http://www.orlandoweekly.com/news/Story.asp?ID=4688

By Alan Waldman
Published 11/18/04

Despite mainstream media attempts to kill the story, talk radio and the Internet are abuzz with suggestions that John Kerry was elected president on Nov. 2 – but Republican election officials made it difficult for millions of Democrats to vote while employees of four secretive, GOP-bankrolled corporations rigged electronic voting machines and then hacked central tabulating computers to steal the election for George W. Bush.

The Bush administration's "fix" of the 2000 election debacle (the Help America Vote Act) made crooked elections considerably easier, by foisting paperless electronic voting on states before the bugs had been worked out or meaningful safeguards could be installed.

Crying foul this time around isn't just the province of whiny Democrats. Consider that The Wall Street Journal recently revealed that "Verified Voting, a group formed by a Stanford University professor to assess electronic voting, has collected 31,000 reports of election fraud and other problems."

University of Pennsylvania researcher Dr. Steven Freeman, in his November 2004 paper "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy," says that the odds that the discrepancies between predicted [exit poll] results and actual vote counts in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania could have been due to chance or random error are 250 million to 1. "Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature conclusion," writes Freeman, "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." Unlike Europe, where citizens count the ballots, in the United States employees of a highly secretive Republican-leaning company, ES&S, managed every aspect of the 2004 election. That included everything from registering voters, printing ballots and programming voting machines to tabulating votes (often with armed guards keeping the media and members of the public who wished to witness the count at bay) and reporting the results, for 60 million voters in 47 states, according to Christopher Bollyn, writing in American Free Press. Most other votes were counted by three other firms that are snugly in bed with the GOP.

This election is not the first suspicious venture into electronic voting. In Georgia, in November 2002, Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes led by 11 percent and Democratic Sen. Max Cleland was in front by 5 percent just before the election – the first ever conducted entirely on touch-screen electronic machines, and counted entirely by company employees, rather than public officials – but mysterious election-day swings of 16 percent and 12 percent defeated both of these popular incumbents. In Minnesota, Democrat Walter Mondale (replacing beloved Sen. Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash), lost in an amazing last-moment 11 percent vote swing recorded on electronic machines. Then, in 2003, what's known as "black box voting" helped Arnold Schwarzenegger – who had deeply offended female, Latino and Jewish voters – defeat a popular Latino Democrat who substantially led in polls a week before the election.

A RAT IS SMELLED

Realizing that the 2004 election results are suspect, many prominent people and groups have begun to demand action. Recently, six important Congressmen, including three on the House Judiciary Committee, asked the U.S. Comptroller General to investigate the efficacy of new electronic voting devices.

Black Box Voting – the nonprofit group which spearheaded much of the pre-election testing (and subsequent criticism) of electronic machines that found them hackable in 90 seconds – is filing the largest Freedom of Information Act inquiry in U.S. history. The organization's Bev Harris claims, "Fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic voting machines."

Florida Democratic congressional candidate Jeff Fisher charged that he has and will show the FBI evidence that Florida results were hacked; he also claims to have knowledge of who hacked it – in 2004 and in the 2002 Democratic primary (so Jeb Bush would not have to run against the popular Janet Reno). Fisher also believes that most Democratic candidates nationwide were harmed by GOP hacking and other dirty tactics – particularly in swing states.

The Green and Libertarian Parties, as well as Ralph Nader, are demanding an Ohio recount, because of voting fraud, suppression and disenfranchisement. Recounts are also being sought in New Hampshire, Nevada and Washington.

Although the Internet is full of stories of election fraud, and major media in England, Canada and elsewhere have investigated the story, you'll find almost nothing in the major U.S. media. "I have been told by sources that are fairly high up in the media – particularly TV – that there is now a lockdown on this story," says Harris. "It's officially 'Let's move on' time." On Nov. 6, Project Censored Award-winning author Thom Hartmann said, "So far, the only national 'mainstream' media outlet to come close to this story was Keith Olbermann, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seemed 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."

VOTE STEALING 101

Votes collected by electronic machines (and by optical scan equipment that reads traditional paper ballots) are sent via modem to a central tabulating computer, which counts the votes on Windows software. Therefore, anyone who knows how to operate an Excel spreadsheet and who is given access to the central tabulation machine can, in theory, change election totals.

