[Marxism] Was It Hacked?

["Craven, Jim" <JCraven@xxxxxxxxx>]

WAS IT HACKED? 

By  Alan Waldman
Published 11/18/04
http://www.orlandoweekly.com/news/Story.asp?ID=4688
<http://www.orlandoweekly.com/news/Story.asp?ID=4688> 
 

Despite mainstream media attempts to kill the story, talk radio and the
Internet are abuzz with suggestions that John Kerry was elected
president on Nov. 2 - but Republican election officials made it
difficult for millions of Democrats to vote while employees of four
secretive, GOP-bankrolled corporations rigged electronic voting machines
and then hacked central tabulating computers to steal the election for
George W. Bush.

 The Bush administration's "fix" of the 2000 election debacle (the Help
America Vote Act) made crooked elections considerably easier, by
foisting paperless electronic voting on states before the bugs had been
worked out or meaningful safeguards could be installed.

 Crying foul this time around isn't just the province of whiny
Democrats. Consider that The Wall Street Journal recently revealed that
"Verified Voting, a group formed by a Stanford University professor to
assess electronic voting, has collected 31,000 reports of election fraud
and other problems."

 University of Pennsylvania researcher Dr. Steven Freeman, in his
November 2004 paper "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy," says that
the odds that the discrepancies between predicted [exit poll] results
and actual vote counts in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania could have been
due to chance or random error are 250 million to 1. "Systematic fraud or
mistabulation is a premature conclusion," writes Freeman, "but the
election's unexplained exit poll discrepancies make it an unavoidable
hypothesis, one that is the responsibility of the media, academia,
polling agencies, and the public to investigate." Unlike Europe, where
citizens count the ballots, in the United States employees of a highly
secretive Republican-leaning company, ES&S, managed every aspect of the
2004 election. That included everything from registering voters,
printing ballots and programming voting machines to tabulating votes
(often with armed guards keeping the media and members of the public who
wished to witness the count at bay) and reporting the results, for 60
million voters in 47 states, according to Christopher Bollyn, writing in
American Free Press. Most other votes were counted by three other firms
that are snugly in bed with the GOP.

 This election is not the first suspicious venture into electronic
voting. In Georgia, in November 2002, Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes led by
11 percent and Democratic Sen. Max Cleland was in front by 5 percent
just before the election - the first ever conducted entirely on
touch-screen electronic machines, and counted entirely by company
employees, rather than public officials - but mysterious election-day
swings of 16 percent and 12 percent defeated both of these popular
incumbents. In Minnesota, Democrat Walter Mondale (replacing beloved
Sen. Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash), lost in an amazing
last-moment 11 percent vote swing recorded on electronic machines. Then,
in 2003, what's known as "black box voting" helped Arnold Schwarzenegger
- who had deeply offended female, Latino and Jewish voters - defeat a
popular Latino Democrat who substantially led in polls a week before the
election.

 ACTION UNDERWAY

 Realizing that the 2004 election results are suspect, many prominent
people and groups have begun to demand action. Recently, six important
Congressmen, including three on the House Judiciary Committee, asked the
U.S. Comptroller General to investigate the efficacy of new electronic
voting devices.

 Black Box Voting - the nonprofit group which spearheaded much of the
pre-election testing (and subsequent criticism) of electronic machines
that found them hackable in 90 seconds - is filing the largest Freedom
of Information Act inquiry in U.S. history. The organization's Bev
Harris claims, "Fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic
voting machines."

 Florida Democratic congressional candidate Jeff Fisher charged that he
has and will show the FBI evidence that Florida results were hacked; he
also claims to have knowledge of who hacked it - in 2004 and in the 2002
Democratic primary (so Jeb Bush would not have to run against the
popular Janet Reno). Fisher also believes that most Democratic
candidates nationwide were harmed by GOP hacking and other dirty tactics
- particularly in swing states.

 The Green and Libertarian Parties, as well as Ralph Nader, are
demanding an Ohio recount, because of voting fraud, suppression and
disenfranchisement. Recounts are also being sought in New Hampshire,
Nevada and Washington.

 Although the Internet is full of stories of election fraud, and major
media in England, Canada and elsewhere have investigated the story,
you'll find almost nothing in the major U.S. media. "I have been told by
sources that are fairly high up in the media - particularly TV - that
there is now a lockdown on this story," says Harris. "It's officially
'Let's move on' time."

 On Nov. 6, Project Censored Award-winning author Thom Hartmann said,
"So far, the only national 'mainstream' media outlet to come close to
this story was Keith Olbermann, when he noted that it was curious that
all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seemed to favor
Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going
through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit
polls had failed."

