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| Name |
Creator |
 Chuck Hagel
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Voting
State of the Notion
http://www.geocities.com/skews_me_too/voting.html |
skews_me
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About Diebold
We won't rest until we measurably improve the extent to which our customers' customers are delighted with our self-service and security solutions; and we measurably improve the effectiveness and profitability of our customers' business.
http://www.diebold.com/aboutus/default.htm |
skews_me
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About ES&S
Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S) is the world's largest and most experienced provider of total election management solutions with over 74,000 systems installed worldwide. Over the past decade, ES&S has handled more than 30,000 of the world's most important events — elections. In the U.S. 2000 General Election, ES&S systems counted over 100 million ballots. ES&S has taken one of the world's oldest traditions — casting a vote — and transformed it into a 21st Century high tech process. ES&S develops and delivers hardware, software, and service solutions to support all phases of the election process for local, state, and national election authorities worldwide. We also provide the same experienced election support to large non-government organizations and associations. Headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, the company has a customer base of over 1,700 jurisdictions in 46 states, Canada, and several international locations. Based on the primary voting tabulation system installed within the United States, our customers represent approximately 50 percent of the precincts and registered voters in the U.S. ES&S systems have counted approximately 56 percent of the U.S. national vote in each of the last four presidential and congressional elections, amounting to more than 100 million ballots cast in each election. In the election business for over three decades, ES&S today has over 400 employees located in eight regional U.S. offices and agents on five continents.
http://www.essvote.com/HTML/about/about.html |
skews_me
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Bev Harris: Embezzler Programmed Voting System
Jeffrey Dean had access to our votes, but what he is not allowed to have is access to handling any checks. That is because his criminal sentence for twenty-three counts of felony Theft in the First Degree forbids him to handle any checks, now that he has been released from prison. While in prison, Jeffrey Dean met and became friends with John Elder, who did five years for cocaine trafficking. At the time of this writing, Elder is still on Diebold’s payroll; in fact, he manages a division and oversees the printing of both ballots and punch cards for several states. Punch cards, remember, can also be rigged, by selectively die-cutting so that some chads dislodge more easily than others. Diebold’s printing division also bids on printing for Sequoia.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0312/S00191.htm |
skews_me
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Black Box Voting: Diebold, electronic voting and the vast right-wing conspiracy (1)
Diebold, located in North Canton, Ohio, does its primary business in ATM and ticket-vending machines. Critics of Diebold point out that virtually every other machine the company makes provides a paper trail to verify the machine’s calculations. Oddly, only the voting machines lack this essential function. A joint study by the California and Massachusetts Institutes of Technology, following the 2000 election, determined that between 1.5 and 2 million votes were not counted due to confusing paper ballots or faulty equipment. The federal government’s solution to the problem was to pass the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002. Bev Harris, author of “Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century,” argues that without a paper trail, these machines are open to massive voter fraud. Diebold has already placed some 50,000 machines in 37 states and their track record is causing Harris, Johns Hopkins University professors and others great concern. Johns Hopkins researchers at the Information Security Institute issued a report declaring that Diebold’s electronic voting software contained “stunning flaws.” The researchers concluded that vote totals could be altered at the voting machines and by remote access. Diebold vigorously refuted the Johns Hopkins report, claiming the researchers came to “a multitude of false conclusions.”
