Category Archives: election fraud

Your Paranoid Election Fraud Scenario (s)

A Paranoid’s Look At A Possible Stolen Election

By any objective measurement, it should be a blowout for Obama today. By any realistic measurement, and in light of what some of us think are the Republican presidential steals of 2000 and 2004, we could be looking at yet another stolen presidential election. The good news: it should be really really hard to steal this election. It would be so obvious that even the Mainstream Media and the Daily Kos would notice. Frankly, I’m hoping that the election thieves were ordered to stand down after their masters looked closely at their shrinking stock portfolios. The Bad News: Ker Razy Christian Fundamentalists have been pinpointed as the master hackers. They’re not in the reality based worlds. The only way they could win is to turnaround elections in DNC strongholds but it could still work. Obama didn’t even ask for a recount in New Hampshire where he could have possibly proven fraud. If he doesn’t question dicey results today, we’re screwed. Everything would depend on a Green Party, Ralph Nader recount. I know they would have the balls to do that. But we would have to fund them.

First, here’s the Markos prediction. In a fair world where the machines work or where the deficit is simply too big to steal believably, this is what should happen given Obama’s superior ground game and early voting advantage.

Now, given the reality of what’s happened over the last decade years, this is a map (below) of what kinds of voting machines are in which states. If I was an election stealer, then I would put all my resources into stealing states that are either orange or red. These states have no paper record of your vote. Some of them have internal audits but they’ll simply reflect the stolen vote totals so they’re worthless.

Again, if I was a thief, I’d take a good look at Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Just for fun, I used one of the free construct your own electoral vote counters from the Internets. This is what I concluded would happen if they steal states that they could easily steal. You might note that even if they were to steal Pennsylvania and New Jersey, where no records or no audits exists, as far as I know, Obama could still win. One note: Florida switched to paper ballots so they’re all green now. I hope.

My prediction below:

Now, here’s where the Big Fat Steal could occur: all along the Eastern seaboard. I would go after Delaware and Maryland. Untraceable. A perfect crime. You would have to go to court and ask for new paper ballot elections. You would be under the 2000 timetable gun. You would have to win in Republican courts. The public would have to buy that Obama lost in four states where he was up by 10 points or more but more than likely the MSM would be fine with it. (“Joe the Plumber struck a chord” or some bullshit like that…) Again, astonishing I agree. But possible. How crazy are right wing Christian Fundamentalist Pro Life hackers? That’s not an answer I’m comfortable with. Here’ the thing: Even if Obama wins this is a terrible system. You can leave your money out on the street overnight. It might be there in morning. But that doesn’t mean that this is a good banking system. Ditto for our voting machine architectures. The whole country should be green with paper ballots and random mandatory audits. One more depressing note: you can steal elections in the green and blue areas too, but its much harder and it should be discovered by way of recounts.

New York Times, Finally, On Examples of GOP Led Election Fraud (Not voter fraud. Whole Damn elections.)

Mark Crispin Miller gets this right:


Although its emphasis on paper trails and audits is misplaced, this is a powerful and important statement from the TIMES, whose overall record on the issues of election fraud and vote suppression is dreadful. (Someone should compare the paper’s coverage of those issues with the space that it devotes to video games.) So hats off to Adam Cohen for this landmark editorial.

Note also that the piece refers, obliquely, to the latest revelations re: the stolen Georgia races in ’02. The whistle-blower that Cohen refers to is the same one that RAW STORY has just mentioned—-the same one whose experience has been confirmed by super-whistle-blower Stephen Spoonamore. (The media—both mainstream and left/liberal—-has yet to mention Spoonamore’s astonishing and all-important stories on BushCo’s election fraud conspiracy throughout the last eight years.)

Also, this latest whistle-blower is not the first one to tell the story of the software patch illegally deployed in Georgia. He is, in fact, the third. So maybe it is time, at last, for some extensive coverage of that scandal (among others) in theTIMES’s own NEWS pages?

MCM

Full story here:

1. The 2002 Georgia Senate and Governor Races — Senator Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was defeated for re-election and Gov. Roy Barnes, a Democrat, was unseated. Polls had suggested that both men would win.

The votes were cast on Diebold A.T.M.-style machines. A whistle-blower who helped prepare the machines reported that secret “patches” — software intended to fix glitches — were installed late in the process without being certified by the state, as the law required.

The unexpected outcomes were likely because of heavy turnout by rural whites, prompted by a Confederate flag dispute, not faulty voting machines. Still, skeptics wonder if the patches contained malicious software that changed votes. Because the Diebold machines did not produce paper records, there is no way to put those doubts to rest.

Lesson: Electronic voting makes large-scale vote theft easy. A patch slipped onto voting machines or centralized vote tabulators can change an election’s outcome. Every piece of software must be scrutinized by neutral experts. If there is not enough time, election officials need a backup plan, such as conducting voting entirely on paper ballots.

