Has anyone heard from Bev Harris? I tried to open her site today & timed out. I'm worried. I know she was to come out with some important info. very soon. What she comes up with through the FOIA could be more important than all the other evidence put together.

I know many times I have tried and sometimes I get a bandwidth exceeded error, or a time out. Perhaps too many people are trying to access the site.

She probably gave up too

No she did not give up.

She actually had some proprietary information which showed fraud which she was not releasing until I believe she heard mor efrom her legal team.

The problem is she needs money...

She has to fight a lot of high proced lawyers defenidng the counties and the election machine companies...

A GENEALOGY OF VOTERGATE MEDIA COVERAGE 2004: THROUGH THE EYES OF GOOGLENEWS
November 10, 2004

By Matthew Cardinale

A textbook case of media diffusion is unfolding before our very eyes. So with the help of the ever-resourceful GoogleNews, I have charted how over the last week progressive websites forced the corporate media to pay attention to Votergate 2004.

I’ve been refreshing GoogleNews and the Blackboxvoting.org site almost every 30 minutes awaiting news on whether Bev Harris has saved America yet or not. My key word searches have been “Bev Harris” and “John Conyers” (both with quotation marks) and several strings of words like “electronic,” “voting,” “fraud,” “election,” and “2004.”

Sorry I’m obsessed, but I mean it’s only the entire basis of our democracy at stake here. The fact that the US corporate media has systematically conspired to suppress news coverage of what is now being called “Votergate” is an absolute atrocity putting into sharp visibility the need to increase and enhance progressive daily news sources in the United States.

A disclaimer is in order on methods: only sites listed on GoogleNews are included in this media coverage genealogy. If your favorite progressive news site’s article did not make GoogleNews, unfortunately many Americans didn’t see it. And while there certainly are many drawbacks to Google.com’s monopoly on American thought, I think using their news search engine is a quite worthy measure of readership given how many other people rely on it for news (ranked #3 site on Alexa).

To be sure, the New York Times, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Columbus Dispatch, and others have been reporting county-wide problems, some more troubling than others, since Election Day. Yet, for a reader of any one of these papers, there isn’t much information with which to connect any dots regarding a larger problem. So here’s where the story begins first, in terms of claiming evidence of a problem big enough to overturn election results…

It started with an innocent-looking November 3rd USA Today article on Bev Harris’ recent Public Records Requests for voting records and mentioned some irregularities. So this is noteworthy but not a mobilizing piece.

Then, November 3rd, Buzzflash.com had contributor, Mike Whitney’s, “Sour Grapes or Voter Fraud.” Then, Counterbias.com had Joseph Cannon’s “The Case for Fraud.”

November 4th, in the Los Angeles Times, Ralph Vartabedian’s “Strain Evident in Election System” appeared. While it mentioned Bev Harris’s Public Records Request toward the end, it mostly focused on long lines at polling places. This article was reprinted in the Monterey Herald.

Still November 4th, Greg Palast’s “Kerry Won,” which ran on Commondreams.org, was the first article to claim that, namely, Kerry won, but it focused mostly on the 3% of ballots that get thrown out in all election as “spoilage.” Yet, coverage of the electronic voting machine problems and counting problems accumulating in various counties took a couple days to really emerge on what George W. Bush calls “the internets.”

November 4th, Thom Hartmann’s “The Ultimate Felony Against Our Democracy”

appeared on Commondreams.org, Truthout.org, Opednews.com, and other sites, but it wasn’t clear from the title what it was about, so I didn’t think to read this one until the following day. Later versions appeared on Axisoflogic.com and the International Labor Communiciations Association (ILCA) website.

Other great articles were out by the end of the day, November 4th, including Opednews.com’s “Never Say Die-Bold,” by Jackson Thoreau, which also appeared on ModerateIndependent.com. Sheila Samples’s helpful and encouraging “The Last Battle” appeared on PressAction.com, Opednews.com, DissidentVoice.org, and Media Monitors Network.

Sheila Samples’s article mentioned the considerable blogging and archiving on the electoral fraud investigation that was being done at DemocraticUnderground.com. I later found an incredible resource compilation available at Democrats.com. So, again, GoogleNews does not have all the answers. But I surfed high and low for other sources, including repeated visits to Moveon.org to find not a mention of the issue there.

November 5th, readers saw Thom Hartmann’s piece on Alternet.org, “Exit Polls Right, Tallies Wrong?” Then, Shane Cory’s “Should America Trust the Election Results?” appeared in Washington Dispatch. Also, Wired.com ran an informative article, “House Dems Seek Election Inquiry” with access to the full-text of Rep. Conyer’s letter to the General Accounting Office (GAO).

Saturday, November 6th was like a watershed day. Thom Hartmann’s unmistakably named, “Evidence Mounts That the Vote May Have Been Hacked,”

ran as Commondreams.org’s lead story. It ran also on ILCA Online, Opednews.com, and Truthout.org.

Monday, November 8th, William Rivers Pitt’s article, “Worse Than 2000:

Tuesday’s Electoral Disaster,” appeared on Truthout.org, ILCA Online, Liberalslant.com, and Yubanet.com. Bob Fitrakis’s “None Dare Call it Voter Suppression or Fraud” ran on Dissidentvoice.org, the ILCA Website, and The Free Press of Columbus, Ohio.

Also, Monday, November 8th, Pacifica Radio and Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now” program interviewed Bev Harris and focused on the election fraud investigation, the transcript of which was made available on the ILCA website.

Then, ILCA published “Media Blacks Out Voting Problems” on their website.

David Swanson, the author, wrote how he sees developing labor-oriented media as a number one priority of this country. Swanson’s article re-appeared on Counterpunch.org.

The corporate media breakthrough came when MSNBC’s Olbermann talked about the election fraud investigation on TV, which also made it on MSNBC.com.

Given that this bodacious step was already taken, Sheila Lennon’s commentary suddenly appeared in the Press-Enterprise and on the websites for three TV stations.

