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Condi Lied: Declassified Memo from Clarke
by SusanHu
Thu Feb 10th, 2005 at 18:40:42 PST
(From the diaries -- kos)
Although then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice wrote a March 22, 2004 column in The Washington Post that "No al-Qaeda threat was turned over to the new administration," a newly declassified document [image below the fold] tells the story.
U.S. media haven't got this yet, but Australian papers have:
US al-Qaeda warning revealed
11feb05
EIGHT months before the September 11 attacks the White House's then counterterrorism adviser urged then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to hold a high-level meeting on the al-Qaeda network, according to a memo made public today.
"We urgently need such a principals-level review on the al-Qaeda network," ... Richard Clarke wrote in the January 25, 2001 memo.
Mr Clarke, who left the White House in 2003, made headlines in the heat of the US presidential campaign ... when he accused the Bush White House of having ignored al-Qaeda's threats before September 11.
Mr Clarke testified before inquiry panels and in a book that Rice ... had been warned of the threat.
CONDI LIED :: CONDI LIED :: CONDI LIED
Saturday, February 12, 2005
George Bush's Moby Dick
Welcome to MichaelMoore.com!
Commentary: George Bush’s Moby Dick
As Captain Ahab obsessively led his crew toward disaster, so George Bush is leading America.
By Gerald Rellick
It is not without good reason that Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick has been used to capture some sense of the madness of George W. Bush and his obsessive war against evil. We see in the legendary White Whale and Captain Ahab the madness that now haunts us all:
The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them…. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it...all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.
The start of Ahab’s fateful journey is described, fittingly for our time, in an insightful article, “Leviathan,” in the New York Review of Books, written in 2003 just prior to the invasion of Iraq. Author Jason Epstein writes:
Captain Ahab of the Nantucket whaler Pequod called his officers and crew together on the afterdeck to announce a change of plans. Instead of filling his hold with oil and returning safely home, he will subordinate the fiscal point of the voyage to a preemptive first strike against evil, embodied, he claimed, in a particular whale of an unusual color which in a previous encounter had torn his leg away.
To a leery and frightened first mate, Mr. Starbuck, Ahab screams, “Death to Moby-Dick. God hunt us all if we do not hunt Moby-Dick to his death!”
And so, George Bush, compelled at first by the obvious, the need to hunt the 9/11 mastermind, Osama bin Laden, did not rest easy with the progress of this “voyage.” The fighting in Afghanistan, with its mountains and circuitous caves, the sluggish going after the initial air bombardment, was simply bad theatre for a president who was untested, unsure of himself, and now suddenly in over his head. George Bush desperately needed a media-age victory.
The villain fit the script well on the surface of things; but the harsh reality was that bin Laden was so clever, so elusive, so enabled by his environs, that this hunt could go on for years without resolve. What George Bush needed now, in the words of Norman Mailer, was to punch out some “bozo in the boondocks” to prove his manhood. And the “hollowed-out Palooka,” just made to order, was Saddam Hussein and Iraq. This was a chance for America to show its ‘stuff,” not in intelligence, wisdom or craft, but in raw military power, America’s hole card -- or so Bush and his Neocon gang believed.
Now, nearly two years into Mad George’s senseless charge into Iraq, and over 1400 American servicemen killed, and possibly as many as 100,00 Iraqis killed, what are we Americans to make of all this?
As the media lavishes attention on the elections in war-torn Iraq, are we to be misled again? Are we to forget that this war was never about democracy in Iraq? Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, ready to be used against us in America, an imminent threat to our security, and Saddam Hussein’s ties to bin Laden and al Qaeda -- all this has evaporated and been revealed as lies and deception. Do we now accept lying to the American people at the highest levels of government as acceptable policy? Even when it means our young men and women die for these lies? How much more are we to take?
As Seymour Hersh put it recently:
…the amazing thing is we are being taken over basically by a cult. Eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease…. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way.
A big part of it is that an unusually virulent strain of moral cowardice has taken over our nation’s capital and much of the “heartland” of America. Fear is the dominant emotion. Fear of authority, fear of speaking out, fear of just about everything. Enemies are everywhere. Whatever happened to the “home of the brave?”
