Exit Polls Again

Just a reminder of how screwy the exit polls were, and the story (long forgotten) of Bushites realizing they were going to lose on election day....

Re-Vote Ohio

Dino Rossi thinks Washington State should re-vote their close election? Why not do the same in Ohio? Ted Glick:

"Our next governor should enter office without any doubt about the legitimacy of his or her office. The people of Washington deserve to know that their governor was elected fair and square. Unfortunately, the events of the past few weeks now make it impossible for you or me to take office on January 12 without being shrouded in suspicion."

-Dino Rossi, Republican candidate for Governor of Washington, in open letter to Democratic candidate Christine Gregoire

Rossi's argument is equally applicable to the Presidential election. Following an extremely flawed and probably illegal "recount" in Ohio, no one can say for sure who won that state's 20 Electoral College votes, and these 20 votes are necessary for either George Bush or John Kerry to claim a victory in the 2004 election. Following the example of the people of the Ukraine, we should demand that Ohio's 5.5 million voters be given a chance to vote for president again in a fair and transparent process.

What Happened in Ohio?

Many thousands of duly-registered African American voters did their civic duty and went to the polls in Ohio on Election Day. Many stood for three, four or even eight hours in the cold and rain with tired, hungry children and sick or elderly relatives. These people, whose children are disproportionately represented in the U.S. military and the Iraq war, suffered disproportionately from misallocation of voting machines, biased application of voting standards, outright harassment, and the ultimate indignity for a voter: unbeknownst to them, many of their votes were not even counted.

Concerns that the votes of African Americans and other Ohio voters were not fairly counted were one of the main reasons that David Cobb of the Green Party and Michael Badnarik of the Libertarian Party demanded a recount of the votes in Ohio. Now that the recount is finished, the picture is a lot worse than any of us thought. Not only were African Americans in huge numbers denied the right to vote on Election Day, but something even more shocking was discovered: we have no idea who won the presidential vote in Ohio. And because we have no idea who won the vote on November 2, we must immediately raise the call for an Ohio re-vote.

The vote totals we are seeing in the newspapers assume that there has been no tampering with the vote totals. While no one has as yet proven definitively that there was vote tampering, any impartial observer can say with certainty that it would be impossible to say that there was NO tampering.

How can we say this so unequivocally? Private company technicians from Triad and possibly Diebold had unsupervised access to ballots and vote counting machines after the initial vote counting and before the recount. In some counties, ballots were not locked up in ways that would preserve their integrity. In almost all counties, the recounts did not comply with the dictates of Ohio election law that the precincts re-counted must be "randomly" selected. Whether in the interest of hiding something, or merely in the interest of wanting to go home for the Christmas holiday, pre-selecting the precincts to be re-counted could lead to re-counting precincts without problems instead of those where machines failed, ballots were soiled, or other problems occurred.

Thankfully, the Ohio recount fulfilled its purpose. It helped us to see the extent of the problems in Ohio's voting processes. It reminded us that many Ohio state and local elections officers should either be fired for incompetence or criminally indicted for allowing voters to be disenfranchised on Election Day. It provided a way to keep the reform process in public view so that changes can be made in time for the 2006 election season. Most importantly, however, the Ohio recount has led us to a conclusion that should be obvious to fair-minded people of any political party: no one can claim victory in a contest when the score-keeping system was broken.

Rest here.

Ohio may have been more stacked than Florida

Jesse Jackson on the election again.

Rule 1: Count Every Vote

Politics is a game played by rules. And the most important rule regarding close elections is that you don't win by being conciliatory during the recount process. Indeed, the only way a candidate who trails on election night ends up taking the oath of office is by refusing to concede and then confidently demanding that every vote be counted -- even when the opposition, the media and the courts turn against you.

That is a rule that Al Gore failed to follow to its logical conclusion in 2000, and that John Kerry did not even attempt to apply this year. Both men were so determined to maintain their long-term political viability that they refused to fight like hell to assure that the votes of their supporters were counted. That refusal let their backers down. It also guaranteed that, despite convincing evidence that the Democrat won in 2000, and serious questions about the voting and recount processes in the critical state of Ohio in 2004, George W. Bush would waltz into the White House.

Maybe someday, if the Democrats really want to win the presidency, they will nominate someone like Christine Gregoire. Gregoire is the Washington state attorney general who this year was nominated by Democrats to run for governor of that state. She is hardly a perfect politician -- like too many Democrats, she is more of a manager than a visionary; and she is as ideologically drab as Gore or Kerry.

But Gregoire had one thing going for her, and that was her determination to win.

When the initial count showed her trailing Republican Dino Rossi by more than 200 votes, she refused to accept the result. Certain that there were Democratic votes that had yet to be tallied, she demanded a recount. The second review showed her trailing Rossi by 42 votes and -- as in the 2000 fight over recounting presidential ballots in Florida -- the Republicans accused Gregoire of traumatizing the state by continuing to demand that every vote be counted. "It's time to move forward," chirped Rossi, who ridiculed Democratic demands for a fuller, sounder recount. Rossi claimed that Gregoire wanted to count and recount the ballots until she was declared the winner.

In a sense, Rossi was right.

Gregoire did want to keep counting until she won. But, of course, that is the point of the recount process: If you think that the votes are there to assure your victory, you keep demanding that they be counted and tabulated. This is the fundamental rule that neither Gore nor Kerry ever quite got.

"Recount" Over in Ohio

Ohio 'recount' came in, with the non-random random selection in most counties, the count changed only marginally.

Under Ohio law, each county must randomly choose a precinct to recount by hand and by machine. If the two counts do not match, officials must conduct a countywide recount by hand. Most county Boards of Elections, however, chose to preselect the sample precinct, a violation of the law. Some counties refused to proceed with a full hand recount when the hand and machine tallies failed to match.

In two of the three counties we observed, technicians from Diebold and Triad, manufacturers of voting machines and vote-counting software, were present during the entire recount. The Diebold technician in Hardin County was actively involved in giving instructions to the observers. Further, he arrived the day before the recount to prepare the machines and data disks that contain the election results.

As Cliff Arneback says, "You're allowing the original error to be repeated a second time, so it's not a meaningful recount," he said.

Sequel to the heartbreak in Farenheit 911 in the works...

Who Really Won: The Popular Vote Edition

There is a substantial discrepancy—well outside the margin of error and outcomedeterminative— between the national exit poll and the popular vote count.

The possible causes of the discrepancy would be random error, a skewed exit poll, or breakdown in the fairness of the voting process and accuracy of the vote count.

Analysis shows that the discrepancy cannot reasonably be accounted for by chance or random error.

Evidence does not support hypotheses that the discrepancy was produced by problems with the exit poll.

Widespread breakdown in the fairness of the voting process and accuracy of the vote count are the most likely explanations for the discrepancy.

In an accurate count of a free and fair election, the strong likelihood is that Kerry would have been the winner of the popular vote.

PDF here.

Sore Loser

In Washington State.

Bush, Cheney, Rove to Testify?

President George Bush, Vice-President Richard Cheney and White House Political Advisor Karl Rove received notice that they will be deposed Tuesday and Wednesday, December 28 and 29. The trio’s Ohio attorney, Kurt Tunnell, so far claims his clients have not been properly served. Under Ohio law, the Republican-dominated Ohio Supreme Court is responsible for serving the three.

Rest here.

Kerry Moves To Protect Evidence

This afternoon, an attorney representing the Kerry/Edwards presidential campaign filed two important motions to preserve and augment evidence of alleged election fraud in the November election. The motions were filed in the matter titled Yost et al. v. Delaware County Board of Elections and J. Kenneth Blackwell (Civil Action No. C2-04-1139) with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. The document is titled "Motion Of Intervenor-Defendant Kerry-Edwards 2004, Inc. For A Preservation Order And For A Leave To Take Limited Expedited Discovery."

The purpose of the motions is twofold: A) To preserve all ballots and voting machines pertaining to the Yost matter for investigation and analysis; and B) To make available for sworn deposition testimony a technician for Traid Systems, the company that produced and maintained many of the voting machines used in the Ohio election. The technician has been accused of tampering with the recount process in Hocking County, Ohio, though other counties are believed to have also been involved. Any officers of Triad Systems who have information pertaining to said tampering are likewise subject to subpoena for sworn deposition testimony.

Blackwell Wants To Hide

Says, in other words, he's above the law:

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell has requested a protective order to prevent him from being interviewed as part of an unusual court challenge of the presidential vote.

Blackwell, in a court filing, says he's not required to be interviewed by lawyers as a high-ranking public official, and accused the voters challenging the results of ``frivolous conduct'' and abusive and unnecessary requests of elections officials around the state.

Free Press: Another Third Rate Burglary

The Free Press does another one of their articles on the various 'isolated irregularities', this time in Lucas County, where the Democrats' computer was stolen before the election. Some samples:

St. Elizabeth Seton School: 4-N (52.69%), 4-L (64.06%), 4-M (71.73%). Polling place was moved from Caldwell Center, and not even the Ward Chairman was notified. Three precincts voted here, and there was nobody to guide voters to the correct line. Voters who were standing in the correct line were told they were not on the registrar’s list and to fill out a provisional ballot or stand in another line. Included were voters who have never moved or changed names, yet mysteriously were not on voter rolls. Voters were sent home to retrieve yellow card with precinct numbers rather than being directed to precinct map. Some voters were turned away from all three tables and left without voting. A man with a mini DV camera was recording inside and outside the polling place.

