[IMC-US] Please publish these results - thanks

[Nancy Oden]

      Published on Saturday, November 6, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
      Evidence Mounts That The Vote Was 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. And not just this year, he said, but that these same
people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb
Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat
to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.

      "It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.

      And evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on
November 2, 2004.

      The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record
of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net
denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table,
available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed
something startling.


            Also See:

             Florida Secretary of State Presidential Results by County
11/02/2004 (.pdf)
             Florida Secretary of State County Registration by Party
2/9/2004 (.pdf)



      While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to
produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios matched
the Kerry/Bush vote, and so did the optically-scanned paper ballots in the
larger counties, in Florida's smaller counties the results from the
optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus
vulnerable to hacking - seem to have been reversed.

      In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of
them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for
Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in
the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

      In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats
and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry,
but 4,433 voted for Bush.

      The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the smaller
counties where, it was probably assumed, the small voter numbers wouldn't be
much noticed. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for
Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.

      Yet in the larger counties, where such anomalies would be more obvious
to the news media, high percentages of registered Democrats equaled high
percentages of votes for Kerry.

      More visual analysis of the results can be seen at
http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and
www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm.

      And, although elections officials didn't notice these anomalies, in
aggregate they were enough to swing Florida from Kerry to Bush. If you
simply go through the analysis of these counties and reverse the "anomalous"
numbers in those counties that appear to have been hacked, suddenly the
Florida election results resemble the Florida exit poll results: Kerry won,
and won big.

      Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever since
Election Day.

      Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of
the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after
midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was
startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George
W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were
clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically,"
noted the AP report.

      But then the computers reported something different. In several
pivotal states.

      Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were
rigged.

      Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton
campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an
article for The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie in
Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.

      "Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the
two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating
actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and
by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative
turnout of different parts of the state."

      He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was
slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all
of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush
was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."

      Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep,
as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states
the election was called for Bush.

      How could this happen?

      On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago,
Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev
Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her
living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated
(other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in
Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold
Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in
the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines
that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is
sent to a "central tabulator" machine.

      That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.

      "In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television,
"you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling
places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling
places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so
it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do
something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to
do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all
of them at once?"

      Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What
surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you
and I use. It's just a regular computer."

      "So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a
central tabulator?"

      Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program
called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into
the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County
Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them
loaded with Diebold's software.

      Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test
election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and
waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various
precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000
votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.

      "Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted.
Diebold wrote a pretty good program.

      But, it's running on a Windows PC.

      So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the
normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local
Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB"
which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the
votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled
"Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a
database program like Excel.

      In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one
precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.

      "Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the
numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's
give 100 votes to Tiger."

      They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software
"the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the
progress of your election."

      As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said,
"And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has
900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.

      Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an
election, and it took us 90 seconds."

      On live national television. (You can see the clip on
www.votergate.tv.)

      Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had
Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a
landslide.

      Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to
cause people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since the
networks would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry. But the
networks didn't do that, and had never intended to. It makes far more sense
that the exit polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that
the vote itself was hacked.

      And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this
hit him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national office
in the most-hacked swing states.

      So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this
story was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he
noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far
uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other
media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain
how the exit polls had failed.

      But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large
part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final
paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across
the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."

      Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored
Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily
progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann .com His most recent books are "The
Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate
Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take
Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."



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