Note: I know of several more fraud indicators, starting with the delay in announcing Florida election returns, there are UK newspaper articles in which the journalist correlates the activity of the private contractor providing the computers that counted the votes to campaign contributions to Bush. I'll have more to say about this later. Note that I just spent half an hour trying to trace the original source of the following text that's been circulated around the Net. There doesn't seem to be one.
A.Lizard
forwarded from who knows where...
---A history professor from Uppsala Universitet in Sweden, called to tell me about an article she had read in which a Zimbabwe politician was quoted as saying that children should study this event closely for it shows that election fraud is not only a phenomenon of the developing world.
1. Imagine that we read of an election occurring anywhere in the third world in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former prime minister and that former prime minister was himself the former head of that nation's secret police (CIA).
2. Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote but won based on some old colonial holdover (electoral college) from the nation's pre-democracy past.
3. Imagine that the self-declared winner's victory' turned on disputed votes cast in a province governed by his brother!
4. Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of one district, a district heavily favoring the self-declared winner's opponent, led thousands of voters to vote for the wrong candidate.
5. Imagine that that members of that nation's most despised caste, fearing for their lives/livelihoods, turned out in record numbers to vote in near-universal opposition to the self-declared winner's candidacy.
6. Imagine that hundreds of members of that most-despised caste were intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under the authority of the self-declared winner's brother.
[editor's note: this is the only statement in this post that actually suggests a foriegn origin. An American observer would have added that thousands of these people were legitimately registered and denied the right to vote by officials overseeing the elections. Voting places in locations expected to favor the winner's opponents mysteriously ran out of ballots, closed early, etc.]7. Imagine that six million people voted in the disputed province and that the self-declared winner's 'lead' was only 327 votes. Fewer, certainly, than the vote counting machines' margin of error.
8. Imagine that the self-declared winner and his political party opposed a more careful by-hand inspection and re-counting of the ballots in the disputed province or in its most hotly disputed district.
9. Imagine that the self-declared winner, himself a governor of a major province, had the worst human rights record of any province in his nation and actually led the nation in executions.
10. Imagine that a major campaign promise of the self-declared winner was to appoint like-minded human rights violators to lifetime positions on the high court of that nation.
None of us would deem such an election to be representative of anything other than the self-declared winner's will-to-power. All of us, I imagine, would wearily turn the page thinking that it was another sad tale of pitiful pre- or anti-democracy peoples in some strange elsewhere.
Did you know that vote fraud is a Florida tradition?
forwarded from who knows where...
---
A history professor from Uppsala Universitet in Sweden, called to tell me
about an article she had read in which a Zimbabwe politician was quoted as
saying that children should study this event closely for it shows that
election fraud is not only a phenomenon of the developing world.
1. Imagine that we read of an election occurring anywhere in the third world in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former prime minister and that former prime minister was himself the former head of that nation's secret police (CIA).
2. Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote but won based on some old colonial holdover (electoral college) from the nation's pre-democracy past.
3. Imagine that the self-declared winner's victory' turned on disputed votes cast in a province governed by his brother!
4. Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of one district, a district heavily favoring the self-declared winner's opponent, led thousands of voters to vote for the wrong candidate.
5. Imagine that that members of that nation's most despised caste, fearing for their lives/livelihoods, turned out in record numbers to vote in near-universal opposition to the self-declared winner's candidacy.
6. Imagine that hundreds of members of that most-despised caste were intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under the authority of the self-declared winner's brother.
7. Imagine that six million people voted in the disputed province and that the self-declared winner's 'lead' was only 327 votes. Fewer, certainly, than the vote counting machines' margin of error.
8. Imagine that the self-declared winner and his political party opposed a more careful by-hand inspection and re-counting of the ballots in the disputed province or in its most hotly disputed district.
9. Imagine that the self-declared winner, himself a governor of a major province, had the worst human rights record of any province in his nation and actually led the nation in executions.
10. Imagine that a major campaign promise of the self-declared winner was to appoint like-minded human rights violators to lifetime positions on the high court of that nation.
None of us would deem such an election to be representative of anything other than the self-declared winner's will-to-power. All of us, I imagine, would wearily turn the page thinking that it was another sad tale of pitiful pre- or anti-democracy peoples in some strange elsewhere.
Would you believe that the 2000 election may have been the SECOND presidential election stolen in Florida? Would you believe that the graveyard vote is still an important part of Florida politics? Since this is from the London Guardian, the author considers this a humorous part of America's political heritage. I ain't laughing.
