November 07, 2006

Attention Bounty Hunters Vote Fraud

MoveOn is offering a quarter million dollar reward "for new material evidence leading to a felony conviction for an organized effort of partisan voter suppression or electronic voting fraud."

Seems like they should have announced this a couple of months ago. Get some people digging.

Posted by Jonathan at 06:30 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb

A Criminal Enterprise Politics  Vote Fraud

Billmon's got it right:

Like everybody else, I don't know what's going to happen today, but this election has already illuminated one critical truth: The modern GOP — or, more specifically, the axis of '70s campus Republicans now running it — really is just a criminal enterprise disguised as a political party.

Dirty tricks, large and small, are a sorry fact of life in American politics, but what the Republicans have done over the past few weeks — the surrealist attack ads, the forged endorsements, the midnight robo calls, the arrest threats, the voter misinformation (did you know your polling station has been moved?) — is sui generis, at least at the national level.

Even Dick Nixon never tried anything like this on such a grand scale — although, of course, he also didn't have the technology. The only thing we haven't seen yet is a break in at DNC headquarters. And if the Rovians thought they could get anything out of it that would be useful in this election (nobody else has) we'd probably be reading about that, too.

It's always possible to point to Democratic/liberal offenses, but at this point the comparisons look pretty silly: some downed yard signs here, a few crooked and/or stoned ACORN canvassers there. Not even in the same universe, much less the same ball park.

Couple the GOP's rat-fucking campaign with all the other stuff we already know about — the collectivized bribery of the K Street Project, the Abramoff casino extortion ring, the Defense and CIA appropriation scams, the Iraq War contracting scams, the Pacific Island sex trade protection racket, the church pulpits doubling as ward halls, the illegal wiretapping, the lies, perjury and obstruction of justice in the Plame case (I really could go on like this all day) — and it's clear that what we need most isn't a new Congress but a new RICO prosecution, with lots of defendents and unindicted co-conspirators. [Emphasis added]

Of course, the mainstream media will never dare to report it that way. But it's the truth.

Posted by Jonathan at 06:05 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb

GOP Distributes False Sample Ballots Vote Fraud

Un-freaking-believable.

But of course every news story will be framed as if there's some sort of equivalency between the parties' tactics.

Posted by Jonathan at 05:49 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb

Pelosi: "Will We Have An Honest Count?" Politics  Vote Fraud

San Francisco Chronicle:

In an interview from her Capitol office, [House Democratic Leader Nancy] Pelosi characterized Tuesday's vote as a referendum on the war, shrugged off President Bush's efforts to make her liberalism a national issue, described the current GOP leadership as a "freak show," and expressed confidence about her party's prospects to pick up the 15 seats it needs for a majority.

"I know where the numbers are in these races, and I know that they are there for the 15; today (it's) 22 to 26," Pelosi said Friday.

Pelosi cautioned that the number of Democratic House victories could be higher or lower and said her greatest concern is over the integrity of the count — from the reliability of electronic voting machines to her worries that Republicans will try to manipulate the outcome.

"That is the only variable in this," Pelosi said. "Will we have an honest count?" [Emphasis added]

What's incomprehensible to me: why Democrats haven't made more of an issue of voter suppression and election fraud. Why do they wait until it's time for an election before they bring it up?

Posted by Jonathan at 11:38 AM | Comments (0) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb

November 06, 2006

Hacking Democracy Vote Fraud

The HBO special "Hacking Democracy" is available online here. Go watch.

Prepare to be outraged.

[Thanks, Jeff]

Posted by Jonathan at 04:44 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb

More GOP Vote Suppression Politics  Vote Fraud

Wayne Madsen Report:

WMR has learned this afternoon that the GOP and the George Allen campaign are conducting a massive statewide voter suppression operation throughout Virginia. [...]

We have learned that GOP robo-callers are phoning Virginia voters who changed their voter registration from other states during at least the past five years. Registered legal Virginia voters are being told that if they attempt to vote tomorrow they will be prosecuted. [Emphasis added]

Posted by Jonathan at 04:36 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb

Robo-Calling Dirty Tricks Politics  Vote Fraud

As you may have read on other blogs, the RNC is paying for automated dirty-trick phone calls in dozens of districts across the country. These calls are designed to trick recipients into thinking they came from Democratic candidates. They reportedly are placed at inconvenient times and are repeated, sometimes immediately after the recipient hangs up. The goal clearly is to piss off voters who would otherwise vote Democratic. Rolling Stone:

Just got off a conference call with Rahm Emanuel of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

He called the burgeoning Republican robo-call scandal — in which the National Republican Campaign Committee is aparently violating state do-not-call registries by placing repeat robocalls after midnight to Democratic voters, calls that are recorded to leave bleary-eyed and angry recipients with the impression that they have been placed by Democratic candidates — "the worst of dirty tricks."

"They're doing again the very thing they got fined for," Emanuel said. "We'll be dealing with this." Unfortunately, Emanuel admitted, any "dealing" will be done after election night. [Emphasis added]

They'll get fined, after the election, but so what? A monetary fine is no disincentive. The only way these tactics could hurt the Republicans is if the mainstream broadcast and cable media picked up the story and covered it extensively, now, before the election. Won't happen. Your liberal media at work.

So we need to make our own coverage. Protect Our Votes:

For this to break through, there needs to be visual evidence that voters are being called back immediately. Bloggers: please tell your readers to get video cameras ready and start rolling when the phone rings. Use the speaker phone so that the call can be heard. We need just one example of that up on YouTube and VideoTheVote.com.

Even better would be emails leaked from the robo call house responsible (or any robo call house for that matter) that offer the service or mention the strategy in question. [Emphasis added]

Stay tuned.

Posted by Jonathan at 04:13 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb

November 04, 2006

Independents Favor Dems 2-To-1 Politics  Vote Fraud

A new Newsweek poll shows the Democrats continuing to surge, with a nearly 2-to-1 advantage among independent voters:

As President George W. Bush jets across Red State America this weekend, Republican candidates are falling further behind Democratic rivals, according to the new NEWSWEEK poll. While the GOP has lagged behind Democrats throughout the campaign season, the trend in the past month — when NEWSWEEK conducted four polls in five weeks — had suggested the Republicans were building momentum in the homestretch.

No more. The new poll finds support for Republicans (and for President Bush) receding. For example, 53 percent of Americans want the Democrats to win enough seats to take control of one or both houses of Congress in the midterm elections on Tuesday. Those results are close to early October levels, while less than a third of Americans (32 percent) want Republicans to retain control. If the elections were held today, 54 percent of likely voters say they would support the Democratic candidate in their district versus 38 percent who would vote for the Republican — a 16-point edge for the Democrats. [...]

