The 2004 U.S. presidential election between the incumbent, George W. Bush (R), and challenger John Kerry (D), two Yale graduates and Skull and Bones occultists, saw unprecedented discrepancies between the proven-reliable, scientific exit poll results and the official vote tally results. The probability of a fix was obvious throughout the 2004 presidential campaign. Corporate media polls continued to predominantly favor Bush, never dipping his rating below 48 percent, despite his trouncing in three straight debates with Kerry, and despite mushrooming war scandals. This was in stark contrast to independent surveys that showed Kerry with commanding leads. Kerry momentum, and massive Kerry/anti-Bush voter turnout, was evident on election day, and confirmed by exit polls with dominant Kerry numbers.
Then what?
Greg Palast reveals in exhaustive detail that John Kerry won the 2004 election and had it stolen through such methods as “spoilage”, intimidation, polling place chicanery, ethnic cleansing of polls. (See Kerry Won .)
Once again, criminals do not “permit” elections. They make them. This time, the Bush forces had years of unencumbered time to orchestrate it, from Ohio (where its notorious secretary of state is the head of the Bush re-election campaign), and, of course, Jeb Bush’s Florida.
The official results failed to match the exit poll results both at the national level, the Bush vs. Kerry popular vote, and in the state level in the key “battleground” or “swing” electoral-count states where each state’s final vote counts differed from the exit poll predictions for Bush vs. Kerry by large swings, well beyond the statistical margin of error. In every case, at the national level, and in the individual state tallies, the surprise vote shifts favored Bush over Kerry, and never Kerry over Bush.
One of the purposes of exit polling is to determine whether or not the processes of voting and vote counting have been legitimately conducted. In the United States, and in other countries, exit polls have been regularly used for decades as scientifically reliable indicators of whether an election has been fair or been fixed.
The afternoon exit poll results of Election Day, November 2, 2004 clearly indicated a Kerry presidential victory for both the “popular vote” nationally, and the “electoral vote” that is the sum of state electoral votes based upon state-by-state Bush or Kerry state wins. These poll results caused many expressions of confidence and even early celebrations of a Kerry victory among his supporters (as has been recorded on internet postings and forum discussions during this phase of Election Day). The end result, later that night, when media announcers proclaimed a Bush electoral vote victory, with sheepish statements from newscasters that the exit polls must have been in error (for the first time in history) to not match the declarations of a Kerry loss in the vote counting, left many observers deeply suspicious that a vote-rigging theft had taken place. There were numerous calls for re-counts and impartial investigations into the many reported voting irregularities and vote count anomalies, before Bush could be officially certified as the next President of the United States in January 2005.
In terms of international norms and standards, such results in any given nation’s outcome would prompt a national outcry for legal prosecutions of mass voting fraud and election theft attempt and the staging of another national election to be held in truly free and fair conditions. The crisis of the July 2006 Mexico presidential elections is one example of such a situation. Mass public demonstrations have recently been held by the progressive candidate Andre Obrador, against victory claims and questionable official vote tallies favoring the rightist candidate Felipe Calderon, with Obrador supporters citing Obrador’s exit polling win as key evidence among other ballot irregularities that an election theft by Calderon has taken place.
Another glaring fact extends the case for a provably stolen election: the exit poll statistical red flags were not raised in the environment of another new voting precedent: the widespread use of computerized, electronic voting machines, that have been demonstrated to be easily and untraceably rigged to give false results before the voting takes place, or soon after, and which did not provide paper receipts, or any traceable, auditable record of the people’s votes. This not only allowed for the faking of vote counts on the order of many thousands of votes being changed instantly, with a few keystrokes, it also made a re-count impossible in many cases.
Prior to Election Day, numerous warnings were made by concerned citizens, voting rights activists, and computer experts about the great dangers of easy and invisible vote tampering that could be effected with these “black box” vote machines, and these dire predictions did indeed appear to come true on November 2, 2004. The mid-term election of November 2002 had occasioned unprecedented, voting preference swings away from the Democratic candidate and toward the Republican candidate, upsetting the predictions of pre-election polls that showed dead heats or Democrat wins. And in each case of these surprise across-the board GOP Senatorial victories, the majority of state voting had been done on the suspect electronic voting machines. Analysis of these 2002 results, with their polling/final result contradictions far beyond the statistical margins of error, helped the anti-electronic voting activists gain momentum for their efforts, but due to the “Help America Vote Act” (HAVA) passed by the GOP-controlled congress and President Bush, computer E-vote machines were by this time being deployed as the law-required vote-counting instruments for every state of the union, with federal legal mandate to phase out the systems of paper ballot and lever punch card counting.
