An Anthology of the Best Political Opinion and Commentary
From the Progressive Internet  --   www.crisispapers.org

Election Fraud

See also: "Electoral Integrity"

For more articles and current developments on this topic, see:

For more information on this issue:

A Compendium of Voter Fraud Links (Imagicke)

 Ernest Partridge on Election Fraud 

 

"Anyone with access to the election software of a major voting machine vendor can change the outcome of a national election and determine which party will control Congress. Election fraud can now be committed on a national, not just a local, basis."

Barbara Simons,  Past President
Association for Computing Machinery.

"A veritable sea of evidence, statistical as well as anecdotal and circumstantial, supports the claim that Bush, again, was not elected by the people.

"To nod agreement that this was indeed an honest win is to forget how Bush was shoehorned into office in the first place; to ignore the ease with which electronic totals can be changed without a trace; to suppress the fact that Diebold, Sequoia and ES&S—the major manufacturers of touch screen voting machines and central tabulators—are owned and run by Bush Republicans, who have made no secret of their partisan intentions; to deny the value of the exit polls, which turn out to have been “mistaken” only in the swing states; to downplay the weird inflation of the Bush vote in county after county, where the number of votes for president was somehow higher than the number of voters who turned out; to ignore the bald chicanery of the Bush supporters who ran the central polling station in Ohio’s Warren County and forced out the press and poll monitors so they could count the vote in secret; to forget the numerous accounts of vote fraud coast to coast throughout the prior weeks of early voting; to overlook the fact that every single “glitch” or “error” that has been reported favors Bush; to ignore the countless instances of ballots—absentee, provisional—thrown away or left uncounted; to forget that the civilian vote abroad (some four million Americans) was being mishandled by the Pentagon (which had somehow become responsible for doing the State Department’s job); and to ignore the many dirty tricks reported—the polling places quickly relocated at the last minute, the fake voter-registration drives, the thousands of Americans who found themselves not on the rolls, the police road-blocks, the bullying pro-Bush poll workers, the machines that kept translating votes for Kerry into votes for Bush. And so on.

Mark Crispin Miller

 

Michael Collins: Congressional Election Nullified -- Nobody Noticed,  Scoop (N.Z.).

Bob Young: The Return of the Silent Majority.  

Aviel Rubin: Pull the Plug, Forbes.

Michael Collins: New Zogby Poll On Electronic Voting, Scoop.

David Dill/Doug Jones/Barbara Simons: The Diebold Bombshell, OpEdNews.

Joan Brunwasser: A Chronology of Vote-Theft and Corruption Post-2004, . OpEdNews.

John Ireland: RFK Jr. Blows the Whistle on Diebold, In These Times.

Brad Friedman: Democracy in Crisis: Interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Brad Blog.

Michael Parenti: The Stolen Election of 2004. ZMag.

Brad Friedman: Court TV's Catherine Crier on Electoral Crisis: "A Full Frontal Attack on Democracy,"  Brad Blog.

Greg Palast/Matt Pascarella: Dispatch from Mexico City: Stealing It in Front of Your Eyes,. GregPalast.com.

Joel Bleifuss: Was the presidential election stolen?  In These Times.

Randolph T. Holhut: Where's the outrage over Bush's election fraud?,
Smirking Chimp.

Greg Palast: Voting Rights Act Nailed to Burning Cross, Guardian (U.K.).

Steve Rosenfeld: Jim Crow GOP, TomPaine.com

Michael Collins: Salon, Mother Jones & the Tortured Dialogue, Scoop

Bradblog: Vote-Switching Software Provided by Vendors in at least 51 Elections So Far This Year.  (With map of locations of ballot programming flaws). Bradblog.

Mark Crispin Miller: Some Might Call it Treason: An Open Letter to Salon, Huffington Post.

Evelyn Pringle: How Bush Rigged Ohio Election: The Noe Factor.  OpEdNews.

Brad Friedman: Busby/Bilbray Election in Doubt,  Brad Blog via TruthOut.

Greg Palast: How They Stole Ohio And the GOP 4-Step Recipe to "Blackwell" the USA in 2008 Abracadabra: Three Million Votes Vanish, BuzzFlash.

Paul Kiel: GOP Jams Democracy,  In These Times.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Was the 2004 Election Stolen? Rolling Stone Magazine.

Steven Hill: Election Security 2006, TomPaine.com.

James Klinikowski: Don't trust computer voting machines, verify ballots.   See also Dorri Steinhoff: How the GOP Stole the '04 Election.
 

Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman: Will the major media finally cover the electronic election fraud issue?, Columbus Free Press, May 15, 2006

"That the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 were stolen has become an article of faith for millions of mainstream Americans. But there has been barely a whiff of coverage in the major media about any problems with the electronic voting machines that made those thefts possible---until now. A recent OpEdNews/Zogby People's poll of Pennsylvania residents found that "39% said that the 2004 election was stolen.." But the poll was skewed by viewers of FOX News. Without them, a majority of Americans appears to believe George W. Bush has no business being in the White House. That the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post finally ran coverage of problems with electronic voting machines this week is itself big news. It says the scandals surrounding computer fraud and financial illegalities at Diebold and other electronic voting machine companies have become simply too big and blatant for even the bought, docile mainstream media (MSM) to ignore."  (5/16)

Greg Palast: Night of the Uncounted: How to Disappear Three Million Votes,  (scroll down for "Night of the Uncounted") mydd.com, May 10, 2006

[From Greg Palast's new book, "Armed Madhouse":] "In Ohio, there were 153,237 ballots simply thrown away, more than the Bush 'victory' margin. In New Mexico the uncounted vote was five times the Bush alleged victory margin of 5,988. In Iowa, Bush's triumph of 13,498 was overwhelmed by 36,811 votes rejected. In all, over three million votes were cast but never counted in the 2004 presidential election. The official number is bad enough-1,855,827 ballots cast not counted, reported to the federal government's Election's Assistance Commission. But the feds are missing data from several cities and entire states too embarrassed to report the votes they failed to count. Correcting for the under-reporting of the undercount, the number of ballots cast but never counted goes to 3,600,380. And there are certainly more we couldn't locate to tote up. Why doesn't your government tell you this? Hey, they do. It's right there in black-and-white on a U.S. Census Bureau announcement released seven months after the election -- in a footnote to the report on voter turnout. The Census tabulation of voters voting 'differs,' from ballots tallied by the Clerk of the House of Representatives for the 2004 presidential race by 3.4 million votes." (5/16)

Stephen Goldstein: No `verify,' no trust, Sun-Sentinel.com, May 10, 2006

"Wake up, Florida voters: Because of our history of hitches, glitches, pitches and switches at the polls, your ballot may still be ditched this fall. We were bushwhacked in 2000 and in 2004. And it may be déjà vu all over again in 2006, unless you help implement the single most important way to restore trust in our elections. Proof that voting in Florida is in free-fall is everywhere. Go to www.voteprotect.org, click on Maps/Research, then on Election 2004, for the tip of the iceberg: 1,118 voter horror stories in Broward (the most in the state), 712 in Palm Beach County, 1,115 in Miami-Dade, and others around the state." (5/16)

Brad Friedman: Newly Discovered Diebold Threat Described as 'Major National Security Risk'!, BradBlog, May 5, 2006

"We've now been able to gather a great deal of additional information concerning details about the story we first posted yesterday on the official Pennsylvania state warning issued about the new "security vulnerability" discovered in all Diebold touch-screen electronic voting machines. That warning, which has now brought a lock-down on all Diebold systems in PA, where early absentee (non-machine) voting is about to begin prior to their upcoming May 16th primary election, was reported by the Morning Call yesterday. The warning says the serious security vulnerability could allow ''unauthorized software to be loaded on to the system." Public details about the warning are still sketchy as those in the know have acknowledged that the problem is so serious, they are hoping to keep the info under wraps until mitigation steps can be taken to safeguard systems. The BRAD BLOG has been told on the record, however, by one person involved in the matter, that the vulnerability is a 'major national security risk.' "  (See also Financial Times: Electronic Voting Switch Threatens Mass Confusion ).  (5/9)

Andrew Welsh-Huggins: Ohio Official  [Blackwell] Invested in Vote Machine Co.,  Washington Post, April 4, 2006

"Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who is  seeking the Republican nomination for governor, said he discovered the shares for Diebold Inc. while  preparing a required filing for the Ohio Ethics Commission. ... The state negotiated a deal with  Diebold last year for $2,700 per touch-screen machine. ... Democrats weren't buying Blackwell's  explanation. 'If he can't manage to know what's in his checkbook, why would the people of Ohio want to  trust this man with the state's checkbook?' said Brian Rothenberg, spokesman for the Ohio Democratic  Party."  ( See also Brad Friedman: Ohio '04 Recount: 'The Fix Was In," Says County Prosecutor , Joan  Mazzolini: [Ohio] Workers Accused of Fudging '04  Recount, and  Sean Greene: With voting machine company now  bankrupt, CEO speaks out: No vendor "has a system  that voters can trust"!).  (4/11)

John Gideon: The Approaching [E-Voting] Train Wreck,  BradBlog, April 9, 2006

"So far this year two states have conducted primary elections. In Texas there is at least one candidate who has stepped forward and has challenged the election because of anomalies in vote counts and known voting machine failures. One county's machines counted some votes up to 6 times which resulted in approximately 100,000 more votes being counted than were cast. Though the vendor, Hart Intercivic, initially blamed the problem on human error, they finally had to admit that it was a programming error and not poll workers or voters who had erred. In Illinois some county officials are threatening to withhold final payment of funds on contracts with Sequoia Voting Systems because of failures with their machines that ended with results in the primary not being known for over a week after the voters went to the polls. In both states the involved vendors were very successful in the media with deflecting the blame from their machines to 'human errors' or 'glitches'. However, when you listen to people who were there and who saw and worked through the problems you get a very different picture. ... As these primaries were being conducted Summit County Ohio announced that over 70% of the memory cards for their precinct based optical-scan machines would not work. ... Memory cards for electronic voting machines store vote tabulations amongst other things. ... Don't let them tell you it won't happen there because it very easily can happen there or here or the next state over. We, you and I, need to take action on this now for the sake of our elections. We are headed for a train wreck."  (4/11)

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman: Shocking Diebold Conflict of Interest Revelations From Secretary of State Further Taint Ohio's Electoral Credibility, Common Dreams, April 6, 2006

"Ohio is reeling with a mixture of outrage and hilarity as Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell has revealed that he has owned stock in the Diebold voting machine company, to which Blackwell tried to award unbid contracts worth millions while allowing its operators to steal Ohio elections. A top Republican election official also says a Diebold operative told him he made a $50,000 donation to Blackwell's "political interests." A veritable army of attorneys on all sides of Ohio's political spectrum will soon report whether Blackwell has violated the law. But in any event, the revelations could have a huge impact on the state whose dubiously counted electoral votes gave George W. Bush a second term. Diebold's GEMS election software was used in about half of Ohio counties in the 2004 election. Because of Blackwell's effort, 41 counties used Diebold machines in Ohio's highly dubious 2005 election, and now 47 counties will use Diebold touchscreen voting machines in the May 2006 primary, and in the fall election that will decide who will be the state's new governor."  (4/11)

Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman: Is the Mainstream Media finally getting half the rigged voting machine story?,  Columbus Free Press, March 30, 2006

"The fact that electronic voting machines don't work may finally be sinking into a segment of the mainstream media. The fact that e-voting machines can, have been, and will be used to steal elections, continues to go unreported. At least the corporate media has moved from framing the allegations of e-voting fraud as "conspiracy theory" into reporting epic errors in election results. Both USA Today and the New York Times have run recent articles on the mechanical problems surrounding electronic voting that mirror much of what happened during the theft the presidential election in Ohio 2004. . . . But the fact that these publications are finally acknowledging the obvious, overwhelming mechanical "glitches" with these machines is at least a start. Now that the Government Accountability Office has confirmed electronic voting equipment is easily hackable for mass vote stealing, and now that the Times and USA Today have reported that there are serious mechanical problems, maybe somebody at one of these media outlets will finally come to the obvious conclusion: electronic voting machines are merely high-tech devices designed to steal elections. And that is precisely why George W. Bush is in the White House today." (See also Bob Fitrakis: The new face of apartheid: J. Kenneth Hackwell's Ohio). (4/4)

Robert C. Koehler: Faith-based voting, Common Wonders, March 30, 2006

"Media curiosity about the voting process stops the moment that ballots are fed into the computer. It's as though some natural process then takes over that, albeit incomprehensible to all but the tech-savvy, spits out a count there would be no more point in questioning than the word of God. This is called faith-based voting. One person who insists we talk about this — about what happens to our ballots once they are surrendered to the proprietary software programs of the voting machine companies — is Paul Lehto, a lawyer from Snohomish County, Wash., which adopted Sequoia's voting system in 2002. Lehto is suing Snohomish County to invalidate its contract with Sequoia on the grounds that the company's ballot-counting software is not public knowledge. Do you get this? Sequoia, like the other companies peddling electronic voting systems to local and state election officials, insists it has the right not to make its source codes, or any other information about its equipment, public. Nor, as Ion Sancho, election supervisor of Leon County, Fla., learned, do the companies even tolerate having their equipment tested. (Sancho demonstrated that you can modify an election without leaving evidence, which Lehto called "the nuclear bomb of election fraud.")" (4/4)

Paul Jacobs: The currency of democracy, OpEdNews, March 28, 2006

"Votes are the currency of democracy, but casting a ballot is far more precious than any monetary transaction. All political power is inherent in the people and that is the core value of the vote. The reason millions of dollars are invested in political campaigns is to capture our votes. We fail to recognize the worth of this treasure we hold and are allowing democracy to be electronically swindled away. Running a clean election is based on a simple precept: Vote in private; count in public. The secret ballot protects the voter from outside intimidation to afford the freest expression of democracy. Counting votes in public ensures total transparency for security and accuracy in the tallying. . . . The leap to hand over our elections to private companies was an irresponsible, knee-jerk travesty. Voting machines appeared virtually overnight and quickly changed democracy in America. They were readymade and purchased off the shelf without the preconceived specifications, policies and procedures that are usually inherent in government endeavors. Safeguards were an afterthought. . . .Electronic voting systems are said to have more than 100 points of entry vulnerable to hacking and other mischief. Every connection in the process provides an opportunity to slip in a little bit of programming that executes a task before vanishing without a trace. One tampered election data cartridge out of the thousands can change everything." (4/4)

Carlos Miller: Programmer who alleged plot to steal Florida election runs for Congress, The Raw Story, March 24, 2006

"To Republicans, Clint Curtis is a traitor; a back-stabbing liar with an imagination that rivaled Jack Abramoff's influence over Congress. To liberal Democrats, Curtis is a hero; a stand up guy who blew the whistle on computer voting fraud, testifying before a group of U.S. House Committee Judiciary Democrats after the 2004 presidential election. And to the man himself, the Republican-turned-Democrat is nothing but a computer geek who purports to have found himself smack in the middle of a brazen political plot to tamper with elections in Florida, where fact can be stranger than fiction and politics as shady as swampy underbrush. . . . In [a] Texas case, Republican Steve Smith is preparing a challenge after losing in the state's Supreme Court Justice primary election earlier this month. In Winkler County, Texas, where Smith respectively received 74 percent and 65 percent of the votes in the 2002 and 2004 elections, he received zero votes in the recent primary. . . . Smiths' opponent, Don Willet, has close ties to President Bush. Willet served as a special assistant to the president in Bush's quest for faith-based initiatives."  (3/28)

John Distaso: Calling Ken?,  Manchester Union Leader, March 23, 2006 (Search "Calling Ken").