 VOTE STEALING 101 

 Votes collected by electronic machines (and by optical scan equipment
that reads traditional paper ballots) are sent via modem to a central
tabulating computer, which counts the votes on Windows software.
Therefore, anyone who knows how to operate an Excel spreadsheet and who
is given access to the central tabulation machine can, in theory, change
election totals.

 On a CNBC cable TV program, Black Box Voting exec Harris showed guest
host Howard Dean how to alter vote totals within 90 seconds, by entering
a two-digit code in a hidden program on Diebold's election software.
Harris declared, "This is not a 'bug' or accidental oversight; it is
there on purpose."

 A quartet of companies control the U.S. vote count. Diebold, ES&S,
Sequoia and SAIC are all hard-wired into the Bush campaign and power
structure. Diebold chief Walden O'Dell is a top Bush fund-raiser.
According to "online anarchist community" Infoshop.org, "At Diebold, the
election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob's brother, Todd, is a top
executive at 'rival' ES&S. The brothers were originally staked by Howard
Ahmanson, a member of the Council For National Policy, a right-wing
steering group stacked with Bush true believers. Ahmanson is also one of
the bagmen behind the extremist Christian Reconstruction Movement, which
advocates the theocratic takeover of American democracy." Sequoia is
owned by a partner member of the Carlyle Group, which is believed to
have dictated foreign policy in both Bush administrations and has
employed former President Bush for quite a while.

 All early Tuesday indicators predicted a Kerry landslide. Zogby
International (which predicted the 2000 outcome more accurately than any
national pollster) did exit polling which predicted a 100-electoral vote
triumph for Kerry. He saw Kerry winning crucial Ohio by 4 percent.

 Princeton professor Sam Wang, whose meta-analysis had shown the
election to be close in the week before the election, began coming up
with dramatic numbers for Kerry in the day before and day of the
election. At noon EST on Monday, Nov. 1, he predicted a Kerry win by a
108-vote margin.

 In the Iowa Electronic Markets, where "investors" put their money where
their mouths are and wager real moolah on election outcome "contracts,"
Bush led consistently for months before the election - often by as much
as 60 percent to 39 percent. But at 7 p.m. CST on Nov. 2, 76.6 percent
of the last hour's traders had gone to Kerry, with only 20.1 percent
plunking their bucks down on Bush. They knew something.

 As the first election returns came in, broadcasters were shocked to see
that seemingly safe Bush states like Virginia, Kentucky and North
Carolina were being judged as "too close to call." At 7:28 EST, networks
broadcast that Ohio and Florida favored Kerry by 51 percent to 49
percent.

 In his research paper, Steven Freeman reports that exit polls showed
Kerry had been elected. He was leading in nearly every battleground
state, in many cases by sizable margins. But later, in 10 of 11
battleground states, the tallied margins differed from the predicted
margins - and in every one the shift favored Bush.

 In 10 states where there were verifiable paper trails - or no
electronic machines - the final results hardly differed from the initial
exit polls. In non-paper-trail states, however, there were significant
differences. Florida saw a shift from Kerry up by 1 percent in the exit
polls to Bush up by 5 percent at close of voting. In Ohio, Kerry went
from up 3 percent to down 3 percent. Exit polls also had Kerry winning
the national popular vote by 3 percent.

 In close Senate races, changes between the exit poll results and the
final tallies cost Democrats anticipated seats in Kentucky (a 13 percent
swing to the GOP), Alaska, North Carolina, Florida, Oklahoma, South
Dakota and possibly Pennsylvania - as well as enough House seats to
retake control of the chamber.

 Center for Research on Globalization's Michael Keefer states, "The
National Election Pool's own data - as transmitted by CNN on the evening
of November 2 and the morning of November 3 - suggest very strongly that
the results of the exit polls were themselves fiddled late on November 2
in order to make their numbers conform with the tabulated vote tallies."

 How do we know the fix was in? Keefer says the total number of
respondents at 9 p.m. was well over 13,000 and at 1:36 a.m. it had risen
less than 3 percent - to 13,531 total respondents. Given the small
increase in respondents, this 5 percent swing to Bush is mathematically
impossible. In Florida, at 8:40 p.m., exit polls showed a near dead heat
but the final exit poll update at 1:01 a.m. gave Bush a 4 percent lead.
This swing was mathematically impossible, because there were only 16
more respondents in the final tally than in the earlier one.