The HAVA Act is legislation crafted in the wake of the disputed Bush vs. Gore Florida state results of the 2000 election; HAVA had the claimed mission of rectifying the difficulties caused by “hanging chads” and other such unclear results that were occasionally found with lever punch card ballots. Its many critics have pointed out that the potential for vote ambiguity and vote fraud is infinitely worse with the electronic vote “solution” enacted across the nation subsequent to the federal disbursement of HAVA funds.
In addition, the E-voting machine manufacturers, for example the Diebold and E.S. & S. corporations, refused to allow public inspection of their voting hardware and software programming codes, despite evidence provided by experts of ?security flaws,? and ?backdoors? for remote rigging by wireless and modem connections. The voting machine corporations cited proprietary law in their refusal to reveal this secret information needed to validate the vote counting. Federal court judges have backed their legal defense, ruling in favor of the E-vote corporations? proprietary claims, and against the voting rights plaintiffs.
Specific Examples of the E-Voting Result Anomalies
1) In the nationwide popular vote count of Nov. 2, 2004, scientific exit polling conducted by the firm of Edison-Mitofsky predicted a Kerry victory over Bush, 50.8%-48.2%. According to the the voting machines and vote counters, the final, official popular vote tally was Bush winning over Kerry, 50.9%-48.1%, an unprecedented shift of 5.4 percentage points favoring Bush, far beyond the statistical margin of error and representing a victory margin for Bush of 3.3 million votes.
(See: http://www.freepress.org/images/departments/PopularVotePaper181_1.pdf .)
In many states, exit poll predictions of a Kerry win over Bush were similarly confounded by the voting apparatus results, there were a number of Kerry leads over Bush that inexplicably narrowed to a margin of fewer percentage points, sometimes beyond the poll MOEs, and in four states the exit poll-predicted Kerry wins actually flipped over to voting count Bush wins, giving Bush the electoral vote count he needed to claim election victory and be reinstated as President. These states were:
- Ohio (very large, critical state with 25 electoral votes; Exit Polls showed: 52.1%-47.9% Kerry Win, flipped to 51%-49% Bush Win election tally)
- Iowa (49.7-48.4 Kerry Win, flipped to 50-49 Bush Win)
- New Mexico (50.1-47.5 Kerry Win, flipped to 50-49 Bush Win)
- Nevada (49.2-47.9 Kerry Win, flipped to 51-48 Bush Win)
In addition, the critical state of Florida exit polling had Bush and Kerry virtually even at 49.8% Bush to 49.7% Kerry; the numbers shifted to 52% Bush vs. 47% Kerry in the official election tally, a shift of 2.5% and well beyond the poll MOE.
There was no state in which exit poll/official results flipped from Bush win to a Kerry win.
The following quote, from website article at http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0813-29.htm further, illustrates such discrepancies,
(Authored by Peter Philips, Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University):
In 2004 Bush far exceeded the 85% of registered Florida Republican votes that he got in 2000, receiving more than 100% of the registered Republican votes in 47 out of 67 Florida counties, 200% of registered Republicans in 15 counties, and over 300% of registered Republicans in 4 counties. Bush managed these remarkable outcomes despite the fact that his share of the crossover votes by registered Democrats in Florida did not increase over 2000, and he lost ground among registered Independents, dropping 15 points. We also know that Bush “won” Ohio by 51-48%, but statewide results were not matched by the court-supervised hand count of the 147,400 absentee and provisional ballots in which Kerry received 54.46% of the vote. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio the number of recorded votes was more than 93,000 greater than the number of registered voters.
