Another article on Votergate- the word is spreading!

lizzieforkerry

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Fri Dec-03-04 01:33 PM
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Another article on Votergate- the word is spreading!

I just got this article in an email from someone I didn't realize was even concerned about the election- the word is spreading! Let me know if this is a dupe!

It's only the beginning!

http://www.missoulanews.com/News/News.asp?no=4508

Does not compute
by Alan Waldman
Watchdogs want to know: Did every vote count?

Talk radio and the Internet are abuzz with suggestions that John Kerry was elected president on Nov. 2-but Republican election officials made it difficult for millions of Democrats to vote while employees of four secretive, GOP-bankrolled corporations rigged electronic voting machines and then hacked central tabulating computers to steal the election for George W. Bush.

The Bush administration's "fix" of the 2000 election debacle (the Help America Vote Act) made crooked elections considerably easier, by foisting paperless electronic voting on states before the bugs had been worked out or meaningful safeguards could be installed.

The Wall Street Journal recently revealed that "Verified Voting, a group formed by a Stanford University professor to assess electronic voting, has collected 31,000 reports of election fraud and other problems."

University of Pennsylvania researcher Dr. Steven Freeman, in his November 2004 paper "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy," says the odds that the discrepancies between predicted results and actual vote counts in swing states Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania could have been due to chance or random error are 250 million to 1. "Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature conclusion," writes Freeman, "but the election's unexplained exit poll discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is the responsibility of the media, academia, polling agencies, and the public to investigate." Unlike Europe, where citizens count the ballots, in the United States employees of secretive, Republican-leaning company ES&S managed every aspect of the 2004 election. That included everything from registering voters, printing ballots and programming voting machines to tabulating votes (sometimes with armed guards keeping the media and members of the public who wished to witness the count at bay) and reporting the results, for 60 million voters in 47 states, according to Christopher Bollyn, writing in American Free Press. Most other votes were counted by three other firms that are snugly in bed with the GOP.

This election is not America's first venture into electronic voting. In Georgia, in November 2002, Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes led in polls by 11 percent and Democratic Sen. Max Cleland was in front by 5 percent just before the election-the first ever conducted entirely on touch-screen electronic machines, and counted entirely by company employees, rather than public officials-but mysterious election-day swings of 16 percent and 12 percent defeated both popular incumbents. In Minnesota, Democrat Walter Mondale (replacing beloved Sen. Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash), lost in an amazing last-moment 11 percent vote swing recorded on electronic machines. Then, in 2003, what's known as "black box voting" helped Arnold Schwarzenegger-who had deeply offended female, Latino and Jewish voters-defeat a popular Latino Democrat who substantially led in polls a week before the election.

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Black Box Voting-the nonprofit group that spearheaded much of the pre-election testing (and subsequent criticism) of electronic machines-is filing the largest Freedom of Information Act inquiry in U.S. history. The organization's Bev Harris claims, "Fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic voting machines." On Nov. 30, Black Box Voting filed suit against Palm Beach County in Florida for failing to provide public records.

Florida Democratic congressional candidate Jeff Fisher charged that he has and will show the FBI evidence that Florida results were hacked; he also claims to have knowledge of who hacked it. Fisher also believes that most Democratic candidates nationwide were harmed by GOP hacking and other dirty tactics-particularly in swing states.

The Green and Libertarian Parties, as well as Ralph Nader, are demanding an Ohio recount, charging voting fraud, suppression and disenfranchisement. Recounts are also being sought in New Hampshire, Nevada and Washington.

VOTE STEALING 101
Votes collected by electronic machines (and by optical scan equipment that reads traditional paper ballots) are sent via modem to a central tabulating computer, which counts the votes on Windows software. Therefore, anyone who knows how to operate an Excel spreadsheet and who is given access to the central tabulation machine can, in theory, change election totals.

A quartet of companies control the U.S. vote count. Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia and SAIC are all hard-wired into the Bush campaign and power structure. Diebold chief Walden O'Dell is a top Bush fund-raiser.

All early Tuesday indicators predicted a Kerry landslide. Zogby International (which predicted the 2000 outcome more accurately than any national pollster) did exit polling which predicted a 100-electoral vote triumph for Kerry. Zogby saw Kerry winning crucial Ohio by 4 percent.

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WIDESPREAD PROBLEMS
Voters Unite! detailed 303 specific election problems, including 84 complaints of machine malfunctions in 22 states (including one reported instance of programming error in Flathead County's optical scan tabulation system), 24 cases of registration fraud in 14 states, 20 abusive voter challenge situations in 10 states, U.S. voters in 18 states and Israel experiencing absentee ballot difficulties, 10 states with provisional ballot woes, 22 cases of malfeasance in 13 states, 10 charges of voter intimidation in seven states, seven states where votes were suppressed, seven states witnessing outbreaks of animosity at the polls, six states suffering from ballot printing errors and seven instances in four states where votes were changed on-screen. In addition, the Voters Unite! website cites four states with early voting troubles, three states undergoing ballot programming errors, three states demonstrating ballot secrecy violations, bogus ballot fraud in New Mexico and double-voting for Bush in Texas.

Kerry's victory was predicted by previously extremely accurate Harris and Zogby exit polls, by the formerly infallible 50 percent rule (an incumbent with less than 50 percent in the exit polls always loses; Bush had 47 percent-requiring him to capture an improbable 80 percent of the undecideds to win) and by the Incumbent Rule (undecideds break for the challenger, as exit polls showed they did by a large margin this time).

Nor is it credible that the surge in new young voters (who were witnessed standing in lines for hours on campuses nationwide) miraculously didn't appear in the final totals; that Kerry did worse than Gore against an opponent who lost support; and that exit polls were highly accurate wherever there was a paper trail and grossly underestimated Bush's appeal wherever there was no such guarantee of accurate recounts. Statisticians point out that based on exit polling data, Bush beat 99 to 1 mathematical odds in winning the election.

Election results are not final until electors vote on Dec. 12.