[Mb-civic] VOTING: GOOD, BAD & The UGLY

[Barbara Siomos]

Thank you for sending this Peter..... It is scary stuff and needs to be
told.

peace,
barbara
>From:  "Peter Fleming"
><peterfleming at earthlink.net> 
>Date: Fri, Nov 5, 2004, 10:28pm (EST-3) 
>To: Civic <mb-civic at islandlists.com>
>Resent-From: Michael Butler
><michael at michaelbutler.com> 
>Resent-Date: Sat, Nov 6, 2004, 3:43pm (EST-3)
 
In 1992, I read the Collier brothers, VOTESCAM,  
a disturbing book about voting irregularieties. 
And there have been other similar writings.  
Here, Jon Rappoport  www.nomorefakenews.com 
has done vital new writing and editorial gathering. 
SO WAR REALLY WAS THE ISSUE
NOVEMBER 5, 2004. There is a significant amount of evidence for the
following: both JFK and RFK were pushing for an end to the Vietnam war.
The assassinations of these men helped continue the war.

In 2004, we have the same war machine, and we have a president who is
determined to use it.
War machines are built by corporations who plug into billions of
government money to do their work. This is the military-industrial
complex that Eisenhower warned against on his way out of office.
Keep these things in mind as you read this excerpt from an article by
Peter Phillips:

Published on Thursday, November 4, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Democracy Fails: Corporations Win
by Peter Phillips

...The real winners November 2 are the military industrial complex, who
will continue to feed at the 500 billion-dollar military trough and the
corporate media, whose coffers were filled with billions of dollars for
campaign ads.

And can we be sure we actually had a fair election among those who did
vote? Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Diebold, and Sequoia are the
companies primarily involved in implementing the new voting stations
throughout the country. All three have strong ties to the Bush
Administration.
The largest investors in ES&S, Sequoia, and Diebold are government
defense contractors Northrup-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, Electronic Data
Systems (EDS) and Accenture.

Diebold hired Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC)
of San Diego to develop the software security in their voting machines.
A majority of officials on SAIC's board are former members of either the
Pentagon or the CIA including:
·Army Gen. Wayne Downing, formerly on the National Security Council
·Bobby Ray Inman; former CIA Director· Retired Adm. William Owens,
former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ·Robert Gates,
another former director of the CIA.
So we have a CIA/military private firm that programmed the security in
the voting machines for companies owned by some of the largest military
contracts [contractors] in the country...

Peter Phillips (peter.phillips at sonoma.edu) is an Professor of Sociology
at Sonoma State University and Director of Project Censored. For a
listing of current censored news stories see
http://www.projectcensored.org/
end of Phillips excerpt

JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com
THE ELECTION: FRAUD ON FRAUD
NOVEMBER 5, 2004. The stories of vote fraud are pouring in from all over
the US. Of course, most of them aren't seeing the light of day in the
mainstream press, which is content to claim Tuesday was, all in all, a
very satisfactory performance despite Cicken Little warnings.
So far, my favorite story is one by Christopher Bollyn. I've reprinted
it below.

