 |
New Civilization News: "Voting Problems in (Yup, You Guessed It)..." |
Category: Politics 5 comments 18 Nov 2005 @ 09:16 by jazzolog : The BradBlog EntryFor posterity I'd like to get this posted~~~ Brad Friedman The Staggeringly Impossible Results of Ohio's '05 Election Is this the Election that will finally break the camel's back? With so much going on, few have noticed the extraordinary outcome of last Tuesday's election in Ohio where the crooked state that brung you -- by hook and by crook -- a second term for George W. Bush may have turned in results so staggeringly impossible, that perhaps even the Mainstream Corporate Media (if only in Ohio?!) will have no choice but to look into it. As usual, the Free Press' heroic Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are on the case. Their article on what happened on ballot issues 1 through 5 last week is A MUST READ for anybody who still gives the slightest damn about whatever democracy might be left in America. I'll try to summarize here briefly. There were five initiatives on the ballot last week. Issue 1 was a controversial proposition for $2 billion in new state spending. The Christian Right was opposed (because some of the new funds might go to stem cell research), but otherwise, the Republican Governor Taft's Administration (he recently plead guilty to several counts of corruption) was pushing it hard alongside progressives in the state. The Columbus Dispatch's pre-election polling, which Fritrakis and Wasserman describe as "uncannily accurate for decades", called the race correctly within 1% of the final result. The margin of error for the poll was +/- 2.5% with a 95% confidence interval. On Issue 1, the Dispatch poll was right on the money. They predicted 53% in favor, the final result was 54% in favor. But then came Issues 2 through 5 put forward by http://ReformOhioNow.org -- a bi-partisan coalition pushing these four initiatives for Electoral Reform in the Buckeye State largely in response to their shameful '04 Election performance led by the extremely partisan Secretary of State (and Bush/Cheney '04 Co-Chair) J. Kenneth Blackwell. On those four issues, which Blackwell and the Christian Right were against, the final results were impossibly different -- and we mean impossibly! -- from both the Dispatch's final polling before the election and all reasoned common-sense... Now, you tell us...What could possibly explain such unheard of differences between the Dispatch's poll and the final results? Now, we'll tell you...This was the year that Ohio, under the encouragement and mandates of Blackwell, rolled out new Electronic Touch-Screen Voting Machines in 44 of its 88 counties...41 of them employeeing the same Diebold Touch-Screen Machines that California's Republican Sec. of State decertified in this state when 20% of them failed this summer in the largest test of its kind ever held. Those would be the very same Electronic Voting Machines which a recent GAO Report http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001940.htm (still unmentioned by a single wire-service or mainstream American newspaper http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001964.htm ) confirmed to be easily hackable. Will the absurdly skewed results from last Tuesday's Ohio Election finally light a fire under the media -- either nationally or just in Ohio alone -- to look into what the hell is going on here?! We remain hopeful...if not optimistic. The Free Press article is a must read, as mentioned, but we'll share their closing thoughts here on the possible reasons for the wildly unexplained discrepancy between the final polling and the final results which, as they posit, are due to either a completely inexplicable breakdown of the Dispatch's historically accurate polling methods wildly beyond the margin-of-error for all initiatives except Issue 1...or...somebody hacked that vote count: "If the latter is true, it can and will be done again, and we can forget forever about the state that has been essential to the election of every Republican presidential candidate since Lincoln. "And we can also, for all intents and purposes, forget about the future of American democracy." Anybody in the Mainstream Media ready to give a damn yet? 18 Nov 2005 @ 09:22 by jazzolog : And The Fitrakis/Wasserman Has American Democracy died an electronic death in Ohio 2005's referenda defeats? by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman November 11, 2005 While debate still rages over Ohio's stolen presidential election of 2004, the impossible outcomes of key 2005 referendum issues may have put an electronic nail through American democracy. Once again, the Buckeye state has hosted an astonishing display of electronic manipulation that calls into question the sanctity of America's right to vote, and to have those votes