Meanwhile, the President's approval has fallen back to 35 percent, after a slow but steady rise from 33 percent at the beginning of October to 37 percent in the NEWSWEEK poll last week.

The good news for Republicans is that their voters are coming home; 90 percent of likely Republican voters say they would vote for the GOP's candidate if the elections were held today, not far behind the 95 percent of Democrats who back their party's nominee. But independents say they would vote for the Democrat over the Republican in their district nearly 2 to 1 (26 percent versus 51 percent.) [...]

[O]nly 29 percent of Americans [say] they’re satisfied with the direction of the country — and 64 percent [say] they're not. [Emphasis added]

The good news: people grasp, finally, that the Bush Republicans have got to go. The bad news: they'll be voting in an election system that's pretty well rigged.

So far, election fraud has tended to be applied in cases where the pre-election polls were somewhat close, where we could tell ourselves the outcome was within the margin of error. But this time around, the polls are lopsided. If elections are stolen under these circumstances, it will be like a decree announcing the end of American democracy. We will have crossed a Rubicon from which we may never return. Meanwhile, the mainstream media will refuse to credit the evidence that will be too scary to acknowledge but too obvious to ignore. We'll see black, they'll say white.

The cognitive dissonance will cause a lot of people to just throw up their hands and say, well that's how elections are now. Nobody knows who really won. And anyway, they're all crooks, on both sides. If that happens, elections will be just another form of reality tv with a predetermined outcome. Democracy will be over. But at least we'll know where we stand.

Posted by Jonathan at 01:14 PM | Comments (3) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb

October 28, 2006

1-866-OUR-VOTE Vote Fraud

Americans reading this, I'll assume you're planning to go vote on the 7th. Here's a phone number to write down and put in your wallet: 1-866-OUR-VOTE. Call it if you encounter suspicious or fraudulent behavior. My guess is that fraud will be rampant. It will be impossible to keep them honest, but every little bit helps.

[Thanks, Matt]

Posted by Jonathan at 02:06 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb

October 23, 2006

Two Weeks To Go Politics  Vote Fraud

Bush and Rove talk like they're convinced they can't lose control of the Congress. NYT:

Mr. Bush has been saying for months that he believes Republicans will keep control of the House and the Senate, and he is not changing his tune now, even if it means taking the rare step of rebuking his own father.

In an interview shown Sunday on ABC News, Mr. Bush was asked about a comment by the first President Bush, who said this month that he hated to think about life for his son if Democrats took control of Congress. "He shouldn't be speculating like that, because he should have called me ahead of time," the president said, "and I'd tell him they're not going to."

The president's professed certainty, shared with outside friends and advisers, is a source of fascination among even his staunchest allies. In lobbying shops and strategy firms around town, the latest Republican parlor game is divining whether the White House optimism is staged, or whether Mr. Bush and his political team really believe what they are saying. [...]

Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove are discounting predictions of Republican demise in part because they believe they have turned out wrong before. "I remember 2004," Mr. Bush said in the interview shown on "This Week." "I was history as far as the punditry was concerned."

Mr. Rove has told associates that the party's turnout machinery, through which the White House will continue to pump an unrelenting message against Democrats on taxes and terrorism, gives Republicans an advantage of four to seven percentage points in any given race. Though Democrats call that too generous, they acknowledge that it accounts for at least a few percentage points. [Emphasis added]

They could be faking it. They could be in denial. Or, they could know something we don't: that the election's already in the bag, courtesy of electronic voting. The incessant harping on a supposed 4-7 point Republican advantage based on their GOTV ground game preps the conventional wisdom for explaining, post-election, why the polls once again mysteriously turned out to be so wrong. Let's hope not, but it is a measure of how far we've sunk that we even have to entertain such thoughts.

Posted by Jonathan at 12:32 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb

September 15, 2006

Game Over Vote Fraud

Computer researchers at Princeton have published a demonstration showing how easily Diebold "Accuvote" touchscreen voting machines can be hacked to steal votes from one candidate and redirect them to another.

They wrote a virus that can be installed on a voting machine in less than a minute. Once installed on one machine, it can spread to others, infecting them as well. The virus steal votes in such a way that all records — on the display screen, in memory cards, and in paper printouts — agree on the fraudulent totals. The virus can tell when the machine is being run in a mode used to test the machine's accuracy, and it will provide accurate results during the test. During an actual election, however, the virus steals votes. When the election ends, the virus deletes itself, removing all traces that it was ever there. Fixing these problems will require more than just a software change; the machines' hardware must be changed as well.

So democracy comes down to who's got access to the machines and who's got the better hackers.

Why is this state of affairs tolerated? Yes, people are cynical and people are lazy, but still. It's hard to escape the conclusion that these machines represent the culmination of an elite dream: take the rabble out of the equation without our even knowing it. Preserve the appearance of democracy, but reduce it to a made-for-tv charade.

The only thing that will stop it is public outrage. There are so many things to be outraged about, though, that it's hard for this one to gain traction. But this one is fundamental. If we can't vote, it's pretty much game over.

Details of the study are available here, along with a video that demonstrates the malicious software in use.

[Thanks, Maurice]

Posted by Jonathan at 05:12 PM | Comments (2) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb

September 06, 2006

Not A Bug, A Feature Vote Fraud

The NYT editorializes on the state of voting in this country:

It's hard to believe that nearly six years after the disasters of Florida in 2000, states still haven't mastered the art of counting votes accurately. Yet there are growing signs that the country is moving into another presidential election cycle in disarray.

The most troubling evidence comes from Ohio, a key swing state, whose electoral votes decided the 2004 presidential election. A recent government report details enormous flaws in the election system in Ohio's biggest county, problems that may not be fixable before the 2008 election.

Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, hired a consulting firm to review its election system. The county recently adopted Diebold electronic voting machines that produce a voter-verified paper record of every vote cast. The investigators compared the vote totals recorded on the machines after this year's primary with the paper records produced by the machines. The numbers should have been the same, but often there were large and unexplained discrepancies. The report also found that nearly 10 percent of the paper records were destroyed, blank, illegible, or otherwise compromised.

This is seriously bad news even if, as Diebold insists, the report overstates the problem. Under Ohio law, the voter-verified paper record, not the voting machine total, is the official ballot for purposes of a recount. The error rates the report identified are an invitation to a meltdown in a close election.