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/031004Fitrakis/031004fitrakis.html |
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Black Box Voting: Diebold, electronic voting and the vast right-wing conspiracy (2)
Harris writes that the documents expose how the mainstream media reversed their call projecting Al Gore as the winner of Florida after someone “subtracted 16,022 votes from Al Gore, and in still some undefined way, added 4,000 erroneous votes to George W. Bush.” Hours later, the votes were returned. One memo from Lana Hires of Global Election Systems, now Diebold, reads: “I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16,022 [votes] when it was uploaded.” Another hacked internal memo, written by Talbot Iredale, Senior VP of Research and Development for Diebold Election Systems, documents “unauthorized” replacement votes in Volusia County. Harris also uncovered a revealing 87-page CBS news report and noted, “According to CBS documents, the erroneous 20,000 votes in Volusia was directly responsible to calling the election for Bush.” The first person to call the election for Bush was Fox election analyst John Ellis, who had the advantage of conferring with his prominent cousins George W. Bush and Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Bob Urosevich was the programmer and CEO at AIS, before being replaced by [Chuck] Hagel. Bob now heads Diebold Election Systems and his brother Todd is a top executive at ES&S. Bob created Diebold’s original electronic voting machine software. Thus, the brothers Urosevich, originally funded by the far-right, figure in the counting of approximately 80 percent of electronic voting in the United States. Wired News reported that “ . . . a former worker in Diebold’s Georgia warehouse says the company installed patches on its machine before the state’s 2002 gubernatorial election that were never certified by independent testing authorities or cleared with Georgia election officials.”
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/031004Fitrakis/031004fitrakis.html |
skews_me
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Black Box Voting: Diebold, electronic voting and the vast right-wing conspiracy (3)
Questions were raised in Texas when three Republican candidates in Comal County each received exactly the same number of votes—18,181—on ES&S machines. Following the 2003 California election, an audit of the company revealed that Diebold Election Systems voting machines installed uncertified software in all 17 counties using its equipment. Former CIA Station Chief John Stockwell writes that one of the favorite tactics of the CIA during the Reagan-Bush administration in the 1980s was to control countries by manipulating the election process. Documents illustrate that the Reagan and Bush administration supported computer manipulation in both Noriega’s rise to power in Panama and in Marcos’ attempt to retain power in the Philippines. Many of the Reagan administration’s staunchest supporters were members of the Council on National Policy. As [Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Kenneth] Blackwell pressures the Ohio legislature to adopt electronic voting machines without a paper trail, Athan Gibbs wonders, “Why would you buy a voting machine from a company like Diebold which provides a paper trail for every single machine it makes except its voting machines? And then, when you ask it to verify its numbers, it hides behind ‘trade secrets.’”
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/031004Fitrakis/031004fitrakis.html |
skews_me
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Complete US Exit Poll Data Confirms Net Suspicions
Dr Stephen F. Freeman from the University of Pennsylvania calculated that the odds of just three of the major swing states, Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania all swinging as far as they did against their respective exit polls were 250 milllion to 1. Dr Freeman's academic paper contains a thorough description of why and how exit polls are conducted (in some countries they use them to prevent against vote fraud), and considers a number of hypotheses for why this year's polls could have been so dramatically wrong. He concludes that the reasons are unknown.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0411/S00227.htm |
skews_me
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Con Job at Diebold Subsidiary
At least five convicted felons secured management positions at a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, according to critics demanding more stringent background checks for people responsible for voting machine software. Voter advocate Bev Harris alleged...that managers of a subsidiary of Diebold, one of the country's largest voting equipment vendors, included a cocaine trafficker, a man who conducted fraudulent stock transactions and a programmer jailed for falsifying computer records. The programmer, Jeffrey Dean, wrote and maintained proprietary code used to count hundreds of thousands of votes as senior vice president of Global Election Systems, or GES. Diebold purchased GES in January 2002. According to a public court document released before GES hired him, Dean served time in a Washington state correctional facility for stealing money and tampering with computer files in a scheme that "involved a high degree of sophistication and planning." Computer programmers say software bugs, hackers or electrical failures could cause more than 50,000 touch-screen machines used in precincts nationwide to delete or alter votes.
