Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked

Well, that's certainly cleared that up...

Hmmm - maybe not horse-manure after all? Normally I think conspiracy theories are dumb - and this one still may well be - but here is a little more:



This in from Wired.com http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65609,00.html?tw=rss.TOP

E-Vote Glitch Inflates Bush Total

09:50 AM Nov. 05, 2004 PT

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said.

Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.

Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told the Columbus Dispatch.

The machines used in the county, Danaher Controls ELECTronic 1242 systems, are made by Danaher Controls, based in Illinois, and are one of the oldest brands of e-voting machines in the country. The machines were previously known as the Shouptronic voting machine.

The machines seemed to have other problems on election morning as well. There were reports that overcharged batteries kept some machines from booting up properly at the beginning of the day. Election workers resolved the problem fiarly quickly, however.

State and county election officials did not immediately respond to requests by the Associated Press for more details about the voting system and its vendor, and whether the error, if repeated elsewhere in Ohio, could have affected the outcome.

Bush won the state by more than 136,000 votes, according to unofficial results, and Kerry conceded the election on Wednesday after acknowledging that 155,000 provisional ballots yet to be counted in Ohio would not change the result.

The secretary of state's office said Friday it could not revise Bush's total until the county reported the error.

The Ohio glitch is among a handful of computer troubles that have emerged since Tuesday's elections.

In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. Officials in Carteret County said UniLect, the maker of the county's electronic voting system, told them that each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes.

And in San Francisco, a malfunction with custom voting software could delay efforts to declare the winners of four races for county supervisor.

In the Ohio precinct in question, the votes are recorded onto a cartridge. On one of the three machines at that precinct, a malfunction occurred in the recording process, Damschroder said. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred.

Damschroder said people who had seen poll results on the election board's Web site called to point out the discrepancy. The error would have been discovered when the official count for the election is performed later this month, he said.

The reader also recorded zero votes in a county commissioner race on the machine.

Workers checked the cartridge against memory banks in the voting machine and each showed that 115 people voted for Bush on that machine. With the other machines, the total for Bush in the precinct added up to 365 votes.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a glitch occurred with software designed for the city's new ranked-choice voting, in which voters list their top three choices for municipal offices. If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes outright, voters' second and third-place preferences are then distributed among candidates who weren't eliminated in the first round.

When the San Francisco Department of Elections tried a test run on Wednesday of the program that does the redistribution, some of the votes didn't get counted and skewed the results, director John Arntz said.

"All the information is there," Arntz said. "It's just not arriving the way it was supposed to."

A technician from the Omaha, Nebraska company that designed the software, Election Systems & Software, was working to diagnose and fix the problem.


And: http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65623,00.html?tw=rss.TOP


House Dems Seek Election Inquiry


By Kim Zetter

04:38 PM Nov. 05, 2004 PT

Three congressmen sent a letter to the General Accounting Office on Friday requesting an investigation into irregularities with voting machines used in Tuesday's elections.

The congressmen, Democratic members of the House of Representatives from Florida, New York and Michigan, cited a number of incidents that came to light in the days after the election. One was a glitch in Ohio that caused a memory card reader made by Danaher Controls to give George W. Bush 3,893 more votes than he should have received. Another was a problem with memory cards in North Carolina that caused machines made by UniLect to lose 4,500 votes cast on e-voting machines. The votes were lost when the number of votes cast on the machines exceeded the capacity of the memory cards.

There were also problems with machines that counted absentee ballots in Florida. Software made by Election Systems & Software began subtracting votes when totals surpassed 32,000. Officials said the problem affected only certain countywide races on one of the last pages of the ballot. Elections officials knew about the problem two years ago, but the company failed to fix the software before the election this year.

Reports from voters in Florida and Ohio also indicated that some of them had problems voting for the candidate of their choice. When they tried to vote for John Kerry, they said, the machine either wouldn't register the vote at all or would indicate on the review page that the vote was cast for Bush instead.

In their letter, representatives John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Robert Wexler of Florida asked the GAO to "immediately undertake an investigation of the efficacy of voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election, how election officials responded to difficulties they encountered and what we can do in the future to improve our election systems and administration."

John Doty, spokesman for Nadler, said the congressmen emphasized that they were not seeking a nationwide recount and were not anticipating that an investigation would change the outcome of the election.

"But we do want to make sure that where there are problems they're fixed so that it won't affect other elections in the future," Doty said. "We want to make sure that people can be confident in the system."

Doty said, however, that if the GAO does find a lot more problems that haven't yet been reported, then people will at least know about them and be able to decide what to do about them.

"We're hopeful that the GAO does not find such terrible irregularities that it would demonstrate widespread problems," Doty said.

No one was available at the office of the GAO to respond to questions. But a GAO representative told Wired News in September that the agency was planning to produce a report on e-voting after the election anyway.


Just sour grapes?

I, for one, have no idea!!!

I would think that glitches ought to affect both parties equally - no?

Wow, Harper. The moderator just removed your link.

What is going on with this site? Perhaps the moderators can explain.

Or is this now a neoconservative site?

Er - try reading the TOS mptwain 1 - proscribed links get removed without discrimination.

