Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All"

(Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" 2008 excepts including most of introduction & first chapter from Amazon

Makeup Call By JONATHAN CHAIT 09/11/2006

Delayed, Denied, Dismissed: Failures on the FOIA Front 07/21/2016 Getting precinct-level election results from the county, however, is an exercise in frustration and expense. No free samples, or free anything.

Chicago And Rigged Elections? The History Is Even Crazier Than You've Heard 10/19/2016

"Fixing Elections: The Failure of America's Winner Take All Politics" By Steven Hill 2004

For years, it was an open secret that the Bush administration had its own ideas about the rule of law, and, in particular, a fierce reactionary grudge against the U.S. Constitution. What made such high extremism an open secret was the deferential silence of the whole Establishment: i.e. the press, the Democratic Party (with very few exceptions), and those odd Republicans -- moderates, libertarians and non-apocalyptic evangelicals -- who kept their qualms about Bush/Cheney to themselves. As long as Big Money liked what Bush et al. were doing, the Establishment obligingly ignored his un-American activities, which, meanwhile, preoccupied the blogosphere, indie radio (as well as certain shows on Air America) and other lowly, heated forums, as well as countless homes and other private haunts.

Since 2005, however, some within "the liberal media," and certain leading members of both parties, have increasingly taken aim at Bush & Co.'s radical betrayals of our founding revolution. By and large, such censure has been far too mild, and also too selective, as this government's belated critics mostly rail at just one scandal at a time (ignoring others just as bad, or worse), and then move on as if it hadn't happened; nor do they dare "connect the dots" between the scandals, so as to build the sort of large and devastating case that Tom Paine would certainly have made if he were here today.*

In short, everyone (apparently) subscribes to the official story. Thus that comfy tale now has, for many good Americans, the ring of truth -- a fact that is at once quite understandable and deeply terrifying. ...... "Study of disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did not Cast the Deciding Vote," proclaimed the New York Times. "Study: Recounts Would have favored Bush," announced the Washington Post. ...... Perhaps that journalistic fiction was (unconsciously) dictated by the "war on terror," which Bush could not have waged so brilliantly if We the People thought he was not our president. (Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" 2008 p.8-9)

From Brad Friedman and Michael Richardson we get the harrowing pre-history of the 2004 election in Nevada, whose voting system had long since bee hijacked by Secretary of State Dean Heller, a party operative (and now a House Republican) colluding with the like-minded players at the National Association of State Elections Directors (NASED). That partisan cabal induced Nevada to use the new Seqoia Edge II e-voting machines equipped with VeriVote Prointers: the first use of the "voter-verified paper trail" (or VVPAT, about which see below). Although loudly advertised as "fail-proof," the system had failed test after test, and was in fact a hacker's dream; and that vaunted "paper trail" was ineffectual. As activist Patricial Axelrod has charged, the system clearly served Bush/Cheney's "re-election" by screwing up repeatedly in Democratic districts only, thereby helping Bush to "win" by under 22,000 votes (out of 820,000 cast). (More important, the selling of the VVPAT entailed the co-option of the Election Assistance Commission, which finally turned a blind eye to the system's proven flaws.)

And then there was, of course, Ohio, where Bush/Cheney had reportedly prevailed by some 118,000 votes ......

In other words, what happened in Ohio was not a fluke, but one step in a larger process of mass disenfranchisement: a national process, as was obvious in the 2004 election, although the Establishment refused to notice it. .....

Thus the Democrats have kept their eyes wide shut to BushCo's crime wave ever since it started in 2000. Certainly election fraud per se is nothing new in the United States. .....

Some argued that the .....

Such deep paralysis is .....

There are, of course, exceptions to the rule, throughout the party and the press – stray idealists who revere this nation’s founding principles, and who, therefore, would surely stand up for democracy, despite the pressures from on high. By and large, however, those idealists also cannot see what’s really happening because it hurts too much to think that it’s been happening here.

And so on the eve of yet another presidential race, this nation is no longer inching toward democracy, but lurching in the very opposite direction. Although this backward movement started well before Election Day 2000 (with the glimmerings of Morning of America”), we didn’t feel the first big jolt until the post-election crisis of 2000, when the Republicans went brownshirt right before our eyes. There was the mob that stopped the vote-count in Miami-Dade – and, The New York Times reported, “trampled, punched or kicked” whoever tried to block its way, while shouting that a thousand angry Cubans would soon be there to help make the point. Although posing as a mere spontaneous assembly of plain citizens (“a bourgeois riot,” as The Wall street Journal’s Paul Gigot approvingly described it), that seeming rabble was a corps of party operatives, dispatched by GOP congressman John Sweeney with the help of tom Delay. The action worked, as Miami-Dade’s canvassing board called off their plan to count the undervotes.

Elsewhere there were other strokes of pseudo-popular "resistance." "Republican supporters waving 'Sore-Loserman' placards, some of them bussed in from outside Florida, jostled and heckled reporters and officials in both Broward and Palm Beach County," the Guardian (UK) reported on November 25,2000. “A brick inscribed ‘We would not tolerate an illegal government’ was thrown through the windows of Democratic Party offices in Broward County, where one of the recounts resumed yesterday.” Meanwhile, up in Washington, a livid horde of party activists laid siege to the Vice Presidential mansion, screaming “Get out of Cheney’s house!” all day and through the night, while Al Gore and his family hid inside. It was “an organized effort,” Karenna Gore said later. “Some of them were anti-abortion groups, and some of them were pro-gun groups, and some of them – they all ahd different signs.” Among them was Doro Bush, George W.’s sister, whose moment with the good squad much amused her mother, Barbara. “’That’s Doro!’ Mrs. Bush hoots when telling about it. ‘She felt better’ after yelling at the Gores’ house for a while, Mrs. Bush says, Newsweek reported later.

Here was an openly fascist drive against democratic process: a fact both “the liberal media” and the Democrats were eager not to see. Beyond some volleys of indignant punditry, the shutdown in Miami-Dade had no consequences – even though the perpetrators’ names and faces were all public knowledge – and it quickly slipped right down the memory hole. The U.S. media also largely failed to note those packed busloads of seething true believers in the other counties, and downplayed, or ignored, the mob’s harassment of Gore’s family in our nation’s capital. In November of 2002, Barbara Walters interviewed the Gores for 20/20, and had them speak at length of their ordeal. ABC then cut the whole exchange, and so the program aired without it.

As shocking as it was, the Republican' Party's thuggery in Florida was actually the least important aspect of Bush/Cheney's opening move against American Democracy. Above all, there was Bush v. Gore, which, as Paul Lehto argues, was far more than a simple (albeit tortuous) intrusion into just that one election. Despite its claim that it is “not a precedent,” that decision radically expanded the Supreme Court’s power to nullify election generally – a power that we cannot appeal, exerted by a body that cannot be voted out. Although it strikes a death blow at republican democracy (and, moreover, was the ultimate expression of “judicial activism”), Bush v. Gore roused little protest from conservatives or liberals, and was soon forgotten by the press and Democrats alike; John Roberts replaced William Rehnquist, and Samuel Alito replaced Sandra Day O’Connor, so that the Court’s strong anti-democratic bloc remained intact, ready to resume its drive against our voting rights.

Hearing arguments, in January of 2008, about Indiana’s voter ID law – the strictest in the nation – those justices shrugged off the fact that voters lacking photo ID’s must then travel to the county seat to get their provisional ballots counted. “County seats aren’t very far for people in Indiana,” offered Roberts, unaware, perhaps, that such a journey could require a long and costly bus ride for the poor. And Roberts et al. waved away the fact that, throughout Indiana’s history, there actually were no known cases of the sort of “voter fraud” that this new law was allegedly intended to prevent: “It’s a type of fraud that, because it’s fraud, it’s hard to detect,” reasoned the Chief Justice, apparently invoking Donald Rumsfeld’s thought concerning Saddam’s huge imaginary arsenal of nukes and poison gas, that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” The court’s decision is, as of this writing, due in June 2008. If they uphold it (an upset is always possible), the cause of voting rights will have been set back fifty years.

While marking the Supreme Court's right to nullify our votes, Bush/Cheney's "victory" was also used to propagate a new distrust of paper ballots counted openly by hand. Having watched the tragicomedy of all those frazzled bureaucrats attempting to decode the Mystery of the chads, we were informed repeatedly that paper was the problem there: a calculated misconception that, as Nancy Tobi argues, helped to make the case for paperless computerized machines to count our votes. (They are known technically as DRE machines, for "Direct Recording Electronic.") thus Americans were sold on the profoundly un-American idea of secret vote counts -- for computers tabulate invisibly (and no more honestly than the programmers command). From there it was a simple step to call for privatizing our elections, as both parties did with equal fervor, although only one of them would benefit. Eager not to see the coup that they were helping to prepare against themselves (and the rest of us), the Democrats -- allied with liberal groups like Common Cause and People for the American Way -- pushed staunchly for "election reform" as Bush & Co. had defined it, which meant dumping all that messy paper, and/or those senescent volunteers, in favor of computer systems made and serviced by private companies. thus the Democrats and liberal groups supported former Representative Bob Ney's Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which mandated the eventual use of e-voting technology in every state.

And so U.S. elections -- as intended -- son became opaque, incomprehensible and (obviously) stacked, like corporate health care or your contract with Verizon. In hesitant response to this catastrophe, the Democrats and others have, as Tobi notes, consistently supported technological solutions, as if all such tricky and hermetic gadgetry were not itself the problem. first there was the voter-verified "paper trail" (VVPAT) -- which as Richardson and Friedman tell us here, had its inglorious beginnings in Nevada. Proposed for national use by Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ), and fiercely championed by the same left/liberal groups that had backed HAVA, the plan was to place pribnters in all paperless machines, and show each voter a hard copy of his ballot, which she would theoretically approve before it disappeared into the mechanism. That paper slip is not a ballot ( although it was advertised as such), but a sort of marker that officials might or might not count eventually, if there should be an audit. Most such "ballots" never would be counted, as the auditors just take a sample.) Thus the "paper trail" does not prevent election fraud, as any hacker can, in seconds, program the machine to print your document one way, and count your "vote" the other way -- or even to misprint your "ballot," since most voters either don't look at their "paper trails" or can't decipher them, as they are often purposely illegible. (the lettering on Diebold's is so tiny that you need a magnifying glass to read it.) Unsurprisingly, VVPATS have been used in several of our most suspicious recent races: New Mexico in 2004 (where Bush "won" by 7,047 votes, while there were over 17,000 undervotes recorded on the DRE machines in Democratic precincts), and, in that same year, Washington's Smercomish County (where GOP gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi stole some 3,000 votes); and in 2006, Florida's 13th district, where the 18,000 undervotes helped Christine Jennings "lose" to Vern Buchanan; and so on.

After the push for "paper trails" ( which foundered when Holt's bill, HR 811, failed in the fall of 2007), the Democrats et al. decided on a different technological solution: optical scanners, which count up paper ballots, only abstract "votes," while op-scans do leave paper ballots in their wake, which human beings may then recount in public, theoretically. Op-scans have become the voting medium of choice for the reformers generally, from Rush Holt, MoveOn and Common Cause, to the Secretaries of State in California, florida, Ohio, Maryland and colorado (among other states), to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Roll Call and Lou Dobbs.

While it is obviously better to have paper ballots than mere electronic signals, the scanners have been oversold. they are, at best, as quirky as the DRE machines. In the 2006 election, for example, op-scans broke down, froze or crashed at polling sites in Athens County, Ohio; Montrose County, Colorado (as well as Denver); Greenville County, south Carolina; Bannock County, Idaho: Mendocino County, California; Flathead Conty Montana; Pawtucket, Rhode Island; Waterville, Maine; and thirteen counties in Kentucky. Those gadgets are, however, not just prone to random glitches, but susceptible to fraud. They were however however clearly hacked in Arizona in 2004, as Dave Griscom argues here, and have performed suspiciously in other doubtful races, including the notorious primary and general congressional elections in San Diego in 2006 -- both "won" by Republican Brian Bilbray, after the machines had been illegally kept for days in certain private homes -- and the Democratic primary in New Hampshire in 2008. which Hillary won according to the op-scans only, while Barack Obama won the precincts where they were counted by hand. (The media, as ever, rushed out many baseless explanations for her victory, which contradicted every poll.)

Such events would not surprise the experts. In October of 2006, Avi Rubin, a computer scientist at John Hopkins (and a longtime advocate for electronic voting) fretfully reported a new study published by researcher at the University of Connecticut, who had found that Diebold's Accuvote AV-OS, an op-scan machine, was easy pickings for malicious hackers. "The authors show," wrote Rubin,

that even if the memory card is scaled and pre-election testing is performed, one can carry out a devastating array of attacks against an election using only off-the-shelf- equipment and without having ever to access the [memory] card physically or opening the AV-OS system box.

Such "attacks," Rubin continued,

are cleverly designed to make a compromised machine appear to work correctly when the system's audit reports are evaluated or when the machine is subjected to pre-election testing. Besides manipulation of the voting machine totals and reports, the authors explain how any voter can vote an arbitrary numbers of times using (get this) Post-it notes, if the voter is left unattended.

