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Something's fishy in Ohio
November 30, 2004
BY JESSE JACKSON Advertisement
In the Ukraine, citizens are in the streets protesting what they charge is a fixed election. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell expresses this nation's concern about apparent voting irregularities. The media give the dispute around-the-clock coverage. But in the United States, massive and systemic voter irregularities go unreported and unnoticed.
Ohio is this election year's Florida. The vote in Ohio decided the presidential race, but it was marred by intolerable, and often partisan, irregularities and discrepancies. U.S. citizens have as much reason as those in Kiev to be concerned that the fix was in. Consider:
In Ohio, a court just ruled there can't be a recount yet, because the vote is not yet counted. It's three weeks after the election, and Ohio still hasn't counted the votes and certified the election. Some 93,000 overvotes and undervotes are not counted; 155,000 provisional ballots are only now being counted. Absentee ballots cast in the two days prior to the election haven't been counted.
Ohio determines the election, but the state has not yet counted the vote. That outrage is made intolerable by the fact that the secretary of state in charge of this operation, Ken Blackwell, holds -- like Katherine Harris of Florida's fiasco in 2000 -- a dual role: secretary of state with control over voting procedures and co-chair of George Bush's Ohio campaign. Blackwell should recuse himself so that a thorough investigation, count and recount of Ohio's vote can be made.
Blackwell reversed rules on provisional ballots in place in the spring primaries. These allowed voters to cast provisional ballots anywhere in their county, even if they were in the wrong precinct, reflecting the chief rationale for provisional ballots: to ensure that those who went to the wrong place by mistake could have their votes counted. The result of this decision -- why does this not surprise? -- was to disqualify disproportionately ballots cast in heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County.
Blackwell also permitted the use of electronic machines that provided no paper record. The maker of many of these machines, the head of Diebold Co., promised to deliver Ohio for Bush. In one precinct in Franklin County, an electric voting system gave Bush 3,893 extra votes out of a total of 638 votes cast.
Blackwell also presided over a voting system that resulted in quick, short lines in the dominantly Republican suburbs, and four-hour and longer waiting lines in the inner cities. Wealthy precincts received ample numbers of voting machines and numerous voting places. Democratic precincts received inadequate numbers of machines in too few polling places that were often hard to locate; this caused daylong waits for the very working people who could least afford the time.
In Ohio, as in Florida and Pennsylvania, there was a stark disconnect between the exit polls and the tabulated results, with the former favoring John Kerry and the latter George Bush. The chance of this occurring in these three states, according to Professor Steven Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania, is about 250 million to 1.
In one of dozens of examples, Ellen Connally, an African-American Supreme Court candidate running an underfunded race at the bottom of the ticket, received over 257,000 more votes than Kerry in 37 counties. She ran better than Kerry in the areas of the state where she wasn't known and didn't campaign than she did where she was known and did campaign.
There should be a federal investigation of the vote count in Ohio, with the partisan secretary of state removing himself from the scene.
In Cleveland, as in Kiev, Ukraine, citizens have the right to know that the election is run fairly and every vote counted honestly. Citizens have the right to nonpartisan election officials. Citizens have the right to voting machines that keep a paper record and allow for an independent audit and recount.
This country needs no more Floridas and Ohios. This shouldn't be a partisan issue. We call for a constitutional amendment to guarantee the right to vote for all U.S. citizens and to empower Congress to establish federal standards and nonpartisan administration of elections. Harris and Blackwell are insults to the people they represent, and stains upon the president whose election they sought to ensure. Democracy should not be for export only.
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Bloglines | My Blogs
Bloglines | My Blogs
Jesse Jackson seeks voting probe
From staff and wire reports
The Rev. Jesse Jackson says Ohioans should not stand for the way elections were run in Ohio Nov. 2, and he planned to bring his message directly to Cincinnati today.
Jackson was expected to speak at a rally this morning at Integrity Hall in Bond Hill, calling for an investigation of the voting process in Ohio. He said the rally this morning and one Sunday night in Columbus were to serve as "a kind of statewide sharing of experiences" that would mobilize citizens and result in "collective state action.
"We are pulling people together from around the state," Jackson, president of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition said in a telephone interview Sunday. "The Ohio race has not yet been (decided) because of so many irregularities 26 days after the election."
Jackson on Sunday called for a recount of votes and said the Ohio Supreme Court should consider setting aside President Bush's victory Nov. 2. Jackson and others are complaining about uncounted punch-card votes, disqualified provisional ballots, discrepancies between exit polling and results, and too many votes counted for President Bush in Ohio. Bush defeated Democrat John Kerry in Ohio by 136,000 votes, according to unofficial results.
Jackson also said that there was a disparity in voting machinery used in suburban and urban neighborhoods.
"The suburban communities had ample machines," he said. "In inner cities, we had people (waiting) five or six hours in line. That was no doubt targeted."
Kerry has already conceded the race. Jackson said he thought it was possible a recount could change the outcome of the election, but said it was more important to get votes counted.
"This is about the integrity of the vote. This is not about the Kerry campaign," said Jackson, who supported Kerry.
On the morning of Nov. 3, less than 12 hours after Ohio's final votes were cast, Kerry called Bush to congratulate him on his victory. His campaign figured he would not get enough of the 155,000 provisional ballots, or those cast by voters whose registrations could not be confirmed at polling places, to overtake Bush's total.
The counting of provisional ballots and wide gaps in vote totals for Kerry and other Democrats on the ballots in certain counties have raised too many questions to let the vote stand without further examination, Jackson said.
"We can live with winning and losing. We cannot live with fraud and stealing," Jackson said.
Attorney Cliff Arnebeck, who has represented political activist groups, said he would ask the Ohio Supreme Court, probably on Wednesday, to take a look at the election results. If the court decides to hear the case, it can declare a new winner or throw the results out.
Since the election, several complaints have surfaced:
• The Green and Libertarian parties asked a U.S. District Court judge to order an immediate recount. The judge agreed with the state that a recount cannot begin until Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell certifies the statewide vote, sometime between Dec. 3 and 6. The two parties are raising the $113,600, or $10 per precinct statewide, needed to force a recount.
• People for the American Way, a national watchdog group, is trying to stop the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections in Cleveland from rejecting 8,099 of the 24,472 provisional ballots cast there. The ballots were thrown out because voters did not properly complete them or cast them at polling places that were not their own.
• An error was detected in an electronic voting system, giving President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus. Elections officials caught the glitch and the votes will not be added to the official tally. Some groups also have complained about thousands of punch-card ballots that were not tallied because officials in the 68 counties that use them could not determine a vote for president. Votes for other offices on the cards were counted.
The Ohio Democratic Party believes every effort should be made to get an accurate count, but it is not planning legal action of its own, spokesman Dan Trevas said.
Tim Burke, chairman of the Hamilton County Board of Elections and of the county's Democratic party, said the county party supports any effort that leads to more efficient elections.
Jesse Jackson seeks voting probe
From staff and wire reports
The Rev. Jesse Jackson says Ohioans should not stand for the way elections were run in Ohio Nov. 2, and he planned to bring his message directly to Cincinnati today.
Jackson was expected to speak at a rally this morning at Integrity Hall in Bond Hill, calling for an investigation of the voting process in Ohio. He said the rally this morning and one Sunday night in Columbus were to serve as "a kind of statewide sharing of experiences" that would mobilize citizens and result in "collective state action.
"We are pulling people together from around the state," Jackson, president of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition said in a telephone interview Sunday. "The Ohio race has not yet been (decided) because of so many irregularities 26 days after the election."
Jackson on Sunday called for a recount of votes and said the Ohio Supreme Court should consider setting aside President Bush's victory Nov. 2. Jackson and others are complaining about uncounted punch-card votes, disqualified provisional ballots, discrepancies between exit polling and results, and too many votes counted for President Bush in Ohio. Bush defeated Democrat John Kerry in Ohio by 136,000 votes, according to unofficial results.
Jackson also said that there was a disparity in voting machinery used in suburban and urban neighborhoods.
"The suburban communities had ample machines," he said. "In inner cities, we had people (waiting) five or six hours in line. That was no doubt targeted."
Kerry has already conceded the race. Jackson said he thought it was possible a recount could change the outcome of the election, but said it was more important to get votes counted.
"This is about the integrity of the vote. This is not about the Kerry campaign," said Jackson, who supported Kerry.
On the morning of Nov. 3, less than 12 hours after Ohio's final votes were cast, Kerry called Bush to congratulate him on his victory. His campaign figured he would not get enough of the 155,000 provisional ballots, or those cast by voters whose registrations could not be confirmed at polling places, to overtake Bush's total.
The counting of provisional ballots and wide gaps in vote totals for Kerry and other Democrats on the ballots in certain counties have raised too many questions to let the vote stand without further examination, Jackson said.
"We can live with winning and losing. We cannot live with fraud and stealing," Jackson said.
Attorney Cliff Arnebeck, who has represented political activist groups, said he would ask the Ohio Supreme Court, probably on Wednesday, to take a look at the election results. If the court decides to hear the case, it can declare a new winner or throw the results out.
Since the election, several complaints have surfaced:
• The Green and Libertarian parties asked a U.S. District Court judge to order an immediate recount. The judge agreed with the state that a recount cannot begin until Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell certifies the statewide vote, sometime between Dec. 3 and 6. The two parties are raising the $113,600, or $10 per precinct statewide, needed to force a recount.
• People for the American Way, a national watchdog group, is trying to stop the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections in Cleveland from rejecting 8,099 of the 24,472 provisional ballots cast there. The ballots were thrown out because voters did not properly complete them or cast them at polling places that were not their own.
• An error was detected in an electronic voting system, giving President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus. Elections officials caught the glitch and the votes will not be added to the official tally. Some groups also have complained about thousands of punch-card ballots that were not tallied because officials in the 68 counties that use them could not determine a vote for president. Votes for other offices on the cards were counted.
The Ohio Democratic Party believes every effort should be made to get an accurate count, but it is not planning legal action of its own, spokesman Dan Trevas said.
Tim Burke, chairman of the Hamilton County Board of Elections and of the county's Democratic party, said the county party supports any effort that leads to more efficient elections.
Saturday, November 27, 2004
Dave Lindorff: Double Standards on Exit Polls
Dave Lindorff: Double Standards on Exit Polls
Double Standards on Exit Polls
By DAVE LINDORFF
A bitterly contested presidential election was held recently. The opposition candidate lost narrowly, by less than three percent of the vote, but now a large segment of the electorate is crying foul.
There was evidence of fraud-supporters of the opposition candidate being kept from the polls while supporters of the incumbent were voting more than once in those "red" regions of the country where the incumbent president's party was most popular, people crying foul in those regions where the opposition was stronger--and besides, exit polls showed the opposition candidate winning handily.
The country? Not America. It's the Ukraine.
The response to this evidence of a possibly stolen election? Hundreds of thousands of protesters have camped on the streets of the capital, insisting that opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko be declared the winner. Yushchenko himself has declared victory and even took a symbolic oath of office.
And in the U.S., the Bush administration, citing the exit polls and evidence of fraud that have been raised, has urged government authorities in Kiev "not to certify results until investigations of organized fraud are resolved."
What's this?
Roll back the film a minute.
Isn't the Bush administration facing much the same situation in the U.S., absent the mass street rallies?
In Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, and other battleground states in the U.S., there is considerable documented and anecdotal evidence of fraud, including organized efforts in Florida and Ohio by Republican Party authorities to hinder or depress the urban (read black and Democratic) vote, in the deliberate denial of voting rights to people of color, and of possible widespread fraud in the registering and the counting of votes. And exit polls universally showed opposition presidential candidate John Kerry winning handily in the key states of Florida and Ohio, victory in either one of which would have given him victory.
Indeed, a University of Pennsylvania researcher, studying those exit poll results, has concluded that the consistent shift from Kerry to Bush from exit poll prediction to official tally result is a statistical impossibility, leaving fraud as the only explanation.
Yet in Ohio, where a recount of all votes requested by two small third parties, the Greens and the Libertarians, could conceivably overturn the state's pro-Bush result and hand the presidency to Kerry, the Republican-run Secretary of State's office is doing everything it can to delay that recount until the state's electoral college meets and hands its 20 votes irrevocably to Bush., making the recount moot.
Where are the government calls to hold off on such a certification of Bush's election win until issues of fraud are "resolved."
Meanwhile, the mainstream media, while making much of the crisis in the Ukraine, have pretty much dropped the whole story of voter fraud in the U.S. election. Indeed, while exit polls are cited as providing strong evidence that Yushchenko probably was the real winner over governing party candidate Viktor Yanukovych in the Ukraine, in the U.S. media, the prevailing wisdom is that the U.S. exit polls-heretofore said to be far more accurate than pre-election polling--were simply wrong.
In contrast to Ukraine opposition candidate Yushchenko, U.S. opposition candidate John Kerry almost immediately conceded victory to Bush, despite mounting evidence of massive fraud in Ohio and Florida, and despite earlier pledges to fight hard and to make sure "every vote is counted."
Little wonder that in the Ukraine, where people take their new democracy seriously, the victims of fraud have taken to the streets demanding an overturning of the tainted results, while in the U.S., voters on the losing side of this electoral scandal are reduced to private grumbling.
Even so, the idea of this president, who took office the first time in the face of widespread voter fraud and disenfranchisement in the state of Florida, thanks to a decision by a Supreme Court packed with members of his own party, and who "won" the Nov. 2 election thanks to similar tactics in Ohio and Florida, telling the Ukraine to hold off on declaring a winner until allegations of fraud can be investigated and resolved is hard to swallow.
Almost as hard to swallow as the media that report this without even a passing note about its irony and hypocrisy.
Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" to be published this fall by Common Courage Press. Information about both books and other work by Lindorff can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.
He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com
Double Standards on Exit Polls
By DAVE LINDORFF
A bitterly contested presidential election was held recently. The opposition candidate lost narrowly, by less than three percent of the vote, but now a large segment of the electorate is crying foul.
There was evidence of fraud-supporters of the opposition candidate being kept from the polls while supporters of the incumbent were voting more than once in those "red" regions of the country where the incumbent president's party was most popular, people crying foul in those regions where the opposition was stronger--and besides, exit polls showed the opposition candidate winning handily.
The country? Not America. It's the Ukraine.
The response to this evidence of a possibly stolen election? Hundreds of thousands of protesters have camped on the streets of the capital, insisting that opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko be declared the winner. Yushchenko himself has declared victory and even took a symbolic oath of office.
And in the U.S., the Bush administration, citing the exit polls and evidence of fraud that have been raised, has urged government authorities in Kiev "not to certify results until investigations of organized fraud are resolved."
What's this?
Roll back the film a minute.
Isn't the Bush administration facing much the same situation in the U.S., absent the mass street rallies?
In Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, and other battleground states in the U.S., there is considerable documented and anecdotal evidence of fraud, including organized efforts in Florida and Ohio by Republican Party authorities to hinder or depress the urban (read black and Democratic) vote, in the deliberate denial of voting rights to people of color, and of possible widespread fraud in the registering and the counting of votes. And exit polls universally showed opposition presidential candidate John Kerry winning handily in the key states of Florida and Ohio, victory in either one of which would have given him victory.
Indeed, a University of Pennsylvania researcher, studying those exit poll results, has concluded that the consistent shift from Kerry to Bush from exit poll prediction to official tally result is a statistical impossibility, leaving fraud as the only explanation.
Yet in Ohio, where a recount of all votes requested by two small third parties, the Greens and the Libertarians, could conceivably overturn the state's pro-Bush result and hand the presidency to Kerry, the Republican-run Secretary of State's office is doing everything it can to delay that recount until the state's electoral college meets and hands its 20 votes irrevocably to Bush., making the recount moot.
Where are the government calls to hold off on such a certification of Bush's election win until issues of fraud are "resolved."
Meanwhile, the mainstream media, while making much of the crisis in the Ukraine, have pretty much dropped the whole story of voter fraud in the U.S. election. Indeed, while exit polls are cited as providing strong evidence that Yushchenko probably was the real winner over governing party candidate Viktor Yanukovych in the Ukraine, in the U.S. media, the prevailing wisdom is that the U.S. exit polls-heretofore said to be far more accurate than pre-election polling--were simply wrong.
In contrast to Ukraine opposition candidate Yushchenko, U.S. opposition candidate John Kerry almost immediately conceded victory to Bush, despite mounting evidence of massive fraud in Ohio and Florida, and despite earlier pledges to fight hard and to make sure "every vote is counted."
Little wonder that in the Ukraine, where people take their new democracy seriously, the victims of fraud have taken to the streets demanding an overturning of the tainted results, while in the U.S., voters on the losing side of this electoral scandal are reduced to private grumbling.
Even so, the idea of this president, who took office the first time in the face of widespread voter fraud and disenfranchisement in the state of Florida, thanks to a decision by a Supreme Court packed with members of his own party, and who "won" the Nov. 2 election thanks to similar tactics in Ohio and Florida, telling the Ukraine to hold off on declaring a winner until allegations of fraud can be investigated and resolved is hard to swallow.
Almost as hard to swallow as the media that report this without even a passing note about its irony and hypocrisy.
Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" to be published this fall by Common Courage Press. Information about both books and other work by Lindorff can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.
He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com
Friday, November 26, 2004
Bloglines | My Blogs
Bloglines | My Blogs
ELECTION DAY AFTERMATH
More voting questions raised
Thursday, November 25, 2004
Jon Craig
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
Several new voting concerns surfaced yesterday as lawyers combed totals from the Nov. 2 presidential election.
An Akron man filed a complaint with the Summit County Board of Elections saying he "witnessed election judges telling potential voters that they could cast a provisional ballot at any table or precinct and if they did so, it would be counted."
