ARTICLES & FACTS:

CLINT CURTIS PASSES POLYGRAPH EXAM!
 The lie-detector test, administered to Curtis by Tim Robinson, the retired chief polygraph operator for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, found that the Florida whistleblowing software designer who has charged in a sworn affidavit that he was asked by U.S. Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL) to create an electronic vote-rigging software prototype in 2000, was indeed found to be truthful in all of his responses!

Diebold Facts - From a Dkos Diary

* ES&S and Diebold count 80% of all votes in America.

* Diebold also makes ATM machines. Their ATM machines, unlike their electronic voting machines during the 2004 election, provide paper receipts.

* ES&S managed many aspects of the 2004 election, including voter registration, printing of ballots, the programming of their voting machines, tabulation of votes (often with armed guards keeping the media and members of the public who wished to witness the count at bay) and the first reporting of the results -- for 60 million voters in 47 states.  Actual counting of votes by citizens is very rare in the U.S., except for a few counties in Montana and other states, where paper ballots are still hand-counted.

* The largest investors in ES&S, Sequoia (another voting machine company), and Diebold are government defense contractors Northrup-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and Accenture. Diebold hired Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of San Diego to develop the software security in their voting machines. A majority of officials on SAIC's board are former members of either the Pentagon or the CIA including:

     - Army Gen. Wayne Downing, formerly of the NSC
     - Bobby Ray Inman; former CIA Director
     - Retired Adm. William Owens, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
     - Robert Gates, another former director of the CIA.

* The U.S.'s largest voting machine company, ES&S, is owned by The Omaha World Herald.

* Diebold has its corporate headquarters in Ohio.

* Diebold chairman, president, and C.E.O., Walden O'Dell, is a prominent Bush supporter and fund-raiser who proclaimed in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." (See "Hack the Vote," by Michael Shnayerson, Vanity Fair, April 2004.)

* The vice president of E.S.&S. and the president of Diebold are brothers.

* Diebold and ES&S's other major "competitor", Sequoia, is owned by a partner member of the Carlyle Group, which has substantial ties to the Bush family and friends.

* Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of AIS, which later became ES&S. He became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines in Nebraska in what was a major upset.

* Senator Hagel, who was on the short-list of G.W. Bush's VP candidates, was caught concealing information about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee, even though he was officially absolved of improperly hiding information.

* One of the longest-serving Diebold directors is W.R. "Tim" Timken.  Since 1991 the Timken Company and members of the Timken family have contributed more than a million dollars to the Republican Party and to GOP presidential candidates such as George W. Bush. Between 2000 and 2002 alone, Timken's Canton-based bearing and steel company gave more than $350,000 to Republican causes, while Timken himself gave more than $120,000. In 2004, he was one of George W. Bush's campaign Pioneers, and pulled in more than $350,000 for the president's reelection bid.

* In 2003, a cadre of computer scientists showed that the software running Diebold's new machines can be hacked with relative ease.

* On a CNBC cable TV program, Black Box Voting (which opposes electronic voting) executive Bev Harris showed guest host Howard Dean how to alter vote totals within 90 seconds by entering a two-digit code in a hidden program on Diebold's election software. "This is not a bug or accidental oversight," Harris said. "It is there on purpose."

* Managers of a subsidiary of Diebold once included a cocaine trafficker, a man who conducted fraudulent stock transactions and a programmer jailed for falsifying computer records.  The programmer, Jeffrey Dean, wrote and maintained proprietary code used to count hundreds of thousands of votes as senior vice president of Global Election Systems, or GES. Diebold purchased GES in January 2002.  According to a public court document released before GES hired him, Dean served time in a Washington state correctional facility for stealing money and tampering with computer files in a scheme that "involved a high degree of sophistication and planning."  He left when Diebold acquired GES.

Voting irregularities in Maryland:

* According to a report to the Montgomery County Election Board, dated December 13, 2004, there were two broad levels of problems with Diebold machines. 7% of units (189) failed. This included failure to boot up, screen freezes and a variety of other problems. Screen freezes, which occurred on 106 voting units were "the most serious of errors" because many "froze when the voter pressed the Cast Ballot button." As a result "election judges are unable to provide substantial confirmation that the vote was in fact counted." In addition there were "122 suspect units (5%) were identified because the unit had few votes captured compared to other voting units in the polling place.

* Also in Montgomery Co., computer memory cards where vote totals are stored inside each voting machine were unreadable in multiple counties.  


Voting irregularities in Ohio:

* More than 35 Ohio counties used electronic voting machines made by Diebold and up to 50,000 Diebold touch-screen machines and 20,000 scanners of paper ballots were used in 38 states during the November 2004 election.

