KARL ROVE'S PLAN TO STEAL OHIO FOR ROMNEY WAS FOILED BY (BELIEVE IT OR NOT) FOX NEWS AND FORBES MAGAZINE!

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TECH | 11/06/2012 @ 12:20AM                                                                                                                 Original Here

The Technological Foundations Of Today's Election Are Shaky, Especially In Ohio




The polls for tomorrow’s presidential election are close, and Ohio will be the most important battleground. Eight years ago, the election was mired in the Florida recount, the results of which are still disputed (by at least half the country.) Could we be heading for something far worse?

This year’s version of the hanging chad could be even more pernicious since it resides in the software that tabulates the votes. Google “election fraud,” and you will get stories about both campaigns lawyering up for possible visible irregularities. They should perhaps hire some hackers and statisticians and get under the hood. Three separate news reports, from well-researched but admittedly left-wing sources, question whether the integrity of the election can be assured. Surprisingly, the only mention of these stories on mainstream television come from the FOX affiliate station in Cincinnati, WXIX-TV. See the “Reality Check” segment above.

The first unsettling report originated in The Free Press, has been corroborated by multiple sources and was covered on Forbes by Rich Ungar, in a very well-read post, Romney Family Investment Ties To Voting Machine Company That Could Decide The Election Causing Concern. Although Tamara Keith, on the supposedly left-leaning NPR provided a debunking headline, No, Romney’s Son Is Not Gunning To Steal Ohio Vote By Rigging Voting Machines, even she had to admit that there are multiple points of contact between the company, Hart InterCivic, and the Romney campaign.

The second, and most recent story, points to last minute “uncertified ‘experimental’ software patches” that have been installed on electronic vote tabulation systems in 39 Ohio counties. The same writers, Bob Fitrakis and Gerry Bello, writing in The Free Press, uncovered a contract between the office of the Republican Secretary of State of Ohio, Jon Husted and electronic voting system manufacturer ES&S, for a modification to the software that controls “vote counting tabulators in up to 39 Ohio counties.” The Secretary of State’s office has been evasive and contradictory in response to questions about the minor seeming change that involved converting results from xml to csv format. Apparently, by calling the software “experimental,” Husted was attempting to avoid any approval, review or testing of the new software. But as the federal Elections Assistance Commission titled a memo back in February , “Software and Firmware modifications are not de minimis changes.”



Brad Friedman (featured in the video above from the Russian RTAmerica YouTube channel) wrote an extensive post about the story on his BradBlog. He points out that Art Levine reported on the Huffington Post that Fitrakis and attorney Cliff Arnebeck are trying to block the use of the new software. Friedman quotes Libertarian election integrity and software expert Jim March’s affidavit for the Fitrakis/Arnebeck injunction lawsuit where he writes, ”The method of execution chosen is unspeakably stupid, excessively complex and insanely risky. In medical terms it is the equivalent of doing open heart surgery as part of a method of removing somebody’s hemorrhoids. Whoever came up with this idea is either the dumbest Information Technology ‘professional’ in the US or has criminal intent against the Ohio election process.” (See the sidebars on the Free Press and BradBlog posts linked to here for additional, relevant stories.) What could this mean? This software vulnerability “creates a digital ‘back door,’ which someone wishing to alter vote totals might be able to exploit,” explains The Christian Science Monitor.

The third story is both the biggest and at the same time, the most circumstantial. Denis Campbell at the UK Progressive, has written a series of posts based on the statistical analysis of a former NSA analyst that show an inexplicable but recurrent statistical anomaly. Draw your own conclusions, but this retired analyst, Michael Duniho, has demonstrated “mathematics [that] showed changes in actual raw voting data that had no statistical correlation other than programmable computer fraud. This computer fraud resulted in votes being flipped from Democrat to Republican in every federal, senatorial, congressional and gubernatorial election since 2008 (thus far) and in the 2012 primary contests from other Republicans to Mitt Romney.” He claims to prove that there is an unexplained, and systemic, shift in favor of Republicans in the larger districts by a factor of 10%. See video below for more detail:



Whether you believe any or none of these assertions, the doubts raised by them show how shaky the technological foundations of our democracy are. No consumer would engage with e-commerce on the web if those systems were as hackable and open to abuse as those that count our votes. The 2007 Ohio EVEREST Voting Study showed how hackable that state’s voting machines, supplied by Elections Systems and Software (ES&S), Hart InterCivic, and Premier Election Systems (formerly Diebold), are and how they do not obey basic principles of containment that underpin any competent security system.