Neil F. Schoenwetter Jr. was a volunteer election challenger for the Democratic Party on Nov. 2 at Copley High School, where six precincts voted.
Congress’ investigative agency, responding to complaints from Ohio and elsewhere, has begun to look into the vote count, including the handling of provisional ballots and malfunctions of voting machines.
The Government Accountability Office usually begins investigations at the request of Congress, but the agency’s head, Comptroller General David Walker, said the GAO acted on its own because of ballot-counting complaints.
The investigation was not triggered by several House Democrats who had written the agency this month, seeking an investigation. That effort was led by senior Judiciary Committee member John Conyers, of Michigan.
Conyers yesterday said he would like the investigation to include allegations that not enough voting machines were available in some Democratic areas, such as Franklin County.
Meanwhile, attorneys for various citizen action groups that plan to contest the results said they are puzzled that vote totals in the presidential race in Warren County far exceed totals in most other statewide and countywide races.
For example, the total of 94,415 votes cast there for President Bush or Sen. John Kerry is 3,000 more than all those cast in the U.S. Senate race and a constitutional amendment about same-sex marriage.
Further, 20,000 to 24,000 fewer votes were cast in three Ohio Supreme Court races and 13,000 to 24,000 fewer were cast in various countywide races.
In Warren County, which reported a 33 percent increase in voter turnout from the 2000 elections, election officials had banned observers at the polls for "homeland security" concerns.
Clifford O. Arnebeck, a Columbus attorney representing the Alliance for Democracy, said he has testimony from poll worker Liz Kent, of Warren County, asserting, "There was no way the actual vote could have been as reported."
Arnebeck’s group plans to join several others in contesting the results in the Ohio Supreme Court. Two third-party presidential candidates plan to formally request a recount.
President Bush’s uncertified margin of victory over Kerry totals more than 137,000 votes in Ohio. There were 155,337 provisional and more than 5,000 overseas ballots.
In Summit County, Schoenwetter said he witnessed election judges giving incorrect instructions to voters in four precincts.
"I tried, unsuccessfully, to point out the judges’ errors to the judges," he said in his affidavit. "I also observed that poll workers were not helpful to — in fact, some were overtly hostile to the idea of helping — voters whose names were not on the rolls in finding their correct polling place.
"Some lines were over an hour or two long. At other precincts, there was no line. I believe that there were potential voters who requested provisional ballots at the incorrect precinct because it was more convenient and because they were told that casting a provisional ballot at any precinct was acceptable," he said.
Bryan C. Williams, director of the Summit County elections board, said he was unaware of Schoenwetter’s affidavit, saying, "We have a stack of complaints we received."
Williams said it would be incorrect to advise people that their provisional ballot would be counted if they were in the wrong precinct. Of 5,400 provisional ballots, about 25 percent won’t be counted, he said, including people not registered or at the wrong address.
Separately, Williams said he plans to refer to the county sheriff, for possible prosecution, the names of 20 people confirmed to have voted twice.
The Cuyahoga County elections board voted Monday to reject one out of three of the 24,472 provisional ballots cast in the Nov. 2 election. The bulk of the 8,099 invalidated ballots were determined to be cast by nonregistered voters or registered voters who cast ballots in the wrong precincts.
In Sandusky County, double counting of 2,600 ballots from nine precincts resulted from duplicate storage in a computer disk, the elections board said. No outcomes were affected by the error, the elections board in northwestern Ohio said.
Barb Tuckerman, board of elections director in Sandusky County, said the error, initially blamed on ballots being run through a scanner twice, was traced to workers duplicating backups of vote totals for the nine precincts on a computerstorage disk.
"We checked everything as it came out of the machines. We got the right answer," Tuckerman said.
In Gahanna, 3,893 extra votes were recorded for Bush because of an unexplained touch-screen machine malfunction. And in Youngstown, some voters who tried to cast ballots for Kerry on electronic machines saw their votes recorded for Bush instead.
Ohio Republican Party Chairman Robert T. Bennett issued a statement questioning the vote challenges:
"These groups have already acknowledged the outcome of the election will not change, and their actions represent a foolish attempt to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Bush presidency," he said. "I call on the leadership of the Ohio Democratic Party to immediately concede that this worthless recount request is an insult to the integrity of Ohio’s election system."
Information from the Associated Press was included in this story.
jcraig@dispatch.com
ELECTION DAY AFTERMATH
More voting questions raised
Thursday, November 25, 2004
Jon Craig
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
Several new voting concerns surfaced yesterday as lawyers combed totals from the Nov. 2 presidential election.
An Akron man filed a complaint with the Summit County Board of Elections saying he "witnessed election judges telling potential voters that they could cast a provisional ballot at any table or precinct and if they did so, it would be counted."
Neil F. Schoenwetter Jr. was a volunteer election challenger for the Democratic Party on Nov. 2 at Copley High School, where six precincts voted.
Congress’ investigative agency, responding to complaints from Ohio and elsewhere, has begun to look into the vote count, including the handling of provisional ballots and malfunctions of voting machines.
The Government Accountability Office usually begins investigations at the request of Congress, but the agency’s head, Comptroller General David Walker, said the GAO acted on its own because of ballot-counting complaints.
The investigation was not triggered by several House Democrats who had written the agency this month, seeking an investigation. That effort was led by senior Judiciary Committee member John Conyers, of Michigan.
Conyers yesterday said he would like the investigation to include allegations that not enough voting machines were available in some Democratic areas, such as Franklin County.
Meanwhile, attorneys for various citizen action groups that plan to contest the results said they are puzzled that vote totals in the presidential race in Warren County far exceed totals in most other statewide and countywide races.
For example, the total of 94,415 votes cast there for President Bush or Sen. John Kerry is 3,000 more than all those cast in the U.S. Senate race and a constitutional amendment about same-sex marriage.
Further, 20,000 to 24,000 fewer votes were cast in three Ohio Supreme Court races and 13,000 to 24,000 fewer were cast in various countywide races.
In Warren County, which reported a 33 percent increase in voter turnout from the 2000 elections, election officials had banned observers at the polls for "homeland security" concerns.
Clifford O. Arnebeck, a Columbus attorney representing the Alliance for Democracy, said he has testimony from poll worker Liz Kent, of Warren County, asserting, "There was no way the actual vote could have been as reported."
Arnebeck’s group plans to join several others in contesting the results in the Ohio Supreme Court. Two third-party presidential candidates plan to formally request a recount.
President Bush’s uncertified margin of victory over Kerry totals more than 137,000 votes in Ohio. There were 155,337 provisional and more than 5,000 overseas ballots.
In Summit County, Schoenwetter said he witnessed election judges giving incorrect instructions to voters in four precincts.
"I tried, unsuccessfully, to point out the judges’ errors to the judges," he said in his affidavit. "I also observed that poll workers were not helpful to — in fact, some were overtly hostile to the idea of helping — voters whose names were not on the rolls in finding their correct polling place.
"Some lines were over an hour or two long. At other precincts, there was no line. I believe that there were potential voters who requested provisional ballots at the incorrect precinct because it was more convenient and because they were told that casting a provisional ballot at any precinct was acceptable," he said.
Bryan C. Williams, director of the Summit County elections board, said he was unaware of Schoenwetter’s affidavit, saying, "We have a stack of complaints we received."
Williams said it would be incorrect to advise people that their provisional ballot would be counted if they were in the wrong precinct. Of 5,400 provisional ballots, about 25 percent won’t be counted, he said, including people not registered or at the wrong address.
Separately, Williams said he plans to refer to the county sheriff, for possible prosecution, the names of 20 people confirmed to have voted twice.
The Cuyahoga County elections board voted Monday to reject one out of three of the 24,472 provisional ballots cast in the Nov. 2 election. The bulk of the 8,099 invalidated ballots were determined to be cast by nonregistered voters or registered voters who cast ballots in the wrong precincts.
In Sandusky County, double counting of 2,600 ballots from nine precincts resulted from duplicate storage in a computer disk, the elections board said. No outcomes were affected by the error, the elections board in northwestern Ohio said.
Barb Tuckerman, board of elections director in Sandusky County, said the error, initially blamed on ballots being run through a scanner twice, was traced to workers duplicating backups of vote totals for the nine precincts on a computerstorage disk.
"We checked everything as it came out of the machines. We got the right answer," Tuckerman said.
In Gahanna, 3,893 extra votes were recorded for Bush because of an unexplained touch-screen machine malfunction. And in Youngstown, some voters who tried to cast ballots for Kerry on electronic machines saw their votes recorded for Bush instead.
Ohio Republican Party Chairman Robert T. Bennett issued a statement questioning the vote challenges:
"These groups have already acknowledged the outcome of the election will not change, and their actions represent a foolish attempt to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Bush presidency," he said. "I call on the leadership of the Ohio Democratic Party to immediately concede that this worthless recount request is an insult to the integrity of Ohio’s election system."
Information from the Associated Press was included in this story.
jcraig@dispatch.com
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
PCWorld.com - E-Voting Problems Found in Maryland
PCWorld.com - E-Voting Problems Found in Maryland
E-Voting Problems Found in Maryland
Reported incidents were likely a small percentage of actual problems, group says.
Grant Gross, IDG News Service
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
Poll observers in about 6 percent of Maryland's precincts recorded 201 problems with electronic voting machines during the November 2 general election, according to a report released this week by TrueVoteMD.org.
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Poll watchers trained by the voting integrity activist group reported 42 cases of crashed e-voting machines, 37 cases of access card or encoder problems, and 30 screen malfunctions, according to the report. More than 400 TrueVoteMD poll watchers observed the elections at 108 of the state's 1787 voting precincts.
TrueVoteMD poll watchers saw problems that were "easily observable" and not problems that may have happened inside the electronic voting machines, says Linda Schade, co-founder of TrueVoteMD. While the problems observed in the precincts where the poll watchers were stationed may not be typical of all precincts, they were likely a "small fraction" of the actual problems with e-voting machines in Maryland, Schade says.
"One of our greatest resources is the widespread common sense of Maryland voters, and also their passion to defend our democracy from what we see is a clear threat, which is nontransparent elections, unverifiable elections using error-prone secret software with gaping security holes, and with a history of election failures," Schade says. "They are in complete agreement about one thing--that is that blind faith has no place in the voting booth."
TrueVoteMD, along with several national groups, has called for electronic voting machines to include voter-verified paper trails, which are printouts of each voter's choices that can later be used to recount ballots. E-voting critics say independent recounts are impossible without such paper trails; when a recount is demanded, most e-voting machines will spit out the same electronically generated set of disputed numbers again and again.
Independent Tests Sought
Separately, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Verified Voting Foundation announced late Monday they have sent letters asking voting officials in eight counties across the U.S. to allow independent testing of their e-voting machines.
Those counties were identified by the groups as encountering significant e-voting problems on November 2. The problems were listed on a Voteprotect.org database after voters called in problems to a toll-free telephone number on Election Day. The counties contacted were Broward and Palm Beach in Florida; Mahoning and Franklin in Ohio; Mercer and Philadelphia in Pennsylvania; Harris in Texas; and Bernalillo in New Mexico.
The Election Verification Project, a coalition of e-voting critics, recorded more than 1800 voting machine problems through the Voteprotect.org database, although the Maryland reports are not yet included. About 900 of the 1800 reported machine problems related to paperless e-voting machines, according to Will Doherty, executive director of the Verified Voting Foundation.
E-voting advocates have defended the machines as accurate and voter friendly. Linda Lamone, administrator of the Maryland State Board of Elections, says the TrueVoteMD poll watchers found a handful of problems in 16,000 e-voting machines used in the state November 2. Replacement machines were available in case of breakdowns, she adds. Maryland uses Diebold e-voting machines.
"By all [Board of Elections] accounts, we had a successful election," Lamone says. "We planned for equipment issues this election just like we do in every election. You can't expect everything to work perfectly."
Report Disputed
Two poll workers attending the TrueVoteMD press conference disputed that the problems described in the group's 18-page report were typical. Along with the 201 e-voting machine problems identified by TrueVoteMD poll watchers, another 330 nontechnical problems, including long lines and registration problems, were reported by the poll watchers.
But Judy Dein, an election judge in Ann Arundel County, says her precinct experienced no problems. "Our experience was different," she says after hearing about e-voting machine and registration problems from Schade and three poll watchers.
An estimated 40 million U.S. voters used about 175,000 e-voting machines on Election Day, says Bob Cohen, senior vice president at the Information Technology Association of America, a trade group that has e-voting machine vendors as members.
"You have a handful of incidents reported," Cohen says. "The electronic voting issues were extremely small compared to the big picture."
Among the incidents reported in Maryland were a voter in Montgomery County who said the machine went dark and spit out her ballot card before she finished voting. Another voter reported the machine shutting down while she was trying to correct her vote, and another voter in Montgomery County said the machine switched her choices and she was directed to another machine.
A poll watcher in Montgomery County reported two e-voting machines at one precinct crashing less than 75 minutes after polls opened.
TrueVoteMD's Schade called for the Board of Elections to adopt "systematic" quality control measures. Because of the secret software inside e-voting machines and the lack of TrueVoteMD volunteers at every precinct, the group doesn't know how many e-voting problems there were, Schade says.
"At a certain point, if we don't know the scope of the problems, we don't know if it's a legitimate election or not," Schade says. "Any rational organization would institute a quality-control program."
Nancy Almgren, a former candidate for Maryland House of Delegates, questions why it was TrueVoteMD's responsibility to track e-voting problems. "I think the question is why is a citizens group doing this?" Almgren says. "Why isn't it being done by the state? If they're investing our money in this system, why aren't they verifying the results?"
The Board of Elections conducts an extensive review of voting issues, counters Lamone, the state elections administrator. "They take far too much credit," she says. "We have a huge process in place to monitor what's going on."
E-Voting Problems Found in Maryland
Reported incidents were likely a small percentage of actual problems, group says.
Grant Gross, IDG News Service
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
Poll observers in about 6 percent of Maryland's precincts recorded 201 problems with electronic voting machines during the November 2 general election, according to a report released this week by TrueVoteMD.org.
Advertisement
Poll watchers trained by the voting integrity activist group reported 42 cases of crashed e-voting machines, 37 cases of access card or encoder problems, and 30 screen malfunctions, according to the report. More than 400 TrueVoteMD poll watchers observed the elections at 108 of the state's 1787 voting precincts.
TrueVoteMD poll watchers saw problems that were "easily observable" and not problems that may have happened inside the electronic voting machines, says Linda Schade, co-founder of TrueVoteMD. While the problems observed in the precincts where the poll watchers were stationed may not be typical of all precincts, they were likely a "small fraction" of the actual problems with e-voting machines in Maryland, Schade says.
"One of our greatest resources is the widespread common sense of Maryland voters, and also their passion to defend our democracy from what we see is a clear threat, which is nontransparent elections, unverifiable elections using error-prone secret software with gaping security holes, and with a history of election failures," Schade says. "They are in complete agreement about one thing--that is that blind faith has no place in the voting booth."
TrueVoteMD, along with several national groups, has called for electronic voting machines to include voter-verified paper trails, which are printouts of each voter's choices that can later be used to recount ballots. E-voting critics say independent recounts are impossible without such paper trails; when a recount is demanded, most e-voting machines will spit out the same electronically generated set of disputed numbers again and again.
Independent Tests Sought
Separately, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Verified Voting Foundation announced late Monday they have sent letters asking voting officials in eight counties across the U.S. to allow independent testing of their e-voting machines.
Those counties were identified by the groups as encountering significant e-voting problems on November 2. The problems were listed on a Voteprotect.org database after voters called in problems to a toll-free telephone number on Election Day. The counties contacted were Broward and Palm Beach in Florida; Mahoning and Franklin in Ohio; Mercer and Philadelphia in Pennsylvania; Harris in Texas; and Bernalillo in New Mexico.
The Election Verification Project, a coalition of e-voting critics, recorded more than 1800 voting machine problems through the Voteprotect.org database, although the Maryland reports are not yet included. About 900 of the 1800 reported machine problems related to paperless e-voting machines, according to Will Doherty, executive director of the Verified Voting Foundation.
E-voting advocates have defended the machines as accurate and voter friendly. Linda Lamone, administrator of the Maryland State Board of Elections, says the TrueVoteMD poll watchers found a handful of problems in 16,000 e-voting machines used in the state November 2. Replacement machines were available in case of breakdowns, she adds. Maryland uses Diebold e-voting machines.
"By all [Board of Elections] accounts, we had a successful election," Lamone says. "We planned for equipment issues this election just like we do in every election. You can't expect everything to work perfectly."
Report Disputed
Two poll workers attending the TrueVoteMD press conference disputed that the problems described in the group's 18-page report were typical. Along with the 201 e-voting machine problems identified by TrueVoteMD poll watchers, another 330 nontechnical problems, including long lines and registration problems, were reported by the poll watchers.
But Judy Dein, an election judge in Ann Arundel County, says her precinct experienced no problems. "Our experience was different," she says after hearing about e-voting machine and registration problems from Schade and three poll watchers.
An estimated 40 million U.S. voters used about 175,000 e-voting machines on Election Day, says Bob Cohen, senior vice president at the Information Technology Association of America, a trade group that has e-voting machine vendors as members.
"You have a handful of incidents reported," Cohen says. "The electronic voting issues were extremely small compared to the big picture."
Among the incidents reported in Maryland were a voter in Montgomery County who said the machine went dark and spit out her ballot card before she finished voting. Another voter reported the machine shutting down while she was trying to correct her vote, and another voter in Montgomery County said the machine switched her choices and she was directed to another machine.
A poll watcher in Montgomery County reported two e-voting machines at one precinct crashing less than 75 minutes after polls opened.