On a CNBC cable TV program, Black Box Voting exec Harris showed guest host Howard Dean how to alter vote totals within 90 seconds, by entering a two-digit code in a hidden program on Diebold's election software. Harris declared, "This is not a 'bug' or accidental oversight; it is there on purpose."

A quartet of companies control the U.S. vote count. Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia and SAIC are all hard-wired into the Bush campaign and power structure. Diebold chief Walden O'Dell is a top Bush fund-raiser. According to "online anarchist community" Infoshop.org, "At Diebold, the election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob's brother, Todd, is a top executive at 'rival' ES&S. The brothers were originally staked by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council For National Policy, a right-wing steering group stacked with Bush true believers. Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist Christian Reconstruction Movement, which advocates the theocratic takeover of American democracy." Sequoia is owned by a partner member of the Carlyle Group, which is believed to have dictated foreign policy in both Bush administrations and has employed former President Bush for quite a while.

All early Tuesday indicators predicted a Kerry landslide. Zogby International (which predicted the 2000 outcome more accurately than any national pollster) did exit polling which predicted a 100-electoral vote triumph for Kerry. He saw Kerry winning crucial Ohio by 4 percent.

Princeton professor Sam Wang, whose meta-analysis had shown the election to be close in the week before the election, began coming up with dramatic numbers for Kerry in the day before and day of the election. At noon EST on Monday, Nov. 1, he predicted a Kerry win by a 108-vote margin.

In the Iowa Electronic Markets, where "investors" put their money where their mouths are and wager real moolah on election outcome "contracts," Bush led consistently for months before the election – often by as much as 60 percent to 39 percent. But at 7 p.m. CST on Nov. 2, 76.6 percent of the last hour's traders had gone to Kerry, with only 20.1 percent plunking their bucks down on Bush. They knew something.

As the first election returns came in, broadcasters were shocked to see that seemingly safe Bush states like Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina were being judged as "too close to call." At 7:28 EST, networks broadcast that both states favored Kerry by 51 percent to 49 percent.

In his research paper, Steven Freeman reports that exit polls showed Kerry had been elected. He was leading in nearly every battleground state, in many cases by sizable margins. But later, in 10 of 11 battleground states, the tallied margins differed from the predicted margins – and in every one the shift favored Bush.

In 10 states where there were verifiable paper trails – or no electronic machines – the final results hardly differed from the initial exit polls. In non-paper-trail states, however, there were significant differences. Florida saw a shift from Kerry up by 1 percent in the exit polls to Bush up by 5 percent at close of voting. In Ohio, Kerry went from up 3 percent to down 3 percent. Exit polls also had Kerry winning the national popular vote by 3 percent.

In close Senate races, changes between the exit poll results and the final tallies cost Democrats anticipated seats in Kentucky (a 13 percent swing to the GOP), Alaska, North Carolina, Florida, Oklahoma, South Dakota and possibly Pennsylvania – as well as enough House seats to retake control of the chamber.

Centre for Research on Globalization's Michael Keefer states, "The National Election Pool's own data – as transmitted by CNN on the evening of November 2 and the morning of November 3 – suggest very strongly that the results of the exit polls were themselves fiddled late on November 2 in order to make their numbers conform with the tabulated vote tallies."

How do we know the fix was in? Keefer says the total number of respondents at 9 p.m. was well over 13,000 and at 1:36 a.m. it had risen less than 3 percent – to 13,531 total respondents. Given the small increase in respondents, this 5 percent swing to Bush is mathematically impossible. In Florida, at 8:40 p.m., exit polls showed a near dead heat but the final exit poll update at 1:01 a.m. gave Bush a 4 percent lead. This swing was mathematically impossible, because there were only 16 more respondents in the final tally than in the earlier one.

