Vaporizing votes
Widespread reports of election fraud are beginning to seriously taint the official results of the November presidential election in the US.

by James Lindfield    Vancouver Republic-News   29 March 2005

The US has no national and neutral organization that is responsible for administering and monitoring elections. Instead, voter registration and elections are organized county by county in a patchwork of private companies and state election bodies who interpret state and federal laws differently.

Two companies with extensive ties to the Republican party, Diebold and ES+S, together electronically counted 80% of the November 2004 votes. Diebold's CEO Wally O'Dell announced to a gathering of Republicans in 2003 that ?he was committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President.? Ohio was the key swing state in the election, and by the next morning, had gone to Bush.

A group of international election monitors toured Florida before the election. Dr Brigalia Bam, the chair of South Africa's Independent Electoral Commission, was amazed by the number of different systems used by different counties. ?Absolutely everything is a violation. All these different systems in different counties with no accountability . . . it's like the poorest village in Africa,? she said.

A 2001 Harvard study found that at least 1.2 million votes were not counted in the 2000 presidential election. An NAACP report found that people in 18 states reported intimidation by police or misconduct by voting officials. Voters in 25 states found that they had been illegally purged from voter lists or not added in time.

Republicans control the voting mechanism in Florida. In 2000, 57,700 ex felons were improperly banned from voting. In 2004, BBC reporter Greg Palast found that a private company was hired to make a list of 48,000 more supposed ex-felons who were then improperly barred from voting in the 2004 election.

At the request of civil rights workers, a judge ordered the list be made public. The majority of the names on the list were found to be not felons. They were, however, mostly black and probable Democrat voters.

Palast estimates that George Bush started the 2004 election with a 27,000 vote advantage in Florida. ?The machinery [of voting is] is set up so that [black people's] votes don't count. Just like black people get the worst schools and they get the worst hospitals, they get the worst voting machines.? Visits by pistol tapping state troopers have intimidated elderly black absentee voters and discouraged them from voting.

Ex-President Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Foundation has overseen over 50 elections in difficult or dangerous conditions, concluded that there was no point to monitoring the 2004 election because the basic requirements for a fair election were missing in Florida. Carter emphasized several factors needed: uniformity and accuracy in all aspects of voting procedures, including voting machines and access to polls, and a non-partisan electoral commission.

The current elections commissioner in Florida, Glenda Hood, is a former Republican elector who demands that people include both their race and party affiliation on their registration envelope. In Ohio, the secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, also coordinated the Bush?Cheney re-election bid in that state.

Some absentee ballot papers seemed deliberately to favor Republicans. Due to the misalignment of the vote markers, placing a mark opposite Kerry's name would result in a vote for Bush.

In October, while working for a private voter registration company in Nevada called Voters Outreach, Eric Russell found supervisors going through registration forms and trashing Democrat registration forms. Russell reported, "We caught her taking Democrats out of my pile, [she] handed them to her assistant, and he ripped them up right in front of us. I grabbed some of them out of the garbage and she tells her assistant to get those from me." Voters Outreach has been active with over 300 temporary workers in at least eight other key states. Voters Outreach is a project of Nathan Sproul Associates which had received over $600,000 from the Republican National Committee in August. (Voter Outreach newspaper advertisements for temporary workers feature the words ?Paid for by the Republican National Committee.?)

Sproul denied any wrongdoing. In Oregon and Nevada, Voter Outreach employees are under criminal investigation for impersonating a non-partisan voter registration organization and destroying Democrat registrations. Other organizations have been conducting bogus polls on student campuses, while actually registering people to vote as Republicans.

Over a third of US voters voted with touch screen computers. These machines have been heavily promoted and paid for by the US Federal Government at a cost of US $3.9 billion, ostensibly to modernize the voting system in accordance with the 2002 Help America Vote Act. The CEOs and major shareholders of the three major voting companies, Diebold, Sequoia, and ES+S, have each made large donations to the Republican Party.

Despite continued industry claims to the contrary, there have been hundreds of reports of problems with computer voting systems. In the March 2004 primary election count in Riverside County, California, the election registrar halted the election count for an hour, during which time an employee observed two Sequoia technicians illegally typing at a computer terminal with access to vote tabulation software. The pattern of results changed markedly afterwards.

In the 2000 presidential election, as media outlets began to declare victory for Gore, Bush's vote began to increase as the results from Volusia County, Florida, came in. News outlets began to declare victory for Bush and Gore made preparations to concede defeat.

An elections official later noticed that Gore had received minus 16,022 votes and that Bush had gained 4,000 votes. An internal Diebold memo from vice president of research Talbot Iredale, after reviewing this anomaly, reported that somehow a second memory card had been ed into a terminal, and that ?there is always the possibility that the ?second memory card' or ?second upload' came from an unauthorized source.?

