Fighting fraud

Obama Assembles U.S.'s `Largest Law Firm' to Monitor Election

By James Rowley

Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Barack Obama and John McCain have a litigation game plan to accompany their election strategy.

Both candidates have armies of volunteers to ring doorbells and get voters to the polls. They are also forming squadrons of lawyers who are filing challenges and preparing in case Election Day doesn't settle the contest for the White House.

Legal battles unfolding in Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin provide fresh evidence of the potential fights to come over ballot access in an election marked by unprecedented spending to increase the number of voters in strategically important states.

The millions of dollars that have been poured into registration drives have yielded millions of new voters across the country. Those same efforts have now generated heated battles in both parties with cries of voter fraud and intimidation that may threaten the integrity of the election.

Election officials, meanwhile, are braced for huge turnout and the problems that could create with long lines, malfunctioning machines and challenges to voters.

Already, the U.S. Supreme Court has handed Ohio Democrats a victory, dissolving a court order obtained by Republicans to force state officials to release the list of 200,000 new voters whose names or addresses don't match government databases.

Democrats' Accusations

Democrats accused Republicans of trying to improperly disqualify voters.

In Florida, Democratic lawyer Charles H. Lichtman has assembled almost 5,000 lawyers to monitor precincts, assist voters turned away at the polls and litigate any disputes that can't be resolved out of court.

``On Election Day, I will be managing the largest law firm in the country, albeit for one day,'' said Lichtman, 53, a Fort Lauderdale corporate lawyer and veteran of the five-week recount after the 2000 election when Florida eventually delivered the presidency to George W. Bush.

Obama's lawyers also have pressed allegations that Michigan Republicans planned to use mortgage-foreclosure lists to challenge voters. Indiana labor unions allied with Democratic presidential nominee Obama, an Illinois senator, are battling a Republican chairman over early voting in the state's second- largest county.

2002 Law

Much of the partisan disagreement is over enforcing a 2002 law enacted by Congress to help states prevent a Florida-type recount by requiring election officials to set up database checks to purge voters.

Ohio's Republican Party obtained a court order directing Jennifer Brunner, Ohio's secretary of state, to give county election officials the lists of new voters whose names didn't match drivers' licenses or Social Security records.

In her successful Supreme Court petition, Brunner called the order a recipe for ``disruption'' and ``chaos'' as the state prepares for a presidential vote that polls of Ohio voters predict will produce another razor-thin margin. Database checks are not ``a litmus test'' for the right to vote, she said in a statement announcing the appeal.

Republicans contend the federal law requires record checks to counter fraudulent voter registration, which they say has been perpetrated by a nationwide network of community activists known as ACORN. The party's presidential nominee, Arizona Senator McCain, has cried foul over the drive by ACORN -- an acronym for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now -- to register 1.3 million voters this year.

`Deceased Individuals'

``They're registering the same person at different addresses,'' said Sean Cairncross, the Republican National Committee's chief counsel. ``They're registering people at vacant lots'' as well as ``deceased individuals.''

ACORN says bogus applications are only a tiny percentage of the new voters it registered, and it flags suspicious cases to election officials.

On Oct. 2, Ohio Republicans won a separate court fight with Brunner over absentee ballots cast by McCain supporters. The state's Supreme Court countermanded Brunner's order that local election boards reject the ballots if the applicant hadn't checked a box that indicating they were a ``qualified voter'' when submitting the absentee ballot.

Democrats and voter-rights lawyers, meanwhile, accuse Republicans of twisting the Help America Vote Act to use identity-card or database checks as a method to prevent legitimate voters from casting ballots.

`No Basis'

``That is one of the oldest dumbest lines the Democratic Party uses,'' said John McClelland, spokesman for the Ohio Republicans in Columbus. ``There is no basis for it.''

Ohio doesn't require first-time voters to register party affiliation, though the Obama campaign said Democrats have a significant edge among the 660,000 new Ohio voters.

Michael McDonald, a political scientist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, said there is scant evidence of large numbers of people fraudulently casting ballots. ```We all know the stories of dead people voting in Chicago,'' he said. ``We don't have zombies showing up at polling places and casting ballots.''

Without ``any data,'' the argument over whether there is vote fraud or ballot suppression is ``the political equivalent of a religious debate,'' said Doug Chapin, director of electionline.org, a Washington-based unit of the Pew Charitable Trust that studies election law.

`Tenets of Faith'

``Both sides have deeply held tenets of faith, but no way to prove'' that ``they are right or the other side is wrong.''

Still, vote fraud has become an attack line for McCain, 72.

In an Oct. 15 debate, McCain said Obama, 47, was in league with ACORN and accused the group of ``perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history.''

