Evidence Mounts That The Vote Was Hacked
by Thom Hartmann, Common Dreams
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 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.
Also See:
Florida Secretary of State Presidential Results by County 11/02/2004 (.pdf)
Florida Secretary of State County Registration by Party 2/9/2004 (.pdf)
While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios matched the Kerry/Bush vote, and so did the optically-scanned paper ballots in the larger counties, in Florida's smaller counties the results from the optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking - seem to have been reversed.
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 smaller counties where, it was probably assumed, the small voter numbers wouldn't be much noticed. 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 larger counties, where such anomalies would be more obvious to the news media, high percentages of registered Democrats equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry.
More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm.
And, although elections officials didn't notice these anomalies, in aggregate they were enough to swing Florida from Kerry to Bush. If you simply go through the analysis of these counties and reverse the "anomalous" numbers in those counties that appear to have been hacked, suddenly the Florida election results resemble the Florida exit poll results: Kerry won, and won big.
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."
On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.)
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. 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."
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann .com His most recent books are " The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," " Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," " We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and " What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."
NEW YORK ?- Bev Harris, the Blackbox lady, was apparently quoted in a number of venues during the day Monday as having written "I was tipped off by a person very high up in TV that the news has been locked down tight, and there will be no TV coverage of the real problems with voting on Nov. 2 My source said they've also been forbidden to talk about it even on their own time."
I didn't get the memo.
We were able to put together a reasonably solid 15 minutes or so on the voting irregularities in Florida and Ohio on Monday's Countdown. There was some You-Are-There insight from the Cincinnati Enquirer reporter who had personally encountered the ?'lockdown' during the vote count in Warren County, Ohio, a week ago, and a good deal of fairly contained comment from Representative John Conyers of Michigan, who now leads a small but growing group of Democratic congressmen who've written the General Accountability Office demanding an investigation of what we should gently call the Electronic Voting Angst. Conyers insisted he wasn't trying to re-cast the election, but seemed mystified that in the 21st Century we could have advanced to a technological state in which voting?- fine, flawed, or felonious?- should leave no paper trail.
But the show should not have been confused with Edward R. Murrow flattening Joe McCarthy. I mean that both in terms of editorial content and controversy. I swear, and I have never been known to cover-up for any management anywhere, that I got nothing but support from MSNBC both for the Web-work and the television time. We were asked if perhaps we shouldn't begin the program with the Fallujah offensive and do the voting story later, but nobody flinched when we argued that the Countdown format pretty much allows us to start wherever we please.
It may be different elsewhere, but there was no struggle to get this story on the air, and evidently I should be washing the feet of my bosses this morning in thanks. Because your reaction was a little different than mine. By actual rough count, between the 8 p.m. ET start of the program and 10:30 p.m. ET last night, we received 1,570 e-mails (none of them duplicates or forms, as near as I can tell). 1,508 were positive, 62 negative.
Well the volume is startling to begin with. I know some of the overtly liberal sites encouraged readers to write, but that's still a hunk of mail, and a decisive margin (hell, 150 to 62 is considered a decisive margin). Writing this, I know I'm inviting negative comment, but so be it. I read a large number of the missives, skimmed all others, appreciate all?- and all since?- deeply.
Even the negative ones, because in between the repeated "you lost" nonsense and one baffling reference to my toupee (seriously, if I wore a rug, wouldn't I get one that was all the same color?), there was a solid point raised about some of the incongruous voting noted on the website of Florida's Secretary of State.
There, 52 counties tallied their votes using paper ballots that were then optically scanned by machines produced by Diebold, Sequoia, or Election Systems and Software. 29 of those Florida counties had large Democratic majorities among registered voters (as high a ratio as Liberty County?- Bristol, Florida and environs?- where it's 88 percent Democrats, 8 percent Republicans) but produced landslides for President Bush. On Countdown, we cited the five biggest surprises (Liberty ended Bush: 1,927; Kerry: 1,070), but did not mention the other 24.
Those protesting e-mailers pointed out that four of the five counties we mentioned also went for Bush in 2000, and were in Florida's panhandle or near the Georgia border. Many of them have long "Dixiecrat" histories and the swing to Bush, while remarkably large, isn't of itself suggestive of voting fraud.
That the other 24 counties were scattered across the state, and that they had nothing in common except the optical scanning method, I didn't mention. My bad. I used the most eye-popping numbers, and should have used a better regional mix instead.