* In Butler County, a Democrat running for the State Supreme Court chief justice received 61,559 votes. The Kerry-Edwards ticket drew about 5,000 fewer votes, at 56,243.  This judicial candidate also outpolled the Kerry-Edwards ticket in 11 other counties.

* In Cuyahoga County, which includes the city of Cleveland, two largely black precincts on the East Side voted like this: In Precinct 4F: Kerry, 290; Bush, 21; Peroutka, 215. In Precinct 4N: Kerry, 318; Bush, 11; Badnarik, 163. Mr. Peroutka and Mr. Badnarik are, respectively, the presidential candidates of the Constitution and Libertarian Parties.  By way of contrast, in 2000, Ralph Nader's best year, the total vote received in Precinct 4F by all third-party candidates combined was eight.

* In Montgomery County, two precincts recorded a combined undervote of almost 6,000. An "undervote" means the voter made selections for lesser offices, but did not vote for President.  In these two precincts alone, that number represents an undervote of 25%, in a county where undervoting averages out at just 2%. Democratic precincts had 75% more undervotes than Republican ones.

* In Precinct lB of Gahanna, in Franklin County, a computerized voting machine recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry. In that precinct, however, there are only 800 registered voters, of whom 638 showed up.

* In Miami County, the Concord Southwest and Concord South precincts boasted incredibly high 98.5% and 94.27% turnouts, respectively, both of them registering overwhelming majorities for Bush.  Miami County also managed to report 19,000 additional votes for Bush after 100% of the precincts had reported on Election Day.

* In Mahoning County, Washington Post reporters found that many people had been victims of "vote hopping," i.e., voting machines highlighted a choice of one candidate after the voter had recorded a preference for another.

* Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican, arranged for ample voting booths in GOP areas and a shortage in liberal college towns and minority precincts. Despite the huge increase in new voter registration (91% of which was Democratic), Blackwell provided fewer total voting machines than were used in 2000.

* Christopher Hitchens: "In practically every case [in Ohio] where lines were too long or machines too few the foul-up was in a Democratic county or precinct, and in practically every case where machines produced impossible or improbable outcomes it was the challenger who suffered and the actual or potential Democratic voters who were shortchanged, discouraged, or held up to ridicule as chronic undervoters or as sudden converts to fringe-party losers."

* At least of 40 of 798 ES&S machines that were personally monitored in Ohio shut down and flashed a message that repair was needed during the 2004 election.  These machines could not be made to report a final printed vote tally.


Voting irregularities in Florida:

* In the 2000 election, in Volusia County, Florida, a Diebold-made central ballot-counting computer showed a Socialist Party candidate receiving more than 9,000 votes and Vice President Al Gore getting minus 19,000. Another 4,000 votes poured into the plus column for Bush that didn't belong there.

* ES&S voting machines in Florida may have awarded George W. Bush up to 260,000 more votes than he should have received, according to a statistical analysis conducted by University of California, Berkeley graduate students and a professor. The total number of excessive votes ranged between 130,000 and 260,000, depending on what kind of problem caused the excess votes. The counties most affected by the anomaly were heavily Democratic.  A sociology professor said the chance for such a discrepancy to occur was less than 1 in 1,000.

* While the approximated Florida discrepancy would not overcome a reported 350,000 vote Bush lead, no meaningful recount can ever be carried out because Diebold machines do not leave a paper trail of any sort.

* Kathy Dopp examined the State of Florida's county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered by party affiliation in the days immediately following the election. Tthe numbers Dopp looked at showed widespread election anomalies in 47 of the state's 67 counties. The discrepancies did not occur so much in the touch-screen counties, where public scrutiny would naturally be focused, but in counties where optically screened paper ballots were fed into a central tabulator PC, which is highly vulnerable to hacking.  Colin Shea of Zogby International analyzed and double-checked Dopp's figures and confirmed that optical-scan counties gave Bush 16% more votes than he should have gotten. "This 16%  would not be strange if it were spread across counties more or less evenly," Shea explains, but it is not. In 11 different counties, the "actual" Bush tallies were 50-100% higher than expected. In one county, where 88% of voters are registered Democrats, Bush got nearly two-thirds of the vote -- three times more than predicted by Shea's statistical model.  "In 21 counties, more than 50% of Democrats would have to have defected to Bush to account for the results," Shea says. "In four counties at least 70% [defection] would have been required. These results are absurdly unlikely."