http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61640,00.html |
skews_me
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Diebold
Diebold, Incorporated is a security systems corporation which is engaged primarily in the sale, manufacture, installation and service of self-service transaction systems (such as ATMs), electronic and physical security products (including vaults and currency processing systems), and software and integrated systems for global financial and commercial markets. The term "black box voting" was coined to describe machines that, like those made by Diebold, use closed source software, do not print paper ballots, and do not use any reliable digital authentication techniques. In August 2003, Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold, announced that he had been a top fund-raiser for President George W. Bush.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diebold |
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Diebold's Political Machine (1)
The biggest maker of computerized election machines...[is] Omaha-based ES&S, and its Republican roots may be even stronger than Diebold's. The firm, which is privately held, began as a company called Data Mark, which was founded in the early 1980s by Bob and Todd Urosevich. In 1984, brothers William and Robert Ahmanson bought a 68 percent stake in Data Mark, and changed the company's name to American Information Services (AIS). Then, in 1987, McCarthy & Co, an Omaha investment group, acquired a minority share in AIS. In 1992, investment banker Chuck Hagel, president of McCarthy & Co, became chairman of AIS. Hagel, who had been touted as a possible Senate candidate in 1993, was again on the list of likely GOP contenders heading into the 1996 contest. In January of 1995, while still chairman of ES&S, Hagel told the Omaha World-Herald that he would likely make a decision by mid-March of 1995. On March 15, according to a letter provided by Hagel's Senate staff, he resigned from the AIS board, noting that he intended to announce his candidacy. A few days later, he did just that. A little less than eight months after steppind down as director of AIS, Hagel surprised national pundits and defied early polls by defeating Benjamin Nelson, the state's popular former governor. It was Hagel's first try for public office. Nebraska elections officials told The Hill that machines made by AIS probably tallied 85 percent of the votes cast in the 1996 vote, although Nelson never drew attention to the connection. Hagel won again in 2002, by a far healthier margin. That vote is still angrily disputed by Hagel's Democratic opponent, Charlie Matulka, who did try to make Hagel's ties to ES&S an issue in the race and who asked that state elections officials conduct a hand recount of the vote. That request was rebuffed, because Hagel's margin of victory was so large.
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/03/03_200.html |
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Diebold's Political Machine (2)
As might be expected, Hagel has been generously supported by his investment partners at McCarthy & Co. -- since he first ran, Hagel has received about $15,000 in campaign contributions from McCarthy & Co. executives. And Hagel still owns more than $1 million in stock in McCarthy & Co., which still owns a quarter of ES&S. If the Republican ties at Diebold and ES&S aren't enough to cause concern, argues election reform activist Bev Harris, the companies' past performances and current practices should be. Harris is author of Black Box Voting, and the woman behind the BlackBoxVoting.com web site. The first signs that the Diebold-made system in Volusia County was malfunctioning came early on election night, when the central ballot-counting computer showed a Socialist Party candidate receiving more than 9,000 votes and Vice President Al Gore getting minus 19,000. Another 4,000 votes poured into the plus column for Bush that didn't belong there. Taken together, the massive swing seemed to indicate that Bush, not Gore, had won Florida and thus the White House. Election officials restarted the machine, and expressed confidence in the eventual results, which showed Gore beating Bush by 97,063 votes to 82,214. After the recount, Gore picked up 250 votes, while Bush picked up 154. But the erroneous numbers had already been sent to the media.
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/03/03_200.html |
skews_me
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E-Voting: Is The Fix In?
Avi Rubin, a computer-science professor at Johns Hopkins University, spent two weeks analyzing the software from the world's biggest voting-machine company, Diebold Election Systems, which has over 50 percent of the market. "We found all kinds of problems in the code," he said. "A computer scientist can look at program and immediately tell you if it was written by professional programmers who know how to do software engineering or if it was just put together by a bunch of hacks. And, upon looking at the source code for Diebold, it was pretty clear that this was a real amateur job." Rumors began with this letter from Diebold's CEO, Wally Odell, who was moonlighting as a Republican fundraiser. In his invitation to a benefit for Bush last August, he wrote, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/main632436.shtml |
skews_me
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Election Officials in Ohio and Florida Fail to Give Poll Access to International Election Observers
A group of distinguished international election experts who will observe the Nov. 2 [2004] U.S. election have not yet received responses from some local electoral officials in Ohio and Florida to their requests to observe polling sites on election day. The observers hope that their requests will receive a positive response, pointing out that non-partisan domestic and international observation is practiced worldwide as a way of creating transparency and boosting voter confidence. The election observers are part of a non-partisan, non-governmental delegation sponsored by the human rights group Global Exchange.
