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Never Say Die-bold:
So You Don’t Think the Bush Campaign Stole This Election? Think Again
- By Jackson Thoreau
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opEdNews.com
If you’re looking for one word to sum
up the way the Bush-Cheney campaign stole another election Tuesday
besides obvious ones like “cheated,” try this one: Diebold.
An election judge where I voted Tuesday in a heavily Democratic
precinct in Maryland knows what that means and wasn’t adverse to
sharing his opinion of the Republican-owned company. As I was about to
vote with the electronic system, I asked this judge if they had a way
to check people’s votes through a paper backup.
- The
official said no, and then in a low voice so no one else would hear,
added, “And that really makes us nervous, with Diebold as the owner
of that system.”
- Goodbye,
hanging chads. Hello, computer fraud that leaves no trace, no chads
hanging.
-
- Diebold
Inc. of North Canton, Ohio, supplied scores of machines and counted
millions of votes Tuesday, while reportedly discarding many votes for
Democrat John Kerry, according to British investigative reporter
Gregory Palast. Walden O’Dell, chief executive of Diebold and a top
fundraiser for the Bush campaign, wrote in a fund-raising letter last
year that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral
votes to the president next year.”
- That he
did.
- Software errors involving the system
can change results, computer scientists say. Since the majority of
touch screens in the United States do not produce paper records, the
machines could alter ballots without anyone noticing.
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- “What has most concerned scientists
are problems that are not observable, so the fact that no major
problems were observed says nothing about the system,” David
Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory in California, told the Associated Press. “The fact that
we had a relatively smooth election yesterday does not change at all
the vulnerability these systems have to fraud or bugs.”
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- Some 8.2 percent of touch-screen
votes in senatorial elections between 1998 and 2000 were lost,
according to an MIT/CalTech study. That was more than any other system
except lever machines, which lost 9.5 percent of votes.
-
- Bev Harris, author of Black Box
Voting and the BlackBoxVoting.com web site, has documented numerous
cases of electronic disasters. One occurred in Volusia County, Fla.,
in 2000 in which county election officials hand recounted more than
184,000 paper ballots used to feed the computerized system, after the
central ballot-counting computer showed a Socialist Party candidate
receiving more than 9,000 votes and Al Gore getting minus 19,000.
Another 4,000 votes were received for Bush that should not have been
there.
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- Election officials eventually tallied
Gore beating Bush by 97,063 votes to 82,214. But the wrong numbers had
already been sent to the media, which were used by FOX and other
networks to erroneously call the election for Bush and swing the
public relations part of the recount battle in his favor.
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- On
Tuesday, Election Protection, a program of People for the American
Way, had more than 15,000 calls to its hotline about ballot problems,
voter intimidation and other
situations.
- The
Institute for Public Accuracy also outlined various problems. Susan
Truitt, co-founder of the Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections, was
quoted on its site saying that seven counties in Ohio had electronic
voting machines without paper trails, and scientific exit polls showed
Kerry with the lead. But verifying votes was impossible, she said.
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- “A
recount without a paper trail is meaningless; you just get a
regurgitation of the data,” Truitt said. “A poll worker told me
[Wednesday] morning that there were no tapes of the results posted on
some machines; on other machines the posted count was zero, which
obviously shouldn’t be the case.”
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- Other problems include Ohio’s version of Katherine Harris
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- There were
many other problems in Ohio. Like in Florida, the Ohio secretary of
state, Ken Blackwell, made decisions on what could be counted and
other important matters even as he shilled for Bush as a co-chair of
his campaign. This raised serious conflict-of-interest concerns, said
Ohio state Senator Teresa Fedor.
-
- “There
is a pattern of voter suppression; that’s why I called for Blackwell’s
resignation more than a month ago,” she said. “Blackwell, while
claiming to run an unbiased elections process, was also the co-chair
of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio. Additionally, he was the
spokesperson for the anti-business, anti-family constitutional
amendment ‘Issue 1,’ and a failed initiative to repeal a crucial
sales-tax revenue source for the state. Blackwell learned his moves
from the Katherine Harris playbook of Florida 2000, and we won’t
stand for it.”
- The Ohio
tally also included a version of the Florida butterfly ballot, said
Bob Fitrakis, an attorney with Election Protection. The absentee
ballots were misleading in Franklin County,” he said. “Kerry was
the third line down, but you had to punch number four to vote for him.
Bush was getting both his votes as well as Kerry’s.”
- There were
also far fewer machines in the inner-city districts than in the
suburbs, Fitrakis said. “I documented at least a dozen people
leaving because the lines were so long in African-American areas,”
he said. “Blackwell did a great deal of suppressing before the
election - like attempting to refuse to process voter registration
forms.”