Just as the mad Ahab deceived his crew into believing their expedition was about hunting whales, so mad George Bush, aided by his chief Neocon thugs -- Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice -- lied to the American people about their true mission, until it was too late to turn back. We had to hunt Saddam Hussein or else. And not to worry, said Mr. Cheney, Iraq would be a “cake walk.”
We are now like Ahab’s crew, trapped it seems into doing his insane bidding. Is our fate sealed? Can Ahab be stopped?
Gerald S. Rellick, PhD, worked in the defense sector of the aerospace industry. He now teaches in the California Community College system. To send Jerry your comments, send an email to info@interventionmag.com
Commentary: George Bush’s Moby Dick
As Captain Ahab obsessively led his crew toward disaster, so George Bush is leading America.
By Gerald Rellick
It is not without good reason that Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick has been used to capture some sense of the madness of George W. Bush and his obsessive war against evil. We see in the legendary White Whale and Captain Ahab the madness that now haunts us all:
The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them…. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it...all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.
The start of Ahab’s fateful journey is described, fittingly for our time, in an insightful article, “Leviathan,” in the New York Review of Books, written in 2003 just prior to the invasion of Iraq. Author Jason Epstein writes:
Captain Ahab of the Nantucket whaler Pequod called his officers and crew together on the afterdeck to announce a change of plans. Instead of filling his hold with oil and returning safely home, he will subordinate the fiscal point of the voyage to a preemptive first strike against evil, embodied, he claimed, in a particular whale of an unusual color which in a previous encounter had torn his leg away.
To a leery and frightened first mate, Mr. Starbuck, Ahab screams, “Death to Moby-Dick. God hunt us all if we do not hunt Moby-Dick to his death!”
And so, George Bush, compelled at first by the obvious, the need to hunt the 9/11 mastermind, Osama bin Laden, did not rest easy with the progress of this “voyage.” The fighting in Afghanistan, with its mountains and circuitous caves, the sluggish going after the initial air bombardment, was simply bad theatre for a president who was untested, unsure of himself, and now suddenly in over his head. George Bush desperately needed a media-age victory.
The villain fit the script well on the surface of things; but the harsh reality was that bin Laden was so clever, so elusive, so enabled by his environs, that this hunt could go on for years without resolve. What George Bush needed now, in the words of Norman Mailer, was to punch out some “bozo in the boondocks” to prove his manhood. And the “hollowed-out Palooka,” just made to order, was Saddam Hussein and Iraq. This was a chance for America to show its ‘stuff,” not in intelligence, wisdom or craft, but in raw military power, America’s hole card -- or so Bush and his Neocon gang believed.
Now, nearly two years into Mad George’s senseless charge into Iraq, and over 1400 American servicemen killed, and possibly as many as 100,00 Iraqis killed, what are we Americans to make of all this?
As the media lavishes attention on the elections in war-torn Iraq, are we to be misled again? Are we to forget that this war was never about democracy in Iraq? Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, ready to be used against us in America, an imminent threat to our security, and Saddam Hussein’s ties to bin Laden and al Qaeda -- all this has evaporated and been revealed as lies and deception. Do we now accept lying to the American people at the highest levels of government as acceptable policy? Even when it means our young men and women die for these lies? How much more are we to take?
As Seymour Hersh put it recently:
…the amazing thing is we are being taken over basically by a cult. Eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease…. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way.
A big part of it is that an unusually virulent strain of moral cowardice has taken over our nation’s capital and much of the “heartland” of America. Fear is the dominant emotion. Fear of authority, fear of speaking out, fear of just about everything. Enemies are everywhere. Whatever happened to the “home of the brave?”
Just as the mad Ahab deceived his crew into believing their expedition was about hunting whales, so mad George Bush, aided by his chief Neocon thugs -- Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice -- lied to the American people about their true mission, until it was too late to turn back. We had to hunt Saddam Hussein or else. And not to worry, said Mr. Cheney, Iraq would be a “cake walk.”
We are now like Ahab’s crew, trapped it seems into doing his insane bidding. Is our fate sealed? Can Ahab be stopped?
Gerald S. Rellick, PhD, worked in the defense sector of the aerospace industry. He now teaches in the California Community College system. To send Jerry your comments, send an email to info@interventionmag.com
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Spearing the Beast
Welcome to MichaelMoore.com!
