Do the names Ferdinand Nahimana, Jean-Bosco
Barayagwiza and Hassan Ngeze mean anything to you?
They are the three Rwandan media executives convicted
of war crimes for inciting the Hutu to commit genocide
against the Tutsi in 1994. Perhaps someday, when the
truth about Iraq and 9/11 is understood, the
executives of the major network and cable news
organizations will be held accountable…if not at the
Hague for the war crimes in which they are surely
complicit, then at least in the court of US public
opinion for the abdication of their responsibility to
speak truth to power about massive vote fraud and
suppression in 2000 and 2004, as well as the gutting
of the US federal surplus for two reckless, unfair tax
cuts, the prostitution of the EPA, the denial of
science on global warming and stem cell research,
Medifraud, Enron, the phony “California Energy
Crisis,” and most importantly, the utter destruction
of the Middle East peace process, the cover-up of
their pre-9/11 negligence and post-9/11 incompetence,
and the lies they told to justify their foolish and
catastrophic military adventure in Iraq, that Mega
Mogadishu for which they fractured the Western
Alliance, violated the UN Charter, mocked the Geneva
Accords, sanctioned torture from the Office of the
White House Counsel and sacrificed thousands of US
soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis already…
It’s the Media, Stupid…
Please review these 16 news and opinion pieces and
share them with others.
Go to www.moveon.org and sign their petition demanding
a US GAO investigation of the 2004 election. Spread
the Univ. of Pennsylvania and UC Berkeley studies far
and wide. Provide financial support to
www.blackboxvoting.org. Follow the latest news on the
citizens revolts at www.democrats.com.
Bob Fitrakis, Columbus Free Press: Following four
community public hearings in Ohio about election
irregularities and voter suppression – two in the
capitol, Columbus, and one each in Cincinnati and
Cleveland – a clear pattern and practice of voter
disenfranchisement is emerging…
Olmedo translated at precinct 13-O, where 90% of the
votes were for Kerry and only 53 votes were counted.
The turnout of 21% was due to the lack of Spanish
instructions and the misspelling of names: “I noticed
that one named Nieves was misspelled as Nieues and the
pollworkers were not able to find his name, these
people were told to complete a provisional ballot
because their names were not on the list.”
In Cuyahoga County, according to the Secretary of
State’s website there are 24,788 provisional ballots,
most of them from the city of Cleveland, not its
surrounding suburbs. Secretary of State J. Kenneth
Blackwell served as Co-Chair of the Bush/Cheney Ohio
reelection committee.
There also seems to be an abnormally high vote count
for third party candidates who received less than
one-half of one percent of the statewide vote total
combined. For example, in precinct 4-F, the right-wing
Constitutional Law candidate Peroutka received 215
votes to Bush’s 21 and Kerry’s 290. In this precinct,
Kerry received 55% of the vote where Gore received 91%
of the vote in the year 200. These numbers suggest
that Kerry’s votes were inadvertently or intentionally
shifted to Peroutka.
In Cincinnati, sworn testimony was taken on vote
buying, the lack of machines in African American
neighborhoods and the deliberate destruction of new
voter registration cards by a private company hired to
process the forms.
Exit polls on Election Day from both the polling firm
Zogby International and CNN projected John Kerry
winning the state of Ohio. University of Pennsylvania
Professor Steven Freeman calculated the odds that the
exit polls in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania all being
wrong are 250,000,000 to one. Pollster John Zogby,
President of Zogby International, is quoted as telling
the Inter Press Service of Stockholm that “something
is definitely wrong.”
Zogby commented that he was concerned about the
discrepancy between the exit polls and the official
vote tallies stating “We’re talking about the free
world here.”
The Alliance for Democracy-Ohio is preparing a lawsuit
challenging the outcome of Ohio’s election results due
to the massive voting irregularities that have emerged
in sworn testimony and affidavits.
Jeff Cohen, www.commondreams.org: Among the reasons
some of us worked for Bush's defeat was to get a new
Federal Communications Commission. Many of us were
ready to fight for the elevation of commissioner
Michael Copps, a Democratic appointee, to FCC chair,
replacing Michael Powell, Colin's son. Powell is the
best friend of the media conglomerates. We need to
stop Powell from any further media concentration over
the next 4 years, and unions need to be in the
forefront of that resistance.
Thanks to media deregulation started during the Reagan
administration, and unfortunately continued by Bill
Clinton: there are now 8 companies that largely
determine what Americans see, hear and read through
the media -- 8 companies sitting on the windpipe of
the First Amendment.
We can thank Clinton's Telecommunications "Reform" Act
of 1996 for the right-wing Clear Channel's dominance
of radio and for the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast
Group becoming the biggest TV chain in the country.
Clear Channel owned 40 radio stations before the
Telecom bill and 1200 soon after. Sinclair had 11
stations before the bill, and now has 62 TV stations.
TV news is dominated by 5 corporations.
NBC, CNBC, MSNBC are owned by GE. When I worked at
MNSBC, some of the constraints imposed on the
"Donahue" show were the result of GE ownership and a
conservative NBC boss who'd come out of GE Financial
and GE's plastics division.
Steven Rosenfeld, Columbus Free Press: The lawyers
have taken sworn testimony from hundreds of people in
hearings in Columbus and Cincinnati, and will use
excerpts as well as documents obtained from county
election officials and Election Day exit polls to make
a case that thousands of votes were incorrectly
counted or not counted on Election Day… The 'Ohio
Honest Election Campaign' is a coalition of
public-interest groups and citizens interested in free
and fair elections. The three lawyers announcing the
challenge are associated with a variety of established
groups. Arnebeck is the counsel for Common Cause's
Ohio chapter and The Alliance for Democracy. Attorney
Susan Truitt is with Citizens Alliance for Secure
Elections-Ohio, www.caseohio.org. The boards of groups
have not yet formally endorsed the election challenge
but are expected to do so in coming days.
The Honest Election campaign is part of a populist
groundswell to safeguard voting rights. The 2004
campaign saw the most new voters in a generation. Even
though Kerry conceded on Nov. 3, many people were not
satisfied with national media explanations of the Ohio
vote. Scientifically designed nonpartisan exit polls
taken during the day showed a different result from
the result reported that night, when George W. Bush
was declared the victor.
Moreover, on Election Day there were long lines and
widespread accounts of people who did not get to vote
in urban Democratic-leaning precincts across the
state. These factors and other reports of voter
frustration, computerized voting miscounts and
still-changing provisional ballot counting rules left
many doubts about the unofficial vote count and George
W. Bush's 130,000 vote margin…
Others lawsuits may be announced next week, Arnebeck
said, because there is limited time to hold a
meaningful recount and to address election
irregularities before the Electoral College meets in
December.
Marjorie Cohen, www.truthout.org: Without much
fanfare, a number of lawyers are busy mounting court
challenges to the election. Lawsuits have been filed
and other actions are being taken in Ohio and Florida,
the two key electoral states. Members of Congress have
demanded a General Accountability Office investigation
of the election. The largest Freedom of Information
Act request in the nation's history has been launched,
and other efforts are in the works.
Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D., www.democrats.com: There are wholesale shifts of scores of votes from the Kerry column to other candidates, and astonishingly
low turnouts in certain precincts and entire wards.
The Ohio recount will prove these numbers to be fraudulent.
I may have identified only the tip of the iceberg. I
note that there are 17,741 uncounted ballots in
Cuyahoga County. Kerry's margin in Cleveland was
reportedly 108,659 votes with a 49.89% turnout. The
rest of Cuyahoga County had a 71.95% turnout. Such a
turnout in Cleveland would have given Kerry a margin
of 156,705 votes, left Bush with a statewide margin of
85,007 votes, and with 248,100 votes still uncounted,
nobody would be conceding Ohio.
This is a situation that demands rigorous
investigation. I can imagine Michael Moore going door
to door in Ward 4, Precinct F, looking for the 215
Peroutka voters, or in Ward 4, Precinct N, looking for
the 163 Badnarik voters. Or going door to door in Ward
6, Precinct C, to find out why the turnout was only
7.10% - or in Ward 13, Precincts D, F, and O, to find
out why the turnout was only 13.05%, 19.60%, and
21.01%, respectively.
www.mediamatters.org: The mainstream media have mostly
ignored a statistical study conducted by faculty and
students of the University of California at Berkeley
sociology department on voting irregularities in
Florida in the 2004 presidential election that found
major discrepancies in vote counts between counties
that utilized electronic voting machines (e-voting)
and those that used traditional voting methods. The
study, released on November 18, determined that
President George W. Bush may have wrongly been awarded
between 130,000 and 260,000 extra votes in Florida --
130,000 if they were all "ghost votes" created by
machine error, or twice that if votes intended for
Senator John Kerry were misattributed to Bush.
Even though decreasing Bush's margin of victory by as
many as 260,000 votes would not change the winner in
Florida, the findings of the study are still
important. The study, at the very least, highlights
the lack of accountability in counties that rely on
paperless electronic voting machines, and, more
generally, the lack of confidence inspired by a system
of elections that, as a November 18 article on
Salon.com noted, "so easily creaked and groaned under
the pressure."
William Rivers Pitt, www.truthout.org: In Franklin
County, Ohio, voting machines gave Bush 3,893 extra
votes in one precinct alone. "Franklin County's
unofficial results gave Bush 4,258 votes to Democratic
challenger John Kerry's 260 votes in Precinct 1B,"
according to the news story. "Records show only 638
voters cast ballots in that precinct. Matthew
Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of
Elections, said Bush received 365 votes there. The
other 13 voters who cast ballots either voted for
other candidates or did not vote for president."
In Craven County, North Carolina, a software error
on the electronic voting machines awarded Bush 11,283
extra votes. "The Elections Systems and Software
equipment," according to the news story, "had
downloaded voting information from nine of the
county's 26 precincts and as the absentee ballots were
added, the precinct totals were added a second time.
An override, like those occurring when one attempts to
save a computer file that already exists, is supposed
to prevent double counting, but did not function
correctly."
