Faun Otter: Vote Fraud - Exit Polls Vs Actuals

SCOOP EDITOR'S INTRODUCTORY NOTE: Within parts of the U.S. progressive community there is already widespread concern that electronic voting fraud may provide an explanation for the astonishing 8 million vote gain made by George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential U.S. election.

Already there a variety of odd phenomena which have aroused suspicions about this possibility:

For example:

- In Florida Bush received a million extra votes, while Kerry received only 500,000 extra votes, in spite of a massive Democratic Get-Out-The-Vote(GOTV) and registration campaign in that state;

- In Florida's Broward County, a democratic stronghold and heavily black community, unauditable voting machines recorded a 33% (70,000+) vote gain on Bush's 2000 results and a much smaller gain to Kerry – again Broward was the scene of a massive GOTV campaign;




http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00072.htm

the election counting in these Dem strongholds? Good ol' machine politics was predicated on overwhelming precinct control. In other words, look the other way when the voting machine shows hundreds of votes before the polls open.

States like OH and Florida which showed Kerry ahead in exit polls but losing after the vote counts. States controlled by the republicans.

control the local elections boards and count rooms in Broward and Miami-Dade. The supervisors stood up to the SOS and did things their way. I remember the sight of election judges peering at punch cards.

there have been a couple of threads on this. all the possible fraud found thus far favors bush.

These are riggable computerized voting machines -- they can be hacked externally (without the local folks even knowing), they can have malicious vote-stealing code inserted right in with the rest of the software (and no, the federal and state certification processes don't even begin to protect us against this problem), and they can be manipulated in realtime by insiders at Diebold and other Republican-controlled voting companies.

There doesn't need to be a big conspiracy, it won't show up, and it can't be proven, esp. where there are no Voter Verified Paper Ballots to recount.

Optical scanners, which DO have VVPB as part of their input, are just as bad as the TouchScreen systems because they use some of the same software that the TS systems do, can be hooked up to modems, etc.

It could all conceivably be done by ONE person sitting in an office in, say, Vancouver, Canada.

Much deserved .:)

I finished an analysis of what happened in Broward county. Just as I was getting ready to post it, I got an email from some observers who reported actions in Broward that explained the anolmalous results.

** To view the spread sheet I mention that that shows the specific suppresion of Dem votes in Broward, go to my post at the Bartcop forum and hit the link at the bottom of the post. It is in HTML format. Please use it for your own analysis and pass on to anyone and everyone who might care.

http://bartcopnation.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_mesg&fo...
_______________________________________
Broward looks to have the most slanted results of the e-touchcreen counties in Fla. The attached spread sheet divides the counties by machine type and by poll winner in 2000. The turnout in Broward of registered voters was 66.7% in 2000 and 66.7% in 2004 - this strikes me as unlikely in view of how fired up people were.

Adjoining Collier county used the same machines and saw an increase of 38.2% in Rep votes while Broward saw a 37.1% gain in Rep votes. However, Broward had a 16.8% increase in Dem votes while Collier saw........ a 46.2% increase!

If Broward had counted the same vote swing as the neighboring county of Collier, that would have yielded an additional 140,000 votes for Kerry.

I felt this was highly suggestive of voter suppression, vote tampering or other shenanigans in Broward. I am even more convinced of this by the report I was emailed today -

Report on Florida by the following:

Libby AnkerRyan  Centner
Jill Greenlee 
Rachel Van Sickle-Ward 

Spurred by the unwillingness of the broadcast media to report
voting problems during the 2004 election race, we want to alert our friends,
family and colleagues to the widespread voter suppression and
disenfranchisement that occurred in Broward County, Florida.  We staffed the
emergency hotline for the Kerry Campaign Headquarters in Broward County from
late October through the election.  All of us were devastated by the margin
of Bush's win in Florida, particularly since polls predicted the race would
be extremely close.

Many of the calls to our hotline were from voters who had
pressed the Kerry button on their electronic voting screen, only to have
Bush light up as the candidate they had chosen. In some cases, this would
happen repeatedly until about the 5th or 6th time the voter pressed Kerry
and eventually his name would light up.  In other cases, the voters pushed
Kerry but were later asked to confirm their Bush vote.

We had calls about a road block, put up by the police at 7am on
Nov. 2, which blocked road access to two precinct locations in majority
black districts.  There was no justification for the road block no
accident or crime scene or construction.

Many of our calls dealt with voter suppression, or
manipulation, of the Haitian population occurrences which seem too
numerous, and their targets too indefensible, as primarily poor,
first-time-voter, Creole-speaking refugees, to be anything but systemic.  In
one example, a voter whose hands were bandaged could not press the
touch-screen himself; he asked the nonpartisan election official to press
Kerry for him, but the election official pressed Bush and sent his vote
immediately into the machine.  Many, many others were denied the right to
vote and were not given provisional ballots, while others were refused
assistance at the polls, even though provisional ballots and voter
assistance are legal rights.   Others were told they had already voted and
were turned away, although they had never voted previously.  This latter
experience was a complaint not isolated to Haitians but also included other
surprised voters with no recourse except their word against that of the

Supervisor of Elections.
We spoke with hundreds of voters who were certain they had
registered to vote in the past 6 months, well before the October 18
deadline, but were not on the rolls.  And those were just the people who had
the information to contact us. The local paper, citing the Supervisor of Elections office as
its source, told all people voting by absentee ballot that they could turn
in ballots by hand to any of its seven offices by 5pm on Tuesday, Nov. 2.
Every single one of those offices except one was closed on Tuesday.

We had numerous calls from voters on Nov. 2 whose precincts had
closed, yet the Supervisor of Elections office had given voters no
notification of the closure, and no notification of where to go to vote.
Thousands of people were likely disenfranchised because of inexcusable
mishaps such as this.

We had many calls from people who had been harassed by poll
workers, who were turned away without being allowed the right to vote
provisionally (another breech of voter rights). Other people were turned
away because the address on their driver's license did not match the address
on their voter registration card; again, this is in direct violation of
election law.

All of these problems do not even take into account the 58,000 absentee
ballots that had been "lost" by the Supervisor of Elections, in perhaps the
most Democratic county in the state, disenfranchising thousands of people
who were disabled, out of the country, or elderly and unable get to the
polls.  These events, and many others, have been documented and also
reported to lawyers, but we fear they will not get the attention they
deserve.  This is what we witnessed in just one county.  We believe that
these voting irregularities raise serious concerns about the legitimacy of
the results in Florida, and more broadly, about the health of democracy in
this country.  Please circulate this widely.