Anders als innen sagen wir Amerikanische Politik, werden Vorwahlen Abstimmungen dünn aus den Grund in Pakistan gebissen. Die Resultate ein jedoch sind durch veröffentlicht worden Dämmerung. Geleitet während Januar 2008, stimmt der Uns-gegründete Terror frei morgen Entdeckungen ab, daß 70% von Pakistanern Präsidenten Pervez Musharraf beendigen wünschen und daß der PPP die populärste Partei diese Seite der Wahlen ist, mit 36.7% von Abstimmungwählern. Das PML (N) von Nawaz Sharif folgt mit 25.3% und das PML (Q), das sich stützt, Musharraf kommt mit 12% herein.
Mohamed Ziauddin Sonderkorrespondent der Dämmerung Anmerkungen:
„Eine saubere Schleife für den PPP an den Wahlen fällt nicht in das gameplan von Musharraf, von London, von Brüssel und von Washington. So gehen sie zusammen mit Musharraf, wenn er in Ordnung bringt und holt in ein gehangenes Parlament.“
Mohamed Ziauddin warnt von den möglichen Gefahren voran:
„Bewegung der Rechtsanwälte', Zivilgesellschaft und Kursteilnehmer sind noch dort, und sie verderben für einen Kampf. Wenn es den bloßesten Tip der Takelung gibt, kommen PPP Verfechter heraus auf die Straßen und ihr Ächzen macht zu das Plündern und die Aufstände. Die Rechtsanwälte können nicht unterjocht werden.“
Wenn ich unterstreiche, daß das Militär immer mobilised kann, antwortet Ziauddin, daß die Armee und die Förster nicht an ihren Selbst abfeuern:
„In Punjab, Lahore zum Beispiel, haben viele der Armee Familie Mitglieder, die den PPP stützen; sie werden zusammengehangen. Mit Rechtsanwälten können sie baton-aufgeladen und heftig zerreissen-gassed sein. Ihre Zahlen sind nur in den Hunderten. PPP Verfechter sind in den Tausenden. Die einzige Weise, sie zu stoppen würde sein, an ihnen mit Gewehrkugeln abzufeuern.“
Zensur und seine eigene Zeitung Gruppe besprechend, sagt Ziauddin das, obgleich Musharraf ihn als sieht Reizmittel, der Präsident sieht nicht die Dämmerung so viel einer Drohung, wie sie auf englisch gedruckt und veröffentlicht hat. Die Diplomaten und die Ratternkategorien, die es lesen, zählen nicht; sie sind nicht eine erhebliche Stimmebank. Musharraf wird mehr über die Urdu-sprechenden Führungen wie Geo Nachrichten betroffen, welches, wie ich in ein früheres blog schrieb, abhängig von einer 78 Tagesverdunkelung war.
Speaking of which, and completely at a tangent, Geo reporters name their cameramen with each sign-off. Considering that the latter often have a trickier job and get less recognition than on-screen reporters, I think that’s a little bit progressive…
Fresh from her confrontations in New Hampshire during which public officials were grilled about slapdash chain of custody and ballot box tampering issues, Bev Harris is now convinced that a “criminal enterprise” is running the primary recount.
Harris was fundamental in the vetting and production of the HBO special Hacking Democracy, and has contributed towards bringing charges against vote fraudsters who cheated in Ohio in 2004.
Harris traveled to New Hampshire personally to discover for herself the disgraceful lapses in chain of custody for the memory cards and ballot boxes used in the recent primary.
Harris is featured in the video below (uploaded today) asking public officials about slits in ballot boxes as they bizarrely deny that the slits are big enough to allow tampering, amongst a myriad of other disturbing questions about chain of custody.
“What they’re doing here is a criminal enterprise,” Harris told the Alex Jones Show today, “It has all the earmarks of it.”
Charismatic democratic leader, Barack Obama had a stunning lead going into the New Hampshire primary, with a huge media blitz, and a lot of energy behind him. Then all of a sudden, despite exit polls showing huge leads for Senator Obama, despite no big moves for Hillary Clinton, Senator Obama looses the New Hampshire primary.
Inexplicable Last Minute Win?
The Zogby poll released Tuesday January 8th, 2008, the day of the election, gives Senator Obama a stunning 42% of votes over 29% for Hillary Clinton. The poll states, “Obama’s margin over Clinton has opened up. He leads among all groups except women and voters over 65.” (www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1417)
What is of grave concern is that these polls and other similar polls, which usually have a fairly decent margin of accuracy, stating an error rate of plus or minus 3.4%, predicted accurately the outcome of the republican race, for Senator McCain, but were totally inaccurate regarding the votes for only one candidate, Senator Clinton.
Does it surprise you to know that a majority of voting machines in New Hampshire are the infamous, Diebold optical-scan voting systems. Which is “wholly controlled and programmed by a very bad company named LHS Associates.” (www.bradblog.com/?p=5530#more-5530)
“Electronic voting machines count about 87% of the votes cast in America today,” reports award winning documentary film Hacking Democracy, which shows among other things how voting machines can be tampered with (www.hackingdemocracy.com) .
During the primary election count, with 63% of the precincts reporting, MSNBC reported Senator Obama still had a solid 3% point lead. Yet when the election tallies were over, rather than staying ahead 3%, Senator Obama fell behind by 3%, a 6% change in just a short period.
