The Vote Was Hacked
Evidence Mounts That The Vote Was Hacked
by Thom Hartmann
When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.
"It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.
And evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.
The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.
While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios matched the Kerry/Bush vote, and so did the optically-scanned paper ballots in the larger counties, in Florida's smaller counties the results from the optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking - seem to have been reversed.
In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.
In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.
The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the smaller counties where, it was probably assumed, the small voter numbers wouldn't be much noticed. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.
Yet in the larger counties, where such anomalies would be more obvious to the news media, high percentages of registered Democrats equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry.
More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm.
And, although elections officials didn't notice these anomalies, in aggregate they were enough to swing Florida from Kerry to Bush. If you simply go through the analysis of these counties and reverse the "anomalous" numbers in those counties that appear to have been hacked, suddenly the Florida election results resemble the Florida exit poll results: Kerry won, and won big.
Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever since Election Day.
Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.
But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal states.
Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were rigged.
Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an article for The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.
"Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state."
He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."
Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states the election was called for Bush.
How could this happen?
On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.
That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.
"In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?"
Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer."
"So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?"
Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software.
Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.
"Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program.
But, it's running on a Windows PC.
So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel.
In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.
"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger."
They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election."
As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.
Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."
On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.)
Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide.
Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to cause people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since the networks would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry. But the networks didn't do that, and had never intended to. It makes far more sense that the exit polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that the vote itself was hacked.
And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this hit him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national office in the most-hacked swing states.
So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this story was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit polls had failed.
But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."
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If this is true - that the election has been fouled up like this - then it would bring a lot of doubt on President Bush.... but at the same time, it seems like a tinfoil hat thing, doesn't it?
I don't know if I want it to be true or not. The GOP has done equally sleezy things (registering democrats in Nevada and throwing away their registrations - it was a close state, too) but if they've really done this and they've been caught and Kerry really did win then...
I'm torn between hope it's true and hope it's false.
what is to be done? this truly made me sick to my stomach. how can this be happening and the media remains silent. if the american media doesnt cover this, someone outside the us must. hopefully it'll become big enough that it cant be ignored inside the us.
terrible.
So, if you tallied up the questionable votes, how much more would it have given Kerry? (notice that wasn't mentioned in this article)
Also, where the questionable votes happened, who was running the election there? Rep or Dem?
Did you bother to investigate even one of the questionable counties? With just a few thousand voters, it should not take more than a day or two to get down to the truth.
In the meantime, may I suggest you not publish accusations. It sounds like sour grapes to me.
The reason the mainstream media doesn't cover it, is because it is a LAUGHABLE story. If these people had hard truth and brought it to the media, they would eat it up.
The only ones being fooled are the readers who believe this crap.
Franklin County’s unofficial results gave Bush 4,258 votes to Democratic challenger John Kerry’s 260 votes in Precinct 1B, which votes at New Life Church on Stygler Road. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.
To read the whole story: http://www.dispatch.com/election/election-president.php?story=dispatch/2004/11/05/20041105-A6-01.html
Franklin County’s unofficial results gave Bush 4,258 votes to Democratic challenger John Kerry’s 260 votes in Precinct 1B, which votes at New Life Church on Stygler Road. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.
To read the whole story: http://www.dispatch.com/election/election-president.php?story=dispatch/2004/11/05/20041105-A6-01.html
There are certainly many unanswered questions but Thom Hartman is not a hack. He deserves a hearing. If initial contacts are just now taking place with the F.B.I. it is not surprising that the mainstream media is not reporting on it yet. These are accusations, the evidence is not all in. To accept or dismiss out of hand would be foolish.
The truth will prevail and the liars and manipulators will be discoverd for who they are but I fear it will be too late.
The analysis at ustogether.org is compelling. It's extremely hard to believe that all these small counties would vote so dramatically in opposition to the party registration of their citizens.
If this were the consequence of someone hacking into the central tabulator, then the vote count in the local county clerk's office would be unaffected. So it would seem that one could demonstrate this with a few phone calls to veryify the count in some of these counties, no?
I'm not torn--I want it more than anything to be false. It is much less morally wrenching to acknowledge that the majority of voters rejected my candidate than that a conspiracy to steal a presidential election has just been pulled off. The latter, if the evidence proves to be real and conclusive, would demand that we get off the internet and take to the streets. Any party which has proof that it has just been robbed cannot in good conscience send its electors to the electoral college, or send its members of Congress to participate with a criminal, treasonous party, deserves our respect or our vote.
If there is not sufficient evidence, we should drop the issue, stop whining and be wary of future elections. But if the evidence is clear and conclusive, we cannot let this drop, and this has implications that go way beyond the conventional forms of political protest that we have just gone through in the recent campaign.