In Carteret County, North Carolina, "More than 4,500
votes may be lost," according to the news story,
"because officials believed a computer that stored
ballots electronically could hold more data than it
did. Local officials said UniLect Corp., the maker of
the county's electronic voting system, told them that
each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the
limit was actually 3,005 votes. Officials said 3,005
early votes were stored, but 4,530 were lost."
In LaPorte County, Indiana, a Democratic stronghold,
the electronic voting machines decided that each
precinct only had 300 voters. "At about 7 p.m.
Tuesday," according to the news story, "it was noticed
that the first two or three printouts from individual
precinct reports all listed an identical number of
voters. Each precinct was listed as having 300
registered voters. That means the total number of
voters for the county would be 22,200, although there
are actually more than 79,000 registered voters."
In Sarpy County, Nebraska, the electronic touch
screen machines got generous. "As many as 10,000 extra
votes," according to the news story, "have been
tallied and candidates are still waiting for corrected
totals. Johnny Boykin lost his bid to be on the
Papillion City Council. The difference between victory
and defeat in the race was 127 votes. Boykin says,
'When I went in to work the next day and saw that
3,342 people had shown up to vote in our ward, I
thought something's not right.' He's right. There are
not even 3,000 people registered to vote in his ward.
For some reason, some votes were counted twice."
Stories like this have been popping up in many of
the states that put these touch-screen voting machines
to use. Bey
ond these reports are the folks who attempted to vote
for one candidate and saw the machine give their vote
to the other candidate. Sometimes, the flawed machines
were taken off-line, and sometimes they were not. As
for the reports I just described, the mistakes were
caught and corrected. How many mistakes made by these
machines were not caught, were not corrected, and have
now become part of the record?
Bob Fitrakis, Columbus Free Press: Bob Fitrakis
One telling piece of evidence was entered into the
record at the Saturday, November 13 public hearing on
election irregularities and voter suppression held by
nonpartisan voter rights organizations. Cliff
Arnebeck, a Common Cause attorney, introduced into the
record the Franklin County Board of Elections
spreadsheet detailing the allocation of e-voting
computer machines for the 2004 election. The Board of
Elections’ own document records that, while voters
waited in lines ranging from 2-7 hours at polling
places, 68 electronic voting machines remained in
storage and were never used on Election Day.
The Board of Elections document details that there are
2886 "Total Machines" in Franklin County. Twenty of
them are "In Vans for Breakdowns." The County record
acknowledges 2886 were available on Election Day,
November 2 and that 2798 of their machines were
"placed by close of polls." The difference between the
machines "available" and those "placed" is 68. The
nonpartisan Election Protection Coalition provided
legal advisors and observed 58 polling places in
primarily African American and poor neighborhoods in
Franklin County.
Ted Rall, www.yahoo.com: Alberto Gonzales, on the
other hand, possesses one of the most twisted minds
the American legal system has ever produced.
If Bush gets his way, the nation's chief law
enforcement official will be a man whose warped
interpretation of presidential power, contempt for due
process and gleeful deconstruction of fundamental
human values puts him at odds with every patriotic
American.
Gonzales is the author of the infamous August 2002
"Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18
U.S.C. 2340-2340A," a legal opinion issued while on
his current job as White House Counsel. The 50-page
"torture memo," which provides government
interrogators justification to torture suspects in the
war on terrorism, isn't just another memo. It's a
benchmark position paper, a document that
Administration figures from Bush and Rumsfeld down to
CIA (news - web sites) interrogators at Guantánamo and
Abu Ghraib still rely upon to protect themselves from
possible future prosecution for war crimes.
First and foremost, Gonzales argues for a definition
of "torture" that omits the most commonly used tactics
banned by the Geneva Conventions. (Gonzales calls
Geneva as a "quaint" anachronism.) To qualify as
torture, he writes, the agony "must be equivalent in
intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical
injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily
function, or even death." Abuses previously banned by
the Army--"pain induced by chemicals or bondage,
forcing an individual to stand, sit or kneel in
abnormal positions for prolonged periods of time, food
deprivation, mock executions, sleep deprivation and
chemically induced psychosis," according to The
Washington Post--are now A-OK, according to Gonzales.
As long as Bush orders it.
Greg Palast, Salon: Now, the facts. Most voters in
Ohio cast their ballots for John Kerry, which should,
in accordance with Mrs. Gordon's civics lessons from
sixth grade, have given Kerry the Electoral College
majority and the White House. Trouble is, those votes
won't be counted…
Last Tuesday, in Ohio, Republicans played the
spoilage game for all it was worth. Over 93,000
ballots were chucked on the spoilage pile, almost all
of them generated by those infernal chad-making
punch-card machines.
Whose votes were lost in the chad blizzard?
According to a recent ACLU analysis of Ohio's system,
votes stolen away by punch-card machine error are
"overwhelmingly" found in African-American - read
"Democratic" - precincts.
After the swindle of 2000, who would have the
nerve to keep these machines in operation? Answer: the
co-chair of Ohio's Bush-Cheney reelection campaign, J.
Kenneth Blackwell, who also happens to have the
convenient post of Ohio secretary of state. Blackwell,
who makes Katherine Harris look like Thomas Jefferson,
concedes the racially bent effects of punch-card
voting; but in spite of this - or because of this - he
refused to replace or fix these machines for the 2004
election.
The result: 93,000 votes spoiled, uncounted.
Salon's Manjoo, ignorant of the ACLU's
precinct-by-precinct studies, simply dismisses out of
hand the assertion that most of those were Kerry
votes. But given that Ohio's spoiled ballots are
concentrated in black and poor communities, it is
hardly a wild leap to discern which candidate got
punched out by the punch cards.
Now, on to the second pile of no-count ballots, the
provisionals. And guess who got these second-class,
back-of-the-bus ballots? Once again, Ohio's
African-American voters.
The Republican Party declared the hunting season open
for dark-skinned voters in October, announcing a plan
to challenge "fraudulent" voters on a mass basis, the
first such programmatic attack on the franchise since
the days of the Night Riders.
And the tactic was very much the same as that used by
the allies of the White Citizens Councils and Bull
Conners in the early '60s: targeted and unequal
application of picayune registration and voting
requirements. The Ohio courts were not amused,
slapping down the Republican Party's challenge lists
before Election Day.
However, the party kept secret lists and a secret
program in its back pocket to ambush black voters on
Election Day, a scheme outed by BBC television the
week before the election…
Here's what we discovered at the BBC: several lists of
voters, every one of them in an African-American
precinct. Fletcher's official explanation (her third
variant, by the way) was that these were returned
undeliverable fundraising solicitations. Odd, that:
Many of the addresses were those of homeless men's
shelters, not where I'd expect a lot of Bush-Cheney
donors. And why were the Republicans sending
solicitations only to black voters? Is that their
normal funding group?
More suspicious is that these lists of
"undeliverable addresses" were sent, not to some clerk
at a direct-mail house, but to the chief of research
for the Republican National Committee in Washington as
well as the executive director of the Bush-Cheney
campaign in Florida. I guess they handle the clerical
overflow work.
Or maybe, as every expert told us, these were hit
lists meant to stop, impede, intimidate and slow down
voters in African-American precincts. The Republicans
have more than embarrassment to motivate them to
mislead us about the true purpose of these lists:
Profiling citizens of one race to block their voting,
even if each challenge itself has merit, is a criminal
violation of the Voting Rights Act.
Whatever their ultimate use of these lists,
whatever the Republican game plan, we have the result:
In Ohio, an astonishing 155,000 voters were shunted to
provisional ballots, where their votes would be
vulnerable to the partisan predation of GOP Secretary
of State Blackwell. And once again, the provisionals
were concentrated in the minority - that is,
Democratic - areas…
Add it up and the demographics of the spoiled and
provisional ballots - if they were all counted - would
overtake George Bush's teeny lead…
Kerry did not concede because he did not have the
votes. He conceded because he could not get them
counted. Kerry would have to demand a hand count of
the spoiled punch cards. But the hard fact is that,
just as Katherine Harris stopped the hand count of the
punch cards in Florida, Blackwell would undoubtedly do
the same in Ohio. And face it: In a legal showdown,
Blackwell could count on the help of that pus-hole of
partisanship, the U.S. Supreme Court. Been there, done
that. Add in the ballot-by-ballot litigation required
to force a count of all the provisional ballots under
rules à la Blackwell, and Kerry, realistically, didn't
stand a chance.
Unfortunately, neither did democracy.
Jason Webb, Reuters: Tens of thousands of people
streamed through central Santiago carrying banners and
chanting slogans against the U.S.-led occupation of
Iraq, including "Fascist Bush is a terrorist."
CNN: Plans for a state dinner for President Bush at
Chile's presidential palace were scratched Sunday
after the United States insisted on security measures
that Chile called unacceptable.
The change came a day after Chilean security guards
temporarily blocked one of Bush's Secret Service
agents from entering an official dinner.
M. Asif Ismail, www.publicintegrity.org: The Carlyle
Group, a Washington, D.C.-based private equity firm
that employs numerous former high-ranking government
officials with ties to both political parties, was the
ninth largest Pentagon contractor between 1998 and
2003, an ongoing Center for Public Integrity
investigation into Department of Defense contracts
found.
A dozen companies in which Carlyle had a controlling
interest netted more than $9.3 billion in contracts…
"Carlyle is the biggest single success in Washington
of a venture capital firm," Dr. Loren B. Thompson Jr.,
a national security expert at the libertarian
Lexington Institute, said.
The group cashed out many of its investments when the
stock of defense companies rose dramatically in the
aftermath of September 11 and the buildups to the
Afghanistan and Iraq wars…
Carlyle finally sold its stakes in United after taking
it public in the aftermath of the September 11
attacks. The Washington Post called the hugely
successful public offering "one of the most successful
single venture investments of recent years."
But United did not seem all that lucrative before
September 11.
"They [Carlyle] were really kind of in a pickle with
United Defense," McCutchan said. "They wanted to cash
out on the equity. There wasn't much money to be
made... When 9/11 happened and the defense budget took
off, suddenly they had a winner on their hands."
