(go to www.sbprogress.com for the live links to stories associated
with this news item, as well as additional news items on these CRIMES)
The Smoking Gun
Florida's election was an utter sham, and Bush stole the state again
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson, 11/06/04
Imagine that you lived in a county that had 30,000 registered voters,
of whom 10,000 were registered as Democrats, 10,000 as Republicans,
and
10,000 as independents. Suppose you further knew that polls had shown
that 91% of Republicans planned to vote for the Republican, and 88% of
Democrats planned to vote for the Democrat. Among the independents,
60%
planned to vote for the Democrat. (Less than 1% of all voters planned
to vote for third party candidates in this scenario.) We'll pretend
that 100% of these voters actually voted, although in reality, the
turnout would have been closer to 75%.
Given that data, you would expect a fairly sizeable win for the
Democrat. If the polls were accurate (and exit polls are VERY
accurate,
to within one half of one percent of the actual vote totals), then the
Democrat would have gotten 8,800 votes from Democratic voters, about
900
from Republican voters, and 6,000 from independents, giving him 15,700
votes to 14,300 votes for the Republican.
If you looked in your paper the next day and saw that the Republican
won, you might be surprised.. Typically, 7% of voters actually decide
in the last day, which is why polls are sometimes off by up to 3%. But
exit polls interview people who have already decided.
If you learned that the Republican got 22,000 votes and the Democrat
just 8,000, you might be very suspicious.
This is what happened in Florida. It didn't happen in just one county.
It happened in a large number of counties, and the discrepancy between
the vote totals and the voting demographics is far bigger and more
egregious than my fictional example above.
Commondreams collated the numbers, and the results are available at
http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm These collations, in turn,
are based directly on the numbers given by the state of Florida, and
represent 98.6% of the vote total.
Here are some of the examples:
In Baker County, where 69.3% of the voters are registered as
Democratic, Bush supposedly won by a 7,738 to 2,180 margin. For this
to
be possible, Bush would have had to have gotten the votes of every
single Republican and 4,500 of the roughly 7,000 Democrats and
independents.
In Calhoun County, where 82.4% of voters are Democrat, Putsch won the
vote by a 3,780 to 2,116 margin. There are less than a thousand
Republicans in that county.
Bradford County: 61.4% Democrat, Putsch won 7,553 to 3,244.
In Dixie county, roughly 1,500 Republicans were able to deliver 4,433
votes for Putsch. The 7,700 Democrats only had 1,959.
It goes on and on. Florida has a lot of counties, and nearly all of
them show these discrepancies. In all, Democrats came up short by
about
430,000 votes, and the Republicans had 1,023,000 more votes than the
models would have predicted.
Equally interesting was the way in which the discrepancies broke down
between counties using touch screen, and those using optical scanners.
In the touch screen counties, the deviation was 410,491 towards Putsch
and 414,913 away from Kerry. (And there were widespread complaints in
Florida that people who had picked Kerry noticed that the screen
showed
them picking Bush) Among the optical scanners, the deviation was
13,250
from Kerry (and well within the margin of error). However, George
seems
to have picked up an extra 612,971 votes from somewhere. That jibes
with reports that early morning voters had encountered ballot boxes
that
already had a whole bunch of ballots in there. It looks like Putsch
did
quite well in the midnight to 6am vote in Florida.
The deviations are most noticeable in small counties, such as Hardee,
Holmes, Lafayees, and Liberty (where Bush managed to get 712% of his
2000 vote).
The touch screen machines were off by 400,000 from what the models
said
they should have reported, but of course, there's absolutely no way to
check their totals. The ONLY record of the voting is the totals that
the machines gave. No recount is possible, and isn't that a disgrace?
However, it's obvious that in the Optical Scan counties, there was
systematic and widespread ballot box stuffing – over 600,000 votes
cast,
not by Americans selecting a President, but by crooked polling
personnel
and Republican party hacks.
The ballot box stuffing was widespread, and focused on small counties
where, it was assumed, the figures wouldn't be examined very closely.
Does anyone believe that there is a single place in America where
Bush could not only get SEVEN TIMES the number of votes he got in
2000, but get over two-thirds of all the Democratic voters in order to
do so?
