"More Americans voted against George Bush than any sitting president in history."
Governor Howard Dean, M.D.
Democracy for America
quotable
Hack the Vote 2004
Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked
6 November 2004, Thom Hartmann, CommonDreams.org
When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.
"It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.
And some believe evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.
MORE: Evidence Mounts
The Myth of the Red & Blue States
Next lesson: The Kinsey Scale
also: Robert J. Vanderbei's Election 2004 Results
UPDATE: Barry Ritholtz at Blogging of the President provides links to several of the best graphic representations of November 2, 2004.
Barry writes: "Map Day is now officially Map Weekend! We know the Red State/Blue State dichotomy is really misleading-- it doesn't accurately reflect the US. So I gathered up, in all their cartographic glory, a series of election map post-mortems. (They were just lying around the internet gathering dust anyway). These graphic representations of the election's outcome are thought provoking and even humorous."
Where some see black and white, others see shades of grey... or purple... or rainbows...
Repeat the mantra:
"golden spoke eyes- light silver grey-
light beam green days- near daylight calm day"
- glassfrequency
Republican Values
The Red Zone
4 November 2004, Maureen Dowd
WASHINGTON- With the Democratic Party splattered at his feet in little blue puddles, John Kerry told the crushed crowd at Faneuil Hall in Boston about his concession call to President Bush.
"We had a good conversation," the senator said. "And we talked about the danger of division in our country and the need, the desperate need, for unity, for finding the common ground, coming together. Today I hope that we can begin the healing."
Democrat: Heal thyself.
W. doesn't see division as a danger. He sees it as a wingman.
The president got re-elected by dividing the country along fault lines of fear, intolerance, ignorance and religious rule. He doesn't want to heal rifts; he wants to bring any riffraff who disagree to heel.
W. ran a jihad in America so he can fight one in Iraq - drawing a devoted flock of evangelicals, or "values voters," as they call themselves, to the polls by opposing abortion, suffocating stem cell research and supporting a constitutional amendment against gay marriage.
Mr. Bush, whose administration drummed up fake evidence to trick us into war with Iraq, sticking our troops in an immoral position with no exit strategy, won on "moral issues."
The president says he's "humbled" and wants to reach out to the whole country. What humbug. The Bushes are always gracious until they don't get their way. If W. didn't reach out after the last election, which he barely grabbed, why would he reach out now that he has what Dick Cheney calls a "broad, nationwide victory"?
While Mr. Bush was making his little speech about reaching out, Republicans said they had "the green light" to pursue their conservative agenda, like drilling in Alaska's wilderness and rewriting the tax code.
"He'll be a lot more aggressive in Iraq now," one Bush insider predicts. "He'll raze Falluja if he has to. He feels that the election results endorsed his version of the war." Never mind that the more insurgents American troops kill, the more they create.
Just listen to Dick (Oh, lordy, is this cuckoo clock still vice president?) Cheney, introducing the Man for his victory speech: "This has been a consequential presidency which has revitalized our economy and reasserted a confident American role in the world." Well, it has revitalized the Halliburton segment of the economy, anyhow. And "confident" is not the first word that comes to mind for the foreign policy of a country that has alienated everyone except Fiji.
Vice continued, "Now we move forward to serve and to guard the country we love." Only Dick Cheney can make "to serve and to guard" sound like "to rape and to pillage."
He's creating the sort of "democracy" he likes. One party controls all power in the country. One network serves as state TV. One nation dominates the world as a hyperpower. One firm controls contracts in Iraq.
Just as Zell Miller was so over the top at the G.O.P. convention that he made Mr. Cheney seem reasonable, so several new members of Congress will make W. seem moderate.
Tom Coburn, the new senator from Oklahoma, has advocated the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions and warned that "the gay agenda" would undermine the country. He also characterized his race as a choice between "good and evil" and said he had heard there was "rampant lesbianism" in Oklahoma schools.