"In the days before and after the state Republican Party's 2002 Election Day phone-jamming scheme, the man who now chairs the Republican National Committee was the White House director of political affairs. And a Democratic-affiliated advocacy group says that court records show Ken Mehlman's office received more than 75 telephone calls from now-convicted phone-jam conspirator James Tobin from Sept. 30 to Nov. 22 of that year. The Senate Majority Project, a brainchild of former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, wonders why Tobin called the White House so often. ... On election morning, a telemarketer hired by the state GOP jammed the telephones of five state Democratic and one firefighters union get-out-the-vote phone banks. Former state GOP executive director Chuck McGee admitted masterminding the scheme and served seven months in jail last year for it. Tobin was found guilty in December of federal telephone harassment charges for acting as a middle man." (  See also Buzz Flash:  Did White House Direct Phone Jamming Scheme?).  (3/28)

Andrew Gumbel: Electoral dysfunction, Los Angeles CityBeat, March 23, 2006

"Ion Sancho is a rare, if not unique, figure in America's blasted electoral landscape, a county election supervisor who actually cares about the reliability, transparency, and public accountability of his voting systems. Since his bailiwick is Leon County, the area in and around Florida's state capital, Tallahassee, he also has a unique vantage point on what arguably remains the most electorally dysfunctional state in the union, and he provides regular, withering commentary on the anti-democratic skullduggery of the other Bush administration, the state government led by George W.'s brother, Jeb. For both these things, he is now being hung out to dry. . . . It's a chilling scenario. A public official takes steps to defend the integrity of elections in his county, and he is promptly identified as a threat who needs to be removed. It would be bad enough if the Sancho affair were limited to Florida, but really it has implications all over the country. The more we find out about the expensive computerized systems being installed in county after county, and state after state, the more it becomes apparent that the processes to inspect and certify them are wholly inadequate and may well be opening the door to election-stealing on a scale this country has never seen before. And yet, with vast quantities of money and bureaucratic pride at stake, the official reaction to the shortcomings remains, overwhelmingly, to pretend that they don't exist. California, sadly, is no exception to this general pattern. . . . As Ion Sancho told me, public authorities are supposed to be "the gatekeepers and protectors of the citizen" but instead they appear interested only in protecting the interests of the voting machine companies. We need to generate the broadest possible outrage about this travesty of our democratic rights. And we need to do it fast."  (3/28)

Allen Snyder: The Elements of Regressive Voting Crimes,  OpEdNews, March 21, 2006

"If you’ve been paying attention to the great work being done by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman on Ohio’s myriad voting irregularities and statistical improbabilities from both the Presidential election in 2004 and the recent electoral defeat of a handful of referendum initiatives concerning the aggressive monitoring of e-voting (available at many progressive Internet outlets), then you know there’s a very strong case to be made that regressive Republicans in Ohio have criminally cheated their way to at least two electoral ‘victories’. I think regressive Republicans are looking really good for voter fraud." See also: Ernest Partridge: Means, Motive, Opportunity.  (3/28)

Ian Hoffman: E-vote case puts actor in limelight, Oakland Tribune, March 13, 2006

"One night early in 2004, a few weeks before the presidential primary, a Van Nuys actor making ends meet temping as a word processor listened on headphones as a young lawyer laid out a defense for Diebold Election Systems Inc.'s use of unapproved voting software in Alameda County.  Sitting at a computer terminal on the 45th floor of a Los Angeles skyscraper, Steve Heller transcribed the lawyer's taped memo suggesting that Diebold could claim the software was a new, "experimental" voting system, even though it had handled two Alameda County elections in 2003. . . . [T]he night after hearing the Diebold defense proposal, according to investigators who recreated his actions from computer logs, Heller went back to work inside the word processing center at the law firm Jones Day and began printing every document he could access that its attorneys had created for Diebold — 107 memos, charts, actions plans and e-mails. . . . Heller himself remained largely unknown until two weeks ago when the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office charged him with a computer crime, second-degree burglary and receiving stolen goods — offenses carrying up to four years in prison — and propelled him to folk hero status among voting reform advocates, computer scientists and critics of electronic voting."  (See also Hemmy So: Whistle-Blower or Thief in Diebold Case?, Brad Friedman: Hart InterCivic Whistleblower Warned of Texas, Ohio E-Voting "Fraud" Concerns in 2004: 100,000+ Votes Were Errantly Added by Hart Machines in a Single County and Paul Lehto: Honest Legal Advice for Your Local Election Officials ). (3/21)

Washingtonpost.com: How To Steal an Election, washingtonpost.com, March 16, 2006

"It's easier to rig an electronic voting machine than a Las Vegas slot machine, says University of Pennsylvania visiting professor Steve Freeman. That's because Vegas slots are better monitored and regulated than America's voting machines, Freeman writes in a book out in July that argues, among other things, that President Bush may owe his 2004 win to an unfair vote count. We'll wait to read his book before making a judgment about that. But Freeman has assembled comparisons that suggest Americans protect their vices more than they guard their rights, according to data he presented at an October meeting of the American Statistical Association in Philadelphia." (3/21)

Fred Grimm: Election official hammered for telling the truth, MiamiHerald.com, March 7, 2006

"Ion Sancho may be a hero in California, where grateful election officials have verified the ''serious security vulnerabilities'' in Diebold voting machines that the Leon County election supervisor uncovered last year. Sancho is regarded a little differently in Florida. Florida's secretary of state's office disparaged Sancho's finding, demonstrating considerably more interest in propping up vendors than protecting elections. California, alarmed by Sancho's report, dispatched its independent, expert-laden Voting Systems Technology Assessment Advisory Board to conduct its own investigation. Florida, meanwhile, threatened to sue Sancho." (3/21)

Dale Keiger: E-lective Alarm, Johns Hopkins Magazine, February, 2004

Here is a definitive essay from February, 2004, which we somehow overlookEd. "The technical director of Hopkins' Information Security Institute warns in a new report that computerized voting is critically flawed. But proponents are downplaying the risk."  (3/21)

Bev Harris: What you can do to support two voting rights heroes: Ion Sancho and Stephen Heller, OpEdNews, March 12, 2006

"Please give to the Stephen Heller fund.  He was faced with the ethical dilemma from hell. What do you do when a presidential primary is just weeks away, and you are assigned a word processing assignment that has you looking at evidence that the secretary of state is being lied to by the voting machine company counting millions of votes? What do you do when those lies explode into thousands of disenfranchised voters? Nothing? In times like these, the citizenry depends on honesty and courage like Stephen Heller has shown. If you want citizens of courage like Heller successfully threatened and ultimately silenced, do nothing. If you believe that he went to the front lines for YOUR rights, please give what you can. See also: Robert C. Koehler: Whistling Diebold.   (3/14)

Robert C. Koehler: Whistling Diebold: What price will we exact from a hero of democracy?, Common Wonders, March 11, 2006

"They ain't gonna kiss you just because you're a whistleblower. No matter that you exposed wrongdoing and struck a blow for fair elections. The larger good isn't always obvious to the powers that be. So Steve Heller, a Los Angeles-based actor whose day job is doing temporary office work, faces three felony charges, all of which are a stretch: felony access to computer data, commercial burglary and receiving stolen property. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's office says he's a thief, an Internet criminal, and that's that. And, oh yeah, he violated attorney-client confidentiality, and cost a big law firm a million dollars in lost business. . . . The documents Heller, the temp word processor, happened upon and subsequently printed out revealed a potential crime in progress. Here's where the ethics become urgent. He could either ignore what he saw or, at considerable personal risk and with nothing to gain except clarity of conscience, take action. He took action. . . . It's just about democracy is all. How rare, how amazing, to learn that ordinary citizens are still sometimes capable of pulling it from the clutches of big-money cynicism. As Steve Heller goes to trial, I guess we'll find out what kind of price is now being exacted for such heroism."  (3/14)

Associated Press: Third [Ohio] Elections Worker Indicted Over Presidential Recount,  Associated Press, March 9, 2006

"The third highest ranking employee at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections has been indicted on charges of mishandling ballots during the 2004 presidential election recount.  Jacqueline Maiden is the third board worker charged with six counts alleging that Ohio laws were not followed in the selection and review of ballots for the recount. The most serious charges carry a maximum sentence of 18 months in prison. The charges stem from a complaint filed by a lawyer who watched over the recount on behalf of two third-party presidential candidates." See also Ana Ribeiro: '04 [Florida] Count Still Sparks Debate.   (3/14)

Maurice Tamman: State: Absentee Vote Count "Will Not be a Problem" in Elections,   Sarasota Herald-Tribune, March 4, 2006

"With just days before elections, state officials were scrambling this week to determine whether they had a problem that could call into question tens of thousands of absentee votes. The problem surfaced in the state's newly minted central voter database, a multimillion-dollar project that is supposed to cleanse the voter rolls of errors and prevent voter fraud. The Herald-Tribune on Wednesday found thousands of mysterious entries in the tally of historic votes that suggested people had already voted in elections that haven't yet occurred."  (See also Peter Soby Jr.: Whistleblower Charged With Three Felonies for Exposing Diebold's Crimes, New York Times Editorial: An Important Election Safeguard and Robert Koehler: "Whistling Diebold").    (3/14)

Missy Comley Beattie: Electronic Voting is a Slam Dunk for Republicans, OpEdNews.com, March 5, 2006

"There’s no reason for George W. Bush to rethink his radical agenda. Disengaged as a human being and transparent in his indifference to suffering, he demands that his “will be done.” Without voting integrity, there’s no reason for me to write about the war. In fact, there’s no end to war and no taking back the country. There’s no end to spying, no end to abuse of the environment, the poor, and our Constitution. There is no end to the criminal doctrine which defines George W. Bush. As long as punch-screen machines are in place, people of compassion might as well stop what we’re doing, shut down our computers, roll over and cry, “Uncle.” It’s a slam dunk for Bush and the end of civilization for us."  (3/7)

Chris Floyd: Party hacks: California sinks into the Bushist Sea, The Moscow Times, March 3, 2006

"Two weeks ago, an obscure, unelected, Republican-appointed official in California decided the future of the world. That future - at least for the next several years - will be an accelerating nightmare of war, corruption, repression, breakdown, atrocity and terror. That's because the loyal apparatchik has, with the stroke of a pen, guaranteed the perpetuation of the militarist Bush Faction in power in 2008 and beyond. One of the few certainties in modern American politics is that no Democrat can hope to win the presidency without carrying California. . . . Thus the sudden, hugger-mugger decision by California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson to override the objections of his own experts and certify the eminently hackable voting machines of the politically partisan private firm, Diebold, for use throughout the state means, quite simply, that the fix is in for the 2008 race. . . . [T]he 2008 election will be conducted largely on wide-open machines programmed by avowed partisans and paymasters of a ruthless gang that has already committed demonstrable vote fraud on a massive scale in engineering narrow "victories" in 2000 and 2004. So it doesn't who runs; it doesn't matter who votes; it doesn't matter how deeply unpopular the Bush Faction becomes through the murderous ruin of its radical militarist-corporatist agenda. The "consent of the governed" will be drowned in the blood money that has bought the nation's electoral process."  (See also Brad Friedman: Florida [Admits Hack,] Issues "Technical Advisory" for "Security Enhancements" on "All Voting Systems' in State!").   (3/7)

Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman: Did 308,000 cancelled Ohio voter registrations put Bush back in the White House?, The Columbus Free Press, March 1, 2006

"While life goes on during the Bush2 nightmare, so does the research on what really happened here in 2004 to give George W. Bush a second term. Pundits throughout the state and nation -- many of them alleged Democrats -- continue to tell those of us who question Bush's second coming that we should "get over it," that the election is old news. But things get curiouser and curiouser. . . . Exit polls flashed worldwide on CNN at 12:20 am Wednesday morning, November 3, showed John Kerry winning Ohio by 4.2% of the popular vote, probably about 250,000 votes. We believe this is an accurate reflection of what really happened here. But by morning Bush was being handed the presidency, claiming a 2.5% Buckeye victory, as certified by Blackwell. In conjunction with other exit polling, the lead switch from Kerry to Bush is a virtual statistical impossibility. Yet John Kerry conceded with more than 250,000 ballots still uncounted, though Bush at the time was allegedly ahead only by 138,000, a margin that later slipped to less than 119,000 in the official vote count. At the time, very few people knew about those first 133,000 voters that had been eliminated from the registration rolls in Cincinnati and Toledo. County election boards purged the voting registration lists."  See also Brad Friedman: Maryland House Committee Votes 20-3 to Scrap Diebold Touch-Screens in State!   (3/7)

Peter Soby, Jr.: Whistleblower Charged With Three Felonies for Exposing Diebold's Crimes, The Huffington Post, February 27, 2006

"A whistleblower in Los Angeles is in legal trouble and needs our help. Stephen Heller is alleged to have exposed documents in Jan. & Feb. 2004 which provided smoking gun evidence that Diebold was using illegal, uncertified software in California voting machines. The docs also showed that Diebold's California attorneys (the powerful international law firm Jones Day) had told them they were in breach of the law for using uncertified software, but Diebold continued to use the uncertified software anyway. . . . The documents also look bad for Diebold's California lawyers, Jones Day. According to Bev Harris, author of the book Black Box Voting, the docs "provided evidence that the Jones Day law firm was helping Diebold to cover up the fact that they were installing uncertified software which, as it turns out, caused thousands of voters to be unable to vote just weeks later." . . . So in a nutshell, Diebold was defrauding the state government and taxpayers of California, and disenfranchising the voters of California. And the documents PROVE it. . . . But we can help. Let's flood the Los Angeles DA's office with phone calls, letters and emails asking them not to crucify this whistleblower. Now of course, BE POLITE. Remember you are writing, calling and emailing the office of the Los Angeles District Attorney, which is a branch of law enforcement. Being harassing, rude, or threatening will only get you in legal trouble of your own, and it won't help Steve Heller, the whistleblower: "   (Follow this link for addresses)   (2/28)

Brad Friedman: AP: 100,000 Errors Reported on Sequoia Voting Machines in Palm Beach, FL. 2004 Election, Brad's Blog, February 24, 2006

"AP -- yes, AP -- is now reporting the just released audit information obtained from Palm Beach County, Florida's 2004 Election. And the picture of the Sequoia paperless touch-screen voting machines used that night is not pretty. To say the least... Diebold continues to run their previously good name into the ground, as the Mainstream Media finally begins to notice what's been going on around here...Finally, the unAmerican Voting Machine Company who originally brung you the War on Democracy, seems to be getting the incredibly bad press they've always deserved...Now from coast to coast."  (See also Brad's Blog: NO, YES, NO: Alaska Now Refuses Release of 2004 Election Data Citing Security Concerns! and Jennifer Medina: Voter Groups See Flaws in Plan to Upgrade Balloting ).  (2/28)

Brian Skoloff: Watchdog Group Questions 2004 Fla. Vote, Yahoo News, February 23, 2006

"An examination of Palm Beach County's electronic voting machine records from the 2004 election found possible tampering and tens of thousands of malfunctions and errors, a watchdog group said Thursday. Bev Harris, founder of BlackBoxVoting.org, said the findings call into question the outcome of the presidential race. But county officials and the maker of the electronic voting machines strongly disputed that and took issue with the findings."  (2/28)

Andrew Gumbel: Excerpt: How to Steal an Election,  AlterNet, February 15, 2006

"A few days before the November 2004 election, Jimmy Carter was asked what would happen if, instead of flying to Zambia or Venezuela or East Timor, his widely respected international election monitoring team was invited to turn its attention to the United States. His answer was stunningly blunt. Not only would the voting system be regarded as a failure, he said, but the shortcomings were so egregious the Carter Center would never agree to monitor an election there in the first place. 'We wouldn't think of it,' the former president told a radio interviewer. 'The American political system wouldn't measure up to any sort of international standards, for several reasons. 'What, after all, was to be done with a country whose newest voting machines, unlike Venezuela's, couldn't even perform recounts? A country where candidates, in contrast to the more promising emerging democracies of the Caucasus or the Balkans, were denied equal, unpaid access to the media? There were a number of reasons, in the sharply partisan atmosphere surrounding the Bush-Kerry race, to wonder whether campaign conditions didn't smack more of the Third World than the First."  ( See also Carlos Miller: Documents show Maryland held election, primary on uncertified, illegal Diebold voting machines,  Crooks and Liars: Bush is Unpopular Across the Entire Country, and  Patricia Goldsmith: Use Your Imagination).  (2/21)

Kathy Dopp: Statisticians recommend new measures to ensure vote count accuracy, release "Ohio’s 2004 exit poll analysis for novices”, Free Press, February 17, 2006