Even Carlyle, which typically does not disclose its
financial and operational details, crowed over the
sale.
"It was one of Carlyle's best investments," Carlyle's
Ullman told the Center. "We did make more than a
billion dollars on that deal, and we are very pleased
that we served our investors quite well."
Molly Ivins, Boulder Daily Camera: Whilst the punditry
wanders weak and weary in the deep fogs of the "moral
values debate," what say we pay some attention to what
is going on, eh?
According to Newsday, "The White House has ordered the
new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of
officers believed to have been disloyal to President
George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to
the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the
hunt for Osama bin Laden ..."
Bad Nooz. In the first place, the concept of "purge"
has not hitherto played much part in our history, and
now is no time to start. Considerable pains have been
taken to protect the civil service from partisan
pressure.
"Disloyalty to Bush," or any president, is not the
same as disloyalty to the country. In fact, in the
intelligence biz, opposing the White House is
sometimes the highest form of loyalty to country.
Bryan Bender, Boston Globe: A growing number of
national security specialists who supported the
toppling of Saddam Hussein are moving to a position
unthinkable even a few months ago: that the large US
military presence is impeding stability as much as
contributing to it and that the United States should
begin major reductions in troops beginning early next
year.
Their assessments, expressed in reports, think tank
meetings, and interviews, run counter to the Bush
administration's insistence that the troops will
remain indefinitely to establish security. But some
contend that the growing support for an earlier
pullout could alter the administration's thinking.
Those arguing for immediate troop reductions include
key Pentagon advisers, prominent neoconservatives, and
some of the fiercest supporters of the Iraq invasion
among Washington's policy elite.
The core of their arguments is that even as the US-led
coalition goes on the offensive against the
insurgency, the United States, by its very presence,
is stimulating the resistance.
"Our large, direct presence has fueled the Iraqi
insurgency as much as it has suppressed it," said
Michael Vickers, a conservative-leaning Pentagon
consultant and longtime senior CIA official who
supported the war.
Retired Army Major General William Nash, the former
NATO commander in Bosnia, said: "I resigned from the
'we don't have enough troops in Iraq' club four months
ago. We have too many now."
Marwaan Macan-Markar , Inter Press Service: Alarmed by
the pace at which consumer-driven lifestyles are
destroying the planet's resources, a leading
environmental body has set its sights on creating a
green-friendly haven replete with houses, restaurants,
shops and hotels.
Portugal will serve as the launching pad for these
planned ''eco-cities,'' said officials from the World
Wildlife Fund (WWF) as they revealed the blueprint for
the 'One Planet Living' initiative here Wednesday, at
a major conservation conference.
The 4,340 hectares of land south of the Portuguese
capital Lisbon, identified for this first phase in an
ambitious global drive towards alternative living,
will have by its completion 6,000 houses, apartments,
shops and hotels. The estimated cost, according to the
WWF, will be over one billion euros (1.3 billion U.S.
dollars).
''We aim to build a series of flagship communities for
people to live sustainably, and which are affordable
and comfortable,'' Eduardo Goncalves, coordinator of
the 'One Planet Living' initiative, said during a
meeting at the 3rd World Conservation Congress, in the
Thai capital, organized by the World Conservation
Union or IUCN.
''The quality of modern life will not be sacrificed in
these communities,'' added Claude Martin, director
general of WWF. ''They will be family friendly.''
The global congress has brought together 81 states,
114 government agencies, 800 plus non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) and some 10,000 scientists and
experts from 181 countries. It has been billed as the
one of biggest environmental meetings in history.
Restore the Republic!
Full texts and URLs follow.
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/995
Columns
Bob Fitrakis
How the Ohio election was rigged for Bush
November 22, 2004
Following four community public hearings in Ohio about
election irregularities and voter suppression – two in
the capitol, Columbus, and one each in Cincinnati and
Cleveland – a clear pattern and practice of voter
disenfranchisement is emerging.
In order to understand the extent of the voter
suppression in the inner city of Columbus and Franklin
County, overwhelmingly Democratic wards, start with
the phrase: “Machines Placed By Close Of Polls” on the
last page of the county’s 17-page voting machine
allocation report.
This phrase at the end of the spreadsheet may be the
key in unraveling a deliberate and unprecedented plan
to repress African American and poor central city
voters. In statistics, when you see a bizarre
definition or measurement, it sends up red flags. Why
doesn’t the Franklin County Board of Elections have a
number for “Machines Placed By Opening Of Polls”?
It now appears that the Franklin County BOE placed
scores of machines too late in the day to alleviate
the long lines of voters who gathered to vote before
work and at lunchtime.
To better understand what the BOE did on Election Day,
consider the following analogy. The near east side of
Columbus needs four buses to move the population to
the downtown business district. Each bus will move 100
people. At the start of the business day at 6:30am,
there are only two buses running and another one with
a dead battery. After a few hours, the third bus is
put into use. Finally, towards the close of the work
day at 6pm, a fourth bus is deployed. The Central Ohio
Transit Authority then reports it had four buses
operating by the end of the business day. What matters
is not how many buses, or voting machines, were
operating at the end of the day, but rather how many
were there to service the people during the morning
and noon rush hours.
Questions remain as to where these machines were
placed and who had access to them during the day.
Pacifica reporter Evan Davis reported that a county
purchasing official who was on the line with Ward
Moving and Storage Company, documented only 2,741
voting machines delivered through the November 2
election day. The county’s own documents reveal that
they had 2,866 “Machines Available” on Election Day.
This would mean that amid the two to seven hour waits
in the inner city of Columbus, at least 125 machines
remained unused on Election Day. Ward holds the
exclusive three-year contract to deliver voting
machines in Franklin County.
If the BOE only had 2,741 placed initially, this would
explain the long lines in Columbus and voters leaving
the polls during the morning voting rush. According to
the Franklin County Board of Elections (BOE), in the
city of Columbus, where voters waited in the heavily
Democratic wards between 2-7 hours to cast the vast
majority of their votes for John Kerry, voter turnout
was 52.7%. In the affluent white suburbs of Columbus,
with far more voting machines available, the turnout
figure was 76.15%.
By contrast, 66.31% of registered voters went to the
polls in Cincinnati and turnout was 76.82% in the
suburbs. In Cincinnati, where more voting machines
were available, the difference between the city and
suburbs was only 10.5% compared to 23.45% in the
Columbus area. Cincinnati and Columbus have similar
demographics.
The Franklin County Board of Elections reported that
68 voting machines were never placed on Election Day.
In addition, Franklin County BOE Director Matt
Damschroder admitted on Friday, November 19, that 77
machines malfunctioned on Election Day.
Franklin County Commissioner Mary Jo Kilroy criticized
Damschroder for calling the elections “well-funded and
well-planned and that problems could not have been
averted, . . .” according to the Columbus Dispatch.
Damschroder, the former Executive Director of the
Franklin County Republican Party, told the Franklin
County Commissioners, “From our perspective, this
election was a success.”
Despite an increased registration of more than 167,253
new voters, Damschroder admits he ran the election
with a “fixed and exhausted” pool of voting machines,
the Dispatch reported. Kilroy pointed out that
Damschroder and Franklin County election officials
told her “We’re fine, we’re fine” and never requested
additional money over the initial allocation.
The Washington Post reported “Franklin is the only
Ohio county to use Danaher Control’s ELECTronic 1242,
an older-style touchscreen voting system.” Franklin
County’s voting machine allocation report shows that
Damschroder deployed his Danaher (formerly
Shooptronics) voting machines, which have been in use
since 1992, in a formula that favored Bush over Kerry.
In precinct 55-B on Columbus’ near east side, there
were 1,338 registered voters and, according to
Franklin County Board of Elections estimates, 956
active voters who had voted in the last two federal
elections. Despite voter registration being up 17%,
and by the BOE’s own guidelines the polling place
requiring ten machines (one per 100 voters), the
polling site had only three machines, one less than
for the 2000 elections.
The Election Protection Coalition that visited the
voting site between 7:30-8:30 a.m. documented a dozen
people leaving the polls, six to go to work and six
who were either elderly or handicapped. But things
were worse in other areas of Columbus.
In precinct 1-B where there were 1,620 registered
voters, a 27% increase in voter registration, the
precinct had five voting machines in 2000 and only
three in 2004. Where did they go? Out to Republican
enclaves like Canal Winchester, where two machines
were added since 2000, for a total of five to service
1,255 registered voters? Or were they re-routed to
Dublin 2-G where 1,656 registered voters apparently
needed six machines, twice the number of Columbus’
1-B?
Nearby in Dublin precinct 3-C, 910 registered voters
were allocated four voting machines. No doubt machines
were shifted from precincts like Columbus 44-G with
1,620 voters and registration up 25%, which lost one
machine from the 2000 elections to 2004.
In Cleveland, where a public hearing was held on
Saturday, November 20, there was a different pattern
of voting irregularities. These include heavily
Democratic wards with abnormally low reported rates of
voter turnout, three under 20%. In Precinct 6-C where
Kerry beat Bush 45 votes to one, allegedly only 7.1%
of the registered voters cast ballots. In precinct
13-D where Kerry received 83.8% of the vote, only
13.05% reportedly voted. In precinct 13-F where Kerry
received 97.5%, the turnout was reported to be only
19.6%.
One explanation comes from Irma Olmedo, who provided
the Free Press with a written statement of her
activities in the heavily Hispanic ward 13, which
contained the three low voter turnout precincts.
“Ohio does not have bilingual ballots and this
disenfranchises many Latino voters who are not totally
fluent in English . . . there were 13 poll workers at
the school and none knew Spanish. Some could not even
find the names of the people on the list because they
couldn’t understand well when people said their names.
. . . Some people put their punch card ballots in
backwards when they voted and discovered that they
couldn’t punch out the holes. They had not read the
instructions which were in English, that they had to
turn the card around in order to vote,” Olmedo stated.
Olmedo translated at precinct 13-O, where 90% of the
votes were for Kerry and only 53 votes were counted.
