eg420ne
02-04-2006, 06:05 PM
20 Amazing Facts About
Voting in the USA
by Angry Girl
Nightweed.com
1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S.
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diebold
2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry.
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0916-04.htm
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html
3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/private_company.html
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html
4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/main632436.shtml
http://www.wishtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1647886
5. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines.
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/03/03_200.html
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/031004Fitrakis/031004fitrakis.html
6. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-connected with the Bush family, was recently caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee.
http://www.blackboxvoting.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=26
http://www.hillnews.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx
http://www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/000896.php
7. Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush's vice-presidential candidates.
http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_28/b3689130.htm
http://theindependent.com/stories/052700/new_hagel27.html
8. ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the U.S. and counts almost 60% of all U.S. votes.
http://www.essvote.com/HTML/about/about.html
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html
9. Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
http://www.itworld.com/Tech/2987/041020evotestates/pfindex.html
10. Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
http://www.diebold.com/solutions/default.htm
11. Diebold is based in Ohio.
http://www.diebold.com/aboutus/ataglance/default.htm
12. Diebold employed 5 convicted felons as consultants and developers to help write the central compiler computer code that counted 50% of the votes in 30 states.
http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61640,00.html
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/10/301469.shtml
13. Jeff Dean was Senior Vice-President of Global Election Systems when it was bought by Diebold. Even though he had been convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree, Jeff Dean was retained as a consultant by Diebold and was largely responsible for programming the optical scanning software now used in most of the United States.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0312/S00191.htm
http://www.chuckherrin.com/HackthevoteFAQ.htm#how
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf
14. Diebold consultant Jeff Dean was convicted of planting back doors in his software and using a "high degree of sophistication" to evade detection over a period of 2 years.
http://www.chuckherrin.com/HackthevoteFAQ.htm#how
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf
15. None of the international election observers were allowed in the polls in Ohio.
http://www.globalexchange.org/update/press/2638.html
http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/10/26/loc_elexoh.html
16. California banned the use of Diebold machines because the security was so bad. Despite Diebold's claims that the audit logs could not be hacked, a chimpanzee was able to do it! (See the movie here: http://blackboxvoting.org/baxter/baxterVPR.mov.)
http://wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,63298,00.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4874190
17. 30% of all U.S. votes are carried out on unverifiable touch screen voting machines with no paper trail.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/main632436.shtml
18. All -- not some -- but all the voting machine errors detected and reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates.
http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65757,00.html
http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04/ThreeResearchStudiesBushIsOut.htm
http://www.rise4news.net/extravotes.html
http://www.ilcaonline.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=950
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00227.htm
19. The governor of the state of Florida, Jeb Bush, is the President's brother.
http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee/news/local/7628725.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10544-2004Oct29.html
20. Serious voting anomalies in Florida -- again always favoring Bush -- have been mathematically demonstrated and experts are recommending further investigation.
http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04/ThreeResearchStudiesBushIsOut.htm
http://www.computerworld.com/governmenttopics/government/policy/story/0,10801,97614,00.html
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/tens_of_thousands.html
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/110904.html
http://uscountvotes.org/
eg420ne
02-04-2006, 06:06 PM
Because they dont work!
Those who cast the votes decide nothing, those who count the votes decide everything." - Joseph Stalin
US Vote Fraud 2004
Whatreallyhappened.com Articles: Pre-November 2, 2004
Dirty tricks return to the sunshine state - October 19, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1330495,00.html
Gordon Sasser first got the feeling that something strange was going on when the telephone pierced the silence of a weekday afternoon at his house on the swampy fringes of Tallahassee, northern Florida.
An automated voice had some surprising news: did he know that he could now cast his presidential vote by phone, and could do so right now, using the keypad? Mr Sasser's suspicion that somebody was trying to trick him into thinking he was casting a vote - presumably so that he wouldn't cast a real one - was far from unique.