The report also found an array of other problems. The county does not have a standardized method for conducting a manual recount. That is an invitation, as Florida 2000 showed, to chaos and litigation. And there is a serious need for better training of poll workers, and for more uniform voter ID policies. Disturbingly, the report found that 31 percent of blacks were asked for ID, while just 18 percent of others were. [Emphasis added]

Diebold also makes ATMs. Imagine if 10% of ATM receipts "were destroyed, blank, illegible, or otherwise compromised" — Diebold would go out of business overnight. But ATM failures are so rare that they make the evening news. Which is to say, Diebold knows how to make the technology work. The obvious conclusion: 10% slop in the system isn't a bug, it's a feature. The machines give people a false sense of security, but 10% is a margin of error large enough to let almost any election be stolen.

It's not like we don't know the consequences. Not after 2000 and 2004. It's a measure of the deterioration of American democracy that we just slide along as if nothing can be done. If it were the banking system, we'd fix it in a hurry. But it's voting, and for some reason we accept that accurate voting is simply too much to ask for.

Posted by Jonathan at 05:40 PM | Comments (2) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb

July 16, 2006

Voto Por Voto Vote Fraud

Another election, another stolen result. This time, for President of Mexico. Greg Palast went to Mexico to look into what happened, and his 15-minute documentary video is available at Democracy Now. Here are excerpts from Democracy Now's transcript:

GREG PALAST: So my first stop was to meet one of Mexico's top numbers experts, statistician Victor Romero of Mexico's National University. Dr. Romero had charted the official government elections returns from each of Mexico's 113,000 voting stations. [...]

On a computer printout, Dr. Romero showed how the official tallies matched the exit polls, with challenger Lopez Obrador ahead by 2% all night. That is, until the very end, when several precincts came in for the ruling party by 10-to-1, and then 100-to-1, putting their candidate Felipe Calderon over the top, literally in the last minutes. The doctor found that statistically improbable.

VICTOR ROMERO: We reached the point I said, "It's over." But then, from 71% 'til the very end, there was not a single moment in which the difference from one report to the next became bigger.

GREG PALAST: So it didn't change at all. Just was perfect.

VICTOR ROMERO: Perfect, perfect. And so we just couldn't believe it. I mean, it fell — with 5% to go, it fell one full point. [...]

GREG PALAST: The results may not seem so miraculous if you take a look at these voter sheets. This is from a district in Guanajuato, which shows that Calderon picked up 192 votes, but Obrador, the challenger, got only 12. And here's how this miraculous total can be explained. We were given a videotape of a poll worker, seen here stuffing ballots into the unguarded cardboard ballot box. Mexico has virtually zero ballot security in rural areas. There is no system for accounting for unused paper ballots. Stuffing them into the cardboard boxes is absurdly easy.

Despite the evidence of ballot stuffing, the conflict with exit polls and the miraculous returns, the Federal Election Commission in Mexico named Calderon the winner by a margin thin as a tortilla, by less than 0.5%. The rush to announce a winner was all the more surprising given the wave of other reported irregularities. This is Cesar Yanez who directed the campaign for Lopez Obrador’s party, the PRD. He noted there were 300,000 fewer votes for president than for senator, a drop-off that voting experts say never happens without fraud. Yanez guessed maybe they ate their votes.

The Federal Election Commission's rush to announce a winner caught my attention because of the astonishingly high pile of supposedly uncountable votes: nearly one million blank unreadable ballots, four times the alleged margin of victory. The smell of Florida was unmistakable. In the 2000 U.S. election, Florida's Secretary of State Katherine Harris stopped a hand count of 179,000 supposedly blank ballots. Mexico's Electoral Commission, taking the exact same stance as Harris, is refusing to have a public hand count of those supposedly blank one million ballots.

Yanez noted that the commission agreed to open a fragment of 1% of the ballot packets. In most cases, ballots that were totaled as blank were, in fact, votes for Obrador. Each box opened produced enough newfound votes for Obrador that opening all the boxes should statistically change the outcome of the election. But all the boxes won't be opened. The ruling party, the PAN, and the Electoral Commission refuse a full public recount, and the government says that it's over.

Felipe Calderon and his ally George Bush say it's all over, but there are hundreds of thousands of people here who say, not until all the votes are counted one by one. On Saturday, half a million Obrador supporters filled the capital to make one simple demand: voto por voto, count every vote. [Emphasis added]

If this all sounds like the last two presidential elections here in the US, that's not entirely coincidental. It turns out that the Bush regime, through private contractor ChoicePoint, Inc., was very much involved in Mexico's election. Palast again:

GREG PALAST: We have obtained from U.S. FBI files a copy of a secret government contract with a private firm, ChoicePoint of Alpharetta, Georgia. ChoicePoint, you may recall, is the company that provided a list to Katherine Harris in 2000, which permitted her office to wrongly scrub thousands of African Americans from Florida voter rolls.

ChoicePoint, this document indicates, was back in the vote list business in Mexico at the request of the Bush administration. While the cover of their September 2001 contract says it is to gather intelligence for counterterrorism investigations, the still classified appendix, which we have, clarifies that the contract is limited to gathering citizen files and voter lists of Latin American nations, specifically those nations which have leftist presidents or leading leftist candidates for president.

The company, we have learned, did, in fact, obtain the voter files of Venezuela and Mexico for the FBI. It's difficult to imagine how these files will help in the war on terror, but they can be very useful in influencing Latin American elections. And, indeed, we filmed voters in Mexico who found themselves mysteriously scrubbed from voter rolls.

SCRUBBED VOTER: I wasn't able to vote. I wasn't on the list. I waited seven hours here for nothing, seven hours in the rain, seven hours hungry, just so the electoral representatives could laugh at me. The Electoral Commission is a real fraud. I tell you that as a Mexican.

GREG PALAST: In Mexico City, I met with an Obrador supporter who discovered that, in fact, the ruling party, the PAN, had somehow got a hold of the voter files. She discovered this information after she obtained the secret passwords to the party's website from a whistleblower. We were not allowed to film her face.

OBRADOR SUPPORTER: I can't tell you how they were using this information, but I can assure you this is illegal. This is a crime.

GREG PALAST: Are you aware of the fact that a contractor for George Bush and the U.S. FBI obtained all these citizen files?

OBRADOR SUPPORTER: Yes, ChoicePoint was the name of the company who got that. Yes, we were aware of that.

GREG PALAST: But we don't know where this information comes from?

