Fw: Election Fraud 20040- great summary

Thank you, Mary Pjerrou.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mary Pjerrou (by way of Tom Wodetzki)"
To: "Alliance for Democracy"
Sent: Saturday, November 27, 2004 12:06 AM
Subject: Election Fraud 2004



ACTION MEMO: Election Fraud 2004 - American democracy's final hour?
From Mary Pjerrou, Elk, California, pirohuck@mcn.org, Nov 24, 04

The evidence of fraud in the 2004 presidential
election is so overwhelming that it is difficult
to know where to start. The evidence encompasses
many states and involves several kinds of voting
fraud and vote suppression. Suspect #1 are the
central electronic tabulating machines that
supposedly count all our votes. Shockingly,
these machines run on source code that is held as
secret, proprietary information (no public
review) by companies whose executives were
committed to Bush's election (including Walden
O'Dell of Diebold who promised in writing to
"deliver" Ohio to Bush in 2004, and Howard F.
Ahmanson of ES&S, known for backing rightwing
religious causes.). To make matters worse, a
third of the country voted on electronic machines
that provide no paper receipt for the vote,
making recounts impossible and auditing
difficult--all in all, a voting system made to
order for fraud.

The evidence so far all points to a Kerry win,
possibly by a landslide, that was changed to a
Bush win, with the main part of the fraud
occurring in the central vote tabulators in at
least a dozen states (probably all over),
combined with significant, blatant suppression of
Democratic and minority voters by highly
prejudiced Republican election officials,
especially in Ohio and Florida. This memo will
summarize the current situation and available
evidence, and the riveting and heroic
investigations, re-counts and lawsuits that are
in progress. It will also provide a working
hypothesis on the overall election fraud plan
(always helpful), and info. on what you and I can
do to help. Election reform is a must-do, and
it's really quite simple. To regain our right to
vote, we need: a) a paper trail; and b) open
source code.

THE CURRENT SITUATION:

John Kerry's concession has no legal force. He
can un-concede (as Al Gore did in '00). There is
reason to believe that his concession was a
strategic move to avoid the chaos of '00, and
quietly gather evidence. But whatever he decides
to do, this Election is not over, and its outcome
is not really up to him. As Kerry himself
recently stated, "They're still counting votesS"

First the states must complete and certify their
counts, and re-counts must be completed (all
on-going). The Electoral College meets and votes
Dec. 15. Congress then certifies the Election on
Jan. 6. (And there could well be fireworks at
that event, considering how angry black Democrats
are after '00, and after what was done to black
voters again this year.)

Many challenges, re-counts, investigations, and
lawsuits are in progress. Fourteen
Congresspeople have requested a GAO
investigation, led by high-ranking members like
Congr. John Conyers--and the GAO just agreed! (on
11/23). The Green Party and Ralph Nader are big
heroes, having successfully raised hundreds of
thousands of dollars in one week to obtain
recounts in Ohio and New Hampshire. The
Democratic Party has filed a lawsuit on the
"provisional" ballot count in Ohio. There are
investigations and lawsuits in FLA (don't know
about a recount there). There is a big citizen
and attorney effort to gather evidence
(particularly to secure the "black boxes" that
contain the secret source code, and their
printouts). Bev Harris, of
www.blackboxvoting.org--another hero--did a
Freedom of Information Act request to every state
in the country for "black box voting"
evidence--the biggest FOIA request ever.
Recently, she got a lockdown on evidence in
Volusia County, FLA. Her group has launched
fraud investigations in FLA, GA, NM, AZ and OH.

One very remarkable man, John B. Kenney, has been
on a hunger strike since Sept. 7, 2004, and will
continue until our right to vote is secured.
(www.hungerfordemocracy.com)

EVIDENCE OF MASSIVE ELECTION FRAUD

* Despite their secret source code, electronic
voting machines are easily hackable and extremely
insecure (well established by Johns Hopkins,
CalTech/MIT, blackboxvoting.org and many other
studies). In addition, the Republican-owned
companies who make them, and Republican
politicians (Tom Delay, and the Secretaries of
State in OH and FLA) insisted that no paper trail
was needed and strongly fought against any such
vote verification. A paper trail consists of a
paper receipt on which each vote is recorded and
locked away for recounts and audits. A third of
the country voted with no paper trail--that is,
without the ability to re-count the vote.
(Venezuela has a paper trail, and open source
code. Our election system is a disgrace by
comparison.) However, expert statisticians and
smart techies can use other methods to track
fraud. (Note: Statistical methods are admissible
in court in a "no paper trail" situation.)

