Bush Eye - Examining U.S. Election Irregularities

So Osama Walks Into This Bar, See?

2006-08-23T20:59:00.000-07:00

by Greg Palast
Monday August 14, 2006

So, Osama Walks into This Bar, See? and Bush says, "Whad'l'ya have, pardner?" and Osama says...

But wait a minute. I'd better shut my mouth. The sign here in the airport says, "Security is no joking matter." But if security's no joking matter, why does this guy dressed in a high-school marching band outfit tell me to dump my Frappuccino and take off my shoes? All I can say is, Thank the Lord the "shoe bomber" didn't carry Semtex in his underpants.

Today's a RED and ORANGE ALERT day. How odd. They just caught the British guys with the chemistry sets. But when these guys were about to blow up airliners, the USA was on YELLOW alert. That's a "lowered" threat notice.

According to the press office from the Department of Homeland Security, lowered-threat Yellow means that there were no special inspections of passengers or cargo. Isn't it nice of Mr. Bush to alert Osama when half our security forces are given the day off? Hmm. I asked an Israeli security expert why his nation doesn't use these pretty color codes.

He asked me if, when I woke up, I checked the day's terror color.

"I can't say I ever have. I mean, who would?"

He smiled. "The terrorists."

America is the only nation on the planet that kindly informs bombers, hijackers and berserkers the days on which they won't be monitored. You've got to get up pretty early in the morning to get a jump on George Bush's team.

There are three possible explanations for the Administration's publishing a good-day-for-bombing color guidebook.

1. God is on Osama's side.

2. George is on Osama's side.

3. Fear sells better than sex.

A gold star if you picked #3.

The Fear Factory

I'm going to tell you something which is straight-up heresy: America is not under attack by terrorists. There is no WAR on terror because, except for one day five years ago, al Qaeda has pretty much left us alone.

That's because Osama got what he wanted. There's no mystery about what Al Qaeda was after. Like everyone from the Girl Scouts to Bono, Osama put his wish on his web site. He had a single demand: "Crusaders out of the land of the two Holy Places." To translate: get US troops out of Saudi Arabia.

And George Bush gave it to him. On April 29, 2003, two days before landing on the aircraft carrier Lincoln, our self-described "War President" quietly put out a notice that he was withdrawing our troops from Saudi soil. In other words, our cowering cowboy gave in whimpering to Osama's demand.

The press took no note. They were all wiggie over Bush's waddling around the carrier deck in a disco-aged jump suit announcing, "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED." But it wasn't America's mission that was accomplished, it was Osama's.

Am I saying there's no danger, no threat? Sure there is: 46 million Americans don't have health insurance. IBM is legally stealing from its employees' pension plan and United Airlines has dumped its pensions altogether. Four-million three-hundred thousand Americans were injured, made sick or killed by their jobs last year. TXU Corporation is right now building four monster-sized power plants in Texas that will burn skuzzy gunk called "lignite." The filth it will pour into the sky will snuff a heck of a lot more Americans than some goofy group of fanatics with bottles of hydrogen peroxide.

But Americans don't ask for real protection from what's killing us. The War on Terror is the Weapon of Mass Distraction. Instead of demanding health insurance, we have 59 million of our fellow citizens pooping in their pants with fear of Al Qaeda, waddling to the polls, crying, "Georgie save us!"

And what does he give us? In my own small town, the federal government has paid for loading an SUV with .50 caliber machine guns to watch for an Al Qaeda attack at the dock of the ferry that takes tourists to the Indian casino in Connecticut. The casino dock is my town's officially designated "Critical Asset and Vulnerability Infrastructure Point (CAVIP)." (To find the most vulnerable points to attack in the USA, Al Qaeda can download a list from the Department of Homeland Security -- no kidding.)

But that's not all. Bush is protecting us from English hijackers with a fearsome anti-terrorist tool: the Virginia-class submarine. The V-boat was originally meant to hunt Soviet subs. But there are no more Soviet subs. So, General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin have "refitted" these Cold War dinosaurs with new torpedoes redesigned to carry counter-terror commandoes. That's right: when we find Osama's beach house, we can shoot our boys right up under his picnic table and take him out. These Marines-in-a-tube injector boats cost $2.5 billion each -- and our President's ordered half a dozen new ones.

Lynn Cheney, the Veep's wife, still takes in compensation from Lockheed as a former board member. I'm sure that has nothing to do with this multi-billion dollar "anti-terror" contract.

Fear sells better than sex. Fear is the sales pitch for many lucrative products: from billion-dollar sailor injectors to one very lucrative war in Mesopotamia (a third of a trillion dollars doled out, no audits, no questions asked).

Better than toothpaste that makes our teeth whiter than white, this stuff will make us safer than safe. It's political junk food, the cheap filling in the flashy tube. What we don't get is safety from the real dangers: a life-threatening health-care system, lung-murdering pollution production and a trade deficit with China that's reducing mid-America to coolie status. Protecting us from these true threats would take a slice of the profits of the Lockheeds, the Exxons and the rest of the owning class.

War on Terror is class war by other means -- to keep you from asking for real protection from true menace, the landlords of our nation give you fake protection from manufactured dangers. And they remind you to be afraid every time you fly to see Aunt Millie and have to give up your hemorrhoid ointment to the underpaid guy in the bell-hop suit with a security badge.

Oh, hey, you never got the punch line.
So, Osama Walks into This Bar, See? and Bush says, "Whad'l'ya have, pardner?" and Osama says, "Well, George, what are you serving today?" and Bush says, "Fear," and Osama shouts, "Fear for everybody!" and George pours it on for the crowd. Then the presidential bartender says, "Hey, who's buying?" and Osama points a thumb at the crowd sucking down their brew. "They are," he says. And the two of them share a quiet laugh.

*****

Greg Palast is the author of the just-released New York Times bestseller, "ARMED MADHOUSE: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War" from which this is adapted. Go to www.GregPalast.com.

Why Democrats Don't Count

2006-07-14T09:41:00.000-07:00

Lessons from the Un-Gore of Mexico

July 14, 2006
By Greg Palast

[Watch "Florida con Salsa," Palast's 15-minute investigative report from Mexico City for Democracy Now!]

The Exit polls said he won, but the "official" tally took his victory away. His supporters found they were scrubbed off voter rolls. Violence and intimidation kept even more of his voters away from the polls. Hundreds of thousands of ballots supposedly showed no choice for president -- like ballots with hanging chads.

And the officials in charge of this suspect election refused to re-count those votes in public. Everyone knew full well a fair count would certainly change the outcome.

You've heard this story before: Gore 2000. Kerry 2004.

But Lopez Obrador 2006 is made out of very different stuff than the scarecrow candidates who, oddly, call themselves "Democrats."

For six years now, I've had this crazy fantasy in my head. In it, an election is stolen and the guy who's declared the loser stands up in front of the White House and says three magic words: "Count the votes."

This past Saturday, my dream came true. Unfortunately, it was in Spanish -- but I'll take what I can get. There was Andreas Manuel Lopez Obrador, presidential challenger, standing in the "Zocalo" -- the square in front of Mexico's White House, telling the ruling clique inside, "Count the votes!"

Most important, his simple demand was echoed by half a million pissed-off, activated voters chanting with him, "Vota por vota!" -- vote by vote.

And you know what? I think they are going to have to listen. I suspect that the rulers of Mexico, a vicious, puffed-up, arrogant elite, may well have to count those votes. But, for that to happen, someone had to ask them to do it -- in no uncertain terms.

Traveling the USA, I'm asked again and again 'Why don't Democrats stand up when their elections are stolen?'

The answer: for the same reason jellyfish don't stand up... they're invertebrates.

I'm beginning to find that answer a bit too glib (though darn funny). Because it's not about electoral cojones; it's about a devotion to democracy deep in the bone. Yet weirdly, candidates that call themselves "Democrats" seem kind of, well, indifferent to democracy.

Why? Elections are the radical tool of the working class -- the great leveler of the powerless against the too-powerful. But the candidates themselves, both Republican and Democrat, tend to come from the privileged and pampered class. Votes are just the surfboards on which their ambitions ride.

Right now in Mexico's capitol, nearly a million ballots sit in tied bundles uncounted. That's four times the "official" margin of victory of the ruling party over Lopez Obrador. Supposedly, they're "votos nulos" -- null votes, unreadable. But, not surprisingly, when a few packets were opened, the majority of these supposedly unreadable votes were Lopez Obrador's.

If you think that's a Mexican game, think again. Because that's exactly what happened in Florida and Ohio.

In Florida, 179,855 ballots supposedly showed no vote for President. A closer look by the US Civil Rights Commission statisticians showed that 54% of those Florida "votos nulos" were cast by African-Americans. Did Black folk forget to vote for President, couldn't make up their minds or, as one TV network implied, were too dumb to figure out the ballot? Not at all. Machines can't count some ballots. But people can. For example, several voters wrote in, "Al Gore," which the machines rejected as his name was already printed on the ballot. The write-in could fool a machine but a human has no problem figuring out that voter's intent.

The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago reviewed all 179,855 "uncountable" votes and found the majority attempted to choose Gore. And they would have been counted -- but Florida's Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, ordered a halt.

So Bush was elected not by counting the votes but by preventing their count. And he was reelected the same way in 2004 when a quarter million votes were nullified in Ohio.

But why fixate on Florida and Ohio? Here's a nasty little fact about voting in the Land of the Free not reported in your newspapers: 3,600,380 ballots were cast in the November 2004 presidential election that were never counted. In 2000, the uncounted ballots totaled just under two million.

And where were the Democrats? In 2004, behind the huge jump in uncounted votes was a mass challenge campaign aimed at poor, Black and Hispanic voters by the Republican Party -- pushing these voters, mostly Democrats, to "provisional ballots." They could have been counted, if someone had fought for it. Hundreds of lawyers were on stand-by but the head of the biggest legal team told me in confidence -- and in frustration -- that the Kerry campaign told them to stand down.

Recently, Al Gore was asked if the election of 2000 was stolen. "There may come a time when I speak on that, but it's not now," said the beta dog. (I suspect that if Al Gore were found bleeding in an alley, he'd answer the question, Who shot you? with "There may come a time when I speak on that...").

Lopez Obrador is of a different breed. At the rally last Saturday in Mexico City, he played video and audio tapes of the evidence of fraud on a screen eighty feet tall. Imagine if Gore had projected the "scrub sheets" of purged Black voters on a ten-story-high screen in front of the White House.

Lopez Obrador put political force behind his legal demands by calling on voters from every state in Mexico to march to the capital. Two million are expected to arrive this Sunday. The result: the word among the political classes is that the election may be annulled. Even the conservative Financial Times has warned Mexico's elite not to "fool itself" by ignoring the demand for a full vote count.

North-of-the-Border Democrats just don't get it. The Republican Party is pushing "provisional" ballots, pushing voter ID requirements, compiling secret challenge lists, scrubbing voter registries and selling us vote-nullifying ballot boxes: they get it completely. The GOP knows the key to their electoral domination is not in winning over their opponents' votes, but in not counting them.

The un-Gore of Mexico City has a lesson for the Blue-party gringos. Either the Democrats demand that all votes count, or the Democrats will count for nothing.

**********
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, "ARMED MADHOUSE: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War." Go to www.GregPalast.com.

Palast's report, "Florida con Salsa? Vote Fraud in Mexico" was filmed and produced by Rick Rowley and Jacquie Soohen (Big Noise Films). Matt Pascarella, in Mexico, contributed to this investigation.
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Massacre of the Buffalo Soldiers

2006-06-16T08:30:00.000-07:00

African-American Voters Scrubbed by Secret GOP Hit List
by Greg Palast
As reported for Democracy Now!

Palast, who first reported this story for BBC Television Newsnight (UK) and Democracy Now! (USA), is author of the New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse.

The Republican National Committee has a special offer for African-American soldiers: Go to Baghdad, lose your vote.

A confidential campaign directed by GOP party chiefs in October 2004 sought to challenge the ballots of tens of thousands of voters in the last presidential election, virtually all of them cast by residents of Black-majority precincts.
Files from the secret vote-blocking campaign were obtained by BBC Television Newsnight, London. They were attached to emails accidentally sent by Republican operatives to a non-party website.

One group of voters wrongly identified by the Republicans as registering to vote from false addresses: servicemen and women sent overseas.

*******
For Greg Palast's discussion with broadcaster Amy Goodman on the Black soldier purge of 2004, go to http://gregpalast.com/armedmadhouse/palastDN6-14-06.mp3

*******

Here's how the scheme worked: The RNC mailed these voters letters in envelopes marked, “Do not forward”, to be returned to the sender. These letters were mailed to servicemen and women, some stationed overseas, to their US home addresses. The letters then returned to the Bush-Cheney campaign as "undeliverable."

The lists of soldiers of "undeliverable" letters were transmitted from state headquarters, in this case Florida, to the RNC in Washington. The party could then challenge the voters' registration and thereby prevent their absentee ballot being counted.

One target list was comprised exclusively of voters registered at the Jacksonville, Florida, Naval Air Station. Jacksonville is third largest naval installation in the US, best known as home of the Blue Angels fighting squandron.

[See this scrub sheet at http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=160156893&context=set-72157594155273706&size=o ]

Our team contacted the homes of several on the caging list, such as Randall Prausa, a serviceman, whose wife said he had been ordered overseas.

A soldier returning home in time to vote in November 2004 could also be challenged on the basis of the returned envelope. Soldiers challenged would be required to vote by "provisional" ballot.

Over one million provisional ballots cast in the 2004 race were never counted; over half a million absentee ballots were also rejected. The extraordinary rise in the number of rejected ballots was the result of the widespread multi-state voter challenge campaign by the Republican Party. The operation, of which the purge of Black soldiers was a small part, was the first mass challenge to voting America had seen in two decades.

The BBC obtained several dozen confidential emails sent by the Republican's national Research Director and Deputy Communications chief, Tim Griffin to GOP Florida campaign chairman Brett Doster and other party leaders. Attached were spreadsheets marked, "Caging.xls." Each of these contained several hundred to a few thousand voters and their addresses.

A check of the demographics of the addresses on the "caging lists," as the GOP leaders called them indicated that most were in African-American majority zip codes.

Ion Sanco, the non-partisan elections supervisor of Leon County (Tallahassee) when shown the lists by this reporter said: “The only thing I can think of - African American voters listed like this – these might be individuals that will be challenged if they attempted to vote on Election Day.”

These GOP caging lists were obtained by the same BBC team that first exposed the wrongful purge of African-American "felon" voters in 2000 by then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Eliminating the voting rights of those voters -- 94,000 were targeted -- likely caused Al Gore's defeat in that race.

The Republican National Committee in Washington refused our several requests to respond to the BBC discovery. However, in Tallahassee, the Florida Bush campaign's spokespeople offered several explanations for the list.

Joseph Agostini, speaking for the GOP, suggested the lists were of potential donors to the Bush campaign. Oddly, the supposed donor list included residents of the Sulzbacher Center a shelter for homeless families.

Another spokesperson for the Bush campaign, Mindy Tucker Fletcher, ultimately changed the official response, acknowledging that these were voters, "we mailed to, where the letter came back – bad addresses.”

The party has refused to say why it would mark soldiers as having "bad addresses" subject to challenge when they had been assigned abroad.

The apparent challenge campaign was not inexpensive. The GOP mailed the letters first class, at a total cost likely exceeding millions of dollars, so that the addresses would be returned to "cage" workers.

“This is not a challenge list," insisted the Republican spokesmistress. However, she modified that assertion by adding, “That’s not what it’s set up to be.”
Setting up such a challenge list would be a crime under federal law. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlaws mass challenges of voters where race is a factor in choosing the targeted group.

While the party insisted the lists were not created for the purpose to challenge Black voters, the GOP ultimately offered no other explanation for the mailings. However, Tucker Fletcher asserted Republicans could still employ the list to deny ballots to those they considered suspect voters. When asked if Republicans would use the list to block voters, Tucker Fletcher replied, “Where it’s stated in the law, yeah.”

It is not possible at this time to determine how many on the potential blacklist were ultimately challenged and lost their vote. Soldiers sending in their ballot from abroad would not know their vote was lost because of a challenge.

__________________________________

For the full story of caging lists and voter purges of 2004, plus the documents, read Greg Palast's New York Times bestseller, ARMED MADHOUSE: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War.

Hand counted paper ballots in 2008

2006-04-19T21:42:00.000-07:00

by Sheila Parks
April 14, 2006

The right to vote, as well as the principle of “one person, one vote,” are cornerstones of our democracy. The anti-slavery, women’s suffrage, and civil rights movements as well as the expansion of voting to young people are all part of the history of electoral reform in this country. Equally fundamental is the assurance that each voter knows that her or his vote counts and is counted as intended. At this time in our history, many have lost confidence in our voting system.

The presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, and at least six contests in the mid-term elections of 2002, raised many questions about fraud and electronic voting machines. The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) established by HAVA, and the Carter-Baker National Commission on Federal Election Reform were all created after the 2000 election to improve the electoral process. All of these efforts, however, have been detrimental to the prevention and detection of election fraud and error due to their advocacy of the use of electronic voting machines. One election reform advocate, Bev Harris of Black Box Voting, provides a particularly vivid glimpse into the scope of the problems associated with electronic voting machines. She notes that, at a special Texas meeting of the Carter-Baker Commission, “I asked a member of the Panel why they [the Commission] had not asked a single question about how hacks can be done. He said it is not necessary to understand how the system can be compromised in order to protect it.”

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) in its nonpartisan September 2005 report on elections states in its conclusions: “Numerous recent studies and reports have highlighted problems with the security and reliability of electronic voting systems…the concerns they raise have the potential to affect election outcomes.”

Currently there is no government agency that regulates the voting machine industry in the United States. Roughly 80% of votes in the 2004 presidential election were cast and counted on machines manufactured by two private companies, Diebold and ES&S (Election Systems & Software, Inc.), both controlled by registered Republicans. There are two principal types of machines now in use: (1) touch-screens (DRE – Direct Response Electronic), on which no audit or recount is possible because they have no paper trail and (2) optical scans, which use paper ballots for the vote but are counted by central tabulators (particularly susceptible to fraud).

Although several bills currently pending in the U.S. House and Senate, introduced by both Republicans and Democrats, propose changes to electronic voting machines, as do HAVA, the EAC and the Carter-Baker Commission, none consider hand marked, hand counted paper ballots (HCPB) as a possible solution. Most of the proposed legislation advocates for what is variously called a voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT), a voter verified paper trail (VVPT) or a voter verified paper ballot (VVPB). A discussion of the nuances between and among these systems is beyond the scope of this article, but all share a potential weakness – namely, there is no way to prevent hacking of electronic voting machines later in the process, whether a voter receives a record of how she or he voted and/or whether there is a paper trail in the machine. Mandated random audits of the vote raise the question of whether the audit will really be random and bring back flashes of Florida in 2000 and a long drawn out struggle. Will the Supreme Court again put a non-elected person in office as president of the United States?

Although much has been published on the Internet, the mainstream media have mostly chosen to ignore or dismiss the questions of fraud and error raised in relation to electronic voting machines. Notable exceptions are discussions by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC’s “Countdown” and Mark Crispin Miller’s article “None Dare Call It Stolen” in Harper’s Magazine, in which he strongly suggests that the presidential election of 2004 was rigged, much of it by electronic voting machines.

HCPB are an alternative to the current widespread and increasing use of electronic voting machines. An HCPB system of voting has the following major advantages over electronic voting machines: (1) Counting of ballots is publicly done, observed and filmed by everyday citizens who are registered voters in the precinct where the counting takes place. (2) Security safeguards are much more easily built in to protect against tampering. (3) The cost is far less.

There have been two recent efforts to promote an HCPB system in the United States, and a third will take place later in 2006. In 2004, voting rights activists Sharona Merel, Kaen Renick, Ellen Theisen, and Kathleen Wynne proposed federal legislation for federal offices. In 2005, four voting rights activists (this writer and three members of CASE Ohio – John Burik, Phil Fry, and Dorri Steinhoff) began work on a protocol for HCPB. Some of this writing has been modified and is included in this paper in the specifics for HCPB. In November 2006, voting rights activist Joanne Karasak plans to promote a state constitutional amendment for HCPB in Ohio. There are 18 states where such constitutional amendments are possible.

The key elements of an HCPB system are as follows: (1) Electronic voting machines are not involved in this process in any way whatsoever. (2) Nothing used in an HCPB system is purchased from companies or vendors who have ties to partisan political groups or parties. (3) Each voter hand marks a sturdy paper ballot with a black felt pen provided at the precinct. (4) The counting process happens at each precinct immediately after the polls close. (5) Each ballot is hand counted by registered voters from that precinct in full view of other registered voters from that precinct. (6) The counting process is filmed. (7) A chain of custody of the ballots and ballot boxes is specified. (8) Ballot boxes are observed and filmed as they are opened and closed and move from place to place.

Three categories of registered voters are included in this process: the official counters, the official observers of the counters, and the public watchers of the counters and observers. The hand marked, paper ballots are hand counted in full view of the public in each precinct by a specified number of registered voters in that precinct – e.g., four, six or eight voters. Half of the counters will consist of one person from each party on the ballot, chosen by the party itself; the other half of the counters will consist of registered voters, chosen by lottery. The hand counting is observed by the same number of registered voters (e.g., four, six or eight), and chosen in the same way as the counters. Counting is filmed by a video projection unit; a process will be set up to determine how the videotaping unit will be selected. The videotaping will be broadcast over closed-circuit TV and streamed over the Internet while the counting is happening. All watchers may also videotape and/or take photographs.

Each polling place must be arranged so that registered voters from that precinct (in addition to the above mentioned official observers) can easily watch the vote counting. These watchers are not to be confused with the observers of the counters. Watchers will include two registered voters from each party on the ballot, chosen by the party, and eight registered voters chosen by lottery. The polling place must be large enough to accommodate these numbers.

Even with all these safeguards in place, the chance for fraud still exists. Therefore, immediately after the first count, there will be a 100% hand counted audit of the vote, carried out in the same way as the first hand count, but in the audit, the observers will be the counters and the counters will be the observers.

Ballot boxes must be clearly marked and visible in plain view. Ballot boxes will be sealed and locked whenever they contain ballots and are not being actively used. Ballot boxes are secured from the beginning of voting until the end of counting by a chain of custody procedure. Ballot boxes never leave the precinct until after the vote is counted, audited and certified. Each time ballot boxes move from the physical control of or visual contact from one person to another, a duplicate record signed by all counters and observers must be made relinquishing and gaining control. There will be a documentation process wherein each ballot box will have a record of its handling from the beginning of the day to the end of counting. On the web site of computer science expert Professor Douglas W. Jones, there is a very clear and detailed protocol for “Ballot and Ballot Box Transportation” and “Ballot Storage.”

The call to action now is: HCPB for all federal races in the 2008 elections. This would mean hand counting just 1-3 races (the president and vice president; your U.S. senator if s/he is up for re-election; your U.S. Representative). Yes, we would need two ballots, one for these races and one for all other contests and questions on the ballots. Canada already uses an HCPB system for its federal races. Various states and municipalities already have protocols for HCPB, and one has been presented in this paper. These could easily be adapted from one jurisdiction to another. Elections are governed by state rather than federal statutes (HAVA notwithstanding). According to electionline.org, a website that provides an ongoing analysis of election reform, “Each state strikes a unique balance in allocating responsibility for elections between state and local governments. A survey of all 50 states reveals a wide spectrum of power-sharing arrangements.” There is a “Snapshot of the States” on pp. 11-14 of the Election Reform Briefing. When you begin this work, call your local Secretary of State and get the exact rules for your state.

It is time to make electronic voting machines a NIMBY (not in my back yard and not in anyone else’s back yard either) issue. To begin a movement for HCPB, ordinary citizens, registered voters, must begin organizing door-to-door with their neighbors to petition their local election officers and demand HCPB in their city or town. Although organizing could also proceed on a state level, going municipality by municipality is a good way to start, depending on your state’s laws.

Sheila Parks, Ed.D. (sheila.parks@verizon.net) is a longtime activist/organizer. She has been working against electronic voting machines for four years. Please contact her to get involved with other election reform activists working for HCPB across the country
Copyright 2006 Tikkun Magazine http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/specials/article.2006-04-10.1693298872

Shocking Diebold conflict of interest revelations from Secretary of State further taint Ohio's electoral credibility

2006-04-10T19:57:00.000-07:00

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
April 6, 2006

Ohio is reeling with a mixture of outrage and hilarity as Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell has revealed that he has owned stock in the Diebold voting machine company, to which Blackwell tried to award unbid contracts worth millions while allowing its operators to steal Ohio elections. A top Republican election official also says a Diebold operative told him he made a $50,000 donation to Blackwell's "political interests."

A veritable army of attorneys on all sides of Ohio's political spectrum will soon report whether Blackwell has violated the law. But in any event, the revelations could have a huge impact on the state whose dubiously counted electoral votes gave George W. Bush a second term. Diebold's GEMS election software was used in about half of Ohio counties in the 2004 election. Because of Blackwell's effort, 41 counties used Diebold machines in Ohio's highly dubious 2005 election, and now 47 counties will use Diebold touchscreen voting machines in the May 2006 primary, and in the fall election that will decide who will be the state's new governor.

Blackwell is the frontrunner for Ohio's Republican nomination for governor. The first African-American to hold statewide office, the former mayor of Cincinnati made millions in deals involving extreme right-wing "religious" radio stations.

As part of his campaign filings he has been required to divulge the contents of his various stock portfolios. Blackwell says that in the process he was "surprised" to learn he owned Diebold shares. According to central Ohio's biggest daily, the conservative Republican "Columbus Dispatch," Blackwell claims his multi-million-dollar portfolio has been handled "by a financial manager without his advice or review."

Blackwell says he gave verbal instructions to a previous fund manager about which stocks not to buy, but failed to do so when he brought in a replacement. He claims the new manager bought 178 Diebold shares in January, 2005, for $53.67/share. He says 95 shares were sold sometime last year, and that the remainder were sold this week after Blackwell conducted an annual review of his portfolio. He says both sales resulted in losses.

Prior to the 2004 election, Blackwell tried to award a $100 million unbid contract to Diebold for electronic voting machines. A storm of public outrage and a series of lawsuits forced him to cancel the deal. But a substantial percentage of Ohio's 2004 votes were counted by Diebold software and Diebold Opti-scan machines which frequently malfunctioned in the Democratic stronghold of Toledo. Many believe they played a key role in allowing Blackwell to steal Ohio's 20 electoral votes---and thus the presidential election---for Bush. Walden O'Dell, then the Diebold CEO, had pledged to "deliver" Ohio's electoral votes to Bush.

Blackwell has since continued to bring in Diebold machines under other multi-million-dollar contracts. In 2005, while he owned Diebold stock, Blackwell converted nearly half Ohio's counties to Diebold equipment.

Those machines have been plagued by a wide range of problems, casting further doubt on the integrity of the Ohio vote count. A number of county boards of elections are trying to reject Diebold equipment. Two statewide referendum issues on electoral reform were defeated in 2005 in a vote tally that was a virtual statistical impossibility. The deciding votes were cast and counted on Diebold equipment.

In recent months, Blackwell has ordered all 88 county boards of elections to send into his office the memory cards that will be used in the primary election, in which Blackwell expects to win the gubernatorial race. There is no effective statewide monitoring system to protect those cards from being rigged.

Matt Damschroder, the Republican chair of the Franklin County (Columbus) Board of Elections has also reported that a key Diebold operative told Damschroder he made a $50,000 contribution to Blackwell's "political interests" while Blackwell was evaluating Diebold's bids for state purchasing contracts. Blackwell denies the contribution was made to him.

Damschroder is former chair of the Franklin County GOP. He says former Diebold contractor Pasquale "Patsy" Gallina boasted of making the contribution to Blackwell. Damschroder himself has publicly admitted to personally accepting a $10,000 check from Pasquale, made out to the Franklin County GOP. That contribution was made while Damschroder was involved in evaluating Diebold bids for county contracts.

Damschroder was censured but not removed from office. On Election Day 2004, Franklin County voting officials told the Free Press that Blackwell and Damschroder were meeting with George W. Bush in Columbus. AP accounts place both Bush and Karl Rove unexpectedly in Columbus on Election Day. Damschroder has denied that he met personally with Bush, but refuses to clarify whether or not he was at GOP meetings with Bush in attendance on Election Day.

An eyewitness ally of Blackwell told a small gathering of Bush supporters, with a Free Press reporter present, that Blackwell was in a frenzy on Election Day, writing percentages and vote totals on maps of rural Republican counties, attempting to figure out how many votes, real or manufactured, Bush would need to overcome the exit poll results in Cleveland and Columbus.

Meanwhile Blackwell has run one of the most vicious primary campaigns ever seen in Ohio politics. A series of expensive television ads have assaulted Blackwell's GOP opponent, Attorney-General Jim Petro, vehemently charging him with extreme corruption and dishonesty. GOP operatives fear Blackwell's attacks could shatter the party.

Now Blackwell's Diebold revelations have both Petro and the state's extremely feeble Democrats jumping for joy. Petro, who has a large portfolio of his own, says he will pursue the question of whether Blackwell has broken the law. "Considering Ken Blackwell's history with Diebold, I think this warrants further investigation to remove any hint of impropriety," says Petro campaign manager Bob Paduchik.

Democratic candidate Ted Strickland has reported no stock portfolio at all. "If [Blackwell] doesn't know what's going on with his own checkbook, why in the world would voters want him to be in charge of the checkbook as governor?" asks Democratic spokesperson Brian Rothenberg.

The common statewide wisdom is that "Ken Blackwell will never lose an election in which he is in charge of the vote count."

But Ohio Democrats never seriously questioned Blackwell's rigged 2004 vote count that put Bush back in the White House. They've mounted no serious campaign challenging Blackwell's handling of the tally in 2005. They've presented no plan for guaranteeing the integrity of upcoming 2006 November election, which will again be run by Blackwell, even though he may be the GOP nominee.

Attorney-General Petro has become Blackwell's sworn enemy. A rugged campaigner with extensive statewide connections, it's not likely Petro would quietly accept an election being stolen from him. That might explain Blackwell's vehement attacks on his fellow Republican.

But having accused his cohort of widespread corruption, and with a long history of scornful contempt for all those who challenge him, Blackwell's own Diebold revelations have opened a Pandora's Box. What comes flying out could affect state and national politics for years to come.

--Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, and are co-editors, with Steve Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO?, upcoming from The New Press.

Utah testing of the Diebold touch-screen reveals new problems

2006-03-25T22:45:00.000-08:00

by Black Box Voting
March 19, 2006

Emery County Clerk Bruce Funk has been running elections for 23 years. He was quite content with his optical scan system. The state of Utah thought otherwise: On Dec. 27, Funk took delivery on 40 Diebold TSx touch-screen machines, part of a statewide directive.

"I had concerns about Diebold," says Funk, "but I thought, 'If the state is going to mandate it, then I guess they'll assume responsibility if anything goes wrong.'"

Not so. He soon learned that he will be responsible but the state will decide what election system will count the votes.

"YOU'RE GOING TO HATE MY GUTS ON ELECTION DAY"

Funk's concerns escalated when he heard a particularly unusual statement by Diebold sales rep Dana LaTour.

"Some of you are going to hate my guts on Election Day," she said to the assembly of elections officials. Later, another Diebold representative named Drew was asked what LaTour meant when she said "Some of you are going to hate my guts..."

"We're going to have problems on Election Day, and we're just going to have to work through them," he said.

FAILURES RIGHT OUT OF THE GATE

Shortly after Funk received his "brand new" TSx machines, Diebold helped him do acceptance testing. Two of the 40 machines promptly failed the test. Diebold arranged to take them away.

The remaining machines showed several defects -- crooked paper feeds that jam, memory card bay doors that wouldn't close, parts getting stuck, coming loose, falling off.

TAKING A CLOSER LOOK

Funk thought it might be a good idea to take a closer inventory.

He booted each machine up to check the battery. Some of the machines were marked with little yellow dots, and he got to wondering about that, too. He studied the screen messages, and noticed something very odd.

Most machines had about 25 MB of memory available, but some had only 7 MB of free memory left. One had only 4 MB of available memory. For perspective, the backup election file generated by the Diebold TSx is about 7.9 MB. Now why would brand new voting machines have used-up memory?

TIME TO GET A MORE IN DEPTH EVALUATION

This prompted Funk to seek an evaluation. He asked Black Box Voting to help him analyze his voting system.

After several consultations, Black Box Voting determined that the nature of the problems in Emery County might be systemic and might be national in scope. Therefore, we arranged for and underwrote the services of Harri Hursti and also Security Innovation, Inc.

Neither Funk nor Black Box Voting were prepared for the depth and breadth of the problems discovered. Based on these discoveries we will begin with a series of articles followed by concise, but more formal reports.

PART I

Hursti quickly determined the three most likely causes of the low memory problem:

1. There might be completely different software in the machines with low memory.

2. Some machines might contain different external data

3. Or, some of the machines might have been delivered with natively different amounts of memory available.

Hursti approached issue #2 first. If the used memory was due to external data or archived election files stored on the system, he reasoned, removing any such files would clear the memory. He discovered that some of the machines did contain test election data, and he deleted the extra data. This produced only a small improvement in available memory, however.

As for issue #1, different programs on the machines -- or, the existence of something stored in memory which is hidden, such a find would obviously be disturbing.

Issue #3, the possibility that some machines had different amounts of memory left in their life cycle, is particularly troubling. The technology choice Diebold made -- memory storage consisting of flash memory, which is known to degrade over time -- carries with it a possibility that used machines will be near the end of their memory life cycle. If such machines were delivered to Emery County as "new," this would be like buying a "new" car with 100,000 miles already on it.

The only thing that was known about the cause of this problem was that there were different amounts of memory. The reason remained to be discovered. In the course of evaluating the reason for the low memory, we learned much more about the TSx.

IS THERE AN INFRA-RED PORT FOR REMOTE COMMUNICATIONS?

Hursti also examined the remote communications capabilities of this system. He found no infra-red (IrDA) ports.

"The whole thing here is that it's network aware even when RAS is not running. You're not dialing out and it's network aware. And it's actually configured to use an Ethernet board.. .It's all the time network aware...Perhaps all you need is this Ethernet cord and a wireless cord inserted and off you go."

Of course, the software would need to be installed for this kind of communications. Unfortunately, we could find no way for elections officials to find out whether inappropriate software is in the touch-screen.

"I haven't asked any 'pins' (Personal ID Number). It hasn't been hostile to me at all. It's a very friendly guy," Hursti reports.

Hursti made a number of observations about the touch-screen, and connected it to his laptop for further "conversation."

In the interest of brevity, we will return to this issue in a later article in this series.

A "SHOCKING" DISCOVERY

It's common for polling places to have too few outlets for a bank of voting machines. The normal cure is to set up hook the computers up in a daisy-chain configuration, with one plug to the wall, and the rest of the plugs linking voting machines together.

Diebold's output plug falls out readily, exposing live 110 volt wall outlet power on bare wires.

This happened on every TSx we tested, and presents a significant safety hazard for poll workers, especially the elderly. According to Hursti, the electrocution might only result in a burned hand, and probably wouldn't be fatal.

This is a design flaw worthy of a general recall for standard consumer and office electronics.

DIEBOLD: DOWN FOR THE COUNT?

While analyzing the memory storage problem, Hursti discovered a critical security hole in the foundation of the touch-screen. Then he found another in the "lobby," and another on the "first floor." Taken together, these present a potentially catastrophic security hole.

These are not programming errors, but architectural design decisions.

Black Box Voting is turning the "road map" of the most dangerous security findings over to the proper authorities. We won't let anybody sit on this for very long because elections are looming and elections officials need to know what to do now.

A concise and more formal report will be released in a few weeks, and this will discuss the procedures for preparing a recovery path for these security holes.

TWO THINGS WE HAVE LEARNED ALREADY:

1. Source code reviews alone are NOT sufficient. Access to fully functional systems MUST accompany source code reviews.

2. Honest election officials and citizens again take the lead in learning the truth about voting machines. We ask for maximum public support for Bruce Funk, who showed courage and commitment to responsible elections. The important and effective work of Utah voting integrity advocates Kathy Dopp (http://www.uscountvotes.org) and Jocelyn Strait should be applauded by fellow activists. They have played an important role to inspire this study in Utah, which may in turn assist with efforts in many other states.

---
Black Box Voting is a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501c(3) organization dedicated to investigating issues of election accuracy and fairness.

Why did J. Kenneth Blackwell seek, then hide, his association with super-rich extremists and e-voting magnates?

2006-03-12T09:40:00.000-08:00

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
March 10, 2006

The man who stole the 2004 election for George W. Bush -- Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell -- has posted a picture of himself addressing the white supremacist ultra-right Council for National Policy (CNP). He then pulled the picture and tried to hide his participation in the meeting by removing mention of it from his website, kenblackwell.com.

First discovered by a netroots investigator (uaprogressiveaction.com), Blackwell's photo at the CNP meeting was found on Blackwell's website on Monday, March 6. Then it mysteriously disappeared.

Blackwell has ample reason to hide his ties to the CNP. When the Free Press investigated the CNP and its ties to the Republican Party, Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates told the paper that the CNP included "a former Ku Klux Klan leader and other segregationist policies." Berlet emphasizes that these "shocking" charges are easy to verify.

Berlet describes CNP members as not only traditional conservatives, but also nativists, xenophobes, white racial supremacists, homophobes, sexists, militarists, authoritarians, reactionaries and "in some cases outright neo-fascists."