Jim DeMint, the new senator from South Carolina, said during his campaign that he supported a state G.O.P. platform plank banning gays from teaching in public schools. He explained, "I would have given the same answer when asked if a single woman who was pregnant and living with her boyfriend should be hired to teach my third-grade children."
John Thune, who toppled Tom Daschle, is an anti-abortion Christian conservative - or "servant leader," as he was hailed in a campaign ad - who supports constitutional amendments banning flag burning and gay marriage.
Seeing the exit polls, the Democrats immediately started talking about values and religion. Their sudden passion for wooing Southern white Christian soldiers may put a crimp in Hillary's 2008 campaign (nothing but a wooden stake would stop it). Meanwhile, the blue puddle is comforting itself with the expectation that this loony bunch will fatally overreach, just as Newt Gingrich did in the 90's.
But with this crowd, it's hard to imagine what would constitute overreaching.
Invading France?
unreliable exit polls?
Sour grapes or voter fraud?
4 November 2004, Mike Whitney, The Smirking Chimp
If you believe that George Bush won last night's election "fair and square" then forget about reading this article. If you know however that tens of thousands of people who lined up for up to four hours at a time in Ohio and Florida to have their vote counted, were not standing there to endorse the aggression and suicidal policies of the current administration then read on.
The unprecedented high turnout coupled with new registrations (that were overwhelmingly in favor of John Kerry) suggest that there was foul play at the voting booths. As a result, consumer investigator and activist Bev Harris (founder of Black Box Voting) "is conducting the largest Freedom of Information action in history. On election night, Black Box Voting blanketed the US with the first in a series of public records requests, to obtain internal computer logs and other documents from 3,000 individual counties and townships."
If the Bush people are so confident in their victory let them "put up or shut up."
The fact of the matter is (as every reasonable person who hasn't been hoodwinked by the pageantry of election night fraud realizes) that the election was stolen again in full view of the American public. The Republican owned voting machines prevailed over exit poll projections and the will of the American people.
If that's not the case, then let's investigate the computer logs.
According to Lynn Landis' article "Could the AP rig the Election": "The Associated Press (AP) will be the sole source of raw vote totals for the major news broadcasters on Election Night.... They refused to confirm or deny that the AP will receive direct feed from voting machines and central vote tabulating computers across the country. But, circumstantial evidence suggests that is exactly what will happen.
And what can be downloaded can also be uploaded. Computer experts say that signals can travel both to and from computerized voting machines through wireless technology, modems, and even simple electricity."
Landis just confirms what is already known about "sketchy" electronic voting and how it invites vote tampering. Her connection between election machinery, vote totals and the AP, however, has not previously been made.
She goes on to explain that, "AP spokespeople would not give out information on who sits on their board, however AP leadership appears quite conservative."
Landis continues: "Burl Osborne, chairman of the AP board of directors, is also publisher emeritus of the conservative The Dallas Morning News, a newspaper that endorsed George W. Bush in the last election. Kathleen Carroll, senior vice president and executive editor of AP, was a reporter at The Dallas Morning News before joining AP. Carroll is also on the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME)'s 7-member executive committee. The APME "works in partnership with AP to improve the wire service's performance," according to their website. APME vice president, Deanna Sands, is managing editor of the ultra conservative Omaha World Herald newspaper, whose parent company owns the largest voting machine company in the nation, Election Systems and Software (ES&S)."
It's a cozy relationship considering that ES&S voting machines count 50% of all the votes in the country. The second largest company, Diebold, is also tied to the Republican Party and promised (in a comment by Wally Diebold that got widespread attention on the internet) to "deliver the vote" in Ohio to President Bush.
Both Wally and ES&S apparently succeeded admirably in their task of undermining the election.
Many readers are probably wondering what happened to the "Help America Vote Act" that was passed by Congress to avoid the problems of Florida 2000? As Landis reports in an earlier article: "What Congress really did was to throw $2.65 billion at the states, so that they could lavish it on a handful of private companies that are controlled by ultra-conservative Republicans, foreigners and felons." (Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia were among the big winners)
None of the facts related to the presidential election add up. Voter registration went up from 105 million to 120 million. In Ohio alone it went up a whopping 17%. Whenever registration has surged like this in the past, it has always favored the challenger and precipitated a change in government.
