Election Fraud, Republican Style #3

Since the election fraud perpetrated by the Republican Party since 2000 is an issue of interest, I'll co-mingle historical and contemporary events. This isn't about the phony stories about ACORN, but rather about the tactics that have been employed to disenfranchise voters.

Some old news -

There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry. CommonDreams

The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.

80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S. Wikipedia

Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines.

Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-connected with the Bush family, was recently caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee.

LINK: On October, 10, 2002 Bev Harris, author of the upcoming "Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering" in the 21st Century, revealed that Republican Senator Chuck Hagel has ties to the largest voting machine company, Election Systems & Software (ES&S). She reported that he was an owner, Chairman and CEO of Election Systems & Software (called American Information Systems until name change filed in 1997). ES&S was the ONLY company whose machines counted Hagel's votes when he ran for election in 1996 and 2002. The Hill, a Washington D.C. newspaper that covers the U.S. national political scene, confirmed her findings today and uncovered more details.
Hagel's campaign finance director, Michael McCarthy, now admits that Senator Hagel still owns a beneficial interest in the ES&S parent company, the McCarthy Group. ES&S counts approximately 60 percent of all votes cast in the United States. According to the Omaha World-Herald which is also a beneficial owner of ES&S, Hagel was CEO of American Information Systems, now called ES&S, from November 1993 through June 2, 1994. He was Chairman from July 1992 until March 15 1995. He was required to disclose these positions on his FEC Personal Disclosure statements, but he did not.

Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush's vice-presidential candidates.
http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_28/b3689130.htm

ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the U.S. and counts almost 60% of all U.S. votes.
http://www.essvote.com/HTML/about/about.html

Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm

Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
http://www.diebold.com/solutions/default.htm

Diebold is based in Ohio.
http://www.diebold.com/aboutus/ataglance/default.htm

Diebold employed 5 convicted felons as senior managers and developers to help write the central compiler computer code that counted 50% of the votes in 30 states.
http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61640,00.html

Jeff Dean, Diebold's Senior Vice-President and senior programmer on Diebold's central compiler code, was convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf

Diebold Senior Vice-President Jeff Dean was convicted of planting back doors in his software and using a "high degree of sophistication" to evade detection over a period of 2 years.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf

None of the international election observers were allowed in the polls in Ohio.
http://www.globalexchange.org/update/press/2638.html

California banned the use of Diebold machines because the security was so bad. Despite Diebold's claims that the audit logs could not be hacked, a chimpanzee was able to do it! (See the movie here .)
http://wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,63298,00.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4874190

30% of all U.S. votes are carried out on unverifiable touch screen voting machines with no paper trail. [At the time this comment was posted elsewhere. It has since increased.]


All -- not some -- but all the voting machine errors detected and reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00227.htm

The governor of the state of Florida, Jeb Bush, is the President's brother.
Serious voting anomalies in Florida -- again always favoring Bush -- have been mathematically demonstrated and experts are recommending further investigation.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/110904.html
http://uscountvotes.org/

Boing Boing:

In another stunning blow to the security and integrity of Diebold's electronic voting machines, someone has made a copy of the key which opens ALL Diebold e-voting machines from a picture on the company's own website. The working keys were confirmed by Princeton scientists, the same people who discovered that a simple virus hack on the Diebold machines could steal an election. Absolutely incredible and another example of how Diebold's e-voting machines pose a great threat to the electoral process.

2008

WP offered:

It is impossible to know how many voters are affected nationwide. There are no reports of large-scale problems in Virginia, Maryland or the District, but the trouble is cropping up in many states.
In Alabama, scores of voters are being labeled as convicted felons on the basis of incorrect lists.

Michigan must restore thousands of names it illegally removed from voter rolls over residency questions, a judge ruled this week.

Tens of thousands of voters could be affected in Wisconsin. Officials there admit that their database is wrong one out of five times when it flags voters, sometimes for data discrepancies as small as a middle initial or a typo in a birth date. When the six members of the state elections board -- all retired judges -- ran their registrations through the system, four were incorrectly rejected because of mismatches.

Several of the battles over registration lists have taken on a partisan tinge, including in Montana, where a state GOP official challenged nearly 6,000 voters over apparent discrepancies in their addresses. He dropped his challenge after Democrats went to court, but not before one county sent letters to hundreds of voters informing them that their registrations were in jeopardy. Now the county is trying to let them know they are eligible to cast ballots after all.
The Republicans filed the case "with the express intent to disenfranchise voters," a federal judge said.

Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, who co-chairs John McCain's campaign in that state, is demanding that election officials use the database to re-verify the identities of voters who registered going back to 2006.
The elections board has refused, citing the database's error rate. The issue has gone to court, and a ruling is expected next week.
Among the errors with Wisconsin's database, which has been fully in place just since August, are incorrect ages for 95,000 voters, all of whom are listed as 108 years old. If no birth date was available when names were moved into the electronic system, it automatically assigned Jan. 1, 1900.
In court filings, Van Hollen said "tens of thousands" of ineligible voters could cast ballots, noting that Wisconsin "will be a swing state" whose 10 electoral votes "may be won by a very narrow margin."