I could take this more seriously if he had actually told us what the evidence was the FBI was supposed to pick up.
It is possible and looks likely it happened in Florida. 88,000 in Brower County, anyone hear of that ? If it happened there it happened in Ohio. It would be kind of easy to make up 4,000,000 or more in urban area's and red states.A freedom of information request has been filed for 30,000 of the black boxes. Can't believe a trail has been left, but if there is nothing to hide, may as well let it take it's course.
"Gray" at dailykos.com has done an analysis of exactly how many more people voted for a presidential candidate in Florida than actually, er, voted. Read it, weep, and then forward it to your favorite local reporters:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/5/18466/2846
Looking at the 2000 results by county provided here http://www.unknownnews.net/election2000.html , it looks like it is fairly consistent with the 2004 results, party registration be damned.
Looking at the 2000 results by county provided here http://www.unknownnews.net/election2000.html , it looks like it is fairly consistent with the 2004 results, party registration be damned.
I guess I'm a bit hopeless about all this. If it is true, that the Repubs are this foul, what difference does it make? It seems to me if they could get away with it in Florida with all that attention, it would only be easier here. Kerry immediately conceded. Unless there is clear proof, and we can point to irrefutable facts, what does it matter? Even if it could be proved, again I ask hopelessly, would anything change? Sorry to be so pessimistic, but I don't know how to consider this idea, the possibility that Kerry really won in a practical way.
I've come to believe so strongly, without even examining it, that the media is complicit, the supreme court is complicit. So who are our true allies?
In other words, other than for our own satisfaction and knowledge, Isn't Shrub going to give us another 4 years irregardless?
Democrat + republican= American. Why should any American whatever their party be more outraged than the other. If it's true then not one vote cast by either has any merit. If my vote is stolen this election you invite me to steal your's the next. Want common ground folks here it is. This issue should be brought to the fore-front by all american's united demanding nothing less than the truth. What is the will of the people?
"I guess I'm a bit hopeless about all this. If it is true, that the Repubs are this foul, what difference does it make?"
Are you kidding? I don't care who misguided they are, at least 95% of the GOP does not think that vote stealing is okay. Nixon had to resign and would have been thrown out of office for covering up a "third-rate burglary" that probably had no effect on Nixon's landslide. What do you think would happen if it were proved that this vote stealing really took place? There are many prominent Republicans who have spoken out against this president for policy errors. You think that they would be silent and sit on the sidelines if they saw proof of real, proved malfeasance? Even if the Democratic party's power amounts to squat (it doesn't), those with a conscience in the GOP will not go along with this if it turns out to be true.
IT MATTERS because this election is not certified until the first week of December,by the Electoral College, THAT'S WHY. That's why we have a presidential inauguration in January. If this is settled before the January inauguration, Kerry will be declared the winner and Bush will have to pack up the U-Haul (that hopefully goes straight to jail, along with Rove and company).
Thanks for posting 3 times, you triple-clickin' Texas ranger! I ought to post 4 times, then we'll see who'll be the next president! Spiders is getting uptight and frustrated. You'll see, one of these days I'll park my new cars near your house, then you'll be nervous. Your pasty multi-post cluster f*%k can't match up to my fiery analysis of you and your ilk! Once Spiders starts rollin', ain't nobody stoppin' him! You watch it, KBL!
Everyone should see this video http://www.votergate.tv/feature.html
Someone keeps hacking their site and shutting it down but they keep putting it back up.
It's a link from blackboxvoting.org
Everyone should see this video http://www.votergate.tv/feature.html
Someone keeps hacking their site and shutting it down but they keep putting it back up.
It's a link from www.blackboxvoting.org
Help America Audit
Our organization has taken the position that fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic voting machines. We base this on hard evidence, documents obtained in public records requests, inside information, and other data indicative of manipulation of electronic voting systems. What we do not know is the specific scope of the fraud.
We are working now to compile the proof, based not on soft evidence -- red flags, exit polls -- but core documents obtained by Black Box Voting in the most massive Freedom of Information action in history.
We need: Lawyers to enforce public records laws. Some counties have already notified us that they plan to stonewall by delaying delivery of the records. We need citizen volunteers for a number of specific actions. We need computer security professionals willing to GO PUBLIC with formal opinions on the evidence we provide, whether or not it involves DMCA complications. We need funds to pay for copies of the evidence.
There are certainly indications that a sting, or at least an investigation, is in play right now.
Strong indications that both Florida and Ohio would be flipped if election manipulations are rolled back. Some indication that fraud may have occurred in at least 30 states.
It's okay to use the "F" word. Fraud. You can say it in public. Pretty soon, they'll be saying it on TV. If no one else does it first, I'll be saying the "F" word on TV shortly.
Fraud.
Use the word.
It's okay, you can say it.
