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Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked (actual State of Florida results )

 

Published on Saturday, November 6, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

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)

http://election.dos.state.fl.us/pdf/canvassing1.pdf

 

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

 

http://election.dos.state.fl.us/voterreg/pdf/2004/2004pppParty.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. "

...............................

 

If you are interested in more about the stolen election, check out these

links, especially

http://blackboxvoting.org/ Black Box Voting - Bev Harris - one of the

leading groups doing voting machine investigations. A nonpartisan, nonprofit,

cons.. If you agree that an investigation is needed, please share the

infromation

and act. Research as soon as possible as some sites are going down when they

post " sensitive " infromation.

 

 

 

http://blackboxvoting.org/

 

http://www.linkcrusader.com/

 

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/3/52213/1921

 

 

http://inn.globalfreepress.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=980

 

 

http://www.votersunite.org/electionproblems.asp

 

 

http://www.legitgov.org/pressrelease_stolen_election_2004_110404.html

 

 

http://www.senderberl.com/

 

 

http://www.opednews.com/kall_110404_outrage.htm

 

 

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/stolennation.html

 

 

http://www.gregpalast.com/

 

 

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1104-38.htm

 

http://votefraud.org/

 

AP Wire | 07/16/2004 | State's top election official pulls plug on electronic

voting machines:

 

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/9172801.htm?1c