Nov 2006 election fraud: Oregon?
author: Ecotopian Yeti
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We, Cascadians, have seen and experienced criminal and other questionable results and actions in elections in Washington State from the gubernatorial race to smaller county races throughout the state.
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We, Cascadians, have seen and experienced criminal and other questionable results and actions in elections in Washington State from the gubernatorial race to smaller county races throughout the state.
Washington gubernatorial race
 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1312302/posts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_gubernatorial_election,_2004
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/04/314880.shtml
Snohomish County
www.votersunite.org/info/SnohomishElectionFraudInvestigation.pdf
California (which included southern Cascadia) also has been the repeated target of electorial manipulation from a Halliburtonconnected governor to questionable results in local races and even the installing of Diebold machine.
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2006/07/342806.shtml
link to en.wikipedia.org
link to cbs5.com
Oregon is not democractically safe with its pride in its "vote-by-mail". ChoicePoint has been shown again and again a tool in undermining the limited democratic system that Amerikans assume as a democracy. The means as to how a vote-by-mail system could be eroded is simply throughthe means of "ghost voting". Ghost voting being "Subverting the vote casting process by recording multiple votes without voters, often called 'ghost voting'."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_fraud
ChoicePoint bought VitalChek several years ago
http://atlanta.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2002/12/02/daily7.html
https://www.vitalchek.com/whatwedo.asp
Oregon's vital records now under VitalChek control
http://www.oregon.gov/DHS/ph/chs/order/faqs.shtml
Other "ghost voter" articles:
More on the 'Stolen Election'
The emails keep pouring in. Please investigate voter fraud! Here's evidence the Republicans stole the election! We're watching YOU cover the election irregularities! A number of Americans--is the number growing?--believe George W. Bush only won the election because the voting was somehow rigged. And each day they disseminate via email what they consider to be proof--or, at the least, reasons to be suspicious. In pieces for The Nation magazine, I've noted that there is good cause to worry about the integrity of a voting system that is overseen by partisan players and that relies in part upon paperless electronic voting machines that are manufactured by companies that are led by pro-GOP executives and that refuse to reveal the computer codes they use. But I've also cautioned against declaring that the potential for abuse means the system was abused to flip the results. Exit polls that differ from reported vote counts are not necessarily proof of foul play, and statistical analyses that seem to raise questions need thorough vetting before they are waved about as signs of chicanery.
Take one of the early arguments for the "stolen election." Shortly after E Day, a former high school math teacher named Kathy Dopp sent out a chart that showed George W. Bush faring unusually well in Florida counties that used optical scan voting machines. A-ha, some folks exclaimed, this chart demonstrated the vote had been fixed. A team of political scientists led by Walter Mebane, a professor of government at Cornell, then examined the votes in these counties and found they were consistent with a years-long trend of registered Democrats in rural counties voting for Republican presidential candidates. Their findings were disputed by some "stolen election" advocates. But the Caltech/MIT Voter Technology Project released a study that reached the same conclusion as the Mebane paper. And this past Sunday, the Miami Herald published the results of its investigation of this particular voting pattern. The paper noted,
Some wondered whether Florida's tally was corrupt, with one Internet site writing: "George W. Bush's vote tallies, especially in the key state of Florida, are so statistically stunning that they border on the unbelievable."
The Miami Herald last week went to see for itself whether Bush's steamroll through north Florida was legitimate. Picking three counties that fit the conspiracy-theory profile--staunchly Democratic by registration, whoppingly GOP by voting--two reporters counted more than 17,000 ballots over three days. The conclusion: no conspiracy.
The count of optical-scan ballots in Suwannee, Lafayette and Union counties showed Bush whipping John Kerry in a region where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 3-1.
The Herald found minor differences with official results, most involving ballots that had been discarded as unreadable by optical-scan machines but in which reporters thought the voter's intent was clear.
For instance, in Union County, more than 75 percent of registered voters were listed as Democrat. The official vote count was 3,396 for Bush and 1,251 for Kerry. The Herald found 3,393 votes for Bush and 1,272 for Kerry--practically no difference. The results were the same in the other two counties. This hands-on exercise demonstrated that statistical analyses that rely on predicted outcomes based on voter registration figures can only prove so much. There's no substitute for inspecting actual evidence, such as ballots.
Of course, that's the problem when it comes to votes cast on machines that produce no physical trace of a voter's decision. After the election, three graduate students at University of California at Berkeley ran the vote counts from three heavily Democratic counties in Florida that used touch-screen voting machines--Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade--through a statistical model based on past voting patterns. They found what they call "ghost votes" for Bush--vote tallies that exceeded what could be expected given previous elections in these counties. In Broward County, the grad students maintained, Bush collected 72,000 of these "ghost votes." They pointed to electronic touch-screen voting machines as the cause of this and estimated that the fifteen e-voting counties in Florida mistakenly yielded Bush between 130,733 and 260,000 "ghost votes." This pattern, they said, did not occur in counties that used optical scan voting machines.