Bev Harris Executive Director Black Box Voting http://www.blackboxvoting.org
posted :http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2602324
You can see the votergate movie here:
http://homepage.mac.com/duffyb/nobush/iMovieTheater268.html
The media will shy away from this story unless there is some smoking gun type of evidence. It will take a couple of weeks to see if anything comes of this.
The responsible media isn't picking it up because there is no truth to it.
Nobody at Common Dreams bothered to follow up and fact check. If they had, they'd know the "Democratic Congressional candidate" who claims to have evidence of a massive national electronic hack is a serious kook. (His "theory" is that some teenagers in a Florida corrections institution used a computer there to do this). Here's his "campaign ad": http://www.walkingwithfisher.com/a/movie1/39434696069.mov
But worse, the assumption that the 4 Florida counties cited in the story constituted "evidence" of vote-hacking is about as embarrassing as they come. Anyone whose ever been to those places, anyone who's got even rudimentary knowledge or the tiniest of backgrounds on Florida demography and voting patterns, would know the folly of making that claim.
Those yellow-dog democrats in those counties have been voting Republican for years and years. All 4 counties are in rural, north Florida (one on the border of Alabama, one on the Georgia border, next door to Republican stronghold of Jacksonville). There's nothing at all unusual about the results. A quick glance at the 2000 results shows the 2004 results came in exactly as would have been expected.
Baker County - In 2000 Democrats were 83% of registered voters, in 2004 they were 69% of registered voters. Republicans moved up from 14% to 25%. 2000 -- Bush 69% / Gore 30% on 66% turnout 2004 -- Bush 77% / Kerry 22% on 77% turnout
Dixie County - In 2000 Democrats were 86% of registered voters, in 2004 they were 77% of registered voters. Republicans moved up from 10% to 15%. 2000 -- Bush 58% / Gore 39% on 44% turnout 2004 -- Bush 69% / Kerry 30% on 66% turnout
Franklin County - In 2000 Democrats were 81% of registered voters, in 2004 they were 77% of registered voters. Republicans moved up from 14% to 16%. 2000 -- Bush 53% / Gore 44% on 61% turnout 2004 -- Bush 58% / Kerry 41% on 78% turnout
Holmes County - In 2000 Democrats were 83% of registered voters, in 2004 they were 73% of registered voters. Republicans moved up from 12% to 21%. 2000 -- Bush 68% / Gore 30% on 71% turnout 2004 -- Bush 77% / Kerry 22% on 76% turnout
This should be an important lesson about taking the conspiracy theory stuff with a grain of salt, and about making assumptions about the credibility of stuff posted on sites like the one who that exercised so little journalistic integrity, and certainly by the author of this piece, who really ought to be embarrassed.
LOL, yellow dog Democrat isn't my term, it's been around politics since it was coined in 1928, referring to southern conservative Democrats who held their noses that year and voted for a northeastern liberal (New Yorker Al Smith). It was said that they'd vote for a yellow dog if that's who the Democrats ran, rather than abandoning the party-line vote.
It's an apt term to apply to all those folks who to this day haven't shed their Democratic party registration and affiliation, even as the party has abandoned them. But as you can see from the registration numbers above, they're beginning to give up on the idea the Democratic party will ever have an interest in them again, which is a major issue for the party.
A few years ago a group of conservative and moderate Democrats banded together and took up the label blue dog Democrats. They came up with the name because they felt like the liberals had choked the old yellow dogs until they turned blue.
There are plenty of people in the Democratic party who know and understand how to reconnect, but they won't be found among the ranks of those who are pulling the party off a cliff to the far left.
I am amused, anon, that you would cite the 2000 election results in Fla as a worthy standard against which to judge anything.
And this behavior from the "moral" majority....
"We cannot betray another without first betraying ourselves. Self-betrayal stems from, among other things, self-absorption. We want what we want, right or wrong. Thus, we become stuck in an emotional place where we self-justify doing wrong in order to feel right about doing what we know we ought not to do. And we usually, as Terry Warner suggests in his brilliant book 'Bonds that Make Us Free', accomplish our self-treason by making victims of ourselves; this requires falsely accusing others, or overly exaggerating our own virtues in contrast to the alleged or real weaknesses of others.
Here’s how Terry Warner views such actions: 'We betray ourselves and shift responsibility onto others by means of our accusing thoughts and feelings, we…believe it is their mistreatment of us that leads us to accuse them. This is the self-betrayer’s lie. The truth- the profound, almost world-shaking truth- is that we accuse them because of our mistreatment of them (p. 30).'"
I found this in an essay titled "Self-Betrayal is Treason" by Jim Birrell, professor of Teacher Education at Brigham Young University (http://www.meridianmagazine.com/ideas/031216progress4.html)