Election Problems Reported by Major Media

 

Special note: Below is a compilation of elections problems from the 2004 U.S. elections. For the most recent elections problems reported by major media, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/electionscoverups.

 

 

There is no shortage of news about mishaps, cover-ups, and even fraud in the 2004 U.S. elections. Below are quick summaries of a number of excellent articles on major elections problems with links to the original media stories for those who would like to read the entire article. Remember that though one party may benefit more than others, this is not a partisan issue. We invite all who care about democracy to join in working towards clean, free elections which truly reflect the will of the people.

 

 

Salt Lake Tribune - Voters in Utah County had more than a one in five chance that their ballots did not get counted in the initial, unofficial tally from Election Day. A programming glitch in the punch-card counter dropped 33,000 ballots from the totals - all of them straight-party ballots. That was more than 22 percent of the 145,769 ballots cast in the Republican stronghold.

Salt Lake Tribune, 11/13/04

 

New York Times - When Maryland decided to buy voting machines, the state commissioned a staged attack in which computer experts would try to interfere with an election. They were disturbingly successful. It was an ''easy matter,' to reprogram the access cards and vote multiple times. By using a modem, they were able to change votes from a remote location. Diebold, the machines' manufacturer, issued a self-congratulatory press release with the headline ''Maryland Security Study Validates Diebold Election Systems Equipment.'' The study's authors were shocked to see their findings spun so positively.

New York Times, 1/31/04

 

MSNBC - The best reporting by far in the mainstream media has been by MSNBC's news anchor Keith Olbermann. Both on TV and on his blog, Mr. Olbermann is asking serious questions. He is even asking why other major media aren't reporting many of these crucial stories. His most excellent blog gives continual updates of recent developments in the elections scandals. Here are a few key quotes from three of the entries there:

 

Nov. 7, 6:55 p.m. "Officials in Warren County, Ohio, “locked down” its administration building to prevent anybody from observing the vote count there....Emergency Services Director Frank Young explained that he had been advised by the federal government to implement the measures for the sake of Homeland Security." "The majority of the media has yet to touch the other stories of Ohio or huge margins for Bush in Florida counties in which registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 2-1."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6368819  (scroll down to find this date and time in the blog)

 

Nov. 9, 12:55 a.m. "....the remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County’s website shows, we had the most unexpected results in years: more votes than voters. I’ll repeat that: more votes than voters. 93,000 more votes than voters." (more on this below)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6368819 (scroll down to find this date and time in the blog)

 

November 10, 12:43 p.m. "The computerized balloting in North Carolina is so thoroughly messed up that all state-wide voting may be thrown out and a second election day scheduled."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6368819 (scroll down to find this date and time in the blog)

 

Dec. 2, 8:13 p.m. “We are not only busting our humps on the voting irregularities beat, but we remain the only mainstream news organization to continue to cover this vital story.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6533008 (scroll down to find this date and time in the blog)

 

Click below to watch 16 minutes of the excellent MSNBC news program broadcast nationally on November 11th covering this topic. Note that it may take several minutes to download. You must have installed either QuickTime (QT) or Windows Media. For dial-up connections, use the 56K option.

http://websrvr20.audiovideoweb.com/avwebdswebsrvr2143/news_video/5.countdown_300k.mov (QT high speed)

http://websrvr20.audiovideoweb.com/avwebdswebsrvr2143/news_video/5.countdown_56k.mov (QT 56K)

http://win20ca.audiovideoweb.com/ca20win15004/5.countdown_300k.wmv  (Windows Media high speed)

http://win20ca.audiovideoweb.com/ca20win15004/5.countdown_56k.wmv  (Windows Media 56K)

 

WOWT/NBC (Nebraska) - "Sarpy County election officials are trying to figure out how they ended up with more votes than voters in the general election. Sarpy County borrowed the election equipment from Omaha-based Election Systems & Software. Its employees operated the machines that are now double-checking the ballots. No one is sure exactly what went wrong."

http://www.wowt.com/news/headlines/1161971.html

 

Los Angeles Times/Associated Press - “A hand recount of ballots cast using optical scanning technology gave a Democrat enough extra votes to bump a Republican from victory in a county commissioner's race. The erroneous tally was caused when the Fidlar Election Co. scanning system recorded straight-Democratic Party votes as votes for Libertarians in southeastern Indiana's Franklin County.”

