(N.Z.) Sludge Report #154 - US election fraud scandal looms?

[Guest guest]

" Arlene Montemarano " <mikarl

Fri, 19 May 2006 07:50:00 -0400

NEW ZEALAND- US ELECTION SYSTEM HAS BEEN COMPROMISED- MORE

BELIEVEABLE THAN EVER

 

 

 

 

 

US Election Fraud Scandal Looms?

Now a New Zealand political activist has published suspicions, along

with supporting evidence, that electronic voting in the US is being

manipulated by right-wing politicians with the connivance of several

voting machine manufacturers. The story revolves around some highly

volatile conjectures and might be explosive, if fully investigated.

 

 

 

 

 

US election fraud scandal looms?

 

Explosive conjectures and evidence

 

By Egan Orion: Wednesday 09 July 2003, 07:03

 

STEALING ELECTIONS is a sordid tradition in the United States, though

it's certainly not unknown in some other countries, as well.

 

From Tammany Hall's machine politics in the 19th century through Mayor

Daley's grasp on Chicago elections, right up to Lyndon Johnson's first

election and John Kennedy's 1960 cliff-hanger defeat of Richard Nixon,

many US elections have been thought to have had " irregularities " .

 

So much so that it's not really certain where " Vote early, and often! "

originated, whether in Boston, New York, or Chicago. It is also well

known that many lesser US cities had political corruption, including

rampant election fraud, at one time or another in their histories.

 

Now a New Zealand political activist has published suspicions, along

with supporting evidence, that electronic voting in the US is being

manipulated by right-wing politicians with the connivance of several

voting machine manufacturers. The story revolves around some highly

volatile conjectures and might be explosive, if fully investigated.

 

The article is reprinted below with permission, lightly edited merely

for formatting, minor typos and a minor fact (G.W. Bush isn't a Jr.).

 

Here at the INQUIRER, we can't help but notice that the highly, er...

accommodating database software that drives these allegedly dodgy and

easily tampered electronic voting machines is... Microsoft Access.

 

And we're trying to decide on a catchy term that ends in " gate " .

 

 

 

 

www.scoop.co.nz

 

Sludge Report #154

 

Bigger Than Watergate!

 

The story you are about to read is in this writer's view the biggest

political scandal in American history, if not global history. And it

is being broken today here in New Zealand.

 

This story cuts to the bone the machinery of democracy in America

today. Democracy is the only protection we have against despotic and

arbitrary government, and this story is deeply disturbing.

 

Imagine if you will that you are a political interest group that

wishes to control forevermore the levers of power. Imagine further

that you know you are likely to implement a highly unpopular political

agenda, and you do not wish to be removed by a ballot driven backlash.

 

One way to accomplish this outcome would be to adopt the Mugabe

(Zimbabwe) or Hun Sen (Cambodia) approach. You agree to hold

elections, but simultaneously arrest, imprison and beat your opponents

and their supporters. You stuff ballot boxes, disenfranchise voters

who are unlikely to vote for you, distort electoral boundaries and

provide insufficient polling stations in areas full of opposition

supporters.

 

However as so many despots have discovered, eventually such techniques

always fail – often violently. Hence, if you are a truly ambitious

political dynasty you have to be a bit more subtle about your methods.

 

Imagine then if it were possible to somehow subvert the voting process

itself in such a way that you could steal elections without anybody

knowing.

 

Imagine for example if you could:

 

- secure control of the companies that make the voting machines and

vote counting software;

- centralise vote counting systems, and politicise their supervision;

- legislate for the adoption of such systems throughout your domain,

and provide large amounts of money for the purchase of these systems;

- establish systems of vote counting that effectively prevent anybody

on the ground in the election – at a booth or precinct level - from

seeing what is happening at a micro-level;

- get all the major media to sign up to a single exit-polling system

that you also control – removing the risk of exit-polling showing up

your shenanigans.

 

And imagine further that you:

 

- install a backdoor, or numerous backdoors, in the vote counting

systems you have built that enable you to manipulate the tabulation of

results in real time as they are coming in.

 

Such a system would enable you to intervene in precisely the minimum

number of races necessary to ensure that you won a majority on

election night. On the basis of polling you could pick your marginal

seats and thus keep your tweaking to a bare minimum.

 

Such a system would enable you to minimise the risks of discovery of

your activities.

 

Such a system would enable you to target and remove individual

political opponents who were too successful, too popular or too

inquisitive.

 

And most importantly of all, such a system would enable you to

accomplish all the above without the public being in the least aware

of what you were doing. When confronted with the awfulness of your

programme they would be forced to concede that at least it is the

result of a democratic process.