The turnout of 21% was due to the lack of Spanish
instructions and the misspelling of names: “I noticed
that one named Nieves was misspelled as Nieues and the
pollworkers were not able to find his name, these
people were told to complete a provisional ballot
because their names were not on the list.”
In Cuyahoga County, according to the Secretary of
State’s website there are 24,788 provisional ballots,
most of them from the city of Cleveland, not its
surrounding suburbs. Secretary of State J. Kenneth
Blackwell served as Co-Chair of the Bush/Cheney Ohio
reelection committee.
There also seems to be an abnormally high vote count
for third party candidates who received less than
one-half of one percent of the statewide vote total
combined. For example, in precinct 4-F, the right-wing
Constitutional Law candidate Peroutka received 215
votes to Bush’s 21 and Kerry’s 290. In this precinct,
Kerry received 55% of the vote where Gore received 91%
of the vote in the year 200. These numbers suggest
that Kerry’s votes were inadvertently or intentionally
shifted to Peroutka.
In Cincinnati, sworn testimony was taken on vote
buying, the lack of machines in African American
neighborhoods and the deliberate destruction of new
voter registration cards by a private company hired to
process the forms.
Exit polls on Election Day from both the polling firm
Zogby International and CNN projected John Kerry
winning the state of Ohio. University of Pennsylvania
Professor Steven Freeman calculated the odds that the
exit polls in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania all being
wrong are 250,000,000 to one. Pollster John Zogby,
President of Zogby International, is quoted as telling
the Inter Press Service of Stockholm that “something
is definitely wrong.”
Zogby commented that he was concerned about the
discrepancy between the exit polls and the official
vote tallies stating “We’re talking about the free
world here.”
The Alliance for Democracy-Ohio is preparing a lawsuit
challenging the outcome of Ohio’s election results due
to the massive voting irregularities that have emerged
in sworn testimony and affidavits.
--
Bob Fitrakis has a Ph.D in Political Science and a
J.D. He is a lawyer working with the Alliance for
Democracy-Ohio and the Editor of the Columbus Free
Press. Reporting in this article also came from
Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D and Joe Knapp
(http://copperas.com/fcelection/wardbubble.jpg). For
additional documentation, visit
http://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/900.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1122-31.htm
Published on Monday, November 22, 2004 by
CommonDreams.org
Media and the Election
by Jeff Cohen
You all know about journalists embedded with the
troops in Iraq. I started out as a media critic at
FAIR and, as if in a slow-motion nightmare, I ended up
embedded inside the mainstream media. I've worked as a
panelist/commentator over the years at all three cable
news channels.
What I've found inside TV news is a drunken exuberance
for stories involving celebrity, lurid crime and sex
scandal -- matched by a grim timidity and fear of
offending the powers that be, especially if they're
conservatives. The biggest fear is of doing anything
that could get you or your network accused of being
liberal.
In 2002, I was an on-air commentator at MSNBC, and
also senior producer on the "Donahue" show, the
most-watched program on the channel. In the last
months of the program, before it was terminated on the
eve of the Iraq war, we were ordered by management
that every time we booked an antiwar guest, we had to
book 2 pro-war guests. If we booked two guests on the
left, we had to book 3 on the right. At one meeting, a
producer suggested booking Michael Moore and was told
that she would need to book 3 right-wingers for
balance. I considered suggesting Noam Chomsky as a
guest, but our studio couldn't accommodate the 86
right-wingers we would have needed for balance.
When we look at the media's role in the 2004 election,
we make a mistake to focus on election coverage per
se. The basis for Bush's victory was in place way
before 2004. At the end of last year, a huge study
done by the University of Maryland's PIPA, the Program
on International Policy Attitudes, found that most of
those who got their news from the commercial TV
networks held at least 1 of 3 fundamental
"misperceptions" about the war in Iraq (and some held
2 or 3 of them):
that Iraq had been directly linked to 9/11
that WMDs had been found in Iraq
that world opinion supported the U.S. invasion of
Iraq.
Viewers of Fox News, where I worked for years, were
the most misled. But strong majorities of CBS, ABC,
NBC and CNN viewers were also confused on at least one
of these points. Among those informed on all 3
questions, only 23 percent supported Bush's war.
How can you have a meaningful election in a country
where, according to polls, half or more of the
American people don't know who attacked us on 9/11?
They think Saddam Hussein was involved.
To help Bush mislead Americans, Fox News Channel
required that the banner "War on Terror" run when Iraq
was discussed.
I was at MSNBC when Tom Ridge was holding a news
conference at Homeland Security in late 2002 about
alleged new terror threats from Al Qaeda -- and MSNBC
ran a lower third: "Showdown with Saddam."
At MSNBC, I was asked to debate Frank Gaffney, the
former Reagan official who seems to live on TV, in a
segment based on Gaffney's claim that not only was
Saddam Hussein behind 9/11, he was also behind Tim
McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing! I'm not
kidding.
Last month, PIPA released a new study that found
majorities of Bush supporters, sometimes huge
majorities, not only had major misunderstandings of
the basic facts about Iraq, but they were misled on
all sorts of other Bush positions. 74 percent of Bush
supporters believed that Bush favors inclusion of
labor and environmental standards in trade agreements.
60 percent of Bush supporters said the US should not
have initiated a war with Iraq unless evidence
established that Iraq had WMDs and was supporting the
Al Qaeda terrrorists. This should have been a bloc of
Kerry voters. But they were unaware the evidence did
not exist.
These are faith-based voters -- not fact-based voters.
Among the reasons some of us worked for Bush's defeat
was to get a new Federal Communications Commission.
Many of us were ready to fight for the elevation of
commissioner Michael Copps, a Democratic appointee, to
FCC chair, replacing Michael Powell, Colin's son.
Powell is the best friend of the media conglomerates.
We need to stop Powell from any further media
concentration over the next 4 years, and unions need
to be in the forefront of that resistance.
Thanks to media deregulation started during the Reagan
administration, and unfortunately continued by Bill
Clinton: there are now 8 companies that largely
determine what Americans see, hear and read through
the media -- 8 companies sitting on the windpipe of
the First Amendment.
We can thank Clinton's Telecommunications "Reform" Act
of 1996 for the right-wing Clear Channel's dominance
of radio and for the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast
Group becoming the biggest TV chain in the country.
Clear Channel owned 40 radio stations before the
Telecom bill and 1200 soon after. Sinclair had 11
stations before the bill, and now has 62 TV stations.
TV news is dominated by 5 corporations.
NBC, CNBC, MSNBC are owned by GE. When I worked at
MNSBC, some of the constraints imposed on the
"Donahue" show were the result of GE ownership and a
conservative NBC boss who'd come out of GE Financial
and GE's plastics division.
Fox News is owned by the right-wing Rupert Murdoch
(and News Corporation), and does Murdoch's ideological
bidding.
ABC is owned by Disney. You'll remember that CEO
Michael Eisner said that Disney wouldn't distribute
"Fahrenheit 911" because Disney "didn't want to be in
the middle of a politically-oriented film during an
election year." Eisner's comment was allowed to pass
only because so few people realize that Disney is one
of the biggest purveyors of political opinion this
election year and every recent election year -- almost
all of it right-wing political opinion. Each day in
major radio markets nationwide, Disney radio stations
serve up hour after hour of Limbaugh, Sean Hannity,
Bill O'Reilly, Laura Ingraham, Matt Drudge, etc. etc.
CBS News, owned by Viacom, got taken in by forged
documents -- and then censored accurate reporting
critical of Bush, apparently at the behest of Viacom's
CEO, Sumner Redstone. Six weeks before the election
Redstone endorsed Bush on behalf of Viacom: "From a
Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican
administration is a better deal. Because the
Republican administration has stood for many things we
believe in, deregulation and so on."
Until broadcasting is demonopolized and removed from
the control of these corporations, and until major
insulated funding goes to genuine public broadcasting,
misinformed voters will be easy prey for political
demagoguery in election after election.
When I lecture about media in culturally conservative
places, as I did this week in West Virginia, what
comes as a shock to people, including the so-called
"values voter," is that what they see as sleaze on TV
and radio is not brought to them by the "liberal
media" but by Republican-endorsing media moguls like
Murdoch and Redstone.
The spectrum of debate in our country keeps getting
pushed further rightward by corporate media. Look at
what passes for left-right debates in the distorting
lens of national TV. Many complain about the Fox News
pairing of forceful, telegenic Sean Hannity on the
right against the less telegenic, often backpedaling
Alan Colmes. But Fox News Channel did not invent the
narrow center-right, GE to GM spectrum. That was
firmly in place thanks to PBS and CNN years before Fox
News Channel was invented. Indeed, FAIR has recruited
thousands of members and subscribers over the years
through full-page magazine ads with pictures of folks
like Michael Kinsley, Mark Shields and others -- with
the headline: "I'm not a leftist, but I play one on
TV."
Almost all those who regularly represent the left on
TV support corporate globalization and NAFTA; a TV
rightist like Pat Buchanan opposes it. TV leftists
tend to defend the immorality of media corporations
while only rightists attack it. On CNN and NBC this
election season, Time magazine's Joe Klein was
presented as the left side of the debate against
various hardcore rightwingers. A few months ago in a
Time column, Klein hailed the corporate sponsored
Democratic Leadership Council for supporting "fiscal
responsibility and free trade" within the Democratic
Party and for "gleefully assaulting the reactionary
left -- the trade unions and bureaucrats."
Every day on TV and radio, you can hear from regular
hosts and pundits who are proud allies of the
anti-abortion movement, proud allies of the NRA
movement, proud allies of the religious right
movement. You don't hear from regulars who are proud
allies of the labor movement.
Moving briefly from punditry to what passes for
"objective reporting," too many reporters have become
easily manipulated by Republican operatives. They
allowed false and defamatory Swift Boat ads to
dominate coverage for weeks; their fact-checking of
campaign and debate claims has often meant that if
they identify 2 huge whoppers from Bush, they have to
inflate or invent 2 Kerry claims in the name of a
false balance that actually distorts the news. FAIR
has written thousands of words this year on "false
balance" in election coverage.
