Greg Palast On The Day Before The Election: 1,000,000 Kerry Votes Already Stolen

This shouldn’t technically be in the “Aftermath” category, because it was published the day before. But I feel like it needs to be here to make this category complete.

An Election Spoiled Rotten

By Greg Palast, contributing editor to Harper’s magazine, for TomPaine.com.

It’s not even Election Day yet, and the Kerry-Edwards campaign is already down by almost a million votes. That’s because, in important states like Ohio, Florida and New Mexico, voter names have been systematically removed from the rolls and absentee ballots have been overlooked

Election Day Report From ABC News: A Number Of Electronic Voting Machine Woes Reported

Wow. Here’s one I missed from ABC News that was published on Election Day (Nov 2, 2004).

Electronic Voting Machine Woes Reported

By ABC News.

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 (website – news – bio) but when the computer asked them to verify the choice it showed them instead opting for President Bush (website – news – bio) , 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…
The Election Protection Coalition received a total of 32 reports of touch-screen voters who selected one candidate only to have another show up on the summary screen, Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a coalition member.

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Dems Seek GAO Investigation Into Voting Irregularities


House Dems Seek Election Inquiry

By Kim Zetter for Wired News.

Three congressmen sent a letter to the General Accounting Office on Friday requesting an investigation into irregularities with voting machines used in Tuesday’s elections.
The congressmen, Democratic members of the House of Representatives from Florida, New York and Michigan, cited a number of incidents that came to light in the days after the election. One was a glitch in Ohio that caused a memory card reader made by Danaher Controls to give George W. Bush 3,893 more votes than he should have received. Another was a problem with memory cards in North Carolina that caused machines made by UniLect to lose 4,500 votes cast on e-voting machines. The votes were lost when the number of votes cast on the machines exceeded the capacity of the memory cards.
There were also problems with machines that counted absentee ballots in Florida. Software made by Election Systems & Software began subtracting votes when totals surpassed 32,000. Officials said the problem affected only certain countywide races on one of the last pages of the ballot. Elections officials knew about the problem two years ago, but the company failed to fix the software before the election this year.
Reports from voters in Florida and Ohio also indicated that some of them had problems voting for the candidate of their choice. When they tried to vote for John Kerry, they said, the machine either wouldn’t register the vote at all or would indicate on the review page that the vote was cast for Bush instead…
In their letter, representatives John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Robert Wexler of Florida asked the GAO to “immediately undertake an investigation of the efficacy of voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election, how election officials responded to difficulties they encountered and what we can do in the future to improve our election systems and administration.”
John Doty, spokesman for Nadler, said the congressmen emphasized that they were not seeking a nationwide recount and were not anticipating that an investigation would change the outcome of the election.
“But we do want to make sure that where there are problems they’re fixed so that it won’t affect other elections in the future,” Doty said. “We want to make sure that people can be confident in the system.”

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The “Twilight Zone” Election Continues

Karl Rove is on Meet The Press right now, and I’ll have it up around noon today.
I gotta say that it’s rather frustrating watching all of these people talk about the Election as if all of these miscount reports didn’t exist.
Obama, Illinois’ new Democratic Senator, just said that he “shared a million votes with President Bush.” There’s no way that a million Democrats in Illinois voted for Bush.
We’re now finding out that this is exactly what we’re supposed to believe: that millions of Democrats took it upon themselves to vote for Bush. This concept is laughable to say the least. (Here’s an article that deals with this specifically.)
I just wanted to drop you guys a note and say “no worries.” This strange episode of the Twilight Zone will continue, but it may just have a happy ending, eventually. There seem to be a lot of folks paying attention to the facts now, and the hard math is on our side.
The question is: what will the Democrats do when it’s been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the election was faulty. A recount is in order, to say the least, but I don’t hear anybody asking for one.
But don’t dispair. We’re in this together guys. Thanks for sending me all the great links. I’m committed to archiving them here.
It’s my birthday on the 10th., and I’m taking a few days off to rest up a bit. So if you don’t hear back from me, that’s why. But I’ll catch up on everything when I get back, and I’m here all day today, so now’s a good time to send anything over. I cancelled my trip. I’ll be right here 🙂

Computers That Tally Optical Votes Aren’t Secure Either


Evidence Mounts That The Vote Was Hacked

By Thom Hartmann for Commondreams.

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
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.

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Did Anyone Get Video Of The Shrub’s “Political Capital” A.K.A. I’m The King And I’m Gonna REALLY Start Acting Like One Speech?

Update 11/08/04 – Turns out
it’s on the White House site
. There’s also a transcription. But, of course, who knows if either one is accurate. I’d feel better if one of you had a copy. (Transcription included in “More” section.)

I didn’t get it and many are asking for it.
I’ll be happy to host it.
thanks,
lisa

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Serious Numbers Comparison Between The Results From Electronic and Optical Voting Machines In Florida

Well, I said I wanted numbers. Here are a lot of them. Now I’ve got to figure out what all this means. (Yes, I’ll update this post.)
Looks like the Repubs have done particularly well in the E-voting districts.
What a surprise.
There are also a number of other links with different perspectives of looking at the data towards the bottom of the page.

Surprising Pattern of Florida’s Election Results

Look at the Percent Change columns
Explanation, Sources, and Graphical Plots are Below the Chart
by Kathy Dopp, kathy@directell.com, Wednesday November 3, 2004

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Meanwhile, A Little Reminder Of Typical Shrub Administration Tactics: Prisoner AbuseAbuse Of Our Own Soldiers Within Military Prisons

I’m taping the 60 Minutes Episode right now. I’ll have it up tomorrow sometime.Here’s the video.

Abuses found at military prison

By Carol Rosenberg, Free Press Foreign Correspondent for the Detroit Free Press.

CBS’s “60 Minutes II” aired a report featuring Spec. Sean Baker, a Kentucky National Guardsman, who said he suffered brain damage while being manhandled by fellow Guantanamo guards during a rehearsal for the forced removal of prisoners from cells.
Baker describes confusion in the drill, during which he acted as a prisoner and wore a jumpsuit, over whether he was a real prisoner and argues that he escaped worse injury by persuading guards that he was a fellow soldier.
Had it been a real prisoner, Baker said in the show, “I think they would have busted him up.
“I’ve seen detainees come outta there with blood on ’em. If there wasn’t someone to say, ‘I’m a U.S. soldier,’ if you were speaking Arabic or Pashto or Urdu or some other language in the camp, we may never know what would have happened to that individual.”
The two most curious cases outlined in the report involved interrogations in April 2003.
Officers discovered a prisoner had bruises on his knees after an interrogator used a so-called fear-up/harsh technique by directing military police to repeatedly bring the prisoner from a standing to a prone position and back, according to the report.
Pentagon officials disclosed the interrogation technique in the aftermath of the abuses in Iraq. They said it was briefly used at Guantanamo Bay.

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A Ton O’ Voting Irregularities In The South = Mass Voter Disenfranchisement

Don’t worry Shrub, most of the disenfranchised don’t have the money or resources to sue the government properly.

Group Finds Voting Irregularities in South

By Doug Gross, Associated Press Writer.

A national voting rights group said Friday it documented hundreds of voting irregularities affecting poor and minority voters in seven Southern states