The Unsettling Facts About Computerized Elections
In The U.S.

It doesn't matter what political views you have, all Americans want fair elections. We take it for granted that our political parties play fair. We want to believe that our elections have always been held honestly. Unfortunately, there is alarming evidence to the contrary. This story isn't about George W. Bush or John F. Kerry. It isn't about politics either. It is about the methods we use to hold elections. You won't find partisan sniping here - just the facts about what has happened since most of America went to computerized voting.
As you will see, both major parties have supported these audit-proof elections, and both have been guilty of dirty tricks. This is why the leading Democrats are trying to ignore the allegations that the last election was fixed - their hands are dirty too. No sensible person, Democrat, Republican, or Independent, can read the facts presented in this article and still support black-box voting. Election supervisors should take all of their computer voting equipment and toss it into the dumpster. Voters should insist that they do so, and should refuse to use these contraptions. Perhaps the states can sue the makers of the machines for refunds, as the State of California did last month. The facts presented here prove that this equipment is unsafe and vulnerable to fraud and manipulation.
There are over 30,000 official reports of problems, "glitches", intimidation, and outright fraud filed with the Federal and state governments regarding the recent election. Here is a sampling of truth you won't find in the mainstream media:
Numbers Don't Add Up:
?All of Oklahoma's 77 counties use a vote tabulator made by ES&S (Election Systems & Software). After 70% of the votes had been counted, the Tulsa World newspaper published official tallies showing that Kerry was winning in 57 counties, and losing 20. The following day, the state released the final results, in which Kerry lost all 77 counties. The remaining 30% of the votes apparently gave Bush 393,000 additional votes, while subtracting 38,000 votes for Kerry which had already been reported. It is mathematically impossible for Kerry to have 38,000 less votes after 100% were counted than he had when 70% were counted. This is no mere "glitch" - the numbers were provided by the State of Oklahoma.
?The final voting results in Palm Beach County, Fla. showed 644 precincts tabulated by their computers. There are only 643 precincts in the county. Officials declined to comment.
?A New Jersey county with 102 precincts tabulated results from 104. What votes came from these nonexistent precincts? Nobody will discuss it with a reporter.
?In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, 29 precincts had more votes certified and counted on Diebold voting machines than there are registered voters in those precincts. The total number of excess votes is 93,000 in these precincts alone. Highland Hills precinct had almost 9,000 votes cast - even though only 760 voters are registered there. An election observer who was present said there was "no way" that many people voted at the tiny precinct. Another precinct tallied an impressive 4,258 votes for Bush and just 260 for Kerry. What was most astonishing was that only 638 people voted there. These are not conditional ballots - they are state-certified votes. It is mathematically impossible to have 116% turnout, no matter how motivated the electorate is. These figures are taken verbatim from the official website of the election board of Cuyahoga County. OH.
?In Sarpy County, Ohio election officials are trying to figure out how they ended up with 10,000 more votes than voters in the general election. For some reason, some votes were counted twice. Deputy County Election Commissioner Ed Gilbert says, "It affected 32 of the 80 precincts. And I suppose as many as 10,000 votes." Sarpy County used election equipment from Election Systems & Software. No one is sure what went wrong.
?Every US state that has computerized voting but no paper trails had an unexplained advantage for Bush of around +5% when comparing exit polls to actual results. On the other hand, in states that have paper audit trails, the exit poll results match the actual results within the published margin of error.
?CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. In the history of America, there has never been an exit poll that was so wrong - by millions of votes. Remember, an exit poll is a same-day poll of people who have already voted. The Ohio exit polls were twice as inaccurate as the exit polls cited last month to accuse the Ukraine of a fraudulent election.