Another website (ronrox.com/paulstats.php?party=DEMOCRATS) , compares the hand vote tally, to the machine vote tally in New Hampshire. Assuming that the hand votes represent a non-biased cross section of the state, the hand votes would accurately predict the winner of the election, and should match up to the machine votes representing another random cross section of the state. However this alignment does not exist, it appears that Hillary Clinton gained 5.419% or (15,584 votes) from the machines. Meanwhile, this page estimates that the Diebold voting machines took away votes from Barack Obama (-8,711 votes), John Edwards (-2,437 votes), and Bill Richardson (-3,478 votes) and gave them to Hillary Clinton for the victory. It seems strange that the counties that vote with Diebold machines just happen to significantly prefer Hillary Clinton with 4.5% more votes over Barack Obama. Whereas the counties where the vote is counted by hand, Barack Obama is the winner, giving him a 4% victory over Hillary Clinton.
A Huge Red Flag
A huge red flag came up for me, when I heard a news announcer report that Senator Clinton’s comeback was much like former president Clinton’s comeback in the 1992 election. The reason being is that part of me has bought into the belief that many presidential candidates, but not all, whether Republican or Democrat, has some ties to private special interest groups that influence how our government runs. If you don’t believe me that elite private groups have infiltrated our government for devious means, let me say two words for you, “Iraq War.” Which is not so much a war, but now a mass murder, with documented reports of at least 81,000 civilian Iraqi deaths (www.iraqbodycount.org) and in October, 2006 Lancet medical journal suggested that about 655,000 people had died in Iraq as a result of the 2003 invasion. Our country has also sacrificed approximately 3900 US soldiers in order to create a “democracy” in Iraq. I wonder if the democracy in Iraq comes complete with Diebold voting machines to ensure that nobodies vote will really be counted.
Is A Global Elite Involved?
Independent journalists and authors have noted that in more recent times, candidates who have won the US presidency have had connections with The Council Of Foreign Relations, The Trilateral Commission, and The Bilderberg Group.
For example, with the Trilateral Commission:
“President Carter was a member from mid-1973 until his election, President Bush was invited to join in early 1977 after he left the government. He resigned in late 1978, two years before he became Vice President. Richard B. Cheney was a Commission member from 1997 until he became a candidate for the Vice Presidency and resigned in 2000.” (www.trilateral.org/moreinfo/faqs.htm)
Would it surprise you to learn that Bill Clinton was also a member of the Trilateral Commission?
Perhaps that is all circumstantial, but I can tell you one thing for sure - something rotten is going on here.
Why in our freedom loving country are we using some electronic voting systems that are easily tampered with and created by suspect corporations?
The Power To Change Is Within the People
Outer world injustice only happens because we are all asleep. Too many people choose to be sponges for absorbing media “reports” without reflection. The reports are many times biased and meant to convince the listener of something, rather than to objectively report the facts. And I let myself be so daring as to state it as if it is a fact, that Hillary Clinton’s miraculous vote lead, is a clear implication of tampering.
How is it that we have allowed our voting systems in some states to become so suspect? Are there any residents in our country who support using voting machines that can be tampered with? I doubt it. So why does our government allow their use? Let’s face it, in some instances the federal and even state government attempts to manipulate the public opinion for the gain of private interests. As a result, rather than a government that listens to and honors the will of the people, we have a government that many times tries to manipulate the people so it can go out and do stupid and harmful things.
The people of this country have a lot of power to make a change, provided that they claim that power and take effective action, which some people do, and most do not. Ordinary people who have a passion can easily make and change laws, and gain the support of the public and convince legislators on the state and federal levels to do good things.
Effective action requires truth, compassion and integrity, it means acting and living with purpose and conviction for what you know is right.
Let’s seriously investigate these issues of election fraud so that we can find the people behind it. The evidence is staring us in the face, it only takes an ear to listen to it and recognize it. Somehow, the truth has a way of releasing itself into the world.
About the author
Rami Nagel is the author of “Cure Tooth Decay: Heal And Prevent Cavities With Nutrition,” which teaches readers how to reclaim their dental health. Learn the real cause and cure for cavities and root canals at: www.curetoothdecay.com
Rami is a father who cares about the way we affect each other, our children, and our planet through our lifestyle choices. His health background is in hands-on energy healing, Hatha & Bhakti yoga and the Pathwork.
Rami is author of several health resources: www.healingourchildren.net - Learn the Cause and Prevention of the Diseases of Pregnancy and Childhood www.preconceptionhealth.org - A Program for Preconception Health based on Indigenous Wisdom www.curetoothdecay.com - Heal and Prevent Cavities with Nutrition! www.yourreturn.org - The cause of disease and the end of suffering of humanity.
NEW YORK Coming between the Iowa and New Hampshire tallies, this Sunday’s cover of The New York Times Magazine ought to strike a chord. It shows a man inside an exploding voting booth with a WARNING label over it and the words: “Your vote may be lost, destroyed, miscounted, wrongly attributed or hacked.”
The massive Clive Thompson article, titled “The Bugs in the Machines,” is quite chilling. “After the 2000 election,” it opens, “counties around the country rushed to buy new computerized voting machines. But it turns out that these machines may cause problems worse than hanging chads. Is America ready for another contested election?”
One key passage: “The earliest critiques of digital voting booths came from the fringe — disgruntled citizens and scared-senseless computer geeks — but the fears have now risen to the highest levels of government.”
One expert says that “about 10 percent” of the devices fail in each election.
The piece focuses on the newly popular “touch-screen” machines, noting that “in hundrds of instances, the result has been precisely the opposite” of the intention to add “clarity” to results: “they fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways; voters report that their choices ‘flip’ from one candidate to another before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward; votes simply vanish. (In the 80-person town of Waldenburgh, Ark., touch-screen machines tallied zero votes for one mayor candidate in 2006–even though he’s pretty sure he voted for himself.)”
During this year’s primaries, about one-third of all votes will be cast on touch-screens. The same ratio will likely hold this November, even with some states junking the devices.