http://www.globalexchange.org/update/press/2638.html |
skews_me
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Elections In America - Assume Crooks Are In Control (1)
Computerized voting machines that were certified by the state of Florida, caused most of the problems in Florida's primary election. "The concept is clear, simple, and it works. Computerized voting gives the power of selection, without fear of discovery, to whomever controls the computer," wrote the authors of VoteScam (1992), James & Kenneth Collier (both now deceased). It's a 'must read' book about how elections have been electronically and mechanically rigged in the United States for decades, and with the knowing and sometimes unknowing support of media giants and government officials, including... ironically... Janet Reno. Only a few companies dominate the market for computer voting machines. Alarmingly, under U.S. federal law, no background checks are required on these companies or their employees. Felons and foreigners can, and do, own computer voting machine companies. Voting machine companies demand that clients sign 'proprietary' contracts to protect their trade secrets, which prohibits a thorough inspection of voting machines by outsiders. And, unbelievably, it appears that most election officials don't require paper ballots to back up or audit electronic election results. So far, lawsuits to allow complete access to inspect voting machines, or to require paper ballots so that recounts are possible...have failed.
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0916-04.htm |
skews_me
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Elections In America - Assume Crooks Are In Control (2)
As far as we know, some guy from Russia could be controlling the outcome of computerized elections in the United States. In fact, Vikant Corp., a Chicago-area company owned by Alex Kantarovick, formerly of Minsk, Belorussia (also known as White Russia, formerly U.S.S.R.), supplies the all-important 'control cards' to Election Systems & Software (ES&S), the world's largest election management company, writes reporter Christopher Bollyn. According to ES&S, they have "handled more than 40,000 of the world's most important events and elections. ES&S systems have counted approximately 60% of the U.S. national vote for the past four presidential elections. In the U.S. 2000 general election, ES&S systems counted over 100 million ballots." Getting back to Kantarovich, he would not disclose where the control cards are made, except they aren't made in America, writes Bollyn. Nor would he discuss his previous employment. Bollyn says he got some not-too-thinly-veiled threats from Kantarovich. Kantarovich sounds more like the Russian mafia, than a legitimate businessman. But the really big deal is this....all of ES&S's touch screen machines contain modems, "allowing them to communicate—and be communicated with—while they are in operation," reports Bollyn. That communication capability includes satellites. "Even computers not connected to modems or an electronic network can still be manipulated offsite, not during the election, but certainly before or after," says voting systems expert Dr. Rebecca Mercuri. ES&S supplied the touch screens for Miami-Dade and Broward counties where the worst machine failures occurred. But the debacle was nothing new for ES&S. Associated Press (AP) reporter Jessica Fargen wrote in June 2000, "Venezuela's president and the head of the nation's election board accused ES&S of trying to destabilize the country's electoral process. In the United States, four states have reported problems with equipment supplied by the company."
