please pass this along:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1106-30.htm
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. 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.
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 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," "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."
On 11/5/04 2:11 PM, "Shaw, Dan" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I think Bush did run a superior campaign. Unlike Bill Clinton, whose folks
> were good at damage control, Kerry's forces let the swift boat ads take hold
> before doing much about them. Further, they did not stress the class warfare
> theme enough, nor did Kerry distinguish his attitude towards Iraq from the
> President's.
>
> But for me, the key moments were at the end of the third debate, when both men
> were asked about their families and their faith. Bush came off as a loving
> husband and father, and as a sincere man of faith. Kerry made a joke about
> marrying above himself, and botched any attempt at devout catholicism.
>
> Kerry the Democrat lost the Catholic vote for the first time in a long time.
> It may have something to do with the fct that he has the charisma of a carrot.
> It makes one long for Al Gore, who actually won the popular vote.
>
>
> "For beauty is the beginning of terror we are still able to bear, and why we
> love it so is because it so serenely disdains to destroy us" Rilke's First
> Duino Elegy
>
> Daniel Shaw
> website: www.lhup.edu/dshaw
>
>
>
>
> *
> *
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