* In 47 Florida counties, initial vote tallies showed that the total number of presidential votes exceeded the total number of voters who showed up at the polls. Palm Beach County recorded 90,774 more votes than voters and Miami Dade had 51,979 more, while relatively honest Orange County had only 1,648 more votes than voters. Overall, Florida reported 237,522 more presidential votes (7.59 million) than citizens who turned out to cast ballots (7.35 million). These anomalies evaporated, without explanation, when Florida issued its last set of poll numbers.

* In Broward Country, the central tabulating machine was incorrectly programmed to expect only 32,000 votes from each precinct; when more votes were received, the machine started counting backwards. The problem existed in the 2002 elections in Broward County but was never fixed. Throughout Florida, as in most tossup states, poll monitors saw prospective voters leaving because of long lines. There were numerous reports of sub-par facilities and faulty equipment in minority neighborhoods.

* Several dozen voters in six states -- particularly Democrats in Florida -- said the wrong candidate appeared on their touch-screen machine's checkout screen (i.e. they voted one way and the result which appeared was the opposite).

* Keith Olbermann demonstrated on MSNBC's Countdown program that many Florida counties where Democrats allegedly "crossed over" were voting Republican for the first time.  He also poked another hole in the theory that these voters were "Dixiecrats" when he noted, "On the same Florida Democratic ballots where Bush scored big, people supported highly Democratic measures -- such as raising the state minimum wage $1 above the federal level. This indicates that only the presidential voting was rigged."

* Moreover, the 18 switchover Florida counties were not in the panhandle or near the Georgia border, but were scattered throughout the state. For instance, voters in Glades County (Everglades region) registered 64.8% Republican but cast 38.3% more votes for Bush than for Kerry. Hardee County (between Bradenton and Sebring) registered 63.8% Democratic but officially gave Bush 135% more votes than Kerry.  

The discrepancies between exit polls and vote tabulations where electronic voting was used:

-    Concerning the discrepancies between exit polls and the final vote tally in 2004, Dr. Steven F. Freeman, faculty member of  the University of Pennsylvania determined that the likelihood of Kerry receiving only 47.1% in Florida, given that the exit polls indicated 49.7% is less than 3 in 1,000. Although Kerry did carry Pennsylvania, the likelihood of his receiving only 50.8% given that the exit polls indicated 54.1% is less than 2 in 1,000. Similarly the likelihood of Kerry receiving only 48.5% in Ohio, given the exit polls indicated 52.1% is less than 1 in 1,000 (.0008).  Freeman says, "The likelihood of any two of these statistical anomalies occurring together is on the order of one-in-a-million. The odds against all three occurring together are 250 million to 1. As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states could have been due to chance or random error."

- In 10 states where there were verifiable paper trails -- or no electronic machines -- the final results hardly differed from initial exit polls. Exit polls and final counts in Missouri, Louisiana, Maine and Utah, for instance, varied by 1% or less. In non-paper-trail states, however, there were significant differences. Florida saw a shift from Kerry +1% in the exit polls to Bush +5% at evening's end. In Ohio, Kerry went from +3% to -3%. Other big discrepancies in key states were: Minnesota (from +10% to +4%), New Mexico (+4 to -1), Nevada (+1 to -3), Wisconsin (+7 to +0.4), Colorado (-2 to -5), North Carolina (-4 to -13), Iowa (+1 to -1), New Hampshire (+14 to +1) and Pennsylvania (+8 to +2). Exit polls also had Kerry winning the national popular vote by 3%.
Miscellaneous:

- On November 10, 2004, Keith Olbermann reported that computerized balloting in North Carolina was so thoroughly messed up that all statewide voting may have to be recounted. A Craven County, N.C. district recorded 11,283 more votes than there were voters, overturning the results of a regional race.

MORE DIEBOLD READING

Voting glitches haunt statistician By Rob Zaleski
Rob Brian Joiner wishes he could "just get over it."He wishes he could ignore the thousands of reported voting irregularities that occurred in the Nov. 2 election, accept the fact that George W. is going to be around another four years and just hope that we haven't created even more enemies or fallen even deeper into debt by the time 2008 rolls around. "I'm sure the Republicans would like me to forget all that stuff, just like they wanted everyone to forget all the strange things that happened in the 2000 election," the retired 67-year-old UW-Madison statistics professor said this week. Well, sorry guys, but he can't.

Former GOP party head sentenced to seven months in phone jamming
Chuck McGee pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiring to make anonymous calls to annoy or harass. He also was fined $2,000 and ordered to perform 200 hours of community service. He faced up to 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Republicans maneuvering to get Voting Rights Act killed
Beware the stranger bearing gifts. Or as the law teaches, caveat emptor, buyer beware. Look before you leap. All these warnings apply to the emerging Republican positioning on the Voting Rights Act.