"The National Election Data Archive’s report . . . summarizes a scientific analysis of Ohio’s precinct-level exit polls in layman’s terms. Why should Americans care about Ohio’s 2004 vote counts? Ohio was a key battleground state. Whichever presidential candidate won Ohio became president. Ohio is also the only state for which pollsters publicly released sufficient precinct-level exit poll and vote count data to perform a valid mathematical analysis. Exit polls by the same exit polling firm, Edison/Mitofsky International, were recently used to judge when elections in the Ukraine and Azerbaijan were valid. Exit polls in the 2004 presidential election were not just randomly inaccurate: Bush's reported vote tally was higher than the exit polls anticipated and the inaccuracy was highest in precincts with the highest reported Bush vote. The pollsters said: “Bush voters completed fewer exit polls.” However, the National Election Archive’s analysis finds that the exit poll error explanation is inconsistent with the data and claim that John Kerry might be president today, if votes had been accurately counted in Ohio."  (2/21)

Anthony Lappé: Fooled Again? GNN, February 15, 2006

"For most Americans, George Bush earned a commanding mandate on November 2, 2004. The race in Ohio, officially decided by 118,000 votes, was close, but was no Florida. There were no hanging chads or Jews for Buchanan. Democracy worked and the guy with the most votes won. But for a small contingent of left-wing activists and progressive Democrats, Ohio was Florida Redux – a ruthless Republican coup orchestrated under the absent gaze of the lapdog media. . . . In his new book, Fooled Again, NYU media critic and outspoken Bush-basher Mark Crispin Miller (The Bush Dyslexicon) says he knows where to look. In Fooled Again, he lays out what he says is a definitive case that Kerry won Ohio, and thus the election. Recently, GNN’s Anthony Lappé conducted this interview with Miller about his controversial allegations."  (2/21)

Mark Crispin Miller Connects the Dots on Election Problems, BuzzFlash Interview, February 9, 2006

Mark Crispin Miller "concludes that team Bush wants to permanently disenfranchise the majority. In his "J'accuse" book on the 2004 election, Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them), Miller documents how the Republicans likely stole a second presidential election, just in a more complicated way than they did in 2000. To those who dismiss such claims as "over the top," BuzzFlash responds, if the Republicans stole the presidency in 2000 by hot-wiring the Supreme Court of the United States, why wouldn't they do it again? They would -- and they probably did. If we could transplant Mark Crispin Miller's passion and stamina into the backbones of the Democrats in the U.S. Senate, we wouldn't have a silent coup taking place now in the United States. In this, Part 2 of a two-part interview, Miller looks at the voting machines, and at our collective refusal to see and acknowledge what has happened to our democracy." (See also Black Box Voting: Vendor Nondisclosure Requirements Block EVERYTHING,  Kathy Dopp: Surprising Pattern of Florida's Election Results , Lisa Demer: State [Alaska] rebuffs raw vote demand and Associated Press: Study: New Machines Await 4 in 5 Voters ).  (2/14)

 

Kat L'Estrange: Stop the Lies, Fight the Fix: Don't Let Them Hide the Bodies, OpEdNews.com, January 22, 2006

"The truth is voters turned out in record numbers in 2004 to remove the Republican candidate from power, and they succeeded. Had not voting machines been rigged to favor Bush over his opponents, or had not a disproportionate number of Democratic, mainly urban voters been disenfranchised, the outcome of the election would have reflected the true intent and will of the majority of Americans. Kerry did win. The proof is in the numbers. It took former President Jimmy Carter five years to acknowledge that Al Gore was the candidate of the people in Florida in the 2000 election. ... Not only will vendors continue to control the counting of votes by electronic voting systems, these private companies will also ultimately control who is allowed to vote especially in precincts where public elections officials who maintain some oversight of county lists are asleep on the job. Unless a problem is identified, elections clerks are bound to not go looking for one, but the reality is elections can be won or lost by wrongful purges of the voter rolls, as in Florida in 2000. ... The public must dig deep in order to find the collective willpower required to stop election fraud and end privatization of public elections even as politicians and the media continue to lie about it or deny the truth while staring a criminal administration straight in the face."   (1/24)

Mark Crispin Miller: Why won't the media touch my book?, The Scoop, January 22, 2006

"Bush/Cheney stole their re-election in 2004. They stole it not just in Ohio, but all throughout the USA, from coast to coast. They stole it not by using any single ploy, but through a stealthy combination of computerized vote theft, bureaucratic monkey business, systematic shortages of viable equipment and old-fashioned dirty tricks, including rampant bullying, disinformation and obstructionism. Such foul play was not apparent "on both sides" in the 2004 election, but was committed mainly by the Bush Republicans. The evidence is both abundant and precise--and it's all here in Fooled Again. . . . Despite its wealth of evidence--meticulously documented in 57 pages of detailed endnotes--and despite the standing of its author (Miller is an NYU professor with a solid global reputation), Fooled Again has been pointedly ignored by the national media. There have been no national reviews of Fooled Again. No network or cable TV show would have the author on to talk about the book. NPR has refused to have him on. Even shows that Miller has appeared on in the past, and more than once ("The Connection," "On the Media," "Talk of the Nation"), have refused him on to talk about this book. Only one daily newspaper--the Florida Sun-Sentinel--has published a review." (1/24)

Paul Craig Roberts: Evidence of a Stolen Election, Lew Rockwell,  January 19, 2006

"The pre-election statement by Diebold's CEO that he would work to deliver the election to Bush was apparently no idle boast. In five states where the new 'foolproof' electronic voting machines were used, the vote tallies differed substantially from the exit polls. Such a disparity is unusual. The chances of exit polls in five states being wrong are no more than one in one million. [In his book 'Fooled Again,' Mark Crispin Miller] describes considerably more election fraud than voting machines programmed to count a proportion of Kerry votes as Bush votes. Voters were disenfranchised in a number of ways. Miller reports incidences of intimidation of, and reduced voting opportunities for, poorer voters who tend to vote Democrat. Some of Miller's evidence is circumstantial. However, he documents widespread Republican dirty tricks and foul play. The media's indifference to a stolen election burns Miller as much as the stolen election itself."  (See also David Sirota: Top Dems Announce Push for Public Financing of Elections).  (1/24)

Susan Pynchon: Diebold in Florida: The Harri Hursti Hack and its importance to our nation, Vote Trust USA, January 20, 2006

"I was one of ten people present at the "hack" of the Leon County, Florida voting system, which took place on Tuesday, December 13, 2005 around 4:30 in the afternoon at the county elections warehouse. Leon County's voting system is the Diebold Accu-Vote OS 1.94w (optical scan). . . . Following is a description of that hack and its significance for our nation, which I hope will correct much of the misinformation circulating regarding this event." (1/24)

Joe Bageant: Goodbye Terry Gross, we niver knew ye, The Smirking Chimp, January 20, 2006

"If, god forbid, you are the pointy headed type interested in details, turn on NPR. And if you consider yourself hipper than the couch taters out here in Budland, go onto the net and visit Salon. Or if you are so worldly and hip you are a downright commie, then subscribe to Mother Jones. That's the way it used to be. But now we are seeing what were once considered the more intelligent and in some cases more principled media such as NPR, Salon and Mother Jones distance themselves from meaningful controversy--pulling the few wimpy punches they have. (Bullshit controversy, however, is still in fashion.) We are talking about Mark Crispin Miller's new book, Fooled Again - How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One, Too (Unless We Stop Them). Miller has become a known and respected progressive figure, one of the few in-your-face bespectacled lefty author types with any credibility. But when it comes to promoting Fooled, the guy can't even get arrested. No interviews, nothing. In fact, these days even his cash bounces--Miller can't even buy a spot on National Public Radio for his book."  (1/24)

Chris Floyd: Loot the Vote: The Bush Faction's Future Victories are Already in the Bag, Information Clearing House, January 19, 2006

"Things are looking a bit grim for the Bush Faction these days. Their chief bagman, Jack Abramoff, is in the clink, naming names. Their top congressional enforcer, Tom Delay, is in the dock, sinking fast. Their "war of choice" in Iraq has stalled in murderous quagmire. Their poll numbers are plummeting , as scandal after scandal -- corruption, despotism, torture, incompetence, deceit -- turn the American people against them. What then will be the fate of these brutal, bungling, bloodstained goons when they face the voters in the coming elections? Why, victory, of course! In fact, this year's congressional races and the presidential contest in 2008 are already over, and the Bushists have won. It's true that some of the candidates have not yet been chosen – including whatever front man the goon squad picks to replace the kill-crazy klutz from Crawford – but the vast machinery of electoral malfeasance that propelled this extremist faction to power over the wishes of the electorate in both 2000 and, yes, 2004, is not only still in place, it's growing stronger all the time." (1/24)

National Election Data Archive: The Gun is Smoking - 2004 Ohio Precinct-Level Exit Poll Data Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount, PRWeb, January 17, 2006

"The National Election Data Archive (NEDA) is the first mathematical team to release a valid scientific analysis of the precinct-level 2004 Ohio presidential exit poll data "The Gun is Smoking: 2004 Ohio Precinct-level Exit Poll Data Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount" available at electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/OH/Ohio-Exit-Polls-2004.pdf. NEDA's analysis provides significant evidence of an outcome-altering vote miscount. The analysis is based on the most accurate statistical method yet devised for determining whether exit poll error, random variations, or vote count manipulation cause the discrepancies between exit polls and official vote tallies. . . . New electronic voting equipment without voter verified paper ballots, implemented under the 2002 Help America Vote Act, makes it easier for a small number of people to manipulate vote counts and nearly impossible to independently audit vote count accuracy. Virtually every county in America today publicly reports its vote counts in a way that hides evidence of miscounts. This allows those with access (whether authorized or not) to manipulate or make mistakes in vote counting with negligible possibility of detection. Without accurate elections, America is not a democracy. NEDA urges the media to publicize the results of this report and its recommendations, in order to return to the American people their right to determine the country’s leaders." (1/24)

BuzzFlash: Interview With Mark Crispin Miller, Part 1,  BuzzFlash, January 16, 2006

"Because the US press refuses to go near the issue of election fraud, it's easy to assume that Bush & Co.'s subversion of the last election was just one of many dark endeavors. That assumption would be dangerously wrong. The subversion of American democracy is the primary interest of the Bush Republicans, whose vast electoral shenanigans were but a part of their ongoing program - a program not at all conservative, but anti-democratic and anti-republican. ... In this they are identical to the regime's deliberate placement of religious maniacs and corporate goons atop the entire edifice of federal power-slash-and-burn types running the Department of Interior and EPA, creationists and anti-sex fanatics running scientific agencies, and so on. Such flagrant strokes against the public interest are not motivated just by greed alone, but by a deeper animus against democracy itself - or, to be more accurate, against the whole program of the Enlightenment." See also New Method for Flagging Vote Miscount Released.

Bob Fitrakis: Did the NSA help Bush hack the vote?, The Columbus Free Press, January 10, 2006

"The Bush administration's utter contempt for the U.S. Constitution and the specific information we now know about its use of the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance network should further call into question Bush' 2004 presidential "election." In a recent revelation, we have learned that the NSA shared the fruits of its illegal spying on behalf of Bush with other government agencies.  What are e-voting machines and central tabulators that pass the voting results over electronic networks from the internet to phone lines? No more than data easily spied on and tapped into. . . . Bush and his cabal are notorious for collecting raw intelligence data and using it for their political gain. While many progressives accept the fact that our government manufactured an illegal war in Iraq and routinely violate human rights worldwide, many are reluctant to accept that they would spy on John Kerry and rig the election - which is very easy to do when the NSA does your bidding. What part of the headline in the Columbus Dispatch: "Diebold vote machine can be hacked, test finds" don't people understand? . . . Would a president who believes he has spy powers, the right to torture, the ability to wage illegal wars based on bogus, manufactured intelligence reports, simply refuse to spy on Kerry and rig an election electronically?"   (1/17)

Robert C. Koehler: Bad Faith: Media Silence and the Assault on Democracy,  OpEdNews.com, January 6, 2006

Review of Mark Crispin Miller's Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them):   "It is a meticulously researched explication of the case that there was serious fraud in that election, both blatant (myriad dirty tricks) and invisible (manipulation of electronic voting), and as such takes its place along several other recent books that examine the topic in gory detail. What Miller's book does in addition is place election fraud - or election theft - in a psychological and religious context. Referring to Robertson's faith-based prediction, which he quotes at the beginning of Fooled Again, Miller comments, sardonically: 'That the statement was a little crass does not make it wrong. Certainly no other worldly factor can account for that amazing win, which no human pollster could foresee, and which no mortal has been able to explain in rational terms.' Miller, a professor of media studies at New York University and a frequent political commentator on radio and TV, makes a compelling case that virulent, anti-democratic forces fueled by religious fervor are making an all-out assault on American democracy, but to my mind the most troubling aspect of Fooled Again is his indictment of the media, democracy's watchdog, which is letting it happen." (See also WTN: Electronic voting machines must be open-sourced and Tikkun: Black Box Voting and What Went Wrong in Ohio).   (1/10)

Michael Collins: Kerry Won!!! Statistical Tools Everyone Can Use,  Scoop, December 25, 2005

"The 2004 Election Controversy will not stop. Statistical analysis of polls is now more accessible with free interactive Excel-based election models available on the Internet. Plus an interview with TruthIsAll... The Kerry concession speech on November 3, 2004 marked the beginning, not the end of the controversy over the 2004 election. Just hours before the speech, Vice Presidential Candidate John Edwards emerged and said that, “John Kerry and I made a promise to the American people that in this election every vote would count and every vote will be counted." Democrats were in a state of shock. 2004 was a banner year for new registrations, party financial support, and activism. Reported new registrations favored Democrats all over the country. Democrats were well ahead of Republicans in new registrations in Ohio. South Florida, the “scene of the crime” in 2000, saw major Democratic efforts and a lackluster Republican response... While Kerry may have conceded the election at 2:14 p.m., Nov. 3, a large portion of the population failed to accept the final results. They knew something was wrong. As one Virginia activist said, “This is simply not possible, the national results or here in Virginia.”   (1/3)

Douglas Drenkow, Ed.: University of Pennsylvania Professor Also "Does the Math", Progressive Thinking, November 14-16, 2004

Just discovered: another statistical analysis of election 2004 posted shortly after the election: "I am sorry to report that I am not alone in my statistical conclusion: Professor Steven F. Freeman, a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania who got his PhD at MIT, has performed a very similar analysis of the unadulterated exit poll data vs. the officially reported votes (albeit more in depth than the analysis conducted by yours truly) and has come to a very similar conclusion: As Dr. Freeman puts it, "As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states [FL, OH, & PA] of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error." Dr. Freeman calculates the odds of the discrepancies occurring as they did in just those three states (let alone the rest of the nation) at 250 million to one. As Dr. Freeman notes, elections in Third World countries have been invalidated and governments overturned on the basis of such unbelievably large discrepancies between scientifically conducted exit polls and reported vote tallies. What in the world is going on in America?"  (1/3)

Clinton Curtis: Another Election Held and Another Election Stolen, justaflyonthewall, December 20, 2005

"Another election held and another election stolen. In 2000 Bush stole the election by restricting the ability to vote by those people most likely to vote against him. The abuses were wide spread and the Democrats and other groups that believe in each individuals right to vote put together an impressive attempt to make sure that every individual that wanted to vote would not be turned away. Everywhere you went there was booths where new voters could register. Celebrities in commercials were urging voters to get out and vote. Poll watchers were placed in polling stations across the country to guarantee that every voter would not be turned away on any technicality. What these well meaning groups failed to account for was that they were defending the 2000 election fixing plan and not taking into account that this election would be decided not by voters but by the rise of technology. Every one might be allowed to vote but their vote, and your vote made no difference at all. The programmers had already decided who would win and by how much. Prior to this election I personally sent out information to the media which should have been provided to the electorate. It was not. The biggest turnout in history had no chance to win this election or any other unless the programmers of the voting machine allowed it. I believe they will allow it less and less as the machines control the elections and the Republicans control the machines. This is not speculation. It is not a rant designed to make the losers feel better. I speak from first hand information and unless people stand up and act, democracy in this country is ended. . . . Did Bush win? Bush could not have won. Take Florida or Ohio. A switch of either would change the outcome. In reality Bush probably lost both."   (1/3)