Not so, this time, and Republican pollsters are eager to convince us that the reason for this is a renewed interest among the American public for "moral values". Is that it or are the results simply an indication of massive (but well calculated) voter fraud?
The exit polling was equally skewed, showing a clear victory for Kerry. Exit polling has traditionally been a reliable way of determining the outcome of elections. Not so in Bush-world, where vote totals are invariably higher for Bush in the contentious areas that ultimately decide the election.
Give strategist Karl Rove his due; he knew what had to be done and did it. The rest, of course, has been papered over by the pollsters, pimps and pundits in American press corps.
Do we need to remind ourselves that representative government can only be established by the power of the vote? It is the electoral process that confers legitimacy on government. Without a popular mandate state power can only be vindicated through force of arms.
Last night American democracy was skillfully subverted and replaced with a mutant form of corporatism that operates independent of the will of the people. It's impossible to know what the long term affects of this will be, but it is a development that should greatly concern us all.
related articles from Lynn Landes:
31 October 2004, If this election is stolen, will it be by enough to stop a recount?
22 October 2004, Could the Associated Press (AP) rig the election?
imagine that!
Computer Scientists Cautious of E-Voting
3 November 2004, Rachel Konrad, AP
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
MIAMI - After only scattered problems in electronic voting's biggest day ever in the United States, with roughly 40 million people casting digital ballots, voting equipment company executives crowed.
To them, the relatively smooth election was a vindication of paperless touch-screen systems.
For more than a year, computer scientists and voting rights advocates had vigorously assailed the nation's 175,000 touch-screen machines as insecure and unreliable, prone to software bugs, hackers and hardware failures.
Some naysayers had even predicted worst-case scenarios in which the ATM-like computers deleted or altered votes, machines overheated and crashed under record turnout. But that's not to say electronic voting was trouble-free.
On Tuesday, poll workers in New Orleans had numerous problems operating the equipment. On Election Day and during early voting, several dozen voters in six states reported difficulty selecting candidates, apparently due to miscalibration.
Tuesday's vote was not marred, however, by the problems that plagued primaries earlier this year - power outages, missing memory cartridges, machines that displayed the wrong ballots and suspicious delays in reporting results.
"It was a very positive day for the American voting system generally and for electronic voting machines particularly," said Harris Miller, president of the industry trade group Information Technology Association of America, which represents voting equipment companies. "The machines performed beautifully ... Instead of theories about catastrophes, the simple reality is that the machines produce accurate results and the voters love them."
Computer scientists reserved judgment.
Many acknowledged that the hardware performed well. But software errors may have changed results, they said. The vast majority of touch screens in the United States do not produce paper records. And that means, critics say, that the machines could alter or delete ballots without anyone noticing.
"What has most concerned scientists are problems that are not observable, so the fact that no major problems were observed says nothing about the system," said David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. "The fact that we had a relatively smooth election yesterday does not change at all the vulnerability these systems have to fraud or bugs."
Avi Rubin, one of the nation's leading critics of e-voting, said he was relieved and encouraged that the machines didn't fail en masse on Election Day.
But Rubin, who worked in Maryland as a poll judge Tuesday, still supports major changes in election technology - including requirements that the machines produce paper records, and that independent researchers be permitted to examine their software for problems.
"I've been saying all along that my biggest fear is that someone would program a machine to give a wrong answer," said Rubin, a Johns Hopkins computer scientist. "If that were to happen, the machine would still work fine - we just wouldn't know it."
Statisticians at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and California Institute of Technology are asking county election officials throughout the nation for raw election data and hope to perform "forensic tests" that could take at least a month. The fledgling U.S. Election Assistance Commission is also compiling data and plans to issue a report later this month. Research will include comparisons of the number of voters and the number of ballots cast in random precincts, an attempt to determine whether votes were mysteriously lost.
