ohio's election was formally debated by Congress in January 2005.

The National Election Data Archive (NEDA) is the first mathematical team to release a valid scientific analysis of the precinct-level 2004 Ohio presidential exit poll data "The Gun is Smoking: 2004 Ohio Precinct-level Exit Poll Data Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount" available at http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/OH/Ohio-Exit-Polls-2004.pdf. NEDA's analysis provides significant evidence of an outcome-altering vote miscount.

The analysis is based on the most accurate statistical method yet devised for determining whether exit poll error, random variations, or vote count manipulation cause the discrepancies between exit polls and official vote tallies. This analysis method was made public recently by NEDA in "Vote Miscounts or Exit Poll Error? New Mathematical Function for Analyzing Exit Poll Discrepancy" available at http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit-Poll-Analysis.pdf

The Gun is Smoking - 2004 Ohio Precinct-Level Exit Poll Data Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount

A Republic, If You Can Keep It - The Last Stand of the American Republic

2006-01-01T15:37:00.000-05:00

He is right. We are witnessing the fall of what America used to mean. And everyone is quiet, waiting for someone else to act... Sigh...

Goodbye America. You were great while you lasted.

lawnorder

Clowntime is Over: The Last Stand of the American Republic

Wednesday, 28 December 2005
So now, at last, the crisis is upon us. Now the cards are finally on the table, laid out so starkly that even the Big Media sycophants and Beltway bootlickers can no longer ignore them. Now the choice for the American Establishment is clear, and inescapable: do you hold for the Republic, or for autocracy?

There is no third way here, no other option, no wiggle room, no ambiguity. The much-belated exposure of George W. Bush's warrantless spy program has forced the Bush-Cheney Regime to openly declare what they have long implied -- and enacted -- in secret: that the president is above the law, a military autocrat with unlimited powers, beyond the restraint or supervision of any other institution or branch of government. Outed as rank deceivers, perverters of the law and rapists of the Constitution, the Bush gang has decided that their best defense -- their only defense, really -- is a belligerent offense. "Yeah, we broke the law," they now say; "so what? We'll break it again whenever we want to, because law don't stick to our Big Boss Man. What are you going to do about it, chump?"

That is the essence, the substance and pretty much the style of the entire Bushist response to the domestic spying scandal. They are scarcely bothering to gussy it up with the usual rhetorical circumlocutions. The attack is being led by the fat, sneering coward, Dick Cheney, who has crawled out of his luxurious hidey-holes to re-animate the rotting husk of Richard Nixon and send it tottering back onto the national stage. Through the facade of Cheney's pig-squint and peevish snarl, we can see the long-dead Nixonian visage, his grave-green, worm-filled jowls muttering once more the lunatic mantra he brought to the Oval Office: "If the president does it, it can't be illegal." This is what we've come to, this is American leadership today: ugly, stupid men mouthing the witless drivel of failed, dead, discredited, would-be petty tyrants.

But not even Nixon was as foul as this crew. When he was caught, he folded; some faint spark of republican conscience restrained him from pushing the crisis to the end. He was a vain, stupid, greedy, grasping, dirty man with blood on his hands, but in the end, he did not identify himself with the government as a whole. He did not say, "l'etat, c'est moi," he had no messianic belief that the life of the nation was somehow bound up with his personal fate, or that he and his clique and his cronies had a God-given right to rule. They just wanted power and loot -- as much of it as they could get -- and they pushed and pushed until the Establishment pushed back.

It has long been evident, however, that Bush and Cheney do believe their clique should by all rights rule the country -- and that anyone who opposes their unrestrained dominion is automatically "anti-American," an enemy of the state. For them, there is no "loyal opposition," or even political opponents in any traditional understanding of the term; there are only enemies to be destroyed, and herd-like masses to be manipulated. They believe that their dominion is more important than democracy, which they despise as a brake and hindrance to the arbitrary leadership of an all-wise elite -- i.e., them. They are the state; a police state.
..

Yet "we live in hope and die in despair," as my father always says. In the back of the minds of many an embittered dissident, there has been a spark of hope that somewhere down the line, one of the many, many Bush outrages would somehow take hold, gain critical mass, and force the Establishment to act, to rein in the renegade, break him, box him in if not remove him from office.

...

it will have to be the Establishment that breaks Bush -- or he won't be broken. All the blogs in the world won't bring him down, no matter how much truth they tell, how much bloodsoaked Bushist dirt they expose. Yes, perhaps if we had millions of outraged citizens marching in the street day after day across America, a sustained mass movement and popular uprising for liberty and democracy, this might obviate the need for Establishment action. But we all know that such marches are not going to happen. If there was sufficient fire for liberty and democracy in America, there would have already been a popular uprising -- and Bush would never have garnered enough public support to keep the election results close enough to be fudged. No, it will be the Establishment -- or no one.

That's why the spy scandal is so pivotal. Because it is a direct, open and unignorable challenge to the institutional life of the American Establishment. In it, the Bush Regime is saying to the various powers-that-be, especially in Congress and the courts, but also to centers of power and influence outside government: you no longer have any power. All real power is now in our gift. Your laws, your institutions, your traditions, the whole complex infrastructure of checks and balances that have sustained society are now essentially meaningless. As in ancient Rome, we will keep the old forms, but the life of the state has now passed into the hands of the autocrat and his court. His arbitrary will can override any law -- although of course, strong law will still be applied to his enemies, and to the riff-raff in the lower orders.

How will the Establishment deal with this direct challenge? The past few years give little grounds for hope: the Democrats spineless, conflicted, co-opted and corrupt; the Republicans slavish, bellicose, cruel and criminal; the media timorous, witless, corporate-controlled; big business absolutely rolling in gravy from the autocrat's larder; academia cowed, silenced, ignored, demonized; the military acquiescent in criminal aggression, top-heavy with time-servers currying autocratic favor. Only the courts provide some stray sparks of hope, although they too are now loaded with political sycophants, corporate bagmen and knuckle-dragging throwbacks produced by the Right's decades-long devolution of American jurisprudence. Prosecutors like Patrick Fitzgerald and Elliot Spitzer "keep hope alive," but their efforts will mean little in a system where lawlessness at the top has been countenanced by the rest of the Establishment. And in any case, the outcome of their work lies ultimately with the Supreme Court -- the same court that shredded the Constitution in awarding power to Bush in the first place, and which is now led by a Bushist apparatchik.

Still, you don't go through a constitutional crisis with the Establishment you want; you go through a constitutional crisis with the Establishment you have. And this sad, sick crew, ladies and gentlemen, is all we have. If they swallow the spy scandal, if they don't push back now -- and I mean really push back, not just make a lot of harrumphing noise or hold a few toothless hearings or get a couple of underlings offered up as ritual sacrifices to save the Leader -- then we will have well and truly and finally lost the Republic that Franklin, Jefferson and Madison gave us so long ago.

The next few weeks will show us if there is still some hope of restoring the Republic through the old institutions...

And my hope is nil... -- law
Chris Floyd - Empire Burlesque - High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium - Clowntime is Over: The Last Stand of the American Republic

Daily Kos: Time reporter: Bush lied

2005-12-01T22:09:00.000-05:00

Time reporter: Bush lied
by kos
Thu Dec 01, 2005 at 10:51:35 AM PDT

Yeah, yeah, Bush lied. Remember when that was a controversial line? Think Progress brings us the latest:

Yesterday, President Bush claimed that Iraqi security forces "primarily led" the assault on the city of Tal Afar. Bush highlighted it as an "especially clear" sign of the progress Iraq security forces were making in Iraq.

The progress of the Iraqi forces is especially clear when the recent anti-terrorist operations in Tal Afar are compared with last year's assault in Fallujah. In Fallujah, the assault was led by nine coalition battalions made up primarily of United States Marines and Army -- with six Iraqi battalions supporting them...This year in Tal Afar, it was a very different story. The assault was primarily led by Iraqi security forces -- 11 Iraqi battalions, backed by five coalition battalions providing support.

TIME Magazine reporter Michael Ware, who is embedded with the U.S. troops in Iraq who participated in the Tal Afar battle, appeared on Anderson Cooper yesterday. He said Bush's description was completely untrue:

I was in that battle from the very beginning to the very end. I was with Iraqi units right there on the front line as they were battling with al Qaeda. They were not leading. They were being led by the U.S. green beret special forces with them.

Think Progress has the actual video of the interview.

Daily Kos: State of the Nation

NEW REPORT REFUTES EDISON/MITOFSKY ‘EXPLANATION’, URGES INVESTIGATION OF US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

2005-01-31T20:19:00.000-05:00

CONTACTS:

Zack Kaldveer, Communications Director, CASE America, 510-938-2664

Susan Truitt, President, CASE America, 614-270-5239

Joan Krawitz, Executive Director, CASE America, 847-962-5290

NEW REPORT BY NATION’S PROMINENT STATISTICIANS AND VOTE-ANALYSIS EXPERTS REFUTES EDISON/MITOFSKY ‘EXPLANATION’ FOR EXIT POLL DISCREPANCY, URGES INVESTIGATION OF US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

Experts conclude unprecedented 5.5% discrepancy between exit polls and final tallies indicate possible systematic, nationwide shift of the vote

(US) –
A new study (See report at www.USCountVotes.org)
was released today co-authored by prominent statisticians and vote-analysis experts from a diverse range of Universities including Notre Dame, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Cornell, and Temple. Their study strongly refutes the ‘explanation’ by pollster Edison/Mitofsky (E/M) that their exit polls (Kerry winning by 3%) differed so widely from the final certified tally (Bush by 2.5%) due to Kerry voters’ answering pollsters questions at a higher rate than Bush voters. The US Count Votes report “debunks” this hypothesis and adds to the mounting evidence that the answer to the exit poll mystery lies in the vote counting, not the accuracy of the exit polls.

“The new Edison/Mitofsky report fails to provide any evidence to substantiate the hypothesis that Kerry voters participated in exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters, or that exit polling errors caused exit polls to favor Kerry by 3% when Bush won the election by 2.5%,” said Kathy Dopp, President, US Count Votes. “The possibility that the overall vote count was substantially corrupted must be taken seriously and investigated thoroughly."

Among the revelations uncovered in the study was that the response to exit pollsters was actually higher in precincts that strongly favored Bush than in those that strongly favored Kerry. This contradicts the E/M hypothesis that Kerry voters’ tended to cooperate more, and suggests that if anything, the exit polls may have been skewed towards President Bush, not Senator Kerry.

“The report’s findings add one more study to a growing list that indicate our democracy was compromised on November 2nd by an assortment of un-democratic tactics,” said Susan Truitt, President and Chief Counsel, CASE America. “Putting faith in partisan corporations to correctly count our vote ‘with secret proprietary software’ was a catastrophic mistake. We should be spending less time worrying about bringing democracy to Iraq and more time working to ensure we practice it here at home.”

CASE America (The Citizens’ Alliance for Secure Elections) is a non-partisan, pro-democracy organization that is partnering with The National Ballot Integrity Project to ensure elections are free, fair, accountable, and accurately reflect the intentions of the voters. The group plans to achieve these goals through research, information and education, grassroots organizational and leadership development, and support and pursuit of various legal and legislative initiatives.

Other key reports detailing the overwhelming evidence suggesting possible electoral fraud are: “Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio”, by Rep. John Conyers; “Evidence of Election Irregularities in Sohomish County Washington”, by Paul R. Leto and Dr. Jeffrey Hoffman; "Myth Breakers: Facts about Electronic Elections", by VotersUnite.org; “The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy”, by Dr. Stephen Freeman; and “New Mexico State Election Data”, by Ellen Theisen and Warren Stewart.

Problems found in nearly every post election investigation, all of which favored the re-election of the President, include: voting machine shortages; ballots counted in secret; lost, discarded, and improperly rejected registration forms and absentee ballots; touch-screen machines that registered “Bush” when voters pressed “Kerry”; precincts in which turnout was suspiciously high, including many which had more votes recorded than registered voters; precincts in which the reported turnout was suspiciously low; and high rates of “spoiled” ballots and under-votes in which no choice for president was recorded.

View report directly here

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) vows to object to 2004 election results

2005-01-03T07:30:00.000-05:00

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) vows to object to 2004 election results

On November 3, 2004 Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) said that he would contest the 2004 election results if election fraud was found. This was in response to a question asked by a citizen at a Medford Oregon Town Hall Meeting that was attended by 150-200 Oregon voters. Ron Wyden knows that systematic voter disenfranchisement is not OK and is evidence of election FRAUD. - picture linked from the Mail Tribune Online ->

Watch him live showing his support for fair U.S. elections on C-Span at 1:00 pm EST on January 6, 2005

On January 6, 2005 Congress will meet in joint session to certify the 2004 presidential election. On that day, if one member of the House and one member of the Senate object to the certification of the vote, then all members of Congress will finally discuss these issues. On January 6, 2001, not a single Senator would join with the Representatives who demanded an inquiry into the Florida recount. Let's help our Senator take this stand.Please support Ron in this historical action with faxes, emails, phone calls before Jan 5, '05 Individually fax and email him all 4 letters below to all of his offices. Then call him with support for contesting '04 votes. Include the letter title, your name, address, phone, and email (email form link can be found at the top left of this page)

letter to Senators from (Rep. John Conyers):Title: Please debate and object to the counting of 2004 Ohio electoral votes

Dear Senator Ron Wyden,

As you know, on January 6, 2005, at 1:00 P.M., the electoral votes for the election of the president are to be opened and counted in a joint session of Congress, commencing at 1:00 P.M. I and a number of House Members are planning to object to the counting of the Ohio votes, due to numerous unexplained irregularities in the Ohio presidential vote, many of which appear to violate both federal and state law. I am hoping that you will consider joining us in this important effort to debate and highlight the problems in Ohio which disenfranchised innumerable voters. I will shortly forward you a draft report itemizing and analyzing the many irregularities we have come across as part of our hearings and investigation into the Ohio presidential election.

-- snip --

please see the Vote Wyden site to show support and read the letters...

And pleeeeeasssee provide your own support for the critical effort to contest this election!

Pitt: Proof of Ohio Election Fraud Exposed

2004-12-15T03:04:00.000-05:00

Man OH man, election fraud finally hits the fan?!

by luaptifer

Wed Dec 15th, 2004 at 03:52:57 EDT

Proof of Ohio Election Fraud Exposed

William Rivers Pitt Wednesday 15 December 2004

...everyone was looking the wrong way. The company that requires immediate and penetrating scrutiny is Triad Systems.

Triad is owned by a man named Tod Rapp, who has also donated money to both the Republican Party and the election campaign of George W. Bush. Triad manufactures punch-card voting systems, and also wrote the computer program that tallied the punch-card votes cast in 41 Ohio counties last November...

Given the ubiquity of the Triad voting systems in Ohio, the allegations that have been leveled against this company strike to the heart of the assumed result of the 2004 election.

...Triad is contracted to do much of the elections work in this county and elsewhere in Ohio

...They also have a technician in the office on election night to actually run the tabulator itself...

Triad also supplies the network computers on which all of the voter registration information and processing is kept for the county...

The source of this report believes that the Triad representative was "making the rounds" of visiting other counties also before the recount. This person also stated they would not pass on the suggestion of the "posted" hidden totals, and would refuse to go along with it if it were suggested by the others in the office at the time.

The source of this information believes they could lose their job if they come forward. The source of this information is named Sherole Eaton, Hocking County deputy director of elections. She has since written and signed an affidavit describing her experience with the Triad representative, the text of which is here:

Go to Original

AFFADAVIT
December 13, 2004
Sherole Eaton
Re: General Election 2004 - Hocking County, TriAd...

...He advised Lisa and I on how to post a "cheat sheet" on the wall so that only the board members and staff would know about it and and what the codes meant so the count would come out perfect and we wouldn't have to do a full hand recount of the county. He left about 5:00 PM.
My faith in Tri Ad and the Xenia staff has been nothing but good. The realization that this company and staff would do anything to dishonor or disrupt the voting process is distressing to me and hard to believe. I'm being completely objective about the above statements and the reason I'm bringing this forward is to, hopefully, rule out any wrongdoing...

Conyers, upon hearing these allegations, sent a letter to both the FBI Special Agent in Charge in Ohio and the Hocking County Prosecutor. The text of that letter is as follows:

December 15, 2004
As part of the Democratic staff's investigation into irregularities in the 2004 election and following up on a lead provided to me by Green Party Presidential Candidate, David Cobb, I have learned that Sherole Eaton, a Deputy Director of Board of Elections in Hocking County, Ohio, has first hand knowledge of inappropriate and likely illegal election tampering in the Ohio presidential election in violation of federal and state law...

I have information that similar actions of this nature may be occurring in other counties in Ohio. I am therefore asking that you immediately investigate this alleged misconduct and that, among other things, you consider the immediate impoundment of election machinery to prevent any further tampering...

Third, it is important to recognize that the companies implicated in the wrongdoing, Triad and its affiliates, are the leading suppliers of voting machines involving the counting of paper ballots and punch cards in the critical states of Ohio and Florida. Triad is controlled by the Rapp family, and its founder Tod A. Rapp has been a consistent contributor to Republican causes.4 A Triad affiliate, Psephos corporation, supplied the notorious butterfly ballot used in Palm Beach County, Florida, in the 2000 presidential election.

Sincerely,
John Conyers, Jr.

The New York Times published a report on the matter late Tuesday night:

Go to Original

Lawmaker Seeks Inquiry Into Ohio Vote
By Tom Zeller Jr.
The New York Times
Wednesday 15 December 3004

The ranking Democratic member of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, plans to ask the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a county prosecutor in Ohio today to explore "inappropriate and likely illegal election tampering" in at least one and perhaps several Ohio counties...

Daily Kos :: BREAKING: Witness Says Voting Company Tampered With Machines

2004-12-14T06:16:00.000-05:00

BREAKING: Witness Says Voting Company Tampered With Machines
by sixmoreweeks
[Subscribe]

Mon Dec 13th, 2004 at 22:31:58 CDT

This is breaking news here from The Blue Lemur (Raw Story) that concerns the witness that Presidential candidate David Cobb (Green Party) brought up at the hearing today in Ohio with John Conyers.

The story is below the fold.

Diaries :: sixmoreweeks's diary ::

Correction from RAW STORY: An earlier version of this article and headline incorrectly stated David Cobb was the Libertarian candidate. Cobb was the Green Party candidate.

12/13/2004
Witness says voting company tampered with machines after vote and tried to plant false information into Ohio recount
Filed under: General-- site admin @ 10:15 pm

Green says voting company tampered with recount effort

By John Byrne | RAW STORY Editor

David Cobb, the unsuccessful Green Party presidential candidate, aired startling allegations at the Democratic House Judiciary Committee’s Columbus hearings Monday, alleging that a voting company representative tampered with voting equipment in Columbus last Friday and attempted to plant false information into the Ohio recount.

Cobb says that a witness who had requested anonymity watched a representative of Triad Systems enter the Columbus Board of Elections unannounced and tamper with a vote tabulator which then lost all data.

The representative then, Cobb said, tried to convince employees to post false information so that it would appear as if the data was valid and had never been lost.

This following is RAW STORY ’s transcript Cobb’s speech as recorded by Inside Track News’ broadcast (mp3 file), an independent media outlet that covered the event. The story has been followed in detail at The Brad Blog.

“A representative from Triad Systems came into this county’s Board of Election’s office unannounced, that is on this Friday. He said he was just stopping by to see if they had any questions about the upcoming recount.

“He then headed into the back room where Triad supplies tabulators, that is the machine that counts the ballots, is kept. This Triad representative told them that there was problem with the system, that the system had a bad battery and it had ‘lost all its data.’

“He then took the computer apart and started swapping parts in and out of it. And in another [incomprehensible] in the room. And he had spare parts in his coat, as one of the people moved in [sic] remarked how very heavy it was.

“He finally reassembled everything and said it was working but not to turn it off. He then asked which precinct would be counted in the 3 percent recount test and that one which had been selected as if it had the right number of votes was relayed to him he then went back and did something else to the tabulator.

“The Triad Systems representative suggested that since the hand recount had to match the machine count exactly and since it would hard to memorize the several numbers which would be needed to get the count exactly right, that they should post this series of numbers on the wall where they would not be noticed by observers such as to make them look like employee information or something similar.

“The people doing the hand count could then he said just report those numbers no matter what the actually counted in the ballot. This would then ‘match’ the tabulator report for this precinct exactly.

Minority leader of the House Judiciary Committee Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) replied, “David Cobb, I need to you to arrange a meeting with our staff immediately.”

Cobb asserted that such practices were “going on across the state.”

The Cleveland Free Press’ Editor David Fitrakis also submitted a list of documented Ohio voting irregularities Dec. 8, which Conyers’ office has posted online in pdf format.

###

Correction: An earlier version of this article and headline incorrectly stated David Cobb was the Libertarian candidate. Cobb was the Green Party candidate.

MORE: http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=490

Daily Kos :: BREAKING: Witness Says Voting Company Tampered With Machines

Judiciary Cmte Dems: "'Free' Exit Poll Data", "Ken Blackwell Riddle Me This", etc.