Certainly the makers of so porous a contraption have no interest in the preservation of democracy. Their interest lies, demonstrably, not with the people but with Karl Rove's party -- a fact that Rush Holt, MoveOn, Common Cause et al. refuse to face, and that the U.S. press will not report. The largest companies behind those op-scans -- Diebold, ES&S and Hart InterCivic -- all enjoy extremely close relations with the GOP. In 2004, Wally O'Dell, CEO of Diebold (headquartered in Clinton, Ohio), created a small furor when he sent a fundraising letter out to prominent Ohio Republicans, stating that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." for four years, Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel served as CEO of ES&S (headquartered in Omaha), departing that position in 1996 to mount his run for the Senate. (In that race and the next one, ES&S machines were used to count the votes, with Hagel winning both times by surprisingly high margins.) Among Hart InterCivic's top investors is Stratford Capital, the investment firm of Tom Hicks, a longtime friend and backer of George W. Bush.

The problem here is not that those hermetic firm are managed by and for Republicans per se. This nation would be in no better shape if Diebold and the others serviced only Democrats (and there are Democrats, like Steny Hoyer, who also serve the likes of Diebold.). The problem, rather, is that any closed technology, should be allowed to play a role in our elections. Our votes should all be counted in the open, and in a way that every citizen can see and understand. Any other course, however more "efficient" it may sound, will certainly empower the seething adversaries of democracy, who will do -- have done -- anything and everything to thwart the will of the majority.

Meanwhile, those still advocating purely technical solutions have refused to see that this is even possible. Thus their plans pose no real threat to the crusade against American democracy, which has moved well beyond the point where any anodyne "reforms" could knock it out or even slow it down. Throughout the states, the GOP has disenfranchised voters with a brazenness that harks back to the days before the march on Selma. "To date, the Kansas GOP had identified and caged more voters in the last 11 months than the previous two years [sic]!" Thus Kris Kobach, chairman of the Kansas party, crowed in a circular sent out in December of 2007. ....

The Party' strategy, in short, .... As Rosenfeld reported in December of 2007, the DOJ " is seeking to apply the principle of 'pre-emption,' or acting now to offset future threats -- as the Bush administration argued before invading Iraq -- to voting rights. when applied to elections, the Department said there does not need to be evidence of actual voter fraud, or individuals impersonating other voters, before states can pass new laws to police that possibility." ..... (Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" 2008 p.18-25)

The catalyst for projecting his cousin as the winner in Florida, Ellis wrote in the December 2000 issue of Inside Magazine was his calculation of a "need/get" ratio ......

It is difficult to overestimate the impact of the erroneous network call on the post-election political environment. It created havoc for Gore, giving rise to the charges that he was a "sore loser" and undermining (Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" 2008 p.36-7) cited in How to Steal an Election: The Inside Story of How George Bush's Brother and ... By David Moore also author of chapter

Felon Disenfranchisement

The only government agency to investigate Florida's administration of the disputed 2000 presidential election was the United States Civil Rights Commission. It was also the only agency to use subpoena powers and require sworn testimony. The commission conducted hearings in January and February 2001, which turned up evidence of a possible conspiracy by Secretary of State Katherine Harris and other high-ranking Republican officials, perhaps including Jeb Bush, to illegally remove predominantly Democratic voters from the registration rolls under the guise of removing felons, who by Florida law are ineligible to vote unless they have civil rights restored by the Governor and Cabinet.

In 1998, Florida's Republican-controlled legislature enacted legislation requiring the registered-voter list to be purged by a private company rather than by professional in the Division of Elections. At no previous time in Florida history had the determination of voter eligibility been placed in private hands. The company that received the contract to work with the Florida Secretary of State and the Director of the Division of Elections to identify ex-felons on registered-voter rolls was Database Technologies (DBT). The Civil rights Commission subpoenaed the companies vice president, George Bruder, and required him to testify under oath.

In recounting his experiences with the project, Bruder explained that, as DBT began to match names and other information on the lists of convicted felons with those on Florida's list of registered voters, he became concerned that the match criteria DBT had been instructed to use were to loose and resulted in "false positives." However, the Division of Elections insisted that DBT use the loosest criteria permissible within the scope of its contract, which called only for the use of first names, last names, and birthdates. The Division instructed DBY not to require that first and middle names be in any particular order to match. In other words John Andrew Smith would be considered to match Andrew John Smith. The Elections Division also insisted that matches be allowed when the last names of indivi=duals on the list of ex-felons only approximated the last names of registered voters. the spelling needed to be just "90 percent" the same. this meant that John Andrew Smith would be counted as a match with John Andrew Smythe, Andrew John Smythe, John Andrew Smitt, and so on. Bruder summed up this part of his testimony by saying that "the state dictated to us that they wanted to go broader and we did it in the fashion that they requested."

The loose match criteria used by DBT under the direction of the Division of Elections resulted in a highly erroneous list of registered voters who were thought to be ex-felons. County elections supervisors were sent to the names of the purported felons who were registered to vote in their particular county. the supervisors were instructed to verify the information and remove voters from the rolls accordingly. How much care was taken by the supervisors is not known, but the investigation by the Civil Rights Commission found that procedures varied widely across the counties.

By June of 2000, it had become obvious to a number of the local supervisors of elections that the lists they had been given were full of errors. Numerous examples of problems are chronicled in the Civil Rights Commission's report. In addition to the loose match criteria, one source of many errors was the mistaken inclusion of misdemeanants on the list of felons from, of all states, Texas. this error alone caused more than 8,000 Florida voters to be improperly identified for removal from the registered voter rolls.

These and other problems were brought to the attention of the Division of Elections, which sent letters to all supervisors advising them of their mistakes. But many of the problems were never corrected at the county level, and thousands of voters were removed from the rolls improperly. Often, the first time voters learned that their voter registration had been revoked was when they arrived at the polls to cast their ballots in the 2000 presidential election. This accounts for much of the chaos that day.

The findings of the Civil Rights Commission were certainly sufficient to warrant a full investigation of the actions of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, and Elections Division Director Clay Roberts. Either singly or in combination, all three may have used their offices to improperly influence the outcome of the 2000 election -- a felony under the state's election laws. At the very least, one of more of them appear to have been guilty of either misfeasance or nonfeasance in issuing a contract that did not contain performance criteria regarding the accuracy of DBT's work, in failing to correct the problems with the felon disenfranchisement initiative once they were adequately staffed on election day in 2000 to handle the resulting confusion. If Harris or others took these steps with the intention of weakening the voting power of African Americans -- and this certainly appears to be the case -- they violated voting rights laws.

However, no follow-up investigation was ever conducted. Incredibly, the hearings of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission received no live television coverage, and media stories about them always included Republican accusations that the Commission was biased because a majority of its members were Democrats or Democratic appointees.

Despite the Obstacles, Gore Won

Florida election officials ultimately declared George W. Bush the winner in 2000 by a margin of 537 votes, but during and after the election dispute, questions remained about the uncounted ballots or 175,010 voters, ballots that had been rejected by error-prone tabulating machines employed in many Florida counties. confusion and conflict, much of it generated by Republican intrigue, prevented these ballots from being counted during the election controversy. However, in 2001, every uncounted ballot was carefully examined in a scientific study by the University of Chicago, which found that when all the votes were counted, more votes had been cast for Gore than Bush.

The source of Gore's winning margin resided in an unexpected place. during the election dispute, when ballots were being recounted by hand, the focus had been on "undervotes" among punch card ballots. Undervotes are ballots rejected by machine tabulators because they appear to include no vote for one of the presidential tickets. vote-tabulation machines read punch cards by shining a light on the cards as they are fed through the machine. Votes are registered by the tabulators when the light shines through holes that are made in the cards when voters punch out the "chad" next to the candidate of their choice. If chads are only partially broken free, they can become like swinging doors that may open or close when they are run through the counter. Often, a valid vote can be missed by a tabulating machine if the chad is left hanging, because a door-like, swinging chad can be folded closed as the ballot goes through the machine. This phenomenon is well known to election officials and is why many states, including Florida, have procedures for ballots to be recounted by hand when elections are very close.

Manual recounts of punch card ballots were controversial in the 2000 election dispute because Florida had no statewide standards for handling ballots with partially punched chads. State law called for county-level election boards. to handle recounts by examining ballots visually and, where possible, determining the intention of the voter. during the recount, Palm Beach County treated hanging chads more restrictively than Broward County, which liberalized its criteria partway through the process. These differing changing standards made the recounts appear arbitrary and vulnerable to manipulation. This was the reason given by the U.S. supreme Court when it intervened to end the statewide recount that had been ordered by the Supreme Court of Florida in early December. when it issued its final decision on December 12, the U.S. supreme Court endorsed the manual recounts, but it said that Florida needed statewide standards. it also ruled that the statewide recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court could not continue to completion because time had run out for submitting new results to Congress.

Ironically, we now know that the outcome of the 2000 presidential election did not hinge on hanging chads. About one-third of the machine-rejected ballots were undervotes. The University of Chicago found that ballots with partially punched chads split more or less evenly between Gore and Bush regardless of the standards used to judge by hanging chads. gore's winning margin was in an entirely different set of machine-rejected ballots -- in what are now called "write-in overvotes." these were ballots on which a selection had been made from the list of candidates and then a name had also been printed in the space for write-ins. Although write-in overvotes were automatically excluded by tabulating machines, they contained unambiguous and legally valid votes whenever the writ-in candidate matched the candidate chosen from the list preceding it. In its comprehensive study of all the uncounted ballots, the University of Chicago found that write-in overvotes heavily favored Gore. Thus, a full recount would have determined unambiguously that Gore had won.

When Election Day ended with no clear winner, Republican officials in Florida continued to behave just as they had before the election, which is to say criminally. the very people who were supposed to be administering the election process to assure fairness, and who had sworn an oath to uphold the constitution, entered into a conspiracy to secure the election for George W. Bush. a series of articles published in the Washington Post a few weeks after the election controversy had been decided revealed that at least some of the actions and decisions of Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris were coordinated directly or indirectly with the strategies of George W.'s legal team. Jeb Bush and Harris became part of a conspiracy to prevent votes cast on Election Day from being fully and fairly counted even though, or precisely because, they realized that a careful review might show that Gore had won.

The Post series was followed in the summer of 2001 by a series in the New York Times suggesting the possibility of a conspiracy between Republican officials in Tallahassee, Republican members of Congress, and military personal at home and abroad. The Times revealed that military personnel had been encouraged to vote after election day; that the delivery of overseas military ballots, at least some known to cast votes illegally, had been expedited in order to get to Florida in time to be counted; and that Republican operatives sent into Florida by the Bush campaign to pressure county canvassing boards had successfully pushed for improperly completed overseas ballots to be counted in republican counties and rejected in Democratic counties.

At the center of these apparent conspiracies was Katherine Harris. As Secretary of State, she was probably most to blame for the election and post-election disorder -- even if she had not been party to criminal conspiracies -- because she had over-all responsibility for administering Florida's election process. to give her advise as the election dispute unfolded, Harris brought into her inner circle one of the state's best-known Republican strategists, Mac Stapanovic, who has not denied being in regular contact with George W. Bush's legal team during the controversy. To be sure, during the dispute, accusations were hurled at Harris publicly -- for example, that she was helping George W. in return for a promised ambassadorship. rumors also circulated in Tallahassee that she and Jeb Bush had an affair on one of their joint trips out of state during the primaries. At the time, however, these accusations seemed to have been contrived by her political enemies. However, once Stapanovic's role behind the scenes had come to light, Harris' repeated rulings that benefited Bush could no longer be easily dismissed as innocent expressions of her best judgement unfairly depicted as partisan sabotage.

For his part, Jeb Bush recused himself from the Election Commission, but nevertheless played a very active role helping his brother behind the scenes. If his aide to George W. Bush had been limited to offering advise and emotional support, Jeb's behavior would have been beyond public reproach. but, in fact, some of his actions appear to have been violations of Florida law. While employed by the state, he personally attended meetings with his brother's lawyers. worse, he instructed or, at the very least, allowed his legal staff, while they too were working on state time, to contact the state's biggest law firms to discourage them from working for Gore. These calls involved more than a misappropriation of state resources for partisan political activities. Given that the law firms in question drew considerable income from state contracts and lobbying contracts requiring access to the governor, the firms would have perceived these calls as veiled threats. Using public office for coercion is a felony.

Although less extensive and more attenuated, partisanship was also evident among the Democrats. Attorney General Bob Butterworth, a Democrat, had regular contact with the Gore team, went on television to defend the recounts, and had his staff suggest to the Palm Beach County canvassing board that it request an opinion from him about the recount deadline imposed by the secretary of State. On the other hand, Butterworth also took actions that worked against Gore. In particular, he stated in writing and on television that requirements in Florida election requiring absentee ballots to have postmarks should be waived, because the mail of some members of the military stationed overseas and on ships would not have been stamped. Butterworth also demonstrated insight by arguing that equal treatment requirements in the U.S. Constitution needed to be addressed by conducting manual recounts statewide. Still, Butterworth's frequent contacts with the Gore legal and political team were inconsistent with the independence expected of his office.

In short, the officials who were supposed to keep Florida's election process fair and open did not appear neutral, and they were not neutral in fact. The Washington Post summed up the role of partisanship as follows:

What is clear is that Bush enjoyed an enormous advantage because of the presence of his brother in the governor's office and Katherine Harris as secretary of state. The role Jeb Bush and his team played in rounding up legal talent, providing political analysis and offering strategic advice is all the more clear from post-election interviews. With Jeb Bush as governor, the Republicans controlled the machinery of state government and with it the power to set deadlines, enforce election laws in ways that were beneficial to the then-Texas governor and put obstacles in Gore's path. Secretary of State Harris also relied on advice from one of the leading Republican strategists in the state -- J.M. "Mac" Stipanovich, a well-connected Republican lobbyist who was an ally of Jeb Bush.