Do you believe that's possible? Well, do you?
The official margin of victory for Putsch in Florida was 377,216
votes.
It looks like Diebold alone would have stolen the election for him,
but the Republicans are greedy, stupid, and insecure. They had to
stuff
the ballot boxes in Op-Scan counties with an extra 600,000 ballots.
Write your Congressmen, write your newspapers, pass this along to all
your friends. Make sure the link to Ustogether.org is in there so
people can check it out for themselves.
And if you live in Florida, contact an attorney and push for a revote
in Florida. If you don't want America to be just another third-world
joke, do it right away. Organize, and push for a revote. Even if Kerry
demurs.
If Florida had had an honest vote, Kerry would have had 280 electoral
votes and would be the President-elect today.
--//--
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."
--//--
Dear 9/11 truth activists and concerned citizens,
The following is the most recent update from Bev Harris' organization
in
Seattle -- BlackBoxVoting.Org. BlackBoxVoting.Org is has submitted the
largest Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in history, asking
for
the computer logs from over 3,000 voting machines around the country.
We at the 9/11 Visibility Project believe the evidence for electronic
voting fraud in the 2004 election is more than compelling, and we will
continue to send you periodic updates as the issue develops.
Let the truth come out!
Emanuel Sferios
Webmaster, 9/11 Visibility Project
http://www.septembereleventh.org
-----
>From Bev Harris:
Freedom of Information requests at http://www.blackboxvoting.org have
unearthed two Ciber certification reports indicating that security and
tamperability was NOT TESTED and that several state elections
directors, a
secretary of state, and Dr. Britain Williams signed off on the report
anyway, certifying it.
The documents, posted at Black Box Voting (.ORG) show that Ciber Labs'
Shawn Southworth used a conformance chart specifying FEC regulations,
marking each test item "pass" or "fail."
Southworth "tested" whether every candidate on the ballot has a name.
But
we were shocked to find out that, when asked the most important
question
-- about vulnerable entry points -- Southworth's report says "not
reviewed."
Ciber "tested" whether the manual gives a description of the voting
system. But when asked to identify methods of attack (which we think
the
American voter would consider pretty important), the top-secret report
says "not applicable."
Ciber "tested" whether ballots comply with local regulations, but
when we
asked Shawn Southworth what he thinks about Diebold tabulators
accepting
large numbers of "minus" votes, he said he didn't mention that in his
report because "the vendors don't like him to put anything negative"
in
his report. After all, he said, he is paid by the vendors.
Was this just a one-time oversight?
Nope. It appears to be more like a habit. We also posted the sister
report, for another vendor entirely, VoteHere, and you can see that
the
critical security test, the "penetration analysis" was again
marked "not
applicable" and was not done.
Maybe another ITA did the penetration analysis?
Apparently not. We discovered an even more bizarre Wyle Laboratories
report. In it, the lab admits the Sequoia voting system has problems,
but
says that since they were not corrected earlier, Sequoia could
continue
with the same flaws. At one point the Wyle report omits its testing
altogether, hoping the vendor will do the test.
Computer Guys: Be your own ITA certifier.
Black Box Voting has posted a full Ciber report on GEMS 1.18.15. We
also
posted a .zip file download for the GEMS 1.18.15 program. We also
provided
a real live Diebold vote database. Compare your findings against the
official testing lab and see if you agree with what Ciber says. E-
mail us
your findings.
Who the heck is NASED?
They are the people who certified this stuff. Now, if the security of
the
U.S. electoral system depends on you to certify a voting system, and
you
get a report that says security was "not tested" and "not
applicable" --
what would you do?
Perhaps we should ask them. Go ahead. Hold them accountable for the
election we just had. (Please, e-mail us their answers) Their names
are
listed on the Web site.
Bev Harris
House Dems Seek Election Inquiry
Three congressmen sent a letter to the General Accounting Office on
Friday requesting an investigation into irregularities with voting
machines used in Tuesday's elections. The congressmen, Democratic
members of the House of Representatives from Florida, New York and
Michigan, cited a number of incidents that came to light in the days
after the election. One was a glitch in Ohio that caused a memory
card reader made by Danaher Controls to give George W. Bush 3,893
more votes than he should have received. Another was a problem with
memory cards in North Carolina that caused machines made by UniLect
to lose 4,500 votes cast on e-voting machines. The votes were lost
when the number of votes cast on the machines exceeded the capacity
of the memory cards.