I sent a couple of these stories to a friend of mine, Dr. Nathaniel Polish, a brilliant software developer and inventor, to see what the tech take on this would be. His response was immediate and opinionated, “Computer based voting is a real problem. If it is not completely open source with code open for public inspection and comment, then is can not be a valid way to collect votes. Period. There is really no room for compromise on this. Elections done electronically with proprietary systems will always be suspect.” He went on to mention the GOP’s voter suppression attempts and the fact that “when you have partisan secretaries of state you have to assume that they will do all that they can for their party. The Dems might be tempted some time to try something similar.”

U.S. ELECTIONS ARE RECORDED ON HACKABLE ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES AND RECORDED BY PRIVATE CONTRACTORS, WHILE THE CORPORATE-OWNED "MAINSTREAM" MEDIA MAKE UP STORIES TO EXPLAIN UNEXPECTED OUTCOMES ...EVEN THOUGH THESE OUTCOMES ARE "STATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE" IN AN UNRIGGED ELECTION.

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Bob Fitrakis

Wisconsin: None dare call it vote rigging
June 14, 2012

If vote-rigging prospers, none may call it vote-rigging. It simply becomes the new norm. Once again, the universal laws of statistics apply only outside U.S. borders. The recall vote in Wisconsin produced another significant 7% discrepancy between the unadjusted exit poll and the so-called "recorded vote." In actual social science, this level of discrepancy, with the results being so far outside the expected margin of error would not be accepted.

When I took Ph.D. statistics to secure my doctorate in political science, we were taught to work through the rubric, sometime referred to as HISMISTER. The "H" stood for an explanation of the discrepancy rooted in some historical intervention, such as one of the candidates being caught in a public restroom with his pants down and a "wide stance" soliciting an undercover cop. The "I" that came next suggested we should check our instrumentation, that is, are the devices adequately reporting the data?

Here's where U.S. elections become laughable. A couple of private companies, count our votes with secret proprietary hardware and software, the most notable being ES&S. Every standard of election transparency is routinely violated in the U.S. electronic version of faith-based voting. How the corporate-dominated media deals with the issue is by "adjusting the exit polls." They simply assume the recorded vote on easily hacked and programmed private machines are correct and that the international gold standard for detecting election fraud – exit polls – must be wrong.

They are not going to go through the rest of the acronym and check to see if the Sample makes sense, that the right Measurements are being taken, or whether or not there's been a breakdown in Implementing the exit polling. They won't check to see if the representative Size of the polling numbers are accurate, or if there are problems with the pollster's Technique, or if there was human Error, or if there's just bad Recording going on.

Of course, the machines could be recording wrong because they are programmed for an incorrect outcome. The easiest people to convince regarding the absurdity of electronic voting with private proprietary hardware and software are the computer programmers across the political spectrum. Statisticians and mathematicians also readily comprehend the obvious nature of rigged elections.

One of my favorite mathematicians is Richard Charnin, who on his website using readily available public information, calculates the odds of the so-called ‘red shift" occurring from the 1988 to 2008 presidential elections. The red shift refers to the overwhelming pick up of votes by the Republican Party in recorded votes over what actual voters report to exit pollsters.

In Charnin's analysis of exit poll data, we can say with a 95% confidence level – that means in 95 out of 100 elections – that the exit polls will fall within a statistically predictable margin of error. Charnin looked at 300 presidential state exit polls from 1988 to 2008, 15 state elections would be expected to fall outside the margin of error. Shockingly, 137 of the 300 state presidential exit polls fell outside the margin of error.

What is the probability of this happening?

"One in one million trillion trillion trlllion trillion trillion trillion," said Charnin.

More proof of Republican operatives and sympathizers is found in the fact that 132 of the elections fell outside the margin in favor of the GOP. We would expect eight.

Say you have a fair coin to flip. We would expect that if we flip that coin there would be an even split between heads and tails – or in this case, Republicans and Democrats. Election results falling outside the margin of error should be equally split between both parties. Yet, only five times, less than expected, did the extra votes fall in the direction of the Democratic Party.

So what are the odds? According to Charnin, of 132 out of 300 state presidential elections exceeding the margin of error in the direction of the Republicans – one in 600 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion.

The corporate-owned media does not want to mention that the problems with the exit polls began with the ascendancy of the former CIA Director George Herbert Walker Bush to the presidency in 1988. It is also that year when the non-transparent push-and-pray voting machines were introduced in the New Hampshire primary by Bush ally John Sununu. Bush, who rigged elections for the CIA throughout the Third World did unexpectedly well where the voting machines were brought in.

In any other election outside the U.S., the U.S. State Department would condemn the use of the these highly riggable machines based on the discrepancy in the exit polls. It's predictable what would happen if an anti-U.S. KGB agent in some former Soviet Central Asian republic picked up an unexplained 5% of the votes at odds with the exit polls. A new election would be called for, as it was in the Ukraine in 2004. We would not have accepted the reported vote from the corrupt intelligence officer.

