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Post by Boomer Chick on Nov 19, 2004 19:02:47 GMT -5
Subject: Bev Harris' description of the Volusia Co. Elections Warehouse Bev Harris' description of the Volusia Co. Elections Warehouse while on her excellent adventure in FL... www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2704906#2713039 Wed Nov-17-04 09:32 PM The warehouse is located in the backside of the backwoods in Florida, in an unmarked brown building invisible from the road or even off the road. You have to be lucky to find someone who knows where it is. We found a fire department employee who had a family member who had once been to a building near it. When you get there, you drive through the mud and ask the construction guys, "where the heck is it" and then you go on a police training obstacle course past a chain link fence to an unmarked brown thing. There is no way in hell they thought we'd find it, much less show up to catch them "recycling" the vote. Maybe this is the Florida version of the Green Party? Anyway, what we saw was pure "shock and awe" when we showed up. The bag was already out there before we got there. He must have been psychic to know we were coming. Far from being "laid out like a buffet" it involved a determined tug of war. And as for the trash pick-up day, I doubt there is one way out there. What it was, was luck. Or divine intervention, however you want to look at it. Smiles, Bev and Kathleen --------------------------------------- Tue Nov-16-04 11:59 PM Ah! Brevard. Yes, that would be interesting -- we already have put in a public records request for complete hand count in Brevard. They could talk us out of this if they would just give us the records. Bev ------------------------------------- Wed Nov-17-04 12:09 AM VOTERGATE.TV NEEDS YOUR DONATION MORE THAN WE DO They are headed to New Hampshire next, then Ohio. But they are running on fumes, even through their film is probably the most important one in the world right now, and they are pros all the way. If you don't believe me, download the 30 minute version. This stuff needs to be seen to be believed, and this is the ONLY film crew that gets this story. They were there. I hope Randi Rhodes gets Russell Michaels on. He is one of the main Real Votergate producers, and he was there for this whole thing, and more. Bev
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Post by Boomer Chick on Nov 19, 2004 19:11:27 GMT -5
Published on Thursday, November 18, 2004 by CommonDreams.org 'Stinking Evidence' of Possible Election Fraud Found in Florida by Thom Hartmann There was something odd about the poll tapes. A "poll tape" is the phrase used to describe a printout from an optical scan voting machine made the evening of an election, after the machine has read all the ballots and crunched the numbers on its internal computer. It shows the total results of the election in that location. The printout is signed by the polling officials present in that precinct/location, and then submitted to the county elections office as the official record of how the people in that particular precinct had voted. (Usually each location has only one single optical scanner/reader, and thus produces only one poll tape.) Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org, the erstwhile investigator of electronic voting machines, along with people from Florida Fair Elections, showed up at Florida's Volusia County Elections Office on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 16, 2004, and asked to see, under a public records request, each of the poll tapes for the 100+ optical scanners in the precincts in that county. The elections workers - having been notified in advance of her request - handed her a set of printouts, oddly dated November 15 and lacking signatures. Bev pointed out that the printouts given her were not the original poll tapes and had no signatures, and thus were not what she'd requested. Obligingly, they told her that the originals were held in another location, the Elections Office's Warehouse, and that since it was the end of the day they should meet Bev the following morning to show them to her. Bev showed up bright and early the morning of Wednesday the 17th - well before the scheduled meeting - and discovered three of the elections officials in the Elections Warehouse standing over a table covered with what looked like poll tapes. When they saw Bev and her friends, Bev told me in a telephone interview less than an hour later, "They immediately shoved us out and slammed the door." In a way, that was a blessing, because it led to the stinking evidence. "On the porch was a garbage bag," Bev said, "and so I looked in it and, and lo and behold, there were public record tapes." Thrown away. Discarded. Waiting to be hauled off. "It was technically stinking, in fact," Bev added, "because what they had done was to have thrown some of their polling tapes, which are the official records of the election, into the garbage. These were the ones signed by the poll workers. These are something we had done an official public records request for." When the elections officials inside realized that the people outside were going through the trash, they called