According to Florida's official vote count, Bush won by 381,000 votes--more than the total of these "ghost votes." Still, the grad student study has been hailed by election results skeptics as reason to believe skullduggery transpired. Yet other experts in statistics have not been persuaded. Charles Stewart III, a political science professor at MIT and researcher at the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, examined the data used by the Berkeley researchers and found what he calls "an interesting pattern." But, he told me, "it may not have anything to do with voting machines." He explained, "It is a baroque form of regression model they're using. Almost everyone I talk to says it looks like they were fishing for results. I would hope you'd find a lot of skeptics." Stewart pointed to two sets of precincts he examined in Palm Beach County. Both were heavily Democratic, one contained many African-Americans, the other set had but a few. It was the set with few black voters that shifted dramatically toward Bush, according to Stewart. And this movement, he said, may be unrelated to the e-voting machines. These precincts, he speculated, could have had more Jewish voters who shifted toward Bush this election.
Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics at Columbia University, also examined the Berkeley study and found that the statistical anomalies only were significant in two counties--Broward and Palm Beach--not all of the 15 e-voting counties. On his weblog, he notes that the Berkeley researchers "make some pretty strong causal claims which I would think should be studied further, but with some skepticism." Gelman observes, "Something unusual seems to have happened in Broward and Palm Beach counties in 2004. One possibility, as suggested by [the Berkeley researchers] is cheating." But he is quick to add, "I don't know what was going on in these counties, what else was on the ballot, etc., but an obvious alternative explanation is that, for various reasons, 3% more people in those counties preferred Bush in 2004, compared to 2000...[S]uch a swing would be unusual (at least compared to recent history), but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen!...It would make sense to look further at Broward and Palm Beach counties, where swings happened which look unexpected compared to the other counties and compared to 2000, 1996, and 1992. But lots of unexpected things happen in elections, so we shouldn't jump to the conclusion that e-voting is related to these particular surprises." (Pollster John Zogby says that he does not believe that the "election was stolen," but he concedes it was an odd result: "51 percent of the voters gave Bush a negative approval rating; 51 percent voted for him.")
The Berkeley study is no slam-dunk. And the-election-was-rigged activists are raising other issues regarding the Florida vote count. When Bev Harris, a prominent critic of electronic voting who runs www.blackboxvoting.org, showed up at the elections office of Volusia County--where Kerry won by 3,723 votes--in mid-November seeking poll tapes for the optical scan voting machines used during the election, she found a set of the poll tapes discarded in a garbage bag. Was this part of a cover-up? Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe told the Daytona Beach News-Journal that these election records were backup copies destined for a shredder. Harris and others fear there is more to the tale. And today Black Box Voting sued Teresa LaPore, the elections supervisor for Palm Beach County, to force her to turn over elections records. (The group is threatening to initiate similar lawsuits against 13 other counties in Florida and up to 80 counties in Ohio.)
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When you're done reading this article, visit David Corn's WEBLOG at www.davidcorn.com. Read recent entries on who--or what--should be the new Democratic Party chairman, billboards funded by ClearChannel that declare Bush "Our Leader," and Bush whoppers on Iraq and 9/11.
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In Ohio--where Bush's margin of victory was 136,000--much organizing has been conducted by activists who question the final tally. As of yet, there have been no statistical studies of Ohio similar to the Berkeley paper. But emailers have zapped around a chart that supposedly shows 93,000 "extra" votes were cast in various municipalities in Cuyahoga County--that is, these areas listed more votes than registered voters. As I've reported earlier, county elections officials have what sounds like a good explanation for this. They claim their software has an odd glitch that assigns absentee ballots for a group of municipalities to one of the municipalities in the group. Consequently, on the spreadsheet posted by the elections office a particular municipality can end up showing more votes than registered voters. Cuyahoga elections officials--who work in an office run by a Democrat--insist there were no "extra" votes.
A recount is set to occur in Ohio as soon as Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, a conservative republican who cochaired Bush's campaign in the state, certifies the results (which is scheduled to happen this week). The recount was requested by David Cobb and Michael Badnarik, who were the presidential candidates for, respectively, the Green Party and the Libertarian Party. The Kerry campaign has not been involved, but it is watching. [UPDATE: On November 30, the Kerry campaign asked an Ohio judge to let it join a lawsuit against Delaware County, which has been seeking to sit out the statewide recount.] The state Democratic Party, though, is supporting the recount, citing complaints from Ohio voters that they faced long lines at the polls, encountered malfunctioning machines, and never received absentee ballots. "As Senator Kerry stated in his concession speech in Boston," Ohio Democratic Party chairman Dennis White remarked, "we do not necessarily expect the results of the election to change; however, we believe it necessary to make sure everyone's vote is counted fairly and accurately."
And claiming there was "fraud and [vote] stealing" in Ohio--without detailing the charges--Jesse Jackson has asked the state supreme court to consider setting aside the election results there. Jackson has called for a "thorough" investigation of voting irregularities. There does seem to be evidence of voter suppression in Ohio--and that does merit investigation. But it is far from clear that any of the alleged suppression tactics--such as not providing Democratic precincts enough functioning voting machines--cost Kerry over 136,000 votes. Nevertheless, a coalition of public-interest outfits calling itself the Ohio Honest Election Campaign has threatened to file a lawsuit to challenge the election results, asserting that thousands of Ohioans votes were incorrectly counted or not counted. And on November 26, People for the American Way filed a lawsuit to challenge the rejection of 8,000 of 24,472 provisional ballots. RedefeatBush.com plans to bus in protesters for a rally in Columbus, Ohio, on December 4 to support the recount.