The CIA Director's son wins with laughable exit poll discrepancies in 2000 and 2004 and the mainstream media sees no evil. The media's perspective is to discredit the exit polls, which they sponsor, and call any who point to the polls "conspiracy theorists."

In 2004, 22 states had a red shift to the CIA Director's son, George W. Bush. Usually such improbably results are signs of a Banana Republic. Now we have a too-close-to-call neck and neck recall race in Wisconsin that show an obvious red shift for a right-wing red governor. Nobody wants to look at the non-transparent black box machines. Electronic election rigging has prospered. Long live the "adjusted" vote totals.

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Originally published by The Free Press, http://freepress.org.

THE MOST INFORMATIVE (AND ENTERTAINING) EXPOSITION OF THE AMERICAN ELECTION SYSTEM YOU WILL EVER WATCH -- AND IN JUST 2 MINUTES AND 47 SECONDS!

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WAR FOR THE WHITE HOUSE!!! Diebold accidently leaks 2012 election results

http://youtu.be/ojmOESqVeak

When you go to vote tomorrow, take notes on any voting machine malfunctions or any odd actions by poll workers ...and report them to the election-integrity activists at the Election Defense Alliance

Watch these two short videos. The things that Jon Stewart refers to are definitely true. While the so-called mainstream media are mostly mum on this subject, these facts are well known to me and others who regularly track this kind if information on the internet.





Our elections are defenseless against rigging by those in charge of voting machines with programmable memory cards and/or ballot-tabulating central computers. Your vigilance, concern, and perchance material aid are dearly needed to begin to reverse this situation.

Just remember:

“The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery."
- - Thomas Paine

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
-- Goethe

“Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”
-- Thomas Jefferson

“There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men.”
-- Edmund Burke

http://electiondefensealliance.org/

Full Disclosure: The blogger is a member of the Coordinating Council of the Election Defense Alliance.

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Some optional choices (added 11/2/10):

Please make time to report incidents/problems around this Nov 2, 2010 election.

- MA, Election Incidents Hotsheet.  The reporting is very simple to do

http://massachusetts-election-incidents-blog.blogspot.com/2010/10/reports-of-problems-observed-firsthand.html

Sponsored by the Center for Hand-Counted Paper Ballots

http://www.handcountedpaperballots.org/

  IL Election Incidents Hotsheet

http://illinois-election-incidents-hotsheet.blogspot.com/2010/09/reports-of-problems-observed-firsthand.html

Sponsored by http://ballot-integrity.org/

- TX Election Incidents Hotsheet

http://texas-election-incidents-hotsheet.blogspot.com/2010/09/reports-of-problems-observed-firsthand.html

Sponsored by http://www.voterescue.org/

Two pages of polling-place etiquette, plus a one-page checklist of things
to be alert for.

Download pdf version from http://ballot-integrity.org/pollwatchertips.pdf

Or read as online at http://www.opednews.com/articles/Pollwatcher-Tools-A-Carro-by-Roy-Lipscomb-101101-438.html

Required Reading for American Stolen-Election Deniers

September 2, 2010 at 10:45:04

Promoted to Headline (H3) on 9/2/10:

Who is rigging our elections? Clues from Massachusetts.

By Josh Mitteldorf

For OpEdNews: Josh Mitteldorf - Writer

Since the stolen presidential election of 2004, Jonathan Simon has been at the forefront of analysis and research into election fraud in America. Yesterday, Simon published the result of his inquiry into the special election last January in which Ted Kennedy's Senate seat (from the nation's most solidly Democratic state) was offered up by the Democrats to a Tea Party Republican.

This was an election with crucial national significance. The Democrats had exactly the 60-vote margin in the Senate needed to push through Obama's health care initiative over united Republican obstruction. Ted Kennedy had been a lifelong champion of that legislation, and his was widely regarded as a safe Democratic seat. State Attorney General Martha Coakley was supposed to be a shoo-in.

But Coakley campaigned half-heartedly -- some would say incompetently. The RNC shoveled money into the race. A media campaign before the election proclaimed that challenger Scott Brown was unexpectedly competitive.

Most inexplicably -- perhaps this is the biggest clue -- Coakley conceded the race at midnight, with a quarter of the votes still uncounted.

So this was a curious election in a number of ways, even if you base your view on the story as reported by the mainstream. But there remains a crucial unreported story, which Simon addresses: Were the votes properly counted? Simon gives us good cause to believe that more voters chose Coakley than Brown last January.

The only proof of a stolen election would be to re-count the votes, or to examine software the scanning machines that were used to tabulate 97% of the votes that day. Simon recounts efforts by the Election Defense Alliance to get this evidence from the State, and the State's determination to seal both the paper ballots and the counting process from public scrutiny.