Today, November 8th, I have seen a slew of new postings, now on both corporate media and on progressive media. The Los Angeles Times has Ralph Vartabedian back with Henry Weinstein, in “Ohio is Set to Reckon with Outstanding Ballots.” MSNBC’s David Shuster writes now that he sees some serious concerns regarding vote counting problems in Ohio, although he’s less worried about Florida. The Nation finally took notice with David Corn’s “A Stolen Election?” As I write this, copious postings are appearing on The Atlanta Journal Constitution, The Minnesota Star Tribune, The Madison Capital Times, and Salon.com.

An exciting recent posting at the ILCA’s website says six Congressman have signed a second letter to the GAO demanding an investigation.

Let’s hope we get an investigation. Let’s hope even the corporate media will take this to center stage coverage. And let’s congratulate the effectiveness of some brave progressive media sources in getting the word out, despite the corporate monopoly of news.

Matthew Cardinale is a freelance writer, activist, and graduate student at UC Irvine in Sociology and Democracy Studies. He can be reached at mcardina@uci.edu.

And guess what -- the way she was raising funds was through her website! Does anyone know a snail-mail address (P.O. box) we can send donations to for her work (and how do we verify that she would get them)?

Presidential Election: Questions Raised About Electronic Voting
Posted by : DavidSwanson on Monday, November 08, 2004 - 04:38 PM
http://www.ilcaonline.org/modules.php?op=m...order=0&thold=0
Questions Raised About Electronic Voting
From Democracy Now!

Serious questions are being raised about the use of electronic voting machines in the 2004 presidential election. In an Ohio county, Bush mistakenly received some 3,900 extra votes. We speak Johns Hopkins University professor Aviel Rubin and investigative reporter Bev Harris. [includes rush transcript]


President Bush arrives back in Washington today after spending a 3-day weekend at Camp David. Since John Kerry conceded to Bush last Wednesday, the president and his advisers have talked extensively about what they call Bush's strong mandate to govern following the November 2 election. But as the rumor mill swirls about a reshuffling of Bush's cabinet and John Kerry returns to the Senate, there are many people who are not willing to simply move on from last Tuesday's election.

Many of John Kerry's supporters were stunned last Wednesday when their candidate conceded the presidency to Bush. Just hours earlier, his running mate John Edwards told a rally of their supporters in Boston that they would not stop until every vote was counted, a reference to the hundreds of thousands of provisional ballots in the key state of Ohio that some Democrats believed could have tipped the balance. But it's not just the provisional ballots.

Even though Kerry has stopped fighting for the presidency, serious questions abound about the use of electronic voting machines. Take this story: In a voting precinct in Ohio's Franklin County, records show that 638 people cast ballots. Yet, George W Bush got 4,258 votes to John Kerry's 260. In reality, Bush only received 365 votes. That means Bush got nearly 3,900 extra votes. And that's just in one small precinct. This in a state that Bush officially won by only 136,000 votes. Elections officials blamed electronic voting for the extra Bush votes.

Meanwhile, a number of Congresspeople are asking the General Accounting Office to investigate electronic voting and the 2004 election and the nonprofit group Blackbox Voting has begun the process of filing the largest Freedom of Information Act request in history.


Bev Harris, investigative reporter and author of the book "Black Box Voting." She has announced plans to file the largest FOIA action in history by seeking the internal logs from voting machines from every county that used electronic voting machines.

Aviel Rubin, professor at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of the report "Analysis of an Electronic Voting System" the initial study of security flaws in voting machine software. He served as an election judge in Baltimore County on November 2nd.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is available free of charge, however donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the woman behind that process, investigative reporter, Bev Harris. She is the author of the book, Black Box Voting. We also are joined by Professor Aviel Rubin who teaches at Johns Hopkins University and is co-author of the report, “Analysis of an Electronic Voting System,” the initial study of security flaws in voting machine software. He served as an election judge in Baltimore county on November 2. Bev Harris, let's begin with you. What exactly -- what kind of information are you looking for now?

BEV HARRIS: Well, first, we’re seeking internal audit logs of the machines, which are public record. There's nothing proprietary about this. It's interesting so far. We have been getting responses, but the officials who run the machines, the county officials, are really so clueless. They don't know what their machines' records are, or how to print them out. So we find ourselves guiding them through the menus on their own software to show them how to print this information out which is a bit scary. But we also sought documentation on all of the troubled slips in all of the documentation of any problems that they had. Right now, we're following up, you know, we have all of the anomalies such as the viewer mentioning, and we're following up with specific public records requests, for example, give me the internal log of machine number such and such of that precinct, or depending on the type of anomaly they're reporting, we are seeking the specific types of records that will shed more light on that.

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to go to a break and then come back to this discussion of the counting of the votes last Tuesday. This is Democracy Now!. We'll be back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman, as we continue on the issue of the electronic voting machines and the overall count in the election. Our guest are Bev Harris, author of the book, Black Box Voting, has plans to file the largest Freedom of Information Act Request in history, by seeking the internal logs from voting machines of every county that used electronic voting machines, and Aviel Rubin, professor at Johns Hopkins University, who served as an elections judge in Baltimore county on November 2 and is co-author of the report, “Analysis of the Electronic Voting System.” Professor Rubin, your assessment of what happened Tuesday.

AVIEL RUBIN: Well, I think that we have a problem now, which is that we have dug ourselves a big hole by running an election using systems that -- there's really no way to tell what's going on inside the voting machines. So, when -- I'd like to separate out all of the talk about the glitches and things not working from the idea that somebody, you know, security -- somebody may have rigged the machines or tampered with them. And I think the fact that we're using systems where it's impossible to tell is very scary. So, Bev talked about these problems that they're trying to uncover, and we have seen the news stories about problems, but what I worry about are the ones that may have happened that are totally undetectable. For example, it doesn't make bug news if a voting machine switches 5% of the votes from one candidate to another, because nobody ever knows it because we have a secret ballot in this country. I think it's very important that we move away from systems where nobody can really see what's going on inside at the time of the election. And there's no capability of doing a recount towards more verifiable, auditable systems, for example, if you had a voter verified paper ballot.

