Election theft update

As always, we have news on the vote theft front.

Institutionalized vote theft. You think this election was dirty? Wait until the next one. Thanks to the RNC's propaganda campaign, exit poll data will not be released on the internet until after the final tallies. And since the exit polls are "conformed" as the day progresses to the actual count, we will not see poll data unpolluted by the fraudulent e-vote data!

More propaganda about exit polls. The Washington Post once more spews nonsense on this subject. By now, you know the drill: If exit polls conflict with the announced final tallies, then exit polls are at fault.

No discussion of why the errors always undervalue the Republican vote, in state after state, election after election. No explanation as to why those errors are far more pronounced in battleground states with computerized voting. No explanation as to why exit polls are more reliable in other countries. No explanation of why international observers in other countries view exit poll disparities as evidence of vote tampering. No explanation of what other methodology can verify the compu-vote.

For an honest assessment of the exit poll mystery, see this.

Zogby. Those of you wondering what John Zogby thinks of the possibility of vote fraud -- he had called the election for Kerry on November 2 -- should see this article by Ritt Goldstein:

Zogby was concerned about the difference between some of the exit polls (surveys of individuals who have just cast ballots) and the official vote counts. "We're talking about the Free World here," he pointedly noted.

Ohio. Activist lawyers plan to contest the election the moment it is certified.

This map explains "Why recount Ohio?" A better title: "Why REVOTE Ohio?" A few examples: Although one county had a seven percent presidential undervote (ballots with no preference for president), one machine counted a mere 51 votes for president among 289 voters. In a college town in another county, students had to wait ten hours to vote because 1500 voters were serviced by only two machines. Impersonators called voters and told them to report to the wrong precincts (and we all know that Ken Blackwell was a hard-ass about getting the precincts right.) These issues add up...

Florida. Germany's respected Der Spiegel calls Florida Bush's "automated election." (Can anyone translate the article for us?) I doubt that many intelligent Europeans believe that these results are legitimate.

If you're looking for a good follow-up article on the Hout report on the pro-Bush "ghost votes" in Florida, check out the Oakland Tribune:

The UC Berkeley report has not been peer reviewed, but a reputable MIT political scientist succeeded in replicating the analysis Thursday at the request of the Oakland Tribune and The Associated Press. He said an investigation is warranted....

Still another expert on our side.

Frustrated at the lowbrow, data-poor nature of allegations of election fraud flooding the Internet, three Berkeley grad students decided to apply the tools of first-year statistics class

.Hmmm...that "lowbrow" remark may be directed at fellows such as yours truly. Well, no harm done.

They shopped their results to faculty and finally to Hout, a well-known skeptic who is chairman of the university's graduate sociology and demography group.

"Seven professors later, nobody's been able to poke a hole in our model," Mangels said. "Our results still hold up."

Hout agreed. "Something went awry with the voting in Florida."

And just in case you're deperate to spout the words "Dixiecrat" or "blue dog"...

The counties -- Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade -- were at the eye of Florida's 2000 election storm. All traded out their reviled punchcards for touch-screen voting machines sold by either Omaha-based Election Systems & Software or Oakland-based Sequoia Voting Systems.

The Kerry-Edwards campaign and allies concentrated most of their Florida effort in those three counties.

In Broward County, the students found, Bush appeared to have received 72,000 more votes than would be forecast based on Broward's past voting patterns.

The UC Berkeley study estimates that all 15 electronic-voting counties in Florida produced at least 130,733 and as many as 260,000 "ghost votes" for Bush -- votes that either weren't cast by voters or were registered for a candidate other than the one intended by the voter.

Academia: This article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch details the growing scholarly consensus that irregularities marked this election. I take issue with one statement: "None of the experts examining the returns has discovered voting anomalies significant enough to have swung the election." Much depends on the size of the "ghost vote" for Bush discovered by the Hout report -- and on whether those votes materialized out of thin air, or originally went to Kerry.

It is to laugh: A story on the upcoming Ukrainian elections included this ripe paragraph:

President Bush, called on Ukrainian authorities for a vote "free of fraud and manipulation. In a letter delivered Friday to President Leonid Kuchma, who is not seeking a new term, Bush warned said "a tarnished election, however, will lead us to review our relations with Ukraine."

My suggestion: The European Union (soon to become the world's major economic power, Bush having gutted our treasury) should review its relations with us.