Spearing the Beast
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 8, 2005
resident Bush isn't trying to reform Social Security. He isn't even trying to "partially privatize" it. His plan is, in essence, to dismantle the program, replacing it with a system that may be social but doesn't provide security. And the goal, as with his tax cuts, is to undermine the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt.
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Why do I say that the Bush plan would dismantle Social Security? Because for Americans who entered the work force after the plan went into effect and who chose to open private accounts, guaranteed benefits - income you receive after retirement even if everything else goes wrong - would be nearly eliminated.
Here's how it would work. First, workers with private accounts would be subject to a "clawback": in effect, they would have to mortgage their future benefits in order to put money into their accounts.
Second, since private accounts would do nothing to improve Social Security's finances - something the administration has finally admitted - there would be large benefit cuts in addition to the clawback.
Jason Furman of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the guaranteed benefits left to an average worker born in 1990, after the clawback and the additional cuts, would be only 8 percent of that worker's prior earnings, compared with 35 percent today. This means that under Mr. Bush's plan, workers with private accounts that fared poorly would find themselves destitute.
Why expose workers to that much risk? Ideology. "Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state," declares Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth and the Cato Institute. "If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state."
By the welfare state, Mr. Moore means Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - social insurance programs whose purpose, above all, is to protect Americans against the extreme economic insecurity that prevailed before the New Deal. The hard right has never forgiven F.D.R. (and later L.B.J.) for his efforts to reduce that insecurity, and now that the right is running Washington, it's trying to turn the clock back to 1932.
Medicaid is also in the cross hairs. And if Mr. Bush can take down Social Security, Medicare will be next.
The attempt to "jab a spear" through Social Security complements the strategy of "starve the beast," long advocated by right-wing intellectuals: cut taxes, then use the resulting deficits as an excuse for cuts in social spending. The spearing doesn't seem to be going too well at the moment, but the starving was on full display in the budget released yesterday.
To put that budget into perspective, let's look at the causes of the federal budget deficit. In spite of the expense of the Iraq war, federal spending as a share of G.D.P. isn't high by historical standards - in fact, it's slightly below its average over the past 20 years. But federal revenue as a share of G.D.P. has plunged to levels not seen since the 1950's.
Almost all of this plunge came from a sharp decline in receipts from the personal income tax and the corporate profits tax. These are the taxes that fall primarily on people with high incomes - and in 2003 and 2004, their combined take as a share of G.D.P. was at its lowest level since 1942. On the other hand, the payroll tax, which is the main federal tax paid by middle-class and working-class Americans, remains at near-record levels.
You might think, given these facts, that a plan to reduce the deficit would include major efforts to increase revenue, starting with a rollback of recent huge tax cuts for the wealthy. In fact, the budget contains new upper-income tax breaks.
Any deficit reduction will come from spending cuts. Many of those cuts won't make it through Congress, but Mr. Bush may well succeed in imposing cuts in child care assistance and food stamps for low-income workers. He may also succeed in severely squeezing Medicaid - the only one of the three great social insurance programs specifically intended for the poor and near-poor, and therefore the most politically vulnerable.
All of this explains why it's foolish to imagine some sort of widely acceptable compromise with Mr. Bush about Social Security. Moderates and liberals want to preserve the America F.D.R. built. Mr. Bush and the ideological movement he leads, although they may use F.D.R.'s image in ads, want to destroy it.
Spearing the Beast
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 8, 2005
resident Bush isn't trying to reform Social Security. He isn't even trying to "partially privatize" it. His plan is, in essence, to dismantle the program, replacing it with a system that may be social but doesn't provide security. And the goal, as with his tax cuts, is to undermine the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt.
Advertisement
Why do I say that the Bush plan would dismantle Social Security? Because for Americans who entered the work force after the plan went into effect and who chose to open private accounts, guaranteed benefits - income you receive after retirement even if everything else goes wrong - would be nearly eliminated.
Here's how it would work. First, workers with private accounts would be subject to a "clawback": in effect, they would have to mortgage their future benefits in order to put money into their accounts.
Second, since private accounts would do nothing to improve Social Security's finances - something the administration has finally admitted - there would be large benefit cuts in addition to the clawback.