The evidence is clear that the 2000 presidential election was stolen. It was stolen mainly by sabotage, but also by plain old-fashioned vote fraud. Moreover, the evidence implicates men and women who held high public offices before and during the election dispute. Under the statute of limitations, these people may no longer be punishable for their crimes, but for the nation's sake, these crimes still need to be investigated so that the truth will be known and reforms can be devised to prevent similar criminality in the future.

Equally important is fro American;s to learn from this experience. When a candidate and his or her supporters appear willing to break laws, ignore the Constitution, disenfranchise qualified voters, and in other ways degrade the political process to gain power, the appropriate response is not to "move on," but to investigate, for people who are willing to cheat and lie to win an election will certainly be willing to do the same or worse once they are in office. This is the lesson from the 2000 presidential election and the shameful administration of George W. Bush. (Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" 2008 p.48-55) Washington Post "A War Leaves Its Questions" 02/01/2001

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The debacle of the 2000 presidential election made it all too apparent to most Americans that our electoral system is broken. And private-sector entrepreneurs were quick to offer a fix: Touch-screen voting machines, promised the industry and its lobbyists, would make voting as easy and reliable as withdrawing cash from an ATM. Congress, always ready with funds for needy industries, swiftly authorized $3.9 billion to upgrade the nation's election systems - with much of the money devoted to installing electronic voting machines in each of America's 180,000 precincts. But as midterm elections approach this November, electronic voting machines are making things worse instead of better. Studies have demonstrated that hackers can easily rig the technology to fix an election.

Even worse, many electronic machines don't produce a paper record that can be recounted when equipment malfunctions - an omission that practically invites malicious tampering. "Every board of election has staff members with the technological ability to fix an election," Ion Sancho, an election supervisor in Leon County, Florida, told me. "Even one corrupt staffer can throw an election. Without paper records, it could happen under my nose and there is no way I'd ever find out about it. With a few key people in the right places, it would be possible to throw a presidential election."

Chris Hood remembers the day in August 2002 that he began to question what was really going on in Georgia. An African-American whose parents fought for voting rights in the South during the 1960s, Hood was proud to be working as a consultant for Diebold Election Systems, helping the company promote its new electronic voting machines. During the presidential election two years earlier, more than 94,000 paper ballots had gone uncounted in Georgia - almost double the national average - and Secretary of State Cathy Cox was under pressure to make sure every vote was recorded properly.

Hood had been present in May 2002, when officials with Cox's office signed a contract with Diebold - paying the company a record $54 million to install 19,000 electronic voting machines across the state. At a restaurant inside Atlanta's Marriott Hotel, he noticed the firm's CEO, Walden O'Dell, checking Diebold's stock price on a laptop computer every five minutes, waiting for a bounce from the announcement.

Hood wondered why Diebold, the world's third-largest seller of ATMs, had been awarded the contract. The company had barely completed its acquisition of Global Election Systems, a voting-machine firm that owned the technology Diebold was promising to sell Georgia. And its bid was the highest among nine competing vendors. Whispers within the company hinted that a fix was in.

"The Diebold executives had a news conference planned on the day of the award," Hood recalls, "and we were instructed to stay in our hotel rooms until just hours before the announcement. They didn't want the competitors to know and possibly file a protest" about the lack of a fair bidding process. It certainly didn't hurt that Diebold had political clout: Cox's predecessor as secretary of state, Lewis Massey, was now a lobbyist for the company.

The problem was, Diebold had only five months to install the new machines - a "very narrow window of time to do such a big deployment," Hood notes. The old systems stored in warehouses had to be replaced with new equipment; dozens of state officials and poll workers had to be trained in how to use the touch-screen machines. "It was pretty much an impossible task," Hood recalls. There was only one way, he adds, that the job could be done in time - if "the vendor had control over the entire environment." That is precisely what happened. In late July, to speed deployment of the new machines, Cox quietly signed an agreement with Diebold that effectively privatized Georgia's entire electoral system. The company was authorized to put together ballots, program machines and train poll workers across the state - all without any official supervision. "We ran the election," says Hood. "We had 356 people that Diebold brought into the state. Diebold opened and closed the polls and tabulated the votes. Diebold convinced Cox that it would be best if the company ran everything due to the time constraints, and in the interest of a trouble-free election, she let us do it."

Then, one muggy day in mid-August, Hood was surprised to see the president of Diebold's election unit, Bob Urosevich, arrive in Georgia from his headquarters in Texas. With the primaries looming, Urosevich was personally distributing a "patch," a little piece of software designed to correct glitches in the computer program. "We were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn't do," Hood says. "The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done."

Georgia law mandates that any change made in voting machines be certified by the state. But thanks to Cox's agreement with Diebold, the company was essentially allowed to certify itself. "It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state," Hood told me. "We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from Urosevich. It was very unusual that a president of the company would give an order like that and be involved at that level."

According to Hood, Diebold employees altered software in some 5,000 machines in DeKalb and Fulton counties - the state's largest Democratic strongholds. To avoid detection, Hood and others on his team entered warehouses early in the morning. "We went in at 7:30 a.m. and were out by 11," Hood says. "There was a universal key to unlock the machines, and it's easy to get access. The machines in the warehouses were unlocked. We had control of everything. The state gave us the keys to the castle, so to speak, and they stayed out of our way." Hood personally patched fifty-six machines and witnessed the patch being applied to more than 1,200 others.

The patch comes on a memory card that is inserted into a machine. Eventually, all the memory cards end up on a server that tabulates the votes - where the patch can be programmed to alter the outcome of an election. "There could be a hidden program on a memory card that adjusts everything to the preferred election results," Hood says. "Your program says, 'I want my candidate to stay ahead by three or four percent or whatever.' Those programs can include a built-in delete that erases itself after it's done."

It is impossible to know whether the machines were rigged to alter the election in Georgia: Diebold's machines provided no paper trail, making a recount impossible. But the tally in Georgia that November surprised even the most seasoned political observers. Six days before the vote, polls showed Sen. Max Cleland, a decorated war veteran and Democratic incumbent, leading his Republican opponent Saxby Chambliss - darling of the Christian Coalition - by five percentage points. In the governor's race, Democrat Roy Barnes was running a decisive eleven points ahead of Republican Sonny Perdue. But on Election Day, Chambliss won with fifty-three percent of the vote, and Perdue won with fifty-one percent.

Diebold insists that the patch was installed "with the approval and oversight of the state." But after the election, the Georgia secretary of state's office submitted a "punch list" to Bob Urosevich of "issues and concerns related to the statewide voting system that we would like Diebold to address." One of the items referenced was" Application/Implication of '0808' Patch." The state was seeking confirmation that the patch did not require that the system "be recertified at national and state level" as well as "verifiable analysis of overall impact of patch to the voting system." In a separate letter, Secretary Cox asked Urosevich about Diebold's use of substitute memory cards and defective equipment as well as widespread problems that caused machines to freeze up and improperly record votes. The state threatened to delay further payments to Diebold until "these punch list items will be corrected and completed."

Diebold's response has not been made public - but its machines remain in place for Georgia's election this fall. Hood says it was "common knowledge" within the company that Diebold also illegally installed uncertified software in machines used in the 2004 presidential primaries - a charge the company denies. Disturbed to see the promise of electronic machines subverted by private companies, Hood left the election consulting business and became a whistle-blower. "What I saw," he says, "was basically a corporate takeover of our voting system."

The United States is one of only a handful of major democracies that allow private, partisan companies to secretly count and tabulate votes using their own proprietary software. Today, eighty percent of all the ballots in America are tallied by four companies - Diebold, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic. In 2004, 36 million votes were cast on their touch-screen systems, and millions more were recorded by optical-scan machines owned by the same companies that use electronic technology to tabulate paper ballots. The simple fact is, these machines not only break down with regularity, they are easily compromised - by people inside, and outside, the companies.

Three of the four companies have close ties to the Republican Party. ES&S, in an earlier corporate incarnation, was chaired by Chuck Hagel, who in 1996 became the first Republican elected to the U.S. Senate from Nebraska in twenty-four years - winning a close race in which eighty-five percent of the votes were tallied by his former company. Hart InterCivic ranks among its investors GOP loyalist Tom Hicks, who bought the Texas Rangers from George W. Bush in 1998, making Bush a millionaire fifteen times over. And according to campaign-finance records, Diebold, along with its employees and their families, has contributed at least $300,000 to GOP candidates and party funds since 1998 - including more than $200,000 to the Republican National Committee. In a 2003 fund-raising e-mail, the company's then-CEO Walden O'Dell promised to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in 2004. That year, Diebold would count the votes in half of Ohio's counties.

The voting-machine companies bear heavy blame for the 2000 presidential-election disaster. Fox News' fateful decision to call Florida for Bush - followed minutes later by CBS and NBC - came after electronic machines in Volusia County erroneously subtracted more than 16,000 votes from Al Gore's total. Later, after an internal investigation, CBS described the mistake as "critical" in the network's decision. Seeing what was an apparent spike for Bush, Gore conceded the election - then reversed his decision after a campaign staffer investigated and discovered that Gore was actually ahead in Volusia by 13,000 votes.

Investigators traced the mistake to Global Election Systems, the firm later acquired by Diebold. Two months after the election, an internal memo from Talbot Iredale, the company's master programmer, blamed the problem on a memory card that had been improperly - and unnecessarily - uploaded. "There is always the possibility," Iredale conceded, "that the 'second memory card' or 'second upload' came from an unauthorized source."

Amid the furor over hanging chads and butterfly ballots in Florida, however, the "faulty memory card" was all but forgotten. Instead of sharing culpability for the Florida catastrophe, voting-machine companies used their political clout to present their product as the solution. In October 2002, President Bush signed the Help America Vote Act, requiring states and counties to upgrade their voting systems with electronic machines and giving vast sums of money to state officials to distribute to the tightknit cabal of largely Republican vendors.

The primary author and steward of HAVA was Rep. Bob Ney, the GOP chairman of the powerful U.S. House Administration Committee. Ney had close ties to the now-disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose firm received at least $275,000 from Diebold to lobby for its touch-screen machines. Ney's former chief of staff, David DiStefano, also worked as a registered lobbyist for Diebold, receiving at least $180,000 from the firm to lobby for HAVA and "other election reform issues." Ney - who accepted campaign contributions from DiStefano and counted Diebold's then-CEO O'Dell among his constituents - made sure that HAVA strongly favored the use of the company's machines.

Ney also made sure that Diebold and other companies would not be required to equip their machines with printers to provide paper records that could be verified by voters. In a clever twist, HAVA effectively pressures every precinct to provide at least one voting device that has no paper trail - supposedly so that vision-impaired citizens can vote in secrecy. The provision was backed by two little-known advocacy groups: the National Federation of the Blind, which accepted $1 million from Diebold to build a new research institute, and the American Association of People with Disabilities, which pocketed at least $26,000 from voting-machine companies. The NFB maintained that a paper voting receipt would jeopardize its members' civil rights - a position not shared by other groups that advocate for the blind.

Sinking in the sewage of the Abramoff scandal, Ney agreed on September 15th to plead guilty to federal conspiracy charges - but he has already done one last favor for his friends at Diebold. When 212 congressmen from both parties sponsored a bill to mandate a paper trail for all votes, Ney used his position as chairman to prevent the measure from even getting a hearing before his committee.

The result was that HAVA - the chief reform effort after the 2000 disaster - placed much of the nation's electoral system in the hands of for-profit companies. Diebold alone has sold more than 130,000 voting machines - raking in estimated revenues of at least $230 million. "This whole undertaking was never about voters," says Hood, who saw firsthand how the measure benefited Diebold's bottom line. "It was about privatizing elections. HAVA has been turned into a corporate-revenue enhancement scheme."

No case better demonstrates the dangers posed by electronic voting machines than the experience of Maryland. As in Georgia, officials there granted Diebold control over much of the state's election systems during the 2002 midterm elections. (In the interests of disclosure, my sister was a candidate for governor that year and lost by a margin consistent with pre-election polls.) On Election Night, when Chris Hood accompanied Diebold president Bob Urosevich and marketing director Mark Radke to the tabulation center in Montgomery County where the votes would be added up, he was stunned to find the room empty. "Not a single Maryland election official was there to retrieve the memory cards," he recalls. As cards containing every vote in the county began arriving in canvas bags, the Diebold executives plugged them into a group of touch-screen tabulators linked into a central server, which was also controlled by a Diebold employee. "It would have been very easy for any one of us to take a contaminated card out of our pocket, put it into the system, and download some malicious code that would then end up in the server, impacting every other vote that went in, before and after," says Hood. "We had absolute control of the tabulations. We could have fixed the election if we wanted. We had access, and that's all you need. I can honestly say that every election I saw with Diebold in charge was compromised - if not in the count, at least in the security."

After the election, Maryland planned to install Diebold's AccuVote-TS electronic machines across the entire state - until four computer scientists at Johns Hopkins and Rice universities released an analysis of the company's software source code in July 2003. "This voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts," the scientists concluded. It was, in fact, "unsuitable for use in a general election."

"With electronic machines, you can commit wholesale fraud with a single alteration of software," says Avi Rubin, a computer-science professor at Johns Hopkins who has received $7.5 million from the National Science Foundation to study electronic voting. "There are a million little tricks when you build software that allow you to do whatever you want. If you know the precinct demographics, the machine can be programmed to recognize its precinct and strategically flip votes in elections that are several years in the future. No one will ever know it happened."