 

How To Rig An Election In The United States

 

So how would such a system actually work?

 

Well one way to run such a corrupt electoral system might look like this.

 

- Each voting precinct (or booth) could be fitted with electronic

voting systems, optical scanning systems, punch card voting systems or

the more modern touchscreen electronic voting machines;

 

- At the close of play each day the booth/precinct supervisor could be

under instructions to compile an electronic record of the votes cast

in their booth;

 

- They might print out a report that contains only the details of the

total votes count for that precinct/booth, and then file via modem the

full electronic record of votes through to the County supervisor;

 

- The County Supervisor could be equipped with a special piece of

software and a bank of modems that enables all these results to be

received and tabulated in the internals of the computer;

 

- The County Supervisors themselves could be assured that their system

was bullet proof, certified and contained tamper-protection mechanisms

par excellence;

 

- The Country Supervisor could be given a range of tools for looking

at the data within this software, but nothing to enable them to

directly manipulate the results;

 

- But unbeknownst to the County Supervisor the software could actually

create three separate records of the voting data;

 

- Meanwhile - also unbeknownst to the County Supervisor - these three

tables of voting data could be in fact completely insecure and

accessible simply through a common database programme, say Microsoft

Access;

 

- Having the three tables would enable you to keep the real data in

place – so the system could pass spot tests on individual precincts

and booth results (should a precinct supervisor be particularly

astute) - while simultaneously enabling you to manipulate the bottom

line result;

 

- Finally you might also enhance the election hacker's powers by

including within the software a utility to enable them to cover their

tracks by changing the date and time stamps on files and remove

evidence of your tampering.

 

Fantasy Becomes Reality

 

The above description of a corrupt voting system is not the result of

an overactive imagination. Rather it is the result of extensive

research by computer programmers and journalists working around the

globe. Principally it is the work of investigative Journalist Bev

Harris, author of the soon to be published book " Black Box Voting:

Ballot Tampering In The 21st Century " .

 

And most important of all it is the result of research focussed on

investigating the actual software distributed by one of the largest

voting systems companies operating in the recent U.S. Elections.

 

CAVEAT: It is important to note that the research into this subject

has not established that the files we have been working on were in

fact in situ in County Election Supervisors offices at the last

election – nor have we proof that the back door we have discovered -

which might enable the rigging of elections - was actually used in any

recent election. However it is the considered opinion of all those

involved in this investigation that it is not up to us as journalists

or programmers to prove that elections were rigged, rather it is a

responsibility of the electoral system itself to prove its integrity.

 

What you read here amounts to revelation of evidence of motive,

opportunity, method, prior conduct, and a variety of items of

consistent unexplained circumstantial evidence. Significantly we do

not believe we have sufficient resources to complete this

investigation to its conclusion and are therefore making available our

findings to the media, community organisations, political parties,

computer scientists and geeks in the anticipation that they will pick

up the torch and take extend this inquiry into every county in the

United States.

 

How We Discovered The Backdoor

 

The story of how this story emerged is a great tale in itself, most of

which has already been told in this report by Bev Harris.

 

SYSTEM INTEGRITY FLAW DISCOVERED AT DIEBOLD ELECTION SYSTEMS

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0302/S00052.htm

 

The short version of the story is relatively simple.

 

In the course of investigating the issue of the integrity of new

electronic voting machines Bev Harris learned that people around the

world had been downloading from an open FTP site belonging to Diebold

Election Systems one of the leading manufactures of voting systems.

 

This website contained several gigabytes of files including manuals,

source codes and installation versions of numerous parts of the

Diebold voting system, and of its vote counting programme GEMS.

 

Realising we had stumbled across what might be the equivalent of the

Pentagon Papers for elections, the full contents of this website have

been secured around the world at several locations. The original

website was itself taken down on January 29th 2003.

 

We can now reveal for the first time the location of a complete online

copy of the original data set. As we anticipate attempts to prevent

the distribution of this information we encourage supporters of

democracy to make copies of these files and to make them available on

websites and file sharing networks.

 

http://users.actrix.co.nz/dolly/

 

As many of the files are zip password protected you may need some

assistance in opening them, we have found that the utility available

at the following URL works well:

 

http://www.lostpassword.com

 

Finally some of the zip files are partially damaged, but these too can

be read by using the utility at:

 

http://www.zip-repair.com/

 

At this stage in this inquiry we do not believe that we have come even

remotely close to investigating all aspects of this data. I.E. There

is no reason to believe that the security flaws discovered so far are

the only ones.