Jason Furman of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the guaranteed benefits left to an average worker born in 1990, after the clawback and the additional cuts, would be only 8 percent of that worker's prior earnings, compared with 35 percent today. This means that under Mr. Bush's plan, workers with private accounts that fared poorly would find themselves destitute.
Why expose workers to that much risk? Ideology. "Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state," declares Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth and the Cato Institute. "If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state."
By the welfare state, Mr. Moore means Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - social insurance programs whose purpose, above all, is to protect Americans against the extreme economic insecurity that prevailed before the New Deal. The hard right has never forgiven F.D.R. (and later L.B.J.) for his efforts to reduce that insecurity, and now that the right is running Washington, it's trying to turn the clock back to 1932.
Medicaid is also in the cross hairs. And if Mr. Bush can take down Social Security, Medicare will be next.
The attempt to "jab a spear" through Social Security complements the strategy of "starve the beast," long advocated by right-wing intellectuals: cut taxes, then use the resulting deficits as an excuse for cuts in social spending. The spearing doesn't seem to be going too well at the moment, but the starving was on full display in the budget released yesterday.
To put that budget into perspective, let's look at the causes of the federal budget deficit. In spite of the expense of the Iraq war, federal spending as a share of G.D.P. isn't high by historical standards - in fact, it's slightly below its average over the past 20 years. But federal revenue as a share of G.D.P. has plunged to levels not seen since the 1950's.
Almost all of this plunge came from a sharp decline in receipts from the personal income tax and the corporate profits tax. These are the taxes that fall primarily on people with high incomes - and in 2003 and 2004, their combined take as a share of G.D.P. was at its lowest level since 1942. On the other hand, the payroll tax, which is the main federal tax paid by middle-class and working-class Americans, remains at near-record levels.
You might think, given these facts, that a plan to reduce the deficit would include major efforts to increase revenue, starting with a rollback of recent huge tax cuts for the wealthy. In fact, the budget contains new upper-income tax breaks.
Any deficit reduction will come from spending cuts. Many of those cuts won't make it through Congress, but Mr. Bush may well succeed in imposing cuts in child care assistance and food stamps for low-income workers. He may also succeed in severely squeezing Medicaid - the only one of the three great social insurance programs specifically intended for the poor and near-poor, and therefore the most politically vulnerable.
All of this explains why it's foolish to imagine some sort of widely acceptable compromise with Mr. Bush about Social Security. Moderates and liberals want to preserve the America F.D.R. built. Mr. Bush and the ideological movement he leads, although they may use F.D.R.'s image in ads, want to destroy it.
Monday, February 07, 2005
Bush's Deficit Plan Is All in the Math
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Bush's Deficit Plan Is All in the Math
Mon Feb 7, 7:55 AM ET
Add to My Yahoo! Top Stories - Los Angeles Times
By Joel Havemann Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — The budget President Bush (news - web sites) will present to Congress today will show the federal deficit cut in half by the time he leaves office in four years.
• Latimes.com home page
• Subscribe to the Los Angeles Times
Reuters Photo
Reuters
Slideshow Slideshow: President Bush
At least technically it will.
Achieving that goal relies on where the budget math starts and stops, how things get counted and what gets left out.
When Bush took office in 2001, the nation had experienced a four-year string of budget surpluses. That changed quickly as the economy slowed, tax rates were cut and spending in the war on terrorism skyrocketed.
By July 2003, the president was urging Congress in his weekly radio address "to make spending discipline a priority, so that we can cut the deficit in half over the next five years."
In his State of the Union address Wednesday, Bush said his fiscal 2006 budget, which he will unveil today, "stays on track to cut the deficit in half by 2009."
But students of the budget say that the president will find it nearly impossible to steer the government along the course that the budget will map out between now and 2009.
"It doesn't quite compute," said Isabel V. Sawhill, director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution think tank, who foresees a shortfall slightly larger in 2009 than now.
It is the 2004 deficit that Bush is promising to cut in half, but he's not starting with the actual 2004 deficit of $412 billion.
Instead, his benchmark is the projected $521-billion deficit that his Office of Management and Budget estimated a year ago, when the fiscal year was four months old. Using half of that figure, Bush's goal is to reach a deficit of $260.5 billion.