2004-12-04T16:04:00.000-05:00

House Committee on the Judiciary Democratic Members

If you experienced voting problems or have first-handknowledge of voting irregularies in the 2004 Presidential election,please contact the Committee by clicking here.

December 3, 2004
Text of Letter from Rep. Conyers to Warren Mitofsky of Mitofsky International Requesting the Release of Exit Poll "raw data"

December 3, 2004
Text of Follow-up Letter from Judiciary Democratic Members to Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell Concerning Ohio Election Irregularities

December 3, 2004
Conyers and Other Congressmen to Hold Forum on Voting Irregularities in Ohio

December 2, 2004
Conyers, and Other House Judiciary Democrats Ask Blackwell to Explain Alleged Ohio Election Irregularities

December 2, 2004
Text of Letter from Judiciary Democratic Members to Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell Concerning Ohio Election Irregularities

VoteLaw: Comparing Ukraine and Ohio

2004-12-02T18:45:00.000-05:00

James K. Galbraith writes on Salon.com: The election was stolen. That's not in doubt. Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted it. The National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute both admitted it. Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana -- a Republican -- was emphatic; there had been "a concerted and forceful program of Election Day fraud and abuse"; he "had heard" of employers telling their workers how to vote; yet he had also seen the fire of the resisting young, "not prepared to be intimidated."

In Washington, former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski demanded that the results be set aside and a new vote taken, under the eye -- no less -- of the United Nations. In the New York Times, Steven Lee Myers decried "the use of government resources on behalf of loyal candidates and the state's control over the media" -- practices, he said, that were akin to those in "Putin's Russia."

Personally, I don't know whether the Ukrainian election was really stolen. I don't trust Lugar, Powell or the National Democratic Institute. It's obvious that U.S. foreign policy interests, rather than love of democracy for its own sake, are behind this outcry. Russia backed the other candidate in Ukraine. For Brzezinski, doing damage to Russia is a hobby.

But if the Ukraine standard were applied in Ohio -- as it should be -- then the late lamented U.S. election certainly was stolen. [emphasis added at Counting Coup.] In Ohio, the secretary of state in charge of the elections process was co-chairman of the Bush campaign in the state. He obstructed the vote count systematically -- for instance, by demanding that provisional ballots without birth dates on their envelopes be thrown out, even though there is no requirement for that in state law. He also required that provisional ballots be cast in a voter's home precinct, ensuring that there would be no escape from long lines. Republicans fielded thousands of election challengers to Democratic precincts, mainly to try to intimidate black voters and to slow down the voting process. A recount, demanded and paid for by the Green and Libertarian parties, has been stalled in court, so that it won't possibly upset the certification of Ohio's electoral votes.

-- Salon.com Democracy inaction

This entry was posted by Edward at 07:50 AM

Voting errors tallied nationwide

2004-12-02T18:02:00.000-05:00

By Brian C. Mooney, Globe Staff December 1, 2004

More than 4,000 votes vanished without a trace into a computer's overloaded memory in one North Carolina county, and about a hundred paper ballots were thrown out by mistake in another. In Texas, a county needed help from a laboratory in Canada to unlock the memory of a touch-screen machine and unearth five dozen votes.

In other places, machine undercounting or overcounting of votes was a problem. Several thousand votes were mistakenly double-counted in North Carolina, Ohio, Nebraska, and Washington state. Some votes in other areas were at first credited to the wrong candidates, with one Indiana county, by some quirk, misallocating several hundred votes for Democrats to Libertarians. In Florida, some machines temporarily indicated votes intended for challenger John F. Kerry were for President Bush, and vice versa.

In the month since the election, serious instances of voting machine problems or human errors in ballot counts have been documented in at least a dozen states, each involving from scores of ballots to as many as 12,000 votes, as in a North Carolina county. On Election Day, or in later reconciling tallies of ballots and voters, local officials discovered problems and corrected final counts. In some cases, the changes altered the outcomes of local races. But in North Carolina, the problems were so serious that the state may hold a rare second vote, redoing a contest for state agriculture commissioner decided by fewer votes than the number of ballots lost.

After the disputed vote in Florida four years ago, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and authorized $4 billion so states could create central computerized voter lists and replace outdated voting systems such as punchcards by 2006. But many states have not completed the overhaul, and this year's election unearthed enough problems -- both with older technologies and newer electronic touch-screens -- that two federal agencies plan unprecedented nationwide inquiries. The investigations by the Government Accountability Office and US Election Assistance Commission will begin early next year and be completed by mid-2005, at the earliest.

In addition, minor presidential candidates requested recounts in four states -- a partial one completed yesterday in New Hampshire, and statewide in Ohio, New Mexico, and Nevada.
None of the recounts or inquiries is expected to affect the results of the presidential election, which Bush won by more than 3.3 million votes.

Those who believe that either or both of the past two presidential elections were manipulated by a vague conspiracy to elect Bush have done statistical analyses of voting patterns in Florida and argued that the voting discrepancies were much larger and systemic, but their studies have not stood up to scrutiny from academics and other analysts.

Most of the concerns, which have rocketed through the Internet, center on computerized voting or tabulating machines, including some that do not keep a paper record for audits and recounts. Some computer scientists acknowledge that these systems could be vulnerable to tampering.

''I would hesitate to take seriously the conspiracy theories, but there are certainly gaps and vulnerabilities that have got to be addressed," said DeForest B. Soaries, chairman of the US Election Assistance Commission, which was created by the 2002 law and plans to conduct hearings around the country on the voting.

''We are convinced that while the election went relatively smoothly compared to what many had expected, that does not eliminate the need to study the results and collect data to document machine malfunctions and other administrative matters," Soaries said.

Since 2000, watchdog groups have intensified their monitoring and cataloging of complaints and errors. The nonpartisan Verified Voting Foundation and other groups built a database of more than 30,000 ''election incidents" reported across the country this year. Most were routine, but nearly 900 involved significant e-voting problems, including malfunctions that shut down machines, lengthening waits at the polls. There were 42 reports of total breakdowns of machines in New Orleans and 28 in Philadelphia and ''15 reports of catastrophic machine failure" in Mercer County, Pa.

The most serious problems occurred in North Carolina, where 4,438 e-votes disappeared in Carteret County. In at least five other counties, major double-counting or undercounting was discovered and corrected by North Carolina officials during their tabulations.

Johnnie McLean, deputy director of the State Board of Elections, attributed many mistakes to ''the human element, brought on by fatigue." In Carteret, for example, election workers apparently did not notice the ''Voter Log Full" message on the black box as the UniLect touch-screen failed to record the electronic votes, she said.

''If we had problems in the past, they were not magnified like this," McLean said, referring not only to the closeness of the statewide race, but also the extraordinary scrutiny of voting since 2000.

Examples of other major problems that were reported on and after Nov. 2, then later corrected, include:

Thousands of ballots were mistakenly double-counted in Sandusky County, Ohio; Sarpy County, Neb.; and Grays Harbor County, Wash. Democrats in Washington ust decide by Friday whether to seek a second recount in the closest governor's race
in state history. One recount has been held, reducing Republican Dino Rossi's 261-vote lead to 42 votes over Democrat Christine Gregoire.
In Gahanna, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus, Bush was temporarily credited with 3,893 more votes than he actually received in a precinct where only 638 voters cast ballots on a Danaher electronic voting machine.
In Franklin County, Ind., a tabulator credited about 600 straight-ticket Democratic votes to Libertarian Party candidates.
In Collin County, Texas, the memory card of a Diebold Election Systems touch-screen machine had to be sent to a laboratory in Canada a week after the election to extract information about 63 votes cast before the machine froze and was taken out of service.
In South Florida's Broward County, ''multiple misrecordings" occurred when votes for Kerry on touch-screens made by Election Systems & Software Inc. appeared as Bush votes, and there was at least one account of a Bush vote going to Kerry, the Verified Voting group reported. Broward voters discovered the problem on screens that allowed them to check their selections before entering them electronically.

The long list of documented problems has fueled the suspicions of conspiracy theorists, activists, and the minor presidential candidates who requested the New Hampshire and Ohio recounts.

Ohio decided the 2004 contest, but since the 2000 election, Florida remains the focus of the doubters and the devotees of various scenarios that suggest skullduggery, in part because early exit polls overstated Kerry's strength.

No group has been more aggressive than Seattle-based Black Box Voting, which bills itself as ''consumer protection for elections." Led by founder Bev Harris, the organization is seeking election records from around the country for audits of the results. The primary focus is Florida, where internal computer records have been requested in all 67 counties, and the results in glitch-plagued Volusia County, in the east-central part of the state, are being contested.

Four years ago, during vote-counting on election night, a faulty memory card initially deducted 16,022 votes from Democrat Al Gore's vote total in Volusia. Despite spending about $300,000 to upgrade equipment and avert a repeat, there were memory card problems this year in tabulators for six Volusia precincts. The optically-scanned paper ballots were re-fed into other counting machines to reach an accurate tally, a county election official said.

''All day long, I get desperate calls from people who are in so much pain," said Harris, the Black Box founder, who said she is convinced fraud occurred in some places Nov. 2. ''They say: Can you fix it? Can you solve it? Can you turn around the presidential election? We're not trying to turn the election around. We're trying to get elections to be more transparent, because with the new machines, it's not transparent."

Deanie Lowe, Volusia's supervisor of elections, said she has complied with Harris's record requests and offered to recount, free of charge, any three of Volusia's 179 precincts selected by Harris.

Harris, however, said records for all precincts were not turned over, and Black Box will seek a 50-precinct recount in the county, which Kerry won but by a smaller margin than Gore did in 2000.

Much of the postelection focus on Florida resulted from a pair of analyses that claimed Bush's vote totals in the state were inflated by two vote-counting technologies.

The first analysis originated on the Web and cited results in rural, overwhelmingly Democratic counties in Florida's panhandle, where Bush crushed Kerry. All use optical scanners. What the analysis failed to note is that Bush routed Gore by nearly equal margins four years ago in the same conservative counties that have been tilting Republican for years in national elections. A team of Miami Herald reporters reviewed 17,000 ballots in three of the counties, basically confirming the election results.

Then, a broadly reported second study by a team at the University of California at Berkeley, using an academic statistical method, asserted that ''Irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000 excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida." In Broward County alone, the study said, Bush ''appears to have received approximately 72,000 excess votes." Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties, which also use touch-screens, were also cited as anomalies.

But if Bush had actually received 72,000 fewer votes in heavily Democratic Broward, his total this year would have been less than it was in 2000 -- even though nearly 132,000 more ballots were cast. Kerry won all three key counties, Broward by more than 209,000 votes.

Bush carried the state by 380,978 votes, or about 5 percent of 7.6 million cast.

If recounts are the skeptics' best hope to uncover systemic irregularities, they got off to a rocky start in New Hampshire. Completed yesterday at the request of independent candidate Ralph Nader, the Granite State re-tally of 50,600 votes in 11 towns and city wards that use optical scanners increased Kerry's total by 87 votes and Bush's by 62.

Secretary of State William M. Gardner said scanned ballots have worked well in New Hampshire. Indeed, the largest discrepancies found this year were in a legislative race involving hand-counted ballots, he said.

On deck is Ohio, which tipped the Electoral College to Bush. At the earliest, the recount of 88 counties won't begin until Dec. 13, according to the secretary of state's office, the same day the Electoral College is scheduled to formalize Bush's reelection. The recount could take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Minor presidential candidates Michael Badnarik and David Cobb of the Libertarian and Green parties, respectively, have said they would formally seek the recount once the state certifies the official results Monday. They will incorporate the review of 155,000 provisional ballots, which were not included in preliminary tallies that showed Bush winning Ohio by 136,483 votes, or about 2.5 percent.

How long the recount takes will depend on whether Badnarik and Cobb ask for a manual inspection of any or all of the 5.5 million ballots, said Carlo LoParo, spokesman for Ohio's secretary of state, J. Kenneth Blackwell.

Of complaints about long lines that discouraged some from voting and allegations that there was a shortage of machines in some urban Democratic areas, LoParo said such decisions in Ohio are made by county boards of elections with two Republicans and two Democrats.

Long waits in Ohio and elsewhere resulted from the system being overwhelmed by a high turnout, said Doug Chapin, director of the nonpartisan electionline.org, which monitors reform efforts.

More attention should be paid to providing an adequate number of machines in polling places, he said, as well as ''finishing the job" mandated by the Help America Vote Act. Forty states, for example, have yet to comply with a mandate to establish a central, statewide database of registered voters. That will reduce questions about voter eligibility at election time, Chapin said.

Whatever the outcome of the recounts and the official inquiries by federal agencies, the impetus for improve voting systems will not fade, he said.

''This is not a fringe issue, because a sizable group is interested in pursuing this as a policy issue going forward," Chapin said. ''There's now a critical mass of people involved who want to address the problems that occurred in 2004. This issue is not going to go away."

Federal Judge Reportedly Declines to Stop Recount

2004-12-02T17:56:00.000-05:00

Federal Judge Reportedly Declines to Stop Recount

A United States District Judge has declined to extend a temporary restraining order barring the Ohio recount from proceeding in Delaware County, according to this press release. As I noted yesterday, the TRO had been issued by state judge, but expired by its terms yesterday at noon. After the TRO issued, the Green and Libertarian candidates removed the case from state court to federal court. Today's press release doesn't explain the federal judge's reasoning, but does note that a hearing is set for tomorrow afternoon in Columbus, to consider the matter further.

- posted by Dan Tokaji @ 3:38 PM

Identify and Audit Central Vote Tabulation Machines

2004-11-24T13:26:00.000-05:00

Central Vote Tabulation: Redux & Plea

by understandinglife [Subscribe]

CRUCIAL! Specifically, I urge all of you to mount an effort to identify the 'central tabulation centers' in each State. And, through whatever legal mechanisms are required, to request and obtain records of those persons having physical access to the systems as well as telecom logs [spanning at least Oct and Nov 2004] of all data/voice communications connections to the hosting centers.

Wed Nov 24th, 2004 at 12:50:48 EDT

On 12 Nov 2004 I posted a Diary entitled "Central Vote Tabulation: What We Should Know and DO "

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/12/104750/99

Please focus on the following text from the Complaint to Contest Election: Susan Rose Pynchon vs. Volusia County Canvassing Board and Ann McFall:

"18. According to a statement by the Supervisor of Elections on November 17, 2004, the GEMS computer is not networked, and is "stand alone." The furnished computer logs show evidence of at least two attempts to remotely access the GEMS central tabulator, which is claimed to be secure. A computer screen shot printout on November 17, 2004 (found in the trash) shows that the GEMS computer at that time had two networked hard drives.
19. Plaintiff is reasonably concerned that access to the memory cards and voting machine tapes is presently not restricted, and that the opportunity for tampering with that critical evidence exists.
Plaintiff accordingly requests that This Honorable Court immediately order the Supervisor of Elections to seal and sequester all memory cards and voting machine tapes pertaining to or used during the November 2, 2004 general election in Volusia County, during the pendency of this Cause."

In my original Diary I requested consideration and action, to whatever extent considered reasonable by the dKos community.

I repeat that request now, and hope that we can leverage what Susan Pynchon and her colleagues in Volusia FL, in collaboration with Bev Harris and her team, have launched.

Specifically, I urge all of you to mount an effort to identify the 'central tabulation centers' in each State. And, through whatever legal mechanisms are required, to request and obtain records of those persons having physical access to the systems as well as telecom logs [spanning at least Oct and Nov 2004] of all data/voice communications connections to the hosting centers.

I make this request not in the spirit of "Kerry over Bush" but in the spirit of all the Diaries I have posted here in the past 21 days -- our franchise is broken; it is Our responsibility to fix it, now.

We have not had a valid election, because almost no one can answer the simple question -- "If you voted, do you know If and How your vote was recorded"?

So, in the spirit of "Prove My Vote Counts, Now" I urge all of you to bring items 18 and 19 of the Complaint to the attention of every State SoS, every State AG, every Congressperson [Federal and State], every reporter, every citizen you know personally.

We must repair our franchise, now, with the same focused intensity and zeal as those folk in the Ukraine are demonstrating to themselves and the world.

Pointsoflight has a dKos Diary on the full text and comments posted at:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/24/10148/692

Peace and Happy Thanskgiving.

Empathy Training: Crossing the Great Liberal-Conservative Divide

2004-11-24T11:55:00.000-05:00

Empathy Training for Liberals: A Primer on the Conservative Mind, From the Inside of One.

..."Another thing we did was go through something called “Empathy Training”, which usually involved going completely blindfolded for a day, or taping several fingers together to simulate motor skills difficulty, or spending a weekend in a wheelchair. This was less fun than spending your Saturday outside building ramps, but for a young man it was a real eye-opener, trying to live “a day in the life”. As a result of this “Empathy Training”, all of a sudden those old Helen Keller jokes weren’t so funny anymore.

Without drawing the analogy that Conservatives are Severely Handicapped ( Hey! Remember, I’m one too :-) ), I would like to offer some insight into how the Conservative mind works for you Liberals out there, so that perhaps we can stop Demonizing each other (Nazi! Fag! Fascist! Pantywaist!) and open meaningful channels of communication."...MORE

Empathy Training for Compassionate Conservatives: Why the Democrats Are Still Whining About the Election.

..."I love him, but he probably couldn't pick Karl Rove out of an Evil Genius Lineup with Dr. Evil, Max Scorpio, and that Steve guy from the Linux cartoon (www.ubergeek.tv/switchlinux). I can imagine it now - "Suspect number 3, please turn to the right and say 'Mwuahh-haa-haa.'"

Actually, this is a guy I've known for almost 15 years, a college buddy and fraternity brother who I have leaned against on many drunken and interesting nights, and is one of the very few people in the world I trust explicitly. I took a few seconds to let what he said sink in, and then I warily replied, "Actually, that's kind of the problem. So far, all the vote fraud analysis that's been done indicates that it benefited us 100% of the time."

He replied, "Yeah? Huh. Go figure. Hey, can you make it to the Tampa Bay / Panthers game next weekend? Kevin's coming up from Florida, and we're tailgating!"....MORE

GAO to investigate election complaints

2004-11-23T18:52:00.000-05:00

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. Government Accountability Office plans to investigate complaints of several systemic problems with this month's elections, a group of Democratic lawmakers said Tuesday.

The investigation comes in response to two letters written by lawmakers to the GAO which address numerous media reports of irregularities in the 2004 vote and call for those to be reviewed.

The GAO said it will not investigate every charge listed by the Democrats, but will examine "the security and accuracy of voting technologies, distribution and allocation of voting machines and counting of provisional ballots."

A spokeswoman for one of the lawmakers requesting an investigation, Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, said the goal is not to overturn the election results, but rather to improve the mechanics of the voting process.

"We are hopeful that GAO's nonpartisan and expert analysis will get to the bottom of the flaws uncovered in the 2004 election," said a statement released by Conyers and five other members of Congress.

As part of the inquiry, the group said it will provide copies of specific incident reports received in their offices regarding the election, including more than 57,000 complaints provided to the House Judiciary Committee.

Those reports include allegations of computer and voting machine problems that added votes to totals, as well as malfunctions that resulted in votes being thrown out.

"We are literally receiving additional reports every minute," said a November 5 letter from lawmakers to the GAO. "The essence of democracy is the confidence of the electorate in the accuracy of voting methods and the fairness of voting procedures.
"In 2000, that confidence suffered terribly, and we fear that such a blow to our democracy may have occurred in 2004."

Requesting lawmakers in addition to Conyers were Reps. Jerrold Nadler, Louise Slaughter and Gregory Meeks of New York; Robert Wexler of Florida; Robert Scott of Virginia; Melvin Watt of North Carolina; Rush Holt of New Jersey; John Olver of Massachusetts; Bob Filner, George Miller and Barbara Lee of California; and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin.

Pentagon drops Internet voting plans for military personnel - Computerworld

2004-11-19T20:47:00.000-05:00

Common Ground Common Sense
we find that the DoD dropped the internet use of voting by the military because it couldn't guarantee the security of the voting :

''In a Jan. 30 memo to David Chu, the undersecretary of Defense for personnel and readiness, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz wrote that 'in view of the inability to ensure legitimacy of votes that would be cast in the SERVE Internet voting project, thereby bringing into doubt the integrity of the election, I hereby direct you to take immediate steps to ensure that no voters use the system to register or vote via the Internet.'

The memo was released today by a Defense Department spokesman who was asked about the status of the controversial voting program, which is called SERVE (Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment).

Wolfowitz said in the memo that 'efforts will continue to demonstrate the technical ability to cast ballots over the Internet,' using knowledge and experience gained so far. He wrote that he would reconsider his decision in the future 'if it can be shown that the integrity of the election results can be assured.''

Yet we are told that the civilian voting systems ARE hackable, and demonstrated as such by Black Box Voting ! This was an invitationg to vote fraud and everyone knew it !"

we find that the DoD dropped the internet use of voting by the military because it couldn't guarantee the security of the voting :

""In a Jan. 30 memo to David Chu, the undersecretary of Defense for personnel and readiness, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz wrote that "in view of the inability to ensure legitimacy of votes that would be cast in the SERVE Internet voting project, thereby bringing into doubt the integrity of the election, I hereby direct you to take immediate steps to ensure that no voters use the system to register or vote via the Internet."

