BackTalker1

BackTalking is what always got me in trouble throughout life, so it would seem to be a good theme for a first blog. It's also part of the title of my public access show.

Maybe Americans AREN'T that stupid...

Published  on Saturday, November 6, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
  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 some believe
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.
 Also  See:

Florida  Secretary of State Presidential Results by County  11/02/2004
(.pdf) <http://election.dos.state.fl.us/pdf/canvassing1.pdf>

Florida  Secretary of State County Registration by Party 2/9/2004  (.pdf)
<http://election.dos.state.fl.us/voterreg/pdf/2004/2004pppParty.pdf>


While the heavily  scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to
produce  results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios  largely
matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties  using results from
optically scanned paper ballots - fed into  a central tabulator PC and thus
vulnerable to hacking â�� the  results seem to contain substantial
anomalies.


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 counties where
optical scanners were used. 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  touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more
vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of  registered
Democrats generally equaled high percentages of  votes for Kerry. (I had
earlier reported that county size was  a variable â�� this turns out not to
be the case. Just the use  of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)


More visual  analysis of the results can be seen at http://us
together.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm
<http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm> , and
www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm
<http://www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm> .  Note the trend line
â�� the only variable that determines a  swing toward Bush was the use of
optical scan machines.


One possible  explanation for this is the "Dixiecrat" theory, that in
Florida white voters (particularly the rural ones) have been  registered as
Democrats for years, but voting Republican since  Reagan. Looking at the
2000 statistics, also available on  Dopp's site, there are similar
anomalies, although the trends  are not as strong as in 2004. But some
suggest the 2000  election may have been questionable in Florida, too.


One of the people  involved in Dopp's analysis noted that it may be possible
to  determine the validity of the "rural Democrat" theory by  comparing
Florida's white rural counties to those of  Pennsylvania, another swing
state but one that went for Kerry,  as the exit polls there predicted.
Interestingly, the  Pennsylvania analysis, available at
http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm,  doesn't show the same
kind of swings as does Florida, lending  credence to the possibility of
problems in Florida.


Even more  significantly, Dopp had first run the analysis while filtering
out smaller (rural) counties, and still found that the only  variable that
accounted for a swing toward Republican voting  was the use of optical-scan
machines, whereas counties with  touch-screen machines generally didn't
swing - regardless of  size.


Others offer  similar insights, based on other data. A professor at the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in Florida  the vote to
raise the minimum wage was approved by 72%,  although Kerry got 48%. "The
correlation between voting for  the minimum wage increase and voting for
Kerry isn't likely to  be perfect," he noted, "but one would normally expect
that the  gap - of 1.5 million votes - to be far smaller than it was."


While all of this  may or may not be evidence of vote tampering, it again
brings  the nation back to the question of why several states using
electronic voting machines or scanners programmed by private,  for-profit
corporations and often connected to modems produced  votes inconsistent with
exit poll numbers.


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 <http://www.thehill.com/morris/110404.aspx> ,  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
<http://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
<http://www.votergate.tv/> .) And  they had left no tracks whatsoever,
Harris said, noting that  it would be nearly impossible for the election
software â�� or  a County election official - to know that the vote database
had been altered.


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.


According to  congressional candidate Fisher, 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."


Thom  Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored
Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally  syndicated daily
progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann .com
<http://www.thomhartmann.com/commondreams.shtml>  His most recent books  are
"The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400051576/commondreams-20/ref=nosim/>
," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate  Dominance and the Theft of
Human Rights
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1579549551/commondreams-20/ref=nosim/>
," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1882109384/commondreams-20/ref=nosim/>
,"  and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To  Democracy
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400052084/commondreams-20/ref=nosim/>
."
Here's my question: will we do anything about it, or just snivel, concede, and ignore it - like last time? There was no question the 2000 election was rigged, do any Dems have the guts to stand up to the Dush Machine?

posted by: BACKTALKER at November 07, 2004 22:40 | link | comments |

Exam time is over.

The national and Florida State IQ tests are complete.

We failed. Okay, not we, you, 'cause I certainly didn't vote for that moron-in-chief nor the bigot-boy senator.

For the first time in my 49 years of life, I'm ashamed to call myself an American.

Of course, there could be another explanation; I would be entirely unsurprised to discover the voting machines were rigged, and the majority did NOT vote for those jerks. Of course, we still should have DEMANDED a paper trail.

If I had a flag, I'd be flying it at half mast, because America is dying.

posted by: BACKTALKER at November 04, 2004 06:47 | link | comments |

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