2004  Election Question

Officially, President Bush won November's election by 2.5%, yet exit polls showed Kerry winning by 3%.  According to a report to be released today by a group of university statisticians, the odds of a discrepancy this large between the national exit poll and election results happening by accident are close to 1 in a million.  . .The authors of this newly released scientific study "Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Poll Discrepancies" consider this "reluctant Bush responder" hypothesis to be highly implausible, . . .“The required pattern of exit poll participation by Kerry and Bush voters to satisfy the exit poll data defies empirical experience and common sense under any assumed scenario.” U.S. Vote Counts, 3/29/05 MORE,  
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How Would You Explain the 5.5% Discrepancy in Bush's Election?

The Edison/Mitofsky [company tht did the 2004 exit polls] report confirms there were large differences between their exit polls and the official results of the 2004 presidential election – much more so than in previous elections. The national exit poll indicated a 3 point victory for Kerry; whereas the official election results indicated that he lost by 2.5%, a difference of 5.5%.  The Edison/Mitofsky report fails to substantiate their hypothesis that the difference between their exit polls
and official election results should be explained by problems with the exit polls. They assert. . . “Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters.” In fact, data included within the report suggest that the opposite might be true. Their analysis of the potential correlation of exit poll errors with voting machine type is incomplete and  inadequate,  US Count Votes, 1/31/05 MORE

Ohio Recount Tampering*

Several volunteer workers in the Ohio recount in Clermont County, Ohio have prepared affidavits alleging serious tampering, violations of state and federal law, and possible fraud. . . . These volunteers . . .assert that during the Dec. 14, 2004 hand recount they noticed stickers covering the Kerry/Edwards oval, whereas the Bush/Cheney oval seemed to be “colored in.”  Some witnesses state that beneath the stickers, the Kerry/Edwards oval was selected. . .  Allegations of ballot tampering in Ohio – which decided the outcome of the presidential election by some 100,000 votes – find particular resonance in Clermont, one of three Ohio counties which saw the biggest increases in votes for Bush from 2000 to 2004. The other counties were Butler and Warren; Warren County had a lockdown after an alleged terror threat that the FBI later denied.  Larisa Alexandrovna,  Raw Story, 1/26/05 MORE

Bush's Racist Triumph*

The ballots left uncounted, and that will never be counted, are so-called spoiled or rejected ballots -- votes cast by citizens, but never tallied. This is the dark little secret of U.S. democracy: Nationwide, in our presidential elections, about 2 million votes are cast and never counted, most spoiled because they cannot be read by the tallying machines. . .  Cleveland State University Professor Mark Salling analyzed ballots thrown into Ohio's electoral garbage can. Salling found that, "overwhelmingly," the voided votes come from African American precincts . . .A U.S. Civil Rights Commission investigation concluded that, of nearly 180,000 votes discarded in Florida in the 2000 election as unreadable, a shocking 54 percent were cast by black voters. . .In Florida, an African American is 900 percent more likely to have his or her vote invalidated than a white voter. Jackson & Palast, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 1/26/05 MORE

Did Bush Win? *

The senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee protested President Bush's re-election Wednesday with a new report claiming serious election irregularities and ``significant disenfranchisement'' of voters in Ohio.  The report by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan says Congress should challenge the Electoral College vote when it is tallied Thursday in the House of Representatives and investigate all claims of voter problems in Ohio.  We have found numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election,'' the report said. ``There are ample grounds for challenging the electors from the state of Ohio.''  Ohio's 20 electoral votes were critical for Bush's defeat of Democratic Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. A recount showed Bush winning Ohio by 118,599 votes, the Ohio Secretary of State's Office announced Wednesday.  AP, 1/5/05  MORE

Ohio Election Question*

Here's something that has been largely overlooked amid all of the complaints about voting irregularities in Ohio during the Nov. 2 election: Nearly 97,000 ballots, or 1.7 percent of those cast across the state, either did not record a preference for president or could not be counted because the voter selected more than one presidential candidate. In analysis by Scripps Howard News Service found that Ohio recorded the second-highest number of missing votes in the country, behind California. Elections experts say a large number of missing votes in a high-profile race like president should raise a red flag that something may be amiss.  MICHAEL COLLINS, Scripps Howard News Service
December 22, 2004  MORE

Republican-Style Democracy*

Ohio's chief justice on Thursday threw out a challenge to the state's presidential election results on a technicality, . . .Chief Justice Thomas Moyer ruled that state law does not allow voters to challenge the results of more than one race in a single complaint. . . Claiming fraud, the 40 voters cited reports of voting machine errors, double-counting of some ballots and a shortage of voting machines in predominantly minority precincts as reasons to throw out the election results. . . Nothing in state law or any previous court decision allows challenges to be combined, said Moyer, a Republican. . . The challengers allege that unlawful ballots were added to the number of properly cast votes and that legally cast ballots were altered to invalidate the presidential vote. . . .the complaint alleges that 130,656 votes for Kerry and John Edwards in 36 counties were somehow switched to count for the Bush-Cheney ticket. AP, 12/16/04 MORE

Bushiness Election Fraud*

"On Friday, December 10 2004, Michael from TriAd called in the AM to inform us that he would be in our office in the PM on the same day. I asked him why he was visiting us. He said, "to check out your tabulator, computer, and that the attorneys will be asking some tricky questions and he wanted to go over some of the questions they maybe ask." He also added that there would be no charge for this service.  . .He said that the battery in the computer was dead[*] and that the stored information was gone. He said that he could put a patch on it and fix it. My main concern was - what if this happened when we were ready to do the recount. He proceeded to take the computer apart and call his offices to get information to input into our computer. Our computer is fourteen years old and as far as I know had always worked in the past" Affidavit re: General Election 2004, Hocking County, OH by Evelyn Roberson, 12/14/04
* Dead Computer battery does not cause data loss MORE from Truthout.org

Ohio Recount Moves Forward*

Unexplained FL Vote Count*

Voting Machines Unsecured *

voting-machine software being readied for the 2004 election is proprietary to the companies supplying the machines. That effectively takes control of the election results away from election officials. . .In one chilling scenario, vote fraud could be perpetrated by an employee of a voting-machine company simply by inserting unauthorized code into the finished product. There would be no way for election officials to detect the attack.   Chappell Brown, EE Times, Info. Week 10/28/04  MORE

DEMAND RANDOM POST- ELECTION VOTING  AUDITS
Costanzo.org Editorial

FROM AN EARLY VOTER IN TEXAS

"I voted early. . . The system is now electronic. Initially, when I touched the screen for a straight Democratic ticket, the next screen (the review screen) showed a straight Republican ticket. Of course I touched the previous page and selected Demo again. This occurred several times until finally the computer accepted Demo..." 

But there are things that could be done; here is an example.

Conduct a post-election test on a random sample of voting machines immediately after the election to detect any systematic vote-count changes that may have been inserted into the system after it was certified.

If someone introduced, for example, a change to the computer program that changed every 500th vote cast for the candidate of Party X to a vote for the candidate in Party Y, it would probably never be noticed.  But if done in hundreds of voting machines in a battleground state, it could change the election result.

To counter this threat, after the election, a random sample of voting machines should be tested by entering a thousand votes for each of the two top candidates.  Then check the new vote totals to see if they have changed by exactly 1000 votes each.