Bob Cesca: A Conversation With Mark Crispin Miller, Huffington Post, December 12, 2005

"Mark Crispin Miller has been at the forefront of watchdogging the Republican leadership for years and has recently released a new book titled Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They'll Steal the Next One Too. If you've read his previous works, The Bush Dyslexicon and Cruel and Unusual, you know that Miller never walks the easy path towards proving his theories. Fooled Again is no exception. It's brilliantly written -- of course. But it also manages to organize and draw together the litany of inconsistencies; the myriad of suspicious deals, methods, and results which were largely ignored by the mainstream media -- and even the losing ticket -- in the days leading up to and through the election. I had an opportunity to chat with Miller via e-mail regarding his book, the campaign, the Christian right, and why all sides don't take a more active roll in guaranteeing fair elections."  (12/13)

Dieb-Throat: Diebold System One of Greatest Threats Democracy Has Ever Known, Bradblog, September 15, 2005

"In exclusive stunning admissions to The BRAD BLOG some 11 months after the 2004 Presidential Election, a "Diebold Insider" is now finally speaking out for the first time about the alarming security flaws within Diebold, Inc's electronic voting systems, software and machinery. The source is acknowledging that the company's "upper management" -- as well as "top government officials" -- were keenly aware of the "undocumented backdoor" in Diebold's main "GEM Central Tabulator" software well prior to the 2004 election. A branch of the Federal Government even posted a security warning on the Internet... 'I have seen these systems connected to phone lines dozens of times with users gaining remote access," said DIEB-THROAT. "What I think we have here is a very serious problem. Remote access using phone lines eliminates any need for a conspiracy of hundreds to alter the outcome of an election. Diebold has held onto this theory [publicly] for years, but Diebold has lied and has put national elections at risk. Remote access using this backdoor means that one malicious person can change the outcome of any Diebold election.'"  (12/6)

Michael Keefer: The Strange Death of American Democracy: Endgame in Ohio,  Centre for Research on Globalization, May 18th, 2005

"Ohio was the swing state of swing states on November 2nd, 2004, the one whose twenty Electoral College votes decided the outcome of the US presidential election. It is therefore a matter of some significance that the testimonial evidence of corruption in the Ohio election is corroborated by statistical evidence which shows the election in this state--and nationwide--to have been not just corrupt, but stolen. The evidence in both categories is massively complex. But thanks to the no less massive analytical labours over the past two months of citizen pro-democracy activists, of social scientists, of mathematicians and statisticians, of computer programmers, and of alternative-media investigative journalists, it can nonetheless be conveniently summarized. You want smoking guns? Here they are, starting with the evidence that John F. Kerry, and not George W. Bush, won the state of Ohio.... [T]he numbers which underlie Bush's supposed victory in the popular vote simply don't add up... Bush appears to have received 4.4 million more votes than he should have, and Kerry 4.3 million fewer than he should have."

Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman: Powerful Government Accountability Office report confirms key 2004 stolen election findings, The Free Press, October 26, 2005

"As a legal noose appears to be tightening around the Bush/Cheney/Rove inner circle, a shocking government report shows the floor under the legitimacy of their alleged election to the White House is crumbling. The latest critical confirmation of key indicators that the election of 2004 was stolen comes in an extremely powerful, penetrating report from the Government Accountability Office that has gotten virtually no mainstream media coverage. The government's lead investigative agency is known for its general incorruptibility and its thorough, in-depth analyses. Its concurrence with assertions widely dismissed as "conspiracy theories" adds crucial new weight to the case that Team Bush has no legitimate business being in the White House." (12/6)

Mark Crispin Miller: Fooled Again Presents Careful Overview and New Election Fraud Evidence, BuzzFlash, November 23, 2005 

"Both [Farhad] Manjoo and [Mark] Hertsgaard have dismissed my book as an extended exercise in wishful thinking by a diehard partisan, portraying themselves as skeptical, hard-headed journalists, devoted only to "the facts." But it is they who are the partisans; for in their staunch refusal to perceive the glaring evidence of fraud, they are merely echoing the tense accommodationism of the over-cautious Democratic Party. In other words, they claim to see "no story" in last year's race because the Democrats (with all too few exceptions) claim there isn't one--a sort of faith-based journalism every bit as dangerous as the kind that has us fighting in Iraq. Surely we must base our civic conduct on reality itself, and not on what the stars of either party claim "reality" to be."  (11/29)

Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman: What John Kerry definitely said about 2004’s stolen election and why it's killing American democracy, Columbus Free Press, November 10, 2005

"The net is abuzz about what John Kerry may or may not be saying now about the stolen election of 2004. But we can definitively report what he has said about New Mexico and electronic voting machines soon after his abrupt "abandon ship" with 250,000 Ohio votes still uncounted. And we must also report that what he's not saying is having a catastrophic effect on what's left of American democracy, including what has just happened (again) in Ohio 2005. In recent days Mark Crispin Miller has reported that he heard from Kerry personally that Kerry believes the election was stolen. The dialog has been widely reported on the internet. Kerry has since seemed to deny it. We have every reason to believe Miller. His recent book FOOLED AGAIN, has been making headlines along with our own HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008. (See also Robert C. Koehler: A crime without a name: 'Concern' about election fraud is useless without guts and anger). (11/15)

Brad: Plaintiffs Blocked During Discovery Phase of New Mexico '04 Election Lawsuit, Bradblog, November 12, 2005

"There is a very important law suit quietly proceeding in New Mexico which is challenging the results of the 2004 Presidential Election there. The final result of that election was very close, and Election Reform advocates -- and indeed a great deal of evidence -- suggests that something was amiss there. . . . Yesterday, VoterAction.org sent out an email about some roadblocks that the plaintiffs are suddenly facing in the discovery phase of the trial. They were supposed to have been allowed to have experts inspect -- for the first time -- the Electronic Voting Machines that were used in the '04 Election, along with the actual results that they gave. All of a sudden, Voter Action says, the county clerks have flat-out refused to permit the inspections by the plaintiff's experts. That, after some interesting evidence has already been found by the experts during discovery, like tests where they were able to see votes for one candidate being registered for their opponent (as has been so widely reported as happening in so many elections of late!) and ballots being confirmed with NO choice for President at all, which wasn't supposed to have been possible on at least one of the machine types being looked at." (11/15)

Lynn Landes: Scrap the "Secret" Ballot and Return to Open Voting, OnlineJournal, November 4, 2005

"Secret ballots are anonymous ballots. They can be easily replaced, altered or destroyed, particularly if voting machines are used. Even if voters 'verify' their ballots and even if audits are performed, widespread vote tampering can still occur with relative ease and little risk of discovery because there still remains no effective method to 'certify' the authenticity of ballots, no way to identify an individual ballot and link it to an individual voter. With few exceptions, election officials around the world are certifying election results based on anonymous and untraceable ballots. And contrary to a growing legion of election statisticians, exit polls are not an adequate check on election results. It's ridiculous when you think about it, using anonymous exit polls to verify anonymous ballot results.The entire voting process should be 100 percent transparent. To that end, I am proposing a protocol for Open Voting with Total Transparency (OVTT)." See also Daily Kos: Sen. Obama: End Deceptive Voting Practices And Voter Intimidation, Angry Girl: 20 Amazing Facts About Voting in the USA, and Bob Fitrakis/Harvey Wasserman: What John Kerry Definitely Said about 2004's Stolen Election and Why It's Killing American Democracy.  (10/15)

Brad Friedman: The Staggeringly Impossible Results of Ohio's '05 Election,  Huffington Post, November 13, 2005

"With so much going on, few have noticed the extraordinary outcome of last Tuesday's election in Ohio where the crooked state that brung you -- by hook and by crook -- a second term for George W. Bush may have turned in results so staggeringly impossible, that perhaps even the Mainstream Corporate Media (if only in Ohio?!) will have no choice but to look into it. As usual, the Free Press' heroic Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are on the case. Their article on what happened on ballot issues 1 through 5 last week is A MUST READ for anybody who still gives the slightest damn about whatever democracy might be left in America. ... We'll share their closing thoughts here on the possible reasons for the wildly unexplained discrepancy between the final polling and the final results which, as they posit, are due to either a completely inexplicable breakdown of the Dispatch's historically accurate polling methods wildly beyond the margin-of-error for all initiatives except Issue 1, or somebody hacked that vote count. ... Anybody in the Mainstream Media ready to give a damn yet?" See also Bob Fitrakis/Harvey Wasserman: Has American democracy died an electronic death in Ohio 2005's referenda defeats?  (10/15)

Farhad Manjoo: Don't get "Fooled Again," Salon, November 14, 2005

A scathing review of Mark Crispin miller's book, "Fooled Again." "Miller claims to prove that "hundreds, even thousands" of people on the right, spread across the country, conspired to steal the 2004 presidential election (and many others besides). I say that Miller claims to prove this because that's pretty much all he does. In his introduction, Miller promises to prove that Republicans rigged the race, and then at some point in the middle of the book he begins talking like he already has, and the reader is left to leaf through the volume in a daze, wondering if perhaps some kind of typesetting or bookbinding error caused the explosive section of Miller's tome to be left out of this one copy. But not so; my book is intact, and though I searched the contents, the index and the voluminous endnotes, I found no proof of Miller's theory." Coming soon: the Crisis Papers editors' reviews of Miller's book.  (10/15)

Brad Friedman: Mainstream media to American democracy: Drop dead!, The Huffington Post, November 4, 2005

"It's been a full two weeks now since the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO came out with their 107-page report [PDF] confirming what so many of us have been trying to ring the bell about for so long: The Electronic Voting Machines which are proliferating counties and states across America even as I type, are not secure, not accountable, not recountable, not transparent, not accurate and not adequately monitored or certified by anybody. To quote from the alarming landmark report:  "[C]oncerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes." The Mainstream Corporate Media couldn't care less. . . . The release of the report was accompanied by a bi-partisan News Release which lauded its findings. . . . And yet, none of the above has been carried by even one wire service or one major American Newspaper. Not one."  (11/8)

Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman: Powerful Government Accounting Office report confirms key 2004 stolen election findings, The Columbus Free Press, October 27, 2005

"As a legal noose appears to be tightening around the Bush/Cheney/Rove inner circle, a shocking government report shows the floor under the legitimacy of their alleged election to the White House is crumbling. The latest critical confirmation of key indicators that the election of 2004 was stolen comes in an extremely powerful, penetrating report from the General Accounting Office that has gotten virtually no mainstream media coverage. The government's lead investigative agency is known for its general incorruptibility and its through, in-depth analyses. Its concurrence with assertions widely dismissed as "conspiracy theories" adds crucial new weight to the case that Team Bush has no legitimate business being in the White House."(11/1)

"Autorank:" The Unanswered Question: Who Really Won In 2004?  Scoop (NZ), October, 2005

"The analysis of exit polls and documented fraud in this election began on the Internet. A number of academics posted detailed work showing the near-impossible odds of Bush overcoming deficits in the state exit polls and the National Exit Polls. Much of this analysis comes from “TruthIsAll” (TIA), a poster on DemocraticUnderground.Com. TIA has a background and several degrees in applied mathematics. Using various elements of the national and state exit polls and other data sources, he produces results that are thorough, detailed, sober and compelling. He shows ALL data and calculations, while encouraging others to check his math. Only once did he make a minor math error, after asking DUers to check his calculation of probability that at least 16 states would deviate beyond their exit poll margin of error and go for Bush. The answer turned out to be one in 19 trillion! The debates on DemocraticUnderground’s “2004: Election Results and Discussion” forum are legendary and have attracted observers from all over the Net... The analysis also demonstrated that other voter statistics make it impossible for Bush to have won. Even if all Bush voters from 2000 showed up and voted for him, he still needed an additional 13 million votes. He didn’t get them from new voters and those who did not vote in 2000; those voters preferred Kerry by an almost 3-to-2 margin. Because of this, a Bush victory required that he must win a whopping 14% of Gore 2000 voters, all of whom had to return to vote in 2004. But Gore voters were angry; they came back to defeat Bush once again after having the election stolen from them."  (11/1)

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman: Why Can't the Left Face the Stolen Elections of 2004 & 2008?, Free Press via Common Dreams, October 18, 2005 

"If some of its key publications are any indicator, much of the American left seems unable to face the reality that the election of 2004 was stolen. So in all likelihood, unless something radical is done, 2008 will be too. Misguided and misinformed articles in both TomPaine.com and Mother Jones Magazine indicate a dangerous inability to face the reality that these stolen elections mean nothing less than the death of what's left of American democracy, and the permanent enthronement of the Rovian GOP. . .  As investigative reporters based in Columbus, Ohio, we witnessed first-hand, up close and personal, exactly how the 2004 election was stolen, and how it will most likely be done in 2008. In the precinct in which Harvey Wasserman grew up, and in the one where Bob Fitrakis now lives, we saw the well-funded, profoundly cynical and deadly effective mechanisms by which the Bush-Cheney-Rove-Blackwell GOP machine switched a victory for John Kerry to an easily-repeatable defeat for democracy.  That Kerry and the spineless Ohio and national Democratic Parties have been complicit is a crucial part of the problem much of the left also seems unwilling to face. But if you live in Franklin County, Ohio, and watch the Republican and Democratic Parties run joint pickets against progressive candidate, and cut backroom deals allowing incumbents of either party run unopposed, you may miss the full scope of the disaster. And until the left faces the rot that defines the Democratic Party, there is no hope for a fair election in this country. In other words: those who think the White House can be retaken in 2008, but refuse to face the theft of the vote in 2004, should prepare to be ruled by the likes of Jeb Bush, now and forever. Before we go into the sordid details, we have to ask: exactly what is it about Team Bush that makes people think they could not or would not steal an American election?"  (See also Miriam Raftery: Monkey Business: A look at vote-counting mischief and the potential for more ).   (10/26)

Scoop: National Summit to Save Our Elections, Day 1, Scoop, October 3, 2005

Here is an invaluable summing-up of the national electoral-integrity summit, held in Portland, Or. " The National Summit to Save our Elections is the logical follow up in a process begun at the Nashville Conference on Election Reform in April of this year. Organized by activist Bernie Sanders, that meeting featured Rep. Cynthia McKinney, Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, among others. The emphasis was on blatant fraud discovered in the 2004 Presidential Election. Journalist Bob Koehler said, "I had a rebirth in outrage" as a result of attending that event. Largely a reaction to the irregularities in 2004 Presidential elections, the voting rights movement has matured significantly in the five months since Nashville. The current meeting agenda looks more like a professional or trade association meeting than a political function. The messages are offered with conviction and passion yet the approach seems to be addressing consistent themes based on extensive research. These themes appeared in every presentation on the first day of the conference. The conference is jointly sponsored by Alliance for Democracy, Portland; Democracy for Oregon; the First Unitarian Church, Portland; Campus Pacific Greens; and Democracy Matters." (10/4)

Bob Fitrakis/Harvey Wasserman: Carter/Baker Report Can't Face Stolen '04 Election, Scoop, September 20, 2005

"The just-issued report of a special commission headed by former President Jimmy Carter and Bush family consigliere Jim Baker is of little real value. The report warns that public confidence in the electoral system is disappearing. But it fails to point out the most obvious cause: in both 2000 and 2004, the presidency was stolen, and the Republican party made a mockery of those who took the time and effort to vote. It did the same in Georgia in 2002, when it overrode the public will to install a Republican US Senator and Governor. The US Senate races that year in Minnesota and Colorado are also suspect, to say the least. ... Among the panel's 87 recommendations is also a warning that electronic voting machines must have verifiable paper trails. On paper this is important. But there are many ways to use electronic voting machines to steal elections, even with a paper trail, if the likes of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney are running the show."  (See also Cynthia Tucker: Not American Enough ).  (9/27)

Brad Friedman: A Diebold Insider Speaks, bradblog, September 15, 2005

"In exclusive stunning admissions to The BRAD BLOG some 11 months after the 2004 Presidential Election, a "Diebold Insider" is now finally speaking out for the first time about the alarming security flaws within Diebold, Inc's electronic voting systems, software and machinery. The source is acknowledging that the company's "upper management" -- as well as "top government officials" -- were keenly aware of the "undocumented backdoor" in Diebold's main "GEM Central Tabulator" software well prior to the 2004 election. A branch of the Federal Government even posted a security warning on the Internet. Pointing to a little-noticed "Cyber Security Alert" issued by the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the source inside Diebold -- who "for the time being" is requesting anonymity due to a continuing sensitive relationship with the company -- is charging that Diebold's technicians, including at least one of its lead programmers, knew about the security flaw and that the company instructed them to keep quiet about it." (9/20)