counted in this crucial swing state. The controversy has been vastly enhanced due to the simultaneous installation of new electronic voting machines in nearly half the state's 88 counties, machines the General Accountability Office has now confirmed could be easily hacked by a very small number of people. Last year, the US presidency was decided here. This year, a bond issue and four hard-fought election reform propositions are in question. Issue One on Ohio's 2005 ballot was a controversial $2 billion "Third Frontier" proposition for state programs ostensibly meant to create jobs and promote high tech industry. Because some of the money may seem destined for stem cell research, Issue One was bitterly opposed by the Christian Right, which distributed leaflets against it. The Issue was pushed by a Taft Administration wallowing in corruption. Governor Bob Taft recently pleaded guilty to misdemeanors stemming from golf outings he took with Tom Noe, the infamous Toledo coin dealer who has taken $4 million or more from the state. Taft entrusted Noe with some $50 million in investments for the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation, from which some $12 million is now missing. Noe has been charged with federal money laundering violations on behalf of the Bush-Cheney campaign. Taft's public approval ratings in Ohio are currently around 15%. Despite public fears the bond issue could become a glorified GOP slush fund, Issue One was supported by organized labor. A poll run on the front page of the Columbus Dispatch on Sunday, November 6, showed Issue One passing with 53% of the vote. Official tallies showed Issue One passing with 54% of the vote. The polling used by the Dispatch had wrapped up the Thursday before the Tuesday election. Its precision on Issue One was consistent with the Dispatch's historic polling abilities, which have been uncannily accurate for decades. This poll was based on 1872 registered Ohio voters, with a margin of error at plus/minus 2.5 percentage points and a 95% confidence interval. The Issue One outcome would appear to confirm the Dispatch polling operation as the state's gold standard. But Issues 2-5 are another story. The Dispatch's Sunday headline showed "3 issues on way to passage." The headline referred to Issues One, Two and Three. As mentioned, the poll was dead-on accurate for Issue One. Issues Two-Five were meant to reform Ohio's electoral process, which has been under intense fire since 2004. The issues were very heavily contested. They were backed by Reform Ohio Now, a well-funded bi-partisan statewide effort meant to bring some semblance of reliability back to the state's vote count. Many of the state's best-known moderate public figures from both sides of the aisle were prominent in the effort. Their effort came largely in response to the stolen 2004 presidential vote count that gave George W. Bush a second term and led to U.S. history's first Congressional challenge to the seating of a state's delegation to the Electoral College. Issue Two was designed to make it easier for Ohioans to vote early, by mail or in person. By election day, much of what it proposed was already put into law by the state legislature. Like Issue One, it was opposed by the Christian Right. But it had broad support from a wide range of Ohio citizen groups. In a conversation the day before the vote, Bill Todd, a primary official spokesperson for the opposition to Issues Two through Five, told attorney Cliff Arnebeck that he believed Issues Two and Three would pass. The November 6 Dispatch poll showed Issue Two passing by a vote of 59% to 33%, with about 8% undecided, an even broader margin than that predicted for Issue One. But on November 8, the official vote count showed Issue Two going down to defeat by the astonishing margin of 63.5% against, with just 36.5% in favor. To say the outcome is a virtual statistical impossibility is to understate the case. For the official vote count to square with the pre-vote Dispatch poll, support for the Issue had to drop more than 22 points, with virtually all the undecideds apparently going into the "no" column. The numbers on Issue Three are even less likely. Issue Three involved campaign finance reform. In a lame duck session at the end of 2004, Ohio's Republican legislature raised the limits for individual donations to $10,000 per candidate per person for anyone over the age of six. Thus a family of four could donate $40,000 to a single candidate. The law also opened the door for direct campaign donations from corporations, something banned by federal law since the administration of Theodore Roosevelt. The GOP measure sparked howls of public outrage. Though again opposed by the Christian Right, Issue Three drew an extremely broad range of support from moderate bi-partisan citizen groups and newspapers