Fw: Evidence Mounts That The Vote Was Hacked

["dougrcurtis" <dougrcurtis@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael" <mhandy@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, November 07, 2004 6:42 AM
Subject: Evidence Mounts That The Vote Was Hacked 


> By Thom Hartmann
> Common Dreams.org
> 11-7-4
> 
>  http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm
> 
> 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 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.
> 
> Also See:
> 
> Florida Secretary of State Presidential Results by County 11/02/2004
> (.pdf)
> Florida Secretary of State County Registration by Party 2/9/2004 (.pdf)
> 
> While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to
> produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios
> matched the Kerry/Bush vote, and so did the optically-scanned paper
> ballots in the larger counties, in Florida's smaller counties the
> results from the optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central
> tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking - seem to have been
> reversed.
> 
> 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 smaller
> counties where, it was probably assumed, the small voter numbers
> wouldn't be much noticed. 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 larger counties, where such anomalies would be more obvious
> to the news media, high percentages of registered Democrats equaled high
> percentages of votes for Kerry.
> 
> More visual analysis of the results can be seen at
> 
> http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm and
> http://www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm
> 
> And, although elections officials didn't notice these anomalies, in
> aggregate they were enough to swing Florida from Kerry to Bush. If you
> simply go through the analysis of these counties and reverse the
> "anomalous" numbers in those counties that appear to have been hacked,
> suddenly the Florida election results resemble the Florida exit poll
> results: Kerry won, and won big.
> 
> 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.)
> 
> 
> 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. 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."
> 
> Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored
> Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated
> daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann .com His most recent books
> are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise
> of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A
> Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To
> Democracy."
> 
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