Peter G. Neumann
Some 2004 voting anomalies
Tue Nov 9, 2004 17:15
64.140.158.113

From:
RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Monday 8 November 2004 Volume 23 : Issue 59
ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks)
Peter G. Neumann, moderator, chmn ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
http://www.risks.org

Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004
From: "Peter G. Neumann" neumann@csl.sri.com
Subject: Some 2004 voting anomalies

For those of you interested in following a collection of reported problems
more carefully, here are just a few reported anomalies, collected from a
variety of sources:

* Palm Beach County logged 88,000 more votes than people who had voted in
the presidential race. (Teresa LePore of 2000 Butterfly Ballot fame is
the County supervisor of elections there.)

* A Franklin County Ohio machine error gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in a
precinct in Gahanna. The correct totals were 365 for Bush, 260 for Kerry.

* In Broward County FL, in balloting for Amendment 4, ES&S software for
tabulating absentee ballots began counting BACKWARDS once a total of
32,767 [215 - 1, in a signed 16-bit field] votes had been reached in a
precinct. When this was discovered, the corrected totals for the precinct
went from 166,000 to 240,000, and actually caused the statewide results to
be reversed on this amendment. Apparently the same flaw was detected two
years ago in the same software, and remained uncorrected.
Nick Simicich wondered in a long message to RISKS:
Do you suppose that they "fixed" this by making the 16 bit field
unsigned? Or do you suppose that they counted the numbers separately
using, say, floating point so that they could check the results for
large discrepancies? Or maybe that they checked the before and after to
see that the numbers increased when they added to them...or anything
else that they could do to make this self auditing? Nah...frankly, I'm
scared by the stupidity of this error. This is a problem that needs an
open source solution.

* The failure of the ES&S ranked-choice vote-counting software in the San
Francisco Supervisors' election that I noted in RISKS-23.58 turns out to
have been a hard-coded constant maximum number of voters that was set too
low. The fix was utterly trivial, but wisely required recertification by
the State. [Perhaps the same programmer wrote the Broward software?]

* Bev Harris reported that ``Jeff Fisher, the Democratic candidate for the
U.S. House 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... 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.... Dick
Morris [famous consultant to both parties, now with Fox News] wrote "So,
according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry
Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa.... Exit polls
cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I
suspect foul play." '' [See http://www.blackboxvoting.org , *NOT* .com]

* Incidentally, Ralph Barone noted an article on the internal database
structures of the Diebold voting machines, plus how to hack an election
and cover your trail afterwards.
http://www.blackboxvoting.com/scoop/S00065.htm

* There were numerous reports of screens "jumping" votes in ES&S and Hart
InterCivic machines, where casting a straight-party subsequently changes
the vote for the President before exiting.

* Also reported were many cases of long lines and long waits only in certain
politically skewed precincts, many legitimate voters who claim they were
disenfranchised, voters who were given special optical scan pens that were
not capable of being tallied, and so on.

Many Web sources provided running lists of reported anomalies, such as
http://www.votersunite.org
http://fairvote.org/easttowest.pdf
https://voteprotect.org
http://www.verifiedvoting.org/eirs/
http://www.electionprotection2004.org/coalition.htm
http://www.blackboxvoting.org

==================
THE WORST IS YET TO COME
BE AFRAID. BE VERY AFRAID...

By: Justin Raimondo


Those "moral values" Republicans – you know, the ones who supposedly tipped the election in favor of the War Party – really are a hoot. Forget the Iraq war – killing tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians for no clear reason isn't a moral question as far as these folks are concerned. What they're really up in arms about is gay marriage and Hollywood's moral depravity (or do I repeat myself?). But what about this kind of depravity?:

"The Iraq war, [Norman Podhoretz] declares, has gone 'triumphantly.' The crowd applauds vigorously at this.

"Later in the day – perhaps for those wondering if the Iraqis themselves agree with Podhoretz's assessment – the

conference organizers screen a trailer for Voices in Iraq, a forthcoming feature-length documentary for which two movie producers had handed out digital video cameras to ordinary Iraqis and asked them to film their daily lives.

Evidently, the Iraqis in question see things the way CPD does. Men on the streets of Baghdad discuss how nice it is to have Saddam gone and to be better paid now. One child asks his mother what she thinks of democracy. 'Hassan,' she replies to her son, 'democracy means having individual freedom.' A torture victim of Saddam says he wouldn't mind being tortured at Abu Ghraib. 'You have a nice American woman undress you and play with your penis,' he smirks. The audience laughs."