The Times notes that “what scares election observers is this: What happens if the next presidnetial election is extremely close and decided by a handful of votes cast on machines that crashed?”
Then there’s this: “If the machines are tested and officials are able to examine the source code, you might wonder why machines with so many flaws and bugs have gotten through. It is, critics insist, because the testing is nowhere near diligent enough, and the federal regulators are too sympathetic and cozy with the vendors.”
The reporter seems to agree with this, detailing “a regulatory environment in which, effectively, no one assumes final responsibility for whether the machines function reliably,” and everyone points fingers at each other.
Thompson declares, chillingly: “In essence, elections now face a similar outsourcing issue to that seen in the Iraq war, where the government has ceded so many core military responsibilities to firms like Haliburton and Blackwater that Washington can no longer fire the contractor.”
Comments one elections supervisor: “This is a crazy world. The process is so under control by the vendor.”
Thompson reveals that during a visit to the polls a suburb of Pittsburgh just days before last November’s elections, he was left alone with six iVtronic voting machines. It looked easy to cut and reseal the seals. “In essence,” he concludes, “I could have tampered with the machines in any way I wanted, with very little chance of being detected or caught.”
Report: Ohio voting machines have critical flaws, could undermine ‘08 election
CINCINNATI– All five voting systems used in Ohio, a state whose electoral votes narrowly swung two elections toward President Bush, have critical flaws that could undermine the integrity of the 2008 general election, a report commissioned by the state’s top elections official has found.
“It was worse than I anticipated,” the official, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, said of the report. “I had hoped that perhaps one system would test superior to the others.”
At polling stations, teams working on the study were able to pick locks to access memory cards and use hand-held devices to plug false vote counts into machines. At boards of election, they were able to introduce malignant software into servers.
Ms. Brunner proposed replacing all of the state’s voting machines, including the touch-screen ones used in more than 50 of Ohio’s 88 counties. She wants all counties to use optical scan machines that read and electronically record paper ballots that are filled in manually by voters.
She called for legislation and financing to be in place by April so the new machines can be used in the presidential election next November. She said she could not estimate the cost of the changes.
Florida, another swing state with a history of voting problems, is also scrapping touch-screen machines and switching to optical scan ones for the election. Such systems have gained favor because experts say they are more reliable than others and, unlike most touch screens, they provide a paper trail for recounts.
Ms. Brunner, a Democrat, succeeded J. Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican who came under fire for simultaneously overseeing the 2004 election and serving as co-chairman of President Bush’s re-election campaign in Ohio.
She ordered the study as part of a pledge to overhaul voting after problems made headlines for hours-long lines in the 2000 and 2004 elections and a scandal in Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, that led to the convictions of two elections workers on charges of rigging recounts. Ms. Brunner’s office temporarily seized control of that county’s board of elections.
The study released Friday found that voting machines and central servers made by Elections Systems and Software; Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold; and Hart InterCivic; were easily corrupted.
Chris Riggall, a Premier spokesman, said hardware and software problems had been corrected in his company’s new products, which will be available for installation in 2008.
“It is important to note,” he said, “that there has not been a single documented case of a successful attack against an electronic voting system, in Ohio or anywhere in the United States.”
Ken Fields, a spokesman for Election Systems and Software, said his company strongly disagreed with some of the report’s findings. “We can also tell you that our 35 years in the field of elections has demonstrated that Election Systems and Software voting technology is accurate, reliable and secure,” he said.
The $1.9 million federally financed study assembled corporate and academic teams to conduct parallel assessments. A bipartisan group of 12 election board directors and deputy directors acted as advisers.
The academic team, made up of faculty members and students from Cleveland State University, Pennsylvania State, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Pennsylvania, said systemic change was needed. “All of the studied systems possess critical security failures that render their technical controls insufficient to guarantee a trustworthy election,” the team wrote.
In addition to switching machines, Ms. Brunner recommended eliminating polling stations that are used for fewer than five precincts as a cost-cutting measure, and introducing early voting 15 days before Election Day.
A recount after next year’s presidential election could mean disaster for Cuyahoga County based on problems discovered Tuesday with paper records produced by electronic voting machines.
More than 20 percent of the printouts from touch-screen voting machines were unreadable and had to be reprinted. Board of Elections workers found the damaged ballots when they conducted a recount Tuesday of two races, which involved only 17 of the county’s 1,436 precincts.
The recount lasted more than 12 hours. Reprinting the damaged records and hand-counting them created an extra step that added hours.
“If it is as close as it’s been for the last two presidential elections and it’s that close again in 2008, God help us if we have to depend on Cuya- hoga County as the deciding factor with regard to making the decision on who the next president of the United States is,” said County Commissioner Jimmy Dimora, a longtime opponent of the county’s touch-screen voting system.
Board of Elections Director Jane Platten said recounting the entire county for the 2008 presidential election could take more than a week.
“The high number of paper audit trails that need to be reprinted was at best a difficult task to have to work through,” Platten said. “I think that’s going to be an indication of future recounts.”
Tuesday’s recounts were for a North Royalton City Council seat and positions on the Bedford Heights Charter Review Commission. The recount upheld the official results that showed Dan Kasaris won the North Royalton race. Results were not available Tuesday night for the Bedford Heights election.
Cuyahoga County uses touch-screen voting machines that store votes on a memory card inside each machine. On Election Day, a paper record of each ballot is printed inside each machine on long reels of paper.
The printout is the paper trail used during recounts. If it’s damaged and unreadable — usually because the paper jammed when printing — a new copy is printed from the machine’s memory card.
“It’s workable, but tedious,” said board member Rob Frost after watching Tuesday’s recounts. “I think that’s, in part, the nature of recounts.”