Crooks Though They Are
It does no good to get rid of Bush and his "party". It's the men
behind the scenes, in the military-industrial-business complex that
control the puppets' strings who represent the real danger. We must
strive to rid the nation of the scourge that supports the
politicians. - Gary R. Cook, editor
Democracy in peril
We may be watching the deconstruction of democracy in America. Yes,
you can put me down as an alarmist. The streams of relativism, irony,
ignorance, ridicule, ahistoricism, media fatuity, excessive
lawyering, hyper-partisanship and power-lust have formed a mighty
river of deconstruction that — before our teared eyes — is washing
away, at a frightening pace, 200 years of American self-government.
We fools thought that votes could be fairly counted, that elections
measured and formed the popular will, and that the law was a shield
to protect our elections, not a sword to shred them. We thought we
were most Americans. But others, dangerous strangers, people alien to
our sense of ourselves, have homegrown in our midst. They have
usurped us in our own country. They are Americans by birth, but they
might as well be Martian reptiles for all the moral kinship they have
with us.
Here's the Goddam Proof the Election Was STOLEN AGAIN
Look at these comparisons between Machine Tallies and Exit Polls
between States with No Paper Verification (Electronic Polling) and
States with Verification!
Report- E-voting problems cause loss of votes
Surprising Pattern of Florida's Election Results
EXPECTED votes would normally vary from the ACTUAL votes due to
increased voter turnout or other factors. What seems very odd in
these numbers is that the increase in ACTUAL votes from EXPECTED
votes has a striking pattern of being so much higher for REPs than
that for DEMs in counties using optical scan voting machines.
http://enight.dos.state.fl.us/ and
http://election.dos.state.fl.us/voterreg/index.shtml for registered
voters by county and election results by county
http://vevo.verifiedvoting.org/verifier/ for voting machine type by
county
Statistical Analysis and Visual Charts of the Data
Interesting Graphical Plots of this Data
Statistical Significance & Graph
Pearson's Correlations
Other Election Results Analyzed:
Florida Presidential 2000
Pennsylvania Presidential 2004
An open source election and vote-counting system with voter
verifiable paper ballot and two independently-programmed, always-
reconciled ballot counting system that needs your support.
Outrage in Ohio: Angry Residents Storm State House!
Massive Voter Suppression and Corruption – Democracy Failure
By David Solnit
November 3, Toledo Ohio -- Hundreds of angry Ohio residents marched
through the streets of Columbus, Ohio's Capital, this evening and
stormed
the Ohio State House, defying orders and arrest threats from Ohio
State
Troopers. "O-H-I-O, Suppressed democracy has got to go," they chanted.
After troopers pushed and scuffled with people, nearly a hundred
people
took over the steps and entrance to the State's giant white column
capital
building and refused repeated orders to disperse or face arrest.
People
prepared for arrests, ready to face jail, writing lawyers phone
numbers on
their arms, signing jail support lists and discussing non-cooperation
and
active resistance (linking arms, but not fighting back).
A freshly painted banner held on the steps read, "ONE VOTE DENIED =
DEMOCRACY IN TROUBLE! 100'S OF 1000'S OF VOTES SURPRESSED = DEMOCRACY
FAILED. An unprecedented massive grassroots voter registration and
get out
the vote effort and widespread opposition to Bush went up against the
massive coordinated Republican effort to suppress, intimidate and
possibly
steal millions of votes. In addition to the voter suppression and
intimidation is the fact that Bush campaign co-chair Secretary of
State
Kenneth Blackwell is in charge of the election and vote counting. But
much
deeper questions about fundamental flaws in the system hang in the
air.
STOLEN ELECTION?
CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53
percent
to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51
percent to 49 percent. Investigative reporter Greg Palast in an
article
today details how the deciding states, Ohio and New Mexico, if all
votes
were actually counted, should have gone to Kerry. Palast explains,
"Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards
for
Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. The
election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called
"spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the
vote is
voided, just thrown away, not recorded."