* Several topnotch statistical studies point a red flag at '04 election
fraud:

The Freeman study:

On Election Day '04, the Exit Polls (face to face
questioning of voters, just after they voted)
showed a big Kerry win--including a Kerry sweep
of all the battleground states--until about 6
p.m. Dr. Steven J. Freeman (an MIT-PhD,
professor at the U. of Penn.) discovered that,
late in the afternoon, CNN began mixing the Exit
Poll data with the incoming data from the central
electronic voters tabulators which showed a turn
to Bush late in the day (odd, because that's when
the working poor and minorities vote). By luck
and fast thinking, Freeman was able to get hold
of the pure Exit Poll data before it was
corrupted by the election "results." The Exit
Poll variance from the election "results" is
extraordinary, and always favors Bush. Freeman
says that this is virtually impossible. He
establishes the reliability of non-partisan Exit
Polls, which are used worldwide to verify
elections. The odds against Kerry's predicted
Exit Poll vote being wrong in all 3 big
battleground states (OH, FLA, PA) are 662,000 to
one. He concludes: "As much as we can say in
social science that something is impossible, it
is impossible that the discrepancies between
predicted and actual vote counts in the three
critical battleground statesScould have been due
to chance or random error." This shift to Bush
(in electronic tally vs. Exit Poll predictions)
occurred in 10 of the 11 states studied. In 4 of
the 11 states (OH, IA, NE and NM), the Kerry win
was changed to a Bush win--with enough Electoral
Votes in the balance to turn the Electoral Vote
to Bush.

[Note: Jonathan Simon (www.scoop.co.nz) also did
critically important early work on the exit poll
issue, analysing 47 states, and showing that the
exit poll variance from the official "results"
was dramatically larger in the battleground
states Bush needed to win--a statistical
impossibility.]

The UC Berkeley study:

An impressive statistical team at UC Berkeley
headed by Professor Michael Hout reports that
irregularities associated with electronic voting
machines may have awarded 130,000 - 260,000 or
more "excess" votes to Bush in Florida. The study
shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes
for Bush in counties where electronic voting
machines were used versus counties using
traditional voting methods. Discrepancies this
large or larger rarely arise by chance -- the
probability is less than 0.1 percent. The
counties studied included big Democratic areas
(Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach). Hout, a
member of the National Academy of Science, called
for an investigation. (This study was recently
endorsed by MIT scientists who also called for an
investigation.)

* The 4 states in the Freeman study whose result
changed from Kerry (exit poll) to Bush
(electronic vote tabulation) don't begin to
exhaust the number of states where serious voting
anomalies are turning up (in addition to FLA,
there are inexplicable numbers in North Carolina,
Ohio, New Hampshire, Nebraska, Iowa, New Mexico,
Indiana--at least). Also, if phantom votes or
flipped votes in large numbers occurred as a
pattern nationwide--as the Berkeley study showed
in FLA--the popular vote (Bush by about 3.5
million) could also be wrong enough to overturn
the election.

* Examples: Another statistician has found an
improbable 15% margin for Bush in North
Carolina--amidst large, inexplicable
discrepancies between the absentee ballot vote
(30% of the vote) and the electronic vote, and
between the vote for President and lower offices.
Another: 29 Dem counties in FLA, one with 88% Dem
registration, producing landslides for Bush.
Another: more votes than voters (Ohio, 93,000;
Nebraska, 10,000). And there is much more. (In
one Ohio precinct, 600 voters, 4,000 votes for
Bush.) Evidence all over of inexplicable
numbers. What the statisticians are
doing--critically important--is sorting out the
probabilities of widespread innocent error always
favoring Bush (not possible.)

MASSIVE VOTE SUPPRESSION BY REPUBLICAN ELECTION OFFICIALS

Over 30,000 complaints of vote suppression and
difficulties in voting were lodged with the
Election Incident Reporting Service (EIRS);
57,000 complaints were sent to Congress; and "265
specific complaints" were listed at the
VotersUnite.org web site. There have already
been big hearings in Ohio, and the testimony is
heart-breaking and infuriating.

Most egregious, the Republican efforts to prevent
black votes, including black precincts being
shorted on precinct places or number of voting
machines--resulting in a 30 mile drive to vote,
or 10 hour voting lines, and black voters
arriving at the precinct they'd voted in all
their lives, to be told it's the wrong precinct,
then given wrong or no information on where to
vote, and many other kinds of harassment and
unlawful behavior.

