No

by Lou Jones

Created on: November 13, 2007   Last Updated: March 19, 2008

Election fraud is not unique to Republicans, to the manipulation of high tech voting machines, to this generation, or to this nation or century. Having said that, vote fraud has risen alarmingly during the past seven years, has primarily benefited the Republican Party, has been made easier to perpetrate and harder to detect with the advent of voting machines, and is underreported and under-monitored.

Lack of widespread public interest (much less alarm or outrage) in reports of vote fraud and failure to demand thorough official investigations, accountability, and safeguards is a dangerous symptom of American frustration and apathy. The failure of the media to accurately and in a timely fashion report verified incidents of machine error, inequitable distribution of voting equipment, and outright fraud is partly to blame, and is another cause for alarm.

In 2001, many Florida voters (particularly minority Florida voters) were improperly scrubbed from voter rolls based on partial name matches of people with prior convictions. As Greg Palast noted in his well researched, widespread (widespread in Europe and in the rest of the world, at any rate) report, partial matches were good enough when it came to the name, but race was exactly matched. So a white Fred Bailey Roberts would not be scrubbed if a black Fred Joseph Roberts had a conviction, but a black Fred Bailey Roberts would be scrubbed.

Since statistically, our justice system prosecutes and convicts more blacks than it does whites, and since statistically, more blacks vote Democrat than Republican, this benefited Bush. In 2001, 22,000 minority voters in Florida were denied their voting rights.

Eventually, Florida settled a lawsuit the NAACP brought against it. If the Palast story and other reports were inaccurate, Florida would not have settled a suit that did not simply claim Florida erred, but that Florida systematically discriminated against minority voters. The willingness of the NAACP to settle, rather than pursue the case in hopes of holding those responsible accountable, or at least bringing much-needed publicity to widespread civil rights violations doesn't say much for the NAACP, either.

In 2004, exit poll discrepancies were blithely explained away, despite the regular accuracy of past polls and the failure of the ones doing the explaining to provide Americans with a reasonable explanation as to why this election was different. By the time statisticians picked apart the excuses and concluded that, most probably, vote fraud and tally error, not polling error, were responsible for the discrepancies, most Americans weren't paying attention anymore.

Perhaps the rise in Attention Deficit Disorder can account for the length of our collective attention span.

The evidence of voting machine error during the 2004 election is staggering, and entirely or almost entirely, the documented, reported errors favored Republicans. While voting machines can reasonably be expected to err, and to err big, considering the widespread reporting of bugs, errors, and generally shoddy programming that began well before the 2004 election. However, the machines cannot be expected to err in favor of only one candidate (unless they were programmed to do so), instead errors that are simply errors would be random and would more or less even out among all candidates and in all districts nationwide. Yet all of the reported errors in Florida favored Bush, and nationwide, reported errors overwhelmingly favored Bush.

Not coincidentally, the owners of virtually every voting machine in the United States are committed Republicans (Diebold's CEO was forced to apologize for a promise to deliver the election to the President, a promise he made made at a Republican fund raiser).

The VP of Diebold had a family member in the voting machine business: ES&S was headed by his brother. ES&S made more than half the voting machines in the United States, and Diebold and ES&S together owned 80% of the machines used in 2004.

Two election workers in Ohio were convicted and sentenced to 18 months for rigging a 2004 recount. 56 Ohio counties illegally destroyed materials from the 2004 election. Records from all Ohio counties were improperly withheld from the public until after the election results were certified. A GAO report confirmed vote tallies could be altered without leaving any record of alteration on some voting machines. Also, vote counts could be flipped, reversing the tally. Vital network passwords were simply not set.

Security seals on voting machines were broken. Diebold machines had infrared ports, making them vulnerable to access by any voter' stepping up to them with the right information and equipment.

Many Kerry voters were treated to the sight of their vote going to Bushin real time, on the screen as they voted!

A related glitch that let voters select Kerry, then summarized their final decisions with Bush as their selection, was actually reported prior to the election, but on election day, voters still reported the problem.

In one county, Kerry started 25,000,000 votes in the hole.

In 2004, Warren County, Ohio barred citizens from watching the vote count. Voters who were improperly denied the right to vote or to have their votes counted were overwhelming Democrats.

CNN altered its exit poll results to conform to the official tally. Sharp-eyed bloggers used screenshots to uncover CNN's switch.

In Miami, 19,000 votes appeared after the computer reported %100 had been counted. 13,000 of those votes were for Bush.

In Ohio, voting machine technicians gave out cheat sheets during a recount.

To rid them of the looming threat that energetic Democrat registration drives posed in Ohio, pro-Bush officials in Ohio unearthed an antiquated regulation that allowed them to throw out registrations not printed on the correct weight paper, effectively disenfranchising up to 100,000 voters despite a last minute letup on the ridiculous and impossible to conform to regulation.

Many well-respected statisticians and non-partisan watchdog groups studied polling and error data (including which candidate the error favored) and declared the election results fraudulent based on the statistical impossibility that either the count was accurate, or that errors were random.

While some known machine error' tallies were reported and then thrown out, some mathematically impossible tallies that favored Bush were counted.

Despite the reputation Democrats have as an opposition party, no real effort was made in 2004 to challenge the election results, nor has much effort been made since to ensure Americans' voting rights.

There's more, lots more, but after a few hours of combing news reports, the GAO report, affidavits, and more, I think I've found enough to at least create a healthy mistrust of our current vote count methods, even among those who liked the end result. After all, if it's fraud for your candidate this election, what guarantees it's not fraud against your candidate next time?

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