(http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won_.php)
TESTIMONIES OF DISENFRANCHISEMENT
The Ohio State House takeover was the culmination of an eight-hour
long
afternoon of protest at the state capital by Ohio student and youth
groups, including the Columbus and Toledo Leagues of Pissed Off
Voters,
Reach Out--Bowling Green, and the Central Ohio Peace Network. The
earlier
speak-out featured a litany of people who experienced or witnessed
voter
suppression, intimidation and disenfranchisement before and during the
election. Thousand of Ohio voters had been disenfranchised by partisan
poll challengers, intimidation incidents, voters polling places
opening
late, lines up to four and five hours long--often in the rain.
Here are a few of their stories:
Holly Roach of Toledo, Ohio spoke of her 74-year-old father, Frank
Roach
and her 89-year-old grandmother; Hazel Thompson requested absentee1s
ballots in early October. Hazel Thompson is homebound and Frank Roach
has
been scheduled for heart surgery on November 2. Absentee ballots never
arrived. They were told by the County Voting Commission that they
could
not vote with either regular or provisional ballots, because they had
already requested absentee ballots and Secretary of State Kenneth
Blackwell has issued a directive forbidding provisional ballots by
people
who have applied for absentee ballots for them and not received them
(including some US service people who returned from Iraq). A lawsuit
late
in the afternoon of November 2 by a voter in Lucas County led to a
late
afternoon order by Judge David Katz of the Northern District of Ohio
instructing the Ohio Secretary of State to immediately advise all
county
boards of election to advise polling precincts in their counties to
issue
provisional ballots to voters in this situation.
Evan Morrison, a young get out the vote volunteer, told of polls
opening
late. One poll at Glenwood Elementary in Toledo, OH opened more than
half
and hour late.. During that time, from 6:30 to after 7AM, more than 50
people left without having voted. An hour and a half after the polling
site opened, the Republican election official said they had run out of
pencils, bringing voting to a halt. Evan ran to the store and bought a
bunch of number 2 pencils out of his own pocket so voting could
resume.
Voting continued until 11AM, by which time up to 100 more people had
walked away.
Suzie Husami, a University of Toledo student said in a press
conference
that her voter registration challenged by Republicans along with
35,000
other mostly newer registrants. She received a letter from the Board
of
Elections reading NOTICE OF HEARING Pursuant to Ohio Revised Code
Section
3503.24: your registration is being challenged. The reason stated as
the
basis for this challenge is that you are unqualified to vote because
you
are not a resident of the precinct where you can vote. A hearing has
been
set at the above stated place and time. You have the right to appear,
testify and call witnesses and to be represented by an attorney. The
letter was addressed from Paula Hicks-Hudson, Director of the Toledo
Board
of Elections. Although the challenges to her were thrown out in court
the
day before her hearing‹three days before the election, many people who
received such letters were likely discouraged from voting.
Alli Starr, also being a get out the vote volunteer told about how 25
minutes before polls closed in Toledo, Ohio, Republican challengers
were
witnessed harassing voters at the Mott Library, Central City polling
station, a low-income African-American community. Observers said that
they
believed these challengers had repeatedly called the police producing
absurd stories in order to intimidate voters. One of the Republican
challengers was recognized as Dennis Lange, a prominent local business
owner who owns Pumpernickels.[???] Mr. Lange aggressively tried to
push
back African-American community members who were poll watching and
voting
at the site. At one point more than four police and sheriffs officers,
including undercover officers, were witnessed at the site for no
apparent
reason. For a photo go to
http://michiganimc.org/newswire/display/7580/index.php
PRE-ELECTION VOTER SUPPRESSION
But even before election day, the Baltimore Chronicle reported
November 1
that "Through a combination of sophisticated vote rustling, ethnic
cleansing of voter rolls, absentee ballots gone AWOL, machines that
'spoil' votes---John Kerry begins with a nationwide deficit that could
easily exceed one million votes."
Troy, Michigan Republican State Rep. John Pappageorge, a Michigan Bush
campaign Co-Chair, was quoted in July 16 edition of the Detroit Free
Press
as saying, "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to
have a
tough time in this election." Blacks comprise 83 percent of Detroit's
population, and the city routinely elects Democratic candidates by
substantial margins. The British Broadcasting Company has also
disclosed a
memo to top Republican officials in Florida identifying voters in
predominantly black precincts for possible challenge.