In response to the study, Maryland commissioned two additional reports on Diebold's equipment. The first was conducted by Science Applications International Corporation - a company that, along with Diebold, was part of an industry group that promotes electronic voting machines. SAIC conceded that Diebold's machines were "at high risk of compromise" - but concluded that the state's "procedural controls and general voting environment reduce or eliminate many of the vulnerabilities identified in the Rubin report." Despite the lack of any real "procedural controls" during the 2002 election, Gov. Robert Ehrlich gave the state election board the go-ahead to pay $55.6 million for Diebold's AccuVote-TS system.

The other analysis, commissioned by the Maryland legislature, was a practical test of the systems by RABA Technologies, a consulting firm experienced in both defense and intelligence work for the federal government. Computer scientists hired by RABA to hack into six of Diebold's machines discovered a major flaw: The company had built what are known as "back doors" into the software that could enable a hacker to hide an unauthorized and malicious code in the system. William Arbaugh, of the University of Maryland, gave the Diebold system an "F" with "the possibility of raising it to a 'C' with extra credit - that is, if they follow the recommendations we gave them."

But according to recent e-mails obtained by Rolling Stone, Diebold not only failed to follow up on most of the recommendations, it worked to cover them up. Michael Wertheimer, who led the RABA study, now serves as an assistant deputy director in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. "We made numerous recommendations that would have required Diebold to fix these issues," he writes in one e-mail, "but were rebuffed by the argument that the machines were physically protected and could not be altered by someone outside the established chain of custody."

In another e-mail, Wertheimer says that Diebold and state officials worked to downplay his team's dim assessment. "We spent hours dealing with Diebold lobbyists and election officials who sought to minimize our impact," he recalls. "The results were risk-managed in favor of expediency and potential catastrophe."

During the 2004 presidential election, with Diebold machines in place across the state, things began to go wrong from the very start. A month before the vote, an abandoned Diebold machine was discovered in a bar in Baltimore. "What's really worrisome," says Hood, "is that someone could get hold of all the technology - for manipulation - if they knew the inner workings of just one machine."

Election Day was a complete disaster. "Countless numbers of machines were down because of what appeared to be flaws in Diebold's system," says Hood, who was part of a crew of roving technicians charged with making sure that the polls were up and running. "Memory cards overloading, machines freezing up, poll workers afraid to turn them on or off for fear of losing votes."

Then, after the polls closed, Diebold technicians who showed up to collect the memory cards containing the votes found that many were missing. "The machines are gone," one janitor told Hood - picked up, apparently, by the vendor who had delivered them in the first place. "There was major chaos because there were so many cards missing," Hood says.

Even before the 2004 election, experts warned that electronic voting machines would undermine the integrity of the vote. "The system we have for testing and certifying voting equipment in this country is not only broken but is virtually nonexistent," Michael Shamos, a distinguished professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, testified before Congress that June. "It must be re-created from scratch."

Two months later, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team - a division of the Department of Homeland Security - issued a little-noticed "cyber-security bulletin." The alert dealt specifically with a database that Diebold uses in tabulating votes. "A vulnerability exists due to an undocumented backdoor account," the alert warned, citing the same kind of weakness identified by the RABA scientists. The security flaw, it added, could allow "a malicious user [to] modify votes."

Such warnings, however, didn't stop states across the country from installing electronic voting machines for the 2004 election. In Ohio, jammed and inoperable machines were reported throughout Toledo. In heavily Democratic areas of Youngstown, nearly 100 voters pushed "Kerry" and watched "Bush" light up. At least twenty machines had to be recalibrated in the middle of the voting process for flipping Kerry votes to Bush. Similar "vote hopping" was reported by voters in other states.

The widespread glitches didn't deter Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell - who also chaired Bush's re-election campaign in Ohio - from cutting a deal in 2005 that would have guaranteed Diebold a virtual monopoly on vote counting in the state. Local election officials alleged that the deal, which came only a few months after Blackwell bought nearly $10,000 in Diebold stock, was a violation of state rules requiring a fair and competitive bidding process. Facing a lawsuit, Blackwell agreed to allow other companies to provide machines as well. This November, voters in forty-seven counties will cast their ballots on Diebold machines - in a pivotal election in which Blackwell is running as the Republican candidate for governor.

Electronic voting machines also caused widespread problems in Florida, where Bush bested Kerry by 381,000 votes. When statistical experts from the University of California examined the state's official tally, they discovered a disturbing pattern: "The data show with 99.0 percent certainty that a county's use of electronic voting is associated with a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases in support for President Bush between 2000 and 2004." The three counties with the most discrepancies - Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade - were also the most heavily Democratic. Electronic voting machines, the report concluded, may have improperly awarded as many as 260,000 votes to Bush. "No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained," said Michael Hout, a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Charles Stewart III, an MIT professor who specializes in voter behavior and methodology, was initially skeptical of the study - but was unable to find any flaw in the results. "You can't break it - I've tried," he told The Washington Post. "There's something funky in the results from the electronic-machine Democratic counties."

Questions also arose in Texas in 2004. William Singer, an election programmer in Tarrant County, wrote the secretary of state's office after the vote to report that ES&S pressured officials to install unapproved software during the presidential primaries. "What I was expected to do in order to 'pull off' an election," Singer wrote, "was far beyond the kind of practices that I believe should be standard and accepted in the election industry." The company denies the charge, but in an e-mail this month, Singer elaborated that ES&S employees had pushed local election officials to pressure the secretary of state to accept "a software change at such a last minute there would be no choice, and effectively avoid certification."

Despite such reports, Texas continues to rely on ES&S. In primaries held in Jefferson County earlier this year, electronic votes had to be recounted after error messages prevented workers from completing their tabulations. In April, with early voting in local elections only a week away, officials across the state were still waiting to receive the programming from ES&S needed to test the machines for accuracy. Calling the situation "completely unacceptable and disturbing," Texas director of elections Ann McGeehan authorized local officials to create "emergency paper ballots" as a backup. "We regret the unacceptable position that many political subdivisions are in due to poor performance by their contracted vendor," McGeehan added.

In October 2005, the government Accountability Office issued a damning report on electronic voting machines. Citing widespread irregularities and malfunctions, the government's top watchdog agency concluded that a host of weaknesses with touch-screen and optical-scan technology "could damage the integrity of ballots, votes and voting-system software by allowing unauthorized modifications." Some electronic systems used passwords that were "easily guessed" or employed identical passwords for numerous systems. Software could be handled and transported with no clear chain of custody, and locks protecting computer hardware were easy to pick. Unsecured memory cards could enable individuals to "vote multiple times, change vote totals and produce false election reports."

An even more comprehensive report released in June by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank at the New York University School of Law, echoed the GAO's findings. The report - conducted by a task force of computer scientists and security experts from the government, universities and the private sector - was peer-reviewed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Electronic voting machines widely adopted since 2000, the report concluded, "pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state and local elections." While no instances of hacking have yet been documented, the report identified 120 security threats to three widely used machines - the easiest method of attack being to utilize corrupt software that shifts votes from one candidate to another. Computer experts have demonstrated that a successful attack would be relatively simple. In a study released on September 13th, computer scientists at Princeton University created vote-stealing software that can be injected into a Diebold machine in as little as a minute, obscuring all evidence of its presence. They also created a virus that can "infect" other units in a voting system, committing "widespread fraud" from a single machine. Within sixty seconds, a lone hacker can own an election.

And touch-screen technology continues to create chaos at the polls. On September 12th, in Maryland's first all-electronic election, voters were turned away from the polls because election officials had failed to distribute the electronic access cards needed to operate Diebold machines. By the time the cards were found on a warehouse shelf and delivered to every precinct, untold numbers of voters had lost the chance to cast ballots. It seems insane that such clear threats to our election system have not stopped the proliferation of touch-screen technology. In 2004, twenty-three percent of Americans cast their votes on electronic ballots - an increase of twelve percent over 2000. This year, more than one-third of the nation's 8,000 voting jurisdictions are expected to use electronic voting technology for the first time.

The heartening news is, citizens are starting to fight back. Voting-rights activists with the Brad Blog and Black Box Voting are getting the word out. Voter Action, a nonprofit group, has helped file lawsuits in Arizona, New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado and New Mexico to stop the proliferation of touch-screen systems. In California, voters filed suit last March to challenge the use of a Diebold touch-screen system - a move that has already prompted eight counties to sign affidavits saying they won't use the machines in November.

It's not surprising that the widespread problems with electronic voting machines have sparked such outrage and mistrust among voters. Last November, comedian Bill Maher stood in a Las Vegas casino and looked out over thousands of slot machines. "They never make a mistake," he remarked to me. "Can't we get a voting machine that can't be fixed?" Indeed, there is a remarkably simple solution: equip every touch-screen machine to provide paper receipts that can be verified by voters and recounted in the event of malfunction or tampering. "The paper is the insurance against the cheating machine," says Rubin, the computer expert.

In Florida, an astonishing new law actually makes it illegal to count paper ballots by hand after they've already been tallied by machine. But twenty-seven states now require a paper trail, and others are considering similar requirements. In New Mexico, Gov. Bill Richardson has instituted what many consider an even better solution: Voters use paper ballots, which are then scanned and counted electronically. "We became one of the laughingstock states in 2004 because the machines were defective, slow and unreliable," says Richardson. "I said to myself, 'I'm not going to go through this again.' The paper-ballot system, as untechnical as it seems, is the most verifiable way we can assure Americans that their vote is counting."

Paper ballots will not completely eliminate the threat of tampering, of course - after all, election fraud and miscounts have occurred throughout our history. As long as there has been a paper trail, however, our elections have been conducted with some measure of public scrutiny. But electronic voting machines are a hacker's dream. And today, for-profit companies are being given unprecedented and frightening power not only to provide these machines but to store and count our votes in secret, without any real oversight.

You do not have to believe in conspiracy theories to fear for the integrity of our electoral system: The right to vote is simply too important - and too hard won - to be surrendered without a fight. It is time for Americans to reclaim our democracy from private interests. (Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" 2008 p.60-1) Revised article reposted at Organic Consumers Organization 09/25/2014

Was the 2004 Election Stolen? Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 06/01/2006

On Election Day 2002, the Alabama governorship seemed all but certain to be delivered to the Democratic incumbent, Don Siegelman. In a largely Republican state, the popular Siegelman had been the only person in Alabama history to hold all of the state's highest offices, having served as Attorney General, Secretary of State, Lieutenant Governor and finally, as Governor. When the polls closed on election night, and the votes were being counted, it seemed increasingly apparent that Governor Siegelman had been victorious in his re-election bid against the Republican challenger, Bob Riley. But, sometime in the middle of the night, a single county changed everything, and by the next morning, Alabamians awoke to find that Riley was their new governor.

According to CNN, the confusion over who the actual winner was stemmed from what appeared to be two different sets of numbers coming in from Baldwin County:

"The confusion stems from two sets of numbers reported by one heavily Republican district," the network stated. "Figures originally reported by Baldwin County showed Siegelman got about 19,000 votes there, making him the state's winner by about two-tenths of 1 percent," its reporter added. "But hours after polls closed, Baldwin County officials said the first number was wrong, and Siegelman had received just less than 13,000. Those figures would make Riley the statewide winner by about 3,000 votes."

Riley's electoral victory had rested on a razor-thin margin of 3,120 votes. According to official reports, Baldwin County had conducted a recount sometime in the middle of the night, when the only county officers and election supervisors present were Republicans. While there were many electronic anomalies across the state, the Baldwin County recount had put Riley over the finish line.

State and county Democrats quickly requested another Baldwin County recount with Democratic observers present, as well as a statewide recount. But before the Baldwin County Democratic Party canvassing board could act, Alabama's Republican Attorney General William Pryor had the ballots sealed. Unless Siegelman filed an election contest in the courts, Pryor said, state county canvassing boards did not have the authority "to break the seals on ballots and machines under section 17-9-31" of the state constitution.

Framing a political opponent

Pryor had won his reelection bid in 1998 to Alabama's top legal office with the help of two campaign managers, one of whom is remarkably well known because he would later go on to lead the George W. Bush victory in the 2000 election: Karl Rove. Pryor's other campaign manager was a longtime GOP operative by the name of Bill Canary. Canary would emerge as the campaign manager for Siegelman's opponent, Bob Riley, in the 2002 election. After Pryor was re-elected in 1998, he almost immediately began investigating Siegelman, who was then Lieutenant Governor. Siegelman appears to have made an enemy of Pryor as early as 1997, when he criticized the latter's close relationship with the tobacco industry. Pryor's history and relationship with Canary and Rove should have been reason enough for the Alabama Attorney General to recuse himself from the November 2002 election controversy. But Pryor refused.

A year earlier, in 2001, President Bush had appointed Leura Canary to serve as U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Alabama. If that last name sounds familiar, it is because her husband is Bill Canary. Leura Canary had begun working on Siegelman's case almost as soon she took office, when she federalized Attorney General Pryor's ongoing state probe. After spending six months investigating Siegelman, Leura Canary was forced to formally recuse herself from the investigation because of her husband's connections to the Riley campaign. At least she gave the appearance of recusing herself; no evidence of this recusal has ever been found, and all requested documents from the Department of Justice are MIA. By all accounts, Leura Canary continued to conduct the investigation from behind the scenes. This resulted in her delivering an indictment in 2004 of conspiracy and fraud in which Siegelman and two alleged co-conspirators were said to have rigged Medicaid contracts in 1999. However, only a few months after filing the indictment, the U.S. Attorney's prosecuting the case were held in contempt of court, and the case against Siegelman was dismissed.