The crush of new registrants around the country has heightened the problems, including in Colorado, where 22,000 must clear up questions about their addresses and other discrepancies before they can cast a regular ballot.

In Alabama, the centralized system triggered a new controversy over a constitutional ban on voting by people convicted of a felony crime of "moral turpitude." The governor's office in the past year issued a list of 480 crimes that meet the definition, including disrupting a funeral and conspiring to set an illegal brush fire.
Alabama's court administrator and attorney general issued a shorter list of 70 more violent and serious crimes. But Secretary of State Beth Chapman [A Republican] said the longer list was used to identify ineligible voters until three weeks ago.

In Georgia, the database has so far labeled 2,600 people as noncitizens.

The Charleston Gazette reports:
WINFIELD, W.Va. -- Three Putnam County voters say electronic voting machines changed their votes from Democrats to Republicans when they cast early ballots last week.
This is the second West Virginia county where voters have reported this problem. Last week, three voters in Jackson County told The Charleston Gazette their electronic vote for "Barack Obama" kept flipping to "John McCain".
In both counties, Republicans are responsible for overseeing elections. Both county clerks said the problem is isolated.
They also blamed voters for not being more careful.
"People make mistakes more than machines," said Jackson County Clerk Jeff Waybright.
Shelba Ketchum, a 69-year-old nurse retired from Thomas Memorial Hospital, described what happened Friday at the Putnam County Courthouse in Winfield.
"I pushed buttons and they all came up Republican," she said. "I hit Obama and it switched to McCain. I am really concerned about that. If McCain wins, there was something wrong with the machines.
"I asked them for a printout of my votes," Ketchum said. "But they said it was in the machine and I could not get it. I did not feel right when I left the courthouse. My son felt the same way.
"I heard from some other people they also had trouble. But no one in there knew how to fix it," said Ketchum, who is not related to Menis Ketchum, a Democratic Supreme Court candidate.
Ketchum's son, Chris, said he had the same problem. And Bobbi Oates of Scott Depot said her vote for incumbent Democratic Sen. John D. Rockefeller was switched to GOP opponent Jay Wolfe.
"I touched the one I wanted, Rockefeller, and the machine put a checkmark on the Republican instead," Oates said of her experience Thursday.
She said she caught the mistake, called over a worker in the county clerk's office and was able to correct her vote. But she worries other voters may not catch such a mistake.
When asked if she is sure she touched the box for Rockefeller, she said, "I'm absolutely positive."
Putnam County Clerk Brian Wood said on Saturday that he is upset there are "so many negative stories out there and not enough positive ones. We want people to vote. People need to know the facts.
"But we haven't had any major issues. We try to explain to voters how the machines work then they come in," Wood said.
In Putnam County, early voters have the option of asking for either touch-screen machines or optical scan ballots -- paper ballots on which people mark in their election choices.
Wood said some voters might not realize that touch-screen voting machines may take a few seconds to record their choices.

The Charleston Gazette:
Ketchum said, "I am educated person. I know what I wanted. I am anxious to see who wins.
"My son Chris said, 'Mom, I didn't vote for the people who came up on that machine. I wanted to go back and vote again. I called the lady at the polls and she said it was my fault because of the way I was punching the buttons.'
"I want a paper ballot. I think it was very bad when they did away with paper ballots. I wish you had something in your hand that is a record of how you voted.
"I never felt that way before. It was early voting, so we went over there to get it over with. We won't do that again," Ketchum said.
Last week, three Jackson County residents said they experienced similar problems when they cast early ballots at the county courthouse in Ripley.
Virginia Matheney, one of those voters, said Friday, "When I touched the screen for Barack Obama, the check mark moved from his box to the box indicating a vote for John McCain."
Retired factory worker Calvin Thomas of Ripley said he experienced the same problem.
"When I pushed Obama, it jumped to McCain. When I went down to governor's office and punched [Gov. Joe] Manchin, it went to the other dude.
"After I finished, my daughter voted. When she pushed Obama, it went to McCain. It happened to her the same way it happened to me," Thomas said.
Jackson County Clerk Jeff Waybright, a Republican, said 400 other people voted without reporting any problems.
Wood said he and Waybright are both very careful to guarantee people's votes are recorded properly.
Wood said, "Voting machines are very reliable. I hate the fact that stories like this are printed. It makes everybody get scared.
"That is not good for anybody. Where the fault is, I don't know and the voter doesn't know. There needs to be good communication between the voters and the poll workers."
Wood offered this advice to voters: "The best way to solve this whole problem is that before you leave the voting booth, make sure on the review screen that everybody you want to vote for is checked."
More than 1,000 voters from 48 local precincts in Putnam County cast early ballots in the past three days, Wood said. Putnam County has 36,000 registered voters.