It isn't great because of some bloodstained truck full of ballots
observed speeding off into the night. It's great because it records a
few details gained by Bollyn actually going down to a central building
in Chicago where votes are tallied.
Yeah, he went there. Lots of people should. What they'll find is mostly
an absence of, well, anything. What would you expect when the rooms are
full of computers?
I had the experience in 1994, in Norwalk, California, in the middle of
the night. I was running for a seat in Congress. Back then, they were
still doing punchcards. The cards were bundled and driven and flown by
chopper to Norwalk from all over LA County.
People still did the initial sorting in big rooms. But then it all
funneled down into Compaq computers modified to be calculating machines.
Then, computer tapes were extracted from the Compaqs and taken up in an
elevator to a room where they were placed on a bigger machine. That
machine relayed the computerese to a mainframe located, we were told,
eight miles away in Downey. Downey digested the communications and spit
back final numbers to Norwalk.
We felt like cows looking for grass being forced to watch brain surgery.
Huh? What? Well... Uh... We were stunned. This was it? This was the
priceless voting process we had learned about in school myths?
There was nothing we could dig into. It was all empty space. It was
invisible. I know that nauseous feeling Bollyn refers to. You want to
reach in and make contact but you can't.
So you start to think about all the ways the count could be rigged. And
in about two minutes you figure out three or four. It doesn't take an
expert to see it.
In 1994, there was a paper trail. The punchcards. We could have paid for
a hand recount. Five to ten thousand dollars. Somebody said, "Hey, if
they cheated with the computers, they could provide a pack of new cards
that mirror what the machines said..." It seemed outrageous to consider,
but...
Anyway, we didn't have the money.
Bollyn is talking about something much more abstract. It's gotten worse.
With today's machines, you can create a complete fantasy in the shape of
a closed loop.
How A Private Company
Counted Our Votes
By Christopher Bollyn
American Free Press
11-5-3
(When the polls closed in Chicago, American Free Press was at the Cook
County clerk's office to see how the secretive private company that
operates the voting machines in America's third largest city actually
controls the counting of the votes.)
CHICAGO - The morning after Election Day, the Democratic vice
presidential candidate John Edwards promised the nation that the
Democrats would "make sure that every vote counts, and that every vote
is counted."
Later in the day, as the Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. John
Kerry, conceded defeat to George W. Bush, his 9th cousin and fellow
"Bonesman" from Yale's elite secret society, The Order of the Skull &
Bones, he said: "In America, it is vital that every vote count."
Kerry and Edwards, however, conceded defeat before some 170,000 to
250,000 provisional ballots from the state of Ohio, which could have
changed the outcome of the election, had been counted. As the public has
been led to believe, the final tally came down to a near 50-50 split and
it was the "swing state of Ohio that made the difference. But how were
the votes actually counted across the nation on November 2?
VOTING IN CHICAGO On Election Day, voters in Cook County (Ill.) were
among the 60 million Americans who voted with machines made by Election
Systems & Software, a secretive and private company based in Omaha.
ES&S, as its known, calls itself "the world's largest and most
experienced provider of total election management solutions."
According to the company's own figures, 42 percent of all registered
voters in the United States voted on ES&S equipment on Election Day.
ES&S sells its "end-to-end election management suite of solutions" to
replace traditional voting methods -- and election officials -- with
what it calls "one-stop-shop full service election coordination from
start to finish."
What this means on Election Day is that ES&S, a private company, manages
everything about the voting, from voter registration, the printing of
ballots, the programming of the voting machines, the counting and
tabulation of the votes, and the final reporting of the results for 60
million Americans in 47 states.
Four years after first revealing the flaws inherent in the insecure ES&S
electronic voting machines used in Cook County, American Free Press went
to the county clerk's office to observe how ES&S controls the counting
of the votes for America's third largest city, Chicago, and the suburban
area around it.
Scott Burnham, spokesman for the county clerk, had informed me that the
vote count is open to the public and that press credentials would not be
required.
Shortly after arriving, I ran into Burnham and David Orr, the county
clerk, in the hallway. Although I had arrived just shortly before the
polls closed at 7 p.m., I was the only member of the public or the press
around except for a couple Associated Press (AP) reporters in the far
corner of the room. They were busy setting up their laptop to the ES&S
computer in the backroom, which provided them with "direct feed of the
results."
I was surprised to see so few people attending such an important event.
In France, scores of citizens watch the vote count in each polling