Would you believe that the unofficial recount in Florida done by news organizations has already shown that Gore won? Personally, I'd like to know why I have to go to a well-known London newspaper, the London Observer to get American election information. Read about it here. Note that only one county has been recounted so far, Gore's ahead by 140. (as of 12/24/2000) The Miami Herald is now projecting that when the final count is done, Gore's final tally will be 27,000 ahead of Bush.
Here's a little known story which might tell you why so many blacks wound up unable to vote in Florida this time around. Another story from the London Observer. If you're in a hurry, scroll down to the Blackout in Florida section at the end of the article.
A Blacklist Burning for Bush. More on the story coming from the UK about a Bush campaign contributor playing fast and loose with lists of "criminals" used to bar people from voting in Florida. Here's a "fair use" quote from the article: "One elections supervisor, Linda Howell of Madison County, was so upset by the errors that she refused to use the Harris/ChoicePoint list. How could she be so sure the new list identified innocent people as felons? Because her own name was on it, 'and I assure you, I am not a felon'"
Here's the latest from the US Commission on Civil Rights on ... election irregularities.
Here's some how-to advice on fixing punch card ballots, complete with pictures. Note that the "improvements" the engineer speaks of with respect to the individual punches can be implemented with a nail file and a few minutes alone with the die fixtures that hold the punches. If the ballot cards are different for each county, the "fix" would have to be done by voting machine technicians or by anybody who can arrange to be alone in a warehouse full of voting "machines" for a few hours. Also note that there are other ways to fix voting machines.
Note that it's neither desirable nor necessary to fix them all in an expected close race, even a die-hard Republican might find it suspicious if a precinct produced zero Gore votes. Or maybe not. Also note that in a typical election, the major party candidates are perhaps 5%-10% apart in the polls. This suggests that only 10% of the votes need to be manipulated in any case. In areas where one party is so dominant that the numbers are greater than 10%, it's smarter to leave bad enough alone, as manipulating much more than 10% of the vote will result in even ordinary citizens asking the kind of questions that ultimately result in Grand Jury investigations.
The state of Texas has a complete set of procedures for handling vote recounts from punch card voting machines. There were numerous complaints from the GOP that there were "no consistent procedures to handle disputed punch card ballots". It now turns out that anybody with a Web browser can find a set of what appear to be fair and comprehensive procedures for doing just that, and these procedures can readily be found at Chapter 127 of the Texas Election Code. Are manual recounts inherently flawed? Why didn't Governor Bush try to make them illegal during his term of office? Or are they a bad thing only when an honest count is practically certain to elect the other guy?
Note: I saved the file from the Texas server here because the URL is one of those database generated URLs and may change at every query. If you want to look it up yourself, go to The Texas Statutes, go to the Search for Words or Phrases link, pull the code menu down to Election Code and use chad as a keyword. It's as simple as that. As for why Bush's attorneys couldn't find it to provide a fair way to conduct a manual recount in all of Florida, I suggest you ask them.
Are you a Libertarian or Green? Remember, this kind of election fix by one major party against another is something your party is even more vulnerable to, given that "bi-partisan" supervision of the electoral process in a situation where a third party candidate has a real chance of winning may mean two groups of party hacks trying to come up with ways of disqualifying "wrong" votes.
Was the election fixed? I don't know and neither do you. However, there is sufficient evidence that election tampering may have taken place to justify a massive Federal investigation. Personally, I suspect that just about every possible method of election fraud was used from keeping "bad" voters out of the process to various kinds of machine tampering to direct manipulation at both the physical ballot tabulation level through the computers used to do the state-level tallies, and that the reason why the election was close was that these efforts were completely uncoordinated by people who weren't exactly reading off out the same playbook. Election fraud as Bavarian fire drill, or if you prefer, election fraud implemented as a clusterfuck. (in military parlance, a confused, uncoordinated, and self-destructive operation) Of course, we may need United Nations observers to oversee any kind of a real investigation, given the partisan nature of any inquiries into this mess so far.
Check out Votescam for interesting things to think about. For the record, I suspect that much of what's there is true, but their aim at the media projections is misdirected. As for their success in tracking down vote fraud in Dade County in that election of a few years ago, I'll merely note that Florida has an international reputation for election fraud, and that the Miami Herald is financing some of the unofficial recounts. Election rigging in Florida is common knowledge among long-time state residents.
Many of the right-wing sites discussing the probability of election fraud were discussing it in the context of the 'evil' Democrats trying to steal the election for Gore. The amusing irony is that they're still discussing this. The funniest part is that the interesting facts they've uncovered do point at fraud, and when they realize this, I'm expecting a lot of pages at places like Freedom Forum to abruptly disappear. So if you've been inspired by this to do your own investigation, I suggest saving to disk along with a note of the original URL any interesting pages you find and not being surprised if the URLs disappear later. Also note that copies of many pages that no longer exist can be found in the Google cache files. If you find something there, grab those too, lest they disappear in a cache purge later.