More importantly national exit polls showed Kerry winning in 2004. However, It was only in precincts where there were no paper trails on the voting machines that the exit polls ended up being different from the final count. According to Dr. Steve Freeman, a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania, the odds are 250 million to one that the exit polls were wrong by chance. In fact, where the exit polls disagreed with the computerized outcomes the results always favored Bush – another statistical impossibility.?
The voting system in place for the 2004 election consisted of a majority of electronic, computerized machines such as those made by Diebold, E.S.& S., Sequoia (now Dominion), Danehar-Guardian, and SAIC, along with electronic optical scan machines, and the remainder the old methods of paper balloting and lever punch card machines still in use. The machine tallies at the voting booths were sent electronically to another set of computer vote-counting machines at precinct county headquarters, after the polls closed, where they were then added together from the precinct booth tallies, with all tallies flowing into the data base of these machines, called central tabulating computers (hereafter referred to as ?CTC?s). In this way, even voting booth count methods of paper and punch cards, that could not have been subject to computer manipulation at the local, polling place level, were eventually counted again in the un-auditable, no paper trail, highly insecure fashion of electronic ?black box? computers of the county CTCs.
This system greatly advanced the ease and un-traceability with which massive vote fraud could be accomplished. And since the CTCs contain software modules that feed back into the booth machine and can alter their numerical counts, it limits the number of human accomplices needed to change the candidate choice of many thousands of votes, or erase them, or add phantom votes, all virtually with a few strokes of a computer keyboard.
A Summary and Model of How the Systematic Vote-Rigging is Done
In conclusion, I am presenting a three-step theoretical model of how the 2004 election anomalies came to fruition, based upon the enormous number of statistical contradictions, reports of irregularities and fraud by eyewitnesses and in official/legal complaints, and the proven capacities of the suspect computer hardware and software that counted the votes, and is set to count the votes again in the November 2006 mid-term congressional elections.
A Three-Step Process of Election Theft Through Computerized Vote Counting:
ONE: The use in voting booths of E-voting Computer Machines (Diebold, Sequoia, E&S, SAIC, GEMS software, Microsoft-Diebold Software, Optical Scan Machines etc.)
PURPOSE:
- Votes can be instantly changed through modem, wireless feed components, or pre- and post-voting software, memory card, and hard drive tampering.
- Switching votes away from Democrats on the spot (booths at the local balloting place, e.g. footage of voter complaints that Jim McBride votes were changed to votes for Jeb Bush on the touchscreen booth in Florida)
- Lost votes on the spot
- Too many (phantom) votes on the spot
- Create confusion, “noise,” distractions: machines need special devices, “security seals,” and technical expert maintenance and repairs, many complications, poll worker help needed by voters
- Shut-downs “glitches”, power problems that stop voting, lower the voter turnout
- Demoralize people into not voting, beat down U.S. population into “learned helplessness”
- Deleted/ Destroyed votes on the spot
- No recounts or audits are possible, cannot be challenged no matter how suspicious are the results and voting anomalies
- EASY, INSTANT FEED TO CTC’S AT COUNTY HQ’S
All of the above have been empirically proven and documented to occur in the 2000, 2002 and 2004 elections.
TWO: Exit Polls
PURPOSE:
- Provide picture of voters’ real vote totals so agents (human agents) can figure how much to “realistically” fudge and fake-input the CTC numbers, within reason of the voting results’ reality, at the county HQ CTS’s, during the voting and vote counting hours on election day.
Ironically, exit polls can aid and abet vote fraud, as well as alerting the public to its occurrence, by providing the fraud perpetrators with the up-to-date, timely data they need to alter the vote count results in a plausible, or at least semi-plausible, and well-orchestrated manner.
THREE: CTC (Central Tabulator Computers)
Faking of Final County Vote Tally
PURPOSE:
- Like “all roads lead to Rome,” all outputs from the local ballot precincts, whether e-vote methods or paper/lever punch, feed into the Central Tabulator Computers (CTCs) at central county HQs, whose results are instantly re-set and manipulated to produce a Republican candidate win for the county, within a reasonable margin of the Democratic win reality, as judged by the human agent’s reading of televised exit poll results.