station.
While the results were coming in, the AP "reporter" read a novel while
her laptop did the communicating. When I went to talk to the AP
reporter, Burnham quickly appeared and told me to leave. "You should
talk to AP," he said.
"She is AP," I replied.
"She just works for AP," he said.
Clearly the subject of AP having direct data feed from the mainframe
computer was something Burnham did not want me to discuss. Dane Placko,
a local reporter for the Fox News network, told AFP that, "Fox gets
direct feed."
Any actual counting of the votes by citizens is very rare in the United
States except for a few counties in Montana and other states where paper
ballots are still hand-counted. In most counties the ballots are treated
as input data to be processed through computer systems controlled by
private companies like ES&S.
In Cook County the ballot is inevitably a cluttered punch card with
nearly 100 votes. After voting for the president and vice-president, a
senator, and a Congressman, the voter has to wade through pages of
choices to vote for some 80 local officials from the sanitation board to
the state's general assembly. Every voter had to vote on nearly 80
judges.
As I voted, every ballot that was fed into the ES&S machine registered
as an "undervote," as did mine. Rather than holding separate elections
for national and local officials, as is done in most countries, the Cook
County ballot is extremely long and complicated.
Officials who support electronic voting systems give the complexity of
the ballot as the main reason why voting machines are necessary --
because it would take too much time to count the votes manually.
After calling and personally visiting ES&S headquarters in Omaha and
Chicago, I can say it is the most secretive company I have ever come
across. In August, I visited ES&S company headquarters on John Galt
Blvd. in Omaha.
Although the company says it is the largest voting machine company in
the United States, they were unable to provide any information about
their company or their products. The ownership of the company is a
closely-guarded secret. I asked to meet with Todd Urosevich, one of the
two brothers that founded the company.
Bob and Todd Urosevich started ES&S as a company called Data Mark in the
early 1980s. Today, Bob Urosevich heads Ohio-based Diebold Election
Systems, a competitor of ES&S and the second largest U.S. manufacturer
of electronic voting machines. Together, the computerized ballot
scanners and touch-screen voting machines systems made by ES&S and
Diebold recorded some 80 percent of all votes cast in the recent U.S.
presidential election.
As ES&S had no media relations person available and Todd Urosevich was
not willing to be interviewed, the company's chief financial officer Tom
O'Brien finally appeared. O'Brien, clearly displeased with my visit and
questions, refused to provide any information about the company.
Although I was ill on Election Day, I knew I had to go to the county
clerk's office to observe "counting" of the vote. It is, after all, the
only "counting" open to the public. What I saw in Chicago, however, only
made me more nauseous.
The only "vote count" the press or public can observe in Chicago is what
is projected on screens. The opening screen read: ES&S Automatic
Election Returns, Release 35, Under License to the City of Chicago,
Serial No. 0004, Copyright 1987.
Carl Zimmerman, technical supervisor for the clerk's office, said that
the computer that ran the system was in the back, "in the ES&S room," he
said.
At 7 p.m., Jonathan Lin, a worker on the county clerk's computer staff,
came out and turned on the monitors on the 6th floor, where the City of
Chicago votes were tallied and displayed. Behind him was Rick Thurman,
an ES&S technician, checking the first results.
Thurman seemed surprised when I asked him if he worked for ES&S. He said
that the company had about 6 engineers running the computer in the back
room. He then checked himself, saying he had said too much. Later I
asked Lin who was actually operating the computer that was generating
the results being shown on the monitors. "ES&S is running the mainframe
for all of this," Lin said pointing to the television displays.
In the press room in the back I noticed stacks of boxes containing
"Votamatic voting machines" and "pre-punched ballots" [what???!!---JR]
printed by ES&S of Addison, Texas, for the different precincts in Cook
County.
In the rear hallway behind the press room was the ES&S room. Only ES&S
personnel were allowed into the room. When I poked around in the hallway
and peeked into the ES&S room an armed marshal and ES&S employee quickly
appeared. In no condition for a confrontation, I made myself scarce.
I met a couple reporters from CLTV, a local cable channel of WGN. One of
the reporters asked about my interest in the Chicago tallies. I said I
was interested to see how a private company runs the elections in
Chicago. Seemingly unaware of how ES&S operates elections in Cook
County, I explained the basics. "I've observed elections across Europe,
I added, "from France and Germany to Serbia and Holland. Everywhere in
Europe voting is done on paper ballots that are counted by the citizens
-- except Holland."
Obviously uncomfortable with this discussion the reporter responded,
"I'm glad I'm not in Serbia. I don't mind if a machine counts the
votes."
end of Bollyn article
JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com
MORE ON EXIT POLLS
NOVEMBER 5, 2004. It happened in the 2000 election. The public was given
a peek at the actual machination of exit polling.
When the networks began, all together, that fateful swing from Bush to
Gore, back and forth, in the prediction of a Florida winner, and finally
had to say WE DON'T KNOW, people discovered that there was a single
outfit called VNS, Voter News Service, that was supplying exit-poll data
to all these networks.
In other words, there was no competitive exit polling with each network
trying to get better data---it was all one moshpit.
And then the public learned that VNS was really a stepchild of the
networks. Created by the networks.
After the 2000 fiasco, VNS was erased. The misbehaving kid was put into
a foster home and forgotten.
In 2000, it also emerged that the networks were making their famous very
early predictions of winners in the states based on exit-polling data.
You know. "The voting has just ended in Georgia, and NBC is ready to
call a winner." No actual votes yet counted. The public learned that
these unconscionable and bizarre early calls of winners were inferences
from exit polls.
So it was all a closed loop that encompassed the networks and their
branch office, VNS.
No VISIBLE problem until Florida, when all hell broke loose.
For the 2004 election, a new exit-poll deal was made. Once again, all
the networks would rely on a single source for data. Edison Media
Research/Mitofsky.
Why? Why didn't each network use a different service?
Because that would have created something less than a unified face.
Suppose the exit-poll companies came up with vastly different results?
Suppose you had networks making different predictions of winners?
Oh no. The facade of pre-knowledge would have crumbled.
This is called a CLUE.
It's like medical research. Suppose a drug company trying to get FDA
approval for a new medicine contracted out clinical trials to five
different groups of completely independent researchers, saying, "Hey
boys, the studies you're about to do are are free and clear. We'll never
talk to you until your results are in. You won't even know who the other
groups of researchers are. These will be five completely pure and
separate studies on the same drug. Go to it."
That will happen when the Pope takes off his mask and reveals that he is
an actor working for Saturday Night Live.
Too much risk. Suppose the five studies are at great odds with one
another. Suppose it turns out, 50 million dollars later, that there are
no clear conclusions about the safety or efficacy of the drug.
The television networks understand the problem. Believe me, they
understand. They may talk about ratings and competition among themselves
when it comes to CSI versus Desperate Housewives, but in the matter of
exit-polling, they are One.
And because they have been One for so many years, the public accepts the
idea that the early predictions of presidential winners are unanimously
based on good information.
When all the networks ram their identical early predictions of winners
in the states down the public's throats, the public submits.
The public says, "Wow. These guys can really see the future. And it's
based on interviews with voters coming out of precincts after they
voted? Exit polls? Amazing. They must have some beautiful scientific
system."
As opposed to: "Shit, NBC is saying Bush won in Illinois, but CBS has it
for Kerry. CNN is saying too close to call yet. FOX says Bush has won
Illinois AND Russia and China. And no votes have been counted in
Illinois yet? What the hell is going on?"
Chaos. Loss of confidence. Suspicion of fraud.
Can't have that.
It would be like Don Rumsfeld holding a press conference during the Iraq
occupation and saying, "I'll now bring to the podium four generals. Each
man will give his impression of how it's going. You're going to get very
different assessments. We're trying to reconcile them..."
BOOM.
So you can see why the networks have to contract out all exit-polling to
one basic firm.
"Don't alarm the children."
And yet...and yet...by God, these identical and early predictions of
winners made by all the networks, often with no votes yet counted, do
come true.
In 2004, no network had to reverse a single one of these early
predictions.
The final vote counts mirrored the early predictions.
This is called ANOTHER CLUE.
We're talking about a tiny, tiny number of voters interviewed in the 50
states as they exit the polls, and then we're talking about mostly
unerring calls by the networks, based on those exit polls, as to the
eventual winner in each state.
At this point, you can go in two possible directions. You can say that
exit polls are fantastically scientific and use computer models for
projection that are brilliant beyond brilliant---or you can say,
"Something is wrong here. Something is very wrong. I'm not sure what the
hell it is, but this is too weird."
Now, exit polls---how they are actually conducted, by what people in the
field, who is interviewed---are pretty much a mystery. We don't get full
disclosure. We don't don't learn who the precinct pollers are by name.
We don't know, of course, what attitudes they are sporting, whether they
say they are from Edison/Mitofsky...and so on.
Because, in past years, these exit polls have SEEMED so uncanny and
accurate and prophetic, we ASSUME they are. And when, last Tuesday, exit