Cherry Pre-School Annex: 10-A (54.41%). Observer at polls was telling people to vote with a pen, which cannot be read by the optical scanner.

Flory Gardens Senior Citizens Center: 6-K (54.48%), 6-M (56.51%), 6-A (74.88%). Many long-time voters were not on the rolls and were forced to vote by provisional ballot. Ballot stubs were not removed, which means that one’s vote is not secret, and the vote count may not be reliable.

All Saints Lutheran Church: 24-D (55.12%), 24-I (66.36%). Polling station ran out of ballots and was turning people away.

Pickett Elementary School: 14-F (55.42%), 14-B (62.82%), 14-A (69.60%). One machine was not counting properly, which would explain the low turnout at 14-F. Many voters who had lived and voted in the same location for years were told they were not on the rolls, or that they had already voted by absentee ballot.

End The Electoral College

Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Wednesday that when Congress returns in January, she will propose a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College and replace it with a one-person, one-vote system for electing the nation's president and vice president.

In introducing the amendment, the Democrat from San Francisco is joining Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, who last month introduced a similar proposal in the House, which she said she would reintroduce in the 109th Congress that convenes on Jan. 3.

The two California lawmakers say the current system makes most Americans election bystanders, pointing toward the recent campaign in which President Bush and his Democratic rival, Sen. John Kerry, focused almost all their time, energy and campaign funds on a handful of undecided states in search of their electoral votes.

"The Electoral College is an anachronism, and the time has come to bring our democracy into the 21st century," Feinstein said in a statement. "During the founding years of the republic, the Electoral College may have been a suitable system, but today it is flawed and amounts to national elections being decided in several battleground states.''

So Called Liberal New York Times

Prints their look at the Ohio vote after it's almost too late...

William Shambora, 53, is the kind of diligent voter who once assumed that his ballot always counted. He got a rude awakening this year.

Mr. Shambora, an economics professor at Ohio University, moved during the summer but failed to notify the Athens County Board of Elections until the day before the presidential election. An official told him to use a provisional ballot.

But under Ohio law, provisional ballots are valid only when cast from a voter's correct precinct. Mr. Shambora was given a ballot for the wrong precinct, a fact he did not learn until after the election. Two weeks later, the board discarded his vote, adding him to a list of more than 300 provisional ballots that were rejected in that heavily Democratic county.

"It seems like such a confused system," said Mr. Shambora, a John Kerry supporter who blames himself for the mistake. "Maybe if enough people's votes had counted, the election might have turned out differently."

And in an editorial they take a bold stance that only Republicans could disagree with:

We hold to a simple principle: if a registered voter casts a ballot in good faith, that vote should count.

Video To Watch

A video of African American vote suppression in Ohio available at We Do Not Concede Coalition.

97,000 Ohio Voters Didn't Bother

To vote in the Presidential election?

Here's something that has been largely overlooked amid all of the complaints about voting irregularities in Ohio during the Nov. 2 election:

Nearly 97,000 ballots, or 1.7 percent of those cast across the state, either did not record a preference for president or could not be counted because the voter selected more than one presidential candidate.

An analysis by Scripps Howard News Service found that Ohio recorded the second-highest number of missing votes in the country, behind California. Elections experts say a large number of missing votes in a high-profile race like president should raise a red flag that something may be amiss.

From Scripps Howard News.

Electors Call For Reform

Breaking with tradition, electors in at least five states have called for a congressional investigation of voting violations during the Nov. 2 election for president. Electors in Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, California, and North Carolina registered their concerns as they cast their votes last week.

The following day, the Berkeley City Council adopted a resolution “supporting the request that the Government Accountability Office immediately undertake an investigation of voting irregularities in the 2004 elections.” Drafted by Berkeley’s Peace and Justice Commission, the resolution also lists 17 measures to improve elections.

After hearing citizens speak, Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates said, “Nothing is more fundamental than a free, fair election. When you start tinkering with that, it throws the whole system into disarray. I am pleased that we are taking this stand.”

In California, one elector cast his ballot provisional upon “all votes being counted — provisional, absentee, under- and over-votes, computerized without paper ballots, even getting valid votes from those turned away illegally, intimidated, discouraged by incredibly long waits, etc.”

Kerry's Toe Still In The Water?

2004 Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry will file today, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, papers in support of the Green Party/Libertarian Party recount effort. Specifically, Kerry will be filing a request for expedited discovery regarding Triad Systems voting machines, as well as a motion for a preservation order to protect any and all discovery and preserve any evidence on this matter.

Triad Systems has come under scrutiny recently after Sherole Eaton, deputy director of elections for Hocking County, swore out an affidavit in which she described her witnessing the tampering of electronic voting equipment by a Triad representative. Rep. John Conyers, the ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee, has requested an investigation into this matter by the FBI and the Hocking County prosecutor.

Rest here.

Triad Troubles

Georgia10 at Daily Kos has posted some of House Rep. John Conyers' letter to Triad, the voting machine company....

I have more questions and concerns than ever about the conduct of your firm in connection with the Ohio presidential election and recount. In particular, I am concerned that your company has operated - either intentionally or negligently- in a manner which will thwart the recount law in Ohio by preventing validly cast ballots in the presidential election from being counted.

You have done this by preparing "cheat sheets" providing county election officials with information such that they would more easily be able to ignore valid ballots that were thrown out by the machines during the initial count. The purpose of the Ohio recount law is to randomly check vote counts to see if they match machine counts. By attempting to ascertain the precinct be recounted in advance, and than informing the election officials of the number of votes they need to count by hand to make sure it matches the machine count is an invitation to completely ignore the purpose of the recount law.

You as much as admitted this was your purpose at the December 20 hearing:


Rapp: "Remember, the purpose was to train people on how to conduct their jobs...and to help them identify problems when they conducted the recount...If they could not hand recount the ballots correctly, they would know what they needed to look for in that recount."

Time To Concede

In Washington (State):

In the absence of any convincing evidence of election fraud or procedural error, it's time for someone in this amazing election to concede. Right now, it looks like that someone should be Dino Rossi.

So writes

Democrats With Spines!!

Spotted in Washington State!

"It's time for Democrats somewhere to draw a line in the sand and say we are not going to let bully Republican tactics determine who our governor is or how an election is going to be determined," he (Paul Berendt, chairman of the state Democratic Party) said.

Mr. Berendt said Washington Democrats had decided from the start that what he described as Al Gore's "nice guy" approach was not to be the tactic here.

"I don't think there's any doubt that people are empowered by this whole thing," said Representative Jim McDermott, one of the state's most prominent Democrats. "The feeling of many of us is they quit too soon in Ohio. We don't know what happened there, but we said, 'By God, they're not going to do that in Washington.' "

The Democrats repeatedly went to court to challenge the Republicans. The party's communications director, Kirstin Brost, fired off a daily stream of news releases with biting words for Mr. Rossi, calling him a thief and the "accidental governor-elect" and deriding him for his "HypocRossi."

Also, judges who get it:

The State Supreme Court, hearing an appeal of a case decided last week by a lower court, on Wednesday ruled that ballots that had been disqualified in King County because election workers initially found no matching signatures on voter registration cards in their files were not "fully examined." Republicans argued that King County was trying to "expand the universe of ballots" after the election and that it was too late to go back and correct errors. But the justices, who ruled for the Republicans in another case last week, this time threw tough questions at them.

"You're looking at it from the point of view of the winner or the loser," Justice Susan Owens said. "Shouldn't we be looking at it from the point of view of the voter?"

It's Default of the Voting Machine?

Yep, the Free Press yet again....

A disturbing story has been widely circulated that a vote for Bush was the default choice in the software of electronic voting machines in a number of states. By definition, “default” settings are built-in by the manufacturer to make sure their programs work properly, and can be changed by the user. Some examples of default settings on a home computer are screen savers, type face, and screen resolution.

In certain counties in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, and New Mexico where touch screen voting machines were used, there have been complaints from voters who selected Kerry on the touch screen and saw their votes change to Bush on a summary screen. In addition, there was a specific problem with the Sequoia AVC Edge machine where voters actually saw preselected default choices presented to them.

With touch screen machines, it is possible to set up a default choice for Bush that would not be seen by the voters. Their votes would be automatically cast for Bush unless they successfully overrode the default choice of the computer. Likewise, if they deliberately chose not to vote for president, their votes would be counted for Bush.

Mahoning County was by far the largest county in Ohio where touch screen voting machines were utilized. According to a report by the Youngstown Vindicator, Mark Munroe, Chairman of the Mahoning County Board of Elections, said there were 20 to 30 machines that needed to be recalibrated during the voting process because some votes for a candidate were being counted for that candidate’s opponent. In addition, about a dozen machines needed to be reset because they “essentially froze.” Later on election night, problems arose in 16 precincts (11 in Youngstown, 2 in Boardman, and one each in Jackson Township, Craig Beach, and Washingtonville), causing election results to be delayed for three hours as Board of Elections employees checked the vote tallies of the touch screen machines.