throughout the state. The Sunday Dispatch poll showed it winning in a landslide, with 61% in favor and just 25% opposed. Tuesday's official results showed Issue Three going down to defeat in perhaps the most astonishing reversal in Ohio history, claiming just 33% of the vote, with 67% opposed. For this to have happened, Issue Three's polled support had to drop 28 points, again with an apparent 100% opposition from the previously undecideds. The reversals on both Issues Two and Three were statistically staggering, to say the least. The outcomes on Issue Four and Five were slightly less dramatic. Issue Four meant to end gerrymandering by establishing a non-partisan commission to set Congressional and legislative districts. The Dispatch poll showed it with 31% support, 45% opposition, and 25% undecided. Issue Four's final margin of defeat was 30% in favor to 70% against, placing virtually all undecideds in the "no" column. Issue Five meant to take administration of Ohio's elections away from the Secretary of State, giving control to a nine-member non-partisan commission. Issue Five was prompted by Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell's administration of the 2004 presidential vote, particularly in light of his role as co-chair of Ohio's Bush-Cheney campaign. The Dispatch poll showed a virtual toss-up, at 41% yes, 43% no and 16% undecided. The official result gave Issue Five just 30% of the vote, with allegedly 70% opposed. But the Sunday Dispatch also carried another headline: "44 counties will break in new voting machines." Forty-one of those counties "will be using new electronic touch screens from Diebold Election System," the Dispatch added. Diebold's controversial CEO Walden O'Dell, a major GOP donor, made national headlines in 2003 with a fundraising letter pledging to deliver Ohio's 2004 electoral votes to Bush. Every vote in Ohio 2004 was cast or counted on an electronic device. About 15%---some 800,000 votes---were cast on electronic touchscreen machines with no paper trail. The number was about seven times higher than Bush's official 118,775-vote margin of victory. Nearly all the rest of the votes were cast on punch cards or scantron ballots counted by opti-scan devices---some of them made by Diebold---then tallied at central computer stations in each of Ohio's 88 counties. According to a recent General Accountability Office report, all such technologies are easily hacked. Vote skimming and tipping are readily available to those who would manipulate the vote. Vote switching could be especially easy for those with access to networks by which many of the computers are linked. Such machines and networks, said the GAO, had widespread problems with "security and reliability." Among them were "weak security controls, system design flaws, inadequate security testing, incorrect system configuration, poor security management and vague or incomplete voting system standards, among other issues." With the 2005 expansion of paperless touch-screen machines into 41 more Ohio counties, this year's election was more vulnerable than ever to centralized manipulation. The outcomes on Issues 2-5 would indicate just that. The new touchscreen machines were brought in by Blackwell, who had vowed to take the state to an entirely e-based voting regime. As in 2004, there were instances of chaos. In inner city, heavily Democratic precincts in Montgomery County, the Dayton Daily News reported: "Vote count goes on all night: Errors, unfamiliarity with computerized voting at heart of problem." Among other things, 186 memory cards from the e-voting machines went missing, prompting election workers in some cases to search for them with flashlights before all were allegedly found. In Tom Noe's Lucas County, Election Director Jill Kelly explained that her staff could not complete the vote count for 13.5 hours because poll workers "were not adequately trained to run the new machines." But none of the on-the-ground glitches can begin to explain the impossible numbers surrounding the alleged defeat of Issues Two through Five. The Dispatch polling has long been a source of public pride for the powerful, conservative newspaper, which endorsed Bush in 2004. The Dispatch was somehow dead accurate on Issue One, and then staggeringly wrong on Issues Two through Five. Sadly, this impossible inconsistency between Ohio's most prestigious polling operation and these final official referendum vote counts have drawn virtually no public scrutiny. Though there were glitches, this year's voting lacked the massive irregularities and open manipulations that poisoned Ohio 2004. The only major difference would appear to be the new installation of touchscreen machines in those additional 41 counties. And thus the possible explanations for the staggering defeats of Issues Two through Five boil down to