A strong case that the election was stolen--either in Ohio or Florida--still has yet to be made. Statistical arguments are not convincing without concrete evidence (or widespread support among statistical experts). When reporters looked at actual ballots in Florida they found the armchair analysts were way off in their assumptions. And a recount requested by Ralph Nader in a limited number of precincts in New Hampshire--after Bush received higher than expected vote tallies in those parts of the Granite State--found little change from the original results. KPFK, the Pacifica radio station in Los Angeles, was a bit ahead of the facts when it issued a statement on November 23 noting it was projecting that Kerry "has won the State of Ohio and thus the Presidency by a minimum electoral college count of 272 to 266."
Yet the voting system is shaky enough to warrant serious concern. The General Accountability Office was right to agree to a request from Representative John Conyers and four other Democratic House members that it investigate election irregularities in the 2004 election. According to these members of Congress, the GAO will examine the security and accuracy of voting technologies, distribution and allocation of voting machines, and the counting of provisional ballots. "All Americans, no matter how they voted, need to have confidence that when they cast their ballot, their voice is heard," the lawmakers said in a statement. Indeed. There are Bush critics who probably never will accept the November 2 results. And the systemic problems that do exist--secretive voting technologies, the opportunity for partisan hacks to engage in voter suppression--will allow these people to hang on to their worst fears and to continue to share look-at-this! emails with fellow believers (or nonbelievers). But the evidence to date is that the election results were not rigged but were produced by a flawed system.
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IT REMAINS RELEVANT, ALAS. DON'T FORGET ABOUT DAVID CORN'S BOOK, The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers). A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! An UPDATED and EXPANDED EDITION is NOW AVAILABLE in PAPERBACK. The Washington Post says, "This is a fierce polemic, but it is based on an immense amount of research....[I]t does present a serious case for the president's partisans to answer....Readers can hardly avoid drawing...troubling conclusions from Corn's painstaking indictment." The Los Angeles Times says, "David Corn's The Lies of George W. Bush is as hard-hitting an attack as has been leveled against the current president. He compares what Bush said with the known facts of a given situation and ends up making a persuasive case." The Library Journal says, "Corn chronicles to devastating effect the lies, falsehoods, and misrepresentations....Corn has painstakingly unearthed a bill of particulars against the president that is as damaging as it is thorough." And GEORGE W. BUSH SAYS, "I'd like to tell you I've read [ The Lies of George W. Bush], but that'd be a lie."
For more information and a sample, go to www.davidcorn.com. And see his WEBLOG there.
found at http://www.thenation.com/blogs/capitalgames?pid=2037
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Election Official Thwarts Recount Using Phony Vote Totals
December 14,2004 -Venice, FL.
by Daniel Hopsicker
A "mistake" made in the office of a seriously-compromised Supervisor of Election in Pinellas County whose husband is a top executive of the country's largest election services company has almost unnoticed spiked the best hope for a election recount in Florida that might have thrown a spotlight on the dark corners of the Florida election process concealing widespread systemic and system-wide vote fraud.
The office of Supervisor of Elections in Pinellas County, Deborah Clark, provided inflated totals on the YES side of the gambling initiative which were then used by state officials in the official state tally of the hotly-contested gambling initiative known as Amendment 4.
The initiative would allow casino slot machine gambling in South Florida, an outcome devoutly to be wished by owners of the spanking new $700 million Hard Rock Café Casino in Hollywood, Florida, a facility all dressed up but with currently nowhere to go.
Pinellas County voters defeated the gambling initiative by more than 17,000 votes. But the official state record says the exact opposite, the result of a "mistake" by the office of Pinellas Elections Supervisor which would have gone unnoticed, said local reports, had it not been caught by outside observers.
Advantage Hard Rock
A recount of Florida's votes on the state gambling initiative offered an opportunity to correlate what was found with what are so far just "theories" of how the Presidential election in Florida might have been stolen.
Deborah Clark provided an extra 34,000 votes on the YES side of the gambling initiative, sufficient to legally preclude what would have otherwise been a mandated recount.
Ms. Clark's performance had been questioned in press accounts before, most recently after the 2002 primary contest, when newspaper headlines read "Clark's election flubs draw fire."
Strangely, no one can said to have benefited more from the inadvertent mistake than Clark's own husband. As a longtime top executive with E S & S, the company which counts more than half the U.S. vote, Richard Clark probably had more to lose from a recount than almost anyone alive...
Should rumored anomalies surface in the recount, the fortunes of any elections firms involved would no doubt suffer.
(continued below)
"Computer Glitches" Beat John Kerry"
A recount of the gambling initiative, known as Amendment 4, election experts said, would have offered clues as to how and why 90,000 extra YES votes for gambling were recorded in Broward County, for example.
This number is almost equal to the "extra" votes for President Bush cast in Broward County which researchers say were inexplicable except through manipulated electronic vote tabulation—which were counted in the same county's tally.