Election workers inspected 70 paper printouts, which represented nearly 4,400 ballots cast Nov. 6 in North Royalton and Bedford Heights. Election workers found 15 of the 70 printouts damaged and those had to be reprinted.
“This is very much a cause for concern,” board member Inajo Davis Chappell said. “All the technology issues pose a challenge to us, especially given the volume of voters we expect in the primary.”
Diebold Inc. made the county’s voting equipment. The company renamed its elections division Premier Election Solutions. The high percentage of damaged paper trails seen on Tuesday is not typical, Premier spokesman Chris Riggall said. “That is a percentage that prompts us to do further investigation,” he said.
The board has two more recounts scheduled to begin today: A race for Olmsted Falls City Council and a seat on the Solon Board of Education. The recounts on Tuesday and today were automatically triggered because the margin of victory was one-half of 1 percent or less.
The damaged paper records found Tuesday were another problem for the board following the Nov. 6 countywide election.
The county still doesn’t know why its vote-counting software crashed twice election night. An investigation into the software problem could begin next week, once the county’s recounts are finished.
Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner hopes to answer concerns about the county’s voting system. She has initiated a statewide voting equipment review. A report expected Dec. 14 could recommend changes.
Meanwhile, elections officials must determine the best way to hold elections with their current machinery.
“I wish those paper trails would come out pristine — and they don’t, and they’re not going to,” Platten said. “We’re going to have to deal with it again.”
With record low approval ratings for the Bush/Cheney regime and the albatross of an unpopular war hanging from the GOP’s neck, do you think that a Democratic presidential candidate will win the White House, get us out of Iraq, and end our long national nightmare?
Think again – the mighty election theft machine Karl Rove used to steal the US presidency in 2000 and 2004 may be under attack, but it is still in place for the upcoming 2008 election.
With his usual devious mastery, Rove has seized upon the national outrage sparked by his electoral larceny and used it as smokescreen while he makes the American electoral system even MORE unfair, and even EASIER to rig. Thus the administration has fired federal attorneys when they would not participate in a nationwide campaign to deny minorities and the poor their access to the polls. It has spent millions of taxpayer dollars to install electronic voting machines that can be “flipped” with a few keystrokes. And under the guise of “reforming” our busted electoral system, it is setting us up for another presidential theft in 2008.
Thus it should come as no surprise that our exclusive investigations into the firings of eight federal prosecutors who refused to execute Rove’s plans for massive disenfranchisement of Democratic voters reveal a pattern of illegalities and fraud aimed at reducing the number of minority, poor and young voters at the core of Democratic support. In the wake of major news breaks, two felony convictions have come from the rigging of the illegal Ohio 2004 vote count and recount that gave George W. Bush a second illegitimate term. Stunning new admissions from county election boards that illegally destroyed voter records will almost certainly lead to new convictions. And the multi-million-dollar electronic voting machine scam that made possible the biggest electoral frauds in US history is under massive new attack, with key states moving to scrap the machines altogether in a desperate attempt to restore American democracy – but with the job far from done.
Rove, Ney and the undead
Indeed, the Rovian theft engine is far from dead. The media groundwork has already been laid out for the Republicans to claim that hordes of illegal aliens have registered to vote. The Bush administration has been caught ordering public agencies – possibly in violation of the law – to cease registering voters. In an April, 2006 speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association, Rove openly alluded to the strategy of demanding photo ID and purging voter roles of poor, minority voters just as had been done in 2000 and 2004. And, as always with Bush/Rove, there is much more beneath the surface.
All that has happened to challenge the GOP death grip on the American vote count has been reported in the pages of Hustler and on the internet at freepress.org, bradblog and elsewhere, and is being seized upon by a national grassroots movement determined to restore American democracy next year.
Nowhere has that movement been more in evidence than with the high profile firestorm surrounding Bush administration Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ firing of eight federal prosecutors without legitimate cause.
Evidence continues to surface from throughout the United States about this blatant Bush abuse of executive power. But we have traced the roots of the firings to an obscure Congressional hearing held at the statehouse in Columbus, Ohio, on March 21, 2005, and to a shadowy GOP operative named Mark F. “Thor” Hearne.
The hearing was conducted by none other than former US Rep. Bob Ney (R-18th OH). The once-powerful Ohio Congressman (who is now behind bars) was the godfather of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), the national boondoggle that mandated electronic voting machines for the American electoral process.
That the machines would cost taxpayers billions was a big plus for Ney. They would come from Diebold and other companies that poured money into Republican coffers. Thanks largely to the manipulations of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, these e-voting machine companies would help guarantee the GOP’s ability to steal elections.
Ney’s hearing featured a marquee appearance by J. Kenneth Blackwell, the Secretary of State responsible for delivering Ohio’s decisive 2004 electoral votes to Bush. Blackwell was a key operative for the Bush election campaign in Florida in 2000 and co-chaired the Bush-Cheney 2004 re-election campaign in Ohio.
“Haul butt!”
Congressional protocol required that Ney allow Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Cleveland) to question Blackwell. Soon Blackwell and Jones were yelling at each other in a legendary exchange that ended with Jones telling Blackwell to “haul butt” out of the chamber.
Not quite so high profile was the ensuing testimony by Hearne, who identified himself as the head of the American Center for Voting Rights. Hearne is a long-time GOP dirty trickster, with a Rovian rap sheet dating to the 1970s. He did not explain that the ACVR had a post box in a Dallas mall, but no office, few staff, a board stacked with GOP operatives, no grassroots mailing list or much else to confirm the functioning of a real organization. Nor did Ney clarify that Hearne had served as election counsel to the Bush-Cheney campaign, and had founded ACVR the previous month, at the urging of Karl Rove.