Some well-known figures affiliated with the CNP include Rev. Jerry Falwell, anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly and the Rev. Pat Robertson. But its the lesser-known CNP mainstays that are more indicative of the organization's politics. They include:

Richard Shoff, a former Ku Klux Klan leader in Indiana.

John McGoff, an ardent supporter of the former apartheid South African regime.

R.J. Rushdoony, the theological leader of America's "Christian Reconstruction" movement, which advocates that Christian fundamentalists take "dominion" over America by abolishing democracy and instituting Old Testament Law. Rushdoony's Reconstructionalists believe that "homosexuals . . . adulterers , blasphemers, astrologers and others will be executed," along with disobedient children.

Reed Larson, head of anti-union National Right to Work Committee.

Don Wildmon, TV censorship activist and accused anti-Semite.

Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North, Major General John K. Singlaub and other principals from the Iran-Contra Scandal.Investigative reporter Russ Bellant, author of OLD NAZIS, THE NEW RIGHT AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY;THE RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT IN MICHIGAN POLITICS; and THE COORS CONNECTION, told the Free Press that the "membership of the Council comprises the elite of the radical right in America."

Blackwell is not the only Ohio Republican with ties to white supremacists, according to Bellant. He found ties between Senator George Voinovich and members of fascist groups formerly from Eastern and Southern Europe living in the Cleveland area.

In 1997, the Free Press disclosed that then-Republican Speaker Pro Tempore of the Ohio House, William G. Batchelder, was listed as a member of the little-known and highly secretive cabal, the CNP. Bellant told the Free Press in 1997, "the CNP is attempting to create a concentration of power to rival and eventually eclipse traditional centers of power in the U.S." Batchelder's wife Alice sits on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals and was recently considered for the U.S. Supreme Court.

The CNP was founded in 1981. Moral Majority Leader Tim LaHaye assumed the presidency with the backing of Texas billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt. In 1982, Tom Ellis succeeded LaHaye as CNP president. Ellis was a director of the Pioneer Fund, a foundation that finances efforts to prove that African-Americans are genetically inferior to whites. Recipients of past Pioneer Fund grants include eugenicist William Shockley, Arthur Jensen and Roger Pearson. Pearson is on record advocating that "inferior races" should be "exterminated."

Newsweek reported that the CNP's first executive director, Louisiana State Representative Woody Jenkins, told CNP members, "I believe that one day before the end of this century, the Council will be so influential that no president, regardless of party, or philosophy, will be able to ignore us or our concerns or shut us out of the highest levels of government."

In 1999, GOP presidential candidate George W. Bush appeared before the secretive white supremacists at a gathering in San Antonio. Bush refused to make public his comments before the group. The CNP may have reached its intended goal of eclipsing all other power groups in U.S. politics when Bush took the presidency in 2000.

Jeremy Leaming and Rob Boston, writing for the Americans United for Separation of Church and State, detail the sordid history of the CNP in their article "Who Is The Council For National Policy And What Are They Up To? And Why Don't They Want You To Know?"

Blackwell is Ohio's Secretary of State, and a Republican candidate for governor. He was a highly visible "on the ground" player in the Bush election theft in Florida 2000. On Election Day 2004, he met in Columbus with Bush and Karl Rove to solidify plans for winning the Buckeye State's 20 electoral votes, which turned the election to Bush. Blackwell's extremely controversial handling of the election and the vote count have the prompted widespread belief that it, too, was stolen. The results ran counter to the historically accurate exit polls, and Blackwell has stonewalled three successive court battles against public scrutiny of the results and has resisted a verified, accurate recount.

The idea of an African-American like Blackwell speaking to a racist cabal like the CNP may seem incongruous. But Blackwell has been courting extremist right wing support for a long time. Most importantly he has been embraced and supported by Rev. Rob Parsley of the powerful World Harvest Church. Parsley is a wealthy right-wing extremist with a powerful grassroots network throughout the state, and a major stake in Blackwell's taking to the governorship. No Republican has ever won the White House without carrying Ohio. With Blackwell's continued control of the voting apparatus, the CNP and Republican Party could well step into an era of unchallenged national domination.

Not surprisingly, Blackwell and a few CNP members share crucial ties to the election/vote counting industry.

The electronic voting machine industry is dominated by only a few corporations - Diebold, Election Systems & Software (ES&S) and Sequoia. Together, Diebold and ES&S count an estimated 80% of U.S. black box electronic votes.

In the early 1980s, brothers Bob and Todd Urosevich founded ES&S's seminal corporation, Data Mark. The brothers Urosevich obtained financing from relatives of the far-Right-wing CNP-linked Howard Ahmanson in 1984, who purchased a 68% ownership stake, according to the Omaha World Herald. Ahmanson has also been a chief financier of Rushdoony's Christian Reconstruction movement.

Brothers William and Robert Ahmanson, cousins of Howard, infused Data Mark with new capital. The name was changed to American Information Systems (AIS). The Ahmanson brothers have claimed that they have no ties to their more well-known right-wing cousin.

But in 2001, the Los Angeles Times reported that Howard and Roberta Ahmanson were important funders of the Discovery Institute, a fount of extremist right-wing publications, including much that pushes creationism in California schools. The Times said the Institute's " $1-million annual program has produced 25 books, a stream of conferences and more than 100 fellowships for doctoral and postdoctoral research."

According to Group Watch, in the 1980s Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr. was a member of the CNP. Heir to a savings and loan fortune, Ahmanson is little reported on in the mainstream U.S. press. But, English papers like The Independent are more informative. They list Ahmanson alongside Richard Mellon Scaife, one of the most important of all right-wing money men. "Such figures as Richard Mellon Scaife and Howard Ahmanson have given hundreds of millions of dollars over several decades to political projects both high (setting up the Heritage Foundation think-tank, the driving engine of the Reagan presidency) and low (bankrolling investigations into President Clinton's sexual indiscretions and the suicide of the White House insider Vincent Foster)," wrote The Independent last November.

The Sunday Mail described an individual as, ". . . a fundamentalist Christian more in the mould of U.S. multi-millionaire Howard Ahmanson, Jr., who uses his fortune to promote so-called traditional family values.. . . By waving fortunes under their noses, Ahmanson has the ability to cajole candidates into backing his right-wing Christian agenda."

Ahmanson is also a chief contributor to the Chalcedon Institute that supports the Christian reconstruction movement. The movement's philosophy advocates, among other things, "mandating the death penalty for homosexuals and drunkards."

The Ahmanson brothers sold their shares in American Information Systems to the McCarthy Group and the World Herald Company, Inc. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel disclosed in public documents that he was the Chairman of American Information Systems and claimed between a $1 to 5 million investment in the McCarthy Group. In 1997, American Information Systems purchased Business Records Corp. (BRC), formerly Texas-based election company Cronus Industries, to become ES&S. One of the BRC owners was Carolyn Hunt of the right-wing Hunt oil family, which supplied much of the original money for the Council on National Policy.

The presence of Ahmanson relatives and Hunt's sister in e-voting software may be a coincidence. But it certainly raises questions as to why family members of anti-democratic forces are getting heavily involved in non-transparent election software. And why they are forging ties to the man in charge of counting votes in Ohio elections.

In 1996, Hagel became the first elected Republican Nebraska senator in 24 years when he did surprisingly well in an election where the votes were verified by the company he served as chairman, and in which he maintained a financial investment. In both his successful 1996 and 2002 campaigns, Hagel's ES&S counted an estimated 80% of his winning votes. Due to the contracting out of services, confidentiality agreements between the State of Nebraska and the company kept this matter out of the public eye. Hagel's first election victory was described as a "stunning upset" by one Nebraska newspaper.

Hagel's official biography states, "Prior to his election to the U.S. Senate, Hagel worked in the private sector as the President of McCarthy and Company, an investment banking firm based in Omaha, Nebraska and served as Chairman of the Board of American Information Systems." During the first Bush presidency, Hagel served as Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer of the 1990 Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations (G-7 Summit).

Bob Urosevich was the Programmer and CEO at AIS, before being replaced by Hagel. Bob later headed Diebold Election Systems, but resigned prior to the 2004 election. His brother Todd is a top executive at ES&S. Bob created Diebold's original electronic voting machine software.
Thus, the brothers Urosevich, originally funded by the far Right, figure in the counting of approximately 80% of electronic votes cast in the United States.

That J. Kenneth Blackwell would now address an organization so thoroughly entwined with the extreme right wing and the electronic voting machine industry can hardly be seen as an accident. Blackwell's active presence in both Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 make him a critical player in the rise of the Bush regime. As governor of Ohio, he could solidify Republican control of presidential elections for decades to come.

Toward that end, the GOP-controlled Ohio legislature has passed a series of laws making it virtually impossible to monitor electronic voting in the state, or to challenge the outcome of a federal election here. The Free Press has also learned that county election board officials, in Blackwell's employ, have stripped nearly a half-million voters from the registration rolls in the key Democratic urban areas of Cleveland, Toledo, Columbus and Cincinnati.

None of this has been seriously challenged by Ohio or national Democrats. And with Blackwell in the governor's mansion, in control of the state's vote counting apparatus, the Democrats will have virtually no chance of ever retaking control of the Ohio legislature, Congressional delegation or, for that matter, the White House.

Small wonder the powerful right wing extremist Council on National Policy would overlook its racist history to embrace an African-American like J. Kenneth Blackwell. Small wonder, also, Blackwell might want to hide what will certainly be a powerful and profitable association for him in his rise to the Ohio governor's mansion … and beyond.

--Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available at www.freepress.org.

Did 308,000 cancelled Ohio voter registrations put Bush back in the White House?

2006-03-04T23:55:00.000-08:00

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
February 28, 2006

While life goes on during the Bush2 nightmare, so does the research on what really happened here in 2004 to give George W. Bush a second term.

Pundits throughout the state and nation---many of them alleged Democrats---continue to tell those of us who question Bush's second coming that we should "get over it," that the election is old news.

But things get curiouser and curiouser.

In our 2005 compendium HOW THE GOP STOLE OHIO'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008 (www.freepress.org), we list more than a hundred different ways the Republican Party denied the democratic process in the Buckeye State. For a book of documents to be published September 11 by the New Press entitled WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO?, we are continuing to dig.

It turns out, we missed more than a few of the dirty tricks Karl Rove, Ken Blackwell and their GOP used to get themselves four more years. In an election won with death by a thousand cuts, some that are still hidden go very deep. Over the next few weeks we will list them as they are verified.

One of them has just surfaced to the staggering tune of 175,000 purged voters in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), the traditional stronghold of the Ohio Democratic Party. An additional 10,000 that registered to vote there for the 2004 election were lost due to "clerical error."

As we reported more than a year ago, some 133,000 voters were purged from the registration rolls in Hamilton County (Cincinnati) and Lucas County (Toledo) between 2000 and 2004. The 105,000 from Cincinnati and 28,000 from Toledo exceeded Bush's official alleged margin of victory---just under 119,000 votes out of some 5.6 million the Republican Secretary of State. J. Kenneth Blackwell, deemed worth counting.

Exit polls flashed worldwide on CNN at 12:20 am Wednesday morning, November 3, showed John Kerry winning Ohio by 4.2% of the popular vote, probably about 250,000 votes. We believe this is an accurate reflection of what really happened here.

But by morning Bush was being handed the presidency, claiming a 2.5% Buckeye victory, as certified by Blackwell. In conjunction with other exit polling, the lead switch from Kerry to Bush is a virtual statistical impossibility. Yet John Kerry conceded with more than 250,000 ballots still uncounted, though Bush at the time was allegedly ahead only by 138,000, a margin that later slipped to less than 119,000 in the official vote count.

At the time, very few people knew about those first 133,000 voters that had been eliminated from the registration rolls in Cincinnati and Toledo. County election boards purged the voting registration lists. Though all Ohio election boards are allegedly bi-partisan, in fact they are all controlled by the Republican Party. Each has four seats, filled by law with two Democrats and two Republicans.

But all tie votes are decided by the Secretary of State, in this case Blackwell, the extreme right-wing Republican now running for Governor. Blackwell served in 2004 not only as the man in charge of the state's vote count, but also a co-chair of the Ohio Bush-Cheney campaign. Many independent observers have deemed this to be a conflict of interest. On election day, Blackwell met personally with Bush, Karl Rove and Matt Damschroder, chair of the Franklin County (Columbus) Board of Elections, formerly the chair of the county's Republican Party.

The Board of Elections in Toledo was chaired by Bernadette Noe, wife of Tom Noe, northwestern Ohio's "Mr. Republican." A close personal confidante of the Bush family, Noe raised more than $100,000 for the GOP presidential campaign in 2004. He is currently under indictment for three felony violations of federal election law, and 53 counts of fraud, theft and other felonies in the "disappearance" of more than $13 million in state funds. Noe was entrusted with investing those funds by Republican Gov. Robert Taft, who recently pled guilty to four misdemeanor charges, making him the only convicted criminal ever to serve as governor of Ohio.

The rationale given by Noe and by the Republican-controlled BOE in Lucas and Hamilton Counties was that the voters should be eliminated from the rolls because they had allegedly not voted in the previous two federal elections.

There is no law that requires such voters be eliminated. And there is no public verification that has been offered to confirm that these people had not, in fact, voted in those elections.

Nonetheless, tens of thousands of voters turned up in mostly Democratic wards in Cincinnati and Toledo, only to find they had been mysteriously removed from the voter rolls. In many cases, sworn testimony and affidavits given at hearings after the election confirmed that many of these citizens had in fact voted in the previous two federal elections and had not moved from where they were registered. In some cases, their stability at those addresses stretched back for decades.

The problem was partially confirmed by a doubling of provisional ballots cast during the 2004 election, as opposed to the number cast in 2000. Provisional ballots have been traditionally used in Ohio as a stopgap for people whose voting procedures are somehow compromised at the polls, but who are nonetheless valid registrants.

Prior to the 2004 election, Blackwell made a range of unilateral pronouncements that threw the provisional balloting process into chaos. Among other things, he demanded voters casting provisional ballots provide their birth dates, a requirement that was often not mentioned by poll workers. Eyewitnesses testify that many provisional ballots were merely tossed in the trash at Ohio polling stations.

To this day, more than 16,000 provisional ballots (along with more than 90,000 machine-spoiled ballots) cast in Ohio remain uncounted. The Secretary of State refuses to explain why. A third attempt by the Green and Libertarian Parties to obtain a meaningful recount of the Ohio presidential vote has again been denied by the courts, though the parties are appealing.

Soon after the 2004 election, Damschroder announced that Franklin County would eliminate another 170,000 citizens from the voter rolls in Columbus. Furthermore, House Bill 3, recently passed by the GOP-dominated legislature, has imposed a series of restrictions that will make it much harder for citizens to restore themselves to the voter rolls, or to register in the first place.

All this, however, pales before a new revelation just released by the Board of Elections in Cuyahoga County, the heavily Democratic county surrounding Cleveland.

Robert J. Bennett, the Republican chair of the Cuyahoga Board of Elections, and the Chair of the Ohio Republican Party, has confirmed that prior to the 2004 election, his BOE eliminated---with no public notice---a staggering 175,414 voters from the Cleveland-area registration rolls. He has not explained why the revelation of this massive registration purge has been kept secret for so long. Virtually no Ohio or national media has bothered to report on this story.

Many of the affected precincts in Cuyahoga County went 90% and more for John Kerry. The county overall went more than 60% for Kerry.

The eliminations have been given credence by repeated sworn testimony and affidavits from long-time Cleveland voters that they came to their usual polling stations only to be told that they were not registered. When they could get them, many were forced to cast provisional ballots which were highly likely to be pitched in the trash, or which remain uncounted.

Ohio election history would indicate that the elimination of 175,000 voters in heavily Democratic Cleveland must almost certainly spell doom for any state-wide Democratic campaign. These 175,000 pre-2004 election eliminations must now be added to the 105,000 from Cincinnati and the 28,000 from Toledo.

Therefore, to put it simply: at least 308,000 voters, most of them likely Democrats, were eliminated from the registration rolls prior to an election allegedly won by less than 119,000 votes, where more than 106,000 votes still remain uncounted, and where the GOP Secretary of State continues to successfully fight off a meaningful recount.

There are more than 80 other Ohio counties where additional pre-November, 2004 mass eliminations by GOP-controlled boards of elections may have occurred. Further "anomalies" in the Ohio 2004 vote count continue to surface.

In addition, it seems evident that the Democratic Party will now enter Ohio's 2006 gubernatorial and US Senate races, and its 2008 presidential contest, with close to a half-million voters having been eliminated from the registration rolls, the vast majority of them from traditional Democratic strongholds, and with serious legislative barriers having been erected against new voter registration drives.

Stay tuned.

--
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available via www.freepress.org. They are co-editors, with Steve Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO?, coming in September from The New Press. Important research for this piece has been conducted by Dr. Richard Hayes Philips, Dr. Norm Robbins and Dr. Victoria Lovegren.

As Alito takes Supreme Court seat, Ohio GOP guts election protection

2006-02-12T19:18:00.000-08:00

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
February 1, 2006

Ohio's GOP-controlled legislature has passed a repressive new law that will gut free elections here and is already surfacing elsewhere around the US. The bill will continue the process of installing the GOP as America's permanent ruling party.

Coming with the swearing in of right-wing extremist Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, it marks another dark day for what remains of American democracy.

Called HB3, the law now demands discriminatory voter ID, severely cripples the possibility of statewide recounts and actually ends the process of state-based challenges to federal elections---most importantly for president---held within the state.

In other words, the type of legal challenge mounted to the theft of Ohio's electoral votes in the 2004 election will now be all but impossible in the future.

Section 35-05.18 of HB3 requires restrictive identification requirements for anyone trying to vote in an Ohio election. Photo ID, a utility bill, a bank statement, a government check or other government document showing the name and current address of the voter will be required.

This requirement is perfectly designed to slow down the voting process in inner city precincts. It allows Republican "challengers" to intimidate anyone who turns up to vote in heavily Democratic precincts. It virtually eliminates the homeless, elderly and impoverished from the voting rolls. Election protection advocates estimate this requirement will erase 100,000 to 200,000 voters in a typical statewide election. By way of reference, George W. Bush allegedly carried Ohio---and the presidency---by less than 119,000 votes in 2004.

The ID requirement is the direct result of intervention by two high-powered Republican attorneys with ties to the White House and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.). Congressman Bob Ney allowed the Bush-Cheney re-election national counsel Mark "Thor" Hearne to testify last March as a so-called "voting rights advocate." Hearne, whose resume shows no connection to voting rights organizations, was responsible for advising the Bush-Cheney campaign on national litigation and election law strategy during the 2004 election. See:

http://www.lathropgage.com/people/bio.aspx?bioid=8185 and http://www.lathropgage.com/ files/tbl_s47Details %5CFileUpload265%5C351 %5CTHOR_Insert.pdf.

Hearne, with the help of Republican attorney Alex Vogel, concocted a story that the problem with the 2004 elections in Ohio was the NAACP paying people with crack cocaine to register voters. Vogel's front group, the Free Enterprise Coalition, even indemnified a local Republican operative, Mark Rubrick, to file an Ohio corrupt practices act suit against the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, ACT-Ohio and ACORN, The suit was later quietly withdrawn after discovery showed that the operatives behind it were linked to the top levels of the Republican Party.

Ironically, the Republican Party engaged in racist and massive voter repression in Ohio and are now institutionalizing that very Jim Crow-style repression and selling it as an election reform bill.

HB3 also ends the ability of the public to conduct meaningful audits of voting machines. Election protection activists recently forced the adoption of an auditable paper trail into the Ohio election process. In a state where virtually all ballots are cast and/or counted on electronic equipment, this cuts to the core of the ability to monitor an election's outcome. The new provision in HB3 will make the paper trail virtually meaningless.

HB3 further imposes a huge jump in the cost of forcing a recount. In 2004, the charge was $10 per precinct, with some 11,366 precincts in the state. Thus the Green and Libertarian Parties, which paid for it, had to pay somewhat more than $113,660. Now the charge will be $50 per precinct, jumping the charge to some $568,300.

Finally, and perhaps most astonishingly, HB3 eliminates the state statutes that have allowed citizens to challenge the outcome of federal elections within the state. After the 2004 election, election protection advocates filed a challenge to Bush's victory. Their attorneys were attacked with an official attempt to levy sanctions, and then were thwarted from an effective suit when GOP Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell locked up the state's voter records.

But HB3 would now entirely eliminate any possibility of a state-based legal challenge. The only alleged recourse for those wishing to officially question the vote count in a presidential, US Senate or US Congressional race in Ohio would be at the United States Congress. There is now no recourse whatsoever on the state level.

Despite grassroots protests and bitter opposition from Common Cause, the League of Women Voters and other pro-democracy groups, HB3 passed with only one Republican vote against it (all Ohio Democratic Senators and Representatives voted against).

So the Ohio GOP has taken another giant step toward ending the possibility of any other party ever taking power in the Buckeye State. When combined with new campaign finance laws that allow huge chunks of private and corporate money to flow virtually unregulated into GOP coffers, HB3 may have all but ended free elections in Ohio---at least until election protection forces can somehow reverse the trend. .

Since the Civil War, only one presidential candidate---John F. Kennedy in 1960---has won the White House without carrying Ohio. This and the other repressive legislation passed by the Ohio GOP will make it virtually impossible for anyone but a Republican to carry the Buckeye State in future statewide and federal elections.

Bills like HB3 are also being lined up to flow through Republican-controlled legislatures throughout the US, including a very similar one in Georgia. "This comes straight from Karl Rove," says Cliff Arnebeck, one of Ohio's leading election protection attorneys. "This legislation originates with a demand that one-party rule by made permanent throughout the United States."

With today's passage of Ohio HB3, along with the seating of Justice Alito, the GOP grip on the American throat has very significantly tightened.

--Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available at http://www.freepress.org/. They are co-editors, with Steve Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO? forthcoming from the New Press.

Recipe for hacking ES&S and Sequoia, Hursti-style

2006-01-07T10:13:00.000-08:00

by Black Box Voting
January 4, 2006

Hold on to your lugnuts, ES&S and Sequoia may risk Hursti-style hack

Dec. 13, 2005: Harri Hursti performs devastating hack in Leon County Florida with Diebold optical scan system, proving he could control votes by manipulating a credit-card-sized memory card..

Jan. 3, 2006: Information received pointing to similar vulnerabilities in the ES&S and Sequoia "Optech" optical scan machines.

In an exclusive interview by BBV investigator Jim March with Dr. Douglas Jones, University of Iowa associate professor and a former voting machine examiner for the state of Iowa, it was learned that one of the most widely-used voting machines over the last 15 years may suffer from design flaws broadly similar to Diebold's version 1.94 and 1.96 optical scan system.

The first problem is that memory chip contents can be modified with easy to obtain reprogramming devices, in ways that could enable Hursti-style hacking.

The second problem is that Sequoia and ES&S have been able to force their way into intimate access to the mechanics of democracy. The electronic ballot controls were maintained exclusively by the vendors at the vendor's headquarters rather than by county election staff.

Diebold took over total control of elections in counties that allowed it. ES&S and Sequoia didn't give them a choice because of the system's design. This effectively removed county officials from their proper oversight role.

ORIGINS OF THE OPTECH MACHINE

Two of the four major voting machine companies have been using an identical machine, the Optech, originally produced by Business Records Corp (BRC).

BRC was the largest voting machine company in America when ES&S purchased it in 1997. The SEC objected on anti-trust grounds, and in the resulting decision, allowed ES&S to purchase BRC, splitting the Optech scanners up between ES&S (service contracts for existing machines) and Sequoia Voting Systems (sales of new machines).

Although now being phased out, Optechs have been used for 15 years without a peep from the federal testing labs, and without the public ever being told of their vulnerabilities, nor of the vendor’s extraordinary level of control over local elections.

SYSTEM DESIGN

According to Dr. Jones, the Optech machines are precinct optical scanners originally developed in the late 1980s. They reflect the technology of that period. They are broadly similar to the Global/Diebold optical scanners designed around the same time: These voting machines store votes on removable electronic memory devices and print out an "end of day ticker tape" on paper similar to a cash register tape, providing a precinct total of votes for each candidate and issue.

The Optech machines don't use a credit card-sized memory card – rather, they use a memory pack about the size of a pack of cigarettes.

This cigarette pack-sized device plugs into the body of the scanner with a proprietary connection. The memory pack provides three things:

- A chip ("ROM" memory) which is difficult to modify outside of a factory and contains the programming for the machine ("firmware")
- An "EPROM" chip which is easier to modify (more on that to follow) containing the ballot layout and precinct information
- Battery-powered memory chips to hold the vote totals

THE GOOD NEWS

As Dr. Jones points out, there's one advantage to this pack design. Honest election officials can separate the scanner body from the pack and send the large bulky scanner out to the field (precinct) days or weeks ahead of the election. Tampering with scanners that are missing the pack isn't really possible (other than to simply vandalize it) because the "brains" aren't present to tamper with. It’s the "memory pack" that needs to be held in strict security. The memory pack can later be hand-carried to the precinct by a group of poll workers and plugged into the scanner on election morning.

THE BAD NEWS

One reason the Hursti hack in Leon County resulted in a failure is that Diebold's memory device holding the votes and critical programs is both read-write (tamperable) and reader/writer devices like the Crop Scanner are available commercially to alter the cards.

The ES&S/Sequoia memory pack has a funky connector. It should be even more secure, right?

Not exactly.

JIM'S RIG-A-VOTE RECIPE

1. Unscrew the top of the pack.

The most critical chip holding the ballot/candidate/precinct layouts is sitting right there in an easy-access socket.

2. Find a chip burner. Once the chip is out with a screwdriver, you can find alteration devices (chip burner) for that chip even more easily that you can find the Crop Scanner.

Tip for finding a read/write device: The chips is called an "EPROM" - Electrically Programmable Read Only Memory .

Here are some examples:

http://www.stag.co.uk/products/EEprom_programmer.htm
http://www.action2k.com/topmax.htm
http://www.elettronicaceleste.com/celeste/programmatore_eeprom/sp280_uk.htm

3. Put the chip in the chip burner device connected to a PC and read the contents. Edit at will using your PC.

4. Peel the sticker off the back of the EPROM, exposing a glass window. This makes the actual silicon surface visible through the glass. It's a neat looking critter, shiny and with lots of tiny circuits that geeks will love.

5. Put the chip in a tiny mouse-sized tanning booth. No, we’re not kidding – exposure to UV light for 25 minutes erases EPROMs. (Warning: We do not recommend putting in an actual mouse unless you can find very small sunglasses for him.)

PICTURE: http://testequip.com//sale/used/pictures/HES2152.jpg

6. Put the sticker back on the chip’s glass window and put it into the chip burner connected to the PC, and download your tampered code from your PC back to the chip.

7. Put the chip back into the "pack" and you’re done.

We have no reason to think that the security of the chip's contents is any better than in the Diebold environment. While this needs testing, it appears that hacking could cause all votes to be switched between any two candidates simply by altering the chip data.

Dr. Jones suggests the possibility of causing a minor party candidate's votes to go to a major party candidate, in addition to the major party candidate's proper votes. This would have the "benefit" of harming a small parties, possibly denying them ballot access. Each major party has at least one smaller party that tends to take a small chunk out of them – the Democrats always lose a few candidates to the Greens, the GOP loses a few to the Libertarians. Each major party would like to see their smaller more radical cousin go away, and that sort of hacking could do it.

THE WORSE NEWS

While moderately advanced hackers should be able to alter the contents of these packs fairly easily, county election officials can’t. Therefore, by design, the memory cards need to be programmed inside the vendor’s corporate headquarters.

WILL THEY DO IT CORRECTLY?

Well let’s see: ES&S was partially owned by now-Senator Chuck Hagel at the time Hagel won his first major political victory to get into congress. Hagel’s victory in the primary was so stunning that it made national news. According to CNN’s "All Politics," Hagel hoped he could make lightening strike twice by winning the big prize – and he did. He defeated popular Democratic Governor Ben Nelson who led in the polls since the opening gun in what the Washington Post called "The major Republican upset in the November [1996] election." (more: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BBV_chapter-3.pdf)

Louisiana state elections chief Jerry Fowler was convicted on felony charges of taking bribes from Sequoia officials for system purchase decisions – one of Sequoia’s key people, Phil Foster, was indicted but the charges were dropped after a judge concluded that his immunized grand jury testimony couldn’t be used against him. (more: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BBV_chapter-8.pdf)

So, is turning over the very foundation of Democracy to ES&S and Sequoia a good idea? We think not.

CONCLUSION

Nobody at the Federal or state testing labs seems to think like a hacker and tries to find ways to defeat these things. For that matter, nobody is paying attention to the basic ethics of the situation. No one ever asked the American citizens whether we choose to remain a Constitutional Republic versus a Corporate Republic.

Black Box Voting would like to do a "test hack" on the Optech with the blessing of public officials in any jurisdiction. Because these machines are not HAVA compliant, they are being phased out. We ask your help in facilitating this opportunity.

"There is only one force in the nation that can be depended upon to keep the government pure and the governors honest, and that is the people themselves. They alone, if well informed, are capable of preventing the corruption of power, and of restoring the nation to its rightful course if it should go astray. They alone are the safest depository of the ultimate powers of government." -- Thomas Jefferson

What John Kerry definitely said...

2005-12-28T20:32:00.000-08:00

...about 2004’s stolen election and why it's killing American democracy
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
November 10, 2005

The net is abuzz about what John Kerry may or may not be saying now about the stolen election of 2004.

But we can definitively report what he has said about New Mexico and electronic voting machines soon after his abrupt "abandon ship" with 250,000 Ohio votes still uncounted.
And we must also report that what he's not saying is having a catastrophic effect on what's left of American democracy, including what has just happened (again) in Ohio 2005.

In recent days Mark Crispin Miller has reported that he heard from Kerry personally that Kerry believes the election was stolen. The dialog has been widely reported on the internet. Kerry has since seemed to deny it.

We have every reason to believe Miller. His recent book FOOLED AGAIN, has been making headlines along with our own HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008.

As in his campaign for president, Kerry has been ambivalent and inconsistent about Ohio's stolen vote count. Soon after the presidential election, Kerry was involved in a conference call with Rev. Jesse Jackson and a number of attorneys, including co-author Bob Fitrakis. In the course of the conversation, Kerry said "You know, wherever they used those [e-voting] machines, I lost, regardless if the precinct was Democratic or Republican."

Kerry was referring to New Mexico. But he might just as well have been talking about Ohio, where the election was decided, as well as about Iowa and Nevada. All four of those "purple" states switched from Democratic "blue" in the exit polls as late as 12:20am to Republican "red" a few hours later, giving Bush the White House.

A scant few hours after that, Kerry left tens of thousands of volunteers and millions of voters hanging. With Bush apparently leading by some 130,000 votes in Ohio, but with a quarter-million votes still uncounted here, Kerry abruptly conceded. He was then heard from primarily through attorneys from Republican law firms attacking grassroots election protection activists who dared question the Ohio outcome.

In the year since that abrupt surrender, Theresa Heinz Kerry has made insinuations that she thought the election might have been stolen. But there has been no follow-up.

Now we have this report from M. C. Miller that Kerry said he knew the election was stolen, and then denied saying it. Coming from Kerry, the inconsistency would be entirely consistent.
But those committed to democracy and horrified by the on-going carnage of the Bush catastrophe still have no credible explanation as to why Kerry abandoned ship so abruptly. He had raised many millions specifically dedicated to "counting every vote," which clearly never happened in Ohio. More than a year after the election, more than 100,000 votes are STILL uncounted in the Buckeye state.

And now, tragically, we have had another set of stolen elections. Four statewide referenda aimed at reforming Ohio's electoral process have been defeated in a manner that is (again) totally inconsistent with polling data, One statewide referendum, aimed at handing the corrupt Taft Administration a $2 billion windfall, has allegedly passed, again in a manner totally inconsistent with polling data, or even a rudimentary assessment of Ohio politics.

We will write more about this tomorrow. But suffice it to say these latest "official" vote counts make sense only in the context of a powerful recent report issued by the Government Accounting Office confirming that electronic voting machines like those used in Ohio can be easily hacked by a very few players to deliver a vote count totally at odds with the will of the electorate.

We have seen it in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, in at least three Senatorial races in 2002, and now in the referenda in Ohio 2005, and possibly elsewhere.

How could this have happened?

By and large, the nation is in denial, including much of the left.
Miller recently debated Mark Hertsgaard over a Mother Jones review of both our books. The idea that the 2004 election could have been stolen has also been attacked by others on the left.

Some reporters have briefly visited here or made calls from the coasts and then taken as gospel anything that mainstream Democratic regulars utter, even if it’s totally implausible and counter-factual.

For example, they would have you believe that, in direct contradiction to how elections have gone in Ohio for decades, it’s now routine for boards of elections to record that 100% of the precincts are reporting, and then suddenly add 18,615 more votes at 1:43 a.m. after the polls have been closed since 7:30 p.m. and 100% of the precincts had been reporting since approximately 9 p.m.

Or that 18,615 Miami County votes could come in late with an impossibly consistent 33.92% for Kerry, as if somebody had pushed a button on a computer with a pre-set percentage---just as the GAO says it can be done.

Or that it's ok for a Democratic county election official, with a lucrative contract from the Republican-controlled Board of Elections (BOE), to admit he doesn't really know whether the vote count had been doctored.

Or it's fine for BOE officials take election data home to report on from their personal PCs. Or for central tabulators to run on corporate-owned proprietary software with no public access. Or for BOE officials to hold up vote counts late into the night that time and again miraculously provide sufficient margins for GOP victories, as with Paul Hackett's recent failed Congressional race in southwestern Ohio.

Or for one precinct to claim a 97.55% turnout when a Free Press/Pacifica canvass quickly found far too many people who didn't vote to make that possible.

There is clearly no end to this story, and there is no indication the dialog on the net will diminish, even though the mainstream media---like the mainstream Democratic Party---absolutely refuses to touch this issue.

But ultimately, whatever John Kerry or the bloviators or even the left press say about these stolen elections, America is very close to crossing the line that permanently defines the loss of our democracy.

As we will show tomorrow, this week's theft of five referendum issues in Ohio is yet another tragic by-product of the unwillingness of John Kerry and so many others to stand up for a fair and reliable electoral process in this country.

--Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available at http://www.freepress.org/, and, with Steve Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO, to be published this spring by The New Press.

An open letter to the Election Assistance Commission

2005-12-26T19:42:00.000-08:00

by John Gideon, Executive Director of VotersUnite.Org and Information Manager for VoteTrustUSA.Org
December 25, 2005

Dear Elections Assistance Commission

Today I write to express my disappointment with the non-responsiveness of the commission to the needs of the voters. You do well when it comes to the needs of the voting machine vendors, it seems, but the voters are being ignored.

You say that "the Commission serves as a national clearinghouse and resource for information and review of procedures with respect to the administration of Federal elections". I'm sorry to say that you fail as both a national clearinghouse and as a resource for information.

Let me give you a few examples of the failures. On October 17, 2004 a letter from VotersUnite.Org was given to, you, the commissioners. This letter expressed an idea that VotersUnite.Org had concerning your mandate to be a national clearinghouse and resource. It was VotersUnite.Org's idea that a communications network be established between all state, county, and local elections officials for the purpose of wide promulgation of information about voting system problems, solutions, and other issues that would have wide-spread interest. To this date VotersUnite.Org has never received a response to this letter even though I have personally spoken with your spokesperson about it and another copy of the letter was transmitted to this person for a response. It is, apparently, sitting on some EAC Counsel's desk for action; or being ignored.

The letter was also given, months later, to members of the Government Accountability Office as testimony prior to their report on your successes and failures since you were formed. I'm sure you have noticed that the clearinghouse idea was mentioned several times in their report. It is hoped that you will not treat the GAO as you have treated the public and ignore their advice.

In mid-August of this year your spokesperson told a newspaper reporter in Pennsylvania, "[S]tates must require that the disabled have the ability to vote, and that machines meet certain auditing and accuracy requirements. But there's nothing in the act saying that decades-old lever voting machines must go, she said; that's a decision for the states to decide." To be fair, the spokesperson told me that she was misquoted; but that misquote caused an almost immediate action because on September 8 you issued an advisory that clarified that lever voting machines do not meet the mandates of the Help America Vote Act of 2002. It is clear that the advisory was quickly issued to clear-up the 'misquote'.

I would think that you would be just as interested in clearing up the rampant misinformation regarding punch card voting systems. As you are aware, HAVA clearly gives means for states, counties, and local jurisdictions to keep their punch-card systems. However, the voting machine vendors have spread the false information that these systems are not legal for use after 1 January 2006. Unlike your action to clear-up a 'misquote' from your spokesperson, you have allowed the vendors to continue to spread this misinformation unchecked.

On September 7 a group of 15 voter advocacy groups representing thousands of voters across the country and signed by the Executive Director of VoteTrustUSA, an umbrella organization representing these 15 local or state groups, sent you a letter requesting clarification of HAVA language concerning lever machines and punch card voting systems. The action requested of you by these groups was to provide guidance regarding these voting systems and HAVA. Fortuitously you cleared-up the question about lever machines the same day that this letter was in the mail.

Unfortunately, again, your staff seems to have lost the letter and there has never been a response to the punch-card issue. I have called more than once and talked to your spokesperson who searched for the original letter but was not able to find it. I sent her, via email, another copy of the letter on October 13. I was then told on October 14 that this email'd letter was forwarded to the appropriate staff person for response. I have since called and asked for a status of that response and I have been given excuses such as that the appropriate staff person is "out with the flu".