FLORIDA FIASCO II

Kathy Dopp's eye-opening examination of Florida's county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered by party affiliation (http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm) suggests systematic and widespread election fraud in 47 of the state's 67 counties. This did not occur so much in the touch-screen counties, where public scrutiny would naturally be focused, but in counties where optically screened paper ballots were fed into a central tabulator PC, which is highly vulnerable to hacking. In these optical-scan counties, had GOP registrants voted Republican, Democratic registrants gone for Kerry and everyone registered showed up to vote, Bush would have received 1,337,242 votes. Instead, his reported vote total there was 1,950,213! That discrepancy (612,971) is nearly double Bush's winning margin in the state (380,952).

Colin Shea of Zogby International analyzed and double-checked Dopp's figures and confirmed that optical-scan counties gave Bush 16 percent more votes than he should have gotten. "This 16 percent would not be strange if it were spread across counties more or less evenly," Shea explains, but it is not. In 11 different counties, the "actual" Bush tallies were 50-100 percent higher than expected. In one county, where 88 percent of voters are registered Democrats, Bush got nearly two-thirds of the vote – three times more than predicted by his statistical model.

In 47 Florida counties, the number of presidential votes exceeded the number of registered voters. Palm Beach County recorded 90,774 more votes than voters and Miami-Dade had 51,979 more, while relatively honest Orange County had only 1,648 more votes than voters. Overall, Florida reported 237,522 more presidential votes (7.59 million) than citizens who turned out to cast ballots (7.35 million).

There were thousands of complaints about Florida voting. Broward County electronic voting machines counted up to 32,500 and then started counting backward. This glitch, which existed in the 2002 election but was never fixed, overturned the exit-poll-predicted results of a gambling referendum. In several Florida counties, early-morning voters reported ballot boxes that already had an unusually large quantity of ballots in them. In Florida and five other states, according to Canada's Globe and Mail, "the wrong candidate appeared on their touch-screen machine's checkout screen" after the person had voted.

Republicans have argued that the Florida counties with majority Democratic registration that voted overwhelmingly for Bush were all conservative "Dixiecrat" bastions in northern Florida, and that all the reported totals were accurate. But Olbermann demonstrated that many of these crossover states voted Republican for the first time. He poked another hole in the Dixiecrat theory when he noted that in Democratic counties where Bush scored big, people also supported highly Democratic measures – such as raising the state minimum wage $1 above the federal level.

Moreover, 18 switchover counties were not in the Panhandle or near the Georgia border, but were scattered throughout the state. For instance, Hardee County (between Bradenton and Sebring) registered 63.8 percent Democratic but officially gave Bush 135 percent more votes than Kerry. WIDESPREAD PROBLEMS

Voters Unite! detailed 303 specific election problems, including 84 complaints of machine malfunctions in 22 states, 24 cases of registration fraud in 14 states, 20 abusive voter challenge situations in 10 states, U.S. voters in 18 states and Israel experiencing absentee ballot difficulties, 10 states with provisional ballot woes, 22 cases of malfeasance in 13 states, 10 charges of voter intimidation in seven states, seven states where votes were suppressed, seven states witnessing outbreaks of animosity at the polls, six states suffering from ballot printing errors and seven instances in four states where votes were changed on-screen. In addition, the Voters Unite! website cites four states with early voting troubles, three states undergoing ballot programming errors, three states demonstrating ballot secrecy violations, bogus ballot fraud in New Mexico and double-voting for Bush in Texas.

Kerry's victory was predicted by previously extremely accurate Harris and Zogby exit polls, by the formerly infallible 50 percent rule (an incumbent with less than 50 percent in the exit polls always loses; Bush had 47 percent – requiring him to capture an improbable 80 percent of the undecideds to win) and by the Incumbent Rule (undecideds break for the challenger, as exit polls showed they did by a large margin this time).

Nor is it credible that the surge in new young voters (who were witnessed standing in lines for hours, on campuses nationwide) miraculously didn't appear in the final totals; that Kerry did worse than Gore against an opponent who lost support; and that exit polls were highly accurate wherever there was a paper trail and grossly underestimated Bush's appeal wherever there was no such guarantee of accurate recounts. Statisticians point out that Bush beat 99 to 1 mathematical odds in winning the election.

Election results are not final until electors vote on Dec. 12. There is still time to find the truth.

Alan Waldman is an award-winning journalist who lives in Los Angeles. He voted for John Kerry and Barbara Boxer.