Los Angeles Times, 11/12/04

 

Sun Journal - A North Carolina newspaper reports that "a systems software glitch in Craven County's electronic voting equipment is being blamed for a vote miscount that ... swelled the number of votes for president here by 11,283 more votes than the total number cast." 

http://www.newbernsj.com/SiteProcessor.cfm?Template=/GlobalTemplates/Details.cfm&StoryID=18297&Section=Local

 

USA Today/Associated Press - "There were also several dozen voters in six states who said the wrong candidates appeared on their touch-screen machine's checkout screen."

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/evoting/2004-11-04-e-voting-error-nc_x.htm

 

UPI – “In Baker County, Fla….there are 12,887 registered voters: 69.3 percent are Democrats, 24.3 percent are Republicans. Yet 2,180 of county residents voted for Kerry while 7,738 voted for Bush -- the opposite of what some election critics say was the typically pattern elsewhere in the United States. In Florida's Dixie County….77.5 percent of the 4,988 registered voters are Democrats, 15 percent are Republicans. On Election Day, Bush carried the county with 4,433 votes vs. 1,959 for Kerry. Nationally, few outlets have pursued the story of what happened in Baker and Dixie.”

http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20041112-010916-6128r

 

Palm Beach Post (Florida) - "Early Thursday, as Broward County elections officials wrapped up after a long day of canvassing votes, something unusual caught their eye. Tallies should go up as more votes are counted. That's simple math. But in some races, the numbers had gone down. Officials found the software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward."
Palm Beach Post, 11/5/04

 

New York Times - In mid-August 2003, Walden W. O'Dell, the chief executive of Diebold, wrote a letter inviting 100 wealthy friends to a fund-raiser at his home in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. He wrote, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." A longtime Republican, he is a member of President Bush's "Rangers and Pioneers,'' an elite group of loyalists who have raised at least $100,000 each for the 2004 race. Through Diebold Election Systems, Mr. O'Dell's company is among the country's biggest suppliers of paperless, touch-screen voting machines.

New York Times, 11/9/03 - (This Nov. 2003 article became pay for view only shortly after elections)

 

Project Censored (Excellent university website exposing media cover-ups): "ES&S, Diebold, and Sequoia are the companies primarily involved in implementing the new, often faulty, technology at voting stations throughout the country. All three have strong ties to the Bush Administration along with major defense contractors in the United States. Some of the most generous contributors to Republican campaigns are also some of the largest investors in ES&S, Sequoia, and Diebold. Most notable of these are government defense contractors Northrup-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, Electronic Data Systems."

http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2005/6.html

 

USA Today - The three companies that certify the nation's voting technologies operate in secrecy, and refuse to discuss flaws in the machines to be used by nearly one in three voters in November. Federal regulators have virtually no oversight over testing of the technology. Michael Shamos, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist and electronic voting expert, told lawmakers in Washington, D.C. "I find it grotesque that an organization charged with such a heavy responsibility feels no obligation to explain to anyone what it is doing." The system for "testing and certifying voting equipment in this country is not only broken, but is virtually nonexistent," Shamos added.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/evoting/2004-08-23-low-evote-scrutiny_x.htm

 

Los Angeles Times - “Officials in Franklin County — which includes state capital Columbus — acknowledged that they may have improperly counted votes for Bush because of a touch-screen voting system malfunction. A precinct in the county reported that a 4,000-vote margin won by Bush appeared to exceed the number of registered voters.”