Recording phony vote totals seemed a system wide and systemic problem, and only AFTER being discovered by an outside observer were the wrong totals corrected. For example, Vincent Profaci, an attorney near Orlando went to bed with Kerry way ahead in his home county of Orange.
When he woke up he discovered to his horror that Kerry had fallen inexplicably behind.
Officials excused the 34,000-vote mistake as a computer glitch.
In fact, almost every time vote fraud was discovered by election observers, it was blandly explained away as nothing but a "computer or software glitch."
Newsflash: "COMPUTER GLITCHES" beat John Kerrey in Florida.
Let's take a closer look at things like this can happen. Lets take a look at what happened in Pinellas County.
"How To Fix An Election for Dummies"
Gov. Jeb Bush appointed Deborah Clark election supervisor in Pinellas County, Florida, in May of 2000.
Trouble began almost immediately. Some of it was even funny...
For example, in the Aug. 31 2002 primary, the population of an entire small town— 12,498 voters— appeared at the polls in Hillsborough County and apparently decided not to vote in the race for state attorney.
The town cast votes in all the other contests, but not in the race for state attorney. Had there been a town-wide secret pact?
To this day no one is sure why those voters didn't vote, or if they did, what might have happened to their votes. They are "ghost votes," floating in the ether. The local papers labeled it "A Voting Mystery."
More seriously, while Deborah Clark had worked as a top official in the Pinellas Supervisor of Elections Office, her husband Richard Clark's employer Elections Systems & Software, was awarded more than $400,000 in business with the office, and was up for a lucrative contract worth as much as $15-million to sell new voting machines to Pinellas County.
Clark, who hadn't disclosed the connection, hotly denied a conflict of interest. "Neither my husband nor I would ever do anything that would compromise the integrity of the elections office, or our own personal integrity," she said.
Clark's failure to disclose that her husband was working for a voting machine company bidding for Pinellas' business, coupled with the last-minute revelation that the executive who would have managed Pinellas' elections for Sequoia Voting Systems, the company the county chose, was under indictment in Louisiana, left a bit of a sour taste.
Elections in Pinellas County have been occasions for holding your breath for several election cycles.
"A reputation for corruption to be proud of."
So when, on the day of the 2004 Presidential election, numerous anecdotes from voters in Pinellas County reported problems like voting for Kerry and having the vote register for Bush, (see "pressing Bernacker and getting Giambelluca" described in a previous story) it did not come as a tremendous shock.
Roberta Harvey, 57, of Clearwater, Fla., said she had tried at least a half dozen times to select Kerry-Edwards when she voted Tuesday at Northwood Presbyterian Church, said an Associated Press report .
"After 10 minutes trying to change her selection, the Pinellas County resident said she called a poll worker and got a wet-wipe napkin to clean the touch screen as well as a pencil so she could use its eraser-end instead of her finger. Harvey said it took about 10 attempts to select Kerry before and a summary screen confirmed her intended selection," said the account.
"Election officials in several Florida counties where voters complained about such problems did not return calls Tuesday night," reported the Associated Press on Nov. 4. And things haven't changed since.
A spokeswoman for the company that makes the touch-screen machines used in Pinellas, Palm Beach and two other Florida counties, Alfie Charles of Sequoia Voting Systems, said the machines' monitors may need to be recalibrated periodically.
Sequoia is the second-largest election services company, with roughly one-third of the voting machine market. In 1999, the Justice Department filed federal charges against Sequoia alleging that employees paid out more than $ 8 million in bribes.
Pinellas County purchased voting equipment from Sequoia worth $14 million, even after discovering that Phil Foster, a Sequoia executive, faced indictment in Louisiana for money laundering and corruption.
The Tampa Tribune stated "Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark's high praise of Sequoia Voting Systems was instrumental in the company's landing a $14 million contract with the county in 2001."
"We're from the Government. We're here to help."
Fifteen Florida counties now use touch-screen machines, including Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade. They had scurried to buy the voting machines after the Legislature outlawed punch-card balloting in the wake of the hanging chad controversy of the 2000 presidential election.
In December 2001, Broward County chose a $17.2 million touch-screen system over a pencil-and-paper system priced at no more than $5 million. Earlier that year, in May, Palm Beach County agreed to pay $14 million for touch-screens, compared with $3 million for the simpler system.
Why use electronic machines at all? Blame the Federal Government's Help America Vote Act, which authorized $3.9 billion in federal spending to help states replace punch-card and lever voting machines.
With a war and a soaring deficit, why would they want to do that?
"I have always been concerned about the undervote on electronic machines," said Rebecca Mercuri, a computer expert at Harvard University who has written extensively about voting issues. "We don't know what happens with the votes because there is no real audit of the machines."
Ah. There's the rub.
Not surprisingly, Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark wants to keep it that way...
Although she hadn't shown much concern over spending $14 million on the machines, she said that the $2 million expense of retrofitting Pinellas County's new touch screen voting machines to generate a receipt for voters which would verify how their ballots were cast was unnecessary.
The county's touch screen system, built by Sequoia Voting Systems, was safe from tampering, she stated.