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0916-04.htm |
skews_me
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Elections In America - Assume Crooks Are In Control (3)
Sequoia is another voting systems company that sends a cold chill down my spine. "Mob ties, bribery, felony convictions, and threats of coercion are visible in the public record of the election services company," according to investigative journalist and filmmaker Daniel Hopsicker, and reported in Spotlight.com. Hopsicker says that Pasquale "Rocco" Ricci, a 65-year-old senior executive with Sequoia, and the firm's Louisiana representative, recently pled guilty to passing out as much as $10 million dollars in bribes over the course of almost an entire decade." According to American Law Education Rights & Taxation (ALERT), Ricci is the president of Sequoia International, which also manufactures casino slot machines. In May 2002 Sequoia was bought by De La Rue, based in England. By their own estimate, De La Rue is "the world's largest commercial security printer and papermaker, involved in the production of over 150 national currencies and a wide range of security documents such as travelers checks and vouchers. Employing almost 7,000 people across 31 countries, (De La Rue) is also a leading provider of cash handling equipment and software solutions to banks and retailers worldwide." And they develop technology for secure passports, identity cards, and driver's licenses. The Shoup Voting Solutions of Quakertown, Pennsylvania, has a reputation for rigging elections, wrote the late co-author of VoteScam, Jim Collier. According to Collier, in 1979, Ransom Shoup II, the president of the firm, was convicted of conspiracy and obstruction of justice stemming from an FBI investigation of a vote-fixing scam involving the old-fashioned lever machines in Philadelphia."
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0916-04.htm |
skews_me
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Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked
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. 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 – 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 9,676 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. 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.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm |
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Jeb Bush's Influence in Fla. Inspires Awe, Rage
Only five of the 39 secretaries of the state who oversee elections are appointed. The change to an appointed position in Florida had bipartisan support, and many of the state's big newspapers endorsed it, as did groups, such as the League of Women Voters, that have since been critical of Bush's role in elections.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10544-2004Oct29.html |
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Media Blacks Out Voting Problems
The "mainstream" media has fallen down on the job by failing to cover efforts since November 2 [2004] to ensure that all votes in the presidential election are accurately counted. The conclusion by John Kerry that an investigation could not possibly reverse the election may quite possibly have been premature. But the question that both activists and the media should be asking is not whether there was enough fraud and errors to decide the election, nor even whether there was more than is usual, but whether there was any fraud or errors, where the problems occurred, how they can be prevented in the future, and -- in particular -- whether new kinds of fraud were permitted by new technologies and by the privatization of our election process. The ILCA is particularly concerned, because of indications, detailed below, that fraud may have occurred in areas where there are heavy populations of workers, African-Americans, and other progressive voters that our member organizations represent. People deserve to have their votes counted, and the strategists who will spend four years studying the election results deserve to have the facts. Some citizens and independent media outlets are raising these issues, but the corporate media is AWOL. An investigation by the media would seem especially appropriate, since the 2000 election led to investigations in Florida that determined the loser was occupying the White House.
http://www.ilcaonline.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=950 |
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Part One: Will Your Vote Count?
Ever since the presidential election of 2000 put the words “hanging chad” into the lexicon, states are going high-tech. One reason Marion County chose optical scan machines is because ballots are saved in case of a recount. “These machines are much more secure and much more tamperproof than old lever machines ever were,” said Doris Anne Sadler, Marion County clerk. But other technology, like touch-screen machines, has no paper trail. When President Bush signed the Help America Vote Act , it promised almost $4 billion of our federal tax money would be reimbursed to counties buying new equipment. But the I-Team learned we'll only get back about two thirds of our investment.
http://www.wishtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1647886 |
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Researchers: Florida Vote Fishy
Electronic voting machines in Florida may have awarded George W. Bush up to 260,000 more votes than he should have received, according to statistical analysis conducted by University of California, Berkeley graduate students and a professor. The analysis -- which hasn't been formally peer-reviewed, but was examined by seven professors -- showed a discrepancy in the number of votes Bush received in counties that used the touch-screen machines and counties that used other types of voting equipment. The researchers examined numerous variables that might have affected the vote outcome. These included the number of voters, their median income, racial and age makeup and the change in voter turnout between the 2000 and 2004 elections. Using this information, they examined election results for the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates in the state in 1996, 2000 and 2004 to see how support for those candidates and parties measured over eight years in Florida's 67 counties. They discovered that in the 15 counties using touch-screen voting systems, the number of votes granted to Bush exceeded the number of votes Bush should have received -- given all of the other variables -- while the number of votes that Bush received in counties using other types of voting equipment lined up perfectly with what the variables would have predicted for those counties. The counties most affected by the anomaly were heavily Democratic.
