Was It Hacked? WITH URL

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Fri, 19 Nov 2004 14:55:59 -0500

Subject:Was It Hacked? WITH URL

 

 

 

http://www.orlandoweekly.com/news/Story.asp?ID=4688

 

Was It Hacked?

 

By Alan Waldman

 

Published 11/18/04

 

 

 

Despite mainstream media attempts to kill the

story, talk radio and the Internet are abuzz with

suggestions that John Kerry was elected

president on Nov. 2 – but Republican election

officials made it difficult for millions of Democrats

to vote while employees of four secretive, GOP-

bankrolled corporations rigged electronic voting

machines and then hacked central tabulating

computers to steal the election for George W.

Bush.

The Bush administration's " fix " of the 2000

election debacle (the Help America Vote Act)

made crooked elections considerably easier, by

foisting paperless electronic voting on states

before the bugs had been worked out or

meaningful safeguards could be installed.

Crying foul this time around isn't just the province

of whiny Democrats. Consider that The Wall

Street Journal recently revealed that " Verified

Voting, a group formed by a Stanford University

professor to assess electronic voting, has

collected 31,000 reports of election fraud and

other problems. "

University of Pennsylvania researcher Dr.

Steven Freeman, in his November 2004 paper

" The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy, " says

that the odds that the discrepancies between

predicted [exit poll] results and actual vote

counts in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania could

have been due to chance or random error are

250 million to 1. " Systematic fraud or

mistabulation is a premature conclusion, " writes

Freeman, " but the election's unexplained exit poll

discrepancies make it an unavoidable

hypothesis, one that is the responsibility of the

media, academia, polling agencies, and the

public to investigate. " Unlike Europe, where

citizens count the ballots, in the United States

employees of a highly secretive Republican-

leaning company, ES & S, managed every aspect

of the 2004 election. That included everything

from registering voters, printing ballots and

programming voting machines to tabulating

votes (often with armed guards keeping the

media and members of the public who wished to

witness the count at bay) and reporting the

results, for 60 million voters in 47 states,

according to Christopher Bollyn, writing in

American Free Press. Most other votes were

counted by three other firms that are snugly in

bed with the GOP.

This election is not the first suspicious venture

into electronic voting. In Georgia, in November

2002, Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes led by 11

percent and Democratic Sen. Max Cleland was

in front by 5 percent just before the election – the

first ever conducted entirely on touch-screen

electronic machines, and counted entirely by

company employees, rather than public officials

– but mysterious election-day swings of 16

percent and 12 percent defeated both of these

popular incumbents. In Minnesota, Democrat

Walter Mondale (replacing beloved Sen. Paul

Wellstone, who died in a plane crash), lost in an

amazing last-moment 11 percent vote swing

recorded on electronic machines. Then, in 2003,

what's known as " black box voting " helped

Arnold Schwarzenegger – who had deeply

offended female, Latino and Jewish voters –

defeat a popular Latino Democrat who

substantially led in polls a week before the

election.

A RAT IS SMELLED

Realizing that the 2004 election results are

suspect, many prominent people and groups

have begun to demand action. Recently, six

important Congressmen, including three on the

House Judiciary Committee, asked the U.S.

Comptroller General to investigate the efficacy of

new electronic voting devices.

Black Box Voting – the nonprofit group which

spearheaded much of the pre-election testing

(and subsequent criticism) of electronic

machines that found them hackable in 90

seconds – is filing the largest Freedom of

Information Act inquiry in U.S. history. The

organization's Bev Harris claims, " Fraud took

place in the 2004 election through electronic

voting machines. "

Florida Democratic congressional candidate Jeff

Fisher charged that he has and will show the FBI

evidence that Florida results were hacked; he

also claims to have knowledge of who hacked it

– in 2004 and in the 2002 Democratic primary

(so Jeb Bush would not have to run against the

popular Janet Reno). Fisher also believes that

most Democratic candidates nationwide were

harmed by GOP hacking and other dirty tactics –

particularly in swing states.

The Green and Libertarian Parties, as well as

Ralph Nader, are demanding an Ohio recount,

because of voting fraud, suppression and

disenfranchisement. Recounts are also being

sought in New Hampshire, Nevada and

Washington.