The secretaries of state, usually the chief election official at the
state
level, in four battleground states--Michigan, Missouri, Florida, and
Ohio
have all taken top campaign posts for Bush and have been accused of
manipulating state election laws to restrict voter access on behalf of
Republicans. Ultra-right Ohio Secretary of State, J. Kenneth
Blackwell,
the co-chair of the Ohio Bush campaign, together with the Ohio
Republican
Party are at the center of this nationwide effort to steal the
election
through voter suppression, intimidation and corruption. In the months
leading up to the election, Blackwell attempted to require that
registration applications that were not posted on the correct weight
paper
be cancelled. His efforts to suppress the vote have continued.
Blackwell
sought to restrict access to provisional ballots: he challenged of the
validity of over 35,000 new voter registrations in the state (recently
thrown out by a Federal Judge): he issued unclear directives
regarding the
right of ex-felons to vote.
"In state after state, Republican officials and operatives are
working to
deny American citizens the right to vote," charges Wade Henderson,
executive director of Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (the
country1s
largest civil and human-rights coalition). Miles Rapoport, former
Secretary of the State of Connecticut and President of the nonpartisan
public policy organization Demos, says "As the election approaches,
chilling reports continue to surface of major efforts to prevent
people
from voting. Legions of partisan challengers' are being readied for
the
polls on Election Day; Latino registrants in rural Georgia are being
targeted; and tens of thousands of new Ohio registrants have been
challenged. All appear to be organized campaigns. These anti-
democratic
activities must be stopped."
TOUCH-SCREEN VOTING
Additionally, the new touch voting machines being used in 29 states
and
the District of Columbia, have been widely criticized by elections
officials and computer scientists and as susceptible to hacking and
malfunction. Election Data Services, a consulting firm, predicted 29
percent of voters would use touch-screen machines on voting day.
According to the November 3 Globe and Mail, "several dozen voters in
six
states -- particularly Democrats in Florida -- said the wrong
candidates
appeared on their touch-screen machine's checkout screen, the
coalition
said. In many cases, voters said they intended to select John Kerry
but
when the computer asked them to verify the choice it showed them
instead
opting for President Bush, the group said. Roberta Harvey, 57, of
Clearwater, Fla., said she had tried at least a half dozen times to
select
Kerry-Edwards when she voted Tuesday at Northwood Presbyterian Church.
After 10 minutes trying to change her selection, the Pinellas County
resident said she called a poll worker and got a wet-wipe napkin to
clean
the touch screen as well as a pencil so she could use its eraser-end
instead of her finger. Ms. Harvey said it took about 10 attempts to
select
Mr. Kerry before and a summary screen confirmed her intended
selection."
On November 9, 2003, the New York Times reported: "In mid-August,
Walden
W. O'Dell, the chief executive of Diebold Inc., sat down at his
computer
to compose a letter inviting 100 wealthy and politically inclined
friends
to a Republican Party fund-raiser, to be held at his home in a suburb
of
Columbus, Ohio. 'I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral
votes to the president next year,' wrote Mr. O'Dell, whose company is
based in Canton, Ohio. That is hardly unusual for Mr. O'Dell. A
longtime
Republican, he is a member of President Bush's 'Rangers and
Pioneers,' an
elite group of loyalists who have raised at least $100,000 each for
the
2004 race. But it is not the only way that Mr. O'Dell is involved in
the
election process. Through Diebold Election Systems, a subsidiary in
McKinney, Tex., his company is among the country's biggest suppliers
of
paperless, touch-screen voting machines. Judging from Federal Election
Commission data, at least 8 million people will cast their ballots
using
Diebold machines next November. ... Some people find Mr. O'Dell's
pairing
of interests -- as voting-machine magnate and devoted Republican
fund-raiser -- troubling."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/business/yourmoney/09vote.htm
*Co-founder of the Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections, Susan
Truitt
said today: "Seven counties in Ohio have electronic voting machines
and
none of them have paper trails. That alone raises issues of accuracy
and
integrity as to how we can verify the count. A recount without a paper
trail is meaningless; you just get a regurgitation of the data. Last
year,
Blackwell tried to get the entire state to buy new machines without a
paper trail. The exit polls, virtually the only check we have against
tampering with a vote without a paper trail, had shown Kerry with a
lead.