the police and one came out to challenge Bev. Kathleen Wynne, a www.blackboxvoting.org investigator, was there. "We caught the whole thing on videotape," she said. "I don't think you'll ever see anything like this - Bev Harris having a tug of war with an election worker over a bag of garbage, and he held onto it and she pulled on it, and it split right open, spilling out those poll tapes. They were throwing away our democracy, and Bev wasn't going to let them do it." As I was interviewing Bev just moments after the tussle, she had to get off the phone, because, "Two police cars just showed up." She told me later in the day, in an on-air interview, that when the police arrived, "We all had a vigorous debate on the merits of my public records request." The outcome of that debate was that they all went from the Elections Warehouse back to the Elections Office, to compare the original, November 2 dated and signed poll tapes with the November 15 printouts the Elections Office had submitted to the Secretary of State. A camera crew from www.votergate.tv met them there, as well. And then things got even odder. "We were sitting there comparing the real [signed, original] tapes with the [later printout] ones that were given us," Bev said, "and finding things missing and finding things not matching, when one of the elections employees took a bin full of things that looked like garbage - that looked like polling tapes, actually - and passed by and disappeared out the back of the building." This provoked investigator Ellen Brodsky to walk outside and check the garbage of the Elections Office itself. Sure enough - more original, signed poll tapes, freshly trashed. "And I must tell you," Bev said, "that whatever they had taken out [the back door] just came right back in the front door and we said, 'What are these polling place tapes doing in your dumpster?'" A November 18 call to the Volusia County Elections Office found that Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe was unavailable and nobody was willing to speak on the record with an out-of-state reporter. However, The Daytona Beach News (in Volusia County), in a November 17th article by staff writer Christine Girardin, noted, "Harris went to the Department of Elections' warehouse on State Road 44 in DeLand on Tuesday to inspect original Nov. 2 polling place tapes, after being given a set of reprints dated Nov. 15. While there, Harris saw Nov. 2 polling place tapes in a garbage bag, heightening her concern about the integrity of voting records." The Daytona Beach News further noted that, "[Elections Supervisor] Lowe confirmed Wednesday some backup copies of tapes from the Nov. 2 election were destined for the shredder," but pointed out that, according to Lowe, that was simply because there were two sets of tapes produced on election night, each signed. "One tape is delivered in one car along with the ballots and a memory card," the News reported. "The backup tape is delivered to the elections office in a second car." Suggesting that duplicates don't need to be kept, Lowe claims that Harris didn't want to hear an explanation of why some signed poll tapes would be in the garbage. "She's not wanting to listen to an explanation," Lowe told the News of Harris. "She has her own ideas." But the Ollie North action in two locations on two days was only half of the surprise that awaited Bev and her associates. When they compared the discarded, signed, original tapes with the recent printouts submitted to the state and used to tabulate the Florida election winners, Harris says a disturbing pattern emerged. "The difference was hundreds of votes in each of the different places we examined," said Bev, "and most of those were in minority areas." When I asked Bev if the errors they were finding in precinct after precinct were random, as one would expect from technical, clerical, or computer errors, she became uncomfortable. "You have to understand that we are non-partisan," she said. "We're not trying to change the outcome of an election, just to find out if there was any voting fraud." That said, Bev added: "The pattern was very clear. The anomalies favored George W. Bush. Every single time." Of course finding possible voting "anomalies" in one Florida county doesn't mean they'll show up in all counties. It's even conceivable there are innocent explanations for both the mismatched counts and trashed original records; this story undoubtedly will continue to play out. And, unless further investigation demonstrates a pervasive and statewide trend toward "anomalous" election results in many of Florida's counties, odds are none of this will change the outcome of the election (which exit polls showed John Kerry winning in Florida). Nonetheless, Bev and her merry band are off to hit another county. As she told me on her cell phone while driving toward their next destination, "We just put Volusia County and their lawyers on notice that they need to continue to keep a number of documents under seal, including all of the memory cards to the ballot boxes, and all of the signed poll tapes." Why? "Simple," she said. "Because we found anomalies indicative of fraud." Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."