Ending on good news: The movement to challenge media
bias has never been stronger among progressive and
union activists, and the movement to challenge media
concentration has never been stronger. We had a real
victory in 2003 in resisting FCC proposals to allow
even greater media consolidation, with a coalition
that started with groups like Free Press and FAIR and
MoveOn and Common Cause and then attracted groups on
the right to the effort: the NRA and the Parents
Television Council. One easy way to get involved in
these battles is to sign up for activist alerts at
FAIR's website: http://www.fair.org.
Remarks made at ILCA workshop in Washington, D.C.,
Nov. 12, 2004
Jeff Cohen founded FAIR, the New York-based media
watch group. He's been a nationally-syndicated
columnist, TV commentator and communications director
of the Kucinich for President campaign
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/112204Y.shtml
Ohio Presidential Results to be Challenged
By Steven Rosenfeld
FreePress.org
Saturday 20 November 2004
Ohio's 2004 presidential vote will be challenged as
soon as next week in the state Supreme Court, a
coalition of public-interest lawyers announced Friday.
The lawyers have taken sworn testimony from hundreds
of people in hearings in Columbus and Cincinnati, and
will use excerpts as well as documents obtained from
county election officials and Election Day exit polls
to make a case that thousands of votes were
incorrectly counted or not counted on Election Day.
"The objective is to get to the truth," said
Columbus Ohio lawyer Cliff Arnebeck, coordinator of
the Ohio Honest Elections Campaign. "What's critically
important, whether it's President Bush or Sen. Kerry,
whoever's been elected actually elected, is to know
you won by an honest election. So it's in the interest
of both sides as American citizens to know the truth
and have this answered."
The challenge comes as the Green Party has plans to
file for a recount of the state's 2004 presidential
vote. The Green Party and the Ohio Honest Elections
Campaign both believe the unofficial results announced
on Election Day were wrong. Ohio Secretary of State
Ken Blackwell has not yet certified the Nov. 2 vote.
The state's election law says an election challenge
must show the wrong candidate was been declared the
winner, or it can be dismissed without a hearing. The
state Supreme Court's chief justice hears the case.
The Ohio Republican Party dismissed the challenge on
Friday, the Associated Press reported, but the
coalition announcing it said they were ready to
litigate.
"The sworn statements that we've received should
give everyone cause to go forward in terms of this
inquiry," said Robert Fitrakis, a lawyer, political
science professor at Columbus State Community College,
and editor at www.freepress.org, at the announcement.
The 'Ohio Honest Election Campaign' is a coalition
of public-interest groups and citizens interested in
free and fair elections. The three lawyers announcing
the challenge are associated with a variety of
established groups. Arnebeck is the counsel for Common
Cause's Ohio chapter and The Alliance for Democracy.
Attorney Susan Truitt is with Citizens Alliance for
Secure Elections-Ohio, www.caseohio.org. The boards of
groups have not yet formally endorsed the election
challenge but are expected to do so in coming days.
The Honest Election campaign is part of a populist
groundswell to safeguard voting rights. The 2004
campaign saw the most new voters in a generation. Even
though Kerry conceded on Nov. 3, many people were not
satisfied with national media explanations of the Ohio
vote. Scientifically designed nonpartisan exit polls
taken during the day showed a different result from
the result reported that night, when George W. Bush
was declared the victor.
Moreover, on Election Day there were long lines and
widespread accounts of people who did not get to vote
in urban Democratic-leaning precincts across the
state. These factors and other reports of voter
frustration, computerized voting miscounts and
still-changing provisional ballot counting rules left
many doubts about the unofficial vote count and George
W. Bush's 130,000 vote margin.
Those concerns coalesced into a grassroots campaign
for an answer. Within two weeks following Election
Day, Arnebeck had talked to the Green and Libertarian
Parties about filing for a recount - if the funds
could be raised. The Greens and the Honest Election
Campaign started fundraising the same day, and in less
than a week, the Greens had raised $150,000 via their
website to file for the recount. The Ohio Honest
Election Campaign raised about $90,000 via the
Alliance for Democracy site, after two Air America
Radio hosts, Laura Flanders and Randi Rhodes, embraced
the cause and talked up the campaign.
Meanwhile, FreePress.org's Bob Fitrakis inspired Amy
Kaplan and Jonathan Meier, two young members of the
League of Pissed-Off Voters' Ohio chapter
(www.indyvoter.org) to organize public hearings to
gather testimony under oath of the people who saw or
experienced what they thought was voter suppression or
intimidation. Such intentional acts would violate the
federal Voting Rights Act. Two hearings were held in
Columbus and hundreds of people showed up and
testified. Then activists in Cincinnati and Cleveland
organized hearings.
At these hearings, scores of people said too few
voting machines were put in Democratic-leaning
inner-city precincts, creating long lines and
deterring many people from voting. In contrast,
Republican-leaning suburbs had plenty of voting
machines and did not have the long lines. There were
also reports of miscounts by computer voting machines,
as well as errors registering the wrong candidate for
president. Minority voters also spoke of
disproportionately getting provisional ballots,
including long-time residents.
Early in the weeks those hearings were being held,
the Green and Libertarian Parties announced they would
seek a statewide recount. By week's end, the Honest
Election Campaign announced its intention to challenge
presidential election result at the Ohio Supreme
Court.
Others lawsuits may be announced next week, Arnebeck
said, because there is limited time to hold a
meaningful recount and to address election
irregularities before the Electoral College meets in
December.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/112204A.shtml
Litigating the Election
By Marjorie Cohn
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 22 November 2004
Without much fanfare, a number of lawyers are busy
mounting court challenges to the election. Lawsuits
have been filed and other actions are being taken in
Ohio and Florida, the two key electoral states.
Members of Congress have demanded a General
Accountability Office investigation of the election.
The largest Freedom of Information Act request in the
nation's history has been launched, and other efforts
are in the works.
Is there substance to these challenges? On
Thursday, the University of California's Berkeley
Quantitative Methods Research Team released a
statistical study - the sole method available to
monitor the accuracy of e-voting - reporting
irregularities associated with electronic voting
machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more
excess votes to Bush in Florida. The three counties
where the voting anomalies were most prevalent were
also the most heavily Democratic: Broward, Palm Beach
and Miami-Dade, respectively. The official tally in
Florida shows Bush with 380,978 more votes than Kerry.
Recount, Lawsuits, Hearings in Ohio
Green Party candidate David Cobb and Libertarian
Party candidate Michael Badnarik have sought a recount
of the votes in Ohio. A demand for a recount can only
be filed by a presidential candidate who was on the
ballot or a certified write-in candidate. Alleged
improprieties in Ohio include mis-marked and discarded
ballots, problems with electronic voting machines, and
the targeted disenfranchisement of African-American
voters. Although a recount doesn't typically begin
until after the vote has been certified (December 6),
Cobb and Badnarik have asked for the recount to
proceed forthwith for fear there won't be sufficient
time to complete the recount in time for the December
13 date on which the Ohio presidential electors will
meet.
Bush now leads Kerry by about 136,000 votes in
Ohio. A battle is looming over nearly 155,000
provisional ballots, which might decide who really won
the election. The Ohio Democratic Party has joined a
lawsuit by elector Audrey J. Schering, which asks U.S.
District Judge Michael H. Watson to order Ohio
Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell to impose uniform
standards for counting provisional ballots on all 88
counties. The lawsuit cites the U.S. Supreme Court's
opinion in Bush v. Gore, which "held that the failure
to provide specific standards for counting of ballots
that are sufficient to assure a uniform count
statewide violates the Equal Protection Clause of the
United States Constitution." Attorney Donald J.
McTigue, who filed the suit, told me that although
many of the provisional ballots are being counted, his
client is concerned about those that are not being
counted. Blackwell has provided only limited
instruction about which provisional ballots to count.
But many doubts remain about how different election
boards determine whether someone is a registered
voter. Some may type the name in on a computer; others
may look for typographical errors; still others may
look at the hard copy. McTigue worries that there is
no way of knowing what each board is doing. Do they go
back to the purged files? Were they properly purged?
Of the 11 counties that had completed checking
provisional ballots by Wednesday, 81 percent have been
ruled valid. McTigue expects the counting of
provisional ballots to last at least two more weeks.
On Election Day, Sarah White filed a class action
against Blackwell and the Board of Elections of Lucas
County, claiming they violated the Help America Vote
Act, passed in the wake of the 2000 election debacle,
that gives voters in federal elections a right to cast
provisional ballots. White claimed that although she
requested an absentee ballot one month before the
election, she never received one. Blackwell ruled that
persons who had requested, but not received their
absentee ballots, would not be permitted to cast a
provisional ballot. U.S. District Judge David A. Katz,
however, ordered that "the Board of Elections of Lucas
County shall immediately advise all precincts to issue
provisional ballots to those voters who appear at the
voting place and assert their eligibility to vote,
including that the voter is a registered voter in the
precinct in which he or she desires to vote, and that
the voter is eligible to vote in an election for
Federal office."
Last week, the Ohio Election Protection Coalition
held public hearings in Columbus. Extensive sworn and
written testimony of Ohio voters, precinct judges,
poll workers, legal observers, and party challengers
revealed a widespread and concerted effort by
Blackwell to deny primarily African-American and young
voters the right to cast their ballots within a
reasonable time. Precincts were deprived of adequate
numbers of voting machines, so voters waited in lines
from 2-7 hours, even though 68 electronic voting
machines remained in storage and were never used on
Election Day. Blackwell, who oversaw the election in
Ohio, also served as co-chair of the Ohio Bush-Cheney
reelection campaign. Lawyers for the Ohio Election
Protection Coalition plan to use the testimony from
the Columbus hearings to challenge the results of
Ohio's presidential vote in the state Supreme Court
next week.