Although the Internet is full of stories of election

fraud, and major media in England, Canada and

elsewhere have investigated the story, you'll find

almost nothing in the major U.S. media. " I have

been told by sources that are fairly high up in the

media – particularly TV – that there is now a

lockdown on this story, " says Harris. " It's officially

'Let's move on' time. " On Nov. 6, Project

Censored Award-winning author Thom

Hartmann said, " So far, the only national

'mainstream' media outlet to come close to this

story was Keith Olbermann, when he noted that

it was curious that all the voting machine

irregularities so far uncovered seemed 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. "

VOTE STEALING 101

Votes collected by electronic machines (and by

optical scan equipment that reads traditional

paper ballots) are sent via modem to a central

tabulating computer, which counts the votes on

Windows software. Therefore, anyone who

knows how to operate an Excel spreadsheet and

who is given access to the central tabulation

machine can, in theory, change election totals.

On a CNBC cable TV program, Black Box Voting

exec Harris showed guest host Howard Dean

how to alter vote totals within 90 seconds, by

entering a two-digit code in a hidden program on

Diebold's election software. Harris declared,

" This is not a 'bug' or accidental oversight; it is

there on purpose. "

A quartet of companies control the U.S. vote

count. Diebold, ES & S, Sequoia and SAIC are all

hard-wired into the Bush campaign and power

structure. Diebold chief Walden O'Dell is a top

Bush fund-raiser. According to " online anarchist

community " Infoshop.org, " At Diebold, the

election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob's

brother, is a top executive at 'rival' ES & S.

The brothers were originally staked by Howard

Ahmanson, a member of the Council For

National Policy, a right-wing steering group

stacked with Bush true believers. Ahmanson is

also one of the bagmen behind the extremist

Christian Reconstruction Movement, which

advocates the theocratic takeover of American

democracy. " Sequoia is owned by a partner

member of the Carlyle Group, which is believed

to have dictated foreign policy in both Bush

administrations and has employed former

President Bush for quite a while.

All early Tuesday indicators predicted a Kerry

landslide. Zogby International (which predicted

the 2000 outcome more accurately than any

national pollster) did exit polling which predicted

a 100-electoral vote triumph for Kerry. He saw

Kerry winning crucial Ohio by 4 percent.

Princeton professor Sam Wang, whose meta-

analysis had shown the election to be close in

the week before the election, began coming up

with dramatic numbers for Kerry in the day

before and day of the election. At noon EST on

Monday, Nov. 1, he predicted a Kerry win by a

108-vote margin.

In the Iowa Electronic Markets, where " investors "

put their money where their mouths are and

wager real moolah on election outcome

" contracts, " Bush led consistently for months

before the election – often by as much as 60

percent to 39 percent. But at 7 p.m. CST on Nov.

2, 76.6 percent of the last hour's traders had

gone to Kerry, with only 20.1 percent plunking

their bucks down on Bush. They knew

something.

As the first election returns came in,

broadcasters were shocked to see that

seemingly safe Bush states like Virginia,

Kentucky and North Carolina were being judged

as " too close to call. " At 7:28 EST, networks

broadcast that both states favored Kerry by 51

percent to 49 percent.

In his research paper, Steven Freeman reports

that exit polls showed Kerry had been elected.

He was leading in nearly every battleground

state, in many cases by sizable margins. But

later, in 10 of 11 battleground states, the tallied

margins differed from the predicted margins –

and in every one the shift favored Bush.

In 10 states where there were verifiable paper

trails – or no electronic machines – the final

results hardly differed from the initial exit polls. In

non-paper-trail states, however, there were

significant differences. Florida saw a shift from

Kerry up by 1 percent in the exit polls to Bush up

by 5 percent at close of voting. In Ohio, Kerry

went from up 3 percent to down 3 percent. Exit

polls also had Kerry winning the national popular

vote by 3 percent.

In close Senate races, changes between the exit

poll results and the final tallies cost Democrats

anticipated seats in Kentucky (a 13 percent

swing to the GOP), Alaska, North Carolina,

Florida, Oklahoma, South Dakota and possibly

Pennsylvania – as well as enough House seats

to retake control of the chamber.

Centre for Research on Globalization's Michael

Keefer states, " The National Election Pool's own

data – as transmitted by CNN on the evening of

November 2 and the morning of November 3 –

suggest very strongly that the results of the exit

polls were themselves fiddled late on November

2 in order to make their numbers conform with

the tabulated vote tallies. "

How do we know the fix was in? Keefer says the

total number of respondents at 9 p.m. was well

over 13,000 and at 1:36 a.m. it had risen less

than 3 percent – to 13,531 total respondents.

Given the small increase in respondents, this 5

percent swing to Bush is mathematically

impossible. In Florida, at 8:40 p.m., exit polls

showed a near dead heat but the final exit poll

update at 1:01 a.m. gave Bush a 4 percent lead.

This swing was mathematically impossible,

because there were only 16 more respondents in

the final tally than in the earlier one.