The "Fix" Software Already Has Been Created:
A Florida computer programmer has admitted that he designed and built a "vote rigging" software program at the request of then Florida Congressman, now U.S. Congressman, Republican Tom Feeney of Florida's 24th Congressional District.
Clint Curtis, 46, says that he built the software for Feeney in 2000 while working at a software design company in Oviedo, Florida (Feeney's home district). Curtis says that as technical advisor and programmer at Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI) he attended meetings where Feeney was present "on at least a dozen occasions".
Feeney, who had run in 1994 as Jeb Bush's running-mate in his initial unsuccessful bid for Florida Governor, was serving as both corporate counsel and registered lobbyist for YEI during the period that Curtis worked at the company. Feeney would eventually become Speaker of the Florida House before being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2002. He is now a member of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.
At an October 2000 meeting, Feeney inquired whether the company could build a "vote fraud software prototype". At least three YEI employees are said to have been present at that meeting; Curtis; company owner Mrs. Li Woan Yang; and her executive secretary, Mike Cohen. Curtis says Feeney was very specific in the specifications required for this program. He detailed that the program needed to be touch-screen capable; the user should be able to trigger the program without any additional equipment; and that the programming to accomplish this needed to stay hidden even if the source code was inspected. At Mrs. Yang's request, Curtis designed the program, which was passed to Feeny on a CD-ROM.
Curtis, a lifelong Republican, claims that it was his belief that Feeney's interest was in trying to stop Democrats from using such a program to steal an election.
When Curtis' allegations came to light, Feeney was quickly cleared of all ethics violations brought against him in the Florida house by the Ethics Committee - which included four Republicans appointed to the committee by Feeney himself. Curtis was never even interviewed by the committee.
In a sworn affidavit, Curtis explains what became of Raymond Lemme, a state investigator who was said to be pursing the allegations against YEI and Tom Feeney. "In June of 2003, he told me that he had tracked the corruption 'all the way to the top' and that the story would break in the next few weeks and I would be satisfied with the results. A few weeks later, on July 1st, Mr. Lemme was found dead in a hotel room in Valdosta, Georgia" under mysterious circumstances.
The program Curtis built runs invisibly and automatically on all of the GEMS (General Election Management Software) systems, which account for all of the computer vote counting systems in use. After the voting is over, it conveniently deletes itself from the system without leaving a trace.

How The Voting System Works:
Poll watchers are allowed to watch the voting booths, but in most precincts, the actual counting of the ballots is concealed from the public. Nobody is allowed to see inside the voting machines, or review the computer software that counts the ballots. 80% of all votes in America are counted by machine, and nobody, not private citizen, not local election official, nobody, is allowed to examine how it all works.
All the voting machines used in the United States come from just three companies. The Presidents of two of them have been convicted of vote fraud and yet all state governments continue to do business with just these three companies. There is no audit trail anywhere along the path from the voting machine to National Election Pool, Inc., the private media-owned company that (without any official oversight) tells us all who won.
Once upon a time, Americans voted by paper ballot. At the end of the day after the polls had closed, neighborhood people - Democrats, Republicans, Independents - worked together to count the votes in their polling place before the ballots left their precinct. The count was then posted at the precinct polling place for all to see. This is the only way to ensure a verifiable election. Variations of method are possible, but the basic counting of paper ballots in public view, with the results posted at the polling place before the ballots leave each neighborhood precinct, are essential to ensure a fair election.
To rig an election with the above safeguards built in, one would have to bribe hundreds of people, including key Democrats and Republicans in each precinct. The people bribed at each precinct would have access only to a tiny fraction of the vote. An election could never be decided from a central location with the push of a button or the flick of a switch.
David T. Stutsman, an Indiana attorney with experience in contested-election cases, said, "In traditional elections, the people in your neighborhood, your neighbors, had the responsibility and the legal duty to supervise an election. They counted the votes. The precinct officials don't count the votes anymore. The power has gone to the vendors."