The sun revolves around the Earth and George W. Bush won the election in Ohio
In order to believe that Bush won in Ohio, you have to ignore deadly accurate exit polls and all observable data to avoid the Bush family theft. By refusing to consider this CIA-connected family’s history, one must accept the following ridiculous political conclusions: that Bush supporters were shy in Ohio and Florida and reluctant to answer exit poll questions, but not shy in Arizona, Arkansas and Louisiana; that pollster Zogby’s Election Day calls for Kerry in Ohio and Florida were wrong, as well as the Harris poll; that Mitofsky’s exit polling is flawed in the U.S. but an accurate predictor in the Ukraine for fraud; that Kerry easily carried the metropolitan areas of Cleveland and Columbus but lost due to an unobserved Bush surge in rural Appalachia; that Bush won despite an incumbent approval rating under 50%; that Bush got 80% or so of the undecided vote although all professional pollsters agree that undecideds generally vote for the challenger; and private partisan companies that secretly count the vote without paper trails are fair and honestly doing their job.

Teresa Heinz Kerry - Hacking the "Mother Machine"?
"Two brothers own 80 percent of the [voting] machines used in the United States," Teresa Heinz Kerry told a group of Seattle guests at a March 7, 2005 lunch for Representative Adam Smith, according to reporter Joel Connelly in an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Connelly noted Heinz Kerry added that it is "very easy to hack into the mother machines."

COUNTING THE VOTES
Heinz Kerry is openly skeptical about results from November's election, particularly in sections of the country where optical scanners were used to record votes."Two brothers own 80 percent of the machines used in the United States," Heinz Kerry said. She identified both as "hard-right" Republicans. She argued that it is "very easy to hack into the mother machines."

Blackwell Halts Deployment Of Diebold Voting Machines For 2004
Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell today halted deployment of Diebold Election Systems’ electronic voting devices in Ohio for the 2004 General Election. The decision is based on preliminary findings from the secretary of state's second round of security testing conducted by Compuware Corporation showing the existence of previously identified, but yet unresolved security issues.

Death of a patriot: No more
The subject line on yesterday’s email read: “Another mysterious accident solves a Bush problem. Athan Gibbs dead, Diebold lives.” The attached news story briefly described the untimely Friday, March 12th death of perhaps America’s most influential advocate of a verified voting paper trail in the era of touch screen computer voting. Gibbs, an accountant for more than 30 years and the inventor of the TruVote system, died when his vehicle collided with an 18-wheeled truck which rolled his Chevy Blazer several times and forced it over the highway retaining wall where it came to rest on its roof.

Why You Should Be Scared to Death of Electronic Voting
Computer scientists and security experts say the systems are so insecure they can be manipulated from inside -- by government poll workers and employees of the contractors -- and hacked from the outside. No one will know because those experts also say such vote-tampering would be nearly impossible to detect. E-voting systems also aren’t open to public scrutiny. The code is proprietary, written and owned by the vendors hired to record and count the votes.

Protect Our Votes - Insist on Paper trail!
Voting systems that are easier to use don't have to be harder to trust. Every voting method should produce a paper ballot, so that voters can verify that their vote is recorded correctly and kept for counting and recounting. We believe:
"Every voter should be able to verify his or her vote on a paper ballot. Election officials must make sure electronic voting terminals produce Voter-Verified Paper Ballots, and they must provide backup paper ballots in case the terminals aren't working."

Secretary of state finally sees the e-voting light
When a posse of computer scientists first raised dire warnings about untrustworthy new voting machines in late 2002 and early 2003, California's top voting official thought they were ``a bunch of nut jobs.''
But Secretary of State Kevin Shelley came to understand the risks. And he's working to head them off.

Feds want e-voting source code disclosed
DeForest Soaries, chairman of the Election Assistance Commission, or EAC, said disclosing the source code--the line-by-line instructions that make up an electronic voting machine's software--would help to restore public trust in the elections process. Vendors should not "have the right to keep this source code a secret," Soaries told a dinner gathering of Maryland election officials.

Who Hacked the Voting System? The Teacher
The fix was in, and it was devilishly hard to detect. Software within electronic voting machines had been corrupted with malicious code squirreled away in images on the touch screen. When activated with a specific series of voting choices, the rogue program would tip the results of a precinct toward a certain candidate. Then the program would disappear without a trace.

Kucinich Calls for Suspension of Electronic Voting
Dennis Kucinich today called on federal, state and local election officials “to suspend immediately the implementation of any voting systems that do not provide a 100 percent reliable paper-trail back-up to corroborate results.”