OBRADOR SUPPORTER: We know that it’s in the official page of the candidate.

GREG PALAST: But they’re not supposed to have these for these purposes?

OBRADOR SUPPORTER: No, no, no. They’re not supposed to have it. And, of course, they are by no way supposed to use it. That's a crime.

GREG PALAST: But it could be very helpful.

OBRADOR SUPPORTER: Well, much more than we ever thought. [Emphasis added]

Here in the US, one pair of brothers, long backed by ultra-right-wing Christian Reconstructionist money, are technical principals behind the two companies (Diebold and ES&S) that count 80% of US black-box electronic votes. The Mexican equivalent? Palast again:

GREG PALAST: Our source believes that the vote-counting software was key to the election victory. She showed us proof that the candidate's brother-in-law was paid to write the vote-counting software.

Was the election stolen?

OBRADOR SUPPORTER: Yes, we can be sure of that. The election was definitely stolen. And people should be there counting the votes one by one. Democracy doesn't have a time limit. [...]

GREG PALAST: Why would the Bush administration be so concerned about the presidency of Mexico? There are many issues, but one stands out. It's the oil. [Emphasis added]

This is how modern elites have solved the pesky problem of ordinary people getting to vote. Make it look like democracy, let us vote, but control the results. Anybody complains, turn it into a he-said-she-said dispute or put it down to sour grapes and conspiracy theories. Quickly move on to the next story. Done. Nor is it limited to any one nation: elites are globalized, even if we aren't.

Here's what scares me. So far, election fraud has been applied in cases where the pre-election polls were close. In US elections this fall, polls may not be so close, but I think we're going to see some significant election meltdowns anyway. In Ohio, for instance, where Kenneth Blackwell continues to control the electoral process even as he himself runs for governor. I.e., vote fraud is going mainstream. It's going to be more and more blatant, more and more out in the open, but the mainstream media will pretend nothing's happening. We'll see black, they'll say white.

The cognitive dissonance will cause a lot of people to just throw up their hands and say, well that's how elections are now. Nobody knows who really won. And anyway, they're all crooks, on both sides. (All the reports of Washington corruption just feed into this perception.) If that happens, elections will be just another tv show with a predetermined outcome. Democracy will be over.

(For more background on recent US vote fraud, click the Vote Fraud link on the home page.)

Posted by Jonathan at 07:39 PM | Comments (2) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb

December 13, 2005

Securities Fraud Alleged Against Eight Top Diebold Execs Vote Fraud

BradBlog reports that eight top executives of voting machine manufacturer Diebold are named in a new securities fraud lawsuit:

The BRAD BLOG can now report that a Securities Fraud Class Action suit has been filed against Diebold, Inc. (stock symbol: DBD) naming eight top executive officers in the company as co-defendants. The suit has been filed by plaintiff Janice Konkol, alleging securities fraud against the North Canton, Ohio-based manufacturer of Voting Systems and ATM machines on behalf of investors who owned shares of Diebold stock and lost money due to an alleged fraudulent scheme by the company and its executives to deceive shareholders during the "class period" of October 22, 2003 through September 21, 2005. [...]

The suit, filed by the law firm SCOTT+SCOTT on behalf of Konkol and the plaintiff class, names former Diebold CEO and Chairman, Walden O'Dell as a co-defendant along with seven other current and former officers of the once-venerable company. [...]

Yesterday, in a surprise announcement, O'Dell unexpectedly resigned from the company. A Diebold press release described O'Dell as leaving the company for "personal reasons". He was immediately replaced by the company's president and chief operating officer, Thomas W. Swidarski, who had directly overseen Diebold's Election Systems subsidiary division for some time. Swidarski is also named as a co-defendant in today's class action suit. [Emphasis added]

O'Dell is the Diebold exec who pledged to deliver Ohio to Bush in 2004.

Karma.

Posted by Jonathan at 05:48 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb

November 25, 2005

GAO Report On E-Voting Machines Vote Fraud

Electronic transactions can be convenient and efficient. We love that we can make purchases online or get cash from an ATM. But we also expect that the implementers of e-commerce sites and bank machines have done their homework, building in the security safeguards necessary to protect us — and themselves as well. If we heard about an e-commerce site or ATM manufacturer that didn't bother to secure their communications, encrypt their data, password-protect their administrative functions, etc., we'd think, what a bunch of idiots, and we'd avoid them like the plague. We understand that if you let people take advantage, some of them will. It's human nature. It's why banks have vaults.

So let's talk about electronic voting machines.

Various partisan observers have written at length about the fundamental problems with the electronic voting machines now in widespread use across the country, especially the touchscreen machines known as DREs. In 2000, about 12% of voters used DREs. In 2004, it was 29%. The overwhelming majority of such machines are manufactured by a handful of companies with ultra-right-wing backers. In a nation of grownups, that would be unacceptable in itself, but the US is "the only major democracy that allows private partisan corporations to secretly count and tabulate the votes with proprietary non transparent software." Why this isn't a massive scandal is beyond me. Are we a nation of suckers and rubes?

A new report analyzing e-voting machines is notable for the nonpartisan nature of its source: the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the federal government's principal agency for investigating issues related to government operation. What the GAO found is disturbing, to put it mildly. You'd think it would be all over the news, but of course it's not. No visuals.

Here's some of what the GAO found:

Regarding key software components:

  • Election management systems did not encrypt the data files containing cast votes (to protect them from being viewed or modified).
  • Other computer programs could access these cast vote files and alter them without the system recording this action in its audit logs.
  • It was possible to alter the ballot definition files on one model of DRE so that the votes shown on the touch screen for one candidate would actually be recorded and counted for a different candidate.
  • It was possible to gain full control of a regional vote tabulation computer — including the ability to modify the voting software — via a modem connection.
  • Someone with physical access to an optical scan voting system could falsify election results without leaving any record of this action in the system's audit logs by using altered memory cards.

    Regarding access controls:

  • One model failed to password-protect the supervisor functions controlling key system capabilities.
  • Another relied on an easily guessed password to access these functions.
  • In another case, the same personal identification number was programmed into all supervisor cards nationwide — meaning that the number was likely to be widely known.
  • Values used to encrypt election data (called encryption keys) were defined in the source code.
  • Smart cards (used to activate the touch screen on DRE systems) and memory cards (used to program the terminals of optical scan systems) were not secured by some voting systems. Reviewers exploited this weakness by altering such cards and using them to improperly access administrator functions, vote multiple times, change vote totals, and produce false election reports in a test environment.