This is a very important article. I recommend everyone copy it and keep a copy on their computer. (But don't use the copy for commercial purposes.)

I'm emailing a copy of this out on my media email distribution list. I think we should keep hammering the mainstream media so they know we SEE what they are doing here and DISAPPROVE OF THEIR LOCKDOWN.

Great article. It SHOULD be on the front page of every newspaper in the country and leading the evening news. SHOULD!

Thanks for the article.

Indeed it should and I can't believe Kerry and his people AND the DNC are ignoring all of this!!

this is wonderful you guys. At least we are starting to hear some voices out there. Don't forget to keep up your campaigning, bathroom walls, cards, writing on money. People are really starting to notice. My neighbor was asking me about it today. She doesn't have a computer so I told her all I could about the theories out there. She said she thought something was fishy too. So lets keep it up.

This is pure speculation. I am still waiting to see proof that these companies "rigged electroning voting machines and then hacked central tabulating computers"

And you wonder why the media and Kerry are not 'all over this'? It is pure tinfoil, that's why.




The Help America Vote Act was passed by Congress, was it not?



This has been thoroughly debunked that 1) it cannot be done in 90 seconds by entering a "two-digit code" - and not in 90 seconds at all, 2) this was not a "hidden program", 3) the only way this could have been done at all is if a person knew the username and password for the computer AND the computer had Microsoft Access installed on it which it likely would not have.

Oh boy! This is just a summary of what we already know. Some of it pure BS, the rest speculation. Where is the darn evidence already????

Once again: why will the real media not touch this? Because mainstream America would lynch them!!! To get real coverage, hard evidence must be found and the tinfoil induced rants need to stop....

Great article Jason! Thanks!

Where has this been debunked? I have not seen that.

Try this (not in final form yet - and no images as I will not link to one of our servers )

Bev Harris appeared on a television piece with Howard Dean showing how to ‘hack’ the GEMS software database in 90 seconds.

I am going to show that, in a real election, this simply would not be possible

First, we need to look at a real election with real data. I obtained the GEMS software and a real election database from a city election in Colorado Springs from Ms. Harris’ web site, blackboxvoting.org

We will start, the same way Bev did. By opening the GEMS software program:



After going to Gems and selection Election Summary Report, as in Ms. Harris’ example, we are shown the following report:



Note that we are going to focus on the race in District 4 where Margaret Radford is currently winning with 60.75 of the vote.

Now, the candidate we want to win is Luis “Joe” Ybarra who currently has 1422 votes to Margaret Radford’s 4760 votes. No way he is going to win without our help.

Ms. Harris would have you believe that it is then as simple as opening a single database table and swapping the two candidate’s votes. However, nothing could be farther from the truth.

Here is what would really have to happen:

If we were to simply open the SumCandidateCounter table as Ms. Harris implies, here is what we would see:



There is not a whole lot of help there. We cannot tell which candidate is which.

So, we would first have to open the Candidate table:



And, there is our guy (highlighted). What we have to remember is the KeyID, which in this case is 554.

We still cannot go into the SumCandidateCounter table as this KeyID does not appear in there, instead, we have to open the CandVGroup table:



As you can see here, I have highlighted the record with CandidateID 554 and that gives us a new KeyID of 545. Now that ID is in the SumCandidateCounter table.

So, now we can open the SumCandidateCounter table again:


Oops! Not a lot of help again. There are several races in the database and the candidates ID’s – listed under CandVGroupId – are all over the place. It would take quite some time to sift through more than 3,000 records (as noted at the bottom of the screen).

Fortunately, we know what we are doing and we run the following SQL query:

SELECT *
FROM SumCandidateCounter
WHERE
CandVGroupId = 545 AND VCenterId <> -1

That will give us only our guy’s records:


OK, now we are getting somewhere. But, again, if we follow Ms. Harris’ example, we would simply give our guy the 4760 votes. Well, that won’t work because there are 59 records with different vote amounts, so what do we do? Well, we could give him enough votes to win, but where do we put them? In Ms. Harris example, she simply changed one record, we have 59. Do we just start changing the numbers?