Obama denied any connection with ACORN, and said the group was defrauded by people who filled out registration cards with fake names just to get paid.

Bob Bauer, the general counsel of Obama's campaign, charged that Republican efforts like the Ohio party's lawsuit, are ``grounded simply in an effort to intimidate voters and suppress the vote.''

In a conference call with reporters, Bauer vowed to mount ``ferocious response'' to any effort to purge voter rolls, such as the lawsuit by Wisconsin's Republican attorney general, J.B. Van Hollen.

Van Hollen, who co-chairs McCain's presidential campaign in Wisconsin, sued to force the state agency overseeing elections to perform database searches to check the validity of all voters registered since Jan. 1, 2006. A decision is expected next week.

Labor Unions

In Indiana, Republicans and Democratic-allied labor unions are battling over early voting in Lake County, an historically Democratic stronghold that includes Hammond, East Chicago and Gary near Chicago. John Curley, the county Republican chairman, argues that the election board lacked authority to open more than one site because state law requires a unanimous vote of the vote of the board.

The McCain campaign wouldn't say how many lawyers it has deployed or how it is preparing for possible court fights.

``We are not jumping to conclusions that litigation efforts are going to be widespread,'' said Ben Porritt, a McCain spokesman.

Hayden Dempsey, a Tallahassee lawyer who chairs Lawyers for McCain in Florida, said his party isn't ``trying to lawyer up nearly so much as the Democrats.'' Republicans are trying to mobilize voters while Florida Democrats appear to be trying to ``win this through having the greatest number of lawyers.''

To contact the reporter on this story: James Rowley at jarowley@bloomberg.net

Original article posted here.

And while Hellery tears up the Party, it causes us to lose focus on what "SHOULD" be the TRUE THREAT

And besides having to deal with Hellary, we still have Dieballed to deal with

Another great site supporter emailed me with the following information to spread about Ron Paul in Louisiana

Hi Weazl,

In case you want to post this info or spread the word: I phoned the Louisiana Republican Party here: http://lagop.com/ ,telling them it is getting out in the national news and making the state look bad. I asked for transparency, particularly:

- How and why did they extend the delegate deadline without a rule change (or did they)? Apparently it was only 6 hours after receiving Pauls totals on the deadline that they extended the deadline for 2 days to let other candidates get more delegates.

- Why did some registered delegates get provisional ballots?

- Have the provisional ballots been counted, and if not why? When will tallies be posted in the open for all to see?



I also contacted the Governor’s office. Bobby Jindal is the first Indian-American governor in America to be elected (he was just sworn in last week) and he won on a reform and “I promise to root out the corruption no matter what” platform. I asked him to use his influence with the party to make sure this thing is resolved in an open and above-board way.



Email: http://www.gov.state.la.us/index.cfm?md=pagebuilder&tmp=home&navID=5&cpID=28&cfmID=0&catID=0

Phone: 225.342.0991 (Governor’s Office, Constituent Services – you’ll have to leave a message).

Julia

Destroying Democracy with Democratic compliance

Rush Holt's HR 811 Does More Harm than Good

A Leading Election Integrity Advocate Speaks Out Against 7 Serious Failures in the Latest Holt Election Reform Bill ...

Guest blogged by Ellen Theisen, Co-Director of VotersUnite.Org

Once we have legitimized that “ballots” need not be counted and have endorsed the practice of secret vote-counting, how is it that we are a democracy?

In September of 2003, when I was working with VerifiedVoting, Greg Dinger, Keone Kealoha, and I coordinated the first national activist effort in the current grassroots election integrity movement. We had a calling campaign to get more co-sponsors for Representative Rush Holt’s (D-NJ) election reform bill, then called HR 2239. In two months, the number of co-sponsors more than doubled — from 29 to 61. After the disastrous November 2003 Fairfax, Virginia, election, we rejoiced when Republican Representative Tom Davis (R-VA) signed on and the bill became bipartisan. By the end of 2003, there were 94 co-sponsors.

But Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) was chairman of the House Administration Committee, and the bill never even got a hearing. Nor did Holt’s subsequent version of the bill in the 109th Congress, HR 550. But this year’s bill in the 110th, HR 811, has been marked up in committee and is expected to soon come to the House floor for a vote. This should be a time for celebration for me, but it’s not.

After more than three years of supporting election reform bills introduced by Representative Rush Holt, I am saddened to see the many severe flaws in the version of HR 811 as it was passed out of committee last month. This year’s bill had serious flaws when it was introduced in January. Primarily, it failed to accommodate a nearly unanimous agreement among citizen activists and computer scientists who have watched election disasters over the past three years — the agreement that electronic voting machines (DREs) should not be used in U.S. elections. I worked with many people to try to get an amendment requiring a paper ballot, one that was actually to be counted, for every vote cast. To my mind, that one significant improvement would have been worth tolerating the other flaws.