Mahoning County utilized ES&S Ivotronic touch screen machines. The administrative password for these machines was reported on the ES&S website itself.

What Are the Republicans Trying to Hide?

The Free Press again, this time on the Repubs still acting as if they have something to hide:

On Monday the expanded legal team issued subpoenas to top election officials in 10 counties where vote-count fraud is suspected.

The rapid filing of subpoenas, the first step in interviewing people under oath, provoked the shrill rejection from Blackwell. Though Blackwell is a state constitutional officer, his business office is in a private building, where protesters -- including former California Congressman Dan Hamburg---have been arrested without apparent provocation.

“They huffed and they puffed, trying to bully people around,” said attorney Peter Pectarsky, a key member of the election challenge legal team. “Now we’re fighting over discovery. We served 10 depositions. The attorney general blew a gasket. They filed a motion to stop it… We will file our response.”

This past Friday, attorneys refiled their election challenge suit, a day after state Supreme Court dismissed it on a technicality. The challengers are trying to get a meaningful recount before the January 6 Congressional vote, while Blackwell's GOP has done all it can to stall.

The election challenge lawsuit claims that statewide vote patterns reveal vote count fraud on a scale that incorrectly awarded the state’s majority – and the presidency – to George Bush. They are using the litigation process to document that fraud.

“Maybe this (the explanation of the Ohio vote) is much closer to the surface than anybody thinks,” said Pete Pectarsky, a lead challenge attorney. “It doesn’t add up. If everything was above board, why are they hiding everything? They could bury people in the details… Okay, look at these records. Look at those.”

Washington State: Democrat Wins?

Takes the lead before the Supreme Court decides if hundreds of more valid ballots should be counted....

OLYMPIA, Wash. - The head of the state Democratic Party said late Tuesday that recount results from King County give Democrat Christine Gregoire an eight-vote victory in the closest governor's race in state history.

Neither King County nor the Republican party could confirm the hand recount results on Tuesday night. But if the Democrats' analysis is correct, it's a stunning reversal in the gubernatorial race, which has been hotly contested ever since election day.

Republican Dino Rossi won the first count by 261 votes and won a machine recount by 42 votes, out of 2.9 million ballots cast. The hand recount did not include the 700-plus ballots cast in heavily Democratic King County that could widen any Gregoire lead if the state Supreme Court allows them to be counted.

(Notice how the D's do not want to stop counting after getting the lead...)

UPDATE:

After losing the first two counts in the extraordinarily close Washington governor's race, Democrat Christine pulled ahead by 10 votes after King County reported its hand recount results on Wednesday.

Gregoire's slim margin could widen on Thursday, when Democrat-heavy King County officials plan to count 700-plus belatedly discovered ballots. Over Republicans' objections, the state Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that those ballots should be counted.

Wheat From Chaff

Keith Olbermann posts his separation of wheat and chaff, including:

3. The American media has a liberal bias:

I think we can pretty much put this one to bed.

The mainstream media has so tiptoed around the voting irregularities stories that it’s deflated any reasonable belief that there are swarms of reporters bypassing facts to substitute their own agendas. Instead of a circus, the Conyers “voting forums” have received tepid coverage.

Had there been a reversal of the poles in this political equation, of course, the impenetrable Sean Hannity would be in his 49th consecutive day of broadcasting without sleep, and by now would’ve already announced that Democrats from Outer Space had stolen the election.

Local Ohio Election Board Officials Speak Up

If Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell's office is under the impression that the local county election boards are going to back up Blackwell's assertion that everything went well with Ohio's Presidential election, they are mistaken. My conversations with two of them, the two that the secretary's office directed me to call, suggest a long litany of issues that may very well have changed the outcome of the election. Franklin County's Anthony summed it up thusly, 'There are public hearings coming up, people are angry and want to see change. they want uniform voting and something they can have confidence in. People have no confidence in the system. If people have no confidence in the system, they will not participate in it. The perception is that it doesn't work.'

Grain Of Salt? Conyers Has A Senator?

You might remember from Farenheit 9/11 that it takes one Senator to go along with a member of the House to challenge the election in Congress.

For what it's worth, there is a report that Rep. Conyers has at least one....

Free Press: 3 Ohio Counties

Almost all of Bush's margin in Ohio comes from incredibly high turnout in just three counties....

Three contiguous counties in southwestern Ohio, all traditionally Republican counties, gave unexpectedly large margins to George W. Bush over John F. Kerry on election night. All three counties experienced a huge increase in voter turnout. In all three counties, Bush received a higher percentage of the vote than he did in the 2000 election, and Kerry received a lower percentage of the vote than Al Gore did in 2000. This study analyzes how it happened.

In Warren County, the administrative building was locked down on election night, all in the name of "homeland security." No independent persons were allowed to observe the vote count. Compared to 2000, the population increased by 14.75%, the number of registered voters increased by 29.66%, voter turnout increased by 33.55%, Bush’s point spread increased from 42.24% to 44.58%, and Bush’s victory margin increased from 29,176 votes to 41,124 votes.

In Clermont County, compared to 2000, the population increased by 4.39%, the number of registered voters increased by 10.20%, voter turnout increased by 24.86%, Bush's point spread increased from 37.50% to 41.69%, and Bush's victory margin increased from 26,202 votes to 36,376 votes.

In Butler County, compared to 2000, the population increased by 3.12%, the number of registered voters increased by 10.06%, voter turnout increased by 18.18%, Bush's point spread increased from 29.40% to 32.52%, and Bush's victory margin increased from 40,197 votes to 52,550 votes.

These three counties provided to George W. Bush a victory margin of 130,050 votes, nearly equal to his statewide margin of 136,483 votes.

Hey Gang! A Slide Show!

37 Reasons To Ignore The Election Fraud

1) ’X-Files’ Argument: "I don’t believe in conspiracies, then joke about Hitler now living comfortably in Barbados, completing his second set of diaries for Der Stern have masterminded yet another election day plot to subvert American democracy." Ask why the Washington Post would feed into conspiracy theories that political reporters on its own staff could have debunked in 30 seconds. RESPONSE: Incorrect: While Hitler and Jim Morrison were the same person, neither had the modem phone numbers and IP addresses can change the central tabulators in a few key battleground counties. One Diebold omployee does not a conspiracy make. $4 billion is odometer fraud every year says where there is an evil will, there is an evil way.

2) ’Sour Grapes’ Argument: "Pro-Kerry folks don’t like losing." We are bad sports. RESPONSE: Yep, that’s true. See ya at the counter-inaugural.

3) ’The Fat Lady Singing’ Argument: "It’s over,get over it." RESPONSE: No, don’t think so. You are reading this article aren’t you?

34 more here....

Free Press: The Greatest Story Never Told

The New York Times devoted several front-page stories to the fraudulent election…in the Ukraine, that is. Its one front-page article on allegations of election fraud in Florida and Ohio carried a headline suggesting that Internet bloggers had been devising wild conspiracy theories, but that sensible folks were quickly debunking them. Meanwhile, Senator John Conyers, ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, held hearings in Washington and Columbus, Ohio at which witnesses detailed gruesome incidents of voter intimidation and disenfranchisement. A software programmer offered an affidavit stating that in October, 2000, a Florida state legislator (now a congressman) had asked the programmer’s company to devise a vote-rigging prototype, which the programmer did…in time for the 2000 election. The congressman in question had been Jeb Bush’s running mate in a 1994 gubernatorial race. The allegation has not been refuted, except in the form of a non-specific blanket denial by the software company and its lawyer. The congressman remains silent.

None of the above news has reached holiday revelers in this Christmas season. The same media that failed to investigate Bush administration claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq now won’t explore what happened on Nov. 2. They’re eager to report to us on fraudulent elections in Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Romania, Kazakhstan, even Puerto Rico. But the very notion that an administration that deceived the American people about why it engaged in preemptive war against a country that wasn’t threatening us, would also rig an election in its own favor, is somehow incomprehensible.

Why We Should Care

Even if there's never any proof of fraud, we can certainly do better counting the votes that are allowed to be cast:

- A review of election results in a 10-county sampling revealed more than 12,000 ballots that failed to record a vote for president, almost one in every 10 ballots cast. The unofficial audit by Scripps Howard News Service uncovered malfunctioning voting machines, improperly designed ballots and poor accounting procedures around the nation.

The review of certified election returns led authorities to restore 662 votes for president in Louisiana and West Virginia that had been miscounted in easily detectable errors made by local officials.

But most of the ballots discovered missing in the study will remain lost.

"I'm so upset over this that I can't sleep," said Sandy Campbell, clerk of Pike County, Ark., upon learning that a damaged optical scanning machine permanently lost nearly 700 votes. "We had no idea this had happened. But I'll know what to look for in the future. We'll try never to let this happen again."

The study - part of a yearlong project examining errors in America's election practices - checked the accuracy of the Nov. 2 election by comparing official results for president against the reported number of ballots cast in more than 2,400 counties nationwide.