The desired, fake numbers are simply typed in to the CTC drive and are announced as the official county final results. A copy of the original vote totals that were fed into the CTCs is saved and privately stored for later study by the covert electoral-rigging committees to gauge true voter/population sentiments and how to fine-tune the vote-rigging process for the next “election.”
For an illustration of CTC number manipulation, see the scene in the Bev Harris documentary (web video link below), where Ms. Harris is seated with DNC head Howard Dean and showing how, using the CTC software, this is un-traceably and easily done with a few keystrokes.
Voting machine vendor fraud may be the biggest story since 1776. The second biggest story may be the silence of the press.
MORE VALUABLE VIDEO DOCUMENTATION:
Voting Machines with memory cards taken home by poll workers before the June 6, 2006 primary elections:
Robert Kennedy on Rolling Stone Vote Fraud Issue
PBS Diebold
Votergate: http://www.votergate.tv
Stolen Election 2004 Cafferty File: Election ThieveryFloridaElectionFraudScandal
From Wikipedia:
The United States presidential election of 2004, the 55th quadrennial presidential election, was held on Tuesday, November 2, 2004. Republican Party candidate and incumbent President George W. Bush won re-election, defeating Democratic Party candidate John Kerry, U.S. Senator from Massachusetts and eventual U.S. Secretary of State.
Bush and incumbent Vice President Dick Cheney were renominated by their party with no difficulty. Howard Dean, former Governor of Vermont, was initially the frontrunner for the Democratic Party’s nomination, but Kerry won nearly all of the primaries and caucuses. Kerry chose Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, who had himself sought that party’s 2004 presidential nomination, to be his running mate.
Foreign policy was the dominant theme throughout the election campaign, particularly Bush’s conduct of the War on Terrorism and the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Domestic issues were debated as well, including the economy and jobs, health care, and moral values.
Bush’s margin of victory in the popular vote was the smallest ever for a re-elected incumbent president, but marked the first time since his father’s victory 16 years prior that a candidate won a majority of the popular vote. As of 2016, this was also the latest election in which the Republican candidate won the popular vote.
On the afternoon of election day 2004, the world was abuzz with the news: exit polls indicated that John Kerry would decisively win the election and become the next president of the United States. That proved not to be the case.
According to the official count—the number of votes tallied, not necessarily the number of votes cast—George W. Bush beat Kerry by a margin of three million votes. The exit polls, however, had predicted a margin of victory for Kerry of five million votes. Occurrences of vote manipulation, vote suppression, and outright election fraud were alleged at the local level in many precincts throughout Ohio and other “battleground” states.
Where the controversy of the 2000 presidential election had come about as the result of an extremely close race, in 2004 the irregularities were widespread and appeared to follow a clear pattern. Why then did the Democrats concede the election early the next morning? Why has there been no investigation by any major news organization? What does it say about our democracy when the slot machine industry is more strictly regulated than our electronic voting machines?
Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? analyzes the available data, and attempts to answer the question of whether America’s sitting president was inaugurated after winning, or losing the 2004 presidential race.
One thing the DNC lynch mob and its corporate media would like us to forget is that one of their own, John Kerry, helped steal the election in 2004. Kerry knew that George Bush and the Republican Party stole the 2004 election from him in Ohio after his voters reported that their votes appeared as Bush votes even though they pulled the lever for Kerry, and after people in majority Democratic districts stood in long lines in thunderstorms and torrential rain waiting to vote (or went home) while majority district Republicans voted easily. Kerry’s patrician memoir “Every Day Is Extra” includes this comic description of another concern:
“Some on the team were bothered by the fact that many voting machines came from a private company, Diebold, owned by two Nebraska brothers who were the chairs of the Bush campaign for president.
“I wonder how many countries have elections in which the machines are privately owned and controlled, where the coding for the tallying cannot be inspected or verified because it is ‘proprietary information.’”
Kerry also wrote that he anticipated fraud but hoped for such a clear outcome that he wouldn’t need to contest. When that bubble burst, he chose not to expose the rot at the core of our so-called democracy (democratic-republic), although, of course, he didn’t put it that way.
As soon as he and his team realized Bush had stolen it again, he wrote, they went into deep deliberations about what to do. His vice presidential candidate, John Edwards, thought they should contest, but both knew that they might win their way past several appeals courts only to lose in the Supreme Court, as Al Gore had.