Joan Krawitz, the signer of the original letter and the Executive Director of VoteTrustUSA, called your spokesperson and left a message on her voice mail asking for a call back. That return call has never been made.

It is unfortunate that by your inaction you have allowed the voting machine industry, and their lobbyists, to misinform counties and jurisdictions into thinking that HAVA mandates a replacement of their punch-card voting systems. Counties that have never had problems with their elections and that have budgetary problems are now reluctantly spending tax payers' funds to purchase new technology that they do not want. It is clear that you have not done your job in this instance.

Finally, rather than take a simple action to provide the "Qualified Voting Systems" list on your own website, you have left it for the National Association of State Elections Directors to do this task. This list is public information; not proprietary. However, until I made many calls over a period of two months to the ITA Secretariat, Brian Hancock, that list was not updated. The list went without being updated from August 30 until November 18. That is an egregious failure to get public information to the public. To be fair Mr. Hancock did make calls to NASED when I called him, and finally he had to call the Chair, Linda Lamone, in order to finally get that vital information made public.

It is clear from the above that you are a failure as an information clearinghouse. It could also be argued that you are reticent to do anything that might damage the voting machine industry. That is an unfortunate perception, I realize, but it is one that you have done nothing to fight. I am disappointed that a government agency that is supposed to ensure fair elections seems to have lost its way. I am disappointed that a government agency that should be giving the voters more confidence in their election process has done nothing to give anyone confidence. Instead, you have stood idly by, watching the voting machine industry make hundreds of millions of dollars at the expense of the taxpayers.

I sincerely hope that actions are taken to immediately assuage my disappointment in your lack of any action on the above matters.

John Gideon
Executive Director www.votersunite.org and
Information Manager www.votetrustusa.org

VotersUnite! is a national non-partisan organization dedicated to fair and accurate elections. It focuses on distributing well-researched information to elections officials, elected officials, the media, and the public; as well as providing activists with information they need to work toward transparent elections in their communities.

With new legislation, Ohio Republicans plan holiday burial for American Democracy

2005-12-08T21:52:00.000-08:00

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
December 6, 2005

A law that will make democracy all but moot in Ohio is about to pass the state legislature and to be signed by its Republican governor. Despite massive corruption scandals besieging the Ohio GOP, any hope that the Democratic party could win this most crucial swing state in future presidential elections, or carry its pivotal US Senate seat in 2006, are about to end.

House Bill 3 has already passed the Ohio House of Representatives and is about to be approved by the Republican-dominated Senate, probably before the holiday recess. Republicans dominate the Ohio legislature thanks to a heavily gerrymandered crazy quilt of rigged districts, and to a moribund Ohio Democratic party. The GOP-drafted HB3 is designed to all but obliterate any possible future Democratic revival. Opposition from the Ohio Democratic Party, where it exists at all, is diffuse and ineffectual.

HB3's most publicized provision will require positive identification before casting a vote. But it also opens voter registration activists to partisan prosecution, exempts electronic voting machines from public scrutiny, quintuples the cost of citizen-requested statewide recounts and makes it illegal to challenge a presidential vote count or, indeed, any federal election result in Ohio. When added to the recently passed HB1, which allows campaign financing to be dominated by the wealthy and by corporations, and along with a Rovian wish list of GOP attacks on the ballot box, democracy in Ohio could be all but over.

The GOP is ramming similar bills through state legislatures around the US, starting with Georgia and Indiana. The ID requirements in particular have provoked widespread opposition from newspapers such as the New York Times. The Times, among others, argues that the ID requirements and the costs associated with them, constitute an unconstitutional discriminatory poll tax.

But despite significant court challenges, the Republicans are forcing changes in long-standing election laws that have allowed citizens to vote based on their signature alone. Across the US, GOP Jim Crow laws will eliminate millions of Democratic voters from the registration rolls. In swing states like Ohio, such ballots are almost certain to be crucial.

The proposed Ohio law will demand a valid photo ID or a utility bill, a bank statement, a paycheck or a government document with a current address. Thousands of Ohio citizens who are elderly, homeless, unemployed or who do not drive will be effectively disenfranchised. Many citizens, for example, rent apartments where the utilities are paid by landlords. In such cases, the number of people living in utilities-included apartment rentals could actually determine an election.

During the 2004 presidential election, Ohio's Republican Secretary of State, J. Kenneth Blackwell, also issued statewide threats against ex-felons and people whose names resembled those of ex-felons. Thousands of such threats were delivered to registered voters who were never convicted of anything, or who were eligible to vote after being released from prison. In 2004 a "Mighty Texas Strike Force" came to Columbus with a specific mandate to threaten ex-felons with arrest if they dared to vote.

It is legal for ex-felons in Ohio to vote, even if they are in half-way houses or on parole. But HB3's identification requirement, combined with the confusion Blackwell has introduced into the process, will intimidate such Ohioans from voting in 2006 and beyond.

HB3 will also reduce voter rolls by ordering county boards of elections to send cards to registered voters every two years. If a card comes back as undelivered, the voter must rely on a provisional ballot. But tens of thousands of provisional ballots were arbitrarily discarded in 2004, and some 16,000 are known to remain uncounted to this day.

HB3 also imposes severe restrictions on voter registration drives. It allows the state attorney-general and local prosecutors wide powers to prosecute vaguely defined charges of fraud against those working to sign up voters. The restrictions are clearly meant to chill the kind of Democratic registration drives that brought hundreds of thousands of new voters to the polls in 2004 (even though many were turned away in Democratic wards due to a lack of voting machines).

Those electronic machines will also be exempted from recounts by random sampling, even in close, disputed elections like those of 2000 and 2004.

In 2004, scores of Ohio voters reported, under oath, that they had pressed John Kerry's name on touchscreen machines, only to see George W. Bush's name light up. A board of elections technician in Mahoning County (Youngstown) has admitted that at least 18 machines there suffered such problems. Sworn testimony in Columbus indicates that votes for Kerry faded off the screen on touchscreen machines there. Other charges of mis-programming, re-programming, recalibrating, mishandling and manipulation of electronic voting software, hardware and memory cards have since arisen throughout Ohio 2004.

For the 2005 election, some 41 additional Ohio counties (of 88) were switched to Diebold touchscreen machines. Despite polls showing overwhelming voter approval, two electoral reform issues went down improbable defeat. Issue Two, meant to make voting easier, and Issue Three, on campaign finance reform, were shown by highly reliable Columbus Dispatch polls to be passing handily.

The Dispatch was within 0.5% on Issue One, a bond issue, and has rarely been significantly wrong in its many decades of Ohio polling. Even opponents of Issues Two and Three conceded that they were highly likely to pass.

On the Sunday before the Tuesday 2005 election, the Dispatch predicted Issue Two would pass by a vote of 59% to 33%, with about 8% undecided. But Tuesday's official vote count showed Issue Two failing with just 36.5% in favor and 63.5% opposed. For that to have happened, the Dispatch had to have been wrong on Issue Two's support by more than 20 points. Nearly half those who said they would support Issue Two would have had to vote against it, along with all the undecideds.

The numbers on Issue Three are equally startling. The Dispatch showed it winning with 61%, to just 25% opposed and some 14% undecided. Instead just 33% of the votes were counted in its favor, with 67% opposed, an almost inconceivable weekend turnaround.

No other numbers were comparable on November 8, 2005, or elsewhere in the recent history of Dispatch polling. The startling outcome has thus raised even more suspicion and doubt about the use of electronic voting and tabulating machines in Ohio, which account for virtually 100% of the state's vote count.

The federal General Accountability Office (GAO) has recently issued a major report confirming that tampering with and manipulating such machines can be easily done by a very small number of people. Charges are widespread that this is precisely what gave George W. Bush Ohio's electoral votes, and thus the presidency, in 2004, not to mention the suspicious referenda outcomes in 2005.

HB3 will make it virtually impossible for any challenge to be mounted involving any votes cast or counted on electronic machines or tabulators---meaning virtually every vote cast in Ohio.
Indeed, HB3 will raise the cost of mounting a recount from $10 per precinct to $50 per precinct. In 2004, Secretary of State Blackwell forced citizen groups to raise private funds for a recount, which he proceeded to sabotage. The process, which became a futile electronic charade, cost donors committed to democracy more than $100,000. Three partial, meaningless faux recounts resulted. To date more than 100,000 votes cast in Ohio remain uncounted, including some 93,000 easily-read machine-rejected ballots. .

During the 2004 election process Blackwell, manipulated the number of precincts in Ohio, and issued inaccurate information about their location and boundaries, making a meaningful precise number hard to come by. But with more than 10,000 precincts still in existence, HB3 would make funding an attempt at another recount in 2006 or 2008 cost more than $500,000.
Such an effort might also result in official retaliation. In 2004, Blackwell and Ohio Attorney-General Jim Petro---both of whom are now Republican candidates for governor---tried to impose stiff financial sanctions against attorneys who filed a legal challenge to the seating of the Ohio electors who gave George W. Bush the presidency. The Ohio Supreme Court disallowed the sanctions after the challenge was withdrawn. But HB3 would make such a federal election challenge illegal altogether.

With the electoral process in Ohio all but disemboweled, those hoping for a change of party in upcoming state and national elections are probably kidding themselves.

The 2004 election in the Buckeye state was riddled with deception, fraud, intimidation, manipulation and outright theft, all of which were essential to the triumph of George W. Bush. In 2005, four electoral reform ballot initiatives were allegedly defeated despite huge poll margins showing the almost certain passage of two of them. The most credible explanation for their defeat lies in electronic manipulation of voting machines, tabulators and memory cards which the GAO confirms have no credible security safeguards.

With campaign finance, voter registration, electronic voting, public recounts, district gerrymandering and overall electoral administration now firmly in the pocket of the GOP, and with Democratic opposition that is virtually non-existent on the issue of vote fraud and election manipulation, there is little reason to believe the Republican grip on Ohio will be loosened at any point in the near future.

In traditional terms, the scandal-ridden Ohio GOP would appear to be more vulnerable than ever. Governor Robert Taft has become the only Ohio governor to be convicted of a crime while in office. With an astonishing 7% approval rating, he has been compared to Homer Simpson by the state's leading Republican newspaper. Republican US Senator Mike DeWine appears highly vulnerable. The GOP has never won the White House without winning the Buckeye State.

But HB3 will solidify the GOP's iron grip on the electronic voting process and all that surrounds it. Unless they break that grip, Democrats who believe they can carry any part of Ohio in 2006 or 2008 are kidding themselves.

When it comes to 2008, can you say "Jeb Bush"?

Why can't the left face the Stolen Elections of 2004 & 2008?

2005-10-23T21:39:00.000-07:00

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
October 18, 2005

If some of its key publications are any indicator, much of the American left seems unable to face the reality that the election of 2004 was stolen. So in all likelihood, unless something radical is done, 2008 will be too.

Misguided and misinformed articles in both TomPaine.com and Mother Jones Magazine indicate a dangerous inability to face the reality that these stolen elections mean nothing less than the death of what's left of American democracy, and the permanent enthronement of the Rovian GOP.

As investigative reporters based in Columbus, Ohio, we witnessed first-hand, up close and personal, exactly how the 2004 election was stolen, and how it will most likely be done in 2008. In the precinct in which Harvey Wasserman grew up, and in the one where Bob Fitrakis now lives, we saw the well-funded, profoundly cynical and deadly effective mechanisms by which the Bush-Cheney-Rove-Blackwell GOP machine switched a victory for John Kerry to an easily-repeatable defeat for democracy.

That Kerry and the spineless Ohio and national Democratic Parties have been complicit is a crucial part of the problem much of the left also seems unwilling to face. But if you live in Franklin County, Ohio, and watch the Republican and Democratic Parties run joint tickets against progressive candidate, and cut backroom deals allowing incumbents of either party run unopposed, you may miss the full scope of the disaster.

And until the left faces the rot that defines the Democratic Party, there is no hope for a fair election in this country. In other words: those who think the White House can be retaken in 2008, but refuse to face the theft of the vote in 2004, should prepare to be ruled by the likes of Jeb Bush, now and forever.

Before we go into the sordid details, we have to ask: exactly what is it about Team Bush that makes people think they could not or would not steal an American election? Do they lack funds? Do they lack expertise? Is there something in the Machiavellian/mobster moral code of Karl Rove and the Bush Family that would prevent them from doing here what they've been doing throughout the Third World for so long?

CIA meister Poppy Bush long ago perfected the art and science of stealing elections. US manipulators have interfered with and tipped elections for decades. Why should Ohio be any different? Especially when all the world knew control of the most powerful office on earth would be decided right here.

Lets do the bookends: before the voting, Ohio's infamous Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell clearly and vehemently denied poll access to teams of international observers from the United Nations and other international election observers.

Since the election, he has effectively stonewalled and sabotaged all recount attempts, to the point that no credible accounting of the Ohio election has ever been done. To this day, at least 100,000 votes remain uncounted, electronic voting machines remain unaudited, key hardware and data files have been trashed, paper ballots have sat unguarded for anyone to pilfer and tallies in dozens of key counties remain filled with statistical impossibilities.

In our HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, we list more than 180 bullet points on how this theft was perpetrated. It was a brilliant, cynical and masterfully executed campaign of death by a thousand cuts.

In Florida 2000, the means of the crime were limited to a few instances of intimidation, butterfly ballots, computer manipulation and a corrupt Supreme Court. But four years after, in Ohio, dozens of sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant tricks were designed to steal a few thousand votes here, a few thousand more there, until victory was in GOP hands. Unless they are exposed and blocked, every one of these scams can and will be duplicated throughout the United States in 2006 and 2008. The question is: will the left follow mainstream Democrats with sheep-like acceptance as every election goes the same way from here on? And if so, why bother even staging more votes in this country at all?

Starting with Russ Baker at TomPaine.com, the indicators are grim. Last January, Baker penned an absurd, ill-reported piece of nonsense called "What Didn't Happen in Ohio." Baker traipsed into Columbus for a few days, interviewed the usual faux Democrats, and left with a Big Story: "The Election Was Fair."

If Baker had done any meaningful research he might have seen the dozens of other instances of intimidation, irregularities and fraud that went unmentioned in his glib paragraphs. Instead he relied on Bill Anthony, chair of the Franklin County Democrats and Board of Elections.

Bill is a pleasant, affable African-American with no commitment or fight for democracy or even the Democrats. He has appeared on Bob's local radio show and with Harvey on others. On one of them, Bill admitted that the Franklin County BOE knew there would be problems with voting machines, and asked Blackwell for paper ballots well before the 2004 election. Blackwell, Anthony said, turned them down. The result was the now infamous chaos at the polls, with inner city voters stuck in the rain for hours. Just what Blackwell wanted.

But did Bill Anthony fight Blackwell's absurd ruling? Did he make it a public issue prior to the election?

Not a chance.

For a quickie reporting job, Anthony is a dream. He's well-spoken, charming and convincing. As an African-American with union connections, he would seem the perfect liberal source.

In 2003, Anthony endorsed the Republican mayor's former press secretary for the Columbus School Board. He then supported two Republican candidates on a "Reform Slate" aimed at ousting the Board's only progressive Democrat, an African-American.

Bill Anthony is just one of a legion of what are known throughout the state as DINOs---Democrats in Name Only. The Ohio Democratic Party is a national embarrassment. Its chair, Denny White, was not long ago a Republican, and will soon be one again, once the party is fully disemboweled, a job very close to done. Throughout Ohio, DINOs piously cover this piece of fraud and that piece of theft with glib "I hate Bush" rhetoric. The pity is, out-of-state reporters actually take them seriously.

Mark Hertsgaard is a well respected author and reporter and a long-time friend of Harvey Wasserman, and of election critic Mark Crispin Miller. He has contributed some very valuable work over the years. But he's done himself---and the voting public---very wrong on "Recounting Ohio" in the new Mother Jones.

Mark is smart and thorough enough to leave open the possibility that Ohio's election was, indeed, stolen. But he also falls prey to the DINO trap, failing to cover far too much of what happened here while taking seriously centrist Democrats who are known locally to have no credibility.

So Mother Jones questions the significance of the firing of a Democratic election official who blew the whistle on computer manipulations by Triad, an obscure Republican voting machine company. But Triad was involved in counting the votes in nearly half of Ohio's 88 counties. Questions are still being raised about Triad, including: "How did they get all these contracts in the first place?"

Mother Jones correctly points out that seven times the number of votes by which Bush took Ohio were cast on Republican-controlled machines. But the magazine fails to follow up with mention that those votes have been tabulated on proprietary non-transparent software---a fact we pointed out in our own article in Motherjones.com many months prior to the election.

Mother Jones also discounts the fact that a phony Homeland Security alert in Warren County landed the vote count in an unauthorized warehouse rather than the official secure location, and that reporters were barred from the vote count. That count, which went hugely and suspiciously and very importantly for Bush, was observed by nominal Democrats. But so were other highly dubious vote counts around the state, as they had been in Florida 2000, which Mother Jones argues adamantly was indeed stolen.

The irony of this is that the same issue of Mother Jones leads off with a dead-on story about Ohio and national Democrats who are sabotaging the campaign of the aggressively electable Paul Hackett for a key US Senate seat. And another MoJo piece bemoans the fact that national Democrats seem adept only at losing.

Yet here in the back of the book is a story discounting evidence compiled by a legion of independent, grassroots election rights advocates, while favoring phone interviews with the very Democrats being denounced in the front of the book.

Above all, the core of evidence that the election was stolen in Ohio 2004 comes from some 500 sworn statements and signed affidavits taken by people of all political parties, including two Republican hearings officers, in the weeks after the election. Anyone truly committed to finding out what happened here needs to start with that huge body of evidence.

As MoJo points out, none of this has been made easier by the "abandon ship" of the biggest DINO of all, John Kerry. Kerry had $7 million in the bank earmarked to "count every vote" and was apparently losing by just 136,000 Ohio votes with more than 250,000 still uncounted when he turned tail and conceded. Even Blackwell's corrupt, virtually meaningless first fake recount dropped Bush's official tally by 18,000 votes.

The Democrats have since attacked the election protection movement here through a lawyer named Daniel Hoffheimer who comes from none other than the stalwart Cincinnati Republican law firm of Taft, Stettinius et. al. MoJo quotes another Kerry/DINO lawyer Michael O'Grady, counsel to the state Democratic Party, who argues that for Ohio to have been stolen, the entire GOP would have had to be "conspiratorial," while the Democrats were "dumb as rocks."

In fact, that's an assessment many activists in Ohio heartily endorse, though you might add the word "inert" to the description of the Democrats.

O'Grady claims, for example, that an impossible vote count in three southern Ohio counties that gave Bush his entire margin of victory can be explained by a feminist outpouring for an African-American court candidate who ran zero campaign in those counties. But the presumption is that those same feminists somehow didn't bother to vote for Kerry over George W. Bush. No local student of that election could begin to take such an assessment seriously.

Or how about the quote from Chris Rakocy, a "tech specialist" about those notorious touchscreens in Mahoning County where voters who chose Kerry saw Bush light up. Rakocy says that problem was "only" on 18 of 1,148 machines, and that it was corrected early.

But Rakocy stands alone against dozens of sworn statements and affidavits confirming that the problem went on all day, and was never fixed, and may have involved far more machines than 18, and not only in Mahoning County but also in Franklin. Even at that, in heavily Democratic Youngstown (not to mention Columbus), just 18 machines could have accounted for switching thousands of votes. And, in fact, Kerry's margins in both Youngstown and Columbus were suspiciously light.

And what would Mother Jones herself do to machines that disenfranchised even one voter, no matter what the apparent impact on the ultimate vote count? Why is the magazine named for her discounting the you-couldn't-make-this-one-up reality of voters pushing one candidate's name on a touchscreen and seeing another's name light up, time after time after time? Or are we taking this---and her---all too seriously?

Then there's the song and dance from Warren Mitofsky. The father of exit polls saw his work used to overturn a stolen election in Ukraine just prior to the American vote. But when his poll-taking here showed John Kerry with a nationwide margin of 1.5 million votes, somehow Mitofsky jumped ship on his own decades of professionalism.

Exit polls funded by six major news organizations showed Kerry carrying Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico and Nevada as late as 12:20 am on Wednesday morning, well after balloting stopped even in Alaska and Hawaii. These four "purple states" gave the election to the "blue" Democrats, then miraculously switched to "red" for Bush, giving him the White House once again.

Given all that's known about exit polls---and it's a lot---the odds on one state switching like that are about one in one hundred. For four, it's a virtual statistical impossibility. Add the fact that not one, not four, but TEN of eleven swing states showed drastic shifts from Kerry to Bush and you enter the realm of, well, a stolen election.

Add huge, unexplained shifts from pre-election polls to post-election vote counts in crucial 2002 Senatorial races in Georgia, Minnesota and Colorado, then remember what happened in Florida 2000, and examine the basic Bush attitude toward democracy itself, and you've got a pattern to say the least. And an obvious prescription for one-party rule as far as the eye can see.

Except when you are dealing with America's Democratic Party in 2004 and with reportage that relies on a few phone calls and a disheartening lack of grassroots perspective. If all politics is local, as Tip O'Neill well knew, then so are all vote counts.

Our first article predicting what would happen in Ohio 2004 was published many months before the election in, of all places, MotherJones.com. We warned that electronic voting machines deployed by the likes of Diebold could give Ohio and thus the nation to George W. Bush. Wally O'Dell, Diebold's infamous CEO, pledged to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in 2004, and all evidence points to the fact that he at least helped.

What we missed in addition was the myriad clever tricks the GOP would bring to bear in pulling this off. Ohio has a long history as a test market. New products like white bread and spam are brought here first, to see how they'll fly with America at large.

In Ohio 2004, scores of tools for stealing an American election were tried and proven out. Outside reporters have come here again and again to pull at this one and tear at that one. Almost always, they get even that wrong. And almost always, they fail to see the bigger picture.

If we have a "know it all" attitude, as is sometimes charged, it's because we were (and are) here, we saw it happen, we witnessed the seven-hour waits and the denials of the absentee ballots, and we took the testimony of the hundreds who later went under oath.

And we see more unravel every day. Conspiracy theories happen sometimes when actual conspiracies occur. The stakes involved, the players on both sides and the events that are out there plain as day are all of a piece that's simply too obvious for anyone on the ground here to miss.

Hertsgaard has the good sense to mention indictments that have recently come down on election thieves in Cuyahoga County. We know that to be the tip of the iceberg.

What matters now is whether the GOP will be allowed to repeat nationwide in 2006 and 2008 what they saw they could get away with in Ohio 2004.

Election theft skeptics tend to conclude their put-downs by urging we forget about the vote-count stuff and concentrate on coming up with candidates so good that "the election won't be close enough to steal."

Having seen what we saw here, knowing what Mother Jones is reporting about the Democratic attacks on Paul Hackett, and about the loser instinct ingrained in the Dems' DLC/DNA, we must charitably describe such a conclusion as being profoundly wishful thinking.

Someday we may indeed have candidates far worthier than Al Gore and John Kerry. But they both won the presidency of the United States, however corruptible their margins of victory.

We need to guarantee that if someone worthwhile and willing to fight ever does come along, we will have a left that's prepared to make sure the votes are fairly counted.

As Rev. Jesse Jackson put it while speaking to election protection activists here, "We can afford to lose an election. We can't afford to lose our democracy."

Who would agree more strongly than Tom Paine and Mother Jones?

--
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available at Freepress.org and harveywasserman.com. Their upcoming WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO, with Steve Rosenfeld, will be published by The New Press in spring, 2006.

Carter/Baker Report can't face how the GOP stole America's 2004 election & is rigging 2008

2005-09-22T21:06:00.000-07:00

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
September 20, 2005

The stolen elections of 2000, 2002 and 2004 are nowhere to be found in the milquetoast Carter-Baker Report now passing for wisdom on America's broken electoral system.

And unless the public is ready to face the reality that we no longer live in a nation with credible elections, the 2008 balloting is all but over.

As investigative reporters and registered voters living in central Ohio, we witnessed firsthand the outright theft of the 2004 election. We also endured the unwillingness of the Democratic Party to face up to a carefully choreographed "do everything" strategy that gave the presidency to George W. Bush for a second time, and which could make all elections to come virtually moot.

The just-issued report of a special commission headed by former President Jimmy Carter and Bush family consigliore Jim Baker is of little real value.

The report warns that public confidence in the electoral system is disappearing. But it fails to point out the most obvious cause: in both 2000 and 2004, the presidency was stolen, and the Republican Party made a mockery of those who took the time and effort to vote. It did the same in Georgia in 2002, when it overrode the public will to install a Republican US Senator and Governor. The US Senate races that year in Minnesota and Colorado are also suspect, to say the least.

Much controversy surrounds the Carter-Baker report over its recommendation that photo IDs be required of all voters. This is the electoral equivalent of blaming the people of New Orleans for Hurricane Katrina (which, of course, this administration has essentially done).

A wide range of critics have pointed out that this requirement is racist and repressive. It is the equivalent of a poll tax and discriminates against people of color, the poor, the elderly, and civil libertarians who object on principle to a national identification card.

The report also recommends that officials who run elections should not be aggressive partisans. But the horse is already out of the barn on that one. Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 were administered by co-chairs of the state Bush-Cheney campaigns. Secretaries of State Katherine Harris and J. Kenneth Blackwell were both extremely outspoken Republican advocates allegedly running non-partisan elections. It's now clear that their fraudulent, illegal vote fixing twice gave George W. Bush the White House.

Among the panel's 87 recommendations is also a warning that electronic voting machines must have verifiable paper trails. On paper this is important. But there are many ways to use electronic voting machines to steal elections, even with a paper trail, if the likes of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney are running the show.

In the most laughable Carter/Baker punch line, the commission warns that "had the margin of victory for the [2004] presidential contest been narrower, the lengthy dispute that followed the 2000 election could have been repeated."

In fact, in our own preliminary report, we have unearthed more than 180 bullet points dealing with exactly how the GOP did steal the presidency in Ohio. A "do everything" Republican assault on democracy used intimidation, fraud, vote theft, computer rigging, machine distribution manipulation, a fake Homeland security alert, trashing of provisional ballots, denial of a recount and dozens more "dirty tricks" to produce a 118,775 "official" margin for Bush that was an utter fiction.

Exit polls in nine swing states showed Kerry a clear winner as late as 12:21 am on election night. Nationwide exit polls showed him with a 1.5 million vote margin in the popular vote.

But somehow, against all statistical probability, Bush wound up with a popular vote victory of nearly 3.5 million. And somehow, against all statistical probability, he carried Ohio and three other states (Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico) where he had been the clear loser in the exit polls. Ohio alone was sufficient to give him a second term, just as Florida had been in 2000.

Such an outcome is beyond implausible -- unless you saw how the Rove-Blackwell machine stole the vote.

The tactics the GOP perfected in Ohio 2004 are now being honed for re-use in 2008. Neither Al Gore nor John Kerry nor the core of the Democratic Party has been willing to face the reality that elections in the United States are all but over. This latest wimp report from the Carter-Baker whitewash commission does no better.

Unless our electoral system gets a total top-to-bottom revamp by an informed public willing to deal with the systematic poisoning of American democracy, there is no reason to bother printing the ballots or plugging in the voting machines in 2008.

--
Harvey Wasserman & Bob Fitrakis are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, now available in a special release at http://freepress.org and http://harveywasserman.com.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

2005-09-22T21:04:00.000-07:00

by Warren Stewart, Director of Legislative Issues and Policy, VoteTrustUSA
September 20, 2005

Don't Let Congress Use the Carter-Baker Report to Make Vote Verification Meaningless

The Report of the Commission on Federal Election Reform, published this morning and available for download at http://www.american.edu/ia/cfer/, is a significant tome at over 100 pages, and its 87 recommendations cover a wide range of issues of concern to election activists. The section dealing with voting technology is of particular interest to those concerned about the accuracy and security of elections in that it explicitly recommends a requirement for a voter verifiable paper trail on all voting systems.

The Commission’s report very correctly recognizes the need to ensure voter confidence in the election process through a verification process. However, the report specifically recommends that the status of the voter verified record should be left to the states. This is unacceptable. It is fundamental to the integrity of the democratic process that it is the voters and not the machines that ultimately confirm the accuracy of their votes.

The record verified by the voter is the only physical record that voter has confirmed and should be recognized as such. It should not be offered to voters as a placebo to ensure their confidence if it does not actually provide reason for that confidence. It is crucial for a transparent election process is a record of each vote that has been verified by the voters themselves. It must be human readable, it must be genuinely permanent and preserved in the manner that all election materials are preserved, and it must be used to confirm the accuracy of machine counts, whether those counts come from DREs or optical scanners. When inconsistencies between hand counts of paper records and machine-tabulated records are uncovered in an audit or recount, the totals of the voter verified records must be considered the true and correct record of the voter’s vote.

And mandatory random manual audits are critically important. While the Commission’s report recommends audits to verify the accuracy of voting systems, it is unclear about the mechanism through which such audits shall be conducted and does not specify the need for hand counts. Meaningful audits require hand counts – it is not possible to confirm the accuracy of machine counts with more machine counts. Publicly observed hand counts are the only means to achieve complete certainty of the vote totals and should be required in all audits and recounts.

Of course there is a bill introduced in Congress that would do all this. It has over 150 co-sponsors and has generated widespread constituent support across the country. The voter verification language in this bill was carefully crafted and benefited from the input of computer scientists, disability organizations, and election reform advocates. This bill deals comprehensively with the broad-based and legitimate concerns about the accuracy of vote casting and counting on electronic voting systems by mandating random manual audits to verify the accuracy of electronic data and prohibit the use of undisclosed software, the use of wireless communications devices, and the connection of voting systems to the Internet. The bill, introduced by Rep. Rush Holt as HR 550, deserves to be passed as written and passed quickly, in time to affect the 2006 elections.

The Commission has identified the importance of a voter verified paper record requirement, audits, and the prohibition of undisclosed voting system software to ensuring confidence in the election process. We urgently need Federal legislation establishing that it is the voters, rather than a secret and non-transparent software code that ultimately confirm the accuracy of their votes. Congress must not be allowed to use the Commission’s report as justification for weakening the language of HR 550. The bill should be passed as written and a companion bill should be introduced and passed in the Senate at once.

Ohio Governor's ethics violations expose money trail to stolen 2004 election

2005-09-14T20:42:00.000-07:00

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
August 30, 2005

COLUMBUS -- The shock waves from Ohio Governor Bob Taft's no contest plea to four misdemeanor ethics violations have turned this state's politics upside down. They also have direct roots in the stolen election of 2004.

Ohio's "Mr. Clean" governor has been forced to admit he took gratis golf games and other insider graft and goodies. His tearful no contest plea led to a nominal fine where lesser public figures could have gotten substantial jail time. Taft faced up to two years in jail.

The mainstream media has indeed reported that these gratuities have come from the usual thieves' den of contractors doing business with the state of Ohio. It's also well known that Tom Noe has been prominent among them. In fact, it has now been reported that Noe told Taft about controversial rare coin investments that may have cost the state millions as early as 2001, rather than 2004, as Taft has claimed. Also, the Columbus Dispatch reported that Taft failed to report eight additional gifts valued at more than $75: three between 1999-2005; five between 2002-2004. Columbus City Prosecutor Steve McIntosh told the Dispatch that there wasn't likely to be a "second round of misdemeanors."

But the media has ignored the fact that Noe is also former Chair of the Lucas County Board of Elections, a major Bush-Cheney donor, and a key player in the theft of Ohio's 2004 electoral votes. He is reportedly under federal investigation for laundering money into the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. Election Day chaos and confusion in Noe's predominantly Democratic Lucas County helped give Bush a second term in the White House.

Time and again Taft has made public posturings about the need for all state employees to be completely free of even the perception of wrongdoing and corruption.

But the Taft sinkhole goes way beyond a few gubernatorial golf games. Millions of dollars are now missing from the Bureau of Workers' Compensation Fund, thanks to his friend Tom Noe's bizarre investment schemes. Noe ran a Toledo coin shop before being fingered as some kind of investment genius, designated to handle some $50 million in state funds. When he got the account, Noe's first move was to write himself a check for fees well in excess of $1 million. As of now, millions more are known to be missing in a "Coingate" scandal that has made headlines nationwide.

But Noe was also at the heart of Ohio's 2004 stolen election. As northwestern Ohio's "Mr. Republican," Noe was the gatekeeper for Toledo-area GOP politics for a dozen years. He chaired not only the Lucas County Republican Party, but also the Lucas County Board of Elections.

As BOE Chair, Tom Noe made a high profile acquisition of Sequoia electronic voting machines, crowing about the speed with which they were installed. But by 2004, Lucas County was knee-deep in malfunctions involving the notorious Diebold opti-scan vote counters, which jammed before and during Election Day. In precinct after precinct throughout the heavily Democratic Toledo inner city, African-American voters were disenfranchised en masse. Machines broke down, lines grew to three, four and five hours. Thousands left without voting.

At the Glenwood School, voting machines were locked in the principal's office. When he called in sick on Election Morning, hundreds of African-American citizens were denied the ability to vote. The situation was cemented by an edict from Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell that paper ballots were not to be issued to Ohio precincts to cover when machines broke down.

At other Lucas County precincts, as citizens have testified under oath, unsuspecting voters were issued faulty markers which ruined the ballots on which they were used. Inner city voters thus left thinking they had voted when, in fact, their ballots were automatically trashed.

The overall situation in Lucas County became so infamously twisted with incompetence, malfeasance and corruption that in mid 2005, Blackwell was forced to issue a scathing staff report on voting practices there. In response, he threatened to fire the entire Board of Elections.

Board Chair Bernadette Noe had already announced her intention to resign. But independent researchers estimate that at least 7,000 votes were shifted in Lucas County from John Kerry to George W. Bush under her regime. Many thousands of African-American citizens, most of them likely Kerry voters, were effectively disenfranchised.

The Toledo Blade reported that in the summer of 2004, 28,000 voters were "erased" from the Lucas County voter registration rolls. The purge included voters like Barbara and Ralph George "who first registered to vote for John F. Kennedy in 1960 and had lived in the same East Toledo house for 44 years." The Georges had called prior to their elimination from the voting rolls and had been told that they were eligible voters.

The Blade also reported that 40 of the provisional voters in precinct 4N were in the right room, but the wrong line on Election Day. All of their votes were rejected as were 50 of the 67 provisional ballots cast in the precinct. The volume of provisional ballots more than doubled when contrasted to the 2000 presidential election.

Taft is the first governor in Ohio history to be charged with misdemeanor ethics violations. His no contest plea opens a new chapter in Ohio politics. Whether its roots in the stolen election of 2004 will be fully exposed in the mainstream media remains to be seen. But we will continue to do our best.

Two Election Workers Indicted in Ohio

2005-09-03T22:09:00.000-07:00

Two Cuyahoga County Board of Elections workers have been indicted today on charges stemming from the 2004 presidential election recount.

Rosie Grier and Kathleen Dreamer have been indicted on six counts each, including unlawfully obtaining possession of ballots. If convicted, they face a maximum prison sentence of 18 months.

Erie County Prosecutor Kevin Baxter was appointed as a special prosecutor in the case and filed the charges today. Messages left seeking comment from Baxter and Board of Elections director Michael Vu were not immediately returned.

What They Did Last Fall

2005-08-19T21:50:00.000-07:00

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 19, 2005

By running for the U.S. Senate, Katherine Harris, Florida's former secretary of state, has stirred up some ugly memories. And that's a good thing, because those memories remain relevant. There was at least as much electoral malfeasance in 2004 as there was in 2000, even if it didn't change the outcome. And the next election may be worse.

In his recent book "Steal This Vote" - a very judicious work, despite its title - Andrew Gumbel, a U.S. correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, provides the best overview I've seen of the 2000 Florida vote. And he documents the simple truth: "Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election."

Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida's ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore. This was true despite a host of efforts by state and local officials to suppress likely Gore votes, most notably Ms. Harris's "felon purge," which disenfranchised large numbers of valid voters.

But few Americans have heard these facts. Perhaps journalists have felt that it would be divisive to cast doubt on the Bush administration's legitimacy. If so, their tender concern for the nation's feelings has gone for naught: Cindy Sheehan's supporters are camped in Crawford, and America is more bitterly divided than ever.

Meanwhile, the whitewash of what happened in Florida in 2000 showed that election-tampering carries no penalty, and political operatives have acted accordingly. For example, in 2002 the Republican Party in New Hampshire hired a company to jam Democratic and union phone banks on Election Day.

And what about 2004?

Mr. Gumbel throws cold water on those who take the discrepancy between the exit polls and the final result as evidence of a stolen election. (I told you it's a judicious book.) He also seems, on first reading, to play down what happened in Ohio. But the theme of his book is that America has a long, bipartisan history of dirty elections.

He told me that he wasn't brushing off the serious problems in Ohio, but that "this is what American democracy typically looks like, especially in a presidential election in a battleground state that is controlled substantially by one party."

So what does U.S. democracy look like? There have been two Democratic reports on Ohio in 2004, one commissioned by Representative John Conyers Jr., the other by the Democratic National Committee.

The D.N.C. report is very cautious: "The purpose of this investigation," it declares, "was not to challenge or question the results of the election in any way." It says there is no evidence that votes were transferred away from John Kerry - but it does suggest that many potential Kerry votes were suppressed. Although the Conyers report is less cautious, it stops far short of claiming that the wrong candidate got Ohio's electoral votes.