Lawsuits in Florida
On Election Day, the American Civil Liberties
Union of Florida and Florida Legal Services sued
Miami-Dade County and Broward County election
officials in U.S. District Court for denying voters
sufficient time to mail in absentee ballots. The
Broward County Supervisor of Elections sent 13,300
absentee ballots to voters late. Plaintiffs Fay
Friedman, Adam Meyer, and Daniel Benhaim claimed the
two counties violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and
the First and Fourteenth Amendments because they did
not receive their absentee ballots until Election Day,
and it was therefore impossible to comply with state
law requiring persons who are out-of-state but present
in the U.S. to submit absentee ballots by 7 P.M. on
Election Day. Under Florida state law, a separate rule
gives more time to absentee voters outside the U.S.,
who may postmark their ballots by November 2 as long
as the ballot arrives within 10 days after the
election. JoNel Newman, a Florida Legal Services
attorney, says, "The rules governing absentee ballots
should apply equally to every voter, whether they are
temporarily in other parts of the country or
overseas." On Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Alan
Gold denied plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary
injunction to include the late ballots in the final
vote tally; however, the lawsuit remains alive for
trial on a request to apply the late counting rule
used for foreign absentees to domestic ballots.
Opponents of slot machines at South Florida
pari-mutuels filed a lawsuit seeking an official
recount of about 78,000 absentee ballots cast in
Broward County on Amendment 4. About 94 percent of the
new votes on the amendment were "yes" and only 6
percent were "no," a "statistical anomaly." No hearing
has yet been scheduled on the case.
Recount in New Hampshire
Pursuant to a request by Ralph Nader, votes in
some New Hampshire towns are being recounted. An
analysis showed wide differences in voting trends
between the 2000 and 2004 elections; about three
quarters of precincts with severe changes used Diebold
optical scanning machines. Last week, Diebold agreed
to pay $2.6 million to settle a lawsuit with the state
of California. Diebold officials misled state leaders
about the security and certification of its products
to get payments from the state, according to
California Attorney General Bill Lockyer. Diebold,
which helped to count the Ohio vote with e-voting
machines and optical scan machines, is headed by
Republican CEO Wally O'Dell. Last year, O'Dell wrote
to Ohio Republican donors, saying he was "committed to
helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the
President next year."
Lawsuits Challenge Mayoral Results in San Diego
Election results in San Diego's mayoral race
remain in doubt. The unofficial tally shows Mayor Dick
Murphy the victor. But write-in votes for Donna Frye
have been excluded because voters did not darken the
oval on the left of the line where they wrote in
Frye's name. A lawsuit seeks to force the county
registrar of voters to count the excluded write-in
votes, which many believe will tip the results in her
favor. Two other lawsuits are attempting to have
Frye's candidacy ruled illegal and force a runoff
between Murphy and Supervisor Ron Roberts. Frye ran on
a platform critical of Murphy's financial leadership
and the culture of secrecy at City Hall.
Congressmen Request GAO Investigation
Three members of Congress - John Conyers, Jr.,
Jerrold Nadler, and Robert Wexler - wrote to the
Government Accountability Office on November 5,
requesting an immediate investigation of the efficacy
of voting machines and new technologies used in the
2004 election, how election officials responded to
difficulties they encountered, and what we can do in
the future to improve our election systems and
administration. The Congressmen cited an electronic
voting system in Columbus, Ohio, that gave Bush 4,000
extra votes; an electronic tally of a South Florida
gambling ballot initiative that failed to record
thousands of votes; a North Carolina county that lost
more than 4,500 votes due to a mistaken belief by
officials that a computer that stored ballots could
hold more data than it did; a substantial drop off in
Democratic votes in proportion to voter registration
in counties utilizing optical scan machines that was
apparently not present in counties using other
mechanisms; and numerous reports from Youngstown,
Ohio, as well as Palm Beach, Broward and Dade counties
in Florida, that voters who attempted to cast a vote
for John Kerry on electronic voting machines saw their
votes instead recorded as votes for Bush.
Freedom of Information Act Requests
Blackboxvoting.org, a nonpartisan, nonprofit
consumer protection group for elections, has filed the
largest Freedom of Information Act request in history.
It seeks the internal computer logs (which are public
records ) from voting machines from every county that
used electronic voting machines. The organization has
initiated fraud investigations in selected counties.
It needs lawyers to enforce public records laws, as
well as computer security professionals and citizen
volunteers.
Open Records Act Motions
Cindy Cohn, Legal Director of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, told me that
independent testing of voting machines could shed
light on why so many people who tried to vote for
Kerry saw their votes registered for Bush. Her
organization is moving under the Open Records Act,
which allows people to see government records, to
gather information, including the impoundment of
voting machines, in some counties in Florida, Ohio,
New Mexico and Pennsylvania that had serious problems
with the machines. Local counsel are needed to help
with this effort. Cohn can be contacted at
cindy@eff.org.
Results Not Final Until January
Although John Kerry conceded that George W. Bush
won the election, a candidate's concession is not
legally binding. Electors will be certified on
December 7, which gives a presumption of legitimacy to
the vote; but electors actually vote on December 13.
These votes are not opened by Congress until January
6, so there is still time to challenge the results in
key states such as Ohio and Florida. A challenge
requires a written objection from one House member and
one senator. If that objection is recorded, both
Houses separate again and they vote by majority vote
as to whether to accept the slate of electoral votes
from that state.
Bush is claiming he has a mandate, planning to
spend his "political capital." Curiously, virtually
all of the so-called "anomalies" in the voting results
favor Bush. The electors have not yet voted; the
election results are not yet final. In the words of
Yogi Berra, "It's not over until it's over."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Marjorie Cohn, a contributing editor to t r u t h
o u t, is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of
Law, executive vice president of the National Lawyers
Guild, and the U.S. representative to the executive
committee of the American Association of Jurists.
http://blog.democrats.com/node/812
Widespread Election Fraud in Cleveland?
by Bob Fertik on November 22, 2004 - 1:44am.
I received this fascinating analysis on Friday. I am
publishing it in the hope that readers will examine
the data with as much scrutiny as Dr. Hayes has. The
preliminary results for Cuyahoga County are here.
Bob
From: Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D.
Date: November 19, 2004
Attached is my recently completed precinct by precinct
analysis of the 2004 presidential vote in Cleveland.
There are wholesale shifts of scores of votes from the
Kerry column to other candidates, and astonishingly
low turnouts in certain precincts and entire wards.
The Ohio recount will prove these numbers to be
fraudulent.
I may have identified only the tip of the iceberg. I
note that there are 17,741 uncounted ballots in
Cuyahoga County. Kerry's margin in Cleveland was
reportedly 108,659 votes with a 49.89% turnout. The
rest of Cuyahoga County had a 71.95% turnout. Such a
turnout in Cleveland would have given Kerry a margin
of 156,705 votes, left Bush with a statewide margin of
85,007 votes, and with 248,100 votes still uncounted,
nobody would be conceding Ohio.
This is a situation that demands rigorous
investigation. I can imagine Michael Moore going door
to door in Ward 4, Precinct F, looking for the 215
Peroutka voters, or in Ward 4, Precinct N, looking for
the 163 Badnarik voters. Or going door to door in Ward
6, Precinct C, to find out why the turnout was only
7.10% - or in Ward 13, Precincts D, F, and O, to find
out why the turnout was only 13.05%, 19.60%, and
21.01%, respectively.
CUYAHOGA COUNTY CANVASS SHEET – 2004 PRESIDENTIAL
ELECTION
THE FOLLOWING IS A PRECINCT BY PRECINCT ANALYSIS OF
THE REPORTED VOTE TOTALS FOR THE PRESIDENTIAL
CANDIDATES IN THE CITY OF CLEVELAND, CUYAHOGA COUNTY,
OHIO, IN THE 2004 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION. THESE ARE
DATA READILY AVAILABLE ONLINE AT THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE
OF THE CUYAHOGA COUNTY BOARD OF ELECTIONS. WHAT YOU
SEE IS AN ACTUAL REPRINT OF THE CUYAHOGA COUNTY
CANVASS SHEET.
IN ORDER TO CONDUCT THIS ANALYSIS I SET UP SEPARATE
MICROSOFT WINDOWS FOR: (1) REGISTERED VOTERS, 2004;
(2) VOTER TURNOUT, BY PERCENTAGE, 2004; (3) VOTE
TOTALS FOR PRESIDENT, 2004; AND (4) VOTE TOTALS FOR
PRESIDENT, 2000. BY CLICKING BACK AND FORTH ON THE
WINDOWS I WAS ABLE TO COMPARE THESE DATA EASILY, IF
TEDIOUSLY.
I HAVE DISCOVERED WHOLESALE “IRREGULARITIES” IN THE
REPORTED VOTES, SOME OF THEM HIGHLY SUSPICIOUS, OTHERS
OBVIOUSLY FRAUDULENT. EVERY NUMBER I BELIEVE TO BE
UNTRUE I HAVE HIGHLIGHTED IN RED, AND I HAVE WRITTEN A
BRIEF ONE-LINE EXPLANATION, ALSO HIGHLIGHTED IN RED,
IN THE RIGHT-HAND COLUMN NEXT TO THE HIGHLIGHTED
NUMBER. THE FOLLOWING WRITE-UP IS THE BEST ESTIMATE I
CAN MAKE AS TO HOW MANY VOTES WERE STOLEN FROM JOHN F.
KERRY IN CLEVELAND, OHIO. IN SOME CASES THERE HAVE
BEEN WHOLESALE SHIFTS OF VOTES FROM THE KERRY COLUMN
TO THE BUSH COLUMN OR TO THIRD-PARTY CANDIDATES; TO
ESTIMATE THE NUMBER OF VOTES TAKEN FROM KERRY, I HAVE
ASSUMED THAT THE PROPORTIONS OF THE VOTE ALLOTTED
ELSEWHERE IN THE WARD ARE CORRECT; IN FACT, ANY
UNREPORTED VOTES COULD ALL HAVE COME FROM KERRY. IN
OTHER CASES THE REPORTED VOTER TURNOUT WAS
ASTONISHINGLY LOW FOR A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION. FOR
PURPOSES OF THIS ANALYSIS, I HAVE ADOPTED 50% AS AN
ARBITRARY ESTIMATE OF THE TRUE VOTER TURNOUT FOR THE
UNDERREPORTED PRECINCTS, AND HAVE ASSUMED THAT THE
PROPORTIONS OF THE VOTE ALLOTTED ARE CORRECT FOR THESE
PRECINCTS.