James Scruggs, another Tallahassee resident, remembers a similar unease about the young woman who phoned him at home, insistently offering to collect his absentee ballot to ensure its safe delivery.
Then there was the elderly woman who called the local elections office last week to register her husband for an absentee vote. According to office staff, as she hung up she made a point of thanking them: she wouldn't have thought to get in touch about her husband, she said, if it hadn't been for their helpful call the night before, when someone had taken her own details, assuring her that she was now registered and would receive a ballot.
But the elections office makes no such calls.
Phony letters tell people they cannot vote - October 28, 2004
http://www.wkyc.com/news/news_fullstory.asp?id=25556
It is an outright case of election fraud in Lake County.
The phony letter says newly registered voters signed up by the Kerry or Capri Cafaro campaigns or the NAACP, their registrations are illegal and they will not be able to vote.
??That was not authorized by the Board of Elections, said Elections Director Jan Clair. ??It was not mailed by the Lake County Board of Elections.?
A real board mailing would have Clair??s signature.
Gallup Poll Racially-Biased - October 19, 2004
http://www.emergingdemocraticmajorityweblog.com/donkeyrising/archives/000808.php
According to data obtained by Steve Soto over at the Left Coaster, Gallup's latest LV sample--the one that showed Bush with an 8 point lead--has only 14.5 percent minority representation and only 7.5 percent black representation.
How plausible is this as a representation of the election day electorate? Not remotely plausible. In 1996, minority representation among voters was 17 percent; in 2000, 19.4 percent. In 2004, the minority proportion of voters should be more than this, because minorities are growing, not declining, as a percentage of the US population. So 14.5 percent for nonwhites as a prediction of the 2004 electorate is very, very unlikely. It would defy both recent history and powerful demographic trends.
As for 7.5 percent blacks. C'mon. Blacks were 10.1 percent in 1996 and 9.7 percent in 2000. And they're 12 percent of the voting age population. There's just no way in the world blacks will only be 7.5 percent of voters in 2004.
So, in effect, Gallup's likely voter approach is disenfranchising minorities in assessing American voters' inclinations on the coming election. That's wrong and Gallup should stop doing it.
A victory by Bush has got to look believable, so likely Democrat voters weren't polled.
New Florida vote scandal feared - October 26, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/3956129.stm
Watch the video at the top of the BBC web page.
A secret document obtained from inside Bush campaign headquarters in Florida suggests a plan - possibly in violation of US law - to disrupt voting in the state's African-American voting districts, a BBC Newsnight investigation reveals.
Two e-mails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign's national research director in Washington DC, contain a 15-page so-called "caging list". It lists 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly black and traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville, Florida.
An elections supervisor in Tallahassee, when shown the list, told Newsnight: "The only possible reason why they would keep such a thing is to challenge voters on election day."
Electronic vote machine too easily corrupted - 6 March, 2004
http://www.azstarnet.com/dailystar/relatedarticles/12730.php
Many locales are quickly adopting the touch-screen technology. Should citizens in these places be concerned that their votes can never be independently verified?
Many people think so. In fact, Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., has proposed a law to require touch-screen systems to print out a paper record for each voter to verify and turn in as an official backup copy of his or her vote.
It seems like a simple solution. After all, the makers of these election systems also make bank ATMs, which easily produce written records of their transactions at the user's request. Unfortunately, the Republicans in Congress want nothing to do with the measure.
Purposely Corrupted Diebold Voting Terminals - October 31, 2004
http://www.rense.com/general59/diebold.htm
Manipulation technique found in the Diebold central tabulator --
1,000 of these systems are in place, and they count up to two million votes at a time.
"By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes" !!!
The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.
This program is not "stupidity" or sloppiness.
It was designed and tested over a series of a dozen version adjustments.