Why not tell Americans, and the rest of the world, the truth? Because, Kerry wrote, he was “deeply concerned about a nation at war, with the world looking at us, coming out of a second consecutive election, where we would be sitting in limbo, wondering for the next six weeks or more who the president would be.”
But why should anyone have been surprised by that? In 2003, John Kerry had voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq, and during his campaign, he stood by his vote. Discussing national security, he said: “(W)e must launch and lead a new era of alliances for the post-9/11 world. America must always be the world’s paramount military power. But we can magnify our power through alliances.”
Nevertheless, people were surprised and aghast. Kerry wasn’t as crude as Bush. He wasn’t so obviously sadistic and sociopathic, so many had somehow imagined that his election would end the horrors we were inflicting on the Iraqi people and the soldiers coming home in coffins or psychically mangled for life.
A 2011 filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio’s 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush.
The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio’s vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush’s unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a suspicious small plane crash.
Additionally, the filing contains the contract signed between then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and Connell’s company, GovTech Solutions. Also included that contract a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State’s election night server layout system.
Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney in the King Lincoln case, exchanged emails with IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore. Arnebeck asked Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the capability to “input data” and thus alter the results of Ohio’s 2004 election. Spoonamore responded: “Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not.”
Spoonamore explained that “they [SmarTech] have full access and could change things when and if they want.”
Arnebeck specifically asked “Could this be done using whatever bypass techniques Connell developed for the web hosting function.” Spoonamore replied “Yes.”
Spoonamore concluded from the architectural maps of the Ohio 2004 election reporting system that, “SmarTech was a man in the middle. In my opinion they were not designed as a mirror, they were designed specifically to be a man in the middle.”
A “man in the middle” is a deliberate computer hacking setup, which allows a third party to sit in between computer transmissions and illegally alter the data. A mirror site, by contrast, is designed as a backup site in case the main computer configuration fails.
Spoonamore claims that he confronted then-Secretary of State Blackwell at a secretary of state IT conference in Boston where he was giving a seminar in data security. “Blackwell freaked and refused to speak to me when I confronted him about it long before I met you,” he wrote to Arnebeck.
Read the email correspondence here [pdf].
On December 14, 2007, then-Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, who replaced Blackwell, released her evaluation and validation of election-related equipment, standards and testing (Everest study) which found that touchscreen voting machines were vulnerable to hacking with relative ease.
Until now, the architectural maps and contracts from the Ohio 2004 election were never made public, which may indicate that the entire system was designed for fraud. In a previous sworn affidavit to the court, Spoonamore declared: “The SmarTech system was set up precisely as a King Pin computer used in criminal acts against banking or credit card processes and had the needed level of access to both county tabulators and Secretary of State computers to allow whoever was running SmarTech computers to decide the output of the county tabulators under its control.”
Spoonamore also swore that “…the architecture further confirms how this election was stolen. The computer system and SmarTech had the correct placement, connectivity, and computer experts necessary to change the election in any manner desired by the controllers of the SmarTech computers.”
Project Censored named the outsourcing of Ohio’s 2004 election votes to SmarTech in Chattanooga, Tennessee to a company owned by Republican partisans as one of the most censored stories in the world.
In the Connell deposition, plaintiffs’ attorneys questioned Connell regarding gwb43, a website that was live on election night operating out of the White House and tied directly into SmarTech’s server stacks in Chattanooga, Tennessee which contained Ohio’s 2004 presidential election results.
The transfer of the vote count to SmarTech in Chattanooga, Tennessee remains a mystery. This would have only happened if there was a complete failure of the Ohio computer election system. Connell swore under oath that, “To the best of my knowledge, it was not a fail-over case scenario – or it was not a failover situation.”
Bob Magnan, a state IT specialist for the secretary of state during the 2004 election, agreed that there was no failover scenario. Magnan said he was unexpectedly sent home at 9 p.m. on election night and private contractors ran the system for Blackwell.
The architectural maps, contracts, and Spoonamore emails, along with the history of Connell’s partisan activities, shed new light on how easy it was to hack the 2004 Ohio presidential election.