But both reports show that votes were suppressed by long lines at polling places - lines caused by inadequate numbers of voting machines - and that these lines occurred disproportionately in areas likely to vote Democratic. Both reports also point to problems involving voters who were improperly forced to cast provisional votes, many of which were discarded.

The Conyers report goes further, highlighting the blatant partisanship of election officials. In particular, the behavior of Ohio's secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell - who supervised the election while serving as co-chairman of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio - makes Ms. Harris's actions in 2000 seem mild by comparison.

And then there are the election night stories. Warren County locked down its administration building and barred public observers from the vote-counting, citing an F.B.I. warning of a terrorist threat. But the F.B.I. later denied issuing any such warning. Miami County reported that voter turnout was an improbable 98.55 percent of registered voters. And so on.

We aren't going to rerun the last three elections. But what about the future?

Our current political leaders would suffer greatly if either house of Congress changed hands in 2006, or if the presidency changed hands in 2008. The lids would come off all the simmering scandals, from the selling of the Iraq war to profiteering by politically connected companies. The Republicans will be strongly tempted to make sure that they win those elections by any means necessary. And everything we've seen suggests that they will give in to that temptation.

Congressman Conyers Urges Kerry and Edwards Not to Withdraw From Ohio Recount Case

2005-08-19T21:43:00.000-07:00

Letter from Congressman Conyers:
August 17, 2005

Honorable John Kerry 511 C Street, NE Washington, DC 20002
Honorable John Edwards 401 W. Trade Street Suite 219 Charlotte, NC 28202-1619

Dear Senators Kerry and Edwards:

I would like to express my deepest appreciation for your role in intervening to protect the rights of the candidates seeking the 2004 election recount in Ohio and I applaud you for your great efforts to stand behind the voting public, urging them not to lose faith in our election system.

As you are aware, this has been the second consecutive presidential election where numerous issues were raised concerning irregularities and improprieties within the system. Specifically, we learned of the massive disenfranchisement of fellow voters, as well as numerous incidents of voter intimidation and the purposeful dissemination of misleading information to the voting public, with the intent to interfere with the system. In addition, we learned of numerous irregularities in the way the recount in Ohio was conducted. I therefore commend your willingness to intervene in the recount case as it proceeds in the federal district court in Ohio and to join the candidates and voters in their struggle to fix a seemingly broken system. It is only by investigating these voting irregularities in each past election that we are able to ascertain the problems and pursue a better election process in each succeeding election.

It is for these reasons that I am deeply concerned to learn of the possibility, however remote, that you may be considering withdrawing from the 2004 election recount case in Ohio. As you know, it is absolutely imperative that we have elections that count every vote of every eligible voter, and if there is any issue that is central to a strong democracy, it is ensuring that all eligible voters are able to participate in our elections without encumbrance or interference from others. There is no question that your continued participation in this case will help ensure that we restore trust in our election system.

As you continue your participation in this important case and we continue our investigation of the voting irregularities during the 2004 presidential election, we hope to be able to maintain an open dialogue. As you know, the objective of the recount itself was never to overturn the election, but to win back the confidence of the electorate in the accuracy of voting methods and the fairness of voting procedures. The objective remains the same for the pending case in federal court challenging the unconstitutional manner in which the Ohio recount was conducted. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact my office at (202) 225-6504.

Sincerely,

John Conyers, Jr.

Election Fraud Continues in the US

2005-08-14T00:51:00.000-07:00

New Data Shows Widespread Vote Manipulations in 2004

by Peter Phillips

August 12, 2005
GlobalResearch.ca

In the fall of 2001, after an eight-month review of 175,000 Florida ballots never counted in the 2000 election, an analysis by the National Opinion Research Center confirmed that Al Gore actually won Florida and should have been President. However, coverage of this report was only a small blip in the corporate media as a much bigger story dominated the news after September 11, 2001.

New research compiled by Dr. Dennis Loo with the University of Cal Poly Pomona now shows that extensive manipulation of non-paper-trail voting machines occurred in several states during the 2004 election. The facts are as follows: In 2004 Bush far exceeded the 85% of registered Florida Republican votes that he got in 2000, receiving more than 100% of the registered Republican votes in 47 out of 67 Florida counties, 200% of registered Republicans in 15 counties, and over 300% of registered Republicans in 4 counties. Bush managed these remarkable outcomes despite the fact that his share of the crossover votes by registered Democrats in Florida did not increase over 2000, and he lost ground among registered Independents, dropping 15 points. We also know that Bush "won" Ohio by 51-48%, but statewide results were not matched by the court-supervised hand count of the 147,400 absentee and provisional ballots in which Kerry received 54.46% of the vote. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio the number of recorded votes was more than 93,000 greater than the number of registered voters.

More importantly national exit polls showed Kerry winning in 2004. However, It was only in precincts where there were no paper trails on the voting machines that the exit polls ended up being different from the final count. According to Dr. Steve Freeman, a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania, the odds are 250 million to one that the exit polls were wrong by chance. In fact, where the exit polls disagreed with the computerized outcomes the results always favored Bush - another statistical impossibility.
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Dennis Loo writes, "A team at the University of California at Berkeley, headed by sociology professor Michael Hout, found a highly suspicious pattern in which Bush received 260,000 more votes in those Florida precincts that used electronic voting machines than past voting patterns would indicate compared to those precincts that used optical scan read votes where past voting patterns held."

There is now strong statistical evidence of widespread voting machine manipulation occurring in US elections since 2000. Coverage of the fraud has been reported in independent media and various websites. The information is not secret. But it certainly seems to be a taboo subject for the US corporate media.

Black Box Voting (www.blackboxvoting.org.) reported on March 9, 2005 that voting machines used by over 30 million voters were easily hacked by relatively unsophisticated programs and audits of the computers would not show the changes. It is very possible that a small team of hackers could have manipulated the 2004 and earlier elections in various locations throughout the United States. Irregularities in the vote counts certainly indicate that something beyond chance occurrences has been happening in recent elections.

That a special interest group might try to cheat on an election in the United States is nothing new. Historians tell us how local political machines from both major parties have in the past used methods of double counting, ballot box stuffing, poll taxes and registration manipulation to affect elections. In the computer age, however, election fraud can occur externally without local precinct administrators having any awareness of the manipulations - and the fraud can be extensive enough to change the outcome of an entire national election.

There is little doubt key Democrats know that votes in 2004 and earlier elections were stolen. The fact that few in Congress are complaining about fraud is an indication of the totality to which both parties accept the status quo of a money based elections system. Neither party wants to further undermine public confidence in the American "democratic" process (over 80 millions eligible voters refused to vote in 2004). Instead we will likely see the quiet passing of legislation that will correct the most blatant problems. Future elections in the US will continue as an equal opportunity for both parties to maintain a national democratic charade in which money counts more than truth.

Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and Director of Project Censored.

Did the GOP steal another Ohio Election?

2005-08-06T23:32:00.000-07:00

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
August 5, 2005

The Republican Party has -- barely -- snatched another election in Ohio. And once again there are telltale symptoms of the kind of vote theft that put George W. Bush in the White House in 2000 and then kept him there in 2004.

This time an outspoken Iraqi War vet named Paul Hackett led the charge for a Cincinnati-area Congressional seat, earning 48% of the vote. The spot was open because Bush appointed his pal Rep. Rob Portman to be a trade representative.

Hackett is a rarity among today's Democrats---a blunt, hard-driving truth talker who blasted Bush's attack on Iraq. Hackett labeled W. "a chicken hawk." He's the first Iraqi war vet to run for Congress. He made no bones about the incompetence and cynicism that define the GOP strategy there. In particular Hackett attacked Bush's attacks on veterans benefits while claiming patriotic support of the war.

In return, GOP candidate Jean Schmidt lied about Hackett's war record. Unlike John Kerry, Hackett fought back immediately.

The Ohio GOP is now being thoroughly roasted by a Coingate scandal in which Republican high roller Tom Noe seems to have walked off with at least $4 million in state funds, and possibly $16.5 million in theft and unauthorized administrative charges from a $50 million rare coin investment fund. Noe is a Bush Pioneer/Ranger level donor, and a supporter of Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the point man in Bush's theft of Ohio's 20 electoral votes and thus the presidency last November.

As his friends and supporters flee him, Noe's role as long-time chair of the Lucas County (Toledo) Board of Elections has come under intense scrutiny. Noe turned the seat over to his wife, Bernadette, in time for a 2004 election rife with disenfranchisement and fraud. Long lines, computer breakdowns, intimidation, harassment and hacked vote counts were the defining characteristics of the election the Noe's administered in the Toledo area last November.

In one instance, an entire precinct was shut down because the voting machines were locked in the office of a school principal, who called in sick. Someone also placed the wrong type of ballot scan markers in heavily Democratic Toledo precincts, causing a high rate of uncounted, machine-rejected votes without the voters knowing it.

Overall, experts estimate more than 7,000 votes were stolen outright from John Kerry under the Noe's supervision in Lucas County 2004.

Whether similar theft defeated Paul Hackett remains to be seen. Hackett ran extremely well in a district thoroughly gerrymandered as a permanent Republican safe seat. Democrats are now crowing about how well Hackett did in "serving notice" that the GOP may be in trouble. But the bottom line is that the Republicans still won the election.

As of 1 am this past Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, Hackett was within 3600 votes---about four percent---of Schmidt.

But election officials announced a mysterious "computer glitch" that delayed reports from Clermont County, which accounted for roughly a quarter of all the ballots cast in the district.

When things finally settled out, Clermont gave Schmidt 58%, and a 5,000 vote margin there. And thus the election.

Earlier in the evening---around 9pm---Hackett and Schmidt had been in a virtual dead heat, according to sources in the Cincinnati area (see among them http://billmon.org/archives/002073.html ).

A full 88% of the district's precincts had then reported, including more than half those in Clermont. As in Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004, it looked like a cliffhanger. Schmidt's lead was less than 900 votes.

Clermont's "technical malfunction" with optical scan readers was blamed on the humidity. Election officials said the southern Ohio summer had soaked into the ballots, making it hard to pass them through opti-scan machines.

Once the problem was "solved," Schmidt picked up more than enough votes to guarantee victory. The percentages by which she won in the post-glitch vote count were far higher than those by which she had been winning prior to the glitch. Vote counts were also higher than expected in the strongest Schmidt precincts.

Clermont and neighboring Butler and Warren Counties gave George W. Bush a margin in 2004 that exceeded his entire statewide margin over John Kerry. Warren County became infamous on election night, when its supervisors suddenly declared a "Homeland Emergency" and dismissed all media and Democrats from the vote count. Bush then emerged with a huge, unexpected and unmonitored majority.

Clermont, Butler and Warren Counties' totals were also suspect because a Democratic candidate for Ohio Supreme Court implausibly out-polled John Kerry. As would be expected, Bush vastly out ran the Republican candidate for Supreme Court Chief Justice in those three counties. But Democrat C. Ellen Connelly, a pro-choice, pro-gay-marriage African-American from Cleveland somehow got a higher vote count than Kerry in these conservative, predominantly white southern Ohio counties. Richard Hayes Philips and other experts who have assessed that vote say it is beyond implausible, indicating a high likelihood of fraud.

But along with Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, Paul Hackett has become another Democratic candidate whose campaign went suddenly and mysteriously down to defeat late in the evening of a close election. Amidst the obligatory computer glitches, the GOP candidate was declared the winner before the vote count could be investigated.

Did Clermont County do for Schmidt in 2005 what it did for Bush in 2004? Did that "glitch" in the evening vote count give GOP dirty tricksters time to once again hack the machines they needed to win?

Who in the Bush/Rove Justice Department or major media will even ask the question?

None dare call it stolen - Ohio, the election, and America's servile press

2005-07-31T22:32:00.000-07:00

by Mark Crispin Miller, summarized by Mary Anne Saucier, Columbus, Ohio
July 24, 2005

While commentators, prompted by Republicans, claimed Bush won the 2004 election through the votes of a silent majority concerned with “family values,” Mark Crispin Miller writes that when voters were asked to state, “in their own words the most important factor in their vote,”only 14 percent named “moral values.” He details how the press (except for Keith Olbermann on MSNBC) ignored “the strange details of the election—except, that is, to ridicule all efforts to discuss them…It was as if they were reporting from inside a forest fire without acknowledging the fire, except to keep insisting that there was no fire.”

Then he lists the copious evidence pointing to a stolen election, easily available on the web or in paperback, from Michigan Representative John Conyers’ report, Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio. More than dirty tricks, it covers “the run-up to the election, the election itself, and the post-election cover-up,” listing “specific violations of the U.S. and Ohio constitutions, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, the National Voter Registration Act, and the Help America Vote Act.”

The Conyers report details the disenfranchisement of Democrats through “intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio.”

There was unequal placement of voting machines.

County boards of elections were ordered to reject all Ohio voter-registration forms not printed on white, uncoated paper of not less than 80 lb. text weight.

Access was limited to provisional ballots.

“Caging”was used to challenge 35,000 individuals who did not sign for registered letters sent to new voters.

There was restriction of media from covering the election and conducting exit polls.

There was a prearranged FBI terrorist attack warning in Warren County which kept reporters from observing a post-election ballot-counting.

There was restriction of foreign monitors from “watching the opening of the polling places, the counting of the ballots, and, in some cases, the election itself.

Numerous statistical anomalies all deducted votes from Kerry.

In Cuyahoga and Franklin Counties, “the arrows on the absentee ballots were not properly aligned with their respective punch holes, so that countless votes were miscast.”

In Mercer County, 4000 votes were mysteriously not in the final count.

In Lucas County a polling place never opened because no one had the key.

In Hamilton County, many absentee voters could not vote for Kerry because his name was not on the ballot.

In Mahoning County 25 electronic machines changed Kerry votes to Bush.

Dirty tricks told voters to go to false polling places; that Democrats were to vote on November 3; volunteers offered to take absentee ballots to the election office; voters were challenged to prove eligibility to vote. The “Texas Strike Force” (25 people registered at a Franklin County Holiday Inn, paid by the Republican Party) threatened targeted people from a pay phone, if they voted.

Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell created rules for the Ohio recount (requested by the Green and Libertarian Parties) which would prevent “countywide hand recounts by any means necessary.” The end result was “the Ohio vote was never properly recounted, as required by Ohio law.”

On December 13, 2004, it was reported by Deputy Director of Hocking County Elections Sherole Eaton, that a Triad GSI employee had changed the computer that operated the tabulating machine, and had “advised election officials how to manipulate voting machinery to ensure that [the] preliminary hand recount matched the machine count.” This same Triad employee said he worked on machines in Lorain, Muskingum, Clark, Harrison, and Guernsey counties.

“Based on the above, including actual admissions and statements by Triad employees, it strongly appears that Triad and its employees engaged in a course of behavior to provide “cheat sheets” to those counting the ballots. The cheat sheets told them how many votes they should find for each candidate, and how many over and under votes they should calculate to match the machine count. In that way, they could avoid doing a full county-wide hand recount mandated by state law. If true, this would frustrate the entire purpose of the recount law—to randomly ascertain if the vote counting apparatus is operating fairly and effectively, and if not to conduct a full hand recount.”

In Union County, Triad replaced the hard drive on one tabulator.

In Monroe County, “after the 3 percent hand count had twice failed to match the machine count, a Triad employee brought in a new machine and took away the old one. (That machine’s count matched the hand count.)”

Green and Libertarian volunteers reported that in Allen, Clermont, Cuyahoga, Morrow, Hocking, Vinton, Summit, and Medina counties, “the precincts for the 3 percent hand recount were preselected, not picked at random, as the law requires.”

Even though the 3 percent hand recount in Fairfield County was different than the machine count, there was no hand count as required.

“In Washington and Lucas counties, ballots were marked or altered, apparently to ensure that the hand recount would equal the machine count.”

“In Ashland, Portage, and Coshocton counties, ballots were improperly unsealed or stored.”

At great cost, Belmont County had an independent programmer change the counting machines so they would only count votes for President.

“..Democratic and/or Green observers were denied access to absentee, and /or provisional ballots, or were not allowed to monitor the recount process, in Summit, Huron, Putnam, Allen, Holmes, Mahoning, Licking, Stark, Medina, Warren, and Morgan counties.

Miller writes about the January 6, 2005 Electoral challenge from Ohio Representative Stephonie Tubbs-Jones and California Senator Barbara Boxer. He decries its rejection by the Congress and the press, with the Republicans calling the Democrats “troublemakers and cynical manipulators”, etc., etc.

According to Miller, “all this commentary was simply wrong” and “went unnoticed and/or unreported;” and with Bush’s re-inauguration “all inquiries were apparently concluded, and the story was officially kaput.” Miller emphasizes that, even after the National Election Data Archive Project, on March 31, 2005, “released its study demonstrating that the exit polls had probably been right, it made news only in the Akron Beacon-Journal,” while “the thesis that the exit polls were flawed had been reported by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Columbus Dispatch, CNN.com, MSNBC, and ABC..”

In conclusion, Mark Crispin Miller does not expect to reverse the 2004 election, but to make it possible for us to move on, and achieve real electoral reform.

…The point of our revisiting the last election.. is to see exactly what the damage was so that the people can demand appropriate reforms… for there has never been a great reform that was not driven by some major scandal.

...In this nation’s epic struggle on behalf of freedom, reason, and democracy, the press has unilaterally disarmed—and therefore many good Americans, both liberal and conservative, have lost faith in the promise of self-government. That vast surrender is demoralizing, certainly, but if we face it, and endeavor to reverse it, it will not prove fatal. This democracy can survive a plot to hijack an election. What it cannot survive is our indifference to, or unawareness of, the evidence that such a plot has succeeded.

The piece on which this summary is based was originally published in Harper's (http://harpers.org). Mark Crispin Miller is a professor at New York University, a political/media commentator, and author of his latest book, Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the Election of 2004, and Why They Will Keep Doing It Unless We StopThem, which will be published by Basic Books this October.

BUSH'S SUPREME COURT NOMINEE

2005-07-22T23:48:00.000-07:00

Confirmation Path May Run Through Florida
Roberts' low-profile role as an advisor to Republicans during the 2000 presidential recount fight is likely to be closely scrutinized.

By Peter Wallsten, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — As the 2000 presidential recount battle raged in Florida, a Washington lawyer named John G. Roberts Jr. traveled to Tallahassee, the state capital, to dispense legal advice.

He operated in the shadows at least some of those 37 days, never signing a legal brief and rarely making an appearance at the makeshift headquarters for George W. Bush's legal team.

But now Roberts has been selected for the very Supreme Court that put Bush into office by settling the recount, chosen by the president to replace the swing vote in that 5-4 decision. And his work in Florida during that time is coming into focus, giving critics some ammunition to paint a respected jurist with an apparently unblemished legal career as an ideological partisan.

Republican lawyers who worked on the recount said Wednesday that Roberts advised Gov. Jeb Bush on the role that the governor and the Florida Legislature might play in the recount battle. At the time, when GOP officials feared that Democrat Al Gore might win a recount battle in court, Republican state lawmakers were devising a plan to use their constitutional power to assign the state's electoral votes to George W. Bush — a proposal criticized by Democrats.

Responding to questions Wednesday about Roberts' role in Florida, a spokesman for Gov. Bush's office said that Roberts had been recommended to the governor, although the spokesman gave no further specifics, and that the two had not known each other until the recount. Miami trial lawyer Dean Colson, who met Roberts when both were law clerks for Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and who was best man at Roberts' wedding, is also close personally with Gov. Bush.

"Mr. Roberts, one of the preeminent constitutional attorneys in the country, came to Florida in 2000 at his own expense and met with Gov. Bush to share what he believed the governor's responsibilities were under federal law after a presidential election and a presidential election under dispute," said the spokesman, Jacob DiPietre. "Judge Roberts was one of several experts who came to Florida to share their ideas. The governor appreciated his willingness to serve and valued his counsel."

DiPietre went on to call Roberts "a man of integrity" who "personifies the qualities of an outstanding jurist with his even temper and respectful demeanor."

Critics, though, were quick to say that Roberts' role in the 2000 election, however minor, suggested that he was not merely the bookish legal scholar described by his supporters.

"What's interesting is that only now is it coming to the fore that John Roberts was part of that," said Ralph G. Neas, president of the liberal group People for the American Way. "He always created an impression of being above the political fray, being part of the Washington legal establishment, but not of partisan politics."

Neas said Roberts' involvement in the recount was not necessarily a reason for senators to oppose his nomination, because many well-known legal scholars on both sides were called into service during the Bush-Gore fight.

And Roberts had only a bit part, compared with higher-profile players such as Florida's then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who was subsequently elected to Congress, and Gov. Bush, the Republican presidential candidate's younger brother.

But, Neas added, coupled with Roberts' past work in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, the recount could become a factor.

"This is a legitimate area of inquiry: How partisan is he?" Neas asked.

It is not clear how much time Roberts spent in Tallahassee or what exactly he told the governor. Lawyers and others who worked on the Bush campaign's behalf said Wednesday that they had little, if any, recollection of Roberts from that period.

U.S. Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.), then speaker of Florida's House of Representatives, said his legal team originated the idea of having the Legislature vote on assigning the state's presidential electors. The rationale was a constitutional provision that lets state lawmakers decide how electors are chosen, but Feeney said he had no memory of Roberts. He said the House was advised by in-house lawyers and scholars from UC Berkeley and Harvard University.

"I have no recollection of meeting Judge Roberts, either before or after" the recount, Feeney said. "Despite the common mythology that Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush and myself were in some secret room every night making plans, a House attorney came up with the idea within 24 hours of the election. It was us who started that whole deal, in the House."

One Republican lawyer who worked on the case in Florida said he recalled seeing Roberts only once during the recount, not at one of the bars or restaurants that were mobbed every night with lawyers and journalists, but in the legal team's office at state GOP headquarters a few blocks from the Capitol.

The lawyer said that although Roberts was not a part of the official Bush-Cheney team, it was not surprising to see him in Tallahassee.

"Every great constitutional scholar in America on both sides wanted to play a role," said the lawyer, who requested anonymity, citing the sensitivity of Roberts' pending confirmation hearings. "And we tried to get everybody to play a role."

Three years later, President Bush nominated Roberts to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. His position on that court, often a steppingstone to the Supreme Court, paved the way for Tuesday's announcement, the culmination of Roberts' legal career.

Feeney, a conservative, speculated that Senate Democrats might well ask Roberts for his view of the Bush-Gore recount outcome. But he advised Roberts to duck.

"I don't know that there is any political benefit to answering that question," Feeney said.

UIC Prof's Statistical Analysis Casts Doubt on '04 Election Result

2005-07-10T22:21:00.000-07:00

Chicago, IL 60607 July 4, 2005

By Gigi Wasz
Gazette news magazine, Chicago

A University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) professor recently issued a report calling into question the results of the 2004 presidential election.

In the 30-plus page report, Ron Baiman, PhD, of UIC's Institute of Government and Public Affairs, along with eleven other colleagues from other prestigious universities, applied quantitative data to explain the discrepancy between exit poll projections and votes actually recorded in the November election and to understand the analysis given by Edison Media Research & Mitofsky International (E/M), the pollster of record for the national election.

E/M's poll projections predicted a win for Democrat John Kerry by 3%, however, when votes were tallied, Republican President George W. Bush was given the win by 2.5%-the largest discrepancy in the poll's history. In its post-election analysis and report, E/M discredited its own poll projections, claiming the official vote was not corrupted and that "Kerry voters were more amenable to completing the poll questionnaire than Bush voters."

"Using their (E/M's) data tables, we demonstrated that their hypothesis of outspoken Kerry supporters is implausible," explained Baiman. "If the polls were faulty because Bush voters were shy in the presence of Kerry voters and less likely to cooperate with pollsters, the polls should be the most accurate in the precincts where Bush voters were in the overwhelming majority and where exit poll participation was also at its maximum. What we find is just the opposite. In fact, the mean exit poll discrepancy was dramatically higher in Bush strongholds than in Kerry strongholds."

Baiman and his research team then set out to explain the discrepancy between the national exit poll and the official vote. They initially targeted random chance or exit poll errors. Said Baiman, "There have been several methods to estimate the probability that the national exit polls would be as different as they were from the national popular vote by random chance. These estimates range from one in 1,240 to one in 16.5 million. No matter how one calculates it, the discrepancy cannot be attributed to chance."

National research shows "exit polling is a well developed science, informed by half a century of experience and continually improving methodology," Baiman explained. For example, E/M samples voters not only for the nationwide exit poll but for each state's exit poll. Furthermore, the research team found that the same exit polls accurately projected U.S. Senate races; both the Presidential and Senate poll results are derived from the exact same responders.

"If Bush supporters were refusing to fill out the survey as hypothesized, the accuracy of the exit polls should have been just as poor in the Senate races as it was in the Presidential race," the research team charged in its report.

According to Baiman, by ruling out random chance and exit poll errors, the only other logical explanation would be that the official vote was corrupted. In its executive summary, the group's report states, "the many anecdotal reports of voting irregularities create a context in which the possibility that the overall vote count was substantially corrupted must be taken seriously." The report concludes by calling for a thorough investigation and a "careful, exhaustive recount in key states."

"Our goal is to raise awareness of the exit poll problems and to highlight the need for broad election reform," commented Baiman. "The fact that Edison/Mitofsky has not released its raw data, which would facilitate independent corroboration of its analysis, is problematic. The biggest problem is not what Edison/Mitofsky has concluded, but the fact that it is sitting on its substantive analysis and data and not allowing any other independent party to look at it. That this is allowed to continue is a national and media disgrace."

According to a website dedicated to investigating the 2004 Presidential election, www.bushoccupation.com, "To believe that Bush won the election, you must also believe: that the exit polls were wrong; that Zogby's [a traditionally accurate pollster] 5 p.m. election day calls for Kerry winning Ohio and Florida were wrong...; that incumbent rule #1-undecideds break for the challenger-was wrong; that the 50% rule-an incumbent doesn't do better than his final polling-was wrong; that the approval rating rule-an incumbent with less than 50% approval will most likely lose the election-was wrong; that it was just a coincidence that the exit polls were correct where there was a paper trail and incorrect (+5% for Bush) where there was no paper trail; that the surge in new young voters had no positive effect for Kerry; that Kerry did worse than (Al) Gore against an opponent who lost the support of scores of Republican newspapers who were for Bush in 2000...."

To learn more about the election analysis by Baiman and his team of professionals, contact Baiman at rbaiman@uic.edu.

GAO Releases First of Scheduled Election Reports

2005-06-27T19:52:00.000-07:00

Elections: Additional Data Could Help State and Local Elections Officials Maintain Accurate Voter Registration Lists, GAO-05-478, June 10, 2005

Highlights-PDF PDF Accessible Text

Reports of ineligible persons registering to vote raised concerns about state processes for verifying voter registration lists. States base voter eligibility generally on the voter's age, U.S. citizenship, mental competence, and felon status. Although states run elections, Congress has authority to affect the administration of elections. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) sets a deadline for states to have a statewide voter registration list and list verification procedures. For this report, GAO selected seven states (AZ, CA, MI, NY, TX, VA, and WI) to represent a range of characteristics relevant to voter registrations, such as whether a statewide voter list existed prior to HAVA. This report discusses how these states verify voter registration eligibility; the challenges they face in maintaining accurate voter lists; the progress toward implementing HAVA registration requirements; and identifies federal data sources that might be used to help verify voter registration eligibility.

The methods used in seven selected states to verify voter eligibility and ensure accuracy of voter registration lists were varied and include relying on registrant self attestation, return mailings, and checking against lists of felony convictions or deceased individuals. Election officials from the selected states described some challenges that may be resolved when HAVA is fully implemented, such as reducing duplicates within the state. Other challenges--identifying duplicate registrations in other states or having insufficient information to match other data sources with voter registration lists--may continue to be issues. The seven states are in different phases of implementing HAVA statewide voter registration lists and eligibility verification requirements. Arizona implemented its statewide voter list by the January 1, 2004, deadline, and the other six states applied for a January 1, 2006, waiver. Of those six states, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin awarded contracts to develop new voter lists that are designed to address HAVA requirements. Michigan has had a statewide list since 1998, and officials believe it is near HAVA compliant. California election officials are still considering how to meet these HAVA requirements, and in New York, legislation was passed in May 2005 to create the state voter registration lists. Federal data sources have the potential to help state election officials identify registrants who may be convicted felons or non-citizens. While the potential number identified may be small, an election can be decided by a few votes. Regarding felons, U.S. Attorneys are required to notify state election officials of federal felony convictions, but the information was not always easy for election officials to interpret or complete. Federal jury services generally do not now, but might feasibly be able to notify elections officials when potential jurors drawn from local voter registration lists claim to be non-citizens.

Congress called on to fix problems

2005-06-21T20:57:00.000-07:00

By ANN McFEATTERS
BLADE WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF

WASHINGTON — Nearly five years after the 2000 election chaos, angry citizen groups are still storming Capitol Hill demanding change, task forces and special commissions are still churning out reports on fraud, and lawmakers are still vowing “never again” will America show the world elections marred by voting irregularities.

Because of the widespread lack of confidence in the vote count of 2000, two years later Congress passed the Help America Vote Act and appropriated $3 billion to improve the system.

But that was followed by the voting problems of 2004, which resulted in long lines at some polling stations, thousands of discarded challenged ballots, and massive confusion in many precincts. There were more hearings in Congress and more studies and commissions on how to reform the way America votes.

The problems with voting machines, voting procedures, identification, and timing of elections have spawned an industry of election-reform experts who have set up Web sites, newsletters, activist groups, and lobbying efforts all in the pursuit of change.

Dozens of states have voted for or are considering hundreds of proposals for change. At the federal level there is enormous confusion and disagreement on what should be done.

Advocates for change argue that if nothing is done this year, congressional elections could take place in an atmosphere of suspicion with a lack of voter participation.

This past week a task force of state and local election officials released a 72-page report of recommendations for change, such as scrapping neighborhood precincts and the quadrennial first-Tuesday-in-November Election Day. Instead, “vote centers” would be set up where voters could cast their ballots over a period of weeks.

In mid September another commission, headed by former president Jimmy Carter and former secretary of state James Baker, is to report to the nation on its findings of what election reforms are needed. It is considering recommendations involving voting machines, timing of elections, how people vote - perhaps by mail or on the Internet - and how better to train poll workers.

From June 9 to 14, lobbyists are spreading out over Capitol Hill urging lawmakers to require that all electronic machine voting have a voter-verified paper trail to reassure voters their ballots are cast and counted.

Of more than a dozen proposals pending on Capitol Hill, many say that restoring a paper trail is the most likely to pass. Proponents say electronic voting has moved the country away from transparent elections. David Dill, a professor of computer science at Stanford University, told the Carter-Baker commission in April that paperless ballots mean voters "have no means to confirm that that the machines have recorded their votes correctly, nor will they have any assurance that their votes won't be changed later."

Despite the argument that the nation has been slow to change voting procedures, big changes are coming. By January all states are required by the 2002 law to have computerized, state-wide databases of registered voters. But a survey by electionline,org, a nonpartisan, nonadvocacy Web site that gathers information on election reform, said that every state's database will be different. Some will be good, some won't, and some won't be ready.

Another new provision of the law that will go into effect in less than seven months will require states that use voting machines to have technological and accessibility standards. But everyone agrees enormous problems remain there too.

For example, Ohio has gone through a years-long battle between county election boards and the secretary of state over everything from the type of voting machines to buy, to who pays for providing the new machines with paper trails, to the weight of ballot paper.

The report by the National Association of Election Officials this past week predicted the new provisions of the law will not be enforced as they should be. It said many problems in 2004 stemmed from an "unrealistic" expectation that an underfunded federal law, way behind schedule, would provide uniformity.

The report said there will be "substantial difficulty" meeting the January deadlies.

Jeffrey Zaino, vice president for the American Arbitration Association's department of elections, oversees hundreds of elections every year for unions, associations, colleges, and corporations. He said technology is not the big problem but inadequate or improper training for 1.4 million Election Day volunteers at 198,000 polling places.

He admits it is not easy to solve. Most Election Day workers only report for duty once or twice a year. And many have little computer experience.

At the federal level, The Century Fund, which co-sponsored the National Commission on Election Reform after the 2000 election, co-chaired by former presidents Gerald Ford and Carter, reports the 2002 law is not working as it should. Worse, the Century Fund said the 2004 election revealed "a deeply flawed voting system that in many ways has become more complicated and prone to abuse" than in 2000 because the new law led to more obstacles in voting.

Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said "tens of thousands" of voters still contact his office to express anger that "once again, their vote did not count." He held a hearing specifically on widespread 2004 problems in Ohio. President Bush received 286 electoral votes, 16 more than the 270 needed to win. Without Ohio, he would not have won.

Mr. Conyers insists most Americans want "real election reform," but he is not encouraged, saying congressional Republicans and Democrats remain far apart.

"Unless we act, the next close election will prompt the same debates and public confidence in our democracy will suffer a potentially fatal blow," Mr. Conyers told constituents.

Mr. Zaino, who has overseen thousands of private elections for 15 years, says that in a nation where the presidential election was decided in a state (Ohio) that has some counties that still use punch cards and where a major swing state (Pennsylvania) still has one-fourth of its voters using old-fashioned optical scanning machines, major changes probably won't occur until Congress gets more involved.

Test shows voter fraud is possible

2005-06-12T21:19:00.000-07:00

Machines are vulnerable to manipulation

By Tony Bridges

All it takes is the right access.

Get that, and an election worker could manipulate voting results in the computers that read paper ballots - without leaving any digital fingerprints.

That was the verdict after Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho invited a team of researchers to look for holes in election software.

The group wasn't able to crack the Diebold system from outside the office. But, at the computer itself, they changed vote tallies, completely unrecorded.

Sancho said it illustrates the need for tight physical security, as well as a paper trail that can verify results, which the Legislature has rejected.

Black Box Voting, the non-profit that ran the test and published a report on the Internet, pointed to the findings as proof of an elections system clearly vulnerable to corruption.

But state officials in charge of overseeing elections pooh-poohed the test process and dismissed the group's report.

"Information on a blog site is not viable or credible," said Jenny Nash, a spokeswoman for the Department of State.

It went like this:

Sancho figured Leon County's security could withstand just about any sort of probing and wanted to prove it.

He went to one of the most skeptical - and vocal - watchdogs of election procedures. Bev Harris, founder of Black Box Voting, had experience with voting machines across the country.

She recruited two computer-security experts and made the trip to Tallahassee from her home in Washington state three times between February and late May.

Leon County is one of 30 counties in Florida that use Diebold optical scanners. Voters darken bubbles on a sheet of paper, sort of like filling in the answers on the SAT, and the scanners read them and add up the numbers.

So the task was simple. Get in, tamper with vote numbers, and get out clean.

They made their first attempts from outside the building. No success.

Then, they sat down at the vote-counting computers, the sort of access to the machines an employee might have. For the crackers, security protocols were no problem, passwords unnecessary.

They simply went around them.

After that, the security experts accomplished two things that should not have been possible.

They made 65,000 votes disappear simply by changing the real memory card - which stores the numbers - for one that had been altered.

And, while the software is supposed to create a record whenever someone makes changes to data stored in the system, it showed no evidence they'd managed to access and change information.

When they were done, they printed the poll tapes. Those are paper records, like cash register tape, that show the official numbers on the memory cards.

Two tapes, with different results. And the only way to tell the fake one?

At the bottom, it read, "Is this real? Or is it Memorex?"

"That was troubling," Sancho said.

Leon County more secure

A disaster?

Not exactly.

In Leon County, access to the machines is strictly controlled, limited to a single employee. The memory cards are kept locked away, and they're tracked by serial number.

Those precautions help prevent any tampering.

"You've got to have security over the individual who's accessing the system," Sancho said. In fact, "you've got to have good security and control over every step of this process."

The trouble is, not every county is as closely run.

In Volusia County, her group has found what they think was memory-card tampering during the 2000 election. More than 16,000 votes for Al Gore vanished.

Harris said her research turned up memos - obtained from the elections supervisor's office - that blamed the failure on an extra memory card that showed up, and disappeared, without explanation.

She believes that was an attempt to change the outcome of the election, but one carried out clumsily. The test in Leon County proved it was possible, if done by more experienced computer programmers, she said.

So what does the Department of State say?

Nash, the spokeswoman, said that the Diebold systems were designed to be used in secure settings, and that, by giving the testers direct access to the computers, Sancho had basically allowed them to bypass security.

In other words, not much of a test.

Except that the security experts were given only as much opportunity as any other election worker would have. Less so, considering that Sancho did not provide them with passwords or any other way to actually get into the programming.

As for the exact vulnerabilities that Harris reported - and Sancho confirmed - Nash said no one from the state could comment, since they hadn't been present at the test.

She added later that Sancho could request help from state certifiers if he had concerns, but had not asked yet.

Help stop irregularities in voting

2005-06-01T20:12:00.000-07:00

By Carol McBrian

On March 31, a group of university statisticians led by Josh Mitteldorf of Temple University issued a troubling report.

They noted that while President Bush officially won by 2.5 percent of the popular vote, the exit polls showed John Kerry winning by 3 percent. According to the statisticians, the chances of a discrepancy this large are close to 1 in a million.

Exit polls have proved to be exceptionally accurate in the U.S., in Ukraine, in Latin America and elsewhere. The 2004 discrepancy, like that of the invalid Ukraine election, was five times the usual discrepancy, a significant difference. The statisticians' report concludes that this discrepancy "is an unanswered question of vital national importance that needs thorough investigation."