TrueVoteMD's Schade called for the Board of Elections to adopt "systematic" quality control measures. Because of the secret software inside e-voting machines and the lack of TrueVoteMD volunteers at every precinct, the group doesn't know how many e-voting problems there were, Schade says.
"At a certain point, if we don't know the scope of the problems, we don't know if it's a legitimate election or not," Schade says. "Any rational organization would institute a quality-control program."
Nancy Almgren, a former candidate for Maryland House of Delegates, questions why it was TrueVoteMD's responsibility to track e-voting problems. "I think the question is why is a citizens group doing this?" Almgren says. "Why isn't it being done by the state? If they're investing our money in this system, why aren't they verifying the results?"
The Board of Elections conducts an extensive review of voting issues, counters Lamone, the state elections administrator. "They take far too much credit," she says. "We have a huge process in place to monitor what's going on."
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
Welcome to MichaelMoore.com!
Welcome to MichaelMoore.com!
November 23rd, 2004 7:25 pm
Government Accountability Office to Conduct Investigation of 2004 Election Irregularities
Common Dreams
WASHINGTON -- November 23 -- Reps. John Conyers, Jr., Jerrold Nadler, Robert Wexler, Robert Scott, and Rush Holt announced today that, in response to their November 5 and 8 letters to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the GAO has decided to move forward with an investigation of election irregularities in the 2004 election. The five Members issued the following statement:
"We are pleased that the GAO has reviewed the concerns expressed in our letters and has found them of sufficient merit to warrant further investigation. On its own authority, the GAO will examine the security and accuracy of voting technologies, distribution and allocation of voting machines, and counting of provisional ballots. We are hopeful that GAO's non-partisan and expert analysis will get to the bottom of the flaws uncovered in the 2004 election. As part of this inquiry, we will provide copies of specific incident reports received in our offices, including more than 57,000 such complaints provided to the House Judiciary Committee.
"The core principle of any democracy is the consent of the governed. All Americans, no matter how they voted, need to have confidence that when they cast their ballot, their voice is heard."
The Members listed above were joined in requesting the non-partisan GAO investigation by Reps. Melvin Watt, John Olver, Bob Filner, Gregory Meeks, Barbara Lee, Tammy Baldwin, Louise Slaughter and George Miller.
November 23rd, 2004 7:25 pm
Government Accountability Office to Conduct Investigation of 2004 Election Irregularities
Common Dreams
WASHINGTON -- November 23 -- Reps. John Conyers, Jr., Jerrold Nadler, Robert Wexler, Robert Scott, and Rush Holt announced today that, in response to their November 5 and 8 letters to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the GAO has decided to move forward with an investigation of election irregularities in the 2004 election. The five Members issued the following statement:
"We are pleased that the GAO has reviewed the concerns expressed in our letters and has found them of sufficient merit to warrant further investigation. On its own authority, the GAO will examine the security and accuracy of voting technologies, distribution and allocation of voting machines, and counting of provisional ballots. We are hopeful that GAO's non-partisan and expert analysis will get to the bottom of the flaws uncovered in the 2004 election. As part of this inquiry, we will provide copies of specific incident reports received in our offices, including more than 57,000 such complaints provided to the House Judiciary Committee.
"The core principle of any democracy is the consent of the governed. All Americans, no matter how they voted, need to have confidence that when they cast their ballot, their voice is heard."
The Members listed above were joined in requesting the non-partisan GAO investigation by Reps. Melvin Watt, John Olver, Bob Filner, Gregory Meeks, Barbara Lee, Tammy Baldwin, Louise Slaughter and George Miller.
Bloglines | My Blogs
Bloglines | My Blogs
November 23rd, 2004 1:17 pm
Krugman: Economic Crisis a Question of When, Not If
By Pedro Nicolaci da Costa / Reuters
The economic policies of President Bush have set the country on a dangerous course that will likely end in crisis, Princeton economics professor Paul Krugman told Reuters in an interview.
Krugman, who may be best known for his opinion column in The New York Times, said he was concerned that Bush's electoral victory over Sen. John Kerry earlier this month would only reinforce the administration's unwillingness to listen to dissenting opinions.
That, in turn, could spell serious trouble for the U.S. economy, which under Bush's first term was plagued by soaring deficits, waning investor confidence and anemic job creation.
"This is a group of people who don't believe that any of the rules really apply," said Krugman. "They are utterly irresponsible."
Krugman is currently taking some time off from journalism to write and promote the second installment of his latest project -- economics textbooks aimed at making the science more accessible to college students.
In the meantime, however, he worries the Bush administration's fiscal policies are going to push the world's largest economy into a rut.
The most immediate worry for Krugman is that Bush will simultaneously push through more tax cuts and try to privatize social security, ignoring a chorus of economic thinkers who caution against such measures.
"If you go back and you look at the sources of the blow-up of Argentine debt during the 1990s, one little-appreciated thing is that social security privatization was a important source of that expansion of debt," said Krugman.
In 2001, Argentina finally defaulted on an estimated $100 billion in debt, the largest such event in modern economic history.
BANANA REPUBLIC?
"So if you ask the question do we look like Argentina, the answer is a whole lot more than anyone is quite willing to admit at this point. We've become a banana republic."
Crisis might take many forms, he said, but one key concern is the prospect that Asian central banks may lose their appetite for U.S. government debt, which has so far allowed the United States to finance its twin deficits.
A deeper plunge in the already battered U.S. dollar is another possible route to crisis, the professor said.
The absence of any mention of currencies in a communique from the Group of 20 rich and emerging market countries this past weekend only reinforced investors' perception that the United States, while saying it promotes a strong dollar, is willing to let its currency slide further.
"The break can come either from the Reserve Bank of China deciding it has enough dollars, thank you, or from private investors saying 'I'm going to take a speculative bet on a dollar plunge,' which then ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy," Krugman opined. "Both scenarios are pretty unnerving."
In the longer-term, Bush's version of social security reform, which Krugman says would relegate pensions for the elderly to the whims of volatile financial markets, could have wide-ranging implications for future generations.
The only bright spot in having Bush in power for another four years, said Krugman, is that further economic mismanagement might trigger some sort of popular outcry.
"I do believe at some point there is going to be a popular tidal wave against what has happened," concluded Krugman. "In the meantime, you keep banging on the drum, you keep telling the truth.
"And then eventually we have the great demonstrations, which I think are important to let the government know that many Americans are not happy with what is happening," he said.
November 23rd, 2004 1:17 pm
Krugman: Economic Crisis a Question of When, Not If
By Pedro Nicolaci da Costa / Reuters
The economic policies of President Bush have set the country on a dangerous course that will likely end in crisis, Princeton economics professor Paul Krugman told Reuters in an interview.
Krugman, who may be best known for his opinion column in The New York Times, said he was concerned that Bush's electoral victory over Sen. John Kerry earlier this month would only reinforce the administration's unwillingness to listen to dissenting opinions.
That, in turn, could spell serious trouble for the U.S. economy, which under Bush's first term was plagued by soaring deficits, waning investor confidence and anemic job creation.
"This is a group of people who don't believe that any of the rules really apply," said Krugman. "They are utterly irresponsible."
Krugman is currently taking some time off from journalism to write and promote the second installment of his latest project -- economics textbooks aimed at making the science more accessible to college students.
In the meantime, however, he worries the Bush administration's fiscal policies are going to push the world's largest economy into a rut.
The most immediate worry for Krugman is that Bush will simultaneously push through more tax cuts and try to privatize social security, ignoring a chorus of economic thinkers who caution against such measures.
"If you go back and you look at the sources of the blow-up of Argentine debt during the 1990s, one little-appreciated thing is that social security privatization was a important source of that expansion of debt," said Krugman.
In 2001, Argentina finally defaulted on an estimated $100 billion in debt, the largest such event in modern economic history.
BANANA REPUBLIC?
"So if you ask the question do we look like Argentina, the answer is a whole lot more than anyone is quite willing to admit at this point. We've become a banana republic."
Crisis might take many forms, he said, but one key concern is the prospect that Asian central banks may lose their appetite for U.S. government debt, which has so far allowed the United States to finance its twin deficits.
A deeper plunge in the already battered U.S. dollar is another possible route to crisis, the professor said.
The absence of any mention of currencies in a communique from the Group of 20 rich and emerging market countries this past weekend only reinforced investors' perception that the United States, while saying it promotes a strong dollar, is willing to let its currency slide further.
"The break can come either from the Reserve Bank of China deciding it has enough dollars, thank you, or from private investors saying 'I'm going to take a speculative bet on a dollar plunge,' which then ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy," Krugman opined. "Both scenarios are pretty unnerving."
In the longer-term, Bush's version of social security reform, which Krugman says would relegate pensions for the elderly to the whims of volatile financial markets, could have wide-ranging implications for future generations.
The only bright spot in having Bush in power for another four years, said Krugman, is that further economic mismanagement might trigger some sort of popular outcry.
"I do believe at some point there is going to be a popular tidal wave against what has happened," concluded Krugman. "In the meantime, you keep banging on the drum, you keep telling the truth.
"And then eventually we have the great demonstrations, which I think are important to let the government know that many Americans are not happy with what is happening," he said.
Monday, November 22, 2004
Welcome to MichaelMoore.com!
Welcome to MichaelMoore.com!
November 22nd, 2004 10:54 pm
Third-Party Candidates Seek Ohio Recount
By Terry Kinney / Associated Press
CINCINNATI - Two third-party presidential candidates filed a federal lawsuit Monday to force a recount of Ohio ballots, and a spokesman for the state Democratic Party said it intends to join the suit.
The lawsuit was filed Monday evening in U.S. District Court in Toledo, according to Blair Bobier, a spokesman for Green Party candidate David Cobb, who brought the suit along with Libertarian Michael Badnarik. Court officials could not be reached for comment Monday night. The case did not immediately show up on the court's Web site.
The third-party candidates have said they are not interested in overturning President Bush's victory in the state. But they say they are concerned about reports of voting irregularities and believe a recount is necessary to ensure accuracy.
Dan Trevas, spokesman for the Ohio Democratic Party, said the party would join the recount request after the secretary of state certified the results, or sooner if an early recount is ordered by a court.
Carlo LoParo, spokesman for Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, has said results will be certified by Dec. 6, and said Monday it would not be feasible to conduct a recount beforehand because there are no final numbers.
Bush led Democrat John Kerry by 136,000 votes in the unofficial count, and Kerry conceded that there were not enough provisional ballots to change the outcome. But Kerry supporters have made numerous claims of voting irregularities in Ohio.
The two third-party candidates received a combined 0.26 percent of the vote in unofficial results.
Keith Cunningham, director of the Allen County Board of Elections and incoming president of the Ohio Association of Election Officials, called the lawsuit "frivolous," adding that he might mobilize counties to resist a recount.
"Commissioners are beginning to understand — and if they don't, will understand soon — what kind of financial impact this is going to have on them, in a year when elections already cost a great deal more than expected," said Cunningham, a Republican.
The two former third-party candidates have said they raised more than $150,000 to cover the state's fee for a recount. Ohio law requires payment of $10 per precinct, or $113,600 statewide, but election officials say the true expense would be far greater.
LoParo has estimated the actual cost at $1.5 million.
November 22nd, 2004 10:54 pm
Third-Party Candidates Seek Ohio Recount
By Terry Kinney / Associated Press
CINCINNATI - Two third-party presidential candidates filed a federal lawsuit Monday to force a recount of Ohio ballots, and a spokesman for the state Democratic Party said it intends to join the suit.
The lawsuit was filed Monday evening in U.S. District Court in Toledo, according to Blair Bobier, a spokesman for Green Party candidate David Cobb, who brought the suit along with Libertarian Michael Badnarik. Court officials could not be reached for comment Monday night. The case did not immediately show up on the court's Web site.
The third-party candidates have said they are not interested in overturning President Bush's victory in the state. But they say they are concerned about reports of voting irregularities and believe a recount is necessary to ensure accuracy.
Dan Trevas, spokesman for the Ohio Democratic Party, said the party would join the recount request after the secretary of state certified the results, or sooner if an early recount is ordered by a court.
Carlo LoParo, spokesman for Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, has said results will be certified by Dec. 6, and said Monday it would not be feasible to conduct a recount beforehand because there are no final numbers.
Bush led Democrat John Kerry by 136,000 votes in the unofficial count, and Kerry conceded that there were not enough provisional ballots to change the outcome. But Kerry supporters have made numerous claims of voting irregularities in Ohio.
The two third-party candidates received a combined 0.26 percent of the vote in unofficial results.
Keith Cunningham, director of the Allen County Board of Elections and incoming president of the Ohio Association of Election Officials, called the lawsuit "frivolous," adding that he might mobilize counties to resist a recount.
"Commissioners are beginning to understand — and if they don't, will understand soon — what kind of financial impact this is going to have on them, in a year when elections already cost a great deal more than expected," said Cunningham, a Republican.
The two former third-party candidates have said they raised more than $150,000 to cover the state's fee for a recount. Ohio law requires payment of $10 per precinct, or $113,600 statewide, but election officials say the true expense would be far greater.
LoParo has estimated the actual cost at $1.5 million.
Sunday, November 21, 2004
Friday, November 19, 2004
'Stinking Evidence' of Possible Election Fraud Found in Florida
'Stinking Evidence' of Possible Election Fraud Found in Florida
Published on Thursday, November 18, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
'Stinking Evidence' of Possible Election Fraud Found in Florida
by Thom Hartmann
There was something odd about the poll tapes.
A "poll tape" is the phrase used to describe a printout from an optical scan voting machine made the evening of an election, after the machine has read all the ballots and crunched the numbers on its internal computer. It shows the total results of the election in that location. The printout is signed by the polling officials present in that precinct/location, and then submitted to the county elections office as the official record of how the people in that particular precinct had voted. (Usually each location has only one single optical scanner/reader, and thus produces only one poll tape.)
Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org, the erstwhile investigator of electronic voting machines, along with people from Florida Fair Elections, showed up at Florida's Volusia County Elections Office on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 16, 2004, and asked to see, under a public records request, each of the poll tapes for the 100+ optical scanners in the precincts in that county. The elections workers - having been notified in advance of her request - handed her a set of printouts, oddly dated November 15 and lacking signatures.
Bev pointed out that the printouts given her were not the original poll tapes and had no signatures, and thus were not what she'd requested. Obligingly, they told her that the originals were held in another location, the Elections Office's Warehouse, and that since it was the end of the day they should meet Bev the following morning to show them to her.
Bev showed up bright and early the morning of Wednesday the 17th - well before the scheduled meeting - and discovered three of the elections officials in the Elections Warehouse standing over a table covered with what looked like poll tapes. When they saw Bev and her friends, Bev told me in a telephone interview less than an hour later, "They immediately shoved us out and slammed the door."
In a way, that was a blessing, because it led to the stinking evidence.
"On the porch was a garbage bag," Bev said, "and so I looked in it and, and lo and behold, there were public record tapes."
Thrown away. Discarded. Waiting to be hauled off.
"It was technically stinking, in fact," Bev added, "because what they had done was to have thrown some of their polling tapes, which are the official records of the election, into the garbage. These were the ones signed by the poll workers. These are something we had done an official public records request for."
When the elections officials inside realized that the people outside were going through the trash, they called the police and one came out to challenge Bev.
Kathleen Wynne, a www.blackboxvoting.org investigator, was there.
"We caught the whole thing on videotape," she said. "I don't think you'll ever see anything like this - Bev Harris having a tug of war with an election worker over a bag of garbage, and he held onto it and she pulled on it, and it split right open, spilling out those poll tapes. They were throwing away our democracy, and Bev wasn't going to let them do it."
As I was interviewing Bev just moments after the tussle, she had to get off the phone, because, "Two police cars just showed up."
She told me later in the day, in an on-air interview, that when the police arrived, "We all had a vigorous debate on the merits of my public records request."
The outcome of that debate was that they all went from the Elections Warehouse back to the Elections Office, to compare the original, November 2 dated and signed poll tapes with the November 15 printouts the Elections Office had submitted to the Secretary of State. A camera crew from www.votergate.tv met them there, as well.
And then things got even odder.
"We were sitting there comparing the real [signed, original] tapes with the [later printout] ones that were given us," Bev said, "and finding things missing and finding things not matching, when one of the elections employees took a bin full of things that looked like garbage - that looked like polling tapes, actually - and passed by and disappeared out the back of the building."
This provoked investigator Ellen Brodsky to walk outside and check the garbage of the Elections Office itself. Sure enough - more original, signed poll tapes, freshly trashed.
"And I must tell you," Bev said, "that whatever they had taken out [the back door] just came right back in the front door and we said, 'What are these polling place tapes doing in your dumpster?'"
A November 18 call to the Volusia County Elections Office found that Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe was unavailable and nobody was willing to speak on the record with an out-of-state reporter. However, The Daytona Beach News (in Volusia County), in a November 17th article by staff writer Christine Girardin, noted, "Harris went to the Department of Elections' warehouse on State Road 44 in DeLand on Tuesday to inspect original Nov. 2 polling place tapes, after being given a set of reprints dated Nov. 15. While there, Harris saw Nov. 2 polling place tapes in a garbage bag, heightening her concern about the integrity of voting records."
The Daytona Beach News further noted that, "[Elections Supervisor] Lowe confirmed Wednesday some backup copies of tapes from the Nov. 2 election were destined for the shredder," but pointed out that, according to Lowe, that was simply because there were two sets of tapes produced on election night, each signed. "One tape is delivered in one car along with the ballots and a memory card," the News reported. "The backup tape is delivered to the elections office in a second car."
Suggesting that duplicates don't need to be kept, Lowe claims that Harris didn't want to hear an explanation of why some signed poll tapes would be in the garbage. "She's not wanting to listen to an explanation," Lowe told the News of Harris. "She has her own ideas."
