---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Adam Shand [email protected] Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 11:56:39 +1300 Subject: [wordup] Was the election rigged? To: [email protected]

This is a series of articles. Note that the one immediately below I'm quite suspicious of, but I got the link from someone I quite trust the the third story seems to at least partially back it up so I'm leaving it in.

IE. http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=Avi+Rubin&btnG=Search...

I'm pretty suspicious of accusations until there's some real proof one way or another, it's too easy for people who poured their heart and soul into the election to *want* there to be foul play. Regardless it is a real possibility and the Diebold voting machines sound awful.

Lets see how it all plays out and keep and open mind until the end.

Adam.

From: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/10/1172/9052

Dr. Avi Rubin is currently Professor of Computer Science at John Hopkins University. He "accidently"got his hands on a copy of the Diebold software program--Diebold's source code--which runs their e-voting machines.

Dr. Rubin's students pored over 48,609 lines of code that make up this software. One line in partictular stood out over all the rest:

#defineDESKEY((des_KEY8F2654hd4"

All commercial programs have provisions to be encrypted so as to protect them from having their contents read or changed by anyone not having the key..The line that staggered the Hopkin's team was that the method used to encrypt the Diebold machines was a method called Digital Encryption Standard (DES), a code that was broken in 1997 and is NO LONGER USED by anyone to secure prograns.F2654hd4 was the key to the encryption. Moreover, because the KEY was IN the source code, all Diebold machines would respond to the same key. Unlock one, you have then ALL unlocked.

I can't believe there is a person alive who wouldn't understand the reason this was allowed to happen. This wasen't a mistake by any stretch of the imagination. This was a fixed election, plain and simple.

This second coup d'etat is either stopped now or America ceases to be.

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

Published on Saturday, November 6, 2004 by CommonDreams.org Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked by Thom Hartmann

When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.

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

And some believe evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.

The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.

While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking – the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In Dixie County, with 9,676 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.

Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had earlier reported that county size was a variable – this turns out not to be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)

More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://us together.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm. Note the trend line – the only variable that determines a swing toward Bush was the use of optical scan machines.

One possible explanation for this is the "Dixiecrat" theory, that in Florida white voters (particularly the rural ones) have been registered as Democrats for years, but voting Republican since Reagan. Looking at the 2000 statistics, also available on Dopp's site, there are similar anomalies, although the trends are not as strong as in 2004. But some suggest the 2000 election may have been questionable in Florida, too.

One of the people involved in Dopp's analysis noted that it may be possible to determine the validity of the "rural Democrat" theory by comparing Florida's white rural counties to those of Pennsylvania, another swing state but one that went for Kerry, as the exit polls there predicted. Interestingly, the Pennsylvania analysis, available at http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm, doesn't show the same kind of swings as does Florida, lending credence to the possibility of problems in Florida.

Even more significantly, Dopp had first run the analysis while filtering out smaller (rural) counties, and still found that the only variable that accounted for a swing toward Republican voting was the use of optical-scan machines, whereas counties with touch-screen machines generally didn't swing - regardless of size.

Others offer similar insights, based on other data. A professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in Florida the vote to raise the minimum wage was approved by 72%, although Kerry got 48%. "The correlation between voting for the minimum wage increase and voting for Kerry isn't likely to be perfect," he noted, "but one would normally expect that the gap - of 1.5 million votes - to be far smaller than it was."

While all of this may or may not be evidence of vote tampering, it again brings the nation back to the question of why several states using electronic voting machines or scanners programmed by private, for-profit corporations and often connected to modems produced votes inconsistent with exit poll numbers.

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

Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.

But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal states.

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

Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an article for The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.

"Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state."

He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."

Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states the election was called for Bush.

How could this happen?

On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.

That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.

"In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?"

Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer."

"So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?"

Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software.

Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.

"Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program.

But, it's running on a Windows PC.

So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel.

In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.

"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger."

They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election."

As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.

Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."

On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.) And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said, noting that it would be nearly impossible for the election software – or a County election official - to know that the vote database had been altered.

Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide.

Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to cause people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since the networks would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry. But the networks didn't do that, and had never intended to.

According to congressional candidate Fisher, it makes far more sense that the exit polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that the vote itself was hacked.

And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this hit him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national office in the most-hacked swing states.

So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this story was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit polls had failed.

But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann .com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."