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- I heard a
report that one Ohio voter had to wait in line 15 hours to vote. In
one of the busiest precincts in Columbus, Blackwell only supplied it
with three voting
machines. How many people gave up and did not vote there?
Dirty tricks by Republicans on the rise
-
- A few days before the 2004 election,
the Washington Post published an article detailing increasing dirty
tricks, mostly by Republicans.
-
- In Lake
County, Ohio, some people received a memo on bogus Board of Elections
letterhead informing voters who registered through Democratic and
NACCP drives that they could not vote.
In Leon County, students at Florida State and Florida A&M
universities who signed petitions to legalize medical marijuana or
impose stiffer penalties for child molesters unknowingly had their
party registration switched to Republican and their addresses
changed. The latter would affect their ability to vote since they
would not be registered at the proper site. The media traced the
source to a group hired by the Florida Republican Party.
-
- In
Allegheny County, Pa., fliers on a bogus county letterhead were handed
out and mailed, saying that “due to immense voter turnout expected
on Tuesday,” the election had been extended. Republicans should vote
Tuesday, while Democrats should vote on Wednesday – the wrong day.
- In some
Milwaukee black neighborhoods, a flier warned people that they could
not vote in that election if they had already voted in another
election that year. “If you
violate any of these laws, you can get ten years in prison and your
children will get taken away from you,” the flier said.
In Charleston County, S.C., a fake letter supposedly from the NAACP
threatens
voters who have outstanding parking tickets or have failed to pay
child support with arrest. A similar flier was distributed in
Baltimore in 2002.
-
- Such tricks are not new. There are
famous examples like the 1971 break-in of Democratic National
Committee headquarters by Nixon. There are also many lesser known
examples. In 2002, Ron Kirk, a former Dallas mayor who ran as a
Democrat for U.S. Senate, reported a bogus automated phone message
dialed to voters in Austin and other cities. The message asked voters
to support Kirk because he supported same-sex marriages and gay
adoptions. Kirk said he didn’t support either issue and blamed more
Republican pre-election dirty tricks. His Republican opponent, John
Cornyn, denied being behind the false phone bank.
-
- U.S. has a long history of rigged
elections
-
- The U.S., of course, is no stranger to
rigged elections, even well before Tuesday’s and the one in 2000. A
famous case was the controversial way that the late President Lyndon
B. Johnson won a U.S. Senate seat in 1948 in Texas on his way to the
White House that reportedly involved votes from dead people. What some
overlook in this case was how LBJ had lost an election in a similar
disputed fashion seven years before.
-
- Another lesser known case involved the
1984 landslide presidential election of the late Republican Ronald
Reagan. In Dallas, where both Bush and Cheney lived at one time, there
were 217 ballots cast in a precinct that had zero registered voters.
That would not affect the election, but it demonstrates that fraud has
existed for a long time.
-
- As early as 1986, Michael Shamos, a
Pennsylvania computer scientist, testified during a Texas hearing that
the computer hardware and software used to tabulate voters’ ballots
could easily be manipulated.
-
- “Computers can be manipulated
remotely, by wire or radio, or by direct physical input,” Shamos
said. “The memories on which these computers operate can easily fit
into a shirt pocket and can be substituted in seconds. The software
can be set to await the receipt of a special card, whose presence will
cause all the election counters to be altered. This card could be
dropped into the ballot box by any confederate. The possibilities for
this type of tampering are endless, and virtually no detection is
possible once tabulation has been completed....Even if the software is
not altered, there is no reason to believe that it is correct. Many
tests performed on such programs have revealed faulty logic and wildly
incorrect results.”
-
- Suzan Kesim, then-vice president of a
security consulting firm in South Bend, Ind., also testified in 1986
that “many of the computer auditing procedures used by the banking
industry that have been tried and true could easily be modified or
used as they are for auditing elections....Fraud possibilities include
‘hidden programs’.”
-
- Texas even had its own voter purge
almost two decades before Florida attempted to strike some 60,000
voters from the rolls with false accusations of felony convictions. In
1982, lists were provided to Texas election officials that made mostly
false accusations of felony convictions against voters. The accused
included public officials who successfully sued for slander. The state
also hired armed officers at minority voter precincts and posted signs
warning voters against casting illegal ballots. Charles Knutson
pointed out in a Democrats.com report that the Texas purge
probably involved Bush mastermind Karl Rove, who worked for then-Texas
Republican Gov. Bill Clements in 1982.
-
- Another odd case involved a West Texas
county where the system’s optical scanners misread ballots and at
first reported landslide wins for two Republican commissioners in
2002. But the next day, after alert poll workers became suspicious of
the wide margins of supposed victory, they discovered a defective
computer chip in the scanner system. After two hand recounts and
another count with a replacement scanner chip, officials announced
that Democrats Jerry House and Chloanne Lindsey actually won by wide
margins.