    Regarding physical hardware controls:

  • Many of the DRE models under examination contained weaknesses in controls designed to protect the system. For instance, one report noted that all the locks on a particular DRE model were easily picked, and were all controlled by the same keys—keys that the reports' authors were able to copy at a local store.
  • A particular model of DRE was linked together with others to form a rudimentary network. If one of these machines were accidentally or intentionally unplugged from the others, voting functions on the other machines in the network would be disrupted.
  • The switches used to turn a DRE system on or off, as well as those used to close the polls on a particular DRE terminal, were not protected.

    Weak security management practices:

    Specific concerns have been expressed about:

  • the personnel security policies used by vendors, including whether vendors conduct background checks on programmers and systems developers;
  • whether vendors have established strict internal security protocols and have adhered to them during software development; and
  • whether vendors have established clear chain of custody procedures for handling and transporting their software securely.

    • The GAO report recommends ways that standards, controls, testing and validation can be used to improve the situation. Such things certainly would help, but imagine if the nation's ATMs were as full of security holes as its electronic voting machines are. Would we stand for it? Would we blithely entrust our paychecks and deposits to such machines? Would we be satisfied with a suggestion that someday somebody might actually institute procedures to make them work properly? Or would we say: fix the machines first, then maybe we'll use them — but until they're fixed, forget about it.

    E-voting machines differ from ATMs in a fundamental way. The ATM manufacturer has every incentive to make the machine's operation as flawless as is technically feasible. If mistakes are made, the bank may gain or lose, the customer may gain or lose, but the ATM manufacturer won't gain: money isn't diverted into the manufacturer's account. If mistakes are made, the manufacturer's customer — the bank — won't be happy.

    But by letting private companies with highly partisan owners count our votes, we permit an extraordinary conflict of interest to come between us and our democracy. Partisan e-voting companies may have every incentive to cheat, especially when their political party is in power and in a position to protect them and to renew their contracts.

    There are only two possibilities here. Either the e-voting machine manufacturers are unbelievably incompetent, or they want to control the electoral process. The incompetence argument is unconvincing, especially since Diebold, one of the major e-voting machine manufacturers, is also a major ATM manufacturer. That means they have the expertise and the experience to do it right, if doing it right were really their goal.

    Posted by Jonathan at 09:41 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb

    November 04, 2005

    Report: Kerry Thinks Election Was Stolen Politics  Vote Fraud

    Mark Crispin Miller has a very good new book (Fooled Again) that makes a convincing case that the 2004 persidential election was stolen. Miller appeared on Democracy Now today along with Mark Hertsgaard. In the interview, Miller dropped this bombshell:

    MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Speaking of John Kerry, I have some news for you. On Friday, this last Friday night, I arranged to meet Senator Kerry at a fundraiser to give him a copy of my book. He told me he now thinks the election was stolen. He said he doesn't believe that he is the person who can go out front on the issue, because of the sour grapes, you know, question. But he said he believes it was stolen. He says he argues about this with his Democratic colleagues on the Hill. He had just had a big fight with Christopher Dodd about it, because he said, you know, "There's this stuff about the voting machines; they’re really questionable." And Dodd was angry. "I don't want to hear about it," you know, "I looked into it. There's nothing there."

    Well, there's plenty there, and let me add one thing: This is not a criminal case, okay? We don't have to prove guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt. This is our election system, right? This is a system based on consent of the governed. If many, many millions of Americans are convinced that they got screwed on Election Day and couldn't vote, or if 3.4 million more Americans claim that they voted than the actual total of voters — this is what the Census Bureau told us last May — this is grounds alone for serious investigation, and I think Mark would agree with me here. We have to have serious investigation.

    AMY GOODMAN: Did Senator Kerry say, when he said on Friday night, according to you, that he does think the election was stolen, did he say why he raced out the next day after, for months, the Democratic candidates had assured the voters that they would make sure every vote was counted? I mean, Mark Hertsgaard says in his own piece in Mother Jones, "It didn't help that Kerry conceded immediately, despite questions about Ohio. The American press is less an independent truth seeker than a transmission belt for opinions of movers and shakers in Washington. If the Democratic candidate wasn’t going to cry foul, the press certainly wasn't going to do it for him."

    MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, that's true. That was a real body blow to the democratic system, and it demoralized a lot of people when Kerry pulled out. It's hard to forgive him for that. Why did he do it? Well, according to my evidence and I've got this in Fooled Again, Kerry was swayed by the brain trust around him. These are people like, you know, Bob Shrum, Mary Beth Cahill — they’re, you know, Democratic Party war horses. I don't think they have a stellar record of winning campaigns, and I don't really understand how it is that they were hired to do this, but they persuaded him up in Martha's Vineyard that he should pull out, otherwise, he told John Edwards in his call, Kerry said, "They say that if I don't pull out, they are going to call us sore losers," as if there's — [...]

    AMY GOODMAN: Are you saying, Mark Crispin Miller, that John Edwards didn't want to concede?

    MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Absolutely not. I spoke to someone, a relative of his who was with him when the phone call came from Kerry. This is this in the book, Fooled Again. Kerry called him on the cell phone, and don't forget that Edwards himself, four hours before, had just been on national TV promising righteously to count every vote, got a big hand. Now he felt he was being made to look like a fool, and he argued with Kerry vehemently. He said, "It's too soon, you know. Wait." Kerry, you know, said this thing about how they will call us sore losers, as if that's worse than the country, you know, going fascist, whatever. And Edwards said quite understandably, "So what?" You know, "So what if they call us sore losers?" I mean, they are going to call them names in any case. But it's true, Mark is right, Kerry's caving in like that gave an enormous gift to the right wing. They could now claim, "Well, even their candidate doesn't think it was stolen." And they left, you know, the American people hanging out to dry there. [Emphasis added]

    There is no more important story in America right now than the disgusting state of our election process. So of course we hear essentially zero serious discussion of it in mainstream media. As for Kerry, well, he is a Bonesman, after all.

    Posted by Jonathan at 05:35 PM | Comments (2) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb

    February 25, 2005

    Ohio, Revisited Vote Fraud

    Christopher Hitchens, no friend of John Kerry's or, these days, of the Left generally, has a good piece in the March Vanity Fair reviewing some of the many reasons for concluding that there was something "seriously awry" with the 2004 election in Ohio. Excerpts:

    Here's what happened in Gambier, Ohio, [home of Kenyon College,] on decision day 2004.