Denied access to the only direct evidence, Simon pursues the indirect evidence with an ingenuity and a thoroughness that makes a solid case for election fraud. His starting point is the fact that among the 3% of ballots that were hand-counted, Coakley won a solid victory. He then proceeds to eliminate, one by one, all the innocent explanations for the disparity between the 3% (hand counted, publicly verifiable) and the 97% (machine-tallied using trade-secret software by two large corporations, ES&S and Diebold, both with partisan Republican ties).

Could it have been a statistical fluke? The chances of this were one in a million.

Were the hand-counted votes in more Democratic parts of the state? No--in fact, these precincts trended slightly more Republican in registration.

In past elections, were the hand-counted precincts more likely to favor Democrats? No -- the 3% has tracked the 97% accurately in other recent elections.

Simon's genius is to pull together clues from disparate, yet publicly verifiable sources, in order to create a convincing picture out of a muddle of uncertainty. As Edison told us, genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Simon has not shied from the task of spreadsheeting historical data from 500 different Massachusetts localities, and he offers us all the data in an appendix. If only the State would be as open as Simon in offering us a basis for confidence in the official election results!

If the picture that Simon paints is valid, there is a disturbing and mysterious pattern over the last several election cycles. Most elections in the US have been untainted but they have also been uncontested, with lopsided victories for one side or the other. Among the few that are hotly contested, there has been a thumb on the scale a lot of the time, and the thumb pushes inexorably from Blue toward the Red. (see EDA article on the 2006 election)

We imagine that politicians are playing to win, that politics is a rough and tumble game. The reality is stranger. One side alone is going for the jugular. The Democrats are not just pulling punches, they are actively complicit in their own defeat. Confronted with solid evidence of Republican election fraud, Democrats ignore and deny. The Liberal Media have uniformly refused to report on stolen elections, and what little coverage we see actually comes from Fox news! Proposed legislation that would demand transparency in the way our votes are counted is opposed by Democrats at the state and the Federal level. Ten years ago (in a scene made famous by Michael Moore), Vice President Al Gore presided over a quashing of a Senate protest over the election that had been stolen from him. Six years ago, John Kerry had a $20 million war chest reserved for legal challenges in case he lost the election under questionable circumstances; but after Bush stole the election in Ohio, Kerry conceded promptly and pursued no inquiry or challenge. And Martha Coakley, handed the seat that was still warm from Ted Kennedy's years of liberal service, passed the seat to the Right.

Why do the Democrats want to lose? What's going on, and who is running this show?

Josh Mitteldorf, a senior editor at OpEdNews, was educated to be an astrophysicist, and has branched out from there to mathematical modeling in a variety of areas. He has taught mathematics, statistics, and physics at several universities. He is an avid amateur pianist, and father of two adopted Chinese girls. This year, his affiliation is with the University of Arizona, where he studies the evolution of aging.

The Media Myth Is that Ted Kennedy's Seat Was Lost to a Right-Wingnut because of Democratic Mistakes. But What If There Had Been an Exit Poll?

Recall Why NOT to Believe the MA Election Results

by Kathy Dopp

National Election Data Archive

I've reposted this exit poll analysis of the MA Super-Tuesday primary
election to remind us that MA had the highest early unadjusted exit
poll discrepancies of any state, and to recall that MA makes *no
attempt whatsoever* to check the accuracy of its election results
after the election, choosing to blithely trust all the programmers,
technicians, and election officials not to make any deliberate or
innocent mistakes.

Here is the Super Tuesday exit poll results, including MA. It is not
surprising that a state that does nothing whatsoever to ensure that
its election counts are accurate after the election has the highest
exit poll discrepancies of any state on Super Tuesday.

http://www.electionmathematics.org/em-exitpolls/SuperTuesday2008DemPrimary.pdf

No one can tell us whether or not the MA election outcomes are
accurate due to the lack of any post-election auditing procedure
there.

Notice that if Rep Holt's Voter Confidence bill had passed (which it might have if we all had supported it), this would not be an ongoing problem at the level it is today because all states would be required to use paper ballots and count at least 10% of randomly selected publicly reported precinct counts manually and independently after each election that had margins this close.

BIPARTISANLY YOURS: COAKLEY WON THE HAND COUNTS

by Bev Harris

This article is about our right to know, not about Martha Coakley or Scott Brown. And lest you think something here favors a Democrat, just you wait, I'm still working on anomalies in the NY-23 election that are just plain hard to 'splain. As Richard Hayes Phillips says when people tell him to forget it, "I'm a historian, I've got all the time in the world." NY-23 still has history to be written. My public records are starting to arrive. But that's another story.

Back to Massachusetts, I think you have a right to know that Coakley won the hand counts there. You can discuss this here:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/80830.html

That's right.