"A Mechanic for Our Time"
Her assertions should be tempered by the knowledge that while Clark worked as a top official in the Pinellas Supervisor of Elections Office, her husband's employer was awarded more than $400,000 in business with the office.
Her husband, Richard Clark, isn't involved in sales," reported a sympathetic article in the St. Petersburg Times. "He installs and fixes elections machines and says he has steered clear of business in Florida."
But it is exactly these people, the ones who install and fix election machines, the so-called mechanics, who have the opportunity and expertise to rig the vote. When an election gets fixed, its almost always because mechanics got "to" the machines.
Yet the development, coming after Clark's controversial handling of the presidential election in Pinellas, raised some eyebrows this week. Some county commissioners say they weren't told about her husband's connection to the company.
It wasn't like bribing election officials was something that never happened in Tampa...
Officers of Shoup Voting Machine Co., a Sequoia predecessor, were indicted for allegedly bribing politicians in Tampa, Florida back in 1971, according to the San Francisco Business Times.
It's a job with a little bit of history... Even Clark's deputy administrator, Karen Butler, is a sister of Sandra Mortham, Florida's former secretary of state and a lobbyist for ES&S before the state Legislature.
Butler told reporters that family ties won't matter.
Clark's husband, Richard Clark, 59, is a nationally known expert in installing new voting systems.
An Insider at the Feast
He worked as a project manager for ES&S for about five years, having joined the firm when it acquired the company that previously employed him, Business Records Corp.
But Clark said he quit ES&S just before his wife was named elections supervisor because he was worried that his employment with the firm could appear as a conflict. But so far, Clark's new company, Richard A. Clark Enterprises, works for just one company: ES&S.
The selection process in Pinellas County became mired in ethical conflicts after county commissioners learned in July 2001 that ES&S had "very" close ties to Deborah Clark.
Clark had been working in Birmingham, Ala. as an independent contractor, after resigning from the company "I have nothing whatsoever to do with that decision in Pinellas County. We don't talk about anything like that," Clark told the St Pete Times. "We've been married 17 years. I love her too much to put her in any position like that."
The paper also quoted a sales executive from Sequoia Pacific, John Krizka, who said he did not think ES&S got any unfair advantage in Pinellas County.
Coming from a salesman for a competitor, this seems convincing, except that the two companies have a documented and tangled history of collusion between the two supposedly competing firms.
Then too, consider that Sequoia had paid $441,000 in a single year to Krizka, just for selling voting machines to four Florida counties. Although this might be viewed as a bit excessive, it wasn't enough for Krizka, who sued, claiming Sequoia had stiffed him on another $1.8 million.
And here's where our story begins to come full circle...
Birmingham, City of 'Mechanics'
Apparently no one noticed that when Richard Clark went to Birmingham, another Birmingham election exec, Phil Foster, was being indicted on felony bribery charges.
Phil Foster, a regional sales vice president, was allegedly involved in a conspiracy and money-laundering scheme that involved the sale of machine parts at inflated prices and kickbacks of nearly $600,000.
Pinellas commissioners were surprised when the St. Pete Times reported that Foster, a key employee for front-runner Sequoia Voting Systems, had been indicted for the elections kickback scheme in Louisiana.
"Sequoia was not involved, nor was the company charged," said the St Pete Times.
This isn't strictly true. In fact, it isn't true at all...
Testimony in Federal Court in Baton Rouge revealed that, in fact, Sequoia had engineered the complex scheme, an action which provides yet another election irony.
Pinellas Commission Chairman Calvin Harris told the Times he assumed the state had checked out the competing companies while their machines were being certified.
Not so, said Clay Roberts, director of the state's Division of Elections, who maintained that background checks were a job for counties.
So while the state of Florida was death on voting by convicted felons, there were no safeguards in place to prevent the votes from being counted by felons.
Invisible Hand Wearing a Velvet Glove
The last time a big gambling initiative was on the ballot in a Southern state, the election, in Louisiana, produced visible evidence of state-wide vote fraud.
Gambling was the burning issue on the ballot. Allegations of voting irregularity became commonplace.
We saw the invisible hand of one of the second largest elections services company, Sequoia Pacific, in action. Commissioner of Elections and former pro football player Jerry Fowler got himself in big gambling trouble at Harrah's and paid off like a jimmied slot machine for over a decade.
When big money's at stake, we learned, people looking to fix elections take off the velvet gloves.
So we paid close attention to Amendment 4, the gambling initiative on the Florida ballot. And what we found revealed that Pinellas County isn't an isolated case..
Sequoia Voting Systems also sold neighboring Hillsborough its $12-million package of touch screen voting machines, had "a computer indexing system malfunction" in the Aug. 31 primary.
That's a serious computer glitch, apparently.
Sequoia had never experienced this particular glitch., which was a doozy. A total of 118,699 people turned out to vote countywide. But somehow 125,891 voted in the race for state attorney.
That's 7,192 more votes than voters.
"All Roads Lead to Vegas"
For why this happens there's no better example than... where else? Las Vegas...
Back in 1993-94, many observers wondered why new Clark County elections chief Kathryn Ferguson would commit to what turned out to be tens of millions of dollars in expenditures to adopt Sequoia Pacific's electronic voting machines.