That would not be advisable. Why? Simple. Each record corresponds to a different ‘voting unit’ or voting machine within a voting center. It is known how many people voted in each voting center and, if we just change the numbers, we could end up having many more votes than voters in some centers. Now, we could look up how many voters voted in each voting center and figure it out that way, but doing that could take an hour or more just to give our candidate the votes needed and then we would still have to go in and remove the votes for the candidate that is currently winning.

The fastest solution to this would be to swap all of the vote totals for our candidate and the candidate that is currently winning. Again, doing this manually would take quite some time. There is no way any novice could do this.

An expert who is very well versed in SQL could write a SQL statement that would do this, but it would take 10 minutes or more if the person had the statement written out already and simply had to type it in. They would still have to go through the tables and determine the proper IDs for both candidates.
A separate program could be written and then run on the machine, but again, that would take an expert to write it and execute it. It would either have to allow the user to enter the IDs to change or would have to be able to look up the candidates by name, determine their IDs and change the numbers on its own. Either way, this is not a simple program to write.

My contention is not that the GEMS software is quite insecure if it uses a Microsoft Access database, nor is it that someone could not ‘hack’ the vote. My contention is that it is not as simple as Ms. Harris would have people believe. The example I use uses a database from a Colorado Springs city election. Take this to the level of a Presidential election and there would not be 59 records (indicated 59 voting machines), there would be thousands.

The other questions that would have to be looked at are:
1. GEMS is not limited to using a Microsoft Access database, it also has the capability to use a SQL Server database which would increase the level of security tremendously. What are the statistics of tabulators using the Microsoft Access database versus a SQL Server database?
2. Viewing the database as in Ms. Harris’ example or my example absolutely requires the Microsoft Access application to be installed. Was it installed on any tabulators and, if so, why?
3. It has also been posited that this could not be done on each tabulator as it would require too many people to gain physical access to the machine, so it would require a small group of ‘hackers’ to remotely access these machines. The problem here is that this would require either the hackers to be able to download the database file and upload an altered one, or, if Microsoft Access was installed on the server, to be able to remotely control the machine. Was there any software installed on these machines that would have allowed this? A default installation of Windows would not have any software of either of these types running.

very hard to follow without images, brossignol.

Sorry. I know. Anyone know where I could toss the images and link to them?

The problem with putting them up on any of our company servers would be a privacy issue.

So you are the source of the debunking? Sorry, but just because you can't do it doesn't mean it can't be done. Have you read the paper by Rubin et al.? Are you familiar with the statements of Mercuri and Dill? Rubin is a Professor at Johns Hopkins. Mercuri has a PhD from Harvard. Dill is a Professor at Stanford. All these folks are internationally recognized experts in the area of computer security.

No, it is not that *I* cannot do it, it is that NO ONE can do it the way that Bev Harris suggests. Now, I could write a program in a few hours that could be tossed on ANY of these machines (I wouldn't even have to know all of the ID's and stuff) and it would change everything in, likely, less than 1 second.

I have read Rubin's stuff. Some of it is interesting, much of it relies on a misunderstanding of what a real election would look like in the database as opposed to what Bev shows in her example. He knows computer security, but he doesn't know the GEMS software and database very well.

Mercuri and Dill? I don't think I have seen those. Do you have links?

On edit: but, keep in mind that THIS is not an issue of security, it is an issue of whether the votes can be manipulated the way that Bev suggests. And that assumes that 1) the security has already been breached, and 2) that Microsoft Access was installed on those machines, I really do not think it was, but I also do not have proof one way or the other.

good job Bross, but I agree with the previous post. Just cause you can't doesn't mean somebody else can't. But your time and effort are impressive to say the least you should apply for a job in the white house. You could be Condi's tech pet.

Well, I am just tossing it out there. If someone wants to prove my analysis wrong, they are welcome to try.

However, I don't believe anyone can.

AND, I do believe that if someone cannot, they certainly should not even try to say that I am wrong. I would certainly never do that to you.

Like this:

YOU: I can crack an egg in less than one second.

ME: I cannot crack an egg at all to save my life, so I cannot say you are wrong at all.