The memo was released today by a Defense Department spokesman who was asked about the status of the controversial voting program, which is called SERVE (Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment).

Wolfowitz said in the memo that "efforts will continue to demonstrate the technical ability to cast ballots over the Internet," using knowledge and experience gained so far. He wrote that he would reconsider his decision in the future "if it can be shown that the integrity of the election results can be assured.""

Yet we are told that the civilian voting systems ARE hackable, and demonstrated as such by Black Box Voting ! This was an invitationg to vote fraud and everyone knew it !

Link

Pentagon drops Internet voting plans for military personnel
It cited security concerns for the move but plans to keep studying the idea

Related to this topic

> Sidebar: Papering Over E-voting Problems
> Hacker breaks into electronic voting firm site
> Criticism of electronic voting machines’ security is mounting
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> Eight best practices for disaster recovery

News Story by Todd R. Weiss

FEBRUARY 05, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD) - The U.S. Department of Defense has decided, for now at least, to drop its efforts to give overseas U.S. military personnel voting access over the Internet, because of concerns about the security of the system.

In a Jan. 30 memo to David Chu, the undersecretary of Defense for personnel and readiness, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz wrote that "in view of the inability to ensure legitimacy of votes that would be cast in the SERVE Internet voting project, thereby bringing into doubt the integrity of the election, I hereby direct you to take immediate steps to ensure that no voters use the system to register or vote via the Internet."

The memo was released today by a Defense Department spokesman who was asked about the status of the controversial voting program, which is called SERVE (Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment).

Wolfowitz said in the memo that "efforts will continue to demonstrate the technical ability to cast ballots over the Internet," using knowledge and experience gained so far. He wrote that he would reconsider his decision in the future "if it can be shown that the integrity of the election results can be assured."

"The bottom line is we could have our president selected by [hackers in] Iran."

—Barbara Simons, ACM past president and technology policy expert
The Wolfowitz memo came nine days after a 34-page report, "A Security Analysis of the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment" (download PDF), was sent by a group of technology experts to the Federal Voting Assistance Program, criticizing the idea as it was envisioned (see story).

The group of about a dozen computer experts was asked by the Defense Department to review the idea of Internet voting, which was proposed after the 2000 presidential elections to make it easier for members of the military and other U.S. citizens to cast ballots when they're overseas. The Federal Voting Assistance Program was assembled by the Pentagon to build an Internet voting system.

One of the writers of the report, Barbara Simons, a past president of the Association of Computing Machinery and a technology policy expert, said today that she's pleased with Wolfowitz's decision

LWV: VOTING PROBLEMS SHOULD BE FULLY INVESTIGATED & RESOLVED

2004-11-19T11:23:00.000-05:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE November 18, 2004
Statement by Kay J. Maxwell, President of the League of Women Voters
Contact: Kelly Ceballos, 202-263-1331 Sara Conrath, 202-263-1332

WASHINGTON, DC – “The League of Women Voters is deeply concerned about voting irregularities in the 2004 election. The appropriate officials must fully investigate these concerns through open and public processes. Election officials should look into problems quickly and thoroughly and fix what proves to be wrong. Transparency and a willingness to look into potential problems will strengthen voter confidence and ultimately improve our electoral system.

“It is important to ensure that every properly cast ballot is counted and to make improvements for future elections. Attention must be given to inadequate polling place procedures, problematic voting machines, voter registration system failures, casting and counting of provisional ballots, and absentee voting issues.

“This was far from a perfect election. Although voter turnout reached record levels, the election system showed signs of stress and voters faced real problems. Two key areas deserve special inquiry. First, voter registration problems plague the system. These problems – from failures to fully process registration applications in time to bureaucratic requirements that blocked voter registration – must still be resolved by election officials. Second, the reasons for the very long lines that voters faced in too many states and localities must be thoroughly examined. Having to wait several hours to vote is an unacceptable barrier to citizen participation. What were the reasons? Were there not enough voting machines? Were these polling places poorly organized? Were long lines a greater problem in minority or student precincts than in rural or suburban precincts? Changes clearly need to be made in polling place operations to address these concerns.

“Finally, the League calls on every voter who cast a provisional ballot to find out whether their ballot was counted. The provisional ballot counting process is still ongoing and must be monitored. But every voter who cast a provisional ballot has the right, under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), to know whether it is counted, and, if it is not counted, why it is not counted. States are required to have a toll-free hotline or Internet system so voters can get this information about their ballot.

“The League’s nationwide network of state and local Leagues will continue to work closely with election officials to identify and correct all voting problems.”

***

The League of Women Voters, a nonpartisan political organization, encourages the informed and active participation of citizens in government, works to increase understanding of major public policy issues, and influences public policy through education and advocacy

DemUnderground: "Best Voter Fraud Summary I've Seen"

2004-11-19T10:52:00.000-05:00

monroncrief RePost: BEST VOTER FRAUD SUMMARY I'VE SEEN

Thu Nov-18-04 03:45 PM

This originally came from Stirling Newberry over at bopnews.com, but has been edited and added to rather heavily. Anyone with the time should update stories and fact check (I've done a little).

Numerous stories are summarized here, with links to the original publications. The following is only what has been learned in the days since the election and new reports are streaming in, seemingly, by the hour. It seems that there is enough evidence in the following to suggest that the electorate may have actually chosen Kerry for President. It cannot be known for sure until results of numerous recounts/investigations are in. Bush has not yet been chosen by the Electoral College, who meet and vote on Dec. 13.

(Please note: some of the newspaper links may expire soon. You may want to print out the stories so that later on, you don't have to buy them from the newspapers' archives.)

FLORIDA:

The most troubling news has come out of Florida. Throughout most of the state, new electronic voting machines were in use. These machines -many manufactured by a company called Diebold - are controversial because they don't leave a paper trail. There is no way to double-check the results.

The final Florida tallies on Diebold machines from Tuesday are literally unbelievable.

In 29 counties where Diebold machines (an optical scanner) were used to count the ballots, large majorities of voters were registered Democrats. But the final results gave all the counties to Bush, sometimes by huge margins.

The individual county data shows how unlikely the machine results were.

For instance:

In Calhoun County, 82% of registered voters are Democrats. But Diebold machines said 63% of the county voted for Bush.

In Lafayette County, 83% of voters are Democrats, but Diebold said 74%
of the county voted for Bush.

In Liberty County, 88% of voters are Democrats, but Diebold said 64%
voted for Bush.

In Washington County, 67% of voters are Democrats, but Diebold said 71% voted for Bush.

This same pattern appears in the results for 29 COUNTIES in Florida. In every one of those counties, the Diebold Optical Scanner produced the results.

The Optical Scanner has been called the voting machine that is most susceptible to tampering.

Do you believe that in 29 Florida counties in which Democrats were in the majority- in some cases with 4 out of 5 registered voters being Democrats - they all voted THAT strongly for Bush? The "Dixiecrat" theory just doesn't hold.

Here are the links.

You can find the voter registration/final result data here:

http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm

You can find a story analyzing these results here:

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1106-30.htm

THE OTHER PROBLEM IN FLORIDA:

In 6 counties - again, they were all using electronic machines - more votes for President were recorded than there were actual voters in the counties.

Altogether, these six counties reported 188,885 more votes for President than there are voters living there.

Right now, no one knows whether those extra 188,000 votes were cast for Bush or for Kerry. But Bush won the state of Florida by a 5% margin- contrary to what all the polls were showing only days earlier.

In Glades County: 2,443 votes for Bush / 1,718 votes for Kerry / 27 votes for Other. Those add up to 4,188. But the machines recorded the official turnout as 3,446. That adds up to 742 more votes than voters.

In Highlands County: 25,874 for Bush / 15,346 for Kerry / 271 for Other.
Official Turnout: 33,996. That adds up to 7,495 more votes than voters.

In Miami-Dade County: 358,613 for Bush / 406,099 for Kerry / 3,841 for Other.
Official Turnout 716,574. That adds up to 51,979 more votes than voters.

In Osceola County: 43,108 for Bush / 38,617 for Kerry / 453 for Other.
Official Turnout 63589. That adds up to 18,589 more votes than voters.

In Palm Beach County: 211,894 for Bush / 327,698 for Kerry / 3,243 for Other.
Official Turnout: 452,061. That adds up to 90,774 more votes than voters.

In Volusia County: 111,544 for Bush / 115,319 for Kerry / 1,495 for Other.
Official Turnout: 209,052. That adds up to 19,306 more votes than voters.

Use this link to get to the data:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/5/18466/2846

STILL MORE PROBLEMS IN FLORIDA

This account comes from partisans. Four Kerry volunteers working in Broward County sent a letter detailing election tampering to one newspaper reporter. All four signed it and included their email addresses. They report a wide, disturbing range of problems, from voters saying their electronic machines malfunctioned, poll workers denied them assistance, to police putting up roadblocks on the routes to polling places, and so on.

11/16: Bev Harris has reported to democraticunderground.com of blatant attempts by Volusia County officials to destroy poll tapes and provide altered poll tape information to BBV's FOIA: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

11/16: HUGE Berkeley report on FL disparities:
http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/new_web/VOTE2004/election04_ ...

OHIO

In Ohio, there were problems in four counties and one city.

In Howard County, a judge ruled on Election Day that everyone standing in line to vote at 7:30 p.m. had to eventually be allowed inside. The order said the ruling was good for the day of Nov. 2. (You can view the order at the website below.) But maybe it didn't occur to the judge that everybody might not make it inside by midnight. At the stroke of midnight, when the calendar legally clicked over to Nov. 3, Republican Ken Blackwell, the secretary of state, told all the waiting voters to go home. His workers gave them paper ballots (i.e., provisional ballots), told them to fill them out and bring them back later.

It was an improvised move that undercut the intent of the judge's ruling,and created chaos. Many people in Howard County still haven't turned in those ballots because they don't know where to take them or what the deadline is. The only kind of ballot in a federal election that people can legally take home, fill out and turn in later is an absentee ballot, and those are marked as such. They're marked with clear rules concerning deadlines, postmarking, and so on. So an uncounted number of people in Howard County - estimated in the thousands - couldn't get in and were turned away with what may be ruled an illegal procedure. The vast majority of those votes were expected to go to Kerry based on the heavily Democratic population of Howard County.

The Democrats have filed a lawsuit. You can click on the Ohio State University law school website to read about it. (Reassemble the
following long link, if it is broken by your email browser.)

http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:pKbOJwHH7OMJ:morit...

Meanwhile, in Warren County, election officials locked the doors to the County building and refused to allow bi-partisan observers to watch the vote-count. They also denied access to the AP reporter (it is standard procedure for the AP to observe vote-counting in counties all over the country.). The Sheriff of the county said he did it for "homeland security" reasons. He never explained or specified what the security concerns were.

Here is the link to the story in the Cincinnati Enquirer:

http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/11/05/loc_warrenv...

Meanwhile, in a Columbus suburb called Gahanna, the same problem showed up with electronic machines that we saw in Florida: more votes were cast than there were voters to cast them. In this case, however, the problem was investigated and the extra 3,893 votes were shown to have been erroneously tallied for Bush.

Here is the link to the story on the Ohio Network News:

http://wwwonnnews.com/Global/story.asp?S=2524952

Meanwhile, in Mahoning and Mercer Counties, electronic machines again malfunctioned, but the effect that had on the vote count is not clear. The machines had to be re-set, and at one point showed votes of "negative 25 million," according to the head of the local board of elections.

Here is the story from the local Youngstown paper, called the
Vindicator:

http://wwwvindy.com/basic/news/281829446390855.php

INDIANA

In Laporte County, electronic voting machines once again appear to have failed.

They tallied results for 22,200 voters, even though there are 79,000 registered voters in LaPorte County. Assuming the county actually had a 65% turnout rate (comparable to others in the area and its own track record), that means 29,000 votes were not counted.

Here is the link to the story in the Michigan City News-Dispatch:

http://www.michigancityin.com/articles/2004/11/04/news/...

NEW HAMPSHIRE

This is one of several states where original exit polls (interviews with voters as they are leaving) do not jive with the results produced by electronic voting machines.

An administrator at Bev Harris's group, called BlackBoxVoting (more on this below) has said that they are urging Ralph Nader to press for a recount in New Hampshire. Nader was on the ballot there, so he is in a good position to ask for a re-count.

You can read about Harris and her work at www.blackboxvoting.org /
http://www.blackboxvoting.org /

SIX STATES

In at least six states, there was a large difference between how people said they'd voted, and how officials said they'd voted.

In Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New Hampshire and New Mexico, there was a large discrepancy between what voters said in the original exit polls, and the final results claimed by election officials.

In each of those six states,electronic voting machines were used in some or most of the counties, with the exception of Ohio, which mainly uses ballot and optical scan machines.

In contrast, in states where paper ballots were the primary method of voting, there was little or no discrepancy between original exit polls and official results.

To see an easily viewable graph of this data, go to:

http://www.therandirhodesshow.com/todays_show.html

That graph was originally compiled by a website affiliated with The Raw Story, which often gets quoted in the major dailies. It is regarded as a reputable site.

You can see their original posting here:

http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=388

MORE ON EXIT POLLS

These are routinely conducted in elections by major news organizations and countries around the world use these numbers to decide elections before results are in. In Germany, for instance, the votes take approximately 3 weeks to count, but they are able to call the election that night within a half percent, based on exit polling. That was also the case here in the US until 2000.

Accounts are surfacing that both the Associated Press and CNN (and perhaps others) later CHANGED their exit polling data to more closely resemble the official results. None of the news organizations is believed to have offered an explanation. They may try to justify it on statistical grounds.

Here are some accounts:

http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/04/11/ana04025.html

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE411A.html

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00227.htm

MORE ON ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES

Here is an except from the Moderate Independent website about Bev Harris's work. She is a freelance journalist who has been documenting how unreliable the machines are, and how vulnerable they are to tampering. "Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting and the blackboxvoting.org web site, has documented numerous cases of electronic disasters. One occurred in Volusia County, Fla., in 2000 in which county election officials hand recounted more than 184,000 paper ballots used to feed the computerized system,after the central ballot-counting computer showed a Socialist Party candidate receiving more than 9,000 votes and Al Gore getting minus 19,000. Another 4,000 votes were received for Bush that should not have been there.

"Election officials eventually tallied Gore beating Bush by 97,063 votes to 82,214. But the wrong numbers had already been sent to the media,which were used by FOX and other networks to erroneously call the election for Bush and swing the public relations part of the recount battle in his favor."

Three Members of Congress Have Asked the GAO to Investigate the
Election

Three Congressmen have asked the General Accounting Office, a federal agency, to investigate the election, citing questionable results in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina and California. Click here to see their letter to the GAO:

forum.therandirhodesshow.com/index.php?act=ST&f=87&t=34711
http://forum.therandirhodesshow.com/index.php?act=ST&f=...

REMEMBER THESE FOUR POINTS:

A. Bush's approval numbers were CONSISTENTLY below 50% throughout the campaign.

B. New Democratic registrations in Ohio were 10 times that of Republicans, and in Florida, Democrats held a similar but somewhat
smaller advantage.

C. All the polls that were still giving Bush leads after the debates were within the margin of error, and when the undecideds started making up their minds over the last weekend, Kerry's poll numbers were surging.

D. The $10 million exit-poll system, specifically designed not to fail this time, clearly showed, in the original reports, a Kerry victory.

OTHER VOICES TO HEAR:

Here are other voices which are beginning to question the legitimacy of the recent election. Here are some of them. (Reassemble any long links which have been broken by your browser's settings.)

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won.php

http://americablog.blogspot.com/archives/2004_10_31_ame...

http://www.ecotalk.org/VotingSecurity.htm

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=18588&mode...

Here is a report of voter complaints in 7 Southern states:

http://www.abcnews4.com/news/stories/1104/185549.html

There may still be time to do something about this before the Electoral College meets on December 13th.

The first step is to immerse ourselves in the facts. The second step is to encourage the mainstream media to take the issue. They will only do that if they feel there is considerable popular concern. The local and regional press, and the alternative media, have been doing their jobs; now we need the national press to do its job, too.

If you are concerned about this election being stolen, please do two
things:

1. Send your concerns to everyone you know, both inside and outside the United States.

2. Send your concerns to the major news organizations.

UC Berkeley Study Questions Florida E-Vote Count

2004-11-18T03:34:00.000-05:00

Research Team Calls for Immediate Investigation

BERKELEY, Calif., Nov. 18 /PRNewswire/ -- When: Thursday, November 18, 2004, 10:00 a.m. PST

Where: UC Berkeley campus, Survey Research Center Conference Room -- 2538 Channing Way (intersection of Channing/Bowditch). Parking on Durant near Telegraph.

What: A research team at UC Berkeley will report that irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000 - 260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election. The study shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods. Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by chance -- the probability is less than 0.1 percent. The research team, led by Professor Michael Hout, will formally disclose results of the study at the press conference.

To attend the conference or request dial-in information, contact:

Erin Reasoner
Eastwick Communications
650-480-4057
erin.reasoner@eastwick.com

Erica Pereira
Eastwick Communications
650-480-4024
erica@eastwick.com

Noel Gallagher
UC Berkeley Media Relations
510-643-7944
noelgallagher@berkeley.edu

Mike McCurry: Forget the election, time to move on...

2004-11-18T01:16:00.000-05:00

How can we have faith in these guys

by fabacube [Subscribe]Wed Nov 17th, 2004 at 16:14:53 EDT

I just heard Al Franken's interview Mike McCurry and it became resoundingly clear to me that the Kerry team was never ready for a fight. He started by saying that they carefully looked at the results in Ohio the morning after the election and concluded that to challenge the results would require a major court battle and the likelihood of success was small and we didn't want to put the country threw that.

Fine, that is a legitimate argument. What I was not prepared for was what he said next.

He went on to argue that in retrospect it is probably better that we did not win Ohio because it would have been by a very small margin and the Republicans would have made it a huge battle.

If that is not enough, wait there is more to the McCurry logic.

He went on to argue that given that Bush won the popular vote we were better off without such a battle.

Say what??? All of a sudden the popular vote is paramount and we basically are better off having Bush for four more years than fighting for an E.C victory with a small margin victory in Ohio that we would have had to protect in court?

How can we have any faith in these guys! The lesson here is simple. This has to be our battle! We can't count on the Democratic Party fighting it for us.

Mike McCurry on the Al Franken show (none / 0)today pretty much dismissed all suggestions of fraud, recount, etc.

He even urged the bloggers to stop talking about the last election, and focus on the future. Said that Kerry told him the same thing.

There was no mixed message: he said flat out that they didn't get the votes or the turnout they needed and it is time to move on.

So, if that's not a strong indication of where the Kerry campaign stands on this, what is?

They claim they looked at it closely on election night, found no significant voting anomalies, and they haven't really looked at it since.

What to make of all of this?

by diana04 on Wed Nov 17th, 2004 at 15:30:00 EDT

Mike McCurry's comments (none / 0) Well - it seems we not only have the Repugs to fight - we have Kerry and McCurry as enemies - haven't they read the blogs and diaries? Have they no interest in the exit poll data? Have they no interest in what computer experts and statisticions and the academics have been demonstrating? And they decided in a very few hours on early morning Nov.3rd, all by themselves, that there was no possibility of a win????
I'll be goddam!

This election is bigger than Kerry - and it is a whole lot bigger than McCurry - it belongs to the people - and if Kerry & Co. aren't going to help, they ought to at least get out of our way.
(At this rate, in Election 2008, the Dem base of 50 million will dwindle to 40 million faithful or less.)

by dmligon on Wed Nov 17th, 2004 at 15:54:28 EDT

Blogger Blackout over 2004 Election Issues

2004-11-17T23:56:00.000-05:00

by TocqueDeville

Wed Nov 17th, 2004 at 20:52:52 EDT

The New York Times, Washington Post and other RWCM outlets are misleading when they assert that "the blogs" have been flaming "conspiracy theories" about possible fraud in this election. In fact, and with minor exception, the top left-leaning blogs have all but avoided this issue like the plague.

While open discussion forums such as the Daily Kos diaries and the Democratic Underground forums have pursued this story relentlessly, the actual bloggers such as Kos, Atrios, Josh Marshall and Calpundit to name a few, have put this topic in a lockdown that CNN would admire.

Why? One can only speculate. Perhaps they don't want to be branded "conspiracy theorist". Or perhaps they want to just move on and focus on the next election. Or, and I find this implausible, they really don't think it's possible that a group of Republicans would actually try to steal an election, much less pull it off. But after the proven malfeasance in 2000 [see THE GREAT FLORIDA EX-CON GAME ] and the clear indications that dirty tricks were at play in the run-up to this election, you would think that any abnormality or suspicious elements in this election would have drawn a spotlight from the "leaders" of our internet community.

So let me address the three possible motives aforementioned for this veritable blackout: cowardice, disbelief, and apathy. [Note: I am not presuming that our bloggers are cowards or apathetic, just that these are possible explanations and therefore should be addressed.]