Finding a more receptive judge

After Siegelman indicated his intention to seek reelection, Canary's original investigation resurfaced in 2005. (Canary had never stopped pushing the investigation along, even against the advice of her professional staff.) As a result, in October 2005, Don Siegelman was once again indicted by a federal grand jury, on 32 counts of bribery, conspiracy and mail fraud.

Siegelman was accused of accepting a $500,000 donation from HealthSouth founder Richard M. Scrushy in exchange for an appointment to the Alabama hospital regulatory board. That donation supposedly went to pay off a debt incurred by a non-profit foundation set up by Siegelman and others to promote an education lottery in a state referendum. However, Siegelman's attorney argued that Siegelman did not control the foundation by which the debt was incurred, nor did he take money from or profit from the foundation.

The case was assigned to Judge Mark Fuller, whom George W. Bush had nominated for a federal judgeship to the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama in 2002. Prior to his promotion to the federal bench, Fuller had served as District Attorney for Alabama's 12th Circuit. Fuller had been replaced as D.A. by Gary McAliley, who in investigating his predecessor's accounting practices, found that Fuller had been defrauding the Alabama retirement system by spiking salaries.

There were many irregularities during the trial, including strong indications of jury tampering involving two jurors. Eventually, in June 2006, Siegelman was convicted of seven of the charges against him, after the jury had deadlocked twice and been sent back each time to deliberate by Judge Fuller. When it came time for sentencing, Fuller imposed a sentence of seven years and four months, and would not allow Siegelman to remain free while his case was under appeal. Within hours of his sentencing, Siegelman had been taken to a federal penitentiary in Atlanta.

A letter sent to then-U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales by members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee revealed numerous questions about the indictment and the trial:

"There have been several reported irregularities in the case against Mr. Siegelman that raise questions about his prosecution. In 2004, charges against Mr. Siegelman were dropped by the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Northern District of Alabama before the case went to trial, and the judge harshly rebuked prosecutors bringing that case. In the RICO case filed in the Middle District of Alabama in 2005, there have been allegations of jury tampering involving two of the jurors who convicted Mr. Siegelman. These and other irregularities prompted 44 former state attorneys general to sign a petition 'urging the United States Congress to investigate the circumstances surrounding the investigation, prosecution, sentencing and detention' of Mr. Siegelman."

However, this story became even more twisted when a long time Alabama Republican attorney who had handled opposition research for Bob Riley's 2002 campaign against Siegelman came forward with some astonishing allegations.

Dana Jill Simpson had spent the 2002 election cycle digging into Don Siegelman's background. In 2007, Simpson filed an affidavit in which she alleged direct White House involvement in the 2002 Alabama election. According to Simpson's affidavit, Siegelman had conceded the election and did not push for a recount because Riley's team had threatened him with prosecution if he did not withdraw from the race. In addition, Simpson also revealed an alleged conference call that took place on November 17, 2002 between herself, Bill Canary, Rob Riley-Governor Bob Riley's son-and other members of the Riley campaign:

"Rob Riley told her in early 2005 that his father and a Republican operative met with Rove months earlier to discuss Siegelman's prosecution. Simpson said Rob Riley told her Rove spoke to Bob Riley and William Canary. 'He proceeds to tell me that Bill Canary and Bob Riley had had a conversation with Karl Rove again, and that they had this time gone over and seen whoever was the head of the department' at Justice overseeing the Siegelman prosecution, Simpson testified."

Expanding on her original allegations, Simpson testified on September 14, 2007 before lawyers for the House Judiciary Committee and dropped a bombshell revelation. Describing a conference call among Bill Canary, Rob Riley and other Riley campaign aides, which she said took place on November 18, 2002-the same day Don Siegelman conceded the election-Simpson alleged that Canary had said that "Rove had spoken with the Department of Justice" about "pursuing" Siegelman and had also advised Riley's staff "not to worry about Don Siegelman" because "'his girls' would take care of" the governor.

The "girls" allegedly referenced by Bill Canary were his wife, Leura, and Alice Martin, another 2001 Bush appointee as the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. Simpson added that she was told by Rob Riley that Judge Mark Fuller was deliberately chosen when the Siegelman case was prosecuted in 2005, and that Fuller would "hang" Siegelman.

Before Simpson testified before the House Judiciary Committee, her house was burned down and her car was run off the road. Simpson was not the only one to have had experienced such bizarre misfortune. Dana Siegelman, Don Siegelman's daughter, said that her family's home was twice broken into during the trial and that Siegelman's attorney had had his office broken into as well.

In the end, what then are we to make of the Alabama election of 2002 and its aftermath, during which not only did Don Siegelman lose, but so did those of us who believe in the rule of law, the Constitution, fair elections, and a Justice System above politics? Is this the type of story you expect to read about in the United States of America? (Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" 2008 p.76-7) reposted on Alternet retrieved through Wayback Machine

.... The public received a regurgitation of election 2000 analysis for 2004. The follow up consensus was formed from this inaccurate analysis. The remarkable Rove had done it again with those energized evangelicals. And, he’d grabbed enough van driving suburban moms to make the difference.

USA Today [3] echoed much of the analysis when they concluded their election wrap up with this insight:

In the end, the states broke for Bush much as they did in 2000. Bush lost one state that he won in 2000: New Hampshire. Late Wednesday, the Associated Press reported New Mexico went to Bush. Iowa was still undecided. Both states backed Gore in 2000. [4]

During the week or so after Election Day, there were additional flourishes added to the portrait of Bush’s remarkable victory. He had captured the values voters, a new demographic. These voters cast aside their normal allegiances and turned red in a full embrace of the values of the administration. According to the National Exit Poll, Bush supposedly achieved another remarkable feat. He moved the Latino vote from a Democratic mainstay to a competitive demographic. Unlike the typical 60-40% margins Democrats counted on, in 2004 Latino votes were divided 54% – 46%, a 12 point swing. These two additional “findings” hinted at but did not address directly the Bush urban wave that Cook had noticed.

While there was no broad public debate on the legitimacy of the outcome, intensive debate on the Internet was stimulated by the accidental release of preliminary exit poll data throughout Election Day which showed Kerry winning 51%-48%. Totaling over 11,000 respondents, these polls were marked “Not for on air use.” This fueled charges of election fraud due to the winning margin for Kerry in all exit polls but the final released on the day after the election. In addition, the debate focused on what was called the red shift, Bush victory in a number of key states, all of which were said to be outside the margin of error for the poll. Aside from these interesting but largely ignored exchanges, Americans settled in for four more years of George Bush.

Is this what actually happened?

According to the final National Exit Poll, there was a lot more to the 2004 election than Red versus Blue. (Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" 2008 p.98-9) variation of same paper at Global Research

Here, however, the exit poll narrative changes. According to the polls, Bush made very surprising gains in the smaller cities, those with populations between 50 and 500 thousand. There Bush trailed Gore by 17 points in 2000, 8.4 million to 12.0 million respectively. In 2004, the smaller cities were almost even with Kerry at 11.36 million and Bush at 11.39 million. Turnout was up just 9%. It is very difficult to explain such a “trend”. Nevertheless, taking the rural voters, the suburbs, and the break even smaller cities as a group, we see that Bush was still in real trouble heading into the larger cities. Had Kerry just held Bush close to the Gore big city margins for 2000 in these Democratic friendly venues, he would have won the election.

Why not expect a strong Kerry showing? Bush had not been a city-friendly President and he had not gone out of his way to help large cities with any initiatives of note. In our largest city, New York, things looked particularly bad. A 2003 poll showed that over 50% of the residents thought that the administration had foreknowledge of the 911 attacks and did nothing, hardly a predictor of great success in that largest of large cities.

But something very unusual happened, as Charles Cook pointed out. According to the NEP, Bush made incredible gains in the cities over his 2000 vote share. These gains were large enough to offset his drop in core support in rural areas and give him a 3% victory.

In addition, big city voters must have been “motivated” by something. Compared to 2000, rural turnout was down 2.0 million, small towns up sharply at 88% (yet still a small segment), and suburban turnout up slightly, with the smaller cities showing a modest increase which was still less than the reported national average. Turnout in cities over 500 thousand in population increased by 66%. What was this all about? The answer to that question and the plausibility of the answer to that question is vital in understanding the story we were told of the 2004 election results.



FIGURE 3. We are expected to believe that after doing poorly in the rural area and small towns, Bush attracted several million new big city voters and pulled off a last minute victory. In the small towns he was well below his 2000 performance for total votes. In the “red” zone, rural America, he got fewer votes in 2004 than he did in 2000 while turnout was up across the nation.

According to the vote totals, the real kill shot for the Bush victory came from large urban areas, “big cities”, defined as those with a population of half a million or more, e.g., New York, Chicago, Detroit, etc. These cities had been the strongest base for Democrats since the Great Depression. There had been variations in turnout from presidential election to election, but the margins had always remained strong. (Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" 2008 p.102-3) variation of same paper at Global Research

Election 2004: The Urban Legend 06/17/2007 By Michael Collins

How to stuff the Electronic Ballot Box: "Hacking and Stacking" in Pima County, Arizona

David Griscom

On November 2, 2004, John R. Brakey was the Democratic Cluster Captain for four precincts in Arizona Legislative District (LD) 27, part of the predominately-Hispanic, 80 percent non-Republican Congressional District 7. LD 27 encompasses a part of Pima Country southwest of the city of Tucson. John was new to the job, and part of his duties was to pick up carbon copies of the hand-printed list of voters who had already cast their ballots, a form called the Consecutive Number Register (CNR). In three of John’s four precincts, poll workers greeted him with hostility, and in one case they attempted to conceal the existence of several completed CNR pages for which he was requesting copies.

About two hours after the official closing time, he returned to his home polling place, a school located in Precinct 324, to see if he could pick up the final copy of the CNR. To his shock, he walked in on poll workers apparently in the act of altering the document, which should have been completed at the time of the arrival of the last voter. John also observed that the vault to the Diebold optical-scan voting machine was open, instead of being locked shut as it should have been. When he approached to see what they were doing, the poll workers rose to their feet in unison, cursing him and telling him to get out.1

The next morning, John caught Greg Palast on Democracy Now, urging election sleuths to go to their polling places and pick through the trash for possible evidence of fraud. John did just that. After finding nothing in the trash outside, he walked into the school library where the voting had taken place, where he noticed several boxes. One was unsealed and held 924 “Advice to Voter” slips, which he had seen the poll workers working with the night before. He stuffed these slips into his jacket and left. These slips turned out to be the key to proving what the poll workers had been up to.

From that moment on, figuring out exactly what had just transpired became John’s all-consuming passion. He abandoned his job and began working 18-hour days gathering and entering into Excel spreadsheets all the available public records bearing on the voting at Tucson Precinct 324 on Election Day 2004. I soon joined him in the forensic analysis of these records. Eventually it became clear to us that the poll workers at Precinct 324 were making, and causing voters to make, large numbers of errors in the “poll books,” which are the public records of Election Day, including the Signature Rosters where the voters are supposed to sign in.

It turned out that the two head poll workers at Precinct 324, the Reverend Benjamin Khan and his wife, had made seven different kinds of errors exactly eleven times each. If those errors had been truly random (for example, if they were due to incompetence) then the odds of all seven having happened exactly eleven times each was less than one in 20 million. Therefore, the only possible conclusion was that the Khan team had made those errors deliberately. The only reason we could think of as to why they would do this was to steal votes by stuffing the ballot box according to a well-practiced system involving (1) creation of one of each kind of poll-book “error” about once every hour, and (2) performance of one illegal ballot manipulation corresponding to each of these “errors.” Such a system would have had the advantages of spreading out the ballot manipulations throughout the twelve-hour Election Day, as well as leaving behind a record in the poll books that was so confusing that even the likes of Sherlock Holms would have had great difficulty reverse-engineering their scheme. John filed a complaint with the Pima County Attorney’s office, but the complaint was eventually dismissed after the Pima County Elections Director reportedly fired the Khans for “incompetence.” (Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" 2008 p.116-7)

How to stuff the Electronic Ballot Box: "Hacking and Stacking" in Pima County, Arizona David Griscom PDF

The Selling of the Touch Screen "Paper Trail": From Nevada to the EAC Michael Richardson and Brad Friedman with additional research by John Gideon (Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" 2008 p.131)

Dozens if not hundreds of articles including some by Brad Friedman and John Gideon

Landslide denied: Exit Polls vs. the Vote Count in 2006 Jonathan Simon and Bruce O'Dell

Introduction: Pre-Election Concern, Election Day Relief, Alarming Reality

There was an unprecedented level of concern approaching the 2006 Election (“E2006”) about the vulnerability of the vote counting process to manipulation. With questions about the integrity of the 2000, 2002 and 2004 elections remaining unresolved, with e-voting having proliferated nationwide, and with incidents occurring with regularity through 2005 and 2006, the alarm spread from computer experts to the media and the public at large. It would be fair to say that America approached E2006 with held breath.

For many observers, the results on Election Day permitted a great sigh of relief—not because control of Congress shifted from Republicans to Democrats, but because it appeared that the public will had been translated more or less accurately into electoral results, not thwarted as some had feared. There was a relieved rush to conclude that the vote counting process had been fair and the concerns of election integrity proponents overblown.