In addition, touchstone voting screens that
changed a Kerry vote to a Bush vote--all day
long, without corrective measures. 60,000
absentee ballots "lost in the mail" just before
election day. Numerous duly registered Democrats,
minorities and students unfairly challenged at
the voting place, sending their votes into
"provisional" ballot limbo. New rules invented
by Republican Secretaries of State--you have to
register on 80 lb. paper; you have to have
written your birthdate on your "provisional"
ballot; you can't vote anywhere in the county
anymore, only at your newly assigned precinct
(the location of which we may or may not give
you). Electronic machines with a pre-set limit on
the number votes, that started counting
backwards, and deducting votes when the limit was
reached (thousands of votes lost). Republican
operatives in Nevada and Oregon pretending to be
a non-partisan voter registration group, then
throwing Democratic voter registration forms
away. Machines that reached pre-set vote limits,
and then started counting backwards, deleting
thousands of votes. And on and on and on.

As I said, the evidence of election fraud is
overwhelming. And virtually all of the weird,
inexplicable and impossible numbers from
electronic voting favored Bush and hurt Kerry.
And virtually all vote suppression was against
Democrats, minorities and students.

To sort all this out, a working hypothesis on the
overall picture of 2004 election fraud is
helpful. Here's mine--most of which occurred to
me around midnight on Nov. 2. The context:
Kerry was winning, according to pre-election
opinion poll analysis and election day exit polls
(after a huge, unprecedented "get out the vote"
campaign featuring Bruce Springsteen and Michael
Moore, and many thousands of volunteers). So, if
you had control of all the vote tabulation
machines, and no paper trail (and no conscience),
and you wanted to manufacture a Bush win, you
would:

1) Tweak several of the "red" states that were
threatening to turn "blue" at the time of the
election, toward Bush, to keep Bush competitive
in the Electoral Vote.

2) Grab %'s here and there, all over the map,
wherever detection had been minimized (f.i., no
paper trail), to manufacture a popular majority
for Bush--not huge, just enough--even in big
Kerry states where "excess" Bush votes might not
be noticed (or in big Kerry counties--as the
Berkeley study showed!);

3) Make it all come down to Ohio (or FLA), where
a lot of prep was done in vote suppression, to
keep it close, and where it now SEEMS to all turn
on a relatively few "provisional" ballots in OH,
with a highly partisan Republican Secretary of
State to judge their validity--whereas the main
fraud actually occurred way back upstream, and

4) (Unknown to me, or any observer, on Election
Night) Get your friends at CNN and Fox News to
start mixing your electronic vote data into the
Exit Poll data, to hide the big Kerry numbers in
the Exit Poll data, and make it appear that Bush
was winning late in the day.

All the evidence so far has confirmed this working hypothesis.

HOW HACKABLE IS THE ELECTION SYSTEM?

People think of CIA "black ops" and a vast
conspiracy. To hack a Diebold voting machine is
as easy as pie (one hacker, a couple of minutes).
As demonstrated for Keith Olberman on Countdown
(MSNBC), by Chuck Herrin at chuckherrin.com (a
computer expert, hacker and remorseful
Republican), as Johns Hopkins concluded, and as
repeatedly demonstrated and described by Bev
Harris, these machines are extremely insecure.
(The source code runs on Windows--a good laugh
for techies. Notoriously unreliable, hackable,
buggy, crash-prone, inferior software.)

A hair-raising Johns Hopkins study of our
electronic voting system, prior to the election,
rips into the Diebold electronic voting system,
exposing the vulnerability of "smartcards" which
are needed for each vote (easily duplicated by a
15 year old in a garage), the highly insecure
language of the code (C++), and the ease with
which anyone--a poll worker, a janitor--could
access and alter voting results leaving no trace.

Means. Motive. Opportunity. You begin to get
the picture. (Why would these Bush supporters
and pro-Bush voting machine companies insist on
no paper trail?)

WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
LEADERSHIP? HOW COULD THEY LET THIS HAPPEN?

I'm not sure. A Republican-owned, extremely
fraud-prone voting system that will vote
Democrats out of office forevermore? Go figure.
You'd think they would've burned down the Capitol
to get this changed.

Here's my gut feeling: Some porkbarrel
(funneling federal election funds to the states).
Some corruption (Diebold spent zillions wining
and dining election officials.) But mostly, a
catastrophic failure of leadership. When you
look at the numerous of articles and reports on
the dangers of e-voting over the last several
years, you can't imagine that the Democrats
didn't know. And I guess they were just too busy
to give a damn about our right to vote, the
future of the Republic, and their own ability to
actually get elected (have us vote for them, get
our votes counted). It's very strange.

