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2004 Presidential Election Stolen?« Thread Started on Oct 1,

Daily newsbrief journal for October 2006, also see http://www.usdemocrats.com/brief for a global 100-page perpetual brief and follow twitter @usdemocrats


2004 Presidential Election Stolen?« Thread Started on Oct 1,

Postby admin » Fri Jan 27, 2012 10:30 am

2004 Presidential Election Stolen?« Thread Started on Oct 1, 2006, 3:27am » --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Interview: Professor Steven F. Freeman, Co-Author of Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?September 30, 2006Larry SakinWas the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?: Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official CountWith the 2006 Midterm elections just weeks away, many progressives have expressed a fear over possible manipulation of the vote by conservative republicans. Hundreds of scholarly articles and semi-scientific studies have been published this year alone which take a hard look at elections, presidential exit polling, and the technology used to record votes.Steven Freeman, a Visiting Scholar and Affiliated Faculty in the Center for Organizational Dynamics at University of Pennsylvania, and co-author Joel Bleifuss, editor of In These Times Magazine, recently published Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?: Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count on Seven Stories Press. The book is a fascinating analysis of election polling, and the flawed Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) machines deployed in several states with funds provided by the 2001 Help America Vote Act. I interviewed Professor Freeman by phone and on the internet.Larry Sakin: In the first chapter of your book, Was the 2004 Presidential Elections Stolen? President Bush seems very worried about the election outcome. If the Republicans stole the election, why would Bush be so concerned?Steve Freeman: Good question. We included this anecdote because it happened on Election Day, involved exit polls, President Bush, was well sourced, and consistent with other evidence (e.g., we confirmed that Election Day broadcasts in the critical battleground state of Florida were in fact cancelled). Throughout the book we tried to present all relevant data whether it directly supported our main findings or seemed to contradict them. A reader might infer that the anecdote suggests that the Bush/Cheney campaign did not steal the election or that if they did, George Bush did not know about it. On the other hand, it also indicates that the president, who is after all a highly seasoned politician, was deeply concerned about the exit polls. Most of all, the story brings us back to Election Day 2004, when it seemed clear that, of course, the exit polls and corollary indicators (high turnout, low approval ratings) were right. All knowledgeable observers understood it. Tony Blair went to bed believing that Kerry had won. Even George Bush understood it. Our source’s account suggests that Bush was furious because he had been assured that he would win. He may not have understood, forgotten, or been temporarily confused he was going to win*despite* the exit polls and corollary indicators, indeed despite how people cast their ballots. The source was equally clear that his political operative Karl Rove calmly assured him everything would be okay. And this is consistent with other reports. Despite widespread Election Day predictions that Kerry had won, the Bush/Cheney campaign team remained highly confident. According to reports from their campaign headquarters, this confidence was based on their “on-the-ground intelligence,” the details of which have never been explained.Sakin: You write extensively about the long poll lines and lack of voting machines in heavily Democratic areas in various places across the country. What measures can voter integrity activists take to counteract these problems?Freeman: There is clear evidence that Ken Blackwell, Ohio’s Secretary of State, held voting machines in warehouses to create long lines in Democratic strongholds. Blackwell is now running for Governor, while continuing to serve as Secretary of State; in other words, he’s overseeing the counting of votes in his own election.I’d like to note though, that in my analyses, I have not dwelt at length on long poll lines and lack of voting machines in heavily Democratic areas. In the book, we do document these instances in part to show what the Bush/Cheney campaign did to manipulate results and Democratic weakness in standing up for their constituencies. But many elections have been manipulated through obstacles to registration, differential treatment of absentee ballots by county and demographic group, artificially long lines and other voting mishaps in poor precincts, and disproportionate vote “spoilage,” wherein poor precincts can “lose” ten percent or more of the votes that are cast despite these other obstacles. Unfortunately, these obstacles and inequities have been institutionalized in our system. So successful are vote suppression efforts that the US ranks # 139 out of 172 nations in the world in Federal election turnout, below such hotbeds of democracy such as Burma/Myanmar and the Central African Republic. Moreover, this ranking is based on turnout; recall that in the US about 2% of ballots cast are also lost; if it were a ranking based on percentage of votes counted, the US would rank even lower yet. When I have asked whether the election was stolen, I am not talking about these suppressed votes. If the election were won through such tactics, it would be unjust and undemocratic and even unprecedented in scale of sophistication, but not new. If such were the case, we might simply say that the Bush/Cheney campaign “stole it fair and square” because such tricks are part of the game, and that Democrats are complicit because for decades such tricks have helped white and “moderate” Democrats win primary battles and maintain control of the party. What we are saying is they did not steal it fair and square. Rather, that even by the rules of the game, which amount to something like a hockey game played on a 15 degree incline, Bush/Cheney still couldn’t win; and that had the votes been counted as cast, Kerry would have won the presidency with something on the order of a six million vote plurality. In short, the official count is off by something on the order of nine million votes! What can be done? Activists at the local level can advocate for more voting machines in their precincts. But that is not enough. Unless we can ensure that votes are counted as cast, efforts at ensuring the right to vote are cruelly in vain. Paper ballots not only provide a measure of integrity, they remove the expense that is the