In the fall of 2001, after an
eight-month review of 175,000 Florida
ballots never counted in the 2000 election, an analysis by the National Opinion
Research Center
confirmed that Al Gore actually won Florida
and should have been President. However, coverage of this report was only a
small blip in the corporate media as a much bigger story dominated the news
after September 11, 2001.
New research compiled by Dr. Dennis Loo with the University of Cal Poly Pomona now shows that
extensive manipulation of non-paper-trail voting machines occurred in several
states during the 2004 election.
The facts are as follows:
In 2004 Bush far exceeded the 85% of registered Florida
Republican votes that he got in 2000, receiving more than 100% of the
registered Republican votes in 47 out of 67 Florida counties, 200% of registered
Republicans in 15 counties, and over 300% of registered Republicans in 4
counties. Bush managed these remarkable outcomes despite the fact that his
share of the crossover votes by registered Democrats in Florida did not
increase over 2000, and he lost ground among registered Independents,
dropping 15 points. We also know that Bush "won" Ohio by 51-48%, but statewide results were
not matched by the court-supervised hand count of the 147,400 absentee and
provisional ballots in which Kerry received 54.46% of the vote. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio
the number of recorded votes was more than 93,000 greater than the number of
registered voters.
More importantly national exit polls showed Kerry winning
in 2004. However, It was only in precincts where there were no paper trails
on the voting machines that the exit polls ended up being different from the
final count. According to Dr. Steve Freeman, a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania, the odds are 250 million
to one that the exit polls were wrong by chance. In fact, where the exit
polls disagreed with the computerized outcomes the results always favored
Bush - another statistical impossibility. .
Dennis Loo writes, "A team at the University of
California at Berkeley, headed by sociology professor Michael Hout, found a
highly suspicious pattern in which Bush received 260,000 more votes in those
Florida precincts that used electronic voting machines than past voting
patterns would indicate compared to those precincts that used optical scan
read votes where past voting patterns held."
There is now strong statistical evidence of widespread
voting machine manipulation occurring in US elections since 2000. Coverage of
the fraud has been reported in independent media and various websites. The
information is not secret. But it certainly seems to be a taboo subject for
the US
corporate media.
Black
Box Voting reported on March 9, 2005 that voting machines used by over 30
million voters were easily hacked by relatively unsophisticated programs and
audits of the computers would not show the changes. It is very possible that
a small team of hackers could have manipulated the 2004 and earlier elections
in various locations throughout the United States. Irregularities in
the vote counts certainly indicate that something beyond chance occurrences
has been happening in recent elections.
That a special interest group might try to cheat on an
election in the United States
is nothing new. Historians tell us how local political machines from both
major parties have in the past used methods of double counting, ballot box
stuffing, poll taxes and registration manipulation to affect elections. In
the computer age, however, election fraud can occur externally without local
precinct administrators having any awareness of the manipulations - and the
fraud can be extensive enough to change the outcome of an entire national
election.
There is little doubt key Democrats know that votes in
2004 and earlier elections were stolen. The fact that few in Congress are
complaining about fraud is an indication of the totality to which both
parties accept the status quo of a money based elections system. Neither
party wants to further undermine public confidence in the American
"democratic" process (over 80 millions eligible voters refused to
vote in 2004). Instead we will likely see the quiet passing of legislation
that will correct the most blatant problems. Future elections in the US will
continue as an equal opportunity for both parties to maintain a national
democratic charade in which money counts more than truth.
Peter Phillips is a Professor of
Sociology at Sonoma
State University
and Director of Project Censored. Dennis Loo's report "No Paper Trail
Left Behind: the Theft of the 2004 Presidential Election," can be viewed
at http://www.projectcensored.org/newsflash/voter_fraud.html
|