Topic: U.S ELECTION - VOTE RIGGING?
Hope you find this interesting - Joe
There are 3 pieces in this mail, all on the same theme.
GLOBAL MONITORS FIND FAULTS
By Thomas Crampton
International Herald Tribune
Wednesday, November 3, 2004
http://iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file= … bserve.htm
l
MIAMI - The global implications of the U.S. election are undeniable,
but
international monitors at a polling station in southern Florida said
Tuesday
that voting procedures being used in the extremely close contest fell
short
in many ways of the best global practices.
The observers said they had less access to polls than in Kazakhstan,
that
the electronic voting had fewer fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the
ballots were not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that no
other
country had such a complex national election system.
(Full story at link)
Published on Thursday, November 4, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
The Ultimate Felony Against Democracy
by Thom Hartmann
The hot story in the Blogosphere is that the "erroneous" exit polls
that showed Kerry carrying Florida and Ohio (among other states)
weren't erroneous at all - it was the numbers produced by paperless
voting machines that were wrong, and Kerry actually won. As more and
more analysis is done of what may (or may not) be the most massive
election fraud in the history of the world, however, it's critical
that we keep the largest issue at the forefront at all time: Why are
We The People allowing private, for-profit corporations, answerable
only to their officers and boards of directors, and loyal only to
agendas and politicians that will enhance their profitability, to
handle our votes?
Maybe Florida went for Kerry, maybe for Bush. Over time - and through
the efforts of some very motivated investigative reporters - we may
well find out (Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org just filed what
may be the largest Freedom of Information Act [FOIA} filing in
history), and bloggers and investigative reporters are discovering an
odd discrepancy in exit polls being largely accurate in paper-ballot
states and oddly inaccurate in touch-screen electronic voting states
Even raw voter analyses are showing extreme oddities in
touch-screen-run Florida, and eagle-eyed bloggers are finding that
news organizations are retroactively altering their exit polls to
coincide with what the machines ultimately said.
But in all the discussion about voting machines, let's never forget
the concept of the commons, because this usurpation is the ultimate
felony committed by conservatives this year.
At the founding of this nation, we decided that there were important
places to invest our tax (then tariff) dollars, and those were the
things that had to do with the overall "life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness" of all of us. Over time, these commons - in
which we all make tax investments and for which we all hold ultimate
responsibility - have come to include our police and fire services;
our military and defense; our roads and skyways; our air, waters and
national parks; and the safety of our food and drugs.
But the most important of all the commons in which we've invested
our hard-earned tax dollars is our government itself. It's owned by
us, run by us (through our elected representatives), answerable to
us, and most directly responsible for stewardship of our commons.
And the commons through which we regulate the commons of our
government is our vote.
About two years ago, I wrote a story for these pages, "If You Want
To Win An Election, Just Control The Voting Machines," that exposed
how Senator Chuck Hagel had, before stepping down and running for the
U.S. Senate in Nebraska, been the head of the voting machine company
(now ES&S) that had just computerized Nebraska's vote. The Washington
Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel's "Senate victory against an incumbent
Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November
election." According to Bev Harris, Hagel won virtually every
demographic group, including many largely black communities that had
never before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24
years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska, nearly all on unauditable
machines he had just sold the state. And in all probability, Hagel
run for President in 2008.
In another, later article I wrote at the request of MoveOn.org and
which they mailed to their millions of members, I noted that in
Georgia - another state that went all-electronic - "USA Today
reported on Nov. 3, 2002, 'In Georgia, an Atlanta
Journal-Constitution poll shows Democratic Sen. Max Cleland with a
49%-to-44% lead over Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss. 'Cox News
Service, based in Atlanta, reported just after the election (Nov. 7)
that, "Pollsters may have goofed" because 'Republican Rep. Saxby
Chambliss defeated incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Cleland by a margin
of 53 to 46 percent. The Hotline, a political news service, recalled
a series of polls Wednesday showing that Chambliss had been ahead in
none of them.'" Nearly every vote in the state was on an electronic
machine with no audit trail.
In the years since those first articles appeared, Bev Harris has
published her book on the subject ("Black Box Voting"), including the
revelation of her finding the notorious "Rob Georgia" folder on
Diebold's FTP site just after Cleland's loss there; Lynn Landes has
done some groundbreaking research, particularly her new
investigation of the Associated Press, as have Rebecca Mercuri and
David Dill. There's a new video out on the topic, Votergate,
available at www.votergate.tv.
Congressman Rush Holt introduced a bill into Congress requiring a
voter-verified paper ballot be produced by all electronic voting
machines, and it's been co-sponsored by a majority of the members of
the House of Representatives. The two-year battle fought by Dennis
Hastert and Tom DeLay to keep it from coming to a vote, thus insuring
that there will be no possible audit of the votes of about a third of
the 2004 electorate, has fueled the flames of conspiracy theorists
convinced Republican ideologues - now known to be willing to lie in
television advertising - would extend their "ends justifies the
means" morality to stealing the vote "for the better good of the
country" they think single-party Republican rule will bring.