According to preliminary media results by municipality, Democrat Martha Coakley won Massachusetts overall in its hand counted locations,* with 51.12% of the vote (32,247 hand counted votes) to Brown's 30,136, which garnered him 47.77% of hand counted votes. Margin: 3.35% lead for Coakley.

Massachusetts has 71 hand count locations, 91 ES&S locations, and 187 Diebold locations, with two I call the mystery municipalities (Northbridge and Milton) apparently using optical scanners, not sure what kind.

ES&S RESULTS

The greatest margin between the candidates was with ES&S machines -- 53.64% for Brown, 45.31% for Coakley, a margin for Brown of 8.33%. It looks like ES&S counted a total of 620,388 votes, with 332,812 going to Brown and 281,118 going to Coakley. Taken overall, the difference -- 8.33% Brown (ES&S) added to 3.35% Coakley (Hand Count) shows an 11.68% difference between the ES&S and the Hand Counts. Of course, as Mark Twain used to say, there are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies, and statistics. These statistics don't prove anything, and probably shouldn't be discussed without a grain of salt handy before examining more detailed demographics.

As a point of reference, however, in the Maine gay marriage issue recently there was no significant overall difference between machine count and hand count locations.

DIEBOLD RESULTS

Diebold's results are 51.42% for Brown, with 791,272 Republican votes counted by Diebold, vs. 47.61% for Coakley, with 732,633 Democratic votes counted by Diebold, for a spread of 3.81% favoring Brown.

LATE-REPORTED RESULTS

It's always interesting to watch hand counts beat machine count results to the newspaper.

In the Massachusetts special senate election, results from six of 71 hand count locations were reported about 2 1/2 hours after the polls closed, with the remaining 65 hand count locations in right away. The slower hand count results represent 8.45% of all hand count locations.

These latecoming hand-counted results favored Coakley very heavily (she got 55.68% of these, earning 4,610 votes to Brown's 42.9%, representing 3,552, a 12.78% margin) Whether the reports came to the media late or the media posted them late is unclear.

ES&S SLOWPOKE VOTES

ES&S had 12 of its 91 locations reported at least 2 1/2 hours after polls closed, a total of 13.2% of all its locations (as compared with just 8.45% of slower reporting hand count locations). So ES&S certainly wasn't faster than hand counts, overall!

These slow-arriving votes represented 88,288 of ES&S's 620,388 votes. Overall Brown got 46,257, for 52.39% of the late-arriving ES&S votes, and Coakley got 41,238, for 46.71%, yielding a margin of 5.68% of the late-arriving votes going to Brown, for a net gain of 5,019 votes to Brown.

North Attleboro and Paxton appear to be the last locations in the state to be reported, and they are both ES&S. North Attleboro brought in 10,881
very late votes, 71.48% of them going to Brown; Paxton brought in 2,036 votes, 65.37% going to Brown.

THE SLOW BOAT FROM DIEBOLD

Yes, I know they're supposed to be called Premier machines now, and ES&S bought the company so it's now all one big monopoly family, and then the whole kit and kaboodle in New England -- Premier and ES&S -- is programmed by the juicy little LHS Associates guys. But I like to just call them Diebold, that familiar name which we all know and love.

Twenty-four of Diebold's 187 locations wandered in late, smoking cigarettes and wearing a bathrobe. That's 12.83% of all its locations. Apparently it was faster to hand count 8,497 ballots, as they did promptly in Newburyport, or 7,339 ballots, as they hand counted in public for all to see in Milton, than to push a button and wait five minutes for the machine to spit out a Diebold results report in Pelham where they had 725 votes. East Brookfield's 899 Diebold votes must have run out of gas somewhere; they weren't reported for hours.

All in all, a total of 170,594 Diebold votes took a long time to stumble in the door, These votes -- surprise! -- favored Coakley. She got 86,214 of them, for 50.54%, and Brown got 82,911 tardy Diebold votes, for 48.60%, putting Coakley on the plus side of the late arrivers by a 1.94% margin, for a net gain of 3,303 slow-moving votes.

They'd called the election by the time the 170,594 tardy Diebold votes showed up. Coakley had conceded. And of course, there are many ways to look at this if you don't trust voting machines, and why should you? It's hard to know who was fooling around, or if anybody was.

You see, the Diebold latecomers represented the strongest showing for Coakley of all and in some heavily populated areas. 32 of 33 Cambridge polling place results couldn't find their way to the media for a long time. Cambridge finally came in with 27,268 votes for Coakley -- 84.11%. Brown was only able to locate 4,921 votes from Cambridge when all was said and done.

And the media couldn't seem to rustle up any Amherst votes for any of its 10 polling places until races were called and candidates had conceded. Amherst generated 84% of its votes for Coakley with only 15% going to Brown.