... A poll worker told me this morning that there were no tapes of the
results posted on some machines; on other machines the posted count
was
zero, which obviously shouldn't be the case."
NATIONWIDE RESPONSE
Across Ohio other demonstrations were held in Toledo, Cleveland,
Oxford,
Athens and Cincinnati. Across the United States on both elections
night
and November 3 people erupted in protest‹some involving 10001s of
people--
with marches, direct actions, civil disobedience, vigils, breaking of
bank
windows in San Francisco and rallies were held in at least 40 cites
and
likely many, many more. Many of the outreach flyers for November 3
actions
were headlined, "NOV 2: VOTE! NOV 3: MAKE IT COUNT!"
Most of the actions planned by groups were planned to take place
regardless of the election outcome and were focussed more on the
deeper
issues of democracy not empire, healthcare, not warfare and education
not
occupation.
The day of action was initially called for by the Beyond Voting
network,
whose call for actions read in part, "When your government has troops
stationed around the world, lets big corporations write the rules of
the
global economy and pushes racist policies that promote fear,
undermines
civil liberties, and rips off working people, you are living in an
EMPIRE!
Empire is as system of global control that combines international
aggression with domestic repression to create a deeply undemocratic
world.
REAL DEMOCRACY means we the people have direct control over the
decisions
and resources that matter in our lives. Real democracy means that we
make
the decisions that impact our neighborhoods, workplaces, schools and
the
state of the world we hand off to our children. This year the world is
counting on us to expand the election year debate beyond Democrats
versus
Republicans to the larger issue of whether the U.S. will be a
Democracy or
an Empire."
Two other networks, This Time We Are Watching (a project of the
League of
Pissed Off Voters, the Truthforce Training Center and the Ruckus
Society
with many other groups) and No Stolen Elections (Global Exhange, Code
Pink, United for Peace and Justice,labor organizers and others) had
also
begun to prepare a people power response for November 3. No Stolen
Elections publicized a pledge of action to stop a stolen election,
but on
election night they chose not to call on people to take to the
streets.
The Election Protection Coalition an umbrella group of volunteer poll
monitors that set up a hotline and planned to monitor and make public
voting irregularities. They may have missed one opportunity to make a
difference when Ralph G. Neas, president of the People for the
American
Way which helped form the coalition, said to the media,"Overall, the
problems of outright voter intimidation and suppression have not been
as
great as in the past."
The massive grassroots participation and activism -- the highest
levels of
activism since before the Iraq invasion-- are hopeful. But electoral
work
and single-issue campaigns without a broader systemic analysis are a
recipe for disappointment or failure. Moveon.org has reportedly not
returned press calls for two days after the election, perhaps because
they
had naively thrown all their hopes with Kerry and lacked a deeper
vision
or longer-term strategy.
The League of Pissed Off Voters was one of the most hopeful efforts
within
the massive grassroots efforts to unelect Bush. Catalyzing activism
around
the election among youth, especialy youth of color, they had a vision
of
building power and organization beyond the elections using creative
tactics and rooting themselves in hip hop and youth culture. Other
local
grassroots efforts like Ithaca, New York1s Bush Must Go Coalition,
used
the energy of anti-Bush election build their organization and
campaigns
that started before and will continue after the election and after
Bush is
gone. http://indyvoter.org
Let's be honest. Kerry would have been an improvement to Bush and
sent a
much better signal to the world, but he is more reactionary than
Nixon; a
pro-war, pro-corporate capitalism millionaire who wants a more
multi-lateral approach to wars and U.S. empire building. It1s also an
important to remember what makes deeper changes in the world is
movements
and communities and people power, not politicians. And if we step
back and
look at things globally, Bush and his gang are fringe extremists whose
empire is overextended, and lacks any global legitimacy. While we are
part
of a global majority, an ever growing movement of movements that is
creating common sense alternatives that will undermine the empire from
below.