    The polls opened at 6:30 a.m. There were only two voting machines (push-button direct-recording electronic systems) for the entire town of 2,200 (with students). The mayor, Kirk Emmert, had called the Board of Elections 10 days earlier, saying that the number of registered voters would require more than that. (He knew, as did many others, that hundreds of students had asked to register in Ohio because it was a critical "swing" state.) The mayor's request was denied. Indeed, instead of there being extra capacity on Election Day, one of the only two machines chose to break down before lunchtime.

    By the time the polls officially closed, at 7:30 that evening, the line of those waiting to vote was still way outside the Community Center and well into the parking lot...By the time the 1,175 voters in the precinct had all cast their ballots, it was almost four in the morning, and many had had to wait for up to 11 hours.

    Across the rest of Ohio,...[r]eporters and eyewitnesses told of voters who had given up after humiliating or frustrating waits, and who often cited the unwillingness of their employers to accept voting as an excuse for lateness or absence. In some way or another, these bottlenecks had a tendency to occur in working-class and, shall we just say, nonwhite precincts. So did many disputes about "provisional" ballots, the sort that are handed out when a voter can prove his or her identity but not his or her registration at that polling place. These glitches might all be attributable to inefficiency or incompetence (though Gambier had higher turnouts and much shorter lines in 1992 and 1996). Inefficiency and incompetence could also explain the other oddities of the Ohio process—from machines that redirected votes from one column to the other to machines that recorded amazing tallies for unknown fringe candidates, to machines that apparently showed that voters who waited for a long time still somehow failed to register a vote at the top of the ticket for any candidate for the presidency of these United States.

    However, for any of that last category of anomaly to be explained, one would need either a voter-verified paper trail of ballots that could be tested against the performance of the machines or a court order that would allow inspection of the machines themselves. The first of these does not exist, and the second has not yet been granted. [...]

    [H]ere are some of the non-wacko reasons to revisit the Ohio election.

    First, the county-by-county and precinct-by-precinct discrepancies. In Butler County, for example, a Democrat running for the State Supreme Court chief justice received 61,559 votes. The Kerry-Edwards ticket drew about 5,000 fewer votes, at 56,243. This contrasts rather markedly with the behavior of the Republican electorate in that county, who cast about 40,000 fewer votes for their judicial nominee than they did for Bush and Cheney. (The latter pattern, with vote totals tapering down from the top of the ticket, is by far the more general—and probable—one nationwide and statewide.)

    In 11 other counties, the same Democratic judicial nominee, C. Ellen Connally, managed to outpoll the Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominees by hundreds and sometimes thousands of votes....In Cuyahoga County, which includes the city of Cleveland, two largely black precincts on the East Side voted like this. In Precinct 4F: Kerry, 290; Bush, 21; Peroutka, 215. In Precinct 4N: Kerry, 318; Bush, 11; Badnarik, 163. Mr. Peroutka and Mr. Badnarik are, respectively, the presidential candidates of the Constitution and Libertarian Parties....In 2000, Ralph Nader's best year, the total vote received in Precinct 4F by all third-party candidates combined was eight.

    In Montgomery County, two precincts recorded a combined undervote of almost 6,000. This is to say that that many people waited to vote but, when their turn came, had no opinion on who should be the president, voting only for lesser offices. In these two precincts alone, that number represents an undervote of 25 percent, in a county where undervoting averages out at just 2 percent. Democratic precincts had 75 percent more undervotes than Republican ones.

    In Precinct 1B of Gahanna, in Franklin County, a computerized voting machine recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry. In that precinct, however, there are only 800 registered voters, of whom 638 showed up. Once the "glitch" had been identified, the president had to be content with 3,893 fewer votes than the computer had awarded him.

    In Miami County, a Saddam Hussein–type turnout was recorded in the Concord Southwest and Concord South precincts, which boasted 98.5 percent and 94.27 percent turnouts, respectively, both of them registering overwhelming majorities for Bush. Miami County also managed to report 19,000 additional votes for Bush after 100 percent of the precincts had reported on Election Day.

    In Mahoning County, Washington Post reporters found that many people had been victims of "vote hopping," which is to say that voting machines highlighted a choice of one candidate after the voter had recorded a preference for another. Some specialists in election software diagnose this as a "calibration issue."

    Machines are fallible and so are humans, and shit happens, to be sure, and no doubt many Ohio voters were able to record their choices promptly and without grotesque anomalies. But what strikes my eye is this: in practically every case where lines were too long or machines too few the foul-up was in a Democratic county or precinct, and in practically every case where machines produced impossible or improbable outcomes it was the challenger who suffered and the actual or potential Democratic voters who were shortchanged, discouraged, or held up to ridicule as chronic undervoters or as sudden converts to fringe-party losers. [...]

    [In Warren County,] [o]n Election Night, citing unspecified concerns about terrorism and homeland security, officials "locked down" the Warren County administration building and prevented any reporters from monitoring the vote count. It was announced, using who knows what "scale," that on a scale of 1 to 10 the terrorist threat was a 10. It was also claimed that the information came from an F.B.I. agent, even though the F.B.I. denies that.

    Warren County is certainly a part of Republican territory in Ohio: it went only 28 percent for Gore last time and 28 percent for Kerry this time....[E]ven those exact-same voting totals have their odd aspect. In 2000, Gore stopped running television commercials in Ohio some weeks before the election. He also faced a Nader challenge. Kerry put huge resources into Ohio, did not face any Nader competition, and yet got exactly the same proportion of the Warren County votes.

    Whichever way you shake it, or hold it to the light, there is something about the Ohio election that refuses to add up. [...]

    [T]here is one soothing explanation that I don't trust anymore. It was often said, in reply to charges of vote tampering, that it would have had to be "a conspiracy so immense" as to involve a dangerously large number of people. Indeed, some Ohio Democrats themselves laughed off some of the charges, saying that they too would have had to have been part of the plan. The stakes here are very high: one defector or turncoat with hard evidence could send the principals to jail forever and permanently discredit the party that had engaged in fraud.

    I had the chance to spend quality time with someone who came to me well recommended, who did not believe that fraud had yet actually been demonstrated, whose background was in the manufacture of the machines, and who wanted to be anonymous. It certainly could be done, she said, and only a very, very few people would have to be "in on it." This is because of the small number of firms engaged in the manufacturing and the even smaller number of people, subject as they are to the hiring practices of these firms, who understand the technology. "Machines were put in place with no sampling to make sure they were 'in control' and no comparison studies," she explained. "The code of the machines is not public knowledge, and none of these machines has since been impounded." In these circumstances, she continued, it's possible to manipulate both the count and the proportions of votes.