But the Ollie North action in two locations on two days was only half of the surprise that awaited Bev and her associates. When they compared the discarded, signed, original tapes with the recent printouts submitted to the state and used to tabulate the Florida election winners, Harris says a disturbing pattern emerged.
"The difference was hundreds of votes in each of the different places we examined," said Bev, "and most of those were in minority areas."
When I asked Bev if the errors they were finding in precinct after precinct were random, as one would expect from technical, clerical, or computer errors, she became uncomfortable.
"You have to understand that we are non-partisan," she said. "We're not trying to change the outcome of an election, just to find out if there was any voting fraud."
That said, Bev added: "The pattern was very clear. The anomalies favored George W. Bush. Every single time."
Of course finding possible voting "anomalies" in one Florida county doesn't mean they'll show up in all counties. It's even conceivable there are innocent explanations for both the mismatched counts and trashed original records; this story undoubtedly will continue to play out. And, unless further investigation demonstrates a pervasive and statewide trend toward "anomalous" election results in many of Florida's counties, odds are none of this will change the outcome of the election (which exit polls showed John Kerry winning in Florida).
Nonetheless, Bev and her merry band are off to hit another county.
As she told me on her cell phone while driving toward their next destination, "We just put Volusia County and their lawyers on notice that they need to continue to keep a number of documents under seal, including all of the memory cards to the ballot boxes, and all of the signed poll tapes."
Why?
"Simple," she said. "Because we found anomalies indicative of fraud."
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."
Published on Thursday, November 18, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
'Stinking Evidence' of Possible Election Fraud Found in Florida
by Thom Hartmann
There was something odd about the poll tapes.
A "poll tape" is the phrase used to describe a printout from an optical scan voting machine made the evening of an election, after the machine has read all the ballots and crunched the numbers on its internal computer. It shows the total results of the election in that location. The printout is signed by the polling officials present in that precinct/location, and then submitted to the county elections office as the official record of how the people in that particular precinct had voted. (Usually each location has only one single optical scanner/reader, and thus produces only one poll tape.)
Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org, the erstwhile investigator of electronic voting machines, along with people from Florida Fair Elections, showed up at Florida's Volusia County Elections Office on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 16, 2004, and asked to see, under a public records request, each of the poll tapes for the 100+ optical scanners in the precincts in that county. The elections workers - having been notified in advance of her request - handed her a set of printouts, oddly dated November 15 and lacking signatures.
Bev pointed out that the printouts given her were not the original poll tapes and had no signatures, and thus were not what she'd requested. Obligingly, they told her that the originals were held in another location, the Elections Office's Warehouse, and that since it was the end of the day they should meet Bev the following morning to show them to her.
Bev showed up bright and early the morning of Wednesday the 17th - well before the scheduled meeting - and discovered three of the elections officials in the Elections Warehouse standing over a table covered with what looked like poll tapes. When they saw Bev and her friends, Bev told me in a telephone interview less than an hour later, "They immediately shoved us out and slammed the door."
In a way, that was a blessing, because it led to the stinking evidence.
"On the porch was a garbage bag," Bev said, "and so I looked in it and, and lo and behold, there were public record tapes."
Thrown away. Discarded. Waiting to be hauled off.
"It was technically stinking, in fact," Bev added, "because what they had done was to have thrown some of their polling tapes, which are the official records of the election, into the garbage. These were the ones signed by the poll workers. These are something we had done an official public records request for."
When the elections officials inside realized that the people outside were going through the trash, they called the police and one came out to challenge Bev.
Kathleen Wynne, a www.blackboxvoting.org investigator, was there.
"We caught the whole thing on videotape," she said. "I don't think you'll ever see anything like this - Bev Harris having a tug of war with an election worker over a bag of garbage, and he held onto it and she pulled on it, and it split right open, spilling out those poll tapes. They were throwing away our democracy, and Bev wasn't going to let them do it."
As I was interviewing Bev just moments after the tussle, she had to get off the phone, because, "Two police cars just showed up."
She told me later in the day, in an on-air interview, that when the police arrived, "We all had a vigorous debate on the merits of my public records request."
The outcome of that debate was that they all went from the Elections Warehouse back to the Elections Office, to compare the original, November 2 dated and signed poll tapes with the November 15 printouts the Elections Office had submitted to the Secretary of State. A camera crew from www.votergate.tv met them there, as well.
And then things got even odder.
"We were sitting there comparing the real [signed, original] tapes with the [later printout] ones that were given us," Bev said, "and finding things missing and finding things not matching, when one of the elections employees took a bin full of things that looked like garbage - that looked like polling tapes, actually - and passed by and disappeared out the back of the building."
This provoked investigator Ellen Brodsky to walk outside and check the garbage of the Elections Office itself. Sure enough - more original, signed poll tapes, freshly trashed.
"And I must tell you," Bev said, "that whatever they had taken out [the back door] just came right back in the front door and we said, 'What are these polling place tapes doing in your dumpster?'"
A November 18 call to the Volusia County Elections Office found that Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe was unavailable and nobody was willing to speak on the record with an out-of-state reporter. However, The Daytona Beach News (in Volusia County), in a November 17th article by staff writer Christine Girardin, noted, "Harris went to the Department of Elections' warehouse on State Road 44 in DeLand on Tuesday to inspect original Nov. 2 polling place tapes, after being given a set of reprints dated Nov. 15. While there, Harris saw Nov. 2 polling place tapes in a garbage bag, heightening her concern about the integrity of voting records."
The Daytona Beach News further noted that, "[Elections Supervisor] Lowe confirmed Wednesday some backup copies of tapes from the Nov. 2 election were destined for the shredder," but pointed out that, according to Lowe, that was simply because there were two sets of tapes produced on election night, each signed. "One tape is delivered in one car along with the ballots and a memory card," the News reported. "The backup tape is delivered to the elections office in a second car."
Suggesting that duplicates don't need to be kept, Lowe claims that Harris didn't want to hear an explanation of why some signed poll tapes would be in the garbage. "She's not wanting to listen to an explanation," Lowe told the News of Harris. "She has her own ideas."
But the Ollie North action in two locations on two days was only half of the surprise that awaited Bev and her associates. When they compared the discarded, signed, original tapes with the recent printouts submitted to the state and used to tabulate the Florida election winners, Harris says a disturbing pattern emerged.
"The difference was hundreds of votes in each of the different places we examined," said Bev, "and most of those were in minority areas."
When I asked Bev if the errors they were finding in precinct after precinct were random, as one would expect from technical, clerical, or computer errors, she became uncomfortable.
"You have to understand that we are non-partisan," she said. "We're not trying to change the outcome of an election, just to find out if there was any voting fraud."
That said, Bev added: "The pattern was very clear. The anomalies favored George W. Bush. Every single time."
Of course finding possible voting "anomalies" in one Florida county doesn't mean they'll show up in all counties. It's even conceivable there are innocent explanations for both the mismatched counts and trashed original records; this story undoubtedly will continue to play out. And, unless further investigation demonstrates a pervasive and statewide trend toward "anomalous" election results in many of Florida's counties, odds are none of this will change the outcome of the election (which exit polls showed John Kerry winning in Florida).
Nonetheless, Bev and her merry band are off to hit another county.
As she told me on her cell phone while driving toward their next destination, "We just put Volusia County and their lawyers on notice that they need to continue to keep a number of documents under seal, including all of the memory cards to the ballot boxes, and all of the signed poll tapes."
Why?
"Simple," she said. "Because we found anomalies indicative of fraud."
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."
Thursday, November 18, 2004
jbcard's Xanga Site
jbcard's Xanga Site
Media accused of ignoring election irregularities
By Mark Jurkowitz, Globe Staff | November 17, 2004
Two weeks after Election Day, explosive allegations about a media coverup are percolating.
There's the widely circulated e-mail about a CBS producer who complained that a news industry "lock-down" has prevented journalists from investigating voting problems that cropped up on Nov 2. There's the rumor that MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who has devoted serious air time to discussing Election Day irregularities, was fired for broaching the topic. There's the assertion by Bev Harris, executive director of Black Box Voting Inc., that she had received calls from network employees saying they had been told to lay off the sensitive subject of voting fraud.
In the days after Nov. 2, the Internet was abuzz with charges from partisans that voting irregularities might have cost John F. Kerry the White House.
With some media outlets moving swiftly to debunk the notion that the election had been stolen by the Republicans, the press itself has come under scrutiny, accused of everything from a conspiracy of silence to a collective passivity about pursuing voting irregularities.
"The mainstream media is not treating this as an important story overall," said Steve Rendall, senior analyst at the liberal media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. "The mainstream media has largely treated the story as some crazy Internet story." At the same time, Rendall acknowledged: "There has been excess in the way stuff has flown around the Internet and e-mail lists."
Tracking down the sources of the rapidly proliferating online allegations about a media "lock-down" is a daunting task. But the response to them has been unequivocal. "Absolutely untrue," a CBS spokeswoman, Sandy Genelius, said when asked about the report of the whistle-blowing CBS producer. "Absolutely, positively, categorically false. Besides that, it's absurd."
"There are a lot of nervous people out there," said Olbermann, whose disappearance from MSNBC was the result not of being terminated but of taking a vacation. "I'm both amused and a little terrified that I became the subject of an Internet rumor."
In an appearance Nov. 8 on the "Democracy Now!" program, Harris, whose organization is investigating allegations of voter fraud in Florida and Ohio, told host Amy Goodman that sources in television news have told her "there is now a lock-down on this story. It is officially . . . 'Let's move on' time." In an interview with The Boston Globe, she reiterated those potent allegations but declined to reveal her sources. She also appeared to soft-pedal the idea that the media was at fault, saying instead that it was too early in the fraud-investigation process to blame reporters for not being more aggressive.
"I'm not terribly concerned about . . . the media's coverage of it yet," she said. "We're still early. . . . Caution's probably appropriate. [It's] a very sensitive story."
Not all accusations that journalists have not vigorously pursued allegations of voting problems involve speculation that they are being muzzled by their bosses. But several left-leaning critics complain that reporters have lost interest in what is still an important story because the outcome of the 2004 election, unlike in 2000, is not being contested.
Media Matters for America, a liberal media monitoring organization, posted an item on its website recently that cited several stories about faulty voting equipment in Ohio that did not generate much media interest. David Brock, the organization's president, said in an interview: "I haven't seen anything that is suggesting that further probing of the issue would change the results of the election." But he added that "there are some irregularities, and I would imagine some reader and viewer interest. . . . It seems that there should have been somewhat more coverage of this. There was all this pressure and buildup and very little follow-up."
TomPaine.com, a liberal website that collects news and commentary about public policy issues, has posted several analyses arguing that Kerry was hurt in Ohio by a shortage of voting machines, as well as by discarded votes that came disproportionately from minority precincts. The website's executive editor, Alexandra Walker, said her organization leaves the conspiracy theories surrounding the media's behavior to "the blogosphere."
But she also argued that, with the election results not being disputed, "the public interest angle was not enough to keep [voter irregularities] in the sights of political reporters. The horse-race coverage of political campaigns shortchanges readers."
No one has been more engaged in the issue than Olbermann, the host of MSNBC's prime-time "Countdown" program.
"The thing that woke me up was the lock-down in Warren County," he said, referring to a Cincinnati Enquirer report that officials in that Ohio county, citing terrorist threats, barred observers from the vote count. "I began to investigate then or at least raise questions. . . . It turns out there are a lot of valid stories, at least valid stories worth investigating."
Olbermann said there are a number of reasons much of the media have not been pursuing the story as ardently as he is, including "a love-hate [relationship] with the blogs. Whatever new media is appearing, the established news industry tend to look down on it." At the same time, Olbermann flatly denies the blogger-fueled rumor that he was fired for his interest in voting irregularities, pointing out that MSNBC has let him pursue the probe.
"It's still largely a game of telephone on the Net," he said.
Media accused of ignoring election irregularities
By Mark Jurkowitz, Globe Staff | November 17, 2004
Two weeks after Election Day, explosive allegations about a media coverup are percolating.
There's the widely circulated e-mail about a CBS producer who complained that a news industry "lock-down" has prevented journalists from investigating voting problems that cropped up on Nov 2. There's the rumor that MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who has devoted serious air time to discussing Election Day irregularities, was fired for broaching the topic. There's the assertion by Bev Harris, executive director of Black Box Voting Inc., that she had received calls from network employees saying they had been told to lay off the sensitive subject of voting fraud.
In the days after Nov. 2, the Internet was abuzz with charges from partisans that voting irregularities might have cost John F. Kerry the White House.
With some media outlets moving swiftly to debunk the notion that the election had been stolen by the Republicans, the press itself has come under scrutiny, accused of everything from a conspiracy of silence to a collective passivity about pursuing voting irregularities.
"The mainstream media is not treating this as an important story overall," said Steve Rendall, senior analyst at the liberal media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. "The mainstream media has largely treated the story as some crazy Internet story." At the same time, Rendall acknowledged: "There has been excess in the way stuff has flown around the Internet and e-mail lists."
Tracking down the sources of the rapidly proliferating online allegations about a media "lock-down" is a daunting task. But the response to them has been unequivocal. "Absolutely untrue," a CBS spokeswoman, Sandy Genelius, said when asked about the report of the whistle-blowing CBS producer. "Absolutely, positively, categorically false. Besides that, it's absurd."
"There are a lot of nervous people out there," said Olbermann, whose disappearance from MSNBC was the result not of being terminated but of taking a vacation. "I'm both amused and a little terrified that I became the subject of an Internet rumor."
In an appearance Nov. 8 on the "Democracy Now!" program, Harris, whose organization is investigating allegations of voter fraud in Florida and Ohio, told host Amy Goodman that sources in television news have told her "there is now a lock-down on this story. It is officially . . . 'Let's move on' time." In an interview with The Boston Globe, she reiterated those potent allegations but declined to reveal her sources. She also appeared to soft-pedal the idea that the media was at fault, saying instead that it was too early in the fraud-investigation process to blame reporters for not being more aggressive.
"I'm not terribly concerned about . . . the media's coverage of it yet," she said. "We're still early. . . . Caution's probably appropriate. [It's] a very sensitive story."
Not all accusations that journalists have not vigorously pursued allegations of voting problems involve speculation that they are being muzzled by their bosses. But several left-leaning critics complain that reporters have lost interest in what is still an important story because the outcome of the 2004 election, unlike in 2000, is not being contested.
Media Matters for America, a liberal media monitoring organization, posted an item on its website recently that cited several stories about faulty voting equipment in Ohio that did not generate much media interest. David Brock, the organization's president, said in an interview: "I haven't seen anything that is suggesting that further probing of the issue would change the results of the election." But he added that "there are some irregularities, and I would imagine some reader and viewer interest. . . . It seems that there should have been somewhat more coverage of this. There was all this pressure and buildup and very little follow-up."
TomPaine.com, a liberal website that collects news and commentary about public policy issues, has posted several analyses arguing that Kerry was hurt in Ohio by a shortage of voting machines, as well as by discarded votes that came disproportionately from minority precincts. The website's executive editor, Alexandra Walker, said her organization leaves the conspiracy theories surrounding the media's behavior to "the blogosphere."
But she also argued that, with the election results not being disputed, "the public interest angle was not enough to keep [voter irregularities] in the sights of political reporters. The horse-race coverage of political campaigns shortchanges readers."
No one has been more engaged in the issue than Olbermann, the host of MSNBC's prime-time "Countdown" program.
"The thing that woke me up was the lock-down in Warren County," he said, referring to a Cincinnati Enquirer report that officials in that Ohio county, citing terrorist threats, barred observers from the vote count. "I began to investigate then or at least raise questions. . . . It turns out there are a lot of valid stories, at least valid stories worth investigating."
Olbermann said there are a number of reasons much of the media have not been pursuing the story as ardently as he is, including "a love-hate [relationship] with the blogs. Whatever new media is appearing, the established news industry tend to look down on it." At the same time, Olbermann flatly denies the blogger-fueled rumor that he was fired for his interest in voting irregularities, pointing out that MSNBC has let him pursue the probe.
"It's still largely a game of telephone on the Net," he said.
Welcome to MichaelMoore.com!
Welcome to MichaelMoore.com!
November 18th, 2004 4:43 pm
UC Berkeley Research Team Sounds 'Smoke Alarm' for Florida E-Vote Count; Irregularities may have awarded 130,000 - 260,000 or more excess votes to Bush in Florida
Statistical Analysis - the Sole Method for Tracking E-Voting - Shows Irregularities May Have Awarded 130,000 - 260,000 or More Excess Votes to Bush in Florida
Research Team Calls for Investigation
BERKELEY, Calif., Nov. 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Today the University of California's Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team released a statistical study - the sole method available to monitor the accuracy of e- voting - reporting irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election. The study shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods - what the team says can be deemed a "smoke alarm." Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by chance - the probability is less than 0.1 percent. The research team formally disclosed results of the study at a press conference today at the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center, where they called on Florida voting officials to investigate.
The three counties where the voting anomalies were most prevalent were also the most heavily Democratic: Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, respectively. Statistical patterns in counties that did not have e-touch voting machines predict a 28,000 vote decrease in President Bush's support in Broward County; machines tallied an increase of 51,000 votes - a net gain of 81,000 for the incumbent. President Bush should have lost 8,900 votes in Palm Beach County, but instead gained 41,000 - a difference of 49,900. He should have gained only 18,400 votes in Miami-Dade County but saw a gain of 37,000 - a difference of 19,300 votes.
"For the sake of all future elections involving electronic voting - someone must investigate and explain the statistical anomalies in Florida," says Professor Michael Hout. "We're calling on voting officials in Florida to take action."