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Post by Boomer Chick on Nov 19, 2004 19:46:21 GMT -5
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Post by Boomer Chick on Nov 22, 2004 14:18:02 GMT -5
Washington State Judge Refuses to Stop Wash. Recount November 22, 2004 08:35 AM EST start.earthlink.net/newsarticle?cat=9&aid=D86GUMC80_storySEATTLE - A federal judge Sunday denied the state Republican Party's bid to force Washington's most populous county to stop counting some ballots in the recount of the governor's race. In a conference call with lawyers, U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman denied the GOP's request for a temporary restraining order barring the hand-counting of ballots in King County that were rejected because they could not be read electronically. "It was a good decision," state Democratic Party Chairman Paul Berendt said. "It's good for voters because it's consistent with the standard we would like to see - that every vote be counted." After all counties reported their tallies last Wednesday, Republican Dino Rossi led Democrat Christine Gregoire by only 261 votes out of some 2.8 million ballots cast. State law requires a machine recount when the margin is less than 2,000 votes. The process should be done by Wednesday, but the uncertainty could stretch into December if a candidate or party demands a total hand recount. Republicans sued Secretary of State Sam Reed and the King County Division of Elections on Saturday, arguing that ballots that could not be counted electronically should be excluded from the recount because they would have to be checked by hand. The lawsuit said the recount would be inconsistent because hand-counting was not an option in other counties where punch card ballots were used instead of optical scanners. "This constitutes a clear violation of hundreds of thousands of Washington voters' right to equal protection under the United States and Washington State Constitutions," the lawsuit stated. GOP Chairman Chris Vance downplayed Pechman's decision, saying it dealt with only one aspect of the lawsuit and was based on King County's assurance that all ballots in question were being kept separate from the others so they can be reviewed if any mistakes are made. "We don't believe King County," Vance said. "Our observers have watched. Ballots are being altered. And we don't believe they are being set aside." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2004 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Post by Boomer Chick on Nov 28, 2004 19:31:39 GMT -5
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Post by Boomer Chick on Nov 28, 2004 19:34:55 GMT -5
www.newsnet5.com/politics/3952395/detail.htmlGroup Files Suit To Overturn Rejected Ballots Cuyahoga County Has Most Provisional Ballots In State POSTED: 9:41 pm EST November 27, 2004 CLEVELAND -- A watchdog group filed a lawsuit Friday that seeks to overturn the rejection of thousands of provisional ballots in Cuyahoga County. The county had the most provisionals in the state at 24,472, of which about 33 percent, or 8,099 ballots, were rejected, mostly because there was no voter registration record for the people who cast them. People for the American Way Foundation wants the county board of elections to hand check the rejected provisionals against voter registration cards, instead of computerized lists compiled from the cards. "The electronic lists are not complete lists. There are mistakes," said Vicky Beasley, attorney for People for the American Way Foundation. The lawsuit also seeks to give voters the chance to have their provisional ballots counted if they cast ballots in the wrong precinct without being directed to the correct precinct. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in late October that a provisional ballot cast outside a voter's home precinct isn't valid. The suit was filed in the Eighth District Court of Appeals against Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell and the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. A message seeking comment was left Friday with Blackwell's office. The county board declined comment until it had a chance to review the suit. People for the American Way Foundation is a national civil rights organization that helped found the Election Protection coalition. Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Post by Boomer Chick on Nov 28, 2004 19:42:28 GMT -5
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Post by Boomer Chick on Nov 28, 2004 19:53:49 GMT -5
www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/930New Ohio voter transcripts feed floodtide of doubt about Republican election manipulation by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman November 25, 2004 COLUMBUS -- A floodtide of evidence of questionable practices in the 2004 election is mounting fast against Ohio Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and Republican Franklin County Board of Elections (BOE) Director Matt Damschroder. New transcriptions of sworn voter testimony, presented below for the first time, confirm growing suspicions of widespread use of rigged machines. Voters experienced hostility from poll workers, refusal of Republican election officials to follow the law, and discriminatory manipulation of voting machine placement, driving significant numbers of Democrats away from the polls. The Columbus Dispatch, central Ohio's dominant conservative daily newspaper, which endorsed Bush for the presidency, says Damschroder “has faced criticism locally and across the country from groups that contend an already short supply of voting machines were shifted from Democratic precincts in Columbus to Republican areas outside the city.” Damschroder is the former head of the Franklin County Republican Party. He claims that the 23.4% increase in voter turnout is a success story. He admitted to the Dispatch on Tuesday, November 23, that he had not asked the Franklin County Commissioners for any additional money this year for new