I plan to have more about the interesting aspects of the handful of private corporations operating in murky secrecy which state and local governments contract vote counting to in various ways later. I'll simply say that there should be nothing proprietary about honest vote counting procedures, whether implemented manually or via computer. This isn't rocket science. It should be possible for any second year computer science student to write workable vote tallying software regardless of the ballot media and electronic hardware used to process it. The content of any software used for counting votes should be available for public review, since this is public business by definition. Any personal computer available is capable of counting to 300 million. What is going on here?
Anybody who is trying to keep this sort of thing secret is automatically admitting that there are things he doesn't want the public to know that are public business by definition. Why are governments buying vote counting software and equipment from a handful of companies like Election Systems and Software (ES&S)? Does their equipment do a "better" job? Better for who? I somehow doubt that the "who" in this case is the taxpaying general public. As for scanning optically marked ballots, any school student is familiar with the "scantron" forms used in multiple choice tests. Most school districts have the machines to tally the results from this kind of form. There are lots of places to get cheap one-shot disposable pencils for marking this kind of ballot.
I will say that anybody who says that "proprietary", "secret" procedures are required to insure vote integrity is either a liar or a fool. Encryption and digital signatures were at the point where ballot information can be digitally signed and transmitted over public networks years ago. There are methods for digitally signing the components of a program, i.e. one used to count votes which can insure that a publically reviewed source code for counting that passed public review is in fact the same one that's being used to count votes.
Here is a discussion of CES , one of the major election services vendors during the early 1980s from RISKS Digest . Unlike the political extremist to semi-extremist fringie sites where I've seen previous discussion of systematic massive vote fraud, RISKS (available as Usenet comp.risks) is the most reputable online publications on public risks from computerized equipment in existence. This is from 1986. The interesting part is that these statements never made it into mainstream media and this software is still considered company secret. What's so secret about their software? Here's another RISKS posting about BRC (formerly CES) from 1988.
Note: The BRC technology is now being sold by Sequoia Pacific Systems. (now owned by the same company as owns ES&S)
interview with William Rouverol, co-inventor of the punchcard voting machine. Interesting quote: "I can see why there's a pretty good reason why the Republicans are so concerned about the hand recount," he said. "It sounds to me that the glitch is in the programming, not the butterfly ballot. Whether it's purposeful or accidental, I'm not prepared to say."
Read this explanation of an electoral screwup that happened using Microvote voting equipment posted by a Microvote official on RISKS. Good and believable explanation. My hardware background says that the causes discussed by this gentleman would indeed explain the problems; everybody makes assembly mistakes once in a while, and the fact that someone in the company takes his job seriously enough to read RISKS says good things about the company. Relevance: some Microvote equipment got used in Florida on the day of infamy.
So far, my research has led me into the hall of mirrors. . . I'm fairly confused at this point as to whether or not the private vendors who provide the facilities for actual vote counting were deliberately and consciously involved in voter fraud.
Here's what Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility has to say about this. They're also reputable to the boring point. Their analysis confirms earlier statements about unverifiable proprietary software and procedures used by companies like ES&S and other major players in the election business, and they state that in effect, any results that come from equipment from the major vendors has to be taken on faith.
You can find an interesting analysis of a Missouri election that went sour here. In that analysis you'll find a history of mergers within the election tabulation industry. The interesting part is that apparently, ES&S (which describes itself as privately owned) and Sequoia are effectively the same company, the company that owns both is called Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) of Dallas, TX. They are apparently also a major player in providing technology services to the US court system, USPS, DOT, FCC, the US Senate, the White House, and several other government agencies. I use "apparently" because I haven't had time to sit down and verify through public record the corporate transfers described in the above page.
What does this mean? It's an interesting concentration of power. If one controls the datastream of an organization, one has a great deal of knowledge of what it's really doing. Actually, in this case, it would be interesting to know the relationship between ACS and the GOP and/or the Bush family.
ES&S is the largest election services and equipment vendor in the world. I saw a statement that says they count votes in 60% in US precincts. Apparently, we aren't the only country that may have had problems with ES&S. Column Democracy teeters on the brink in Peru. This discusses the reelection of Fujimori in an election widely believed to be fraudulent. ES&S provided the equipment. Note that Fujimori is believed to be friendly to US corporate interests.
There's one conclusion I've come to. It is time for publically reviewed open source electoral software to come into universal use in the election process. Nothing else is or can be good enough. Proprietary software and procedures means that we are putting our votes in the hands of companies are saying "Trust Us". In a democracy, nobody can be considered worthy of that kind of trust.