No, it isn't a Beverly Hills bash or at night on the town with Paris Hilton: it's a conference sponsored by the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), a group that may not be noticeably Christian, but which sports such professional moralizers as Betting Bill Bennett and Pope Poddy himself, whose latest encyclical to the neocon true believers is certainly longer than the original call for the Crusades issued by Pope Urban II.

Although the kind of "moral equivalence" exhibited by "Voices in Iraq" would normally have the CPD'ers in a lather – after all, are we to be judged according to standards set by Saddam Hussein? – this is what passes for humor in neoconservative circles, along with tittering gloat-fests about how Yasser Arafat supposedly contracted AIDS. Mostly secular blue state intellectuals who, nonetheless, believe that religion is good for other people, the neocons are happy to applaud their Christian cohorts, egging them on to more militant acts of defiance against an increasingly pagan culture, while privately despising Christianity in all its manifestations and publicly celebrating the "pagan virtues."



But the Christian fundamentalists don't mind being patronized and treated with ill-disguised contempt by their secular neocon allies, just as long as certain theological and political goals are met: a theocracy on the home front and Armageddon in the Holy Land. According to the End Times theology of dispensationalist Protestants, the ingathering of Jews to Israel prefigures the Second Coming, which they can hasten if they give unconditional support to the government of Israel – even above and beyond their own. Such are the vaunted "moral values" of the American "heartland," that alleged bastion of super-patriotism. Too bad it's patriotism in support of a foreign power.

This is Bizarro-patriotism, i.e. the sort one might encounter on Bizarro World, where water flows uphill, and moral and political as well as physical laws are weirdly inverted. Ever since the 9/11 attacks ripped a hole in the space-time continuum – due, perhaps, to the extreme heat of the exploding planes, that literally melted down reality, which then hardened into a distorted and misshapen new form – we've been seeing a lot of this sort of thing., and it's due, as I've theorized before, to what I call the Bizarro Effect.

In ordinary Earth-logic, it makes no sense to go after a secular fourth-rate power like Iraq to retaliate against an atrocity committed by an Islam militant of Osama bin Laden's ilk. In Bizarro logic, however, it makes perfect non-sense.

In Iraq, we are being beaten on the battlefield by a rag-tag underground resistance, and to our Bizarro-president, this represents great progress. Operating under the constraints of the old, pre-9/11 earth-logic, an American president, faced with a disaster such as our looming defeat in Iraq would declare victory and get out. This is what Bob Novak and Pat Buchanan hoped for and predicted, but these two distinguished gentlemen are both of them living in the past. They don't' understand the subtleties of Bizarro-logic, which is almost dialectical in its sinister simplicity.

Nor are they alone in their naivete: I, too, fell for this "the neocons are finished" meme, although with caveats. The idea being that, after the elections, the administration would take a U-turn in policy, Iraq could have its elections in January, and we could begin withdrawing from from the country, albeit cautiously at first. The neocons would be dumped overboard, and the "realists," with Brent Scowcroft and Robert Blackwill leading the charge, would take the foreign policy helm.

Yet the dark cloud of the election is still hanging over the streets of blue state cities like a pall of autumn smoke, and already news of the neocons' rebirth is on everyone's lips. Blackwill, who was brought in to the National Security Council to clean up the neocons' mess in Iraq – and who was behind the ditching of Ahmed Chalabi – is out. Paul Wolfowitz, on the other hand, whose fate will be a bellwether of neocon influence in Bush's second term, could be brought in as head of the NSC, or so it is rumored.

Not only that, but Rumsfeld is staying on indefinitely, while neocon ideologue John Bolton and neocon ally Stephen Hadley (Condi Rice's chief assistant) are up for promotions. Colin Powell is also out, along with neocon opponent Richard Armitage, the two top "realists" in the administration. In retrospect, the pre-election U.S. News piece that somewhat hysterically compared the supposedly imminent purge of the neocons to the Night of the Long Knives seems like Bizarro-logic at its best (or is that worst?). The knives are out, all right, but it isn't for the neocons: instead, it is the "realists" who are falling on their own swords.