Interestingly, none of the complaining emailers took issue with the remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County's website shows, we had the most unexpected results in years: more votes than voters.
I'll repeat that: more votes than voters. 93,000 more votes than voters.
Oops.
Talk about successful get-out-the-vote campaigns! What a triumph for democracy in Fairview Park, twelve miles west of downtown Cleveland. Only 13,342 registered voters there, but they cast 18,472 votes.
Vote early! Vote often!
And in the continuing saga of the secret vote count in Warren County, Ohio (outside Cincinnati), no protestor offered an explanation or even a reference, excepting one sympathetic writer who noted that there was a "beautiful Mosque" in or near Warren County, and that a warning from Homeland Security might have been predicated on that fact.
To her credit, Pat South, President of the Warren County Commissioners who chose to keep the media from watching the actual vote count, was willing to come on the program?- but only by phone. Instead, we asked her to compose a statement about the bizarre events at her County Administration building a week ago, which I can quote at greater length here than I did on the air.
"About three weeks prior to elections," Ms. South stated, "our emergency services department had been receiving quite a few pieces of correspondence from the office of Homeland Security on the upcoming elections. These memos were sent out statewide, not just to Warren County and they included a lot of planning tools and resources to use for election day security.
"In a face to face meeting between the FBI and our director of Emergency Services, we were informed that on a scale from 1 to 10, the tri-state area of Southwest Ohio was ranked at a high 8 to a low 9 in terms of security risk. Warren County in particular, was rated at 10 (with 10 being the highest risk). Pursuant to the Ohio revised code, we followed the law to the letter that basically says that no one is allowed within a hundred feet of a polling place except for voters and that after the polls close the only people allowed in the board of elections area where votes are being counted are the board of election members, judges, clerks, poll challengers, police, and that no one other than those people can be there while tabulation is taking place."
Ms. South said she admitted the media to the building's lobby, and that they were provided with updates on the ballot-counting every half hour. Of course, the ballot-counting was being conducted on the third floor, and the idea that it would have probably looked better if Warren had done what Ohio's other 87 counties did?- at least let reporters look through windows as the tabulations proceeded?- apparently didn't occur to anybody.
Back to those emails, especially the 1,508 positive ones. Apart from the supportive words (my favorites: "Although I did not vote for Kerry, as a former government teacher, I am encouraged by your ?'covering' the voting issue which is the basis of our government. Thank you."), the main topics were questions about why ours was apparently the first television or mainstream print coverage of any of the issues in Florida or Ohio. I have a couple of theories.
Firstly, John Kerry conceded. As I pointed out here Sunday, no candidate's statement is legally binding?- what matters is the state election commissions' reports, and the Electoral College vote next month. But in terms of reportorial momentum, the concession took the wind out of a lot of journalists' aggressiveness towards the entire issue. Many were prepared for Election Night premature jocularity, and a post-vote stampede to the courts?- especially after John Edwards' late night proclamation from Boston. When Kerry brought that to a halt, a lot of the media saw something of which they had not dared dream: a long weekend off.
Don't discount this. This has been our longest presidential campaign ever, to say nothing of the one in which the truth was most artfully hidden or manufactured. To consider this mess over was enough to get 54 percent of the respondents to an Associated Press poll released yesterday to say that the "conclusiveness" of last week's vote had given them renewed confidence in our electoral system (of course, 39 percent said it had given them less confidence). Up for the battle for truth or not, a lot of fulltime political reporters were ready for a rest. Not me?- I get to do "Oddball" and "Newsmakers" every night and they always serve to refresh my spirit, and my conviction that man is the silliest of the creator's creations.
There's a third element to the reluctance to address all this, I think. It comes from the mainstream's love-hate relationship with this very thing you're reading now: The Blog. This medium is so new that print, radio, and television don't know what to do with it, especially given that a system of internet checks and balances has yet to develop. A good reporter may encounter a tip, or two, or five, in a day's time. He has to check them all out before publishing or reporting.
What happens when you get 1,000 tips, all at once?
I'm sounding like an apologist for the silence of television and I don't mean to. Just remember that when radio news arose in the '30s, the response of newspapers and the wire services was to boycott it, then try to limit it to specific hours. There's a measure of competitiveness, a measure of confusion, and the undeniable fact that in searching for clear, non-partisan truth in this most partisan of times, the I'm-Surprised-This-Name-Never-Caught-On "Information Super Highway" becomes a road with direction signs listing 1,000 destinations each.