    In the bad old days of Tammany Hall, she pointed out, you had to break the counter pins on the lever machines, and if there was any vigilance in an investigation, the broken pins would automatically incriminate the machine. With touch-screen technology, the crudeness and predictability of the old ward-heeler racketeers isn't the question anymore. But had there been a biased "setting" on the new machines it could be uncovered—if a few of them could be impounded. The Ohio courts are currently refusing all motions to put the state's voting machines, punch-card or touch-screen, in the public domain. It's not clear to me, or to anyone else, who is tending the machines in the meanwhile...

    I asked her, finally, what would be the logical grounds for deducing that any tampering had in fact occurred. "Well, I understand from what I have read," she said, "that the early exit polls on the day were believed by both parties." That, I was able to tell her from direct experience, was indeed true. But it wasn't quite enough, either. So I asked, "What if all the anomalies and malfunctions, to give them a neutral name, were distributed along one axis of consistency: in other words, that they kept on disadvantaging only one candidate?" My question was hypothetical, as she had made no particular study of Ohio, but she replied at once: "Then that would be quite serious." [My emphasis]

    Hitchens says he "did not think that John Kerry should have been president of any country at any time." He's not engaged in partisan pleading. He is simply calling attention to what should be obvious: There is no conceivable innocent explanation for the fact that the vote suppression anomalies, the vote count anomalies, the voting machine anomalies, and the exit poll anomalies, in almost every case, advantaged Bush. It cannot have been due to chance — the odds against that happening by chance would be, quite literally, astronomical.

    A simple application of probability theory, really, if anyone were paying attention. If.

    [See also: this.]

    Posted by Jonathan at 08:01 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb

    February 24, 2005

    The Exit Polls, Revisited Vote Fraud

    Remember the exit polls? As noted in earlier posts, in the 2004 US presidential election the difference between the exit polls and the official results was so great that it is, for all practical purposes, a statistical impossibility that the discrepancy was due to chance.

    People try to explain away the discrepancy by asserting, without evidence, various possible sources of systematic bias in the exit polls — for example, that Republican voters were somehow systematically intimidated from participating in the exit polls.

    A report released the day before the inauguration by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, the two companies that did the exit polling for the National Election Pool media consortium, casts doubt on such conjectures, however.

    Some points of note (quotes are from the report):

    Of course, the fact that the discrepancies were far greater in swing states is consistent with a scenario where Republicans stole votes in states where it mattered most. The fact that the discrepancies were far greater in Bush strongholds is consistent with a scenario where Republicans stole votes in precincts where they had the greatest control over the process. And it is remarkable, to put it mildly, that the precincts where the discrepancies were by far the smallest were the precincts that used old-fashioned paper ballots, where vote-stealing would be most easily detected.

    It should be emphasized that the discrepancy between the offical count and the exit polls was huge and one-sidedly favored Bush. And, it should be remembered that, historically, exit polls have been highly accurate. As In These Times reported:

    Although President Bush prevailed by 3 million votes in the official, tallied vote count, exit polls had projected a margin of victory of 5 million votes for Kerry. This unexplained 8 million vote discrepancy between the election night exit polls and the official count should raise a Chinese May Day of red flags. [...]

    Exit polls are highly accurate. They remove most of the sources of potential polling error by identifying actual voters and asking them immediately afterward who they had voted for.

    The reliability of exit polls is so generally accepted that the Bush administration helped pay for them during recent elections in Georgia, Belarus and Ukraine. Testifying before the House Committee on International Relations Dec. 7, John Tefft, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, explained that the Bush administration funded exit polls because they were one of the "ways that would help to expose large-scale fraud." Tefft pointed to the discrepancy between exit polls and the official vote count to argue that the Nov. 22 Ukraine election was stolen. [My emphasis]

    But we don't live in the Ukraine, and the media have moved on to more pressing matters: the celebrity trials of Robert Blake and Michael Jackson.

    This is the way our democracy ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.

    Posted by Jonathan at 07:12 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb

    January 14, 2005

    Horse Gone, Lock Barn Vote Fraud

    The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports that Ohio is now going to standardize on optical-scan voting machines.

    After years of wrangling and protests, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell announced Wednesday that he will limit Ohio's uncompleted voting-machine conversion to a single device: the precinct-count optical-scan machine. [...]

    Blackwell's order calls for optical-scan machines — which process paper ballots filled out by hand and fed into a computerized counter at the precinct — to be deployed statewide by November.

    The current generation of optical-scan machines are still vulnerable — especially at the vote tabulation servers, many of which store their counts in Microsoft Access databases that your eight-year-old could hack into — but at least there will be paper ballots available for a recount.

    [Thanks, Dennis]

    Posted by Jonathan at 10:37 AM | Comments (0) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb

    January 06, 2005

    What About The Exit Polls? Vote Fraud

    I'm watching as the House debates the challenge to Ohio's electors on C-Span. I'm glad the challenge was made. I'm glad it's being debated.

    But I find it more frustrating than I can say that everyone seems so willing to accept what is practically a mathematical impossibility: that the exit polls in all of the battleground states differed from the final vote tallies by such substantial margins, and in every case the discrepancy in the vote tallies was in Bush's favor. (The only exception was Wisconsin, where the exit polls were dead on.) The table below shows for each state the number of percentage points by which Bush's vote tally exceeded what exit polls showed.

    Battleground States

    StateDifferential
    ColoradoBush +3.4
    FloridaBush +4.9
    IowaBush +2.2
    MichiganBush +1.6
    MinnesotaBush +5.5
    NevadaBush +3.9
    New HampshireBush +9.5
    New MexicoBush +3.7
    OhioBush +6.7
    PennsylvaniaBush +6.5
    WisconsinNone

    You may want to go back and read this post. As I described there, University of Pennsylvania professor Steven Freeman calculated the probability that a random sample could produce the observed discrepancies in just three of the battleground states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. The odds against it happening were more than 660,000 to one. If Freeman had considered all 10 battleground states the odds would have been astronomical. People shrug that off like it's nothing. I don't get it.

