[IMC-US] Please publish these results - thanks

[Tribal Scribal]

this is the piece i posted on the list last night. perhaps we should feature 
Hartman's commentary just as we did Palast's 'cuz the former addresses FLA 
which Palast did not.

d.o.


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"I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as 
necessary in the political world as storms in the physical world."

- Thomas Jefferson
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more rebellion here:
http://concertobi.blogspot.com/

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>From: "Nancy Oden" <cleanearth at acadia.net>
>Reply-To: "Working Group for IMC-US." <imc-us at lists.cu.groogroo.com>
>To: "Todd Benoit" <tbenoit at bangordailynews.net>,"Jeff Tuttle" 
><Jtuttle at bangordailynews.net>, <imc-us at indymedia.org>
>Subject: [IMC-US] Please publish these results - thanks
>Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2004 20:24:36 -0500
>
>       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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