On November 2, 2004 millions of Americans went to the polls to elect a new president; some waited almost six hours to do so. Some voters stepped up to the electronic terminals and registered their choice. Some voters stepped into a booth, pulled a lever, and registered their choice. Some voters filled out provisional ballots or absentee ballots by hand and registered their choice. All these votes were then counted by honest non-partisan citizens or were they?
Now of course, anyone who insinuates that the 2004 election was fixed is doomed to the title of crazy-conspiracy- theorist. The majority of Americans would need the visible proof right before their eyes to support such a “radical” idea, and even then it is still quite hard to swallow. We do know though that these problems are not just fabricated fiction by the Democrats or a wild-eyed freshman journalist because the information is indeed documented on government websites. Perhaps these irregularities are just coincidences— a lot of coincidences! But what if they are not? If these coincidences begin to have a pattern, one that eventually leads back to a candidate, we have what would be a serious infraction of our democracy.
George W. Bush already has a credibility problem with half of America. After all, this president is the one who became president in 2001 after losing the popular vote and stalling the count through the Supreme Court. After all, this president is the one with the 9/10 mentality where 9/11 occurred on his watch even after repetitive warnings from Richard Clarke and others in the CIA. After all, this is the president who went to war with Iraq, claiming there were WMD and links to terrorism when there were none, while many believe the administration forged, distorted and used out of date intelligence to convince Congress. After all, this is the president who has assaulted the environment for the best interest of corporate contributors and who appointed friends to cabinet positions who previously worked for oil, coal, gas, timber, and energy companies. After all, this is the president who said gay unions would be left up to the states and has since pushed for a Constitutional ban. After all, this is the president who took a trillion dollar surplus and dragged us into a canyon of deficit. George W. Bush may just be the least credible president in the history of the United States, so with this and the facts about both the 2000 and 2004 elections, how could one not suspect fraud?
IRREGULARITIES
The first category of irregularities in the 2004 election are the electronic voting scanners, most without any paper receipts or trail, coincidentally designed by Diebold, a company with close ties to the Republicans. These electronic machines have been proven to register inaccurate votes and are prone to being tapped into and hacked. 52 counties in Florida scanned their votes with these machines; 29 of these were predominantly Democratic, yet Bush won. For example, counties with 88% registered Democrats produced landslides for Bush. Furthermore, only counties where the optical scanning was used for precinct totals had results that turned pro-Kerry exit polls into a Bush victory.
The two companies that developed the touch-screen voting machines have deep Republican roots. The two companies are Diebold of Ohio and Election Systems and Software of Nebraska. It’s quite strange that the United States Department of Homeland Security picked up on the Diebold crisis before it occurred, quite possibly on accident. In a cyber security bulletin the week of September 1, 2004, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (a section of Homeland Security) reported that “A vulnerability exists due to an undocumented backdoor account” in the Diebold system.[i] This vulnerability revealed that an authenticated malicious user could modify votes, yet nothing was done to stop it.
While Diebold got the most attention for having rotten ethics and Republican connections, the Omaha-based ES&S is just as bad. The ES&S Company began under the name Data Mark in the 1980’s. After several buy-outs, merges, and name changes, the company eventually became ES&S. In 1992 an investment banker named Chuck Hagel became chairman of ES&S. In 1996, in less than eight months after stepping down as director, Hagel defeated a very popular former Nebraska Governor Benjamin Nelson for a seat on the Senate. National predictions and exit polls all indicated the opposite results, but hey, maybe it was just a coincidence that ES&S produced the machines that tallied over 85% of the votes. Hagel, coincidently still owns more than $1 million worth of stock in McCarthy & Co, which owns a healthy percentage of ES&S interest. Yet the media never even reported these facts.
Diebold made news (not headline news) after reports of fraud during the 2000 election. Remember the over, under, and double votes in Florida during the 2000 election? On election night in Volusia County, a central ballot-counting computer showed a Socialist Party candidate with more than an impossible 9,000 votes. On the same computer, Al Gore showed having -19,000. Notice the -? Yes, that’s a minus. How in the universe does a candidate lose votes?
Throughout the night of the 2000 election, Gore’s votes continued to go down in several key counties. When confronted with this, Diebold simply responded that it was due to a “faulty memory chip.” The company cost a major candidate an election because of a “faulty memory chip,” and admitted it with apathy, yet they’re allowed to produce even more computers for the 2004 election?
