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More Key Reporting by Media on Election Problems
Fri Nov 12, 2004 16:14
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More Key Reporting by Media on Election Problems

There is no shortage of news about mishaps, cover-ups, and even fraud in the recent elections. Below are quick summaries of a number of excellent articles with links for those who would like to read the entire article. Read also about key members of Congress who have demanded an investigation. And at the end of this message, you will find links to two excellent petitions demanding more responsibility and accountability in our elections. Please take the time to sign these important petitions and pass this information on to your friends and colleagues.

MSNBC - The best reporting by far in the mainstream media has been by MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. Both on TV and on his blog, Mr. Olbermann is asking serious questions. He is even asking why other major media aren't reporting many of these sensational stories. His most excellent blog gives continual updates of recent developments in the elections scandals. Here are a few key quotes from three of the entries there:

Nov. 7, 6:55 p.m. "Officials in Warren County, Ohio, “locked down” its administration building to prevent anybody from observing the vote count there....Emergency Services Director Frank Young explained that he had been advised by the federal government to implement the measures for the sake of Homeland Security." "The majority of the media has yet to touch the other stories of Ohio (the amazing Bush Times Ten voting machine in Gahanna) or huge margins for Bush in Florida counties in which registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 2-1."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240 (scroll down to find this date and time in the blog)

Nov. 9, 12:55 a.m. "....the remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County’s website shows, we had the most unexpected results in years: more votes than voters. I’ll repeat that: more votes than voters. 93,000 more votes than voters." (more on this below)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240

November 10, 12:43 p.m. "The computerized balloting in North Carolina is so thoroughly messed up that all state-wide voting may be thrown out and a second election day scheduled."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240

WOWT/NBC (Nebraska) - "Sarpy County election officials are trying to figure out how they ended up with more votes than voters in the general election. Sarpy County borrowed the election equipment from Omaha-based Election Systems & Software. Its employees operated the machines that are now double-checking the ballots. No one is sure exactly what went wrong."
http://www.wowt.com/news/headlines/1161971.html

Sun Journal - A North Carolina newspaper reports that "a systems software glitch in Craven County's electronic voting equipment is being blamed for a vote miscount that ... swelled the number of votes for president here by 11,283 more votes than the total number cast."
http://www.newbernsj.com/SiteProcessor.cfm?Template=/GlobalTemplates/Details.cfm&StoryID=18297&Section=Local

Associated Press/USAToday - "There were also several dozen voters in six states who said the wrong candidates appeared on their touch-screen machine's checkout screen."
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/evoting/2004-11-04-e-voting-error-nc_x.htm

Palm Beach Post (Florida) - "Early Thursday, as Broward County elections officials wrapped up after a long day of canvassing votes, something unusual caught their eye. Tallies should go up as more votes are counted. That's simple math. But in some races, the numbers had gone . . . down. Officials found the software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward."
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/politics/content/news/epaper/2004/11/05/a29a_BROWVOTE_1105.html

New York Times - In mid-August 2003, Walden W. O'Dell, the chief executive of Diebold, wrote a letter inviting 100 wealthy friends to a fund-raiser at his home in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. He wrote, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." A longtime Republican, he is a member of President Bush's "Rangers and Pioneers,'' an elite group of loyalists who have raised at least $100,000 each for the 2004 race. Through Diebold Election Systems, Mr. O'Dell's company is among the country's biggest suppliers of paperless, touch-screen voting machines.
http://www.WantToknow.info/031109nytimes (article became pay for view shortly after elections)

Project Censored (Excellent university website exposing media cover-ups): "ES&S, Diebold, and Sequoia are the companies primarily involved in implementing the new, often faulty, technology at voting stations throughout the country. All three have strong ties to the Bush Administration along with major defense contractors in the United States. Some of the most generous contributors to Republican campaigns are also some of the largest investors in ES&S, Sequoia, and Diebold. Most notable of these are government defense contractors Northrup-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, Electronic Data Systems."
http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2005/6.html

USA Today - The three companies that certify the nation's voting technologies operate in secrecy, and refuse to discuss flaws in the machines to be used by nearly one in three voters in November. Federal regulators have virtually no oversight over testing of the technology. Michael Shamos, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist and electronic voting expert, told lawmakers in Washington, D.C. "I find it grotesque that an organization charged with such a heavy responsibility feels no obligation to explain to anyone what it is doing." The system for "testing and certifying voting equipment in this country is not only broken, but is virtually nonexistent," Shamos added.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/evoting/2004-08-23-low-evote-scrutiny_x.htm

Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Board of Elections Website - 29 precincts in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, reported votes cast above the number of registered voters - 93,136 extra votes total. And the numbers are on the official Cuyahoga County Board of Elections website below. To verify the discrepancies, first look at the number of registered voters for the below precincts, then scroll down to the number of ballots cast for the precinct. In particular, compare the numbers for the precincts listed below.
http://boe.cuyahogacounty.us/BOE/results/currentresults1.htm