excuse for shortages. Paper ballots provide an audit trail to check the integrity of the machine count and permit a manual count as necessary. And paper ballots, whether counted manually or by optical scan machines, are far less costly than Direct Record Electronic (DRE) machines.Direct Record Electronic (DRE) machines are almost universally opposed by computer scientists. As anyone who has read my book, Bev Harris’ reporting in Black Box Voting, or recent studies from NYU, Princeton, and John Hopkins Universities will understand, voting on DRE machines is a “faith-based” exercise. Moreover, the companies to whom we entrust the count have done nothing to justify any faith whatsoever. In fact, it was just the opposite. Where despite all logic, evidence, and expert counsel, DRE machines are used anyway, voters should demand absentee ballots. Absentee ballots are far from ideal – traditionally, they are the most common source of election fraud. Such ballots have been cavalierly lost, rejected, and discarded in Florida and elsewhere. Absentee ballots also obviate some verification measures such as Election Day turnout, exit polls and general activity. But they are the lesser of two evils. Sakin: You make a [case] for the accuracy of exit polling, but many well regarded pollsters have publicly disagreed with the idea that exit polling as an absolute measure for predicting election results. Why is there such a wide chasm of thought on this issue?Freeman: There is not a wide chasm of thought on this issue among well regarded pollsters. Most respected pollsters would concur that exit polls properly conducted will closely mirror how voters do, in fact, cast their ballots. Many commentators have recently sought for political or professional purposes to discredit exit polls. In the past few elections exit polls have received unwarranted bad publicity. This is unfortunate because exit polls since the late 1960s have overall been extremely reliable and served us well, providing us with extensive information on how and why Americans vote as they do. No college class on electoral behavior could be taught without the valuable information provided by exit poll data. In 2000, exit polls were attacked because results indicated that Gore had defeated Bush in Florida by more than seven percentage points. Yet, though Bush won the state, even the president’s supporters generally acknowledge that a plurality of Florida’s voters intended to vote for Gore. “Anomalies” such as flawed ballots and counting processes disproportionately disqualified Gore votes. In 2002, exit poll results were never reported or released at all because the pollsters “lost all confidence in the polls,” perhaps due in part to discrepancies with official counts in a slew of surprising Republican victories that enabled the GOP to gain control of the Senate.In 2004 exit polls were especially attacked because the Presidential election exit poll results differed from “actual” results like literally never before. In Ohio, a state that would have given Kerry the White House, exit poll results deviated from official results by eleven percentage points, that is to say, exit poll data indicates that Bush did not win by 120,000 votes, but rather lost by 500,000.And even while the polls are being disparaged here, they are used throughout the world to verify the integrity of the count. In democracies with hand-counted paper ballots such as Germany and the United Kingdom, exit polls predict the outcome of national elections with extreme accuracy. Around the world, exit polls have been used to verify the integrity of elections, and discrepancies between exit polls and the official vote count have been used to successfully overturn election results in Peru, Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine. At the same time that Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie was saying, "I would encourage the media to abandon exit surveys on Election Day,” the administration was paying for exit polls in the Ukraine to help ensure that any fraud committed would be exposed.Foreign nations aside, pollsters and political scientists who have spent their career analyzing election results are highly resistant to any suggestion that the official tally is questionable. The official count is their North Star, without which their analyses are lost. In fact, when they are “wrong,” they try to “correct” their data and analysis so as to conform to the official numbers. Moreover, in today’s political climate, any suggestion of the possibility of a corrupted count will be attacked as a partisan bias, and if exit pollsters are perceived as partisan, they will never see another media contract.For my part, I have never treated exit polls as an absolute measure for predicting election results. Moreover, no one I know has said that the discrepancy itself indicates that Kerry must have really won the election. Rather, the evidence that cast doubts on the election results come from diverse sources. The exit polls have never been cited as primary evidence of fraud, but only as a reason to take that primary evidence to heart. US Representative John Conyers, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee and author of the foreword to our book says the discrepancy is "but one indicia or warning that something may have gone wrong — either with the polling or with the election." The discrepancy is an undisputed fact. The question thus becomes, “What caused it?” Those who defend the election say that Bush voters must have participated in the polls at a lower rate than Kerry voters did. This presumption has never been substantiated by any data or even coherent theory. In fact, the data that has been made available by the pollsters not only fail to validate the presumption, they undermine it entirely.All indicators on poll participation suggest not lower, but slightly higher response rates among Bush voters. For example, if Bush voters were responding at lower rates, then response rates should be lower in precincts where Bush voters predominated as compared to Kerry precincts. The opposite is true. Response rates in Bush precincts are slightly higher, not lower.Whereas we could find no evidence regarding lower participation of Bush voters, we observed more than a dozen indicators of a corrupted count. I’ll mention just two of them. First, consider: If you are going to steal an election you go after votes most vigorously where they are most needed. In this case, the 11 swing states where the election was close. As it turns out, even though there is no reason why exit polls should be more or less accurate in key states, the discrepancy is significantly higher in the swing states than other states and significantly higher yet in the three critical battleground states