If Bush were to start with the actual 2004 figure, his goal would be a deficit of $206 billion — $54.5 billion more.
There are more twists. Bush proposes to cut the deficit in half not in dollars but as a share of the economy. If the economy grows, as is projected, then the deficit will decline as a share of the economy even if it does not shrink by a single dollar.
The 2004 deficit was 4.5% of the economy. So in fiscal 2009 it must be 2.2% or less. That is exactly the average share of the last 43 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office (news - web sites).
Finally, the budget that the president will send to Congress will, like his past budgets, omit some major deficit-raising items.
It will, as Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) said on "Fox News Sunday," be "the tightest budget that has been submitted since we got here." It will hold the growth in domestic programs whose spending levels are set in annual appropriations bills to less than inflation.
But these programs, because they exclude defense and giant benefit programs such as Social Security (news - web sites), account for about $1 of every $5 the government spends.
Most of the cost of the Iraq (news - web sites) and Afghanistan (news - web sites) wars will not be included in the budget. Instead, it will be sent to Congress as a supplemental budget request for 2006, just as the administration recently announced an $80-billion supplemental request for the current fiscal year.
Nor will the cost of introducing private investment accounts to Social Security — $754 billion over the first 10 years alone — be found in the budget, according to administration officials.
That cost will be borrowed, Cheney said, calling the figure a "manageable amount" in terms of dealing with the deficit. He acknowledged that it would also be necessary to borrow "trillions more" after the first decade, but he argued that the private accounts eventually would greatly enhance Social Security recipients' retirement income.
On the tax side, the budget is not expected to show the effect of its proposal to curb the alternative minimum tax, which is likely to win congressional approval.
This tax, designed to hit wealthy individuals who shelter much of their income from taxes, has been snaring a growing number of taxpayers whose income has merely grown with inflation. Preventing the alternative minimum tax's reach from growing would add $44 billion to the deficit that today's budget will project for 2009, the CBO said.
Even if the administration succeeded in getting the actual 2009 deficit to half of its 2004 size, analysts at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities expect it to rocket back upward shortly thereafter. They point out that the first wave of the baby boom generation would reach the full retirement age of 66 in 2012, sending federal retirement and healthcare costs soaring.
"The 2.2% deficits won't be sustainable for long," predicted Richard Kogan, a senior fellow at the center.
The problem, watchdog groups say, is that the government's spending habits and penchant for cutting taxes do not match the administration's budget-restraint rhetoric.
"This administration has a schizophrenic fiscal policy," said Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, which lobbies for smaller deficits. "It has a big-government spending policy and a small-government revenue policy."
Bush's tax cuts, whatever their economic merit, have taken their toll on government income. Tax revenue fell in each of Bush's first three years in office, though this year it is projected to rise to a record level.
But as a share of the nation's economic output, tax payments to the government fell to 16.3% last year, the lowest level since 1959. And in 1959, the government was not paying for Medicare (which cost $297 billion in 2004), Medicaid ($176 billion), food stamps ($29 billion) or the space program ($15 billion).
Spending, meanwhile, was lower than its 25-year average by about 1 percentage point. But at 19.8% of the economy it was $412 billion greater than revenue — a record deficit.
Faced with growing deficits, more conservatives are abandoning the doctrine that the government should run surpluses or hold deficits to a minimum.
"The deficit is merely the uninteresting difference between two very interesting numbers," said Grover Norquist, president of the conservative advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform and an informal advisor to the White House and Republican lawmakers.
Norquist's organization is dedicated to restraining both spending and revenue. Spending is the key, Norquist said. Whether financed by tax revenue or borrowing, it drains money from the private economy.
"The fundamental difference between the two parties," he said, "is how big the government should be."
Norquist's argument has become sufficiently popular that it has spurred formal rebuttal from deficit hawks. Brookings Institution scholars Sawhill and Alice M. Rivlin write in a recent book for the Washington policy research organization that "deficits matter a lot" and "better policies are possible and urgently needed."
Deficits, Sawhill and Rivlin argue, drain money from the economy that could otherwise be used for private investment, thus inhibiting economic growth and forcing interest rates upward. Deficits force the government to set aside a growing share of tax revenue for the payment of interest on the national debt, and "they impose enormous burdens on future generations."
