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http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm

 

 

Evidence Mounts That The Vote Was Hacked

 

Published on Saturday, November 6, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

 

Evidence Mounts That The Vote Was Hacked

by Thom Hartmann

 

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. And not just this year, he

said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic

primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against

Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against

Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.

 

" It was practice for a national effort, " Fisher told me.

 

And evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on

November 2, 2004.

 

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

matched the Kerry/Bush vote, and so did the optically-scanned paper

ballots in the larger counties, in Florida´s smaller counties the

results from the optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central

tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking - seem to have been

reversed.

 

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 smaller

counties where, it was probably assumed, the small voter numbers

wouldn´t be much noticed. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats,

went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went

77.25% for Bush.

 

Yet in the larger counties, where such anomalies would be more obvious

to the news media, high percentages of registered Democrats equaled

high percentages of votes for Kerry.

 

More visual analysis of the results can be seen at

http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and

www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm.

 

And, although elections officials didn´t notice these anomalies, in

aggregate they were enough to swing Florida from Kerry to Bush. If you

simply go through the analysis of these counties and reverse the

" anomalous " numbers in those counties that appear to have been hacked,

suddenly the Florida election results resemble the Florida exit poll

results: Kerry won, and won big.

 

Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever since

Election Day.

 

Election night, I´d been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of

the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after

midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I

was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier

sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he´d lost the election. The

exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. " Bush took

the news stoically, " noted the AP report.

 

But then the computers reported something different. In several

pivotal states.

 

Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were

rigged.

 

Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton

campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular,

wrote an article for The Hill, the publication read by every political

junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant

points.

 

" Exit Polls are almost never wrong, " Morris wrote. " They eliminate the

two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly

separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots

but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in

judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state. "

 

He added: " So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was

slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa,

all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going

to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points. "

 

Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep,

as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various

states the election was called for Bush.

 

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.)

 

Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had

Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he´d lost the election in a

landslide.

 

Morris´s conspiracy theory is that the exit polls " were sabotage " to

cause people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush,

since the networks would call the election based on the exit polls for

Kerry. But the networks didn´t do that, and had never intended to. It

makes far more sense that the exit polls were right - they weren´t

done on Diebold PCs - and that the vote itself was hacked.

 

And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this

hit him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national

office in the most-hacked swing states.

 

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. "

 

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored

Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated

daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann .com His most recent

books are " The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, " " Unequal Protection:

The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights, " " We

The People: A Call To Take Back America, " and " What Would Jefferson

Do?: A Return To Democracy. "

 

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm

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