" You may not post links to your site or use Able2Know for promotional purposes (both commercial and non-commercial) unless you have been granted an exception by the site administrators. The determination of what consitutes a violation of this rule is determined exclusively by Able2Know."

http://www.able2know.com/disclaimer.php

Whle I'm unburdenned by illusion the Democrats will heed the advice, I offer the observation their recent electoral woes stem largely from the mindset that fosters such nonsense as the absurd and desperate conjecturing posed in the subject article of this thread.

Great job, Democrats. Keep it up, please.

Timber
Timber, I'm disappointed that you would not want to know that the US voting system was accurate and fair---regardless of the winner of an election.

Loss of confidence in the voting system would do great damage to the US electorate.

If Kerry had won and Bush lost, I'm sure you would want the vote to at least be accurate.

BBB

No, BBB. We're just crybabies.

I'm unsurprised The Democrats fail to realize they have brought about their own decline and will not address the causes thereof. The absurdity of their position in this matter serves only to further diminish their already sorely stressed credibility.

Unable to restore the influence they've lost through the electoral process, they cling to the notion that despite the recorded will of The Electorate, and the well-established trending of that record, they might be able to subvert the system through resort to the judicial system. That is pathetic.

I note The Republicans are not clamoring for a recount in either Iowa or Wisconsin, which they lost by narrower margins than The Democrats lost Ohio. I not e to that as the absentee ballot totals have been added to the various state totals, the Republican lead grows across the board. In not one state have The Democrats gained ground with the tallying of mail-in votes, while in several their percentage has declined marginally. They plain and simple lost. They beat themselves and by appearances seem committed to continuing to do so.

And I opine The Denocrats are not so much being defeated by The Republicans as they are by their own actions increasingly ineffective at challenging The Republicans. The problems inconveniencing The Democratic Party are wholly internal.

Yep. Crybabies.

I second this and extend it to the others who use pictures just to irk others.

As to the notion this thread is about it is as absurd as the picture posting.

Democrats will do themseleves a disservice to pursue this.

Well, yeah ... I was more than a little heavy-handed there. I apologize to all ... and I'll try to refrain from similar practice in the future.

Craven, I'm not saying this election was stolen as I truly believe the 2000 election was....but I fail to see how getting to the bottom of possible election fraud does a disservice to any American...no matter who it might of been done by or who may have been victimized by it, or whether it was due to honest glitches in the system.....these are things that we al lneed to know and need to be pursued until there is no question in any rational persons mind....

"Evidence Mounts"??? lmao



2000 Election Results:

Baker Co.
Bush 5,610 Gore 2,392

Dixie Co.
Bush 2,698 Gore 1,825

Franklin Co.
Bush 2,448 Gore 2,042

Holmes Co.
Bush 4.985 Gore 2,154

Looks like Bush won these same counties this year by about the same margins he won them in 2000. Should I point out the Bob Dole won both Baker and Holmes Counties in 1996 too? Or that Bush 41 won Baker, Franklin and Holmes counties in 1992 too?

Sorry, you have to do more than just get people to register with your party to win the race. They actually have to vote for your candidate too.

Appreciated, Timber.

Voter registration increased about 3% 2004 over 2000. Voter turnout was 11% greater in 2004 than it had been in 2000. Overall, Kerry recieved 10% more vote than had Gore, while Bush received 18% more votes than he garnered the last time around. In 2003, the 18-29 age demographic comprised 17% of the total vote. In 2004, the youth turnout was the same. In nearly every demographic, Bush bettered his 2000 performance, while Kerry performed below the level achieved by Gore almost across the board. In nearly 67% of The Nation's counties, Kerry drew a lower percentage of votes in 2004 than did Al Gore 4 years earlier while Bush bettered his previous vote share in nearly 90% of counties. More registered Democrats voted for Bush this time than registered Republicans voted for Kerry ... by nearly 2-to-1. The overall Congressional vote went to the Rebublicans 51-47, picking up for the party not only seats in both Houses, but unseating Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. Not since FDR has the re-election of an incumbent brought his party gains in both Houses. The Democrats gained no Governorships, out of 11 at stake, despite successfully taking Montana and New Hampshire from the Republicans. Though early, incomplete, essentially unauthorized, leaks of exit polling data appeared to favor Kerry, the final tally of the full day's exit polls all but mirrored the recorded vote total in every state. While insufficient to alter the percentages to any significant degree, whether now finished or still ongoing, the absentee ballot vote is running for Bush above the 51 - 49 margin tallied on Election Day. In every contest in which they were balloted, Gay Marriage and Marijuana initiatives failed. Having fielded over 10,000 lawyers tasked with uncovering and pursuing election irregularities, The Democratic Party Leadership not only has brought no meaningful action, it has officially conceded the election.

Them's the facts.

There's a message there for The Democrats.

In my opinion said point has passed, and pursuit hurts the Democrats precisely because it makes them look like they are not rational.

Clinton's advice was good advice.

Some things just never change, I guess...

Don't think of it as "hacking"... think of it as "Pre-emptive electoral enhancement'.

(Isn't rhetoric FUN?!)