The research team is comprised of doctoral students and faculty in the UC Berkeley sociology department, and led by Sociology Professor Michael Hout, a nationally-known expert on statistical methods and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center.
For its research, the team used multiple-regression analysis, a statistical method widely used in the social and physical sciences to distinguish the individual effects of many variables on quantitative outcomes like vote totals. This multiple-regression analysis takes into account of the following variables by county:
* number of voters
* median income
* Hispanic/Latino population
* change in voter turnout between 2000 and 2004
* support for Senator Dole in the 1996 election
* support for President Bush in the 2000 election
* use of electronic voting or paper ballots
"No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained," said Hout. "The study shows, that a county's use of electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. There is just a trivial probability of evidence like this appearing in a population where the true difference is zero - less than once in a thousand chances."
The data used in this study came from public sources including CNN.com, the 2000 US Census, and the Verified Voting Foundation. For a copy of the working paper, raw data and other information used in the study can be found at: http://ucdata.berkeley.edu.
November 18th, 2004 4:43 pm
UC Berkeley Research Team Sounds 'Smoke Alarm' for Florida E-Vote Count; Irregularities may have awarded 130,000 - 260,000 or more excess votes to Bush in Florida
Statistical Analysis - the Sole Method for Tracking E-Voting - Shows Irregularities May Have Awarded 130,000 - 260,000 or More Excess Votes to Bush in Florida
Research Team Calls for Investigation
BERKELEY, Calif., Nov. 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Today the University of California's Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team released a statistical study - the sole method available to monitor the accuracy of e- voting - reporting irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election. The study shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods - what the team says can be deemed a "smoke alarm." Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by chance - the probability is less than 0.1 percent. The research team formally disclosed results of the study at a press conference today at the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center, where they called on Florida voting officials to investigate.
The three counties where the voting anomalies were most prevalent were also the most heavily Democratic: Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, respectively. Statistical patterns in counties that did not have e-touch voting machines predict a 28,000 vote decrease in President Bush's support in Broward County; machines tallied an increase of 51,000 votes - a net gain of 81,000 for the incumbent. President Bush should have lost 8,900 votes in Palm Beach County, but instead gained 41,000 - a difference of 49,900. He should have gained only 18,400 votes in Miami-Dade County but saw a gain of 37,000 - a difference of 19,300 votes.
"For the sake of all future elections involving electronic voting - someone must investigate and explain the statistical anomalies in Florida," says Professor Michael Hout. "We're calling on voting officials in Florida to take action."
The research team is comprised of doctoral students and faculty in the UC Berkeley sociology department, and led by Sociology Professor Michael Hout, a nationally-known expert on statistical methods and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center.
For its research, the team used multiple-regression analysis, a statistical method widely used in the social and physical sciences to distinguish the individual effects of many variables on quantitative outcomes like vote totals. This multiple-regression analysis takes into account of the following variables by county:
* number of voters
* median income
* Hispanic/Latino population
* change in voter turnout between 2000 and 2004
* support for Senator Dole in the 1996 election
* support for President Bush in the 2000 election
* use of electronic voting or paper ballots
"No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained," said Hout. "The study shows, that a county's use of electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. There is just a trivial probability of evidence like this appearing in a population where the true difference is zero - less than once in a thousand chances."
The data used in this study came from public sources including CNN.com, the 2000 US Census, and the Verified Voting Foundation. For a copy of the working paper, raw data and other information used in the study can be found at: http://ucdata.berkeley.edu.
Tuesday, November 16, 2004
TomPaine.com - Action
TomPaine.com - Action
November 12, 2004
Investigate The E-Vote
Friday 2:42 PM
A little more than a week after Election Day, the reports are rolling in of some unsettling trends concerning electronic voting machines. In Columbus, Ohio, for example, the machines registered several hundred more votes for Bush than the number of total voters who cast ballots. And in North Carolina, a voting machine lost more than 4,000 votes because of problems determining the machines' memory capacity. There's been more than 30,000 complaints about electronic voting machines—and the Internet rumors are flying. That's why Working Assets' ActForChange is working with several members of Congress to call for an independent authority to investigate and dig deeper into the electronic voting problems. Tell the Government Accountability Office to immediately start an investigation—so we can get to the bottom of the e-voting mess. ACT NOW
November 12, 2004
Investigate The E-Vote
Friday 2:42 PM
A little more than a week after Election Day, the reports are rolling in of some unsettling trends concerning electronic voting machines. In Columbus, Ohio, for example, the machines registered several hundred more votes for Bush than the number of total voters who cast ballots. And in North Carolina, a voting machine lost more than 4,000 votes because of problems determining the machines' memory capacity. There's been more than 30,000 complaints about electronic voting machines—and the Internet rumors are flying. That's why Working Assets' ActForChange is working with several members of Congress to call for an independent authority to investigate and dig deeper into the electronic voting problems. Tell the Government Accountability Office to immediately start an investigation—so we can get to the bottom of the e-voting mess. ACT NOW
I Smell a Rat
I Smell a Rat
Published on Monday, November 15, 2004 by Zogby International
I Smell a Rat
by Colin Shea
I smell a rat. It has that distinctive and all-too-familiar odor of the species Republicanus floridius. We got a nasty bite from this pest four years ago and never quite recovered. Symptoms of a long-term infection are becoming distressingly apparent.
The first sign of the rat was on election night. The jubilation of early exit polling had given way to rising anxiety as states fell one by one to the Red Tide. It was getting late in the smoky cellar of a Prague sports bar where a crowd of expats had gathered. We had been hoping to go home to bed early, confident of victory. Those hopes had evaporated in a flurry of early precinct reports from Florida and Ohio.
By 3 AM, conversation had died and we were grimly sipping beers and watching as those two key states seemed to be slipping further and further to crimson. Suddenly, a friend who had left two hours earlier rushed in and handed us a printout.
"Zogby's calling it for Kerry." He smacked the sheet decisively. "Definitely. He's got both Florida and Ohio in the Kerry column. Kerry only needs one." Satisfied, we went to bed, confident we would wake with the world a better place. Victory was at hand.
The morning told a different story, of course. No Florida victory for Kerry--Bush had a decisive margin of nearly 400,000 votes. Ohio was not even close enough for Kerry to demand that all the votes be counted. The pollsters had been dead wrong, Bush had four more years and a powerful mandate. Onward Christian soldiers--next stop, Tehran.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics
I work with statistics and polling data every day. Something rubbed me the wrong way. I checked the exit polls for Florida--all wrong. CNN's results indicated a Kerry win: turnout matched voter registration, and independents had broken 59% to 41% for Kerry.
Polling is an imprecise science. Yet its very imprecision is itself quantifiable and follows regular patterns. Differences between actual results and those expected from polling data must be explainable by identifiable factors if the polling sample is robust enough. With almost 3.000 respondents in Florida alone, the CNN poll sample was pretty robust.
The first signs of the rat were identified by Kathy Dopp, who conducted a simple analysis of voter registrations by party in Florida and compared them to presidential vote results. Basically she multiplied the total votes cast in a county by the percentage of voters registered Republican: this gave an expected Republican vote. She then compared this to the actual result.
Her analysis is startling. Certain counties voted for Bush far in excess of what one would expect based on the share of Republican registrations in that county. They key phrase is "certain counties"--there is extraordinary variance between individual counties. Most counties fall more or less in line with what one would expect based on the share of Republican registrations, but some differ wildly.
How to explain this incredible variance? Dopp found one over-riding factor: whether the county used electronic touch-screen voting, or paper ballots which were optically scanned into a computer. All of those with touch-screen voting had results relatively in line with her expected results, while all of those with extreme variance were in counties with optical scanning.
The intimation, clearly, is fraud. Ballots are scanned; results are fed into precinct computers; these are sent to a county-wide database, whose results are fed into the statewide electoral totals. At any point after physical ballots become databases, the system is vulnerable to external hackers.
It seemed too easy, and Dopp's method seemed simplistic. I re-ran the results using CNN's exit polling data. In each county, I took the number of registrations and assigned correctional factors based on the CNN poll to predict turnout among Republicans, Democrats, and independents. I then used the vote shares from the polls to predict a likely number of Republican votes per county. I compared this ‘expected' Republican vote to the actual Republican vote.
The results are shocking. Overall, Bush received 2% fewer votes in counties with electronic touch-screen voting than expected. In counties with optical scanning, he received 16% more. This 16% would not be strange if it were spread across counties more or less evenly. It is not. In 11 different counties, the ‘actual' Bush vote was at least twice higher than the expected vote. 13 counties had Bush vote tallies 50--100% higher than expected. In one county where 88% of voters are registered Democrats, Bush got nearly two thirds of the vote--three times more than predicted by my model.
Again, polling can be wrong. It is difficult to believe it can be that wrong. Fortunately, however, we can test how wrong it would have to be to give the ‘actual' result.
I tested two alternative scenarios to see how wrong CNN would have to have been to explain the election result. In the first, I assumed they had been wildly off the mark in the turnout figures--i.e. far more Republicans and independents had come out than Democrats. In the second I assumed the voting shares were completely wrong, and that the Republicans had been able to massively poach voters from the Democrat base.
In the first scenario, I assumed 90% of Republicans and independents voted, and the remaining ballots were cast by Democrats. This explains the result in counties with optical scanning to within 5%. However, in this scenario Democratic turnout would have been only 51% in the optical scanning counties--barely exceeding half of Republican turnout. It also does not solve the enormous problems in individual counties. 7 counties in this scenario still have actual vote tallies for Bush that are at least 100% higher than predicted by the model--an extremely unlikely result.
In the second scenario I assumed that Bush had actually got 100% of the vote from Republicans and 50% from independents (versus CNN polling results which were 93% and 41% respectively). If this gave enough votes for Bush to explain the county's results, I left the amount of Democratic registered voters ballots cast for Bush as they were predicted by CNN (14% voted for Bush). If this did not explain the result, I calculated how many Democrats would have to vote for Bush.
In 41 of 52 counties, this did not explain the result and Bush must have gotten more than CNN's predicted 14% of Democratic ballots--not an unreasonable assumption by itself. However, in 21 counties more than 50% of Democratic votes would have to have defected to Bush to account for the county result--in four counties, at least 70% would have been required. These results are absurdly unlikely.
The second rat
A previously undiscovered species of rat, Republicanus cuyahogus, has been found in Ohio. Before the election, I wrote snide letters to a state legislator for Cuyahoga county who, according to media reports, was preparing an army of enforcers to keep ‘suspect' (read: minority) voters away from the polls. One of his assistants wrote me back very pleasant mails to the effect that they had no intention of trying to suppress voter turnout, and in fact only wanted to encourage people to vote.
They did their job too well. According to the official statistics for Cuyahoga county, a number of precincts had voter turnout well above the national average: in fact, turnout was well over 100% of registered voters, and in several cases well above the total number of people who have lived in the precinct in the last century or so.
In 30 precincts, more ballots were cast than voters were registered in the county. According to county regulations, voters must cast their ballot in the precinct in which they are registered. Yet in these thirty precincts, nearly 100.000 more people voted than are registered to vote -- this out of a total of 251.946 registrations. These are not marginal differences--this is a 39% over-vote. In some precincts the over-vote was well over 100%. One precinct with 558 registered voters cast nearly 9,000 ballots. As one astute observer noted, it's the ballot-box equivalent of Jesus' miracle of the fishes. Bush being such a man of God, perhaps we should not be surprised.
What to do?
This is not an idle statistical exercise. Either the raw data from two critical battleground states is completely erroneous, or something has gone horribly awry in our electoral system--again. Like many Americans, I was dissatisfied with and suspicious of the way the Florida recount was resolved in 2000. But at the same time, I was convinced of one thing: we must let the system work, and accept its result, no matter how unjust it might appear.
With this acceptance, we placed our implicit faith in the Bush Administration that it would not abuse its position: that it would recognize its fragile mandate for what it was, respect the will of the majority of people who voted against them, and move to build consensus wherever possible and effect change cautiously when needed. Above all, we believed that both Democrats and Republicans would recognize the over-riding importance of revitalizing the integrity of the electoral system and healing the bruised faith of both constituencies.
This faith has been shattered. Bush has not led the nation to unity, but ruled through fear and division. Dishonesty and deceit in areas critical to the public interest have been the hallmark of his Administration. I state this not to throw gratuitous insults, but to place the Florida and Ohio electoral results in their proper context. For the GOP to claim now that we must take anything on faith, let alone astonishingly suspicious results in a hard-fought and extraordinarily bitter election, is pure fantasy. It does not even merit discussion.
The facts as I see them now defy all logical explanations save one--massive and systematic vote fraud. We cannot accept the result of the 2004 presidential election as legitimate until these discrepancies are rigorously and completely explained. From the Valerie Plame case to the horrors of Abu Ghraib, George Bush has been reluctant to seek answers and assign accountability when it does not suit his purposes. But this is one time when no American should accept not getting a straight answer. Until then, George Bush is still, and will remain, the ‘Accidental President' of 2000. One of his many enduring and shameful legacies will be that of seizing power through two illegitimate elections conducted on his brother's watch, and engineering a fundamental corruption at the very heart of the greatest democracy the world has known. We must not permit this to happen again.
Colin Shea is author of "The Freezer Box"
Published on Monday, November 15, 2004 by Zogby International
I Smell a Rat
by Colin Shea
I smell a rat. It has that distinctive and all-too-familiar odor of the species Republicanus floridius. We got a nasty bite from this pest four years ago and never quite recovered. Symptoms of a long-term infection are becoming distressingly apparent.
The first sign of the rat was on election night. The jubilation of early exit polling had given way to rising anxiety as states fell one by one to the Red Tide. It was getting late in the smoky cellar of a Prague sports bar where a crowd of expats had gathered. We had been hoping to go home to bed early, confident of victory. Those hopes had evaporated in a flurry of early precinct reports from Florida and Ohio.
By 3 AM, conversation had died and we were grimly sipping beers and watching as those two key states seemed to be slipping further and further to crimson. Suddenly, a friend who had left two hours earlier rushed in and handed us a printout.
"Zogby's calling it for Kerry." He smacked the sheet decisively. "Definitely. He's got both Florida and Ohio in the Kerry column. Kerry only needs one." Satisfied, we went to bed, confident we would wake with the world a better place. Victory was at hand.
The morning told a different story, of course. No Florida victory for Kerry--Bush had a decisive margin of nearly 400,000 votes. Ohio was not even close enough for Kerry to demand that all the votes be counted. The pollsters had been dead wrong, Bush had four more years and a powerful mandate. Onward Christian soldiers--next stop, Tehran.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics
I work with statistics and polling data every day. Something rubbed me the wrong way. I checked the exit polls for Florida--all wrong. CNN's results indicated a Kerry win: turnout matched voter registration, and independents had broken 59% to 41% for Kerry.
Polling is an imprecise science. Yet its very imprecision is itself quantifiable and follows regular patterns. Differences between actual results and those expected from polling data must be explainable by identifiable factors if the polling sample is robust enough. With almost 3.000 respondents in Florida alone, the CNN poll sample was pretty robust.
The first signs of the rat were identified by Kathy Dopp, who conducted a simple analysis of voter registrations by party in Florida and compared them to presidential vote results. Basically she multiplied the total votes cast in a county by the percentage of voters registered Republican: this gave an expected Republican vote. She then compared this to the actual result.
Her analysis is startling. Certain counties voted for Bush far in excess of what one would expect based on the share of Republican registrations in that county. They key phrase is "certain counties"--there is extraordinary variance between individual counties. Most counties fall more or less in line with what one would expect based on the share of Republican registrations, but some differ wildly.
How to explain this incredible variance? Dopp found one over-riding factor: whether the county used electronic touch-screen voting, or paper ballots which were optically scanned into a computer. All of those with touch-screen voting had results relatively in line with her expected results, while all of those with extreme variance were in counties with optical scanning.
The intimation, clearly, is fraud. Ballots are scanned; results are fed into precinct computers; these are sent to a county-wide database, whose results are fed into the statewide electoral totals. At any point after physical ballots become databases, the system is vulnerable to external hackers.
It seemed too easy, and Dopp's method seemed simplistic. I re-ran the results using CNN's exit polling data. In each county, I took the number of registrations and assigned correctional factors based on the CNN poll to predict turnout among Republicans, Democrats, and independents. I then used the vote shares from the polls to predict a likely number of Republican votes per county. I compared this ‘expected' Republican vote to the actual Republican vote.
The results are shocking. Overall, Bush received 2% fewer votes in counties with electronic touch-screen voting than expected. In counties with optical scanning, he received 16% more. This 16% would not be strange if it were spread across counties more or less evenly. It is not. In 11 different counties, the ‘actual' Bush vote was at least twice higher than the expected vote. 13 counties had Bush vote tallies 50--100% higher than expected. In one county where 88% of voters are registered Democrats, Bush got nearly two thirds of the vote--three times more than predicted by my model.
Again, polling can be wrong. It is difficult to believe it can be that wrong. Fortunately, however, we can test how wrong it would have to be to give the ‘actual' result.
I tested two alternative scenarios to see how wrong CNN would have to have been to explain the election result. In the first, I assumed they had been wildly off the mark in the turnout figures--i.e. far more Republicans and independents had come out than Democrats. In the second I assumed the voting shares were completely wrong, and that the Republicans had been able to massively poach voters from the Democrat base.
In the first scenario, I assumed 90% of Republicans and independents voted, and the remaining ballots were cast by Democrats. This explains the result in counties with optical scanning to within 5%. However, in this scenario Democratic turnout would have been only 51% in the optical scanning counties--barely exceeding half of Republican turnout. It also does not solve the enormous problems in individual counties. 7 counties in this scenario still have actual vote tallies for Bush that are at least 100% higher than predicted by the model--an extremely unlikely result.