Who Are These Vendors?
Bob Urosevich, CEO of Diebold Election Systems is also the founder of ES&S, a competing voting machine company. Together these two companies are responsible for tallying around 80% of votes cast in the United States.
The major players in the business work together to set prices. They are interwoven through front companies that supply the same product at the same price, all over the country. These are the main companies involved:
Sequoia Pacific: One third of the votes cast in the US 2004 election were counted by a company called Sequoia Pacific. It began its modern life as Automatic Voting Machine, spun off to shareholders of defense contractor Rockwell in the 1960s. The company's founder, Lloyd A. Dixon Jr., went to prison after being indicted by a New York federal grand jury for bribing Buffalo election officials. The company was also fined nearly $50,000 for bribing Texas and Arkansas officials. Things soon got worse. Sequoia Pacific financier Louis Wolfson was convicted of bribing the only Supreme Court Justice ever forced to resign in disgrace. "Dishonest Abe" Fortas got caught accepting illegal money (bribes) from Wolfson.
Fortas cut a deal with the FBI. He taped phone calls in which Wolfson pleads with the Supreme Court Justice to keep quiet. In the transcripts of these phone calls the word 'coverup' enters the American lexicon for the first time. Fortas coined it when he said, "I can't do that! That would be a cover-up!"
ES&S (Election Systems & Software): Dixon's main "competitor", Ransom Shoup, also got sent to prison, in 1979. The company which became E S & S, barely escaped a probe by President Carter's Justice Dept. They managed to stall things until Carter left office and Reagan's incoming Attorney General let the probe die. "We had to get Ronald Reagan elected President to get this thing killed," quipped ES&S's President at the time. In a 1985 Chicago Tribune article a company marketing director says that he met Shoup during a sales pitch to dictator Anastasio Somoza in which Somoza asked "Can I be guaranteed to win?" Somoza must have received the right answer - he later bought the voting machines.
US Senator Chuck Hagel was the CEO of ES&S before he decided to run for the Senate in Nebraska in 1996. That year, ES&S machines reported his amazing wins in the primaries and general election. Hagel was the state's first Republican Senator in 24 years. He even won the black vote.
Six years later Hagel ran again against Democrat Charlie Matulka in 2002, and won in a landslide. He was re-elected to his second term with 83% of the vote: the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska. The votes were again counted by ES&S.
Hagel is still a major stockholder of the parent company of ES&S, run by Michael McCarthy, who happens to also be Hagel's treasurer. His investment is valued at $1-5 million. McCarthy also served as campaign treasurer for Hagel until December of 2002.
ES&S also has a connection to the Bush family. Jeb Bush's first choice as running mate in 1998 was Sandra Mortham who was a paid lobbyist for ES&S and received a commission for every county that bought its touch-screen machines.
Diebold: Diebold Inc. is run by Walden "Wally" O'Dell, a top fundraiser for the Bush campaign. O'Dell wrote in a fund-raising letter last year that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." Last August, he was a guest at George W's ranch in Crawford.
Diebold keeps having "incidents" with its machinery, leading to a growing concern that the company is losing, or even stealing, large numbers of votes. The ATM equipment banks purchase from Diebold is considered reliable to the penny and safe from computer hackers. Their voting machines and tabulators have the opposite reputation.
California's Secretary of State recently decertified Diebold voting machines in that state, noting that the company was "banned, decertified, fraudulent, despicable, and deceitful" in their dealings with the state. A few days after the last election, Diebold quietly settled a suit by the State of California. Diebold agreed to a $2.6+ million settlement over allegations it sold the state faulty voting machines. Prosecutors said Diebold used bait-and-switch tactics in selling unreliable electronic voting systems that lacked federal and state certification and were vulnerable to computer hackers and software bugs.


A History of Computerized Election Fraud:
The earliest computerized voting fraud I know of was the Shoup Voting Machine scandal of the early 1970s. The story was covered for the Tampa Times newspaper by my uncle, reporter Jerry Daniels.  Now retired from the Sacramento Bee in California, Jerry says the Shoup Company (now called ES&S) allegedly bribed politicians all over the country to buy Shoup Voting Machines in the 60s and 70s. He said that in Tampa, the County Commission sold 180 "obsolete" machines back to Shoup for $30 each, replacing them with new machines that cost over a half-million dollars. The old machines were then sold by Shoup to Houston for $270,000, where they worked just fine. The new Tampa machines were the first time computers were used to count votes, and they were a nightmare. No one will ever know who really won the 1971 Tampa city elections. A retired programmer who worked on the system, A.R. Cacciatore, says the programs were written in BASIC, and that when they failed, rather than admit that the election results were lost, the staff simply invented numbers out of thin air, and reported them. One City Council candidate in the election, Keller Cochran, suspected something was amiss and demanded a hand recount. Although a judge ordered the recount, it was too late - election workers had already dumped the IBM cards into the local landfill.
With all of the Shoup bribe money floating around, the local Grand Jury couldn't seem to indict anyone, so US Attorney General John Mitchell stepped in, indicting Shoup on Federal charges. Ultimately, a few politicians and company officials were convicted and sent to jail. The County Elections Supervisor, Jim Fair, vanished into thin air and could not be found until the whole thing was over. He was fired by the Governor during his absence. Fair resurfaced, sporting long hair and a beard, to appeal the firing. He claimed that he had disappeared in fear of his life. At his hearing in the state Senate, Fair passed out U.S. flags and Uncle Sam hats to the senators. But the Senate upheld his removal 46-0.