Bay Village - 13,710 registered voters / 18,663 ballots cast
Beachwood - 9,943 registered voters / 13,939 ballots cast
Bedford - 9,942 registered voters / 14,465 ballots cast
Bedford Heights - 8,142 registered voters / 13,512 ballots cast
Brooklyn - 8,016 registered voters / 12,303 ballots cast
Brooklyn Heights - 1,144 registered voters / 1,869 ballots cast
Chagrin Falls Village - 3,557 registered voters / 4,860 ballots cast
Cuyahoga Heights - 570 registered voters / 1,382 ballots cast
Fairview Park - 13,342 registered voters / 18,472 ballots cast
Highland Hills Village - 760 registered voters / 8,822 ballots cast
Independence - 5,735 registered voters / 6,226 ballots cast
Mayfield Village - 2,764 registered voters / 3,145 ballots cast
Middleburg Heights - 12,173 registered voters / 14,854 ballots cast
Moreland Hills Village - 2,990 registered voters / 4,616 ballots cast
North Olmstead - 25,794 registered voters / 25,887 ballots cast
Olmstead Falls - 6,538 registered voters / 7,328 ballots cast
Pepper Pike - 5,131 registered voters / 6,479 ballots cast
Rocky River - 16,600 registered voters / 20,070 ballots cast
Solon (WD6) - 2,292 registered voters / 4,300 ballots cast
South Euclid - 16,902 registered voters / 16,917 ballots cast
Strongsville (WD3) - 7,806 registered voters / 12,108 ballots cast
University Heights - 10,072 registered voters / 11,982 ballots cast
Valley View Village - 1,787 registered voters / 3,409 ballots cast
Warrensville Heights - 10,562 registered voters / 15,039 ballots cast
Woodmere Village - 558 registered voters / 8,854 ballots cast
Bedford (CSD) - 22,777 registered voters / 27,856 ballots cast
Independence (LSD) - 5,735 registered voters / 6,226 ballots cast
Orange (CSD) - 11,640 registered voters / 22,931 ballots cast
Warrensville (CSD) - 12,218 registered voters / 15,822 ballots cast

Michigan City News-Dispatch - In LaPorte County, Indiana, a Democratic stronghold, electronic voting machines decided that each precinct only had 300 voters. "At about 7 p.m. Tuesday," according to this report, "it was noticed that the first two or three printouts from individual precinct reports all listed an identical number of voters. Each precinct was listed as having 300 registered voters. That means the total number of voters for the county would be 22,200, although there are more than 79,000 registered voters.
http://www.WantToKnow.info/041104newsdispatch (article became pay for view shortly after elections)

Common Dreams (excellent news website) - 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 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.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm

Popular Mechanics - A team of former National Security Agency (NSA) computer experts conducted a weeklong exercise with six Diebold machines and a server. According to team leader Michael Wertheimer, the group uncovered "considerable security risks." They found that the smart cards used to provide supervisors with access to the machines could be easily hacked; the removable media containing voting information was protected by flimsy locks that the team picked in under a minute using bent paper clips. The paper clips weren't even necessary, since all 32,000 keys supplied by Diebold for the machines are identical, allowing any key to open all of the machines. On the software side, the most glaring weakness was in election headquarters servers: Dell PCs ran the Windows 2000 operating system without Microsoft's security upgrade patches, which left servers susceptible to viruses and worms, enabling a remote attacker to tamper with election systems by phone."
http://popularmechanics.com/science/research/2004/11/hack_the_vote/index3.phtml (pg 3 of 4 webpages)

Popular Science - In South Carolina, officials bought machines too late for adequate testing. And on many of their onscreen ballots, the presidential contest included names of candidates from local elections. Several Texas counties are thousands of votes short because a bug in the software failed to record Spanish-language ballots. For hundreds of thousands of votes, there will be no paper record at all. In Colorado, a group of hackers is boasting that they stole a box of electronic smartcards used to activate e-voting machines and reprogrammed them to allow multiple votes, just for fun. In virtually every state, officials failed to invite outside technical experts to participate in the process of e-voting machine selection. Because none of the major vendors of e-voting machines release their code for security testing, states and counties are forced to trust vendors’ own assessments of their machines’ reliability.
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/generaltech/article/0,20967,714491-1,00.html (3 web pages)

House of Representatives Website - Representatives John Conyers, Jerrold Nadler, and Robert Wexler, members of the House Judiciary Committee, posted a letter on November 5th to David Walker, Comptroller General of the U.S. The letter reads as follows: "We write with an urgent request that the Government Accountability Office immediately undertake an investigation of the efficacy of voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election, how election officials responded to difficulties they encountered and what we can do in the future to improve our election systems and administration."
http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/gaoinvestvote2004ltr11504.pdf

What You Can Do. For starters, you can email your support to the above three members of Congress at http://www.workingforchange.com/activism/action.cfm?itemid=18055 There are also two excellent petitions demanding an investigation which you can sign on the Internet. The first already had 26,000 signatures as of 4:00 p.m. November 11th. The second, posted by MoveOn.org doesn't list numbers who have signed, though their membership numbers nearly 3 million.
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/uselect/petition.html

http://www.moveon.org/investigatethevote/


In addition to these petitions, visit websites covering the elections mess. They provide ideas on other actions you can take. Two of the best such websites are:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org

http://www.votescam.com


We also highly recommend the excellent 30-minute documentary available for free viewing at http://www.votergate.tv/ though they are having problems because of the extremely high number of people wanting to watch this incredible documentary. And if you haven't seen our first posting on this topic, take a look at http://www.wanttoknow.info/electronicvoting It is well worth reading.

For reliable, verifiable information on other major cover-ups which directly affect our democracy, see www.WantToKnow.info The WantToKnow.info team is a group of dedicated researchers from around the world who are deeply committed to revealing critical information being hidden from the public, and to designing ways that we can work together to build a brighter future for us, for our children, and for our world. To join our mailing list (one email every two days on average), send an email to wecare@wanttoknow.info Together, we can and will make a difference. Please help to spread this important news by sending this important information to your friends and colleagues.

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PissedOffVoters.net

"The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery..."
—Thomas Paine
http://www.pissedoffvoters.net/

Stolen Election continues...
http://radtimes.blogspot.com/2004_11_01_radtimes_archive.html

$100,000 Reward for Evidence of Vote Fraud — BUZZFLASH, Fri Nov 12 18:59
• Welcome to Fair Elections — Fair Elections, Sat Nov 13 02:23