Jim Glover: 'Let us pray — for Bush relief', Dissident Voice, September 19, 2005

"Skeptics may scoff, but consider the huge role played by prayer and Divine Intervention in Bush's "election" last fall. By all accounts, going into the election, Bush supporters were praying up a storm on his behalf. They needed to, because Bush went into it with a less-than-50-percent approval rating, and no incumbent had ever beaten those odds. And through much of the day, exit polls showed Bush losing. As late as 9 PM (Eastern), CNN announced that Kerry had a 3 point lead, based on a sample of 13,000 voters. And then, God stepped in. By 1:30 AM, according to CNN, a five-point swing had occurred. Bush was now ahead by two points. And here's the miracle: Bush made up the five percentage points on just 531 more respondents. Which is literally impossible in this earthly world. By the time the actual votes were counted, the miracle had been completed. Bush had "won" after all! For this one great miracle to happen, there had occurred a great number of smaller ones. In Florida, for example, unbelievable numbers of registered Democrats had voted for Bush. In one county, nearly 90 percent of voters were Democrats, yet Bush got two-thirds of the votes! ... Many other miraculous things happened in Bush's favor that evening, but you get the idea. And the only logical explanation is that God intervened. Otherwise, you'd have to believe that the election was dishonest."    (9/20)

Jason Leopold: FEMA Director Brown Paid Millions to Florida Residents Unaffected by '04 Hurricanes to Help Bush Win Majority of Votes There, OnlineJournal, September 11, 2005

"Michael Brown, the embattled head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, approved payments in excess of $31 million in taxpayer money to thousands of Florida residents who were unaffected by Hurricane Frances and three other hurricanes last year in an effort to help President Bush win a majority of votes in that state during his reelection campaign, according to published reports.'Some Homeland Security sources said FEMA's efforts to distribute funds quickly after Frances and three other hurricanes that hit the key political battleground state of Florida in a six-week period last fall were undertaken with a keen awareness of the looming presidential elections,' according to a May 19 Washington Post story. Homeland Security sources told the Post that after the hurricanes that Brown 'and his allies [recommended] him to succeed Tom Ridge as Homeland Security secretary because of their claim that he helped deliver Florida to President Bush by efficiently responding to the Florida hurricanes'."  (See also Two Bush 2000 Florida Recount Aides Rewarded With Top FEMA Posts ).  (9/14)

Bob Nichols: Update:Voting Machines Count Backwards in Okla.,  Oklahoma Independent Media Center, November 27, 2004

"Rural Oklahoma Voting machines know how to count backwards. That's right. Voting machines counted Senator Kerry's votes backward - downward - in Oklahoma, contributing to George Bush's apparent victory in Oklahoma. All 77 Oklahoma counties used the Optech Eagle voting machines and Tabulator's made by ES&S, Senator Hagel's (R) company. The respectable, conservative "Tulsa World" newspaper reported on November 3rd that, as of the tabulation of 70% of OK votes, Kerry was winning in 57 of the states's rural counties.... A simple comparison of total votes for Kerry between the staid establishment mouthpiece the "Tulsa World" newspaper and the so-called "official" final vote totals at the State Election Board show fewer votes for Kerry in 57 counties than the "Tulsa World" does. That's counting backwards for one candidate. That's not fair."  (8/23)

Florida League of Conservation Voters: Patterns of Touchscreen Voting Machine Vote Fraud Identified and Documented.

"Activists investigating the 2004 Presidential election have identified hundreds of preceincts in Florida, Ohio and other states where the voting results do not match the exit polls. These inconsistencies occurred primarily in precincts where electronic voting machines with no paper trail were used. In Florida, these discrepancies appear to have amounted to enough to have been responsible for George Bush's statewide "victory" margin. Many of them were in precincts with a strong Democratic majority. Some media commentators have explained the gap between the exit polls and the final vote counts by claiming that the exit polls were flawed. However, in those precincts where there was a machine that produced a "paper trail," the exit polls almost exactly matched the actual vote and there were few discrepancies giving George Bush extra votes. When a voter casts his or her ballot for someone other than the candidate they intended to vote for, this is called a "misvote." Misvotes in Ohio,Florida, and New Mexico appear to have given George Bush his winning percentage. (Misvotes favoring George Bush reached as high as 40% on some vote machines in some Florida, Ohio and New Mexico precincts. There were also high misvote totals in other states.)"   (8/23)

David G. Mills: Census Statistics Indicate Vote Count Was Significantly Off,  Daily Kos, May 27, 2005

"Where did 3.4 million votes go? If the census bureau's statistics can be trusted, this is just more evidence that the count was off. The official tabulation on November 2, was 122.3 million voters. The census bureau predicted post-election that 125.7 million people (thought they) had voted. Why when we have so much evidence that the count was off and could have been easily manipulated by the corporate computers of Diebold and ES&S, which counted 80% of the vote, including 30% with no paper trail whatsoever, why are not more people questioning the validity of this election?"   (8/23)

Peter Phillips: Election Fraud Continues in the U.S.: New Data Shows Widespread Vote Manipulations in 2004,  Global Research .ca, August 12, 2005 

"In the fall of 2001, after an eight-month review of 175,000 Florida ballots never counted in the 2000 election, an analysis by the National Opinion Research Center confirmed that Al Gore actually won Florida and should have been President. However, coverage of this report was only a small blip in the corporate media as a much bigger story dominated the news after September 11, 2001.  New research compiled by Dr. Dennis Loo with the University of Cal Poly Pomona now shows that extensive manipulation of non-paper-trail voting machines occurred in several states during the 2004 election. The facts are as follows: In 2004 Bush far exceeded the 85% of registered Florida Republican votes that he got in 2000, receiving more than 100% of the registered Republican votes in 47 out of 67 Florida counties, 200% of registered Republicans in 15 counties, and over 300% of registered Republicans in 4 counties. Bush managed these remarkable outcomes despite the fact that his share of the crossover votes by registered Democrats in Florida did not increase over 2000, and he lost ground among registered Independents, dropping 15 points. We also know that Bush 'won' Ohio by 51-48%, but statewide results were not matched by the court-supervised hand count of the 147,400 absentee and provisional ballots in which Kerry received 54.46% of the vote. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio the number of recorded votes was more than 93,000 greater than the number of registered voters.. . . There is now strong statistical evidence of widespread voting machine manipulation occurring in US elections since 2000. Coverage of the fraud has been reported in independent media and various websites. The information is not secret. But it certainly seems to be a taboo subject for the US corporate media. . . . There is little doubt key Democrats know that votes in 2004 and earlier elections were stolen. The fact that few in Congress are complaining about fraud is an indication of the totality to which both parties accept the status quo of a money based elections system. Neither party wants to further undermine public confidence in the American "democratic" process (over 80 millions eligible voters refused to vote in 2004)." See also Mark Crispin Miller: Excerpt: None Dare Call It Stolen ).  

Dennis Loo:  No Paper Trail Left Behind,  Project Censored, Current.

A detailed and definitive account of the case for fraud in election 2004.  Loo writes: "In order to believe that George Bush won the November 2, 2004 presidential election, you must also believe all of the following extremely improbable or outright impossible things."  He follows this with eighteen "improbabilities" and "impossibilities."  "Taken as a whole, this list points overwhelmingly to fraud. The jarring strangeness of the results and the ubiquity of complaints from voters (e.g., those who voted for Kerry and then saw to their shock the machine record their votes as being for Bush), require some kind of explanation, or the legitimacy of elections and of the presidency would be imperiled. "  He then examines the three conventional (i.e. mainstream media) explanations: flawed exit polls, an energized religious right and the "moral values" issue, and the charge that skeptics are "conspiracy theorists."  This report is an excellent "gateway" into the election fraud issue.   (8/16)

Steve Bhaerman: Curing Electile Dysfunction,  OpEd News, November 24, 2004

"With all of the lamenting about how the Democrats could have reached out to more voters, it just might be that the key to victory was 'reaching in' to those optical scam (oops, I mean optical scan) voting machines and just creating more voters that way. If you read the newspapers and watch TV news, you may have heard vague rumors that a few extreme nutcase 'flat-earthers' subscribe to the laughable notion that voters were intimidated in Ohio and Florida, and voting machines and tallies were tampered with. These 'conspiracy nuts' include Green Party Presidential candidate David Cobb, Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik, and the public interest advocacy group, Common Cause. A few fearless journalists like Greg Palast, William Rivers Pitt, Thom Hartmann, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Air America's Randi Rhodes have joined in.... But if television won't cover the story, then 'tell a person' must. Therefore we are inviting you to take 'emerge 'n see' measures -- to emerge from frustration and despair and see that this is a battle that cannot be won from the top down, but must be won from the ground up. And time to extend that state of 'emerge n' see' to all of our friends, family and neighbors who have fallen prey to the 'not-see' mentality -- i.e., insisted on not seeing what the current ruling cadre is capable of doing, and in fact has done."  (8/16)

Mark Crispin Miller: None Dare Call It Stolen - Ohio, the Election, and America's Servile Press, The Columbus Free Press, July 24, 2005

"While commentators, prompted by Republicans, claimed Bush won the 2004 election through the votes of a silent majority concerned with "family values," Mark Crispin Miller writes that when voters were asked to state, "in their own words the most important factor in their vote,"only 14 percent named "moral values." He details how the press (except for Keith Olbermann on MSNBC) ignored "the strange details of the election-except, that is, to ridicule all efforts to discuss them. It was as if they were reporting from inside a forest fire without acknowledging the fire, except to keep insisting that there was no fire." Then he lists the copious evidence pointing to a stolen election, easily available on the web or in paperback, from Michigan Representative John Conyers' report, Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio."  (8/9)

Steven Rosenfeld and Bob Fitrakis: The DNC 2004 Election Report: An indictment of incompetence, The Free Press, June 25, 2005

"The Democratic National Committee's investigation into Ohio's 2004 presidential election irregularities is the perfect postscript to the party's 'election protection' efforts last fall: it is a shocking indictment of a party caught completely off-guard in its most heated presidential campaign in years, and a party that still doesn't fully understand what happened and how to avoid a repeat in the future. The report primarily documents the fact that Jim Crow voter suppression tactics targeting Democratic African-American voters were rampant in Ohio’s cities during the 2004 presidential election... But the DNC reports says those factors do not mean John Kerry won the election, nor does it mean that the new electronic voting machines are unreliable – even though some of the precincts with the highest percentages of reported problems were outfitted with the new electronic voting machines, known as DREs. The DNC asked for access to the new electronic voting machines and their software, but was denied by local election officials and the private manufacturers. The report leaves the matter there."   (7/26)

Brad Menfil: Voter Fraud in Florida and Ohio: Kerry Won the Election by at least 1,7 Million Votes. Centre for research on Globalization, December 3, 2004

"Brad Menfil is not my real name. I work for the RNC. I fear reprisals if I'm found out. The truth about this election is this: Florida and Ohio had to go for Bush in order for him to "win" the election. In reality he lost both states. In fact, he did not even win the popular vote. He lost the national popular vote by at least 1,750,000. This shows you the scale of the fraud. The exit polls were not wrong. Kerry was the clear winner, but victory was snatched from him. Florida first. The 200,000+ margin of victory for Bush made this state uncontestable. Everybody assumes that even with some fraud, Kerry could never have made up the difference in a recount. But Kerry actually won by about 750,000 votes. The numbers were changed by a computer program (in both electronic and scan-tron voting systems) called "KerryLite." ... In Ohio, computer voting fraud, vote tossing and voter suppression were the main methods. Vote tossing was simply the removal of Kerry votes and some third party votes. In some areas, the Bush vs. Kerry votes were absurd. Nine to one, eight to two... So this will all come out and be known to everyone. Nothing this massive can be kept a secret. You're already beginning to see these "irregularities" and the whisper will become a roar."  (7/26)

Robert Parry: Evidence of a Second Bush Coup? Consortium News, November 6, 2004

"Theoretically at least, it is conceivable that sophisticated CIA-style computer hacking – known as “cyber-warfare” – could have let George W. Bush’s campaign transform a three-percentage-point defeat, as measured by exit polls, into an official victory of about the same margin.... Though there's still no proof of such a cyber-attack, suspicions are growing that the U.S. presidential election results were manipulated to some degree. Voting analyses of some precincts in Florida and Ohio have found surprisingly high percentages for Bush. Others have noted that the large turnout among young voters and the obvious enthusiasm of John Kerry’s voters would have suggested a better showing for the Democrat. But the most perplexing fact is that exit polls into the evening of Nov. 2 showed Kerry rolling to a clear victory nationally and carrying most of the battleground states, including Florida and Ohio, whose totals would have ensured Kerry’s victory in the Electoral College."  Significantly, polls also showed Republicans carrying the bulk of the tight Senate races. However, when the official results were tallied, the presidential exit polls proved wrong while the Senate polls proved right."  (7/26)

Bob Fitrakis and Steven Rosenfeld: A Dumb Donkey Report, AlterNet, July 12, 2005

"The Democratic National Committee's investigation into Ohio's 2004 presidential election irregularities is the perfect postscript to the party's 'election protection' efforts last fall: it is a shocking indictment of a party caught completely off-guard in its most heated presidential campaign in years, and a party that still doesn't fully understand what happened and how to avoid a repeat in the future.  The report primarily documents the fact that Jim Crow voter suppression tactics targeting Democratic African-American voters were rampant in Ohio's cities during the 2004 presidential election. . . . [T]he DNC reports says those factors do not mean John Kerry won the election, nor does it mean that the new electronic voting machines are unreliable — even though some of the precincts with the highest percentages of reported problems were outfitted with the new electronic voting machines, known as DREs. The DNC asked for access to the new electronic voting machines and their software, but was denied by local election officials and the private manufacturers. The report leaves the matter there."  (7/19)

Bob Fitrakis/Steven Rosenfeld/Harvey Wasserman: Introduction: Did George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election?,  Columbus Free Press, June 16, 2005

From the introduction to their new book: "The most hotly contested evidence comes most importantly from Ohio, whose 20 electoral votes decided the election. But it also comes from other key swing states—-especially Florida and New Mexico—-where exit polls and other evidence raise questions about the officially certified vote tallies in favor of Bush. As mentioned, this book presents the most crucial documents indicating how this bitterly contested election was actually decided."  (See also John Gideon: Corporate Control of the Election Process and Robert Tanner: Vote Cast for New Kind of U.S. Elections).   (6/21)

Farhad Manjoo: No exit, Salon.com, June 15, 2005

Taking another look at the exit polls, the writer debunks claims of fraud. "[A] clear consensus among experienced pollsters is finally emerging on what happened with the exits. Last month, at an annual conference of opinion pollsters in Miami Beach, Warren Mitofsky, the veteran pollster who conducted the exit poll for the networks, offered a detailed and convincing explanation of what went wrong with the polls. The reason the exits were off, Mitofsky said, is that interviewers assigned to talk to voters as they left the polls appeared to be slightly more inclined to seek out Kerry voters than Bush voters. Kerry voters were over-represented in the poll by a small margin, which is why everyone thought that Kerry was going to win. The underlying error, Mitofsky's firm said in a report this January, is "likely due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters." There's another interesting wrinkle in the exit poll discussion. During the past several months, some of the early "fraudsters" -- an initially derogatory term that some in the election-was-stolen camp have embraced -- who once suspected that the exit polls pointed to election fraud, have begun to change their minds."  (6/21) 

