Was The Vote Hacked?
Evidence mounts that it was writes Thom Hartmann at Common Dreams:
When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat."It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.
And some believe evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.
The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.
While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking ñ the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.
In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.
In Dixie County, with 9,676 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.
The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.
Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had earlier reported that county size was a variable ñ this turns out not to be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)
Good thing Olbermann says that "no Presidential candidateís concession speech is legally binding. The only determinants of the outcome of election are the reports of the state returns boards and the vote of the Electoral College." I guess that's why they're counting the ballots in secret in Ohio, as Olbermann reports:
...County Commissioners confirmed that they were acting on the advice of their Emergency Services Director, Frank Young. Mr. Young had explained that he had been advised by the federal government to implement the measures for the sake of Homeland Security.Gotcha. Tom Ridge thought Osama Bin Laden was planning to hit Caesar Creek State Park in Waynesville. During the vote count in Lebanon. Or maybe it was Kings Island Amusement Park that had gone Code-Orange without telling anybody. Al-Qaeda had selected Turtlecreek Township for its first foray into a Red State.
The State of Ohio confirms that of all of its 88 Counties, Warren alone decided such Homeland Security measures were necessary. Even in Butler County, reports the Enquirer, the media and others were permitted to watch through a window as ballot-checkers performed their duties. In Warren, the media was finally admitted to the lobby of the administration building, which may have been slightly less incommodious for the reporters, but which still managed to keep them two floors away from the venue of the actual count.
Nobody in Warren County seems to think theyíve done anything wrong. The newspaper quotes County Prosecutor Rachel Hurtzel as saying the Commissioners ìwere within their rightsî to lock the building down, because having photographers or reporters present could have interfered with the count.
You bet, Rachel.
To think I joked that the U.N. should have shipped in observers from ChilÈ to make sure there were no hijinks on election day. Turns out we could've used the Chileans -- and a few from Cuba, too.
It's Hanging Chads 2K4!
Jim Treacher at November 8, 2004 5:55 AM
Why are liberals so fascinated with the interior lives of the voting machines?
John O at November 8, 2004 12:12 PM
Olbermann debunked:
http://yalefreepress.blogspot.com/2004/11/keith-obermann-wheres-your-tin-foil.html
http://dbsoxblog.blogspot.com/2004_11_01_dbsoxblog_archive.html#110003266690538626
http://www.theneweditor.com/archiveFloridaandOhiovotes.html
Cridland at November 9, 2004 1:08 PM
Also, would readers of these comments please imagine their own snarky play on the theme of evidence being "mounted?" Very good. Thank you.
Cridland at November 9, 2004 1:11 PM