The Democratic Party leadership owes an
apology--to all those voters who stood in lines
for 12 hours to vote for them, and to all of us
fabulous grass roots democracy workers who gave
them a smashing victory, if the truth were known.
And the Democrats CAN redeem themselves if they
would just step up to the plate and help us NOW
to challenge this election! If they don't,
forget them! Let's form a new party!

WHAT YOU AND I CAN DO

* Write letters/emails and call Congressional
reps, state election officials, and the
mainstream news media, and rake them over the
coals (or praise them, if they're doing their
jobs to your satisfaction). (Praise is
impoortant, where warranted.)

* Groups that need our immediate financial support (and volunteers):

Bev Harris: www.blackboxvoting.org (or donations
to: Black Box Voting, PO Box 25552, Seattle, WA
98165)

The Green Party and the Cobb campaign (donations,
volunteers): http://www.votecobb.org

John B. Kenney (hunger strike-donations): http://hungerfordemocracy.com

Alliance for Democracy (action resource!):
http://www.thealliancefordemocracy.org


MORE INFORMATION [It's all over the web--here's for starters:]

[on-going investigation, info on e-voting:] http://www.blackboxvoting.org

[many articles:] http://www.votersunite.org/news.asp

[Diebold hacking demonstration:] http://www.chuckherrin.com/hackthevote.htm

[an amazing list of Election Fraud '04 articles:]
http://www.bopnews.com/archives/002328.html#2328

[excellent archive:] http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/995

[a really good explanation of the '04 exit poll
thing--very dramatic:]
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00142.htm

[detailed info, analysis, discussion of
everything - takes patience - see 2004 Election
forum:] http://www.democraticunderground.com

[The Freeman report:]
http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/11/The_unexplained_exit_poll_discre
pancy_v00k.pdf
[Freeman report update:] http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/11/ale04090.html

[The Jonathan Simon-Alastair Thompson Report]
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00142.htm

[The Berkeley report:]
http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/ [scroll down to
"Voting": "The Effects of Electronic Voting
Machines..."]

[04 Election in Ohio:]
http://www.dkosopedia.com/index.php/2004_Ohio_Irregularities

[a great general resource:] http://en.wikipedia.org

Some other good sites: www.votersunite.org,
www.verfiedvoting.org, www.commoncause.org,
www.ballotintegrity.org, www.truevotemd.org,
www.truthout.org, www.commondreams.org

Also, for inspiration - "Granny D"--a fabulous 94
year old woman who ran for Senate in NH:
http://www.grannyd.com/

Info Media: Randi Rhodes, Janeane Garofola, Sam
Seder and Mike Malloy of Air America
(www.airamericaradio.com).
Keith Olberman (MSNBC-Countdown).
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/ And some
interesting Olberman reportage posted at:
http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/NewsArticle.cfm?ID=2369


A CURE FOR KERRY VOTER DEPRESSION:

In my opinion, we are one minute to midnight as
to losing our democracy. I figure we've already
gone beyond Germany 1933, to Germany 1934--the
consolidation of all state power. The fascists
now own the presidency, the Congress, the courts,
the media, AND the election system.

It is easy to get scared--or worse, to bury your
head in the sand. The day after the Election,
there were 100,000 hits on the Canadian
immigration site. That's one solution, I guess.
On the other hand, our children and the entire
world are counting on us to restore democracy in
the U.S., especially to stop Bush Inc.'s madness
in the Middle East, and also impending federal
bankruptcy. We are the only ones who can do it.
The rest of the world is far more aware than many
American citizens of how fraudulent this election
was, and how close the parallel is to Germany
1933-34. In Europe, they've lived it. And they
are pulling for us.

We were born to--or consciously chose--the great
heritage of American democracy. It has fallen to
us to try to save it, in what looks to be its
final hour. It is a time for clarity, unity and
focused action. I think it's panic-inducing to
try to address the million issues raised by Bush
Inc. actions and policy, and a delusion to think
that the Left can influence them or can re-gain
power, after what they've pulled in this
election. Our right to vote is first and
fundamental, and we must salvage it--by trying to
overturn this election; and by focused, state by
state efforts to achieve, a) paper trail; b) open
source code (Congress isn't going to do this!).
But it's not up to you or me alone. It's a
collective burden. So don't let yourself get
depressed or feeling powerless. Take care of
yourself; help create a sustainable local
economy; think creatively of other important ways
of collective action (there is a corporate news
media product boycott in the works, for
instance). And make time to write that letter,
send that donation, spread the word--and do more
if we can. Together, we shall overcome.

Mary Pjerrou
November 24, 2004
Elk, CA