THESE ESTIMATES ARE JUST THAT. FORTUNATELY, OHIO HAS
A PAPER TRAIL AND THERE WILL BE A RECOUNT. HOPEFULLY
THE CORRECT NUMBERS WILL EMERGE. SOME, BUT NOT ALL,
OF THE UNREPORTED VOTES WILL TURN UP AS PROVISIONAL
BALLOTS OR UNCOUNTED PUNCH CARDS. WHERE WHOLESALE
SHIFTING HAS OCCURRED FROM ONE COLUMN TO ANOTHER, I
EXPECT THAT THE OHIO RECOUNT WILL PROVE, ONCE AND FOR
ALL, ELECTION FRAUD.
LINE 1604 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 129 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 25 VOTES.
LINE 1614 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 166 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 38 VOTES.
LINE 1702 41 VOTES APPEAR IN BADNARIK COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 41 VOTES.
LINE 1709 70 VOTES APPEAR IN PETROUKA COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 70 VOTES.
LINE 1806 215 VOTES APPEAR IN PETROUKA COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 213 VOTES.
LINE 1814 163 VOTES APPEAR IN BADNARIK COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 162 VOTES.
LINE 1902 16 VOTES APPEAR IN PETROUKA COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 15 VOTES.
LINE 1903 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 390 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 142 VOTES.
LINE 1909 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 362 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 119 VOTES.
LINE 1910 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 228 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 66 VOTES.
LINE 1912 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 324 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 93 VOTES.
LINE 1915 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 157 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 25 VOTES.
LINE 1916 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 49 VOTES, KERRY LOSES
11 VOTES.
LINE 2002 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 197 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 106 VOTES.
LINE 2003 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 324 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 272 VOTES.
LINE 2004 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 229 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 93 VOTES.
LINE 2011 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 283 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 81 VOTES.
LINE 2006 NOT AN IRREGULARITY; BUSH DID WELL IN
CLEVELAND 6F IN 2000.
LINE 2012 81 VOTES APPEAR IN BUSH COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 36 VOTES.
LINE 2023 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 144 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 20 VOTES.
LINE 2103 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 276 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 74 VOTES.
LINE 2111 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 120 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 35 VOTES.
LINE 2122 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 482 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 177 VOTES.
LINE 2207 51 VOTES APPEAR IN BADNARIK COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 51 VOTES.
LINE 2208 45 VOTES APPEAR IN BUSH COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 32 VOTES.
LINE 2209 27 VOTES APPEAR IN PETROUKA COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 26 VOTES.
LINE 2301 41 VOTES APPEAR IN BUSH COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 33 VOTES.
LINE 2316 87 VOTES APPEAR IN BUSH COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 68 VOTES.
LINE 2319 39 VOTES APPEAR IN BUSH COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 31 VOTES.
LINE 2412 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 433 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 212 VOTES.
LINE 2513 35 VOTES APPEAR IN THIRD PARTY COLUMNS,
KERRY LOSES 33 VOTES.
LINE 2521 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 377 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 104 VOTES.
WARD 12 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 6095 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 475 VOTES.
LINE 2704 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 962 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 586 VOTES.
LINE 2706 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 411 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 242 VOTES.
LINE 2708 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 134 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 41 VOTES.
LINE 2715 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 117 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 61 VOTES.
LINE 2717 17 VOTES APPEAR IN THIRD PARTY COLUMNS,
KERRY LOSES 15 VOTES.
LINE 2723 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 481 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 133 VOTES.
LINE 2724 37 VOTES APPEAR IN BADNARIK COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 36 VOTES.
LINE 2725 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 28 VOTES, KERRY LOSES
7 VOTES.
WARD 14 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 6878 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 1106 VOTES.
LINE 2902 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 132 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 36 VOTES.
LINE 2908 22 VOTES APPEAR IN THIRD PARTY COLUMNS,
KERRY LOSES 20 VOTES.
LINE 2919 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 138 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 20 VOTES.
WARD 17 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 6394 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 706 VOTES.
LINE 19O 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 239 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 44 VOTES.
CLEVELAND KERRY LOSES 6032 VOTES
THUS, A NOT UNREASONABLE CONCLUSION IS THAT TAMPERING
WITH THE NUMBERS HAS COST JOHN KERRY 6,000 VOTES IN
CLEVELAND.
I AM NOT CLAIMING THAT THE FINAL RESULTS, WHEN ALL THE
VOTES HAVE BEEN COUNTED AND RECOUNTED, WILL COME CLOSE
TO MATCHING UP WITH THE ESTIMATES I HAVE GIVEN ABOVE.
I HAVE MADE THESE ESTIMATES ONLY TO GIVE THE READER
SOME IDEA OF THE MAGNITUDE OF THE PROBLEM. NOT ALL OF
THESE IRREGULARITIES WILL TURN OUT TO BE FRAUD. BUT
SOME OF THEM WILL. WHOLESALE SHIFTING OF SCORES OF
VOTES TO THE COLUMNS OF THIRD PARTY CANDIDATES WHO
RECEIVED LESS THAN ONE HALF OF ONE PERCENT OF THE
STATEWIDE VOTE BETWEEN THEM, VOTER TURNOUTS OF 7.10%,
13.05%, 19.60%, 21.01%, 21.80%, 24.72%, 28.83%,
28.97%, 29.25% IN CERTAIN PRECINCTS, AND A VOTER
TURNOUT OF 39.35% FOR AN ENTIRE WARD, ARE SIMPLY NOT
CREDIBLE.
THERE MAY BE SOME CORRELATION BETWEEN THE PRECINCTS
WITH ASTONISHINGLY LOW VOTER TURNOUT, AND THE REPORTS
OF LONG LINES AT THE POLLING PLACES DUE TO A LACK OF
ENOUGH VOTING MACHINES. PEOPLE ON THE GROUND IN OHIO
SHOULD LOOK AT THE PRECINCT MAPS, CHECK THE NEWS
REPORTS, TALK WITH LOCAL RESIDENTS, AND FIGURE THIS
OUT.
I WISH TO EXPRESS MY DEEPEST APPRECIATION FOR THE
GRASSROOTS EFFORT THAT HAS MADE AN OHIO RECOUNT
POSSIBLE. I AWAIT THE RESULTS.
RICHARD HAYES PHILLIPS, Ph.D.
http://www.northnet.org/minstrel
http://mediamatters.org/items/200411220005
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Media largely ignored Berkeley study on Florida voting
irregularities
The mainstream media have mostly ignored a statistical
study conducted by faculty and students of the
University of California at Berkeley sociology
department on voting irregularities in Florida in the
2004 presidential election that found major
discrepancies in vote counts between counties that
utilized electronic voting machines (e-voting) and
those that used traditional voting methods. The study,
released on November 18, determined that President
George W. Bush may have wrongly been awarded between
130,000 and 260,000 extra votes in Florida -- 130,000
if they were all "ghost votes" created by machine
error, or twice that if votes intended for Senator
John Kerry were misattributed to Bush.
Even though decreasing Bush's margin of victory by as
many as 260,000 votes would not change the winner in
Florida, the findings of the study are still
important. The study, at the very least, highlights
the lack of accountability in counties that rely on
paperless electronic voting machines, and, more
generally, the lack of confidence inspired by a system
of elections that, as a November 18 article on
Salon.com noted, "so easily creaked and groaned under
the pressure."
According to the Berkeley study:
Irregularities associated with electronic voting
machines may have awarded 130,000 excess votes or more
to Bush in Florida.
Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with
electronic voting machines were significantly more
likely to show increases in support for Bush between
2000 and 2004. This effect cannot be explained by
differences between counties in income, number of
voters, change in voter turnout, or size of
Hispanic/Latino population.
In Broward County alone, Bush appears to have received
approximately 72,000 excess votes.
The Berkeley researchers can be 99.9 percent sure that
these effects are not attributable to chance.
Media Matters for America has documented the
mainstream media's cursory coverage of reports of
election irregularities: They were dismissed as
"conspiracy theories," as The Washington Post did on
November 10, or ignored altogether. The coverage given
to the Berkeley study represented a continuation of
that pattern. A Nexis search revealed that the
Berkeley study has not been covered on any of the
cable or broadcast news networks and has received
little attention in the print media:
A November 19 Associated Press article on academia's
"fixation" on Senator John Kerry mentioned how the
Berkeley study has increased "Internet buzz" about the
possibility of flawed election returns. The article
questioned the study's findings by quoting its critics
who "say Bush's success may simply be due to a better
get-out-the-vote effort, or fears of terrorism driving
many Democrats to choose Bush over party loyalty" and
listing possibly influential factors that were not
included in the study such as "the number of campaign
visits that the Bush campaign made to a county, or the
number of residents who consider themselves
evangelical Christians." The AP article was picked up
by The Miami Herald (November 20), The Indianapolis
Star (November 20), the Los Angeles Times (November
19), and The Boston Globe (November 19), among others.
A November 19 article in the Oakland Tribune on the
Berkeley study noted that a Massachusetts Institute of
Technology political scientist was asked by the
Tribune and the Associated Press to replicate the
analysis of the study. He succeeded in doing so, and
said that an investigation into the discrepancy was
"warranted."
An article on the Berkeley study appeared in the San
Francisco Chronicle on November 19.
The technology news website CNET News.com published a
November 19 article on the study, which also appeared
on The New York Times website. The report quotes a
Princeton University professor of microbiology who
conducted an independent analysis, using different
methods, that produced results similar to those of the
Berkeley study. The Princeton professor also lent
credence to the study, saying: "Their analysis
indicates that even when all these variables [within
the study] are accounted for, a significant difference
remains between counties that used electronic voting
and counties that used optical scanning or paper
ballots."
Keith Olbermann, host of MSNBC's Countdown with Keith
Olbermann, discussed the Berkeley study and the
November 19 Oakland Tribune article in a November 21
entry on his MSNBC.com weblog. Olbermann has received
criticism from conservatives in the media for his
coverage of reports of election irregularities and the
lack of media attention being paid to them, as MMFA
has noted.