In the second scenario I assumed that Bush had actually got 100% of the vote from Republicans and 50% from independents (versus CNN polling results which were 93% and 41% respectively). If this gave enough votes for Bush to explain the county's results, I left the amount of Democratic registered voters ballots cast for Bush as they were predicted by CNN (14% voted for Bush). If this did not explain the result, I calculated how many Democrats would have to vote for Bush.
In 41 of 52 counties, this did not explain the result and Bush must have gotten more than CNN's predicted 14% of Democratic ballots--not an unreasonable assumption by itself. However, in 21 counties more than 50% of Democratic votes would have to have defected to Bush to account for the county result--in four counties, at least 70% would have been required. These results are absurdly unlikely.
The second rat
A previously undiscovered species of rat, Republicanus cuyahogus, has been found in Ohio. Before the election, I wrote snide letters to a state legislator for Cuyahoga county who, according to media reports, was preparing an army of enforcers to keep ‘suspect' (read: minority) voters away from the polls. One of his assistants wrote me back very pleasant mails to the effect that they had no intention of trying to suppress voter turnout, and in fact only wanted to encourage people to vote.
They did their job too well. According to the official statistics for Cuyahoga county, a number of precincts had voter turnout well above the national average: in fact, turnout was well over 100% of registered voters, and in several cases well above the total number of people who have lived in the precinct in the last century or so.
In 30 precincts, more ballots were cast than voters were registered in the county. According to county regulations, voters must cast their ballot in the precinct in which they are registered. Yet in these thirty precincts, nearly 100.000 more people voted than are registered to vote -- this out of a total of 251.946 registrations. These are not marginal differences--this is a 39% over-vote. In some precincts the over-vote was well over 100%. One precinct with 558 registered voters cast nearly 9,000 ballots. As one astute observer noted, it's the ballot-box equivalent of Jesus' miracle of the fishes. Bush being such a man of God, perhaps we should not be surprised.
What to do?
This is not an idle statistical exercise. Either the raw data from two critical battleground states is completely erroneous, or something has gone horribly awry in our electoral system--again. Like many Americans, I was dissatisfied with and suspicious of the way the Florida recount was resolved in 2000. But at the same time, I was convinced of one thing: we must let the system work, and accept its result, no matter how unjust it might appear.
With this acceptance, we placed our implicit faith in the Bush Administration that it would not abuse its position: that it would recognize its fragile mandate for what it was, respect the will of the majority of people who voted against them, and move to build consensus wherever possible and effect change cautiously when needed. Above all, we believed that both Democrats and Republicans would recognize the over-riding importance of revitalizing the integrity of the electoral system and healing the bruised faith of both constituencies.
This faith has been shattered. Bush has not led the nation to unity, but ruled through fear and division. Dishonesty and deceit in areas critical to the public interest have been the hallmark of his Administration. I state this not to throw gratuitous insults, but to place the Florida and Ohio electoral results in their proper context. For the GOP to claim now that we must take anything on faith, let alone astonishingly suspicious results in a hard-fought and extraordinarily bitter election, is pure fantasy. It does not even merit discussion.
The facts as I see them now defy all logical explanations save one--massive and systematic vote fraud. We cannot accept the result of the 2004 presidential election as legitimate until these discrepancies are rigorously and completely explained. From the Valerie Plame case to the horrors of Abu Ghraib, George Bush has been reluctant to seek answers and assign accountability when it does not suit his purposes. But this is one time when no American should accept not getting a straight answer. Until then, George Bush is still, and will remain, the ‘Accidental President' of 2000. One of his many enduring and shameful legacies will be that of seizing power through two illegitimate elections conducted on his brother's watch, and engineering a fundamental corruption at the very heart of the greatest democracy the world has known. We must not permit this to happen again.
Colin Shea is author of "The Freezer Box"
Restoring Trust in the Vote
Restoring Trust in the Vote
Published on Monday, November 15, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Restoring Trust in the Vote
by Thom Hartmann
Mea culpa.
On November 6th, I submitted an article to Common Dreams that - based on interviews I'd done with a Florida Democratic candidate for Congress and information and people he'd pointed me to analyzing Florida's vote - suggested that small Florida counties may have been digitally "flipped" to benefit George W. Bush. The editors of Common Dreams published my article.
A few hours later, my email box contained notes from Anthony Lappe of GNN.TV and Kathy Dopp. Anthony pointed out that small Florida counties have been voting Republican since Reagan (and before - this is a remnant of Nixon's "Southern Strategy" of appealing to anti-integrationist whites). I called Anthony, and then contacted Kathy Dopp, who agreed with Lappe that while my citations were right, the conclusions I'd drawn from them were wrong. It wasn't that counties had flipped, Dopp said, but that there was a difference in counties that could only be accounted for by the type of machine on which the vote was counted.
I contacted Common Dreams and asked them to take down the story, and re-wrote it to conform with Dopp's information, including a (perhaps too brief) reference to the fact that the original posting had contained errors.
In the meantime, a small industry has grown up of people claiming to have set me straight, or rebutting the original, incorrect, story, including some who even then go on to write articles challenging the assertions of my first story version without acknowledging the corrections and issues of the second version. This is all, of course, my own fault, for having submitted in the first place (even though it was corrected within hours) an article that was insufficiently fact-checked, and the early version of which is still cited on some websites.
Was the vote hacked? Nobody knows for sure. Dopp stands by her analysis, and has several credible PhDs backing her up. Others of similar veracity say she has found an anomaly, but not one of significance. Congressional candidate Fisher continues to insist that he has proof, and has now turned it over to the FBI, but has been unable to provide me with what I would consider credible evidence. Similar analysis in other states are uncovering troubling questions, leading to investigations and provoking Ralph Nader to ask for a recount of New Hampshire.
The larger question is one of trust in the reliability of our elections system. Unlike most of the world's other advanced democracies, we have privatized much of our vote. Private, for-profit corporations, claiming trade secrecy, process our vote via their software in ways they say we cannot see. For many, their honesty is less an issue than the transparency of a privatized voting system.
On November 24, 2000, as the lawsuit initiated by George W. Bush to stop a recount in Florida was grinding its way to the Supreme Court, Rush Limbaugh noted one of the more famous quotes attributed to Josef Stalin. "Those who cast the votes decide nothing," intoned Limbaugh. "Those who count the votes decide everything."
Shortly thereafter, Limbaugh's Republicans, led by Tom DeLay and Dennis Hastert in the House and Bill Frist in the Senate, were fighting hard to keep their corporate friends counting the vote, by blocking legislation introduced in the House by Rep. Rush Holt (H.R. 2239) and in the Senate by Senators Bob Graham and Hillary Clinton (S. 2313).
The Restore Elector Confidence in Our Representative Democracy (RECORD) Act would require voting machines to produce a voter-verified paper ballot and to be randomly audited. During the past two years, neither bill has made it out of committee in the Republican-controlled House or Senate, so in 2004 it was private, for-profit corporations who, for the most part, counted the votes, be they touch-screen, optical scanners, or even punch cards.
On November 11th, 2004, Doug Halonen reported in TV Week that former Enron lobbyist and current RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie had, at a National Press Club event that day, called for an end to exit polls. Gillespie, it turns out, is concerned about the emotional well being of Republicans who may feel as "discouraged" as he felt when he saw the initial exit polls.
"In 2000 the exit data was wrong on Election Day," Gillespie said, an observation ironically in agreement with Dopp's Florida analysis. "In 2002," he added, "the exit returns were wrong on Election Day." (An observation that Max Cleland could agree with.) "And in 2004," Gillespie moaned, "the exit data were wrong on Election Day - all three times, by the way, in a way that skewed against Republicans and had a dispiriting effect on Republican voters across the country."
Alex Pelosi's new film "Diary of a Political Tourist" catches a tipsy Congressman Peter King making a comment at a White House function before the election had been finished that, "It's already over. The Election's over. We Won."
When Pelosi asks, "How do you know that?" King replies, "It's all over but the counting. And we'll take care of the counting."
To some, while not evidence of conspiracy, this is, at best, unseemly. Republican-affiliated corporations secretly handling our vote; significant disparities between exit polls and machine-based vote counts (that vary widely from state-to-state); the Republican Party fighting legislation that would make the vote transparent; Republicans saying they'll "take care of the counting"; and now RNC chairman Gillespie calls for an end to exit polls.
To the extent that some people thought, based on the first in-error version of my story, that a smoking gun of voting fraud had definitely been found and have now become skeptical and thus may abandon efforts at real investigation or reform, is a tragedy, for which I take full responsibility.
To the extent that this issue has been raised, and is being pursued by many, this episode may well turn out to be a good thing. Some very interesting rocks are being overturned, and there is new energy behind Rush Holt's bill to force greater transparency for electronic voting.
Every responsible American wants to move beyond this election and its results. It's vital that progressives - in particular - immediately work to develop a well-crafted message, and rapidly engage today's fight for the hearts and souls of America's voters. And, yet, at the same time we must resolve the issues raised by this election - both old-fashioned voter suppression/fraud, and the possibility of electronic tampering - and do so quickly.
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."
Published on Monday, November 15, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Restoring Trust in the Vote
by Thom Hartmann
Mea culpa.
On November 6th, I submitted an article to Common Dreams that - based on interviews I'd done with a Florida Democratic candidate for Congress and information and people he'd pointed me to analyzing Florida's vote - suggested that small Florida counties may have been digitally "flipped" to benefit George W. Bush. The editors of Common Dreams published my article.
A few hours later, my email box contained notes from Anthony Lappe of GNN.TV and Kathy Dopp. Anthony pointed out that small Florida counties have been voting Republican since Reagan (and before - this is a remnant of Nixon's "Southern Strategy" of appealing to anti-integrationist whites). I called Anthony, and then contacted Kathy Dopp, who agreed with Lappe that while my citations were right, the conclusions I'd drawn from them were wrong. It wasn't that counties had flipped, Dopp said, but that there was a difference in counties that could only be accounted for by the type of machine on which the vote was counted.
I contacted Common Dreams and asked them to take down the story, and re-wrote it to conform with Dopp's information, including a (perhaps too brief) reference to the fact that the original posting had contained errors.
In the meantime, a small industry has grown up of people claiming to have set me straight, or rebutting the original, incorrect, story, including some who even then go on to write articles challenging the assertions of my first story version without acknowledging the corrections and issues of the second version. This is all, of course, my own fault, for having submitted in the first place (even though it was corrected within hours) an article that was insufficiently fact-checked, and the early version of which is still cited on some websites.
Was the vote hacked? Nobody knows for sure. Dopp stands by her analysis, and has several credible PhDs backing her up. Others of similar veracity say she has found an anomaly, but not one of significance. Congressional candidate Fisher continues to insist that he has proof, and has now turned it over to the FBI, but has been unable to provide me with what I would consider credible evidence. Similar analysis in other states are uncovering troubling questions, leading to investigations and provoking Ralph Nader to ask for a recount of New Hampshire.
The larger question is one of trust in the reliability of our elections system. Unlike most of the world's other advanced democracies, we have privatized much of our vote. Private, for-profit corporations, claiming trade secrecy, process our vote via their software in ways they say we cannot see. For many, their honesty is less an issue than the transparency of a privatized voting system.
On November 24, 2000, as the lawsuit initiated by George W. Bush to stop a recount in Florida was grinding its way to the Supreme Court, Rush Limbaugh noted one of the more famous quotes attributed to Josef Stalin. "Those who cast the votes decide nothing," intoned Limbaugh. "Those who count the votes decide everything."
Shortly thereafter, Limbaugh's Republicans, led by Tom DeLay and Dennis Hastert in the House and Bill Frist in the Senate, were fighting hard to keep their corporate friends counting the vote, by blocking legislation introduced in the House by Rep. Rush Holt (H.R. 2239) and in the Senate by Senators Bob Graham and Hillary Clinton (S. 2313).
The Restore Elector Confidence in Our Representative Democracy (RECORD) Act would require voting machines to produce a voter-verified paper ballot and to be randomly audited. During the past two years, neither bill has made it out of committee in the Republican-controlled House or Senate, so in 2004 it was private, for-profit corporations who, for the most part, counted the votes, be they touch-screen, optical scanners, or even punch cards.
On November 11th, 2004, Doug Halonen reported in TV Week that former Enron lobbyist and current RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie had, at a National Press Club event that day, called for an end to exit polls. Gillespie, it turns out, is concerned about the emotional well being of Republicans who may feel as "discouraged" as he felt when he saw the initial exit polls.
"In 2000 the exit data was wrong on Election Day," Gillespie said, an observation ironically in agreement with Dopp's Florida analysis. "In 2002," he added, "the exit returns were wrong on Election Day." (An observation that Max Cleland could agree with.) "And in 2004," Gillespie moaned, "the exit data were wrong on Election Day - all three times, by the way, in a way that skewed against Republicans and had a dispiriting effect on Republican voters across the country."
Alex Pelosi's new film "Diary of a Political Tourist" catches a tipsy Congressman Peter King making a comment at a White House function before the election had been finished that, "It's already over. The Election's over. We Won."
When Pelosi asks, "How do you know that?" King replies, "It's all over but the counting. And we'll take care of the counting."
To some, while not evidence of conspiracy, this is, at best, unseemly. Republican-affiliated corporations secretly handling our vote; significant disparities between exit polls and machine-based vote counts (that vary widely from state-to-state); the Republican Party fighting legislation that would make the vote transparent; Republicans saying they'll "take care of the counting"; and now RNC chairman Gillespie calls for an end to exit polls.
To the extent that some people thought, based on the first in-error version of my story, that a smoking gun of voting fraud had definitely been found and have now become skeptical and thus may abandon efforts at real investigation or reform, is a tragedy, for which I take full responsibility.
To the extent that this issue has been raised, and is being pursued by many, this episode may well turn out to be a good thing. Some very interesting rocks are being overturned, and there is new energy behind Rush Holt's bill to force greater transparency for electronic voting.
Every responsible American wants to move beyond this election and its results. It's vital that progressives - in particular - immediately work to develop a well-crafted message, and rapidly engage today's fight for the hearts and souls of America's voters. And, yet, at the same time we must resolve the issues raised by this election - both old-fashioned voter suppression/fraud, and the possibility of electronic tampering - and do so quickly.
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."
Saturday, November 13, 2004
League of Pissed Off Voters
League of Pissed Off Voters: "PUBLIC HEARINGS IN OHIO!
They might have conceded - but we haven't conceded our right to have our votes count.
The Ohio Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections (CASE-OH), This Time We're Watching, the League of Young Voters, People for the American Way Foundation - a leading member of the Election Protection Coalition, Common Cause Ohio, Ohio Election Reform Now, Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism, WVKO Radio, and Ohio Voterization Project are calling for public hearings to investigate voting irregularities and vote suppression in Ohio surrounding the 2004 General Election.
THIS IS A NONPARTISAN STATEWIDE CALL TO ACTION. VOTERS AND POLL WORKERS FROM AROUND THE STATE ARE INVITED TO TESTIFY.
Saturday November 13, 1-4 PM
New Faith Baptist Church
955 Oak Street
Columbus, Ohio 43205
Monday November 15, 6-9 PM,
Auditorium (Meeting Room A)
Courthouse, 373 S. High St.
Columbus, OH
Voters, poll workers, and poll watchers who experienced or observed election
irregularities or vote suppression on Election Day to come forward and
give their testimony.
Legislators, experts on voting rights, election protection, electoral reform, and election law will also present.
We will document and videotape the testimonies for use in a report
and a formal complaint to the Franklin County Board of Elections.
This is a public space to respond to the systemic undermining of our
democratic process and assess how to respond to racial disenfranchisement and suppression of democratic rights.
The coalition hopes to expose the systemic undermining of our democratic process that occurred leading up to and on Nov 2, and assess how to respond to racial disenfranchisement and suppression of democratic rights.
Testimony will be followed by a summary statement of patterns of voting rights violations emerging in the state of Ohio and a discussion of statewide reforms needed to address these issues.
ENDORSERS:
* Ohio State Senator Teresa Fedor
* Ohio State Senator Ray Miller
* Carol Mosley Braun
* Cobb/LaMarche campaign
* League of Pissed Off Voters (www.indyvoter.org )
* freelance journalist Lynn Landes
* Dr. Robert Fitrakis, Ph.D, J.D.
* Bill Moss, community leader/former Columbus School Board Member
* Lawyers Committee For Civil Rights in San Francisco Bay Area
* Medea Benjamin - Code Pink & Global Exchange
* Ted Glick - IPPN
* Wisconsin Green Party
* Ohio Green Party
* Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, San Francisco
* Driving Votes (www.drivingvotes.org )
* Chris Vaeth - Truth Force Training Center
* International Labor Communications Association
* No Stolen Elections Coalition (www.nov3.us )
* Liberty Tree
* Black Voices for Peace
* Alliance for Democracy
* Global Women's Strike (www.globalwomenstrike.net)
* Women of Color in the Global Women's Strike
* Payday (www.refusingtokill.net )
* Citizens for Democracy and Ending Corporate Rule
* Sybil Edwards-McNabb Ohio State Caucus of the NAACP
WHAT YOU CAN DO:
To testify, show up.
If you are unable to attend but would like to submit written testimony, contacct:
Jeff Zelli: ohiohearings@yahoo.com with TESTIMONY in the subject line.
To volunteer, contact: Amy Kaplan - amy@indyvoter.org 614.405.2160.
To sponsor this call to action by promoting it to your networks and/or donating, send an email to: ohiohearings@yahoo.com with SPONSOR in the subject line or call Navina: 425.269.5194.