Ten counties with some of the nation's worst voting record discrepancies were selected in the project. Local election officials were asked why their vote tallies didn't match their ballot counts.

All but one county official admitted they did not make this important crosscheck before reporting results that, most now concede, contained significant errors. State officials also failed to notice the discrepancies.

"This speaks to the need for states to be more thorough," said DeForest Soaries, chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, after seeing results of the Scripps Howard study. "Every state is accountable to ensure their procedures and practices deliver election results with integrity."

E-Voting Project Manager Resigns

You shouldn't know about Wendy Orange. She should be someone who served behind the scenes to make our elections work. Orange became a public figure when she revealed voting machine problems. She blamed her employer, Election Systems and Software (ES&S).

Voting machine problems drove former ES&S project manager Wendy Orange to resign. She says ES&S knew it had a software problem and then tried to hide it.

Rematch!

New ABC/Washington Post poll:

Bush's overall job approval stood at 48 percent while 49 percent disapproved of his performance as president.

Mandate?

Ohio County Finds 6 percent of Its Votes

As one can see, a total vote count discrepancy of 1,079 votes was determined by the full hand recount. This is a substantial number of votes, and resulted in 6.25 percent of all Presidential votes cast in Coshocton County on November 2, 2004 failing to be counted when the vote was certified on December 6, 2004. I recognize that all involved parties in the recount, Board members, Board employees and candidate witnesses all desire and expect fair, accurate and secure elections. Obviously you are as concerned as I about these disturbing facts and events.

Welcome Bush Supporters!

FINAL UPDATE?

Quite a few hits lately from Bush supporters at Timblair/spleenville sent from this post:

"A thriving coalition of election denialists has emerged in the wake of George W. Bush's victory.

Compare the paranoid howlings from these people to the calm reason of Michael Moore. If only all anti-Bush activists were as rational."

Of course, the timblair types ignore their own history of making similar charges in the other direction.

Anyway, comments were allowed on this post, so Republicans were free to post responses to this question:

If it's mathematically impossible for Kerry to win a recount in Ohio why is Blackwell doing his best to slow it down or prevent it? Apparently the law provides for a recount and does not allow the Secretary Of State to claim "it costs too much" or "I don't think it would change anything" to avoid a recount.

The "law and order" party would not just toss aside laws they disagree with, would they?

Bonus question: Why shouldn't there be paper trails in elections?

After a few days of more visits from right wingers and no answers yet I read their comments on their site and found they were concerned about registering to post. So I wondered aloud what the actual problem was with registering (of course, most sites these days require to register to comment or even read them in the first place). So one brave soul posted an answer here. Most declined, and then comments at their site were closed down. Lots of brave keyboarders over there.

Republican Hypocrites in Washington State

Via Susan Hu at dailykos, we find out that Republicans want to count only those previously uncounted ballots found in Washington State that come from Republican leaning counties:

In Snohomish County a tray of 224 uncounted ballots was found after the initial count and which were included in the subsequent count.

In King County, where about 900,000 votes were cast, the recount process uncovered 573 votes that officials say were mistakenly omitted from the first counts because election workers neglected to properly verify thier signatures, plus 22 that were found at the bottom of vote-counting machines. (KING TV FAQ on Recount)

Of course, the Republicans initially argued that the King County votes should be counted, until they did the math:

Both sides in the high court case [on Dec. 13, 2004, before the WA Supreme Court] used King County's discovery, on Sunday, of 561 wrongly disqualified absentee ballots as an example to prove their point.

Democrats said the newly discovered error [as of Dec. 13, 561 ballots -- there are some 732 now] shows why counties should go back and review all their rejected ballots, to search for similar mistakes.

Republicans said the King County case shows that the system works - election officials discovered a mistake and corrected it, in accordance with state law, without prompting from the courts. ...

(Rebecca Cook, A.P., "Supreme Court hears arguments in governor recount case, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Dec. 13, 2004)

The allegedly liberal NY Times takes a stance:

But there is no reason these ballots and other valid ballots that have turned up during the recount should not be counted. The right to vote cannot be taken away because an election official did not do his or her job correctly.

Ohio Election Certifiable

For some reason, Kerry gets a higher percentage of the Ohio vote counted after election day than he did then. The Free Press breaks it down, some highlights:

For less than 3% of the votes counted to offset by 0.30% the margin between the two candidates is significant. State wide, Kerry’s percentage of the newly counted votes was 54.46%, much greater than his percentage in the officially certified statewide results. The newly counted votes, whether absentee or provisional, were all paper ballots. The sample size is statistically significant. If the newly counted ballots do not represent a random sample of the electorate, it can only be because, on the one hand, absentee ballots tend to break in favor of Republicans, and on the other hand, provisional ballots disproportionately favor Democrats because of Republican challengers at the polling places.

On the other hand, the official count increased Kerry’s percentage of the vote in 66 counties (in 6 counties the percentages were unchanged). Kerry’s share of the newly counted votes was more than 4% higher than his unofficial total in 36 counties, including the ten biggest counties in the state.

VoteCobb Update

As you might have read, there is widespread confusion among BoE's about the definition of "random" when referring to the "random 3%" hand recount required by law. Many officials seem to believe that choosing which precincts to hand recount based on the number of voters is 'random.' Cuyahoga limited the selection of 'random' precincts to those that had 550 votes and over, which effectively eliminated approximately 90% of precincts from consideration.

One county put the names/numbers of all precincts in a bowl and pulled out precincts to recount -- that's random.

Observers have faced a range of attitudes, from pleasantness and willingness to answer questions to outright obstruction and hostility. Some are being threatened with expulsion if they talk to the counting teams [note: so far, I do not think anyone has been expelled] creating a very tense and negative experience for those volunteers who want to exercise their right under law to observe the process.

These volunteers deserve our thanks and gratitude for stepping up.

Ballot security is a big issue.We're discovering that ballots are being stored in unsealed boxes in locked broom closets, or in shelves in a locked lunchroom, open to all employees who lunch there every day. There are deeply disturbing reports coming out of Greene County, about unlocked offices and intimidation techniques including: phone calls and slashed tires [reported to the local police].

NEW TOTALS DON'T MEAN A THING UNDER RECOUNT CODE

Vote totals are changing, with extra votes for Kerry and Bush being found (not huge amounts) but a new vote total doesn't trigger a full hand recount. Only a discrepancy between the 3% hand recount and computer count can trigger a full hand recount.

In Montgomery County, the hand recount of 3% found an additional 8 votes for Kerry. Because the hand and computer counts matched, though, the remaining 97% of the ballots were run thru the computer. An additional 12 votes for Kerry were found.

3% hand = extra 8
97% computer = extra 12

It seems obvious that a full hand recount would have discovered more than just 12 new votes for Kerry.

RECOUNT REPORTS
Day Four of the Ohio Recount brought more tales of ballot prepping (to allow the hand count and the machine count to match) and more tales of not-so-random selection of voting precincts. Observers are taking copious notes, and we are posting initial reports by Coordinators and Observers as they come in. Take a moment to read about Fairfield County, which will reconvene on Saturday to do a hand recount of the 3% with a new machine (the same situation Monroe County faced on Tuesday). Nine more counties will begin their counts on Friday, with Defiance County scheduled for Saturday and Trumbull County for Monday. For now, all reports can be found at http://www.votecobb.org/press/

Free Press: Recount Fraud

Meanwhile, efforts to recount Ohio's vote may have been fatally tainted by the Republican Party, raising questions of what the GOP has to hide, and prompting demands for criminal prosecution.

New affidavits point to possible criminal activity by top Ohio election officials, raising yet more questions about the 2004 vote. Rhonda J. Frazier, a former employee of the Ohio Secretary of State's office, has confirmed in an affidavit taken by Cynthia Butler, working with freepress.org, that the Office had secret slush funds. Frazier says it also failed to comply with the requirements of "The Voting Reform Grant" that required all the voting machines in Ohio to be inventoried and tagged for security reasons.

"I was routinely told to violate the bidded contracts to order supplies from other companies for all 17 Secretary of State offices throughout the State which were cheaper vendors, leaving a cash surplus differential in the budget," Frazier states, "After complaining about the office's repeated practices of violating grants and contracts I was fired."

A letter from the Shelby County Board of Elections, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, admitted that data critical to a meaningful recount had been discarded, possibly illegally. Sworn testimony from election observers in Greene County indicated that ballots had been left loose on tables in an unlocked, unguarded building, open to manipulation and theft, prior to a recount. And in Lucas County and Hocking County, it was revealed that technicians from the Diebold and Triad companies had inexplicably taken control of voting machines and dismantled them, rendering verifiable recounts impossible.

On Wednesday, December 15, U.S. Representative John Conyers posted an affidavit from Douglas W. Jones, a professor of computer science and a voting technology consultant. In Professor Jones' opinion, the bizarre behavior by the Triad Company, which provides computer software and voting machines in 41 of Ohio's 88 counties, may have tainted the entire recount effort. A Triad employee took apart a computer used in the recounting process and inserted new parts as well as alleged modifications of the software. "As a result, the incident in Hocking County could compromise the statewide recount and undermine the public's trust in the credibility and accuracy of the recount," Jones stated in an affidavit.

