FL, OH and EVERYONE: Help Sort the Vote Fraud Smoking Guns

[JackRiddler]

Here is an attempted hierarchy of the best smoking guns and statistical evidence in the Vote Fraud issue. (This is not meant to direct the research, but to give order to the presentation.)

This message is for DUers who know the value of the Vote Fraud story in slowing down the Bush push, regardless of how unlikely it is we will Reverse the Curse with this alone. This isn't about Kerry, it's about hope for democracy in the future, getting the truth out virally to strengthen our position once the Bush crew overreaches on all fronts, as they inevitably will.

We should want to activate the lawyers and journalists to get audits, investigations and recounts everywhere we can.

I am FAR AWAY from the places where it counts, unused to this form of research, and tied down - among DUers it's above all up to Ohioans, Floridians, New Hampshirites, statisticians and Internet media campaigners to really get the ball rolling.

Specifics on "hot spot" localities where fraud seems likeliest are the strongest material we can use. Show probable cause for fraudulent actions by individuals, and you make the story viable for journalists, explicable to the people, and actionable by investigators (if any are left).

We're waiting for Jeff Fisher on the 2002-2004 Florida evidence, and for Nader in New Hampshire, and for Bev Harris, and for others who are coming forward.

But, PENDING THESE NEW REVELATIONS OF SPECIFICS,

So far these are, in order, what I consider to be the strongest "smokers" or pressure points, and I encourage focusing more scrutiny on each:

1) WARREN COUNTY, OH, Republican administration and Republican majority, invokes homeland security to block outside observation of vote count. Unprecedented. Highly suspicious and no doubt a viper's nest of nasty connections if you look at the players there. Anyone live there? Anyone got the full numbers on Warren County? We should look at 2000x2004, comparisons to registrations, actual-vs.-exit polling if available, precinct breakdowns, demographics...
See http://www.michigancityin.com/articles/2004/11/04/news/news02.txt
(Cincinatti Enquirer Friday, November 5, 2004: "Warren's vote tally walled off. Alone in Ohio, officials cited homeland security" By Erica Solvig, Enquirer staff writer. Write to her and to thank her and encourage more investigation of this: [e-mail] - write to other local and national media!)
This was the last county to report results on Nov. 3
http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/11/04/loc_warrenvote04.html
If we can't get press to descend on Warren County as the first Ground Zero in this fight, we can forget about it.

2) "Glitch" in GAHANNA (near Columbus) adds 3,800 to Bush at one polling place - one machine - in Franklin County. Turns out it was in a church!
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov2004/Fitrakis1105.htm
This was the big breakthrough so far, 190-plus stories on Google News, NY Times, etc. etc., mostly trying to pooh-pooh it as an isolated minor thing, with Franklin County being the only one using this obsolete system, etc.
THIS IS PRECINCT 1-B IN GAHANNA. WHO LIVES ANYWHERE NEAR THIS PLACE? CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT THE NEW LIFE CHURCH?
I'll be careful because the location of the polling machines may be insignificant - what matters is who worked them - and I don't know much about Christian denominations. But New Life is apparently a fundamentalist Baptist Church with a literal interpretation of the Bible
http://www.newlife-ministries.org/ourmission.htm#co
Founded 20 years ago by graduates of Falwell's Liberty University in Virginia
http://www.liberty.edu/
Has New Life received any faith-based funds?
Opening an investigation of this case as possible fraud is the lever for an audit of machine "glitches" and statistical irregularities everywhere.

Most important about this: demonstrates that huge "glitches" are possible, and that they can skew results powerfully. How do we know other cartridges didn't screw up? Even if this wasn't fraudulent, how do we know there was no fraud elsewhere? We need an audit of all e-voting and optiscan cross-country to establish that.

3) Other "glitches": Carteret Cty. in NC loses 4,300, Craven Cty. picks up 11,000 (for WHOM? Reports so far do not specify)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x960485
Indiana La Porte "power surge" resets results to "default" position of 300 per candidate.
http://www.michigancityin.com/articles/2004/11/04/news/news02.txt

4) Broward loses 58,000 absentee ballots?! (As of Oct 28).
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/columnists/sfl-mayo28oct28,0,1684609.column
Broward and Palm machines count backward?
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/politics/content/news/epaper/2004/11/05/a29a_BROWVOTE_1105.html

5) Background and actions of Ken Blackwell. He makes as ideal a villain figure for this as Katherine Harris did (and deserves it).
Check out the dossier on him compiled by Jon Rapoport (and never mind what you think about Rapoport) at http://www.nomorefakenews.com

6) Optiscan vs. Other Methods in Florida and NH. (Anyone doing the work for Ohio?)

