Vote fraud -- the latest

Lots of news today. (You'll also want to read my posts below on the moneyfolk behind ES&S; they seem to have a problem with democracy.)

Bev Harris. Some extraordinary comments from Bev Harris appeared today on the Democratic Underground site. Before we get to the other links, I'll give you most of her words in one go:

I was tipped off by a person very high up in TV that the news has been locked down tight, and there will be no TV coverage of the real problems with voting on Nov. 2. Even the journalists are pretty horrified. My source said they've also been forbidden to talk about it even on their own time, and he was calling from somewhere else. He was trying to figure out how to get the real news out on vote fraud.

This is a person I've worked with off and on for nearly two years, and the voice was so somber it really bothered me.

In the comments section, she added the following:

And I heard this, from a 20-year veteran journalist:

"This needs a recall. An impeachment. It's got to be stopped."

And:

A reporter for a large newspaper said to me, "so it's really true. I knew it was true. God, I've been living in a bubble." And then he just said, "Well, it is what it is. It's just the state of media today."

That wasn't a glib last line. It was said in sort of a shellshocked way.

I have never, NEVER had journalists from the big media outlets express anything like this to me before.

Bev Harris, part 2:

and I heard something quite disgusting this morning there, regarding their apparent failure to account for provisional ballots. I knew this was going to happen -- they put in a law for provisional ballots without putting in auditing controls and some states can't seem to tell anyone how many there were.

In Ohio, the estimate is between 150,000 and 500,000. At 150k, exclusive of all the other fraud there, Bush wins. At 300k, Kerry wins. While I have heard reports of how many provisionals were received, no one can seem to specify where the records are, the source documents that back up the figures.

One political operative said "they are still coming in." (?!?!?)

Provisional ballots are cast on Election Day. There is absolutely no excuse not to know how many were cast, precinct by precinct, as of Election Night. For the secretary of state to do this kind of stonewalling is bad.

I can guess who is sending in those "late" provisional ballots and why. (Why does Ohio election supervisor J. Kenneth Blackwell allow this nonsense? See below.)

Now THAT'S turnout! Speaking of Ohio -- turnout was high in Cuyahoga County. How high was it? As much as 1160.78% in some precincts! Gosh...and I thought 100% was the ceiling...

How to do it. Tom Flocco contributes what may be the best piece yet on how to accomplish electronic vote fraud.

Britain helps Bush. This paragraph showed up on www.blackboxvoting.org:

BREAKING -- SUNDAY Nov. 7 2004: Freedom of Information requests at http://www.blackboxvoting.org have unearthed two Cyber certification reports indicating that security and tamperability was NOT TESTED and that several state elections directors, a secretary of state, and computer consultant Dr. Britain Williams signed off on the report anyway, certifying it.

Once again, Britain helps Bush.

Jeff Fisher. You may recall the previous report that Democratic candidate Jeff Fisher has declared that he has evidence that the Florida vote was hacked, and that he knows who did the hacking. (Earlier, I referred to Fisher as a "congressman," but he lost the election in his district. My apologies for the error.) Fisher calls for a national revote on his web page. He offers detailed reports of voting problems in Florida, although he still does not name names of the parties responsible on his web site (or at least what I've seen of it.) However, in this story Fisher points the finger at one Dr. Piotr Blass, a Florida senatorial candidate, as being involved with irregularities in the 2000 vote. The allegations are too detailed for summary here, and I'm unsure whether they impact the more recent election.

Ohio. This is a good story on problems with the Ohio vote.

Also in Ohio: There was highly suspicious activity by ES&S employee Joe McGinnis, who somehow got improper access to the computer that compiles the main election result in Auglaize county. Xymphora is worth quoting in this context:

The Auglaize County results in 2000 and 2004 are striking. Kerry got essentially the same amount of votes as Gore did. Bush got 3000 more votes than he got in 2000. Are we to believe that Bush received almost 100% of the extra turnout?

On to Wisconsin. A story on possible vote fraud in a Madison, Wisconsin newspaper includes this interesting paragraph:

It's troubling to Bill Hawkes, a retired A.C. Nielsen Co. statistician, that exit polls and vote totals were so far out of whack. "I've spent my whole life in marketing. The difference is clearly beyond any sampling variability. ... The community of statisticians and media experts need to not let this be dropped."