I don't crack eggs. I'm vegan. :D

Ok, then peel carrots.... but, I can peel carrots, but I am horrible in the kitchen (I have been banned for life), so I am SURE you are better than I am at it, so I will just go with whatever you say.

I think you can see what I am saying.... I hope.

Great ideas jessiegirl! This is one time I wouldn't mind a few graffitti artists pitching in to get the message out!

I am now having people approach me again asking what I know about the voter fraud... after last week being told I was a sore loser ( was ready to throw in the towel in all this... thanks for the encouragement JG BTW) .. this wasa welcomed change. My wife was at a meeting at our church last night and found out that someone else's husband was also "not letting go" of this voter fraud investigation.
We are seeing it bubble up in our local papers and in op-ed sections too.

This is such a great article.
I see that the author Alan Waldman also has the longer version of the article on his blogspace:
http://frogblog.journalspace.com/

OK, I now understand where you are coming from. So I am not going to disagree with you, but just say that I have a different interpretation of the significance of the Harris demonstration. I don't think Harris was trying to demonstrate the specific method that would be used if someone wanted to engage in vote fraud. (If I were her, I certainly would NOT do that.) I think she was trying to make people understand that while the technology and procedures used to count our votes are shrouded in secrecy, what we do know about them suggests that they are vulnerable to failure and fraud.

Were our votes counted correctly on November 2? We have no way of knowing! For me, this is the key issue.

*sits and cries*

And how do YOU know GEMS software and database very well bros ?

GOOD question. Maybe Bros is a paid blogger here working on influencing the real bloggers. Interesting that every comment he makes negates the possiblity of FRAUD.

WHO DO YOU WORK FOR BROS???

BUNK!!!

We gave "brossignol" at least 3 ways that it can be done. Read this thread to get some laughs and see who bros really is...

target='_blank'>


http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...indpost&p=26978

All you've shown is that manually exchanging votes would take too long. Thats it.

If I had the database table schemas, I could write a SQL Procedure (or with some effort, an Access Program) that could easily flip all the individual votes, machine by machine, where the votes for "our guy" was less than the votes for "the other guy" while not touching the entries where the votes for "our guy" were greater than those for "the other guy".

All I would then need to do is save that program on my PC with just the KEY_ID values missing. Then, on election night, with all the proper access and userid/passwords given to me by Blackwell or some other insider, I would simply connect, do a few quick lookups to get the KEY_IDs, plug them into my program, upload the program, run the program, delete the program, edit the Audit Log, and log off.

Cake walk.

Don't get me wrong. I think the true significance of what Bev first(??) demonstrated is just how little security there could potentially be on the GEMS database.

I have never backed off from my original opinion that the software is junk.

And, I agree, not only do we have no way of knowing if our votes were counted (I don't know if MINE was even counted), we, honestly, may never know.

I think we can certainly learn from THIS election and apply the knowledge to future elections. And I certainly believe that if anyone is found to have tampered with this election, they should be draw and quartered!!!

Simple. I got the software and database from Bev.

Right. I agree with your assessment here. That is all I was trying to prove in my overall report.

My conclusions were 1) that this simply could not be done manually the way that Bev demonstrated, and 2) that this could not have been done without someone on the inside giving the *hackers* (not really hacking if you have login access already) usernames and passwords to get in.

This could either be done via a saved SQL statement, sort of like you suggest, or a very simply program that simply runs a SQL statement. And you don't actually have to edit the audit log, because only GEMS creates entries in it and not directly accessing the database.

Absolutely cake walk, if you have the SQL statement ready and the login info for the system.

Geezus, if even the Wall Street Journal wrote an article on the widespread voter fraud, then why won't the New York Times?

I have said several times, I work for a software and web development company.

And my posts don't negate the possibility of fraud. They simply try to find the truth.

Was fraud committed? I don't know. Do you? For certain? I certainly don't.

If you know that fraud was committed then show the proof.

That is all I am saying. There is certainly speculation that fraud was committed, but there is no hard evidence. There is speculation that bigfoot exists, and UFOs, etc. I don't think we want election fraud lumped in with those sorts of things, but that is where it is right now until absolute evidence is found.