So this is all very interesting, and hopefully is accurate because I'm spreadsheeting after midnight. And we're talking statistics based on premature and unofficial results which came from the media and not the government, and the Massachusetts Secretary of State doesn't officially tell us which place is using which system, so we're relying on volunteers from the VerifiedVoting Web site who hunted it down.**

** A public service announcement from Disclaimers-R-Us, a subsidiary of the US Elections Industry.

GET OVER IT, SCOTT BROWN WON

Actually, I think any intellectually honest person will see that Brown garnered financing and executed brilliantly, and that's just politics.

He probably DID win. In 71 Massachusetts locations we could watch the counting (woops, he lost those, overall). But in 277 locations, the counting was on computerized voting machines and concealed from the public.

So we can never really know who won, and that is unfair to both Scott Brown and Martha Coakley. But it's most unfair to the citizens of Massachusetts, who have an inalienable right to choose their own governance. You can't hold sovereignty over the choosing process if you can't see it.

Black Box Voting is a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit 501c(3) elections watchdog organization. We need your support in 2010 very much. If you think our work is important, do support us.

Just click here: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/donate.html
or mail to:
Black Box Voting
330 SW 43rd St Suite K
PMB 547
Renton WA 98057

Bloggers Note: Bev Harris is perhaps the best know superstar of the election integrity community.  Here above is her preliminary report of a lot of data which she went to a great deal of trouble to collect.  In order to be perfectly objective, she doesn't claim that this election was stolen for Brown, but she emphasizes that the discrepancies between the hand counts and the machine counts look fishy and that there is no way at all to know what went on inside those electronic voting machines, which are known to be hackable by election insiders. And the election insider of note in this case is a private outfit called LHS Associates (with a convicted criminal as a key management team member/voting machine support guy) hired by the taxpayers of the State of Massachusetts to determine how they voted.
On the matter of discrepancies between hand-counted precincts and machine-counted precincts, I did a (binomial) mathematical calculation of the probability of a discrepancy of the same order of magnitude that took place in the New Hampshire 2008 presidential primary ...finding 100% probability that the vote tallies counted on the optical scanners were hacked!  (If you should go to this link, be sure to visit the reader comments, and my rebuttals, at the bottom!)

What Do YOU Do when You Know Your Democracy Is Being Stolen?

OOPS! We rigged the Iran/Florida-Ohio vote count AGAIN!!
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
June 23, 2009

Iran's Ayatollahs have just admitted that in some 50 cities there were as many as 3 million more votes cast than there were voters in the recent presidential election.

But, they say, that's not enough to change the outcome. So, like Florida in 2000 and Ohio 2004, there will be no total recount and no new election. Election theft should be opposed, whether it's sanctioned by a supreme Ayatollah or the U.S. Supreme Court.

It's as if the Iranian government is being advised by Ohio's former Imam J. Kenneth Blackwell, who, as Ohio's 2004 Secretary of State, purged hundreds of thousands of voters, and stole, switched and disappeared enough votes to put George W. Bush in the White House for a second term. The dubious Iranian tallies look very similar to the inflated Bush outcomes in 12 Republican southwest Ohio counties, most notably Warren, Clermont and Butler. They are reminiscent of the vote counts in two precincts in Perry County that reported turnouts of 121% and 118% of registered voters.

The chief difference between Iran 2009 and Ohio 2004---and Florida 2000----is in the opposition. Iran's Mir Hussein Moussavi has vowed martyrdom.

John Kerry, trailing in Ohio by just 130,000 votes with more than 250,000 yet to be counted, walked away less than 12 hours after exit polls showed him a clear victor.

Gore fought a little, but instead of embracing martyrdom, opted for boredom, and for making sure there was no challenge in the US Senate to the votes stolen.

Nationwide, Bush's alleged 3 million-vote nationwide margin in 2004, and 600 votes in Florida 2000, were as fictional as those ballots the Ayatollahs now admit should not exist.

Moussavi believes he has a date with destiny. But Kerry apparently had one on the golf course. Gore's failure to effectively respond in Florida 2000 remains an inconvenient truth.

Blackwell, Florida's Jeb Bush and Iran's Revolutionary Guard used registration tampering, disinformation, intimidation and fraud to disenfranchise millions of eligible voters before the balloting.

Blackwell and Bush then used a lethal mix of black box machines, faulty scantrons and hijacked ballots to finish the job. Blackwell worked with Diebold, ES&S, Triad, and other electronic magicians that let him disappear or switch all the votes he needed with a few keystrokes at around 2am election night. His high-tech IT henchman, Michael Connell, has since died in a mysterious plane crash.