From: http://www.ilcaonline.org/modules.php? op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=961

Presidential Election: Questions Raised About Electronic Voting Posted by : DavidSwanson on Monday, November 08, 2004 - 04:38 PM

Questions Raised About Electronic Voting

Serious questions are being raised about the use of electronic voting machines in the 2004 presidential election. In an Ohio county, Bush mistakenly received some 3,900 extra votes. We speak Johns Hopkins University professor Aviel Rubin and investigative reporter Bev Harris. [includes rush transcript]

President Bush arrives back in Washington today after spending a 3-day weekend at Camp David. Since John Kerry conceded to Bush last Wednesday, the president and his advisers have talked extensively about what they call Bush's strong mandate to govern following the November 2 election. But as the rumor mill swirls about a reshuffling of Bush's cabinet and John Kerry returns to the Senate, there are many people who are not willing to simply move on from last Tuesday's election.

Many of John Kerry's supporters were stunned last Wednesday when their candidate conceded the presidency to Bush. Just hours earlier, his running mate John Edwards told a rally of their supporters in Boston that they would not stop until every vote was counted, a reference to the hundreds of thousands of provisional ballots in the key state of Ohio that some Democrats believed could have tipped the balance. But it's not just the provisional ballots.

Even though Kerry has stopped fighting for the presidency, serious questions abound about the use of electronic voting machines. Take this story: In a voting precinct in Ohio's Franklin County, records show that 638 people cast ballots. Yet, George W Bush got 4,258 votes to John Kerry's 260. In reality, Bush only received 365 votes. That means Bush got nearly 3,900 extra votes. And that's just in one small precinct. This in a state that Bush officially won by only 136,000 votes. Elections officials blamed electronic voting for the extra Bush votes.

Meanwhile, a number of Congresspeople are asking the General Accounting Office to investigate electronic voting and the 2004 election and the nonprofit group Blackbox Voting has begun the process of filing the largest Freedom of Information Act request in history.

Bev Harris, investigative reporter and author of the book "Black Box Voting." She has announced plans to file the largest FOIA action in history by seeking the internal logs from voting machines from every county that used electronic voting machines.

Aviel Rubin, professor at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of the report "Analysis of an Electronic Voting System" the initial study of security flaws in voting machine software. He served as an election judge in Baltimore County on November 2nd.

------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------- RUSH TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is available free of charge, however donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the woman behind that process, investigative reporter, Bev Harris. She is the author of the book, Black Box Voting. We also are joined by Professor Aviel Rubin who teaches at Johns Hopkins University and is co-author of the report, "Analysis of an Electronic Voting System," the initial study of security flaws in voting machine software. He served as an election judge in Baltimore county on November 2. Bev Harris, let's begin with you. What exactly -- what kind of information are you looking for now?

BEV HARRIS: Well, first, we're seeking internal audit logs of the machines, which are public record. There's nothing proprietary about this. It's interesting so far. We have been getting responses, but the officials who run the machines, the county officials, are really so clueless. They don't know what their machines' records are, or how to print them out. So we find ourselves guiding them through the menus on their own software to show them how to print this information out which is a bit scary. But we also sought documentation on all of the troubled slips in all of the documentation of any problems that they had. Right now, we're following up, you know, we have all of the anomalies such as the viewer mentioning, and we're following up with specific public records requests, for example, give me the internal log of machine number such and such of that precinct, or depending on the type of anomaly they're reporting, we are seeking the specific types of records that will shed more light on that.

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to go to a break and then come back to this discussion of the counting of the votes last Tuesday. This is Democracy Now!. We'll be back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman, as we continue on the issue of the electronic voting machines and the overall count in the election. Our guest are Bev Harris, author of the book, Black Box Voting, has plans to file the largest Freedom of Information Act Request in history, by seeking the internal logs from voting machines of every county that used electronic voting machines, and Aviel Rubin, professor at Johns Hopkins University, who served as an elections judge in Baltimore county on November 2 and is co-author of the report, "Analysis of the Electronic Voting System." Professor Rubin, your assessment of what happened Tuesday.

AVIEL RUBIN: Well, I think that we have a problem now, which is that we have dug ourselves a big hole by running an election using systems that -- there's really no way to tell what's going on inside the voting machines. So, when -- I'd like to separate out all of the talk about the glitches and things not working from the idea that somebody, you know, security -- somebody may have rigged the machines or tampered with them. And I think the fact that we're using systems where it's impossible to tell is very scary. So, Bev talked about these problems that they're trying to uncover, and we have seen the news stories about problems, but what I worry about are the ones that may have happened that are totally undetectable. For example, it doesn't make bug news if a voting machine switches 5% of the votes from one candidate to another, because nobody ever knows it because we have a secret ballot in this country. I think it's very important that we move away from systems where nobody can really see what's going on inside at the time of the election. And there's no capability of doing a recount towards more verifiable, auditable systems, for example, if you had a voter verified paper ballot.