First, fear of labeling is not a valid reason for ignoring this story, nor is it an acceptable one. TV personality Keith Olberman has demonstrated clearly that one can cover this issue and bring to light credible concerns while happily leaving the tinfoil hat at home. There is a difference between running around claiming proof of fraud when you have none and recognizing and reporting credible claims of irregularities.

Second, if you find it hard to believe the possibility that this election may have been rigged, then you are sadly uninformed. I won't even bother to cite the plethora of research and testimony from computer security experts as to the susceptibility of our voting and vote-counting technology. I can't believe that you could have missed it. Nor can I believe that you could have blogged this administration for the last few years and doubt that they are above such malfeasance. This is why I find this excuse implausible.

And last but not least, apathy. I'm probably most sympathetic with this excuse because it is an emotional response to a hard reality: that we will probably never prove fraud even if it occurred and even if we do, it probably won't change the outcome of the election. I also understand how exhausting it is to stay immersed in this story day after day and only find bits and pieces of the puzzle. But this is an excuse that we can accept the least.

Recently my wife had her purse stolen. This event began a process of bureaucratic entanglement that lasted over a month. First the police, then credit card companies and the justice system. It was an exhausting nightmare. But we had to go through it. Money was involved.

What if it was your money?

So let me ask you this. What if I told you that these central tabulating computers, the ones that are so concerning because they are connected by modem to thousands of other computers and accessed by thousands of people --election officials, Diebold personel, poll volunteers--, also housed your checking account? And anyone with access could add and delete money from your balance with a few mouse clicks? How would you feel about that?

And what if your balance continued to be off by about 5% and coincidentally, it was always off by a lesser amount than the balance shown by your records? Never more.

What would you do?

And how would you feel if your bank told you could no longer get a receipt on your deposits and regardless of your records, you need to simply trust the bank?

And how would you feel if, upon finding discrepancies between their records and your own, you were told to move on and live for another payday?

Now, does anyone believe that their vote is any less valuable than ALL the money in their checking account? This is how important the integrity of this election is. And moving on and planning for 2006 or 2008 is utterly futile if all our opponents have to do is rig some machines every two years.

Priorities

Currently, there is a front-page story on the Daily Kos showing Bush and some woman almost kissing on the lips. Now, I have zero problem with posting amusing things. In fact I find humor essential to my well being. But juxtaposed to the glaring absence of any mention of still outstanding anomalies and the historical aberration in the exit-poll/vote tabulation discrepancies, this appears to reflect a degree of out-of-touch-ness that parallels the French nobility immediately prior to the revolution.

We cannot let this slide. If fraud occurred we have to do everything in our power to uncover it. Only the fate of democracy is at stake. And I'll repeat, if all they have to do is rig an election every two years, all the Goerge Lakoffs in the world won't help us.

We need leadership

Let me be clear about what I do not expect. I don't expect the blogs to post every single story that bubbles to the surface of the forums. Nor do I expect Kos to feed a frenzy of speculation and false hopes. But I do expect leadership on this issue. And I expect support for all the folks who are vigorously pursuing all leads.

I believe this leadership and support should come in the form of using the bully-pulpit of the blog format to openly acknowledge this issue is critically important, that there are real causes for concern, and that there should be a full investigation into the anomalies and so-called glitches that have surfaced. All of which should be framed in the context of an absolute truth: that no election that is conducted by private corporations using closed, proprietary source code and tabulated in secrecy can ever be truly valid.

Release the exit-poll data

There should also be a loud, unified demand for release of the final Edison/Mitofsky exit-polling data in the raw form before it was corrupted by an infusion of the tabulation returns. Regardless of what you think about Dick Morris, he knows elections. And he was absolutely right that exit-polls are "almost never wrong." He was the first MSM figure I know of to use the term fraud. Of course he suspects that the exit-polls were rigged (someone send him a gift certificate for Tin Foil Hats Are Us).

With a sampling that exceeded 13,000 voters, the margin of error was less than 1%. What happened?

And of course leadership also includes the reigning in of unsubstantiated allegations and premature conclusions. Now, one could argue that the diary/forum crowd is doing a pretty good job of policing themselves. Generally, I would agree. And no one expects Kos et al to go through and debunk every frivolous assertion. But the diaries are like the wild west of blogworld and we desperately need a high-profile (read: not the kosopedia) repository of information that has been credibly vetted and/or debunked.

In sum, I implore the leaders of the blog community to rejoin the blog community in calling for a close examination of this election in an objective, responsible manner that serves not the false hopes of disheartened Democrats, but the confidence in the most important process in American democracy: the self-governance of our people through an honest vote.

Preemtive Disclaimer: I know that some Kos fans or friends or loyalist will take issue with this post. Let me be clear up front.

I am not calling anyone a coward. I am merely stating that cowardice is probably a factor amongst some, I don't know this for sure and I sure don't know who. I also acknowledge that there may be reasons for not giving this issue the attention I believe it deserves that I am not aware of. Although, I can't imagine what that could be.

Secondly, I don't feel that I have any right to tell Kos or any other blogger how to run their blog. I am merely advocating. Lobbying if you will. Nor do I hold expectations. I make my case and move on.

Thanks for listening.

Media Accused of Ignoring Election Irregularities

2004-11-17T23:52:00.000-05:00

by Mark Jurkowitz

Two weeks after Election Day, explosive allegations about a media coverup are percolating. There's the widely circulated e-mail about a CBS producer who complained that a news industry "lock-down" has prevented journalists from investigating voting problems that cropped up on Nov 2. There's the rumor that MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who has devoted serious air time to discussing Election Day irregularities, was fired for broaching the topic. There's the assertion by Bev Harris, executive director of Black Box Voting Inc., that she had received calls from network employees saying they had been told to lay off the sensitive subject of voting fraud.

In the days after Nov. 2, the Internet was abuzz with charges from partisans that voting irregularities might have cost John F. Kerry the White House.

With some media outlets moving swiftly to debunk the notion that the election had been stolen by the Republicans, the press itself has come under scrutiny, accused of everything from a conspiracy of silence to a collective passivity about pursuing voting irregularities.

"The mainstream media is not treating this as an important story overall," said Steve Rendall, senior analyst at the liberal media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting."The mainstream media has largely treated the story as some crazy Internet story." At the same time, Rendall acknowledged: "There has been excess in the way stuff has flown around the Internet and e-mail lists."

Tracking down the sources of the rapidly proliferating online allegations about a media "lock-down" is a daunting task. But the response to them has been unequivocal. "Absolutely untrue," a CBS spokeswoman, Sandy Genelius, said when asked about the report of the whistle-blowing CBS producer. "Absolutely, positively, categorically false. Besides that, it's absurd."
"There are a lot of nervous people out there," said Olbermann, whose disappearance from MSNBC was the result not of being terminated but of taking a vacation. "I'm both amused and a little terrified that I became the subject of an Internet rumor."

In an appearance Nov. 8 on the "Democracy Now!" program, Harris, whose organization is investigating allegations of voter fraud in Florida and Ohio, told host Amy Goodman that sources in television news have told her "there is now a lock-down on this story. It is officially . . . 'Let's move on' time." In an interview with The Boston Globe, she reiterated those potent allegations but declined to reveal her sources. She also appeared to soft-pedal the idea that the media was at fault, saying instead that it was too early in the fraud-investigation process to blame reporters for not being more aggressive.

"I'm not terribly concerned about . . . the media's coverage of it yet," she said. "We're still early. . . . Caution's probably appropriate. [It's] a very sensitive story."

Not all accusations that journalists have not vigorously pursued allegations of voting problems involve speculation that they are being muzzled by their bosses. But several left-leaning critics complain that reporters have lost interest in what is still an important story because the outcome of the 2004 election, unlike in 2000, is not being contested.

Media Matters for America, a liberal media monitoring organization, posted an item on its website recently that cited several stories about faulty voting equipment in Ohio that did not generate much media interest. David Brock, the organization's president, said in an interview: "I haven't seen anything that is suggesting that further probing of the issue would change the results of the election." But he added that "there are some irregularities, and I would imagine some reader and viewer interest. . . . It seems that there should have been somewhat more coverage of this. There was all this pressure and buildup and very little follow-up."

TomPaine.com, a liberal website that collects news and commentary about public policy issues, has posted several analyses arguing that Kerry was hurt in Ohio by a shortage of voting machines, as well as by discarded votes that came disproportionately from minority precincts. The website's executive editor, Alexandra Walker, said her organization leaves the conspiracy theories surrounding the media's behavior to "the blogosphere."

But she also argued that, with the election results not being disputed, "the public interest angle was not enough to keep [voter irregularities] in the sights of political reporters. The horse-race coverage of political campaigns shortchanges readers."

No one has been more engaged in the issue than Olbermann, the host of MSNBC's prime-time "Countdown" program.

"The thing that woke me up was the lock-down in Warren County," he said, referring to a Cincinnati Enquirer report that officials in that Ohio county, citing terrorist threats, barred observers from the vote count. "I began to investigate then or at least raise questions. . . . It turns out there are a lot of valid stories, at least valid stories worth investigating."

Olbermann said there are a number of reasons much of the media have not been pursuing the story as ardently as he is, including "a love-hate [relationship] with the blogs. Whatever new media is appearing, the established news industry tend to look down on it." At the same time, Olbermann flatly denies the blogger-fueled rumor that he was fired for his interest in voting irregularities, pointing out that MSNBC has let him pursue the probe.

"It's still largely a game of telephone on the Net," he said.

Conservatives rail against MSNBC's Olbermann for reporting election irregularities

2004-11-17T23:46:00.000-05:00

Media conservatives have labeled MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann a "voice of paranoia" and accused him of perpetuating "idiotic conspiracy theories" for his sustained spotlight on the numerous local news reports of voting irregularities during the November 2 presidential election. Olbermann's emphasis during Countdown with Keith Olbermann on voting irregularities has been part of a critique of what he has called the "Rube Goldberg voting process of ours" -- as well as a criticism of the major media outlets' failure to report on the irregularities.

In her November 11 nationally syndicated column, right-wing pundit Ann Coulter falsely asserted that Olbermann has been "peddling the theory that Bush stole the election" and referred to "Olbermann's idiotic conspiracy theory." A November 14 column by associate editor Bill Steigerwald in the conservative Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (owned by right-wing financier Richard Mellon Scaife) claimed Olbermann "really made a Dan Rather of himself" by focusing a segment of MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann on allegations of voter fraud. And in his November 10 "Inside Politics" column, Washington Times columnist Greg Pierce quoted the conservative Media Research Center's analysis of Olbermann's coverage:

"With 'Did Your Vote Count? The Plot Thickens' as his on-screen header, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Monday night led his 'Countdown' program with more than 15 straight minutes of paranoid and meaningless claims about voting irregularities in tates won by President Bush," the Media Research Center reports at www.mediaresearch.org.

But Olbermann has not suggested that the election was stolen. Discussing the possible causes of the bevy of reported voting irregularities from around the country, Olbermann offered this analysis on the November 10 edition of Countdown:

There are really only three possible explanations for all of this. The first is hoped for virtually unanimously by supporters of every candidate and every party -- namely, that all those elected last Tuesday got in because that's the way the people voted. The second is that some of them got in through manipulation of a series of insufficiently sophisticated, insufficiently secure computer voting machines that might be hacked into by the nearest 9-year-old. But the third possibility is actually more heart-stopping still, one that threatens the democracy in the way 100 terrorist rings could not -- that the president or the District 90 dog catcher or other Republicans or other Democrats were elected because a series of insufficiently sophisticated, insufficiently secure computer voting machines was affected by bad design, bad use, damp ballots, power surges, and/or static cling.

Olbermann's commitment to addressing voting irregularities has been coupled with commentary on the lack of media coverage they have received, which Media Matters for America has also noted. "Even assuming there's nothing nefarious about the national election," Olbermann asked Newsweek senior editor and columnist Jonathan Alter, "why has the cascade of irregularities around this country occurred virtually in a news blackout?" Alter responded by saying that "I'm not justifying this, but by way of explanation, I think it is that there's no sense that, with a three-and-a-half-million vote difference [between President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry], that this would affect the outcome, even if there were widespread irregularities found." On the November 11 edition of Countdown, Congressional Quarterly columnist and MSNBC political analyst Craig Crawford offered another perspective: "The glib answer, which is part of the truth, is I think everybody was tired after that election. ... [W]e're often wimps in the media. And we wait for other people to make charges, one political party or another, and then we investigate it."

In a November 14 entry on his MSNBC.com weblog, Olbermann responded to the attacks on him by citing the gradual increase in attention the voting irregularities issue is receiving among the mainstream press:

On Friday, [NBC News correspondent] David Shuster, who has already done some excellent research at Hardblogger [the MSNBC.com weblog associated with MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews], did a piece on the mess for Hardball, and Chris followed up with a discussion with Joe Trippi and Susan Molinari. There was a cogent, reasoned, unexcited piece about the mechanics of possible tampering and/or machine failure on CNN's "Next" yesterday, and Saturday alone there were serious news pieces in the Cincinnati Enquirer, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Los Angeles Times, Salt Lake Tribune, and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. NPR did a segment of its "On The Media" on the topic (with said blogger as the guest).
And today the New York Times continues its series of "Making Vote Counts" editorials with a pretty solid stance on the necessity of journalistic and governmental proof that the elections weren't tampered with. ... I suspect the coverage is going to go through the roof as the news spreads that [presidential candidate Ralph] Nader has gotten his recount in New Hampshire, and that the Greens and Libertarians are actually going to get their Ohio recount. When reporters discover what Jonathan Turley pointed out to us on Tuesday's show, namely that 70% of Ohio's votes were done with punch cards and as Florida proved in 2000, in court, a lot of those punch cards -- as Jon put it -- "turn over," I suspect there will be long-form television on the process.

— J.C.
Posted to the web on Tuesday November 16, 2004 at 4:11 PM EST

Conservatives rail against MSNBC's Olbermann for reporting election irregularities

Republican IT Security Expert: How to Hack the Vote: the Short Version

2004-11-17T09:05:00.000-05:00

YOU CAN’T DO A RECOUNT! There’s no paper trail. It’s the perfect crime.

Q: How'd you get involved with this? Aren't you a Republican?
A: I get asked this a lot, and it really shows how focused our country is on partisan politics. I am a voter, first and foremost. That being said, yes, I am a Republican and have been since being sent to Republican Indoctrination Camp at age 2. That's where we are taught supply-side economics and the values of mutually assured destruction. :-)
I got involved with this because I have been against the adoption of these voting systems for years. It's a dumb-ass idea to implement them this way - our votes are too important. I wouldn't trust my Bank with computer systems this insecure; Hell, I wouldn't keep recipes on a system this insecure. When I saw all of the documentation regarding Diebold and their heavy partisan leanings, and then when the results came flooding in with a clear Bush victory when I seriously expected Kerry to win, I put two and two together. I am, by trade, a professional White-Hat Hacker, so I know how easily "secure" systems can be breached, especially by insiders. Roughly 80% of all computer crimes are perpetrated by insiders, so that's always the best place to look first. When the insiders also write the code and roll the machines out, there is no question that they have too much power and can not be trusted, whether they support my party or not. It's called "Segregation of Duties" in the professional world, and it is vital for system integrity.
But that was all theory and conceptual before I tried it myself. I knew that the descriptions and ideas were bad, but I hadn't actually seen a copy of the software. So I went to BlackBoxVoting.org following a link off of some website, I don't remember which, and saw Bev's plea - "Computer Guys - Test it yourself!". I thought, all right, I will. After all, this IS what I do for a living. It's like asking an accountant to balance debits and credits - nothing special, and besides, I was curious. Surely if our states are rolling this out to Hundreds of Millions of voters, somebody checked it. It can't be as bad as these liberal whiners are making it out to be - they're just pissed off that our folks turned out in mass.
What I found truly shocked me, and made me physically ill. That's what is documented on the other page. It IS that bad. I personally don't have conclusive evidence that voter fraud was perpetrated, but I can tell you as an Information Security professional that it would have been very, very easy to do. If I had to choose between someone conspiring with exit poll workers nationwide or someone changing values in an Access Database as the cause of the difference between the poll numbers and the "actual" results, I'll go with the easier, more effective option every time. Why choose the hard way when it's more trouble and you're less likely to succeed? Again, I'm staying clear of making specific allegations - I'll leave that to the activists who are gathering data - but I would be much more surprised if the election weren't hacked than to find out that it was.
It was too easy, the companies were too partisan and unethical, and there was too much at stake for them NOT to hack it. It looked like Bush was going to lose, and they had this tool available to pull out a victory.
Why do I call Diebold partisan and unethical, you ask? How's this:
"I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." - Walden O'Dell, Diebold's CEO in a fundraising letter to Republicans, Fall 2003. O'Dell and other Diebold Senior Executives are Republican "Pioneers", which is the designation you get when you raise over $100,000. His brother is President of ES&S, the #2 vote machine maker, and is also a "Pioneer". Is that partisan enough for you? Well, what about calling them unethical?
Check this out - No less than 5 of Diebold's developers are convicted felons, including Senior Vice President Jeff Dean, and topping the list are his twenty-three counts of felony Theft in the First Degree. According to the findings of fact in case no. 89-1-04034-1:
“Defendant’s thefts occurred over a 2 1/2 year period of time, there were multiple incidents, more than the standard range can account for, the actual monetary loss was substantially greater than typical for the offense, the crimes and their cover-up involved a high degree of sophistication and planning in the use and alteration of records in the computerized accounting system that defendant maintained for the victim, and the defendant used his position of trust and fiduciary responsibility as a computer systems and accounting consultant for the victim to facilitate the commission of the offenses."
To sum up, he was convicted of 23 felony counts of theft from by - get this - planting back doors in his software and using a "high degree of sophistication" to evade detection. Do you trust computer systems designed by this man? Is trust important in electronic voting systems?
So here we are - Means, Motive, Opportunity - the whole package. And since the systems are so poorly designed, no audit trail to show any wrongdoing. Add some cries of "conspiracy theories" and "sore losers", and you've got yourself a mandate. Four more years, indeed. Surprise, surprise.
BUT - what happens in 2006 or 2008, now that tens of thousands of activists know about the holes and how easy it is to steal votes? Well, it'll be interesting, that's for
sure. These systems appear to be DESIGNED to be easy to Hack, so one can only imagine what will happen. But I for one will embrace President Homer Simpson and will fully support his new 2008 doughnut agenda as a welcome change. I hope that we can all stand together and welcome him as we Republicans continue to bring "dignity back to the White House."

How to Hack the Vote: the Short Version
11/13/2004 Chuck Herrin, CISSP, CISA, MCSE, CEH

http://www.chuckherrin.com/

Enron was a conspiracy theory, too. Were their whistleblowers Crackpots? Were the people who lost their retirements to those corporate criminals just "sore losers"?I've never been part of the "Tin Foil Hat" conspiracy theory crowd. I'm just a voter who happens to be a Professional IT Auditor.

Author’s Note – Did our votes count? More importantly, will they count next time? We in Information Security have been protesting the use of the poorly designed voting machines from Diebold and others, and as a result of their poor implementation and widespread use, our election remains in question and our country remains bitterly divided. Many people feel that their votes didn’t count, and for good reason. THESE SYSTEMS ARE NOT WORTHY OF OUR TRUST! In an effort to bring this to your attention, I have put together this shortened document that will show you exactly how easy it would be to break into Diebold’s GEMS software, which is the software used to tabulate regional voting results. This software runs on regular Windows machines and counts the votes from multiple precincts that may have used touch screens (which have their own problems), optically scanned punch cards, or other balloting methods. It is responsible for the accurate reporting of tens of millions of votes cast using many different types of ballots.

That’s right – even if you used the older systems like punch cards, your vote can still be Hacked when the numbers all come together. Wanna see how easy it is?

I am going to show you, step by step and with screenshots, how an attack against our election system could very easily steal a Statewide or even a National election without leaving a trace. This attack would be easy to carry out, difficult to detect, and exert enormous influence on the results, leaving the humble voter coldly left out of the decision-making process.

Here we go…. Oh wait – let me do some CYA stuff first.

**Important** - I would like to stress that this demonstration was performed locally on a system totally under my control, and no unauthorized access to any computer system occurred. The voting database used was the sample obtained from http://www.blackboxvoting.org/, and this election does not reflect data for any election currently taking place. I want to be very clear that this is only a proof-of-concept demonstration, and at no time was actual voter fraud committed in order to prove a point. THIS IS A DEMONSTRATION ONLY, very similar to the well-documented demonstration Bev Harris performed for Governor Howard Dean recently on National television. Also, GEMS software is a trademark of Diebold, and Windows and Access are both copyrights of Microsoft, Inc.**
REQUIREMENTS:
Windows-based PC with 150megs free
disk space and 128megs RAM (minimum)
A copy of MS Access.
The GEMS software - http://freespeech.metacolo.com/GEMSIS-1-18-17.zip is one place to get it. There are plenty other places on the web.
A Sample Election Database - http://speakeasy.seattle.wa.us/jmarch/cobb-corrected-100102-backup.zip is one from Cobb county, GA. Again, there are several out there.
With all that out of the way – OK! Let’s get started!

Step One: The Before Picture.

This is the summary report run based on our sample election from Colorado Springs, CO. This is what the actual, official results looked like before I decided to cast “my vote”.