FLORIDA FIASCO II

Kathy Dopp's eye-opening examination of

Florida's county-by-county record of votes cast

and people registered by party affiliation

(http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm)

suggests systematic and widespread election

fraud in 47 of the state's 67 counties. This did not

occur so much in the touch-screen counties,

where public scrutiny would naturally be focused,

but in counties where optically screened paper

ballots were fed into a central tabulator PC,

which is highly vulnerable to hacking. In these

optical-scan counties, had GOP registrants voted

Republican, Democratic registrants gone for

Kerry and everyone registered showed up to

vote, Bush would have received 1,337,242

votes. Instead, his reported vote total there was

1,950,213! That discrepancy (612,971) is nearly

double Bush's winning margin in the state

(380,952).

Colin Shea of Zogby International analyzed and

double-checked Dopp's figures and confirmed

that optical-scan counties gave Bush 16 percent

more votes than he should have gotten. " This 16

percent would not be strange if it were spread

across counties more or less evenly, " Shea

explains, but it is not. In 11 different counties, the

" actual " Bush tallies were 50-100 percent higher

than expected. In one county, where 88 percent

of voters are registered Democrats, Bush got

nearly two-thirds of the vote – three times more

than predicted by his statistical model.

In 47 Florida counties, the number of presidential

votes exceeded the number of registered voters.

Palm Beach County recorded 90,774 more votes

than voters and Miami-Dade had 51,979 more,

while relatively honest Orange County had only

1,648 more votes than voters. Overall, Florida

reported 237,522 more presidential votes (7.59

million) than citizens who turned out to cast

ballots (7.35 million).

There were thousands of complaints about

Florida voting. Broward County electronic voting

machines counted up to 32,500 and then started

counting backward. This glitch, which existed in

the 2002 election but was never fixed,

overturned the exit-poll-predicted results of a

gambling referendum. In several Florida

counties, early-morning voters reported ballot

boxes that already had an unusually large

quantity of ballots in them. In Florida and five

other states, according to Canada's Globe and

Mail, " the wrong candidate appeared on their

touch-screen machine's checkout screen " after

the person had voted.

Republicans have argued that the Florida

counties with majority Democratic registration

that voted overwhelmingly for Bush were all

conservative " Dixiecrat " bastions in northern

Florida, and that all the reported totals were

accurate. But Olbermann demonstrated that

many of these crossover states voted

Republican for the first time. He poked another

hole in the Dixiecrat theory when he noted that in

Democratic counties where Bush scored big,

people also supported highly Democratic

measures – such as raising the state minimum

wage $1 above the federal level.

Moreover, 18 switchover counties were not in the

Panhandle or near the Georgia border, but were

scattered throughout the state. For instance,

Hardee County (between Bradenton and

Sebring) registered 63.8 percent Democratic but

officially gave Bush 135 percent more votes than

Kerry. WIDESPREAD PROBLEMS

Voters Unite! detailed 303 specific election

problems, including 84 complaints of machine

malfunctions in 22 states, 24 cases of

registration fraud in 14 states, 20 abusive voter

challenge situations in 10 states, U.S. voters in

18 states and Israel experiencing absentee ballot

difficulties, 10 states with provisional ballot woes,

22 cases of malfeasance in 13 states, 10

charges of voter intimidation in seven states,

seven states where votes were suppressed,

seven states witnessing outbreaks of animosity

at the polls, six states suffering from ballot

printing errors and seven instances in four states

where votes were changed on-screen. In

addition, the Voters Unite! website cites four

states with early voting troubles, three states

undergoing ballot programming errors, three

states demonstrating ballot secrecy violations,

bogus ballot fraud in New Mexico and double-

voting for Bush in Texas.

Kerry's victory was predicted by previously

extremely accurate Harris and Zogby exit polls,

by the formerly infallible 50 percent rule (an

incumbent with less than 50 percent in the exit

polls always loses; Bush had 47 percent –

requiring him to capture an improbable 80

percent of the undecideds to win) and by the

Incumbent Rule (undecideds break for the

challenger, as exit polls showed they did by a

large margin this time).

Nor is it credible that the surge in new young

voters (who were witnessed standing in lines for

hours, on campuses nationwide) miraculously

didn't appear in the final totals; that Kerry did

worse than Gore against an opponent who lost

support; and that exit polls were highly accurate

wherever there was a paper trail and grossly

underestimated Bush's appeal wherever there

was no such guarantee of accurate recounts.

Statisticians point out that Bush beat 99 to 1

mathematical odds in winning the election.

Election results are not final until electors vote on

Dec. 12. There is still time to find the truth.

Alan Waldman is an award-winning journalist

who lives in Los Angeles. He voted for John

Kerry and Barbara Boxer.