Unfortunately the evidence forces us to a very different and disturbing conclusion: there was gross vote count manipulation and it had a great impact on the results of E2006, significantly decreasing the magnitude of what would have been, accurately tabulated, a landslide of epic proportions. Because much of this manipulation appears to have been computer-based, and therefore invisible to the legions of at-the-poll observers, the public was informed of the usual “isolated incidents and glitches” but remains unaware of the far greater story: The electoral machinery and vote counting systems of the United States did not honestly and accurately translate the public will and certainly can not be counted on to do so in the future.

The Evidentiary Basis

Our analysis of the distortions introduced into the E2006 vote count relies heavily on the official exit polls once again undertaken by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International (“Edison/Mitofsky”) on behalf of a consortium of major media outlets known as the National Election Pool (NEP). In presenting exit poll-based evidence of vote count corruption, we are all too aware of the campaign that has been waged to discredit the reliability of exit polls as a measure of voter intent. Our analysis is not, however, based on a broad assumption of exit poll reliability. Rather we maintain that the national exit poll for E2006 contains within it specific questions that serve as intrinsic and objective yardsticks by which the representative validity of the poll’s sample can be established, from which our conclusions flow directly.

For the purposes of this analysis our primary attention is directed to the exit poll in which respondents were asked for whom they cast their vote for the House of Representatives.2 Although only four House races (in the single-district states) were polled as individual races, an additional nationwide sample of more than 10,000 voters was drawn,3 the results representing the aggregate vote for the House in E2006. The sample was weighted according to a variety of demographics prior to public posting, and had a margin of error of +/- 1%.4

When we compare the results of this national exit poll with the total vote count for all House races we find that once again, as in the 2004 Election (“E2004”), there is a very significant exit poll-vote count discrepancy. The exit poll indicates a Democratic victory margin nearly 4%, or 3 million votes, greater than the margin recorded by the vote counting machinery. This is far outside the margin of error of the poll and has less than a one in 10,000 likelihood of occurring as a matter of chance.

The Exit Polls and The Vote Count

In E2004 the only nontrivial argument against the validity of the exit polls—other than the mere assumption that the vote counts must be correct—turned out to be the hypothesis, never supported by evidence, that Republicans had been more reluctant to respond and that therefore Democrats were "oversampled." And now, in E2006, the claim has once again been made that the Exit Polls were "off" because Democrats were oversampled.5 Indeed this claim of sampling bias is by now accepted with something of a “so what else is new?” shrug. The 2006 Exit Poll, however, contains intrinsic yardsticks that directly refute this familiar and convenient claim. But before turning to the yardstick questions themselves, we need to clarify certain aspects of exit polling data presentation that have often proven confusing.

Any informed discussion of exit polling must distinguish among three separate categories of data:

1) “Raw” data, which comprises the actual responses to the questionnaires simply tallied up; this data is never publicly released and, in any case, makes no claim to accurately represent the electorate and can not be usefully compared with vote counts.

2) “Weighted” data, in which the raw data has been weighted or stratified on the basis of numerous demographic and voting pattern variables to reflect with great accuracy the composition and characteristics of the electorate.

3) “Forced” or “Adjusted” data, in which the pollster overrides previous weighting in order to make the "Who did you vote for?" result in a given race match the vote count for that race, however it distorts the demographics of the sample (that's why they call it "forcing"). (Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" 2008 p.149-51-74)

The Fate of Tammy Duckworth: Fighting for Democracy in DuPage County Illinois Jean Kaczmarek

DuPage County, a western neighbor of Cook County, had been a Republican stronghold for decades. However, shigfting demographics had created a new playing field. the Republican voters were aging, dying off or moving to escape the high property taxes and bleak winters. The Democrats, on the other hand, were younger, more diverse, and ahd relocated from Cook County and other metropolitan areas. In addition, DuPage had the highest growth of Latinos in any county in Illinois. With each election, Democrats were showing a steady gain in vote share, which was indicated by a Zogby/Reuter's poll taken on November 1, just six days before the election, which showed Duckworth leading Roskam 54 percent to 40 percent.

On Election Night, the Drury Lane ballroom was packed with candidates and their families, local Democratic leaders, and election workers rejuvenated after weeks of exhausting pavement pounding. They all expected a historic victory, and there was a roar of cheering and applause when it was reported that Democrats won the House.

While everyone else was excited about an expected Duckworth victory, I, along with my colleague Melisa Urda, were focused instead oin a seamingly dull county government office fifteen miles away in Wheaton. for the previous eighteen months, Melisa and I had been investigating this office, which was home to the DuPage County Election Commission. among our discoveries were:

* Public records being destroyed without compliance to the Illinois Local Records Act.

* A small, local company with partisan ties had been given carte blanche to all things electronic in DuPage's electoral process -- the software, the machines, the tabulation room, the voter registration database and the election night hosting.

* Public records and election equipment had been stored in a warehouse owned by the brother of the Commission's chairman.

* Cronyism was pervasive, with vendors making generous contributions to local officials.

* Tens of thousands of voters had been purged from the registration database.

* Suspiciously large voter turnout in many elections, affecting the outcomes of both local and state races.

* the Illinois Election Code was questionably interpeted and selectively followed.

While Bev Harris of Black Box Voting fame had declared that DuPage County was among the worst places to vote in America, few among the packed conference crowd understood what was happening behind the scenes and how it would impact that night's election results.

To understand the DuPage County Election Commission, it is helpful to understand DuPage County. Current Illinois State Senator and former DuPage County Republican Chairman -- Kirk Dillard like to brag that DuPage was most Republican county in Illinois. One city, Wheaton, is home to the well-known Christian undergraduate school, Wheaton College. The alma mater of Reverend Billy Graham, the school is just half a mile away from Milton Township Precinct 21, which would report a miraculous 106 percent voter turnout in the 2006 midterm election. Although once considered quite conservative, the school now attracts a mixture of evangelicals, both left and right. It also boasts the j. Dennis Hastert Center for Economics, Government and Public Policy, in honor of the 1964 alumnus and former Speaker of the House.

In the 1960 presidential election, where John Kennedy narrowly defeated Richard Nixon, neighboring Cook County had gained notoriety for Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley's "impossible" 89 percent "get out the vote" turnout, which was widely reported as giving the election to JFK. However, one would be hard-pressed to find a single news article on that year's 93 percent voter turnout in DuPage County in support of Nixon.

My first encounter with the Election Commission was in the spring of 2005, when I gave a public statement before it. Melisa and I had already been actively working on state and national election reform, and we were enraged to have discovered voter suppression, problems with electronic voting, and exit polls that did not match the outcome in the 2004 presidential election. At the time, I knew nothing about the DuPage County Election Commission. I didn't know the names of the commissioners or high-ranking staff members. I had to use map Quest to even find where it was located.

the Commission's boardroom is just what you would expect for a municipal office. Non-descript color scheme. government-issue office furniture. american flag hanging in the corner. Large table in the middle for the commissioners to conduct their meetings. What I didn't expect, however, were Diebold vendors seated and joking with commissioners and staff members before the public was herded into the room. My education on local government had begun.

Around the table were the six people who held the keys to the kingdom: Chairman Dean Westrom, Commissioners Charlotte Mushow and Jeanne McNamara, Executive Director Robert T. Saar, Assistant Executive Director Doreen Nelson, and the Commission's outside attorney, Patrick Bond.

My statement before the commission was on Jefferey Dean, the consultant hired by Diebold to program its 1.96 software for the opti-scan voting systems used in DuPage County, as well as thirty other states, in 2004. Dean among other things, had twenty-three conviction fro computer-related fraud. ironically while thousands of convicted felons were disenfranchised from voting nationwide, a felon had programmed the software for millions of Americans to use on Election Day.

I have given several speeches during the course of my life. Yet my statement before the ?Election Commission was the first time I ahd created a sensation with my words. My temperature rose, my eyes watered and I trembled. From what I was later told, the Diebold vendors sitting fifteen feet away were fuming. Later when Robert Kennedy Jr. asked me on his Ring of Fire radio program how the Election Commission had responded to my statement about Jeffrey Dean, I replied that they responded by buying more Diebold.

Meanwhile, Melisa had been in contact with Bev Harris, who had faxed FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests to every jurisdiction in the country, including DuPage County, asking for public records pertaining to the 2004 election. However the county had never responded. Three months later, when Harris called seeking a response, she was astonished to learn that some of the materials from the election had been destroyed. She had been told that the records had been "retained statutorily for 60 days," though, according to the Federal Election Code, all public records from federal elections must be retained for a minimum of twenty-two months. Destroying these records prematurely is a felony.

Several months later, we sent a FOIA request to the Election Commission for the same records. We were particularly interested in seeing the poll tapes -- the print-outs from the opti-scan machines, which resemble grocery store receipts. Poll tapes, sometimes referred to as result slips, can provide a quick audit to compare with the official totals. they also contain the signatures of the election judges at each poling place. The comparison verifies the accuracy of the vote counts. This time we were told that the poll tapes had not been destroyed after all, but were "sealed" and "exempt from disclosure."

Soon after, Melisa discovered numerous payments to a company called "Accurate Document Destruction" in the Commission's line-item expenditures. We allerted the media, local and state authorities that the Commission was destroying election records. We also sent letters to the Election Commission and their attorneys demanding that they halt the destruction of public records. In June 2006, the Illinois Local Records Commission presented a request to the Illinois Attorney General's office on our behalf seeking an opinion to clarify the Illinois Local Records Act included election records. That same month I contacted DuPage Chief Judge Ann Jorgensen; as chief judge, Jorgensen had signed off on audits of line-item expenditures, including the payments to Accurate Document Destruction. In Augusts, I traveled to Springfield to make a public statement before the Illinois Local Records Commission, requesting that they alert the authorities regarding the destruction of the records. while they complied with my request, the destruction still continues. to date, 194 ninety-six gallon toters of material have been destroyed since we began our efforts, No certificate of disposal has ever been filed.

As of this writing, the Illinois Attorney General's office still has not rendered an opinion on the Illinois Local Records Act. My requests to that office that they have the Election Commission's records preserved in the meantime, or to provide a reason why this is not necessary, have been ignored. As a result, we still don't know what was destroyed in the Election Commission's backrooms. (Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" 2008 p.176-9)

On Election Day, I arrived at my precinct at 5:15 in the morning for poll watching. the janitor unlocked the door, and there before my very eyes, was the touch screen machine set up the previous day. A Princeton University study had recently released a video showing how a Diebold touch screen could be opened with a filing cabinet key. If a key wasn't handy, a nail file could do the same job in about ten seconds. it was also reported that a single memory card placed into single machine could spread an undetectable vote-flipping virus. Executive Director Saar assured the media that this wasn't the case with the Diebold machines in DuPage because they were the TSx, not the touch screens, and that any flaws in the accuracy and security of the touch screens, did not apply to these machines. However, the only difference between the two machines is that the TSx has a printer attached to it.

As I went from precinct to precinct that day, I encountered numerous problems. Poll watchers reported that voters were facing registration issues, that some touch screens hadn't been set up on time, that some weren't functioning at all, that printers were jamming, and that poll tapes weren't available in many locations. In addition, one poll watcher reported that a touch screen machine in Naperville had pre-selected Republican Judy Baar Topinka in the gubernatorial race.

I was present for the closing of a polling place in Lombard. Before the touch screen, closing out a precinct had been relatively quick. In 2004, I had been done by 7:45 pm, with a copy of the poll tape in hand. That was not the case this night, as precinct judges hunched over the touch screen machine for over an hour, trying to figure out what to do, before giving up. Since no poll tapes were printed, the judges couldn't sign off on the results. They were then told via cell phone to bring the machine to the Election commission office. The machine's battery kicked in when it was unplugged, so that the machine was still live with a lit screen and the memory card still inserted as it was transported.

There were closing problems like that all over DuPage County. I would learn the next day from an observer that eighty memory cards had not been returned to the tabulation room properly. Memory cards are electronic ballot boxes; leaving them behind is a grave breach in the chain of custody. Two-dozen memory cards stayed out all night long. When the cards were retrieved the next day, with a police escort no less, some were found unlocked or outside their prospective pouches.

Duckworth began her concession speech at 11:15 pm on election night. At that point, Robis had reported that she was behind by 5 percent. While we gad expected the Democrats to surrender without a ruckus, we didn't expect it to come this early, as only 50 percent of the vote had been counted. Several days later, a reliable source said that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley had called Roskam at 10:45 to congratulate him and was surprised to learn that Duckworth had not yet conceded. Daley then called ?Duckworth, saying words to the effect of, "we've gotta work with this guy," so she should concede. Illinois National Guard Major Tammy Duckworth had her legs cut off again.

By morning, the margin in the race had tightened to 2 percent.*

* all the information presented in this essay, with substantial documentation and evidence has been presented to the DuPage County Ethics Commission, the DuPage County State's Attorney's office, the Illinois Secretary of State's office, the Illinois Attorney's General's office and the U.S. attorney's office/Northern Illinois district. To date no action has been taken. (Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" 2008 p.184-5)

"As Ohio goes ..." Bob Fitrakis

.... After the election, the Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism (CICL), publisher of the Free Press, organized public hearings in order to solicit testimony from voters. While the mainstream media would later echo former Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell's mantra that not a single irregularity had occurred in the election, the CICJ hearings produced the largest known body of evidence on election irregularities in Ohio history:

* In various polling stations in Democrat-rich inner city precincts in Youngstown and Columbus, voters who pushed touch screens for Kerry saw Bush's name light up. In addition, voting procedures regularly broke down in inner city and campus areas known to be heavily Democratic.