Download the Plaintiffs’ Brief here [zip]. (source: Truthout)
Florida
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.”
The Triumph of the Bush Machines
But there is one overriding fact that has been left out most of the ridiculous post-election punditry that renders all other analyses completely irrelevant. It is also the reason why the smiles on the faces of Bush crime family members are so bright, as they watched the returns on election night.
Air America Radio’s Mike Malloy gave the most succinct and passionate explanation in his Wednesday, November 3, 2004 , program [my links included-LC]:
“The American vote count is controlled by three major corporate players, Diebold , ESS , Sequoia , and a fourth, SAIC , Science Applications International. All four are hard-wired into the Bush power structure, the Bush crime family.
They have been given millions of dollars by the Bush regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines that were just used in the 2004 election. The technology involved had a trial run during the 2002 mid-term elections. Georgia had Diebold machines in every precinct. As a result, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called an “amazing” 16 percent swing.
Diebold’s Walden O’Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, publicly committed himself to delivering his home state Ohio’s votes to Bush. At Diebold, the election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob’s brother, Todd, is a top executive at “rival” ES&S. The brothers were originally staked by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council For National Policy , a right-wing steering group stacked with Bush true believers. Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist Christian Reconstruction Movement , which advocates the theocratic takeover of American democracy.
The four companies are interconnected; they are not four “competitors”. Ahmanson has large stakes in ES&S, whose former CEO was Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. When Hagel ran for office, his own company counted the votes, and his victory was considered “an amazing upset”. Hagel still has a million dollar stake in ES&S.
Sequoia is the corporate parent of a private equity firm, Madison Dearborn , which is partner in the Carlyle Group . (Also see here .)
Meanwhile, SAIC is referred to a “shadowy defense contractor”. They have gotten into the vote count game both directly and through spinoffs by its top brass, including Admiral Bill Owens, former military aide to Dick Cheney, and Carlyle Group honcho Frank Carlucci and ex-CIA chief Robert Gates. SAIC’s history of fraud charges and security “lapses” haven’t prevented it from becoming one of the largest Pentagon and CIA contractors, and will doubtless encounter few obstacles in its entrance into the vote counting business.
Kerry Welcomes Fascism with Open Arms
John Kerry’s pitiful and immediate capitulation, surrendering with even less of a fight than Al Gore in 2000, despite clear, overt and gross vote fraud across the country, including Ohio—Diebold’s home state—was sickening.
Bush’s Skull & Bones fraternity brother then spoke of “healing” and uniting behind Bush, a speech grotesquely reminiscent of Al Gore’s sickening 2000 declaration that Bush was “mah president.”
Twice at this point, with Gore and Kerry, Democrats had won the White House, and then refused to speak the truth about the crime, and fight for the people who bled for them. Twice, America has been sold out.
Will those who supported Kerry actually heed his command, and obediently march in step, “without anger or rancor,” and follow George W. Bush, the strutting tyrant, and the most dangerous and irrational collection of mass-murdering war criminals in modern history?
In a cynical view, and one that is likely accurate, the election of 2004 may have been nothing more than an elaborate trial balloon, a “good cop-bad cop” theater that is mandated every few years to uphold the appearance of legitimacy. Our candidates lie, all the while gauging the effectiveness of long-term manipulation programs. They think, are the people still gullible and uninformed? What slogans and illusions can we fool them with? Is the “war on terrorism” mindset still unwavering? How far can we push them? Will they accept the baseball bat in the face, or the velvet glove to the nose?
How many beatings will this republic take, before its people wake up? When will the people realize what is really happening, and “chase us down the street and lynch us” (as George H.W. Bush said to reporter Sarah McClendon )?
Sources:
- https://sfbayview.com/2020/01/john-kerry-let-george-bush-steal-the-2004-election/
- https://www.thomhartmann.com/articles/2004/11/stinking-evidence-possible-election-fraud-found-florida
- https://protectthevote.wordpress.com/2008/10/28/nov-2004-how-computer-vote-fraud-stole-the-presidential-election/
- https://www.resilience.org/stories/2004-11-05/electronic-voting-stolen-election-2004/
See Also:
- https://archives.globalresearch.ca/articles/PAL411B.html