Paid Bush supporters cause uproar - November 1, 2004
2004110101010
State Democrats reacted quickly when the Republican Party, trying to garner last-minute support with New Hampshire's swing voters, began paying part-time workers $75 this weekend to devote a day to the Bush campaign -- especially in liberal areas like Hanover.
Democratic field organizers in the area alerted supporters and volunteers Friday about students from nearby colleges who had been paid to hold Bush-Cheney signs and wear campaign stickers on the Green.
Group tallies more than 1,100 e-voting glitches
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2004/1103grouptalli.html
U.S. voters calling in to a toll-free number had reported more than 1,100 separate incidents of problems with electronic voting machines and other voting technologies by late Tuesday during the nationwide election.
In more than 30 reported cases, when voters reviewed their choices before finalizing them, an electronic voting machine indicated they had voted for a different candidate.
E-voting backers called the number of reported problems minor in the context of almost 50 million U.S. voters projected to use e-voting machines on Tuesday.
In a majority of cases where machines allegedly recorded a wrong vote, votes were taken away from Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, or a Democratic candidate in another race, and given to Republican President George Bush or another Republican candidate, said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
Computers do not make mistakes, they precisely follow instructions contained in software. "Glitches" only occur if software instructions are flawed. The only way votes could have been transferred from Democratic to Republican candidates is if the software was coded to achieve this.
White House-linked clandestine operation paid for "vote switching" software
http://onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/120604Madsen/120604madsen.html
According to a notarized affidavit signed by Clint Curtis, while he was employed by the NASA Kennedy Space Center contractor, Yang Enterprises, Inc., during 2000, [Florida Republican Representative Tom Feeney] solicited him to write a program to "control the vote." At the time, Curtis was of the opinion that the program was to be used for preventing fraud in the in the 2002 election in Palm Beach County, Florida. His mind was changed, however, when the true intentions of Feeney became clear: the computer program was going to be used to suppress the Democratic vote in counties with large Democratic registrations.
[...]
In 2002, Feeney asked Curtis if he could develop a touch screen voting machine "flip flop" program. According to Curtis, Feeney asked him, "Can you write a program to flip votes around on touch screen machines?" Curtis said Feeney wanted the program to merely reduce votes in heavily Democratic areas and flip Republican votes to 51 percent and keep Democrat votes to 49 percent. Curtis added that Feeney "did not want to win by a lot."
Errors plague voting process in Ohio, Pa.
http://www.vindy.com/basic/news/281829446390855.php
[Extracts]
Mahoning and Mercer ?? the only counties in the Mahoning and Shenango valleys to use electronic voting machines and among only a handful in Ohio and Pennsylvania with the technology ?? encountered a series of problems that delayed results for hours Tuesday.
The Mahoning County Board of Elections will begin an investigation immediately to find out the sources of the problems, said Mark Munroe, the agency's chairman.
Of the 16 precincts, 11 were in Youngstown, two in Boardman, one in Jackson Township, one in Craig Beach, and one in Washingtonville.
Some of the machines malfunctioned, others had problems with the personal electronic ballot cartridge placed into the machines before each vote to count the ballots, and other problems were caused by human error, Munroe said.
The human error specifically was precinct officials getting nervous or overwhelmed by the number of people voting, and then failing to properly follow protocol to count the ballots in the machine, he said.
That led to some races showing votes of negative 25 million, Munroe said.
"The numbers were nonsensical so we knew there were problems," he said.
There were similar problems at four or five other Mahoning precincts, but poll officials there were alert enough to catch the problems, and fix them, said Thomas McCabe, deputy elections director.
There were other problems with Mahoning machines. One in Boardman Precinct 44 had to be removed because the glass on top of the electronic screen was too far from the screen, making it difficult for people to use their fingers to cast ballots, Munroe said. A screen went blank on a Youngstown voter while he cast his ballot, he said.
Also, there were 20 to 30 machines that needed to be recalibrated during the voting process because some votes for a candidate were being counted for that candidate's opponent, Munroe said.