Media - contact Naina Khanna, naina@indyvoter.org/ 347.528.6023
Here are a few articles on the types of voter suppression/disenfranchisement that we are hoping to call attention to:
Kerry Won. Greg Palast, Tompaine.com
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won_.php
Did Kerry Concede Too Soon? Bob Fitrakis, The Free Press
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/981
Was the Ohio Election Honest and Fair? Institute for Public Accuracy
http://www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR110304.htm
Worse Than 2000: Tuesday's Electoral Disaster, William Rivers Pitt,
Truthout
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/110804A.shtml
None Dare Call it Voter Suppression and Fraud, Bob Fitrakis, Free Press
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/983
"
They might have conceded - but we haven't conceded our right to have our votes count.
The Ohio Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections (CASE-OH), This Time We're Watching, the League of Young Voters, People for the American Way Foundation - a leading member of the Election Protection Coalition, Common Cause Ohio, Ohio Election Reform Now, Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism, WVKO Radio, and Ohio Voterization Project are calling for public hearings to investigate voting irregularities and vote suppression in Ohio surrounding the 2004 General Election.
THIS IS A NONPARTISAN STATEWIDE CALL TO ACTION. VOTERS AND POLL WORKERS FROM AROUND THE STATE ARE INVITED TO TESTIFY.
Saturday November 13, 1-4 PM
New Faith Baptist Church
955 Oak Street
Columbus, Ohio 43205
Monday November 15, 6-9 PM,
Auditorium (Meeting Room A)
Courthouse, 373 S. High St.
Columbus, OH
Voters, poll workers, and poll watchers who experienced or observed election
irregularities or vote suppression on Election Day to come forward and
give their testimony.
Legislators, experts on voting rights, election protection, electoral reform, and election law will also present.
We will document and videotape the testimonies for use in a report
and a formal complaint to the Franklin County Board of Elections.
This is a public space to respond to the systemic undermining of our
democratic process and assess how to respond to racial disenfranchisement and suppression of democratic rights.
The coalition hopes to expose the systemic undermining of our democratic process that occurred leading up to and on Nov 2, and assess how to respond to racial disenfranchisement and suppression of democratic rights.
Testimony will be followed by a summary statement of patterns of voting rights violations emerging in the state of Ohio and a discussion of statewide reforms needed to address these issues.
ENDORSERS:
* Ohio State Senator Teresa Fedor
* Ohio State Senator Ray Miller
* Carol Mosley Braun
* Cobb/LaMarche campaign
* League of Pissed Off Voters (www.indyvoter.org )
* freelance journalist Lynn Landes
* Dr. Robert Fitrakis, Ph.D, J.D.
* Bill Moss, community leader/former Columbus School Board Member
* Lawyers Committee For Civil Rights in San Francisco Bay Area
* Medea Benjamin - Code Pink & Global Exchange
* Ted Glick - IPPN
* Wisconsin Green Party
* Ohio Green Party
* Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, San Francisco
* Driving Votes (www.drivingvotes.org )
* Chris Vaeth - Truth Force Training Center
* International Labor Communications Association
* No Stolen Elections Coalition (www.nov3.us )
* Liberty Tree
* Black Voices for Peace
* Alliance for Democracy
* Global Women's Strike (www.globalwomenstrike.net)
* Women of Color in the Global Women's Strike
* Payday (www.refusingtokill.net )
* Citizens for Democracy and Ending Corporate Rule
* Sybil Edwards-McNabb Ohio State Caucus of the NAACP
WHAT YOU CAN DO:
To testify, show up.
If you are unable to attend but would like to submit written testimony, contacct:
Jeff Zelli: ohiohearings@yahoo.com with TESTIMONY in the subject line.
To volunteer, contact: Amy Kaplan - amy@indyvoter.org 614.405.2160.
To sponsor this call to action by promoting it to your networks and/or donating, send an email to: ohiohearings@yahoo.com with SPONSOR in the subject line or call Navina: 425.269.5194.
Media - contact Naina Khanna, naina@indyvoter.org/ 347.528.6023
Here are a few articles on the types of voter suppression/disenfranchisement that we are hoping to call attention to:
Kerry Won. Greg Palast, Tompaine.com
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won_.php
Did Kerry Concede Too Soon? Bob Fitrakis, The Free Press
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/981
Was the Ohio Election Honest and Fair? Institute for Public Accuracy
http://www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR110304.htm
Worse Than 2000: Tuesday's Electoral Disaster, William Rivers Pitt,
Truthout
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/110804A.shtml
None Dare Call it Voter Suppression and Fraud, Bob Fitrakis, Free Press
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/983
"
Friday, November 12, 2004
BuzzFlash > News Alert > The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy
BuzzFlash > News Alert > The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy: "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT
11/12/04 4:48 PM Update: PDF link goes to version '00l.'
BuzzFlash was forwarded a copy of a new research paper (271k PDF) on the exit polls from the 2004 election.
In 'The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy,' Dr. Steven F. Freeman says:
'As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states [Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania] of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.'
The odds of those exit poll statistical anomalies occurring by chance are, according to Freeman, '250,000,000 to one.' That's 250 MILLION to ONE.
He concludes the paper with this:
'Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature conclusion, but the election's unexplained exit poll discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is the responsibility of the media, academia, polling agencies, and the public to investigate.'
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT"
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT
11/12/04 4:48 PM Update: PDF link goes to version '00l.'
BuzzFlash was forwarded a copy of a new research paper (271k PDF) on the exit polls from the 2004 election.
In 'The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy,' Dr. Steven F. Freeman says:
'As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states [Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania] of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.'
The odds of those exit poll statistical anomalies occurring by chance are, according to Freeman, '250,000,000 to one.' That's 250 MILLION to ONE.
He concludes the paper with this:
'Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature conclusion, but the election's unexplained exit poll discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is the responsibility of the media, academia, polling agencies, and the public to investigate.'
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT"
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
Bloglines | My Blogs
Bloglines | My Blogs
Posted on Tue, Nov. 09, 2004
Click here to find out more!
Hackers rigging voting machines a real possibility
It's not my conspiracy theory.
But I've been scalded, via e-mail, just for noting that there has been a bothersome outbreak of rigged-voting rumors in the last week. I've been called a sore loser, a ''paranoid conspiracy theoriest'' and a liberal lunkhead. I've been accused of trying to help Democrats steal the election from President Bush. I've been called a Michael Moore flunky.
But, hey, it's not my conspiracy theory.
Since last Tuesday evening, the Internet has been jammed with untoward explanations of a Bush victory that occurred despite exit polls indicating things would go swimmingly for the challenger. I never suggested that I believed that Republic computer hackers had altered the true outcome of the election. I don't. But our nifty new touch-screen voting systems do nothing to discourage such paranoia.
Electronic voting machines have two unsettling flaws. They generate no paper records that can be used to check the actual results against the totals offered by the computer.
Worse, the operating systems that run the machines are the privately-held property of the manufacturers. The computer source codes are not open to public inspection. Yet computer scientists from Stanford, MIT, Rice and Johns Hopkins universities have warned that the secret operating systems are rife with vulnerabilities.
Anyone with a Microsoft Windows operating system on their home computer -- locked in a constant, losing battle to fend off viruses, worms, Trojan Horses and spyware -- ought to shudder with fear when they cast votes on machines manufactured by Diebold, Sequoia or ES&S (used in Broward and Miami-Dade counties). Without public inspections of the operating systems, without the paper records, election officials have no evidence to quiet talk that an election was rigged.
That doesn't mean I believe the conspiracy theories.
A number of voters claimed that when they voted on the ES&S system, they pushed a button for Kerry and a vote for Bush popped up in their ballot summary. But this is more likely an indication of a machine malfunction than fraud.
If a talented computer geek really wanted to alter an election outcome, voters would never know. Avi Rubin, who heads the computer security program at Johns Hopkins University, told me that tampering by a skilled hacker would be virtually ``undetectable.''
David Dill, the Stanford computer science professor who founded the Verified Voting Foundation, told National Public Radio last week that he was worried because, ''We don't know what's happening inside the machine.'' Dill said that, without independent checks or a backup system, ``We don't know what the invisible errors are.''
The computer scientists are bothered by widespread reports of breakdowns and errors in the voting systems.
But they are more bothered by what they don't know. Because state and local election officials have allowed the basic voting mechanism to remain a private company secret -- off limits to the public.
Angry Republicans, at least those firing off e-mails, seem to suspect that I'm conspiring with the computer science departments of several major universities to undermine the election of their candidate. But they ought to consider a vote-chilling reality.
Hackers (at least the few that authorities manage to nab) tend to be youngish, anti-establishment, anti-status quo, anti-corporate, anti-social. They're not likely to join the country club. They're not singing in the choir at an evangelical church. They're not security moms. They're not anxious to join the Marines and rush gung-ho into the battle for Fallujah. They're not likely to spend much time humming along with country music's Brooks & Dunn, who performed at the Republican National Convention.
Dear Republican critics: Which way do you suppose hackers will tip an election, when they decide, just for the heck of it, to have a little fun with the computer programs that now determine American elections?
Posted on Tue, Nov. 09, 2004
Click here to find out more!
Hackers rigging voting machines a real possibility
It's not my conspiracy theory.
But I've been scalded, via e-mail, just for noting that there has been a bothersome outbreak of rigged-voting rumors in the last week. I've been called a sore loser, a ''paranoid conspiracy theoriest'' and a liberal lunkhead. I've been accused of trying to help Democrats steal the election from President Bush. I've been called a Michael Moore flunky.
But, hey, it's not my conspiracy theory.
Since last Tuesday evening, the Internet has been jammed with untoward explanations of a Bush victory that occurred despite exit polls indicating things would go swimmingly for the challenger. I never suggested that I believed that Republic computer hackers had altered the true outcome of the election. I don't. But our nifty new touch-screen voting systems do nothing to discourage such paranoia.
Electronic voting machines have two unsettling flaws. They generate no paper records that can be used to check the actual results against the totals offered by the computer.
Worse, the operating systems that run the machines are the privately-held property of the manufacturers. The computer source codes are not open to public inspection. Yet computer scientists from Stanford, MIT, Rice and Johns Hopkins universities have warned that the secret operating systems are rife with vulnerabilities.
Anyone with a Microsoft Windows operating system on their home computer -- locked in a constant, losing battle to fend off viruses, worms, Trojan Horses and spyware -- ought to shudder with fear when they cast votes on machines manufactured by Diebold, Sequoia or ES&S (used in Broward and Miami-Dade counties). Without public inspections of the operating systems, without the paper records, election officials have no evidence to quiet talk that an election was rigged.
That doesn't mean I believe the conspiracy theories.
A number of voters claimed that when they voted on the ES&S system, they pushed a button for Kerry and a vote for Bush popped up in their ballot summary. But this is more likely an indication of a machine malfunction than fraud.
If a talented computer geek really wanted to alter an election outcome, voters would never know. Avi Rubin, who heads the computer security program at Johns Hopkins University, told me that tampering by a skilled hacker would be virtually ``undetectable.''
David Dill, the Stanford computer science professor who founded the Verified Voting Foundation, told National Public Radio last week that he was worried because, ''We don't know what's happening inside the machine.'' Dill said that, without independent checks or a backup system, ``We don't know what the invisible errors are.''
The computer scientists are bothered by widespread reports of breakdowns and errors in the voting systems.
But they are more bothered by what they don't know. Because state and local election officials have allowed the basic voting mechanism to remain a private company secret -- off limits to the public.
Angry Republicans, at least those firing off e-mails, seem to suspect that I'm conspiring with the computer science departments of several major universities to undermine the election of their candidate. But they ought to consider a vote-chilling reality.
Hackers (at least the few that authorities manage to nab) tend to be youngish, anti-establishment, anti-status quo, anti-corporate, anti-social. They're not likely to join the country club. They're not singing in the choir at an evangelical church. They're not security moms. They're not anxious to join the Marines and rush gung-ho into the battle for Fallujah. They're not likely to spend much time humming along with country music's Brooks & Dunn, who performed at the Republican National Convention.
Dear Republican critics: Which way do you suppose hackers will tip an election, when they decide, just for the heck of it, to have a little fun with the computer programs that now determine American elections?
Michael Moore.com : Must Read
Michael Moore.com : Must Read
In India, outsourcing firms rejoice
By Saritha Rai The New York Times
Friday, November 5, 2004
BANGALORE, India Outsourcing companies in India are jubilant that the elections in the United States have returned President Bush to office.
.
"This is great news for the offshoring industry," said Nandan Nilekani, chief executive of Infosys Technologies, a software services company. The trend toward outsourcing will now become even more inexorable, Nilekani said.
.
News on Wednesday that John Kerry had conceded the election to Bush was greeted with joy in the industry.
.
"We are very happy that Bush is back," said Kiran Karnik, president of the industry group Nasscom, or National Association of Software and Service Companies. "The president's track record has been of recognizing the advantages of free trade."
.
Bush's re-election will bring out the latent demand for outsourcing and lead to more offshoring announcements by companies, he said. "Some corporations have been cautious about signing or announcing deals in the last few months," Karnik said. "Now they will no longer hold back."
.
Offshore outsourcing, or the moving of work to low-cost regions like India, was an issue in the U.S. presidential election, with Kerry, the Democratic candidate, blaming Bush and offshoring for the loss of thousands of American jobs.
.
Kerry once referred to "Benedict Arnold companies" and chief executives that sent jobs overseas, invoking the name of a notorious 18th-century American traitor. He promised that as president he would end tax deferrals for companies that send work abroad.
.
Bush, in contrast, was largely silent on the issue. But members of his team, among them N. Gregory Mankiw, the chief economic adviser, and Treasury Secretary John Snow, have both defended offshoring as a form of free trade.
.
Some executives said that offshoring would grow even more strongly with Bush's victory. "The elections are over and so is the rhetoric; it will be easier for American corporations to step out with their outsourcing plans," said Vivek Paul, the vice chairman of Wipro, who works in Mountain View, California. The company itself is based in Bangalore.
.
The tone of some campaign comments criticizing outsourcing was viewed with some concern in India. The Times of India, the country's leading newspaper, called offshoring the "swear word" of the 2004 elections.
.
India's outsourcing industry employs more than 800,000 people. The country's software and back-office services industry posted $12.5 billion in export revenues in the year ended in March, a 30 percent rise over the previous year, as global demand for its services grew.
.
For more than a decade now, leading Indian outsourcing companies like Infosys Technologies and Wipro have written software applications and done back-office work for top American corporations, including General Electric and Citigroup. The work can be done more cheaply here, where skilled labor is inexpensive and plentiful.
.
The leading outsourcing companies earn as much as two-thirds of their revenue from customers from the United States.
.
.
Indian outsourcing companies have been growing robustly recently. In the quarter that ended in September, Infosys Technologies announced a 49 percent rise in profit and added more than 5,000 employees. Its rival Wipro had a 65 percent increase in quarterly profit and hired 5,500 more workers.
.
Some experts said that Bush's return to the White House augured well not just for India's technology industry but also for trade relations between India and the United States.
.
"The results mean that it is less likely that either the Congress or the administration will interfere in the growing and mutually beneficial trade relations between the two countries," said Daniel Griswold, director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington.
.
See more of the world that matters - click here for home delivery of the International Herald Tribune.
< < Back to Start of Article
BANGALORE, India Outsourcing companies in India are jubilant that the elections in the United States have returned President Bush to office.
.
"This is great news for the offshoring industry," said Nandan Nilekani, chief executive of Infosys Technologies, a software services company. The trend toward outsourcing will now become even more inexorable, Nilekani said.
.
News on Wednesday that John Kerry had conceded the election to Bush was greeted with joy in the industry.
.
"We are very happy that Bush is back," said Kiran Karnik, president of the industry group Nasscom, or National Association of Software and Service Companies. "The president's track record has been of recognizing the advantages of free trade."
.
Bush's re-election will bring out the latent demand for outsourcing and lead to more offshoring announcements by companies, he said. "Some corporations have been cautious about signing or announcing deals in the last few months," Karnik said. "Now they will no longer hold back."
.
Offshore outsourcing, or the moving of work to low-cost regions like India, was an issue in the U.S. presidential election, with Kerry, the Democratic candidate, blaming Bush and offshoring for the loss of thousands of American jobs.
.
Kerry once referred to "Benedict Arnold companies" and chief executives that sent jobs overseas, invoking the name of a notorious 18th-century American traitor. He promised that as president he would end tax deferrals for companies that send work abroad.
.
Bush, in contrast, was largely silent on the issue. But members of his team, among them N. Gregory Mankiw, the chief economic adviser, and Treasury Secretary John Snow, have both defended offshoring as a form of free trade.
.
Some executives said that offshoring would grow even more strongly with Bush's victory. "The elections are over and so is the rhetoric; it will be easier for American corporations to step out with their outsourcing plans," said Vivek Paul, the vice chairman of Wipro, who works in Mountain View, California. The company itself is based in Bangalore.
.
The tone of some campaign comments criticizing outsourcing was viewed with some concern in India. The Times of India, the country's leading newspaper, called offshoring the "swear word" of the 2004 elections.
.
India's outsourcing industry employs more than 800,000 people. The country's software and back-office services industry posted $12.5 billion in export revenues in the year ended in March, a 30 percent rise over the previous year, as global demand for its services grew.
.
For more than a decade now, leading Indian outsourcing companies like Infosys Technologies and Wipro have written software applications and done back-office work for top American corporations, including General Electric and Citigroup. The work can be done more cheaply here, where skilled labor is inexpensive and plentiful.
.
The leading outsourcing companies earn as much as two-thirds of their revenue from customers from the United States.
.
.
Indian outsourcing companies have been growing robustly recently. In the quarter that ended in September, Infosys Technologies announced a 49 percent rise in profit and added more than 5,000 employees. Its rival Wipro had a 65 percent increase in quarterly profit and hired 5,500 more workers.