Having said all that?- for crying out loud, all the data we used tonight on Countdown was on official government websites in Cleveland and Florida. We confirmed all of it?- moved it right out of the Reynolds Wrap Hat zone in about ten minutes.
Which offers one way bloggers can help guide the mainstream at times like this: source your stuff like crazy, and the stuffier the source the better.
Enough from the soapbox. We have heard the message on the Voting Angst and will continue to cover it with all prudent speed.
Thanks for your support.
Keep them coming... Email me at [email protected]
Harper wrote:OK then tell me what it is in the interview that you dispute.
The entire absurd, preposterous, paranoid "black helicopter"-ish premis. I don't dispute it, for it merits no such serious attention, but rather I wonder at the gullibilitity and credulity of those so desperate as to be able to convince themselves there might be so much as a scintilla of validity to the allegation. Alex Jones and Bev Harris strike me as havin' the makin's of quite the comedy team.
Of course it is getting legs. Every conspiracy does, just look at the who killed JFK thread.
Faun Otter: Vote Fraud - Exit Polls Vs Actuals
Thursday, 4 November 2004, 1:21 pm
Article: The Scoop Editor
SCOOP EDITOR'S INTRODUCTORY NOTE: Within parts of the U.S. progressive community there is already widespread concern that electronic voting fraud may provide an explanation for the astonishing 8 million vote gain made by George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential U.S. election.
Already there a variety of odd phenomena which have aroused suspicions about this possibility:
For example:
- In Florida Bush received a million extra votes, while Kerry received only 500,000 extra votes, in spite of a massive Democratic Get-Out-The-Vote(GOTV) and registration campaign in that state;
- In Florida's Broward County, a democratic stronghold and heavily black community, unauditable voting machines recorded a 33% (70,000+) vote gain on Bush's 2000 results and a much smaller gain to Kerry - again Broward was the scene of a massive GOTV campaign;
- In several places voters reported ( http://www.infozine.com/news/stories/op/storiesView/sid/4154/) voting for Kerry but noticing the machine record their vote for Bush;
- Recollections, reported here at Scoop.co.nz in 2003, that there is evidence of vote fraud in Florida in 2000 involving security holes in voting systems;
- Observations that many of the security flaws reported in mid 2003 in vote counting systems remained in place for the 2004 count last night (see http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ for details.)
But by far the most wide source of public suspicion about the results came from the stark difference between the exit polls, which showed strong Kerry leads in many battleground states including Ohio and Florida, and the actual results in those same states. Bush achieved a 5% margin of victory in Florida and came very close to winning Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Add in the fact that the reported exit poll results were changed in the early hours of Wednesday morning, and there was a recipe for suspicion brewing in the online internet vote fraud community last night.
In order to attempt to get a firmer hold on the extent of vote fraud if it did occur Faun Otter (a veteran of the U.S. based vote fraud investigative community) conducted the following preliminary analysis comparing the initial exit poll results (note this link takes you to the revised results) vs actual results.
- Scoop Co-Editor, Alastair Thompson
**********
Analysis Of Exit Polls Vs. Supposed Ballot Counts
Method
Grab one site which lists the exit polls before they were "corrected."
(Correction is the procedure by which the exit polls are retrofitted to match the figures provided by the vote counting machines. It is easily done by changing the exit poll results, such as the 2.00 a.m. flip-flop of the Nevada exit poll scores which was done without any change to the sample size. A slightly less obvious sleight of hand is to alter the weighting. Weighting is the name for a multiplier used to correct sample subgroups to match the proportions in the whole of a state population. Thus an exit poll can be ?'corrected' by saying something to the effect,
"Oh well, the vote results show we must have under sampled Republicans and therefore we'll multiply that subgroup of the exit poll sample by 1.5 to make our results fit the figures the ballot counting machines are spitting out.")
Here is one list as an example of raw (pre-correction) exit poll data:
http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=386
[Note another list was published on Scoop.co.nz HERE - Scoop editor]
Then take a look at the results by state, such as on this chart:
http://news.yahoo.com/electionresults
There is a bit of math involved but don't worry, I taught market research at a University - a place where Republicans fear to tread, according to the media's own polls! The Bush people argue that the exit polls are skewed by the methodology employed. It is odd that they don't say what that error producing part of the methodology might be. A skew means a systematic error is introduced by the test protocol and causes a consistent shift in one direction.
