by Thom Hartmann
"Two brothers own 80 percent of the [voting] machines used in
the United States," Teresa Heinz Kerry told a group of Seattle
guests at a March 7, 2005 lunch for Representative Adam Smith,
according to reporter Joel Connelly in an article in the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Connelly noted Heinz Kerry added
that it is "very easy to hack into the mother machines."
The two brothers Mrs. Kerry is referencing are, according to
voting machine expert (and founder of
www.BanVotingMachines.org) Lynn Landes, in an article for
the
Online Journal, Bob Urosevich,
president of Diebold Election Systems, and
Todd Urosevich, who was vice president for customer support
of
Chuck Hagel's old company, now known as ES&S.
Presumably the "mother machines" Teresa was talking about are
the "central tabulator" computers, like the Windows-based
Diebold central tabulator PC that Howard Dean hacked into and
untraceably changed an election on - in 90 seconds - live on the
"Topic A With Tina Brown" CNBC TV show late last year.
As Dean noted while hacking the Diebold machine on national
television, "In 1998, only 7% of all U.S. counties used
electronic voting machines." But, Dean noted of the 2004 race,
"in the next presidential election, roughly 1 in 3 of us will
use one."
Dean added:
"But critics have found all sorts of flaws with these
machines, from software security concerns, to the complete
lack of a paper trail to verify votes. These machines cannot
be recounted.
"In Riverside County, California, an incumbent
mysteriously pulled ahead after the voting machine company
employees stopped the tally to tinker with the machines.
"In Iowa [graphic shows 'Allamakee County, Iowa'],
machines in one precinct returned 4 million votes-- when only
300 actual voters turned out.
"In San Diego, election officials reportedly turned to
teenagers to reboot their malfunctioning machines.
"And in Florida, a computer crash erased the records
from Miami-Dade's first widespread use of touchscreen voting
machines-- all data from the 2002 gubernatorial primary is
gone.
"There are two problems. One, there's no paper trail
which means you can't verify your vote, and it can't be
recounted. The other potentially serious problem: tampering
and rigging of elections. We asked Diebold, one of the
companies that makes these machines, and Florida Secretary of
State Glenda Hood to appear on this program. They both turned
us down."
Democratic concern about electronic voting machines has
floated around for several years, particularly since voting
rights activist Bev Harris (of
www.blackboxvoting.org) reported that she was Googling
around the internet and stumbled across an FTP backdoor on
Diebold's website that, just after the 2002 election, contained
a folder titled "Rob Georgia." (Cleland's 2002 loss in Georgia
helped hand control of the Senate back to the Republicans, who
had lost it when Jim Jeffords of Vermont left the party to
become an independent.)
In Georgia and Florida, where paper had been totally replaced
by touch-screen machines in many to most precincts during 2001
and 2002, the 2002 election produced some of the nation's most
startling precursors to the alarming shift from an "exit poll
win" for Kerry to the "voting-machine win" for Bush in 2004.
USA Today reported on Nov. 3, 2002, "In Georgia, an Atlanta
Journal-Constitution poll shows Democratic Sen. Max Cleland with
a 49%-to-44% lead over Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss." Cox
News Service, based in Atlanta, reported just after the election
(Nov. 7) that, "Pollsters may have goofed" because "Republican
Rep. Saxby Chambliss defeated incumbent Democratic Sen. Max
Cleland by a margin of 53 to 46 percent. The Hotline, a
political news service, recalled a series of polls Wednesday
showing that Chambliss had been ahead in none of them."
Just as amazing was the 2002 Georgia governor's race.
"Similarly," the
Zogby polling organization reported on Nov. 7, "no polls
predicted the upset victory in Georgia of Republican Sonny
Perdue over incumbent Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes. Perdue won by
a margin of 52 to 45 percent. The most recent Mason Dixon Poll
had shown Barnes ahead 48 to 39 percent last month with a margin
of error of plus or minus 4 points."
Almost all of the votes in Georgia were recorded on the new
touch-screen computerized voting machines, which produced no
paper trail whatsoever. Similarly, as the San Jose Mercury News
reported in a Jan. 23, 2003 editorial titled
"Gee Whiz, Voter Fraud?" "In one Florida precinct last
November, votes that were intended for the Democratic candidate
for governor ended up for Gov. Jeb Bush, because of a misaligned
touchscreen. How many votes were miscast before the mistake was
found will never be known, because there was no paper audit."