But the bill that was passed out of committee still allows for invisible, unverifiable, electronic ballots on DRE touch-screens as the official ballot for the all-important initial count where electronic voting systems are used. Adding a "paper trail" to those machines makes no real difference. Voters still can’t verify the electrical charges that make up the ballots that are counted on Election Night by the DRE.

In addition to other flaws that remained in the bill as it came out of committee, some changes removed valuable safeguards from the bill, and other changes introduced new problems. (Both versions of the bill can be viewed by inputting "HR 811" at the government's legislation search engine, Thomas.gov. The complete text of the current version is here. )

In my opinion, HR 811 will cause more problems than it will solve.

My primary objection is the extreme shift in the concept of “democracy” that the bill institutes legally. Specifically, it gives a federal stamp of approval to “ballots” that will never be counted, and it endorses secret vote-counting.

Let me explain seven of the bill's severe failures....

1) Under HR 811, some “ballots” don’t have to ever be counted.

The foremost flaw in HR 811 (both the introduced version and the version passed out of committee) is that the bill amends the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) to allow for “paper ballots” that will never be used for anything at all, not for the initial count and not for any audit, since most HR811-mandated audits will count only 3% of those ballots, in some cases, and in some cases, as many as 10% of the them.

The very first requirement listed in HAVA [Section 301(a)(1)(A)(i)] is that all voting systems “permit the voter to verify (in a private and independent manner) the votes selected by the voter on the ballot before the ballot is cast and counted.”

Since voters can't see inside the inner workers of the compuer, they cannot verify their electronic ballot before it’s cast and counted, so this legal requirement of HAVA is presently violated wherever electronic voting machines (DREs) are used. But instead of enforcing the requirement, HR 811 legitimizes the violation. Although a DRE system with a so-called “voter-verified paper ballot” would permit the voter to verify a paper record supposedly representing their vote, the paper record is not the ballot that is cast and counted. While that is now the case in many jurisdictions, no state or federal law, yet, defines those non-counted records of the vote as “ballots.” We’ve had some wiggle-room for democracy, and HR 811 takes it away by declaring uncounted paper records to be “ballots.”

2) Secret vote-counting is endorsed.

One of the committee changes that removed an important value in the bill is the “disclosure” section. That section has now become a reversal of the original Holt position. Holt’s 2003 bill said simply:

No voting system shall at any time contain or use undisclosed software. Any voting system containing or using software shall disclose the source code of that software to the Commission, and the Commission shall make that source code available for inspection upon request to any citizen.

As originally introduced in 2006, Holt’s HR 811 version was even stronger:

source code, object code, executable representation, and ballot programming files [shall be made] available for inspection promptly upon request to any person.

The position is very clear, a simple mandate for public disclosure, without any exceptions or conditions. But the current HR 811, as rewritten in committee, takes four and half pages to describe the “disclosure,” and if you unravel the terms and conditions, you discover that public disclosure is prohibited, rather than required (unless a state passes new disclosure laws of their own and amends their current trade secret laws specifically to get around this mandate.)

HR 811 now endorses secret software for secret vote-counting — the antithesis of democracy.

People say, “oh well, who would examine the software and find errors and malicious code anyway?” But that’s not the point. The point is that a government claiming to be democratic should not endorse secret vote-counting.

Once we have legitimized that “ballots” need not be counted and have endorsed the practice of secret vote-counting, how is it that we are a democracy?

And there are still more serious problems with the bill as well...

3) Audits are inadequate and contain an invitation to tamper.

The bill requires what it calls “audits.” But many experts who have researched election audit methods agree that the model in HR 811 will not be effective or provide confidence. Furthermore, the precincts to be selected “randomly” and audited “without advance notice” can be announced long before the audits actually start — thus enabling tamperers to fix up the ballots in the chosen precincts.

America has a long and sordid history of ballot tampering. With electronic voting, wholesale theft may be just a matter of a few well-placed keystrokes. The prize of controlling government spending is bigger than ever. Attempts to steal elections will continue, and the audit provisions in HR 811 won’t even present a serious obstacle.

4) The “ban” on electronic communications and networking is incomplete and convoluted.

The ban on wireless communications is confusing and unenforceable. In contrast, Holt’s first bill, HR 2239, said simply:

No voting system shall contain any wireless communication device at all.

That was a good start, and the latest bill should have banned ALL communications and networking capability. (What difference does it make to tamperers if they use a cell phone or land line or Internet connection, or even telegraph as they did in the old days? If you aren’t convinced, read Pokey Anderson’s “Even a Remote Chance?”.