Here are more examples of computer voting problems:
?In 2002, Comal County, Texas, tried out new computer voting machines--and three Republican candidates each won their respective offices, each with exactly 18,181 votes. "Isn't that the weirdest thing?" County Clerk Joy Treater asked at the time. "We noticed it right away, but it is just a big coincidence." The uncanny "coincidence" was called weird, but not audited. The lucky winners were Danny Scheel, Carter Casteel, and Jeff Wentworth. But it gets even more bizarre: In Michigan, Republican Candace Miller also won with 18,181 votes. In Maryland, Republican Michael Smiguel won his race with 18,181 votes. Five races, all computerized, five Republicans, all with the same vote. The odds that this was a coincidence are into the billions, especially considering that the three Texas candidates are neighbors.
?Just down the road in Scurry County, Texas, two unexpected landslide wins for Republican candidates struck election clerks as just one coincidence too many in 2002. Joan Bunch, the county clerk, investigated and found that a faulty computer chip had caused the county's optical scanner to record Democratic votes as Republican. After two manual recounts and one electronic recount using a replacement chip in the scanner, the Democratic candidates won by large margins and the original results were overturned.
?November 1990, Seattle, Washington - Some candidates watched votes alight, then flutter away. Democrat Al Williams saw 90 votes wander off his tally between election night and the following day, though no new counting had been done. At the same time, his opponent, Republican Tom Tangen, gained 32 votes. At one point several hundred ballots added to returns didn't result in any increase in the number of votes. But elsewhere, the number of votes added exceeded the number of additional ballots counted. A Republican candidate achieved an amazing surge in his absentee percentage for no apparent reason. And no one seemed to notice (until a determined Democratic candidate started demanding an answer) that the machines simply "forgot" to count 14,000 votes.
?November 1996, Bergen County, New Jersey - Democrats told Bergen County Clerk Kathleen Donovan to come up with a better explanation for mysterious swings in vote totals. Donovan blamed voting computers for conflicting tallies that rose and fell by 8,000 or 9,000 votes. The swings perplexed candidates of both parties. For example, the Republican incumbent, Anthony Cassano, had won by about 7,000 votes as of the day after the election but his lead evaporated later. One candidate actually lost 1,600 votes during the counting.
?November 1999, Onondaga County, New York - Computers gave the election to the wrong candidate, then gave it back. Bob Faulkner, a political newcomer, went to bed on Election Night confident he had helped complete a Republican sweep of three open council seats. But after Onondaga County Board of Elections staffers rechecked the totals, Faulkner had lost to Democratic incumbent Elaine Lytel.
?April 2002, Johnson County, Kansas - Johnson County's new Diebold touch screen machines, proclaimed a success on election night, did not work as well as originally believed. Incorrect vote totals were discovered in six races, three of them contested, leaving county election officials scrambling to make sure the unofficial results were accurate. Johnson County Election Commissioner Connie Schmidt checked the machines and found that the computers had under and over-reported hundreds of votes. The problem, however, was so perplexing that Schmidt asked the Board of Canvassers to order a hand recount to make sure the results were accurate. Unfortunately, the touch screen machines did away with the ballots, so the only way to do a hand recount is to have the machine print its internal data page by page. Vote totals changed dramatically.
?November 2002, Baldwin County, Alabama - No one at the voting machine company can explain the mystery votes that changed after polling places had closed, flipping the election from the Democratic winner to a Republican in the Alabama governor's race. "Something happened. I don't have enough intelligence to say exactly what," said Mark Kelley of ES&S. Baldwin County results showed that Democrat Don Siegelman earned enough votes to win the state of Alabama. All the observers went home. The next morning, however, 6,300 of Siegelman's votes inexplicably had disappeared, and the election was handed to Republican Bob Riley. A recount was requested, but denied.
?November 2002, Georgia - Fulton County election officials said that memory cards from 67 electronic voting machines had been misplaced, so ballots cast on those machines were left out of previously announced vote totals. No hand count can shine any light on this; the entire state of Georgia went to touch-screen machines with no physical record of the vote. Ten of the memory cards were never found.
?A pair of journalists found hard proof of vote fraud in Dade County Fla. a few years back - the computer's tabulator tape was already printed and labeled before voting began! They gave this evidence to the assistant State Attorney. Sadly, that assistant State Attorney was Janet Reno, who killed the investigation. 60 Minutes taped a segment on the story, but never aired it. When Miami Magazine ran a story about the fraudulent voting in Dade County, the magazine was purchased almost immediately by the editor of the Miami News, Sylvan Meyer - who ordered that no further stories on vote fraud be published. When Dade precinct workers went to the media to report the election rigging, the media ignored them. So did the attorney general. So did the FBI. Citizens who tried to observe the next election in Miami were arrested and jailed.
?Several years later, Janet Reno would face vengeance. Running for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 2003, Reno noted some unusual outcomes on election day. In South Florida precincts where she was strong, the ES&S voting machines were inexplicably recording no votes in the governor's race. In some polling places where there were over 1,000 votes cast in other races, there were no votes for governor. ES&S later sent "data extraction" technicians, who "found" some votes. Was this the actual count? Officials don't know; ES&S certified the count. Reno lost by less than 5,000 votes out of 1.3 million cast.
?In a computer vote fraud case in West Virginia, an expert witness testifying for the plaintiff sat down at a computer voting machine provided by the defendants, studied it for a while, then with a single ballot card added 10,000 votes to one of the fictional candidates. The judge refused to allow the jury to see the demonstration and the charges were eventually dropped.
?In Volusia County, Fla., in 2000, county election officials hand recounted more than 184,000 paper ballots used to feed the computerized system, after the central computer showed a Socialist Party candidate receiving more than 9,000 votes and Al Gore getting minus 19,000. Another 4,000 votes were received for Bush that should not have been there.
?In 2002, the State of Georgia had six big upsets of Democrats by Republicans, including in the U.S. Senate race, where incumbent Max Cleland had a big lead in the polls but surprisingly was upended by the GOP's Saxby Chambliss. The statewide vote was cast on 22,000 Diebold machines. Just before the election, Diebold reportedly applied software "patches" to all of these machines, purportedly to fix a problem with the computers crashing. The patches were said to have been "certified" by election officials by phone--with no examination of what the patches actually did. Diebold honchos later said that they had investigated themselves and (surprise!) found they had done nothing to mess with the system .
It was later discovered that Diebold had disposed of all the memory cards from these touch-screen machines. Paper ballots are retained by law for 22 months, and they're a lot bulkier than credit-card-size memory cards. For some reason the Diebold people felt compelled to get rid of them all.