polls taken early in the day and leaked to the press favored Kerry, we
say that we are looking at an anomaly. "Wow, this year, for the first
time, they got it wrong. They always got it right, but this year they
called it for Kerry and then the vote went the other way. So the vote
itself must have been rigged for Bush."
I have several comments about this. I agree that there was massive fraud
in the vote. Electronic, and human, on several levels. I have read
accounts that correlate exit poll results with states where the
electronic vote had a paper trail and states where the electronic vote
didn't have that paper trail. These accounts conclude that, if the exit
poll in state X favored Kerry and if state X had no countable paper
trail, the ensuing vote count went to Bush...but if state X had a backup
paper trail, the exit-poll prediction for Kerry held up.
I have not personally confirmed the accuracy of these accounts. Nor have
I looked at the later exit polls in these states (still taken ahead of
the vote count in the afternoon, as opposed to the morning). I am not
saying this is a bad piece of research or that it shouldn't have been
done.
I'm saying, think about exit polls in general. Think about the
non-competition factor and what that signifies. Think about the
suspiciously uncanny predictions, from a tiny number of voters
interviewed to a call for a winner, when no votes have been counted yet.
Don't automatically assume that exit polls are a gold standard.
The prediction game is frought with problems and reverses.
Pre-election-day polls often contradict one another. Corporations do
polls on consumer preferences and then sometimes find themselves in the
toilet when they market a product that conforms to those preferences.
People in the entertainment biz sometimes build a TV series around what
polled viewers say they want---and then the series tanks. It's not black
and white.
And, as I wrote the other day, the 2004 election, the last time I
looked, was a perfect replication of the 2000 red-and-blue map, except
for New Hampshire. Yet between 2000 and 2004, many new things happened.
9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, massive corporate outsourcing at new levels,
the build-up of the Internet influence, the Patriot Act, on and on.
Yet, the election map stayed virtually the same. And the early
(never-to-be-reversed) network predictions of winners in a number of
states, made before a single vote had been counted in those states, were
based on exit polls.
No, I don't have all the answers to this maniacal puzzle. But I see the
embrace between the exit polls and eventual vote counts, and I don't buy
it.
I believe that, if 20 different companies had been exit-polling in all
50 states, we would have had diversity. Strangeness. Uproar. Chaos at
the networks. And out of this fertile process, I believe something ugly
and true and shocking would have sprung out of the mix and we would now
know a lot more about how the election process really works in America.
"Today, Smith-Jones, an exit-polling company hired by NBC to supply data
for early predictions of winners, filed a suit against the secretaries
of state in ten states. John Jones, president of the company, said,
'Yes, we called ten states in the presidential race that turned out to
be wrong. But we stand by our data. Mather-Blather, the exit-polling
company that called those ten states correctly for CBS, is owned by
Garble Barble, who has raised more than forty million dollars for
Republican candidates. And Mather-Blather called six other states wrong.
We demand a recount of the vote...'"
You see, I believe this IS the way it would turn out if competing
exit-poll outfits were at play in the election. And THAT leads me to
infer that the monolithic and nearly perfect track record of the one
exit-polling monopoly that represents all the networks is somehow
obscuring the truth.
If there were one car manufacturing company that supplied cars to every
person on Earth, we would tend to accept the product as the best
possible example of current technology---especially if that company had
been the monopoly for decades.
Until some new firm exploded on the scene with rides that got much
better gas mileage.
That means the predictions of the One Exit Polling Company and the later
mirror-perfect confirmation by the vote-count constitute a lie. And THAT
means we are tangled in an illusion.
Which is another clue.
So in 2008, I'd like to see 50 exit-poll outfits out there in the field,
with the best modeling systems they can put together. And I'd like to
see the results posted online throughout the day of the election. I'd
also like to see complete transparency: these are the people we used in
the field; these are how many voters we interviewed in each state; here
is the model we used to make predictions; this is how the model works;
here is the interview form we used; here is how we trained the field
pollers; here are the precincts in each state we visited; here are how
many (or how few) Edison/Mitofsky people we spotted along the way...
I know there are people out there who'll think, "Guess what? All these
50 outfits will use the same system of exit-polling because there is
only one state-of-the-art way to do it, and that way is very, very good,
and we know this because, year after year, the predictions of the
exit-polling monopoly turn out to be right."
Yeah, well, that's my point. RIGHT means: the predictions meshed exactly