Recall when I asked for an expert opinion from a statistician? Now we have one...

Differing reactions to exit polls. Although I'm no fan of Counterpunch (or rather, no fan of Alexander Cockburn), you'll want to read this terrific piece by David Swanson. He compares the mainstream media's reaction to the exit polls used in the Venezuelan election to the American experience:

The Miami Herald ran this headline: "Find Out If Chavez Stole Vote." United Press International ran a column arguing that Carter was unqualified to criticize voting procedures in Florida because exit polls had proved him wrong in Venezuela. Carter had said that Florida's voting arrangements didn't meet "basic international requirements."

On October 17, the New York Times ran an article on the use of exit polls to identify and prevent election fraud in a number of countries. The article suggested that exit polls might play a similar role in the upcoming U.S. election.

A November 5 New York Times article, and the rest of the U.S. media's coverage after the election, sang a very different tune, building in as an unargued assumption that the November 2 exit polls had been proved wrong by the official vote counts. The Times' article sought to determine in a very "balanced" and "objective" manner exactly what went wrong with the exit polls, but not whether they were wrong or right.

The New York Post switched song books as well, running on November 3 in its online edition a column by Dick Morris demanding to know who had rigged the exit polls. Exit polls, according to Morris, cannot be off by as much as they were this time without intentional fraud.

I recall that Dick Morris piece well. The only media voices declaring the November 3 exit polls suspicious belong to right-wingers like Morris -- who argue that the polls, not the votes, were rigged. The motive, we are told, was to suppress the pro-Bush vote. Oddly, the "liberal" media refused to discuss the exit poll numbers on the air. Some suppression effort!

(And they call me a conspiracy theorist...)

Another good bit from that same column:

The Congress Members, John Conyers, Jerrold Nadler, and Robert Wexler, cited a few of the problems that have already arisen, including a machine in a single Ohio precinct awarding Bush an extra 3,893 votes, machines in North Carolina losing 4,500 votes, machines in Florida miscounting absentee ballots, and voters in both Florida and Ohio reporting machines registering votes for Bush that were intended for Kerry.

Y'know what's really unnerving? The "errors" always work to Bush's favor. That pattern tells you that these "errors" didn't happen by mistake.

Oddities. "Something zapped" the vote in a Democratic county in Indiana. Such zappage does not occur in Republican areas. Wonder why?

Someone added an extra 10,000 votes to a Republican county in Indiana.

Quite a few ballots in Florida's left-leaning Seminole county became mysteriously wet, and therefore unreadable. Purely by accident, of course.

Dominion or democracy? Bob Fritakis has telling details on the overlap between vote suppression in Ohio and Christian Dominionist groups. As we note in two posts below, the far-right Ahmanson family is the force behind ES&S, and they have definite Dominionist leanings.

Fritikis draws out attention to the Dominionist side of Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell:

Free Press reporter Marley Greiner has been tracking Blackwell's relationship with far right-wing religious forces like Biblical America and Christian dominionist groups that want to establish theocratic religious rule in America.

So -- not only do the guys who make the voting machines feel uncomfortable with the notion of democracy, now we learn that the fellow charged with running the election in Florida also has theocratic buddies.

Another blog. Brad Friedman, another California writer, is doing everything he can to turbocharge this story.

Finally, Truthout prints a good summary which contains this notable paragraph:

To believe that Bush won the election, you must also believe: That the exit polls were wrong; that Zogby's 5pm election day calls for Kerry winning Ohio and Florida were wrong (he was exactly right in his 2000 final poll); that Harris' last-minute polling for Kerry was wrong (he was exactly right in his 2000 final poll); that incumbent rule #1 - undecideds break for the challenger - was wrong; That the 50% rule - an incumbent doesn't do better than his final polling - was wrong; That the approval rating rule - an incumbent with less than 50% approval will most likely lose the election - was wrong; that it was just a coincidence that the exit polls were correct where there was a paper trail and incorrect (+5% for Bush) where there was no paper trail; that the surge in new young voters had no positive effect for Kerry; that Kerry did worse than Gore against an opponent who lost the support of scores of Republican newspapers who were for Bush in 2000; that voting machines made by Republicans with no paper trail and with no software publication, which have been proven by thousands of computer scientists to be vulnerable in scores of ways, were not tampered with in this election.