http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65757,00.html |
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Tens of Thousands of Votes Lost, Stolen, Miscounted
There were thousands of reported incidents and problems with electronic voting systems on Election Day [2004]. In Florida alone there were more than 4,369 incidents of voting problems reported to Voteprotect.org. For example, in Carteret County, N.C., thousands of votes were lost, while in Sarpy County, Neb., a single voting machine recorded 10,000 extra votes. In Carteret County, the Associated Press reported, “a voting machine used to store electronic ballots ran out of storage space” and 4,438 votes “disappeared.” Because the electronic voting machines used in Carteret County do not count or create a paper ballot, the disappeared votes were irretrievably lost. During the recent election, many voters had to wait for hours because of the limited number of voting machines. In Columbus and Knox County, Ohio, some voters waited until 3 a.m. to vote. In Florida, New Mexico, and Ohio, exit polls showed the Democratic presidential candidate John Forbes Kerry leading, but victory went to George W. Bush after the votes were processed in the states’ central counting tabulators. Dr. Steven F. Freeman from the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Organizational Dynamics analyzed the exit polling data for his Nov. 10 paper The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy. “Exit polls showed [Kerry] ahead in nearly every battleground state, in many cases by sizable margins,” Freeman wrote. “But then in key state after key state, counts were showing very different numbers than the polls predicted; and the differentials were all in the same direction.”
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/tens_of_thousands.html |
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The Presidency has been HACKED, hacker covert op in place via Diebold machines
BEV HARRIS: "By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created; and this set of votes can be changed in a matter of seconds, so that it no longer matches the correct votes." Harris appeared before the California Voting Systems Panel (CVSP) on April 21, 2004, presenting a smoking gun Diebold internal memo proving the company had not corrected Diebold's Global Election Systems (GEMS) software flaws even though it had updated and upgraded the GEMS program. She also showed Democrat Howard Dean how to fraudulently alter the GEMS system on CNBC-TV.
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/10/301469.shtml |
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Two voting companies & two brothers will count 80 percent of U.S. election using both scanners & touchscreens
Meet the Urosevich brothers, Bob and Todd. Their respective companies, Diebold and ES&S, will count (using both computerized ballot scanners and touchscreen machines) about 80 percent of all votes cast in the upcoming U.S. presidential election. Both ES&S and Diebold have been caught installing uncertified software in their machines. Although there is no known certification process that will protect against vote rigging or technical failure, it is a requirement of most, if not all, states. And, according to author Bev Harris in her book, Black Box Voting, " . . . one of the founders of the original ES&S (software) system, Bob Urosevich, also oversaw development of the original software now used by Diebold Election Systems." Even if states or counties hire their own technicians to re-program Diebold or ES&S software (or software from other companies), experts say that permanently installed software, called firmware, still resides inside both electronic scanners and touchscreen machines and is capable of manipulating votes. The ability to rig an election is well within easy reach of voting machine companies. And it does not matter if the machines are scanners or touchscreens, or are networked or hooked up to modems. So, for those states and counties who think they're dodging the bullet by not buying (or not using) the highly insecure and error-prone touchscreen voting machines (which will process 28.9 percent of all votes this year), a huge threat still remains—computerized ballot scanners. They will count 57.6 percent of all votes cast, including absentee ballots.