So determined was Ms. Ferguson to buy the Sequoia machines for Las Vegas that a former member of her elections department team stated Ferguson resorted to the simple exigency of having Sequoia Pacific's representative send a list of bid specifications designed so that Sequoia's machines were the only ones that could meet them.
This hardly seems sporting. And its definitely illegal. Asked at the time, Ferguson said she had no concern that her acceptance of a job at Sequoia Pacific might appear to be a payoff for favors rendered.
Today Kathryn Ferguson is E S & S's chief spokesman. She's good to go.
So the real question isn't "Did vote fraud affect the Presidential race?"
The real question is, "How could it not?"
Although many profess amazed and seem confused about why Democrats have been such weenies about vote fraud, this is a bipartisan scandal. And both parties know it.
When several dozen voters in six states - particularly Democrats in Florida - said the wrong candidates appeared on their touch-screen machine's checkout screen, the "Election Protection Coalition" called the problem "troubling but anecdotal."
Why are they excusing felony fraud?
State Election Commissioner Jerry Fowler, sentenced to five years in prison for taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks from voting machine contractors, could tell you...
Revelations of his bribe-taking might never have emerged except for complaints from, of all things, a Republican candidate, Woody Jenkins, narrowly beaten by Democratic Senate candidate Mary Landrieu, in an especially bad-tempered campaign.
A year-long investigation into the voting process ensued, which uncovered certain financial irregularities.
Today Woody Jenkins is out of politics.
The system rolls on...
found at http://www.madcowprod.com/12142004.html
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Democracy in Crisis - An Exclusive BRAD BLOG Interview with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
author: Brad of course
"The Republican Party, the Republican National Committee, has been using old-fashioned, Jim Crow, apartheid-type maneuvers to steal the last two national elections."
- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Democracy in Crisis - An Exclusive BRAD BLOG Interview with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
An Exclusive Interview for The BRAD BLOG as Guest Blogged by Joy and Tom Williams...
"The Republican Party, the Republican National Committee, has been using old-fashioned, Jim Crow, apartheid-type maneuvers to steal the last two national elections."
- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Recently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., (bio) , wrote the article: "Was the 2004 Election Stolen" where he examined the election fraud in Ohio that took place during the last Presidential Election. He also has written a book "Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush & His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking our Democracy". Mr. Kennedy, along with Mike Papantonio have filed a "qui tam" lawsuit against some of the voting machines companies, in an effort to save our Democracy.
I've long had a deep respect for Robert F. Kennedy for his dedicated work as an environmental advocate. Tom and I enjoyed interviewing him and were moved by his passion and dedication to our country and our Democracy. We spoke to him via phone at his office at Pace University's Environmental Litigation Clinic in White Plains, New York, which he founded, about the election of 2004. This was an experience to remember...
BRAD BLOG: In your book, "Crimes Against Nature," you said that Bush won the 2004 election because of an information deficit caused by a breakdown in our national media. You go on to say that "Bush was re-elected because of the negligence of-and deliberate deception by-the American press." Your recent article in "Rolling Stone" seems to suggest that your opinion has changed, focusing more on the fraud and deception in Ohio with the computerized voting machines. What was the most important thing that made you suspect fraud and decide to investigate the 2004 election?
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Well, my opinion hasn't changed, that the press has been negligent, and that the large amount of support for the President, and for the people that did vote for the President, that large numbers of them would not have done so, had they known the truth about his policies, and his record. You say my opinion changed, but it hasn't changed.
You know I've known this for many years, because of my anecdotal experience. I give about 40 speeches a year, in red states to Republican audiences, and I get the same enthusiastic responses from those audiences as I get from Liberal college audiences. The only difference is, is that the Republicans often say to me, "How come we've never heard this before?" I made the conclusion many years ago that there's not a huge values difference between Red State Republicans and Blue State Democrats. The distinction is really informational. 80% of Republicans are just Democrats who don't know what's going on. And my anecdotal conclusion was confirmed by a survey done immediately after the 2004 election called the PIPA report, which tested Bush supporters and Kerry supporters based upon their knowledge of current events. It found that among Bush supporters, they were widespread in its interpretations, or there were factual errors in the way that they viewed Bush's major public policy initiatives.
For example, 75% of the Republican respondents believed that Saddam Hussein bombed the World Trade Center, and 72% believed that WMD had been found in Iraq. And most of them believed that the war in Iraq had strong support among Iraq's Muslim neighbors and our traditional allies in Europe, which of course is wrong. The Democrats as a whole had a much more accurate view of those events. And then PIPA went back twice to these same people. The first time it went back to the people that had these misinterpretations, and asked them where they were getting their news, and invariably they said talk radio and FOX news. And PIPA went back a third time, and made inquiries about their fundamental values, and it did start with a string of hypotheticals:
"What if there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? What if Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with bombing the World Trade Center? What if the U.S. Invasion of Iraq had little support among Iraq's Muslim neighbors and was largely opposed by Iraq's Muslim neighbors, and by our troops and allies in Europe? Should we have still gone in?" And roughly 80% of Dem and 80% of Rep said the same thing, "We should not." And so the values were the same. It was the facts, the information, it was the access to information that was different.