Recount confirms Kerry's win

In Cuyahoga County, anyway....

John Kerry picked up 17 votes and George W. Bush lost six in Cuyahoga County's presidential recount.

That means the county still went for Kerry giving him 448,503 votes compared with 221,600 for Bush.

Witnessing the recount showed citizens where the election system can be manipulated, she said, so those holes can be plugged.

"That does not mean that the Board of Elections was doing anything wrong," she said, praising board workers and their cooperative spirit. "It means we need to rethink our system.

"This is an opportunity for us to engage as citizens in making a better electoral system."

Cuyahoga County elections director Michael Vu described many of the problems as innocent human errors.

Polls were crowded on Election Day, and poll workers may have not had voters sign in before they were given a ballot, he said. That's a problem that will be tracked next week when the county's voter history is conducted, Vu said.

The ballot mix-ups, reported earlier, were most likely a result of crowded polling places where voters inadvertently used machines from the wrong precinct. Precincts often share the same polling station.

Rep. Feeney Story Inches Closer to The Mainstream

From the Seminole Chronicle in Florida:

Republican Congressman Tom Feeney of Oviedo asked a computer programmer in September 2000, prior to that year's contested presidential vote in Florida, to write software that could alter vote totals on touch-screen voting machines, the programmer said.

Former computer programmer Clint Curtis made the claim Monday in sworn testimony to Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee investigating allegations of voter fraud in the 2004 presidential election involving touch-screen voting in Ohio.

In his testimony, Curtis said that Feeney, then a member of the Florida House of Representative, met with Curtis and other employees of Yang Enterprises, an Oviedo software company, and asked if the company could create a program that would allow a user to alter the vote totals while using the touch-screen machine. The program had to be written so that even the human-readable computer code would not show its illicit capabilities, Curtis recalled.

Curtis said he wrote a prototype program for Feeney, and that he believed the program might not only be usable on touch-screen voting machines, which some counties - predominantly in South Florida - now use, but also on optical-scan machines, which most of the state's counties used in the 2004 elections

They also have an editorial:

The clear path to maintaining public trust in our elections process is to ensure that adoption of new technologies uses common sense. If there's a risk of tampering -which, through computers, can be widespread and unnoticed - the software that runs those voting machines needs to be open to public inspection, and each machine that has software installed on it should be inspected by experts before they are taken to the precincts. Otherwise, votes will continue to be called into question, and America's faith in the power of the people will wither further with each election.

Ohio Voters Refile Election Challenge

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Voters who claim problems with Ohio voting machines Nov. 2 indicated fraud refiled a request with the Ohio Supreme Court on Friday to overturn the presidential results.

The 40 voters cite reports of machine errors, double-counting of some ballots and a shortage of voting machines in predominantly minority precincts as reasons to throw out the election results.

Return of the hanging chad

For those who only pay attention to the Mainstream Media, here's the latest from the AP.

Kerry/Edwards On Tampering

From The Raw Story:

Ohio Justice Throws Out Election Challenge

On a technicality...

The Ohio Supreme Court's chief justice on Thursday threw out a challenge to the state's presidential election results.

A lawyer for the voters bringing the case said he would refile the challenge as early as Friday.

Chief Justice Thomas Moyer ruled that the request improperly challenged two separate election results. Ohio law only allows one race to be challenged in a single complaint, he said

Ohio County Recount Info

Lots of good info compiled by "georgia10" over at Daily Kos...

Some more suspicious activites...

More Suspicious Activity: Franklin County, Ohio

At 4 pm today, after failing to get a match of hand counted ballots with punch card tabulator (ESS), two hand counts and two times through machine, after stating they were awaiting a call back from that company to have a new machine delivered, less than 30 seconds later convened a board meeting, voted to suspend recount, to await a new machine from ESS, and recount will be re-done Saturday, same exact precincts, the building is now closed, you are to exit the facility. BOE blaming issues on "machine failure" in order to avoid the now required entire county hand count. Precints were not random, they were selected by BOE, one from the Dem and one from the Repub.

Pre-Selected Random Recount

Among the problems identified so far in Ohio recounts was the careful pre-selection of a precinct in Medina County that would not have voting anomalies, so that the initial "3% recount" mandated by Ohio law would not return a mismatch between the initial tally and the recount.

What are they trying to hide?

"None of these ballots should be counted"

Washington State Republican Chairman Chris Vance: "None of these ballots should be counted."

573 absentee ballots had not been counted because the voters' signatures had not been scanned into the county's computer system. Election workers should have checked the paper files, but instead the ballots were mistakenly rejected.

Still to be decided was the fate of 22 other newly discovered ballots. They were found in several polling places in the side bins of plastic bases in which polling machines sit, said Bill Huennekens, county election superintendent.

Yep, those 573 ballots cast shouldn't be counted because of a SNAFU committed by election workers or because they were misplaced.

Apparently the Constitution allows you the right to vote only if it gets counted election night. Any mistake, even not your own, means your vote can be cast aside.

Tampering Lawsuit Includes Kerry/Edwards

The lawyers for Green presidential candidate David Cobb and Libertarian presidential candidate Michael Badnarik, along with Kerry-Edwards 2004 have added election tampering to a civil suit filed against the state of Ohio over problems with the state's recount, RAW STORY has learned.

The suit, detailed here, alleges that a manufacturer of voting machines, Triad Election Systems, which serves 43 counties in the state, is tampering with the recount. It is unclear exactly what recourse the plaintiffs' seek; the filing adds on to an original suit to have the recount take place before Ohio electors meet, which failed in the courts. Green Party spokesman Blair Bobier did not respond to immediate calls for comment.

Exchanging Letters

Buzzflash has excerpts from and links to PDFs of the letters exchanged between Rep John Conyers and Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell...

Election Fraud Exposed?

William Rivers Pitt has the story of various reports of suspicious activities of techies from Triad 'helping' with the recount:

He went back into the tabulation room. Shortly after that he (illegible) stated that the computer was ready for the recount and told us not to turn the computer off so it would charge up.

Before Lisa ran the tests, Michael said to turn the computer off. Lisa said, " I thought you said we weren't supposed to turn it off." He said turn it off and right back on and it should come up. It did come up and Lisa ran the tests. Michael gave us instructions on how to explain the rotarien, what the tests mean, etc. No advice on how to handle the attorneys but to have our Prosecuting Attorney at the recount to answer any of their legal questions. He said not to turn the computer off until after the recount.

He advised Lisa and I on how to post a "cheat sheet" on the wall so that only the board members and staff would know about it and and what the codes meant so the count would come out perfect and we wouldn't have to do a full hand recount of the county.

If you need the Mainstream Media's version, fair and balanced, here's the
NY Times version.

Write Your "Elected" Representatives

Rep. Conyers is looking for a million emails to help investigate the legitimacy of our electoral system.

Moveon makes it easy to do...

Washington Post Posts Recap

MSNBC has the Washington Post recap story. Lots of the stories you can read elsewhere here tied up in one package. Here's an excerpt or two:

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Tanya Thivener's is a tale of two voting precincts in Franklin County. In her city neighborhood, which is vastly Democratic and majority black, the 38-year-old mortgage broker found a line snaking out of the precinct door.

She stood in line for four hours -- one hour in the rain -- and watched dozens of potential voters mutter in disgust and walk away without casting a ballot. Afterward, Thivener hopped in her car and drove to her mother's house, in the vastly Republican and majority white suburb of Harrisburg. How long, she asked, did it take her to vote?

Fifteen minutes, her mother replied.

"It was . . . poor planning," Thivener said. "County officials knew they had this huge increase in registrations, and yet there weren't enough machines in the city. You really hope this wasn't intentional."

Electoral problems prevented many thousands of Ohioans from voting on Nov. 2. In Columbus, bipartisan estimates say that 5,000 to 15,000 frustrated voters turned away without casting ballots.

But similar problems occurred across the state and fueled protest marches and demands for a recount. The foul-ups appeared particularly acute in Democratic-leaning districts, according to interviews with voters, poll workers, election observers and election board and party officials, as well as an examination of precinct voting patterns in several cities.

While some promote conspiratorial theories, most have a straightforward bottom line. "A lot of people left in the four hours I waited," recalled Thivener, the mortgage broker from Columbus. "A lot of them were young black men who were saying over and over: 'We knew this would happen.'

"How," she asked, "is that good for democracy?"

Meanwhile, In Washington (State)

Democrat May Be Leading in Wash. Race

Through all the counting and recounting in the closest governor's race in state history, Republican Dino Rossi has held the slimmest of margins over Democrat Christine Gregoire - even picking up a few votes here and there as a tedious hand recount grinds on.

For the first time since the Nov. 2 election, it looks as though the tide could be turning.

Election officials in the Democratic stronghold of King County announced Monday that they would count more than 500 ballots that were mistakenly rejected after the election - possibly enough to swing the election to Gregoire.

Rossi won the Nov. 2 election by 261 votes, but saw that margin shrink to 42 votes after a machine recount of all 2.9 million ballots cast. As of Monday night, with 24 of the state's 39 counties completing their hand recounts, Rossi had gained 46 votes.