While the press corps rushed to report the Jones-Blackwell dust-up, Hearne laid out for Ney and the few of us left listening the essential template for the new GOP strategy for disenfranchising millions of suspected Democrats from voting in future elections. In classic Rovian terms, Hearne bemoaned a litany of “voter fraud” abuses allegedly committed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Association for Communities Organizing for Reform Now (ACORN) and other multi-racial coalitions working to register millions of new voters across the United States.
Among other things, Hearne told Ney the voter registration campaigns were using “crack cocaine” as an “incentive” for registering new voters. Adding the AFL-CIO and ACT-Ohio to his list of evil-doers, Hearne warned that millions of “fraudulent” ballots would be cast in future elections unless something was done to curb the ability of ordinary citizens to vote without extensive identification papers.
Hearne’s testimony drew little press. But it has led directly to the national Bush/Rove push for new laws requiring voters to show picture IDs at the polls and other methods of mass disenfranchisement – and the firing of eight US prosecutors who apparently refused to go along.
The cover-up
References to Hearne’s ACVR have now mysteriously disappeared from the internet. But the McClatchy Newspapers have reported that Hearne’s ACVR and the Republican Lawyers Association have actively campaigned – with a war chest of at least $1.5 million – in at least nine battleground states. They stump for voter ID laws and rigid registration restrictions and other tactics aimed at radically reducing the ability of Democrat-leaning organizations to register new voters.
The ACVR agenda embraces the Administration’s illegal demand that public agencies stop registering new, mostly poor voters. And the pressure to rid our democracy of such voters has carried over to the offices of the nation’s federal prosecutors, even in the face of widespread investigations showing the numbers of people illegally trying to register and vote have been miniscule.
Emblematic of the firings is the case of David Iglesias of New Mexico. Iglesias has testified to Congress that Albuquerque lawyer Patrick Rogers pressured him to prosecute alleged vote fraud perpetrators. When he resisted, Iglesias was fired by Gonzales.
Rogers is listed as “secretary” of Thor Hearne’s American Center for Voting Rights, as well as a former general counsel to the New Mexico Republican Party.
Meanwhile, the Bush Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has reversed its mandate by fighting to narrow rather than broaden the voting rights of minorities, and to prosecute voter registration operations without just cause. An ACVR director, Cameron Quinn, is now the Division’s voting counsel.
A key target has been Project Vote, which registered 1.5 million voters in 2004 and 2006. Five days before the 2006 election, Bush’s interim US attorney in Kansas City issued indictments against four ACORN workers under contract with Project Vote. Prosecutions that close to election day have traditionally been discouraged by the Justice Department. Acorn officials had notified the federal officials when they noticed the doctored forms. But ACVR’s “job was to confuse the public about voter fraud and offer bogus solutions to the problem,” said Michael Slater, the deputy director of Project Vote, They used “deception and faulty research” to help Rove’s GOP.
The common denominator in the firings of the federal attorneys has been an unwillingness to pursue prosecutions on the basis of such research. Iglesias, for example, told Newsweek magazine he “had been repeatedly pushed by New Mexico GOP officials to prosecute workers for ACORN” who were registering voters.
Media missed it again
The media has missed what DID happen when the attorneys complied with the Bush/Rove game plan. Just four days prior to the 2004 vote, Assistant Attorney-General Alex Acosta, the civil rights chief of the Bush Justice Department asked a federal judge in Ohio to sign off on policies that would disenfranchise thousands of black voters. The move almost certainly had a significant impact on Bush’s subsequent victory in the Electoral College. Joseph Rich, a former chief of the Justice Department’s Voting Rights Section, has called the Ohio scheme “vote caging,” which is illegal.
The case arose when Republicans allegedly sent “caging” letters to thousands of registered voters in inner city districts. The letters had “do not forward” stamped on them, with a return receipt requested. When some 23,000 came back as undeliverable, GOP operatives demanded the right to get the names removed from voter rolls. Acosta argued in his letter that restricting such challenges would “undermine” the electoral process.
But an exclusive investigation by freepress.org found that at least 25% of the people being removed from the voter rolls were in fact still living at their registered address. Greg Palast has reported that the GOP deliberately targeted black soldiers still fighting in Iraq.
Acosta says his letter endorsed the GOP challenges as “permissible” as long as they were not racially motivated, and that anyone whose eligibility was challenged could still get a provisional ballot.
But due to the actions of former Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell, more than 16,000 provisional ballots from the 2004 election remain uncounted. Independent observers have testified that thousands more may have been discarded right at the polling stations. (Bush’s official margin of victory in Ohio was less than 119,000 votes.)
Robert Kengle, who served under Acosta at the Justice Department’s Voting Rights Section, says Acosta’s unsolicited letter to the courts was “cheerleading” for the GOP. “It was doubly outrageous,” he said, “because the allegation in the litigation was that these were overwhelmingly African-American voters that were on the challenge list,” precisely those whose right to vote the Justice Department was charged to protect.
Acosta was not among the attorneys fired by Bush. In fact, he is now the federal attorney in Miami.
Eyewitness testimony from throughout the state confirms that scores of GOP activists did challenge voters in numerous inner city polling stations. Many carried Blackberries and used sophisticated lists that may have included those illegally garnered caging rosters. The challenges did lead to numerous voters being turned away, and increased the long delays suffered by inner city voters throughout the state.
Surveys show it took blacks nearly an hour to vote on average in Ohio in 2004, while whites voted in less than fifteen minutes. In the inner city of Columbus, black voters waited between three and seven hours to vote, while in the nearby suburb of Bexley it took just five minutes. The delays in Columbus alone may have cost Kerry up to 60,000 votes.
Similar challenges were also endorsed by White House operative Tim Griffin, who has been widely accused of trying to cage mostly black voters in Florida. Rich says the scheme became public before the election, and the GOP apparently dropped the idea.