BB: Are you then adding a layer of suspicion about the direct manipulation and fraudulent counting through computerized voting?
RFK JR.: That also happened, that was another factor. Our democracy is broken. Our democracy is broken because of our campaign finance system, which is just a system of legalized bribery, which has allowed corporations and the very wealthy to control the electoral results. Let me go back and say our electoral system is broken for three reasons, in three large respects: The first is our campaign finance system, which is a system of legalized bribery, and which has allowed corporations and the very rich to control the results of our electoral process. Number two is the failure of the American press and that is also a function and result of corporate control, as I showed in my book. Number three is the election system itself, which is broken. We've privatized it and allowed four large corporations to count our votes on machines that don't work.
But also the Republican party has inculcated a culture of corruption. The Republican party has adopted a strategy of denying votes to blacks and other minorities, and to other people more traditionally Democratic, suppressing Democratic vote and fraudulently expanding Republican vote. And this is happening all over the country. I would urge you to read Greg Palast's latest book, Armed Madhouse. He does for the national elections what I did for the Ohio election, which is to synthesize the information that's out there into a readable document, in which he shows exactly how this election was stolen-not just in Ohio but in many other states as well.
BB: Have any of your expert witnesses or anyone referred to some of the stringent requirements in the gaming industry which uses computerized slot machines, poker machines and so forth involving the levels of certification and disclosure of the security requirements of its vendors?
RFK JR.: Well, you see this was just another corporate boondoggle that gave the most venal mendacious corporations charge of our most sacred public trust, which is the right to vote. These corporations were making hundreds of millions of dollars. The machines, as it turns out, were manufactured by wireless companies and were just a cheap piece of junk that cost less than $100 to manufacture, and they were selling them for $2400 apiece. And they were using Jack Abramoff and other corrupt lobbyists to persuade federal officials to pass the federal act to appropriate the money and then to persuade state and local officials to purchase the defective machines.
BB: Jack Abramoff was involved in this?
RFK JR.: Oh yes. Jack Abramoff, and Bob Ney (R-Oh), the principle figure in the Abramoff scandal and he's the author of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). And Diebold contributed millions of dollars to these guys, including hundreds of thousands of dollars to Abramoff to lobby on behalf of HAVA, and to lobby states like New York and the other states, to adopt the Diebold machines.
BB: So HAVA was "created specifically to disenfranchise voters and verfication"?
RFK JR.: HAVA was written specifically to require the states to buy Diebold machines. I mean one company basically had control of the whole legislative process. That's why HAVA has a provision in it that discourages vote verification by paper ballots. Both Republicans and Democrats tried to reform the HAVA, saying of course we should have paper verification of the vote. Paper verification would allow you to go in, make your vote on the electronic machine, and you get a receipt that is a copy of who you voted for and you are allowed to examine that receipt. You deposit it in a locked box in the voting area. That way, if there's ever any question, if you need to count, you can count the papers, and see if it compares to what the machine says.
But Bob Ney fought tooth and nail against that provision because Diebold made a machine that does not provide a paper ballot. And he went so far, because Diebold contributed a million dollars to an organization that purportedly protects the rights of blind people. And in exchange for that, that organization got one of its officers to testify on Capitol Hill at the HAVA hearings, that blind people in America did not want paper ballots - voter verified ballots - because it would deprive someone of the right to vote secretly. Now the other organizations that support handicapped rights and rights of the blind, do not take that position. This was a position that that organization adopted after accepting a million dollars from Diebold. The whole operation was corrupt and now Bob Ney is going to jail for it.
BB: Also, speaking of those guys, election officials in several states, most notably Ken Blackwell in Ohio and Bruce McPherson here in the state of California, appear to be be deliberately flaunting established law and procedures as well as direct court orders, and they seem to be just "getting away with it". How can that be?
RFK JR.: Well, again, it's because of the failure of the American press. This is the most important issue in American Democracy and the press isn't covering it. So the politicians who want to fix the elections, and who want these fraudulent machines, can get away with it, don't take a position because it gets no traction in the press.
BB:: But then why didn't people like Kerry want to contest the results?
RFK JR.: You'd have to ask Kerry.
BB: Why hasn't the DNC done anything about this?
RFK JR.: You'd have to ask the DNC.
BB: We watched Howard Dean on television having a hack demonstrated to him by Bev Harris, and he doesn't seem to say anything... I guess we'll have to ask them! But there seems to have been a pattern here in the leadership of the Democratic Party... .What I was getting to in those questions was not for you to interpret the actions of the those in the DNC and so forth, but there seems to be a pattern in the leadership of the Dem Party that shies away from direct conflict in this... .
RFK JR.: The Democratic leadership on this issue has been abysmal. And particularly since this is a civil rights issue and it's a racial issue. The machines themselves are kind of a distraction because the machines are recent innovations. The Republican Party, the Republican National Committee, has been using, old-fashioned, Jim Crow, apartheid-type maneuvers to steal the last two national elections.
BB: Like in Georgia, who were trying to establish the Poll Tax again...
