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Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked |
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by Thom Hartmann |
08 Nov 2004
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This is from Common Dreams. This article brings up a lot of interesting questions about the voting process and the very real possibility that this election was hacked and stolen. I don't know what to make of all of it, but there's a lot to be skeptical about this.
-S |
Saturday 06 November 2004
When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the
Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th
District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he
says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and
how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously
hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to
run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against
Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.
"It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.
And some believe evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on
November 2, 2004.
The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of
votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy
Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at
http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.
While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce
results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the
Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned
paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking -
the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.
In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them
Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and
7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country
where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.
In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a
mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433
voted for Bush.
The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where
optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went
58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.
Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more
vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats
generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had earlier reported
that county size was a variable - this turns out not to be the case. Just the
use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)
More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://us
together.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and
www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm. Note the trend line - the only
variable that determines a swing toward Bush was the use of optical scan
machines.
One possible explanation for this is the "Dixiecrat" theory, that in Florida
white voters (particularly the rural ones) have been registered as Democrats for
years, but voting Republican since Reagan. Looking at the 2000 statistics, also
available on Dopp's site, there are similar anomalies, although the trends are
not as strong as in 2004. But some suggest the 2000 election may have been
questionable in Florida, too.
One of the people involved in Dopp's analysis noted that it may be possible to
determine the validity of the "rural Democrat" theory by comparing Florida's
white rural counties to those of Pennsylvania, another swing state but one that
went for Kerry, as the exit polls there predicted. Interestingly, the
Pennsylvania analysis, available at
http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm, doesn't show the same kind of
swings as does Florida, lending credence to the possibility of problems in
Florida.
Even more significantly, Dopp had first run the analysis while filtering out
smaller (rural) counties, and still found that the only variable that accounted
for a swing toward Republican voting was the use of optical-scan machines,
whereas counties with touch-screen machines generally didn't swing - regardless
of size.
Others offer similar insights, based on other data. A professor at the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in Florida the vote to raise
the minimum wage was approved by 72%, although Kerry got 48%. "The correlation
between voting for the minimum wage increase and voting for Kerry isn't likely
to be perfect," he noted, "but one would normally expect that the gap - of 1.5
million votes - to be far smaller than it was."
While all of this may or may not be evidence of vote tampering, it again
brings the nation back to the question of why several states using electronic
voting machines or scanners programmed by private, for-profit corporations and
often connected to modems produced votes inconsistent with exit poll numbers.
Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever since Election
Day.
Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the
radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during
the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the
reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform
him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in
a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.
But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal
states.
Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were rigged.
Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton campaign
who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an article for
The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie in Washington, DC, in
which he made a couple of brilliant points.
"Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two
major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual
voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by
substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of
different parts of the state."
He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated
to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which
Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West
Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."
Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the
computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states the election
was called for Bush.
How could this happen?
On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean
had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the
Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev
pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts,
only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is
done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots
filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch
cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases
the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.
That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.
"In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you
have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places,
sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a
single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all
the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a
voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000
machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?"
Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises
people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's
just a regular computer."
"So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central
tabulator?"
Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called
GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central
tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County Supervisor
sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with
Diebold's software.
Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test election.
They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and waited a moment
while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various precincts," and then
saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500,
and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.
"Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold wrote
a pretty good program.
But, it's running on a Windows PC.
So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal
Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:,"
open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris
noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris
then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator
Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like
Excel.
In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct
Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.
"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from
one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes
to Tiger."
They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the
legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress
of your election."
As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you
can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger
Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.
Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election,
and it took us 90 seconds."
On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.) And
they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said, noting that it would be nearly
impossible for the election software - or a County election official - to know
that the vote database had been altered.
Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen
Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide.
Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to cause
people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since the networks
would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry. But the networks
didn't do that, and had never intended to.
According to congressional candidate Fisher, it makes far more sense that the
exit polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that the vote
itself was hacked.
And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this hit him
and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national office in the
most-hacked swing states.
So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this story was
Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted that it
was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seem to
favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going
through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit polls had
failed.
But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part.
Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, "This
was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were
on election night. I suspect foul play." |
This work is in the public domain |
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