There are a variety of reasons for that problem, including static electricity, Munroe said. Munroe said he strongly believes that the calibration issue didn't mark people's votes improperly because when a vote is cast for a candidate, their name is lit up in bright blue and the name comes up as a review of a vote before it is finalized.
About a dozen machines needed to be reset because they essentially froze.
[If static electricity caused problems then why don't touch-screen ATMs "glitch" or crash regularly?]
In Mercer County
Mercer County's director of elections said it was a computer software glitch that caused touch-screen voting machines to malfunction in about a dozen precincts Tuesday. The election board didn't finish counting ballots in Mercer until about 3:30 a.m. today.Election workers in Mercer County raced to take paper ballots to polling places in the Shenango Valley after a series of computer errors.
"I don't know what happened," said James Bennington, who had been assured Friday that all 250 of the county's touch-screen units had been checked and rechecked. The county has 100 voting precincts.
Precincts in Hermitage, Farrell, Wheatland, West Middlesex, Shenango Township and Sharon experienced the most serious machine difficulties, some from the moment the polls opened at 7 a.m. Some machines never operated, some offered only black screens and some required voters to vote backwards, starting on the last page of the touch-screen system and working back to the front page.
Some of those systems never came back on line, leaving poll workers to resort to handing out paper ballots for people to cast their votes. The county had about 2,000 paper ballots prepared in advance for emergencies, but the problem was so great that "a couple thousand more" were printed and hauled out to the precincts as they ran low or ran out of ballots.
Bennington said some precincts in Hermitage, Farrell, Wheatland, Shenango Township and West Middlesex never got their machines back on line. The end result was thousands of paper ballots that workers at each precinct had to count and add to the total votes.
Residents turned away at polls
Brandon Norman was among residents who showed up at the polls Tuesday and was turned away.
Norman, 24, thought he was registered ?? he filled out a registration form on the University of Louisiana campus two weeks before the Oct. 4 deadline.
??They had booths all over campus, so I thought I was cool,? Norman said Tuesday night at the Lafayette Registrar of Voters Office.
The Registrar??s office was swamped all day Tuesday with calls and visits from those who were turned away from the polls because their names were not on the rolls.
University of Louisiana sophomore Lashindra Fisher, 19, of New Orleans waits in line while a poll worker at S.J. Montgomery calls in her information Tuesday morning. Despite registering to vote on the UL campus, Fisher was told that if she wanted to vote, she had to travel to New Orleans.
Elections officials were discouraging voters Tuesday from filling out provisional ballots ?? paper ballots that would be counted only if the voter??s proper registration could be found after Election Day. The reason, said Clerk of Court Louis Perret and Registrar Steve Bernard, is state officials are confident that if a voter??s name doesn??t appear on the rolls or in the statewide database of voters, then the person did not register correctly.
Exit polls and ??actual?? results don??t match; Evoting states show greater discrepancy
http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=388
In Florida, Bush led exit polling by CNN??s exit polling consortium by just 5355 votes (when the exit polling information is multiplied by the actual vote). Yet he led by 326,000 in the end result. On Wednesday morning, CNN changed their exit polling to favor Bush, saying that had overweighted African American voters.
In Wisconsin, where exit polls put Kerry up seven percent, Bush has a lead of one percent, an unexplained difference of eight percent.
In New Mexico, Kerry led Bush by 3.8 percent, yet Bush leads Kerry by 3 percent in actual reported voting.
In Minnesota, where a new law sharply restricts reporters?? access to polls, Kerry led 9.6 percent in exit polling. Actual voting counts found that Bush trailed by 5 percent, with a 5 percent discrepancy favoring Bush.
Ohio, which does have paper trail capability but does not mandate receipts, had exits showed Kerry and Bush in a dead heat; in the near-final results, Bush led by three percent.
Exit polls put Kerry up by 8 percent in Michigan; actual results show Bush trailing by just 3 percent.