According to an MIT/CalTech study, 8.2 percent of touch-screen votes in senatorial elections between 1998 and 2000 were lost - more than any other system except lever machines, which lost 9.5 percent of votes.
Other critics said comfortable, sometimes predictable margins of victory in states with electronic voting - Bush in Georgia and Florida, Kerry in California and Maryland - will minimize scrutiny of touch-screen results.
A razor-thin outcome could have prompted a recount, but it would have likely been challenged in court because votes cast on touch screens - everywhere but in Nevada - cannot be manually recounted owing to the lack of a paper trail.
Ohio, where votes were still being counted Wednesday, does not rely heavily on electronic systems.
"We've resolved in our heads to provide scrutiny only when the election is close, and that's a bad way of approaching it," said Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, chairwoman of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition. "We need to apply scrutiny every time so we know we have a healthy process." More than half of Florida voters cast electronic ballots.
David Bear, spokesman for Diebold Inc., which has about 45,000 machines installed nationwide, said more counties will switch to touch screens - particularly for early voting.
Because they can toggle between ballots in dozens of precincts, election officials can consolidate polling places for early voting, reducing lines on Election Day.
The machines also toggle between languages and can be equipped with headphones for blind voters.
Bear dismissed the notion that comfortable margins obscured problems.
"There was no dodging of a bullet," Bear said. "The fact of the matter is, electronic voting is a better way of voting because touch screens are more accurate and they meet people's special needs."
Bin Laden: Goal is to bankrupt U.S.
Al-Jazeera releases full transcript of al Qaeda leader's tape
(CNN) - The Arabic-language network Al-Jazeera released a full transcript Monday of the most recent videotape from Osama bin Laden in which the head of al Qaeda said his group's goal is to force America into bankruptcy.
Al-Jazeera aired portions of the videotape Friday but released the full transcript of the entire tape on its Web site Monday.
"We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah," bin Laden said in the transcript.
He said the mujahedeen fighters did the same thing to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, "using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers."
"We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," bin Laden said.
He also said al Qaeda has found it "easy for us to provoke and bait this administration."
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," bin Laden said.
Al-Jazeera executives said they decided to post the entire speech because rumors were circulating that the network omitted parts that "had direct threats toward specific states, which was totally untrue."
"We chose the most newsworthy parts of the address and aired them. The rest was used in lower thirds in graphics format," said one official.
U.S. intelligence officials Monday confirmed that the transcript made public Monday by Al-Jazeera was a complete one.
As part of the "bleed-until-bankruptcy plan," bin Laden cited a British estimate that it cost al Qaeda about $500,000 to carry out the attacks of September 11, 2001-- an amount that he said paled in comparison with the costs incurred by the United States.
"Every dollar of al Qaeda defeated a million dollars, by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs," he said. "As for the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.
The total U.S. national debt is more than $7 trillion. The U.S. federal deficit was $413 billion in 2004, according to the Treasury Department.
"It is true that this shows that al Qaeda has gained, but on the other hand it shows that the Bush administration has also gained, something that anyone who looks at the size of the contracts acquired by the shady Bush administration-linked mega-corporations, like Halliburton and its kind, will be convinced.
"And it all shows that the real loser is you," he said. "It is the American people and their economy."
As for President Bush's Iraq policy, Bin Laden said, "the darkness of black gold blurred his vision and insight, and he gave priority to private interests over the public interests of America.
"So the war went ahead, the death toll rose, the American economy bled, and Bush became embroiled in the swamps of Iraq that threaten his future," bin Laden said.
U.S. government officials said Friday that the tape appeared to be authentic and recently made. It was the first videotaped message from the al Qaeda leader in nearly three years.
little helpers
"I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
Walden W. O'Dell, Diebold Inc.
Chairman of the Board, President, and Chief Executive Officer
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