machines, despite a 24% increase in voter registration. “If we had 5000 machines we would have put every one of them out there,” Damschroder says. But he also defends his refusal to ask for more in the run-up to the election. In fact, according to the Dispatch, Damschroder's own records show large numbers of voting machines were not deployed on election day despite frantic requests from inner city poll workers. According to the Dispatch, Damschroder's office received 32 calls from precinct judges requesting more machines, not one of which was filled. Only nine of those calls came from suburban precincts, while 23 came from the Inner City. Overall the board logged 101 calls for voting machine problems this year. In 2000 the number was just 46. Through it all, Damschroder insisted in a Dispatch interview that, “From our perspective, there are (thousands of) stories of people who stood in line and voted.” But many voters had very different views. The Free Press offers the following sworn statements from public hearings held at the Franklin County Courthouse November 15: Janine Smith-White, Youngstown: “I went to my polling place approximately about 9:45 to vote. I waited, I would say, 30 minutes in a line. When I did get to my machine, I pushed John Kerry and my vote immediately jumped up to George Bush. After I started screaming about them cheating again, the aide hurried up and came over and said, oh, that's been happening a lot. Just go ahead and push John Kerry again and I'm saying, you say that's been happening a lot and it hasn't been corrected? Yes, but we can't do anything about it. So I did push John Kerry again and the vote did stay on John Kerry. Even though I completed my voting and after I went over my ballot and I pushed the vote button, I'm still not sure that I voted for John Kerry because, I mean, did my first vote that went to George Bush count or did John Kerry count.” Steven Heyman, Pickerington: “I noticed that one of the big problems was on Molar Road there are two different buildings that you can vote in, 1201 and 1560 Southmore Middle and Bowler School. People were sometimes confused as to which precinct they were supposed to vote in. I had a listing of all the voters for 51 A and if I could catch them before they went in and [stand] in line for two or three hours, and they were really upset if they were in the wrong precinct and had to go to the other one. We probably lost at least 75 voters during the 12 and a half hours I was there.” Tom Pinnetello: “I need to tell you what happened on my first experience voting in Ohio. On November 2nd, I got to my polling station early, so I got -- I wanted to get there early so I got in the car and I headed over to nearby Livingston School and I signed in and waited about 45 minutes in a line that looked to have about 60 people waiting to vote. Once in the library, we noticed that there were only three voting machines. Once it was my turn, I got inside and looked over the voting machine, and this is one of the electronic voting machines. It consisted of an array of blinking lights urging you to vote for something, and once you did vote for something, the blinking light would go out and a steady red light would appear next to your selection. On the upper left-hand part was the selection for president. I wanted to do this, I wanted to get this out of the way, that's what I came here, to vote, that was my number one priority. So I pushed the button for John Kerry for president of the United States. And the light -- the flashing light went out and the light next to John Kerry's name came on. I then mulled over the rest of the propositions and local races that were taking place, some of which I knew about, some of which I didn't. It took the better part of five minutes or so to get through them all. Some of the political players locally I don't know about so I just left them blank because I think you should be making an informed decision and not just pressing buttons. Once I was finished, I got down to the lower right-hand corner and the big green vote button was beckoning. I almost pushed it and I said, no, wait a minute, I want to -- I want to proofread what I just did. I want to look over my selections. I looked up into the upper left-hand corner and the area for president of the United States was now flashing again. My vote for John Kerry had been neutralized. It had been reset. Now, you can call this a glitch, you can call this a design flaw, you can call it a bologna sandwich if you want, but whatever you call it, that machine nearly threw out and neutralized my vote for John Kerry.”
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Post by Boomer Chick on Nov 28, 2004 19:54:36 GMT -5
Jen Miller: “I went ahead and walked in because the lines at that point were four hours long. Again, this used to be my polling location, after the last presidential location it was my polling location and at that time there were two precincts and there were four booths per precinct. This year the first thing I noted that there were three and not one of the precincts had a booth down, so they were operating on two, just 50 percent the amount that they had the election before. The next thing I noted that there were more people in line, probably, at that point than I had probably had ever voted in that precinct. I had voted there for several times. It was just absolute chaos. People were wandering this way and that. The first thing someone said to me is, I don't think they want me here. This is confusing. I voted here for years and I'm leaving. And I asked him to stay, but he wouldn't.. . . So I would say at least a third of the people that were in line were elderly or had mobility challenges. A lot of those people would be standing in line for one to three hours to then come across some steep steps that would be even challenges for the average able-bodied person. One side of the steps could -- one side of the steps didn't even have a rail to hang onto and there was no one to assist people down, okay.”