AMY GOODMAN: Why the opposition? You had the Election Monitoring Group, that the State Department brought in itself from the OSCE, the Organization of Security and Cooperation Europe. Some of their election monitors were saying that this is worse than the situation in Serbia, another one referring to the Venezuelan elections and saying, their electronic voting machines, people were given a ticket that they dropped in a box and randomly around the country, they can compare the paper trail in the boxes to the voting machines. Why is there such fierce opposition to having any paper trail, which means zero possibility of recount?

AVIEL RUBIN: I have always been very surprised that the people running elections are not jumping at the chance of having a way to recount the election. I think that, you know, the best thing would be to get one of those people on the show and ask them that question, because it doesn't make any sense it me. From the vendor's perspective, they would sell a more expensive, more feature-rich product if they could add photograph verifiable printout. I have been completely confused about why they're -- everybody is not embracing this concept.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you convinced, Professor Rubin, that President Bush won this election?

AVIEL RUBIN: I don't know. I think that as long as we use systems where you cannot really tell what's going on inside the machine -- you know, when I was an election judge, I watched people walk into the precinct, walk up to Diebold machines, vote, and walk out. And at the end of the day we printed results. And I was thinking if I had written that program that's running on those machines, I could have made any outcome that I wanted come out. So, you know, do I believe that Bush really won? Well, I don't know.

AMY GOODMAN: What about this letter, Bev Harris, that has been signed by three Congress members, including Florida Congress member Robert Wexler, John Conyers, and Gerald Nadler. Can you talk about it? We have hardly seen any reference to it.

BEV HARRIS: Well, you know, the concern I have is, we have got to go after this from all fronts. I haven't seen any reference to it in the media. I have also been told from sources that I have inside the media that are fairly high up that particularly in TV, there's been -- there is now a lockdown on this story. It is officially and from an executive producer level, let's move on time. And I am very concerned about that, because it looks like we're going to have to go to places like BBC, to get the real story out. I find it amazing that we went ahead with an election without even auditing it. You are never going to find the problems with the machines that you can quantify until you at least do the basic canvassing that's in the current election procedures, such as, comparing how many people showed up to vote with how many signatures are in this poll book with how many votes show up in the machines. They haven't even done that. And to make it even worse, Ohio, they don't even know how many provisional ballots there are. They don't know if there's 150,000 or 500,000. They don't seem to be able to tell us what records they have. This is amazing, and I knew this was going to happen. They set up this thing. They said we're going to have provisional ballots nationwide. They didn't set up any auditing for them. And so, in case after case, we're not able to account for those ballots. We ought to know, because they're cast at the precinct. We ought to know how many provision ballots we have on election night. Why wouldn't we if we have proper book keeping?

AMY GOODMAN: There's been serious questions raised about New Mexico, but does it hurt trying to find out the ultimate counts that John Kerry and John Edwards so immediately conceded, despite the fact that Edwards had said as they promised during the campaigns, making references to Al Gore squelching protests four years ago, that they would make sure that the votes were counted?

BEV HARRIS: Oh yes, they conceded very prematurely. As I was saying in Ohio, they don't even know if they won or lost in Ohio, really. They are basing this on, I think, a verbal okay from someone in the Secretary of State's office that said, that they were being assured there was only 150,000 provisional ballots. Well I said, where is the source data on that? What auditing do they have on those? They couldn't tell me. You see, I don't understand how you would concede anyway without even beginning the canvassing, because with these voting machines, we don't have adequate auditing in place, but we have some. The full auditing we have does -- it does find some anomalies that are quite big and sometimes they flip elections. So, you know, why not just wait a couple of days. The other thing I'm seeing is that in some parts the media gave a huge push to hurry, hurry, hurry, certify. This was happening in New Mexico. They're saying -- they're putting tremendous pressure on Governor Bill Richardson to hurry and certify the election. Well why? You have x-number of days to certify the election. One would think you would want it to be right, and you’d think would you want to go through and you want to check out the information. And understand, a lot of this is already election procedures. We keep saying that election procedures are what really save us from the insecure and mysterious machines, and that the election procedures would catch anomalies. Understand, that they have not done the election procedures yet in most cases. They have chosen to go ahead and call elections without doing the very procedures that they say protect the system.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us, Bev Harris, who is filing the largest Freedom of Information Act request in the history of the act, and Professor Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins University.

AVIEL RUBIN: Thanks a lot.

AMY GOODMAN: Thank you.

To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, call 1 (800) 881-2359.

The first thing Bev needs is more bandwidth. I don't know what she's working with now and what amount is needed but I do know for sure that she needs to get what's needed to keep the site operating without these untimely downtimes.

Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cf...=90&ItemID=6616
......... by Thom Hartman November 10, 2004
Common Dreams Printer Friendly Version
EMail Article to a Friend

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 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 9,676 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 http://us together.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and 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 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 The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.

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

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

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

How could this happen?

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

That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But, it's running on a Windows PC.

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

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

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

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

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

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

On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.) 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 (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann .com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."

Do We Still Have a Democracy?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/artic..._democracy.html
November 10, 2004
By Ernest Partridge, The Crisis Papers

Was the 2004 presidential election fixed?

The question is virtually absent in the mainstream, corporate media, as if it is at least impolite and at worst paranoid and delusional even to ask it. The final totals of this election are an undisputed given, and media discussion follows from this hard-core assumption. The issue of the validity of the final election returns, for the nation or for pivotal states such as Florida and Ohio, is rarely raised in the mainstream media.

Meanwhile, on the Internet, speculation as to the fairness and validity of the official vote count is active and increasing. Bev Harris' BlackBoxVoting.org has filed the most extensive Freedom of Information action in history, in an attempt to prove that fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic voting machines. And Greg Palast has proclaimed straight-out that, had all the votes been counted, John Kerry would have won Ohio, Florida, and therefore the election.