7) Exit vs. Actual in comparison of "paper trail" to "no-paper" states and counties as done by TruthIsAll. However, this work requires more specifics: How is "paper" defined? More importantly: what are the mechanics and possible gateways for fraud of the various methods?

Points 6 and 7 need to be broken down county-by-county and according to all methods for Ohio, as it has been done for Florida at this site:
http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm (see the linked pages for illuminating graphical treatments)

8) 2000x2004 comparisons as supporting the other statistical analyses in locating "hot spots." (I breathlessly await Al the Cat's results.)

8a) Discrepancies in party registration vs. vote totals and in vote totals for other races vs. presidential vote totals are useful as supporting evidence for cases that already have a basis in one of the above categories, but not very good stand alone since it will be argued (often correctly) that people do split their votes and do vote for popular local or state candidates without caring about presidentials.

9) Suspicious surges of votes for third-party candidates (like that famous old 5,000 for Buchanan in Palm Beach Cty. example from 2000).

When we find hot spots, there must be follow-up on the ground. DUers who are there and venturesome are vital. DUers who write to all local and national press to point out hot spots, ditto. Again, we want press descending on the localities and scrutinizing the players as the essential first step in breaking it open.

REMEMBER, THIS IS ABOUT GETTING ENOUGH TO STICK THAT THE MANIACS LOSE THEIR LEGITIMACY AND BOGUS "MANDATE" - DON'T EXPECT TO WIN HERE, JUST TO SCORE POINTS VITAL TO A LATER VICTORY.

[papau]

1. MACHINES "DEFAULT" VOTING FOR BUSH - and no Sunday talk

default to Bush in BBV is a AP story - why no real press?

Sequoia Vote Machines default to Bush if Touchscreen not pressed hard enough for Kerry!-problem was "workers who had not calibrated them properly"?

This is a ABC 11/2 story - why is the media burying it?

http://www.whtm.com/news/stories/1104/184856.html

Electronic Voting Machine Woes Reported
UPDATED - Tuesday November 02, 2004 11:23pm


FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) - Voters nationwide reported some 1,100 problems with electronic voting machines on Tuesday, including trouble choosing their intended candidates.

The e-voting glitches reported to the Election Protection Coalition, an umbrella group of volunteer poll monitors that set up a telephone hotline, included malfunctions blamed on everything from power outages to incompetent poll workers.

But there were also several dozen voters in six states - particularly Democrats in Florida - who said the wrong candidates appeared on their touch-screen machine's checkout screen, the coalition said.

In many cases, voters said they intended to select John Kerry but when the computer asked them to verify the choice it showed them instead opting for President Bush, the group said.

After 10 minutes trying to change her selection, the Pinellas County resident said she called a poll worker and got a wet-wipe napkin to clean the touch screen as well as a pencil so she could use its eraser-end instead of her finger. Harvey said it took about 10 attempts to select Kerry before and a summary screen confirmed her intended selection. Election officials in several Florida counties where voters complained about such problems did not return calls Tuesday night.

A spokesman for the company that makes the touch-screen machines used in Pinellas, Palm Beach and two other Florida counties, Alfie Charles of Sequoia Voting Systems Inc., said the machines' monitors may need to be recalibrated periodically (claims they default to Bush if Kerry was not pressed hard enough!). <snip>

I assume the screens were calibrated to be harder to push depending on the age of the population in that precinct. The older the people, the harder the screen was to push..... - but the "selection" was made for Bush

the article still says this

If Touch screen setup is more than a sensitivity adjustment, and includes moving the mask around so that the area called a Kerry vote becomes a Bush vote, then how can repeated attempts - moving up scale to a hard eraser - change the vote if it is a mask problem?

It appears to be a default to Bush - perhaps on a random basis.

[Nicholas_J]

2. The way it was done this time

Makes tracking it much more difficult.


In Miami, one machine was found in one precinct that gave Bush almost 4000 votes that were intended for Kerry.

In another case in Broward County, machines were found that SUBTRACTED some votes when they were cast for Kerry. The county was able to repair this "glitch" for the ballot cast on amendment 4, turing the "NO" vote on the amendment to a "yes" vote for the county by several thousand votes.

In Columbus Ohio, one machine in one precinct gave Bush around 5000 votes that were intended for Kerry.

In Palm Beach Florida, almost 89,000 more votes were cast than the sign in sheets for voters who cast the votes.

In Duval county, a large number of democratic votes "disappeard" from the machines. Between 10 and 20 thousand. No investigation has been done.



When these things were discovered, the investigations into the machine "errors" was limited to the precincts in which those machine errors were found. Nothing was done to investigate to see if simliar problems occurred in other precincts.