To get the results, we open GEMS, (username "admin", password "password")

Figure 1: The opening GEMS screen.

Go to GEMS > Election Summary Report,

Figure 2: Choose the Election Summary Report for our Before Pictures

and here we go! The official Election Summary Report, as of right now. Note the timestamp at 23:59:07 - we'll come back to that in the Audit Log section.

Figure 3: Election summary report – before.

Pay attention to District 3. Here we have Sallie Clark in District 3 winning by a 2/3 majority. But let’s say that for this scenario, Sallie’s daughter is my ex, or she supports gay marriage, or maybe she’s against deficit spending. Whatever – let’s say maybe she’s a Pinko Commie and must be stopped, so let’s have some fun…..

*Note – I do not actually know Sallie Clark or any of these election participants, and therefore cannot speak to her character. Again, this is just a demonstration.*

OK - now we know how the election was supposed to turn out. I do not need the GEMS software to see the results - I could use a software package called JResult (included with the GEMS software) to poll it, or as we'll see below, just go straight to the backend database and view the numbers from there. Having a copy of the GEMS software is not required to Hack the votes. It does show us what the Election Workers can see and what the ultimate vote counts will be.

Step 2: Getting in. The “Hard” Part.

The biggest part of step two is getting into the Windows PC in question, either locally or over a network. This is the hardest part, but if anybody thinks that hacking into a Windows PC is hard, you should not be online right now. As anyone confronted with the continuing barrage of viruses, worm, and Hackers can attest, this part is not really a problem. In fact, let’s run through a few sample ways in, just off the top of my head:

If the GEMS machine is networked - (I have heard conflicting reports as to whether they are or not)

1) Wander into the building, and quietly put a wireless access point on the same network segment as the Tabulation PC, maybe behind a copier somewhere, and then casually come in from across the street using a laptop and wireless card.

We know they're connected by modems, so:

2) Find the telephone number of the office the PC is located in, and use a “war-dialing” program such as ToneLoc to dial all of the numbers in that exchange looking for a hanging modem. This technique was made famous by the 1983 movie “Wargames” and it still works today. These machines typically have hanging modems installed, so this should be a fairly easy way in.

3) Come in through the Internet. It is reported that many of these machines are connected to the Internet to enable results to be queried using Jresult to pull data from the central PCs. Windows PCs on the Internet are inherently vulnerable, particularly if they’re not behind a firewall. Since a firewall would prevent the legitimate Jresult queries from being made, these machines are likely at extreme risk for being compromised through their Internet connection.

Then there are the REALLY easy ways….

4) If you’re an insider, you already have the phone numbers and any usernames and passwords you may need. Dial into the machine, authenticate normally, and then manipulate the data as explained below.

5) Again, if you’re an insider - walk up to the machine and use the keyboard and mouse. Most poll workers, despite being good, caring people, tend to be political enough to motivate them to volunteer. It’s just human nature to use the tools at your disposal to your advantage, and people have a remarkable knack for justifying even the worst acts if they can convince themselves that the cause is worthwhile.

For more on physical access and ways in, check out Jim March's excellent review at

http://www.equalccw.com/dieboldtestnotes.html#appendixB

With a little time and creativity, other ways in are possible. You have probably already thought of a couple more, haven’t you?

Diebold's best defense to this point, as pointed out by following the link above, is the physical security - if you can't get to them, you can't hack them. But we KNOW that election workers, poll volunteers, and Diebold staff all have access and CAN get in. It would be very easy to write a little script to call into the GEMS machines or have the GEMS machines call back out and modify the results at any time. As Mr. March also points out, the IP address listed in the memo referenced on his site is part of a known block that would have bridged that machine to the Internet. Let's face it, a lot can go on when a machine is connected to a big bank of modems and a lot of people have the numbers, usernames, and passwords.

Also, there is home video of voting machines being taken home and stored by election volunteers. Watch the video at http://www.votergate.tv/. No physical security in that case.

Note for non-technical folks - did you know that in Windows, C: drives are shared out by default? No? Well, they are. But there’s a super-secret Hacker trick to connect to them. You have to call it C$ instead of just C. The $ means it’s a “hidden” drive, but it is still accessible via the network! Pick any Class C (classes are how network addresses are broken up) range of network addresses on the Internet and I’ll guarantee that you can simply “map” someone else’s C: drive over the Internet and browse their hard drives without their knowledge.

Think this couldn't happen? Are you kidding? This happens every minute of every single day. American companies spend Billions of dollars a year trying to protect corporate computer systems from attack - would they do that for no reason?

In any case, once we have access we simply browse the C: drive of the server and go to the C:program filesGEMSlocalDB directory. Here we will find an Access database for each election named .mdb. With a copy of Microsoft Access, we open it and find that no, it is not even password protected. The directory it’s in isn’t protected or restricted in any way. The data is not encrypted or even encoded. It is as open as an email message, and this is where all of our voting data is stored. From here, you could add candidates, drop them from the ballots, or delete entire precincts, but all of that is too obvious. A very simple trick would be to switch candidate IDs (see Figure 3 to see what candidate IDs look like), which would cause the vote tallies to simply reverse. In fact, this looks like what may have happened in some Florida counties, where the vote totals were fine, but the party affiliations were almost exactly the reverse of the vote counts. This type attack would be unlikely to raise much suspicion, since the total number of votes cast and turnout numbers would not change. And since Hacking rule #1 is to not get caught, rather than add Homer Simpson to the race and have him win, we’ll be more “subtle” and just change the results.

Figure 4: The c:program filesGEMSlocalDB folder where all of our valuable data is stored.

This is the Access database that is the back end for the entire system. Potentially hundreds of thousands of votes could be stored here on a central computer with no access control, no passwords, etc. When we open the database and view the Candidate table inside, we see:

Figure 5: The Candidate table

Ah ha! Look at the first and second columns - Sallie’s opponent, Linda Barley, was assigned 550 as a candidate number, and Sallie is candidate number 551.
From the CandV Table in the same database, we see that the Race ID is 221, and that their Key IDs are 541(Linda) and 542 (Sallie). The Key IDs are what we need to change the vote counts for. Remember that the original vote results were 4209 to 8291, Linda to Sallie. Let’s change that from a 2/3s victory to a shutout victory for the candidate who should have lost.

Step 3: Changing the Votes

I located the Linda’s ID, #541, in the CandidateCounter table and simply by clicking on the cell and typing with my number keys, I gave Linda 111 votes for every reporting unit. This isn’t really hacking – this is changing values in a table. Anybody who’s ever used an Excel spreadsheet has done this before.

There were 71 reporting units, so she should have 7881 votes now, an increase of over 3600 votes. I finally found a way to make my vote count! We’ll come back and check the math later to make sure there are no surprises. When you’re stealing an election, you want to make sure it comes out the right way!

Figure 6: Changing the votes inside the CandidateCounter table. This is repeated in the CandidateSummary table, since some records are cross-linked, and I want to know exactly how many votes I’m changing.

Once I was done adding 3672 votes to Linda’s tally, I decide to just wipe out all of Sallie’s votes, making her total 0. Pay attention – I just added 3672 votes to one candidate's results and deleted 8291 votes from another in about 45 seconds! Just click the cell, type 0, click the cell, type 0; I’m wiping out votes by the hundreds. Sallie now has 0 votes - hopefully she was so over-confident that she didn’t bother to vote for herself ;-). A real attacker would likely be more subtle to avoid suspicion, but again, this is a demonstration. Unfortunately, since many of the new machines do not produce a paper ballot, a manual recount would be very difficult, if not altogether impossible. This is a clear violation of many state election laws, but elections officials put them in place anyway. I wouldn’t withdraw $20 from an ATM without a receipt, but I guess my vote isn’t worth that much trouble.

Anyway, now that our results are changed, we save the database, and viola!

Step 4: Run the new summary report and declare my candidate the winner!

Figure 7: The new summary report with the results the way I wanted them.

Note the final numbers for District 3 – 7881 to 0. Just as I expected, I was able to override the wishes of 11,963 voters and replace their ballots with my own. How hard was that?

My candidate wins in a landslide, although the voters actually voted 2-to-1 for her opponent. This took me about 5 minutes and a moderate exercise of skill. There were no passwords to crack, and all I had to do was figure out the way things were stored in an unprotected, clear text Access database, which fortunately, has been available on the web for quite some time for Hacker-types to practice on. In fact, with the widespread availability of the GEMS software, you can go in and create your own elections to practice on before ever venturing out to touch the real thing.

Step 5: Those Pesky Audit Trails.

But what if someone notices? Now that my work fixing the election is done, all that remains is clearing up the audit trail.

From within the GEMS software, let's look at the audit log:

Figure 8: GEMS > Audit Log

Figure 9: Looking for evidence of tampering. See anything?

Above, we see at 23:59 where I viewed the summary report (Figure 3), then closed the GEMS software at 00:00:16. The next entry is at 00:44:56, when I logged back into GEMS and ran another summary report (Figure 7) at 00:45:08 showing the Hacked results. Note the timestamps on the 2 Summary reports earlier in this document - they correspond exactly to the Election Summary Reports that show our candidate winning, and then losing in a shutout. Do you see any evidence AT ALL in the Audit Logs that the votes were tampered with? We know they were - I just showed you step by step that it was done.

Nope! No evidence - so feel free to ridicule anyone who complains as a conspiracy theorist or whining sore loser!

Now, Diebold officially insists that this cannot be done, but as with this example, this has repeatedly been shown to be false. Diebold's staff knows it - in fact, in a memo by Diebold principal engineer Ken Clark in 2001, he says “Being able to end-run the database has admittedly got people out of a bind though. Jane (I think it was Jane) did some fancy footwork on the .mdb file in Gaston recently. I know our dealers do it. King County is famous for it. That's why we've never put a password on the file before.” (http://www.blackboxvoting.org/Oct2001msg00122.html)

In a particularly humorous and distressing response to Diebold’s assertion that “Generated entries on the audit log cannot be terminated or interfered with by program control or by human intervention”, the folks at http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ actually trained a chimpanzee to delete the audit logs from an election database. You read that right – a chimp. Well, since it wasn’t a human or computer, I guess they’re technically correct. Here’s a link. http://blackboxvoting.org/baxter/baxterVPR.mov

Another audit log incident occurred during the Washington State primary just six weeks ago. Two interesting events took place here:

1) all entries are absent from the audit log between 9:52 pm and 1:31 am. This includes records of summary reports being printed during that time frame, which is something that is always logged by the system, and shows up when they are printed before and after that block of time. Here is the audit log:

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/auditlog.PDF

2) Here are copies of the 5 sets of summary reports printed off during that missing time period, complete with timestamps showing that they were printed during that block of time and signed by the elections chief, Dean Logan.

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/resultspages.PDF

Can anybody guess what it means when you are missing audit logs for a specific block of time, and known events took place that should be reflected in the logs?

Look at our results again. It means you were Hacked.

Conclusions:

Would you trust your bank account balance if their systems were this easy to hack? As a result of my hands on testing, I have absolutely no faith that my vote was counted or will be in future elections where this software is used. It is simply too easy to change! Any motivated insider or Hacker of moderate skill can change hundreds of thousands of votes with very little effort and almost no chance of being caught.

The best part is that if anyone tries to question the results, you can ridicule them and call them sore losers! Conspiracy theorists! But won’t this be caught in a recount? Check this out - with the new machines, YOU CAN’T DO A RECOUNT! There’s no paper trail. It’s the perfect crime.

This is the democracy we’re exporting to the rest of the world.

Here are more links for your reference:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
http://www.blackboxvoting.com/
http://www.equalccw.com/dieboldtestnotes.html
http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm
http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm
http://www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm
http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm
http://www.thehill.com/morris/110404.aspx
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
http://www.votergate.tv/
http://www.thomhartmann.com/

You are free to distribute this document in its entirety or link to this page to help get the word out and change the system. Good luck! Let's get this stupid, stupid system fixed and get our democracy back!

Anybody who wants to try this themselves can get the GEMS software and this same sample database from http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ or the links earlier in the document. Go for it! Try it yourself - you'll see that it works. For any wannabe Hackers reading this, it doesn’t get any easier than that!

Chuck Herrin, CISSP, CISA, MCSE, CEH
CISSP – Certified Information Systems Security Professional
CISA – Certified Information Systems Auditor
MCSE – Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer
CEH – Certified Ethical Hacker
Email: me at chuckherrin.com

BBV: Volusia County election records just got put on lockdown

2004-11-17T07:50:00.000-05:00

Pre-script: the DU poster, God_bush_n_cheney aka Andy Stephenson, one of the founders of BlackBoxVoting, in response to Bev Harris original post of the article below.

God_bush_n_cheney (1000+ posts) Tue Nov-16-04 09:08 PMResponse to (original DU post of article) Reply #61
100. You aint seen nothing yet....
trust me on this.

County election records just got put on lockdown

Dueling lawyers, election officials gnashing teeth, Votergate.tv film crew catching it all.
Here's what happened so far:

Friday Black Box Voting investigators Andy Stephenson and Kathleen Wynne popped in to ask for some records. They were rebuffed by an elections official named Denise. Bev Harris called on the cell phone from investigations in downstate Florida, and told Volusia County Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe that Black Box Voting would be in to pick up the Nov. 2 Freedom of Information request, or would file for a hand recount. "No, Bev, please don't do that!" Lowe exclaimed. But this is the way it has to be, folks. Black Box Voting didn't back down.

Monday Bev, Andy and Kathleen came in with a film crew and asked for the FOIA request. Deanie Lowe gave it over with a smile, but Harris noticed that one item, the polling place tapes, were not copies of the real ones, but instead were new printouts, done on Nov. 15, and not signed by anyone.

Harris asked to see the real ones, and they said for "privacy" reasons they can't make copies of the signed ones. She insisted on at least viewing them (although refusing to give copies of the signatures is not legally defensible, according to Berkeley elections attorney, Lowell Finley). They said the real ones were in the County Elections warehouse. It was quittin' time and an arrangment was made to come back this morning to review them.

Lana Hires, a Volusia County employee who gained some notoriety in an election 2000 Diebold memo, where she asked for an explanation of minus 16,022 votes for Gore, so she wouldn't have to stand there "looking dumb" when the auditor came in, was particularly unhappy about seeing the Black Box Voting investigators in the office. She vigorously shook her head when Deanie Lowe suggested going to the warehouse.

Kathleen Wynne and Bev Harris showed up at the warehouse at 8:15 Tuesday morning, Nov. 16. There was Lana Hires looking especially gruff, yet surprised. She ordered them out. Well, they couldn't see why because there she was, with a couple other people, handling the original poll tapes. You know, the ones with the signatures on them. Harris and Wynne stepped out and Volusia County officials promptly shut the door.

There was a trash bag on the porch outside the door. Harris looked into it and what do you know, but there were poll tapes in there. They came out and glared at Harris and Wynne, who drove away a small bit, and then videotaped the license plates of the two vehicles marked 'City Council' member. Others came out to glare and soon all doors were slammed.

So, Harris and Wynne went and parked behind a bus to see what they would do next. They pulled out some large pylons, which blocked the door. Harris decided to go look at the garbage some more while Wynne videotaped. A man who identified himself as "Pete" came out and Harris immediately wrote a public records request for the contents of the garbage bag, which also contained ballots -- real ones, but not filled out.

A brief tug of war occurred, tearing the garbage bag open. Harris and Wynne then looked through it, as Pete looked on. He was quite friendly.

Black Box Voting collected various poll tapes and other information and asked if they could copy it, for the public records request. "You won't be going anywhere," said Pete. "The deputy is on his way."

Yes, not one but two police cars came up and then two county elections officials, and everyone stood around discussing the merits of the "black bag" public records request.

The police finally let Harris and Wynne go, about the time the Votergate.tv film crew arrived, and everyone trooped off to the elections office. There, the plot thickened.

Black Box Voting began to compare the special printouts given in the FOIA request with the signed polling tapes from election night. Lo and behold, some were missing. By this time, Black Box Voting investigator Andy Stephenson had joined the group at Volusia County. Some polling place tapes didn't match. In fact, in one location, precinct 215, an African-American precinct, the votes were off by hundreds, in favor of George W. Bush and other Republicans.
Hmm. Which was right? The polling tape Volusia gave to Black Box Voting, specially printed on Nov. 15, without signatures, or the ones with signatures, printed on Nov. 2, with up to 8 signatures per tape?

Well, then it became even more interesting. A Volusia employee boxed up some items from an office containing Lana Hires' desk, which appeared to contain -- you guessed it -- polling place tapes. The employee took them to the back of the building and disappeared.

Then, Ellen B., a voting integrity advocate from Broward County, Florida, and Susan, from Volusia, decided now would be a good time to go through the trash at the elections office. Lo and behold, they found all kinds of memos and some polling place tapes, fresh from Volusia elections office.

So, Black Box Voting compared these with the Nov. 2 signed ones and the "special' ones from Nov. 15 given, unsigned, finding several of the MISSING poll tapes. There they were: In the garbage.

So, Wynne went to the car and got the polling place tapes she had pulled from the warehouse garbage. My my my.

There were not only discrepancies, but a polling place tape that was signed by six officials.

This was a bit disturbing, since the employees there had said that bag was destined for the shredder.

By now, a county lawyer had appeared on the scene, suddenly threatening to charge Black Box Voting extra for the time spent looking at the real stuff Volusia had withheld earlier. Other lawyers appeared, phoned, people had meetings, Lana glowered at everyone, and someone shut the door in the office holding the GEMS server.

Black Box Voting investigator Andy Stephenson then went to get the Diebold "GEMS" central server locked down. He also got the memory cards locked down and secured, much to the dismay of Lana. They were scattered around unsecured in any way before that.

Everyone agreed to convene tomorrow morning, to further audit, discuss the hand count that Black Box Voting will require of Volusia County, and of course, it is time to talk about contesting the election in Volusia.
# # # # #

E-Voting hacked: Logs showing modem access

2004-11-16T01:59:00.000-05:00

These citations should definitely be checked out! Please refer to lawnorder's post of this story, right next door.

Also please note there are several other stories of similar interest there.

Sources for 'modem access' outside of lawnorder's story.

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/index.php?act=ST&f=64&t=53&st=364#

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/11/301607.shtml

Greens & Libs Come Through! Recount in Ohio a Sure Thing

2004-11-16T01:04:00.000-05:00

t r u t h o u t Press Release
Monday 15 November 2004

Green Party Campaign Raises $150,000 in 4 Days, Shifts Gears to Phase II

WASHINGTON -- November 15 -- There will be a recount of the presidential vote in Ohio.

On Thursday, David Cobb, the Green Party’s 2004 presidential candidate, announced his intention to seek a recount of the vote in Ohio. Since the required fee for a statewide recount is $113,600, the only question was whether that money could be raised in time to meet the filing deadline. That question has been answered.

“Thanks to the thousands of people who have contributed to this effort, we can say with certainty that there will be a recount in Ohio,” said Blair Bobier, Media Director for the Cobb-LaMarche campaign.
“The grassroots support for the recount has been astounding. The donations have come in fast and furiously, with the vast majority in the $10-$50 range, allowing us to meet our goal for the first phase of the recount effort in only four days,” said Bobier.
Bobier said the campaign is still raising money for the next phase of the recount effort which will be recruiting, training and mobilizing volunteers to monitor the actual recount.
The Ohio presidential election was marred by numerous press and independent reports of mis-marked and discarded ballots, problems with electronic voting machines and the targeted disenfranchisement of African American voters. A number of citizens’ groups and voting rights organizations are holding the second of two hearings today in Columbus, Ohio, to take testimony from voters, poll watchers and election experts about problems with the Ohio vote. The hearing, from 6-9 p.m., will be held at the Courthouse, meeting room A, 373 S. High St., in Columbus. The Cobb-LaMarche campaign will be represented at the hearing by campaign manager Lynne Serpe.
A demand for a recount in Ohio can only be filed by a presidential candidate who was either a certified write-in candidate or on the ballot in that state. Both Green Party candidate David Cobb and Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik will be demanding a recount. No other candidate has stated an intention to seek a recount and no other citizen or organization would have legal standing to do so in Ohio. The Cobb-LaMarche campaign is still exploring the possibility of seeking recounts in other states but no decision has been made yet.

Think Kerry Is Not Involved In This Fight? Think Again. Also: Fallujah = Operation Distract From Fixed Election.