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. At 1:05 a.m. Wednesday morning, CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. (The exit polls were later combined with - and therefore contaminated by - the tabulated results, ultimately becoming a mirror of the apparent actual vote.) According to the same exit polls, Kerry 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.

Thom Hartmann reports:


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... 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.

Mark Crispin Miller writes:

[B]
[T]his election was definitely rigged. I have no doubt about it. It's a statistical impossibility that Bush got 8 million more votes than he got last time. In 2000, he got 15 million votes from right-wing Christians, and there are approximately 19 million of them in the country. They were eager to get the other 4 million. That was pretty much Karl Rove's strategy to get Bush elected.

But given Bush's low popularity ratings and the enormous number of new voters - who skewed Democratic - there is no way in the world that Bush got 8 million more votes this time. I think it had a lot to do with the electronic voting machines. Those machines are completely untrustworthy, and that's why the Republicans use them.

And finally, Mike Whitney says:


[T]ens of thousands of people who lined up for up to four hours at a time in Ohio and Florida to have their vote counted, were not standing there to endorse the aggression and suicidal policies of the current administration...

The unprecedented high turnout coupled with new registrations ( that were overwhelmingly in favor of John Kerry) suggest that there was foul play at the voting booths....

The fact of the matter is (as every reasonable person who hasn't been hoodwinked by the pageantry of election night fraud realizes) that the election was stolen again in full view of the American public. The Republican owned voting machines prevailed over exit poll projections and the will of the American people.
Of course, the Republicans and the Bush Administration deny explicitly, and the media deny implicitly (by ignoring the story), that there was any fraud whatever in the election. Defenders of the machines say that the critics of the paperless voting machines cannot prove their charges. The machines yield no direct evidence of the alleged vote tampering so instead the critics must rely on circumstantial and statistical evidence.

The defenders' response is correct: the machines produce no independent paper record of the voting, and the source codes that transmit and record the voters' selections are secret and "proprietary" – the property of the companies that build the machines and write the software codes. These are the simple facts, that both sides will agree to.

The problem for defenders of the machines is that while the critics cannot directly prove vote tampering, for the very same reasons, election officials cannot prove that the votes were cast and recorded as the voters intended.

So it comes down to this: how can we know that the software codes were not written to deliberately "throw" an election? The answer of the manufacturers, code writers and election officials is simple: "trust us." Given the circumstances just presented, it is the only answer that they can give.

In a free society, where the legitimacy of the government must reside in the consent of the governed, "trust us" is a totally unacceptable response to the citizen's demand for proof of the integrity of his vote. It is doubly unacceptable, when "trust us" is uttered by an employee of a private company, the officers of which have announced their support of a political party and of candidates whose names appear on the ballot.

And that is exactly the condition in which we find ourselves in the presidential election of 2004.

Herein, as all too few observers have noticed, is the crux of this issue: it is not the ability of the critics to prove electoral fraud, but rather the inability of the manufacturers and software programmers to prove electoral integrity.

Let us state the fundamental moral and political issue clearly and emphatically.

The citizen has no obligation to prove that his ballot is secure; the citizen has a right to be confident that his vote will be counted, as he cast it. And it is the solemn obligation of the government to secure that right.

The right of the citizen to a secure ballot is the foundation of a democratic society and the guarantee that the government rules with the consent of the governed. If that right has been violated by supporters and/or agents of the government, that government has no legitimacy.

We do not know if Election 2004 was fraudulent. But equally important, the paperless machines have made it impossible to verify that it was not fraudulent. And it is the inalienable right of a free people that their franchise be fair, accurate, transparent, and verifiable.

This, at least, we can affirm: there are disquieting indications that this presidential election, like the previous, was a fraud and that in a fair election, John Kerry would now be the president-elect.

It is unlikely that the media will raise the issue and that there will be a thorough investigation of this election. Not unless an outraged public demands such an investigation. And so, if John Kerry was fraudulently deprived of his office, and a possible majority of American voters denied the election victory that they had earned, then that crime can not be rectified after December 12, when the Electoral College finalizes the election. If the case is to be made, and if Kerry and Edwards are to assume their fairly-won offices, this must be accomplished in a mere five weeks. It is in the hands of the people.

Even Kerry supporters should hope that the election was fair, for if it was not, American Democracy is dead today, even though few Americans are willing even to contemplate that possibility. If in fact the election was rigged, and if nothing is to be done to restore the integrity of the ballot, then the Democrats might just as well save their time and money and not bother to contest the next mid-term election in 2006 and the presidential election of 2008.

The outcome of these elections will be pre-determined, as was the election just completed. The rule of the Republican party will be permanent, and independent of the consent of the governed.

And that precisely defines a tyranny.

Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics and Public Policy. He publishes the website, The Online Gadfly and co-edits the progressive website, The Crisis Papers.

Making the count... more or less
By: Ray Molzon - Staff Writer
Date Posted: November 10, 2004

The relief from the finale of our three-ring circus, commonly referred to as democratic elections, has finally hit me. Unfortunately, it appears that this election has been cursed with fraud, like so many others in recent memory. Of course most people who picked winning candidates will dismiss this notion as whiny liberals being sore losers, but there are several eyebrow-raising issues being investigated right now.

Neglecting all the dirty tricks pulled before last Tuesday, of which both Democrats and Republicans have been accused, there is evidence that suggests rigged election results from a handful of states.

Exit polls are rather accurate predictors of which candidate will carry a state, much better than pre-election polls which possess biases inherent to their methodology. If you will recall, the original exit polls had Kerry leading in both the popular and electoral votes. However, the incoming vote counts told a different story.

In a prime example of unabashed kowtowing, the media corporations proceeded to change their exit polls to match the government's numbers. It was assumed that the exit polls were wrong, and the pundits came out with all kinds of theories as to why this should happen now, when this hadn't been observed before.

Did anyone bother questioning whether the counts were wrong? Certainly not on CNN. Nor would you be told on television how relatively easy it could be to hack into the central tabulator machine that totals the votes from various precincts.

