This is a summary I wrote of the issues and irregularities in the 2004 election, including links for documentation. Please use it if you find it helpful as a resource to help people become informed about this critical issue!
SUMMARY
Far too many irregularities are apparent in the conduct of the election, especially in key "battleground states." The suppression of minority voters, in particular, is a stain on the election that we must not overlook.
Also, the use of unverifiable, no-paper-trail "black box" voting machines, and computerized vote tabulating systems that have been shown to be vulnerable to corruption and that are controlled by private corporations with partisan ties, is very troubling.
A growing number of people are losing confidence that this election was fair. I believe that this is the most important issue facing our nation today, as it is the democratic process on which our whole system of government rests.
We must call for a full investigation of the integrity of the voting process in the 2004 election. See below the fold for detailed information and what you can do now.
ELECTION 2004: CURRENT EVENTS
House Judiciary Committee Democrats Take Action
Rep. Conyers, Nadler, Wexler and other Democrats on the Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the GAO requesting an investigation into the election system. They have also been holding forums on voting irregularities in Ohio (Republicans on the Committee have refused to participate).
One such forum was held in Wash. D.C. last week and covered by CSPAN, and another was held Mon. 12/13 in Ohio. Jesse Jackson and a panel of experts and witnesses spoke of the many problems on election day in Ohio, including multiple tactics to suppress the vote of minority and Democratic voters, alarming errors in machine vote counts, and inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and final vote tabulations. http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/elections/article.adp?id=20041208233809990003&cid=946
A Recount in Ohio
The Green Party candidate, supported by the Kerry campaign, has filed for and been granted a recount in Ohio, where the final count gave Bush 119,000 vote margin. http://www.votecobb.org/
A Challenge to the Ohio Election
In addition, challenges have been filed by Common Cause and other groups based on the many problems seen there: http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=186966
http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/elections/article.adp?id=20041213113409990003&cid=946
IRREGULARITIES IN ELECTION 2004
Voter Suppression Tactics Widely Used
A heinous array of tactics were used to limit the vote of minority and Democratic voters in the last election. See, e.g., http://www.sfbayview.com/112404/hearingsonohio112404.shtml
They included:
- shortage of machines in minority and Democratic precincts compared to Republican precincts, and baseless challenges at the polls, resulting in extraordinarily long waits of 4-12 hours that many could ill-afford
- scare tactics such as flyers and phone calls warning that voting could lead to arrest if one had outstanding traffic tickets, outstanding child-support debt, or ever been charged with any crime, or giving false information about polling locations or the date for voting (e.g., stating that Democrats should vote on Nov. 3 rather than Nov. 2)
- purging of voter rolls, tearing up of Democratic party registrations, disqualification of registrations and ballots for trivial reasons
PROBLEMS WITH ELECTRONIC VOTING & VOTE TABULATING EQUIPMENT
Alarming errors were observed in the counts generated by these machines in the recent election, including:
- Officials in Youngstown, Ohio caught a glitch that had the total of all precincts initially showing negative 25 million votes cast.
- A machine in Gahanna, Ohio gave 4,258 votes to Bush even though there were only 638 votes cast.
- A machine in North Carolina lost 4500 votes because it could only store 3,000 votes, not the 10,000 that company reps had told election officials. Those votes were irretrievable.
- There were numerous reports in Ohio and Florida, as well as other states, of touch screen machines refusing to register a vote for Kerry, and instead showing a vote for George Bush.
- In Guildford County, North Carolina, large voter turnout caused machines to simply throw votes away.
- A machine in Florida started counting backwards after 32,000 votes.
- In Broward County, Florida, at least 21 machines malfunctioned and had to be replaced. Most of them had already been used by voters.
- In one Florida county, reported memory card failures included recording zero votes after one week of early voting, and requesting permission to upload votes before voting even began.
- A UC Berkeley statistical study found that electronic voting machines in Florida may have awarded Bush as many as 260,000 extra votes.