2004-11-15T23:57:00.000-05:00

INSIDE THE ELECTION FRAUD BATTLE

Think Kerry Is Not Involved In This Fight? Think Again. Also: Fallujah = Operation Distract From Fixed Election.

by Betsy R. Vasquez

NOVEMBER 10, 2004 – When Senator John Kerry (D-MA) talked about how his policy would be different in Iraq, he kept saying, in effect, ‘It’s the how, stupid.’ He said repeatedly he would fight a “smarter” war.
Flash forward to today. Following the election, there was a problem apparent. The exit polling didn't match the ballot count, and many reasons for that began to become apparent.John Kerry was faced with three options. One, fight on publicly rather than conceding and put the nation into a media frenzied limbo. Two, concede and go on with his life, turning his back on his promise to his supporters to ensure that “every vote will be counted.”
Most people are assuming that John Kerry opted for the second of these while John Edwards, his runningmate, opted for the first, and since Kerry was the big dog, he won out. But people who think this are thinking in Bush terms, all or nothing, either you are for the war or against it, that either Senator Kerry was for recounting the votes or he was against it.
The reality is, John Kerry has chosen a third, much smarter course – just as he said he would all along.
John Kerry realized that to launch a public campaign calling the vote into question would be disastrous. In fact, he likely realized he would we walking right into a Bush-set booby trap.
In particular, during our election coverage we talked about the pending battle of Fallujah, about the timing of it being an election ploy, about how it was following in the constant Bush pattern of creating a media event to sway the election, as he did last time by making the run up to the Iraq invasion come to a head exactly on election week.
Well, the battle in Fallujah began hitting the media hard in the week before the election, right on cue. Of course it was billed as the solution, the battle that – if you just keep Bush in office – will wipe out those insurgents and solve the problems over there. This was yet another obvious use of our nation’s troops by President Bush as if they were campaign volunteers rather than non-partisan volunteers to defend our nation.
But Fallujah, it turns out, seems to be even more than that. Fallujah, in effect, was the get away car for an election heist.
Following the fiasco in Florida in 2000, Gore was able to battle on for 30 days to try and get a fair accounting. All the while, the Bush camp claimed he should just stop and give up because his delaying of what they were saying was the inevitable end was threatening the nation’s security and stability. They said the stock market was suffering, the nation was unstable, and so Gore should just give up and accept the result as is.This time, John Kerry had made clear he was prepared to fight 100 times as hard and long as Gore did if necessary. In fact, he had solicited fund just for that eventuality so he could battle all over the nation if necessary to ensure that every vote was properly counted.
Enter Fallujah. As we know – and saw on election night, as Bush’s people began calling Networks and demanding they call Ohio for their camp – the Bush team’s strategy was to try and force all questions to be closed ASAP. Last time, they weren’t prepared for that part. This time, they were.
Picture if John Kerry had chosen to call the election into question. Immediately, the Bush camp would talk about how 50,000 of our troops are just about to launch the biggest military operation since the invasion of Baghdad. And, just a couple of days after the election, it was launched.
You can imagine the arguments from the Bushies: “How could Senator Kerry undermine our security while our troops are in the midst of battle.” Fallujah was to be the pressure point that would, if not stop Kerry from uncovering all the dirt and getting a fair election count, would at least tarnish his name with much of the nation and, as importantly, create something for the right-wing dominated media to hammer away at him on, making it seem as if he is only caring about himself and not the nation.
It was quite a well-crafted plan. Completely amoral, but smart.Unfortunately for them, John Kerry was smarter.As Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, who has been about the only mainstream journalist to actually follow up on the many serious problems with regard to the integrity of the election, has pointed out, a concession speech, in effect, means nothing. It is not legally binding.
So, if you were thinking like a Bush goon, you would expect that either Kerry would stand up to the mischief that went on, not conceding in the meantime, and so your booby trap would work perfectly, or that he would just give up and let it go, as wimpy Democrats are prone to do.
But John Kerry chose a smarter course. Ask yourself the question, what if John Kerry were to do both, concede publicly but, at the same time, look into every instance of mischief, and see if in fact the election was fair or fixed.
This would be a no lose situation for him. The booby trap set up for him would become irrelevant, as he would have done the right thing for the nation, not putting it into turmoil while its troops are in battle.
But at the same time, he is still just as free to look into any voting irregularities as he would have been had he not conceded. Even better, he could do it without the press going insane and the nation being kept on tension-creating edge. All of the lawyers he could have sent to look into things still could be sent to look into things, and if the election is truly called into question, he could then, with ample justification so as to make it legitimate, come out publicly and retract his concession. It is the prosecutor, also one of Kerry’s previous jobs, who knows well enough to thoroughly prepare and investigate his case be leveling charges. You may have a real hunch that someone is responsible for a
murder, but until you believe you can win that case in court, you do not make the allegation.
This is called fighting smart. And the Bushies, in the same way they failed to plan for the subtleties of doing battle in Iraq, haven’t even caught on yet that this is what is occurring, that they are, in fact, being outflanked and attacked after being tricked into looking the other way.
And just in case you don’t quite believe John Kerry is on the case, and instead think he just turned out to be a wimp who didn’t live up to his word, take a look at this letter from his brother, released privately to his supporters:

CAM KERRY'S LETTER
I am grateful to the many people who have contacted me to express their deep concern about questions of miscounting, fraud, vote suppression, and other problems on election day, especially in Florida and Ohio. Their concern reflects how much people care about the outcome of this election. I want to you to know we are not ignoring it. Election protection lawyers are still on the job in Ohio and Florida and in DC making sure all the votes are counted accurately. I have been conferring with lawyers involved and have made them aware of the information and concerns people have given me. Even if the facts don't provide a basis to change the outcome, the information will inform the continuing effort to protect the integrity of our elections. If you have specific factual information about voting problems that could be helpful to the lawyers doing their job, please send it to (e-mail removed for the story) rather than to me. The election protection effort has been important to me personally, and I am proud of the 17,000 awyers around the country who helped. It's obvious that we have a way to go still, but their efforts helped make a difference. Their work goes on. Thank you, Cam Kerry

Notice that he chose to have his brother, who is not well-known to the public, sign the letter. As far as the public is concerned, John Kerry has conceded at that is that.
But now you know that that is not truly the case.
Make no mistake, he will never publicly call the election into question unless enough fraud turns out to truly challenge the end result.
And so, in effect, he is not at this point contesting the election. But in reality, he is like the DA who says, “At this time we are not charging President Bush with anything.” Evidence first. It is the best strategy for him personally, the best strategy politically, and the best strategy for the nation.
And now stepping in to help is the man who was supposed to be the spoiler, Ralph Nader. As the Washington Post reports (see article: Losing by 335,000 in N.H., Nader Demands a Recount), Nader is using New Hampshire as a staging ground to call the Diebold machine-recorded electronic votes into question.
Why is he doing it in New Hampshire, which Kerry won? Does this mean he is going after Kerry? Not at all. It is tactically brilliant. In New Hampshire, any candidate can call for a recount as long as he offers to pay for it. And that cost in this small state is only $2,000 dollars. So Nader is choosing to challenge the results there, but only to make the case that, if there turns out to be a problem with the machines there, the votes must be challenged everywhere.
As the WashPost reports, "We have received reports of irregularities in the vote reported on the AccuVote Diebold Machines in comparison to exit polls and trends in voting in New Hampshire," Nader wrote Secretary of State William M. Gardner. "These irregularities favor President George W. Bush by 5% to 15% over what was expected."
So you see clearly he is charging that the machines skewed in favor of President Bush. New Hampshire was just the easiest, smartest, and cheapest place to get a first crack at making the case, and so opening a Pandora’s Box that will spread out across the nation.
So enjoy the non-Moderate Independent media’s coverage of Fallujah and ignoring of the recount. But rest assured that people are on the case, and that Kerry is taking the fight to them – in such a smart matter they don’t even know what’s hitting them. And remember, Watergate didn’t break the week after the election. No one knew anything was even fishy, but in the end, the devil go his due.

And on another note, the non-M/I media should be given some credit. As one Washington Post reporter told me, you can bet they are looking into all of this. And, as you see with the above Washington Post story, when they get something concrete they are going to print.
But it is the new media – the blogs – that are powering this one as much as the mainstream media.
So rest assured, and feel free to help out in anyway you can. We are the eyes, ears, and analysts of our nation. support Olbermann at MSNBC, and rest assured, Kerry is on the case.
And lest you not realize what exactly is going on, this today from Olbermann: “With news this morning that the computerized balloting in North Carolina is so thoroughly messed up that all state-wide voting may be thrown out and a second election day scheduled, the story continues.”
And, even better, this from a first-hand witness’ e-mail being circulated among Kerry supporters:

Subject:
Basic report from ColumbusI worked for 3 days, including Election Day, on the statewide voter protection hotline run by the Ohio Democratic Party in Columbus, Ohio. I am writing this because the media is inexplicably whitewashing what happened in Ohio, and Kerry's concession was likewise inexplicable.
Hundreds of thousands of people were disenfranchised in Ohio. People waited on line for as long as 10 hours. It appears to have only happened in Democratic-leaning precincts, principally (a) precincts where many African Americans lived, and (b) precincts near
colleges.
I spoke to a young man who got on line at 11:30 am and voted at 7 pm. When he left at 7 pm, the line was about 150 voters longer than when he'd arrived, which meant those people were going to wait even longer. In fact they waited for as much as 10 hours, and their voting was concluded at about 3 am. The reason this occurred was that they had 1 voting station per 1000 voters, while the adjacent precinct had 1 voting station per 184. Both precincts were within the same county, and managed by the same county board of elections. The difference between them is that the privileged polling place was in a rural, solidly republican, area, while the one with long lines was in the college town of Gambier, OH. Lines of 4 and 5 hours were the order of the day in many African- American neighborhoods.
Touch screen voting machines in Youngstown OH were registering "George W. Bush" when people pressed "John F. Kerry" ALL DAY LONG. This was reported immediately after the polls opened, and reported over and over again throughout the day, and yet the bogus machines were inexplicably
kept in use THROUGHOUT THE DAY.
Countless other frauds occurred, such as postcards advising people of incorrect polling places, registered Democrats not receiving absentee ballots, duly registered young voters being forced to file
provisional ballots even though their names and signatures appeared in the voting rolls, longtime active voting registered voters being told they weren't registered, bad faith challenges by Republican "challengers" in Democratic precincts, and on and on and on.
I was very proud of the way so many Ohioans fought so valiantly for their right to vote, and would not be turned away. Many, however, could not spend the entire day and were afraid of losing their jobs,
due to the severe economic depression hitting Ohio.
I do not understand why Kerry conceded and did not fight to ensure that all Ohioans would have a
chance to vote, and for their vote to be counted.

If he is an M/I reader, now he will know.

Greens and Libs Need Help TODAY!

2004-11-15T09:24:00.000-05:00

Your Help Needed for Ohio Recount!

David Cobb and Michael Badnarik, the 2004 presidential candidates for the Green and Libertarian parties, have announced their intentions to file a formal demand for a recount of the presidential ballots cast in Ohio.
The Cobb and Badnarik campaigns are in the process of raising the required fee, estimated at $113,600, for a complete recount in all 11,306 precincts in Ohio. We also need to raise money for other expenses involved with this effort; for example, our candidates and staff and communications systems and travel expenses also need to be paid.
Considering the grassroots support we have received from over 1500 donors in the first 48 hours hours, we are confident that we will raise enough for the recount filing fee plus other related expenses over the course of the next week. Funds donated to the Ohio recount are not subject to the contribution cap. Please be sure to include the words 'Ohio Recount' in the Notes section of our donate form.
The integrity of the democratic process is at stake; thank you for your support.

http://web.greens.org/c/cobb/supporters.cgi?function=donate

The Problem with Electronic Voting Machines

2004-11-15T07:33:00.000-05:00

Posted on November 10, 2004 at 09:15 AM
In the aftermath of the U.S.’s 2004 election, electronic voting machines are again in the news. Computerized machines lost votes, subtracted votes instead of adding them, and doubled votes. Because many of these machines have no paper audit trails, a large number of votes will never be counted. And while it is unlikely that deliberate voting-machine fraud changed the result of the presidential election, the Internet is buzzing with rumors and allegations of fraud in a number of different jurisdictions and races. It is still too early to tell if any of these problems affected any individual elections. Over the next several weeks we'll see whether any of the information crystallizes into something significant.
The U.S has been here before. After 2000, voting machine problems made international headlines. The government appropriated money to fix the problems nationwide. Unfortunately, electronic voting machines -- although presented as the solution -- have largely made the problem worse. This doesn’t mean that these machines should be abandoned, but they need to be designed to increase both their accuracy, and peoples’ trust in their accuracy. This is difficult, but not impossible.
Before I can discuss electronic voting machines, I need to explain why voting is so difficult. Basically, a voting system has four required characteristics:
Accuracy. The goal of any voting system is to establish the intent of each individual voter, and translate those intents into a final tally. To the extent that a voting system fails to do this, it is undesirable. This characteristic also includes security: It should be impossible to change someone else’s vote, ballot stuff, destroy votes, or otherwise affect the accuracy of the final tally.
Anonymity. Secret ballots are fundamental to democracy, and voting systems must be designed to facilitate voter anonymity.
Scalability. Voting systems need to be able to handle very large elections. One hundred million people vote for president in the United States. About 372 million people voted in India’s June elections, and over 115 million in Brazil’s October elections. The complexity of an election is another issue. Unlike many countries where the national election is a single vote for a person or a party, a United States voter is faced with dozens of individual election: national, local, and everything in between.
Speed. Voting systems should produce results quickly. This is particularly important in the United States, where people expect to learn the results of the day’s election before bedtime. It’s less important in other countries, where people don’t mind waiting days -- or even weeks -- before the winner is announced.

Through the centuries, different technologies have done their best. Stones and pot shards dropped in Greek vases gave way to paper ballots dropped in sealed boxes. Mechanical voting booths, punch cards, and then optical scan machines replaced hand-counted ballots. New computerized voting machines promise even more efficiency, and Internet voting even more convenience.
But in the rush to improve speed and scalability, accuracy has been sacrificed. And to reiterate: accuracy is not how well the ballots are counted by, for example, a punch-card reader. It’s not how the tabulating machine deals with hanging chads, pregnant chads, or anything like that. Accuracy is how well the process translates voter intent into properly counted votes.
Technologies get in the way of accuracy by adding steps. Each additional step means more potential errors, simply because no technology is perfect. Consider an optical-scan voting system. The voter fills in ovals on a piece of paper, which is fed into an optical-scan reader. The reader senses the filled-in ovals and tabulates the votes. This system has several steps: voter to ballot to ovals to optical reader to vote tabulator to centralized total.
At each step, errors can occur. If the ballot is confusing, then some voters will fill in the wrong ovals. If a voter doesn’t fill them in properly, or if the reader is malfunctioning, then the sensor won’t sense the ovals properly. Mistakes in tabulation -- either in the machine or when machine totals get aggregated into larger totals -- also cause errors. A manual system -- tallying the ballots by hand, and then doing it again to double-check -- is more accurate simply because there are fewer steps.
The error rates in modern systems can be significant. Some voting technologies have a 5% error rate: one in twenty people who vote using the system don’t have their votes counted properly. This system works anyway because most of the time errors don’t matter. If you assume that the errors are uniformly distributed -- in other words, that they affect each candidate with equal probability -- then they won’t affect the final outcome except in very close races. So we’re willing to sacrifice accuracy to get a voting system that will more quickly handle large and complicated elections. In close races, errors can affect the outcome, and that’s the point of a recount. A recount is an alternate system of tabulating votes: one that is slower (because it’s manual), simpler (because it just focuses on one race), and therefore more accurate.
Note that this is only true if everyone votes using the same machines. If parts of town that tend to support candidate A use a voting system with a higher error rate than the voting system used in parts of town that tend to support candidate B, then the results will be skewed against candidate A. This is an important consideration in voting accuracy, although tangential to the topic of this essay.
With this background, the issue of computerized voting machines becomes clear. Actually, “computerized voting machines” is a bad choice of words. Many of today’s voting technologies involve computers. Computers tabulate both punch-card and optical-scan machines. The current debate centers around all-computer voting systems, primarily touch-screen systems, called Direct Record Electronic (DRE) machines. (The voting system used in India’s most recent election -- a computer with a series of buttons -- is subject to the same issues.) In these systems the voter is presented with a list of choices on a screen, perhaps multiple screens if there are multiple elections, and he indicates his choice by touching the screen. These machines are easy to use, produce final tallies immediately after the polls close, and can handle very complicated elections. They also can display instructions in different languages and allow for the blind or otherwise handicapped to vote without assistance.
They’re also more error-prone. The very same software that makes touch-screen voting systems so friendly also makes them inaccurate. And even worse, they’re inaccurate in precisely the worst possible way.
Bugs in software are commonplace, as any computer user knows. Computer programs regularly malfunction, sometimes in surprising and subtle ways. This is true for all software, including the software in computerized voting machines. For example:
In Fairfax County, VA, in 2003, a programming error in the electronic voting machines caused them to mysteriously subtract 100 votes from one particular candidates’ totals.
In San Bernardino County, CA in 2001, a programming error caused the computer to look for votes in the wrong portion of the ballot in 33 local elections, which meant that no votes registered on those ballots for that election. A recount was done by hand.
In Volusia County, FL in 2000, an electronic voting machine gave Al Gore a final vote count of negative 16,022 votes.
The 2003 election in Boone County, IA, had the electronic vote-counting equipment showing that more than 140,000 votes had been cast in the Nov. 4 municipal elections. The county has only 50,000 residents and less than half of them were eligible to vote in this election.
There are literally hundreds of similar stories.
What’s important about these problems is not that they resulted in a less accurate tally, but that the errors were not uniformly distributed; they affected one candidate more than the other. This means that you can’t assume that errors will cancel each other out and not affect the election; you have to assume that any error will skew the results significantly.
Another issue is that software can be hacked. That is, someone can deliberately introduce an error that modifies the result in favor of his preferred candidate. This has nothing to do with whether the voting machines are hooked up to the Internet on election day. The threat is that the computer code could be modified while it is being developed and tested, either by one of the programmers or a hacker who gains access to the voting machine company’s network. It’s much easier to surreptitiously modify a software system than a hardware system, and it’s much easier to make these modifications undetectable.
A third issue is that these problems can have further-reaching effects in software. A problem with a manual machine just affects that machine. A software problem, whether accidental or intentional, can affect many thousands of machines -- and skew the results of an entire election.
Some have argued in favor of touch-screen voting systems, citing the millions of dollars that are handled every day by ATMs and other computerized financial systems. That argument ignores another vital characteristic of voting systems: anonymity. Computerized financial systems get most of their security from audit. If a problem is suspected, auditors can go back through the records of the system and figure out what happened. And if the problem turns out to be real, the transaction can be unwound and fixed. Because elections are anonymous, that kind of security just isn’t possible.
None of this means that we should abandon touch-screen voting; the benefits of DRE machines are too great to throw away. But it does mean that we need to recognize its limitations, and design systems that can be accurate despite them.
Computer security experts are unanimous on what to do. (Some voting experts disagree, but I think we’re all much better off listening to the computer security experts. The problems here are with the computer, not with the fact that the computer is being used in a voting application.) And they have two recommendations:
DRE machines must have a voter-verifiable paper audit trails (sometimes called a voter-verified paper ballot). This is a paper ballot printed out by the voting machine, which the voter is allowed to look at and verify. He doesn’t take it home with him. Either he looks at it on the machine behind a glass screen, or he takes the paper and puts it into a ballot box. The point of this is twofold. One, it allows the voter to confirm that his vote was recorded in the manner he intended. And two, it provides the mechanism for a recount if there are problems with the machine.
Software used on DRE machines must be open to public scrutiny. This also has two functions. One, it allows any interested party to examine the software and find bugs, which can then be corrected. This public analysis improves security. And two, it increases public confidence in the voting process. If the software is public, no one can insinuate that the voting system has unfairness built into the code. (Companies that make these machines regularly argue that they need to keep their software secret for security reasons. Don’t believe them. In this instance, secrecy has nothing to do with security.)
Computerized systems with these characteristics won’t be perfect -- no piece of software is -- but they’ll be much better than what we have now. We need to start treating voting software like we treat any other high-reliability system. The auditing that is conducted on slot machine software in the U.S. is significantly more meticulous than what is done to voting software. The development process for mission-critical airplane software makes voting software look like a slapdash affair. If we care about the integrity of our elections, this has to change.

Proponents of DREs often point to successful elections as “proof” that the systems work. That completely misses the point. The fear is that errors in the software -- either accidental or deliberately introduced -- can undetectably alter the final tallies. An election without any detected problems is no more a proof the system is reliable and secure than a night that no one broke into your house is proof that your door locks work. Maybe no one tried, or maybe someone tried and succeeded...and you don’t know it.
Even if we get the technology right, we still won’t be done. If the goal of a voting system is to accurately translate voter intent into a final tally, the voting machine is only one part of the overall system. In the 2004 U.S. election, problems with voter registration, untrained poll workers, ballot design, and procedures for handling problems resulted in far more votes not being counted than problems with the technology. But if we’re going to spend money on new voting technology, it makes sense to spend it on technology that makes the problem easier instead of harder.

Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist and author. Described by The Economist as a "security guru," Schneier is best known as a refreshingly candid and lucid security critic and commentator. When people want to know how security really works, they turn to Schneier.