Most important, though, the rallying cry of the emerging "honest
vote" movement must become: Get Corporations Out Of Our Vote!
Why have we let corporations into our polling places, locations so
sacred to democracy that in many states even international election
monitors and reporters are banned? Why are we allowing corporations
to exclusively handle our vote, in a secret and totally invisible
way? Particularly a private corporation founded, in one case, by a
family that believes the Bible should replace the Constitution; in
another case run by one of Ohio's top Republicans; and in another
case partly owned by Saudi investors?
Of all the violations of the commons - all of the crimes against We
The People and against democracy in our great and historic republic -
this is the greatest. Our vote is too important to outsource to
private corporations.
It's time that the USA - like most of the rest of the world -
returns to paper ballots, counted by hand by civil servants (our
employees) under the watchful eye of the party faithful. Even if it
takes two weeks to count the vote, and we have to just go, until
then, with the exit polls of the news agencies. It worked just fine
for nearly 200 years in the USA, and it can work again.
When I lived in Germany, they took the vote the same way most of the
world does - people fill in hand-marked ballots, which are
hand-counted by civil servants taking a week off from their regular
jobs, watched over by volunteer representatives of the political
parties. It's totally clean, and easily audited. And even though it
takes a week or more to count the vote (and costs nothing more than a
bit of overtime pay for civil servants), the German people know the
election results the night the polls close because the news media's
exit polls, for two generations, have never been more than a tenth of
a percent off.
We could have saved billions that have instead been handed over to
ES&S, Diebold, and other private corporations.
Or, if we must have machines, let's have them owned by local
governments, maintained and programmed by civil servants answerable
to We The People, using open-source code and disconnected from
modems, that produce a voter-verified printed ballot, with all
results published on a precinct-by-precinct basis.
As Thomas Paine wrote at this nation's founding, "The right of
voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other
rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to
slavery."
Only when We The People reclaim the commons of our vote can we again
be confident in the integrity of our electoral process in the world's
oldest and most powerful democratic republic.
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."
http://www.opednews.com/thoreau_110404_diebold.htm
and from www.tompaine.com:
Kerry Won
Greg Palast
November 04, 2004
Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the
United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are
voided-known as "spoilage" in election
jargon-because the ballots cast are inconclusive.
Palast's investigation suggests that if Ohio's
discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have
won the state. Today the Cleveland Plain
Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672
votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672
discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional
ballots.
Greg Palast, contributing editor to Harper's
magazine, investigated the manipulation of the
vote for BBC Television's Newsnight. The
documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes," based on his
New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy
Money Can Buy, has been released this month on
DVD .
Kerry won. Here's the facts.
I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face
one more hung chad. But I don't have a choice.
As a journalist examining that messy sausage
called American democracy, it's my job to tell
you who got the most votes in the deciding
states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was
John Kerry.
Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for
Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush
among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent.
Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters
51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender
voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.
So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls
are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote
for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial,
question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters
don't know.
Here's why. Although the exit polls show that
most voters in Ohio punched cards for
Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were
simply not recorded. This was predictable and it
was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, "An Election
Spoiled Rotten," November 1.]
Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted
vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads
and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks
old and new.
The election in Ohio was not decided by the
voters but by something called "spoilage."
Typically in the United States, about 3 percent
of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not
recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on the tube
tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent
to 49 percent, don't you believe it ... it has
never happened in the United States, because the
total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The
television totals simply subtract out the spoiled
vote.
And not all vote spoil equally. Most of those
votes, say every official report, come from
African American and minority precincts. (To
learn more, click here.)
We saw this in Florida in 2000. Exit polls showed
Gore with a plurality of at least 50,000, but it
didn't match the official count. That's because
the official, Secretary of State Katherine
Harris, excluded 179,855 spoiled votes. In
Florida, as in Ohio, most of these votes lost
were cast on punch cards where the hole
wasn't punched through
completely-leaving a 'hanging chad,'-or was
punched extra times. Whose cards were discarded?
Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for
the government calculated that 54 percent of the
ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black
folks. (To read the report from the U.S. Civil
Rights Commission, click here .)
And here's the key: Florida is terribly typical.
The majority of ballots thrown out (there will be
nearly 2 million tossed out from Tuesday's
election) will have been cast by African American
and other minority citizens.
So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again.
Because unlike last time, Democrats aren't even
asking Ohio to count these cards with the
not-quite-punched holes (called "undervotes" in
the voting biz).
Ohio is one of the last states in America to
still use the vote-spoiling punch-card machines.
And the Secretary of State of Ohio, J. Kenneth
Blackwell, wrote before the election, "the
possibility of a close election with punch cards
as the state's primary voting device invites a
Florida-like calamity."
But this week, Blackwell, a rabidly partisan
Republican, has warmed up to the result of
sticking with machines that have a habit of
eating Democratic votes. When asked if he feared
being this year's Katherine Harris, Blackwell
noted that Ms. Fix-it's efforts landed her a seat
in Congress.