Cathy Varian: “I was a poll worker at 39B at Creeder Wood School. Quickly, the polls did not open at 7:00. They didn't open until 7:20. We did not sign our tapes like we were supposed to at the beginning. We signed everything at the end and it was very chaotic. The presiding judge was very inexperienced and lacked training. He was very judgmental against a lot of people that came into our poll, one especially that I want to speak out for today. . . . during the day he turned away several people that were in our precinct from work who said they had signed up but they weren't on our books. . . .I wanted to assist him going downtown because I was afraid he was going to open up the provisional ballots and do something with them because I fought so hard and so long all day trying to protect them. And it was a horrible, horrible experience.. . . The police were involved. The police did escort him down to the Board of Elections, but a Democratic representative could not go with the presiding Republican judge in a Democratic precinct, period. . . .Our presiding judge was Republican in a Democratic precinct and they would not let me, the Democratic poll worker accompany him downtown, . . .Only one person went with the ballots and the tapes and I begged and pleaded and called everybody I could. . . .We did not sign the tapes until the end of the evenings. Signs on how to use the machines weren't posted and people were turned away.”
Mark Dunbar, Columbus: “I got off work about 9:30 that morning. I went down and dropped off some ballots down at the Board of Elections. Then I went to my home near Eastgate Elementary. I arrived there at 10:00. I went in. There was no signs as to how to use the voting machines. I heard one of the poll workers tell a guy in one of the booths that he had one minute because he had been in there four minutes. So they were actually rushing people in and out of the polls. The line was about three hours when I got there. There was only three voting booths and I remembered the last time I vote there, we had at least four to five voting booths, so we were down to three. They did allow the people to sit in chairs and move the chairs up and down the line. They did have an elderly woman who was in a wheelchair just sitting there for a couple hours and she was still sitting there when I left. So she didn't get to vote the kind of way she should have. She should have been taken to the front but I didn't see any accessible voting booths and I saw -- I counted at least 27 to 30 people who left while I was there, but I didn't leave. I had to vote.”
John Perry, Upper Arlington: “For the record, I did observe, in my voting place, that there was a sticker over the ballot and spot apparently originally intended for Ralph Nader. However, in looking at the machine times from other precincts, I noticed that there were numerous machine votes, not write in votes but machine votes for Nader in other precincts. So apparently if you pushed the button for the Nader spot, it was recorded as a vote for Nader and printed out as such on the tape.”
Monica Justo, Columbus: “I ran 6 wards for the Kerry campaign in the Clintonville corridor. At 8:00 -- my precinct location was 19H -- it is run out of the Southwick Funeral Home by Bill Good. Bill Good is a Republican. At 8:00 in the morning, he went out to the people in line. There was already over an hour wait at this time and informed them that they all needed to get out of line and move their cars because he had a funeral coming. . . . According to the Franklin County Board of Elections, it was their fault for not verifying that business was not being held on that day, that they needed to inform them of that.”
Michael Greenman, Westerville: “I live in Westerville, voted in precinct 3B. I voted there in the elections for the last five years. When I went to the precinct this last election, I came in and looked at the list and my name was not on the list. It was a computerized list. My wife's name was on the list. I asked them how this could be. They had no explanation. They were very cooperative, gave me a provisional ballot. I was in and out right quick like. They were very efficient, it was a good precinct. But I cannot imagine how many could have been removed from the list without some active action. I'm a political activist. I'm the head of a political group called Citizens for Democracy and the corporate rule but I don't know why my name was not on the list. MS. TRUITT: [Hearing Examiner] Had you voted within the last five years? MR. GREENMAN: Every year, every time for the last five years at that precinct.”