    When I was in college, I took statistics from John Allen Paulos, author of Innumeracy and a number of other books on statistical thinking. Here's what Professor Paulos had to say about the exit polls:

    Absent any proof or compelling reasons for the differences between the final tallies and the exit polls in the swing states, I don't understand why these gross discrepancies are being so widely shrugged off. After all, the procuring of random samples is far more of a problem for ordinary telephone polls, where the minority of people who cooperate with pollsters presumably differs in some way from the majority who don't. Still, these [telephone] polls are not dismissed with the same impatient nonchalance as this year's exit polls. [My emphasis]

    I've talked to intelligent, educated people who shrug off the exit polls by saying that the discrepancy was unlikely but not impossible. One in 660,000, after all, is not zero.

    Please. Get real. One in 660,000. If that's not "beyond a reasonable doubt", what is?

    Read the original post.

    Posted by Jonathan at 02:35 PM | Comments (3) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb

    Boxer To Join Challenge Of Ohio Electors Vote Fraud

    Senator Barbara Boxer has agreed to join the challenge of Ohio's 20 electoral votes, so House members won't be left standing at the altar like they were in 2000. AP:

    By law, a protest signed by members of the House and Senate requires both chambers to meet separately for up to two hours to consider it. Lawmakers are allowed to speak for no more than five minutes each.

    "I have concluded that objecting to the electoral votes from Ohio is the only immediate way to bring these issues to light by allowing you to have a two-hour debate to let the American people know the facts surrounding Ohio's election," Boxer wrote in a letter to Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio, a leader of the Democratic effort.

    Let's hope this isn't the end of it. The Conyers report stated that "intentional misconduct and illegal behavior" took place in Ohio. Criminal investigations should be demanded, and charges brought where warranted.

    Posted by Jonathan at 11:01 AM | Comments (1) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb

    January 05, 2005

    Conyers Report Online Vote Fraud

    The House Judiciary Committee's Democratic Staff has issued a report with findings from the hearings spearheaded by Rep. Conyers.

    It's available here.

    An excerpt:

    We have found numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election, which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters. Cumulatively, these irregularities, which affected hundreds of thousand of votes and voters in Ohio, raise grave doubts regarding whether it can be said the Ohio electors selected on December 13, 2004, were chosen in a manner that conforms to Ohio law, let alone federal requirements and constitutional standards.

    This report, therefore, makes three recommendations: (1) consistent with the requirements of the United States Constitution concerning the counting of electoral votes by Congress and Federal law implementing these requirements, there are ample grounds for challenging the electors from the State of Ohio; (2) Congress should engage in further hearings into the widespread irregularities reported in Ohio; we believe the problems are serious enough to warrant the appointment of a joint select Committee of the House and Senate to investigate and report back to the Members; and (3) Congress needs to enact election reform to restore our people's trust in our democracy. These changes should include putting in place more specific federal protections for federal elections, particularly in the areas of audit capability for electronic voting machines and casting and counting of provisional ballots, as well as other needed changes to federal and state election laws.

    With regards to our factual finding, in brief, we find that there were massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio. In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio. [My emphasis]

    Strong language. I'll have more to say when I've had a chance to peruse the report.

    Posted by Jonathan at 04:16 PM | Comments (0) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb

    January 01, 2005

    Read 'Em And Weep Vote Fraud

    Twenty horrifying facts about voting in the US. As you read them, ask yourself what you'd think if you were to read similar facts about the election system of some country in eastern Europe, say, or the Third World.

    Add to the list the fact Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, the person responsible for counting the votes in the state that turned out to be pivotal in 2004, was co-chair of the Bush campaign there, just as Katherine Harris was the Bush co-chair in Florida in 2000.

    As Xymphora points out, this is as if in American football one of the teams' quarterbacks were also to serve as referee. Not that that would ever happen. Football's too important.

    Posted by Jonathan at 04:55 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb

    December 30, 2004

    Ohio Update: Conyers To Challenge Ohio Electors Vote Fraud

    William Rivers Pitt reports that Rep. John Conyers, senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, will challenge the legitimacy of Ohio's electors on January 6. He is asking members of the Senate to join him and his House allies. Truthout:

    Representative John Conyers, ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee, will object to the counting of the Ohio Electors from the 2004 Presidential election when Congress convenes to ratify those votes on January 6th. In a letter dispatched to every Senator, which will be officially published by his office shortly, Conyers declares that he will be joined in this by several other members of the House. Rep. Conyers is taking this dramatic step because he believes the allegations and evidence of election tampering and fraud render the current slate of Ohio Electors illegitimate.

    "As you know," writes Rep. Conyers in his letter, "on January 6, 2005, at 1:00 P.M, the electoral votes for the election of the president are to be opened and counted in a joint session of Congress. I and a number of House Members are planning to object to the counting of the Ohio votes, due to numerous unexplained irregularities in the Ohio presidential vote, many of which appear to violate both federal and state law."

    The letter goes on to ask the Senators who receive this letter to join Conyers in objecting to the Ohio Electors. "I am hoping that you will consider joining us in this important effort," writes Conyers, "to debate and highlight the problems in Ohio which disenfranchised innumerable voters. I will shortly forward you a draft report itemizing and analyzing the many irregularities we have come across as part of our hearings and investigation into the Ohio presidential election."

    Will anyone in the Senate come forward? This time (unlike 2001) the challenge may get some media play — thanks to Michael Moore.

    Posted by Jonathan at 08:01 PM | Comments (1) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb

    December 29, 2004

    Ohio Update: Kerry Campaign Joins The Fray Vote Fraud

    [Continuing from the previous post. Sequence starts here.]

    Monday afternoon, the Kerry campaign in Ohio joined a lawsuit to preserve certain evidence relating to Ohio's recount. This is noteworthy because the Kerry campaign has, until now, been content to stay in the background. You can read the motion at Raw Story, which reports:

    [T]he motion seeks to preserve all ballots and voting machines for investigation and analysis, and to make a Triad Election Systems technician available for a sworn deposition.

    The Triad technician in question is the one refered to in this earlier post.

    It's also possible that there may be a Congressional challenge of the election results even without Kerry's participation. If you saw Fahrenheit 911, you'll recall the scene at the start of the film in which members of the Congressional Black Caucus rise, one after another, to challenge the 2000 election. Their challenge is thwarted when not even one Senator comes forward to sign off on it. Rep. Conyers told Salon he doesn't think the Senate will let that happen again:

    I think the Senate is going to go along with an inquiry this time. I don't think they would embarrass themselves to let this happen two times in a row.

    Michael Moore's movie — and the threat of another one — may push the Senate to act. Cool.

    Posted by Jonathan at 10:44 AM | Comments (1) | Link to this  del.icio.us digg NewsVine Reddit YahooMyWeb