2. The 2006 Congressional Race in Florida’s 13th District — The machines said that Republican Vern Buchanan defeated Democrat Christine Jennings by 369 votes. But in Sarasota County, a Democratic area, up to 18,000 ballots, about 13 percent of the total cast, did not record a vote for Congress. That is extraordinarily high; in Republican Manatee County, only 2 percent of ballots didn’t contain a vote for Congress.

Sarasota’s low vote may have been because of a bad ballot design, which made the Buchanan-Jennings race hard to find. But the Jennings campaign said it received hundreds of complaints that the machines would not accept a vote for Ms. Jennings, or recorded a vote for her as a vote for Mr. Buchanan.

Did Ms. Jennings lose a seat in Congress because of a glitch? Could there have been sabotage? We’ll never know, because there are no paper records.

Lesson: Electronic voting machines must produce a voter-verifiable paper trail for each vote so voters can see that their choices register properly. In a disputed election, the paper, not the machine tallies, should decide who wins.

More than half the states require votes to be recorded on paper, but many still don’t. These include battleground states like Virginia.

3. Alabama’s 2002 Race for Governor — Former Gov. Don Siegelman has been in the news because it appears that federal prosecutors may have put him in prison for political reasons. The controversy has brought attention to the odd way he lost the governorship.

Mr. Siegelman went to sleep on election night thinking he had won. But overnight, Republican Baldwin County reported that a glitch had given Mr. Siegelman, a Democrat, about 6,000 extra votes. When they were subtracted, Republican Rob Riley won by roughly 3,000 votes.

James Gundlach, a professor at Auburn University, crunched the numbers and concluded that Mr. Siegelman lost because of “electronic ballot stuffing,” possibly by an operative who accessed the computers and “edited” the results, though others dispute his analysis.

Baldwin County used paper ballots that were then read by an optical scan machine. Mr. Siegelman says local officials gave him permission to count the paper ballots by hand, but the attorney general threatened to arrest anyone who did. No count was done.

Lesson: Paper ballots alone are not enough. There must be strong audit laws that mandate comprehensive hand recounts when an election is close.

After the 2000 election debacle, Americans demanded a better system of voting. What we have gotten is new technology with different flaws. If the presidential race is close, this year’s “hanging chad” could be a questionable result on electronic voting machines that cannot be adequately investigated.

Roundup of Several of My Election Fraud Posts

I got this from the Prolefeed guy. I’m pretty sure the guy with the gun is an auto insurance agent. Related and hilarious clip here. Is it just me or is the Prolefeed as good as anybody on teevee or in my newspapers? More political stencils here. We can only beat them with stencils you see.

When I asked Chris Potter what happened to Ted Rall I also noted–perhaps a bit too obtusely– that the Pennsylvania primary results were essentially unverifiable. Perhaps it was really a 52 to 48 race like the exit polls. Perhaps Hillary won by 20 points. Who knows. And who can check. Trust politicians because they would never never ever lie to us, right Chris? Now, as it turns out, they’ve been having this debate in New Jersey except its happening in a courtroom. Get the background here from Bradblog. Long story short: Sequoia doesn’t want you looking inside their machines, or the machines that were used all over Pennsylvania last week and Allegheny County in particular. (I could be wrong about that.) Sequoia had been fighting in court to make sure that their machines couldn’t be examined. That this would be an issue in a real democracy is stunning. Then again, I suppose I don’t live in a real democracy. Anyway, super hacker Ed Felton is getting a look.

Here’s what he’s found so far. Remember, Fast “Eddy” Rendell and our Secretary of State said everything worked fine last Tuesday. Compare and contrast with these graphs from Slashdot:

“Princeton Professor, Ed Felton, has posted a series of blog entries in which he shows the printed tapes he obtained from the NJ voting machines don’t report the ballots correctly. In response to the first one, Sequoia admitted that the machines had a known software design error that did not correctly record which kind of ballots were cast (republican or democratic primary ballots) but insisted the vote totals were correct. Then, further tapes showed this explanation to be insufficient. In response, State officials insisted that the (poorly printed) tapes were misread by Felton. Again further tapes showed this not to be a sufficient explanation. However all those did not foreclose the optimistic assessment that the errors were benign — that is, the possibility that vote totals might really be correct even though the ballot totals were wrong and the origin of the errors had not been explained. Now he has found (well-printed) tapes that show what appears to be hard proof that it’s the vote totals that are wrong, since two different readout methods don’t agree. Sequoia has made trade-secret legal threats against those wishing to mount an independent examination of the equipment. One small hat-tip to Sequoia: at least they are reporting enough raw data in different formats that these kinds of errors can come to light — that lesson should be kept in mind when writing future requirements for voting machines.”