The Times seems to finally understand the problem. In their June 22 editorial, "How to Trust Electronic Voting," they argued the following: "In paperless electronic voting, voters mark their choices, and when the votes have all been cast, the machine spits out the results. There is no way to be sure that a glitch or intentional vote theft – by malicious software or computer hacking – did not change the outcome. If there is a close election, there's also no way of conducting a meaningful recount."

Saddled with paper ballots that may or may not still exist, the Iranian authorities have simply trashed the whole election. "I don't think they actually counted the votes," one observer told the New York Times.

Because the American people did not take to the streets in the Iranian model, our democracy was subverted.

Thanks to Kerry and Gore, the public follow-up in Ohio and Florida was ineffective. As in Iran, the primary reporting has been largely limited to the Internet. The results---8 years of George W. Bush---speak for themselves.

But in the US, a nationwide election protection movement has arisen that protected the results in 2008, and that could make all the difference for the future of American democracy.

The Iranian people are speaking for themselves, and for the finest principles of democracy. For confirmation and inspiration, they need only look at America 2000-8 to see the consequences of unelected executives.

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Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection. Bob's FITRAKIS FILES are at FreePress.org, where this article first appeared. HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE U.S. is atwww.harveywasserman.com.

AZ Attorney General Recounts Pima County RTA Ballots in Secret, Foiling Citizen Efforts to Determine Whether or Not this $2 Bn Initiative Was Stolen

Bill Risner is interviewed by Tucson newscaster Bud Foster on this subject.

Tucson Citizen
April 27, 2009

Election integrity: Ensured or still in question?
Bill Risner: Full Transparency is the answer in achieving solid results - and public trust

The Pima County Democratic Party is in unanimous agreement that the accurate counting of our votes is fundamental, critical and non-negotiable. Some 1,500 of our volunteers work at each election to ensure the honesty of those elections. The recent RTA ballot count by the Attorney General’s office was a by-product of that effort but, by no means, a central focus. The central problem is that we use a computer system that makes cheating easy and detection difficult.

The RTA was endorsed by the Democratic Party. Our concerns had nothing to do with the plan. It had everything to do with the sworn affidavit in which the computer operator confessed to rigging the election on the instruction of his county bosses. That reported confession combined with our analysis of the database that revealed multiple anomalies consistent with such rigging required an investigation, in our view, to settle a supremely important question.

Local newspapers and the Republican and Libertarian parties joined in our request for a serious investigation. Since the ballots had been in the custody of Pima County officials for the past two and a half years, the issue of whether those ballots were the original ballots was a necessary issue to resolve. Pima County owns a ballot printing machine and the “GEMS” election software still contains all the printing instructions for that election. The original ballots were printed on an offset press by the Runbeck Company and Pima County’s ballot printing machine uses a laser printer. We asked the Attorney General to conduct a forensic examination itself, or to allow us to look at the ballots with a microscope to confirm that they were all offset-printed. The Attorney General refused both requests.

We noted that the simple non-destructive examination of sample ballots would serve our mutual goal of public confidence. Despite the presence of the microscope during the one-and-a-half weeks that the ballots were being counted, the Attorney General never permitted the examination of any ballots. We regret that he chose not to resolve that obvious issue since it was both important and easy to resolve.

However, our primary concern, by far, concerns future elections. The value of examining past election practices is to ensure that corrections and safeguards are in place for future elections. The entire election process is dependant on doing it right in the first place.

The common problem shared by all citizens in Pima County is that it is easy to cheat using our computer system and very difficult to do anything about it. The “easy-to-cheat” issue is agreed upon by all knowledgeable observers. Interestingly, those who know the most about computers are the least comfortable with them counting our votes using secret software instructions. Some sample quotes explain the problem.

“Because it can be easily manipulated, the bottom line in this whole thing is we’re only going to catch the stupid people, all right, because one could also alter the audit logs. One could do anything.” – Pima County Attorney’s Office Chief Civil Deputy, Chris Straub.

-iBeta report to the Arizona Attorney General: “During testing it was discovered that the GEMS software exhibits fundamental security flaws that make definitive validation of data impossible due to the ease of data and log manipulation.”

-David Jefferson, Ph.D.: “The security mechanisms that are there are ‘in general hopelessly inadequate to prevent manipulation of ballot records or vote totals by anyone with even a very short period of access to the system.”

-Arizona Election Director Joseph Kanefield: “…this is no secret. These issues have been known by not only our office but election offices all over the country.”

The “easy-to-cheat” problem must be combined with the impossibility to challenge any election. State law requires that an election challenge be filed within five days of the approval of the canvass with specific details as to why the outcome would have been different. The paper ballots cannot be examined. The electronic database cannot be examined within that narrow time frame and can be easily altered in any event. Finally, the courts have no jurisdiction after the five-day period. Therefore, it is impossible to challenge any crooked election. We know it is impossible and so do the election computer operators.