A Petition to Congress requesting an investigation into the Presidential Election of 2004

2004-11-13T16:35:00.000-05:00

A Petition to Congress requesting an investigation into the Presidential Election of 2004

To: United States Congress
TO: All members of the Congress of the United States of America; all Senators and Members of the House of Representatives A Petition to immediately and without delay open a joint investigation into potential wrongdoing in the Presidential Election of 2004, specifically to investigate the potential of voting machine manipulation or purposeful malfunction, especially electronic voting machines manufactured and supplied by Diebold, Inc.; Electronic Systems & Software (ES & S); Sequoia Voting Systems, and others, and also to identify and investigate all allegations of improper conduct by election officials, workers, observers, challengers and operatives and employees of both major parties concerning the voting process including intimidation, dissemination of improper information, manipulation of registration records, improper handling of actual voting ballots and, in general, any and all potential improprieties which could have led to improper or inaccurate election results. Such inquiries should not be limited to any particular state, precinct or district but strive to examine the voting process in any and all areas in which there is even the slightest indication of impropriety, but especially in the states of Florida, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Nevada, New Mexico, Iowa, Arkansas, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, Texas and New Hampshire, and not limit such investigation, and expand such investigations to cover Senatorial races as well, especially those in Kentucky, Florida and South Dakota. We, the undersigned, request that our elected representatives act in accordance with the Constitution of the United States of America in a legal, impartial and expedient manner for an open hearing before the people of the United States and if such wrongdoing, illegal practices, manipulation of voting records or processes is of such a nature to indicate egregious or extensive tampering, alteration or misappropriation of the voting process that the violators be brought to justice and remedies, potentially including a nationwide audit, recall, recount or new election be imposed by your bodies. We feel it is our patriotic duty to request such action from you, our elected officials, and your duty to respond in a responsible manner.
Sincerely,
The Undersigned

Green Party at $70k of $113k Needed in Ohio

2004-11-12T19:13:00.000-05:00

Green Party has raised more than $70,000 towards $113,000 Ohio recount

11/11/2004
By John Byrne RAW STORY Editor

The Green Party in concert with the Libertarian Party has raised more than $70,000 towards an estimated $113,000 filing fee for a recount of Ohio ballots in the presidential election as of 6:30 p.m. Friday evening, RAW STORY has learned.

The party, which posted an appeal and press release at 11 a.m. Eastern time, has received a flood of small contributions, according to Green Party Media Coordinator Blair Bobier. Their donation site is available at gp.org

“All of it is coming in small donations at this point,” Bobier said. “I think it’s just starting to get traction.”

Ohio has seen a spate of reports of irregularities in the voting system, and one county refused to let bipartisan observers watch the vote. In a Columbus suburb, nearly 4,000 votes were erroneously tallied for Bush, though they were not cast by actual voters.

In Mahoning and Mercer Counties, electronic machines malfunctioned; the machines had to be reset. At one point showed votes of “negative 25 million,” according to the head of the local board of elections. In Howard County, a judge ruled Election Day that everyone standing in line to vote at 7:30 p.m. had to eventually be allowed inside, but the Republican Secretary of State avoided the ruling by sending everyone home at 12 a.m., since the ruling only applied to Election Day.

In Warren County, officials said they had been told of a threat of terrorism, though the FBI denied any such threat.

“The integrity of the voting process is at stake,” Bobier said. “A recount is just part of that. Preferably there should be an investigation.”

“Our country is so concerned about creating democracy in other countries,” he added. “I think we should manufacture it here before we export it elsewhere.”

Asked if he had had any communication with the Democratic Party, Bobier demurred. But he said that rank-and-file Democrats were unhappy with the party for its unwillingness to take seriously the allegations of fraud.

“I think that rank and file Democrats are disgusted with their party leadership,” he said.
Bobier said the Greens had no hard evidence of fraud in Ohio, but were troubled by myriad irregularities in the state.

“We want to see the numbers,” he said.

Bobier noted that the Party had asked Republican Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell to step asid, saying that his partisanship was “definitely a problem.” Blackwell was chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio.

“It seems like there should really be a national standard that would prohibit people having dual roles like that,” he stated.

Bobier, an attorney in Oregon, has a legal background in activism work, election reform and environmental work. He founded the Pacific Green Party of Oregon and has been active in the party since the late 1980s.

The Green Party won less than one percent of the popular vote in the November presidential election.

http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=415

Group offers $100,000 reward for proof of fraud that could change electoral outcome

2004-11-12T18:32:00.000-05:00

Group offers $100,000 reward for proof of fraud that could change electoral outcome

11/12/2004

By John Byrne RAW STORY Editor

A non-profit music advocacy group is offering a $100,000 reward to anyone with evidence of voting fraud that could change the outcome of the presidential race, RAW STORY has learned.
The group, Justice Through Music, said that one of their major donors from Ohio had agreed to front the money for the award. Ohio was the battleground state that decided the 2004 election.
They are offering “at least a $100,000 reward to any person or persons who provide conclusive and verifiable evidence that the results of the 2004 presidential election were not correctly tabulated” if it would affect the electoral outcome.
“Mainly we’re looking for whistleblowers, insiders, stuff like that,” media director and photographer Shahzad Rauf said.
Rauf stressed that the group is hoping to increase the size of the award, so that if someone loses their job by reporting anything, they would have something to live on for a fair amount of time.
“I’m asking some of the bloggers to donate too,” he said. “I think if we could get it up to a million, it’s a better incentive.”
If anything, Rauf says he hopes the reward will give life to the movement questioning the security of the nation’s voting systems and the myriad cases of erroneous vote tabulations. No evidence of deliberate fraud has surfaced beyond statistical analyses, though there have been numerous reports in Ohio of machines giving out wrong totals.
In a Columbus suburb, nearly 4,000 votes were erroneously tallied for Bush, though they were not cast by actual voters.
Electronic machines malfunctioned in Mahoning and Mercer Counties; the machines had to be reset. At one point showed votes of “negative 25 million,” according to the head of the local board of elections. In Howard County, a judge ruled Election Day that everyone standing in line to vote at 7:30 p.m. had to eventually be allowed inside, but the Republican Secretary of State avoided the ruling by sending everyone home at 12 a.m., since the ruling only applied to Election Day.
In Warren County, officials said they had been told of a threat of terrorism, though the FBI denied any such threat.
Rauf called the reward “a way to get it out there without being involved in the big conspiracy theories.”
“I get so tired of that,” he added. “I tend to agree that the numbers look fishy and fuzzy, but I haven’t really seen any evidence.”
Awarding of the money will be considered by a five-member internal panel in February of 2005.
Justice Through Music is a non-profit, 501©(3) organization that uses famous musicians and bands to organize, educate and activate young people about the importance of civil rights and voting.

BuzzFlash > News Alert > The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy

2004-11-11T20:54:00.000-05:00

BuzzFlash > News Alert > The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy

OHIO Recount: Make It Happen; FL soon?!

2004-11-11T16:46:00.000-05:00

Google Search 'vote recount'

News Now Headlines 'recount'

Technorati Blogs Search 'vote recount'

Donate to Greens Ohio Recount Effort

The Alliance For Democracy Recount Effort

Help America Recount! - WEDNESDAY NOV 10, Washington D.C. -- Consumer groups rallying citizens for recounts in Ohio, Florida; voters can fund audits of Ohio and court challenges in Florida by donating to HelpAmericaRecount.org, a 527 tax exempt organization set up exclusively for recount funding...

Listening to Air America Radio this evening, I thought I heard Bev Harris mention that BBV would be recounting Florida but wasn't sure. Apparently as per AAR's message board, it seems my hearing was correct!



Donate! Your Help Needed for Ohio Recount! David Cobb and Michael Badnarik, the 2004 presidential cndidates for the Green and Libertarian parties, have announced their intentions to file a formal demand for a recount of the presidential ballots cast in Ohio. The Cobb and Badnarik campaigns are in the process of raising the required fee, estimated at $110,000, for a complete recount in all 11,000 precincts in Ohio. Funds donated to the Ohio recount are not subject to the $2000 contribution cap. Please be sure to include the words 'Ohio Recount' in the Notes section of our donate form. The integrity of the democratic process is at stake thank you for your support.
Recent Daily Kos daries on the recount story: 1. Help Recount Ohio! (Diaries, Diary)posted by FullDisclosure on 11/11/2004 17:22:23 EDT4 comments (0 new) 2. Nader calls for Ohio recount (Diaries, Diary)posted by racerx on 11/11/2004 11:51:00 EDT8 comments (8 new) 3. Donate to Support Ohio Recount (Diaries, Diary)posted by scorponic on 11/11/2004 11:35:59 EDT9 comments (9 new) 4. Cobb to demand recount in Ohio (Diaries, Diary)posted by jigsaw68 on 11/11/2004 10:24:02 EDT15 comments (15 new) 5. Put Your Money Where Your Tin-Foil Hat Is! (Diaries, Diary)posted by FullDisclosure on 11/11/2004 02:29:42 EDT25 comments (25 new) 6. Want an Ohio Recount? It'll cost $110,000 (Diaries, Diary)posted by Dittoz on 11/11/2004 01:25:59 EDT21 comments (21 new) 7. Ohio Paper:Recount to be persued.... (Diaries, Diary)posted by pronin2 on 11/11/2004 00:51:57 EDT8 comments (8 new) 8. demand ohio recount! (Diaries, Diary)posted by Cedwyn on 11/07/2004 20:16:19 EDT72 comments (72 new) 9. Need Ohio Advice (Diaries, Diary)posted by Cedwyn on 11/05/2004 19:40:10 EDT9 comments (9 new) 10. Ohio recount law (Diaries, Diary)posted by teresahill on 11/04/2004 18:58:18 EDT3 comments (3 new)

GAO Election Inquiry: Nadler Gathers Vote Info Online

2004-11-11T13:58:00.000-05:00

Nadler Launches Webpage to Gather Information About Voting Irregularities

For Immediate Release Nov. 10, 2004

Washington, D.C. - Today Representative Nadler announced his plan to gather information directly from voters and voting rights activists in order to further efforts by Members of the Judiciary Committee and the Government Accountability Office to investigate the voting irregularities that have been reported since Election Day.

Rep. Nadler will be using a form on his website http://www.house.gov/nadler/ to gather evidence about voting irregularities and to share information with interested parties about progress in the election inquiry.

"I am hopeful that the information people provide will be helpful to Members of the Judiciary Committee to assist in our inquiry," said Rep. Nadler. "The goal is to make it easier for concerned citizens to share their views and insights with the interested Members of the Judiciary Committee," he continued.

The House Judiciary Committee has jurisdiction over the Voting Rights Act, the Help America Vote Act, and constitutional rights to free and fair democratic elections. Rep. Nadler said, "As the Ranking Member on the Constitution Subcommittee, I want to hear from you. If you have information that would be useful to the Committee as it considers voting rights issues, items that should be investigated, or would like to provide a testimonial, please fill out the form below."

To access the form or to sign up to receive additional information go to

http://www.house.gov/nadler/issue-gao.shtml

GAO Election Inquiry
Sign up for email updates on voting rights and the integrity of our democratic elections. Required fields are marked with an asterisk*.

Register Your Official Comments
The House Judiciary Committee has jurisdiction over the Voting Rights Act, the Help America Vote Act, and our constitutional rights to free and fair democratic elections. As the Ranking Member on the Constitution Subcommittee, I want to hear from you. If you have information that would be useful to the committee as it considers voting rights issues, items that should be investigated, or would like to provide a testimonial, please fill out the form below. Required fields are marked with an asterisk*.

Greens & Libs Push OHIO Recount Effort

2004-11-11T13:43:00.000-05:00

Green candidated David Cobb announced yesterday that he and Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian candidate, are requesting a recount in Ohio. This is going to cost them $110,000. Please donate if you can:

http://web.greens.org/c/cobb/supporters.cgi?function=donate

Ohio secretary of state suddenly changes provisional ballot rules
New rules saying that blah blah blah type of provisional ballot can't be counted are coming down. He ruled on Tuesday that any ballot without a date of birth shall not be counted, despite documents saying that it wasn't mandatory. Election stealing Republican Secretary of State. Where have we seen this before?

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/985

For people investigating Diebold , a word of caution

2004-11-11T11:08:00.000-05:00

Bait & Snitch scam #2

1. A user pops out of nowhere and says he's an expert programmer, CEO of a company with several servers he can put at our disposal, to help us prove the election fraud. Such a generous soul, heh ?

2. His only problem: He needed to get the Diebold Source code and was having trouble contacting Bev Harris to get it.

THIS IS THE ILLEGAL PART HE CAN SNITCH (giving him Diebold property)

3. None of us had it so we started discussing the way the software was built, the OS, etc.. It was immediately obvious he didn't know WTF he was talking about

4. Suddenly he "found the code". He said he had it all on his servers and offered it to anyone who wanted it.

ANOTHER TRAP (If you accepted it you can be charged with receiving stolen goods)

5) Thankfully, because on his discussions about OS, code (3) he rubbed everyone the wrong way, so there were no takers

WATCH OUT!!!

Articles, Analyses, Collections 11/11/04

2004-11-11T09:30:00.000-05:00

***Wikipedia entry for 2004 U.S. Election controversies and irregularities***

NEWS - Votes Downloaded to AP - Confirmation that the Association Press gets direct feed from vote tabulating computers - read Christopher Bollyn's article

Check out websites below where interesting statistical analysis (still in the development stage) indicates, perhaps, another stolen election. On initial inspection, some statisticians are finding that it is the scanners in Florida that gave Bush a big boost, not the touchscreens.

***http://www.invisibleida.com/New_Hampshire.htm (Ida's charts and graphs)***
http://www.stolenelection2004.com/Florida.htm /
http://ustogether.org/election04/ (Dopp's graphs & analysis)http://onlinejournal.com/evoting/110504Madsen/110504madsen.html (a snapshot of results across the country)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x21834 (New Zealand-based Scoop)http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won_.php (Palast)http://www.stolenelection2004.com/ (compilation of stories)http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1104-38.htm (great article with links)

Oct 31, 04: If This Election Is Stolen, will it be by enough to stop a recount?
Oct 26, 04: Landes submits brief to United States Supreme Court - This is a long shot, but I felt I had to do something. Lynn
Oct 22, 04: Could the Associated Press (AP) Rig the Election? The answer is yes! with some help from their friends.

Electronic Voting
The stolen election of 2004: welcome back to hellBy Larry Chin
Grand Theft Election: Karl Rove's turd droppings all over this oneBy Wayne Madsen
Kerry wonBy Greg Palast
Something amiss in OhioBy Kevin Quirk
Never say Die-bold: So you don’t think the Bush campaign stole this election? Think againBy Jackson Thoreau
If this election is stolen, will it be by enough to stop a recount?By Lynn Landes
Could the Associated Press rig the election?By Lynn Landes
Journalist seeks temporary restraining orders against use of voting machines & absentee ballotsUrges use of remote polling precincts & provisional ballots
E-Voting: The new battle hymn of the republicBy Bob Fitrakis
Voting: When low-tech beats high-techBy Bev Conover
Federal commission nixes talk of paper-only elections; stacks panels with proponents of paperless touchscreensBy Lynn Landes
Two voting companies & two brothers will count 80 percent of U.S. election using both scanners & touchscreensBy Lynn Landes
Faking democracy: Americans don't vote, machines do, & ballot printers can't fix thatBy Lynn Landes
Death of a patriotBy Bob Fitrakis
Diebold, electronic voting and the vast right-wing conspiracyBy Bob Fitrakis
Questions mount over New Hampshire's primaryBy Lynn Landes
Democrats send mixed signals in voting technology debateBy Lynn Landes
NIST ignores scientific method for voting technologyBy Lynn Landes
Voting machine voodoo: Democracy at riskBy Colleen Redman
Stopping the vote theft—urgent—drop all elseBy Mac Sperry
Computerized voting systems cannot be made secureBy Bev Conover
Republicans and Brits will count California's recall votesBy Lynn Landes
Electronic voting minus paper trails makes it easy to rig electionsBy Jason Leopold
Internet voting: The end of democracy?By Lynn Landes
Voting industry insiders hold secret meeting to hire PR firm to sell electronic voting to publicBy Bev Harris
Voting machine fiasco: SAIC, VoteHere and DieboldBy Lynn Landes
Offshore company captures online military voteBy Lynn Landes
Voting machines violate ConstitutionWho will launch legal challenge?By Lynn Landes
Are American elections fixed?By Ernest Partridge
Now your vote is the property of a private corporationBy Thom Hartmann
"If you want to win an election, just control the voting machines"By Thom Hartmann
Mission Impossible: Federal observers & voting machinesBy Lynn Landes
Can we trust the vote count anywhere? In any race? In any election?By Thomas Penn
2002 elections: Republican voting machines, election irregularities, and "way-off" polling resultsBy Lynn Landes
Florida’s “fixed it” farceBy Bev Conover
Once again, the media try to con the people into believing Bush wonBy Bev Conover
Your stolen vote—the missing piece of the puzzleBy Victoria Collier

http://alternet.org/election04/20451

Pre-election articles: http://www.ecotalk.org/articles.htm

Scoop: Sludge Report #154 Bigger Than Watergate!

2004-11-10T18:43:00.000-05:00

Scoop: Sludge Report #154 Bigger Than Watergate!

Geek alert: XML Archive Exit Poll & Election data

2004-11-10T18:06:00.000-05:00

Geek alert: XML Archive Exit Poll & Election data
by ivote2004

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/5/201039/952

Fri Nov 5th, 2004 at 21:10:39 EDT

Will we let them cook the books, and then burn 'em before we can do our audit? Will we let them hide their tracks? Shred the evidence?
===============
Action #1: Archive everything relevant you can find online. Grab it while it's hot. Before it vanishes.

Download & archive all data; dont depend on URLs being stable.

Make local backup copies, on your own hard disk, and burn to CD. Before URLs no longer hold the content they hold now, please make your own local backup copies --- especially of exit poll data. We need plenty of grassroots people to have copies of data that can be used (sooner, or later) to reverse-engineer how this election was stolen. So grab snapshots of unofficial vote tallies, exit polls, and other forms of raw election-relevant data.

Sure, there is plenty that hasn't been made public, and plenty that hasn't made it to the web yet. Getting hold of that data is much harder, and there are great efforts underway to do exactly that -- see http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
and help them out any way you can.

But there is plenty of data which has been put on the web, and we need to secure it. In other words, even if unscrupulous officials delete the data or change the data that has been available at a given URL, we want to have our own snapshots of what had already been posted.

Let's catch them in the lie, and document it well.
=============
ACTION #2:

Data needs to be transformed from HTML, PDF, XLS, and other source formats into a neutral open format: XML.

And the XML files need to be uploaded & organized into a simple data repository web site, which needs to be hosted at multiple mirrored servers, with stable longterm URLs for access.

XSL stylesheets need to be crafted for different useful views upon the data repository.

Investigators and researchers should be able to access the XML raw to get the data for number crunching, while the rest of us should be able to see userfriendly views via the XSL styling.

(((that's a very highlevel strategy; architecture & details can be discussed below)))

Remember the Open Source maxim:

"Given enough eyeballs, all problems are shallow."

Therefore:
Secure the data.
Make the data available in a useful way.
Apply many eyeballs.
Reverse-engineer how we've been hacked.
Fix, before Dec 13, when the Electoral College performs the vote that really matters.