While there are some encouraging signs that many conservatives are beginning to question the globalist hyper-interventionism and "democratic" universalism at the heart of this administration's foreign policy, a recent article in the New York Times makes their predicament all too clear:

"Around 8 p.m. Tuesday, a gloomy mood was settling over the dozen conservative stalwarts gathered with martinis and glasses of red wine in an office in Arlington, Va., to watch the returns. Early exit polls showed President Bush trailing, and Richard Viguerie, dean of conservative direct mail, thought he knew who was to blame: the neoconservatives, the group associated with making the case for the invasion of Iraq.

"'If he loses, they are going to have a bull's-eye on their back,' Mr. Viguerie said. Ronald Godwin, a top aide to Dr. Jerry Falwell, agreed. 'I see a real battle for the Republican Party starting about Nov. 3,' he said."

Yes, but Bush didn't lose, and now the realists and their paleoconservative allies have a target on their backs.

Like Novak and Buchanan, these guys are still living in a world where conservatism is a cautious temperament, not a revolutionary ideology intent on overthrowing governments worldwide. Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation and now at the Free Congress Foundation, is calling for a reevaluation of the neoconservative case for democratic imperialism, and Grover Norquist, a top conservative strategist and president of Americans for Tax Reform, convincingly argues that the Iraq war is a drag on the Republicans, who would have won an even more resounding victory without the albatross of an unpopular war.

But the question is: what does Bush need any of these people for? He's already got what he wants: four more years, and a solid Republican majority in both houses of Congress. Just as those Old Rightists who spoke up against the war well before the elections – including myself – were demonized by neocon enforcer David "Axis of Evil" Frum in his infamous National Review interdiction, so they will be cast out, too, and shortly. Donald Devine, of the American Conservative Union – a sometime critic of the new imperialism – has already been forced to make a public apology and self-criticism straight out of the Stalin era for failing to properly stand up and loudly applaud a speech by President Bush before his group. It should hardly come as a shock that both Norquist and Weyrich have already been set up for bogus charges of "anti-Semitism" and "pro-terrorist" activities (with a little of the heavy lifting done by establishment liberals like Kevin Drum and the insufferable Eric Alterman).

The views of Norquist's nemesis and chief accuser, professional militarist Frank Gaffney, head of the Center for Security Policy, are far more likely to dominate this administration. Gaffney, a longtime star in the military-industrial firmament, has issued a laundry list that reflects the neconservative agenda for a second term in all its unvarnished red-state messianism: "liberate" Iran (which is really behind the Iraq insurgency), and also overthrow the government of nuclear-armed North Korea, by force if necessary, while taking on Russia, China, and even much of Latin America (where, mysteriously, "Islamo-fascism" seems to be making significant inroads!). After listening to a post-election speech given by Gaffney at the Westchester Country Club, in upstate New York, Maurice Freedman, the director of the Westchester Library System, "was not rushing forward to shake Gaffney's hand," according to one news account:

"'I'm just as scared as I was before I walked in,' he said. 'The big difference is that I saw, up close and personal, the face of those advocating for those things that scare the hell out of me.'"

He has good reason to be scared to death: we all do.

It would be a grave error to underestimate the ruthless venality of the neocon gang that now controls the foreign policy of this country, and the President of the United States is clearly in their camp. This isn't about the evil neocons whispering in the ear of the ruler and somehow manipulating him behind his back: if the neocons are pulling the strings, then Bush II is their all-too-willing puppet. With the Powell-Armitage-Blackwill faction out the door, or on the way, the neocons are unleashed in all their viciousness and vainglory.

That's why we need Antiwar.com more than ever – if only to keep track of the new wars this administration is planning.

Yes, I'm getting around to mentioning that it's pledge week – our quarterly fundraising campaign, during which we block out the front page of Antiwar.com, or some portion of it, in order to pitch our readers as to why we deserve to exist. But this time around the case for our continuity is even more urgent. Because the basis of our opposition to the interventionism and outright militarism of this administration has to be not just moral outrage, but also superior knowledge. The biggest weapon in the War Party's arsenal is information, and the control of that essential resource is what they lust after. But in the age of the internet, that is becoming increasingly impossible. They are always ready with their "spin": and yet, within minutes if its dissemination, we can have our counter-spin posted and circulating, with the extra added advantage of being an argument based on fact.

With anywhere from 50,000 to 60,000 unique visitors a day, it's no wonder we're rated by Alexa/Google as the 37th most popular news site in the English-speaking world. We made the word "neocon" into a term of opprobrium, and spread that meme far and wide. Back