Tom Kessel, Bexley: “. . .in precincts 4 A and 4 C in Bexley. What it was is Republican challengers got there about 7:30 in the morning. Precinct 4 C was going fine, so I watched her. On three different occasions, I caught her sitting at the table with the poll workers. Each time I had to go up there and say, excuse me, you're not allowed here, you know, you're not allowed to be sitting there. She was not challenging it. She was talking and kibitzing and working with the poll workers. I don't know. One time I went outside, I came back in, she was actively going over some sort of computerized list she had with the precinct judge in precinct 4A in Bexley. One of the three machines went down and they were not able to get the tape out of it and the cartridge at the end of the day. Later on, when I got the poll -- data from Franklin County poll workers, that machine which had the lowest numbers of votes had the highest percentage of Bush votes. The other two machines were coming back 30 percent for Bush. This one came back 40 percent for Bush. I don't know. Also, they sealed up their provisional ballots before I had a chance to count them and let them know how much provisional ballots were there. Also, she signed off as an official witness at the end of the day, even though she was a Republican worker. I was met with open hostility from the workers in precinct 4 A in Bexley. They let me know in no uncertain terms that they were Bush people.”
-- Dr. Bob Fitrakis, JD, moderated the public hearings on voter suppression held in Columbus November 13 and 15. He is publisher of freepress.org, of which Harvey Wasserman is senior editor. Their ANOTHER STOLEN ELECTION: VOICES OF THE DISENFRANCHISED, 2004 will soon be available at freepress.org.
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Post by Boomer Chick on Nov 30, 2004 16:24:15 GMT -5
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Post by Boomer Chick on Dec 1, 2004 19:45:45 GMT -5
www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23344-2004Nov30?language=printerKerry Team Seeks to Join Fight to Get Ohio County to Recount Wednesday, December 1, 2004; Page A08 Sen. John F. Kerry's presidential campaign asked an Ohio judge yesterday to allow it to join a legal fight there over whether election officials in one county may sit out the state's impending recount. A pair of third-party presidential candidates, who said that reports of problems at the polls on Election Day are not being addressed, are forcing the Buckeye State to recount its entire presidential vote. But David A. Yost, a lawyer for Delaware County, just outside Columbus, won a temporary restraining order last week blocking any recount there. He told the Columbus Dispatch that a second count would be a poor use of county resources. President Bush won the mostly Republican area handily, unofficial results show. Lawyers for the Kerry campaign asked to join Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb, Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik and the National Voting Rights Institute in the fight to force the county to participate in the recount. "If there's going to be a recount in Ohio, we don't want it to exclude Delaware County or any other county that might decide to follow Delaware County's lead," Kerry lawyer Dan Hoffheimer said. "It should be a full, fair and accurate recount." Bush won the critical battleground state by approximately 136,000 votes, a victory that also won him a second term. Cobb's lawyers filed papers yesterday asking a federal court to take over the case, which is scheduled for state court. -- Brian Faler © 2004 The Washington
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Post by Boomer Chick on Dec 3, 2004 18:24:04 GMT -5
;D www.truthout.org/docs_04/120404W.shtmlEditor’s Note | Any who wish to see this hearing receive wide attention should contact their Senators and Representatives and ask that they attend. Furthermore, any who wish to see this hearing receive wide attention should contact the television network C-SPAN and ask them to broadcast the event in its entirety. C-SPAN accepts suggestions for events to be broadcast at events@c-span.org. The network can also be contacted via telephone at (202) 737-3220. - wrp Also see below: Letter from House Committee on the Judiciary to Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell • Conyers to Hold Hearings on Ohio Vote Fraud By William Rivers Pitt t r u t h o u t | Report Friday 03 December 2004 Democratic Representative John Conyers, Jr. of Michigan, ranking Minority member of the House Judiciary Committee, will hold a hearing on Wednesday 08 December 2004 to investigate allegations of vote fraud and irregularities in Ohio during the 2004 Presidential election. The hearing is slated to begin at 10:00 a.m. EST in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington DC. Democratic Representatives Melvin Watt and Robert Scott will also be centrally involved with the hearing. Rev. Jesse Jackson will be in attendance, along with Ralph Neas (President, People for the American Way), Jon Greenbaum (Director, Voting Rights Project, Lawyers Committee For Civil Rights Under Law), Ellie Smeal (Executive Director, The Feminist Majority), Bob Fitrakis ( The Free Press), Cliff Arnebeck (Arnebeck Associates), John Bonifaz (General Counsel, National Voting Institute), Steve Rosenfeld (Producer, Air America Radio), and Shawnta Walcott (Communications Director, Zogby International). Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell has been invited to attend. The term ‘hearing’ is technically not accurate in this matter, as Conyers and his fellow Representatives will be holding this forum without the blessing of the Republican Majority leader of the Judiciary Committee. Staffers from the Minority office at the Judiciary Committee describe the event as a ‘Members Briefing.’ That having been said, this event will be a hearing by every meaningful definition of the word. Expert testimony will be offered, and a good deal of data on potential fraud previously unreported to the public will be discussed and examined at length. The hearing came together thanks to a confluence of events, and through the work of like-minded individuals who are deeply concerned about the allegations of vote fraud in the Ohio Presidential election. Tim Carpenter and Kevin Spidel, along with other members of Progressive Democrats of America, went to Washington DC to speak with the Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee about the need for an investigation into these allegations. They found Rep. Conyers, his fellow Judiciary Democrats, and their staffers already working on assembling such an investigation. The core of what Conyers and his fellow Minority members will be discussing at this hearing can be found in the letter below, which was sent by the Minority office to Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell on 02 December. In the letter, Conyers, along with Reps. Watt, Nadler and Baldwin, outline a broad and detailed series of questions and concerns about the manner in which the Ohio election took place. I will be traveling to Washington DC to begin t r u t h o u t coverage of this event on Tuesday night, and we will keep you posted on further developments as they arise. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and international bestseller of two books - 'War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You To Know' and 'The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.'
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Post by Boomer Chick on Dec 6, 2004 18:58:20 GMT -5
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Post by Boomer Chick on Dec 8, 2004 19:38:50 GMT -5
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Post by Boomer Chick on Dec 8, 2004 19:41:56 GMT -5
Bev Harris's response to the Madsen article above! blackboxvoting.org/CONSUMER PROTECTION FOR ELECTIONS NOTICE: It has come to our attention that some sort of fund-raising letter has been circulating, and that it mentions “working with Beverly Harris” of Black Box Voting. We are NOT working with or associated with any other group, and fund-raising by association with us is not appreciated or approved of by our organization. Update TUESDAY, DEC. 7, 2004: Why the Feeney vote-rigging story sounds like disinformation Discussions and updates on current investigations, volunteer actions, Volusia County lawsuit and more. Update: SUNDAY, DEC. 5, 2004: Black Box Voting is honing in on seven investigations right now. To the surprise of some, five of the counties we are investigating are Democratic. A national investigation we are doing trends Republican. Our members just want clean elections. We want answers, not theories, statistics, or potentialities, and therefore we are concentrating on areas which have anomalies, and where we believe we can get the facts. HOW TO DONATE. PayPal, credit card, Wish List, address are at this link. Our mailing address is Black Box Voting, PO Box 25552, Seattle WA 98165. If you have signed up to volunteer for Help America Audit go to VOLUNTEER INSTRUCTIONS for most current actions. To join the cleanup crew, e-mail crew@blackboxvoting.org Note that we will have an announcement around Dec. 10 for groups wishing to Help America Audit on a permanent or long-term basis. Media calls and problem reports: 206-335-7747 or 206-778-0524 or 206-354-5723 E-mail TUESDAY DEC 7 2004: Why the Feeney vote-rigging story sounds like disinformation ABOUT DISINFORMATION: Like a good lie, it has elements of truth. Trouble is, the truth doesn't relate to the nuts and bolts of the story. For example in the Tom Feeney vote-manipulation story, people are documenting relationships between Tom Feeney and Yang, and between the writer of the story and other scandals, but so far the evidence presented does not back up the vote manipulation story itself. DISINFORMATION IS DANGEROUS TO THE CLEAN VOTING MOVEMENT: Black Box Voting is finding real evidence consistent with fraud. We are even finding, in one of our investigations, evidence consistent with a systemic, or widespread breakdown in security, possibly exploited. Getting the facts is tedious, unexciting work, consisting of auditing and personal interviews, and it takes time. Many Americans want a magic bullet, a single shot that will blow the lid off everything at once. That's risky. If the mainstream media continues to be bombarded with stories that sound credible, but aren't, when the real thing comes down the pike it will be ignored. While MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and I had a run-in last week, I agree absolutely with Olbermann's earlier critique of the Madsen homeland security story, and this new Madsen story is just as weak. Most of both Madsen stories are bait and switch. While real journalists "write tight" and include only the information directly relevant to the topic, Madsen wanders all over the place, recapping unrelated information from real news agencies, piggybacking onto their credibility, with only the most tenuous ties to what he is actually trying to prove. Analyze the meat of the story, taking out all the loose references to other stories, and Madsen's work gets very weak indeed. ======================================== Here are questions raised by the Feeney vote-manipulation story: 1. One of the most significant problems is that, while Clint Curtis describes a technique of writing a program, he never mentions HOW he supposedly got this program into the voting machines. 