But King County Elections Director Dean Logan said an error had "prevented valid ballots from being counted" in the heavily Democratic county that includes Seattle. Gregoire won about 58 percent of the vote there.

Logan said workers did not count 561 absentee ballots because the signatures on them did not match computerized voter registration records. But he discovered Sunday that the signatures simply were not on file in the county's computer system.

Kerry/Edwards Letter

Hey, didja hear somebody in the Electoral College voted for Edwards for Prez instead of Kerry? Just another isolated glitch?

Anyway, if you want to read the whole Kerry/Edwards letter to the boards of elections in Ohio, Buzzflash obliges.

Vote Machine Tampering?

From the Raw Story/Blue Lemur:

“He then headed into the back room where Triad supplies tabulators, that is the machine that counts the ballots, is kept. This Triad representative told them that there was problem with the system, that the system had a bad battery and it had ‘lost all its data.’

“He then took the computer apart and started swapping parts in and out of it. And in another [incomprehensible] in the room. And he had spare parts in his coat, as one of the people moved in [sic] remarked how very heavy it was.

“He finally reassembled everything and said it was working but not to turn it off. He then asked which precinct would be counted in the 3 percent recount test and that one which had been selected as if it had the right number of votes was relayed to him he then went back and did something else to the tabulator.

“The Triad Systems representative suggested that since the hand recount had to match the machine count exactly and since it would hard to memorize the several numbers which would be needed to get the count exactly right, that they should post this series of numbers on the wall where they would not be noticed by observers such as to make them look like employee information or something similar.

“The people doing the hand count could then he said just report those numbers no matter what the actually counted in the ballot. This would then ‘match’ the tabulator report for this precinct exactly.

Varying Standards

Shouldn't all recounts be the same, as per Bush V Gore?

Ohio elections boards on Monday revealed various plans for handling new recount requests by Democrat John Kerry's presidential campaign that range from visually inspecting some ballots to getting a neutral group involved.

Over the weekend, Kerry asked the county elections officials to allow his witnesses to visually inspect the 92,000 ballots cast in Ohio in which no vote for president was recorded.

The request was one of 11 items that Kerry asked for as part of the recount that Ohio's 88 county boards of elections will begin this week.

When contacted Monday by The Associated Press, many boards officials said they hadn't heard about the weekend request by Donald McTigue, the lawyer handling the recount for the Kerry campaign.

A few elections officials said they would cooperate, while some officials said there was just no way they could comply with some demands.

Messing With A Recount?

Of course, the only reason for a fraudulent recount is a fraudlent result you have to match...

The House Judiciary Cmte., meeting in Columbus, Ohio to investigate presidential election vote irregularities in the state, has heard evidence that preparations to conduct a fraudulent recount are underway statewide.

In early testimony, chairman of the forum, Rep. John Conyers heard from Green party presidential candidate, David Cobb that employees of punch card vendor, Triad Governmental Systems, Inc. (Triad GSI) are attempting to orchestrate a fraudulent recount of the 3 percent of precincts likely to be included in the first phase of the recount process.

Cobb cited one case detailed by an --as yet anonymous-- informant, that a Triad GSI employee had told staff at the Columbus County Board of Elections office to inconspicuously note a prepared recount result, then report this data irrespective of the actual recount. The Triad GSI representative had also tampered with Triad voting equipment in the offices.

"This is going on, all over the state," Cobb told the hearing.

Another BradBlog Exclusive

From Bradblog:

The BRAD BLOG has just received an exclusive first-hand account of Clint Curtis' sworn testimony (as reported earlier) to the Judiciary Committee Democrats holding hearings this morning in Columbus, Ohio on Election 2004 Voting Irregularities.

The software programmer, whose sworn affidavit was first reported by The BRAD BLOG, named Republican U.S. Congressman Tom Feeney (a Republican member of the Judiciary Committee!) as having asked him to create "vote-rigging" software when he was a Florida Congressman prior to 2000 elections!

Curtis was the only witness to be sworn in at today's hearings.

Here is the exclusive account as we've just received it by a very reliable BRAD BLOG source inside the committee hearings!


The following account may sound melodramatic but it is highly accurate.

None of these are quotes and represent my best recollection.

At apprx 1p, after a witness had finished, cliff arnebeck -- who had given a presentation some time before -- interjected and asked to call one more witness. He was given permission to do so. He said he was calling clint curtis.

Some of the audience literally gasped while others applauded. They clearly knew who he was.

Curtis stood at the front of room with arnebeck seated behind him. Curtis was about five to ten feet from the members of congress. At the front of the room, he placed his hand on a bible and was sworn. To my knowledge, he was the only witness sworn.

Arnebeck began a direct examination of curtis with basic questions, name, residence....

Then got to his qualifications.

Then, he asked curtis something like whether voting machines could be hacked. He said yes. Arnebeck asked him on what he based that opinion. He said because I wrote a program that could do it. Arnebeck asked when that happened. Curtis said feeney had asked him to design such a program at yang enterprises.

Jaws dropped. Tubbs jones and waters looked shocked.

Tubbs jones, waters and nadler asked questions. Waters asked him to repeat who asked him to do it. Congressman feeney, he said. Nadler asked him some questions, as did tubbs jones and a state senator.

Curtis was asked what he would conclude if there was such a substantial deviation btwn exit polls and actual results. He said he would conclude the election had been hacked. Gasps. Could have heard a pin drop.

In the end, curtis was very very convincing to everyone in attendance. He was a show stopper, a stunner. It was a really amazing moment.

"Final" Popular Vote Total

DavidHW at DailyKos:

I've been tallying since election night, and now, all states have reported final official results. The bad news? Bush still leads. The good news? His final margin dropped to under 3 million votes.
The totals:

Bush: 62,027,466 (50.73%)
Kerry: 59,027,612 (48.28%)
Nader: 456,356 (0.37%)
Badnarik: 396,888 (0.32%)
Others: 361,079 (0.30%)

Bush's margin: 2,999,854 (2.45%)

Total Votes Counted for President: 122,269,401

Kerry Speaks Up

Kerry lawyer asks for visual inspection of some Ohio ballots

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Democrat John Kerry is asking county elections officials to allow his witnesses to visually inspect the 92,000 ballots cast in Ohio in which no vote for president was recorded, a Kerry lawyer said Sunday night.

The request is one of 11 items that Kerry is asking for as part of the recount that Ohio's 88 county boards of election will begin this week, according to a letter sent to the boards over the weekend.

"We're trying to increase the transparency of the election process," said Donald McTigue, the lawyer handling the recount for the Kerry campaign.
McTigue said the visual inspection is allowed under state law. The goal is to look for potential votes that were not registered by the tabulating equipment.

Other requests include the use of independent experts to check the programming and calibration of the election equipment, something McTigue said has never been allowed.

McTigue also asked that counties accept the help of a group called Votewatch to determine which precincts will be chosen for that part of the vote that will be counted by hand. McTigue said using the group will ensure that the ballots are selected using a valid random sampling method.

The procedures require 3 percent of ballots to be counted by hand in each county, and then all ballots to be counted if the initial check turns up problems.

McTigue would not speculate how many of the items the counties will honor.

"Several requests are trying to push the edge of envelope," he said.

Carlo LoParo, spokesman for Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, said state law will guide counties on how to do the recount.

"I don't know if Mr. McTigue is in a position to dictate the terms of a recount," he said.

Give Those Guys Credit

They think of everything to suppress the vote. First, create a voting machine shortage. Then...

One polling place in Howard County, Ohio, that was under court order to permit everyone in line to cast their vote sent them all home at midnight because the order applied only to Election Day itself.

Lockdown? Or Open House?

Dayton Daily News:

Election observers examining Greene County voter records were told Friday the records were to be sealed after Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell ordered county boards of election to consider all election-related records as falling within a "canvassing period."
This period usually lasts about 10 days after the election, but was being extended because an official recount is under way in the state, according to Blackwell spokesman Carlo LoParo.

LoParo said the records are to be treated with the "utmost care" until the recount is over.

The two election observers say they later found the Greene County Board of Elections office unlocked Saturday morning, fueling their suspicions they weren't allowed to examine records that might have been tampered with.

"It is shocking that they would first deny us access, and then leave the records unlocked overnight," said Joan Quinn, a retired lawyer from Sacramento, Calif., an election observer acting on behalf of the Green Party, which asked for a recount of the Ohio presidential vote.

Election board officials returned Saturday afternoon to lock up the building after they were told of the security lapse.

The Scoop: More Absentee Votes than Voters

A careful review of the absentee vote in one Ohio county revealed that many more absentee votes were cast than there were absentee voters identified.

All absentee voters must be identified as such by name and residence in the precinct poll books of the precinct in which they are registered. Over 100 precinct poll books in Trumbull County were checked for absentee voters and that number of actual absentee voters was compared to the certified number of absentee votes. There was an inflated difference in nearly every precinct of the five communities examined. The five communities whose poll books were carefully inspected for an absentee vote overcount are: Warren City (311), Howland TownshipThe 106 precincts of these five Ohio communities, about 39% of all precincts in Trumbull County, netted a total of 580 absentee votes for which there were no absentee voters identified in the poll books.