with the vote count. And meshing is just meshing is just meshing. If the
whole system is a closed loop.
Too horrible to contemplate?
Must be another explanation?
Let's find out. 50 exit-poll outfits in the field. Let the chips fall
where they may. Exert pressure on the networks. Let's see who and what
cracks wide open like a pumpkin under a sledgehammer.
JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com
EXIT POLLS, FRAUD, AND CONFLICT OF INTEREST
NOVEMBER 4, 2004. Much has been made of the disparity between early exit
polls and the actual vote counts on Tuesday.
I would instead think about why, in the past, exit polls have seemed to
be such accurate predictors of the way the vote swings. There are many
pitfalls involved in exit polls, not the least of which are sheer fraud,
misreporting results, and inventing results when in truth no exit polls
are done.
I have covered some of this in earlier articles leading up to the
election.
Instead, I would focus more heavily on electronic fraud, other gross
types of fraud---such as voter intimidation and intentional
discouragement, throwing ballots away---and clear evidence of conflict
of interest, a case for which I detailed in my article on Ken Blackwell,
who ran the vote in Ohio as secretary of state while serving as co-chair
of the committee to re-elect Bush in that state.
It is my contention that exit polls have traditionally been used to
paint a picture which is later verified by massive fraud in vote counts.
In other words, the so-called results of exit surveys indicate that
candidate X will win---and then the vote count is rigged so that X does
win.
The networks would call winners in some states (and still do) based on
NO votes yet counted on election night, and these networks would base
their calls on the exit polls. Realize that this past Tuesday, despite
all the commotion about very early exit polls favoring Kerry, once the
networks started calling states for Bush or Kerry, they NEVER had to
retract a prediction---and many of those calls occurred just as voting
precincts closed in states and before a single vote had been counted.
This is some pretty great prediction. If I had a tout like that for the
NFL...
We are being led to believe, with hindsight, that it was the issue of
values that caused all those states to turn red and leave Kerry with a
fringe of blues. And later exit polls have been trotted out to show us
this remarkable voter focus on so-called traditional values.
Which, as far as I'm concerned, is the real purpose of exit polls. To
explain or predict why the vote (fraud) went the way it did.
Well, if elections are being rigged in various ways, you need a cover
story.
It's basically an intelligence op.
You don't launch an op without a cover story and limited hangouts that
disclose a little piece of a problem to paper over a rotten crime of
large proportions.
Of course, you don't have rig every vote everywhere. You just need to do
it in crucial situations, like Ohio.
In this election, the cover story has been values. It could have been
leadership or trust or security or the war on terror or children. It
could have been cooked up any number of ways to show why Bush should
have---and did---come out on top.
In the wake of this particular cover story, we have suddenly been told
that between 30 and 40 percent of all voters in America are Christians,
or some such.
That's called backfill. You have floated the cover story, and then you
come in behind it with "facts" to bolster it.
"Bush won because he looks like an alien from Pluto. That's what the
later exit polls show. And look, the new movie on Pluto and the
destruction of planet Earth has just taken in more money than all other
movies from the last two years combined."
Now that the values cover story has taken hold, pundits are lining up to
talk about "essential culture wars in the US" and "the divide between
the heartland and the big urban centers," and based on this
third-generation spin (the whole cycle only took two days), Democrats
are pondering how they can re-energize their party to combat the silent
takeover of the Christians.
Instead, look at election fraud in all its forms.
As I've written before, I have a little personal experience in this
area. When I ran for a Congressional seat in 1994, as soon as the polls
closed, a local LA TV station posted the full count of absentee ballots.
They gave my opponent an 80-20% margin. Later that night, as my campaign
staff and I stood behind computer screens down at the county registrar's
office watching the returns posted at half-hour intervals, that 80-20
split never wavered by more than two points---throughout the entire
night. It was as if each bundle of new votes coming in by van and by
chopper reflected 80-20...every half hour. It was a miracle.
The next day, people said, "Well, you were running against an incumbent
who has held that seat for 20 years. What did you expect?" That was like
a little post-mortem exit poll. The other guy won because he's been
there for 20 years.
And if I had planned to run again, I might have assembled my staff and
said, "We have to develop a plan to unseat a 20-year incumbent. I need
specific ideas on how we do that."
But I had been there watching the accumulating vote tally the night
before, and I had seen something else. I had seen the miracle.
JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com