11/09/04 More Collections of Links and Articles

2004-11-10T09:39:00.000-05:00

Miami Herald: 11/10/04 Hackers rigging voting machines a real possibility

Washington Times: 11/09/04 Voter fraud uncovered in New Mexico

Superbly organized VOTE FRAUD Links (Thanks Eloriel!): a DU Compendium

others at DU: Presidential Results and Discussion Report Voting Problems

Common Ground - Common Sense: Proving Electoral Fraud Thread

Sludge Report #164 - Vote Fraud 2004 - WTF!!! 11/09/04 In This Edition ::
Today Was Stolen Election Action Day
Ground Zero For Election Fraud 2004 Investigations
Karl Rove - Acclaimed Architect Of Election Fraud 2004
Show Me The Votes or Where Did George Suddenly Get 11 Million New Friends?
Thinking The Unthinkable – If We Vote Fraud Theorists Are Correct
According to The BBC – There May Be More Truth In This Than Intended
Spot The Difference – Exit Poll Variations By Ballot Type
To Believe That Bush Won The Election, You Must Also Believe...
Why Did CNN Change Their Exit Poll Data for Ohio After 1:00 AM?
Hillsborough County FLA - Oddities + Undervotes
Bush Increased His Minority Turnout by 69%
Florida Projection vs Actual Data In A Graphical Form
Still Don't Believe They Stole It? Look Here

What Really Happened 11/09/04:

Naked Promotional Announcement (Keith Olbermann)
Keith Olbermann Plays Hardball, Breaks Votergate Story on National, Mainstream Media
Incredible As It May Seem, MSNBC Covers Voting Problems
GOP files suit to stop vote count in San Diego city.
State Police investigating voter fraud
Votes exceeding registered voters (full list)
Did Bush fix the elections?
Computer glitch still baffles county clerk
Countinghouse Blues
Bush's 'Incredible' Vote Tallies
FLASHBACK: Florida ballot papers go missing
Will Your Vote Count?
Massive Ohio Sit-In to Protest Stolen Election!
Maybe Kerry SHOULD have waited!
MAINSTREAM MEDIA MOVES TO DENY THEY ARE SUPPRESSING VOTE FRAUD STORY
Cuyahoga County Precincts
Warren's vote tally walled off
Why Kerry Conceded Defeat despite Electoral Fraud
Election stolen, group suspects
Another Rigged Election? The Elephant in the Voting Booth - Maureen Farrell at BuzzFlash.com
Media Black Out on Vote Fraud Allegations
None Dare Call it Voter Suppression and Fraud

BOP News 11.09.04 Republican Election Theft Clearinghouse

BOP House Crew on Election Fraud
New! 11/9 Ian Welsh: Thinking about vote fraud
Matt Stoller: another stolen election
oldman: speaks for itself
Barry Ritholtz: mapping out election results
Ian Welsh: Okay, it was stolen
Shaula Evans: fight fight fight

New Links November 9
Statistical improbabilities of Bush FL vote tallies
Atrois: The Ohio Code
Sarpy County, Nebraska: More votes than voters
FL: voting machines reject mysterious wet ballots
Shifting numbers of Florida's election (with graphs and charts)
More from MSNBC's Keith Olbermann plus he wants your feedback at KOlbermann@msnbc.com
Bob Fitrakis: Evidence is mounting
97,489 extra votes in Cayahoga County, Ohio
Democracy Now: The E-vote Factor
eRiposte: Election 2004 results
No paper ballot recount requests yet in Florida - and how to start one
Another rigged election? The Elephant in the voting booth
Electronic voting machine woes reported
Machine error gives Bush extra Ohio votes
Gambling glitch mars vote tally
Wired: Watchdogs spot e-vote glitches
National voting rights monitor documents voting irregularities in the south
Warren County, OH shrouds vote count in darkness
Ralph Nader challenges vote count in New Hampshire
Citizen attempt to expose irregularities in Florida
WI group says, Election stolen
Indianapolis Wish-TV asks, Will Your Vote Count?
AP gets direct feed from tabulating computers
media Black Out Voting Problems
Republicans and Democrats spar over vote tally
House Democrats Seek election inquiry
Voting irregularities (with charts!)
William Rivers Pitt: Worse Than 2000
Florida rigged the optical scanners with stats and charts
Strange election results from Ohio
Electronic Voting machine woes reported
Defective software lost votes
Over 20 percent of the machines tested failed to record votes properly.
Electronic Ballots: Major media reporting major problems
Video the Vote: Documentation from Cleveland Polls
Angry Ohio Residents Storm State House

other collections:

http://www.ledgeofliberty.com/2004/11/its_official_el.html

http://www.supportthetruth.com/voteFraud.php

http://shadowbox.i8.com/stolen.htm

I present a couple of examples of ways the authors represent populations while recalling how disheartening it was to see those large swathes of red strewn across the screen on election night. When selling possible fraud, it's perception of the buyer that matters. Ask the President, perception is everything.

Maps and cartograms of the 2004 US presidential election results
Election results by state

On election night and in the days since then, we have seen many maps that look like this (click on any of the maps for a larger picture):

The (contiguous 48) states of the country are colored red or blue to indicate whether a majority of their voters voted for the Republican candidate (George W. Bush) or the Democratic candidate (John F. Kerry) respectively. The map gives the superficial impression that the "red states" dominate the country, since they cover far more area than the blue ones. However, as pointed out by many others, this is misleading because it fails to take into account the fact that most of the red states have small populations, whereas most of the blue states have large ones. The blue may be small in area, but they are large in terms of numbers of people, which is what matters in an election.
...
The answer seems to be that the amount of red on the map is skewed because there are a lot of counties in which only a slim majority voted Republican. One possible way to allow for this, suggested by Robert Vanderbei at Princeton University, is to use not just two colors on the map, red and blue, but instead to use red, blue, and shades of purple to indicate percentages of voters. Here is what the normal map looks like if you do this:

And here's what the cartogram looks like:

Daily Kos :: Comments Olbermann blows voting "irregularity" story WIDE OPEN.

2004-11-10T00:44:00.000-05:00

NEW CONTACT EMAIL FOR KERRY, INVESTIGATION!!!!

Here's a message from Cameron Kerry about the present state of things, in Florida and Ohio, as well as the new contact email for "factual information about voting problems."

"Election protection lawyers
are still on the job in Ohio and Florida and in DC making sure all the
votes are counted accurately. I have been conferring with lawyers
involved and have made them aware of the information and concerns people
have given me. Even if the facts don't provide a basis to change the
outcome, the information will inform the continuing effort to protect the
integrity of our elections.

If you have specific factual information about voting problems that could be helpful to the lawyers doing their job, please send it to vri@dnc.org rather than to me.

Election Day Concerns and Contact Information

2004-11-09T21:49:00.000-05:00

Election Day Concerns and Contact Information

November 09, 2004

Greetings! Below is an email I received today from Cam Kerry, brother of John Kerry.

-----Original Message-----
From: Cameron Kerry
Sent: Tuesday, November 09, 2004 3:00 PM
To: dal@progressivegovernment.org
Subject: Election Day 2004

I am grateful to the many people who have contacted me to express their deep concern about questions of miscounting, fraud, vote suppression, and other problems on election day, especially in Florida and Ohio. Their concern reflects how much people care about the outcome of this election.

I want to you to know we are not ignoring it. Election protection lawyers are still on the job in Ohio and Florida and in DC making sure all the votes are counted accurately. I have been conferring with lawyers involved and have made them aware of the information and concerns people have given me.

Even if the facts don't provide a basis to change the outcome, the information will inform the continuing effort to protect the integrity of our elections.

If you have specific factual information about voting problems that could be helpful to the lawyers doing their job, please send it to vri@dnc.org rather than to me.

The election protection effort has been important to me personally, and I am proud of the 17,000 lawyers around the country who helped.

It's obvious that we have a way to go still, but their efforts helped make a difference. Their work goes on.

Thank you,

Cam Kerry

-----End forwarded message-----

Dal LaMagna
Progressive Government Institute

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

email: dal@progressivegovernment.org
web: http://www.progressivegovernment.org

ISO Convincing Vote Fraud Evidence - Update

2004-11-09T21:46:00.000-05:00

ISO Convincing Vote Fraud Evidence - Update

Tue Nov 9th, 2004 at 20:24:45 EDT

Sorry for delay in update on the 'Hard Evidence' issue. My contact was frustrated in his attempts and that devolved to me. We finally connected today in a different venue. The Message: interest exists and is strong but requires a 'smoking gun' before force is mobilized. Our bewilderment at apparent inaction of Dem-powers-that-be should probably take into account the once-burned reflex: recall the Rove-job CBS received as they bent over to pick up the 'faked AWOL memos'.

Just my inference but I'm sure the pain of that event is a poignant memory for many here.

Anyhow, the obvious idea, to make the convincing case, is a prerequisite. Somewhat frustrated in my own effort to promote consolidation of 'convincing evidence', I joined with another kossak to establish Counting Coup 2004 where possible 'smoking guns' might be accumulated. So if you've got anything that looks real, please be sure to at least post a link and short description in 'Comments' here, or there, to trigger a headsup email for passing on.

TIA and please bump the diary to keep it in view for awhile.

I forgot to mention that the 'big guns' are interested in the work that BlackBoxVoting.org is doing so I'm doing my best to make that connection. If you can forward my note to the right person, I suspect it may pass my messages waiting in the queues somewhere on BBV servers...

by luaptifer on Tue Nov 9th, 2004 at 20:38:20 EDT

How to get a Recount in your State

2004-11-09T12:12:00.000-05:00

State Recount Provisions

You can find out your state's provisions for recounts here:
http://www.electionline.org/site/docs/html/recount_provisions_-_part_1.htm

You can further check out the specific code/law here:
http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/procedures_recount07.html

Some of the provisions are restrictive, some are not. Don't let that deter anyone wanting a recount. ANY recount could show problems in the system and that would mean every race should be recounted.

Crooks and Liars

2004-11-09T11:20:00.000-05:00

Crooks and Liars

Crooks and Liars: "Keith Olbermann on Voter Irregularities: Part 1

Keith talks about the new Cincinnati Enquirer article and a host of other voter problems in Ohio and Florida.

Video

Keith Olbermann on Voter Irregularities: Part II

Interview with John Conyers. A senior member in the House of Representatives that was elected by his congressional colleagues to lead the Democratic side of the pivotal House Committee on the Judiciary.

Video

11/09/04 Counting Coup Videos, Articles

2004-11-09T04:21:00.000-05:00

Votergate 2004; We Don't Need Paper to Prove Fraud, But We Do Need Money and Leadership, NOW.
We have a Watergate story here that could give the media a post election explosive news story that could make the 2000 Florida vote debacle look like small potatoes. We need to get the media to see that votergate 2004 is huge news and we need to quickly fund the investigation and get Democratic leaders behind it.
Sheldon Drobny is CPA and Venture Capitalist and co-founder of Air America Radio; email at sdrobny@paradigmventure.com

Keith Olbermann: Video - Countdown on Voter Irregularities
Windows Media Player Version

and as MSNBC's Bloggerman, he's helping to make the left world right again, first MSM broadcast to look at emerging fraud story!
Electronic Voting Angst (Keith Olbermann)
November 9, 2004 NEW YORK - Bev Harris, the Blackbox lady, was apparently quoted in a number of venues during the day Monday as having written “I was tipped off by a person very high up in TV that the news has been locked down tight, and there will be no TV coverage of the real problems with voting on Nov. 2… My source said they’ve also been forbidden to talk about it even on their own time.”
I didn’t get the memo.

Black Box Voting: Voter Gate site hosting video documentary of evote problems

A Media Blackout: Media Blacks Out Voting Problems
Posted by : DavidSwanson on Monday, November 08, 2004 - 07:31 AM
The "mainstream" media has fallen down on the job by failing to cover efforts since November 2 to ensure that all votes in the

E-Voting Returns Mixed Results
November 8, 2004 By caron_carlson@ziffdavis.com
Makers of electronic voting machines declared victory for their technology in this year's presidential election, but computer scientists, who collected thousands of reports of voting glitches, said the results may reveal a different outcome.

Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked
by Thom Hartmann
When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how...
"Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote....
He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."

Ohio Whitewash November 4, 2004
Basic report from Columbus
From a lawyer who was in there in Ohio. A database of voter irregularities is reportedly being assembled, and hopefully there will be web sites devoted to documenting what really happened.

Election 2004: Shoplifting the Presidency?
Wednesday, November 3rd, 2004
We speak with investigative reporter Greg Palast and Barbara Arnwine of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law about voting problems in Florida, Ohio and New Mexico. [includes rush transcript]

Petition: Should we demand an investigation into black boxvoting fraud in the 2004 election?
Why don't you tell the Kerry campaign, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) where you stand? Here, we'll make it easy for you. All you have to do is fill in one form now and with one click we will send your personal message to all of the above.

None Dare Call it Voter Suppression and Fraud by Bob Fitrakis
November 8, 2004First Published in The Free Press
Evidence is mounting that the 2004 presidential election was stolen in Ohio. Emerging revelations of voting irregularities coupled with well-documented Republican efforts at voter suppression prior to the election suggests that in a fair election Kerry would have won Ohio.

Countinghouse Blues, Too Many Votes
Sarpy County election officials are trying to figure out how they ended up with more votes than voters in the general election. As many as 10,000 extra votes have been tallied and candidates are still waiting for corrected totals.

Glitch gave Bush extra votes in Ohio
Friday, November 5, 2004 Posted: 2115 GMT (0515 HKT)
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said.

Broward machines count backward
By Eliot Kleinberg Friday, November 05, 2004
FORT LAUDERDALE — It had to happen. Things were just going too smoothly.
Early Thursday, as Broward County elections officials wrapped up after a long day of canvassing votes, something unusual caught their eye. Tallies should go up as more votes are counted. That's simple math. But in some races, the numbers had gone . . . down.

Palm Beach County Logs 88,000 More Votes Than Voters
November 5, 2004 04:56 PM
Update: Palm Beach County has updated their numbers and added 91,802 absentee ballots and 1,041 provisional ballots. Note that the vote totals for president only increased by 1,543 votes. To view an archived copy of the previous report, click here. While Palm Beach County appears to have accounted for the discrepancy, this underscores the flaws in the system and data compilation.

Computer glitch still baffles county clerk
Thursday, November 04, 2004 By Kristin Miller, The News-Dispatch
LaPORTE - The day after a two-and-a-half-hour delay in counting ballots due to a glitch in a computer program, LaPorte County election officials are still trying to figure out what happened.

Foreign eyes on U.S. voting
By Thomas Crampton International Herald Tribune Thursday, November 4, 2004 MIAMI
The global implications of the U.S. election are undeniable, but international monitors at a polling station in southern Florida said Tuesday that voting procedures fell short in many ways of the best global practices.

not enough time...others:

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/981

http://www.ansiblegroup.org/furtherleft/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=51

analysis: http://pages.ivillage.com/americans4america/id20.html

Daily Kos :: Comments Election Theft Info Collected At this site

2004-11-09T04:11:00.000-05:00

[http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/8/111412/704#23]

Daily Kos :: totals from yesterday:
by drummer55

Mon Nov 8th, 2004 at 11:14:12 CDT
is there a centeral place to keep these?

10,000 Extra Votes Added in Nebraska County Another ES&S
computer 'failure'.
http://www.wowt.com/news/headlines/1161971.html

50,000 Votes could be LOST in Dem Indiana County! Yet another ES&S
computer 'failure'.
http://www.michigancityin.com/articles.../news02.txt

19,000 new ballots were added after all precincts reported for
Miami county ohio
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/983

268,159 more votes than voters in florida
http://ideamouth.com/voterfraud.htm#FL

22000 votes in Guilford county NC
http://www.mercurynews.com/.../10104576.htm

11,283 votes in Craven county NC
4,530 votes lost in Carteret county
http://www.wcnc.com/news/...otes.264d17aa.html

4000 extra votes in Mecklenburg NC
http://www.news14charlotte.com/.../?ArID=78411&SecID=3

Diaries :: drummer55's diary ::
4000 votes in PA
http://www.vindy.com/basic/news/288078640794824.php

3893 votes in Franklin county OH
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/..../index.html

4000 lost votes in mercer county OH
http://www.vindy.com/basic/news/288078640794824.php"

Bev Harris: Kerry conceded because of a lie

2004-11-09T03:09:00.000-05:00

Daily Kos :: Comments Election Theft Info Collected At this site

Bev Harris: Kerry conceded because of a lie (none / 0)

Kerry conceded because of a lie

Bev Harris gave a radio interview tonight, which can be found at:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/08/1513252

Monday, November 8th, 2004
The E-Vote Factor: Kerry Conceded But Did He Really Lose?

...

Perhaps the most shocking point of this interview (to me) is the fact that Kerry conceded the election based on false information -- he was told that there were about 150,000 provisional ballots left to count, but in reality, Ohio HAD NO IDEA how many provisional ballots there were From the radio interview:

BEV HARRIS: Oh yes, they conceded very prematurely. As I was saying in Ohio, they don't even know if they won or lost in Ohio, really. They are basing this on, I think, a verbal okay from someone in the Secretary of State's office that said, that they were being assured there was only 150,000 provisional ballots. Well I said, where is the source data on that? What auditing do they have on those? They couldn't tell me.

The Kerry/Edwards Online Forum "baby"

2004-11-09T02:50:00.000-05:00

has 2 sections just for that. I think anyone can join, now that's not "official" anymore

The Official K/E Forum got shutdown last Friday, but the IT people and moderators put this new one

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org

Counting the Coup 2004

2004-11-08T16:10:00.000-05:00

The SCLM has done little to assess or demonstrated the apparent theft of the presidency as culminated on Nov. 2, 2004. A beautiful thing it's been to engage the large corps of small 'd' democrats stepping into the vaccuum where corporate media 'watchdogs' once upon a time were believed to represent the little guy. It's getting well past time to reconsider whether these corporate watchdogs represent interests of more than their shareholders. 'Til then....

The sole purpose here it is to make and keep a record of the analyses, reports, sources for further information and link collections that help Americans understand if and how they've been ripped off in this presidential election. It's my intent to enable multiple administrators of this blog to maximize its potential as a source of record.

It's also my intent that visitors be sure to make their own contributions via the Comments logs. Comments will be retained there and/or incorporated by admins to the central blog repository.

BBV: Help America Audit -- 5 Things You Can Do Immediately

2004-11-08T15:05:00.000-05:00

BBV: Help America Audit -- 5 Things You Can Do Immediately
copied wholesale from her post on Democratic Underground today
Edited on Mon Nov-08-04 12:15 AM by BevHarris

I was tipped off by a person very high up in TV that the news has been locked down tight, and there will be no TV coverage of the real problems with voting on Nov. 2. Even the journalists are pretty horrified. My source said they've also been forbidden to talk about it even on their own time, and he was calling from somewhere else. He was trying to figure out how to get the real news out on vote fraud.

This is a person I've worked with off and on for nearly two years, and the voice was so somber it really bothered me.

At any rate -- and perhaps, especially important due to the tipoff above, there are things you can do to take back America.

====================

We have a different list for lawyers, computer people, statisticians. But if you are a regular person like most of us, and want to help, here's what to do.

Please distribute: If you have not done so already, sign up at Black Box Voting -- http://www.blackboxvoting.org -- to audit the election and deal with vote fraud.

HELP AMERICA AUDIT: 5 Things You Can Do Right Now to Reclaim Democracy

You’re our greatest hope. If you choose to accept it, your job is to spread the word in order to build a fast-growing grass roots movement -- a voting integrity project so powerful that it cannot be mowed down.

1. BE THE MEDIA -- See below.

2. CRUNCH THE NUMBERS: Discrepancies please, and hurry. E-mail them to tips@blackboxvoting.org . Pass the word. Need source documents, too. ASAP. Follow your nose, or join the Black Box Scavenger Hunt: Pick a county. Look at small counties, as we are seeing many discrepancies in those. Look in any state. Get the official number of registered voters, Dem and Republican. Get the number of votes cast on Nov. 2, Republican and Dem. Make a grid like this, filling in the right numbers:

# reg. voters % # votes cast %
Rep 100 33% 150 50%
Dem 200 67% 150 50%
Totl 300 100% 300 100%

We can find out a lot from this procedure, very hard data, that will make a real difference. As soon as you have finished a county, e-mail it to us. Do as many counties as you can.

3. HAVE A HOUSE PARTY: Show the film “Votergate” (the real one, which you can download for free at www.Votergate.tv .) Organize “Be the media” actions and set up investigative teams to help dig up information like you have in #2. Timeline is NOW, to get action before seating the electoral college.

4. HELP CONNECT THE WIRES: Hook Black Box Voting (.ORG) up with powerhitters you know, people who can make things happen.

5. DONATE to any of 3 organizations: Black Box Voting (.ORG), the consumer protection group for elections; or the new recount fund (information upcoming, contact DU's Hedda_Foil), or send contribution to Votergate.tv (The REAL Votergate film, by Russell Michaels, Robert Carrillo Cohen, and Simon Ardizzone. There is another by someone else, make sure you get the right one.) The real VOTERGATE is the most powerful investigative film on this topic, and consequently it has been attacked and blocked repeatedly. They deserve your support.

“HOW TO BE THE MEDIA”

Don’t expect to see vote burglary on TV. To get the message out fast, you’re going to have to become the underground railroad. Do it now. Take pictures of each other doing it. Have house parties to show others how to do it. Here’s how to “be the media.”

BE YOUR OWN REPORTER: We will send you new information as we get it. We need your e-mail to get you on the list, so if a friend sent this to you, please shoot an email to crew@blackboxvoting.org to sign up.

Spread the information we send you to every blog, listserv, forum you know and throughout your personal network. Talk about it at work and to people you meet everywhere, lots, quickly, all the time.

SELF SERVE SOUND BITES: Frequent, very short messages to immediately increase public awareness. Assume you won’t see it on TV.
Put vote fraud related messages on:
- Yard signs
- Car windows
- Write them on duct tape and wear them
- Print REMOVABLE stickers and stick them on things:
- Bathroom door at the gas station.
- On telephone poles in the dead of night
- At bus stops
- On the back of bus seats
- Stick them into your junk mail and send it back via return mail
- Slip them into menus at restaurants
- Leave them in books at the bookstore
- Share new self serve sound bite ideas with us and we’ll send them out with new messages.

ELECTION “TRUTH TOURETTES”. Please excuse the political incorrectness, as it is not meant to be hurtful. It is for a good purpose. This the antidote to “watch what you say.” It is a good icebreaker at a party. Have your guests make up truths, like those below, and mix them into the conversation at surprise times throughout the party. Unexpectedly and urgently blurt them out:

Recount!
Electile Dysfunction!
Gotta audit-Gotta audit-Gotta audit
Florida!
--mathmatically impossible!--
Count all the votes! Count all the votes! Count all the votes!
Votefraud.
Paperballots! Handcounts!
--where’s my vote?--
Where’s the paper?
Feel free to interchange and mix it up, or even try a game where different people have to interject with different truths.
- WHO REALLY WON -- I DUNNO -- GOTTA AUDIT!

Also, here are more ideas.
- Magnetic signs for your car
- If you know a trucker, have them put a message in the window as they drive across the county.
- Make a patch and put it on the front of your baseball cap
- Carry a sign and stand in the window outside the Today Show

If we have to be our own media, so be it. We will not sacrifice democracy just because TV executive producers have a problem with this issue.

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