 

Therefore we expect many more discoveries to be made. We want the

assistance of the online computing community in this enterprise and we

encourage you to file your findings at the forum HERE

 

Finally, for obvious reasons it is important that this information is

distributed as widely as possible as quickly as possible. We encourage

all web bloggers, web publishers and web media to re-publish and link

to this article and to its companion article by Bev Harris which

contains detailed descriptions of how to use the GEMS software to rig

an election.

 

To conclude this overview article I will make a few more comments on

the evidence we have thus far that the U.S. election system has been

compromised. As stated earlier we do not at this stage have proof that

it has in fact been been compromised through this method, just a great

deal of circumstantial evidence that it could have been.

 

If this was Watergate, we are effectively at the point of discovering

evidence of a break-in and have received the call from deep-throat

telling us that should dig much deeper.

 

Proof will follow in time we expect, but only if the work we have

begun is completed and this inquiry is taken into every corner of the

U.S. electoral system.

 

Evidence Of Motive

 

This is probably the easiest part of this puzzle to get your head

around. The motivation of the Republican Party in general and the

current administration in particular to gain ever greater amounts of

power - by whatever means possible and damn the consequences - is

evidenced most recently in the Supreme Court's partisan appointment of

George [W.] Bush [...] as President, the attempt to recall California

Governor Gray Davis, and the Ken Starr investigation and attempted

impeachment of President Clinton.

 

Evidence Of Opportunity

 

Republican connected control over the major election systems companies

in the United States has been thoroughly researched.

 

Bob Urosevich, CEO of Diebold Election Systems is also the founder of

ES & S, a competing voting machine company. Together these two companies

are responsible for tallying around 80% of votes cast in the United

States. Also significant, from what we can determine about the

architecture of the software, is that its basic structure was

specifically a creation of Mr Urosevich's company I-Mark. For more

background on Diebold Systems connections to the Republican Party see:

 

Diebold - The Face Of Modern Ballot Tampering

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0211/S00081.htm

 

Meanwhile Presidential wannabee and Republican Party United States

Senator Chuck Hagel has been directly connected to ES & S via his

campaign finance director, Michael McCarthy, who has admitted that

Senator Hagel still owns a beneficial interest in the ES & S parent

company, the McCarthy Group.

 

Senate Ethics Director Resigns; Senator Hagel Admits Owning Voting

Machine Company

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0301/S00166.htm

 

Evidence Of Method

 

The evidence of method has been detailed in a companion article by Bev

Harris, author of the soon to be published block-buster Black Box Voting.

 

Inside A U.S. Election Vote Counting Program

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00065.htm

 

In this article – which contains screenshots from the software and

detailed instructions on how one might rig an election - Bev Harris

explains security flaws thus:

 

" The GEMS election file contains more than one " set of books. " They

are hidden from the person running the GEMS program, but you can see

them if you go into Microsoft Access.

 

" You might look at it like this: Suppose you have votes on paper

ballots, and you pile all the paper ballots in room one. Then, you

make a copy of all the ballots and put the stack of copies in room 2.

 

" You then leave the door open to room 2, so that people can come in

and out, replacing some of the votes in the stack with their own.

 

" You could have some sort of security device that would tell you if

any of the copies of votes in room 2 have been changed, but you opt

not to.

 

" Now, suppose you want to count the votes. Should you count them from

room 1 (original votes)? Or should you count them from room 2, where

they may or may not be the same as room 1? What Diebold chose to do in

the files we examined was to count the votes from " room 2. " "

 

Evidence Of Prior Conduct

 

It is a recorded fact that every system of balloting established in

America has been gamed and rigged. I.E. America's political

practitioners have a very long history of ballot rigging and vote

tampering. This is nothing new and evidence of the sort we have

uncovered has been long predicted by computer scientists such as Dr

Rebecca Mercuri.

 

In more recent history investigative Journalist Greg Palast has

documented in detail Katherine Harris's use of electronic data

matching technologies to disenfranchise thousands of Florida voters in

advance of the 2000 Presidential election.

 

We highly recommend readers purchase a copy of " The Best Democracy

Money Can Buy " by Greg Palast to read much more about this.

 

A compendium of links on Palast's investigations can be found via a

Google search on: " greg palast florida katherine harris " .

 

Consistent Unexplained Circumstantial Evidence

 

During the 2002 Mid-term there were numerous reports of unusual

happenings in counties throughout the United States.

 

Among the phenomena reported were voting numbers suddenly fluctuating

in the middle of the counting process, something you might expect to

see if the backdoor identified above were used clumsily.

 

An organisation called Votewatch was set up during the 2002 elections

to record unusual happenings and its archives can be viewed here.