RFK JR.: And this has been happening all over the country. If you look at who's being denied the right to vote, on absentee ballots, on provisional ballots, it's Hispanics, it's Blacks and it's Native Americans, and the Democratic Party ought to be touting this as the biggest civil rights issue of our time. But they are ignoring it, and that really is shocking. It's shocking that the Republicans are not up in arms about this too, because this should not be a partisan issue. This is a fundamental basis of our American value system, which is representative Democracy. For a party that claims to speak for "American Values" to ignore the fact that other members of the party, that the leadership of the party is involved in an active national campaign to stop black people from voting, and to steal elections, shows the moral bankruptcy of everybody in that party!
Why aren't Republicans standing up and speaking on this issue? Why isn't Republican leadership standing up and speaking on this issue?
BB: California just recently went to Diebold machines, all over the state. If California "goes" Republican, do you think we will be able to say, ok, there's no doubt anymore?
RFK JR.: Listen: all I can say is that the Diebold machines are among the worst. They break down, they are easily hacked, Diebold uses fraudulent misrepresentations to sell the machines, and they should not be part of our voting system.
BB: Are there any plans on a national or state level to contest suspicious results this time around?
RFK JR.: They make it very difficult to contest crooked elections. Nebraska is one of several states that have now passed laws, and I believe Florida is one of those states, that prohibit counting paper ballots in votes that were originally counted by machines. The only way that you can count votes is the original way in which they were counted. And so, of course, that makes it easy to fix any election and make sure that nobody has the right to challenge it.
Many other states, including Ohio, have made it impossible for anybody to challenge an election, even if it was obviously fixed. And these kinds of initiatives are happening all over the country. Why would any state legislature vote for such a rule unless they were Republicans who felt that elections would be fixed in their favor? Why would any American vote for such a rule? It is completely anti-American and un-American. We should be encouraging Americans to vote and encouraging EVERY American to cast a vote and to make sure that every vote is counted. And both parties should be working toward that.
But instead you have a Republican party that is trying to suppress votes and trying to defraud the public. And you have a Democratic party that is like the deer in headlights. And the Democrats are never going to win another election if they don't fix this issue because they are starting out every election with a 3 million vote deficit, and those are mainly the black voters in this country and who no longer have their votes counted.
And you know, this may sound shrill, but look at the facts. And I challenge anyone who says that this is shrill and inaccurate to read Greg Palast's book, to read my article, to look at the facts, because the facts are infallible.
BB: Do you think we are going to need a reaction like they are having currently in Mexico?
RFK JR.: Well, I wish the Democratic Party had the cojones that the Mexican opposition party has! They're saying "We're not gonna stand for our elections being stolen anymore!" It's great for these (our) political leaders to stand up and say "I will gracefully concede" but what does that mean for the rest of us? We are getting stuck with these governments that are absolutely running our country into the ground.
BB: You said in your recent interview with Charlie Rose, that this is the worst Presidency we've ever had, and they've ruined our reputation in the world. So if you had your ideal President, what kind of things would he or she need to do to restore our credibility?
RFK JR.: Well the first thing we need to do is to restore American Democracy.
Number One: Fix the campaign finance system to get corporate money out of the electoral process. Corporations are a great thing for our country. They drive our economy but they should NOT be running our government because they don't want the same thing for America that Americans want. Corporations don't want democracy, they want free markets, they want profits, and oftentimes the easiest path to profits is to use the campaign finance system to get their hooks into a public official and to use that public official to dismantle the marketplace to give them monopoly control and a competitive edge and to privatize the commons-to steal our air, our water, or our public treasury, and liquidate it for private profits.
Number Two: We have to fix the press: restore journalistic ethics in this country, and that is by bringing back the fairness doctrine and strengthening the FCC. The Fairness Doctrine was abolished by Ronald Reagan in 1988, and it recognized that the airwaves belong to the public; that the broadcasters can be licensed to use them to make a profit, but they use them with the proviso that their primary obligation is to advance democracy and promote the public interest. They have to inform the public because a democracy cannot survive an uninformed public. As Thomas Jefferson said, "An uninformed public will trade a hundred years of hard-fought civil rights for a half an hour of welfare." And they will follow the first demagogue or religious fanatic that comes along and offers them a $300 tax break.
Number Three: We have to fix our electoral system so that every vote is counted. Those are the first three things that any President should do, Republican or Democrat, to restore American Democracy.
BB: Now all these state laws that are being put in place could be trumped by Congress...
RFK JR.: Of course, we should have a federal law that creates federal standards for elections. All federal elections have to be verified by paper ballots. Election officials, whose job is to ensure the integrity of federal elections, cannot simultaneously serve as campaign managers or candidates who are participating in that contest. Many states already have that rule, but Florida and Ohio do not. It's a formula for corruption!
BB: In summary, how optimistic or pessimistic are you about our ability to get our country back?
RFK JR.: Well, you know, my attitude is that I don't try to predict the future, I can only say that those of us who care about this country have to keep fighting, and whether you think you're gonna win or lose, you gotta just keep slugging and you gotta be ready to die with your boots on, because that's what our forefathers did, they started a revolution, and they put their fortunes and their lives at stake. And we need to summon the same kind of courage from our generation, and demand that kind of courage from our leadership.
BB: And we have to get that message out to the Democratic leadership as well.
RFK JR.: And that's what you guys are doing... .
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