Alarming as this information may be, it came as no surprise to those of us familiar with the work of Bev Harris, the Web-surfing grandmother whose book, "Black Box Voting," gives example after example of abuses by the voting machine industry, all meticulously documented:

In 2002, voting machines said Jerry Mayo lost his race for commissioner of Clay County, Kan. However, a manual recount found he had won with 76 percent of the vote.

In 2000, an optical scanning machine in an Iowa county was fed 300 ballots, but reported 4 million votes. "We don't have 4 million voters in the state of Iowa," one auditor commented.

In 1996, Chuck Hagel, an executive with the AIS voting machine company, left his job two weeks before entering the Nebraska Senate race - which was counted by AIS. Hagel never disclosed this connection, which was finally discovered shortly before Hagel's re-election in 2002.

When Hagel's opponent asked for a vote audit and offered to pay for it, he was told that there was "no provision in the law" for such an audit.

These examples don't cover the worst possibility - corruption in a paperless electronic machine where there is no way to check the original ballots.

In response to these and other abuses, voting reform groups have sprung up around the nation, including the Eugene group Truth in Voting. We are trying to get election reform legislation passed before the 2006 elections.

Our members have studied and discussed the various voting reform bills. We also considered the recommend- ations of the Verified Voting Web site, which is dedicated to obtaining voter-verified paper ballots for all state and national elections involving electronic voting machines.

Our favorite bill was the Count Every Vote Act, introduced by Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y. This far-reaching bill has provisions for preventing conflict of interest from voting machine companies; creating consistent, transparent standards for states wishing to purge voter rolls; providing special machines for disabled voters; and requiring voter-verified paper ballots.

The scope of this bill would make it costly and difficult to implement by 2006 - so we decided to put our support behind the bills recommended by Verified Voting.

In the House, we are supporting the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act. It contains many of the provisions of the Count Every Vote Act, but does not address purging voter rolls, and it has less ambitious provisions for disabled voters. Still, it is a good bill, with 134 co-sponsors, including our own Rep. Peter DeFazio.

In the Senate, we support the Voter Integrity and Verification Act, which would require a voter-verified paper ballot and mandate that it be the ballot of record in the case of any audits or recounts. That is all it would do. However, this bill has the best chance of coming to the Senate floor, where senators could propose amendments to address other election issues.

Free elections are a cornerstone of our democracy. But when our votes are not accurately counted, our elections lose their meaning. These bills would increase the accuracy and integrity of our elections.

Encourage Sens. Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith to co-sponsor the Voter Integrity and Verification Act. Thank DeFazio for co-sponsoring Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act. Log onto our Web site (www .truthinvoting.org) to learn more.

Truth in Voting was formed in response to the many reports of irregularities in last November's election. Our mission is "to reform our voting system, nationwide ... by ensuring ... the right of all citizens to equal, unimpeded access to voting (and) that all votes are cast on paper ballots, and counted in a public, transparent, accurate and verifiable way."

Balloting Irregularities

2005-05-30T20:56:00.000-07:00

John Brakey insists there was fraud at one precinct during November's election--and he has evidence backing him up

By DAVE DEVINE

Pacing as he talks, John Brakey believes he has uncovered serious problems with November's election results in Pima County--results that could have national implications.
Brakey admits he was a Democratic Party poll watcher who was escorted from his own precinct. But after six months of extensive research, Brakey is convinced what he saw on Election Day was voter fraud.

He accuses some of the people who worked at his polling place of stealing votes for George Bush. "These people knew exactly how the system works. I know those people were in there doing bad things," Brakey says.

Contacted by Brakey the day after Election Day, Pima County's director of elections, Brad Nelson, looked into the complaint. "There were four Republicans and three Democrats working at the polling place," Nelson says, "and I spoke to as many of them as I could. They have all attested in writing ... that everything was fine."

Acknowledging the poll workers did make errors in how they handled both the balloting and bookkeeping processes, Nelson indicates that some of them won't be asked back for future elections. Then he adds: "There were bookkeeping problems, but I can't find anything to substantiate irregularities that affected the outcome of the election."

After countless hours of research, Brakey ardently disagrees. He thinks poll workers obtained ballots by marking "spoiled" on some valid ballots and then casting their own choices as replacements.

Brakey also believes several people who requested early ballots but came to the precinct on Election Day had their "provisional" ballots manipulated there. Based on the records he has, Brakey additionally insists that other votes were cast by poll workers who covered up the act by making it appear people who didn't vote actually did.

Scattered across Brakey's dining room table are stacks of election documents for his precinct. He has entered all the data into a computer that allows him to track the voters. "The county looks at numbers," he emphasizes, "but I looked at names."

Once the alleged problems are meticulously explained, with the paperwork carefully examined, it makes for a strong argument that well more than 10 percent of the almost 900 votes from Brakey's polling place were questionably handled. It was a very busy day at the precinct, but the irregularities are glaring.

Among numerous categories of problems, several stand out. Thirty-nine questionable "provisional" ballots were apparently improperly placed into the optical-scan vote-counting machine instead of being sent to the Pima County Recorder's Office for verification. In addition, while the poll workers certified there were 59 provisional ballots cast, only 53 people actually signed as having done so.

The list of problems grows longer. Some voters' names appear twice on the official roster of those who showed up on Election Day, indicating they were given two ballots. Precinct records also indicate that several people were provided a second ballot because they spoiled the first one, but Brakey says he has contacted a handful of these people--and they deny it happened. Based on that, he believes poll workers cast at least some of these second votes.

Nineteen people also didn't sign in at the precinct, but according to the polling place paper trail, a few of them did cast ballots there. Others from this same list aren't shown as voting by the recorder's office, but claim they did. One person in this latter category, when contacted by phone by the Weekly, was positive she did vote in November.

For those who did not sign in on Election Day but had a ballot given out in their name, it's possible someone else may have gotten it. An example is a Libertarian voter who didn't sign in, and is not shown as voting by the Pima County Recorder. Her name, however, appears on the roster, prepared by poll workers, of those who actually received ballots--but she is mistakenly listed as a Republican.

When asked to explain this particular discrepancy, Nelson replies: "I have to fall back on what the board workers told me. But that absolutely should not happen."

Brakey thinks this process was intended both to create votes for George Bush and to switch some intended for John Kerry to Bush. "It was all part of a strategy," he says, "with the intent to convert enough Democratic votes to Republican to win the (national) popular vote."

Not satisfied with his own analysis, Brakey hooked up with David Griscom, a 33-year employee of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., before his retirement to Tucson last year. Reviewing the precinct results statistically, Griscom says he found the data supports Brakey's views.

"There was fraud," Griscom insists after trying to mathematically reconstruct what happened at the polling place. "I think the poll workers arbitrarily picked some innocent people and were in cahoots with other voters."

These serious allegations were turned over to the Pima County Attorney's office. After an investigation, the case was recently closed, based in part on Nelson's written assertion that he found "the integrity of the November 2, 2004 General Election at (the) Precinct sound and reliable."

Brakey remains undeterred, saying of the county election's director: "He's a bureaucrat and wants this swept under the rug."

Even though John Kerry received only 1 percent less of the precinct's votes than Al Gore did in 2000, Brakey continues to believe there was foul play involved last year.

"No way was this gross error," he insists. "The only way you screw things up this bad is you have to plan. It was methodically planned out. But if it was gross error, we have a pretty bad system, and your vote is a joke."

The Edison/Mitofsky report and the theory of the shy republican

2005-05-18T20:52:00.000-07:00

The Huffington Post

Byron York has treated me fairly and without rancor, and I am grateful for that. Certainly I am more in his wheelhouse than mine, and I’m honored that he saw fit to engage me in this little set-to we’ve conducted since Monday. I fired a lead right, Rep. John Conyers shouted encouragement from my corner, then York delivered a hook to the body. I shot back an uppercut, then he loaded up a right hand and attempted to bring an end to the discussion.

Byron York’s most recent refutation of my charge that irregularities in the 2004 Presidential election demand criminal investigation cites quotes from the report of Edison/Mitofsky, the two-company partnership which provided exit polls to the major television networks, on the vast discrepancies between those polls and the official results of the election. The report, which Mr. York has helpfully highlighted in his second post and which runs to about eighty pages, essentially offered the conclusion that an five-and-a-half point gap between final poll numbers and the national popular vote tabulation-- a variance more than four times the statistical margin for error of 1.3%-- can be attributed to shy Republicans. The Washington Post summarized the conclusion: "procedural problems compounded by the refusal of large numbers of Republican voters to be surveyed led to inflated estimates of support for John Kerry." With this, in effect, York dismisses the exit poll variance argument.

I could go on at length here about the curious disconnect between the actual data in the report and its guesswork conclusion, how Edison/Mitofsky systematically validate all their sampling choices and their methodology, in effect eliminating any logical underpinnings for their ultimate summation, all the while selectively ignoring the lopsided skewing of pro-Bush discrepancies in the most critical swing states. I could spend some time dissecting what I believe is an obvious whitewash, a delicate sidestep away from the potential public relations disaster of being tied forever to the most notorious election theft in history.

But none of that is necessary, because the entire Edison/Mitofsky report is irrelevant to the argument, given that it is based on the assumption the final official vote tally is accurate. Make no mistake: my argument is that the final official vote tally is anything but accurate, that it is the product of massive vote fraud carried out through the programing of Diebold voting machines and various other machinations aimed at suppressing, destroying or losing Kerry votes. My argument is that what were accurate were the exit polls. As one Ivy League research methodologist has noted, "Apparently the pollsters at Mitofsky and Edison have found it more expedient to provide an explanation unsupported by theory, data or precedent than to impugn the machinery of American democracy."

Various statisticians have reported that the odds on the occurrence of variances from exit polls to actual results such as were produced in this election range up to 959 000 to 1. Sounds like DNA. As US Count Votes notes in a statistical abstract, "No matter how one calculates it, the discrepancy cannot be attributed to chance."

So let me put it in Foxspeak. If all the circumstantial evidence related to potential vote fraud in this election were gathered up into one big file for the Scott Peterson jury, they’d convict. The jury that might look at all this and acquit? O.J. Simpson. Politics make strange bedfellows.

The GOP's Attack On Voting Rights

2005-05-15T21:07:00.000-07:00

Rep. John Conyers Jr.
May 13, 2005

190: The number of days since Election 2004 and the second consecutive presidential election in which the integrity of this nation’s democracy was questioned. This past November, this country witnessed a flawed election process in which there were biased election officials, overt voter suppression tactics and improper ballot counts and recounts. We know too well the stories about the illegal demands for voter identification, the voting machine shortages, the voting machine malfunctions and the improperly disqualified provisional ballots. More than six months after the election, now is the time to ensure that our second very sad election in a row does not become a third. There is agreement in America that real election reform is necessary and a consensus and focus is needed to guarantee such election reform.

12: A conservative count of the number of election reform proposals currently pending in Congress. While we must continue to assess and debate the accounts of Election 2004 improprieties and irregularities for the sake of history and truth, we must move forward. We need to come to agreement on what election reform should encompass and pursue that agenda with a single-minded focus. The Republicans have made clear the parameters of an election reform bill they will advance this Congress—one that does nothing or even takes us backwards by imposing onerous new requirements on voters. As we go back and forth on paper ballot or no paper ballot and assign ourselves to the pro-theft camp or the anti-theft camp, are we devoting the same energy to developing a consensus about what must be done to reform elections?

22: The number of times the phrase "voter identification" or "voter ID" was said at the first Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform hearing on April 18, 2005. The mantra of Republicans is that dogs, dead people, and cartoon characters are allowed to cast fraudulent votes. Republicans are advancing that strict voter identification requirements are the means to eliminate such voter fraud and state legislators are passing voter identification legislation as fast as they can with little debate or delay. In recent months, Indiana and Georgia have enacted voter identification requirements that have been characterized as some of the most severe and unreasonable voter identification requirements in the country. Several other state legislatures have similar legislation pending. At this first Carter-Baker Commission hearing, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Barbara Arnwine told of the real-world consequences of these measures: More than 10 percent of eligible voters currently lack government-issued photo ID, and would be arbitrarily disenfranchised.

6: The number of days the American Center for Voting Rights, a new, "non-partisan," "voting rights" organization, had been in existence before it was called to testify by Republican members of Congress before a House Administration Committee hearing on March 22. The American Center for Voting Rights was formed by a lawyer for the Bush-Cheney campaign and the notoriously anti-voting rights Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri, who described the group as a non-partisan, voting rights advocacy group. He testified and submitted a report on Ohio election irregularities, which highlighted the Mary Poppins Conspiracy in this country. If you haven't heard about it, the Mary Poppins Conspiracy consists of many, many ineligible voters—using the names Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and Jive F. Turkey—fraudulently voting in elections.

Unfortunately for advocates of this conspiracy theory, a precinct has yet to report that a citizen by the name of Mary Poppins showed up on Election Day and voted. Searches for Dick Tracy votes and Jive F. Turkey votes have also come up empty.

598: The number of days left in the 109th Congress to pass election reform legislation. The debate over whether voting machines were hacked or there was deliberate suppression of minority votes will continue. We should all agree—given the shoddy, unaccountable and unverifiable state of our election machinery and procedures—that, unless we act, the next close election will prompt the same debates and public confidence in our democracy will suffer a potentially fatal blow. Of even more importance, we must be vigilant as Republicans try to roll our voting rights backwards.

The Biggest Story of Our Lives

2005-05-11T20:35:00.000-07:00

The Huffington Post

At 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on Election Day, I checked the sportsbook odds in Las Vegas and via the offshore bookmakers to see the odds as of that moment on the Presidential election. John Kerry was a two-to-one favorite. You can look it up.

People who have lived in the sports world as I have, bettors in particular, have a feel for what I am about to say about this: these people are extremely scientific in their assessments. These people understand which information to trust and which indicators to consult in determining where to place a dividing line to influence bets, and they are not in the business of being completely wrong. Oddsmakers consulted exit polling and knew what it meant and acknowledged in their oddsmaking at that moment that John Kerry was winning the election.

And he most certainly was, at least if the votes had been fairly and legally counted. What happened instead was the biggest crime in the history of the nation, and the collective media silence which has followed is the greatest fourth-estate failure ever on our soil.

Many of the participants in this blog have graduate school educations. It is damned near impossible to go to graduate school in any but the most artistic disciplines without having to learn about the basics of social research and its uncanny accuracy and validity. We know that professionally conceived samples simply do not yield results which vary six, eight, ten points from eventual data returns, thaty's why there are identifiable margins for error. We know that margins for error are valid, and that results have fallen within the error range for every Presidential election for the past fifty years prior to last fall. NEVER have exit polls varied by beyond-error margins in a single state, not since 1948 when this kind of polling began. In this past election it happened in ten states, all of them swing states, all of them in Bush's favor. Coincidence? Of course not.

Karl Rove isn't capable of conceiving and executing such a grandiose crime? Wake up. They did it. The silence of traditional media on this subject is enough to establish their newfound bankruptcy. The revolution will have to start here. I challenge every other thinker at the Huffington Post: is there any greater imperative than to reverse this crime and reestablish democracy in America? Why the mass silence? Let's go to work with the circumstantial evidence, begin to narrow from the outside in, and find some witnesses who will turn. That's how they cracked Watergate. This is bigger, and I never dreamed I would say that in my baby boomer lifetime.

Is the NIST Technical Guidelines Development Committee Working for You, the Voter?

2005-05-07T23:30:00.000-07:00

Voting Machine Rulemakers Poised to Violate Their Public Interest Mandate
by John Gideon
www.dissidentvoice.org
May 5, 2005

Should the makers of voting machines set the standards that their voting machines must live up to in order to satisfy the public interest? Though the answer is obviously “No”, a recent meeting of a technical subcommittee of the Election Assistance Commission shows that this is happening, yet the EAC may reveal these new standards, on or about July 1, coupled with a claim that they adequately protect the heart of democracy.

By way of background, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) was chartered by the Elections Assistance Commission to provide updated standards against which all voting machines will be tested in order to be qualified for use. Presently voting technology is qualified to standards that were written in 1990 or 2002. The charter instructs NIST to form a committee to be called the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC). This committee is to operate with guidance from the EAC charter and with funding coming from the EAC.

The TGDC has been holding public meetings as they go through the suggested standards they have developed for qualifying all voting systems. They are modifying or deleting suggested standards in order to have a finished product that will set the standards for the industry.

Among the guidelines laid out for this committee by the EAC charter is a requirement, in law, that the committee operate in the public interest. The seventh of the "Administrative Provisions" shows a concern by the EAC that there be no conflict of interest in the decision makers.

Given the “protections” against conflicts of interest and in favor of the public interest, we might expect good things to come out of the committee. However, reports from witnesses to the April 20/21 meeting of the TGDC are quite troubling. During discussions of voter verified paper audit trail requirements, Dr. Brit Williams, a member of the committee, stated that he opposes any new standards that would make technology already purchased non-compliant. Paul Craft, another member of the committee, then suggested that they hear from the vendor engineers who were in the audience to see what they would do about the proposed standards. At this point, Dr. Semerjian, the chairman of the committee and the Director of NIST, said that the TGDC is not in existence to approve existing voting systems, nor rubber stamp state decisions. The committee then went on a break.

Upon return from the break Paul Craft announced that he had talked to the vendors and that they did not like some of the standards. A vote was then held and those standards were deleted.

It is clear that the EAC charter is not being followed in that conflicts of interest are dictating the workings of this committee. It appears that this committee is not operating in the public interest, but in the interest of the vendors by dropping (and likely adding) items to achieve industry objectives.

It must be pointed out that Dr. Brit Williams and Paul Craft both have individual conflicts of interest. Dr. Williams has been an outspoken defender of DRE voting systems and has worked closely with Diebold as the company’s ally in Georgia. Dr. Williams was one of the architects of the voting system presently being used in Georgia. Can he be expected to approve standards that are counter to decisions that he has made in regards to the Georgia voting system?

As an official in the Florida Secretary of State’s office, Mr. Craft is a defender of DRE voting systems. He, like Dr. Williams, is constantly called on to defend the voting machines used in some Florida counties. Can he be expected to turn his back on decisions he has already supported in Florida?

Those who have conflicts of interest usually say they can still maintain objectivity, but the rules on conflicts of interest put no weight on those kinds of self-serving statements. It is apparent that, in appointing Dr. Williams and Mr. Craft to the committee, NASED "stacked the deck" with pro-industry partisans.

The committee's proceedings on April 20/21 reveal that the standards established by this committee will be heavily favorable to the voting machine industry and not necessarily what is in the public interest. What this committee is doing is tantamount to the federal government allowing the baby crib industry to write their own safety standards for cribs. If that had been done, poorly designed cribs would still be causing the deaths of thousands of babies every year.

How many times does democracy have to suffer before these committees learn that for democracy to thrive, they must follow the public interest; and the public’s interest alone?

(Author’s Note: This article was sent to both NIST and the EAC asking for their comments prior to release. Both organizations were given three days to respond and neither chose to accept the invitation.)

John Gideon is the Information Manager for VotersUnite.Org and VoteTrustUSA. VotersUnite! is a national non-partisan organization dedicated to fair and accurate elections. It focuses on distributing well-researched information to elections officials, elected officials, the media, and the public; as well as providing activists with information they need to work toward transparent elections in their communities. John can be reached at: jgideon@votersunite.org.

Debate on renewal of voting act heats up

2005-05-03T20:39:00.000-07:00

By Don Schanche Jr.

Telegraph Staff Writer

For 40 years, Georgia and most of the South, plus a few other states, have lived under a law that says they may not change their voting procedures without first getting approval called "preclearance" from the federal government.

The requirement is in Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, passed after civil rights workers were bloodied in Selma, Ala., as they challenged discriminatory laws that barred black people from the elections process.

But Section 5 and other special provisions of the Voting Rights Act will expire in 2007, unless Congress decides to renew them.

And already a debate is brewing over what Congress should do.

Civil rights activists are gathering testimony to show that racism still infects the election process, and the need for federal oversight remains.

"The persistence of racial bloc voting suggests to us we still need the remedy of the Voting Rights Act and the special provisions," said Debo Adegbile, associate director of litigation for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Last week, the Rev. Jesse Jackson promised to hold a national march in Atlanta on Aug. 6 to fight for reauthorization of those provisions.

But others say that even if the special provisions of the Voting Rights Act were needed 40 years ago, the South and the nation have outgrown them.

"There's no evidence the conditions in the covered states still require preclearance. You can expect a wholesale revision of Section 5 to go before Congress," said Phil Kent of Atlanta, former president of the conservative Southeastern Legal Foundation and one-time staffer for the late U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond.

Congress passed the Voting Rights Act to put teeth in the constitutional guarantee of the right to vote. Parts of that law - such as Section 2, which prohibits discrimination in voting procedures - are permanent and apply nationwide.

But Section 5, along with other special provisions governing the use of federal election monitors and special bilingual ballots for language minorities, are temporary.

Congress has renewed and strengthened them several times, most recently with a 25-year renewal in 1982.

Section 5 applies in all or parts of 16 states. Although most of them are in the South, portions of New York, California, Michigan and New Hampshire also fall under the act.

One thing, at least, is indisputable: The Voting Rights Act has revolutionized Georgia and the South.

Before the act was passed, you could count all of Georgia's black elected officials on one hand. Today, the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials counts more than 700 members. Georgia's legislative black caucus is the largest in the nation.

Dozens of Georgia cities and counties have seen their election systems overhauled under the Voting Rights Act to give minorities a better chance to elect representatives of their choice.

State Sen. Robert Brown, D-Macon, said, "There's no doubt in my mind that we would not have these numbers had it not been for the Voting Rights Act. You take it from there down to mayor, city council, school board - just a whole range of elected offices - and compare it to 45 years ago, and immediately see the value of the Voting Rights Act."

But what about Section 5, and its application to a limited number of states?

As freshman U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, R-Sharpsburg, sees it, the special provisions should be extended to cover the entire nation or done away with altogether.

"I think the Section 5 part of it either needs to affect everybody or nobody," Westmoreland said.

It's a sentiment echoed by others who chafe under the stigma of being singled out.

"I'm old enough to remember being preached at by some very sanctimonious Northeastern folks about how much we needed to be overseen by them and others," said Rogers Wade, president of the nonpartisan, conservative-leaning Georgia Public Policy Foundation. "If those laws are still necessary, then they ought to be shared with the rest of the country. And if they want to renew it, it should be renewed for all 50 states. Because our record in the South is much better in nearly every respect than any other region in the country."

Laughlin McDonald, of the American Civil Liberties Union's southern regional office, said that argument is a smokescreen for killing Section 5.

"The problem with the nationwide (proposal) is that it would be almost impossible to administer Section 5 because there would be hundreds of thousands of these things," he said. "There would be no way the Department of Justice could administer Section 5."

Another problem, McDonald said: It would mean extending a legal remedy to places that never had a problem. And if Congress were do do that, he said, the U.S. Supreme Court very likely would strike down the law.

Former Thurmond staffer Kent pointed out that the act requires preclearance of even minor changes, such as moving a polling place, and that most changes are routinely precleared.

"It shows the Section 5 coverage is too broad, and it's an enormous waste of time and resources," Kent said.

Adegbile of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Education Fund said the value of the preclearance requirement lies partly in what it prevents.

"That procedure deters many jurisdictions from proposing voting changes that are discriminatory in the first place," he said. "When policy-makers know their work is going to be reviewed, he said, they are "less likely to do something that is intentionally discriminatory or has retrogressive effects."

State Rep. Tyrone Brooks, D-Atlanta, said Georgia's recent General Assembly session provided evidence that preclearance is still essential. The state Legislature passed a law requiring voters to bring a photo ID to the polls. Republican supporters said it's aimed at stemming voter fraud. But Democrats and civil rights leaders protested that it will unduly hamper poor, black, elderly and rural voters. Under Section 5, the law won't go into effect until the U.S. Justice Department or a federal court approves it.

"It proves the point that the Voting Rights Act is critical, particularly to Southern states as far as these states moving the clock back," Brooks said.

Rep. John Lewis, D-Atlanta, fought for the Voting Rights Act with his own blood. He was among the marchers who were clubbed in Selma in 1965. He still bears the scars.

"I think there's a need to renew Section 5," he said. "We've made a lot of progress, there have been a lot of changes. But there is still progress to be made. It's been 40 years, but I think we still need preclearance and the sections that will expire in 2007 so we will not be tempted to go back."

Lewis said that although President Bush hasn't indicated which course he favors, the president recently demonstrated a distressing lack of knowledge about the issue. It happened a few months ago when members of the Congressional Black Caucus were meeting with the president. One of the congressmen asked Bush if he favored extending Section 5.

"He said he didn't know enough about it to make a comment on it," Lewis recalled. "I think the members of the Congress couldn't believe it. Because the president had been the governor of Texas, and Texas is one of the states covered by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. We all thought he should know something about the Voting Rights Act. ... It was unreal."

But Lewis said he is optimistic that the extension will find bipartisan support in Congress.

So is U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall, D-Macon.

"I would expect the next Congress will approve renewal of the Voting Rights Act without significant amendments," Marshall said. "Frankly, I'll be surprised if there's a big fight about this."

But Westmoreland said, "I think they'll either make Section 5 apply across the country or it'll be done away with, period."

Macon lawyer and conservative blogger Stephen Dillard said there's no question that Section 5 was needed 40 years ago.

But he asked, "How long do we maintain what the Department of Justice has referred to as 'extraordinary remedies'? ... What I would say is I think it's time for a lot of these provisions to go. You look at a town like Macon, the diversity at the local level, in terms of the types of people. You have men, women, white, black. You have the full spectrum of people from all sorts of racial and socioeconomic backgrounds who are now running the city and the county and the state and the country for that matter. Especially in the South. I think it's time to allow the new South to take hold. We are not the same South we used to be."

What Can We the People Do About Election Fraud?

2005-05-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

April 26, 2005 By Ernest Partridge, The Crisis Papers

During the two and a half years that The Crisis Papers has been on the web, we have posted hundreds of articles and links on our Election 2004 Fraud and Electoral Integrity pages. In addition I have written and published numerous essays about the issue, most recently just two weeks ago. On each occasion, I have received numerous letters telling me "I'm convinced that the elections are fraudulent," then asking, "now what can I do about it?"

Here is a partial answer. Partial, because if honest and verifiable elections are ever to return to the United States it will be because this question will be asked relentlessly by an outraged public.

Electoral integrity is arguably the most important political issue to face the American people since the founding of our democracy, as it raises the question of whether, in fact, we still have a democracy. For if, as the skeptics contend, the outcome of our federal elections are decided before a single vote is cast, then the government of the United States no longer "[derives] its just powers from the consent of the governed." Despite what we are told from Washington, or by the corporate media, this is not a government "of, by, and for the people."

The grounds for suspicion about the integrity of our elections are simple, straightforward, and undisputed. In federal elections, thirty percent of the votes are cast and eighty percent of the votes are regionally compiled in machines (a) utilizing secret software, (b) producing no independent record of the votes (e.g. paper trails), and (c) manufactured by active members and supporters of the Republican Party. In sum, the system in place is effectively designed, either deliberately or accidentally, to facilitate fraud.

Moreover, remedies for these shortcomings are readily available, and in fact, in use. These include (a) a requirement that software (source codes) be made public (as in Australia), and (b) production of a separate paper ballot to be inspected by the voter (as in Nevada). In addition, voting machines could be selected at random, during elections, and examined for accuracy. And central compiling could be done "in parallel" by two distinct and independent methodologies.
These black box voting machines now in use inevitably raise questions as to the legitimacy of the elections. For if the current system is as honest as the winners (i.e., the Republicans) tell us it is, why do they oppose these guarantees? Would not the winners want these suspicions to be put to rest? Why, then, do they doggedly oppose reforms that would validate the honesty of our elections? Causes one to wonder, does it not?

Add to this the accumulating evidence that our elections have in fact been fixed. This includes (a) anecdotal evidence from voters – e.g. malfunctioning screens, "lost" registrations, etc., (b) public demonstrations of simulated vote fraud, (for example, the CNBC demonstration by Bev Harris and Howard Dean – see here and here), (c) impossible and improbable vote totals – e.g. more votes reported than registered voters, and negative vote totals, (d) exit poll discrepancies – accurate polls in precincts with validated (e.g. paper) ballots, inaccurate polls in precincts with black box machine voting and all discrepancies favoring one candidate or party, and (e) statistical analyses of these anomalies.

Because the evidence of machine voting fraud has been extensively published elsewhere, I will not elaborate here. (For a list of websites and articles dealing with voting fraud, see The Crisis Papers pages on Election Fraud 2004 and Electoral Integrity).

So what is to be done about this outrage?

The Media Problem

Don't expect help from the mainstream media – at least, not without some persistent and creative pressure from the public. The issue of voting fraud is virtually absent from the media, except for occasional debunkings of the skeptics. There are reports that "top down" orders have been given to media staff to say and write nothing about the issue, and that violations of these orders are career-enders. True or not, the media behaves as if such orders have been given. There is a black hole of reporting on ballot integrity. As for investigative reporting, fagetaboutit.
What to do? We begin by acknowledging this problem, and then proceed to locate the pressure points that might budge the media from its negligence.

Ask an ordinary citizen, "Who are the sellers and the customers, and what is the product, of the broadcast mass media?" and you will likely be told that the TV and radio networks are the sellers, the audience are the customers, and the programming is the product. Wrong! In fact, the media corporations are the sellers, the corporate sponsors are the customers, and the attention ("eyes") of the public is the product. If you doubt this, then just follow the money. It flows from the sponsors to the broadcasters.

So therein is the pressure point: if the public withdraws the product, namely its attention, the public can starve the beast. This is the crucial difference between the media in the Soviet Union and the media in United States. The Soviet Commissars didn't care a whit if Pravda, Izvestiya and Gostelradio failed to turn a profit, so long as they continued to spew out the party line. In the US, profit is the sine qua non – the whole point of having a media at all.

Case in point: the Sinclair Broadcasting "Stolen Honor" fiasco. As you likely recall, in the closing days of the Presidential campaign, Sinclair scheduled "Stolen Honor," a smear of John Kerry's Vietnam service. Following a public outcry, Sinclair withdrew the program. And why? A sudden realization of civic responsibility? Ya gotta be kidding! Fear of offending the public? Yes, but not directly. In fact, the Sinclair management, solid supporters of George Bush and the GOP, buckled from pressure from the stockholders.

The offended public was removing its eyes from the Sinclair TV screens. Hence lower ratings and lower profits. Sinclair management was ungently reminded that their job was not to campaign for George Bush, their job was to provide a return on the stockholders' investments. Failing that, management might quite properly be sued, or at least booted out, at the next stockholders' meeting.

The immediate target of our protest is not the mainstream media at large, it is the mainstream news media. And that beast is starving even today. The credibility of the corporate news media is in free-fall. Timothy Maier reports that:

For two decades polls increasingly have indicated public dismay at the spin and fantasies of the press. In fact, a recent Gallup Poll says Americans rate the trustworthiness of journalists at about the level of politicians and as only slightly more credible than used-car salesmen. The poll suggests that only 21 percent of Americans believe journalists have high ethical standards, ranking them below auto mechanics but tied with members of Congress. More precisely, the poll notes that only one in four people believe what they read in the newspapers. Chicago Tribune Editor Charles M. Madigan may have put it best when he offered this advice: "If you are a journalist, you should probably just assume that you come across as a liar." ... The study also points out that there has been a rapid decline in newspaper readership since the 1980s, with slightly more than half of Americans, 54 percent, reading a newspaper during the week.

The prospects for the future are grim, as the younger cohorts are particularly cool to the media. In a recent speech, Rupert Murdoch (no less!) noted that the 18-34 age group was abandoning newspapers for the Internet. Furthermore, he reported that "only 9%" of this group "describe us as trustworthy, a scant 8% find us useful, and only 4% think we're entertaining."

Professional journalists find these statistics alarming. On the contrary, I find them very hopeful. The mainstream news media have richly deserved this public contempt, as they have increasingly become purveyors of trivia and conduits of official right-wing propaganda, and decreasingly independent investigative watchdogs serving the public interest. The public, especially the younger cohort, knows this and is now looking elsewhere for its news.

With the abandonment of responsible broadcast journalism in favor of trivial "info-tainment," there is a latent demand for the "old-style" reporting and investigations of pros such as Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Woodward and Bernstein. Surely such an enterprise would be commercially viable. To paraphrase Field of Dreams, if they build it the public will come.

And so the news media, desperate for recovery, need to be told, time and again, that if they want our attention, they had better declare their independence and get back to the business of investigating and reporting significant public issues. And they might start with the most important issue of all: the integrity of our ballots.

Our job: tell the media, and their sponsors, that we no longer trust their news reporting, and are now looking elsewhere. And while we are at it, we should collect and distribute the names and addresses of media and sponsors, and encourage still others to voice their complaints. (The Democratic Underground's outstanding Local Media Blaster can supply this information. See also The Crisis Papers' Activist's Page).

Progressive Voices on the Commercial Broadcast Media. Air American Radio is a good start – but merely a start. A progressive cable news channel – an "anti-FOX" - is long overdue, and as the past election campaign demonstrated, start-up funds are available from such major sources as George Soros and Warren Buffet.

The Internet and Alternative Media. Unless and until the mainstream news media acknowledge and deal with the ballot integrity issue, the progressive Internet and the alternative media must be supported and encouraged to publicize the problem of ballot fraud. In your public and private e-mails, include links to the websites and the particular articles that deal with the issue. Download, print, and copy these articles, and pass them around to your friends and associates.

Recruit Allies. Regrettably, many prominent progressives are not convinced that the past election was fixed - among them, Paul Begala, Al Franken, Arianna Huffington, and Bernie Sanders. To this day, the Democratic Party is mute on the issue, as is the progressive think-tank, The Center for American Progress. Demand that they examine the evidence and challenge them to refute it. And if they can't, tell them to join the fight.

Where are the Books? Effective political movements have a supporting literature. The American Revolution had Tom Paine and Common Sense. The Civil War had Uncle Tom's Cabin. The supporting documents of the electoral reform movement are compelling, but they are diffuse. The defining and catalyzing book – the book that is held aloft at the public meetings, cited in the media and in the letters to Congress – that work is desperately needed and overdue. Perhaps it is still in progress, or even now at the publishers. If not, will some genius (and our cause has several) please write that book!

Perhaps such a book exists, but no American publisher dares to print it. In that case, the author might look abroad and import it. (And what a message that would convey about the state of our "free" press!) In the meantime, or instead, the book should be put on the Internet.

Send a Message to the Democrats. Those who contributed to the Democrats and the Kerry Campaign are surely receiving numerous solicitations for donations. Find them, take out a red felt pen, and write something like: "Unless the Democratic Party addresses the problem of voting fraud, its time and my contribution will be wasted. Secure my vote, and I will once again contribute generously. Until then, nada!"

Demand Action on the Local Level. As Ohio's Kenneth Blackwell dramatically demonstrated, federal elections are administered on the state level. Election fraud is a violation of both federal and state laws. Obviously neither Attorney General Gonzales nor the Republican Congress will touch the issue. However, there must surely be a state with a Democratic Governor and/or Legislature and/or Attorney General that could investigate, indict, and prosecute some culprits involved in the Great Election Robbery of 2004. And if elected officials refuse to take the initiative, citizen groups and defeated candidates should file law suits. With the threat of perjury and imprisonment, and the prosecutor's power of investigative discovery, some culprit somewhere might break, then another and another, whereupon the whole rotten system of fraud and cover-up might collapse. It happened to Richard Nixon, and it can happen again.

The voting fraud issue is a sleeping giant that the Busheviks, with the determined complicity of the mainstream media, are desperately trying to keep asleep. Few appreciate just how daunting a task this is. As we noted at the outset of this essay, the opportunity for fraud is known and undisputed. The evidence published, available, and compelling. There is no refutation other than "trust us," "get over it," "let's move on," "don't be so paranoid," and other such irrelevancies.

Bush, the GOP and their media allies hope that if they ignore the issue and direct public attention elsewhere, the sleeping giant will not stir. But if I were Bush, Rove, Cheney, or the rest, I'd be afraid – I'd be very afraid. For now Bush's approval ratings are falling even as gas prices, interests rates, and the consumer price index rise. And all these may be harbingers of much worse to come. As the dire economic costs to almost everybody of the Bushevik plunder become more apparent, the American public will become ever more receptive to the idea that they were criminally robbed of their franchise in (at least) the past three federal elections, that the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress lack legitimacy, and that the American people are no longer, in any authentic sense, citizens of a free society.

Those of us who are aware of the electoral crime against the American people must steadfastly sound the alarm and arouse the sleeping giant. No doubt many of you who read this essay will have still more ideas. Share them with us. Send your suggestions to me at crisispapers@hotmail.com, and I promise to collect and publish a selection of them in The Crisis Papers.

Dayton Calls for Paper Trail

2005-04-30T23:21:00.000-07:00

April 27, 2005
Contact: Semonti Mustaphi (202) 228-3263
Press Release

Dayton Calls for Paper Trail of All Ballots Cast on Electronic Voting Machines

Senator secures commitment for hearing on protecting the integrity of elections

Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Mark Dayton, a member of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, introduced an amendment to a campaign finance reform bill that would require electronic voting machines to print receipts of all cast ballots. The receipts would help to eliminate discrepancies in vote tabulations, which were reported during the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. The amendment would also reduce voter error, by enabling voters to print and verify their ballots before casting them. The Rules and Administration Committee failed to adopt the amendment.