-
- “It was hard to believe that that
type of mistake had happened,” Robbie Floyd, one of the Republicans
who lost, said in one press report.
-
- So could Kerry have been ripped off by
a defective computer chip in Ohio and Florida, where scientific exit
polls indicated Kerry wins? We will never know since, unlike the Texas
machines in 2002, the Diebold machines in Ohio and Florida have no
paper trail.
-
- How convenient.
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- Popular vote fixed?
-
- With all
the former and current Republicans supporting Kerry – even a
long-time Texas Republican friend of mine voted for a Democrat for the
first time for president on Tuesday – it’s hard to believe that
Bush got about 3.5 million more votes than Kerry and 8 million more
than he received in 2000.
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- There can’t
be that many new devil worshippers or Christian fundamentalists.
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- A larger
turnout – Tuesday’s 60 percent turnout was the largest since 1968
– has favored Democrats in the past. But about 6 million of those
votes have not been counted.
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- Some said
that exit polls were accurate in states that had paper trails, but not
in ones without the paper trails for e-voting.
-
- Even
though Kerry conceded, groups like the International Labor
Communications Association refused to follow suit. The group is waging
a campaign to count all the votes in Ohio.
Kerry’s concession was really strange and disappointing. Would
Howard Dean have conceded so fast to Bush? Gore fought Bush harder
than Kerry. I don’t get it since Kerry even had Bruce Springsteen
play “No Retreat, No Surrender” at a campaign appearance and used
that song during other events. John Edwards also pledged to make sure
votes were counted. Then they surrendered without putting up a fight
in the overtime phase. That was most disappointing, more so than Gore’s
concession in 2000.
-
- Did Skull
and Bones members blackmail Kerry into conceding without a real fight?
- Perhaps
Kerry simply foresaw the inevitable result, but he still could have
seen the counting of provisional ballots through to the end. It would
have raised some more awareness about the problems with Diebold and
possibility of vote tampering. It would have shown Bush-Cheney that
Democrats weren’t backing down, especially with so many questions
about vote reliability and reports of Republican voter suppression and
dirty tricks.
-
- But Kerry called for unity with the Evil Empire. Why is it that
Democrats are always trying to call for unity and compromise with
Republicanazis? As Carolyn Kay with MakeThemAccountable.com said, we
have to completely remake the Democratic Party. We have to learn from
right wingers to “take a licking and come back kicking. It is
absolutely essential that as soon as possible we pick ourselves up,
dust ourselves off, and start working to take over the Democratic
Party. It has lost its moorings, and because of that it is losing
elections, over and over and over again.”
-
- Sure, the deck was stacked against
Kerry. Perhaps the last week of bad news for Bush, the Washington
Redskins loss, the exit polls, and other omens that seemed to spell a
Kerry victory were mere ploys by Rove to make his side work harder and
our side slack off a bit.
-
- One thing I know: We have to keep
fighting these cheating thieves, not try to make peace with them. And
I hope many people on our side won’t move away – though I realize
moving out of the country is the ultimate protest and I understand
that choice. We all have to figure out what is the best path to take
for ourselves.
-
- As for me, I’m staying in the belly
of the beast, in the shadow of the Evil Empire, to continue to sucker
punch it in its bloated, bullshit-filled gut. Starting now, just as
many conservatives boycotted France for its correct stance against the
Iraqi invasion, I’m boycotting the state of Texas, where I lived for
40 years before moving to friendlier and more progressive confines
last year. Bush got his political start in Texas, where the
Republicanazis imposed a redistricting scheme that made that far-right
state even more Republican. Every statewide official is a Republican
there. The Texas Republican Party platform reads like a nazi playbook,
even calling for getting out of the UN, abolishing numerous federal
agencies, making homosexuality a crime and teaching the Bible in
public schools.
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- Enough is enough. Fuck Texas and the
horses that Bush and Cheney rode in on.
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- And fuck Diebold, too.
-
- As for you, Sen. Kerry, I appreciate
your hard work, your intelligence, your dedication to this campaign,
although I was disappointed by your finish. But, with all due respect,
you know where you can stick your call for unity…..
Jackson Thoreau is a Washington, D.C.-area journalist/writer. The
latest book to which he contributed, Big Bush Lies, was
published by RiverWood Books of Ashland, Ore., and is available at
bookstores across the country. He can be contacted at jacksonthor@yahoo.com
or jacksonthor@juno.com. -
- Read
more of Jackson's writing at Jackson
Thoreau Article Archive
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