Nevada, which also has electronic voting ?? though should have mandated paper trails, had a variance of 4.2 percent. Kerry led the exit polls by 1.2 percent, while Bush led reported votes by 3 percent.
Two states with paper trails for voting were within 0.5 percent margin of error.
In New Hampshire, which uses paper ballots, exit polling was within 0.1 percent of the actual vote. Kerry led by 3 percent in exit polling, and 2.9 percent in the actual vote.
Maine, the final state for which analysis of exit polling was conducted before the AP ??resampled? their data, was in the Kerry column by 7.5 percent; the end result put Kerry up 8 percent, a variance of 0.5 percent. Maine has no electronic voting.
In one precinct, Bush??s tally was supersized by a computer glitch
http://www.dispatch.com/election/election-president.php?story=dispatch/2004/11/05/20041105-A6-01.html
A computer error involving one voting-machine cartridge gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in a Gahanna precinct.
Franklin County??s unofficial results gave Bush 4,258 votes to Democratic challenger John Kerry??s 260 votes in Precinct 1B, which votes at New Life Church on Stygler Road. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.
Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, said Bush received 365 votes there.
The remaining 13 voters who cast ballots either voted for other candidates or did not vote for president.
Damschroder said he received some calls yesterday from people who saw the error when reading the list of poll results on the election board??s Web site
Software flaw found in Florida vote machines
Early Thursday, as Broward County elections officials wrapped up after a long day of canvassing votes, something unusual caught their eye. Tallies should go up as more votes are counted. That's simple math. But in some races, the numbers had gone ... down.
It turns out the software used in Broward County can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward. Why a voting system would ever be designed to vote backward was a mystery to Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman. It had her on the phone late Wednesday with Omaha-based Elections Systems and Software.
Bad numbers showed up only in running tallies through the day, not the final one. Final tallies were reached by cross-checking machine totals and officials are confident they are accurate.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Election problems due to a software glitch
[
A systems software glitch in Craven County's electronic voting equipment is being blamed for a vote miscount that, when corrected, changed the outcome of at least one race in Tuesday's election.
Then, in the rush to make right the miscalculation that swelled the number of votes for president here by 11,283 more votes than the total number cast, a human mistake further delayed accurate totals for the 40,534 who voted
The Ohio Factor: Did Homeland Security and the FBI Interfere with the Vote Count?
[url]http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111204I.shtml
In Warren County, Ohio election officials took a rather unprecedented action on November 2. They locked down the building where the votes were being tallied, blocking anyone from observing the vote counting process. County officials said they took the action in response to a terror threat warning from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. County Commissioner Pat South said they were told by an FBI agent that the county was facing a level 10 security threat on a scale of 1 to 10.
FBI denies warning officials of any special threat
http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/11/10/loc_warrenvote10.html
E-mails released Monday show lockdown pre-planned - Nov 24, 2004
http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041116/NEWS01/411160355/1056
County Commissioner Pat South has said the decision to lock the doors election night was made during an Oct. 28 closed-door meeting (the Thursday before Election Day). But in e-mailed memos dated Oct. 25 and Oct. 26 - released Monday after an Enquirer public records request - other county officials were already detailing the security measures, down to the wording of signs that would be posted on the locked doors.
Group Finds Voting Irregularities in South
]
The group sent monitors Tuesday to 700 precincts in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina. Their goal was to observe such issues as the timely opening of polls, the presence of correct ballots and functioning machines, and the impartiality of elections officials.
Among their preliminary findings, the group listed a shortage of early voting locations in Duval County, Fla., the largest county in Florida in area and voting-age population, the failure of electronic voting machines in three South Carolina counties, and the loss of votes at a North Carolina precinct when too much information was stored on a computer unit.
``In one case, sprinklers came on while people were waiting to vote and the poll workers didn't know how to turn them off,'' said Alma Ayala, who monitored voting in St. Petersburg, Fla.
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