Several causes can be considered. First, both these states have Republican administration. Republican heads of Voters Registration divisions. Next, after the Bill Clinton impeachement for the Monica Lewinski affair, when allegations about George W. Bush appeared during the 2000 elections, the nation was tired of scandal. No matter what appeared in the media, the public ewas numb to this stuff, and the media justdidnt press it.

After the 2000 election debacle, the media seems just as unwilling to start election fraud coverage. Since the states did not pursue investigations into every machine in every precinct as the red flags of the above nted situations would warrant, the media has reported that we had one of the smoothest elections in history. Regardless of the fact that exits polls, which have been relatively accurate in the past failed during this election, the media, which has gone form perfirming its purpose as investigator and guardian of the public trust has fallen into the realm of infotainment. When the best investigation in the country is the "Drudge Report" The nations media has falllen into a shabby state. We are unlikely to see anyone break a "Watergate"story ever agains in the U.S.

Even the election percentage results smack of having been created in the mathematical realmof electronic manipulation. In the real world, no election results in a mathematically perfect 100 percent, where in a state like Ohio, Bush gets 51 percent and Kerry gets 49 percent. The existance of spoiled votes always eliminates such a mathematically perfect result. Anywhere from one to three percent of the vote ends up as spoiled, so it is simply not possible for an election result total to add up to 100 percent.

Anthoer cluse, Republicans fought vigorously, and suceeded in preventing electronic voting machines, most importantly touch screen machines, from having means of providing a back up of the voting data that the machines counted.

In 2000, the vote fraud was accomplished at the top end of the dta collection.On the lage state computers. All the "errors" thistime occured at the local precinct level, and then were reported upowards to the large computer level. The local levels had minimal or no security. All that would be necessary for someone to access the computerized voting machines at the precint level was form someone who had access to the higher levels to access themain computers, and then someone with relatively good hacking skills could access and change the programming on the devices attached, and even erase the methods used to change the votes once the day was over. Or even simply run the program in memory, so that when the machines were powered down the program would be lost. Diebold and the other companies that built the new machines vigourously stated that there machines were hack proof, and needed no backups, but as most of us no, hack proof is a fantasy. The strange results noted above that the machines certainly are capable of making large errors.

But since no other machines in other precincts were examinied for smaller, less obvious errors in assigning votes it is quite possible that the Kerry vote was nickel and dimed into a Kerry loss rather than the outright and obvious discarding of votes that occured in Florida in 2000.

The mathematical advantage that democrats had in Florida virtually assured that the larger the voter turnout, the greater the chance of a Kerry win, regardless of how large the Republican turnout was. For Bush to win in a state in which Democrats had a 360.000 vote advantage would be close to impossible if not totally impossible unless a fairly large portion of Kerry votes were "errored" into the Bush count.

The only way to even begin to determine if this happened would be to supoena every machine, adn check to see if there were more of these machines that made similar errors in every precinct in the state of Florida, To check the logs for access to the mainframes and then check for access to the precinct and machine levels. It would not take a great percentage of the machines in all of the precincts to end up with a result such as the final count in Florida for voter fraud to occur. The facts of the errors noted above shoew how it would not require many machines to give votes to the wrong candidate in order to result in errors reaching into the hundreds of thousands to end up with a Bush win in a state where more people intended to vote for Kerry. THe fact that these errors were most noted in states controlled by the party of the winner is also problematic.

What can ew, do, not much, at lease openly. We can hope that something is being done quitely and in a very secretive fashion in order to prevent attempts to destroy evidence, ot at leat to absolve people at the highest level of being accused of being involved with voter frauid.this perhaps is what caused Kerry to concede rather than fight. Giving up early could simply be the prelude to investigation in secret, and over many months in order to make a strong case against all possibly involved in possible fraud.

[Toucano]

3. Warren County History.

It's Republican.

WARREN Repub Dem Other Total Repub Dem
2004 66,523 25,399 91,922 72.37% 27.63%
2000 48,318 19,142 67,460 71.62% 28.38%
1996 33,210 17,089 4,689 56,984 58.28% 29.99%
1992 27,998 13,542 11,115 54,647 51.23% 24.78%

[JackRiddler]

4. That's the point - it's Republican!

Um, Republican counties are exactly the place where you can boost the vote count for Bush and think you can get away with it.

Republican admin WALLS OFF the vote count in unprecedented fashion, citing homeland security. Suspicious and ominous. Let's run with it.

[Toucano]

5. Exactly!

It's the perfect way to do it. There are plenty of "helpers" available and everyone expects you to go Bush.

[JackRiddler]

6. So, damn, let's see some action on these threads...

Come on people, what an opportunity - this is why DU was born - to fight vote fraud!