[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked

[Alfred Kagan]

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>>Let the conspiracy theories begin:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>   Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked
>>   By Thom Hartmann
>>   CommonDreams.org
>>
>>   Saturday 06 November 2004
>>
>>   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 some believe 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.
>>
>>   While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to
>>produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios
>>largely
>>matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from
>>optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and
>>thus
>>vulnerable to hacking - the results seem to contain substantial
>>anomalies.
>>
>>   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 counties
>>where
>>optical scanners were used. 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 touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been
>>more
>>vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered
>>Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had
>>earlier reported that county size was a variable - this turns out not to
>>be
>>the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)
>>
>>   More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://us
>>together.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and
>>www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm. Note the trend line - the
>>only
>>variable that determines a swing toward Bush was the use of optical scan
>>machines.
>>
>>   One possible explanation for this is the "Dixiecrat" theory, that in
>>Florida white voters (particularly the rural ones) have been registered
>>as
>>Democrats for years, but voting Republican since Reagan. Looking at the
>>2000
>>statistics, also available on Dopp's site, there are similar anomalies,
>>although the trends are not as strong as in 2004. But some suggest the
>>2000
>>election may have been questionable in Florida, too.
>>
>>   One of the people involved in Dopp's analysis noted that it may be
>>possible to determine the validity of the "rural Democrat" theory by
>>comparing Florida's white rural counties to those of Pennsylvania,
>>another
>>swing state but one that went for Kerry, as the exit polls there
>>predicted.
>>Interestingly, the Pennsylvania analysis, available at
>>http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm, doesn't show the same
>>kind of swings as does Florida, lending credence to the possibility of
>>problems in Florida.
>>
>>   Even more significantly, Dopp had first run the analysis while
>>filtering
>>out smaller (rural) counties, and still found that the only variable
>>that
>>accounted for a swing toward Republican voting was the use of
>>optical-scan
>>machines, whereas counties with touch-screen machines generally didn't
>>swing
>>- regardless of size.
>>
>>   Others offer similar insights, based on other data. A professor at the
>>University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in Florida the vote to
>>raise the minimum wage was approved by 72%, although Kerry got 48%. "The
>>correlation between voting for the minimum wage increase and voting for
>>Kerry isn't likely to be perfect," he noted, "but one would normally
>>expect
>>that the gap - of 1.5 million votes - to be far smaller than it was."
>>
>>   While all of this may or may not be evidence of vote tampering, it
>>again
>>brings the nation back to the question of why several states using
>>electronic voting machines or scanners programmed by private, for-profit
>>corporations and often connected to modems produced votes inconsistent
>>with
>>exit poll numbers.
>>
>>   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.)
>>And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said, noting that it
>>would be
>>nearly impossible for the election software - or a County election
>>official
>>- to know that the vote database had been altered.
>>
>>   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.
>>
>>   According to congressional candidate Fisher, 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," "We The People: A Call To Take Back
>>America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."
>>
>>   -------
>>
>>
>>
>>
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-- 


Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
Africana Unit, Room 328
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801, USA

tel. 217-333-6519
fax. 217-333-2214
e-mail. akagan at uiuc.edu