of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania.If fraud were afoot, it would also make sense that the president's men would steal votes in their strongholds, where they control the machinery of government and few people would be in a position to challenge the result. Lo and behold, we learn that in those precincts where Bush won 80 percent or more of the vote, the average disparity between the exit poll predictions and the official count was a whopping 10 percentage points. In these Bush strongholds, Kerry received only about two-thirds of the votes that voters said they cast for him. Sakin: One of the main problems in the 2004 election was with DRE [voting machines] recording votes inaccurately. You wrote that there was no way for officials to check the machines after the fact to ensure the quality of the vote count. Mark Crispin Miller charges in his book “Fooled Again” that the internal logs could have been checked, but elections officials refused to do so. Can internal logs show how someone voted, or only how the machine recorded a vote?Freeman: In principle, internal logs show only how the machine recorded a vote. A Princeton group demonstrated last week that in 1 minute they could modify the software in a voting machine in a way that left no trace, and even erased itself, automatically restoring the original software after the election was ended. Machine experts may, however, be well able to detect some kinds of fraud. It depends on the skill and care with which the voting machines were hacked. After a two-year lawsuit in Alaska, machine records from the 2004 election have recently been released, and they reveal massive disparities with the totals recorded at the county level.That is why some election integrity advocates requested machine logs and access to machines. Statistical analysis and polling data suggest large anomalies in precincts throughout the country. For example, in Snohomish County, Washington there was an unusual situation wherein two thirds of the residents voted on paper and one third on machines. We learned that the Democratic Gubernatorial Christine Gregoire won on paper (a result confirmed by the recount); but that Republican Dino Rossi won big on electronic voting machines, bigger yet in precincts where machines were serviced shortly before the election, and by 50% on machines which had to be removed for overt malfunction. That election's officials permit voting machine companies to refuse access to machines even when presented with such damning evidence, begins to illustrate the extent to which our election system has been degraded and corrupted.Sakin: On the same subject, Diebold and other DRE manufacturers are unwilling to share their programming codes under the rubric of these codes being “proprietary information.” Are there any manufacturers offering machines which offer their codes in the public domain and if so, are they getting any state contracts?Freeman: The Open Voting Consortium has recently developed a system that is in the public domain, and offers opportunities for inspection at all levels as shields against fraud but they say that they need $1.5 million to fund project completion, including certification. Athan Gibbs had raised and spent in excess of $2 million developing and certifying his TruVote Voter Validation and Verification System, which was dedicated to verified counts and which provided two separate voting receipts. The Microsoft-backed system had been tested and certified by the National Association of State Election Directors, was approved for sale in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Ohio, and was under review throughout the country, when Gibbs met an untimely demise. In March 2004, Gibbs was killed when his vehicle collided with an 18-wheeled truck which rolled his Chevy Blazer several times and forced it over the highway retaining wall where it came to rest on its roof. Even if the big three of Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia, or some other company were to sell electronic voting machines with open code, it would hardly represent a satisfactory answer. While a big improvement over the current situation, open code is still vulnerable to hacking because it is unlikely that investigators could detect a single vote-altering line buried within a million lines of programming code. Even with open code, “Easter eggs” could easily change an election’s outcome.In a voting machine, such code would do nothing until Election Day, when it would change how votes were recorded. Such code could be loaded into a voting machine in many ways: in the voting software itself, in the tools that assemble the software (complier, liner and loader), or in the tools the program depends on (database, operating system scheduler, memory management and graphical-user-interface controller). Easter eggs could be activated by the real-time clocks that are curiously mandated by HAVA for all new voting machines. It would not be difficult to devise a secure paper-based voting system. The obstacles are not technological, but political. There are many systems incomparably superior to extant ones. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a worse system than what we have, unless one's intent is to control the outcome of elections. But the only way to consider election systems on their merits and demerits would be to somehow spur the public to action, a promethean task given a vacuous mass media, the Democrats reluctance to contest questionable election results, and an over-cautious class of professionals easily veered into comfortable, non-controversial pathways. If massive evidence of a stolen presidential election is insufficient to even elicit barks from these watchdogs, then it's hard to imagine how a technical discussion on voting system merits will somehow do so. In my opinion, the best chance we have of seeing fair elections in this country is for independent journalists and voter activists to continue communicating the outrages of our current system, beginning with what transpired in the 2004 presidential election and carrying through to concerns about the critical elections of 2006 and 2008. Sakin: If Democrats win big in the 2006 midterms, will voter integrity issues fall off the progressive’s radar screen?Freeman: Given what we have found about shortcomings in election integrity, I would be shocked if the Democrats win big no matter how unpopular the Republicans are. I cannot say what will be on anyone’s radar screen. Indeed, when I embarked on this investigation, I never in a million years would have imagined that massive, compelling evidence of a stolen presidential election could be treated so cavalierly.read at source: http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/09/30/100800.php
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