“When there are more votes than voters, there is a big problem” stated Dr. Werner Lange, author of this study which would have been completed weeks earlier if Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, co-chair of the Ohio Bush-Cheney campaign, had not unlawfully ordered all 88 boards of elections to prevent public inspection of poll books until after certification of the vote.

Recount Update

From votecobb.org:

Yesterday was a very busy day; most of the Boards of Elections were finally answering the questions of our Regional and County Coordinators.

Eighty-eight counties and it feels like 50 different start times. For example, we have at least six counties starting on Monday the 13th - at 7am, 9am, 9:30 am, 2 @ 10am, 1pm, 3pm....not like they could make it easy, right?

Monday, December 13th also brings lots of activity to Columbus, Ohio. Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones along with Judiciary Committee Ranking Member John Conyers, Reps. Maxine Waters and Ted Strickland, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson will hold a forum addressing Voting Irregularities in Ohio to take place at Columbus City Hall, Columbus City Council Chambers, 90 West Broad Street, Columbus.

Meanwhile, outside the State Capitol, protesters will be gathering from 11am - 1pm to demonstrate their outrage that Ohio's electors will cast their votes on the day the recount finally begins. David Cobb will address the crowd around 12:15.

Tuesday, December 14th is the big day for DRE (Direct Recording Electronic)
voting machines with Franklin County (515, 472 votes) and Mahoning County (131,
938 votes) as well as Pickaway and Ross Counties starting recounts of....what exactly?

DREs have no voter-verified paper trail.

Election Fraud In Ohio

Big news from Ohio Election Fraud. IF accurate, legally it's election fraud.

On Friday December 10 two certified volunteers for the Ohio Recount team assigned to Greene County were in process recording voting information from minority precincts in Greene County, and were stopped mid-count by a surprise order from Secretary of State Blackwell’s office. The Director Board of Elections stated that “all voter records for the state of Ohio were “locked-down,” and now they are not considered public records.”

Quinn and Roberson asked specifically for the legal authority authorizing Mr. Blackwell to “lock down” public records. Garman stated that it was the Secretary of State’s decision. Ohio statute requires the Directors of Boards of Election to comply with public requests for inspection and copying of public election records. As the volunteer team continued recording information from the precinct records in question, Garman entered the room and stated she was withdrawing permission to inspect or copy any voting records at the Board of Elections. Garman then physically removed the precinct book from Ms. Roberson’s hands.

Ohio Revised Code Title XXXV Elections, Sec. 3503.26 that requires all election records to be made available for public inspection and copying. ORC Sec. 3599.161 makes it a crime for any employee of the Board of Elections to knowingly prevent or prohibit any person from inspecting the public records filed in the office of the Board of Elections. Finally, ORC Sec. 3599.42 clearly states: “A violation of any provision of Title XXXV (35) of the Revised Code constitutes a prima facie case of election fraud within the purview of such Title.”

Free Press: Turnout Oddities and Missing Votes

The Free Press strikes again with a story on the suspicious turnout patterns in Ohio. Basically, allegedly, Bush voters had historic turnout percentages and Kerry voters barely cared....

The range is striking, and turnout is distinctly higher in the Bush precincts than in the Kerry precincts. In some precincts the reported turnout is too high to be credible. Turnout above 90% is almost unheard of.

Altogether there were 50 precincts in Toledo with less than 60% reported turnout. All of them were won overwhelmingly by John Kerry. The vote in the aggregate was 14,830 to 2,707, better than 5 to 1. But look at the distribution, or more precisely, the concentration. All 6 of the precincts with less than 50% reported turnout are located in three wards.

The optical scanners used in Lucas County were not precinct-based. They were of the central count variety. The results could have been altered without anybody at the precinct level knowing about it. If turnout had been equal in Toledo and the suburbs, Kerry’s plurality in Lucas County would have been considerably larger. There is an old adage that says elections are stolen at the precinct level. This election was rigged at the ward and county levels.

They have another story on the voters who stood in long lines to vote and then allegedly decided to skip voting for a president, with stats looking at this issue which was raised in the 14-page letter from four Members of Congress to Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Secretary of State:

“According to post election canvassing, many ballots were cast without any valid selection for president. For example, two precincts in Montgomery County had an undervote rate of over 25% each ? accounting for nearly 6,000 voters who stood in line to vote, but purportedly declined to vote for president. This is in stark contrast to the 2% of undervoting county-wide. Disturbingly, predominantly Democratic precincts had 75% more undervotes than those that were predominantly Republican. It is inconceivable that such a large number of people supposedly did not have a preference for president in such a controversial and highly contested election.”

The conclusion?

The strikingly partisan distribution of the uncounted ballots is nothing short of shocking. There are 588 precincts in Montgomery County. As the above table shows, the percentage of uncounted ballots is 4.0% or more in 47 precincts, and every single one of these precincts was won by John Kerry, nearly all of them by overwhelming margins. Only two were even close.

Altogether, in these 47 precincts, Kerry won 14,871 votes to 2,032 for Bush, a margin of 7 to 1. In these 47 precincts there are 920 uncounted regular ballots, or 21.0% of the county wide total. In the other 541 precincts in Montgomery County, among which the uncounted regular ballots are distributed at a rate of 6.4 per precinct, Kerry won 128,106 votes to 136,329 for Bush. Thus, 21.0% of the uncounted regular ballots are in 8.7% of the precincts that accounted for 6.0% of the votes in the county.

In these 47 precincts, which went for Kerry by a margin of 7 to 1, the “spoilage” rate of regular ballots was 5.16%, compared to 1.31% for the rest of the county, and 1.70% for the whole of the county.

There is an old political adage which says that only a close election can be stolen. In a close election, uncounted ballots can make all the difference.

The Mainstream Flows Our Way

AP picks up the election story. Not much new for those who search the internet, but it hits the mainstream media....

Grassroots activists say politicians who refuse to discuss voting concerns will lose respect — and votes.

"If the Democratic leadership doesn't step up, why do they think that the activists on the ground — the people who collected millions of dollars, made phone calls and registered people to vote — would do it again in 2008?" said Don Goldmacher of the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club of Oakland, Calif.

Ohio's Republican Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell, has conceded that a recount would likely alter the vote tally somewhat.

Off Kilter Results in Cleveland

The election results tabulated from the two precincts at Benedictine High School seemed off-kilter from the start.

Had more than a third of the 1,000-plus voters at the East Side school really embraced the ideals of Michael Peroutka, the candidate of the Constitution Party, and Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik?

Could 215 people have voted for Peroutka in a precinct that delivered 299 votes for John Kerry?

Did Badnarik win 164 votes to Kerry's 334 in the precinct that was in the same room?

At more than a dozen Cuyahoga County precincts - primarily on Cleveland's East Side - spikes in votes for the little-known third-party contenders shot up a flare that something went awry on Election Day.

Some "smoke signals from hell" from the blogosphere? (Nah, those yahoos caught this a while back).

Nope, the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Of course, it's an honest mistake, and what are a few hundred votes here and there anyway? Didn't help things that this heavily Democratic area didn't have enough machines and then had one of them break down.

Upcoming Events

From Ohio Election Fraud (formerly Fairness), a lengthy list of upcoming events.

84 of 89 Voting Machine Isolated "Glitches" Favored Bush

The Revere Report quotes TruthIsAll:

OF 89 NATIONWIDE RANDOM MACHINE GLICHES, 84 KERRY VOTES CAME UP BUSH!

TALK ABOUT A SMOKING GUN.
I WON'T EVEN ATTEMPT TO CALCULATE THE ODDS OF THIS. AND THE INCIDENTS WERE SPREAD AROUND THE NATION IN SEPARATE PRECINCTS.

https://voteprotect.org/index.php?display=EIRMapNation

TO COME UP WITH THESE STATISTICS, I FILTERED "MACHINE PROBLEMS" FROM THE 40,000 VOTER INCIDENT DATABASE. THEN I SEARCHED FOR THE NAME "KERRY" IN THE DESCRIPTION OF THE PROBLEM IN ORDER TO EXTRACT THOSE INCIDENTS IN WHICH IT WAS INDICATED JUST WHO THE VOTER WAS TRYING TO VOTE FOR. OF COURSE, AS YOU WOULD EXPECT, IN EVERY CASE, BOTH NAMES (KERRY AND BUSH) CAME UP, TYPICALLY AS: "TRIED TO VOTE FOR KERRY BUT THE MACHINE REGISTERED BUSH".

THERE WERE SURELY MANY MORE INSTANCES OF THIS TYPE WHICH WENT UNREPORTED. BUT THIS IS A GOOD REPRESENTATIVE SAMPLE.

OF THE 89 INCIDENTS:
84 KERRY VOTES CAME UP BUSH ON THE SCREEN
2 BUSH VOTES CAME UP KERRY
3 WERE UNCLEAR

MOST OF THE INCIDENTS WERE IN FLORIDA AND OHIO.

Professor Freeman Stands By Stats

Freeman concluded in a paper on Nov. 10 - a paper, by the way, he has revised twice since - that the odds of exit polls in the critical states of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania all being so far off were roughly 662,000 to 1.