Another expert offers his view. Avi Rubin, an expert on computer security issues at Johns Hopkins University, was an election judge in Baltimore County, Maryland, where he became convinced that electronic voting machines were insecure:

One of the reasons why we have election judges from both major parties at each station at the polling center is to provide checks and balances. The night before the election, there was an imbalance. Two judges from the same party had set up the machines alone, and that night, someone from the same party had access to the room where the machines were left unguarded. Why is that a problem? The Diebold Accuvote TS machines were shown to be highly vulnerable to tampering. With physical access to the machines, for example, one could change a few bytes in the ballot definition file and votes for the two major Presidential candidates would be swapped. In that case, none of the procedures we had in place could detect that votes were tallied for the wrong candidates. At the end of the election, we packed up the machines and left them in the same room with the door locked. Any malicious changes that had been made the night before could have been undone then. Each machine had a plastic seal on it, but the seal did not look like something that would be impossible to find. In fact, our supply packet contained a number of extras.

Rubin went on to write a powerful analysis of the security issues. From the abstract:

Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts. We identify several problems including unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software development processes. We show that voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal software. Furthermore, we show that even the most serious of our outsider attacks could have been discovered and executed without access to the source code. In the face of such attacks, the usual worries about insider threats are not the only concerns; outsiders can do the damage.

This paper prompted a response from Diebold, which in turn gave birth to Rubin's response to the response. Here's a taste:

In this response, we show that Diebold's arguments often miss the point, do not address many of our most serious findings, and demonstrate a considerable lack of knowledge of the technical matter, including a misunderstanding of technical terms such as "safe language," as we describe below.

Also, Diebold criticized our network-based attacks as being unrealistic since the voting machines will not be networked in practice. The Diebold code we examined contains many different configuration options, including the use of wired or wireless networks and the use of modems. Any communication, whether wired or wireless, whether over the Internet or over private phone lines, is fair game for an analysis of what can be intercepted by an intruder. If there is no such communication, only then would the Diebold system be safe against such attacks. Our paper carefully stated these assumptions, while Diebold's response blurs this distinction.

Precedents: Larry Chin's article on how Kerry "unwon" the election makes a point emphasized in this column, though perhaps not to the necessary degree: This is not the first election in which the e-vote has delivered dubious results:

The technology had a trial run in the 2002 mid-term elections. In Georgia, serviced by new Diebold systems, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called ‘amazing’ upsets, with results showing vote swings of up to 16 percent from the last pre-ballot polls. In computerized Minnesota, former Vice President Walter Mondale—a replacement for popular incumbent Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash days before the vote—was also defeated in a large last-second vote swing. Convenient ‘glitches’ in Florida saw an untold number of votes intended for the Democratic candidate registering instead for Governor Jeb "L'il Brother" Bush. A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly ‘glitched’ local election went to court to have the computers examined—but the case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the innards of America's voting machines are the ‘trade secrets’ of the private companies who make them.

Chin goes on to make a good point which he does not take far enough:

Diebold’s Walden O’Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, publicly committed himself to delivering his home state Ohio’s votes to Bush. At Diebold, the election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob’s brother, Todd, is a top executive at "rival" ES&S. The brothers were originally staked by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council For National Policy , a right-wing steering group stacked with Bush true believers. Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist Christian Reconstruction Movement , which advocates the theocratic takeover of American democracy.

The theocratic Ahmanson family still controls ES&S, although they've played some corporate games designed to hide that fact.

The Osama vote: Geraldo Rivera (not the most trustworthy source) claims that John Kerry believes that the Osama tape scared the electorate into voting for Bush. Many have offered doubts as to authenticity of that tape, in which Osama Bin Laden -- who usually references material most Americans would find obscure -- suddenly spoke in terms comprehensible to our electorate. In fact, he sounded like a speaker at the Democratic National Convention, which played directly into Bush's hands.

Those wanting to create momentum for a revote should look more closely into this angle. Further evidence that the video was fraudulent will demolish the legitimacy of the current administration.

What to do? Xymphora echoes my suggestion (made before the election) that Democrats have been taxed without representation.

Final Note: I'm tempted to turn the comments off if a certain right-winger doesn't stop spamming this blog with nonsense about a Democratic conspiracy to skew the exit polls. Anyone who has studied American history since November 22, 1963 knows that Democrats don't conspire; Republicans do. Democrats are too ornery to work together; Republicans are the Borg. As a certain Newt once put it: "If we played fair, we'd never win." If our critic can prove that his credentials outweigh those of, say, Professor Freeman, he is welcome to stay, as long as he does not commandeer the section. Otherwise -- well, the internet has no shortage of right-wing blogs; he should go thither and stay thither, there to complain about my fascist, censoring ways.