Bush's Deficit Plan Is All in the Math
Mon Feb 7, 7:55 AM ET
Add to My Yahoo! Top Stories - Los Angeles Times
By Joel Havemann Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — The budget President Bush (news - web sites) will present to Congress today will show the federal deficit cut in half by the time he leaves office in four years.
• Latimes.com home page
• Subscribe to the Los Angeles Times
Reuters Photo
Reuters
Slideshow Slideshow: President Bush
At least technically it will.
Achieving that goal relies on where the budget math starts and stops, how things get counted and what gets left out.
When Bush took office in 2001, the nation had experienced a four-year string of budget surpluses. That changed quickly as the economy slowed, tax rates were cut and spending in the war on terrorism skyrocketed.
By July 2003, the president was urging Congress in his weekly radio address "to make spending discipline a priority, so that we can cut the deficit in half over the next five years."
In his State of the Union address Wednesday, Bush said his fiscal 2006 budget, which he will unveil today, "stays on track to cut the deficit in half by 2009."
But students of the budget say that the president will find it nearly impossible to steer the government along the course that the budget will map out between now and 2009.
"It doesn't quite compute," said Isabel V. Sawhill, director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution think tank, who foresees a shortfall slightly larger in 2009 than now.
It is the 2004 deficit that Bush is promising to cut in half, but he's not starting with the actual 2004 deficit of $412 billion.
Instead, his benchmark is the projected $521-billion deficit that his Office of Management and Budget estimated a year ago, when the fiscal year was four months old. Using half of that figure, Bush's goal is to reach a deficit of $260.5 billion.
If Bush were to start with the actual 2004 figure, his goal would be a deficit of $206 billion — $54.5 billion more.
There are more twists. Bush proposes to cut the deficit in half not in dollars but as a share of the economy. If the economy grows, as is projected, then the deficit will decline as a share of the economy even if it does not shrink by a single dollar.
The 2004 deficit was 4.5% of the economy. So in fiscal 2009 it must be 2.2% or less. That is exactly the average share of the last 43 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office (news - web sites).
Finally, the budget that the president will send to Congress will, like his past budgets, omit some major deficit-raising items.
It will, as Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) said on "Fox News Sunday," be "the tightest budget that has been submitted since we got here." It will hold the growth in domestic programs whose spending levels are set in annual appropriations bills to less than inflation.
But these programs, because they exclude defense and giant benefit programs such as Social Security (news - web sites), account for about $1 of every $5 the government spends.
Most of the cost of the Iraq (news - web sites) and Afghanistan (news - web sites) wars will not be included in the budget. Instead, it will be sent to Congress as a supplemental budget request for 2006, just as the administration recently announced an $80-billion supplemental request for the current fiscal year.
Nor will the cost of introducing private investment accounts to Social Security — $754 billion over the first 10 years alone — be found in the budget, according to administration officials.
That cost will be borrowed, Cheney said, calling the figure a "manageable amount" in terms of dealing with the deficit. He acknowledged that it would also be necessary to borrow "trillions more" after the first decade, but he argued that the private accounts eventually would greatly enhance Social Security recipients' retirement income.
On the tax side, the budget is not expected to show the effect of its proposal to curb the alternative minimum tax, which is likely to win congressional approval.
This tax, designed to hit wealthy individuals who shelter much of their income from taxes, has been snaring a growing number of taxpayers whose income has merely grown with inflation. Preventing the alternative minimum tax's reach from growing would add $44 billion to the deficit that today's budget will project for 2009, the CBO said.
Even if the administration succeeded in getting the actual 2009 deficit to half of its 2004 size, analysts at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities expect it to rocket back upward shortly thereafter. They point out that the first wave of the baby boom generation would reach the full retirement age of 66 in 2012, sending federal retirement and healthcare costs soaring.
"The 2.2% deficits won't be sustainable for long," predicted Richard Kogan, a senior fellow at the center.
The problem, watchdog groups say, is that the government's spending habits and penchant for cutting taxes do not match the administration's budget-restraint rhetoric.
"This administration has a schizophrenic fiscal policy," said Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, which lobbies for smaller deficits. "It has a big-government spending policy and a small-government revenue policy."