EXIT POLL DISCREPANCIES
In the 2004 election, exit polls showed Kerry/Edwards clearly winning in Ohio and Florida, as well as nationwide. The discrepancy between the polls and the outcome has not really been explained. However, it is highly improbable.
Steven Freeman, a professor at U Penn, conducted a statistical analysis showing the probability of the observed discrepancies in the battleground states to be close to a million to one against this happening at random. Thus some systematic bias, always favoring Bush, must exist, and has not been explained. http://www.dakotatechnics.com/downloads/Exitpoll_discre...
Exit polls have been widely used to validate election results in other countries (including just now in Ukraine), and were always accurate in the U.S. as well, until the widespread implementation of electronic voting.
ELECTRONIC VOTING: HISTORY & ISSUES
After the 2000 election Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which provided a large amount of money for supposed reform of the voting machinery.
Much of this money has gone to a few corporations that manufacture this equipment: Diebold and ES&S now provide equipment to record and tabulate approximately 80% of America's votes, including DRE's (computerized voting machines that provide no paper record) and optical scan machines that scan paper ballots and electronically record and tabulate them.
A Corruptible System
The software used by these companies has been demonstrated to be highly vulnerable to corruption.
For example, code in the machines themselves can easily be written to flip votes to other candidates. The vote tabulation totals can also be hacked into and changed remarkably easily.
However, the companies maintain that the software is proprietary and refuse to allow the source code to be examined by impartial experts.
A security analysis conducted by people at Johns Hopkins, see http://www.avirubin.com/vote/.
Also see http://blackboxvoting.org on the vulnerability of the system, including a video showing how easily vote tabulations can be hacked (bonus, it features Howard Dean): http://www.votergate.tv
Unverifiable Results
Furthermore, most of the e-voting machines provide no paper trail, so there is no way for the voter to verify that his/her vote was recorded correctly or for a recount to be done afterward. The companies have resisted efforts to get them to provide paper receipts.
A bill in the house requiring a paper trail had bi-partisan support but was suppressed by the Republican leadership prior to the election.
Partisan Corporate Control
In addition, both corporations were founded & funded, and are now run by strong Republican partisans. For example:
--The CEO of Diebold, based in Ohio, is Walden O'Dell, a major Bush donor and co-chair of the Ohio Bush/Cheney campaign. In a letter that was leaked to the press, O'Dell stated that he was committed to delivering Ohio's electoral votes to George Bush: http://www.portclintonnewsherald.com/news/stories/20030827/localnews/140871.html
--ES&S is the election systems branch of a company once headed by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel. Hagel resigned from his job with the company shortly before his first election in 1996, in which 85% of the votes were counted by ES&S, and which he won in an upset. He still owns a strong financial interest in the company. http://www.hillnews.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx
The TruVote Alternative
We had another alternative!
After the disastrous 2000 election in Florida, a public-spirited African-American businessman named Athan Gibbs developed an electronic voting technology, the TruVote system, that would provide not only an auditable paper trail but a tracking number for the voter to look up their vote on the internet or by phone to make sure that it was correctly recorded. The technology got rave reviews, and he was partnering with Microsoft to develop it for national implementation. http://sweetliberty.blogspot.com/2003_12_28_sweetliberty_archive.html
Tragically, Athan Gibbs was killed in a car accident in March 2004 days after displaying the machine at a trade show. Since then his company has languished while Diebold and ES&S got the contracts to provide our voting equipment.
http://www.technologycouncil.com/news.ez?viewStory=701
(They have fought every effort to force them to provide an auditable paper trail.)
Outcomes in Prior Elections:
In addition to the 1996 Senate race in Nebraska using ES&S machines won by Chuck Hagel, a number of startling upsets, ALL favoring Republicans, have occurred in past elections where this equipment was used. Examples include the 2002 Georgia elections in which Max Clelland lost his Senate race, and the Minnesota Senate race in which Walter Mondale lost to Norm Coleman right after the death of Paul Wellstone.