The computers that do this counting are supposed to be tested for possible flaws, performed by private corporations with no accountability to the American voter. Bev Harris' blackboxvoting.org group, which reviewed some of these testing reports, found "penetration analysis" left untested. All kinds of other nitty-gritty details are considered, but not the security of the machine running the software. It's hard to fathom why this particular issue would be given such short shrift, yet the machines were all certified regardless of any problems.

The security of these machines isn't verified, but does that necessarily imply tampering? One researcher did a statistical analysis of Florida county election results and found something rather surprising. Using the percentage of voters that are registered as Democrats or Republicans, one can find a rough estimate of the number of votes expected for Kerry or Bush in a given county.

It was found that some counties had much more Bush votes than would be expected. This happened much more consistently in counties that used paper ballots, as opposed to touch-screens. While this analysis isn't completely rigorous, it does raise the question of why such a phenomenon would be observed.

There are many more similar stories from around the nation that should make anyone with a reasonable mind ponder the probability of yet another stolen election. There is no smoking gun, and it would be rash to jump to premature conclusions. Nevertheless, both the means and the incentive exist for people in power to fudge some numbers. It actually seems more unreasonable to assume that this sort of corruption is beyond our leaders' capacities.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Article URL: www.mtulode.com/viewarticle.php?ArticleID=3794

Last update: November 9, 2004 at 8:18 PM
For some, the fat lady hasn't sung yet
Julia Malone, Cox News Service
November 10, 2004 ELECT1110

http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/5077645.html

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Sen. John Kerry conceded, President Bush declared victory and planning for the second term is well under way at the White House.

But some of the disappointed supporters of the Democratic challenger are not giving up, at least not yet. Fueled by skepticism about voting machinery and vivid memories of the election debacle in Florida four years ago, conspiracy theories are swirling on the Internet.

Activists are forming groups with names like "stolenelection2004.com" and members of "Ohio Recount 2004" are assembling to share their suspicions. On the airwaves of predominantly black radio station WAOK in Atlanta, the hot topic this week has been whether hackers rigged computer voting equipment or why the exit polls early on Election Day seemed to point to a Kerry victory.

None of the conspiracy theorists has pointed to any proof of a widespread error that might have changed the election outcome. Independent groups who monitored the voting found problems scattered around the nation but nothing decisive, and election officials have generally dismissed the Internet chatter.

Moon landing

"There are also Web sites devoted to theories that there was no landing on the moon," said James Lee, spokesman for Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. He noted that the well-lawyered Kerry campaign has not challenged the outcome.

Even so, Doug Chapin, executive director of Electionline.org, a non-partisan research group that studies the voting system, is not surprised by the dark doubts. After 2000, he said, "Any problem is going to get noticed, not matter how small."

Election Day shortcomings have provided plenty of fodder for bloggers, Internet users who run opinion and discussion Web sites. Among the glitches, a voting machine in Franklin County, Ohio, at first gave Bush more than 4,000 votes, when only 638 votes were cast. (The error was quickly corrected, after a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch called the county board of elections.)

In North Carolina, an estimated 4,500 votes were lost altogether because computer voting machines were allowed to be overloaded. And an unknown number of voters around the country have complained about problems with touch-screen machines that appeared to record a different candidate from the one the voters chose.

The group Blackboxvoting. org, founded by computer programmer Bev Harris, who works from her home from Seattle, warned before Election Day that the electronic voting systems could be easily hacked. Her Internet site alleges that it has documents that prove fraud and asks for donations to pursue the charge.

Florida anomaly

Another site, ustogether.org, uses charts of election data to suggest an anomaly because Democrats turned out in surprisingly high numbers for Bush in several Florida counties that used "optical scan" equipment, while voters in counties that used touch-screen equipment tended to vote according to their party identification.

Many of the bloggers beseech Kerry to withdraw his concession and lambaste the "mainstream news media" for failing to investigate voting irregularities.

At the watchdog group Electionline.org, Chapin said, "I am not surprised to hear that there are people who believe that Senate Kerry was 'robbed' in 2004 the same way Vice President [Al] Gore was 'robbed' in 2000." But as he surveys the allegations, he said, "I have yet to see any evidence that bears that out."

Cindy Cohn, legal director for the non-partisan tech group Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been closely following electronic voting problems, concurred that there were many problems. She said her group has questions about whether computerized machines malfunctioned in some areas and would be seeking legal authority to examine equipment in a handful of counties.

Cohn cautioned that she knows of no errors large enough to change the outcome, considering the size of the Bush margin. "We just need to sort out what the hard facts are," she said.

Don't refresh Bev's site over and over again trying to get it to work. That is just exacerbating the bandwidth problem

And please stop posting articles in their entirety that have been already posted countless times.

With all the intimidation from the neocons, It wouldnt suprise me if this administration intimidates her...look so far, tanks were sent to a protest in LA.......one of the members of this forum was visited by the cia for posting and voicing their opinion...what next? Bush wants all doubts about the election swept under the rug ....This country is not leaning towards the left or right, but towards anarchy....our country is being ripped apart, and we are standing by and allowing it to happen..the people who voted this administration in, is brainwashed, thats how Bush won the election. ..luckily there are some of us who can think on our own....I will never allow this administration do my thinking for me....hell, Bush cant think on his own, they want to control all of us just like they control him...who ever they are.

VISITED BY THE CIA? I am done here!!!!!! I dont care that much!!!!

ND - I hope you don't mind if I ignore your insane statement - as if I am supposed to be aware of all the other documents posted on this website...

maybe you can do a bibliography alphabetically by author - source and article and I'll check that before I post...

Cheers mate.

Even if they haven't been posted countless times WHICH THEY HAVE, it is rude to post entire articles like that. JUST GIVE LINKS

The CIA can visit me all they want -- we can have tea and cookies every afternoon for all I care. I'm not going to stop caring about this. Too many people have died to secure our rights for us to roll over and let ourselves be intimidated like that. Sorry, that just my opinion.