But as he was firing the federal attorneys who refused to cage, Bush appointed Griffin to be US attorney for Arkansas. Griffin has since resigned the post under fire. But along with Ohio, the administration used similar tactics in the key swing states of Florida and Pennsylvania, as well as in Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Texas and Washington. Bush’s Justice Department also supported former California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson’s rejection of 20,000 voter registration forms, a move later reversed in court. And it has helped push photo ID requirements – again rejected in court – devised by Georgia to restrict black and poor voter access.
A 35-year veteran of the Justice Department’s Voting Right Sections, Rich told the McClatchey papers that he quit over political appointees who “skewed aspects of law enforcement in ways that clearly were intended to influence the outcome of the elections.” Thus Thor Hearne’s original blueprint for disenfranchising minorities and the poor is now established administration policy, supported by Bush’s Justice Department, and backed by his firing of federal attorneys – illegal or otherwise – who refuse to go along. Whether the Democrats in Congress do anything about it, and whether the GOP successfully uses these tactics again in 2008, remain to be seen.
New cyber-thuggery
Alongside the Bush/Rove commitment to mass disenfranchisement, the key to the outcome of the 2008 election may be the rise and incomplete fall of electronic voting machines.
Unmonitorable DRE (Direct Record Electronic) voting machines have been center stage at every Bush-era stolen election. In Florida 2000, some 16,000 votes that “disappeared” from Al Gore’s tallies in Volusia County helped turn the tide for Bush at a key election night moment, even though they were later reinstated. In 2002, fraudulent electronic vote counts in Georgia almost certainly deprived Vietnam war hero Max Cleland of his US Senate seat in a race which all credible polls showed him winning by a substantial margin.
The spread of DREs is at the core of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) pushed through by then-Congressman (now jailbird) Bob Ney. High-powered studies from the likes of the Government Accountability Office, the Brennan Center on Voting Rights, the Carter-Baker Commission on Voting Rights, Princeton University and US Representative John Conyers all conclude that DRE’s can be easily manipulated, with entire elections illicitly shifted by a few keystrokes.
The GOPs HAVA means to put the nation on DREs as thoroughly as possible by 2008. But a public rebellion has slowed that plan. In Ohio, grassroots campaigners stopped Blackwell from giving Diebold an unbid $100 million contract to put virtually the entire state on DREs. Elsewhere, state and local election boards rebelled against the high cost of maintaining the machines, which often must be kept air conditioned around the clock, resulting in huge electric bills. Programming and other costs make administering elections on DREs far more expensive than doing it on paper ballots. The DREs have become infamous because of widespread testimony in Ohio that 2004 voters were pushing John Kerry’s name, only to see George Bush’s name light up, or to have their Kerry vote simply disappear moments later.
In response to nationwide opposition, US Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ) proposed federal legislation that would have forced all electronic voting machines to be fitted with devices that would produce a paper trail. An accredited scientist, Holt also wanted to force manufacturers to make public the software that ran their machines.
Holt’s proposed House Bill 811 divided the election protection movement, much of which saw it as an endorsement of DREs. And as the bill progressed, the GOP gutted it, killing the software transparency requirements and settling for unworkable paper trail provisions.
The governors of Florida and Maryland have already moved to ban DREs in 2008, and to use paper ballots instead. Grassroots confrontations over how to cast and count votes will rage right up to election day.
The need for electronic safeguards has been confirmed to the hilt by an astonishing flood of revelations from Ohio. To report Ohio’s 2004 election-night vote count, Blackwell contracted with the same GOP computer programmer who created the Bush-Cheney web site in 2000. Those GOP-programmed results were then run through servers housed in the basement of a bank in Chattanooga, Tennessee which also housed the servers for the Republican National Committee (through which Karl Rove ran his off-the-record e-mails, now being sought by Congress).
Supervised by Blackwell, those results showed a substantial victory for John Kerry until about 12:20 at night, when reporting inexplicably stopped. When it resumed about 90 minutes later, Ohio’s margin – and the presidency – suddenly switched to Bush.
After the election, a citizen-based federal lawsuit (in which we are attorney and plaintiff) was filed, aimed at preserving all of Ohio’s 2004 election materials for further investigation. Those materials were protected by federal law until September 2, 2006, when Blackwell intended to destroy them. But a week prior, we won a federal court decision barring the counties from destroying any of these materials. Ohio’s new Secretary of State (SOS), Jennifer Brunner, then ordered the boards of election to deliver this evidence to her.
But in July 2007, 56 of Ohio’s 88 county BOEs admitted to illegally destroying all or some of their records. John M. Williams, Director of Elections in Hamilton County (Cincinnati) told Brunner he was “…unable to transfer the unvoted precinct ballots and soiled ballots” essential to an accurate audit because they “…were inadvertently shredded between January 19th and 26th of ’06 in an effort to make room for the new Hart voting system.”
In Clermont County, a key Republican stronghold permeated with election irregularities, Director Mike Keeley told Brunner that “in interviewing the staff, no one could remember the disposition of said ballots,” meaning the actual number of votes cast remains a mystery. In neighboring Butler County, Director Betty L. McGary informed the SOS on May 9, 2007 that they had lost the “ballot pages” thus making it impossible to confirm how votes were counted.
Delaware County, where the last 359 votes cast in one precinct were all counted for Bush, informed Brunner that they had 29 boxes of ballots, but then delivered only 26. The Delaware BOE initially reported 1872 provisional ballots, but the official number is now 1462, feeding suspicions the boxes were stuffed.