Black Box Voting: Optical scan system hacked,  BlackBoxVoting.org, May 27, 2005

"Most states prohibit elections officials from checking on optical scan tallies by examining the paper ballots. In Washington, Secretary of State Sam Reed declared such spontaneous checkups to be "unauthorized recounts" and prohibited them altogether. New Florida regulations will forbid counting paper ballots, even in recounts, except in highly unusual circumstances. Without paper ballot hand-counts, the hacks demonstrated below show that optical-scan elections can be destroyed in seconds. . . . The Black Box Voting team proved that the Diebold optical scan program, housed on a chip inside the voting machine, places a call to a program living in the removable memory card during the election. The demonstration also showed that the executable program on the memory card (ballot box) can easily be changed, and that checks and balances, required by FEC standards to catch unauthorized changes, were not implemented by Diebold -- yet the system was certified anyway. The Diebold system in Leon County, Florida succumbed to multiple attacks."  (6/7)

Robert Koehler: Citizens in the Rain,  Common Dreams, May 5, 2005

"Anyone else just a little bit offended? As one of the hundred or so readers who responded to the column (and cc'd me) put it, 'Winning isn't everything, but fair elections are everything.' Nearly a week after Wycliff's column ran, the Tribune has printed only one letter in response to it - and this letter was about Nixon. It didn't have a word to say about the 2004 election. So much for my naive optimism that an actual debate would ensue on the pages of the Trib. Once again I quote exit-poll analyst Jonathan Simon: 'When the autopsy of our democracy is performed, it is my belief that media silence will be given as the primary cause of death.' The stakes are getting higher and higher. Could it be we can't have election reform without media reform? The 'respectable press' refuses to confer the least legitimacy on the citizens who are questioning this election and demanding accountability in the voting process. How do we make them care? How do we make them look for themselves? How do we make them stand outside with us in the rain, waiting to cast our ballot for democracy?"  (See Robert C. Koehler: Democracy's Abu Graib, Moonbat Lefty for Fair Elections, Citizens in the Rain and The Deafening Sound of Media Silence  also Dave Astor: Syndicate Opts for Substitute Column About 2004 Election Problems).   (5/10)

Russ Baker: What Didn't Happen In Ohio, TomPaine.com, May 5, 2005

"Back in January, I wrote a piece for TomPaine.com questioning widely circulated claims that the election in Ohio had been stolen. I had done some poking around, anticipating that at least some of the frightening anecdotes filling our mail boxes and raging on talk radio would be borne out. In spot checks on a few popular fraud anecdotes, I found credible alternative explanations such as incompetence, structural problems, politicization of decision-making and other failings— but no evidence of deliberate fraud designed to hand the election to Bush. . . . Until the public becomes confident in the underlying integrity of the electoral apparatus in this country, none of the urgently needed improvements to that system can take place. That’s why the conspiracy-mongering must cease. Can we instead please turn now to the many substantive proposals already being proffered to make things better—including pending legislation? Let’s keep our eye on the real ball that’s in our court."   (5/10) 

Josh Mitteldorf : My Election 2004 Bad Dream, Philadelphia Inquirer via Common Dreams, April 26, 2005

"I met David Griscom, a retired physics prof who spent months with colleague John Brakey poring over election tapes, signature rosters and "consecutive number registers" from Brakey's Tucson home precinct. They audited and verified, one by one, the 895 votes in the precinct and found: 12 innocent and unsuspecting voters who had their names duplicated on the roster and their votes for Bush counted twice. Twenty-two "undervotes" where the machine had failed to register a preference for president, and these had been dutifully and meticulously converted to 22 votes for Bush. The "Republican" and "Democratic" co-directors of the polling place were a local fundamentalist preacher and his wife. Thirty-nine of their parishioners from another precinct had cast provisional ballots, which were (illegally) converted to regular ballots and passed through, all 39 for Bush. I met Richard Hayes Phillips, a geologist from New Hampshire who was invited to Ohio to study the integrity of the vote, and realized that a complete inventory of lost and miscounted votes was needed. To date, Phillips has analyzed 15 of Ohio's 88 counties, and by his most conservative estimate has found 101,000 uncounted Kerry votes - 136,000 is the margin by which Bush officially defeated Kerry." (See also Elizabeth Jordan & Oliver Dawshed: Doubtful elections in George Bush's America ). (5/3)

Robert C. Koehler: The Silent Scream of Numbers, CommonWonders.com via Common Dreams, April 14, 2005

"The media are not on our side. The politicians are not on our side. It’s just us, connecting the dots, fitting the fragments together, crunching the numbers, wanting to know why there were so many irregularities in the last election and why these glitches and dirty tricks and wacko numbers had not just an anti-Kerry but a racist tinge. This is not about partisan politics. It’s more like: “Oh no, this can’t be true.” . . . In contrast to the deathly silence of the media is the silent scream of the numbers. The more you ponder these numbers, and all the accompanying data, the louder that scream grows. Did the people’s choice get thwarted? Were thousands disenfranchised by chaos in the precincts, spurious challenges and uncounted provisional ballots? Were millions disenfranchised by electronic voting fraud on insecure, easily hacked computers? And who is authorized to act if this is so? Who is authorized to care? No one, apparently, except average Americans, who want to be able to trust the voting process again, and who want their country back." (4/19) 

Diane Perlman: Psychological resistance to facing election fraud, Newtopia Magazine, April 11, 2005

"Under what conditions do millions of allegedly "free" people knowingly acquiesce to being deceived, dominated and deprived of their own political will? How is it that even those who were politically engaged for the first time resign themselves to an unjust fate, refusing even to consider what happened to our country? Why do progressive citizens actively dismiss and even malign a small group of courageous, devoted people working day and night on their behalf to uncover, calculate, analyze, and evaluate the extensive, varied forms of criminal sabotage that undermined their democracy? How are Americans becoming complacent with escalating fraudulent activity? In other words, how do so many people live with the knowledge that they have been tricked before, were just tricked again--and then submit to life under the power of those who tricked them? Why were hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians out for days in the freezing cold, refusing to accept fraud, while Americans are helplessly colluding with forces of domination? Granted, we face a conspiracy of silence in the media, a propaganda campaign discrediting exit polls (which are accurate in counties with paper trails and other countries), and a dismissal of those who challenge the vote as nuts, sore losers and "conspiracy theorists." Censorship, brainwashing and intimidation create an environment of passivity and fear in subtle yet powerful ways that keep the system going with the complicity of those who have been robbed. We must wonder what is going on in the collective psyche that allows the systematic and progressive usurpation of power." (4/19)

Peter Coyote, Mass Media In 'Lock Down, Rense.com, November 13, 2005

"On Friday I received a phone call from a good friend who works at CBS--I've known her for years and she is a Producer for some of the news programs, one well known one in particular. She tipped me off that the news media is in a "lock-down" and that there is to be no TV coverage of the real problems with voting on Nov. 2nd... She said similar "lock-down orders" had come down last year after the invasion of Iraq, but this is far worse--far scarier. She said the majority of their journalists at CBS and elsewhere in NYC are pretty horrified--every one is worried about their jobs and retribution Dan Rather style or worse. My source said they've also been forbidden to talk about it even on their own time but she was pissed and her journalistic and moral integrity as what she considers to be a gov't watchdog requires her to speak out, while be it covert and she therefore asked me to "spread" the word... She said that journalism and the truth is at stake. "  (4/12)

Chris Floyd: Where is the outrage?, Moscow Times, April 8, 2005

"Let's face the facts. The game is over and we -- the "reality-based community," the believers in genuine democracy and law, the heirs of Jefferson and Madison, Emerson and Thoreau, the toilers and dreamers, all those who seek to rise above the beast within and shape the brutal chaos of existence into something higher, richer and imbued with meaning -- have lost. The better world we thought had been won out of the blood and horror of history -- a realm of enlightenment that often found its best embodiment in the ideals and aspirations of the American Republic -- is gone. It's been swallowed by darkness, by ravening greed, by bestial spirits and by willful primitives who now possess overwhelming instruments of power and dominion. A gang of such spirits seized control of the U.S. government by illicit means in 2000 and maintained that control through rampant electoral corruption in 2004. The re-election of President George W. Bush last November was a deliberately shambolic process that saw massive lockouts of opposition voters; unverifiable returns compiled by easily hackable machines operated by avowed corporate partisans of the ruling party; and vast discrepancies between exit polls and final results – gaps much larger than those that led elections in Ukraine and Georgia to be condemned as manipulated frauds." (4/12) 

Stephen Dyer: Exit poll analysis points to 2004 election corruption, Akron Beacon-Journal, April 1, 2005

"There's a one-in-959,000 chance that exit polls could have been so wrong in predicting the outcome of the 2004 presidential election, according to a statistical analysis released Thursday. Exit polls in the November election showed Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., winning by 3 percent, but President George W. Bush won the vote count by 2.5 percent. The explanation for the discrepancy that was offered by the exit polling firm -- that Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polling -- is an "implausible theory," according to the report issued Thursday by US Count Votes, a group that claims it's made up of about two dozen statisticians. . . . The report dismisses chance and inaccurate exit polling as the reasons for their discrepancy with the results. They found that the one hypothesis that can't be ruled out is inaccurate election results." (4/5)

US Count Votes: Analysis - Vote Counts May Have Been Altered, Scoop, April 1, 2005

"Officially, President Bush won November's election by 2.5%, yet exit polls showed Kerry winning by 3% [1] . According to a report to be released today by a group of university statisticians, the odds of a discrepancy this large between the national exit poll and election results happening by accident are close to 1 in a million. In other words, by random chance alone, it could not have happened. But it did. Two alternatives remain. Either something was wrong with the exit polling, or something was wrong with the vote count... The authors of this newly released scientific study "Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Poll Discrepancies" consider this "reluctant Bush responder" hypothesis to be highly implausible, based on extensive analysis of Edison/Mitofsky's exit poll data. They conclude, “The required pattern of exit poll participation by Kerry and Bush voters to satisfy the exit poll data defies empirical experience and common sense under any assumed scenario.” A state-by-state analysis of the discrepancy between exit polls and official election results shows highly improbable skewing of the election results, overwhelmingly biased towards the President. The report concludes, “ We believe that the absence of any statistically-plausible explanation for the discrepancy between Edison/Mitofsky’s exit poll data and the official presidential vote tally is an unanswered question of vital national importance that needs thorough investigation.”   (4/5)

Bob Fitrakis: The sun revolves around the Earth and George W. Bush won the election in Ohio, Online Journal, March 11, 2005

"The Bush family and friends stole both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. The covert operations long associated with George Herbert Walker Bush, former president and CIA director, are now overtly practiced in key battleground states. . . . In order to believe that Bush won in Ohio, you have to ignore deadly accurate exit polls and all observable data to avoid the Bush family theft. By refusing to consider this CIA-connected family’s history, one must accept the following ridiculous political conclusions: that Bush supporters were shy in Ohio and Florida and reluctant to answer exit poll questions, but not shy in Arizona, Arkansas and Louisiana; that pollster Zogby’s Election Day calls for Kerry in Ohio and Florida were wrong, as well as the Harris poll; that Mitofsky’s exit polling is flawed in the U.S. but an accurate predictor in the Ukraine for fraud; that Kerry easily carried the metropolitan areas of Cleveland and Columbus but lost due to an unobserved Bush surge in rural Appalachia; that Bush won despite an incumbent approval rating under 50 percent; that Bush got 80 percent or so of the undecided vote although all professional pollsters agree that undecideds generally vote for the challenger; and private partisan companies that secretly count the vote without paper trails are fair and honestly doing their job."  (3/15)

Christopher Hitchens: Ohio's Odd Numbers, Vanity Fair via Make Them Accountable, March 2005

"The maverick conservative columnist writes: "Whichever way you shake it, or hold it to the light, there is something about the Ohio election that refuses to add up. . . .   I had the chance to spend quality time with someone who came to me well recommended, who did not believe that fraud had yet actually been demonstrated, whose background was in the manufacture of the machines, and who wanted to be anonymous. It certainly could be done, she said, and only a very, very few people would have to be “in on it.” This is because of the small number of firms engaged in the manufacturing and the even smaller number of people, subject as they are to the hiring practices of these firms, who understand the technology. “Machines were put in place with no sampling to make sure they were ‘in control’ and no comparison studies,” she explained. “The code of the machines is not public knowledge, and none of these machines has since been impounded.” In these circumstances, she continued, it’s possible to manipulate both the count and the proportions of votes. . . . The Federal Election Commission, which has been a risible body for far too long, ought to make Ohio its business. The Diebold company, which also manufactures A.T.M.s, should not receive another dime until it can produce a voting system that is similarly reliable. And Americans should cease to be treated like serfs or extras when they present themselves to exercise their franchise." (3/1)

Larisa Alexandrovna: Ohio recount volunteers allege electoral tampering, legal violations and possible fraud, The Raw Story, January 26, 2005

"Serious new election tampering allegations have emerged from an Ohio county, where witnesses allege that stickers were placed on presidential election ballots, RAW STORY has learned. Several volunteer workers in the Ohio recount in Clermont County, Ohio have prepared affidavits alleging serious tampering, violations of state and federal law and possible fraud. They name the Republican chief of Clermont's Board of Elections Daniel Bare and the head of the Clermont Democratic Party Priscilla O'Donnell as complicit in these acts. These volunteers, observing the recount on behalf of the Greens, Libertarians and Democrats, assert that during the Dec. 14, 2004 hand recount they noticed stickers covering the Kerry/Edwards oval, whereas the Bush/Cheney oval seemed to be 'colored in.' Some witnesses state that beneath the stickers, the Kerry/Edwards oval was selected. The opti-scan ballots were then fed into the machines after the hand recount."  (2/8)

US Count Votes: "Response to Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report. US Count Votes, Current

"We consider here the three possible explanations for a discrepancy between the official vote count and exit polls: 1. Statistical sampling error – or chance. 2. Inaccurate exit polls – Kerry supporters responded in greater numbers than Bush supporters. 3. Inaccurate election – the voters’ intent was not accurately recorded or counted. We agree with Edison/Mitofsky that the first possible cause, random statistical sampling error, can be ruled out. The second possible cause, that inaccurate exit polls were biased towards Kerry, is a hypothesis that is compelling only if one dismisses the third, that official election results may have been distorted... The Edison/Mitofsky report fails to substantiate their hypothesis that the difference between their exit polls and official election results should be explained by problems with the exit polls. They assert without supporting evidence that (p. 4), “Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters.” In fact, data included within the report suggest that the opposite might be true. Their analysis of the potential correlation of exit poll errors with voting machine type is incomplete and inadequate, and their report ignores the alternative hypothesis that the official election results could have been corrupted."  (2/1)

Arlene S. Ash: Why we must question our elections, truthout, January 18, 2005

"I am a statistician. When I testified about electoral tampering in Martin County, Florida, in November 2000, I focused exclusively on the fact that the number of disputed ballots would have changed the outcome. That was shortsighted. As U.S. newspapers have written about the Ukraine, an election's outcome may be less important than how it was conducted. Democratic elections must be verifiably fair. . . . On the evening of November 2, Election Day ("exit") poll data showed comfortable margins for Kerry. These figures disappeared shortly after midnight, replaced by numbers very close to the final tallies. In Ohio, for example, as late as midnight the Bush/Kerry split was 47.9%/52.1%. Later, it was 50.9%/48.6%. The official vote tally is 51.0/48.5. The press has published speculation about how the early numbers might have come to be wrong, yet, two months after the election, there is still no convincing explanation of the discrepancy." (1/25) 

Chuck Herrin: Paper Ballots, ChuckHerrin.com, January 12, 2005

"There is no reason for computers to be involved in our electoral process. They have not solved any problems, but only created new ones. This is not surprising news to anyone involved in the tech industry, nor is it a surprise for criminals. It used to be that you had to put on a ski mask and run down to the bank in person in order to rob it, but now criminals can pull it off using a web browser and free AOL account. . . . Is it a coincidence that within the last 5 or 6 years the exit polls have all of a sudden gotten unreliable and wrong, which just happens to coincide with the introduction of electronic voting machines? Is it a coincidence that a man convicted of 23 felony counts of theft in the first degree was employed by Diebold as Senior Vice President of Development? . . . You have to take a step one level back in the tabulation process to the computers that actually do the tallying. That's where votes from touchscreens, as well as optically scanned AND absentee ballots come together to be counted. Don;t get me wrong - these touchscreens suck- but the problem is bigger than just that. Lemme tell you about just one of these systems. It's the General Election Management Software, or GEMS, made by Diebold. You know Diebold, the folks who hired felons, the ones that make ATMs but say they can't put printers on voting machines?" (1/18)