Bush's tax cuts, whatever their economic merit, have taken their toll on government income. Tax revenue fell in each of Bush's first three years in office, though this year it is projected to rise to a record level.
But as a share of the nation's economic output, tax payments to the government fell to 16.3% last year, the lowest level since 1959. And in 1959, the government was not paying for Medicare (which cost $297 billion in 2004), Medicaid ($176 billion), food stamps ($29 billion) or the space program ($15 billion).
Spending, meanwhile, was lower than its 25-year average by about 1 percentage point. But at 19.8% of the economy it was $412 billion greater than revenue — a record deficit.
Faced with growing deficits, more conservatives are abandoning the doctrine that the government should run surpluses or hold deficits to a minimum.
"The deficit is merely the uninteresting difference between two very interesting numbers," said Grover Norquist, president of the conservative advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform and an informal advisor to the White House and Republican lawmakers.
Norquist's organization is dedicated to restraining both spending and revenue. Spending is the key, Norquist said. Whether financed by tax revenue or borrowing, it drains money from the private economy.
"The fundamental difference between the two parties," he said, "is how big the government should be."
Norquist's argument has become sufficiently popular that it has spurred formal rebuttal from deficit hawks. Brookings Institution scholars Sawhill and Alice M. Rivlin write in a recent book for the Washington policy research organization that "deficits matter a lot" and "better policies are possible and urgently needed."
Deficits, Sawhill and Rivlin argue, drain money from the economy that could otherwise be used for private investment, thus inhibiting economic growth and forcing interest rates upward. Deficits force the government to set aside a growing share of tax revenue for the payment of interest on the national debt, and "they impose enormous burdens on future generations."
Saturday, February 05, 2005
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Gambling With Your Retirement
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Gambling With Your Retirement
Gambling With Your Retirement
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 4, 2005
A few weeks ago I tried to explain the logic of Bush-style Social Security privatization: it is, in effect, as if your financial adviser told you that you wouldn't have enough money when you retire - but you shouldn't save more. Instead, you should borrow a lot of money, buy stocks and hope for capital gains.
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Before President Bush's big speech, a background briefing by a "senior administration official" made it clear that the plan calls for exactly the "borrow, speculate and hope" strategy I described - not just for the system as a whole, but for each individual.
Here's the money quote: "In return for the opportunity to get the benefits from the personal account, the person forgoes a certain amount of benefits from the traditional system. Now, the way that election is structured, the person comes out ahead if their personal account exceeds a 3 percent rate of return" - after inflation - "which is the rate of return that the trust fund bonds receive. So, basically, the net effect on an individual's benefits would be zero if his personal account earned a 3 percent rate of return."
Translation: If you put part of your payroll taxes into a personal account, your future benefits will be reduced by an amount equivalent to the amount you would have had to repay if you had borrowed the money at a real interest rate of 3 percent.
Peter Orszag of the Brookings Institution got it exactly right: "It's not a nest egg. It's a loan."
For years, privatizers - including Mr. Bush - have claimed that people would do better with private accounts than with traditional Social Security even if they played it safe and invested in U.S. government bonds (which yield 3 percent after inflation).
But the official at the briefing made it clear that his boss was fibbing: if you invested your private account in government bonds, you would face benefit cuts equal in value to your investment, so you would be no better off than under the current system.
The only way to get ahead would be to invest in risky assets like stocks, and hope for higher yields. But if the investment went wrong and you earned less than 3 percent after inflation, your benefit cuts would leave you poorer than if you had never opened that private account.
So people are expected to take a loan from the government and use it to buy stocks, and if that turns out to have been a mistake - well, too bad.
Experts usually tell people to plan for their retirement by investing in a mix of stocks and bonds. They disapprove strongly of speculation on margin: borrowing to buy stocks. Yet Mr. Bush wants tens of millions of Americans to do exactly that.
Meanwhile, what does any of this have to do with the ostensible purpose of the whole thing: saving Social Security?
Here's the senior official again: "In a long-term sense, the personal accounts would have a net neutral effect on the fiscal situation of Social Security." The government would have to borrow huge sums up front to create the personal accounts - $4.5 trillion in the first two decades - but it would supposedly make up for all that borrowing with offsetting cuts in account holders' benefits many decades later.