Two election officials in Cleveland have thus far been convicted of felonies stemming from rigged recount procedures after 2004. Now a solid majority of Ohio’s election boards face potential federal criminal action. They have made a reliable reconstruction of the true 2004 outcome virtually impossible.
Brunner has pledged to preside over a fair election in Ohio 2008. Like Debra Bowen, California’s new Secretary of State, Brunner is running extensive tests on the state’s electronic voting machines. Most or all of California and Ohio’s DREs could be gone by 2008, possibly to be replaced by paper ballots counted by electronic scanners.
But even those are not immune to fraud. In 2004, Diebold technicians provided inner city precincts with malfunctioning opti-scan machines. Throughout the state, more than 90,000 ballots were never counted because of voting machine malfunctions. At a mostly Democratic precinct in Toledo, poll workers handed out pencils whose marks could not be read by the electronic counters, thus voiding the votes cast there.
Overall, our nation’s history has been filled with stolen elections. Most have been robbed with paper ballots and stuffed ballot boxes. But under Bush/Rove, electronics are at center stage.
High tech Tammany
Bush/Rove stole the 2000 and 2004 elections by intimidation, vote caging, rigged machines, rigged recounts, and much more. Bush’s firing of the eight federal attorneys only underscores the fraud perpetrated by those who weren’t fired.
Whether Congress gets to the bottom of those firings remains to be seen. But there is little doubt the Democrats were able to retake the House and Senate in 2006 only because of the increased vigilance of a national grassroots voter protection movement.
Though Democrats carried Ohio in the off-year elections of 2006, our research indicates that the GOP still stole as much as 12% of the vote, and is still intent on disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of minority, poor and young voters. In a single election in Franklin County in 2006, a magistrate found that more than 83% of all the precincts were miscounted on the DRE machines.
And though DRE machines are under intense attack, their presence in 2008 will still be substantial, and will still subject the election to GOP theft.
The lessons of 2000 and 2004 are in the terror imposed on the registration process and the error perpetrated in the vote count. Only by saying “never again” can Americans hope to see a return to actual democracy.
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Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman co-wrote How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008.Voting Section has more related reportsHelp keep RINF going..
Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) rebuked a Justice Department voting official Friday night who said Ohio’s African American voters faced long lines in the 2004 presidential election because blacks tend to vote at night.
Justice Department Voting Section Chief John Tanner’s “investigation of the 2004 election in Ohio concluded that long lines and late voting precincts were due to the fact that white voters tend to cast ballots in the morning (i.e., before work) and black voters cast ballots in the afternoon (i.e., after work),” Conyers said in a release.
Why did African American voters suffer long lines in Ohio?
Tanner wrote in a letter TPM Muckraker uncovered that “…the principal cause of the difference appears to be the tendency in Franklin County for white voters to cast ballots in the morning (i.e., before work), and for black voters to cast ballots in the afternoon (i.e., after work). We have established this tendency through local contacts and through both political parties, and it accords with our considerable experience in other parts of the United States. Morning voters may wait in line several hours, as happened in white precincts, without keeping the polls open after 7:30 am; this is not the case, however, at sites where voters arrive after 5:30 p.m.”
Voters in black counties faced far longer lines than those in the more white Ohio suburbs. Investigations showed that Ohio officials had deliberately placed fewer voting machines in some areas and in some instances even kept voting machines out of service. The resulting lines generally resulted in less individuals voting because the lines were so long.
“I am concerned about the extreme lengths Mr. Tanner went to in order to justify the reasons African-Americans were not treated equally in the 2004 Ohio election,” Conyers said. “The committee needs to consider this matter. I am aware of no precedent for the Department acting in this capacity in the past.
“The Department of Justice – since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – has a responsibility to thoroughly investigate allegations of voter suppression and discrimination, like those made in Ohio in 2004,” the Michigan Democrat added. “I look forward to hearing more from Mr. Tanner in our committee later this month as he testifies about his work as chief of the voting section. The 2004 election exposed serious deficiencies in this section’s failure to adequately investigate and prosecute voter suppression efforts nationwide and I hope he is prepared to address this issue head on.”
Conyers wrote a detailed report while in the House minority which detailed Ohio’s voting discrepancies, What Went Wrong in Ohio.
“We have found numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election, which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters,” he wrote in the January 2005 report. “Cumulatively, these irregularities, which affected hundreds of thousand of votes and voters in Ohio, raise grave doubts regarding whether it can be said the Ohio electors selected on December 13, 2004, were chosen in a manner that conforms to Ohio law, let alone federal requirements and constitutional standards.”
Among the irregularities in voting, Conyers listed insufficient voting machines in predominately minority and Democrat districts, provisional ballots that disenfranchised thousands, voter registrations that were rejected because of paper weight, efforts by Republicans to engage in “caging” tactics that targeted 35,000 mostly minority voters for intimidation and the use of voting “challengers,” who could challenge voters’ rights to have their vote counted.
The challengers, he said in his report, were “concentrated in minority and Democratic areas likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of legal voters, who were not only intimidated, but became discouraged by the long lines. Shockingly, these disruptions were publicly predicted and acknowledged by Republican officials: Mark Weaver, a lawyer for the Ohio Republican Party, admitted the challenges ‘can’t help but create chaos, longer lines and frustration.’”
Karl Rove and at least one of the federal prosecutors appointed by Alberto Gonzales engaged in a criminal conspiracy to deny hundreds of thousands of American citizens their right to vote.
This is a felony. It’s a jailable offense. It undermines the results of the 2004 election and calls the results of the 2000 election into question.
George Bush is not the legitimate president and the White House is full of unindicted felons (or at least it used to be until they all resigned.)
Tens of thousands of votes in the Holyrood election were rejected by the counting machines without any human adjudication, BBC Scotland has learned. An investigation has established that the machines were programmed to reject some of the new style ballot papers automatically.