Los Angeles Times, 11/9/04

 

Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Board of Elections Website - 29 precincts in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, reported more votes cast than the total number of registered voters - 93,136 extra votes total. In several precincts the number of votes cast was more than double the number of registered voters. Highland Hills Village precinct had over 10 times more votes cast than registered voters! The numbers are provided on the official Cuyahoga County Board of Elections website below. To verify the discrepancies, first look at the section listing the number of registered voters, then scroll down to the number of ballots cast for the precinct. In particular, compare the numbers for the precincts listed below.

http://www.WantToKnow.info/cuyahogacounty (webpage has been changed, click to compare)

Bay Village - 13,710 registered voters / 18,663 ballots cast
Beachwood - 9,943 registered voters / 13,939 ballots cast
Bedford - 9,942 registered voters / 14,465 ballots cast
Bedford Heights - 8,142 registered voters / 13,512 ballots cast
Brooklyn - 8,016 registered voters / 12,303 ballots cast
Brooklyn Heights - 1,144 registered voters / 1,869 ballots cast
Chagrin Falls Village - 3,557 registered voters / 4,860 ballots cast
Cuyahoga Heights - 570 registered voters / 1,382 ballots cast
Fairview Park - 13,342 registered voters / 18,472 ballots cast
Highland Hills Village - 760 registered voters / 8,822 ballots cast
Independence - 5,735 registered voters / 6,226 ballots cast
Mayfield Village - 2,764 registered voters / 3,145 ballots cast
Middleburg Heights - 12,173 registered voters / 14,854 ballots cast
Moreland Hills Village - 2,990 registered voters / 4,616 ballots cast
North Olmstead - 25,794 registered voters / 25,887 ballots cast
Olmstead Falls - 6,538 registered voters / 7,328 ballots cast
Pepper Pike - 5,131 registered voters / 6,479 ballots cast
Rocky River - 16,600 registered voters / 20,070 ballots cast
Solon (WD6) - 2,292 registered voters / 4,300 ballots cast
South Euclid - 16,902 registered voters / 16,917 ballots cast
Strongsville (WD3) - 7,806 registered voters / 12,108 ballots cast
University Heights - 10,072 registered voters / 11,982 ballots cast
Valley View Village - 1,787 registered voters / 3,409 ballots cast
Warrensville Heights - 10,562 registered voters / 15,039 ballots cast
Woodmere Village - 558 registered voters / 8,854 ballots cast
Bedford (CSD) - 22,777 registered voters / 27,856 ballots cast
Independence (LSD) - 5,735 registered voters / 6,226 ballots cast
Orange (CSD) - 11,640 registered voters / 22,931 ballots cast
Warrensville (CSD) - 12,218 registered voters / 15,822 ballots cast

 

Wyoming Secretary of State’s Website – According to the official website of the Secretary of State, the state of Wyoming produced a strange miracle by turning out 106% of registered voters for the 2004 elections! The percentage of registered voters who turn out to vote has been rising rapidly over the last 10 years. Could this have anything to do with the increase in electronic voting machines and the accompanying increased ease of elections fraud?

http://soswy.state.wy.us/election/profile.htm

 

USA Today – A review of election results in 10 counties nationwide by the Scripps Howard News Service found more than 12,000 ballots that weren't counted in the presidential race, almost one in every 10 ballots cast in those counties. When the mistakes were pointed out to local officials, some were chagrined; others said they didn't want to be bothered correcting mistakes.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2004-12-27-edit_x.htm

 

Michigan City News-Dispatch - In LaPorte County, Indiana, a Democratic stronghold, electronic voting machines decided that each precinct only had 300 voters. "At about 7 p.m. Tuesday," according to this report, "it was noticed that the first two or three printouts from individual precinct reports all listed an identical number of voters. Each precinct was listed as having 300 registered voters. That means the total number of voters for the county would be 22,200, although there are more than 79,000 registered voters.