Which, of course, they would. ANYone with more than two brain cells and intending to rig an election plans for it months, even years in advance and HAS THE NEEDED STATEMENTS AND INFO ready to do the deed.

So SHE doesn't know and you do, yet she had it for longer than you.. Gotcha!

I doubt it. You haven't impressed me with your IT knowledge so far.

OK, no problem. I am with you on this.

Can we then dismiss the ideas that any group *hacked* these systems? I mean without knowing the usernames and passwords.

So if we go with the idea that, if these machines were hacked, they were done by someone who had the cooperation of the companies in question. Therefore, there MUST be a trail and THAT is the evidence that should be pursued.

Ask Bev.

I have been working with and writing software programs for more than 23 years. It doesn't take long to study a simple program like GEMS.

In a court of law, the verdict isnt dependent on facts, its dependent on the opinions of the jury (or judge in non-jury cases). Facts may influence the jury/judge (and they do), but the opinion of the people/judge is what renders the verdict, and the verdict is binding.

Im not saying we shouldnt get as many facts as humanly possible, obviously we should. But your entire freaking world revolves around facts, and that just isnt how real people think. I read an article on this board from a reputable professor that the chances of the election being fair and honest and accurate are 250 million to 1, due to the oddities being found. That is NOT evidence, yet to me and virtually all other people, that is proof the election was tampered with fraudulently. And ultimately, its only our opinions that really matter in the end.

I thought we were adults here.

We need everybody's perspective here. It should be welcomed not shunned.

I suppose I've made it on ppl's ignore lists too for asking too many questions ...or drawing "negative conclusions"

Common Ground... that's the first part... to me means for everybody... and I MEAN EVERYBODY ... to come together in a sense of unity to place principles before PERSONALITIES.

Common Sense... that's the second part.... to me means logical reasoning. Sometimes our logic is clouded by one-sided thinking. The balance in common ground is necessary.

Now, is it OK if I play in this sand box too or am I now "ignored"


yes... I'm reapeating myself..

Ken I look for everybody's perspective... inlcuding yours, activisms and Brossignol's. Take it easy.

No problem.

Occam's razor. What answer takes the fewest leaps of logic. The principle of parsimony.

Is it more likely the the universe exists, has existed and always will exist and is absolutely infinite just because, or due to the actions of a supreme being?

The "90 second" election engineering was demonstrated on a number of occasions, the first time this was demonstrated was in 2003 and then more recently before the elections.

this is not tin foil stuff.


computers are hackable and the ease of hacking and riggin with these particular machines were widely reported/demonstrated by computer engineers and software developers all over the country for nearly two years.

massive elections fraud has been a fact in the history of our "democracy" for several decades - but at no time was it ever on such a national level, at least not to our awareness previously. These machines only add to an already highly corrupted system and we must address and reform elections, by implementing strict safegaurds with a federalized system and rules.

and we have to do it NOW.

No, it is NOT tinfoil stuff.

What it is is impossible as demonstrated in a real election. That is a fact.

In fact, I would challenge anyone to take a real election database and *hack* it as demonstrated to make their chosen candidate win and not exceed the number of potential voters in any one precinct in under 90 seconds.

This election was stolen from John Kerry! B*sh and his republicanazi friends control the board of elections in key states. Ohio and Ken Blackwell are the perfect example of how a person (Blackwell) can abuse his power to swing the election. Here is a repost of an incident I posted about earlier:

In Howard County, Ohio, a judge ruled on Election Day that everyone standing in line to vote at 7:30 p.m. had to eventually be allowed inside. The order said the ruling was good for the day of Nov. 2. (You can view the order at the website below.) But maybe it didn't occur to the judge that everybody might not make it inside by midnight. At the stroke of midnight, when the calendar legally clicked over to Nov. 3, Republican Ken Blackwell, the secretary of state, told all the waiting voters to go home. His workers gave them paper ballots (i.e., provisional ballots), told them to fill them out and bring them back later.

