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... ...The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling. 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 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... ...How could this happen? On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine. That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC. "In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?" Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer." "So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?" Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software. Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning. "Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program. But, it's running on a Windows PC. So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel. In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400. "Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger." They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election." As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser. Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds." On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.)... ...So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this story was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit polls had failed. But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play." Read it all, and explain it away.
UPDATE: as far as watching the 30-minute VOTERGATE film referred to above, well... Our video files have been attacked and taken out. Who doesn't want you to see this film? We are working around the clock to get the video files back online right away. Please check back soon.
Wow, that is some serious stuff. Normally I would be dismissive of such a thing, but thats enough for me to want to have a more serious independent investigation.
Btw, here's the quick numbers that I think explain why something is up, assuming that those numbers are accurate: Actual-Expected vote counts for Florida per voting system E-Touch Rep/Dem 410,491/414,913 Opti-scan counties Rep/Dem 612,971/13,250 Now, assuming these numbers are accurate, thats a pretty serious anomoly that you cannot dismiss.
According to the charts, those numbers you quoted above are the difference between the expected votes for each candidate and the actual votes. In other words, Bush got 612,971 more votes from optiscan counties than had been statistically projected. Kerry got 13,250 more votes than statistically projected. Just thought it should be clarified, as your post is a little confusing on this point.
Here are the actual vote totals from the Florida Department of State website. I didn't look at every single county, but I looked at about 20, and they were either exactly on or just barely off with the site linked in the first post (which could be due to new absentee totals since that website looked at the charts).
What we dont know though is the voter registration by county being accurate. I dont know where to verify that.
OK, here's the problem. It's possible for someone to hack any system that uses a single telephone number to call in votes that are tabulated by MS Access. A 14-year-old could do it, most likely. But just because it's possible doesn't mean it happened, yet there are thousands of angry Dems who keep saying that it did. And they keep using the voter registration numbers as their "proof". Problem is, if you look at the 2000 election in Florida where nobody had these Diebold machines, the results are quite similar. These Floridians are DINOs, people. Zell Miller fans. It's not ludicrous to see the voter reg #s and the vote #s be so different because that's how rural and suburban FL has been trending. Really, the entire thing makes us, Democrats, look silly. Either show some real proof or leave it alone.
OK, here's that info from the FL DOS site. Again, the numbers on the US Together site look about right. They're all a little high--probably because of late registration from GOTV movements--but they seem slightly high equally for both sides, and the percentages look abut right.
Agreed. And you're probably right. Mostly, I'm just trying to get the real numbers from the real source, so that that part of the discussion can be gotten past. The discrepancy between touch-screen and optiscan is a strange anomoly, however.
What's the distribution of machines by county? What I mean is, is there a pattern in what machines are used in what county and how the votes differed?
Oops ... in one Ohio precint where a total of 638 people voted, Bush received 4,258 votes. http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/11/05/voting.problems.ap/index.html This was only a mistake, but it's frustrating that things like this can happen.
All data is by county. So the pattern is that in counties that used the opti-scan equipment in Florida there was And Obie, your point was exactly why I was thinking an investigation is in order, and not saying clearly that there clearly was fraud. There are perfectly reasonable explanations for this sort of pattern to have occured. Of course, there were also a number of factors that point to some sort of vote tampering. That doesnt mean that it occurred, but its enough that I think there should be an official look. Interestingly enough, the exit poll data for the Floridian senatorial race was just about dead on.
A few bong hits, and the liberal conspiracy "machine" starts to roll! Liberal conspiracies really take root (in hippy cafe's) when it's action-movie ready, like this. Can't wait for the wackiness. Plus, I'm writing this script, only in mine, the Dems are doing the manipulation of the computers, and the hero Republicans foil the plot.
The movie-going public may be willing to believe flying elephants and body-snatching aliens, but no one's dumb enough to believe there's such a thing as a heroic Republican.
Never read any Ayn Rand I take it. Then how about: Ah-nold Schwarrzeneggar Mel Gibson Bruce Willis Bob Dole Jimmy Stewart Condalesa Rice (what a back-stroy!)
Yeah, George W. is the epitome of John Galt and Howard Roark. You are astute. Do you know that movies aren't depicitions of real events? Mel Gibson didn't really have to dislocate his shoulder underwater and all that, and Bruce Willis never Died Hard.
The Florida results look rather fishy, I'll admit. But lacking any forensic evidence it really does make us look like the tinfoil hat brigade. Not that we should not have very valid concerns over the reliability and security of computerized voting machines and vote tabulation. These things have been shown again and again to be reasonably trivial to compromise. The fact that we have yet to catch anyone fiddling with the numbers should not make us less nervous. Everyone, Democrats and Republicans should be demmanding secure, transparent electronic voting systems that keep a paper ballot backup. Jesus Christ, it's not that f***ing hard.
Is there a good reason to vote against paper ballot backup, ever? Who has voted against it? Forensic evidence is needed to conclude hacking/associated malfeasance, not to investigate it.