I received an email from her crew yesterday with what needs done. They're Internet server has probably just been overloaded or maybe they've been hacked again. Who knows? Maybe they called the "Patriot Act" on her and brought her down.

Unless I hear otherwise, I am going to assume that all is well and they are just being cautious.

Don't give up hope! That's what they want us to do.

She was on Air America this morning.

Not me. Too many lives are at stake here. So many great people in history died to give us the right to vote and we should not turn our backs on their memories and courageous battles.

I don't know how many of you watched the movie "Iron Jawed Angels" about Alice Paul and the brave women who stood by her (Alice Paul The excerpt below comes directly from her foundation website:[/URL]



or

The right to vote wasn't just handed to Americans. They had to fight for it.

After all, isn't this what we're teaching our children? Isn't this what is done to institute change?

ND - while I respect your request - I can't say I'll honor it until you get that bibliography up - but I do respect it - it is certainly your right to make.

FYI - I've posted over 3,000 topics since February on the Kerry site and three persons have complained of full article posts. You are the first to suggest that it is rude. Many more persons have expressed appreciation for them.

There are several reasons for full article posts other than the ease of readbility...sometimes the links disappear when articles are archived - they are also useful if a participant wants to comment on several aspects of an article - and cuts and pastes those quotes.

Best -

Now let's get back to the discussion and the fact that this is an issue of some importance...

Donachiel - I'll have to look for IJA - sounds good. Our children - our citizens need to know the truth. We have a right to feel that our votes were truly counted...

Its working fine, everythings there.

I think they ignore the point of Palast's article when they say he wrongly assumes those votes would go for Kerry. Palast I believe meant that the people intended to vote for Kerry - not that the vote would actually show up for Kerry. In addition, everything I have read suggests that the provisinal ballots were mostly from high Democratic turnout areas where challenges were made - and that most of those votes would go for kerry - has anyone heard anything different?

Going Down the Stolen Election Road?
By David Corn, The Nation
Posted on November 10, 2004, Printed on November 10, 2004
http://www.alternet.org/story/20458/

Before the vote-counting was done, the e-mails started arriving. The election's been stolen! Fraud! John Kerry won! In the following days, these charges flew over the Internet. The basic claim was that the early exit polls – which showed Kerry ahead of George W. Bush – were right; the vote tallies were rigged. Could this be? Or have ballot booths with electronic voting machines become the new Grassy Knoll for conspiracy theorists?

Anyone who questioned the integrity of the nation's voting system – before the election or after – has had good reason to do so. Electronic voting that does not produce an auditable paper trail is worrisome – as is the possibility that the machines can be hacked. The proponents of these systems claim there are sufficient safeguards. But in this election there were numerous reports of e-voting gone bad. Votes cast for one candidate were registered for another. In Broward County, Fla., software subtracted votes rather than added them. In Franklin County, Ohio, an older electronic machine reported an extra 3,893 votes for Bush. Local election officials caught that error. But when I asked Peggy Howell, one of those officials, why the mistake occurred, she replied, "We really don't know." Were these errors statistically insignificant glitches that inevitably happen in any large system? "It gives us the uneasy feeling that we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg," Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is part of the Election Protection Coalition, told Reuters. "What has most concerned scientists are problems that are not observable," David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, explained to the Associated Press. "The fact that we had a relatively smooth election ... does not change at all the vulnerability these systems have to fraud or bugs." And the 2000 fiasco in Florida demonstrated that non-electronic voting can also have serious problems, which often disproportionately affect low-income counties.

Then there's the issue of who is running the show. Only a few companies manufacture electronic voting machines. They are not transparent. They do not use open-source code. Last year, Walden O'Dell, the head of Diebold, a leading manufacturer of touch-screen machines, declared in a fundraising letter for the Ohio Republican Party that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." That hardly inspired confidence. And across the country, oversight of voting is conducted by partisan officials. In Ohio, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican and conservative activist, oversaw the voting. On his watch, the polling place for Kenyon College was equipped with only two voting machines. Yet about 1,100 people – mostly students – wanted to vote there. These voters (and you can guess whom they preferred) had to wait up to nine hours. It doesn't require much cynicism to suspect that this was no accident.

But did something more foul than minor slip-ups and routine political chicanery occur? Those who say yes – at this point – are relying more on supposition than evidence. They cite the exit polls to claim the vote count was falsified to benefit Bush. The pollsters say they oversampled women, that their survey takers were not allowed to get close enough to the polls and that Kerry supporters may have been more willing to cooperate with the pollsters than Bush backers. Impossible, huffs pollster/consultant Dick Morris: "Exit polls are almost never wrong." But Morris argues that the faulty exit polls are not a sign the vote count was off but an indication that the pollsters deliberately produced pro-Kerry results "to try to chill the Bush turnout." (Talk about conspiracy theory.) The screwy exit polls do raise questions, but they are not proof of sabotage. And left-of-center accusers have promoted contradictory theories. Many suggest Diebold and other vendors put in the fix via the paperless touch-screen machines. But other critics – including progressive talk show host and author Thom Hartmann – also point to a spreadsheet created by an activist named Kathy Dopp that shows what she considers anomalous pro-Bush results in Florida counties that used optical-scan voting, not electronic touch-screen voting. (The optical-scan machines were manufactured by Diebold and the other firms that produce the touch-screen machines.) But Walter Mebane, a Cornell professor, and colleagues at Harvard and Stanford examined this allegation of fraud and concluded that it is "baseless." They note that the counties in question are mostly in the conservative Florida Panhandle and "have trended strongly Republican over the past twelve years."

Making a different we-wuz-robbed claim, journalist Greg Palast, in an article bluntly titled "Kerry Won," contends the Democrat would have definitely triumphed in Ohio had the final tally included the uncounted ballots – by which he means 92,672 ballots that did not register a vote when run through a counting machine – and the 155,000 provisional ballots. Palast wrongly assumes that an overwhelming majority of these ballots contain votes for Kerry, who lost by 136,000 votes. Not all of the provisional ballots, however, would pass legal muster. (Ohio Democrats estimated less than 90 percent would be valid.) And more important, the 92,672 other ballots, if hand-counted, probably would not have produced a major vote gain for Kerry. After the Florida 2000 mess, I examined almost a third of the 10,500 uncounted votes in Miami-Dade County. Of those, only a few hundred contained a discernible vote. Tallying them produced merely a five-vote edge for Al Gore. It is highly improbable that the pool of uncounted and provisional ballots in Ohio could have yielded Kerry a net gain of more than 136,000 votes.