 

http://pub103.ezboard.com/bsoldiervoice

 

It will suffice here to cite a couple of specific examples – these are

excerpts from the soon to be published " Black Box Voting: Ballot

Tampering In The 21st Century " . These examples of actual events are

consistent with the existence and use of an electronic vote counting

hack described above.

 

November 1990, Seattle, Washington - Worse than the butterfly ballot,

some Democratic candidates watched votes alight, then flutter away.

Democrat Al Williams saw 90 votes wander off his tally between

election night and the following day, though no new counting had been

done. At the same time, his opponent, Republican Tom Tangen, gained 32

votes. At one point several hundred ballots added to returns didn't

result in any increase in the number of votes. But elsewhere, the

number of votes added exceeded the number of additional ballots

counted. A Republican candidate achieved an amazing surge in his

absentee percentage for no apparent reason. And no one seemed to

notice (until a determined Democratic candidate started demanding an

answer) that the machines simply forgot to count 14,000 votes.

 

November 1996, Bergen County, New Jersey - Democrats told Bergen

County Clerk Kathleen Donovan to come up with a better explanation for

mysterious swings in vote totals. Donovan blamed voting computers for

conflicting tallies that rose and fell by 8,000 or 9,000 votes. The

swings perplexed candidates of both parties. For example, the

Republican incumbent, Anthony Cassano, had won by about 7,000 votes as

of the day after the election but his lead evaporated later. One

candidate actually lost 1,600 votes during the counting. " How could

something like that possibly happen? " asked Michael Guarino, Cassano's

Democratic challenger. " Something is screwed up here. "

 

November 1999, Onondaga County, New York - Computers gave the election

to the wrong candidate, then gave it back. Bob Faulkner, a political

newcomer, went to bed on Election Night confident he had helped

complete a Republican sweep of three open council seats. But after

Onondaga County Board of Elections staffers rechecked the totals,

Faulkner had lost to Democratic incumbent Elaine Lytel.

 

April 2002, Johnson County, Kansas - Johnson County's new Diebold

touch screen machines, proclaimed a success on election night, did not

work as well as originally believed. Incorrect vote totals were

discovered in six races, three of them contested, leaving county

election officials scrambling to make sure the unofficial results were

accurate. Johnson County Election Commissioner Connie Schmidt checked

the machines and found that the computers had under- and over-reported

hundreds of votes. " The machines performed terrifically, " said Bob

Urosevich, CEO of Diebold Election Systems. " The anomaly showed up on

the reporting part. "

 

The problem, however, was so perplexing that Schmidt asked the Board

of Canvassers to order a hand re-count to make sure the results were

accurate. Unfortunately, the touch screen machines did away with the

ballots, so the only way to do a hand recount is to have the machine

print its internal data page by page. Diebold tried to re-create the

error in hopes of correcting it. " I wish I had an answer, " Urosevich

said. In some cases, vote totals changed dramatically.

 

November 2002, Comal County, Texas - A Texas-sized lack of curiosity

about discrepancies: The uncanny coincidence of three winning

Republican candidates in a row tallying up exactly 18,181 votes each

was called weird, but apparently no one thought it was weird enough to

audit. Conversion to alphabet: 18181 18181 18181 ahaha ahaha ahaha.

 

November 2002, Baldwin County, Alabama - No one at the voting machine

company can explain the mystery votes that changed after polling

places had closed, flipping the election from the Democratic winner to

a Republican in the Alabama governor's race. " Something happened. I

don't have enough intelligence to say exactly what, " said Mark Kelley

of ES & S. Baldwin County results showed that Democrat Don Siegelman

earned enough votes to win the state of Alabama. All the observers

went home. The next morning, however, 6,300 of Siegelman's votes

inexplicably had disappeared, and the election was handed to

Republican Bob Riley. A recount was requested, but denied.

 

November 2002, New York - Voting machine tallies impounded in New

York: Software programming errors hampered and confused the vote tally

on election night and most of the next day, causing elections

officials to pull the plug on the vote-reporting Web site.

Commissioners ordered that the voting machine tallies be impounded,

and they were guarded overnight by a Monroe County deputy sheriff.

 

November 2002, Georgia - Election officials lost their memory: Fulton

County election officials said that memory cards from 67 electronic

voting machines had been misplaced, so ballots cast on those machines

were left out of previously announced vote totals. No hand count can

shine any light on this; the entire state of Georgia went to

touch-screen machines with no physical record of the vote. Fifty-six

cards, containing 2,180 ballots, were located, but 11 memory cards

still were missing two days after the election: Bibb County and Glynn

County each had one card missing after the initial vote count. When

DeKalb County election officials went home early Wednesday morning,

they were missing 10 cards.

 

Anti©opyright Sludge 2003