* a voting machine in Mahoning County recorded a negative 25 million votes for Kerry. The problem was allegedly fixed.

* In Gahanna Ward 1B, at a fundamentalist church, a so-called "electronic transfer glitch" gave Bush 4258 votes when only 638 people had actually voted at the polling place. the tally was allegedly corrected, but remains infamous as the "loaves and fishes" vote count.

* In Franklin County, dozens of voters swore under oath that their vote for Kerry faded away on the DRE without a paper trail.

* In Miami county, at 1:43 am the morning after Election Day, with the county's central tabulator reporting 100 percent of the vote, 19,000 more votes mysteriously arrived; 13,000 were for Bush at the same percentage as prior to the additional votes, a virtual statistic impossibility.

* In Cleveland, large, entirely implausible vote totals turned up for obscure third party candidates in traditional Democratic African-American wards. Vote counts in neighboring wards showed virtually no votes for those candidates with 90 percent going for Kerry.

As we can see, the wide range of discrepancies in both electronic and paper balloting systems leaned almost uniformly toward the Bush camp. For example, 14.6 percent of Ohio's ballots were cast on computerized devices that left no paper trail, but nearly all votes were counted on computerized central tabulators. With more than 5.7 million votes cast in a state yielding an official margin for Bush of less than 1119,000 votes, a skewed vote count on those machines alone could have made the difference in Bush's reelection.

the most widely publicized problems came when predominantly African-American precincts turned up suspiciously short of voting machines. As a result, many inner-city voters had to wait three hours on average, and occasionally up to seven hours, to vote, according to election officials and the sworn testimony of local residents. the wait at liberal Kenyon College, located in Knox County, Ohio, was eleven hours, while the voters at a nearby conservative Bible school were able to vote in a few minutes.

In a series of visits to Ohio after the election, the Reverend Jesse Jackson rallied an African-american community that felt it had been deprived of its vote. Calling it "a bigger deal than Selma," Jackson likened what had happened to the deprivation of black voting rights in the nineteenth century Jim Crow south. To try and get to the bottom of it all, he enlisted the support of Congressman John Conyers and Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones. Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, convened two Congressional forums, one in Washington and one in Columbus, where activists delivered thousands of public records and hundreds of sworn voter affidavits documenting the election irregularities. these became the basis of Conyers' report, "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic staff."

at the same time, on December 13, 2004, an Ohio legal team filed two election challenge lawsuits, Moss v. Bush, and Moss v. Moyer, to try to overturn the Bush victory. At the federal courthouse that same morning in Columbus, suits were also filed on behalf of the Green and Libertarian Party candidates, demanding that the Ohio electors not be seated until a full investigation of both the balloting and the recount was conducted. On January 3, 2005 Reverend Jackson hosted a rally in downtown Columbus at which Representative Tubbs Jones announced that she would formally question the seating of the Ohio Electoral delegation. The next day, a bus load of activists left from Columbus for an overnight "Winter Freedom Ride" to Washington D.C. As they arrived the next morning, the burgeoning "Election Protection" coalition staged a media briefing at the National Press Club, generating major global media coverage, including ABC's Nightline. Throughout that day and the next, Reverend Jackson, with this author and others in tow, lobbied congress, providing in-depth briefings for key Democratic leaders, including Senator Hillary Clinton.

On January 6, 2005, at a morning rally across from the White House, Reverend Jackson announced that Senator Barbara Boxer would join Representative Tubbs Jones in questioning the seating of the Republican delegation from Ohio to the Electoral College. By invoking an 1877 law, Tubbs Jones and Boxer stopped Congressional ratification of the 2004 Electoral College vote by challenging the Ohio results. A handful of progressive Democrats in the House and Boxer in the Senate forced the Republican-dominated Congress to hear two hours of protest about how the 2004 presidential vote had been replete with efforts to disenfranchise Democratic voters and suppress turnout. While the national news media, particularly the major television networks, exercised a virtual blackout on the challenge, those tuned to C-SPAN, public radio and the Internet saw the emergence of a new generation of Democratic leaders willing to fight for progressive causes, starting with the most fundamental tenet of American Democracy, the right to vote.

The Moss v. Bush lawsuit challenging Ohio's 2004 presidential race was withdrawn after Bush's inauguration in 2005. The contesters had stated that Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, Karl C. Rove, Richard B. Cheney and George W. Bush "were properly noticed for depositions" and "failed to appear for their depositions." Blackwell argued he did not have to testify because he was a "public official." His office also labeled the deposition notices as a form of "harassment." Without his testimony, and the ability to examine actual election records of a more detailed manner Moss v. Bush had little chance of proving what had really happened on November 2, 2004.

However, on March 21, 2005, Blackwell finally testified about the controversial 2004 election before the House Committee on Administration, chaired by then Representative Bob Ney. "While much as been written by the conspiracy theorists, I would like to point out that there has only been one complaint filed by the HAVA process," Blackwell said, referring to the Help America Vote Act, which was enacted by congress after Florida's 2000 election debacle. "I am interested in clean, fair and transparent elections."

"We had the most successful election on a punch card system ever," he continued. It's silly on its face to say there was systematic attempt to disenfranchise blacks in Franklin County ... We have to work very hard to make sure our system is fraud proof ... and that's what I found so offensive, that charges were made against a system by folks who didn't have the decency to check the facts ..."

Also testifying was an obscure Republican political operative serving as general counsel to a newly formed "voting righs" group, the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR). Mark F. "Thor" Hearne told the congressional committee that one of the reasons for the problems in Ohio was that the NAACP was bringing people with crack cocaine in order to entice them to register to vote. Hearne based his "testimony" on a lawsuit filed against the NAACP in wood County, Ohio "alleging fraudulent voter registration under the Ohio Corrupt Practices Act." he also wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice in March 2005 claiming there was "substantial evidence to suggest potential criminal wrongdoing by organizations such as Americans Coming Together (ACT), ACORN and the NAACP--Project Vote." Hearne turned out to be the former national general council for Bush-Cheney '04, and had no history of working in a voting rights organization.

The Republican state legislature used this "voter fraud" spin to introduce the draconian Ohio House Bill 3, which became law in times for the 2006 elections. While HB 3's most publicized provision required voters to show ID before casting a ballot, it also opened voter registration activists to criminal prosecution, exempted electronic voting machines from public scrutiny, quintupled the cost of citizen-requested statewide recounts, and made it illegal to challenge a presidential vote count or any federal election result in Ohio. In addition, HB 3 reduced voter rolls by ordering county boards of elections to send cards to registered voters every two years. If a card came back as undelivered, the voter was forced to rely on a provisional ballot.

As the League of Women Voters put it in a letter to Republican legislative leaders, "Its [HB 3's] purported purpose of preventing voter fraud is based on the fallacy that there was widespread fraud perpetrated by voters in Ohio. In fact, the fraud was committed against Ohio voters by inadequate preparation that suppressed the votes of those whose registrations were not recorded correctly, those who could not wait for hours to vote or those whose votes were not counted because of misdirection of mishandling."

******

In June 2005, the Democratic National Committee released an "investigative" report, "Democracy at Risk: the 2004 Election in Ohio." Although the report conceded that the African-American vote was suppressed, it downplayed the extent, stating that African-American voters waited an average of fifty-two minutes in line, compared to eighteen minutes on average for white voters. In addition, the report said nothing about precinct-by-precinct illegalities --including unguarded ballots and election machine tampering -- an unexplained bogus Homeland Security alert in Warren County Ohio, or the firing of a whistle-blowing election board official. It also ignored the discrepancies between exit polls that gave George W. Bush a second term. In response to the report, John Tanner, Chief of the Voting Section of the U.S. Department of Justice, issued a June 29, 2005 letter denying that there was any suppression of black votes in Ohio.

However a report released by the Government Accountability Office in September 2005 demonstrated the fragility of the system on which the election of 2004 had been decided. Representative Conyers had asked the GAO to investigate electronic voting machines as they were used during the 2004 presidential election, and the organization's final report stated, among other issues, that :

* Some electronic voting machines "did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected."
* "It was possible to alter the files that define how a ballot looks and works so that the votes for one candidate could be recorded for a different candidate." Numerous sworn statements and affidavits asserted that this did happen in Ohio in 2004.
* "Vendors installed uncertified versions of voting system software at the local level."
* Access to the voting network was easily compromised because not all the digital recording electronic voting systems (DREs) had supervisory functions that were password-protected, so access to one machine provided access to the whole network.
* Access to the voting network was also compromised by repeated use of the same user IDs combined with easily guessed passwords.
* the locks protecting access to the system were easily picked and keys were simple to copy.
* Problems with the security protocols and background screening practices for vending personnel.
* One DRE model was shown to have been networked in such a rudimentary fashion that a power failure on one machine would cause the entire network to fail. Also cited in "Proving Election Fraud: Phantom Voters, Uncounted Votes, and the National Exit Poll By Richard Charnin

 a voting machine in Mahoning county recorded a negative 25 million votes for Kerry. The problem was allegedly fixed.

(Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" 2008 p.192-7)

Moss v. Bush moves on and movement continues 01/13/2005

Just prior to the scheduled September 3, 2006 destruction date for the 2004 presidential ballots, Ohio election protection activities won a landmark court battle to preserve the election records in King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association et. al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell. Finally, the 2004 votes in Ohio would be accurately counted. In addition, the election of a Democratic and pro-election reform Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, had Heartened the voting rights community. In a bold first act, Brunner forced the resignation of the entire Cuyahoga County Board of Elections after two board members were convicted for rigging the 2004 recount.

While things looked promising initially, that promise disappeared quickly when voting rights activists learned of the illegal destruction of the federally protected 2004 election materials by fifty-six of Ohio's eighty-eight counties. In all, 1.6 million cast and uncast 2004 ballots were destroyed.

Every county had a unique excuse for the destruction. Hancock County said it had "received verbal directions" from then Secretary of State Blackwell's office that unused and soiled ballots "did not have to be retained and these items were destroyed." But any election audit requires a complete set of used an unused ballots to ensure that the unused ballots weren't stuffed illegally into the ballot box. Putnam County apparently understood this all too clearly, which is why they informed Brunner that, "all unused ballots were destroyed for security purposes." Clermont County "could not locate" the unused ballots, according to Mike Keeley, Director of the county's Board of Elections. Butler County could not provide its "2004 General Election Ballot Pages," because "our staff unintentionally discarded boxes containing Ballot Pages as requested in Directive 2007-07 due to unclear and misinterpreted instructions," said Butler BOE Director Betty McGary. (For complex reasons having to do with Ohio's precinct ballot rotation law, the ballots from Butler County could not be recounted with the Ballot Pages missing.) Holmes County BOE Director Lisa Welch wrote Brunner that, "a shelving unit collapsed in the Board of Elections storeroom on the morning of Friday, April 7, 2006. that shelving unit held the voted ballots, stubs, soiled and defaced ballot envelopes, and ballot accounting charts from the 2004 General Election. The shelves and stored items collapsed onto a side table holding a working coffee maker. The carafe on the coffee maker was full at the time of the incident. many of the stored items had to be destroyed due to the broken glass and hot coffee."

Allen County "labeled all voted ballots and placed [them] in our vault for the required 22 months of storage," said Keith Cunningham, director of the country's Board of Elections. However, Cunningham told the Secretary of State that in the "... latter part of 2004 and into 2005 ... [we] began to experience problems with storm water migrating and subsequently penetrating our primary storage areas including our vault." He later told Free Press reporter Paddy Shaffer that the vault had been flooding for "six years," and he had put the 2004 presidential ballots on the floor because he needed the shelf space. "As a result of these events "Cunningham said, "much of what was stored in our vault, including the 2004 general election ballots, were compromised by water damage and subsequently destroyed on or about August 20, 2006. Pursuant to the recommendations of the Allen County Health Department the boxes displaying mold or mildew were set aside to be discarded. Unfortunately the contractor hired to remove the damaged boxes also accidentally removed the undamaged boxes as well."

Guernsey County's ballots suffered a similar twisted fate. According to BOE Director Jacqueline Newhart, "the unused ballots as well as the punch card ballot pages were destroyed in error" because "the county maintenance worker, when collecting trash, picked up the boxes" that contained them. In Mahoning County, the Board of Elections blamed environmentalists for inadvertently destroying the ballots. Apparently the "Manoning County Green Team picked up all recyclables in the storage room for disposal pursuant to the retention schedule," according to BOE Director Thomas McCabe. As a result, some 115,936 ballots "were accidentally disposed of on Friday, march 23 of 2007." down in Hamilton County (Cincinnati), home of the Taft family dynasty, both used and unused ballots were "inadvertently shredded between January 19th and 26th of '06." (Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" 2008 p.202-3)

Ohio Secretary of State confirms 2004 election could have been stolen by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman 12/14/2007

Ohio 2004 Election case study by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman 08/17/2017

The Perils of Naive Reform: A Second Look At Federal Election Law Nancy Tobi

......

Rise of the Machine

The media painted the contested 2000 election as a problem of butterfly ballots and pregnant chads, incessantly playing video clips of Florida election officials staring at computer punch cards trying to discern the "intent" of the voter. Americans were told that paper ballots had caused the chaos in Florida, and that HAVA would fix the problem. As part of the "fix," nearly $3 billion was distributed to the states to buy electronic voter registration databases and computerized voting machines. consequently, the number of votes counted by computers went from 40% in 2000, to 70% in 2004, to 80% in 2006, This change was cataclysmic for election system, and officials have continued to this day to struggle with the transformation of familiar and manageable low-tech elections to the complex high-tech theatre wrought by HAVA.