.
Some experts said that Bush's return to the White House augured well not just for India's technology industry but also for trade relations between India and the United States.
.
"The results mean that it is less likely that either the Congress or the administration will interfere in the growing and mutually beneficial trade relations between the two countries," said Daniel Griswold, director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington.
.
BANGALORE, India Outsourcing companies in India are jubilant that the elections in the United States have returned President Bush to office.
.
"This is great news for the offshoring industry," said Nandan Nilekani, chief executive of Infosys Technologies, a software services company. The trend toward outsourcing will now become even more inexorable, Nilekani said.
.
News on Wednesday that John Kerry had conceded the election to Bush was greeted with joy in the industry.
.
"We are very happy that Bush is back," said Kiran Karnik, president of the industry group Nasscom, or National Association of Software and Service Companies. "The president's track record has been of recognizing the advantages of free trade."
.
Bush's re-election will bring out the latent demand for outsourcing and lead to more offshoring announcements by companies, he said. "Some corporations have been cautious about signing or announcing deals in the last few months," Karnik said. "Now they will no longer hold back."
.
Offshore outsourcing, or the moving of work to low-cost regions like India, was an issue in the U.S. presidential election, with Kerry, the Democratic candidate, blaming Bush and offshoring for the loss of thousands of American jobs.
.
Kerry once referred to "Benedict Arnold companies" and chief executives that sent jobs overseas, invoking the name of a notorious 18th-century American traitor. He promised that as president he would end tax deferrals for companies that send work abroad.
.
Bush, in contrast, was largely silent on the issue. But members of his team, among them N. Gregory Mankiw, the chief economic adviser, and Treasury Secretary John Snow, have both defended offshoring as a form of free trade.
.
Some executives said that offshoring would grow even more strongly with Bush's victory. "The elections are over and so is the rhetoric; it will be easier for American corporations to step out with their outsourcing plans," said Vivek Paul, the vice chairman of Wipro, who works in Mountain View, California. The company itself is based in Bangalore.
.
The tone of some campaign comments criticizing outsourcing was viewed with some concern in India. The Times of India, the country's leading newspaper, called offshoring the "swear word" of the 2004 elections.
.
India's outsourcing industry employs more than 800,000 people. The country's software and back-office services industry posted $12.5 billion in export revenues in the year ended in March, a 30 percent rise over the previous year, as global demand for its services grew.
.
For more than a decade now, leading Indian outsourcing companies like Infosys Technologies and Wipro have written software applications and done back-office work for top American corporations, including General Electric and Citigroup. The work can be done more cheaply here, where skilled labor is inexpensive and plentiful.
.
The leading outsourcing companies earn as much as two-thirds of their revenue from customers from the United States.
.
.
Indian outsourcing companies have been growing robustly recently. In the quarter that ended in September, Infosys Technologies announced a 49 percent rise in profit and added more than 5,000 employees. Its rival Wipro had a 65 percent increase in quarterly profit and hired 5,500 more workers.
.
Some experts said that Bush's return to the White House augured well not just for India's technology industry but also for trade relations between India and the United States.
.
"The results mean that it is less likely that either the Congress or the administration will interfere in the growing and mutually beneficial trade relations between the two countries," said Daniel Griswold, director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington.
.
BANGALORE, India Outsourcing companies in India are jubilant that the elections in the United States have returned President Bush to office.
.
"This is great news for the offshoring industry," said Nandan Nilekani, chief executive of Infosys Technologies, a software services company. The trend toward outsourcing will now become even more inexorable, Nilekani said.
.
News on Wednesday that John Kerry had conceded the election to Bush was greeted with joy in the industry.
.
"We are very happy that Bush is back," said Kiran Karnik, president of the industry group Nasscom, or National Association of Software and Service Companies. "The president's track record has been of recognizing the advantages of free trade."
.
Bush's re-election will bring out the latent demand for outsourcing and lead to more offshoring announcements by companies, he said. "Some corporations have been cautious about signing or announcing deals in the last few months," Karnik said. "Now they will no longer hold back."
.
Offshore outsourcing, or the moving of work to low-cost regions like India, was an issue in the U.S. presidential election, with Kerry, the Democratic candidate, blaming Bush and offshoring for the loss of thousands of American jobs.
.
Kerry once referred to "Benedict Arnold companies" and chief executives that sent jobs overseas, invoking the name of a notorious 18th-century American traitor. He promised that as president he would end tax deferrals for companies that send work abroad.
.
Bush, in contrast, was largely silent on the issue. But members of his team, among them N. Gregory Mankiw, the chief economic adviser, and Treasury Secretary John Snow, have both defended offshoring as a form of free trade.
.
Some executives said that offshoring would grow even more strongly with Bush's victory. "The elections are over and so is the rhetoric; it will be easier for American corporations to step out with their outsourcing plans," said Vivek Paul, the vice chairman of Wipro, who works in Mountain View, California. The company itself is based in Bangalore.
.
The tone of some campaign comments criticizing outsourcing was viewed with some concern in India. The Times of India, the country's leading newspaper, called offshoring the "swear word" of the 2004 elections.
.
India's outsourcing industry employs more than 800,000 people. The country's software and back-office services industry posted $12.5 billion in export revenues in the year ended in March, a 30 percent rise over the previous year, as global demand for its services grew.
.
For more than a decade now, leading Indian outsourcing companies like Infosys Technologies and Wipro have written software applications and done back-office work for top American corporations, including General Electric and Citigroup. The work can be done more cheaply here, where skilled labor is inexpensive and plentiful.
.
The leading outsourcing companies earn as much as two-thirds of their revenue from customers from the United States.
.
.
Indian outsourcing companies have been growing robustly recently. In the quarter that ended in September, Infosys Technologies announced a 49 percent rise in profit and added more than 5,000 employees. Its rival Wipro had a 65 percent increase in quarterly profit and hired 5,500 more workers.
.
Some experts said that Bush's return to the White House augured well not just for India's technology industry but also for trade relations between India and the United States.
.
"The results mean that it is less likely that either the Congress or the administration will interfere in the growing and mutually beneficial trade relations between the two countries," said Daniel Griswold, director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington.
.
In India, outsourcing firms rejoice
By Saritha Rai The New York Times
Friday, November 5, 2004
BANGALORE, India Outsourcing companies in India are jubilant that the elections in the United States have returned President Bush to office.
.
"This is great news for the offshoring industry," said Nandan Nilekani, chief executive of Infosys Technologies, a software services company. The trend toward outsourcing will now become even more inexorable, Nilekani said.
.
News on Wednesday that John Kerry had conceded the election to Bush was greeted with joy in the industry.
.
"We are very happy that Bush is back," said Kiran Karnik, president of the industry group Nasscom, or National Association of Software and Service Companies. "The president's track record has been of recognizing the advantages of free trade."
.
Bush's re-election will bring out the latent demand for outsourcing and lead to more offshoring announcements by companies, he said. "Some corporations have been cautious about signing or announcing deals in the last few months," Karnik said. "Now they will no longer hold back."
.
Offshore outsourcing, or the moving of work to low-cost regions like India, was an issue in the U.S. presidential election, with Kerry, the Democratic candidate, blaming Bush and offshoring for the loss of thousands of American jobs.
.
Kerry once referred to "Benedict Arnold companies" and chief executives that sent jobs overseas, invoking the name of a notorious 18th-century American traitor. He promised that as president he would end tax deferrals for companies that send work abroad.
.
Bush, in contrast, was largely silent on the issue. But members of his team, among them N. Gregory Mankiw, the chief economic adviser, and Treasury Secretary John Snow, have both defended offshoring as a form of free trade.
.
Some executives said that offshoring would grow even more strongly with Bush's victory. "The elections are over and so is the rhetoric; it will be easier for American corporations to step out with their outsourcing plans," said Vivek Paul, the vice chairman of Wipro, who works in Mountain View, California. The company itself is based in Bangalore.
.
The tone of some campaign comments criticizing outsourcing was viewed with some concern in India. The Times of India, the country's leading newspaper, called offshoring the "swear word" of the 2004 elections.
.
India's outsourcing industry employs more than 800,000 people. The country's software and back-office services industry posted $12.5 billion in export revenues in the year ended in March, a 30 percent rise over the previous year, as global demand for its services grew.
.
For more than a decade now, leading Indian outsourcing companies like Infosys Technologies and Wipro have written software applications and done back-office work for top American corporations, including General Electric and Citigroup. The work can be done more cheaply here, where skilled labor is inexpensive and plentiful.
.
The leading outsourcing companies earn as much as two-thirds of their revenue from customers from the United States.
.
.
Indian outsourcing companies have been growing robustly recently. In the quarter that ended in September, Infosys Technologies announced a 49 percent rise in profit and added more than 5,000 employees. Its rival Wipro had a 65 percent increase in quarterly profit and hired 5,500 more workers.
.
Some experts said that Bush's return to the White House augured well not just for India's technology industry but also for trade relations between India and the United States.
.
"The results mean that it is less likely that either the Congress or the administration will interfere in the growing and mutually beneficial trade relations between the two countries," said Daniel Griswold, director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington.
.
See more of the world that matters - click here for home delivery of the International Herald Tribune.
< < Back to Start of Article
BANGALORE, India Outsourcing companies in India are jubilant that the elections in the United States have returned President Bush to office.
.
"This is great news for the offshoring industry," said Nandan Nilekani, chief executive of Infosys Technologies, a software services company. The trend toward outsourcing will now become even more inexorable, Nilekani said.
.
News on Wednesday that John Kerry had conceded the election to Bush was greeted with joy in the industry.
.
"We are very happy that Bush is back," said Kiran Karnik, president of the industry group Nasscom, or National Association of Software and Service Companies. "The president's track record has been of recognizing the advantages of free trade."
.
Bush's re-election will bring out the latent demand for outsourcing and lead to more offshoring announcements by companies, he said. "Some corporations have been cautious about signing or announcing deals in the last few months," Karnik said. "Now they will no longer hold back."
.
Offshore outsourcing, or the moving of work to low-cost regions like India, was an issue in the U.S. presidential election, with Kerry, the Democratic candidate, blaming Bush and offshoring for the loss of thousands of American jobs.
.
Kerry once referred to "Benedict Arnold companies" and chief executives that sent jobs overseas, invoking the name of a notorious 18th-century American traitor. He promised that as president he would end tax deferrals for companies that send work abroad.
.
Bush, in contrast, was largely silent on the issue. But members of his team, among them N. Gregory Mankiw, the chief economic adviser, and Treasury Secretary John Snow, have both defended offshoring as a form of free trade.
.
Some executives said that offshoring would grow even more strongly with Bush's victory. "The elections are over and so is the rhetoric; it will be easier for American corporations to step out with their outsourcing plans," said Vivek Paul, the vice chairman of Wipro, who works in Mountain View, California. The company itself is based in Bangalore.
.
The tone of some campaign comments criticizing outsourcing was viewed with some concern in India. The Times of India, the country's leading newspaper, called offshoring the "swear word" of the 2004 elections.
.
India's outsourcing industry employs more than 800,000 people. The country's software and back-office services industry posted $12.5 billion in export revenues in the year ended in March, a 30 percent rise over the previous year, as global demand for its services grew.
.
For more than a decade now, leading Indian outsourcing companies like Infosys Technologies and Wipro have written software applications and done back-office work for top American corporations, including General Electric and Citigroup. The work can be done more cheaply here, where skilled labor is inexpensive and plentiful.
.
The leading outsourcing companies earn as much as two-thirds of their revenue from customers from the United States.
.
.
Indian outsourcing companies have been growing robustly recently. In the quarter that ended in September, Infosys Technologies announced a 49 percent rise in profit and added more than 5,000 employees. Its rival Wipro had a 65 percent increase in quarterly profit and hired 5,500 more workers.
.
Some experts said that Bush's return to the White House augured well not just for India's technology industry but also for trade relations between India and the United States.
.
"The results mean that it is less likely that either the Congress or the administration will interfere in the growing and mutually beneficial trade relations between the two countries," said Daniel Griswold, director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington.
.
BANGALORE, India Outsourcing companies in India are jubilant that the elections in the United States have returned President Bush to office.
.
"This is great news for the offshoring industry," said Nandan Nilekani, chief executive of Infosys Technologies, a software services company. The trend toward outsourcing will now become even more inexorable, Nilekani said.
.
News on Wednesday that John Kerry had conceded the election to Bush was greeted with joy in the industry.
.
"We are very happy that Bush is back," said Kiran Karnik, president of the industry group Nasscom, or National Association of Software and Service Companies. "The president's track record has been of recognizing the advantages of free trade."
.
Bush's re-election will bring out the latent demand for outsourcing and lead to more offshoring announcements by companies, he said. "Some corporations have been cautious about signing or announcing deals in the last few months," Karnik said. "Now they will no longer hold back."
.
Offshore outsourcing, or the moving of work to low-cost regions like India, was an issue in the U.S. presidential election, with Kerry, the Democratic candidate, blaming Bush and offshoring for the loss of thousands of American jobs.
.
Kerry once referred to "Benedict Arnold companies" and chief executives that sent jobs overseas, invoking the name of a notorious 18th-century American traitor. He promised that as president he would end tax deferrals for companies that send work abroad.
.
Bush, in contrast, was largely silent on the issue. But members of his team, among them N. Gregory Mankiw, the chief economic adviser, and Treasury Secretary John Snow, have both defended offshoring as a form of free trade.
.
Some executives said that offshoring would grow even more strongly with Bush's victory. "The elections are over and so is the rhetoric; it will be easier for American corporations to step out with their outsourcing plans," said Vivek Paul, the vice chairman of Wipro, who works in Mountain View, California. The company itself is based in Bangalore.
.
The tone of some campaign comments criticizing outsourcing was viewed with some concern in India. The Times of India, the country's leading newspaper, called offshoring the "swear word" of the 2004 elections.
.
India's outsourcing industry employs more than 800,000 people. The country's software and back-office services industry posted $12.5 billion in export revenues in the year ended in March, a 30 percent rise over the previous year, as global demand for its services grew.
.
For more than a decade now, leading Indian outsourcing companies like Infosys Technologies and Wipro have written software applications and done back-office work for top American corporations, including General Electric and Citigroup. The work can be done more cheaply here, where skilled labor is inexpensive and plentiful.
.
The leading outsourcing companies earn as much as two-thirds of their revenue from customers from the United States.
.
.
Indian outsourcing companies have been growing robustly recently. In the quarter that ended in September, Infosys Technologies announced a 49 percent rise in profit and added more than 5,000 employees. Its rival Wipro had a 65 percent increase in quarterly profit and hired 5,500 more workers.
.
Some experts said that Bush's return to the White House augured well not just for India's technology industry but also for trade relations between India and the United States.
.
"The results mean that it is less likely that either the Congress or the administration will interfere in the growing and mutually beneficial trade relations between the two countries," said Daniel Griswold, director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington.
.
BANGALORE, India Outsourcing companies in India are jubilant that the elections in the United States have returned President Bush to office.
.
"This is great news for the offshoring industry," said Nandan Nilekani, chief executive of Infosys Technologies, a software services company. The trend toward outsourcing will now become even more inexorable, Nilekani said.
.
News on Wednesday that John Kerry had conceded the election to Bush was greeted with joy in the industry.
.
"We are very happy that Bush is back," said Kiran Karnik, president of the industry group Nasscom, or National Association of Software and Service Companies. "The president's track record has been of recognizing the advantages of free trade."
.
Bush's re-election will bring out the latent demand for outsourcing and lead to more offshoring announcements by companies, he said. "Some corporations have been cautious about signing or announcing deals in the last few months," Karnik said. "Now they will no longer hold back."
.
Offshore outsourcing, or the moving of work to low-cost regions like India, was an issue in the U.S. presidential election, with Kerry, the Democratic candidate, blaming Bush and offshoring for the loss of thousands of American jobs.
.
Kerry once referred to "Benedict Arnold companies" and chief executives that sent jobs overseas, invoking the name of a notorious 18th-century American traitor. He promised that as president he would end tax deferrals for companies that send work abroad.
.
Bush, in contrast, was largely silent on the issue. But members of his team, among them N. Gregory Mankiw, the chief economic adviser, and Treasury Secretary John Snow, have both defended offshoring as a form of free trade.
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Some executives said that offshoring would grow even more strongly with Bush's victory. "The elections are over and so is the rhetoric; it will be easier for American corporations to step out with their outsourcing plans," said Vivek Paul, the vice chairman of Wipro, who works in Mountain View, California. The company itself is based in Bangalore.
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The tone of some campaign comments criticizing outsourcing was viewed with some concern in India. The Times of India, the country's leading newspaper, called offshoring the "swear word" of the 2004 elections.
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India's outsourcing industry employs more than 800,000 people. The country's software and back-office services industry posted $12.5 billion in export revenues in the year ended in March, a 30 percent rise over the previous year, as global demand for its services grew.
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For more than a decade now, leading Indian outsourcing companies like Infosys Technologies and Wipro have written software applications and done back-office work for top American corporations, including General Electric and Citigroup. The work can be done more cheaply here, where skilled labor is inexpensive and plentiful.
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The leading outsourcing companies earn as much as two-thirds of their revenue from customers from the United States.
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Indian outsourcing companies have been growing robustly recently. In the quarter that ended in September, Infosys Technologies announced a 49 percent rise in profit and added more than 5,000 employees. Its rival Wipro had a 65 percent increase in quarterly profit and hired 5,500 more workers.
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Some experts said that Bush's return to the White House augured well not just for India's technology industry but also for trade relations between India and the United States.
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"The results mean that it is less likely that either the Congress or the administration will interfere in the growing and mutually beneficial trade relations between the two countries," said Daniel Griswold, director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington.
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