AMY GOODMAN: Why the opposition? You had the Election Monitoring Group, that the State Department brought in itself from the OSCE, the Organization of Security and Cooperation Europe. Some of their election monitors were saying that this is worse than the situation in Serbia, another one referring to the Venezuelan elections and saying, their electronic voting machines, people were given a ticket that they dropped in a box and randomly around the country, they can compare the paper trail in the boxes to the voting machines. Why is there such fierce opposition to having any paper trail, which means zero possibility of recount?

AVIEL RUBIN: I have always been very surprised that the people running elections are not jumping at the chance of having a way to recount the election. I think that, you know, the best thing would be to get one of those people on the show and ask them that question, because it doesn't make any sense it me. From the vendor's perspective, they would sell a more expensive, more feature-rich product if they could add photograph verifiable printout. I have been completely confused about why they're -- everybody is not embracing this concept.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you convinced, Professor Rubin, that President Bush won this election?

AVIEL RUBIN: I don't know. I think that as long as we use systems where you cannot really tell what's going on inside the machine -- you know, when I was an election judge, I watched people walk into the precinct, walk up to Diebold machines, vote, and walk out. And at the end of the day we printed results. And I was thinking if I had written that program that's running on those machines, I could have made any outcome that I wanted come out. So, you know, do I believe that Bush really won? Well, I don't know.

AMY GOODMAN: What about this letter, Bev Harris, that has been signed by three Congress members, including Florida Congress member Robert Wexler, John Conyers, and Gerald Nadler. Can you talk about it? We have hardly seen any reference to it.

BEV HARRIS: Well, you know, the concern I have is, we have got to go after this from all fronts. I haven't seen any reference to it in the media. I have also been told from sources that I have inside the media that are fairly high up that particularly in TV, there's been -- there is now a lockdown on this story. It is officially and from an executive producer level, let's move on time. And I am very concerned about that, because it looks like we're going to have to go to places like BBC, to get the real story out. I find it amazing that we went ahead with an election without even auditing it. You are never going to find the problems with the machines that you can quantify until you at least do the basic canvassing that's in the current election procedures, such as, comparing how many people showed up to vote with how many signatures are in this poll book with how many votes show up in the machines. They haven't even done that. And to make it even worse, Ohio, they don't even know how many provisional ballots there are. They don't know if there's 150,000 or 500,000. They don't seem to be able to tell us what records they have. This is amazing, and I knew this was going to happen. They set up this thing. They said we're going to have provisional ballots nationwide. They didn't set up any auditing for them. And so, in case after case, we're not able to account for those ballots. We ought to know, because they're cast at the precinct. We ought to know how many provision ballots we have on election night. Why wouldn't we if we have proper book keeping?

AMY GOODMAN: There's been serious questions raised about New Mexico, but does it hurt trying to find out the ultimate counts that John Kerry and John Edwards so immediately conceded, despite the fact that Edwards had said as they promised during the campaigns, making references to Al Gore squelching protests four years ago, that they would make sure that the votes were counted?

BEV HARRIS: Oh yes, they conceded very prematurely. As I was saying in Ohio, they don't even know if they won or lost in Ohio, really. They are basing this on, I think, a verbal okay from someone in the Secretary of State's office that said, that they were being assured there was only 150,000 provisional ballots. Well I said, where is the source data on that? What auditing do they have on those? They couldn't tell me. You see, I don't understand how you would concede anyway without even beginning the canvassing, because with these voting machines, we don't have adequate auditing in place, but we have some. The full auditing we have does -- it does find some anomalies that are quite big and sometimes they flip elections. So, you know, why not just wait a couple of days. The other thing I'm seeing is that in some parts the media gave a huge push to hurry, hurry, hurry, certify. This was happening in New Mexico. They're saying -- they're putting tremendous pressure on Governor Bill Richardson to hurry and certify the election. Well why? You have x-number of days to certify the election. One would think you would want it to be right, and you'd think would you want to go through and you want to check out the information. And understand, a lot of this is already election procedures. We keep saying that election procedures are what really save us from the insecure and mysterious machines, and that the election procedures would catch anomalies. Understand, that they have not done the election procedures yet in most cases. They have chosen to go ahead and call elections without doing the very procedures that they say protect the system.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us, Bev Harris, who is filing the largest Freedom of Information Act request in the history of the act, and Professor Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins University.

AVIEL RUBIN: Thanks a lot.

AMY GOODMAN: Thank you.

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