Steven F. Freeman: The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy,  University of Pennsylvania, Center for Organizational Dynamics December 29, 2005

"In this report, I have: (1) documented that, in general, exit poll data are sound, (2) demonstrated that it is exceedingly unlikely that the deviations between exit poll predictions and vote tallies in the three critical battleground states could have occurred strictly by chance or random error, and (3) explained why explanations for the discrepancy thus far provided are inadequate... Given that neither the pollsters nor their media clients have provided solid explanations to the public, suspicion of mistabulation or even fraud is running rampant and unchecked. The fact that so many people suspect misplay undermines not only the legitimacy of the presidency, but faith in the foundations of the democracy. Systematic fraud or mistabulation is as yet an unfounded conclusion, 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."  (See also:  Steve Freeman: Keeping Our Democracy Alive: Did Voters Really Count in US Election?). (1/11)

Pokey Anderson: Even a Remote Chance?, Online Journal, January 7, 2005

Remote control of elections? Science fiction, right? Start playing the Twilight Zone music? Not exactly. Let's look at a test that was done for the State of Maryland on the Diebold equipment. The testers used actual Diebold election equipment and, after a week's study, attempted to hack and manipulate it. The newspaper report said they were nearly "giddy" with their success. "One guy picked the locks protecting the internal printers and memory cards. Another figured out how to vote more than once—and get away with it. Still another launched a dial-up attack, using his modem to slither through an electronic hole in the State Board of Elections software. The team was able to remotely upload, download, and execute files with full system administrator privileges. Results could be modified at will, including changing votes from precincts. "My guess is we've only scratched the surface," said Michael A. Wertheimer, who spent 21 years as a cryptologic mathematician at the National Security Agency.... As a bonus, the test hack team was able to change votes and exit the system without a trace of their visit. Slick!"  (1/11)

House Judiciary Democrats: Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio:  Democratic Staff, January 5, 2005

"Representative John Conyers, Jr., the Ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, asked the Democratic staff to conduct an investigation into irregularities reported in the Ohio presidential election and to prepare a Status Report concerning the same prior to the Joint Meeting of Congress scheduled for January 6, 2005, to receive and consider the votes of the electoral college for president. The following Report includes a brief chronology of the events; summarizes the relevant background law; provides detailed findings (including factual findings and legal analysis); and describes various recommendations for acting on this Report going forward. We have found numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election, which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters. Cumulatively, these irregularities, which affected hundreds of thousand of votes and voters in Ohio, raise grave doubts regarding whether it can be said the Ohio electors selected on December 13, 2004, were chosen in a manner that conforms to Ohio law, let alone federal requirements and constitutional standards."  (1/11)

Lynn Landes: Did networks fake exit polls, while AP 'accessed' 2,995 mainframe computers?  Online Journal, January 7, 2005

"Did networks fake exit polls, while AP 'accessed' 2,995 mainframe computers? By Lynn Landes Online Journal Contributing Writer January 7, 2005—Why have exit polls historically matched election results? How about this? It's all made up. It's a scam. A con. A fake. A fraud. Since they first started "projecting" election night winners in 1964, the major news networks have never provided any 'hard' evidence that they actually conducted any exit polls, at all. Researchers and activists who point to the disparity of the early exit polls and the 2004 election results, have failed to consider the obvious—that exit polls never existed to begin with. Nothing about the 2004 election makes sense. The numbers don't add up. The surveys don't match up. But, the networks have clammed up. Despite mounting questions and controversy, the networks continue to stonewall. Citing proprietary claims (something the voting machine companies like to do), the NEP won't release the raw exit poll data. Okay. Maybe they have a point. However, they also won't release any logistical information either, particularly where and when the exit polling was conducted. And that's definitely not cricket."  (1/11)

Farhad Manjoo: More Fun With Exit Polls,  Salon, January 6, 2005

Second thoughts from an early debunker of "electoral fraud conspiracy theories." "Do Election Day exit polls prove that John Kerry actually beat George W. Bush? As Congress moved on Thursday to certify the electoral votes for the presidency, the polls -- which have fueled a great deal of skepticism over the legitimacy of Bush's win in the two months since the vote -- merit revisiting... This week, though, Scoop, an online magazine based in New Zealand, released a stash of exit poll data that, on first glance, seems to strengthen the case of the people who question Bush's win. The documents appear to be the ones that the National Election Pool, the consortium of television networks that ran the poll, sent to subscribers (mostly newspapers) during the course of Election Day."   (1/11)

Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman: Ohio vote count battles escalate amidst new evidence of potential criminal activity, The Free Press, December 18, 2004

"The epic legal battle over Ohio's presidential vote count is back in the state Supreme Court, with an election challenge claiming George W. Bush was wrongly declared the winner on Nov. 2 and seeking a court-ordered reversal of that victory. Meanwhile, efforts to recount Ohio's vote may have been fatally tainted by the Republican Party, raising questions of what the GOP has to hide, and prompting demands for criminal prosecution. New affidavits point to possible criminal activity by top Ohio election officials, raising yet more questions about the 2004 vote."   (1/4) 

Bob Fitzrakis/Steve Rosenfeld/Harvey Wasserman: Ohio's Official Non-Recount Ends Amidst New Evidence of Fraud, Theft and Judicial Contempt Mirrored in New Mexico,  Columbus Free Press, December 31, 2004

"The Ohio presidential recount was officially terminated Tuesday, December 28. But the end comes amidst bitter dispute over official certification of impossible voter turnout numbers, over the refusal of Ohio's Republican Supreme Court Chief Justice to recuse himself from crucial court challenges involving his own re-election campaign, over the Republican Secretary of State's refusal to testify under subpoena, over apparent tampering with tabulation machines, over more than 100,000 provisional and machine-rejected ballots left uncounted, over major discrepancies in certified vote counts and turnout ratios, and over a wide range of unresolved disputes that continue to leave the true outcome of Ohio's presidential vote in serious doubt. ... Additional new evidence of massive vote-counting fraud across the state continues to be unearthed, calling into question George W. Bush’s alleged victory in Ohio and pending re-election in the Electoral College." (See also Evidence of Fraud and Disenfranchisement in Ohio: A Partial List, Bob Fertik:  Stolen Election 2004  , Bob Nichols:  Voting Machines Count Backward in Okla.).   (1/4) 

William Rivers Pitt: Proof of Ohio Election Fraud Exposed,  truthout, December 15, 2004

"It was Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell who vowed to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush. As it turns out, everyone was looking the wrong way. The company that requires immediate and penetrating scrutiny is Triad Systems. ... 'A representative from Triad Systems came into a county board of elections office un-announced. He said he was just stopping by to see if they had any questions about the up-coming recount. He then headed into the back room where the Triad supplied Tabulator (a card reader and older PC with custom software) is kept. He told them there was a problem and the system had a bad battery and had 'lost all of its data'. He then took the computer apart and started swapping parts in and out of it and another 'spare' tower type PC also in the room. He may have had spare parts in his coat as one of the BOE people moved it and remarked as to how very heavy it was. He finally re-assembled everything and said it was working but to not turn it off. He then asked which precinct would be counted for the 3% recount test, and the one which had been selected as it had the right number of votes, was relayed to him. He then went back and did something else to the tabulator computer. The Triad Systems representative suggested that since the hand count had to match the machine count exactly, and since it would be hard to memorize the several numbers which would be needed to get the count to come out exactly right, that they should post this series of numbers on the wall where they would not be noticed by observers. He suggested making them look like employee information or something similar. The people doing the hand count could then just report these numbers no matter what the actual count of the ballots revealed. This would then 'match' the tabulator report for this precinct exactly. The numbers were apparently the final certified counts for the selected precinct'." (See also  Plea for Help from Ohio Activist  ). (12/21)

Chuck Herrin: "Empathy Training for Compassionate Conservatives: Why the Democrats Are Still Whining About the Election (and Why Maybe We Should Be, Too),  www.chuckherrin.com .

Among the best summaries of the reasons to suspect that election 2004 may have been fraudulent.  Ideal as an introduction to the issue.  Also a fine refresher for those lost among "the trees" desiring another view of "the forest."  Herrin writes: As of right now, 11-23-2004, there is no conclusive evidence that massive voter fraud took place, but there is overwhelming evidence that the weaknesses in our voting system could have allowed it. I hope it didn't happen, but the simple fact is that whether it did or not, our election systems, particularly those using DREs, appear to have been designed specifically to allow fraud, rather than prevent it. Who put these systems in place, and what is the real current state of e-voting? Read on, gentle surfer, and I'll do my best to tell you."  (12/14)

Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman: "Startling new revelations highlight rare Congressional hearings on Ohio vote,"  The Free Press, December 13, 2004

"Startling new revelations about Ohio's presidential vote have been uncovered as Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee join Rev. Jesse Jackson in Columbus, the state capital, on Monday, Dec. 13, to hold a rare field hearing into election malfeasance and manipulation in the 2004 vote. The Congressional delegation will include Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, and others. "Taken together, the revelations show Republicans – in state and county government, and in the Ohio Republican Party – were determined to undermine and suppress Democratic turnout by a wide variety of methods... On Sunday, John Kerry spoke with Rev. Jesse Jackson and urged him to take an more active role in investigating the irregularities and ensuring a fair and impartial recount. Kerry said there were three areas of inquiry that should be addressed: 92,000 ballots that recorded no vote for president; qualifying and counting provisional ballots; and supported an independent analysis of the software and set-up of the optical scan voting machines. What follows are excerpts from some of the affidavits for the election challenge."   (12/14)

Mark Crispin Miller: The New York Times Ignores the Voting Problems, Buzz Flash, December 11, 2004

"As you know (and way too many others don't), Rep. John Conyers recently held open hearings in the US Congress, on the all-important subject of the voting in Ohio on November 2nd. There was a lot of harrowing testimony on the tricks and tactics used there by Bush/Cheney to suppress as many Democratic votes as possible, and to exaggerate Ohio's electoral support for the regime. It was a public inquiry of towering importance, and not only because it was (allegedly) Ohio that gave Bush just enough electoral votes to win. . . . And yet the New York Times, our nation's "newspaper of record," did not even mention it, much less cover it. The hearings were on Wednesday. There was no word of it in Thursday's paper, nor any word, belatedly, in Friday's. (Thursday's Times did run a couple of long stories on the electoral situation in Ukraine, but none on the quite similar, and -- to Americans -- vastly more important story here at home.)  Such silence is bizarre. It's deeply wrong. In fact, it's un-American. For what public issue could there be that matters quite as much as the integrity of our elections?" (12/14) 

William Rivers Pitt: From Selma to Ohio: A Report from the Conyers Hearing,  Truthout, December 8, 2004

"It looked for all the world like a real hearing. Along the far wall were arrayed Congressional Representatives from the Judiciary Committee. Before them at a long table sat witnesses and experts in front of microphones, prepared to give testimony on the record. Behind the witnesses sat row upon row of everyday citizens who came out to watch the proceedings; the crowd was so large that an overflow room needed to be opened on another floor. Along both walls were arrayed more than a dozen television cameras... The hearing itself was a showcase for both fact and passion. The witnesses, the Representatives before them, and the crowd that filled the room lit the place up with a concerned electricity. Some believed the irregularities and outright fraud which marred the Ohio vote require immediate redress, a successful completion of which could come to overthrow the results of last month's election. Others saw the hearings as a gift to their children and the future, a means to ensure that any and all elections to come will not suffer the kind of nonsense that afflicted both November of 2004 and November of 2000."   (12/14)

Bradblog: Whistleblower Affidavit: Programmer Built Vote Rigging Prototype at Republican Congressman's Request!  www.bradblog.com

"In stunning revelations set to rock the vote from Tallahassee to Capitol Hill -- and perhaps even a bit further up Pennsylvania Avenue -- a Florida computer programmer has now made remarkable claims in a detailed sworn affidavit, signed this morning and obtained exclusively by The BRAD BLOG! The programmer claims that he designed and built a "vote rigging" software program at the behest of then Florida Congressman, now U.S. Congressman, Republican Tom Feeney of Florida's 24th Congressional District. (Here is the affidavit in PDF format.   See also:  John Byrne, rawstory,  and an interview with Clinton Curtis).  (12/7)

Chuck Herron:  Hack the Vote www.chuckherrin.com/hackthevoteFAQ.htm

This is a significant website! It contains informed criticism of the e-voting scandal that should alarm anyone capable of giving it a fair and impartial reading. The webmeister, Chuck Herrin, is a systems engineer with a long string of qualifying letters after his name (Certified Information Systems Auditor, etc.) -- and a republican, no less! The best access for the computer novice is to his "HackthevoteFAQ" page. He also presents step-by-step instructions on how to fix an election.  (12/7)

Bob Nichols: Voting Machines Count Backwards in Oklahoma,  Oklahoma Independent Media Center, November 27, 2004

"Rural Oklahoma Voting machines know how to count backwards. That looks like what the secretly programmed machines did for Sen. Kerry in President Bush's easily won Presidential Election victory in Oklahoma. All 77 counties use the Optech Eagle voting machines and Tabulator's made by ES&S, Sen Hagel's republican company. The respectable, conservative "Tulsa World" newspaper reported Nov 3rd that Kerry was winning in 57 of the states's rural counties., with 70% of the vote counted. Turns out that the famous November 3rd report was probably not supposed to be printed... The "official" State of Oklahoma Election Board vote totals released later show Kerry not winning; but, losing in all the state's 77 counties, including the 57 rural counties. Yea, somebody really messed up, big time, and published a partially completed and, I guess you would haver to call it, "fixed" vote.... In other words, Kerry lost votes already cast by voters. The voting machines counted backwards. What could be simpler than that?"  (11/30) 

Alan Waldman: How the Grinch stole the White House . . . again, Online Journal, November 20, 2004

"Despite corporate media attempts to kill or ridicule away the story, Talk Radio and the Internet are abuzz with considerable evidence that John Kerry was elected president on November 2, but that Republican election officials made it difficult for millions of Democrats to vote while employees of four secretive, GOP-bankrolling corporations rigged electronic voting machines and then hacked central tabulating computers to steal the election for George W. Bush. . . . Here’s a shocking fact. The reason it was so easy to steal this election is that, unlike the situation in Europe, where citizens count the ballots, employees of a highly secretive Republican-leaning company, ES&S, totally managed every aspect of the 2004 U.S. election. That included everything from voter registration, printing of ballots, the programming of the voting machines, tabulation of votes (often with armed guards keeping the media and members of the public who wished to witness the count at bay) and the first reporting of the results—for 60 million voters in 47 states—according to Christopher Bollyn, writing in American Free Press." (11/30)

UC Berkelely: UC Berkeley Research Team Sounds 'Smoke Alarm' for Florida E-Vote Count.  YubaNet.com, November 18, 2004

"Research team calls for investigation. Today the University of California's Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team released a statistical study - the sole method available to monitor the accuracy of e- voting - reporting irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election. The study shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods - what the team says can be deemed a "smoke alarm." Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by chance - the probability is less than 0.1 percent.... 'For the sake of all future elections involving electronic voting - someone must investigate and explain the statistical anomalies in Florida," says Professor Michael Hout. "We're calling on voting officials in Florida to take action'." (Follow this link for the original paper).   (11/23) 

Alastair Thompson: Complete US Exit Poll Data Confirms Net Suspicions, Scoop, November 17, 2004

"Scoop.co.nz is delighted to be able today to publish a full set of 4pm exit poll data for the first time on the Internet since the US election. The data emerged this evening NZT in a post on the Democratic Underground website under the forum name TruthIsAll. The new data confirms what was already widely known about the swing in favour of George Bush, but amplifies the extent of that swing... In the data which is shown [here] in tabulated form, and above in graph form, we can see that 42 of the 51 states in the union swung towards George Bush while only nine swung towards Kerry. There has to date been no official explanation for the discrepancy."  (11/23) 


Sara DeHart: Something is rotten in Denmark: Exit poll data in former Soviet Republic of Georgia vs. USA, Online Journal, November 17, 2004