Instead, the new HR 811 gives a convoluted mandate:

No voting system shall contain, use, or be accessible by any wireless, powerline, or concealed communication device, except that enclosed infrared communications devices which are certified for use in the voting system by the State and which cannot be used for any remote or wide area communications or used without the knowledge of poll workers shall be permitted.

What does the exception for "infrared communications devices" mean, and how would poll workers know about any hidden communications devices? They wouldn’t. This new provision is incomprehensible to the ordinary person ... and it’s unenforceable.

HR 811 is even ambiguous about Internet connections. The title of the section sounds promising, “Prohibiting Connection of System or Transmission of System Information Over the Internet.” But the text of the section does not refer to a SYSTEM at all, but just a DEVICE. So it appears that while a voting device such a DRE touch-screen voting machine may not be connected to the Internet, the all-important central tabulator computers (which hold the final tallies) can be connected to the Internet — an invitation to dial in and change the results.

5) The impossible is required.

HR 811 requires all configuration files used in any voting system to be certified by the State and escrowed with the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC).

The problem is that ballot configuration files are different for every precinct in every election; some counties have thousands of precincts; some states have hundreds of counties. And there might be a window of a few weeks, just before the election, for the State to certify the tens of thousands of configuration files to be used in an election.

Is it possible? No. It’s no more possible than it is to conduct adequate pre-election testing on the thousands of DREs in use in some counties, which is why they simply aren’t tested before an election.

6) Massive voter disenfranchisement caused by broken machines will remain in 2008 and beyond.

An excellent provision in HR 811 when it was introduced was a requirement for emergency paper ballots to be available in case machines break down — as they always do, and as we saw week after week during the 2006 election cycle. Recent elections have seen untold numbers of registered voters turned away from the polling place because the DREs broke down or malfunctioned. So, having emergency paper ballots on hand is absolutely essential.

But that provision is no longer present in the current official version. (Oddly, it was still in the version approved by the committee, and the question remains why it is no longer in the official version destined to go to the floor.)

Instead, the bill now requires that paper ballots be offered to any voter who wants one. This provision would allow voters to choose paper ballots when the machines are broken — or for any other reason. That’s good. However unlike the original provision, this option won’t take effect until 2010, and it won’t ever apply to early voting, even after 2010.

Further, there is no explicit requirement for those paper ballots to be counted on Election Night with all other reported results from DRE systems, etc. The state of California has a similar provisional for voters to request a paper ballot if they prefer. And in violation of the intent of that provision, some elections officials in the state announced they would not even begin to count such ballots until the Thursday following the election. Results reported on Election Night --- the all important ones reported in the news and establishing the “winner” in everyone’s minds --- would be skewed to represent the results of those who trust the use of DRE voting machines.

So, with new equipment required in a huge number of precincts across the country, 2008 is certain to see more of the same disenfranchisement that the original HR 811 was intended to halt. And this current version of the bill does nothing to address the disenfranchisement that broken voting machines will cause in early voting — ever.

7) The dysfunctional Election Assistance Commission (EAC) is made permanent.

Reports from the Government Accountability Office reveal that the Election Assistance Commission is incompetent, behind schedule by years, and derelict in their duties. Recent news articles regarding their suppression and subsequent altering of a Voter Fraud report, along with their undisclosed disapproval of the CIBER voting system test lab, has shown that the EAC is partisan and secretive. The process by which the 2005 federal voting systems standards were developed show that the agency is unduly influenced by the interests of voting system manufacturers. Yet, HR 811 puts these four Presidential appointees in charge of more duties than those they've inadequately handled so far, makes the EAC a permanent agency, and provides it with permanent funding.

The flaws in this bill are more damaging to democracy than the good that might come of the minimal safeguards it could provide for our elections in 2008 and beyond.

I have not addressed every problem with the bill. But these seven problems are sufficient to convince me that this bill is not just “imperfect.” In my opinion, the flaws in this bill are more damaging to democracy and our future election process than the good that might come of the minimal safeguards it could provide for our elections in 2008 and beyond. So, far from celebrating that a Holt election reform bill will finally come to the floor for a vote as I might have been back in 2003, or even 2005, I am now filled with sadness. This bill should never be passed as it is currently written.

Original article posted here.

Pesky Nigerians think they're entitled to democracy. Will someone tell them that there is no democracy so long as their is oil in their dirt?

Nigerian labor unions call for strike to protest elections

ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) -- Labor leaders in Nigeria called a two-day nationwide strike on Thursday in protest at last month's elections, to coincide with the inauguration of a new government on May 29.