By the way, if you’re playing the home game, this would be evidence of election fraud. But remember, only dirty fucking hippies on the internets think this story matters.

(Review by Joan at Oped here.)

Nuns and students without valid photo ID turned away from the Indiana polls, according to Bradblog. Not an accident and thank you so much my neo Jim Crow Supreme Court. Atrios doesn’t get the magnitude of this. It kind of is a grand magnificent conspiracy. Writer at Booman Tribune correctly sees nature of grand magnificent conspiracy in a piece titled: “The Republican War on Voting Rights“. Here’s a snippet:

The real basic take away here is that if you are going to tip elections, you aren’t going to be able to do it “one vote at a time” as these voter id, anti-voter laws purport to combat.

You do it by rigging the system from the inside – by massive voter roll purges that are designed to purge the very demographics that are most likely to hurt the other party, by challenging districting in order to “make it more fair for people’s votes to be reflective of the district”, by implementing laws that are meant to keep millions of people who are likely to vote for the other party from voting and by stacking the deck in the positions where the voting machines are selected and monitored, where the federal and state election laws are “interpreted”, where the decisions are made with respect to voter registration and how the elections are run and even having cousins in the very media outlets who are calling the races for their candidate-cousins.

Make no mistake – this is a more than just a major partisan initiative. This is an all out assault on the voting rights of millions of potential Democratic voters and therefore, votes. This is a premeditated, long term, wide ranging attack against millions of Americans’ voting rights. But it isn’t just an assault on Democratic voters. It is an assault on the most basic right that a democracy affords.

And it should be referred to accordingly.

Related: Dems failed to pass newest version of Holt bill. The bill required the abnormal two thirds and apparently there is no plan to add it as an attachment. That would mean you really wanted to pass a bill like that of course. Steny Hoyer, the Dems number two, doesn’t want to reform the machines because things are going so well now. Kind of like when Biff got the betting results book in Back to the Future II…I always wondered what happens to the people who live in those awful splintered realities. Now I know.

And now: Time for Phil’s Quixotic Musing…

I don’t suppose the dems could attach something to that $100 billion dollar Iraq spending proposal that would fix our machines and outlaw modern versions of Jim Crow? Yeah, I didn’t think so either.


If you’re at all interested in the election fraud debate, then please watch this Bob Fitrakis vid above. It answers the question of why doesn’t the mainstream/corporate press show more of an interest in the issue. Note the shocking bit about how republican senator Mike DeWine killed the story at the papers. Why would papers care? Because they would need Mike’s help in order to expand their monopolies in terms of all kinds of legislation and FCC issues. That’s why your daily Post Gazette gives you hard hitting pieces like this or this. Its to distract you from the really important things that are happening, like how the American public has been robbed of its choice for president in two consecutive presidential elections. Features a nice retort to all the “election fraud” denialists like Markos and a great definition of the successful newspaper “editor”. Related: This funny Smallville scene between Lex Luther and Chloe, one of Clark’s Scooby friends (I’m thinking Velma.), seems fairly realistic. A force of ultimate evil has taken over most of our newsrooms, afterall. Unrealistic part of the scene: she would never get her story about “office espionage” published and if she had kids to feed she probably wouldn’t have even complained.


How The 2008 Election is Being Stolen

From the Independent by Way of Mark Crispin Miller:

There is a real risk they could succeed. They are close to getting the number of signatures they need to secure a referendum in June. (The Los Angeles Downtown News claims to have witnessed signature-gatherers offering homeless people food in return for signing.) The turnout for the referendum is expected to be extremely low, because the state-wide primaries usually held on that date have been moved forward to February. So the Republicans only have to activate a small part of their base to push it through – and they have the cash to do it. California dreamin’, on such a winter’s day.

The Democrats in response shouldn’t be trapped in the conservative position of defending the indefensible electoral college. There is an alternative way to reform it – one that would be fair to all parties. It used to be thought it was all but impossible to ditch the system because it would require a constitutional amendment, which needs the approval of two-thirds of both houses of Congress, plus three-quarters of state legislatures.

But then constitutional scholars realised there was another way. The Constitution only requires that each state must “appoint” its presidential electors “in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct”. That leaves a glimmer of hope. The Campaign for a National Popular Vote is campaigning for every state simply to commit its delegates to the electoral college to vote 100 per cent for the candidate who wins the popular vote. This would render the electoral college a forgotten technicality. It’s very revealing that when the California state senate voted to introduce this genuinely democratic system last year, the Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed it, with the support of his party.

It shows that the Republicans’ rhetoric of wanting “fairness” and “equal representation” in California is a honeyed lie. They want a system that retains their power, even if it subverts the will of the people. It risks becoming Florida Part II: just when you thought it was safe to go back into the polling booth… Fasten your seatbelts – it’s going to be a bumpy election.

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