It was an improvised move that undercut the intent of the judge's ruling,and created chaos. Many people in Howard County still haven't turned in those ballots because they don't know where to take them or what the deadline is. The only kind of ballot in a federal election that people can legally take home, fill out and turn in later is an absentee ballot, and those are marked as such. They're marked with clear rules concerning deadlines, postmarking, and so on. So an uncounted number of people in Howard County - estimated in the thousands - couldn't get in and were turned away with what may be ruled an illegal procedure. The vast majority of those votes were expected to go to Kerry based on the heavily Democratic population of Howard County.

The Democrats have filed a lawsuit. You can click on the Ohio State University law school website to read about it. (Reassemble the
following long link, if it is broken by your email browser.)

http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:pKbOJwHH7OMJ:morit...

WOW! That is the first I had heard of that!!!

Good legal move on their part I must admit. I mean, I have to be honest, I would want those kind of attorneys representing me, but geez! in this case, a good legal move is not necessarily the right thing to do!

Why would they have to hack into the voting machines to carry out the voting fraud?

What if a brand new Diabold voting machine were delivered with corrupted binaries from Diabold Inc or even better a script file that uploads diabolically wicked code into the memory from the hard disk and changes the code in memory? It is not like anyone will know what is going on without a paper trail where the voter confirms the ballot that has been printed out before it drops into the lockbox.


What if as the election day ends the software restores the binaries to clean code and removes files that give the fraud away and wipes any traces in memory? Oh yes it can be done, to wipe out the last trace the execution jumps to a legitimate part of the code that fills up a memory buffer with legitimate data.


After this stage there will be no traces of any wrongdoing and the machine cannot repeat the fraud without being hacked into, or updated with new binaries for the next election.


Remember the source code is secret, the software providers have only handed over binaries for a particular version, in case there is a scandal.

Agreed. Though it wasn't the voting machines we were referring to, but the GEMS central tabulator machines (just NT/2000 based boxes).

But you are absolutely right. That is the sort of method *I* would use. Especially one that *cleans up* after itself.

And, sure we can get our hands on the source code for GEMS, but who knows what was actually loaded.

That is why we need a 100% tamper free national voting system:


The final vote count must be officially released in conjunction with a listing of all ballots casted with their respective tracking numbers on the Internet. This way people can verify for themselves that their vote actually was included in the final vote count.

http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/03190...04fitrakis.html
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0318-02.htm

The mere fact that we are having this discussion is an indication that something is wrong with WE THE PEOPLE'S elections.

Even the fact that suspicians of Fraud are so widespread, and whether you agree or not with the data, so well documented indicates that we have lost control of the process.


We should not be having this discussion at all. Not in this day and age.

The technology exists to have secure, trusted elections. It was invented about 10,000 years ago.

Chisel and rock. Reed and papyrus. Quill and ink.

Sure, it takes a bit longer, but pen and paper backed up by the human eyeball is the most secure system there is. Low tech, affordable, but unfortunately not real quick.

But if we have to have the quick fix, the sexy tech toys to play with, at least let's make them verifiable. And secure. It can be done. Easily. Why Our Government choose to buy cheesy products is another topic in itself. But there are reputable firms out there that can make a quality product.

This is my blue print for reform, courtesy of the New York Times.

No, sorry, but I'm not dismissing anything. I admit that I know next to nothing about hacking, codes and the high level of knowledge that this would have taken. OR perhaps it didn't take anything high tech and the how of what happened is so obvious that we fail to see it right in front of us. I run a website and do my own design work, but the truth is that well over half of what you and others talk about goes right over my head.

BUT I don't have to prove anything either. I'm a voter with valid questions that deserve real answers instead of being told (yet again) that the bulge on Bush's back really isn't there and that I don't really see it. In fact, now that I think of it, that may be the best supporting argument of possible election tampering of all.

If Bush and the Republicans will lie about something as innocent as explaining the bulge that was obviously there and try to tell us that it wasn't there, then yes.......... they are going to lie about something this big. Whatever it was on Bush's back probably had a simple explanation. A bullet proof jacket. Or maybe simply a back brace. But do they tell the truth and answer a perfectly reasonable question???? No. The Republican political machine spent weeks trying to deny the obvious. So pardon me for not believing them now. If someone is gonna lie about the little stuff, then they're gonna lie about the big stuff too. And they have no right to be surprised when I stop believing a word out of their mouth.