How Hard Would It Be To Rig The Computers?
A single, Berkeley - based firm manufactures the software used in the machines that compile more than two-thirds of the nation's electronically-counted votes. Even a mediocre programmer could hack the system files, the application, or the compiler - in fact the software contains known "back doors" and vulnerabilities.
In January 2003, a peculiar web folder - cleverly named "rob-georgia" - was discovered at an unprotected  Diebold Election Systems storage site. This unauthorized "patch" instructed programmers to replace Windows files and run an attached program on all of Georgia's voting computers. The Georgia Secretary of State admits a patch was administered to all 22,000 voting machines in the state just before the election. They never approved it, and it has now vanished.
A curious plug-in was found in the program, called PE Explorer. This utility can be used to change the date and time stamp. Thus a novice could easily place votes on the card and date them for election day. None of this is encoded, and it all opens on notepad or Microsoft Access. As something of a computer expert myself, I can tell you this is the same thing as a bank vault with walls made out of rice paper!

Some Expert Opinions:
?Randall H. Erben, Republican former assistant secretary of state in Texas: "I have no question that somebody who's smart enough with a computer could rig it. It's going to be virtually undetectable if it's done correctly."
?Steve White, assistant attorney general of California: "It could be done easily by somebody relatively unsophisticated."
?Michael Shamos, voting-systems examiner for Pennsylvania: "One person could do it. A national mechanism exists that could be manipulated by anybody, even a single individual. The mechanism is there to make it easy."
?Howard Strauss, Princeton Professor: "One individual, working alone, would be able to effect changes in the code more quickly and securely than a group. They could never detect it if he took only the most basic steps to conceal it."
?Peter Neumann, Computer Executive: "If somebody is a skilled user of a conventional computer, he has the ability to do almost anything he wants and leave no trace, because most computer systems today do not have adequate protection. Personal computers are non-secure, for the most part. Now, in the election systems the vulnerabilities are enormous. You effectively have to trust the entire staff of the corporation that is producing your software. Every single member has to be trusted. It would take one person to rig the system, typically, because of the way the thing is set up. There are very few internal controls."

Where Do We Go From Here?
Even without all of these blatant examples, voting with no paper trail is a terrible plan. Electronic voting is what is known as "a bad idea". Would you trust a Diebold ATM machine if it didn't print out a receipt of your bank transaction? There needs to be a voter-verified paper ballot for any man or woman who steps into a voting booth. Without it, there can be no trust for any result that follows. If computers must be used in voting, hook up a printer to these machines, and have election officials count the paper outputs for results. If the companies protest that printers sometimes jam, then that proves their equipment in unreliable and can't be trusted. Just in case, have paper ballots on hand as backup for the unexpected computer snafu. Come to think of it, just ditch the computers and use paper ballots in the first place!>br>This is an issue that goes to the heart of our Democracy, and there is no room for partisanship. Either you support fair and verifiable elections, or you don't.
Regardless of your political affiliation, if you believe in Democracy, this dangerous situation must be remedied. Josef Stalin once said "the power is held not by the voters, nor by those elected. The true power is held by those who count the votes." The American people will never again vote safely until they once again count the votes themselves. GATOR