("Misaligned" touchscreens also caused 18 known machines in
Dallas to register Republican votes when Democratic
screen-buttons were pushed in 2002: it's unknown how many others
weren't noticed.)
Maybe it's true that the citizens of Georgia simply decided
that incumbent Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a wildly popular
war veteran, was, as Republican TV ads suggested, too
unpatriotic to remain in the Senate, even though his Republican
challenger, Saxby Chambliss, had sat out the Vietnam war with a
medical deferment.
Maybe, in the final two days of the race, those voters who'd
pledged themselves to Georgia's popular incumbent Governor Roy
Barnes suddenly and inexplicably decided to switch to Republican
challenger Sonny Perdue.
Maybe George W. and Jeb Bush, Alabama's new Republican
governor Bob Riley, and a small but congressionally decisive
handful of other long-shot Republican candidates around the
country really did win those states where conventional wisdom
and straw polls showed them losing in the last few election
cycles, but computer controlled voting or ballot-reading
machines showed them winning.
Perhaps, after a half-century of fine-tuning exit polling to
such a science that it's now used to verify if elections are
clean in Third World countries, it really did suddenly become
inaccurate in the United States in the past few years and just
won't work here anymore. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that
the sudden rise of inaccurate exit polls happened around the
same time corporate-programmed, computer-controlled,
modem-capable voting machines began recording and tabulating
ballots.
As the
Washington Post noted in a January 20, 2005 article by
Richard Morin and Claudia Deane ("Report Acknowledges
Inaccuracies in 2004 Exit Polls"):
"But 'there were 26 states in which the estimates produced
by the exit poll data overstated the vote for John Kerry....'
said Joe Lenski of Edison Media Research and Warren Mitofsky
of Mitofsky International.
"Throughout election night, the national exit poll
showed the Massachusetts senator leading President Bush by 51
percent to 48 percent. But when all the votes were counted, it
was Bush who won by slightly less than three percentage
points."
Mitofsky and Edison's work also showed that Ohio was one of
the states where the discrepancies between the official
tabulation and the exit polls were most noticeable. The
Washington Post noted: "At the request of the media sponsors,
Mitofsky and Lenski are continuing to examine exit polling in
Ohio and Pennsylvania, two critical battleground states where
the poll results were off."
When four attorneys in Ohio sued that state to discover
details of how voting was conducted in that state, they report
they were slapped with a massive and expensive lawsuit
engineered by the State of Ohio's Secretary of State, Ken
Blackwell (also co-chair of the Ohio Bush For President
campaign) and Ohio Attorney General, Republican Jim Petro. The
Ohio lawyer/activists have launched a legal defense fund
(information available at
http://freepress.org/store.php#donate) to help them fight
both for an exposé of Ohio irregularities and to defend
themselves against this attack by the Republican officials who
control the voting systems in that state.
Oddly, though, as statistics experts Steven Freeman and Josh
Mittledorf noted in an article for
In These Times, analyzing the data provided by exit polling
companies Mitofsky and Edison, "only in precincts that used
old-fashioned, hand-counted paper ballots did the official count
and the exit polls fall within the normal sampling margin of
error." In those places where computers were used to count the
vote, oddly the exit polls showed Kerry winning but the voting
machines had Bush winning.
Mitofsky/Edison tried to explain this away with their "shy
Republican" theory, suggesting that they'd hired young pollsters
and older Republican voters were less willing to talk with them.
Noted Freeman and Mittledorf:
"But in fact, the data suggest that Bush voters were
slightly more likely to complete the survey: 56 percent of
voters completed the survey in the Bush strongholds, while 53
percent cooperated in Kerry strongholds."
Thus, say these two university experts: "The exit polls
themselves are a strong indicator of a corrupted election."
This analysis comes just as Bev Harris' organization
www.blackboxvoting.org provided testimony to the House
Judiciary Committee, as reported on their website:
"In mid-February, Black Box Voting, together with computer
experts and videographers, under the supervision of
appropriate officials, proved that a real Diebold system can
be hacked.
"This was not theoretical or a 'potential'
vulnerability. Votes were hacked on a real system in a real
location using the actual setup used on Election Day, Nov. 2,
2004.
"In October, Black Box Voting published an article on
this Web site about remote access into the Diebold system.
After examining the Diebold software and related internal
e-mails, local security professionals were able to demonstrate
a hack into a simulated system.
"In February, we were allowed to try various hacking
techniques into a real election system. To our surprise, the
method used in our October simulation did not work.