Clear away the rhetoric, and what's mainly left are the odd early exit polls (which did show Kerry's lead in Ohio and Florida declining as Election Day went on and which ended up with the current national Bush-Kerry spread), troubling instances of bad electronic voting, and curious – or possibly curious – trends in Florida. This may be the beginning of a case; it is not a case in itself. Investigative reporter Robert Parry observes, "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. Whether such a scheme is feasible, however, is another matter, since it would require penetration of hundreds of local computer systems across the country, presumably from a single remote location. The known CIA successes in cyber-war have come from targeting a specific bank account or from shutting down an adversary's computer system, not from altering data simultaneously in a large number of computers."

The skeptics – correct or not in their claims of fraud – are right to be concerned in general about the vote-counting system. Reps. John Conyers, Jerrold Nadler and Robert Wexler have asked the Government Accountability Office (formerly the General Accounting Office) to investigate the "voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election." Blackboxvoting.org – a group that has long decried electronic voting and now claims that "fraud took place in the 2004 election" – has filed Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain internal computer logs and other documents from 3,000 counties and localities, in an attempt to audit the election. The public does deserve any information that would allow it to evaluate vote-counting. Beyond that, extensive election reform is necessary. Electronic voting ought to produce a paper trail that can be examined. There should be national standards for voting systems and for verifying vote tallies. And vote counters should be nonpartisan public servants, not secretive corporations or party hacks. The system ought to be so solid that no one would have cause even to wonder whether an election has been stolen.


View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/20458/

I don't expect you to be a juggler but many of us as working mothers are required to juggle so much that sometimes we forget what is the most important thing in our life.

I'm not saying that I expect everyone to do this. Just those of us who may be out of work, trying to find work, and tired of sitting back and doing nothing but watching TV or whatever.

I appreciate full article postings because I don't want to sign up at a lot of news sites.

It seems like teh New York Times copped out totally....

November 14, 2004
MAKING VOTES COUNT
About Those Election Results

here have been a flood of reports, rumors and theories over the last 12 days about problems with the presidential election. The blogosphere, in particular, has been full of questions: Why did electronic voting machines in Ohio add nearly 4,000 phantom votes for President Bush, and why did machines in Florida mysteriously start to count backward? Why did the official vote totals for Ohio's largest county seem to suggest that there were more votes cast than registered voters? Why did election officials in yet another part of Ohio lock down the building where votes were being counted, turning away the press and public?

Defenders of the system have been quick to dismiss questions like these as the work of "conspiracy theorists," but that misses the point. Until our election system is improved - with better mechanics and greater transparency - we cannot expect voters to have full confidence in the announced results.

Electronic voting proved to be, as critics warned, a problem. There is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale. But this country should have elections in which the public has no reason to worry whether every vote was counted properly, and we're still not there. In Franklin County, Ohio, one precinct reported nearly 4,000 votes for President Bush, although the precinct had fewer than 800 voters. In Broward County, Florida election officials noticed that when the absentee ballots were being tabulated, the vote totals began to go down instead of up. Voters in several states reported that when they selected John Kerry, it turned into a vote for President Bush.

These problems were all detected and fixed, but there is no way of knowing how many other machine malfunctions did not come to light, since most machines do not have a reliable way of double-checking for errors. When a precinct mistakenly adds nearly 4,000 votes to a candidate's total, it is likely to be noticed, but smaller inaccuracies may not be. There is also no way to be sure that the nightmare scenario of electronic voting critics did not occur: votes surreptitiously shifted from one candidate to another inside the machines, by secret software.

It's important to make it clear that there is no evidence such a thing happened, but there will be concern and conspiracy theories until all software used in elections is made public. Voters who use electronic machines are entitled to a voter-verified paper trail, which Nevadans got this year, so they can be sure their votes were accurately recorded.

The outrageous decision by Warren County, Ohio, to lock down the building where votes were being counted is an extreme example of another serious problem with the elections: a lack of transparency. In some states, reporters are barred from polling places. The wild rumors about Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where the official results appeared to include an extra 90,000 votes, were a result of its bizarrely complicated method of posting election results, which is different in even- and odd-numbered years. The nation needs to develop an election culture in which officials in every part of the country automatically keep things as open - and as simple - as humanly possible.

Besides election equipment that is easy to check for error, the strongest defense against conspiracy theorists is election officials who act with openness and integrity. Here, too, the current system is at fault. Ohio and Florida, two of the key states in the election, have highly partisan secretaries of state who favored the Republicans all year in their rulings. If we want the voters to trust the umpires, we need umpires who don't take sides.


Making Votes Count: Editorials in this series remain online at nytimes.com/makingvotescount.

Saturday, November 13, 2004

Watchdogs demand vote accountability

By NEIL MODIE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Phone Bev Harris in Renton, and you might conclude that America is at the brink of an electoral Apocalypse.

"This is Bev Harris from BlackBoxVoting.org," begins the recorded voice. "First, let me say that we share your intense feelings of shock and disappointment at this betrayal of democracy, and, like you, we are determined to get it back."

No, this isn't a bitter Democrat, appalled at the outcome of the presidential election. Rather, it's the national icon of the fast-growing, multifaceted, election-integrity movement, appalled at the process that was used to count the votes.

"Black Box Voting has taken the position that fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic voting machines," BlackBoxVoting.org declares on its Web site.

Harris, 53, and her organization were among the first wave of a spreading flood of election-activist groups nationwide that fear for the security of the voting process with the advent of computerized voting.