— S.S.M.
Posted to the web on Monday November 22, 2004 at 5:11
PM EST
Copyright © 2004 Media Matters for America. All rights
reserved.
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/112304Z.shtml
Author's Note | I delivered the following remarks on
the evening of November 21 at a Brookline PeaceWorks
forum on the 2004 voting irregularities. Truthout
readers will recognize some of the text to follow, as
it is from my article on this topic from 08 November.
Saving Your Right to Vote
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 22 November 2004
Section two of the 14th Amendment to the United
States Constitution reads, in paraphrase, as follows:
"But when the right to vote at any election for the
choice of electors for President and Vice President of
the United States, Representatives in Congress, the
executive and judicial officers of a state, or the
members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any
of the inhabitants of such state, or in any way
abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or
other crime, the basis of representation therein shall
be reduced in the proportion which the number of such
male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male
citizens twenty-one years of age in such state." In
other words, if a state can't manage to run a fair
election, that state loses Senators or Congresspeople.
I have this dream of sending Senators DeWine and
Voinovich of Ohio, along with Congressman Ralph Regula
of Ohio, out of Washington in a blizzard of shame and
disgrace. It's a dream, but a good one.
You've heard from Jonathan Simon tonight about what
has been happening over the last several weeks since
the election. By now you've also heard the stories:
Nationally, there were more than 1,100 incidents of
electronic voting machine malfunctions. In Broward
County, Florida, election workers were shocked to
discover that their shiny new machines were counting
backwards. "Tallies should go up as more votes are
counted," according to the news story. "That's simple
math. But in some races, the numbers had gone down.
Officials found the software used in Broward can
handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the
system starts counting backward."
In Franklin County, Ohio, voting machines gave Bush
3,893 extra votes in one precinct alone. "Franklin
County's unofficial results gave Bush 4,258 votes to
Democratic challenger John Kerry's 260 votes in
Precinct 1B," according to the news story. "Records
show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.
Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County
Board of Elections, said Bush received 365 votes
there. The other 13 voters who cast ballots either
voted for other candidates or did not vote for
president."
In Craven County, North Carolina, a software error
on the electronic voting machines awarded Bush 11,283
extra votes. "The Elections Systems and Software
equipment," according to the news story, "had
downloaded voting information from nine of the
county's 26 precincts and as the absentee ballots were
added, the precinct totals were added a second time.
An override, like those occurring when one attempts to
save a computer file that already exists, is supposed
to prevent double counting, but did not function
correctly."
In Carteret County, North Carolina, "More than 4,500
votes may be lost," according to the news story,
"because officials believed a computer that stored
ballots electronically could hold more data than it
did. Local officials said UniLect Corp., the maker of
the county's electronic voting system, told them that
each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the
limit was actually 3,005 votes. Officials said 3,005
early votes were stored, but 4,530 were lost."
In LaPorte County, Indiana, a Democratic stronghold,
the electronic voting machines decided that each
precinct only had 300 voters. "At about 7 p.m.
Tuesday," according to the news story, "it was noticed
that the first two or three printouts from individual
precinct reports all listed an identical number of
voters. Each precinct was listed as having 300
registered voters. That means the total number of
voters for the county would be 22,200, although there
are actually more than 79,000 registered voters."
In Sarpy County, Nebraska, the electronic touch
screen machines got generous. "As many as 10,000 extra
votes," according to the news story, "have been
tallied and candidates are still waiting for corrected
totals. Johnny Boykin lost his bid to be on the
Papillion City Council. The difference between victory
and defeat in the race was 127 votes. Boykin says,
'When I went in to work the next day and saw that
3,342 people had shown up to vote in our ward, I
thought something's not right.' He's right. There are
not even 3,000 people registered to vote in his ward.
For some reason, some votes were counted twice."
Stories like this have been popping up in many of
the states that put these touch-screen voting machines
to use. Beyond these reports are the folks who
attempted to vote for one candidate and saw the
machine give their vote to the other candidate.
Sometimes, the flawed machines were taken off-line,
and sometimes they were not. As for the reports I just
described, the mistakes were caught and corrected. How
many mistakes made by these machines were not caught,
were not corrected, and have now become part of the
record?
The flaws within these machines are well documented.
Professors and researchers from Johns Hopkins
University performed a detailed analysis of these
electronic voting machines in May of 2004. In their
results, the Johns Hopkins researchers stated, "This
voting system is far below even the most minimal
security standards applicable in other contexts. We
identify several problems including unauthorized
privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography,
vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software
development processes. We show that voters, without
any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes
without being detected by any mechanisms within the
voting terminal software."
"Furthermore," they continued, "we show that even
the most serious of our outsider attacks could have
been discovered and executed without access to the
source code. In the face of such attacks, the usual
worries about insider threats are not the only
concerns; outsiders can do the damage. That said, we
demonstrate that the insider threat is also quite
considerable, showing that not only can an insider,
such as a poll worker, modify the votes, but that
insiders can also violate voter privacy and match
votes with the voters who cast them. We conclude that
this voting system is unsuitable for use in a general
election."
Many of these machines do not provide the voter with
a paper ballot that verifies their vote. So if an
error - or purposefully inserted malicious code - in
the untested machine causes their vote to go for the
other guy, they have no way to verify that it
happened. The lack of a paper ballot also means the
end of recounts as we have known them; now, on these
new machines, a recount amounts to pushing a button on
the machine and getting a number in return, but
without those paper ballots to do a comparison, there
is no way to verify the validity of that count. The
paper ballot aspect isn't nearly the worst part. The
paper ballots are only useful in a recount situation.
If the margin of victory or defeat described by these
machines is large enough, there won't be a recount in
most states.
The worst part is the fact that all the votes
collected by these machines are sent via modem to a
central tabulating computer which counts the votes on
Windows software. This means, essentially, that any
gomer with access to the central tabulation machine
who knows how to work a spreadsheet program and can
fiddle around in Explorer can go into this central
computer and make wholesale changes to election totals
without anyone being the wiser.
Bev Harris, who has been working tirelessly since
the passage of the Help America Vote Act to inform
people of the dangers present in this new process, got
a chance to demonstrate how easy it is to steal an
election on that central tabulation computer while a
guest on the CNBC program 'Topic A With Tina Brown.'
Ms. Brown was off that night, and the guest host was
none other than Governor Howard Dean.
Thanks to Governor Dean and Ms. Harris, anyone
watching CNBC that night got to see just how easy it
is to steal an election because of these new machines
and the flawed processes they use.
"In a voting system," Harris said on the show, "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? What surprises people
is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what
you and I use. It's just a regular computer."
Harris then proceeded to open a laptop computer that
had on it the software used to tabulate the votes by
one of the aforementioned central processors. Harris
had Dean close the Diebold GEMS tabulation software,
return to the 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.
"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and
pasted the numbers from one cell into the other.
Harris sat up and said, "We just edited an election,
and it took us 90 seconds."
It goes without saying, and is the core of the
argument, that any system which makes it this easy to
steal or corrupt an election has no business being
anywhere near the voters on election day. Period.
The counter-argument states that people with
nefarious intent, people with a partisan stake in the
outcome of an election, would have to have access to
the central tabulation computers in order to do harm
to the process. Keep the partisans away from the
process, and everything will work out fine. Surely no
partisan political types were near these machines on
Tuesday night when the votes were counted, right?
One of the main manufacturers of these electronic
touch-screen voting machines is Diebold, Inc. Millions
of voters across the country used their machines to
cast their ballot on November 2nd. According to the
Center for Responsive Politics, Diebold gave $100,000
to the Republican National Committee in 2000, along
with additional contributions between 2001 and 2002
which totaled $95,000. Of the four companies competing
for the contracts to manufacture these voting
machines, only Diebold contributed large sums to any
political party. The CEO of Diebold is a man named
Walden O'Dell. O'Dell was very much on board with the
Bush campaign, having said publicly in 2003 that he
was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral
votes to the president next year."
So much for keeping the partisans at arm's length.
I could go on and on in this vein, but as a former
teacher, I am a big believer in visual aids. I hold in
my hand here a Diebold corporate document from March
of 2003. It lists all the counties in all the states
where their electronic touchscreen voting machines
were put to use. The document is 28 pages long, and
lists counties in 37 states. This is what we are up
against. Thanks to the Help America Vote Act, this
document will get longer and longer with each
successive election.
I'm supposed to stand up here and talk about what we
can do about it. I'll ignore, for the moment, the fact
that we are forced to fight a political war on twenty
fronts right now. I'll ignore the fact that the media
remains an abomination, that we have no empowered
allies in any of the three branches of government,
that our new Attorney General will probably get
confirmed despite the fact that he made a number of
documented legal arguments claiming that the torture,
murder and rape of prisoners at Abu Ghraib wasn't
really torture, that the supreme court will soon be
packed with Scalia clones, and that our illegal war in
Iraq continues to claim life after life after life.
1,221 American soldiers are dead in Iraq as of today,
100 in the month of November.
I'll ignore all of that, and instead stand here and
talk about money. Money money money. If you want to
attack the problems surrounding these electronic
voting machines, you had better be prepared to dig
deep, because no attack will amount to a bucket of
warm spit without money. In today's political world,
nothing happens without money, and money makes all the
difference. I'll give you one example. We've had all
these reports of voting irregularities, but nothing
has seemed to take root in the public or media
consciousness. Is it a conspiracy? No.
As ominous as these reports have been, they have
been brushed off because George W. Bush managed to
nail down a three million vote advantage in the
popular vote. Can these machines, combined with the
kind of vote spoilage/voter intimidation that Greg
Palast has been reporting on, account for all that?
Possibly, but another factor must be brought into the
equation. Bush got that three million vote advantage
because the Kerry campaign and the DNC did not spend
any money in the South and Midwest to boost voter
turnout. Had the campaign spent that money and managed
to get 40-45% of the popular vote in the South and
Midwest, that three million popular vote margin would
have been erased, and the issues surround