[lit-ideas] Re: Hack the Vote?
- From: JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 19:14:27 EST
Why isn't this on the front page of the NY Times, the Washington Post,
CNN????
Julie Krueger
========Original Message======== Subj: [lit-ideas] Hack the Vote? Date:
11/9/04 3:43:12 PM Central Standard Time From: _NYCEric@xxxxxxxxxxx
(mailto:NYCEric@xxxxxxxxxx) To: _lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(mailto:lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) Sent on:
Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked
By Thom Hartmann CommonDreams.org Saturday 06 November 2004
When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06,
2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives
from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up.
Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was
hacked, but of who hacked it and how.
And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had
previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush
would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to
Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat. "It was practice
for a national effort," Fisher told me. And some believe evidence is
accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.
The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record
of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net
denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table,
available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed
something startling.
While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to
produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios
largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results
from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC
and thus vulnerable to hacking - the results seem to contain substantial
anomalies. In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters,
69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only
2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen
everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted
for Kerry.
In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats
and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for
Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush. The pattern repeats over and over
again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used.
Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes
County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush. Yet in the
touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more vigorously
looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats
generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had earlier
reported that county size was a variable - this turns out not to be the
case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.) More
visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://us
together.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and
www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm.
Note the trend line - the only variable that determines a swing toward
Bush was the use of optical scan machines. One possible explanation for
this is the "Dixiecrat" theory, that in Florida white voters
(particularly the rural ones) have been registered as Democrats for
years, but voting Republican since Reagan. Looking at the 2000
statistics, also available on Dopp's site, there are similar anomalies,
although the trends are not as strong as in 2004.
But some suggest the 2000 election may have been questionable in
Florida, too. One of the people involved in Dopp's analysis noted that
it may be possible to determine the validity of the "rural Democrat"
theory by comparing Florida's white rural counties to those of
Pennsylvania, another swing state but one that went for Kerry, as the
exit polls there predicted. Interestingly, the Pennsylvania analysis,
available at http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm, doesn't
show the same kind of swings as does Florida, lending credence to the
possibility of problems in Florida.
Even more significantly, Dopp had first run the analysis while filtering
out smaller (rural) counties, and still found that the only variable
that accounted for a swing toward Republican voting was the use of
optical-scan machines, whereas counties with touch-screen machines
generally didn't swing - regardless of size. Others offer similar
insights, based on other data.
A professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in
Florida the vote to raise the minimum wage was approved by 72%, although
Kerry got 48%. "The correlation between voting for the minimum wage
increase and voting for Kerry isn't likely to be perfect," he noted,
"but one would normally expect that the gap - of 1.5 million votes - to
be far smaller than it was."
While all of this may or may not be evidence of vote tampering, it again
brings the nation back to the question of why several states using
electronic voting machines or scanners programmed by private, for-profit
corporations and often connected to modems produced votes inconsistent
with exit poll numbers. Those exit poll results have been a problem for
reporters ever since Election Day. Election night, I'd been doing live
election coverage for WDEV, one of the radio stations that carries my
syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m.
Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter
detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform
him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was
winning in a landslide.
"Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report. But then the
computers reported something different. In several pivotal states.
Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were
rigged.
Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton
campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote
an article for The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie
in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points. "Exit
Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two
major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating
actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do
and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the
relative turnout of different parts of the state." He added: "So,
according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry
Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush
carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West
Virginia, which the president won by 10 points." Yet a few hours after
the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized
vote numbers began to come in from the various states the election was
called for Bush.
How could this happen? On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown,"
several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest
host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started
www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that
regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only
done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is
done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper
ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners
that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the
screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator"
machine.
That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC. "In a voting
system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you have all
the different voting machines at all the different polling places,
sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places
in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it
can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do
something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient
to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal
with all of them at once?"
Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What
surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what
you and I use. It's just a regular computer." "So," Dean said, "anybody
who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?" Harris
nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called
GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the
central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County
Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between
them loaded with Diebold's software. Bev then had Dean open the GEMS
program to see the results of a test election. They went to the screen
titled "Election Summary Report" and waited a moment while the PC "adds
up all the votes from all the various precincts," and then saw that in
this faux election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and
Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.
"Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold
wrote a pretty good program. But, it's running on a Windows PC. So
Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal
Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk
C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB"
which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep
the votes."
Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled
"Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in
a database program like Excel. In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of
numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and
Lex Luthor had gotten 400. "Let's just flip those," Harris said, as
Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she
added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger." They closed the
database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way,
you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your
election." As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation,
Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes,
Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now
the loser. Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just
edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."
And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said, noting that it
would be nearly impossible for the election software - or a County
election official - to know that the vote database had been altered.
Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen
Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide.
Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to
cause people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since
the networks would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry.
But the networks didn't do that, and had never intended to. According
to congressional candidate Fisher, it makes far more sense that the exit
polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that the vote
itself was hacked.
And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this
hit him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national
office in the most-hacked swing states. So far, the only national
"mainstream" media to come close to this story was Keith Olbermann on
his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted that it was curious
that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seem to
favor Bush.
In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going
through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit
polls had failed. But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at
least in large part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in
his final paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as
wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."
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