Color me skeptical: will retirees with private accounts that performed badly really be forced to repay their loans in full? Even if they are, private accounts will at best have a "net neutral effect" - that is, they will do nothing to improve Social Security's finances. Mr. Bush says the system faces a crisis; what does he propose to do about it?
The answer, presumably, is that his plan will also involve major benefit cuts over and above those associated with private accounts. And it's true that you can improve Social Security's finances with privatization, as long as you also slash benefits - just as you can kill a flock of sheep with witchcraft, provided you also feed them arsenic. (Thanks, M. Voltaire.)
Do you believe that we should replace America's most successful government program with a system in which workers engage in speculation that no financial adviser would recommend? Do you believe that we should do this even though it will do nothing to improve the program's finances? If so, George Bush has a deal for you.
Gambling With Your Retirement
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 4, 2005
A few weeks ago I tried to explain the logic of Bush-style Social Security privatization: it is, in effect, as if your financial adviser told you that you wouldn't have enough money when you retire - but you shouldn't save more. Instead, you should borrow a lot of money, buy stocks and hope for capital gains.
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Before President Bush's big speech, a background briefing by a "senior administration official" made it clear that the plan calls for exactly the "borrow, speculate and hope" strategy I described - not just for the system as a whole, but for each individual.
Here's the money quote: "In return for the opportunity to get the benefits from the personal account, the person forgoes a certain amount of benefits from the traditional system. Now, the way that election is structured, the person comes out ahead if their personal account exceeds a 3 percent rate of return" - after inflation - "which is the rate of return that the trust fund bonds receive. So, basically, the net effect on an individual's benefits would be zero if his personal account earned a 3 percent rate of return."
Translation: If you put part of your payroll taxes into a personal account, your future benefits will be reduced by an amount equivalent to the amount you would have had to repay if you had borrowed the money at a real interest rate of 3 percent.
Peter Orszag of the Brookings Institution got it exactly right: "It's not a nest egg. It's a loan."
For years, privatizers - including Mr. Bush - have claimed that people would do better with private accounts than with traditional Social Security even if they played it safe and invested in U.S. government bonds (which yield 3 percent after inflation).
But the official at the briefing made it clear that his boss was fibbing: if you invested your private account in government bonds, you would face benefit cuts equal in value to your investment, so you would be no better off than under the current system.
The only way to get ahead would be to invest in risky assets like stocks, and hope for higher yields. But if the investment went wrong and you earned less than 3 percent after inflation, your benefit cuts would leave you poorer than if you had never opened that private account.
So people are expected to take a loan from the government and use it to buy stocks, and if that turns out to have been a mistake - well, too bad.
Experts usually tell people to plan for their retirement by investing in a mix of stocks and bonds. They disapprove strongly of speculation on margin: borrowing to buy stocks. Yet Mr. Bush wants tens of millions of Americans to do exactly that.
Meanwhile, what does any of this have to do with the ostensible purpose of the whole thing: saving Social Security?
Here's the senior official again: "In a long-term sense, the personal accounts would have a net neutral effect on the fiscal situation of Social Security." The government would have to borrow huge sums up front to create the personal accounts - $4.5 trillion in the first two decades - but it would supposedly make up for all that borrowing with offsetting cuts in account holders' benefits many decades later.
Color me skeptical: will retirees with private accounts that performed badly really be forced to repay their loans in full? Even if they are, private accounts will at best have a "net neutral effect" - that is, they will do nothing to improve Social Security's finances. Mr. Bush says the system faces a crisis; what does he propose to do about it?
The answer, presumably, is that his plan will also involve major benefit cuts over and above those associated with private accounts. And it's true that you can improve Social Security's finances with privatization, as long as you also slash benefits - just as you can kill a flock of sheep with witchcraft, provided you also feed them arsenic. (Thanks, M. Voltaire.)
Do you believe that we should replace America's most successful government program with a system in which workers engage in speculation that no financial adviser would recommend? Do you believe that we should do this even though it will do nothing to improve the program's finances? If so, George Bush has a deal for you.
Thursday, February 03, 2005
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Google
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.
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.
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.
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."
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"
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