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html |
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U.S. states using e-voting in Nov. 2 [2004] election
State -- # of counties using e-voting -- Systems in use -- Comments
http://www.itworld.com/Tech/2987/041020evotestates/pfindex.html |
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University researchers challenge Bush win in Florida
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, said [18 Nov 2004] that they have uncovered statistical irregularities associated with electronic voting machines in three Florida counties that may have given President George W. Bush 130,000 or more excess votes. The researchers are now calling on state and federal authorities to look into the problems. The study, "The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections," was conducted by doctoral students and faculty from the university's sociology department and led by sociology professor Michael Hout. According to the study, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases in support for Bush between 2000 and 2004 compared to counties with paper ballots or optical scan equipment. This change cannot be explained by differences between counties in income, number of voters, change in voter turnout, or size of the Hispanic/Latino population, said Hout. In Broward County, for example, Bush appears to have received approximately 72,000 excess votes, Hout said, adding that the research team is 99.9% sure that these effects are not attributable to chance. The other two counties that experienced unexplained statistical discrepancies in the vote are Miami-Dade and Palm Beach. The three counties revealed the most significant irregularities and were the most heavily Democratic counties in the state. Smaller counties that showed strong support for Bush didn't produce any statistical anomalies, Hout said. In an effort to explain what might account for the statistical irregularities related to counties that used touch-screen e-voting systems instead of optical scanning systems, Hout said there could be embedded software glitches or other potential hardware problems as were reported on election day in the press.
http://www.computerworld.com/governmenttopics/government/policy/story/0,10801,97614,00.html |
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Votergate 2004? Research Studies Uncover Potential Massive Election Fraud (1)
On November 18, 2004 a University of California, Berkeley research team headed by Professor Michael Hout told a press conference that a study the team conducted focused on electronic machine voting in Florida. While all 67 Florida counties were reviewed, the study shows there is a statistical anomaly in three southern counties which gave President Bush between 130,000 and 260,000 or more extra votes. At issue were Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami Dade counties. In Broward County alone, Mr. Bush appears to have received 72,000 excess votes. According to the study President Bush received a total of 1,157,435 votes when he should have received between 900,000 and 1,020,000. If the extra votes were simply added to Mr. Bush’s total votes, his “stuffed” ballots would have added 130,000 votes to his tally and the county totals should reveal the additional votes by comparing the signed-in number of voters to the actual votes. If however, 130,000 votes were taken away from Kerry and converted to the use of Bush, then Bush’s net gain would be 260,000 votes. Bush won Florida by about 311,000 votes, so investigators would have to locate another 52,000 or more unlawful votes in the state before Kerry could claim the presidency based on Florida's votes.
http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04/ThreeResearchStudiesBushIsOut.htm |
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Votergate 2004? Research Studies Uncover Potential Massive Election Fraud (2)
On November 21, 2004, Dr. Steven F. Freeman, faculty member of the University of Pennsylvania, authorized the Yurica Report to post the latest draft of his research paper, “The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy.” Dr. Freeman's paper focuses on the three major battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. Freeman conducts an analysis of Kerry’s votes: The likelihood of Kerry receiving only 47.1% in Florida, given that the exit polls indicated 49.7% is less than three in one thousand. Although Kerry did carry Pennsylvania, the likelihood of his receiving only 50.8% given that the exit polls indicated 54.1% is less than two in one thousand. Similarly the likelihood of Kerry receiving only 48.5% in Ohio, given the exit polls indicated 52.1% is less than one in one thousand (.0008). Freeman says, “The likelihood of any two of these statistical anomalies occurring together is on the order of one-in-a-million. The odds against all three occurring together are 250 million to one. As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states could have been due to chance or random error.” 29 precincts in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, reported votes cast IN EXCESS of the number of registered voters - at least 93,136 extra votes total. And the numbers are right there on the official Cuyahoga County Board of Elections website.
http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04/ThreeResearchStudiesBushIsOut.htm |
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Votergate video
Votergate is the investigative documentary feature film uncovering the truth about new computer voting systems, which allow a few powerful corporations to record our votes in secret. Votergate is continuing to film since the Nov. 2nd 2004 election and we have begun editing for the release of our 90 minute feature film / DVD. This free version was created and made available for activists and concerned citizens to share with others and help educate people about this imporant issue.We hope this 30 minute Special Edition will help viewers navigate past the fear and spin which is continuously being thrown at this critical issue.
http://www.votergate.tv/ |
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