Diebold apologizes for device flaws
"We were caught. We apologize for that,"

How They Could Steal the Election This Time
On November 2 millions of Americans will cast their votes for President in computerized voting systems that can be rigged by corporate or local-election insiders. Some 98 million citizens, five out of every six of the roughly 115 million who will go to the polls, will consign their votes into computers that unidentified computer programmers, working in the main for four private corporations and the officials of 10,500 election jurisdictions, could program to invisibly falsify the outcomes.

None dare call it voter suppression and fraud
Evidence is mounting that the 2004 presidential election was stolen in Ohio. Emerging revelations of voting irregularities coupled with well-documented Republican efforts at voter suppression prior to the election suggests that in a fair election Kerry would have won Ohio.

Voting Fraud in the 2004 Presidential Election
The exit polls were dismissed as being innaccurate. But their accuracy depended on the type of voting machine that was used, implying that the machines, not the polls, were inaccurate. he counties that used optical scanner machines to record votes showed a consistent pattern of far more votes for Bush and far less votes for Kerry than projected, based on the number of registered republicans and democrats.

Activists Find More E-Vote Flaws 
Voting activist Bev Harris and a computer scientist say they found more vulnerabilities in an electronic voting system made by Diebold Election Systems, weaknesses that could allow someone to alter votes in the election this November. ... In the demonstration, a five-line script whipped up by a hacker in Notepad altered the election tallies in Global Election Management System, or GEMS, the (Windows-based) software that runs on a county's server and tallies votes after they come in from Diebold touch-screen and optical-scan machines in polling places.

Saving the Vote
Much of Florida's vote will be counted by electronic voting machines with no paper trails. Independent computer scientists who have examined some of these machines' programming code are appalled at the security flaws. So there will be reasonable doubts about whether Florida's votes were properly counted, and no paper ballots to recount. The public will have to take the result on faith.

Wrong Time for an E-Vote Glitch
It was simultaneously an uh-oh moment and an ah-ha moment. When Sequoia Voting Systems demonstrated its new paper-trail electronic voting system for state Senate staffers in California last week, the company representative got a surprise when the paper trail failed to record votes that testers cast on the machine.

California official seeks criminal probe of e-voting
Machines banned in four counties;
10 more counties must meet conditions.The state’s top election official called for a criminal investigation of Diebold Election Systems Inc. as he banned use of the company’s newest model touchscreen voting machine, citing concerns about its security and reliability.

Ronald L. Rivest: Voting Resources Page
This page contains links to a number of useful resources related to voting and voting technology. This collection is idiosyncratic and not intended to

More Diebold Links:

MSNBC's Hardblogger: Keith Olberman on George, John, and Ohio

The numbers don't add up

CIA-style hacking rigs election for Bush

Black Box Voting calls it Fraud

Surprising Pattern of Florida's Election Results

The Greg Palast classic: An Election Spoiled

Washington Dispatch: Vote Fraud in Ohio?

Presidential votes mis-cast on machines across the country

Reconciling voting machine and exit poll discrepancies

Ohio Whitewash

Institute for Public Accuracy on Ohio Elections

software flaw found in Florida vote machines

Florida numbers analysis (chart)

exit poll chart

Stolen Election 2004

Open Voting Consortium

4000 votes missing in Pennsylvania County

Palm Beach county logs 88,000 more votes than voters

outrage in ohio

Broward County Florida voting machines count backwards

Diebold Pres Odell's 2003 promise to "deliver Ohio for Bush"

Greg Palast: Kerry Won

Diebold Machines yield fishy results

Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Votes in Ohio

More evidence of possible fraud in Darke County, Ohio

NC: 11,823 "extra" votes cast for Bush

chart: Florida voter reg vs performance

Something looks very wrong in Florida

Election Theft Bombshell: Major Security Breach

“Another mysterious accident solves a Bush problem. Athan Gibbs dead, Diebold lives.”

7,000 Orange County Voters Were Given Bad Ballots

Diebold and the 2000 election

Missing Votes

MSNBC pick up vote scam story (finally!)

Proof of Election rigging!

Electronic voting's critics predict problems Oct. 7

Techies see fraud danger in California's touch-screen voting

Diebold voting machines - busted again!

The web site Diebold Wants to shut down

What can you do to help? Sign this petition!

Voter-Verified Paper Ballots petition

HELP AMERICA AUDIT: 5 Things You Can Do Right Now to Reclaim Democracy

www.verifiedvoting.org/
We advocate the use of voter-verified paper ballots (VVPBs) for all elections in the United States, so voters can inspect individual permanent records of their ballots before they are cast and so meaningful recounts may be conducted. We also insist that electronic voting equipment and software be open to public scrutiny and that random, surprise recounts be conducted on a regular basis to audit election equipment.