Exactly how many votes were lost to spoilage this
time? Blackwell's office, notably, won't say,
though the law requires it be reported. Hmm. But
we know that last time, the total of Ohio votes
discarded reached a democracy-damaging 1.96
percent. The machines produced their typical
loss-that's 110,000 votes-overwhelmingly
Democratic.
The Impact Of Challenges
First and foremost, Kerry was had by chads. But
the Democrat wasn't punched out by punch cards
alone. There were also the 'challenges.' That's a
polite word for the Republican Party of Ohio's
use of an old Ku Klux Klan technique: the attempt
to block thousands of voters of color at the
polls. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, the GOP
laid plans for poll workers to ambush citizens
under arcane laws-almost never used-allowing
party-designated poll watchers to finger
individual voters and demand they be denied a
ballot. The Ohio courts were horrified and
federal law prohibits targeting of voters where
race is a factor in the challenge. But our
Supreme Court was prepared to let Republicans
stand in the voting booth door.
In the end, the challenges were not overwhelming,
but they were there. Many apparently resulted in
voters getting these funky "provisional"
ballots-a kind of voting placebo-which may or may
not be counted. Blackwell estimates there were
175,000; Democrats say 250,000. Pick your number.
But as challenges were aimed at minorities, no
one doubts these are, again, overwhelmingly
Democratic. Count them up, add in the spoiled
punch cards (easy to tally with the human eye in
a recount), and the totals begin to match the
exit polls; and, golly, you've got yourself a new
president. Remember, Bush won by 136,483 votes in
Ohio.
Enchanted State's Enchanted Vote
Now, on to New Mexico, where a Kerry plurality-if
all votes are counted-is more obvious still.
Before the election, in TomPaine.com, I wrote,
"John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in
New Mexico, though not one ballot has yet been
counted."
How did that happen? It's the spoilage, stupid; and the provisional
ballots.
CNN said George Bush took New Mexico by 11,620
votes. Again, the network total added up to that
miraculous, and non-existent, '100 percent' of
ballots cast.
New Mexico reported in the last race a spoilage
rate of 2.68 percent, votes lost almost entirely
in Hispanic, Native American and poor
precincts-Democratic turf. From Tuesday's vote,
assuming the same ballot-loss rate, we can expect
to see 18,000 ballots in the spoilage bin.
Spoilage has a very Democratic look in New
Mexico. Hispanic voters in the Enchanted State,
who voted more than two to one for Kerry, are
five times as likely to have their vote spoil as
a white voter. Counting these uncounted votes
would easily overtake the Bush 'plurality.'
Already, the election-bending effects of spoilage
are popping up in the election stats, exactly
where we'd expect them: in heavily Hispanic areas
controlled by Republican elections officials.
Chaves County, in the "Little Texas" area of New
Mexico, has a 44 percent Hispanic population,
plus African Americans and Native Americans, yet
George Bush "won" there 68 percent to 31 percent.
I spoke with Chaves' Republican county clerk
before the election, and he told me that this
huge spoilage rate among Hispanics simply
indicated that such people simply can't make up
their minds on the choice of candidate for
president. Oddly, these brown people drive across
the desert to register their indecision in a
voting booth.
Now, let's add in the effect on the New Mexico tally of provisional
ballots.
"They were handing them out like candy,"
Albuquerque journalist Renee Blake reported of
provisional ballots. About 20,000 were given out.
Who got them?
Santiago Juarez who ran the "Faithful
Citizenship" program for the Catholic Archdiocese
in New Mexico, told me that "his" voters, poor
Hispanics, whom he identified as solid Kerry
supporters, were handed the iffy provisional
ballots. Hispanics were given provisional
ballots, rather than the countable kind "almost
religiously," he said, at polling stations when
there was the least question about a voter's
identification. Some voters, Santiago said, were
simply turned away.
Your Kerry Victory Party
So we can call Ohio and New Mexico for John Kerry-if we count all the
votes.
But that won't happen. Despite the Democratic
Party's pledge, the leadership this time gave in
to racial disenfranchisement once again. Why? No
doubt, the Democrats know darn well that counting
all the spoiled and provisional ballots will
require the cooperation of Ohio's Secretary of
State, Blackwell. He will ultimately decide which
spoiled and provisional ballots get tallied.
Blackwell, hankering to step into Kate Harris'
political pumps, is unlikely to permit anything
close to a full count. Also, Democratic
leadership knows darn well the media would punish
the party for demanding a full count.
What now? Kerry won, so hold your victory party.
But make sure the shades are down: it may be
become illegal to demand a full vote count under
PATRIOT Act III.
I used to write a column for the Guardian papers
in London. Several friends have asked me if I
will again leave the country. In light of the
failure-a second time-to count all the votes,
that won't be necessary. My country has left me.
© 2004 TomPaine.com ( Project of The Institute for America's Future )