GOP Exploits ACORN Probe

In a replay of "prosecutor-gate" tactics used in 2004 and 2006, Republicans are trumpeting criminal investigations into ACORN's voter registration drives, reports Jason Leopold.

The Republican ACORN Hoax

The myth of ACORN's "voter fraud" returns every election cycle, but the amnesiac U.S. news media always forgets that the Republicans have pulled this hoax before, observes Michael Winship.

Justice Watch

The NYT:

Earlier this year, the League of Women Voters halted its registration drive in Florida after the state imposed onerous new requirements.

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The answer is for government to do a better job of registering people to vote. That way there would be less need to rely on private registration drives, largely being conducted by well-meaning private organizations that use low-paid workers. Federal and state governments should do their own large-scale registration drives staffed by experienced election officials. Even better, Congress and the states should adopt election-day registration, which would make such drives unnecessary.

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The real threats to the fabric of democracy are the unreasonable barriers that stand in the way of eligible voters casting ballots.

From PFAW:
ACORN Hit by Threats and Vandalism in Wake of McCain Comments
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From the ACLU: ACLU Of Utah Releases Report On Ogden Election Irregularities
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Slate offers a review of Ballot Controversies.
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FactCheck : ACORN Accusations
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Old News:
E-Vote Machines Drop More Ballots 02.09.04

Six electronic touch-screen voting machines used in two North Carolina counties lost 436 ballots cast in early voting for the 2002 general election because of a software problem, state election officials said recently, raising increasing doubts about the accuracy and integrity of voting equipment in a presidential election year. This is the first reported case of a touch-screen machine failing to report votes in an election.

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Election Systems & Software, the manufacturer of the touch-screen machines, said problems with the firmware of its iVotronic system caused it to lose ballots in two North Carolina precincts during the state's early voting in 2002. The state was trying out the machines in early voting to determine if it wanted to switch from optical-scan machines it already owned to the new touch-screen systems. ES&S machines are also the focus of attention into lost votes last month in Florida during a special election.

This is the first time that anyone has been able to verify that a touch-screen machine failed to record votes. Although there have been a number of reported problems with electronic optical-scan machines that failed to read paper ballots scanned into them, no one has been able to prove that touch-screen machines are fallible because there has not, until now, been a paper trail to compare against the machine results.

Election officials discovered the problem only by chance. In Wake County, early voters, unlike election-day voters, filled out an absentee ballot and submitted them to poll workers. Each application had a computer-generated tracking number, and before the voters cast their ballot on one of six touch-screen machines, a poll worker keyed the number into the machines. But when poll workers later compared the number of votes on machines to the number of absentee applications, the figures didn't match.

(Some might want to consider which Senator was elected shortly after leaving the employ of ES&S, the company that counted the votes in the state that abruptly switched from historically Democratic to Republican.)

Diebold May Face Criminal Charges 04.23.04

Following a contentious six-hour hearing during which the Voting Systems and Procedures Panel grilled Diebold president Bob Urosevich about his company's business practices, the panel voted to recommend decertifying the Diebold AccuVote-TSx machine, which was used for the first time in California during the March primary in Kern, San Joaquin, Solano and San Diego counties.
The decision was based partly on the fact that a peripheral device for the machine performed poorly in the March primary and partly on the fact that Diebold had marketed and sold the TSx to counties before it was certified by the state. The panel also said Diebold misled the state about issues pertaining to the federal certification of the system.

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In 2000, Greg Palast reported and the U.S. Main Stream Media consistently refused to report:

If Vice President Al Gore is wondering where his Florida votes went, rather than sift through a pile of chad, he might want to look at a "scrub list" of 173,000 names targeted to be knocked off the Florida voter registry by a division of the office of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. A close examination suggests thousands of voters may have lost their right to vote based on a flaw-ridden list that included purported "felons" provided by a private firm with tight Republican ties.

Palm Beach and Duval weren't the only counties to dump the list after questioning its accuracy. Madison County's elections supervisor, Linda Howell, had a peculiarly personal reason for distrusting the central voter file: She had received a letter saying that since she had committed a felony, she would not be allowed to vote.
Howell, who said she has never committed a felony, said the letter she received in March shook her faith in the process. "It really is a mess," she said.
"I was very upset," Howell said. "I know I'm not a felon." Though the mistake did get corrected and law enforcement officials were quite apologetic, Howell decided not to use the state list anymore because its "information is so flawed." She's unsure of the number of warning letters that were sent out to county residents when she first received the list in 1999, but she recalls that there were many problems. "One day we would send a letter to have someone taken off the rolls, and the next day, we would send one to put them back on again," Howell said. "It makes you look like you must be a dummy."
Dixie and Washington counties also refused to use the scrub lists. Starlet Cannon, Dixie's deputy assistant supervisor of elections, said, "I'm scared to work with it because of lot of the information they have on there is not accurate."
Carol Griffin, supervisor of elections for Washington, said, "It hasn't been accurate in the past, so we had no reason to suspect it was accurate this year."