Owei Lakemfa, a spokesman for the umbrella blue collar union, the Nigeria Labor Congress, said workers are being asked to stay at home and hold neighborhood rallies on May 28-29. The white collar counterpart, Trade Union Congress, also agreed to call for a strike, he said.

The unions argue that the April elections which gave a sweeping victory to President-elect Umaru Yar'Adua and the ruling People's Democratic Party were fraudulent and unacceptable. They have called for a re-run of the vote.

The handover from President Olusegun Obasanjo to Yar'Adua will mark the first time Nigeria has seen power transferred from one civilian leader to another since the country wrested independence from Britain in 1960. Annulments and military coups ruined all earlier attempts for such a transfer in the country of 140 million people, Africa's largest oil producer.

But international observers as well as a majority of Nigerians say the April vote was undemocratic. Thugs openly stole ballot boxes, electoral officials stuffed boxes with votes marked for Obasanjo's ruling party and ballot shortages prevented citizens from making their voices heard in many opposition strongholds.

In some wards where the vote failed to occur at all, the ruling party was announced the runaway winner, international observers have said. The weak, fractured opposition has rejected the results, but has not been able to muster comprehensive protests.

The workers' unions are considered among the few organizations capable of rallying supporters.

Original article posted here.

More Crimes of the Bush Anti Democracy Regime

The GOP's cyber election hit squad

by Steven Rosenfeld and Bob Fitrakis

Did the most powerful Republicans in America have the computer capacity, software skills and electronic infrastructure in place on Election Night 2004 to tamper with the Ohio results to ensure George W. Bush's re-election?

The answer appears to be yes. There is more than ample documentation to show that on Election Night 2004, Ohio's "official" Secretary of State website – which gave the world the presidential election results – was redirected from an Ohio government server to a group of servers that contain scores of Republican web sites, including the secret White House e-mail accounts that have emerged in the scandal surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s firing of eight federal prosecutors.

Recent revelations have documented that the Republican National Committee (RNC) ran a secret White House e-mail system for Karl Rove and dozens of White House staffers. This high-tech system used to count and report the 2004 presidential vote– from server-hosting contracts, to software-writing services, to remote-access capability, to the actual server usage logs themselves – must be added to the growing congressional investigations.

Numerous tech-savvy bloggers, starting with the online investigative consortium epluribusmedia.org and their November 2006 article cross-posted by contributor luaptifer to Dailykos, and Joseph Cannon's blog at Cannonfire.blogspot.com, outed the RNC tech network. That web-hosting firm is SMARTech Corp. Of Chattanooga, TN, operating out of the basement in the old Pioneer Bank building. The firm hosts scores of Republican websites, including georgewbush.com, GOP.com and rnc.org.

The software created for the Ohio secretary of state’s Election Night 2004 website was created by GovTech Solutions, a firm co-founded by longtime GOP computing guru Mike Connell. He also redesigned the Bush campaign's website in 2000 and told "Inside Business" magazine in 1999, "I wouldn't be where I am today without the Bush campaign and the Bush family because the Bushes truly are about family and I’m loyal to my network."

Ohio's Cedarville University, a Christian school with 3,100 students, issued a press release on January 13, 2005 describing how faculty member Dr. Alan Dillman’s computing company Government Consulting Resources, Ltd, worked with these Republican-connected companies to tally the vote on Election Night 2004.

"Dillman personally led the effort from the GCR side, teaming with key members of Blackwell's staff," the release said. "GCR teamed with several other firms – including key players such as GovTech Solutions, which performed the software development – to deliver the end result. SMARTech provided the backup and additional system capacity, and Mercury Interactive performed the stress testing."

On Election Night 2004, the Republican Party not only controlled the vote-counting process in Ohio, the final presidential swing state, through a secretary of state who was a co-chair of the Bush campaign, but it also controlled the technology that allowed the tally of the vote in Ohio's 88 counties to be reported to the media and voters.

Privatizing elections and allowing known partisans to run a key presidential vote count is troubling enough. But the reason Congress must investigate these high-tech ties is there is abundant evidence that Republicans could have used this computing network to delay announcing the winner of Ohio's 2004 election while tinkering with the results.

Did Ohio Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell or other GOP operatives inflate the president's vote totals to secure George W. Bush's margin of victory? On Election Night 2004, many of the totals reported by the Secretary of State were based on local precinct results that were impossible. In Clyde, Ohio, a Republican haven, Bush won big after 131 percent voter turnout. In Republican Perry County, two precincts came in at 124 percent and 120 percent respectively. In Gahanna Ward 1, precinct B, Bush received 4,258 votes despite the fact that only 638 people voted for president. In Concord Southwest in Miami County, the certified election results proudly proclaimed at 679 out of 689 registered voters cast ballots, a 98.55 percent turnout. FreePress.org later found that only 547 voters had signed in.