Minnesota and 19 other states have legislation pending that would require paper trails for electronic voting machines; 14 states have already enacted such legislation. Over the next year, states and counties will receive $1 billion in federal funding to purchase new voting machines and equipment. The amendment Dayton introduced would have required states and counties to purchase systems that provide voter-verified paper ballots and receipts.

“As a former State Auditor, I learned the necessity of keeping back up documents and a paper trail,” said Dayton. “There is potential for massive fraud by somebody breaking into an electronic system and altering the numbers after votes have been cast without a paper back up. It would be impossible to go back and determine what the actual vote tally should have been.

“The legislation was tabled, but I did get from Senator [Trent] Lott a promise that we would have a hearing on protecting the integrity of our elections before the August recess. I will work with other members to advance legislation which will take effect before the next election.”

“Paperless electronic voting machines fail to provide this very basic and essential capability, because they deny voters the opportunity to verify that their votes have been accurately recorded,” said Mark Halvorson, President of Citizens for Election Integrity. “We are very grateful for Senator Dayton's support on the crucial issue of voter-verified paper ballots which takes an important first step in remedying this problem which is far too common in our current voting system.”

Failing the Electoral Standards

2005-04-27T21:14:00.000-07:00

The Nation
by Andrew Gumbel

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has been monitoring elections in emerging democracies ever since the fall of the Berlin wall, but now it has done something different and uniquely controversial. It has turned its attention to the United States, issuing a report that highlights numerous areas in which this past November's presidential and Congressional elections failed to meet international standards.

One would have thought the voter reform movement in this country would jump at the chance to see the United States judged by the same criteria as Ukraine, Georgia or Kyrgyzstan--especially since the report finds it badly wanting. Here, in black and white, is authoritative proof that the disenfranchisement of ex-felons, the uneven rules applied to provisional balloting, the unreliability of voter registration procedures and the dual role of election supervisors who also help run partisan political campaigns are not merely objectionable but also violate international norms to which the United States, as a participating member of the fifty-five-nation OSCE, is a leading signatory.

And yet the OSCE's twenty-nine-page report, published in April has not generated a single column inch in any US newspaper. There are both good and bad reasons for this. For a start, the report has come out five months after the election, virtually guaranteeing its lack of topicality. It is also written in excruciatingly careful prose, belying the pointedness of its conclusions. There is no summary sentence stating explicitly that the United States has failed to meet its international commitments. (That has to be inferred.) Nor does it allude to the fact that Ohio was just a few tens of thousands of votes away from another Florida-style meltdown. This is a document that takes every conceivable step to avoid being controversial, even as it delivers its damning assessment.

Therein, though, lies the real story. The OSCE report has been the hottest of political hot potatoes for months, its reticence the result of an escalating diplomatic battle pitting the United States against the countries of the former Soviet Union, not unlike the cold war standoffs of old.

OSCE sources complain that US officials made "inappropriate" phone calls in the run-up to the report's publication, in the hope that its conclusions would not come down too hard on the dysfunctions of its electoral system. Russia and the other former Soviet republics, meanwhile, have accused both the United States and the OSCE itself of a glaring double standard--making no bones about criticizing the conduct of their elections (in Georgia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and, most recently, Kyrgyzstan) while skirting over the inadequacies of voting in the world's sole remaining superpower.

There is far more to this debate than mere diplomatic brick-throwing. At stake is the integrity of the single most powerful institution pressing for global democratization--a phenomenon President Bush professes to cherish these days. There is little doubt that the reason the Russians, Belarusians and the rest want to get the OSCE off their backs is that they are terrified of a Ukraine-style democratic uprising in their own autocratic backyards. (Kiev's Orange Revolution was sparked, in part, by a withering OSCE election report, as was the popular revolt against Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia.) But the reason they feel able to protest so vehemently comes right back to the United States and the fact that this country's electoral house is in such manifest disarray.

The Russians have been banging the "double standard" drum ever since their own OSCE observers saw Florida's electronic voting machines melt down during the 2002 midterms--a fiasco less well remembered than the punch-card disaster of 2000 but one that has poisoned just about every effort at electoral reform since. The Americans, admittedly, did not help themselves when, at an OSCE meeting on international election standards right after the Florida primary, they refused to acknowledge the slightest flaw in their domestic system.

OSCE officials sought to get around the mounting fracas in a couple of ways. First, they indicated they would entertain the possibility of much bigger election observation missions to the United States in the future. And then they commissioned a report drawing up universal standards applicable to all democracies, both emerging and established. This report came out in October 2003 and, to the attentive reader at least, suggested eleven areas in which the United States was falling short--the failure to establish nationwide voting procedures, the felon problem, the inequitable distribution of voting machines in poorer areas, the lack of money and media time accorded to third-party candidates, and so on.

The international tensions, though, continued to mount. By 2004 the OSCE's reports on the former Soviet zone were proving so incendiary that President Putin personally ordered his OSCE ambassador to make the neutering of the OSCE's election monitoring division his top priority.

In response, the OSCE seriously considered a full-scale observation of the Bush-Kerry presidential race, which would have involved hundreds of international monitors spread out across the entire country. The treacherous waters of US politics, however, made this option next to impossible, not least because the person pushing hardest for a major monitoring mission, the president of OSCE's parliamentary assembly, turned out to be a black Democratic Congressman from Florida, Alcee Hastings. The OSCE realized a full-scale mission could easily be misinterpreted as a partisan assault on the Republicans, so it backed off.

It opted instead for a so-called "targeted observation mission," focusing on just a handful of districts in swing states. Even this, though, ran into trouble. No European government wanted to risk the wrath of the United States by offering up observers--the whole EU ended up providing just two people, both from the Netherlands--and barely any state or county officials in this country wanted to allow the OSCE near their polling stations, even though they had a commitment to grant access under the terms of the OSCE's founding 1990 Copenhagen agreement.

The OSCE appealed to both the State Department and the National Association of Secretaries of States for help, only to be told there was nothing either of them could do. As a result, the OSCE deployment on November 2 was patchy at best in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and a couple of less contentious states.

The Russians were not impressed. At a high-level meeting in Sofia last December, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, denounced the OSCE as a divisive and dishonest organization. "Election monitoring is not only ceasing to make sense," he said, "but is also becoming an instrument of political manipulation and a destabilizing factor."

The delay in publication of the OSCE's final report on the US election only infuriated the Russians and their allies further. At this point they are threatening to withhold their portion of the OSCE budget unless the whole institution is restructured, starting with its election monitoring division. The actual content of the US report does not appear to have mollified them.

The Russians want the OSCE to prune back its monitoring procedures, so that instead of taking stock of the target country's overall democratic health, as it has routinely done, it would merely measure voting procedures against a narrow technical checklist. The problem with such a list is that it would create boundless opportunities for loopholes and political sleight of hand--such skulduggery has been going on in the United States, for starters, for the past 200 years. Senior OSCE officials believe it would effectively gut their organization and the work they have done for the past fifteen years.

And so the debate rages on. The moral of the story is that meaningful electoral reform is not only a burning issue here in the United States. The democratic future of much of the world could depend on it.

Chairman of voting reform panel resigns

2005-04-23T21:44:00.000-07:00

By ERICA WERNER
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

WASHINGTON -- The first chairman of a federal voting agency created after the 2000 election dispute is resigning, saying the government has not shown enough commitment to reform.

DeForest Soaries said in an interview Friday that his resignation would take effect next week.

Though Soaries, 53, said he wanted to spend more time with his family in New Jersey, he added that his decision was prompted in part by what he called a lack of support.

"All four of us had to work without staff, without offices, without resources. I don't think our sense of personal obligation has been matched by a corresponding sense of commitment to real reform from the federal government," he said.

Soaries, a Republican former New Jersey secretary of state, was the White House's pick to join the Election Assistance Commission, created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to help states enact voting reforms.

A Baptist minister, Soaries was confirmed by the Senate in December 2003 and elected the independent agency's first chairman by his three fellow commissioners. His term as chairman ended in January 2005 and since then he has stayed on as a commission member.

Soaries and the other commissioners complained from the beginning that the group was underfunded and neglected by the lawmakers who created it.

"It's bad enough to be working under extremely adverse circumstances, but what throws your thinking into an abyss, as it were, is why you would be doing that when, for instance, you have to beg Congress for money as if the commission was your idea," Soaries said.

White House spokesman Allen Abney said only, "We appreciate his service and we are working to fill the vacancy promptly."

Envisioned as a clearinghouse for election information that would make recommendations about technology and other issues and distribute $2.3 billion to states for voting improvements, the commission initially couldn't afford its own office space. The commissioners were appointed nine months later than envisioned by the Help America Vote Act, and of a $10 million budget authorized for 2004, the panel received just $1.2 million.

Soaries said the commission could claim some credit for last November's relatively smooth election, including recommending "best practices" to voting administrators and getting the election reform money to states faster than it otherwise would have gone. The commission has sent about $1.8 billion to states so far.

But the commission has failed to preside over the kinds of sweeping reforms some hoped for, with many counties still relying in November on the same punch-card and lever machines derided after the 2000 election. Soaries said the commission is making progress with improvements, including technical guidelines and centralized voter registration lists, that are supposed to be in place for the 2006 election.

"There is so much more work to do to bring federal elections to the standard I think that the citizens expect, and there doesn't seem to be a corresponding sense of urgency among the policy-makers in Washington," Soaries said. "Nor does there seem to be a national consensus among leaders of the states about what success looks like."

Soaries said election reform was on the front burner after the 2000 presidential recount, but it moved to the back burner - and stayed there - after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer, the No. 2 House Democrat and a lead sponsor of the Help America Vote Act, said Soaries' resignation underscored a need to give the commission adequate resources.

"I hope this administration and Congress seriously consider Mr. Soaries' observations as we develop the fiscal year 2006 budget," Hoyer said.

The commission also has run into opposition from state officials accustomed to running their own elections and wary of federal involvement. Earlier this year, the National Association of Secretaries of State approved a resolution asking Congress to dissolve the Election Assistance Commission after 2006.

But Soaries said that despite his frustration and Congress' lack of engagement, he saw a lasting role for the Election Assistance Commission.

"Someone's got to wake up every morning with the mission of improving federal elections in a way that assures the voting public that they can have confidence in voting," he said.

Baker-Carter Commission Cont'd

2005-04-19T21:33:00.000-07:00

From Rep. John Conyers Blog:

Conyers Endorses Voting Recommendations of Election Reform Coalition
Led By Progressive Dems of America

I have been closely following the formation of the Baker-Carter election commission, with some concern. As readers of this blog know, I wrote to former President Jimmy Carter, about these concerns. I hope to have a meeting this week with the leadership of the Commission to discuss these concerns in more detail and ascertain whether there is any room to work together on this vital issue.

In the meantime, a group of organizations, many who helped to bring about the Ohio election challenge (and led by the Progressive Democrats of America), have issued their own challenge to the Commission. I wanted my blog readers to know that I issued the following statement today, which I think pretty much speaks for itself:

"I wholeheartedly support and endorse the recommendations of the Progressive Democrats of America election reform coalition, which includes Code PINK, Velvet Revolution, United Progressives for Democracy and Global Exchange. I have heard from thousands of progressive activists, along with traditional civil rights groups, who are very concerned about the direction of the Baker-Carter Commission. I have previously written to President Carter expressing my concerns about his co-chair, James Baker III, who for me -- and many, many other voters will forever be remembered for his role in disenfranchising Florida voters, particularly minority voters and the elderly, by stopping the counting of votes in the 2000 Presidential election. This weekend, additional information has come to light in the alternative media about other advisors to the Commission and the witnesses chosen for its first hearing. To many, the deck seems to be stacked against traditional civil rights concerns and voter verified paper ballots, and in favor of wealthy corporate voting machine companies and Right wing operatives who have advocated Jim Crow-style tactics, such as partisan challengers at the polls and new and needless voter ID requirements. An early signal of that this Commission's policy agenda would go a long way toward allaying the fears of many, fears that I share."

National Conference on Election Reform Opens with Civil Rights Panel

2005-04-17T00:47:00.000-07:00

by Abigail Thorton
April 13, 2005

Summary: On the evening of the opening of the National Conference on Election Reform, participants from twenty six states gathered in the sanctuary of the Jefferson Street Missionary Baptist Church in Nashville, Tennessee to listen to a civil rights panel, introduced by Bernard Ellis, conference organizer. Those present were former president of the NAACP Nashville, Reverend Sonnye Dixon, Dr Charles Kimbrough, and Michael Grant. Panelists discussed the struggle to obtain the right to vote during the civil rights era, the need to address the human needs of those most disempowered by the powers that be, and the need for election reform to preserve our democracy.

Bernard Ellis of the National Conference on Election Reform was the first to speak. This was the 25th gathering of his group, the Gathering to Save Our Democracy, since December 12th when they had their first protest regarding election fraud. Members of the Gathering to Save Our Democracy wear orange armbands to symbolize their solidarity with the Ukrainian people who struggled to guarantee free elections at about the same time that this movement was happening. Ellis talked about the historic struggle for civil rights in the South and the appropriateness of hosting the conference at the Jefferson Street Missionary Baptist Church, which has been an important part of the struggle for civil rights in Nashville.

Dr Charles Kimbrough was the first to address the gathering. He said that it was amazing what a few concerned citizens can do. In his own words he said, "We shall overcome. We went to Selma in 1965 because people were being excluded because of their skin color. The same thing happened in Tennessee, where people were excluded and disenfranchised. Black people were determined to win the right to vote. We went to Macon County to help the disenfranchised people there when there was gerrymandering going on in their districts. It has been a long road."

In 1967 Dr Kimbrough went to Southeast Missouri to engage in the civil rights struggle there where people wanted to vote but did not have the leadership. Dr Kimbrough said that, "Those who do not wish to be disturbed by the truth need to know that we will be vigilant and we will see this struggle through."

The next speaker was the Reverend Sonnye Dixon of Hobson United Methodist Church and former president of the Nashville NAACP. Reverend Dixon focused on the importance of human dignity and the emptiness of a struggle if it does not address the human needs of those most disenfranchised by society.

"When I look back at the struggle I look back to the Black Church. I was too young to be active when the civil rights struggle was in its full but I remember James Lawson coming to our community. He said there were people ready to go be arrested in their efforts to struggle for civil rights in Nashville and he needed to find property owners who were willing to bail people out of jail. My father was a property owner and he felt he had a moral obligation to help in this struggle. This was a community effort and everyone had to make a sacrifice. My father agreed to help bail people out, putting up his property as collateral."

"What we need is a holistic approach to voting. It can't just be about voting, it must be about issues that give people a sense of value. The church did that and if we are going to sustain our movement we must do that also. If there is anyone in this struggle we have turned our backs on, it is young black men. We have forgotten about the human aspect of the struggle. In the meanwhile, the right wing political establishment has modeled their success on the historic black church. The republicans are taking it to the churches, but they do not empower these people as individuals but rather use them for their votes."

"If we want to win we must show up in people's lives. Successful campaigns happen when we value people and let them know they are part of the process. If we do not reach out to invidividuals and give them repsect and dignity we will not succeed. We need to move the disenfranchised and marginalized to the empowered and valued. This is about individuals being valued for who they are. Our agenda is about human dignity."

The final speaker of the opening plenary was Michael Grant. Mr Grant praised the visionary leadership of Bernard Ellis and praised Reverend Tex Thomas for hosting the conference at the Jefferson Street Missionary Baptist Church. Dr Grant opened his remarks by asking three questions about election reform.

"I want to begin by asking you three questions and these are the following: Why should we care? How much should we care? and How do we connect this issue with the historical precedent of civil rights?"

"We cannot afford to fail. People have to know their votes were counted. Nothing is more sacred than freedom and democracy. If you love what we are doing then I urge you to call every member of Congress and tell them that we will have a paper trail. We will have voting machines that give us a paper receipt and our votes can be verified. We must fight this fight until every vote is counted. We must insist on the highest standards of accuracy. Voters must be able to independently verify the process and there needs to be triple redundancy. There can be no way that someone can hack into a machine to steal our votes. "

"We the people must talk about why democracy is important. Democracy is about the will of the people. We must keep it this way and the only way is to reform our voting system. Our cause is something that can lift people up. The sovereign will of the people shall prevail."

View from Another Planet

2005-04-16T22:43:00.000-07:00

by Josh Mitteldorf
April 13, 2005

On the flight to Nashville this past weekend, I sat next to a man who asked what I was writing. Preparing a talk, I told him, for a conference of people sharing evidence that the 2004 presidential election was stolen. Without missing a beat, he asked ‘Isn’t that next door to the convention on UFO sightings?’

I wasn’t surprised. We’ve been painted as conspiracy theorists and worse by Democrats and Republicans alike, and even the liberal arm of the press has steered clear of this issue.

But when I arrived at the Jefferson Street Baptist Church in Nashville, my doubts about the election were reinforced by a community of sober professionals, none of whom seemed overtly loony.

I met David Griscom, a retired physics prof who had spent months with his colleague John Brakey poring over election tapes, signature rosters and “consecutive number registers” from Brakey’s Tucson, AZ home precinct. They audited and verified, one by one, the 895 votes in the precinct, and here’s what they discovered: 12 innocent, and unsuspecting voters had had their names duplicated on the roster and their votes for Bush counted twice. There were 22 ‘undervotes’ where the machine had failed to register a preference for president, and these had been dutifully and meticulously converted to 22 votes for Bush. The “Republican” and “Democratic” co-directors of the polling place were a local fundamentalist preacher and his wife. 39 of their parishioners from another precinct had cast provisional ballots, which had been (illegally) converted on the spot to regular ballots and passed through the vote counter, all 39 for Bush. The net result, Dr Griscom figured, was that Bush got 394 votes when he was entitled only to 336, a swing of 13%.

I met Judith Alter, another retired professor who discovered the software specification in a Diebold programming manual: When you press the “Straight Democratic” button, the machine should record votes for all Democrats except the president. The “Straight Republican” button should record votes for every Republican, including the president. This explained the mysterious pattern she’d noticed in Santa Fe, NM, where Kerry’s vote was lower than obscure local Democrats whose names appeared at the bottom of the ticket. Could this explain a similar pattern in Ohio, she wondered?

I heard Clint Curtis talk about working in 2001 as a programmer for Yang Enterprises in Florida. He was assigned, one day, to a meeting with State Senate Speaker Tom Feeney, who asked to have a program written into the software that controls voting machines so that the totals could be manipulated without leaving a trace. Curtis, the whistleblower, is now unemployed. Feeney, the politician, is now the U.S. Representative from Florida’s 24th Congressional district.

I was inspired to hear the travails of Ohio Attorney Cliff Arnebeck. After the Green Party raised $200,000 and obtained authorization for a recount in Ohio, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell staged a charade, in which every State rule about the conduct of the recount was thrown out, and two hand-picked precinct captains emerged from behind locked doors to report that yes, indeed the numbers were exactly right and all was hunky dory. Arnebeck was lead attorney in a lawsuit to expose this sham, and demand a real recount. The suit was dismissed by Supreme Court Justice Thomas Moyer, who ruled on the case despite the fact that his own re-election in 2004 was part of the challenge. Arnebeck has continued to pursue the case while he fights on the side for his legal life: State Attorney General Jim Petro has brought an action to discipline Arnebeck for bringing a frivolous lawsuit that wastes the precious time of the Ohio court.

I was in Nashville to present the work of Steve Freeman, a Penn professor who was the first to point out that we do have a way to pull these horror stories together, and to know how much effect all these little scandals have had in the aggregate. The National Exit Poll by the Edison/Mitofsky consortium interviewed 70,000 voters fresh from the voting booth on November 2, and asked for whom they had just cast their ballots. 51% of them said John Kerry, and 48% said George Bush.

Now it’s Monday morning. I’m safely returned from Planet Nashville, back home in the land of ABC-CBS-NBC-FOX-AP-UPI. I find it reassuring to remember that if any of this had really happened, the Democrats in Congress would be screaming about it. I’d read about it on the front page, and it would be all over the network news. Yes, I can be sure that Nashville was just a bad dream. The reality is that President Bush won the election, and it’s time to move on. Time to move on. It was all just a dream. Yes, it’s time to move on.

Have We Learned ...?

2005-04-13T11:03:00.000-07:00

Voting systems without voter-verified permanent paper ballots for official hand counts and recounts are unacceptable for use in polls because they are failure-prone and unable to offer accurate election results.

(PRWEB) April 11, 2005 -- The laws of physics themselves had been transcended, by the superhuman forces of UniLect, yet in quaint and sleepy Beaver County, Pennsylvania. For the first time in history, reports were made of an electronic processing system which was impervious to both electromagnetic and mechanical forces, not subject to the known vagaries of manufacturing and programming, and even immune to mismanagement and human error.

Never before had anyone managed to conceive, design, engineer, or manufacture such a computer system, yet this marvel was said to be present in all the Beaver County polls every election, in the form of the miraculous 'Patriot' paperless direct recording electronic voting system. Described as the world's only known paragon of printed-circuit-board perfection, in effect, and it was found in Beaver County, Pennsylvania of all places ...

For a not-particularly-prosperous, smaller, suburban and rural region, this was truly an amazing discovery. The scientific and technological worlds had experienced, somehow, an unprecedented and monumental upheaval, and it had occurred in relatively humble and obscure circumstances in a place where it would never be expected.

It turned out to be a total hoax.

The Commissioners and Director of Elections said they'd never had any problems. They said that even after they'd received numerous formal complaints, from candidates, from pollworkers, and from voters, for years. They knew they were using a faulty system.

It refused to accept touchscreen inputs, and changed the inputs, and refused to start, and gave the people that creepy feeling any other piece of mysterious technology gives them, especially when it wants them to trust it with the very currency of their democracy.

It didn't count their votes.

The officials said, at every turn, things which confirmed their ignorance, their willful deceit, and their intentions of thwarting valid elections. They'd been told that what they were doing was obvious to the public and, moreover, that it was wrong.

Finally, the state confirmed what the people had told them: the UniLect Patriot paperless voting system was throwing away the votes. There could be no excuse for using such a system. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania decertified the UniLect Patriot voting system on April 7th, for which they earn the admiration of the people.

The officials would have to give up their wonder. They'd have to quit trying to blame the vote losses on the apathy of the voters.

Citizens had gone to court to try to stop the use of the fake voting system prior to the election last November, but a judge spewed misinformation because he hadn't learned that university studies had shown paper ballots to be more reliable than the secret electronic systems. The people were forced to give up their right to vote in that election.

Another nearby county had thrown away as many as 7 or 8 out of every 10 votes in one precinct, and the Director of Elections had been forced to resign after he finished trying to clean up the crime scene. 41 precincts there had serious losses of the votes. The same system had failed spectacularly, and it had failed to some degree everywhere it was used.

In another state the system had caused an election to fail, and when the people there told the vendor that it would cost them millions, he shrugged it off and rejected the notion of his own responsibility.

Local elected officials are responsible for the quality of their decisionmaking and for the costs to the public of their mistakes. In this case, the state is picking up the tab because they'd originally approved the system. The primary election only weeks ahead is a relatively light one without a long complicated ballot. It is a prime opportunity to do the right thing and do it well.

Instead, the Commissioners specifically stated that they were 'shocked' (despite years of very specific warnings). They're trying to claim it'd take half a million dollars to do twenty thousand dollars' worth of ballot printing. They're going to charge the state for all they possibly can, complaining rather than working for valid elections. They're refusing to hand-count the votes, and forcing their technological ineptitude and fraud on the people with yet another flawed tabulation method featuring unchecked computers.

They're also going to try to buy another flawed system.

Undervote rates per se are only one problem known to exist with paperless direct recording electronic voting systems, and these other problems must not be ignored.

The public must not tolerate a mere upgrade/switch to systems which merely hide the undervotes and other problems infesting this equipment.

Nonrecorded voting systems also tabulate thousands of nonexistent votes. They fail from mechanical glitches and electrical anomalies and user errors, among many other things. They fail undectably in many instances, with only the most extreme of the failures becoming apparent.

These cheat machines are more expensive to operate. They're not better for disabled voters. They're not required by HAVA.

They're not acceptable to the voting public.

Not in my America ...

Paper Makes a Comeback as Electronic Elections Spur Opposition

2005-04-10T21:58:00.000-07:00

April 8 (Bloomberg) -- Meet the next big thing in paperless voting: paper.

Voting-rights groups and computer scientists, concluding that a tangible record is essential to any electronic voting system, are persuading a growing number of U.S. lawmakers and election officials either to reject paperless voting machines or to require fitting them with costly add-on printers to help verify results.

Even Ohio, home to Diebold Inc., the world's leading maker of paperless machines, plans to spend $106 million in federal funds exclusively on optical-scan systems that require voters to mark their choice on a paper ballot.

After two tight presidential elections in a row, each producing complaints about voting machinery, proponents say a paper trail is the only way to convince voters that elections are safeguarded from technological defect or high-tech fraud.

``It's not sufficient for elections to be accurate,'' said David Dill, a professor of computer science at Stanford University and founder of VerifiedVoting.org, which advocates paper-trail laws. ``People have to know they are accurate.''

So far, 12 states require a vote-by-vote paper trail, half of them as a result of laws passed in the last year. Similar bills are pending in about 20 other state legislatures, and five bills introduced in Congress would require paper trails in all states, according to electionline.org, a non-partisan Washington- based clearinghouse on election reform.

At stake are hundreds of millions of dollars in federal, state and local purchases of new voting equipment. The purchases are being spurred by the Help America Vote Act, passed by Congress and signed by President George W. Bush in 2002 in the wake of the disputed 2000 presidential election.

The Battle of Florida

Bush's 537-vote Florida victory that year over Democrat Al Gore, which gave him the presidency, came after protests and legal challenges over the design and counting of punch-card ballots. The election pointed up weaknesses in the nation's hodge- podge system of paper ballots, punch-card voting machines and other mechanisms for recording ballots.

Under the 2002 law, 30 states are sharing $300 million in federal aid to replace old punch-card and mechanical-lever machines in time for next year's congressional elections. An additional $1.7 billion has gone to all 50 states to meet other requirements, including one that each polling place have at least one machine that lets disabled voters cast ballots independently and privately.

Paperless machines -- known as direct recording electronic machines, or DREs -- capture votes electronically rather than relying on a paper ballot. Voters enter their selections by pressing buttons on or near an electronic screen. Their main competition is optical scanners: Voters make their selection on a paper ballot, which is then fed into a computerized reader. The paper ballot can be stored for use in a recount, if needed.

Complicating Efforts

The trend toward paper has complicated the work of some election officials. Counties that moved swiftly to embrace paperless machines now find themselves out of compliance with new state laws requiring paper trails. Two Ohio counties, for instance, are suing the state to defend their paperless machines.

Advocates for disabled voters also are unhappy, saying the emphasis on paper ballots undermines efforts to let people with visual, physical and other disabilities vote without assistance. Voters with disabilities now often need help from poll workers, so their choices aren't secret.

Jim Dickson, director of the Disability Vote Project at the Washington-based American Association of People with Disabilities, said only paperless touch-screen machines can fulfill the 2002 law's requirement that all voters be allowed to cast ballots ``in a private and independent manner.'' Allegations that electronic elections are especially prone to fraud constitute ``a Y2k scare all over again,'' Dickson said.

Optional Equipment

Responding to the increasing demand for paper trails, three leading manufacturers of DREs now offer printers as an optional add-on to new or existing machines. The printers create a running vote-by-vote record that the electronic tally can be checked against. Alfie Charles, vice president for business development at Sequoia Voting Systems Inc., said a printer attachment adds about $1,000 to the cost of his company's machines, which is typically $3,000 to $3,500.

While such printers ``are not an essential component of an accurate and reliable election, they do add value for voter confidence and an additional layer of security,'' Charles said. Sequoia, which was acquired March 9 by Smartmatic Corp. of Boca Raton, Florida, pioneered paper-trail-enabled touch-screen machines by providing 2,000 of them to Nevada under a $9 million contract awarded in 2003.

Computer Memory

A problem with electronic voting in Carteret County, North Carolina, last November lent momentum to those pushing a paper trail. A touch-screen machine ran out of computer memory before the polls closed, causing 4,438 votes to be lost.

Jack Gerbel, president of the company that made the machine, Unilect Corp. of Dublin, California, said a setting in its computer should have been adjusted more than three years earlier. It's unclear whether the county or the company was at fault, he said.

The Carteret glitch, though accidental, provided fuel for critics of electronic elections such as Avi Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

``If you don't have the paper trail, it's impossible to detect whether the machines are rigged,'' said Rubin, who is studying whether hackers might hide ``malicious code'' in machines to fix an election.

Security

Rubin co-wrote a 2003 report that questioned the security of computer code used by Diebold, the North Canton, Ohio, company that bills itself as ``the world leader in electronic voting equipment.''

Though Diebold contested the findings, a year later it agreed to pay California $2.6 million to settle a lawsuit charging that the company falsely claimed its machines weren't vulnerable to tampering.

David Bear, a spokesman for Diebold, said the company never opposed adding paper-ballot verification to its touch-screen machines. ``The reason nobody provided it before was nobody thought of it before,'' he said. Paperless machines have been used in hundreds of elections ``and always performed well,'' he said.

Diebold drew criticism from Democrats during the most recent presidential campaign after its chief executive, Walden O'Dell, sent a fundraising letter in 2003 that said he was ``committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes'' to Bush. O'Dell later said he regretted that remark. Shares of Diebold, which is also the world's second-largest seller of automated teller machines, have risen 3.3 percent this year and gained $1.40 to $57.58 yesterday.

Speedier Tally

Hesitancy to go paperless is boosting optical-scan machines, which became widely used in the 1970s to speed ballot counting. Many states and counties ``are looking toward the optical scanners as a fallback,'' said Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services, a Washington consulting firm.

Dill said optical scanners are the best current option because they have a built-in paper trail, have been used and studied more than touch-screens and are cheaper.

In Ohio, where 71 of 88 counties use punch-card or mechanical lever machines, a 2003 state plan said officials would be allowed to buy either DREs or optical scanners.

Ohio's Orders

After state law mandated a paper trail, Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell said in January that counties may purchase only optical-scan machines made by Diebold or Election Systems & Software Inc. of Omaha, Nebraska.

Three Ohio counties went to court to challenge Blackwell's decision. Two of them, Franklin and Lake, already use paperless electronic machines.

In Georgia and Maryland, where officials made statewide purchases of Diebold touch-screen machines, critics continue to fight paperless voting. Bills to require a paper trail are pending in both state legislatures.

Cathy Cox, Georgia's secretary of state, has staunchly defended the state's decision. In a March 10 newspaper column, she wrote, ``Our touch-screen voting system is dramatically more accurate than the antiquated systems that preceded it.''

Gathering To Save Our Democracy

2005-04-05T21:07:00.000-07:00

National Conference on the 2004 Election and the Need for Election Reform
Nashville, Tennessee, April 8-10, 2005

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THE CONFERENCE TODAY!
BACKGROUND

Since November 3, 2004, there has been a groundswell of concern, and a plethora of evidence, that the conduct of the 2004 Presidential election in the United States was highly problematic. These concerns have been belittled by many and ignored by the corporate media in this country. However, the weight of the evidence is overwhelming that a multi-faceted strategy of voter intimidation and disenfranchisement, potential manipulation of electronically cast votes in many states, and other instances of election fraud and theft improperly influenced the will of the American people and may have subverted the "consent of the governed". This evidence was sufficient to have stimulated the Government Accountability Office and U.S. Representative John Conyers and other national leaders to investigate the evidence of wrong-doing. This evidence also caused the U.S. Congress to suspend their routine business and to debate the merits of accepting Ohio's electoral votes on January 6, 2005, a historic occasion that highlighted the many problems in Ohio and also served to shed light on similar problems in other states. With this Congressional debate, the American people's responsibility to win back our democratic process was enumerated and enjoined.

To date, most of the discussion and information sharing on the problems with the 2004 election have occurred in the virtual world of the Internet. While there have been some local gatherings and regional and national protests focused on this issue, there has been no opportunity for concerned citizens, researchers, activists and elected officials to meet under one roof to review the wealth of evidence for the many threats to our democratic processes which the 2004 election revealed and to discuss the urgent need for election reform. While some panels on this topic have been added to several national meetings, these panels are not nearly sufficient to present all of the evidence for the 2004 election problems. It is also insufficient to fully inform the American people enough to motivate them to seek redress for the violations of our voting rights which occurred with this past election and to coalesce sentiment around an election reform agenda.

For these reasons, this three day Gathering To Save Our Democracy - A National Conference will provide the appropriate forum for expanding public awareness, for congregating the accumulated knowledge under one roof and for providing a platform for mobilizing support for election reform and justice.

Nashville, Tennessee is the setting of this conference. Nashville has a proud history of early successes in the 1960s civil rights movement, we are in a Southern and supposedly "red" state (we prefer to consider ourselves an Orange State, in deference to the Ukrainian example), we are centrally located within a day's drive of 60% of the U.S. population, we have an international airport serviced by a dozen major airlines, and we have several locations tentatively identified as appropriate and historic venues for hosting the conference. But most importantly, we have an energetic (and growing) band of citizen-activists for election reform in Tennessee who would insure the successful implementation of this conference.

This conference will be a comprehensive and historic event that will bring together the "major players" who have surfaced in the dialogue over the problems with the 2004 election and the need for election reform. We also anticipate that the conference will be a gathering place for the many concerned citizens throughout the nation and the world who are intent on preserving democracies. We hope that this conference will help break the media silence about the problems with the 2004 election within our country and provide a forum for increasing the world's attention to our threatened democratic principles. In addition, we will hold discussion sessions before and after the conference to exchange ideas and build coalitions to pursue the necessary elements of election reform and to redress our concerns with the 2004 election.

The conference registration fee is $30 (with exceptions for hardships), and will cover all conference-related activities. Please review the tentative conference agenda, current list of speakers and supporting organizations, complete the conference registration form and register using PayPal. Special hotel rates available. (People who cannot attend the conference but who would like to support the conference by making a donation can do so using PayPal also.) We will send you the final conference agenda and other details one week prior to the conference. Please contact Bernard Ellis, Jr., MA, MPH (931/682-2864; tracevu [at] bellsouth.net ) for more information on the conference.

Thank you for supporting the conference and for promoting the preservation of democracy in America.

Democrats, Paper ‘Trails’ Aren’t Good Enough

2005-04-02T00:01:00.000-08:00

Count The Damn Ballots!
by Lynn Landes, Online Journal Contributing Writer
April 1, 2005

March 19, 2005—After the 2004 election I thought I would barf if I heard one more Democratic pundit or politician lament the lost election and blame it on the party's "message." As grassroots activists across the country reported thousands of election irregularities and voting machine "glitches" that overwhelmingly benefited Bush, the Democratic leadership seemed unusually willing to look the other way. John Kerry quickly conceded, former President Carter attended Bush's ignoble inauguration, and Bill Clinton now pals around with Bush the First.

Rank and file Democrats are tearing their hair out.

Now, in a gesture calculated to win back their base, but gain little else (in terms of voting security), both House and Senate Democrats have offered a flurry of bills (with many state legislatures following in hot pursuit) that require ballot printers for touchscreen voting machines.

Incredibly, none of these bills call for the ballots to be counted .. except in the extremely remote event of a recount.

It takes your breath away. The Dems know that two Republican-controlled companies (ES&S and Diebold) count 80 percent of all votes in America. Why do they still trust these companies and their lousy machines, particularly after the last two presidential was first introduced, machine malfunctions almost always benefit Republicans. Perhaps that’s why the Republican stranglehold over the political landscape has grown so tight. Otherwise, things don’t add up. One example, if Bush’s war on the world is so popular, why don’t lots of young Republicans sign up for the military? Haven't the Dems noticed that?

The proposed legislation, popularly known as "voter-verified paper audit trail", sounded all right when I first heard about it a few years ago. But, on closer inspection it became clear that it wasn't a good idea at all. Fundamentally, it allows "voter verification" and "audits" to replace our constitutional right to mark, cast, and count ballots. Under this legislation, machines and election officials continue to control theelections? In fact, since the 1960s when computerized voting technology process, while meaningful citizen participation and oversight is effectively destroyed.

Besides all that, don't Dems understand that malfunctioning machines make ballot printers irrelevant? What are they thinking?

In the real world, recounts are very rare. In general, they only get triggered if an election is "close." Many people think that if a candidate wins by a significant margin (as Bush appeared to do), then vote fraud or system failure is unlikely. I call it, "The myth of the margin of victory". There are four things to consider regarding recounts and margins of victory:

First, anyone contemplating vote fraud will certainly want to win by a significant margin in order to avoid triggering an automatic recount.

Second, two corporations are counting 80 percent of the votes. Millions of votes can be easily manipulated by a handful of company technicians. There will be little chance of detection. So, even a landslide election is not evidence that massive vote fraud or system failure did not occur.

Third, a significant margin of victory packs a powerful psychological punch against the opposing candidate. They will be unlikely to contest the election under these circumstances. Some observers contend that is exactly what happened to John Kerry in this past election. On the other hand, something was fishy when candidate Kerry said that he was going to make sure that "every vote will be counted" in the 2004 presidential election. Who was he kidding? He had to know that 99 percent of all votes are processed by machines, not people. Kerry sent thousands of attorneys and volunteers to the polls on Election Day 2004 in a futile attempt to monitor an unobservable vote count.