The destabilizing effect on American's mechanism of democracy has been substantial. In addition to causing shortages of poll workers, who with an average age of seventy-two years, are averse to the complexities of e-voting, today's "techno-elections" have harmed the ability of public officials to independently administer elections without the support of the e-voting industry. As a result, corporate voting company employees have become part of the election process, assisting poll workers in the use of voting equipment, administering "fixes" when the equipment malfunctions, and keeping voting data and election results in "black Box" secret vaults, far from public scrutiny. A Republican House attorney involved in the drafting of HAVA once remarked to me that, "They are trying to complexify our elections to the point where citizens have no idea what is going on."

Election Reform Alchemy: From "Right To Vote" To "Opportunity to verify a Voting Machine"

The cornerstone of HAVA are elections that are designed to adhere to technology, rather than voter needs. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the now normative vocabulary of election reform: "verifiable voting." HAVA states that a voting system must "permit the voter to verify (in a private and independent manner) the votes selected by the voter on the ballot before the ballot is cast and counted." However, if a voter marks an "X" next to a candidates name on a paper ballot, they don't need to "verify" their choice; a voter only needs to "verify" his vote when it has been marked and/or counted by a computer. In HAVA alchemy, our Constitutional right to vote has been transformed into the opportunity to verify a voting machine's vote. As a result, many election reformers now believe that giving voters the opportunity to verify voting machines, and election officials the opportunity to audit those machines, equates to the right to vote. Indeed, the verifiable voting movement has spawned an entire cottage industry of election reform minded computer scientists and statisticians who devise elaborate protocols to support the "verifiability" and "auditability" of technology-based elections. The net result is that verifiable voting is turning voters and election official officials into quality control agents for the e-voting industry. The problem is further exacerbated when computerized voting systems are privately owned and controlled by corporations claiming proprietary trade secrecy for the software counting our votes. Despite the inherently false premise of verifiable voting, it ahs become the clarion call for twenty-first century election reform, as Congress, the Election Assistance Commission, and activists have all jumped on board. (Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" 2008 p.218-9)

The Department of Justice Whistles "Dixie" Steven Rosenfeld

But while Democrats like Tubbs Jones were looking back at 2004, Republicans were looking ahead at shaping the future electorate to their advantage. The hearing was notable because it signaled the start of a renewed Republican campaign to highlight “voter fraud” as an issue needing legislative redress. The assertions and responses that unfolded that day would be heard in many states in 2005 and 2006 as GOP-majority legislatures “dealt” with the issue. Ohio Republican Representative Kevin DeWine spoke of a proposed voter ID law — which would later pass — and suggested that the Legislature’s concern was not whether the law would pass, but how tough it should be. The state also added strict new rules for mass voter registration drives early in 2005, which were overturned in federal court in February 2008, and later passed a bill facilitating Election Day challenges to individual voters. Ohio Republican State Senator Jeff Jacobson said that these laws were needed to stop “fraudulent registrations” because national groups “are paid to come in and end up registering Mickey Mouse …. The millions of dollars that poured in, in an attempt to influence Ohio, is not normal.”

What Jacobson said was true, though lacking in context. Groups like ACORN and Americans Coming Together had registered millions of new voters in battleground states before the 2004 election, and some of ACORN’s staff — i.e. temporary workers — had filed a handful of registration forms with fabricated names. ACORN discovered the error, alerted the authorities and prosecutions ensued. While those mistakes were cited by politicians like Jacobson as evidence of a national voter fraud crisis, others, such as Norman Robbins, a Case Western University professor and co-coordinator of the Greater Cleveland Voter Coalition, urged the House panel to look at the facts and keep the issue in perspective:

“We desperately need research on all of the issues raised today,” he said. “For instance, what are the real causes and effects of the long lines? How many voters were actually disenfranchised? How long did they take to vote? That would be one set of questions. Does showing an ID increase the reliability of the vote or does it disenfranchise people? Those are answerable questions. How many people truly have been convicted of election fraud? What do we really know about this in terms of cases and conditions.”

To answer those questions, the committee chairman, Republican Bob Ney — who has since been convicted and jailed on bribery charges — turned to a long-time Republican operative, Mark “Thor” Hearne, who introduced himself as an “advocate of voter rights and an attorney experienced in election law.” Hearne, a lawyer based in St. Louis, certainly was experienced. In 2000, he had worked for the Bush campaign in Florida during the presidential recount. He was also the Vice President of Election Education for the Republican National Lawyers Association, which helps the party train partisan poll monitors. In 2004, he became counsel to the Bush-Cheney campaign, where he “worked with White House presidential advisor Karl Rove and the Republican National Committee to identify potential voting fraud in battleground states … and oversaw more than 65 different lawsuits that concerned the outcome of the election.”8 After 2004, “with encouragement from Rove and the White House, Hearne founded the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR), which represented itself as a nonpartisan watchdog group looking for voting fraud.” The group would go on to urge federal and state officials to prosecute voter fraud, adopt tougher voter ID laws and purge voter rolls. It would also file legal briefs in voter ID cases, urging tighter regulations.

Hearne presented the panel with a report suggesting that fraudulent registrations were threatening U.S. elections. The report listed problems in Ohio cities with sizeable African-American populations — the state’s Democratic strongholds. Nationally, ACVR would use the same approach to identify other voter fraud “hot spots.”

A national pattern

Though the facts were slim, Republicans across the country acted as if a voter fraud crisis was rampant. As a result, Republican-controlled legislatures in Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin passed new voter ID requirements after the 2004 election, although gubernatorial vetoes or court orders nullified these laws in every state except for Indiana. (In January 2008, the Supreme Court heard a challenge to Indiana’s voter ID law.) Meanwhile, two states with Republican-majority legislatures — Florida and Ohio — made voter registration drives more difficult by raising penalties for errors on registration forms, as well as shortening the timeline for organizers to submit these forms — which prevents these groups from checking the registrations for accuracy and completeness. Litigation and court rulings reversed those laws before the 2006 election, but not before the League of Women Voters was forced to halt registration drives in Florida for the first time in the group’s 75-year history. In Ohio, where ACORN was registering approximately 5,000 new voters per week, those efforts were suspended during the litigation, meaning an estimated 30,000 people were not given the opportunity to register.

Since 2004, five other states have imposed new restrictions on voter registration drives — Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, New Mexico and Missouri — according to research by Project Vote, which has worked with the Brennan Center for Justice to challenge these laws. To date, these laws still remain on the books in Missouri and New Mexico. “It’s no secret who these restrictions affect,” wrote Michael Slater, Project Vote’s deputy director, in the October 2007 issue of The National Voter, a publication of the League of Women Voters. “In 2004, 15 percent of all African-American and Latino voters were registered to vote as a result of an organized drive; an African-American or Latino voter was 65 percent more likely to have been registered to vote by an organized drive than a White voter. In the final analysis, spurious allegations of voter fraud give rise to yet more roadblocks on the path to full participation in political life for historically disadvantaged Americans.”

These state-level responses to voter fraud did not occur in a vacuum. Since the creation of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department a half-century ago, the federal government has had great power and influence over how states implement voting rights. But by early 2005, the same mindset shared by GOP legislators in Ohio and other states, and by vote fraud activists like Hearne, could also be found among the Bush administration’s senior appointees overseeing voting rights at the DOJ.

Just four days before the 2004 election, the Department’s civil rights chief, Assistant Attorney General Alex Acosta, wrote to a federal judge in Cincinnati who was deciding whether to allow the Ohio Republican Party to challenge the credentials of 23,000 mostly African-American voters. Acosta supported the voter challenges, saying an order to block them could undermine the enforcement of state and federal voting laws. The challenges, Acosta wrote, “help strike a balance between ballot access and ballot integrity.” The voter challenges were allowed to go forward, although the final judicial ruling came too late for Ohio’s Republican Party to deploy thousands of party members to local precincts to challenge voter credentials.

Another sign of the Department’s shift from its historic mission of enfranchising voters to a new “selective enforcement” mindset could also be seen by 2005 when a coalition of voting rights groups failed to convince the Department to enforce the law that requiring states to offer welfare recipients the opportunity to register to vote. “In January 2005, we had a 10-year report, which documented the 59 percent decline [in registrations] from 1995 through 2004,” said Scott Novakowski of the center-left think tank Demos. He added that many states, including Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Tennessee, were ignoring the registration requirements for welfare recipients. “John Conyers [now the House Judiciary Committee chairman] and 29 other representatives asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to look into this, and there was no response.”

The political stakes in registering low-income voters are enormous. The Election Assistance Commission’s biennial voter registration report for 2005-2006 found that while 16.6 million new registration applications were received by state motor vehicles agencies, only 527,752 applications came from public assistance offices — a 50 percent drop from 2003-2004. As a result, in early 2005, voting rights groups met with the DOJ’s top Voting Section officials — including Hans Von Spakovsky, counsel to the assistant attorney general overseeing the Voting Section, and Voting Section Chief Joseph Rich — to discuss enforcing the public assistance requirement. Von Spakovsky, like ACVR’s Hearne, had worked for Bush in Florida during the 2000 recount and was among a handful of GOP appointees who were established “vote fraud” activists. Rich, a Civil Rights Division attorney for thirty-seven years, had been chief of the Voting Section for six years when he resigned in April 2005, citing politicization of voting rights enforcement.

Rich recalled the meeting about the voter registration requirements, saying that Von Spakovsky — who had become his de facto boss — decided to ignore that part of the law, and instead focus on one line in the statute that allowed the Justice Department to pressure states to purge voter rolls. “Four months before I left, in 2005, Von Spakovsky held a meeting where he said he wanted to start an initiative for states we want to purge … Their priority was to purge, not to register voters … To me, it was a very clear view of the Republican agenda … to make it harder to vote: purge voters and don’t register voters.”

The Bush Administration Voting Section

Rich was one of a number of career attorneys at the DOJ Voting Section who resigned because pressure from the Bush administration had altered the agency’s historic civil rights mission. Between 2005 and 2007, 55 percent of the attorneys in the Voting Section left, according to a report by NYU’s Brennan Center and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which cited, among other things, a “partisan hiring process,” “altered performance evaluations” and “political retaliation on the job.” The shift in enforcement philosophy did not go unnoticed. In July 2006, The Boston Globe reported that the Civil Rights Division had turned away from hiring lawyers with civil rights movement backgrounds. Of the nineteen attorneys hired since 2003, The Globe reported, eleven were members of the conservative Federalist Society, Republican National Lawyers Association, or had volunteered for Bush-Cheney campaigns. Moreover, the Voting Section had virtually stopped filing suits on behalf of minority voters. Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, told the House Judiciary Committee on March 22, 2007 that, “The Voting Section did not file any cases on behalf of African-American voters during a five-year period between 2001 and 2006,” adding that, “no cases have been brought on behalf of Native American voters for the entire administration.” While the Justice Department had all but stopped filing lawsuits on behalf of Native and African-Americans, the Voting Section had more than doubled the number of lawsuits seeking to enforce the providing of bilingual ballots and election materials in Latino and Asian communities, constituencies that were seen as likely Republican swing votes, particularly after the GOP made electoral gains among Latinos in 2004. (Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" 2008 p.228-33)

The Department of Justice Whistles "Dixie" Steven Rosenfeld

(Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" 2008 p.)

(Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" 2008 p.)

(Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" 2008 p.)

Fake voting rights activists and groups linked to White House 12/30/2005

Brad Blog including numerous articles about voter fraud in Cuyahoga County Ohio

Was the 2004 Election Stolen? Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House byRobert F. Kennedy Jr. 06/01/2006

The Mysterious Case of Ohio's Voting Machines 03/26/2008

Recounting Ohio Was Ohio stolen? You might not like the answer. November 2005 By Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman, and Steve Rosenfeld.

Blowback from Ohio's 2004 Stolen Election is Escalating 03/20/2007

Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, an American Political Tradition, 1742-2004 by Tracy Campbell 2005

What Happened in Ohio?: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election 2006

Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?: Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count By Steven F. Freeman, Joel Bleifuss 2006

The Myth of the Hacker-Proof Voting Machine New York Times 02/21/2018

How ACORN Was Framed: Political Controversy and Media Agenda Setting Sept 2010

Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN was in the News, and What the News Got Wrong Sept. 2009

Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" 2008 Groundbreaking New Book Documents Widespread Election Fraud 04/25/2008

Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?: Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and ... By Steven F. Freeman, Joel Bleifuss

Was the Presidential Election Stolen? 06/19/2006 BY Joel Bleifuss

How to Rig an Election The G.O.P. aims to paint the country red By Victoria Collier November 2012 P. 1

How to Rig an Election The G.O.P. aims to paint the country red By Victoria Collier November 2012 P. 9

How to Rig an Election The G.O.P. aims to paint the country red By Victoria Collier November 2012 PDF

(Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" PDF 2008 p.207-15, 242-7)

New York Times: The Myth of the Hacker-Proof Voting Machine 02/21/2018

Georgia: The Epicenter of America’s Corrupted Electronic Elections 06/29/2018

Many Electronic Voting Machines Are Not Secure. One County Is Trying To Fix That 05/13/2018

Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine 2007 or later . For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities—a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab.

The Vulnerabilities of Our Voting Machines 11/01/2018

(Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" 2008 p.)

(Mark Crispin Miller "Loser Take All" 2008 p.)