These strange election results were routed by county election officials through Ohio's Secretary of State's office, through partisan IT providers and software, and the final results were hosted out of a computer based in Tennessee announcing the winner. The Cedarville University releases boasted the system "was running like a champ." It said, "The system kept running through the early morning hours as users from around the world looked to Ohio for their election results."

All the facts are not in, but enough is known to warrant a serious congressional inquiry. Beginning with a timeline on Election Night after a national media consortium exit poll predicted Democrat John Kerry would win Ohio, the first Ohio returns were from the state's Democratic urban strongholds, showing Kerry in the lead.

This was the case until shortly after midnight on Wednesday, Nov. 3, when for roughly 90 minutes the Ohio election results reported on the Secretary of State's website were frozen. Shortly before 2am EST election returns came in from a handful of the state's rural Republican enclaves, bumping Bush's numbers over the top.

It was known Bush would carry rural Ohio. But the vote totals from these last-to-report counties, where Karl Rove said there was an unprecedented late-hour evangelical vote giving the White House a moral mandate, were highly improbable and suggested vote count fraud to pad Bush’s numbers. Just how flimsy the reported GOP totals were was not known on Election Night and has not been examined by the national media. But an investigation by the House Judiciary Committee Democratic staff begun after Election Day 2004 and completed before the Electoral College met on Jan. 6, 2005, was first to publicly point to vote count fraud in rural Ohio.

That report, "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio," cited near-impossible vote totals, including 19,000 votes that were mysteriously added at the close of tallying the vote in Miami County. The report cited more than 3,000 apparently fraudulent voter registrations – all dating back to the same day in 1977 in Perry County. The report noted a homeland security emergency was declared in Warren County, prompting its ballots to be taken to a police-guarded unauthorized warehouse and counted away from public scrutiny, despite local media protests.

In our book, "What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election" (The New Press, 2006), we go beyond the House Judiciary Democratic report to analyze precinct-by-precinct returns and we print copies of the documents upon which we base our findings. We found many vote-count irregularities based on examining the certified results, precinct-level records and the actual ballots.

The most eyebrow-raising example to emerge from parsing precinct results was finding 10,500 people in three Ohio's 'Bible Belt' counties who voted to re-elect Bush and voted in favor of gay marriage, if the official results are true. That was in Warren, Butler and Clermont Counties. The most plausible explanation for this anomaly, which defies logic and was not seen anywhere else in the country, was Kerry votes were flipped to Bush while the rest of the ballot was left alone. While we have some theories about how that might have been done by hand in a police-guarded warehouse, could full Republican control of the vote-counting software and servers also have played a role?

The early returns on the Secretary of State's website suggest Blackwell's vote-tallying and reporting system could manipulate large blocks of votes. Screenshots taken during the early returns in Hamilton County, where Cincinnati is located, gave Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb 39,541 votes, which was clearly incorrect. Similarly, early return screenshots in Lucas County, where Toledo is located, gave Cobb 4,685 votes, another clear error. (The screenshots are in our book). Were these innocent computer glitches or was a GOP vote-counting and reporting system moving and dumping Kerry votes?

There's more evidence the late returns from Ohio's Republican-majority countryside were not accurate. During the spring and summer of 2006, several teams of investigators associated with Freepress.org, notably one team led by Ron Baiman, a Ph.D. statistician and researcher at Chicago's Loyola University, examined the actual election records from precincts in Miami and Clermont Counties. These records – from poll books where voters sign in, to examining the actual ballots themselves – were not publicly accessible until last year, under orders from Ohio’s former Republican Secretary of State. Baiman compared the number of voters who signed in with the total number of votes attributed to precincts. He found hundreds of "phantom" votes, where the number of voter signatures was less than the reported vote total. That discrepancy also suggests vote count fraud.

There was other evidence in the observable paper trail of padding the vote, including instances in Delaware County where in one precinct, 359 of the final punch-card ballots cast on Election Day contained no Kerry votes, which means the day's last voters all were Bush supporters, which also is improbable. In another Delaware County precinct, Bush allegedly received the last 210 votes of the day. Were partisan local election workers trying to mask what was happening electronically to tilt the vote count?

Ohio's 2004 ballots were to be destroyed last September. However that fate was blocked by a federal judge, who ruled in the early phase of trying a Voting Rights Act lawsuit that accused Ohio officials of suppressing the minority vote in Ohio's cities. The state's new Secretary of State and Attorney General, both Democrats, are now holding settlement talks for that suit, suggesting its claims have merit. However, unlike Florida after the 2000 election, there still has yet to be a full accounting of Ohio's presidential vote.