News Dispatch, 11/4/04 (article became pay for view only days after the elections)

 

Common Dreams (alternative news website) - In Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking - 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 4,988 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.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm

 

Popular Mechanics - A team of former National Security Agency (NSA) computer experts conducted a weeklong exercise with six Diebold machines and a server. According to team leader Michael Wertheimer, the group uncovered "considerable security risks." They found that the smart cards used to provide supervisors with access to the machines could be easily hacked; the removable media containing voting information was protected by flimsy locks that the team picked in under a minute using bent paper clips. The paper clips weren't even necessary, since all 32,000 keys supplied by Diebold for the machines are identical, allowing any key to open all of the machines. On the software side, the most glaring weakness was in election headquarters servers: Dell PCs ran the Windows 2000 operating system without Microsoft's security upgrade patches, which left servers susceptible to viruses and worms, enabling a remote attacker to tamper with election systems by phone."

http://popularmechanics.com/science/research/2004/11/hack_the_vote/index3.phtml (pg 3 of 4 webpages)

 

Popular Science - In South Carolina, officials bought machines too late for adequate testing. And on many of their onscreen ballots, the presidential contest included names of candidates from local elections. Several Texas counties are thousands of votes short because a bug in the software failed to record Spanish-language ballots. For hundreds of thousands of votes, there will be no paper record at all. In Colorado, a group of hackers is boasting that they stole a box of electronic smartcards used to activate e-voting machines and reprogrammed them to allow multiple votes, just for fun. In virtually every state, officials failed to invite outside technical experts to participate in the process of e-voting machine selection. Because none of the major vendors of e-voting machines release their code for security testing, states and counties are forced to trust vendors’ own assessments of their machines’ reliability.

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/generaltech/article/0,20967,714491-1,00.html (3 web pages)

 

New York Times - Some of electronic voting’s loudest defenders have been state and local election officials. Many of those same officials have financial ties to voting machine companies. Officials from Georgia, California and Texas argued that voter-verifiable paper trails, which voters can check to ensure their vote was correctly recorded, are impractical. Former secretaries of state from Florida and Georgia have signed on as lobbyists for Election Systems and Software and Diebold Election Systems. When Bill Jones left office as California's secretary of state in 2003, he quickly became a consultant to Sequoia Voting Systems. His assistant secretary of state took a full-time job there. The list goes on. While they may sincerely think that electronic voting machines are so trustworthy that there is no need for a paper record of votes, their views have to be regarded with suspicion until their conflicts are addressed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/12/opinion/12sun2.html?ex=1103691600&en=6461bea9d8e8c1e1&ei=5070

 

House of Representatives Website - Representatives John Conyers, Jerrold Nadler, and Robert Wexler, members of the House Judiciary Committee, posted a letter on November 5th to David Walker, Comptroller General of the U.S. The letter reads as follows: "We write with an urgent request that the Government Accountability Office immediately undertake an investigation of the efficacy of voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election, how election officials responded to difficulties they encountered and what we can do in the future to improve our election systems and administration."

http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/gaoinvestvote2004ltr11504.pdf

 

What You Can Do. For starters, you can email your support to the above three members of Congress at http://www.workingforchange.com/activism/action.cfm?itemid=18055 There are also two excellent petitions demanding an investigation which you can sign on the Internet. The first already had 36,000 signatures as of November 13th. The second, posted by MoveOn.org doesn't list numbers who have signed, though their membership numbers nearly 3 million.

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/uselect/petition.html 

http://www.moveon.org/investigatethevote/

 

In addition to these petitions, visit websites covering the elections mess. They provide ideas on other actions you can take. Two of the best such websites are:

http://www.blackboxvoting.org

http://www.votescam.com 

 

We also highly recommend the excellent 30-minute documentary available for free viewing at http://www.votergate.tv (though the download may take over 10 minutes). And for several more elections articles well worth reading, take a look at http://www.WantToKnow.info/medianewsarticles#elections

 

For reliable, verifiable information on other major cover-ups which directly affect our democracy, see www.WantToKnow.info The WantToKnow.info team is a group of dedicated researchers from around the world who are deeply committed to revealing critical information being hidden from the public, and to designing ways that we can work together to build a brighter future for us, for our children, and for our world. To subscribe to the WantToKnow.info list (one email every few days): http://www.WantToKnow.info/subscribe. Together, we can and will make a difference. Please help to spread this important news by sending this important information to your friends and colleagues.



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Elections Problems