Coverage in the Mainstream Media (or not)
Since the 2004 election, we have heard virtually nothing about these problems in the mainstream media except dismissive reports of "conspiracy theorists" on the Internet(s). The only consistent source has been MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann (Mon-Fri 8-9pm, repeated 12-1am). You can also find most of the show's election-related content on Olbermann's blog: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/
However, prior to the election the New York Times had extensive coverage of the problems with electronic voting and vote tabulating in articles, op-eds, and editorials warning us that the system needed reform. Below is part of an Op-Ed by Paul Krugman, who did a great series on this matter, that lays out the issues for our nation:
"Democracy at Risk
January 23, 2004
The disputed election of 2000 left a lasting scar on the nation's psyche. A recent Zogby poll found that even in red states, which voted for George W. Bush, 32 percent of the public believes that the election was stolen. In blue states, the fraction is 44 percent.
Now imagine this: in November the candidate trailing in the polls wins an upset victory -- but all of the districts where he does much better than expected use touch-screen voting machines. Meanwhile, leaked internal e-mail from the companies that make these machines suggests widespread error, and possibly fraud. What would this do to the nation?
Unfortunately, this story is completely plausible. (In fact, you can tell a similar story about some of the results in the 2002 midterm elections, especially in Georgia.) Fortune magazine rightly declared paperless voting the worst technology of 2003, but it's not just a bad technology -- it's a threat to the republic. . .
<snip>
. . . here's the crucial point: even if there are strong reasons to suspect that electronic machines miscounted votes, nothing can be done about it. There is no paper trail; there is nothing to recount.
So what should be done? Representative Rush Holt has introduced a bill calling for each machine to produce a paper record that the voter verifies. The paper record would then be secured for any future audit. The bill requires that such verified voting be ready in time for the 2004 election -- and that districts that can't meet the deadline use paper ballots instead. And it also requires surprise audits in each state. . .
<snip>
I can't see any possible objection to this bill. Ignore the inevitable charges of 'conspiracy theory.' . . .
To support verified voting, you don't personally have to believe that voting machine manufacturers have tampered or will tamper with elections. How can anyone object to measures that will place the vote above suspicion?"
In an August 17 Op-Ed, after the House bill had been stalled and it was clear that the voting machinery would not be reformed, Krugman wrote:
"Everyone knows it, but not many politicians or mainstream journalists are willing to talk about it, for fear of sounding conspiracy-minded: there is a substantial chance that the result of the 2004 presidential election will be suspect.
When I say that the result will be suspect, I don't mean that the election will, in fact, have been stolen. (We may never know.) I mean that there will be sufficient uncertainty about the honesty of the vote count that much of the world and many Americans will have serious doubts."
What Can We Do Now?
Sadly, since the election the mainstream media has treated this issue as though it were toxic. I think we know why, but it's up to us to make them pay attention.
1. Rep. Conyers has called for a million emails to be sent to the Judiciary Committee's Democrats calling for a full investigation of the 2004 election by the House Judiciary Committee. A brief message saying that you want an investigation to be held is all you need.
http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/contact.html
2. MoveOn also has a petition for signature on their website: Just click on the link for "sign petition" under the first item. (A written statement is optional here.)
http://www.moveon.org/front/
- Write or call your mainstream media outlets to let them know how important this issue is to you and ask them to cover it.
- Write or call your elected representatives to express your concern and demand action.
- Talk to your friends and acquaintances. Many otherwise well-informed people know nothing about this because of the slipshod media coverage.
- Look at the websites below. Common Cause, Verified Voting, and Black Box Voting are working on this issue and can use your financial help if you can afford it. They can also use your support with specific actions, so put yourself on their mailing lists.
Let's take it back before it's too late--if it's not already!
Some websites where you can find more information:
http://www.nightweed.com/usavotefacts.html
http://www.votersunite.org
http://www.blackboxvoting.org
http://www.freepress.org
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0131-01.htm
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm http://www.whoseflorida.com/voting_machines.htm
http://www.bloggermann.com
http://www.buzzflash.com
http://www.gregpalast.com
http://www.chuckherrin.com/hackthevote
http://www.wired.com/news/evote
http://www.stolenelection2004.com