"However, another method did work. 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.
"This hack stunned the officials who were observing the
test. It calls into question the results of as many as 40
million votes in 30 states. We are awaiting the response of
the House Judiciary Committee to this new development for
their investigation.
"In another real-world example, Black Box Voting
obtained the actual files used in the Nov. 2 election in a
specific county. In this situation, the local officials did
not know how to run their Diebold system, so a Diebold tech
ran the election in that county. Election officials remembered
the Diebold tech's first name, but not his last name.
"The Diebold tech had gone home after the election, and
no one in the county was able to access their own voting
system, leading to some consternation because they could not
provide our public records request.
"Because local officials could not access their logs, we
were given permission to sit down and copy files. (We have
since found that this is not an isolated problem -- many local
officials are painfully unfamiliar with their own voting
systems.)
"Local officials did not know their password, so Bev
Harris asked if they would like her to hack the password. They
said 'yes' (!)
"Later, to our even greater surprise, Bev Harris found
that the password set by the Diebold tech on this real
election file, used in the Nov. 2004 election was ... drum
roll please ... the diabolically clever password: 'diebold.'
(This took only two tries to guess.)"
So what to do? Here's a five-step process that Americans
interested in clean elections - regardless of party affiliation
- could start immediately, so it'll in place in time for the
2006 elections.
- 1. Organize and fund a national exit poll, using a
non-partisan, professional organization like Zogby, or one
built from the ground up.
- 2. Have detailed systems in place - using the internet and
email, in particular - to release the results of those exit
polls within an hour of the close of the polls on election eve
in November, 2006.
- 3. Plan for vote fraud, and brand the plan. In the
Ukraine, the slogan was "Time's up!" The logo was a ticking
clock, and thousands of paper stencils were distributed so the
logo could be spray-painted on sidewalks or buildings in the
event evidence of vote-fraud showed up. The color was orange,
and orange scarves and hats were mass purchased before
election day.
- 4. Develop a corps of people committed to showing up and
speaking out wherever the exit polls demonstrate the clear
possibility of election fraud.
- 5. Have a relentless media strategy in place to keep the
pressure on and bring people out into the streets.
If you think this isn't viable, it is. It's already been
done, in Ukraine, Belarus, the former Soviet state of Georgia,
and Serbia. In three of those four elections, this very strategy
succeeded in getting "official" vote tabulations changed and
elections reversed. And, irony of ironies, it was largely
funded by the United States.
One would think that the United States Congress would be
working for greater transparency in our elections. And, indeed,
Congressman Rush Holt and Senator Hillary Clinton have
introduced bills into the House and Senate that would call for
that. But, inexplicably, Republicans in the House and Senate
have blocked them from coming to a vote.
At the same time, computer programmer Clinton Curtis charged,
in a sworn affidavit before a
U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee
investigation in Ohio, that Republican Congressman Tom Feeney of
Florida participated in hiring Curtis to write "undetectable"
(when compiled) voting-machine-rigging software. Republicans in
the House have also blocked efforts to investigate this and
other charges made during hearing held in Ohio by Congressman
John Conyers.
In Ukraine, an entrenched political machine dedicated to
single-party rule laughed off the possibility that exit polls,
colored scarves, a catchy slogan, and spray-painted logos could
force a change in a national election. As Peter Finn reported in
The Washington Post on November 22, 2004:
"The [Russian-supported and "officially" winning]
Yanukovych campaign said the exit polls, which were funded by
the United States and other Western countries, and the
demonstration were a calculated effort to preempt the official
result....
"'These polls don't work,' said Gennady Korzh, a
spokesman for Yanukovych. 'We will win by between 3 to 5
percent. And remember, if Americans believed exit polls, and
not the actual count, John Kerry would be president.'"
According to a survey released the day before the November 2,
2004 election by the
Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of
Pennsylvania, one of the most respected and non-partisan groups
to regularly take the pulse of the American electorate, "As of
Election Eve, only 62 percent of registered voters are 'very
confident' that their votes will be accurately counted."
Perhaps Teresa Heinz Kerry was one of the skeptical voters
Annenberg surveyed. And, if the fears she candidly expressed
this week have any basis, Americans - of all political
persuasions - who believe in democracy, fairness, and open
elections must be prepared to act in 2006.
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project
Censored Award-winning best-selling author, psychotherapist and
licensed NLP Trainer, 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," "We
The People," "The
Edison Gene", and "What
Would Jefferson Do?"
