Dear all,
Votergate is a continuing fascination. Are we watching the first
cracks in the American monolith? Have the oil conglomerates finally overstepped
the mark? More importantly, will ordinary Americans react, and if so how?
Regards,
Bob.
The best reporting by far in the mainstream media has beenby MSNBC's
Keith Olbermann. Both on TV andon 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 Countyâs website shows, we had the most unexpected results
in
years: more votes than voters. Iâll 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 Carolinanewspaper 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/USA Today - "There were also several dozen voters in six
stateswho 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_BRO
WVOTE_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'scompany 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. "Ifind 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 castabovethe 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
ofregistered voters for the belowprecincts, 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 conducteda 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 vendorsâ own
assessments of
their machinesâ 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
alsotwo 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.orgdoesn't list numbers who have signed,though
their membership numbers nearly3 million.
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/uselect/petition.html
http://www.moveon.org/investigatethevote/
In addition to these petitions, visit websites covering the elections mess.
Theyprovide 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-minutedocumentary available for free
viewingat 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 whoare 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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.
www.WantToKnow.info - Revealing major cover-ups & working together for a better
world
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