What's clear, however, is the highest ranks of the Republican Party's political wing, including White House counselor Karl Rove, a handful of the party's most tech-savvy computer gurus and the former Republican Ohio Secretary of State, created, owned and operated the vote-counting system that reported George W. Bush's re-election to the presidency. Moreover, it appears the votes that gave Bush his 118,775-vote margin of victory – the boost from Ohio's countryside – have yet to be confirmed as accurate. Instead, the reporting to date suggests that what happened on the ground and across Ohio's rural precincts is at odds with the vote tally released on Election Night.

As numerous congressional committees attempt to retrieve and examine the secret White House e-mails surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' firing of eight federal prosecutors, those panels must also probe the privatization and partisan manipulation of the 2004 presidential vote count in Ohio. The lessons from 2004 have yet to be fully understood or learned.

Similarly, the House Administration Committee, which is expected to soon mark up H.R. 811, a bill by Rep. Rush Holt, D-NJ, to regulate electronic voting technology, also must take heed. The vote count and outcome of American elections cannot be left in the hands of known partisans, who can control and manipulate how the votes are counted and what is reported to the media and American people.

Original article posted here.

American Supported African Governments: Democracy in Name, Dictatorship in Form

Millions Vote in Nigeria, but Intimidation Is Widespread

By 10:30 a.m. in Oye, Nigeria, officials were unable to process a single ballot because voters had been kept away from the polling stations.

By LYDIA POLGREEN

ADO EKITI, Nigeria, April 14 — Millions of Nigerians went to the polls on Saturday to choose state and local leaders in the first stage of what is to be a landmark election for Africa’s most populous nation.

The voting was marred by unrest and violence across the country, though in some areas the polls appeared to go smoothly. In the oil-rich Niger Delta, militants attacked police stations, burning three to the ground. In the volatile north, the military broke up demonstrations.

The election, if it is successful, could lead to something new in Nigeria: the first time one elected government hands over power to another, a watershed moment for a nation that has suffered through repeated coups, military rule and a grim civil war that nearly destroyed the country.

“The last time we tried and failed,” said Kayode Fayemi, an opposition candidate for governor in Ekiti State. “What we have now is an elected dictatorship masquerading as a democracy.”

If this election fails, it could plunge Africa’s most populous nation and largest producer of crude oil into chaos, potentially destabilizing oil markets and the entire region.

The balloting was tense in Ekiti State, which has been under a state of emergency since its governor, a member of the ruling People’s Democratic Party, was removed from office amid allegations of corruption and killing of his opponents. On Saturday, parties were accusing one another of rigging the elections.

The voting across Nigeria will choose governors for its 36 states and state and local legislatures. While much of the international attention has focused on the presidential vote, which will take place a week later, for most people state and local government has the deepest influence over their lives.

These offices are highly contested — Nigeria’s federal system of government means that each office controls a piece of the country’s oil bonanza.

Nigeria exports billions of dollars worth of oil each year, and much of that money is sent to state and local governments to spend on basic development and infrastructure — schools, health care, water, electricity. In Ekiti, for example, a tiny state of just two million people, the monthly take of government revenue has averaged about $14 million.

But that money is seldom spent as it should be. Ekiti’s last governor, Ayo Fayose, used the state as his personal purse, building a grandiose office for himself while allowing cronies to pocket millions destined for a poultry farming scheme that failed to produce a single egg, according to federal investigators. As schools, roads and hospitals crumbled, Mr. Fayose bought expensive cars for himself and his entourage.

Violence started early on election day. In Port Harcourt, the capital of the oil industry and a hotbed of militia activity, three police stations were attacked overnight. Residents near one station said they heard gunfire and explosions in the dead of night, and awoke to find the building, several cars and motorbikes destroyed.

Here in Ekiti, in the town of Oye, polling officials were harassed repeatedly by gangs of youths accompanied by armed soldiers. Ogunyemi Tajudee, a 23-year-old geologist, was manning a polling booth, but had been unable to process a single vote by 10:30 Saturday morning.

“Men came on a motorbike with policemen and stamped the ballot papers,” Mr. Tajudee said. “They have been intimidating all the voters.”

A stack of ballots for governor had been marked by the men, 25 in all, each bearing a thumbprint for the candidate of the ruling People’s Democratic Party. The men had intended to stuff these ballots in the box and carry it away, Mr. Tajudee said, but were scared off by the arrival of some foreign journalists.

An hour later, Mr. Tajudee had collected only four ballots of the 236 registered voters assigned to his station. A menacing group of young men tried repeatedly to snatch the ballot box, and had succeeded in taking all the ballot papers for the state assembly race.