Ellen Theisen, a software technical writer who works out of her home in Port Ludlow, co-founded VotersUnite!, another national watchdog group, in April. She did so after learning about direct recording electronic, or DRE, voting machines, which lack a voter-verified paper trail.

In Washington, DREs are used only in Snohomish and Yakima counties. King and most other counties use optical-scan ballots.

"With my background in software, it struck me as an absurd idea to trust computers with democracy," Theisen said.

"Unfortunately, to people who don't have a technical background, it makes perfect sense. ... Software is a lot less reliable than most people realize, and it requires an enormous amount of testing." Theisen and Harris are also concerned that some voting equipment used in Washington hasn't been federally certified.

Election officials here and elsewhere, however, profess relief that the 2004 election went so well, given the flood of new voter registrations, massive turnout and high number of provisional ballots.

"In any major election, you run into situations where a machine doesn't work like it's supposed to or something got programmed wrong," said John Pearson, the deputy state elections supervisor.

"The process is set up so that during the (vote) canvassing period, if a problem occurs, you find it. I've been surprised, actually, by the lack of these kinds of problems not only in this state but nationally."

While election officials say citizen scrutiny of the election process is good for democracy, they say Harris goes overboard with her dire conspiracy-theory views and largely unsubstantiated charges about election-equipment problems.

Nick Handy, Washington's election supervisor, said watchdog groups benefit the election process by "advocating diligence and good election practices," and activists like Harris "provide that kind of stimulus to election administrators."

But Harris and her group, he added, "have made a lot of claims that have not been well substantiated over time, and to the extent that those have undermined confidence in the elections system, the public policy benefits are mixed, I think."

Harris, Theisen, and like-minded others have had a busy two weeks, scouring election returns from across the nation for signs of fraud, miscounting or breakdowns.

Harris, who didn't reply yesterday to requests for comment, is the heroine of the movement, the result of her book, "Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century."

It exposed what she termed egregious security breaches in election software manufactured by some of the nation's biggest election-equipment makers. It got Harris a flood of TV appearances, speech engagements and a big spread in Vanity Fair magazine in April.

If any state has been the movement's general-election poster child it is probably Ohio, where there have been reports of spoiled ballots, software glitches resulting in excessive vote tallies, too few voting machines and other problems. In Washington, however, the hassles have mainly involved the invalidation of a number of provisional ballots.

One of Harris' big issues has been the lack of a voter-verified paper trail for DRE machines. Under rules issued by Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed, paper trails will be required in this state by Jan. 1, 2006.

Many people don't trust ballots on a computer screen instead of a piece of paper, acknowledged Pam Floyd, the secretary of state's voter registration services manager.

"The conspiracy theorists are pretty sure that somebody -- a programmer for one of the (voting equipment) vendors or for one of the elections offices -- is going to program (the voting machine) so that someone touches (the screen) for one candidate and it tabulates for another," Floyd said. But she said enough safeguards, including multiple vote-monitoring processes, have been built into the system.

Harris' group last week launched what she called "the largest Freedom of Information action in history," sending out public records requests for internal computer logs and other election equipment to 3,000 counties and townships across the country.

Harris accused King County of "profound problems with security" in the Sept. 14 primary election, in which election officials statewide had to adjust to a new primary system, although she hasn't publicly found fault with the county's administration of the general election.

"We simply disagree" with Harris' allegations about the primary, said Dean Logan, King County's director of records, elections and licensing services. "The observations and linkages she makes don't add up, ... and we feel very confident that the outcome of the primary was proper, ... and the data we have backs up the results for that election."

The secretary of state's Floyd said computerized elections might be inevitable, "but I do not believe it is going to happen quickly, and it should not. We need to take a measured approach," first adopting national standards developed independently.

"We're moving in the direction of having all of the checks and balances in place to assure folks that all the software can be trusted," she said. "Are we there yet? No."

P-I reporter Neil Modie can be reached at 206-448-8321 or neilmodie@seattlepi.com

Ohio voters tell of Election Day troubles at hearing
Sunday, November 14, 2004
Reginald Fields
Cleveland Plain Dealer Bureau
Columbus

Tales of waiting more than five hours to vote, voter intimidation, under-trained polling-station workers and too few or broken voting machines largely in urban or heavily minority areas were retold Saturday at a public hearing organized by voter-rights groups.

For three hours, burdened voters, one after another, offered sworn testimony about Election Day voter suppression and irregularities that they believe are threatening democracy.

The hearing, sponsored by the Election Protection Coalition, was to collect testimony of voting troubles that might be used to seek legislative changes to Ohio's election process.

The organizers chose Ohio because it was a swing state in the presidential election as well as the site of numerous claims of election fraud and voter disenfranchisement.

"I think a lot of us had a sense that something had deeply went wrong on Nov. 2 and it had to do with the election process and procedures in place that were unacceptable," said Amy Kaplan, one of the hearing's coordinators.

Kaplan said the hearing gave everyday citizens a chance to have their concerns placed into public record.

Both a written and video report on the hearing will be provided to anyone who wants a copy, especially state lawmakers who are considering mandating Election Day changes, Kaplan said.

Many of the voters who testified were clearly Democrats who wonder if their losing presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry, was able to draw all the votes that were intended for him.

"I call on Sen. Kerry to un-concede until there is a full count of the votes," said Werner Lange of Trumbull County, who claimed that polling places in his Northeast Ohio neighborhood had half the number of voting machines that were needed.

"This caused a bottleneck at polling stations, and many people left without voting," he said.

Others said they were testifying not on political grounds but out of concern for a suspicious election system that should be above reproach.

Harvey Wasserman of Bexley said he tried to vote absentee with the same home address he has used for 18 years but was told he couldn't because his absentee application had the wrong address.

"But the notice telling me I had the wrong address arrived at the right address," he said. "I wonder, how many of these absentee ballots were rejected for no good reason?

"My concern is not out of the outcome of the election," Wasserman said, "but that this could go on and an election could be stolen. And we simply can't have that in a democracy."

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:

rfields@plaind.com, 1-800-228-8272