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Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 02:49:07 -0500 (EST)
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Subject: Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked


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<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/110804Z.shtml
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1106-30.htm

Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked
By Thom Hartmann
CommonDreams.org

Saturday 06 November 2004

When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), 
the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from 
Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher 
has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but 
of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these 
same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so 
that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a 
real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.

"It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.

And some believe evidence is accumulating that the national effort 
happened on November 2, 2004.

The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of 
votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen 
Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available 
at [11]http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something 
startling.

While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to 
produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely 
matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from 
optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus 
vulnerable to hacking - the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them 
Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry 
and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the 
country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and 
a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, 
but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where 
optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, 
went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 
77.25% for Bush.

Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more 
vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered 
Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had 
earlier reported that county size was a variable - this turns out not to 
be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)

More visual analysis of the results can be seen at 
[12]http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and 
[13]www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm. Note the trend line - the 
only variable that determines a swing toward Bush was the use of optical 
scan machines.

One possible explanation for this is the "Dixiecrat" theory, that in 
Florida white voters (particularly the rural ones) have been registered as 
Democrats for years, but voting Republican since Reagan. Looking at the 
2000 statistics, also available on Dopp's site, there are similar 
anomalies, although the trends are not as strong as in 2004. But some 
suggest the 2000 election may have been questionable in Florida, too.

One of the people involved in Dopp's analysis noted that it may be 
possible to determine the validity of the "rural Democrat" theory by 
comparing Florida's white rural counties to those of Pennsylvania, another 
swing state but one that went for Kerry, as the exit polls there 
predicted. Interestingly, the Pennsylvania analysis, available at 
[14]http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm, doesn't show the 
same kind of swings as does Florida, lending credence to the possibility 
of problems in Florida.

Even more significantly, Dopp had first run the analysis while filtering 
out smaller (rural) counties, and still found that the only variable that 
accounted for a swing toward Republican voting was the use of optical-scan 
machines, whereas counties with touch-screen machines generally didn't 
swing - regardless of size.

Others offer similar insights, based on other data. A professor at the 
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in Florida the vote to 
raise the minimum wage was approved by 72%, although Kerry got 48%. "The 
correlation between voting for the minimum wage increase and voting for 
Kerry isn't likely to be perfect," he noted, "but one would normally 
expect that the gap - of 1.5 million votes - to be far smaller than it 
was."

While all of this may or may not be evidence of vote tampering, it again 
brings the nation back to the question of why several states using 
electronic voting machines or scanners programmed by private, for-profit 
corporations and often connected to modems produced votes inconsistent 
with exit poll numbers.

Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever since 
Election Day.

Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the 
radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight, 
during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to 
hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush 
down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: 
Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted 
the AP report.

But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal 
states.

Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were 
rigged.

Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton 
campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an 
article for [15]The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie 
in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.

"Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two 
major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating 
actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do 
and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the 
relative turnout of different parts of the state."

He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was 
slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all 
of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush 
was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."

Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as 
the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states the 
election was called for Bush.

How could this happen?

On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard 
Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, 
the Seattle grandmother who started [16]www.blackboxvoting.org from her 
living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated 
(other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in 
Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold 
Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in 
the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines 
that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is 
sent to a "central tabulator" machine.

That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.

"In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, 
"you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling 
places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling 
places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so 
it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do 
something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient 
to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with 
all of them at once?"

Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises 
people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I 
use. It's just a regular computer."

"So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central 
tabulator?"

Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program 
called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it 
into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the 
County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting 
between them loaded with Diebold's software.

Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test 
election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and 
waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various 
precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000 
votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.

"Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold 
wrote a pretty good program.

But, it's running on a Windows PC.

So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal 
Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk 
C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, 
Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the 
votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled 
"Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a 
database program like Excel.

In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one 
precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.

"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers 
from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 
100 votes to Tiger."

They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the 
legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the 
progress of your election."

As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And 
you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, 
and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.

Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an 
election, and it took us 90 seconds."

On live national television. (You can see the clip on 
[17]www.votergate.tv.) And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris 
said, noting that it would be nearly impossible for the election software 
- - or a County election official - to know that the vote database had been 
altered.

Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen 
Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide.

Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to cause 
people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since the 
networks would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry. But 
the networks didn't do that, and had never intended to.

According to congressional candidate Fisher, it makes far more sense that 
the exit polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that 
the vote itself was hacked.

And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this hit 
him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national office 
in the most-hacked swing states.

So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this story 
was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted 
that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far 
uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and 
other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to 
explain how the exit polls had failed.

But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part. 
Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, 
"This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board 
as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."

- -------

Thom Hartmann ([18]thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored 
Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated 
daily progressive talk show. [19]www.thomhartmann.com. His most recent 
books are "[20]The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "[21]We The People: A 
Call To Take Back America," and "[22]What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To 
Democracy."

References

11. http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm
12. http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm
13. http://www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm
14. http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm
15. http://www.thehill.com/morris/110404.aspx
16. http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
17. http://www.votergate.tv/
18. mailto:thom@...mhartmann.com
19. http://www.thomhartmann.com/
20. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400051576/commondreams-20/ref=nosim/
21. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1579549551/commondreams-20/ref=nosim/
22. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400052084/commondreams-20/ref=nosim/

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