two: either the Dispatch polling---dead accurate for Issue One---was wildly wrong beyond all possible statistical margin of error for Issues 2-5, or the electronic machines on which Ohio and much of the nation conduct their elections were hacked by someone wanting to change the vote count. If the latter is true, it can and will be done again, and we can forget forever about the state that has been essential to the election of every Republican presidential candidate since Lincoln. And we can also, for all intents and purposes, forget about the future of American democracy. Updated November 13, 2005 -- Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION AND IS RIGGING 2008, available at http://www.freepress.org/ and http://www.harveywasserman.com/, and, with Steve Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO, available from The New Press in spring, 2006. 18 Nov 2005 @ 19:02 by vaxen : demand... an accounting with rifles in hand. ah but... "give me liberty or give me death."---t.p. give me? storm the fortress and take it! thanks jazz and i hope all is well with you and your family. one if by land two if by sea and what if by space via emf and ionospheric heaters? later bro., all the best to you. 19 Nov 2005 @ 04:16 by vaxen var @67.35.193.134 : hidden agenda and all the kings horses and all the kings men... the graduated income tax is one of the planks in marxian doctrine. the federal reserve isn't federal at all. america was founded as a ''republic (L. Res Publica)" not a democracy (Gk. Demos Kratein)! now just go back to sleep like good little sheeple and everything will be taken care of. a little digital stenography goes a long way. "Your potentialities are a great deal better than anyone ever permitted you to believe."--- Self Analysis LRH 7 Feb 2006 @ 10:55 by jazzolog : So How Could This Happen? Election Day Carlisle, Monroe to vote in special election It’s special election day, and voters in Monroe and Carlisle have issues at stake. Monroe residents will decide on a half percent income tax increase that would increase the tax from 1 percent to 1.5 percent. The city has been pushing to raise the income tax since 2003; today marks the fifth time in four years the issue will come before voters. The tax was last defeated in the November general election with 52 percent of voters opposed. But city leaders, contending the tax is the best option to address future growth in the area, are pushing the tax on today’s February special election ballot. A “yes” vote on Monroe’s income tax hike will eliminate a 1.85 mills property tax. If the property tax is terminated, homeowners will see property tax savings — about $40 a year for the owner of a $150,000 home, according to city officials. In Carlisle, residents will get a second chance to decide whether a 24-hour combined fire and emergency medical service department will replace the city’s volunteer fire department. This special election was ordered in December by a Montgomery County Common Pleas Court judge after the city contested the results from the November general election as a result of errors using that county’s new electronic touch screen voting machines. To ensure there are no errors in this special election, employees of the Montgomery County Board of Elections will be staffing that county’s precinct. If voters approve the fire and EMS levy, the owner of a $100,000 home would pay about $4 more than they currently pay for the services. Passage of the levy would create 24-hour staffing to improve response times to fire and EMS calls, city officials said. Journal Reporter Ed Richter contributed to this report. Contact Meghan Crosby at (513) 705-2813, or e-mail her at mcrosby@coxohio.com. Copyright ©2006 Cox Ohio Publishing, Dayton, Ohio, USA. http://www.middletownjournal.com/hp/content/news/stories/2006/02/07/MJ020706ELECTION.html Though not dated on this page, click HOME and you'll see the item is scheduled for today's paper. So what "errors" turned up from the new mandated electronic machines? It seems more votes were cast on Diebold's AccuVote TSX touch-screen voting machines than there were actually registered voters in the county. Other entries in Politics 1 Jul 2010 @ 02:21: PHILIPPINES’ NEW PRESIDENT: AKBAR OR NERO? 4 Jun 2010 @ 08:30: SCUTTLE EU NOW, BEFORE 4TH REICH OPTION AWAKENS! 17 Nov 2008 @ 10:11: My 'story' I just uploaded to change.gov 8 Nov 2008 @ 16:06: A Boy Named Sue and the False American Dream 7 Nov 2008 @ 16:01: No He Can't... 6 Nov 2008 @ 09:16: History is NOW 5 Nov 2008 @ 16:58: Obamas World - Africa and the World beyond Poverty !? - but how? - what world? 5 Nov 2008 @ 14:02: Proud to be An American 26 Oct 2008 @ 15:26: Systemic Intelligence: How to teach Systemic Thinking effectively 26 Oct 2008 @ 10:27: OBAMA IS AMERICA’S MAN OF THE HOUR
|
17 Nov 2005 @ 10:52, by Richard Carlson