"The International Foundations sponsored an exit poll in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia during their November 2003 parliamentary election and projected a victory for the main opposition party. Exit poll data is considered so robust that when the sitting government counted the votes and announced that its own slate of candidates had won, supporters of the opposition stormed the Parliament, and the president, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, resigned his office under pressure from the United States and Russia. Contrast that event with what happened in the United States in the recent national election when in three battle ground states, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, with data based on exit polls predicted an outcome in variance with the tallied vote outcomes. Major news organizations, including CNN changed their exit poll data to conform with the tallied outcomes, most of which came from paperless, electronic voting equipment. In each case the tallied outcomes favored the incumbent, George W. Bush. The odds for such an occurrence is one in 250 million for this to have occurred by chance."  (11/23) 

Mark Crispin Miller: Let’s Get Real,  In These Times, November 16, 2004

"Bush & company’s theft of the election was a crime so obvious that it requires more effort to deny than to affirm. This rip-off was as flagrant as the L.A. cops’ assault on Rodney King, Kerry’s stellar soldiering in Vietnam, or Bush’s lousy record in the Texas Air National Guard, and yet this national calamity is being dismissed as a delusion. The reason for the Busheviks’ denial is as obvious as the theft itself: How better to commit the perfect crime than to insist it never happened? And yet what makes this stance so dangerous is not just its use on the right, but its prevalence throughout the corporate media (MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann excepted) and even among those on the left."  (11/23) 

Thom Hartmann: "Stinking Evidence" of Possible Election Fraud Found in Florida,  Common Dreams, November 18, 2004

"We caught the whole thing on videotape," she said. "I don't think you'll ever see anything like this - Bev Harris having a tug of war with an election worker over a bag of garbage, and he held onto it and she pulled on it, and it split right open, spilling out those poll tapes. They were throwing away our democracy, and Bev wasn't going to let them do it. ... "We were sitting there comparing the real [signed, original] tapes with the [later printout] ones that were given us," Bev said, "and finding things missing and finding things not matching, when one of the elections employees took a bin full of things that looked like garbage - that looked like polling tapes, actually - and passed by and disappeared out the back of the building." This provoked investigator Ellen Brodsky to walk outside and check the garbage of the Elections Office itself. Sure enough - more original, signed poll tapes, freshly trashed. ... "The difference was hundreds of votes in each of the different places we examined," said Bev, "and most of those were in minority areas. ,,,The pattern was very clear. The anomalies favored George W. Bush. Every single time." (See also BuzzFlash:  Study released Thursday indicates the probability is that electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000 - 260,000 or more in excess votes to Bush in Florida,  Mark Crispin Miller:  Let's Get Real,  , and Steve Weissman:  How Much Fraud Does the GOP Need?). (11/23) 

Michael Keefer: Footprints of Electoral Fraud: The November 2 Exit Poll Scam. GlobalResearch.ca, November 5, 2004

"Republican electoral fraud in the 2004 presidential election was widely anticipated by informed observers--whose warnings about the opportunities for fraud offered by "black box" voting machines supplied and serviced by corporations closely aligned with Republican interests (and used to tally nearly a third of the votes cast on November 2) have been amply borne out by the results.1 One of the clear indicators of massive electoral fraud was the wide divergence, both nationally and in swing states, between exit poll results and the reported vote tallies. The major villains, it would seem, were the suppliers of touch-screen voting machines. There appears to be evidence, however, that the corporations responsible for assembling vote-counting and exit poll information may also have been complicit in the fraud."  (11/16)

Colin Shea: I Smell a Rat,  Zogby International, November 14, 2004

"For the GOP to claim now that we must take anything on faith, let alone astonishingly suspicious results in a hard-fought and extraordinarily bitter election, is pure fantasy. It does not even merit discussion. The facts as I see them now defy all logical explanations save one--massive and systematic vote fraud. We cannot accept the result of the 2004 presidential election as legitimate until these discrepancies are rigorously and completely explained. From the Valerie Plame case to the horrors of Abu Ghraib, George Bush has been reluctant to seek answers and assign accountability when it does not suit his purposes. But this is one time when no American should accept not getting a straight answer. Until then, George Bush is still, and will remain, the ‘Accidental President' of 2000. One of his many enduring and shameful legacies will be that of seizing power through two illegitimate elections conducted on his brother's watch, and engineering a fundamental corruption at the very heart of the greatest democracy the world has known. We must not permit this to happen again."   (11/16)

Steven F. Freeman, PhD: The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy, Author's Manuscript

"My purpose in this paper ... has not been to allege election theft, let alone explain it. Rather, I have tried to demonstrate that exit poll data is fundamentally sound, that the deviations between exit poll predictions and vote tallies in the three critical battleground states could not have occurred strictly by chance or random error, and that no explanations have yet been provided to explain the discrepancy. in short, I have tried to justify the discrepancy as a legitimate issue that warrants public attention... given that neither pollsters nor their media clients have provided solid explanations to the public, suspicion of fraud, or among the least accusatory, "mistabulation," is running rampant an unchecked. that so many people suspect misplay undermines not only the legitimacy of the President, but faith in the foundations of the democracy. Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature conclusion, but the election's unexplained exit poll discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is the responsibilities of the media, academia, polling agencies, and the public to investigate."  (11/16)

Sam Parry: Washington Post's sloppy voting analysis,  Consortium News, November 12, 2004

"The Washington Post and the big media have spoken: Questions about Nov. 2 voting irregularities and George W. Bush's unusual vote tallies are just the ravings of Internet conspiracy theorists. In a Nov. 11 story on A2, the Post gave the back of its hand to our story about Bush's statistically improbable vote totals in Florida and elsewhere. While agreeing with our analysis that Bush pulled off the difficult task of winning more votes in Florida than the number of registered Republicans, the Post accuses us of overlooking the obvious explanation that many independents, "Dixiecrats" and other Democrats voted for Bush." (This articles is a response to: Manuel Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating: "Latest Conspiracy Theory -- Kerry won -- Hits the Ether").  (11/16)

The Squanderer: Did Bush Lose... Again?  The Squanderer, November, 2004

"Why did Florida voters with one type of machine vote one way, and voters with a different machine vote another? In Florida, the figures show that, in counties with one type of voting machine, voters with no Democrat or Republican party affiliation appeared to split their votes roughly 50/50 between Bush and Kerry, which was to be expected; yet in counties with another type of voting machine, unaffiliated voters seemed to vote nearly 100% for Bush!" The database for this analysis is drawn from the official Florida election returns.  The statistical case for fraud is compelling, and if true, this fraud alone determined the Presidential election.  (For more, see Ernest Partridge's Crisis Papers blog.)  (11/11)

Farhad Manjoo: Was the election stolen?, Salon.com, November 10, 2004

Here's a rebuttal to the "voting fraud" charges: "Did John Kerry actually win the presidency? If you've spent any time online this week, you've no doubt heard this argument: The election was stolen. Corrupt officials, rigged voting machines, a sleepy media and a Democratic Party that's been less than fully aggressive in its efforts to counter Republican dirty tricks came together to subvert the true will of the people. According to proponents of this theory, proof of electoral fraud abounds. The journalist Greg Palast argues that in Ohio, there were probably enough "spoiled" punch-card ballots -- ballots tossed out by counting machines -- to make up Bush's margin over Kerry. . . . There's little question that the American election process is a mess, and needs to be cleaned up. But even if this particular election wasn't perfect, it was still most likely good enough for us to have faith in the results. Salon has examined some of the most popular Kerry-actually-won theories currently making the rounds online, and none of them hold up under rigorous scrutiny."   (See also Manjoo: "Election Fraud Watch").   (11/11)

Sam Parry: Bush's 'Incredible' Vote Tallies, consortiumnews.com, November 9, 2004

"George W. Bush’s vote tallies, especially in the key state of Florida, are so statistically stunning that they border on the unbelievable. While it’s extraordinary for a candidate to get a vote total that exceeds his party’s registration in any voting jurisdiction – because of non-voters – Bush racked up more votes than registered Republicans in 47 out of 67 counties in Florida. In 15 of those counties, his vote total more than doubled the number of registered Republicans and in four counties, Bush more than tripled the number. Statewide, Bush earned about 20,000 more votes than registered Republicans. . . . Similar surprising jumps in Bush’s vote tallies across the country – especially when matched against national exits polls showing Kerry winning by 51 percent to 48 percent – have fed suspicion among rank-and-file Democrats that the Bush campaign rigged the vote, possibly through systematic computer hacking. . . . While it's conceivable Bush might have achieved these and other gains through his hardball campaign strategies and strong get-out-the-vote effort, many Americans, looking at these and other statistically incredible Bush vote counts, are likely to continue to suspect that the Republicans put a thumb on the electoral scales, somehow exaggerating Bush's tallies through manipulation of computer tabulations. Only an open-minded investigation with public scrutiny would have much hope of quelling these rising suspicions."  (11/11)

Rick Klein: Internet buzz on vote fraud is dismissed, Boston Globe, November 10, 2004

A debunking of the charge of election fraud. "As they ricochet around the country on the Internet, the details seem aligned to raise the eyebrows of suspicious Democrats... Much of the traffic is little more than Internet-fueled conspiracy theories, and none of the vote-counting problems and anomalies that have emerged are sufficiently widespread to have affected the election's ultimate result. Kerry campaign officials and a range of election-law specialists agree that while machines made errors and long lines in Democratic precincts kept many voters away, there's no realistic chance that Kerry actually beat Bush. ''No one would be more interested than me in finding out that we really won, but that ain't the case," said Jack Corrigan, a veteran Kerry adviser who led the Democrats' team of 3,600 attorneys who fanned out across the country on Election Day to address voting irregularities."  (11/11)

Faun Otter: Vote Fraud - Exit Polls Vs Actuals, Scoop, November 10, 2004

"SCOOP EDITOR'S INTRODUCTORY NOTE: Within parts of the U.S. progressive community there is already widespread concern that electronic voting fraud may provide an explanation for the astonishing 8 million vote gain made by George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential U.S. election.  Already there a variety of odd phenomena which have aroused suspicions about this possibility: For example: In Florida Bush received a million extra votes, while Kerry received only 500,000 extra votes, in spite of a massive Democratic Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) and registration campaign in that state ... In order to attempt to get a firmer hold on the extent of vote fraud if it did occur Faun Otter (a veteran of the U.S. based vote fraud investigative community) conducted the following preliminary analysis comparing the initial exit poll results (note this link takes you to the revised results) vs. actual results."   (11/11)

Thom Hartmann: Evidence Mounts That The Vote Was Hacked, Common Dreams, November 6, 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. . . . 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." (11/8) 

Greg Palast: Kerry Won -- Here's the Facts,  TomPaine.com, November 4, 2004

Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided—known as “spoilage” in election jargon—because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Drawing on what happened in Florida and studies of elections past, Palast argues that if Ohio’s discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots. So far there's no indication that Palast's hypothesis will be tested because only the provisional ballots are being counted. "It's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry. Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state. So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know."  (11/5)

Thom Hartmann: The Ultimate Felony Against Democracy, Common Dreams, November 4, 2004

"The hot story in the Blogosphere is that the "erroneous" exit polls that showed Kerry carrying Florida and Ohio (among other states) weren't erroneous at all - it was the numbers produced by paperless voting machines that were wrong, and Kerry actually won. As more and more analysis is done of what may (or may not) be the most massive election fraud in the history of the world, however, it's critical that we keep the largest issue at the forefront at all time: Why are We The People allowing private, for-profit corporations, answerable only to their officers and boards of directors, and loyal only to agendas and politicians that will enhance their profitability, to handle our votes? ... [B]loggers and investigative reporters are discovering an odd discrepancy in exit polls being largely accurate in paper-ballot states and oddly inaccurate in touch-screen electronic voting states Even raw voter analyses are showing extreme oddities in touch-screen-run Florida, and eagle-eyed bloggers are finding that news organizations are retroactively altering their exit polls to coincide with what the machines ultimately said."  (11/5)

Greg Palast: An Election Spoiled Rotten, TomPaine.com, November 1, 2004

"It's not even Election Day yet, and the Kerry-Edwards campaign is already down by a 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—overwhelmingly in minority areas, like Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, where Hispanic voters have a 500 percent greater chance of their vote being "spoiled." Investigative journalist Greg Palast reports on the trashing of the election." (11/5)

Rachel Konrad: Electronic Voting Machine Woes Reported, Yahoo, November 3, 2004

"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."  (11/5)

Ann Harrison: The Ghost Votes in the Machine, Voting Snafus Across the Nation,  CounterPunch, November 3, 2004

"A non-partisan coalition monitoring problems at polling sites has reported failures of electronic voting machines around the United States - some of which recorded touch screen votes for candidates voters had not selected. While errors were resolved in the cases brought to the attention of poll watchers, many voters remain uncertain whether their proper vote was cast in a bitterly contested election in which President George Bush has claimed victory. 'A number of people who thought they were voting for Kerry, when the screen came up it showed they were voting for Bush," said Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) which is a member of the coalition. "We've seen it across several voting systems, not just one machine.'"   (11/5)

Greg Palast: Congratulations, Mr. President! Florida's Computers Have Already Counted Thousands of Votes for George W. Bush [Before a Vote Was Cast],  Harper's Magazine (via Greg Palast.com), October 28, 2004

"Before one vote was cast in early voting this week in Florida, the new touch-screen computer voting machines of Florida started out with a several-thousand vote lead for George W. Bush. That is, the mechanics of the new digital democracy boxes "spoil" votes at a predictably high rate in African-American precincts, effectively voiding enough votes cast for John Kerry to in a tight race, keep the White House safe from the will of the voters. To understand the fiasco in progress in Florida, we need to revisit the 2000 model..." (See also: Greg Palast: Abused and Conned in Florida).  (11/1) 

Harold Meyerson: The GOP's Shameful Vote Strategy, The Washington Post, October 27, 2004

"With Election Day almost upon us, it's not clear whether President Bush is running a campaign or plotting a coup d'etat. By all accounts, Republicans are spending these last precious days devoting nearly as much energy to suppressing the Democratic vote as they are to mobilizing their own. Time was when Republicans were at least embarrassed by their efforts to keep African Americans from the polls... For George W. Bush, Karl Rove and their legion of genteel thugs, however, universal suffrage is just one more musty liberal ideal that threatens conservative rule. Today's Republicans have elevated vote suppression from a dirty secret to a public norm... This is civic life in the age of George W. Bush, in which politics has become a continuation of civil war by other means. In Bush's America, there's a war on -- against a foreign enemy so evil that we can ignore the Geneva Conventions, against domestic liberals so insidious that we can ignore democratic norms. Only bleeding hearts with a pre-Sept. 11 mind-set still believe in voting rights."  (10/28)  

Max Blumenthal: Republican dirty tricks, AlterNet, October 16, 2004

"Just how close is dirty trickster Nathan Sproul to the Bush/Cheney re-election campaign? . . . In Nevada, Voter Outreach of America is accused by former employees of shredding the registration forms of thousands of Democrats; in West Virginia, Voter Outreach of America employees say they were instructed to mislead voters into registering Republican and voting for Bush; in Oregon, yet another swing state, the state attorney general has opened a criminal investigation into allegations that Sproul's firm, which is Voter Outreach of America's parent company, was involved in intentionally destroying or discarding voter registration forms signed by Democrats. According to OpenSecrets.org, Sproul's firm received $125,000 this year from the Republican National Committee for voter registration and another $500,000 for "political consulting." The cozy ties between Sproul and Bush operatives should raise a serious question: Is Sproul simply an overzealous lone wolf, or are his activities part of a concerted effort by the Bush/Cheney campaign to subvert the democratic process?"  (See also BuzzFlash's editorial, "The Republican National Politboro (aka RNC)"  ,  and Associated Press' "Jankow Criticizes GOP Vote Effort").  (10/18)

Ford Fessenden: Florida List for Purge of Voter Proves Flawed, New York Times, July 10, 2004

"Florida election officials used a flawed method to come up with a listing of people believed to be convicted felons, a list that they are recommending be used to purge voter registration rolls, state officials acknowledged yesterday. As a result, voters identifying themselves as Hispanic are almost completely absent from that list. Of nearly 48,000 Florida residents on the felon list, only 61 are Hispanic. By contrast, more than 22,000 are African-American. About 8 percent of Florida voters describe themselves as Hispanic, and about 11 percent as black." (7/13)

 

 

 

 

 

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