Fourth, although polling data can be used to raise red flags where election fraud may have occurred, polls can also be used to shape public opinion, create false expectations, and even support rigged election results. The relationship between the corporate news media and polling organizations is completely nontransparent. There is no reason to believe a thing these polls have to say. And there's plenty of reason to suspect the news media. This country's largest voting machine company, ES&S, is owned by one of their members, The Omaha World Herald.

But, none of this should be news to the Democrats. So, why aren't they demanding the obvious solution? Get rid of the machines. Or, at least don’t wait for a recount. Count the damn ballots the first time. Again, what are they thinking? Either the Democrats are unbelievably naive or they've been bought off.

The Democratic National Committee's (DNC) leadership on the issue of voting systems has been mind-bending. On Oct. 3, 2004, the DNC voted to endorse the policy of requiring paper ballots for touchscreen voting machines by the 2004 election. Then, on Nov. 22, the DNC approved the use of the most insecure voting system on the face of the planet for the 2004 Michigan Democratic primary—Internet voting. That was the second time. In the 2000 Arizona Democratic primary, the Internet was also used. Strangely, the Democrats tried to stonewall this journalist from finding out the name of the company that conducted the online Michigan primary. What did they have to hide? (See "Democrats Send Mixed Signals In Voting Technology Debate.")

There's more. John Fund, author of the book, Stealing Elections, writes, "Joe Andrew, chairman of the Democratic National Committee until 2001, is a senior adviser to a biotech firm that owned several Internet companies. He says the conspiracy theories aren't healthy and last month he told the Maryland Association of Election Officials that "When it comes to electronic voting, most liberals are just plain old-fashioned nuts.’

While conservatives were skilled at coordinating their messages, he added, ‘that does not mean there is a vast right-wing conspiracy trying to steal votes in America, as the loudest voices on the left are saying today’ . . . Mr. Andrew said the people obsessed about DRE manipulation are either computer experts with impressive technical knowledge but little practical experience with elections or left-leaning computer users who are conspiratorial by nature. He noted with regret that they have been joined in their hysteria by prominent Democrats who ‘are rallying behind the anti-DRE bandwagon in a big election year because they think that this movement is good for Democrats.’"

Mr. Andrew appears to be batting for the other side.

Will things change under Howard Dean's leadership? Maybe not. Back on Oct. 02, 2003, the Associated Press reported, "Eight of the presidential candidates have written national Democratic officials to support a challenge of Michigan Democrats' plan to allow Internet voting in its caucuses Feb. 7. Only Howard Dean, former Vermont governor, and Wesley Clark, the retired general who just joined the race, did not sign on to back the protest."

Perhaps, the Democrats need a crash course in Voting 101. There is an enormous difference between people marking, casting, and counting ballots and machines performing these same functions. People can be observed and machines can't. If poll watchers can't observe the process, then they'll have no real opportunity to discover if vote fraud or miscounts occur. It's that simple. But, it's a simple truth that seems to elude congressional Democrats.

In contrast, the Republicans have figured it out. An HBO documentary that aired on October 11, 2004, shows Congressman Pete King (R-NY) bragging about the upcoming election, "It's already over. The election's over. We won It's all over but the counting and we'll take care of the counting."

They sure did.

Lynn Landes is one of the nation's leading journalists on voting technology and democracy issues. Readers can find her articles at EcoTalk.org. Lynn is a former news reporter for DUTV and commentator for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Contact info: lynnlandes@earthlink.net / (215) 629-3553.

Scientific Analysis Suggests Presidential Vote Counts May Have Been Altered

2005-04-01T21:33:00.000-08:00

March 30, 2005

Study Will Be Released Tomorrow March 31st
Group of University Professors Urges Investigation of 2004 Election

Officially, President Bush won November's election by 2.5%, yet exit polls showed Kerry winning by 3%[1] <#_ftn1>. According to a report to be released March 31^st by a group of university statisticians, the odds of a discrepancy this large between the national exit poll and election results happening by accident are close to 1 in a million.

In other words, by random chance alone, it could not have happened. But it did.

Two alternatives remain. Either something was wrong with the exit polling, or something was wrong with the vote count.

Exit polls have a long history of exceptional accuracy in past decades in the US, in the Ukraine, in Latin America, in Germany, and elsewhere. Yet in November 2004, the discrepancy was more than five times this (and similar to that of the invalid Ukraine election.[2] <#_ftn2>)

In a recent survey of US members of the world's oldest and largest computer society, The Association for Computing Machinery, 95% opposed software driven un-auditable voting machines[3] <#_ftn3>, of the type that now count at least 30% of U.S. votes. The vast majority of today's electronic vote-counting machines are not built with basic safeguards that would prevent and detect machine or human caused errors, be they innocent or deliberate.[4] <#_ftn4>

The consortium that conducted the presidential exit polls, Edison/Mitofsky, issued a report in January suggesting that the discrepancy between election results and exit polls occurred because Bush voters were more reticent than Kerry voters in response to pollsters.

The authors of this scientific study of the National Election Data Archive Project, consider that scenario highly unlikely, based on extensive analysis of the election data presented in their report “Final Study of the 2004 Presidential Election Poll Discrepancies”. They conclude, /“The required pattern of exit poll participation by Kerry and Bush voters to satisfy the exit poll data defies empirical experience and common sense under any assumed scenario.”/

An executive summary of the report by Josh Mitteldorf of Temple University has been released today and is available at: http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit_Polls_summary.pdf. The full 25 page scientific report will be released tomorrow. This group's preliminary study on the exit poll discrepancies was not refuted by any PhD statistician in America, and we expect our final study to be similarly received in the academic community.

Amidst the data, many extremely unlikely anomalies exist, invariably in President Bush’s favor. For one, a state-by-state analysis of the discrepancy between exit polls and official election results shows highly improbable skewing of the election results biased towards the president.

We have had election fraud in this country before. November's wildly inaccurate presidential exit polls should warrant concern of the highest order by every American citizen.

The report acknowledges that the possibility of fraud in our vote counting system is the most serious issue any democracy can face. If there is any chance that vote counts have been electronically manipulated, it is imperative that the people of the United States know the truth.

The report concludes, “/We believe that the absence of any statistically-plausible explanation for the discrepancy between Edison/Mitofsky’s exit poll data and the official presidential vote tally is an unanswered question of vital national importance that needs thorough investigation./”

US Count Votes is seeking financial support for its "National Election Data Archive" project in order to collect detailed election data and, prior to November 2006, to develop statistical methods to audit elections results data and provide statistical evidence of vote tabulation errors immediately following any US election.

*Contributors and Supporters of the Report include:*
*Josh Mitteldorf*, PhD - Temple University Statistics Department
*Steven F. Freeman*, PhD - Center for Organizational Dynamics, University of Pennsylvania
*Brian Joiner*, PhD - Prof. of Statistics (ret) University of Wisconsin
*Frank Stenger*, PhD - Professor, School of Computing, University of Utah
*Richard G. Sheehan*, PhD -Professor, Department of Finance, University of Notre Dame
*Paul F. Velleman*, PhD - Associate Prof., Department of Statistical Sciences, Cornell University
*Victoria Lovegren*, PhD - Department of Mathematics, Case Western Reserve University
*Campbell** B. Read*, PhD - Prof. Emeritus, Department of Statistical Science, Southern Methodist University
*Jonathan Simon*, J.D., National Ballot Integrity Project
*Ron Paul Baiman, *PhD* *– Institute of Government and Public Affairs, University of Illinois at Chicago
*About US Count Votes*

US Count Votes is a Utah non-profit corporation. It is the sponsor of the National Election Data archive project and of research to scientifically analyze the accuracy of vote counting in the United States. Its goal is to provide nationwide, impartial statistical auditing services to help ensure the accuracy of future elections.

Jimmy Carter to Chair Election Reform Commission

2005-03-25T21:35:00.000-08:00

March 24, 2005

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former President Jimmy Carter will lead a bipartisan commission to examine problems with the U.S. election system, American University's Center for Democracy and Election Management said on Thursday.

Carter, a Democrat whose Carter Center has monitored more than 50 elections around the world, will co-chair the private commission with Republican James Baker, who served as Secretary of State under President George H. W. Bush.

Former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, a Democrat who lost his seat in the 2004 election, will also participate.

"I am concerned about the state of our electoral system and believe we need to improve it," Carter said in a statement. He said the group will assess "issues of inclusion" in federal voting and propose recommendations to improve the process.

"We will try to define an electoral system for the 21st century that will make Americans proud again," he said.

Though disputes over recounts and voter eligibility marred the 2000 U.S. presidential election, international monitors in place in November 2004 reported the polls were mostly fair.

Still, concerns emerged about exceedingly long lines that kept voters from the polls in several states including Ohio, whose 20 electoral college votes ultimately decided the election in President Bush's favor.

The Center for Democracy and Election Management, which will organize the work of Carter's commission, said the group would hold two public hearings -- the first on April 18 at American University in Washington and the second at Houston's Rice University in June.

The Commission on Federal Election Reform aims to produce a report to Congress on its findings by September.

As Blackwell Says, Ohio’s in 2004 was a National Model

2005-03-24T21:28:00.000-08:00

The Free Press
by Steve Rosenfeld, Bob Fitrakis, and Harvey Wasserman
March 24, 2005

Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell finally testified – something he had refused to do in the Moss v. Bush Ohio election challenge before the State Supreme Court and refused to do in Washington, D.C. His testimony proved so contentious that at one point Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, D-OH, told him to “haul butt” if he was unwilling to answer questions about irregularities in the 2004 election.

Blackwell vigorously defended his role in last fall’s presidential election at a congressional hearing on Monday, March 21, at the Ohio Statehouse, claiming critics have smeared his state as if it were a “third world country” rather than the national model of election administration that Blackwell said it was. In December, Republican state senators blocked a similar Democrat-sponsored forum from using the Statehouse, forcing testimony to be taken at the Democrat-controlled Columbus City Council chambers. Meanwhile, hundreds of disenfranchised voters testified under oath in Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo and Warren concerning their voting day hardships.

“We had a good election in the state of Ohio. Not a perfect election – elections are human endeavors,” Blackwell, a Republican gubernatorial candidate and co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign, told the House Committee on Administration in Columbus. In opening remarks, he also noted Ohio coped with a million new voters and tremendous efforts by both political parties to exploit legal tactics to their advantage.

“While much has been written by the conspiracy theorists, I would like to point out that there has only been one complaint filed by the HAVA process,” Blackwell said, referring to the Help America Vote Act, which was enacted by Congress after Florida’s 2000 election debacle. “I am interested in clean, fair and transparent elections.”

Blackwell’s opening remarks set the stage for a dramatic, revealing hearing where observers either accepted his assertions that explained away and minimized the vast problems documented on November 2, 2004 – or his remarks, in tandem with earlier testimony from other Ohio election officials, made the strongest possible case that the entire voting process must be federalized, or else elections will run under separate and unequal laws drafted according to varying local and state whims.

“We had the most successful election on a punch card system ever,” he said. “It’s silly on its face to say there was systematic attempt to disenfranchise blacks in Franklin County… We have to work very hard to make sure our system is fraud proof… and that’s what I found so offensive that charges were made against the system by folks who didn’t have the decency to check the facts… We were targeted for such chaos and confusion.”

Blackwell’s wholesale denial of the legal record documenting the scores of Election Day problems that disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters – from the House Judiciary Committee Democrats’ report, to the 900 pages of sworn affidavits and other analysis filed at the Ohio Supreme Court in response to his attempt to sanction the lawyer who filed a lawful challenge of the 2004 presidential results, to the statements made in Washington on January 6, 2005 during the Electoral College challenge – did not go unanswered by Democrats on the House Administration Committee.

“Mr. Secretary of State, you have a lot of improvement to do,” said Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald, D-CA, the ranking Democrat on the panel.

Blackwell testified after a string of county election directors and election board chairs said his office did not provide adequate funds for poll worker training and public education. In addition, they said their offices were deluged with administrative orders by Blackwell before the election and continuing through Election Day, complicating the process and leading to poll worker confusion, especially in some of Ohio’s biggest cities – the traditional Democratic strongholds. Those complications slowed or sullied the voting process, several county board of election directors said.

The county directors and chairs also said voter registration information from Blackwell’s office – the basis for allocating voting machines in some cases – also was typically 6 months old. And Cayuhoga County’s Michael Vu said his effort to tell 6,000-plus poll workers how to better-handle provisional ballots were met with written threats from Blackwell.

“Mr. Blackwell, there have been many allegations put out there – you don’t want to hear that,” Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald said. “But they are out there… you did have long lines, therefore there was a certain amount of disenfranchisement.”

Blackwell – who turned his back to Millender-McDonald when she spoke and was told by the congresswoman to face him and speak up – had answers for all the problems cited. The shortage of voting machines was in part the federal government’s fault, he said, as HAVA required new machines – but only provided limited funding to buy those new machines. Thus he said he was unable to replace old machines or buy new ones, adding – and this is notable in itself – that even the newest electronic voting machines had unacceptable security flaws.

While Vu noted that there were 10,000 voting machines available in the Cleveland area, Franklin County Election Board Chair William Anthony acknowledged that his county and the city of Columbus was woefully short. Anthony has repeatedly stated that Franklin County operated with only 2866 machines available, about half the number necessary.

As for why his office had not provided or spent poll worker raining and voter education funds given to the state through HAVA, Blackwell said he did spend some of that money, but was holding back until the state bought a new generation of voting machines.

Blackwell was asked why he enforced a rule only giving voters 5 minutes in a voting booth if there was a line of people waiting to vote. He said that was Ohio law and provided the state statute. He was asked why he instituted a rule that mailed-in voter registrations had to be on a certain weight paper or they’d be rejected. He said there were stricter state standards before the 2004 election season and he “relaxed” them.

Blackwell was also asked by Millender-McDonald about following the provisional ballot rules in HAVA. Not making these ballots available to voters who are not on the poll’s list of registered voters is illegal under HAVA, and Blackwell said he did this.

“In Ohio in this election, everyone got a provisional ballot who requested one,” he said. “There was a good faith effort to do that.”

“Giving provisional ballots is one thing, but counting them is another,” Millender-McDonald replied.

Blackwell replied that ballots would not be counted unless voters too them to the county courthouses or board of election office. He said voters were told that at the polls.
“But that disenfranchised them anyway,” Millender-McDonald replied.

Blackwell’s response was Ohio had one of the highest rates of counting provisional ballots in the country; with 78 percent of the provisional ballots cast being accepted.

The thrust of Millender-McDonald’s questioning suggested that Blackwell’s policies, en masse, created barriers to voting – rather than opening the process to all citizens.

“A lot of assertions are made on Internet blogs or by wild conspiracy theorists,” he replied. “If I could interpret their brains or their minds, I’d be a rich man.”

ENTER REP. STEPHANIE TUBBS-JONES

Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, the judge-turned-congresswoman from Ohio’s largest city, Cleveland, led the House challenge to the 2004 Electoral College certification. While she is not a member of the House Administration Committee, the committee members let her participate as a panel member as a House courtesy.

When it was her turn to ask questions, Blackwell said it was “good to see you,” to which Rep. Tubbs-Jones replied, “It was so good to see you that you chose not to shake my hand in the anteroom.”

Jones followed up the questioning on the provisional ballots by asking Blackwell why his ‘public education’ campaign – radio ads and recording phone messages to voters’ homes - did not tell people that if they were given a provisional ballot they had to be turned in at the board of elections to be counted.

“In this ad you said ‘Vote your precinct,’ but you didn’t say ‘Vote in your board of elections,” Tubbs-Jones said. “You did an ad statewide and you spent $2.5 million.”

“We went into one million households by phone, in your district and Cleveland. We told them how to vote,” Blackwell replied. “As much as you want to create a third-world situation in your state, we called… We told them how to make their vote count.”

“Let’s count the words, you could have said…” Tubbs-Jones replied.

“I refuse to sit here and be harangued by you,” Blackwell said.

“Not every voter has a master’s degree. Not every voter has a bachelor’s degree. We want to make sure that information is on a level where everyone understands,” Millender-McDonald said.

“I used the language that a bipartisan (advertising) firm recommended,” Blackwell said.
“Bipartisan doesn’t mean a thing when they speak over the heads of the average voter,” Millender-McDonald replied.

This and other exchanges between Blackwell and the congresswomen typically ended with Blackwell saying he was following the “best practices” in the election field and defending state election workers as models for other states to follow.

“We will defend the professionalism and integrity of the 50,000 election workers in this state,” he defiantly concluded.

Another View: County Election Directors

While Blackwell sought to deflect criticism and dismiss those who said the 2004 election in his state was marred by problems, some of the very people who serve at his pleasure – county board of election directors who he appoints and fires – testified in the panel just before him that the Secretary of State’s policies, practices and orders confused and complicated the voting process.

County election officials were asked why there was confusion over provisional ballots. The first problem explored was why many registered voters received these ballots. One explanation was voters were not adequately directed at polling places, especially where multiple precincts were located. Thus, voters got in any line, or the shortest line, and did not realize that they needed to be in the correct line, said Cayuhoga County Board of Elections Director Michael Vu. Often, voters did not realize this until after waiting for hours. And then there was confusion over filling out the ballots, casting and counting. “Poll workers also were confused by the provisional ballot process,” Vu said.

Several county officials pointed out that they did not have access to the federal funds allocated under HAVA to better train poll workers. Blackwell later said he was holding onto the money for future training purposes, particularly for new voting machines.

“It could have been a bigger mess,” said Bill Anthony, Franklin County Director of Elections, referring to the use of provisional ballots. Anthony said there should be “no-excuse absentee voting” and “Election Day should be a holiday,” but he then added Ohio’s legislature did not want these two options as law.

Long Lines, Too Few Machines

House Administration Committee Chairman, Republican Robert Ney, R-OH, asked Anthony about the cause of the long lines on Election Day. In many inner-city precincts, people waited as long as seven hours to vote, at times standing outside in a cold rain.

“We did not have enough machines,” Anthony said, saying the county had an increase in voter registration but allocated the voting machines based on the 2000 election. “We tried to have at least two machines for each precinct.”

Later, Michael Vu said Cayuhoga County, which includes Cleveland, has one machine for every 115 registered voters. In Franklin County, where Columbus is located, the ratio was as high as one machine for every 500 voters.

When Anthony was asked if Franklin County could have borrowed machines from other cities, he said that was not possible because his county used different brands and machine types. Moreover, the machines in Franklin County were not on “an approved list” from the Blackwell’s office, meaning Anthony could not buy more of them – even if he wanted to. “We’re in between a rock and hard spot,” he said, adding, “We don’t believe the optical scan machines will work in large county like ours.” (Of course, many cities and counties across America use optical-scan voting machines).

When asked about Knox County, where Kenyon College was located at students had to wait until 4 a.m. to finish voting – because there was only one working machine - Keith Cunningham, President of the Ohio Association of Election Officials and Director of the Allen County Board of Elections, said that problem was blown out of proportion because that “was only one precinct.” Rep. Millender-McDonald quickly replied, “Come on. No one should be denied the right to vote.”
Public Participation

When asked what preparations were made in preparation for Ohio’s battleground state role, Cunningham said such heightened scrutiny – by the public, press and partisans – was a tremendous problem. “We never had attorneys in our office. We never had activists in our office. They were very disruptive,” he said. “People were trying to create chaos and confusion to exploit.”

Mike Sciortino, Director, Mahoning County Board of Elections, said he and other county election directors had daily telephone conference calls with Blackwell, but in his case – a county where numerous electronic voting machines malfunctioned by recording a vote for Kerry as a vote for Bush – Sciortino said poll workers could not be trained “more than 30 days out.” His county did not have funds to train poll workers, he said, adding that to do so earlier in the year was ineffective because “they don’t retain that information.”

As a result, Blackwell issued “a blizzard of directives” at the last minute on a long list of Election Day procedures to follow, Vu said. However, none of Blackwell’s directives said how voters were to be notified about up-to-date registration information, he said.

Notably, the county election directors said the registration information they received from Blackwell’s office was six months old. “You’re saying the Secretary of State was late and you guys were not,” Rep. Millender-McDonald said. “Yes,” Anthony replied. “That’s awful,” Millender-McDonald said. In later testimony, Blackwell said this gap was an unavoidable consequence of modernizing Ohio’s statewide voter registration database, adding that Ohio was now in the national forefront of computerizing these records.

Blackwell’s Heavy Hand

Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, D-OH, said rather than blame poll workers, explain what happened with the federal voter education money allocated under HAVA. The county directors said they didn’t receive that money from Blackwell. “It might have answered some of the issues that were floating around for this election,” she said.

Tubbs-Jones also asked if the county directors took park in creating a statewide election plan, another HAVA requirement. All replied no. In one instance, Cayuhoga County’s Vu said he told his 6,000 poll workers and 500 alternates to give out provisional ballots to anyone voter in question – which conflicted with Blackwell’s directive that provisional ballots only were to go to people who were in the proper precinct – a problem when a polling place had multiple lines and multiple precincts. Vu said he then received a threatening letter from Blackwell on the matter.
“It was an implied threat,” he said, to which, Rep. Millender-McDonald, replied, “Sir, threats are not implied. They are made.”

In sum, the House Administration Committee field hearing is likely to be one of the few chances the public will have the opportunity to hear Blackwell questioned and challenged in a legal forum. When the committee last asked him to appear– while he was in Washington, D.C. – Blackwell did not show up. Similarly, Blackwell refused to be deposed during the 2004 election challenge lawsuit process.

Blackwell did not answer many of the questions that would have been asked had he appeared before the election challenge legal team, attorney Cliff Arnebeck said. For example, Blackwell did not answer questions about specific vote counts in counties – where the number of votes tabulated was bigger than the number of registered voters. Those figures, which were certified and used to calculate Bush’s victory margin, were pointed out in the election challenge suit. Since then, Blackwell’s office has ‘corrected’ the official vote count, another election challenge legal team member said.

But the biggest point made at the March 21 hearing was this: if you accept Blackwell’s assertion that his administration of the 2004 vote was a model for the nation to follow, then this example of ‘best practices’ shows why elections have to be run based on one federal standard. Otherwise, you get what Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., D-IL, says are “13,000 separate and unequal” voting jurisdictions across the country.

Election officials like Blackwell and his county election directors all want to retain the power to run elections - creating rules, imposing barriers or removing them - as they see fit. That power, coupled with what Blackwell said were “security issues” with the latest electronic voting machines, even those with paper trails, shows why elections in the country have a long way to go before they can be fully free and fair.

Blackwell says no problem

2005-03-23T20:02:00.000-08:00

Ohio official says election went smoothly
JOHN McCARTHY
Associated Press

COLUMBUS, Ohio - The state's election chief told lawmakers at a sometimes-testy congressional hearing Monday that Ohio's presidential election went as smoothly as possible, given the resources available and some last-minute interpretations by state and federal courts.

Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell testified before members of the U.S. House Administration Committee during a special hearing at the Ohio Statehouse. Members of the committee peppered Blackwell with questions about provisional ballots, long voting lines and other issues in the election that gave President Bush the 20 electoral votes he needed to capture re-election.

His appearance came more than a month after he failed to appear before the committee at a hearing in Washington.

U.S. Rep. Bob Ney, an Ohio Republican and the committee's chairman, took Blackwell's absence as a snub, especially since Blackwell was in Washington the same day to lead a meeting of the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute.

Blackwell, also a Republican, said he couldn't appear at Ney's hearing because of the previously scheduled institute meeting. Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood, another Republican, also did not appear, citing a previous commitment in her state.

The exchanges Monday became heated at times, especially between Blackwell and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, a Cleveland Democrat who is not a committee member but sat in with the panel.

Tubbs Jones questioned Blackwell about a telephone message delivered to thousands of voters just before the election to make sure they voted in the correct precinct, especially if they had not changed their registration and needed a provisional ballot. Tubbs Jones wondered why he didn't say in the message that voters had the option to use provisional ballots at their local boards of elections.

Blackwell said, "It worked," several times, his voice rising as Tubbs Jones continued the question. Ohio ranked fourth nationwide in the number of provisional ballots that were validated. Ten days before the election, a judge upheld Blackwell's directive that voters must cast provisional ballots in the correct precinct.

Blackwell also said directives he issued on provisional ballots and voter registration cards that led to complaints about their timeliness were forced by court rulings made just weeks or days before the election.

Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald of California, the committee's ranking Democrat, asked Blackwell several questions about alleged irregularities, including voters getting calls telling them the election was the day after Nov. 2 and voting machine misallocation by elections officials.

Blackwell responded that he know of no such calls from elections officials and that to rig the machine allotment to favor Bush, poll workers of both parties would have had to work together, Blackwell said.

"It would have taken the collusion of 176 Democratic leaders. It's silly on its face to think there was some kind of bipartisan conspiracy," Blackwell said.

Election reform proposals ignite clash over states rights

2005-03-20T22:38:00.000-08:00

Associated Press
18 March 2005

WASHINGTON - As Congress considers possible election reforms in light of another close presidential race, a fight is shaping up between lawmakers who want national standards and state officials, who maintain that running elections is a state right.

This underlying ideological conflict - federal power vs. states rights - is a tension that has been a part of American politics since the beginning of the union. But how it plays out on this issue is critical to what future election changes end up being put in place.

"Our system certainly is not perfect ... but we are concerned by what we see is a movement to federalize elections," Kansas Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh said at a recent congressional hearing. "The states, clearly, must be allowed to do what we do best."

House Administration Chairman Bob Ney, R-Ohio, whose committee oversees election issues, agreed that making election reforms strikes a "horrific balance" between states and the federal government, but he has said the reported problems that followed both the 2000 and 2004 elections demand Congress' attention.

Congress was able to sidestep this conflict when it passed its landmark Help America Vote Act in 2002 by guaranteeing states large amounts of money if they installed certain reforms, such as provisional balloting, d voting machines and statewide registration databases.

Now, as state officials struggle to implement these reforms with less money than the law promised they are bristling over a slew of recent legislative proposals that would force additional standards on them, such as national polling place hours of operation, voter eligibility criteria, and restrictions on election chiefs serving in political campaigns.

In response to legislation on these reforms - from Reps. John Conyers of Michigan and Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio, and Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and John Kerry of Massachusetts, both possible presidential contenders in 2008 - the National Association of Secretaries of State sent a harshly worded resolution to members of Congress.

In it, they urged lawmakers to dissolve state election officials' oversight organization, the federal Election Assistance Commission, which was created by the Help America Vote Act to set election standards that states must implement in order to receive funding.

"Soon, you will be asked to consider legislation that would dictate national standards for administering elections. The passage of any such law would undercut the states' ability to effectively administer elections and interfere with the progress they have made in implementing election reforms," the elections officials wrote in a letter to lawmakers.

Rebecca Vigil-Giron, New Mexico's secretary of state and president of NASS, said the group wasn't downplaying the need for election improvements. They were reacting to the pending legislation in an attempt to head off any consideration of national election standards.

But Ney and other lawmakers on his committee, which has jurisdiction over election issues, called the resolution premature and disappointing. They urged state officials to cooperate with the election commission.

Stanley Renshon, a political psychologist at the City University of New York, said the problem is that since states allowed Congress to make some election reforms in its 2002 law, with the promise of funding, they essentially opened the door to additional reforms.

"What the states would prefer is a lot of funding without a lot of oversight. But once you open the door and let the federal government in, it is what it is," he said. "The federal government thinks that once it hands out money, it likes to see what happens to it."

John Green, director of the University of Akron's Ray C. Bliss Institute for Applied Politics, said offering federal funding is one way the federal government gets past the states rights conflict. On other issues, such as with the Clean Air Act, the federal government sets standards that it then allows states to implement.

If neither of these methods works, however, the only other outcome to this conflict is an all-out fight over jurisdiction, Green said.

"What we're seeing now is the states and the federal government wanting to avoid that third alternative. They're hard bargaining now, so they won't have that nasty confrontation," Green said, adding that the score is pretty even in terms of who wins that battle.

Election Day Analysis in PA

2005-03-18T23:13:00.000-08:00

The PA Voters Coalition Releases Election Day 2004 Analysis

The Pennsylvania Voters Coalition (PVC) has released its 2004 Election Day Analysis (PDF). The report is based on thousands of reports from voters throughout the state to telephone help-lines. Despite national and state efforts under the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) much more needs to be done to protect Pennsylvanians’ right to vote. The report evaluates how the election system performed in several critical areas, identifies problems and makes recommendations for corrective actions.

• First-time voters had to wait until they were at their polling places to learn that they were not on the registration rolls, since there was no easy way to verify whether the registration was complete. This problem is compounded by Pennsylvania’s failure to get the Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors (SURE) system into operation. This system would allow voters to verify that their registration was complete and accurate, and to get this information on-line, not in-line!

• Fraudulent activities occurred in which voter registration forms were withheld, and letters were received by citizens telling them that their polling places had been moved or that Democrats would vote on one day and Republicans on the next.

• Instances in which applicants failed to check boxes affirming their age and citizenship and/or the party preference box kept voter registration forms from being processed. Other voters claimed they had been inappropriately purged from voter rolls

• Asian American voters faced difficulties in registering to vote due to language barriers and a lack of translated voter registration forms.

• Pennsylvania’s absentee ballot process is confusing and burdensome to voters. Worse yet, the confusion and disputes over who would be on the ballot delayed many counties from mailing out absentee ballots. Many voters did not receive their absentee ballots in time to vote on Election Day.

• People who became incapacitated or hospitalized over the weekend prior to Election Day were unable to vote.

• Some election officials seemed unfamiliar with new provisional ballot and voter ID requirements and had not even read the information packet. There were reports of voters being asked to present an ID although they had voted in the same place for years; and poll workers not offering provisional ballots when appropriate. Some polling places ran out of provisional ballots while others had none.

• Most counties did not complete counting provisional ballots within the required three days. Some voters were unable to find out for weeks if their votes had been counted.

• Long lines at polling places were a problem, and many citizens became discouraged and left without voting. Some polls were understaffed.

• There were many reports of voting equipment being out of order and some polling places had no functioning voting machine when the polls opened.

• Too many polling places are inaccessible for people with physical disabilities. Some locations specified as accessible were not. Pennsylvania is out of compliance with a 20 year old federal law requiring polling place accessibility.

• Some precincts had no phones while others that did could not get through to the election bureaus.

Summary: In accordance with HAVA most counties in Pennsylvania will be upgrading or replacing their voting equipment this year. Many issues with the current system can be traced to inadequate staffing and training of poll workers, lack of voter information and education, and poor administration at the state and county level. Immediate corrective action is needed or these problems will only be compounded with new voting systems. Other problems can only be solved by legislative or regulatory changes.

Equal access of every citizen to the right to vote is fundamental to our democratic system. A flawed election system is discriminatory, creates lack of confidence in our electoral and governing systems, and discourages voter participation. The Pennsylvania Voters Coalition is committed to working with the Governor, the State Legislature, the Pennsylvania Department of State, and local election officials to ensure that Pennsylvania elections are a model worthy of the state that is the cradle of American democracy.

Save Our Democracy

2005-03-17T21:31:00.000-08:00

by John Irwin
March 16, 2005

For the last several decades, the corporate establishment, because of their control of the media, gained more and more control of the country. However, after the 2000 election, which won voter fraud in Florida and by the bizarre action of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, a great mobilization took place that was aimed at winning the next election. The accomplishments of this mobilization were phenomenal. A coalition of traditional democrats, old lefties, and new activists matched the tremendous 150 million dollar war chest accumulated by the Republicans. Theirs came from corporations and rich donors, ours mostly from small donations from more ordinary people. Then, we register millions of new voters—mothers, minorities, and young people—and they voted.

We stuck to the right issues—the mistake of going to war, the lose of good jobs, the huge tax give away to the wealthy and its consequences to our economy, the destruction of our environment, our failed medical delivery system, the erosion of our civil liberties, our loss of respect and support in the world, and the government’s lying to us on the reasons for going to war.

They spewed their hollow rhetoric on “family values” (though they had never delivered any real support to families). They harangued on patriotism and support for our troops, though what supporting meant to them was sending mostly reservists to battle a war that should not have been fought. They militated against abortion and gay rights. Finally, they stooped to attacking the war record and the anti-war activities of Kerry, though the top leaders of the republican party were draft dodgers themselves.

When Election Day started, it looked like our efforts had paid off. All the early results indicated that Kerry was winning by 4 or 5 percentage points. When the final vote counts started coming in, it got closer and closer and it finally boiled down to Florida and Ohio. Late in the night, these two states ended up in the Bush column and it appeared we had lost.

Immediately, some perspicacious people concluded that something was wrong. Ira Glasser, the former director of the ACLU and mathematician by education, circulated a memo indicating that when you looked at the huge increase of young voters, who were much more likely to be Kerry supporters and the closeness of the last election, the numbers did not add up. Then a comparison of 3 states (Wisconsin, Maine, and Illinois) that had paper ballots with 6 (North Carolina, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania) that had electronic voting was circulated. This comparison revealed that in the states with paper ballots the exit polls and the actual vote were within 1.5 percentage points of each other and in the states with electronic voting they were off from 4 to 6 percent, all in the direction favoring Bush. In addition, people working in Ohio and Florida were discovering many voting “irregularities”: machines that started with thousands of Bush votes already recorded, people in heavy democratic districts left off the voting lists, lack of voting machines in heaving democratic districts, etc. More people started getting suspicious.

However, what was surprising was that people who should have been suspicious and desirous of initiating a systematic examination of the vote remained silent or capitulated. Even the persons who conducted the exit polls immediately capitulated and offered the flimsy explanation for the large errors in their predictions that Bush supporters were less likely than Kerry supporters to respond to the pollsters. They gave no reason why this was so.

The majority response on the part of our democratic leaders and the journalists who purport to be on our side was to wring their hands and whine about our not understanding the mood of the people who, as good Christians, are upset that we have moved too far away from the central moral values of the United States. The talk was that to regain power, we were going to have to move back to the center and be more like Republicans. As one group from Texas put it:

The Democrats' mistake was in thinking that a disastrous war, national bankruptcy, erosion of liberties, corporate takeover of government, environmental destruction, squandering our economic and moral leadership in the world, and systematic Administration lying would be of concern to the electorate.

The Republicans correctly saw that the chief concern of the electorate was to keep gay couples from having an abortion.

Well, they are wrong. We won the election. The massive efforts to get out the vote worked. We won by 3 or 4 percent. Our mistake was that we let them supply the voting machines and they did what we should have known that they would do, they cheated.

Solid proof that this is what occurred is now in.

--John Irwin is a Professor Emeritus at San Francisco State University where he taught sociology for 27 years. His speciality was criminology and he wrote 6 books on prisons and jails. This became his speciality because he had served a five year sentence for robbery in California State Prison at Soledad during the 1950s. In the late 1960s, he became involved in prison reform and prisoners rights and organized the California Prisoners' Union. He has worked with a variety of organizations on prisoners' rights since then.

Paper Trails Aren't Good Enough, Count The Ballots

2005-03-16T20:32:00.000-08:00

Democrats! Paper "Trails" Aren't Good Enough. Count The Damn Ballots!
By Lynn Landes

After the 2004 election I thought I would barf if I heard one more Democratic pundit or politician lament the lost election and blame it on the party's ''message''. As grassroots activists across the country reported thousands of election irregularities and voting machine "glitches" that overwhelmingly benefited Bush, the Democratic leadership seemed unusually willing to look the other way. John Kerry quickly conceded, former President Carter attended Bush's ignoble inauguration, and Bill Clinton now pals around with Bush the First.

Rank and file Democrats are tearing their hair out.

Now, in a gesture calculated to win back their base, but gain little else (in terms of voting security), both House and Senate Democrats have offered a flurry of bills (with many state legislatures following in hot pursuit) that require ballot printers for touchscreen voting machines.

Incredibly, none of these bills call for the ballots to be counted.except in the extremely remote event of a recount.

It takes your breath away. The Dems know that two Republican-controlled companies (ES&S and Diebold) count 80% of all votes in America. Why do they still trust these companies and their lousy machines, particularly after the last two presidential elections? In fact, since the 1960's when computerized voting technology was first introduced, machine malfunctions almost always benefit Republicans. Perhaps that's why Republican stranglehold over the political landscape has grown so tight. Otherwise, things don't add up. One example, if Bush's war on the world is so popular why don't lots of young Republicans sign up for the military? Haven't the Dems noticed that?

The proposed legislation, popularly known as "voter-verified paper audit trail", sounded alright when I first heard about it a few years ago. But, on closer inspection it became clear that it wasn't a good idea at all. Fundamentally, it allows "voter verification" and "audits" to replace our constitutional right to mark, cast, and count ballots. Under this legislation, machines and election officials continue to control the process, while meaningful citizen participation and oversight is effectively destroyed.

Besides all that, don't Dems understand that malfunctioning machines make ballot printers irrelevant? What are they thinking?

In the real world, recounts are very rare. In general, they only get triggered if an election is "close." Many people think that if a candidate wins by a significant margin (as Bush appeared to do), then vote fraud or system failure is unlikely. I call it, "The myth of the margin of victory". There are four things to consider regarding recounts and margins of victory:

First, anyone contemplating vote fraud will certainly want to win by a significant margin in order to avoid triggering an automatic recount.