The answer is to use a graphic commercial scanner to scan all the ballots after they are counted and to make the totality of the ballots publicly available on the internet or other electronic means. Those ballots can then be counted by any person, candidate or political party using open-source free software.

-Bill Risner is a personal injury specialist trial attorney who has represented the Pima County Democratic Party in election matters.

PS If this should be the reader's first exposure to this issue and you would like to know more, please see this blog and play the video.

Electronic Voting Ruled Unconstitutional in Germany

German High Court’s Ruling Strikes Down
Electronic Voting Under Principles of Democracy
Signed by and Imposed by USA After WWII

Paul R Lehto, Juris Doctor

Lehto.paul@gmail.com

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

According to a ruling by Germany’s highest court yesterday, computerized voting machines used by 2 million of Germany's 5 million voters in 2005’s parliamentary elections are unconstitutional because they are not in line with democratic standards and principles -- especially the “publicity” of the vote counting (i.e. transparency, visibility). The court added that “specialized technical knowledge” may not be demanded of observing citizens, and that government-defined checks or audits are no substitute for the constitutional requirement of publicity via observation.

The ruling of Germany’s highest court affirmed the principles required for a constitutional voting system that makes Self-Government possible, which include the following tests:

1. No "specialized technical knowledge" can be required of citizens to vote or to monitor vote counts. (This is a simple application of democracy’s equality principle combined with an aversion to an aristocracy of experts.)
2. The constitution requires a bona fide publicly observed vote count. (The court noted that the government substitution of its own check or checks in any amount, or substitution of what we’d probably call in the USA an “audit” is no substitute at all for the constitutional requirement of public observation or “publicity.” Publicity was the term of art favored by Founders of the USA, and the term still used by the German (High) Federal Constitutional Court.)
3. A paper trail does not suffice to meet the above standards where ballots are not publicly counted on election day, the court holds generally, in its ruling on the NEDAP push-button DRE electronic voting system used in the 2005 Bundestag elections in Germany.
4. The German Federal Constitutional Court threw out the German Voting Machine Act completely (the analog in the US would be HAVA – the “Help America Vote Act.”) Message to Congress: We don’t need YOUR help, especially since your help comes with concealing the vote counts on computers like optical scans and touch screens so we can’t tell on election night if the counts are genuine results or not.!
5. CONCLUSION ON THE EFFECT OF THE OPINION’S HOLDING: As a result of these principles, a source in Ireland concludes that “all independent observers” conclude that “electronic voting machines [are totally] banned in Germany” because no conceivable computerized voting system can cast and count votes that meet even just the two most basic requirements of publicity: being both publicly observed and not requiring specialized technical knowledge on the part of the public in order to exercise the right of observation (transparency).
6. CONCLUSION ON THE OUTLOOK IN GERMANY ITSELF: Moreover, any resumption of any kind of optical scan or touch screen voting of any kind would require the Bundestag to first past a new Voting Machine Act that complies with the constitutional principles set forth in the Courts opinion. About the only kind of electronic voting that would be constitutionally permissible would be that strictly limited to those who need a computer’s help to cast a ballot, because in that case only would the right to vote FAVOR technology such that concerns of constitutional magnitude (quite unlike speed, efficiency or other such business-based non-constitutional values) would come into play and be balance against the constitutional command for publicity/transparency of vote counts and “all essential steps.” A little non-transparency in how individual small numbers of disabled persons cast their ballot is not an “essential step” given the secret ballot, so long as the output of the process is a ballot that can be publicly counted like all the others.

Download full article here.

Excerpts from European and American based media outlets:
International Herald Tribune:
"Federal Constitutional Court upheld two complaints about the use of the machines in 2005. It found they violated provisions requiring that voters be able to assure themselves - without specific technical knowledge - that their vote was recorded correctly."
IT Examiner:
"The court made it clear that a simple print-out or flashy icon displaying what party or person was voted for is not enough. / Not only that, any constraint on the people's right to know cannot be alleviated by having a state institution check machines to make sure they have not been tampered with."
Radio Netherlands reports that elections later this year must be on pencil and paper, counted publicly.
"[Plaintiffs] complained that push button voting was not transparent because the voter could not see what actually happened to his vote inside the computer and was required to place "blind faith" in the technology."
Here's a link to the national Zogby poll official press release expressing an apparently unprecedented 92% level of support for the proposition that Americans have "the right to observe vote counting and obtain any and all information about vote counting"
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Lehto.paul@gmail.com
This article is (c) 2009 by Paul R Lehto, but may be forwarded and/or posted freely with attribution and all links and footnotes attached, so long as it is on a not for profit basis.