Three weeks later, Freeman says he stands by his findings. At the same time, he admits being flabbergasted by the response: More than 1,000 e-mails - a large percentage of which were shockingly mean-spirited, he says - and about 100 requests for interviews, most of which he's had to turn down.

(He's grateful, by the way, for the many positive e-mails he received from faculty members and students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Which, he acknowledged, is a big reason he granted my request for an interview. "Madison," he suggested, "is a lot like Philadelphia. I mean, the truth of it is, I don't know a single Bush supporter at this university.")

Freeman says his intent from the beginning was just "to generate some attention" about the discrepancy and to raise a legitimate question: What caused it? "But I didn't know it was going to generate such a reaction."

Granted, "every statistician is going to come up with a slightly different number," he adds. "But I really thought I was just stating the obvious. I don't think there's much to disagree with."

In fact, Freeman says, he expects that a second paper he'll be releasing this week will be far more controversial. That paper, he says, analyzes the different explanations given for the discrepancy - such as the contention by Republicans that Bush supporters disproportionately refused to respond to the pollsters.

That may well be true, Freeman says. "But, you know, nobody's provided any evidence of that."

Whatever the case, Freeman was feeling pretty darn good on Monday. Although the major media virtually ignored his paper when it first came out, CNN, USA Today and The Washington Post have all requested interviews in recent days, he says.

Former Rep Arrested

A former US congressmen went from the halls of congress to the halls of justice and was jailed in Columbus after attempting to deliver a letter about voting irregularities to Secretary of State Ken Blackwell.

Dan Hamburg was a California congressman in the early 1990s. This week Hamburg and his wife have been part of a group watching the latest developments in the Ohio recount.

Columbus police arrested Hamburg and his wife, Carrie, Wednesday for trespassing after refusing to leave a private downtown building that houses the secretary's office.

A Republican Steps Up

Meanwhile, Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Administration Committee, said he will hold hearings on the election early next year.

Of course, he's still a Republican:

“Election reform is a serious issue that requires serious, bipartisan examination and debate. It does not deserve what we are seeing today — partisan attacks and unsubstantiated claims disguised as fact in a faux hearing,” Ney said, referring to the Conyers’ hearing.

We Do Not Concede

We don't!

Latest From the Free Press

The Free Press has a good summary of the story so far....

Conyers Hearings Wednesday

You have to go to sites like this for coverage of the hearings on election irregularities today:

DailyKos

ILCA

Raw Story

common cause

truthout

The Nation or Yahoo's version of the Nation's story

Olbermann

What Is Bush Afraid Of?

Recount in Ohio? Not yet, says W.

The recount will probably not begin until next week because of a five-day waiting period to allow candidates time to arrange witnesses to the counting. Cobb, Badnarik and the Kerry camp gave permission for the recount to start before the five-day period. The Bush campaign did not waive the waiting period.

Of course, if we had a liberal media, they would be asking Bush and Co. what exactly is their motivation for not waiving the waiting period. They all say the recount is pointless, why not get it over with?

Mandate Watch

As of Dec. 8th, Bush won 50.75% of the official votes (that were allowed to be counted).

Proposed challenge. Pour water into a glass up to the 50.75% mark and ask everyone if it's more empty or more full.

Faithless Elector Watch

Of course, this is a fun "what if", but only really comes into play if some foul play is proved between now and the final certification.

Is There An American Way Any More?

People for the American Way shatters the rose colored glasses:

Among the most disturbing reports were the more than a thousand reports of voter suppression or intimidation at the polls, including:
Police stationed outside a Cook County, Illinois polling place requesting photo ID and telling voters if they had been convicted of a felony that they could not vote.


In Arizona voters at multiple polls were confronted by an individual wearing a black tee shirt with “US Constitution Enforcer” and a military-style belt that gave the appearance he was armed. He asked voters if they were citizens, accompanied by a cameraman who filmed the encounters.


Numerous incidents of intimidation by partisan challengers at predominately low-income and minority precincts.


Misinformation campaigns delivered through anonymous flyers or phone calls with a variety of intimidating or vote-suppressing messages, advising voters to go to the polls on November 3rd rather than November 2, or giving other false information on voting rights. A few of the most outrageous examples include:
"If you already voted in any election this year, you can’t vote in the Presidential Election."


"If anybody in your family has ever been found guilty of anything you can’t vote in the Presidential Election."


"If you violate any of these laws, you can get 10 years in prison and your children will be taken away from you."

While workers are still entering voter complaints into the Election Incident Reporting System, the 39,000 reports already entered include a wide range of problems surrounding voter registration, absentee ballots, voting machines, and provisional ballots.

“Since we targeted 3,500 vulnerable precincts, we saw only the tip of the iceberg. We found human error, equipment problems, bureaucratic snafus and outright attempts to deceive and misinform the voters everywhere. Extrapolate our findings to the rest of the country, and you see a picture of a flawed election system, badly in need of reform,” said Neas.

A New Blog

A lot like the old blog.

Bradblog was overwhelmed with hits and unreachable after the 'whistleblower' report, so he's come up with bradblogtoo for his latest news, including media interest in the Curtis (whistleblower) issue:

While many internet folks have been all over this since yesterday (and on the Election 2004 issue in general for moreone exhausting month now), I can confirm as well that a number of very prominent mainstream media organizations are also currently looking into this. Even several organizations that The BRAD BLOG has been a tad critical of over the last several weeks for not investigating and reporting on so many issues that have long been well-worthy of it. I am glad to see some folks are sitting up and taking notice finally.

And you can read his take on the Bev Harris take on the Curtis affair. If you don't know who these characters, you've got a lot of Who Really Won or google reading to do...

Voting Complaints? I Hadn't Heard

The public editor at admits they ignore their readers:

The limited coverage also reflects the evolving relationship between newspapers and Web logs, commonly known as blogs. Skepticism about those blogs among the press is well-founded; several theories and rumors abound on blogs, including many regarding the election, and often are discredited. But newspapers that ignore significant issues on the Web do so at their own peril; they're ignoring topics that matter to many readers.

"It's another reminder that the blog has become an important force in our lives, but that just because something is there, it doesn't mean it's more authentic or more real," says Tom Rosenstiel, of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. "But it does mean that it deserves to be examined."

Rosenstiel says the press needs to do a better job of tapping and vetting what is discussed in the blogosphere -- because blogs often pick up on what matters to many people. "We're not very good at capturing the discussion going on around the kitchen table and the water cooler," he says. "That's what the blogs can do better than the press can do.

And if a significant number of readers have questions about the election process, the newspaper has a responsibility to address those questions. Americans already are skeptical about major institutions, and a recent Harris poll shows 16 percent of those who responded thought the elections were not conducted fairly.

Cannonfire: We Meant This Time!!

Goes off on many of these subjects...

What other proof can we ever hope to have in this modern age of paperless ballots and hackable software?

This is the third election in a row in which the exits undervalued the Republican vote. As one wag has put it: "Last time when we said next time, we meant this time!"

The time for patience has passed. We need a damn good explanation right this minute for this continuing pattern of error -- and not just in the most recent election. Absent such an explanation, we should all confess that democracy has ended in the United States, and that any further contributions to the Democratic party would be pointles.

The (Alleged) Programmer Speaks

He answers questions here.

Says it's too late to detect the fraud, if it happened....

DNC to Investigate Ohio Voting Irregularities

The Washington Post reports:

The leader of the Democratic National Committee announced yesterday that he will launch an investigation into voting irregularities in Ohio, where lines snaked outside some inner-city polling places on Election Day and provisional ballots were sometimes in short supply.

Later we read:

(Blackewell spokesman) said that at one polling station, at Kenyon College in Knox County, some voters had to wait six hours because Democratic and Republican campus groups registered thousands of students. They voted at a precinct "that normally handles a few hundred people," LoParo said.

Maybe that's one of the reasons we register voters-so we know in advance that we may need a few more machines than we did when we had fewer registered voters.

Of course, to 'balance' the charges we have to read this again:

Tara Wall, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, said Democrats should investigate claims against themselves as well as those against their opponents.

"The Democrats need to look at the intimidation and voter disenfranchisement that took place on their behalf in Colorado, Ohio, Illinois and Pennsylvania," she said.

There were 68 cases in 16 states that county clerks and agencies were reporting thousands of suspicious registrations, including dead people, fictional characters like Dick Tracy and Mary Poppins, and people who lived on vacant lots," Wall said.

Of course, the liberal WashPost doesn't investigate if any of these Dicks and Marys voted.

Or tell us exactly how goofy registrations=intimidation or disenfranchisement.

Voting Machines Go Missing

“Twenty-one touch-screen voting machines in Broward County were replaced because of technical problems, said Gisela Salas, the county’s deputy supervisor of elections. At least one of the machines had shown votes cast for the wrong candidates.”

This striking sentence in the fourteenth paragraph of a Nov. 4 AP wire story was merely the accidental starting point for RAW STORY research into voting irregularities in Broward County, Florida.

I came across Ms. Salas’ statement by sheer accident while researching another story. Twenty-one voting machines being removed and replaced on Election Day would seem to merit more than a four sentence description. I wondered as to the process by which these machines were taken and replaced. Who supervised this process?

You can read the rest here.