*Quote from the Institute for Public Accuracy
http://accuracy.org
-----
David Solnit volunteered with the Mobilization for Democracy Not
Disenfranchisement and local anti-bush groups in NW Ohio in late
October/early November and is the editor of Globalize Liberation: How
to
Uproot the System and Build a Better World
http://www.globalizeliberation.org
Ohio Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Votes
COLUMBUS, Ohio - An error with an electronic voting system gave
President Bush (news - web sites) 3,893 extra votes in suburban
Columbus, elections officials said. Franklin County's unofficial
results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260
votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast
ballots in that precinct. Bush's total should have been recorded as
365. Franklin is the only Ohio county to use Danaher Controls Inc.'s
ELECTronic 1242, an older-style touch-screen voting system. Danaher
did not immediately return a message for comment. Sean Greene,
research director with the nonpartisan Election Reform Information
Project, said that while the glitch appeared minor "that could change
if more of these stories start coming out."
SNAP OUT OF IT!
by Michael C. Ruppert
The Day to Forget the November 2nd Election Forever is November 3rd
The Rest of the World Fights the Empire With Money - What We Should
Have Been Doing Here All Along. Now is the Time to Attack on the
Fronts Where We Have Real Power
Read this free story and other articles here:
FromTheWilderness.com
--//--
Still Missing the Big Picture About This Election
This is not about Republicans or Democrats.
This is not about the war.
This is not about the economy.
This is not even about counting the votes.
This is the final step in the 20-year creeping coup by the theocrats,
the Dominionists.
In the House and the Senate, the theocrats made dramatic advances,
far beyond the number of seats that switched parties. On the GOP
side, they have replaced moderates with zealots, and have
significantly strengthened the support for the main theocrat bills
that will be reintroduced in the new Congress.
You can hear it in the media's codewords: this election did NOT turn
on Iraq or the economy or security, it turned on "moral values", the
politically correct code-word for theocratic values, i.e., placing
one's religion above the laws of man. Exit polls show that "moral
values" were the most common #1 concern among voters, and that among
those who marked "moral values" as their primary concern, 80% voted
for Bush. Every state that had a same-sex marriage ban up for
decision voted the theocrat way.
Click here for the rest of the story
Nov. 4, 2004 - 8:30 PM
Wake up, America!
Thus, the election is already over, even though I personally think
that Kerry won, not only Ohio, but states like Florida, and may even
have won the popular vote, so deep is the fraud, led by the
electronic voting machines--not just those people actually use to
vote, but far more significantly those used to tally the votes,
carefully placed in key districts, carefully managed behind the
scenes, vote totals manipulated with no way for an audit or
verification.
--//--
CONSUMER PROTECTION FOR ELECTIONS
THURSDAY Nov. 4 2004: If you are concerned about what happened
Tuesday, Nov. 2, you have found a home with our organization. Help
America Audit.
Black Box Voting has taken the position that fraud took place in the
2004 election through electronic voting machines. We base this on
hard evidence, documents obtained in public records requests, inside
information, and other data indicative of manipulation of electronic
voting systems. What we do not know is the specific scope of the
fraud. We are working now to compile the proof, based not on soft
evidence -- red flags, exit polls -- but core documents obtained by
Black Box Voting in the most massive Freedom of Information action in
history.
We need: Lawyers to enforce public records laws. Some counties have
already notified us that they plan to stonewall by delaying delivery
of the records. We need citizen volunteers for a number of specific
actions. We need computer security professionals willing to GO PUBLIC
with formal opinions on the evidence we provide, whether or not it
involves DMCA complications. We need funds to pay for copies of the
evidence.
TUESDAY Nov 2 2004: BREAKING NEWS: New information indicates that
hackers may have targeted the central computers that are counting our
votes.
Media calls: 206-335-7747 (congestion) - 206-778-0524 E-mail
Freedom of Information requests are not free. We need to raise
$50,000 as quickly as possible to pay for records and the fees some
states charge for them. We launched one major FOIA action last night,
and have two more on the way, pell-mell. Now is the time. If you
can't donate funds, please donate time. E-mail to join the Cleanup
Crew.
Important: Watch this 30-minute film clip