Second, two corporations are counting 80% of the votes. Millions of votes can be easily manipulated by a handful of company technicians. There will be little chance of detection. So, even a landslide election is not evidence that massive vote fraud or system failure did not occur. Third, a significant margin of victory packs a powerful psychological punch against the opposing candidate. They will be unlikely to contest the election under these circumstances. Some observers contend that is exactly what happened to John Kerry in this past election. On the other hand, something was fishy when candidate Kerry said that he was going to make sure that "every vote will be counted" in the 2004 presidential election. Who was he kidding? He had to know that 99% of all votes are processed by machines, not people. Kerry sent thousands of attorneys and volunteers to the polls on Election Day 2004 in a futile attempt to monitor an unobservable vote count.

Fourth, although polling data can be used to raise red flags where election fraud may have occurred, polls can also be used to shape public opinion, create false expectations, and even support rigged election results. The relationship between the corporate news media and polling organizations is completely nontransparent. There is no reason to believe a thing these polls have to say. And there's plenty of reason to suspect the news media. This country's largest voting machine company, ES&S, is owned by one of their members, The Omaha World Herald.

But, none of this should be news to the Democrats. So, why aren't they demanding the obvious solution? Get rid of the machines. Or, at least don't wait for a recount. Count the damn ballots the first time. Again, what are they thinking? Either the Democrats are unbelievably naive or they've been bought off.

The Democratic National Committee's (DNC) leadership on the issue of voting systems has been mind-bending. On Oct. 3, 2004 the DNC voted to endorse the policy of requiring paper ballots for touchscreen voting machines by the 2004 election. Then, on Nov. 22 the DNC approved the use of the most insecure voting system on the face of the planet for the 2004 Michigan Democratic primary - Internet voting. That was the second time. In the 2000 Arizona Democratic primary the Internet was also used. Strangely, the Democrats tried to stonewall this journalist from finding out the name of the company that conducted the online Michigan primary. What did they have to hide? See:
http://www.ecotalk.org/Democrats&VotingTechnology.htm.

There's more. John Fund, author of the book, Stealing Elections, writes, "Joe Andrew, chairman of the Democratic National Committee until 2001, is a senior adviser to a biotech firm that owned several Internet companies. He says the conspiracy theories aren't healthy and last month he told the Maryland Association of Election Officials that "When it comes to electronic voting, most liberals are just plain old-fashioned nuts." While conservatives were skilled at coordinating their messages, he added, "that does not mean there is a vast right-wing conspiracy trying to steal votes in America, as the loudest voices on the left are saying today....Mr. Andrew said the people obsessed about DRE manipulation are either computer experts with impressive technical knowledge but little practical experience with elections or left-leaning computer users who are conspiratorial by nature. He noted with regret that they have been joined in their hysteria by prominent Democrats who "are rallying behind the anti-DRE bandwagon in a big election year because they think that this movement is good for Democrats."

Mr. Andrew appears to be batting for the other side.

Will things change under Howard Dean's leadership? Maybe not. Back on Oct. 02, 2003, the Associated Press reported, "Eight of the presidential candidates have written national Democratic officials to support a challenge of Michigan Democrats' plan to allow Internet voting in its caucuses Feb. 7. Only Howard Dean, former Vermont governor, and Wesley Clark, the retired general who just joined the race, did not sign on to back the protest."

Perhaps, the Democrats need a crash course in Voting 101. There is an enormous difference between people marking, casting, and counting ballots and machines performing these same functions. People can be observed and machines can't. If poll watchers can't observe the process, then they'll have no real opportunity to discover if vote fraud or miscounts occur. It's that simple. But, it's a simple truth that seems to elude congressional Democrats.

In contrast, the Republicans have figured it out. A HBO documentary that aired on October 11, 2004 shows Congressman Pete King (R-NY) bragging about the upcoming election, "It's already over. The election's over. We won. It's all over but the counting and we'll take care of the counting."

They sure did.

Lessons from Cuyahoga and Harris Counties

2005-03-15T20:41:00.000-08:00

Whose Elections? Our Elections?
By GREG MOSES

While the power of new voting technology was attracting a nationwide convergence of suspicion in the vote count reported for Ohio's Cuyahoga County, the very same software system was being put to troubling new uses in Harris County, Texas where hardly a word was uttered in reply.

Yet the power of software to politically manage votes and voters is not simply the power to produce vote totals, it also lies in the power of information technology to "discipline and punish" voting populations with increasing speed and efficiency.

In the case of Harris County, a small legislative district with unique political geography became a testing ground for the power of software to criminalize and discredit voters in the aftermath of a surprising vote count. Although a rare legislative contest failed to reverse a 33-vote defeat of a powerful Republican incumbent, the process of the contest did reduce the margin of victory for the Democrat. And the tactic of using new software to identify and pursue individual voters was added to the Republican playbook as yawning observers nodded.

Thanks to the recent addition of VOTEC Election Management And Compliance System or VEMACS (the same software package used in Cuyahoga County and ten other states) the Voter Registrar of Harris County was able to deliver with unprecedented speed and precision a list of 167 suspected illegal voters shortly after Republican attorneys charged that Democratic voters had illegally stolen the election.

The production and distribution of the Registrarís fat report was widely viewed as a normal and helpful thing to do in sorting out the facts of the election contest. However, according to documents supplied to the Texas Civil Rights Review, the Registrarís usual investigation of voter activity in major elections takes several months to complete, and does not target specific election contests. In the case of Houstonís HD 149, it is still not clear that anything motivated the special report apart from Republican allegations that the election had been stolen by illegal Democratic voters. Media-fed allegations of voter misconduct created an environment in which a historically unique report appeared as a normal and timely contribution.

In the end, hyped-up Republican charges against Democratic voters were not supported by the evidence. But the report produced by the Registrarís election software did enable an unprecedented invasion of voter privacy. Within a month following the release of the Registrar's report, about 150 voters had been served with subpoenas that demanded them to reveal their votes in the election contest. And about 110 voters eventually saw their votes deducted from the race. Was the interrogation of Houston voters in January the largest voter sweep in history? We hope so. Because the Harris County precedent warns us that where powerful software is available, there will be more voter sweeps to come.

And despite the outcome, the contest for House District 149 was conducted under circumstances favorable to an election reversal. As one official explained, the district is bounded on the Southwest side by a diagonal line that represents the longest county-line boundary given to any legislative district in the state. With election laws that draw hard lines against voters who cross county lines, the likelihood of out-of-county fouls was favorable from the start.

The Texas Civil Rights Review conducted a Mapquest review of addresses reported by 19 voters who were flagged by the Registrar in one borderline precinct. Seven of the voters continued to live within a mile of their old precinct. And for one of those voters, the Mapquest star that marks the voter's home touched the county line. On a TerraServer satellite image also, the red dot marking the voter's address virtually hugged the imaginary county line that cut diagonally through the neighborhood. Although the voter was subpoenaed and ordered to reveal his vote in the race, the Master of Discovery for the legislative contest Rep. Will Hartnett (R-Dallas) was unable to determine a clear answer as to how he voted.

A phone call to that voter remains unreturned. As I left a message with his spouse, she explained it was a busy night at home, and I could hear the sounds of happy children in the background. As with the homes of two other voters that I have contacted by telephone, I came away with the impression that voters do not want to extend their experiences of the election contest any further. Like any trauma of life, they prefer to move on. And the circumstances make it difficult for me to feel any pushier about getting their quotes. For this reason, I worry about the long term effects that these contests may have on voters who seem dispirited enough already.

There has been virtually no journalistic interest in reporting the experiences of approximately 150 voters who were served and deposed in the Republican-led contest (unless you count the Norwegian citizen who on his voter application listed his previous residence as Oslo, checked "not a citizen" and was given a voter card anyway for his George Bush Park precinct. His case was reported as a kind of absurd comedy, and his Republican vote was subtracted.)

But what about the two young women who were citizens but who neglected to find and check the citizenship box on applications that were laid out quite differently than the one filled out by our Norwegian resident above. The citizenship box on applications given the two women was separated from the field for all other information and placed into a section that appeared above and to the right. Although the two voters eventually submitted the proper checkmarks and voted on election day, their online registrations were re-dated during the month of January. Following merciless post-election review of their registration histories by Republican attorneys, the two women were disqualified for the crime of completing their registrations too late, and their Democratic votes were subtracted as illegal.

As voter activists from the Ohio campaign are calling for open-source codes and paper trails to help check the power of vote counting software, there should also be a response to the newfound power of post-election review. With the increasing ability of technology to monitor where voters actually reside, the antidote for post-election harassment would appear to lie in pre-election flexibility. Let voters register later, electronically, and with instant printouts that confirm completed applications. If a checkbox is crucial to registration, voters could be prompted to complete their forms in real time.

Furthermore, why not allow voters to access their proper ballots from any polling place? Why in this world of broadband interactivity should voters be told to drive around, when ballots can be delivered to them by keystroke? Rather than drift yawning into a future of technology built by and for the few, democrats can demand from Voter Registrars the kind of lightning quick responsiveness that enables, encourages, and motivates voters. In a world of digital power, Voter Registrars should feel pressure to make tools that work for voters, not against them, before during and after election day.

Teresa Heinz Kerry - Hacking the "Mother Machine"?

2005-03-14T21:14:00.000-08:00

"Two brothers own 80 percent of the [voting] machines used in the United States," Teresa Heinz Kerry told a group of Seattle guests at a March 7, 2005 lunch for Representative Adam Smith, according to reporter Joel Connelly in an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Connelly noted Heinz Kerry added that it is "very easy to hack into the mother machines."

Read full article.

Democrats walk on bill requiring photo ID to vote

2005-03-13T12:27:00.000-08:00

By JIM GALLOWAY

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Twenty-one of 22 Democrats walked out of the Senate chamber for about 30 minutes Friday evening following a vote that lowered the number of pieces of identification acceptable for voting. Senate Bill 84 would require photo identification from the Department of Motor Vehicle Safety to vote.

Democrats said they had serious voting rights concerns about the bill and worried that elderly and the poor wouldn’t be able to get photo IDs.

Tim Golden (D-Valdosta), head of the Democratic Caucus, said, “White Democrats joined black ones to show their solidarity.”

He spoke of “the irony of getting rid of Jim Crow laws tomorrow while putting another on the books today.”

Republican sponsors of the bill said it was an effort to cut down on voter fraud. But Democratic critics compared it to the poll taxes, literacy tests and other laws aimed at suppressing black votes during segregation.

Most of the Democrats returned when the time came to vote on Sonny Perdue’s faith-based initiative, which would allow religious institutions that provide social services to compete for state funding. Critics say the resolution’s language could lead to school vouchers. The resolution calls for a constitutional amendment which would require a two-thirds majority. Some Democrats would have to support the resolution for it to pass.

The Stolen Election

2005-03-12T18:31:00.000-08:00

The sun revolves around the Earth and George W. Bush won the election in Ohio

March 8, 2005
Bob Fitrakis

The Bush family and friends stole both the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections. The covert operations long associated with George Herbert Walker Bush, former President and CIA director, are now overtly practiced in key battleground states.

The mainstream media is much like medieval theologians, who refused to accept the obvious, that the Earth revolved around the sun. Instead, they plotted bizarre planet rotations to prove the Earth was the center of the universe.

In order to believe that Bush won in Ohio, you have to ignore deadly accurate exit polls and all observable data to avoid the Bush family theft. By refusing to consider this CIA-connected family’s history, one must accept the following ridiculous political conclusions: that Bush supporters were shy in Ohio and Florida and reluctant to answer exit poll questions, but not shy in Arizona, Arkansas and Louisiana; that pollster Zogby’s Election Day calls for Kerry in Ohio and Florida were wrong, as well as the Harris poll; that Mitofsky’s exit polling is flawed in the U.S. but an accurate predictor in the Ukraine for fraud; that Kerry easily carried the metropolitan areas of Cleveland and Columbus but lost due to an unobserved Bush surge in rural Appalachia; that Bush won despite an incumbent approval rating under 50%; that Bush got 80% or so of the undecided vote although all professional pollsters agree that undecideds generally vote for the challenger; and private partisan companies that secretly count the vote without paper trails are fair and honestly doing their job.

Equally important as the implausible scenarios one must accept, is the real life Bush family history one must ignore. One must turn away from three generations of Bush ties to the security intelligence complex and the CIA. When George H.W. Bush took over the CIA in the mid-1970s, critics across the political spectrum warned that Bush would politicize the agency for his own political aspirations. Roland Evans and Robert Novak, writing in the Washington Post, reported that some in the CIA were objecting “against any presidential scenario that looks to the CIA as a possible stepping-stone to the Vice Presidential nomination.”

Kevin Phillips, in American Dynasty, details how covert CIA operatives fired by Jimmy Carter’s CIA director Stansfield Turner, “joined the 1980 Bush campaign.” The Washington Post noted, “Simply put, no presidential campaign in recent memory – perhaps ever, has attracted so much support from the intelligence as the campaign of former CIA director George Bush.” Bush and his ex-CIA buddies secured the Vice Presidency in 1980, the Presidency in 1988 and have now rigged the 2000 and 2004 elections for Bush the Lesser.

To believe in W’s victory in 2004, you also have to forget the following historical facts: that in 1942, Prescott Bush, the current President’s grandfather, was called Hitler’s Angel by the New York Tribune; that in 1946, the OSS/CIA overthrew the Metakas government in Greece; that the U.S. gave at least $60 million to bring to power the former Nazi intelligence network of General Reinhard Gehlen in the first decade following World War II to control the intelligence apparatus in West Germany; that in 1953, the U.S. overthrew the popular Mossadegh in Iran and installed the brutal Shah; that in 1954, the CIA overthrew the democratically-elected Arbenz government in Guatemala; that in 1957, the CIA financed the election of pro-American candidates to the Lebanese Parliament; that in 1964, the CIA gave $20 million in assistance for Eduardo Frei to defeat Salvador Allende in Chile; that in 1967, the CIA overthrew the democratically-elected government of George Papandreou and installed a military dictatorship; that in 1973, the CIA overthrew the second oldest democracy in the western hemisphere in Chile; that in 1975, the CIA destabilized and forced the dissolution of the Labor government under Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in Australia; that in 1976, the CIA attempted to overthrow Michael Manley’s government in Jamaica.

The veterans of these covert operations established the first Bush Presidency. They also brought us Iran-Contra.

Under the Reagan-Bush administraton, mainframe computers were used to rig the election for Noriega supporters to be elected to the Panama Parliament and pre-programmed computer tapes were brought in to the government’s central tabulating center in a last ditch effort to prop up Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos in a “demonstration election.”

Even in the last election in the Ukraine, the Associated Press reports “the Bush administration has spent more than $65 million the past two years to aid political organizations in Ukraine….” And the Bush family’s candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, who won on a re-vote because the Mitofsky exit polls detected fraud, is married to Kateryna Chumachanko, a former Reagan White House official and daughter of right-wing Ukrainian exiles. Chumachanko was accused of being a CIA operative by her husband’s political opponents, according to the Washington Post.

Do we simply ignore all the signs of election theft in the U.S. and accept the bizarre axiom that the universal laws of statistics that reveal fraud in the Ukraine somehow stop at the United States border?

Interview with Conyers

2005-03-11T18:52:00.000-08:00

Full transcript: Raw Story interviews Rep. John Conyers on Gannon, voting, democracy

In an interview with RAW STORY Wednesday, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) detailed concerns on a broad array of issues, including discredited White House reporter Jeff Gannon, remarks by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and voting reform.In summary, Rep. Conyers expressed concern at what he perceives to be a systematic erosion of due process throughout government. He asserted this departure from the “protection that the government provides people” should be a “wake up call” to those who cherish democracy in the United States.Transcript follows.

Raw Story’s John Byrne: I wanted to say first Congressman, it’s an honor to speak with you. First of all, I wanted to touch on the Gannon scandal which seems to be consuming the media a little more than was expected. I’m wondering what you think will become of the Gannon scandal and what the Gannon’s exposure shows the American people.

Rep. John Conyers (D-MI): John, we’re aiming at one piece of information. Who in the White House knew that Jeff Gannon was an assumed name, was not a legitimate journalist and was merely a shill for the Administration for more than two years, almost three years. We, with [Rep.]Louise Slaughter (D-NY) and two or three other dozen members of Congress, we’ve been making some very good headway. Like you, I’m surprised and pleased that many others in the media are looking by in the amazement as we deal with a person who actually has flouted the very basic fundamental of our society in terms of gaining access into the White House with the President of the United States and which many, many reporters cannot do. So it’s a key question because it raises suspicions as to how the White House manages the news.

Raw Story: As I understand it you haven’t heard back from the White House, you haven’t gotten any documentation. Is that correct?

Conyers: We got a little bit under our Freedom of Information request but it was inadequate and it was much short; we’ve asked for more information. But we’ve got another technique. We have a Resolution of Inquiry that is guaranteed to members under the House rules in which we can hold a hearing, demand a vote in our committee, which would be Judiciary, and then go to the floor and get a vote in which we would request that this information that we need, we’ve got 20 something questions in, to tell us, who is this Gannon person, how did he get credentialed, does he have confidential information, for example, the secret, the CIA woman, agent, Valerie Plame, remember that he’s claimed that he got information that is classified about how they decided to go after her.

Raw Story: What have you gotten from the Freedom of Information request? Has there been more than the letter than the Secret Service?

Conyers: No, that’s essentially it. We’re demanding more, and others are joining in with because now its become clear that agencies of the government are going to stonewall to prevent us from knowing what Jeff Gannon’s relationship to the White House really is.

Raw Story: So you think they’re hiding something?

Conyers: [Laughs] That’s putting it mildly, my friend.

Raw Story: And if they’re hiding something, what do you think that might be?

Conyers: Well, the truth about their relationship. In other words, it’s very hard to get press credentials to go into the White House. As a matter of fact, you have to reapply every time you go there. And he’s been doing this for years. So somebody must know who he really is and we want to know who that somebody is. We want to trace these bread crumbs of facts to what office, what person or persons in the White House have been letting him get through the very strict investigation that they give press people before the let them come into the White House to talk with the President of the United States.

Raw Story: Senator Graham (R-SC) made remarks Saturday at a Lincoln Day dinner in Tennessee that “We don’t do Lincoln Day Dinners in South Carolina. It’s nothing personal, but it takes awhile to get over things.” His spokesperson told Mary Ann Akers at Roll Call yesterday that they should be understood in their “proper context.” I’m wondering whether you think there are a proper context for such remarks?

Conyers: Well, I can only take the senator at face value for what he said. It’s no secret of course, is it John, that in our history the Lincoln Republicans were in short supply even when Lincoln was alive before his assassination. There were people that really were fed up with him particularly in the South and actually throughout his party. Now as a result in history in ‘48 when Senator Hubert Humphrey and others started pushing for desegregation laws in the South, what happened was that the Southerners began to desert the Democratic Party. They did a switch; they left the Democrats and became Republicans.

Raw Story: Do you think then it has more to do with Lincoln? You don’t interpret it as something suggesting that, you know, that the South wasn’t getting over the Civil War as regards slavery, you think that’s a leap to make?Conyers: No, I don’t think it’s a leap at all. That’s what I assume he was referring to. But you’ll probably be able to get a quick interview with him to clear this thing up. And I’m sure you’ll be able to make it clear to everybody just what Senator Graham was saying when he said what is if we take it [at] face value it seems very clear that it’s referring to the legacy of slavery and second class citizenship that had been the cause of the Civil War itself.Raw Story: You mentioned in our last call that you were pushing Chairman [F. James] Sensenbrenner (R-WI) about voting reform. What’s become of that?

Conyers: It’s on the table. He and I are going before the committee that handles our Judiciary budget so I’m waiting until I find out how much our resources will be before I really begin to press him. It is commonly viewed that the leadership may ask him not to hold hearings on election reform since much of the, uh, legislation that we’ve created comes out of the debacle in the Ohio elections of November 2004. If so, it would be a great disservice. Elections, voting is the bedrock of a democratic society where the people are supposed to choose their representatives. No state had as many irregularities, violation of due process, disparities in locations of machines, misinformation coming from no less than the Secretary of the State of Ohio itself Mr. Ken Blackwell. Plus we have machines that do not have paper trails so that we can make sure these computer-driven devices are not for some reason erroneous. And we’ve found out that there’s plenty of room for error. There’s lots of computer companies that are now almost supplanting election workers on the polls on election days because they know how to handle machines and most election workers don’t. So we’ve got a privacy question as well. With these new machines coming from corporations like Triad and Diebold who are very busy trying to make sure that we don’t impose requirements that would guarantee us an ability to trace every ballot. We’re trying to make the elections better, not just keep them the same.

Raw Story: Also in regards to voting, there was an Ohio paper that reported that the FBI was investigating in Claremont County in the stickers allegations that we reported on [Recount witnesses alleged seeing white stickers over some of the ovals on the presidential election ballots]. Our witnesses had told us that they hadn’t been questioned by the FBI. I’m wondering if, given that, and also given the experience that you guys have had in pushing hard to get agencies to investigate, have you been satisfied with the FBI and other agencies’ responses in terms of investigating your findings in Ohio?

Conyers: I would need to call in my chief of staff, attorney Perry Applebaum, who’s been tracking that, but you know, we’re dealing with a political viewpoint now that is witnessing the steady erosion of the protection that the government provides people in voting, against emergencies, problems in life, or unemployment, or running out of money, or having to go into bankruptcy, or suing in court, where you may be injured far beyond some measly cap of $250,000. So, it seems like on every front they’re trying to frustrate, obfuscate and make it as difficult as possible for citizens to assert their rights. And it seems to me that this should be a wake up call to a lot of people who begin to realize that we’re moving backwards in terms of democracy. We’re moving backwards in terms of economic security, we’re having many of our rights taken away that we thought we had in the courts. There’s some wholesale movements that are quietly going on. I see this 60-day rush of President Bush’s [trip] around the country about the privatization of Social Security as a cover for all of these terrible things that are happening to our legislative process and our courts.

Raw Story: It’s interesting that you mention that because I’m sure your aware of Congresswoman Slaughter’s staff’s report on the alleged Republican abuse of power in the House…

Conyers: It’s right on. The democratic process of allowing amendments, and allow us to have time to review the legislation, or sometimes they don’t even go through committee, they just bring it straight to the floor. Period.Raw Story: Have there been, then, times when you haven’t even been able to read legislation before it’s gone to the floor?Conyers: Well, yes. We have that with great regularity, especially if a complicated report is put out the night before it goes to the floor, there may be only a couple copies available to all the members except for going to the web page on the computer to really know what we’ve got. And, uh, this is all part of that systematic deprivation of due process that’s going on, in my view.

Raw Story: Are there means for the minority then, in your opinion, to ensure they have a voice?

Conyers: You know, because of the Senate rules and their ability to filibuster, they’re our last hope in a Congress where the majority has no problem of trampling the rights of the minority party representatives whenever we feel like it. So, we want to make sure Sen. [Harry] Reid (D-NV)and Sen. [Dick] Durbin (D-IL) are right in there with stiff upper lips with Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) so that we’re doing everything we can to assert our rights because we’ve got to fight back – that’s the only way we’re going to get that changed. I never thought I would be defending the filibuster with such passion as I am now, when I first came to Congress I remember I wanted to do away with the filibuster because that was the fate of many of the civil rights bill at that time.

Raw Story: Yeah, that was the –

Conyers: An irony, isn’t it. I was also against a lot of seniority building up in members too so that we young guys could get in Congress. It’s funny how your views get modified by the realities of the situation.

Raw Story: The filibuster in interests me in particular. There was a piece in the New Yorker this week. They raised a question that you seem to indicate as well is that over American history, it seems, that if the filibuster hadn’t been in place, anti-lynching laws would have gone through, and a number of other critical civil rights legislation wouldn’t have been able to be stopped. Some people would argue then it would be better just to do away with the filibuster altogether and if Democrats want to stop procedure by other means…

Conyers: There aren’t any other means, that’s the problem. The only way the minority can protect itself against the majority in the Senate is through the filibuster. Now of course we don’t even have the filibuster here in the House, and things sail through because they make sure they get enough votes, they leave the votes open for hours, and hours, late into the night until they get a Republican to shame-facedly go into the well and change his vote the way that the Republican leadership wants it. It’s not a pretty picture.

Raw Story: Would you say then the House then demonstrates the importance of the filibuster?

Conyers: Oh it does, because that’s the only protection the minority has. I don’t defend the use of a filibuster to prevent good legislation or important legislation from going through, but when we get down to a point where we have nominees whose credentials are being written and discussed and analyzed all over the country, and they say we don’t care, we’re not going to reconsider their confirmation, a couple of senators can stop business in the U.S. Senate until that is reconsidered as a matter of right.

Raw Story: I know you’ve got to run, I just wanted to shoot you one last question. There’s a recent bill about allowing faith-based groups federal funding, and given that some of those groups are discriminating on the basis of faith and some of those groups are discriminating against, say, gay Americans. I’m wondering what you thought of that bill and the Scott amendment that would have removed the faith-based initiatives to override discrimination provisions.

Conyers: But we lost it. I was with Bobby Scott of Virginia who’s carried on a long and lonely opposition over the years in this. It’s amazing how these kinds of questions that were never even on the agenda up until recently. The right of a religious group to discriminate is to me hostile to the rules of nondiscrimination in the federal system. It’s as plain and simple as that. I think that we need to examine where all these conservative philosophies now being hastily translated into legislation are going. My position is that they’re setting us back many, many years. And I’ve enjoyed this discussion with you John, very much.

Raw Story: I have as well.

Conyers: I just hope the people that listen to you find it as useful and enjoyable as I do in participating in it.

Raw Story: Thanks so much for your time.

Conyers: Have a good day, and a good week.

Raw Story: All right. You too.

Emerging Scandal on MD Voting Machine Performance

2005-03-09T19:20:00.000-08:00

All MD Diebold Machines on Lockdown Under Investigation for Widespread Statewide Election Day 2004 Failures MD Election Group Calls for Independent Investigation and De-Certification of Machines

Montgomery County, Maryland. According to county election officials and other sources, all Maryland voting machines have been on "lockdown" since November 2, 2004 due to statewide machine failures including 12% of machines in Montgomery County, some of which appear to have lost votes in significant numbers. The State Board of Elections convinced the media that Election Day went smoothly, when in fact there were serious statewide, systemic problems with the Diebold electronic voting machines -- so serious that the SBE and Diebold still have not figured out how to prevent the loss of votes in the future.

"Election Day was anything but smooth. Votes were lost, computer cards storing votes were unreadable, thousands of error messages were reported, machines froze in mid-voting and machines refused to boot up. The problems with the machines were so widespread and serious that efforts to hide the problems have failed," said Linda Schade, director of TrueVoteMD.org. "It is not sufficient for Diebold and the SBE to investigate themselves. They have misled the public about this problem and an independent investigation is needed. Further, these problems indicate that the Diebold machines should be decertified as required by Maryland law and as provided for in the Diebold contract. This is an opportunity to correct the mistaken purchase of paperless electronic voting machines. Diebold should refund Maryland tax dollars and we should start anew with a system that voters trust because it can be independently audited and recounts can be meaningful."

VOTES LOST According to the IT Report to the Montgomery County Election Board, dated December 13, 2004 there were two broad levels of problems. Seven percent of units (189) failed. This included failure to boot up, screen freezes and a variety of other problems. Screen freezes, which occurred on 106 voting units were "the most serious of errors" because many "froze when the voter pressed the Cast Ballot button." As a result "election judges are unable to provide substantial confirmation that the vote was in fact counted." In addition there were "122 suspect units (5%) were identified because the unit had few votes captured compared to other voting units in the polling place. A unit was considered suspect if it had 25-50 votes captured when all other units in the polling place had over 150 votes," the report stated. The IT report includes other details of Diebold machine failures including smart card and encoder problems as well as thousands of yet unexplained error messages, now called 'ballot exception errors."

UNREADABLE PC MEMORY CARDS Multiple sources also have revealed that the computer memory cards where vote totals are stored inside each voting machine were unreadable in multiple counties.

DIEBOLD UNABLE TO RESOLVE TECHNICAL FAILURE FOUR MONTHS AFTER ELECTION After IT examinations within Maryland failed to decipher the root of these problems, the State Board and Diebold sent voting machines to several out-of-state locations in Texas and Ohio for further testing, according to a Diebold memo dated February 16, 2005. As of the March 3, Montgomery County Election Board meeting, the PC memory card problems as well as those listed above cannot be explained by Diebold, according the IT report.

MACHINE FAILURES STATEWIDE Montgomery County Elections official Sam Statland has acknowledged that local boards around the state are gravely concerned about the Diebold system's performance and are pressuring the State Board of Elections for answers. In testimony before the State House Ways and Means on February 24, 2005, Mr. Statland cited the facts above and asserted that "Since the 2000 election cycle, the State of Maryland has become and still is a 'test site' for electronic voting." In the January State Board of Elections meeting, Linda Lamone discussed the "performance problems" and confirmed that "once [Montgomery County was] finished they will start the same process in the other counties, beginning with Baltimore County."

TRUEVOTEMD CALLS FOR INDEPENDENT REVIEW AND DECERTIFICATION OF MACHINES AS REQUIRED BY LAW TrueVoteMD.org, an election integrity organization, is now calling for an independent investigation and for de-certification of the machines as required by Maryland election law (MD Code, Election Law § 9-102(c)(1)).* TrueVoteMD.org is a founding organization for VoteTrustUSA a national network of state election integrity groups and has been raising the alarm that the electronic Diebold voting system has serious vulnerabilities to computer malfunction and fraud for nearly two years. This information is confirmed by TrueVoteMD's Election Day report "When the Right to Vote Goes Wrong: Md Voters Tell The Story of Election Day 2004"
http://www.truevotemd.org/Resources/MDproblems04map.pdf.

"If the gubernatorial race in 2006 is as close as 2002 it would only take four errors per precinct to change the outcome of the election. Maryland cannot risk the election disaster that is impending. Maryland was lucky the presidential election in Maryland was not close; otherwise we would be embroiled in scandal to this day. It is time to put in place a system that is reliable and that voters can trust," concluded Schade. "Three independent reports have raised serious concerns with the security of Diebold machines, now we have seen the worst come to pass. These machines are unreliable and insecure. How many more warnings to Maryland officials need in order to take action to protect the vote?"

*MD Code, Election Law § 9-102(c)(1) (emphasis added). The SBE “shall decertify a previously certified voting system if” that system “[does not] protect the security of the voting process,” and “[does not] count and record all votes accurately.” Id. § 9-103(a)(2) (emphasis added).

Selma 40 Years Later

2005-03-08T20:21:00.000-08:00

by Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.

The Free Press
March 6, 2005

This weekend in Selma, Alabama, marchers will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in that city. The violence unleashed by Southern sheriffs and racial vigilantes on that day galvanized President Johnson to push through the Voting Rights Act, giving blacks the right to vote in the South for the first time since the brief reconstruction period after the Civil War.

Now 40 years later, that right to vote is once more at risk. When President Bush met with the 43 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. - I report with some pride - asked him if he would support extension and strengthening of the Voting Rights Act when it comes up for renewal in 2007.

President Bush responded that he did not support voting rights for the District of Columbia. Rep. Jackson said that was not what he asked; he asked about extending the Voting Rights Act. Bush replied that he was not aware of the act and would look at it when it got to his desk. The president's passivity would enable House Majority leader Rep. Tom "the Hammer" DeLay to torpedo the act, just as he has real voting-rights reform.

The president has been eloquent in promoting democracy across the world. He said he would tell Russian president Vladimir Putin that democracies should be founded on "the rule of law, and respect for human and rights and dignity." The president has argued that democracy is so important in Iraq that it alone is worth Americans' dying and killing for. The interim Iraqi constitution protects the rights of women and minorities to vote. But in America, the president and his party are undermining the right to vote - and the right to have one's vote counted. The glaring contrast between the president's rhetoric abroad and his record at home raises deep questions here and there about his true intentions.

When Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, he predicted that there would be a fundamental upheaval in the South, and that Democrats might well lose that region for a generation. He got that right. Those who fought against equal rights for African-Americans shifted parties, but they did not shift their views. Republicans became the party of white sanctuary, using racial fears and cultural insecurities to attract votes. And a solid South built on Jesse Helms' tactics remains the foundation of Republican majorities in Congress today.

Now in this divided nation, the undermining of voting rights - and the unwillingness of the majority party to defend them - is spreading. We saw it in Florida in 2000, where a partisan secretary of state, head of the Bush campaign in Florida, intentionally purged qualified black voters from the voting lists. Then intimidation tactics were rolled out in black districts and, in the final instance, a five-person, right-wing majority in the Supreme Court prohibited a full count of the vote, while ruling that the Constitution does not give Americans the right to vote in national elections.

We saw it once more in 2004, in Ohio. Once more the secretary of state in charge of the election was a rabid partisan and co-chair of the Bush election campaign. Once more, African-American voters were disqualified improperly. Machines without paper records, manufactured by companies headed by pro-Bush partisans, were adopted for use. When black registration went up, the number of machines in black districts went down, creating lines that lasted for hours. The tactics of Southern crackers were adopted for the key swing state in the North.

In the midst of these outrages, the White House is absent without leave. Legislation has been introduced at the national level to require machines that provide a paper record, and to insure that election officials are nonpartisan, rather than partisan operatives like J. Kenneth Blackwell of Ohio. The president is silent on the legislation. The Republican leadership in the Congress has already indicated that legislation will not go forward.

A constitutional amendment to guarantee the right to vote, to insure that residents of the District of Columbia have the same right to vote as residents of Baghdad, and to set up federal rules for fair elections has been proposed. The president is silent. The Republican leadership in the Congress has already indicated its opposition.

And now the Voting Rights Act - which President Bush knows well as a former governor of Texas - must be renewed and strengthened. The president claims ignorance. The Republican leadership in the Congress, dependent on its strength in the South, will determine its fate.

Dr. Martin Luther King knew that progress towards equal rights depended on gaining the right to vote. But today, Republicans are shameless in their disregard for that right and Democrats are too passive in defense of it. It will require a renewed movement of concerned citizens to revive the right to vote in this country.

In Selma, Ala., 40 years later, we will mark the anniversary of the march that forced Congress to act. Now once more fierce resistance to voting rights is growing and it will take fierce popular pressure to defend the right to vote in this country, even as our troops die to provide that right in Iraq.

Legal filing highlights Blackwell's hypocrisy in Ohio recount case

2005-03-08T20:15:00.000-08:00

by Blair Bobier

The Free Press
March 7, 2005

Legal filing highlights Blackwell's hypocrisy in Ohio recount caseby Blair BobierMarch 7, 2005A spokesman for the Green Party's 2004 presidential campaign, which initiated the Ohio recount, today blasted the suggestion by Ohio's Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell that he would need to take depositions from John Kerry and John Edwards as part of the Ohio recount litigation.

"Mr. Blackwell's contention that he needs to depose Senators Kerry and Edwards is a laughable and blatantly political move. Mr. Blackwell has refused to be deposed himself about the Ohio election, has refused to appear before Congress and has refused to answer questions from members of the House Judiciary Committee who have been investigating allegations of election fraud. To suggest that Kerry and Edwards should be deposed to address a legal technicality while Mr. Blackwell continues to avoid any public scrutiny of his own misconduct in the Ohio election is the height of hypocrisy," said Blair Bobier, Media Director for the 2004 Cobb-LaMarche campaign.

The report by the House Judiciary Committee's Democratic staff on the Ohio election and recount states that "there were massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio. In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio."

Blackwell's intention to depose Kerry and Edwards was made known by Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro in the latest round of legal filings concerning the Ohio recount. In February, Federal Judge Edmund Sargus in Columbus asked the parties in the Ohio recount case to submit filings to his court addressing whether the litigation should be transferred and consolidated with a Toledo case brought last November seeking to expedite the start of the recount. Blackwell's filing was in response to that request.

Attorneys for Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb and Libertarian Party presidential candidate Michael Badnarik, who jointly requested the Ohio recount, have already filed their response to the Judge's question. Kerry and Edwards, through their Ohio attorney, filed a one sentence statement with the Judge supporting the Cobb and Badnarik position. Kerry's lawyer also filed a short, two page summary charting inconsistencies observed by Democratic Party witnesses to the recount.

The matter is pending in the Eastern Division of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, before Judge Sargus.

Conferences, lectures and teach-ins about the Ohio election and electoral reform have been taking place all over the country, most recently in Santa Monica, California on Sunday.

Additional information about the recount and the entire 102 page report by the House Judiciary Committee's Democratic staff can be found at http://www.votecobb.org. The website for the national Green Party is http://www.gp.org.

Dems to Review Ohio Election

2005-03-07T20:30:00.000-08:00

Democratic National Committee Announces Ohio Election Review Team

Washington, D.C. – The Democratic National Committee (DNC) announced the members of its Ohio Election Task Force. This group of seasoned professionals in the electoral and technology fields are taking an in-depth look into the issues of voter registration problems, long lines at the polls, the issuance and counting of provisional ballots and voting equipment irregularities that voters faced during the 2004 presidential election in Ohio. The team has been hard at work since January, conducting surveys and reviewing election data from all across the state. The task force will submit its report to the DNC with suggestions for moving forward.

"I am confident that Voting Rights Institute (VRI) Chair Donna Brazile and her team of experts will properly investigate what went wrong in the Ohio election process," said DNC Chairman Governor Howard Dean. "This investigation will ensure that every vote will be counted and everyone who is eligible to vote will be able to secure that right."

"This team is hard at work, analyzing voting irregularities," said VRI Chair Brazile. "We are putting the efforts and resources into this project because it is vital that we find out what went wrong, how we can fix it, and restore the faith of the American people in our voting system."

OHIO REVIEW TEAM MEMBERS