They never appeared on the screens to be challenged by the parties or adjudicated by returning officers.
The Scotland Office said there was no evidence it added to voter confusion.
It added that, in the instance of auto-adjudication for the 3 May election, the decision was taken between returning officers and the e-counting provider.
However, First Minister Alex Salmond described the development as “astonishing” and deeply disturbing.
“I was under the impression - until this revelation - that the ballots that were rejected were actually seen by the election agents as part of the process,” he said.
More than 140,000 ballots were spoilt on 3 May when votes were held for the Scottish Parliament.
Tens of thousands more ballots were rejected for the local authority elections, which were held on the same day, under a separate electoral system.
One of the enduring images of election night was of candidates and agents scrutinising screens showing the rejected ballots.
However, the BBC has learned that in some contests, more than half of all the “spoilt” ballots were rejected without any human adjudication.
The machines were set to auto-adjudicate if they thought they had a Holyrood ballot paper with a cross in one column but apparently no mark in the other.
Human adjudication
In those circumstances the machine would count the good vote, reject the other one and automatically put the ballot paper in the pile alongside all the correctly-completed ballots.
Shadow Scottish secretary David Mundell said he was “appalled” by the claims.
“Unfortunately it has become part of a series of revelations. Right from the start the Scotland Office did not come clean about the mishandling of the elections,” he told BBC Scotland.
The Tory MP claimed that information had to be “dragged out of” the Scotland Office.
He said: “Rather than putting their hands up and saying ‘we made a complete hash of this and we apologise to the people of Scotland’, they’ve just continued to show arrogance and contempt, as if somehow it was nothing to do with them.”
Mr Mundell’s Lib Dem opposite number, Alistair Carmichael, added that the auto-adjudicate decision was “inappropriate”.
“Individual decisions should have been taken by returning officers in consultation with the machine operating company,” he said.
A spokesman for the Scottish Green Party said that the review of the election must leave no stone unturned in order to get to the bottom of the problems.
He added: “We are particularly concerned that the review of the election may only look at samples of rejected ballot papers rather than all of them. It is important that the review is absolutely thorough.”
George Bush has shredded the Constitution; bankrupted the country; blackened our reputation as a people; and lied us into an illegal, immoral, self-destructive military operation in Iraq.
And he was never elected president.
Not in 2000. Not in 2004.
And the news media, Congress, and the Democratic Party have never even attempted to do anything about it.
If you’re living in America, that’s the kind of country you’re living in now.
It’s not a question of when or if we’ll lose our democracy, it’s been gone a long time. The only question is what we’re going to do to get it back.
[The Times plays down the import of this story, but basically the California Secretary of State found that these machines, used to decide who won recent elections, are not to be trusted.]
NY TIMES - Expressing concern that several brands of electronic voting machines used in California were vulnerable to tampering, Secretary of State Debra Bowen late Friday ordered new security protections be added and limited the use of two types of machines that were to be used in next year’s elections in several Southern California counties. Bowen also withdrew state approval of the InkaVote Plus machines used in Los Angeles County, saying that the machines’ maker, Election Systems and Software, had failed to submit its equipment to her office in time to analyze its vulnerability to hacking. . .
Bowen ordered that some machines made by Diebold Election Systems and Sequoia Voting Systems be limited to one per polling place to limit the chances that they could be tampered with. The Sequoia machines are used in Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura Counties.
Bowen said the presence of the machines, though limited, would be helpful for disabled voters, though any voter could use the machines. Weir, however, said she was creating a “separate but unequal” voting system.
The security requirements Bowen imposed include: reinstalling the software before the Feb. 5. election to ensure it has not already been tampered with; placing special seals at vulnerable parts of the machines to reveal tampering; securing each machines at the close of each day of early voting; assigning a specific election monitor to safeguard each machine; and conducting a complete manual count of all votes cast.
BRAD BLOG - The [review] had found that all electronic voting systems certified in California were easily accessible to hacking. A single machine, the testers discovered, could be easily tampered with by an election insider, voting machine company employee, or other individual in such a way that an entire election could be effected without detection. . .
A recent report documenting computer scientists’ ability to hack into voting machines certified for use in the state of California has already begun reverberating on Capitol Hill.
In a statement Tuesday, Feinstein expressed dismay at “how easily these machines could be hacked into and election results distorted,” based on her reading of the report.
“The findings are yet another reason that states and counties should consider a move to optical scan machines that provide an auditable, individual
without having to rely on a separate printer,” she went on.
The study, commissioned by California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, focused on machines made by Diebold Election Systems, Hart InterCivic, and Sequoia Voting Systems. The University of California researchers who conducted the testing rattled off a list of security weaknesses they were able to exploit in each of the machines–although they didn’t attempt to quantify how difficult it was to carry out the hacks.
Anders als innen sagen wir Amerikanische Politik, werden Vorwahlen Abstimmungen dünn aus den Grund in Pakistan gebissen. Die Resultate ein jedoch sind durch veröffentlicht worden Dämmerung. Geleitet während Januar 2008, stimmt der Uns-gegründete Terror frei morgen Entdeckungen ab, daß 70% von Pakistanern Präsidenten Pervez Musharraf beendigen wünschen und daß der PPP die populärste Partei diese Seite der Wahlen ist, mit 36.7% von Abstimmungwählern. Das PML (N) von Nawaz Sharif folgt mit 25.3% und das PML (Q), das sich stützt, Musharraf kommt mit 12% herein.
Tens of thousands of votes in the Holyrood election were rejected by the counting machines without any human adjudication, BBC Scotland has learned. An investigation has established that the machines were programmed to reject some of the new style ballot papers automatically.
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