 FLORIDA FIASCO II 

Kathy Dopp's eye-opening examination of Florida's county-by-county
record of votes cast and people registered by party affiliation
(http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm) suggests systematic and
widespread election fraud in 47 of the state's 67 counties. This did not
occur so much in the touch-screen counties, where public scrutiny would
naturally be focused, but in counties where optically screened paper
ballots were fed into a central tabulator PC, which is highly vulnerable
to hacking. In these optical-scan counties, had GOP registrants voted
Republican, Democratic registrants gone for Kerry and everyone
registered showed up to vote, Bush would have received 1,337,242 votes.
Instead, his reported vote total there was 1,950,213! That discrepancy
(612,971) is nearly double Bush's winning margin in the state (380,952).

 Colin Shea of Zogby International analyzed and double-checked Dopp's
figures and confirmed that optical-scan counties gave Bush 16 percent
more votes than he should have gotten. "This 16 percent would not be
strange if it were spread across counties more or less evenly," Shea
explains, but it is not. In 11 different counties, the "actual" Bush
tallies were 50-100 percent higher than expected. In one county, where
88 percent of voters are registered Democrats, Bush got nearly
two-thirds of the vote - three times more than predicted by his
statistical model.

 In 47 Florida counties, the number of presidential votes exceeded the
number of registered voters. Palm Beach County recorded 90,774 more
votes than voters and Miami-Dade had 51,979 more, while relatively
honest Orange County had only 1,648 more votes than voters. Overall,
Florida reported 237,522 more presidential votes (7.59 million) than
citizens who turned out to cast ballots (7.35 million).

 There were thousands of complaints about Florida voting. Broward County
electronic voting machines counted up to 32,500 and then started
counting backward. This glitch, which existed in the 2002 election but
was never fixed, overturned the exit-poll-predicted results of a
gambling referendum. In several Florida counties, early-morning voters
reported ballot boxes that already had an unusually large quantity of
ballots in them. In Florida and five other states, according to Canada's
Globe and Mail, "the wrong candidate appeared on their touch-screen
machine's checkout screen" after the person had voted.

 Republicans have argued that the Florida counties with majority
Democratic registration that voted overwhelmingly for Bush were all
conservative "Dixiecrat" bastions in northern Florida, and that all the
reported totals were accurate. But Olbermann demonstrated that many of
these crossover states voted Republican for the first time. He poked
another hole in the Dixiecrat theory when he noted that in Democratic
counties where Bush scored big, people also supported highly Democratic
measures - such as raising the state minimum wage $1 above the federal
level.

 Moreover, 18 switchover counties were not in the Panhandle or near the
Georgia border, but were scattered throughout the state. For instance,
Hardee County (between Bradenton and Sebring) registered 63.8 percent
Democratic but officially gave Bush 135 percent more votes than Kerry.

 WIDESPREAD PROBLEMS 

Voters Unite! detailed 303 specific election problems, including 84
complaints of machine malfunctions in 22 states, 24 cases of
registration fraud in 14 states, 20 abusive voter challenge situations
in 10 states, U.S. voters in 18 states and Israel experiencing absentee
ballot difficulties, 10 states with provisional ballot woes, 22 cases of
malfeasance in 13 states, 10 charges of voter intimidation in seven
states, seven states where votes were suppressed, seven states
witnessing outbreaks of animosity at the polls, six states suffering
from ballot printing errors and seven instances in four states where
votes were changed on-screen. In addition, the Voters Unite! website
cites four states with early voting troubles, three states undergoing
ballot programming errors, three states demonstrating ballot secrecy
violations, bogus ballot fraud in New Mexico and double-voting for Bush
in Texas.

 Kerry's victory was predicted by previously extremely accurate Harris
and Zogby exit polls, by the formerly infallible 50 percent rule (an
incumbent with less than 50 percent in the exit polls always loses; Bush
had 47 percent - requiring him to capture an improbable 80 percent of
the undecideds to win) and by the Incumbent Rule (undecideds break for
the challenger, as exit polls showed they did by a large margin this
time).

 Nor is it credible that the surge in new young voters (who were
witnessed standing in lines for hours, on campuses nationwide)
miraculously didn't appear in the final totals; that Kerry did worse
than Gore against an opponent who lost support; and that exit polls were
highly accurate wherever there was a paper trail and grossly
underestimated Bush's appeal wherever there was no such guarantee of
accurate recounts. Statisticians point out that Bush beat 99 to 1
mathematical odds in winning the election.

Election results are not final until electors vote on Dec. 12. There is
still time to find the truth.

 Alan Waldman is an award-winning journalist who lives in Los Angeles.
He voted for John Kerry and Barbara Boxer.
 
James M. Craven
Blackfoot Name: Omahkohkiaayo-i'poyi
Professor/Consultant,Economics;Business Division Chair
Clark College, 1800 E. McLoughlin Blvd.
Vancouver, WA. USA 98663
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