2. A second significant problem is that several of the Florida counties used different software in 2000 than they do now, and that various Florida counties use different manufacturers and different systems. Writing one program that would tamper with ES&S punch cards and Diebold optical scans at the same time is somewhat unrealistic. The questions this raises are these: a. Which specific counties was this software supposedly used in for 2000, 2002 and 2004? Actually, from reading both the affidavit and the Madsen article, there is no evidence it was used anywhere. - Madsen does a bait and switch when he discusses Volusia County. He starts by saying it is Feeney's district, and then actually goes on to report a story broken by Black Box Voting in October, 2003, about minus 16,022 votes for Bush in Volusia -- which appears to have nothing to do with the Feeney story. What systems was his vote rigging program for? Which manufacturers? 3. The techniques used to program a vote-rigging system in the Madsen article don't actually match the techniques in the affidavit by Clint Curtis, and neither one makes much sense. It's a simple matter to re-map a touch-screen to flip votes, and you don't need a special program for it. Simply switch the candidate ID numbers and it's done. 4. Most political shenanigans are not conducted by the candidate himself, but by operatives. It is certainly possible for a politician to hold several meetings in which he commits a felony in front of several witnesses, but that's not usually how it is done. A more common technique is an envelope full of cash left in a drawer of an operative, with at least one, sometimes more, buffer layers between the operative and the politician. Clint Curtis says Feeney himself had meeting after meeting to directly discuss election rigging software. Could happen, certainly, but this seems unusual. 5. There are some statements that don't hang together from a programming standpoint. The author says that it will be difficult to write a program that will escape notice if the source code is examined. That's not quite true. Writing a trigger into a program can involve a very small amount of code and there are several ways to do it. The idea is you write a very simple, hard to detect trigger with as little code as possible -- or you comment the code such that it looks like it is there for another purpose. The trigger can do several kinds of things -- allow a user to open up remote access without authentication, for example, or change permissions so that the user can do things that are supposed to be forbidden. In other words, the more complex program certainly would not reside on the voting system, but would appear only when triggered, or inserted by someone with access, or by remote access through telephone lines. 5. Why write a whole software program anyway? You can do what needs to be done with a VBA script, which never goes through certification, never gets compiled, and enters the system like a virus. The program described by the author is not a VBA script, but a compiled software program. You can do anything you want if you obtain remote access such that penetration of the computer itself is enabled. Why lock yourself in, by writing a specific program into the source code? 6. The originator of the story, Clint, says he has filed a "QUITAM" whistleblower suit, that is "pending." This is one of the least credible parts of the story. First, he doesn't spell it correctly. The correct spelling is two words, "Qui Tam." Next, Qui Tam cases MUST be filed under seal. If a Qui Tam is filed in Florida, both the evidence and the existence of the case must be sealed, and only the Florida Attorney General can unseal it. Black Box Voting Executive Director Bev Harris, and Black Box Voting board member Jim March, filed a Qui Tam suit in California. Using a California law, they refused to seal the evidence, but still had to keep the existence of the case under seal. It did not come out from under seal until the California Attorney General got the court to unseal it, and the Associated Press covered the unsealing of the case. You cannot keep the unsealing of a Qui Tam case away from the press. The press has mentioned no such Qui Tam in Florida. This leaves two possibilities: (1) He filed the Qui Tam and is violating the court order to keep the case under seal, or (2) There is no Qui Tam case on this. To develop a more credible story, we'd like to see answers for the following: 1. How the program got into the machine. Not "theoretically" how it got in, but how Clint Curtis says he got it in there. 2. What systems were used (which manufacturers, and were they punch card, optical scan or touch screen) in each of the counties, during each of the years this manipulation supposedly occurred. 3. What's the deal on the Qui Tam, and how is he getting around the sealing of the case? # # # # #
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