“Please don’t leave this area,” Mr. Tajudee pleaded with visiting journalists. “We are in danger.”

At a nearby hospital, Sampson Olawumi winced as a nurse stitched a deep gash in his left shoulder blade. As an observer for the opposition Action Congress, he had gone to a polling station where the ruling party had carted off the ballot box. When he protested, the men attacked him with a machete.

“They just hacked at me,” Mr. Olawumi said.

A P.D.P. poll monitor who tried to intervene was also attacked, and was lying on a nearby bed, covered in blood and in shock.

At another nearby polling station, Bomi Adeya showed up early with her voting card but was told the voting was finished, that she was too late. It was 10 a.m. Election officials standing nearby had the clear plastic boxes slung over their shoulders, full of near stacks of ballots. They refused to be interviewed.

“Nobody voted here,” Mr. Adeya said, before quickly running away from the crowd of young men gathered around the polling station.

Elections have always been messy affairs in Nigeria. In 1999, Olusegun Obasanjo, a former military ruler, was elected president, marking the end of a long and dark period of vicious military dictatorship.

That election was marred by vast fraud and intimidation, according to international observers. The Carter Center, an election monitoring organization, concluded in 1999 that “it is not possible for us to make an accurate judgment about the outcome of the presidential election.”

In 2003, Mr. Obasanjo and his party won unlikely landslide victories, in some case winning more than 99 percent of the vote in precincts where few people had been allowed to cast ballots at all.

The chaotic days leading to this year’s presidential and national legislative elections next week have led to deep concerns that the vote will have little credibility.

The Independent National Electoral Commission has come under criticism for barring from the ballot candidates accused of improprieties by a federal anticorruption agency.

Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Africa subcommittee, said in a statement last week that Mr. Obasanjo had “sparked fresh outrage by using the Independent National Electoral Commission to limit competition, not promote it; by repressing dissent rather than encouraging free speech; by harassing domestic observers and obstructing the free and fair participation of opposition candidates.”

Original article posted here.

The tip of the iceberg . . .

Prosecutor: Elections officials in Ohio county rigged 2004 presidential recount to avoid work

(AP) Three county elections workers conspired to avoid a more thorough recount of ballots in the 2004 presidential election, a prosecutor told jurors during opening statements of their trial Thursday.

Witnesses testified that, two days before a planned recount, selected ballots were counted so the result would be determined.

"The evidence will show that this recount was rigged, maybe not for political reasons, but rigged nonetheless," Prosecutor Kevin Baxter said. "They did this so they could spend a day rather than weeks or months" on the recount, he said.

Elections have fallen under greater scrutiny since the 2000 presidential election when recounts of paper ballots in Florida dragged on for weeks and the U.S. Supreme Court became involved.

Defense attorneys said in their opening statements that the workers in Cuyahoga County didn't do anything out of the ordinary.

"They just were doing it the way they were always doing it," said defense attorney Roger Synenberg, representing Kathleen Dreamer, a ballot manager.

Charged with various counts each of election misconduct or interference are Jacqueline Maiden, the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections' coordinator, who was the board's third-highest ranking employee when she was indicted last March; Rosie Grier, assistant manager of the board's ballot department; and Dreamer. The most serious charge faced by each is a felony that carries a maximum sentence of 18 months in prison, Baxter said.

Baxter made no claim about whether mishandling the recount could have affected the presidential election.

Ohio gave President Bush the electoral votes he needed to defeat Democratic Sen. John Kerry and hold on to the White House in 2004. Statewide, Bush won by about 118,000 votes out of 5.5 million cast. Green Party candidate David Cobb and Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik sought the recount and complained about its procedure.

In Cuyahoga County, a Democratic stronghold where about 600,000 ballots were cast, the recount did not have much effect on the results. Kerry gained 17 votes and Bush lost six.

Ohio law states that during a recount each county is supposed to randomly choose 3 percent of its ballots and tally them by hand and by machine. If there are no discrepancies in those counts, the rest of the votes can be recounted by machine.

If there is a difference, the county must randomly recount 3 percent of the ballots a second time. All the county's ballots must be recounted by hand if there is a second discrepancy, but if there isn't, all the ballots can be recounted by machine.

Baxter said testimony in the case will show that instead of conducting a random count, the workers chose sample precincts for the Dec. 16, 2004, recount that did not have questionable results to ensure that no discrepancies would emerge.

"This was a very hush operation," Baxter said.

It's unlikely another recount would be ordered because of the court case, which voting rights advocates have used as an example of flaws with the state's recount laws. There were allegations in several counties of similar presorting of ballots for the recounts that state law says are to be random.

Original article posted here.