Black Box Voting did an investigative study on the Diebold systems and concluded that the 2004 election could have been easily altered by one hacker with a secondary education:
After examining the Diebold software and related internal e-mails, local security professionals were able to demonstrate a hack into a simulated system…The hack that did work was unsophisticated enough that many high school students would be able to achieve it. This hack altered the election by 100,000 votes, leaving no trace at all in the central tabulator program. It did not appear in any audit log. The hack could have been executed in the November 2004 election by just one person…It calls into question the results of as many as 40 million votes in 30 states…By hacking into the central tabulator so easily, we showed that Diebold has not told the truth about the security of its system. Indeed, the software being used in BOTH examples is still extremely vulnerable, with little or no effort made to correct its security flaws.[ii]
Brad Blog reported another exhaustive investigation, which turned up links between “current Florida Republican Representative Tom Feeney, a customized Windows-based program to suppress Democratic votes on touch screen voting machines, a Florida computer services company and top level officials of the BAD.”
According to a notarized affidavit signed by Clint Curtis, while he was employed by the NASA Kennedy Space Center contractor, Yang Enterprises, Inc., during 2000, Feeney solicited him to write a program to “control the vote.” At the time, Curtis was of the opinion that the program was to be used for preventing fraud in the 2002 election in Palm Beach County, Florida. His mind was changed, however, when the true intentions of Feeney became clear: the computer program was going to be used to suppress the Democratic vote in counties with large Democratic registrations. (47)
Clint Curtis, a technology adviser for Yang, first became aware of Feeney’s interest in election rigging in 1999. According to Curtis, Feeney bragged at a meeting how “he could reduce the minority vote and deliver the election to George.” At the same meeting, Feeney also said he had “implemented a list that would eliminate thousands of voters that would vote for Democratic candidates” and that “a proper placement of police patrols could further reduce the black vote by as much as 25 percent.” (44)
The number of votes in 2004, both electronic and paper, were also, indeed, off. Many more votes than registered voters were found in counties throughout Ohio. For example, 29 precincts in Cuyahoga, Ohio showed 93,000 more votes than registered voters. In Fairview Park, Ohio, where there were only 13,342 registered voters, 18,472 votes were somehow cast. In North Carolina, it is estimated that 4,500 to 12,000 votes were lost per machine. In Ohio, it is believed that at least 130,656 votes were deducted from Kerry and added to the Bush column. It is estimated that Kerry won Ohio by at least more than 142,537 votes, but due to irregularities in record-keeping and lack of paper receipts, we’ll never know how much Kerry really won by.
Another quandary was the odd exit polls, which showed Kerry in a strong lead over Bush in most of the questionable states. All national exit polls indicate Kerry won. The exit polls show that Bush actually lost the national vote by a significant margin to John Kerry. According to a report completed by Steven F. Freeman, PhD, University of Pennsylvania, “The chance of Kerry receiving a greater percentage of the popular vote than Bush in an honest election was 98.7%.” Freeman’s exhaustive research further reveals there was “clear and convincing evidence of election fraud in ten of the ‘battleground’ states (Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.)
Take the home state of John Edwards, North Carolina, a state riddled with irregularities and suspected fraud. There were 3,498,746 total votes for president according to the office of electors in the state. There were 3,471,720 total votes for the open senate seat that Edwards was leaving. That’s a difference of over 27,026 votes between senate and president; votes that are missing. Furthermore, 3,486,688 voted to elect a new state governor. That’s also a difference of over 12,000 missing votes between president and governor. Who would walk into a voting facility, vote for the president and leave the rest of the ballot blank forfeiting the rest of their potential votes? It doesn’t even make sense. Moreover, the newly elected state governor was a Democrat who easily defeated his Republican opponent with close to 60% of the vote. Yet the ever so popular John Edwards couldn’t deliver his home state? Doubtful.
Now let’s also throw in the 155,815 voter complaints from around the country, the majority in Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina, New Mexico, and Florida. In Ohio, these complaints ranged from voters being turned away to Ralph Nader being on the ballot when he had “officially” been taken off, therefore wasting votes. It’s pretty bad when Nader votes do “not” count. In one odd situation, Democrats and members of the press were locked out and denied observation of the counting of votes in an administration building in Warren County, Ohio. According to Warren County officials, this lockdown came by order of the Department of Homeland Security, which has refused to comment on the incident. We should feel really safe now that George’s department is protecting our votes!
Excerpt from Broken Nation