IF this was true, then all the exit polls would show the same sort of shift from 'actual' results.
The GOP offer an alternative argument that the exit polls are not large enough samples and therefore the results are off by a large random error.
IF this was true, then the exit polls should scatter on either side of the actual result, especially if the final result is close to 50/50.
So what do we actually see when comparing exit polls with actual results?
There is skew - but ONLY in states which the Republicans had previously stated to be target states in play. The skew is in the same direction every time; that is to say in favor of Bush.
The exit poll results are not scattered about the mean as the alternative theory predicts.
They are all on the Kerry side of the vote counts as issued by the states except for a hand full of states which hit amazingly close to the exit poll figures.
Here are the figures. They list the four contemporaneous and uncorrected exit polls. Kerry is listed first and Bush second in each pair of figures. Published = the figure presented as the vote count as of 10.00 a.m. EST on 11/3/04
Arizona
Poll one 45-55 Final 45-55 Published 44-55
Colorado
Poll one 48-51 2nd 48-50 3rd 46-53 Published 46-53
Louisiana
Poll one 42-57 Final 43-56 Published 42-57
Michigan
Poll one 51-48 Published 51-48 Published 51-48
Iowa
Poll one 49-49 3rd 50-48 Final 49-49 Published 49-50
New Mexico
Poll one 50-48 2nd 50-48 3rd 50-48 Final 50-49 Published 49-50
Maine 3rd poll 55-44 Published 53-45
Nevada:
3rd poll 48-49 Published 48-51
Arkansas:
3rd poll 45-54 Published 45-54
Missouri
Final 46-54 Published 46-53
These tracking polls were right where you would expect them to be and within the margin of error. However, if we look at some other states, the figures are beyond curious. either the exit polls were wrong or the vote count is wrong:
Wisconsin
Poll one 52-48 3rd 51-46 Final 52-47 Published 50-49
Pennsylvannia
Poll one 60-40 3rd 54-45 Final 53-46 Published 51-49
Ohio
Poll one 52-48 2nd 50-49 3rd 50-49 Final 51-49 Published 49-51
Florida
Poll one 51-48 2nd 50-49 3rd 50-49 Final 51-49 Published 47-52
Minnesota
Poll one 58-40 3rd 58-40 Final 54-44 Published 51-48
New Hampshire
Poll one 57-41 3rd 58-41 Published 50-49
North Carolina
Poll one 3rd 49-51 Final 48-52 Published 43-56
Taking the figures and measuring the size and direction of the poll to supposed vote count discrepancy, we find the variance between the exit poll and the final result:
Wisconsin
Bush plus 4%
Pennnsylvannia
Bush plus 5%
Ohio
Bush plus 4%
Florida
Bush plus 7%
Minnesota
Bush plus 7%
New Hampshire
Bush plus 15%
North Carolina'
Bush plus 9%
In summary our election results appear to have been tampered with to give Bush some unearned electoral votes.
- Faun Otter
FreeDuck, no one seriously proposes The Democrats "move to the Republicans". What The Democrats - their leadership - must do to reverse their recent fortunes is to move back to The Mainstream. It is they - theleadership of The Democratic Party - who have distanced themselves from The Electorate. The Democratic Party seems committed to putting as much ground between itself and The Great Middle as it can.
Harper, I listened to it ... several times, with growing mirth. Unable to refute what "evidence"? There simply is no basis for allegations of systemic irregularity. It is telling to the point of conclusivity the argument of The Left re election improprieties and background "Governmental Manipulation" is so bankrupt as to beggar description. It truly is tinfoil hat stuff.
But go with it if that comforts you. Pressing the issue will serve only to further diminish the credibility and viability of The Democratic Party. Sore-Loserman didn't work 4 years ago. It is stupid to persist in a demonstrated repeatedly failed course of action in expectation of improved result. That appears to be one thing some in The Democratic Party do very well. Keep it up.
Please.
Its working.
FreeDuck, no one seriously proposes The Democrats "move to the Republicans". What The Democrats - their leadership - must do to reverse their recent fortunes is to move back to The Mainstream. It is they - theleadership of The Democratic Party - who have distanced themselves from The Electorate. The Democratic Party seems committed to putting as much ground between itself and The Great Middle as it can.