In 2003, a group of 900 computer experts released a joint statement pointing out serious flaws in the programming of computer voting machines and the ease of hacking and manipulating the vote count. ?Whoever certified that code as secure should be fired? said Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins University.

Rubin examined software source code that Diebold had placed on an open internet site for access by their technicians. Rubin concluded that a teenager could make smart cards, which could be used to vote repeatedly. Insiders could program the machine to alter the election result without detection.

Voting terminals have been designed for use without a paper verification of the vote cast, making a recount impossible. In addition, examination of the harddrives of the machines by election officials is prohibited by the companies for ?proprietary reasons.? In testimony to the US Election Assistance Commission in June, 2004, Rubin said, ?Not only have the vendors not implemented security safeguards that are possible, they have not implemented the ones that are easy.?

In response to the obvious problems with the machines, Congressman Rush Holt introduced a bill last year designed to make a paper audit trail mandatory, to make it possible to examine all voting machines' source codes, and to outlaw the use of remote wireless access to the machines. However, due to heavy lobbying by Tom Delay (Republican), the bill has been stalled at the committee stage.

Activists have found a series of internal Diebold emails which confirm that the code is ?easy? to hack into and that the audit log is modifiable. A former employee reported making illegal patching and frantic last minute modifications to computers which were then sent out unchecked to over a thousand Diebold machines in the days prior to an election in Georgia.

Diebold claims that it is humanly impossible to erase votes from their computer system. However, at a September press conference in Washington, DC, activists and computer specialists took ten minutes to teach a chimpanzee to erase the voting record. Bev Harris of Black Box Voting.org wrote, ? Simply by double clicking the file we opened a real Diebold audit log file, we then highlighted the records we wanted Baxter [the chimp] to obliterate. Baxter then hit the key and then the enter key confirming the command. . . . The truth is you could alter Diebold's audit log by ping a dead fish on it. ?

Harris said her organization had estimated that up to 10,000 technicians and local election officials would have access to voting data in November. "No hacking required," Harris said. "We're talking editing here. It can be done with a cut-and-paste command."

Harris also has found a vote manipulation technique in the Diebold central tabulator. This uses Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Access. Harris discovered that ? by entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the US has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks. ?

An actual error has been found without a recount. In Columbus, Ohio, in a precinct which recorded only 638 votes, Bush supposedly received 4,258, and Kerry 260 votes. This obvious error has been attributed to a malfunctioning cartridge.

Harris has filed Freedom of Information requests for all vote records in key states in the November 2004 election throughout the country, in order to examine the records.

In Germany, which uses pencil and paper ballots and employs hand counting, the exit polls are regarded as accurate reflections of voting, until the hand counting is completed and provides final confirmation.

There are large discrepancies between the exit poll data and the official results of the November US election, particularly in New Mexico and Ohio, two important swing states. Within these two states, the discrepancies occur in polls that used touch screen machines. In Ohio, CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 to 47 percent, and among men by 51 to 49 percent.

Greg Palast estimates that 110,000 votes were lost due to poorly functioning machines, the majority of them Democrat. Democrats say 250,00 provisional ballots were given out to people whose registration was deemed to be faulty, often as a result of Republican challengers in the voting precincts. Provisional ballots may or may not be included later in the final tally. K Blackwell, Ohio Secretary of State, estimates there are 175,000 provisional ballots. Both numbers represent a lot of people, and the majority of them live in predominantly black and Democrat voting districts. Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes.

An attorney who worked on a Democrat voter hotline says that ? Countless other frauds occurred, such as postcards advising people of incorrect polling places, registered Democrats not receiving absentee ballots, duly registered young voters being forced to file provisional ballots even though their names and signatures appeared in the voting rolls, longtime active voting registered voters being told they weren't registered, bad faith challenges by Republican ?challengers' in Democratic precincts. ? He reported that in some areas, people waited ten hours to vote. Waits of four to five hours in black areas were the norm.

In New Mexico, vote spoilage in past elections in Latino and Black districts occurred at a rate five times higher than in white areas. Palest estimates that in the current election, 18,000 mostly Democrat votes were lost to faulty machines. In addition, approximately 20,000 provisional ballots (which are not included in the official tally) were handed out freely in predominantly Democrat Latino areas under Republican control. Bush won New Mexico by 11,620 votes.

For the many people inside the US and around the world who were hoping that Cheney and Bush would be ousted, we can at least be clear in our public discussion and dealings with the US that their 2004 election was a manifestly corrupt process and support calls for radical electoral reform and election monitoring, assuming there will be an election in 2008.

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