Many thanx to Fred Burks for this comprehensive compilation of 2004
voting irregularities and problems which UNfortunately took place in our
"democratic model" this past Tuesday.
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From: "Frederick Burks" <burksf@earthlink.net>
To: "Undisclosed Recipients" <gcforall@earthlink.net>
Subject: Electronic Ballots - Major Media Report Major Problems
Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2004 16:04:28 -0800
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Dear friends,
Below are links
to a powerful documentary and
several revealing articles reported by major news media
exposing serious problems with electronic voting machines. This is followed
by excerpts from an excellent article which explains core problems
within the elections system.
Washington Post - "In
one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials
misjudged the amount of data that could be stored electronically by a
computer."
New York Times - An
article titled "Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud," presents the
troubling results of a detailed study by Johns Hopkins University. "We
found some stunning, stunning flaws." "The systems....could be tricked
by anyone with $100 worth of computer equipment." "Ballots
could be altered by anyone with access to a machine, so that a voter might think
he is casting a ballot for one candidate while the vote is recorded for an
opponent."
Associated
Press/ABC - "Voters nationwide reported some 1,100 problems with electronic voting
machines on Tuesday, including trouble choosing their intended
candidates."
Miami Herald - An article
titled "Defective Software Lost Votes" states, "Attorneys scrutinizing the close
vote on Amendment Four noticed that vote totals changed in an unexpected way
after 13,000 final ballots were counted. Election officials quickly determined
the problem was caused by the Unity Software." "The glitch was
discovered two years ago, and should have been corrected by software
manufacturer ES&S."
CNN - "An
error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in
suburban Columbus."
USA Today - "Nearly one in
three voters, including about half of those in Florida, were expected to cast
ballots using ATM-style voting machines that computer scientists have criticized
for their potential for software glitches, hacking and malfunctioning."
"Most of the machines, including all of Florida's, lack paper
records that could be used to verify the electronic results in a
recount". "Over 20 percent of the machines tested by observers
around the country failed to record votes properly."
These are only a few of the many
problems that we know about. How many more votes were changed or disappeared
that we don't know about? We will never know. For more powerful information on this, the excellent documentary
Votergate takes us on a fact-finding mission
across the US revealing stunning evidence of defects and outright
fraud in electronic voting. Engaging interviews with whistleblowers
and courageous Americans, including members of Congress and top
elections officials, reveal critical information which the mass media has given
very little coverage. Don't miss this powerful 30-minute
documentary available free at http://www.votergate.tv
The Problem Goes
Deeper. Below are excerpts from a riveting article which goes to
the very core of the problem. The author's father
and uncle uncovered serious elections fraud years ago and
suffered severely for trying to reveal the truth. In 1992,
they published the book Votescam which exposed
major elections fraud, only to have it effectively banned. They
both died young in the 1990s. Please pass on this powerful information
which is so vital to the future of democracy. Invite all of your friends and
colleagues to forward this message, and to join together in calling
for election reform.
A Brief History of
Computerized Election Fraud in America (Excerpts)
By
Victoria Collier
Squadrons of shiny new
touch screen Trojan horses are being rolled into precincts across America. Not,
as we are told, to make voting easier or more accurate. The real reason America
is being flooded with billions of dollars worth of paperless
computerized voting machines is so that no one will be able to
prove vote fraud. These machines are not
just unverifiable, they are secretly programmed. Their software is not
open to scrutiny by election officials or computer experts. They are also
equipped with modems accessible by computer, telephone, and
satellite.
We the People are responsible
for taking back the control of our democratic process. No one else will do it
for us. We cannot afford to be naive, or uneducated at this time in history. In
order to fully understand the extent of the corruption we are dealing with, and
to avoid making dangerous mistakes based on ignorance, we must understand the
history, and the power structure, behind vote fraud in
America.
I grew up with two
men who spent twenty-five years investigating vote fraud in America: James and
Kenneth Collier, my father and uncle. Their book, Votescam: The
Stealing of America was published in 1992 and immediately banned by the
major book chains, which listed the book as "out of print" and actively
worked to prevent its sale. Votescam chronicles the Collier brother's
groundbreaking investigation into America's multi-billion dollar election
rigging industry, and the corporate government and media officials who control
it. [First five
chapters available free online]
The Votescam investigation began in 1970, in -- surprise! --
Dade County, Florida, where Ken ran for Congress (with Jim as his campaign
manager). Ken was rigged out of the election
through a vote scam, which the Colliers later discovered was used throughout the
country for decades. It went like this: The local newscaster would announce
during the broadcast of election returns that the election "computer has broken
down." Instead of giving official returns from the county courthouse, the
networks would be running vote "projections" for the rest of the
night.
Jim and Ken, who had
garnered 30 percent of the vote, noticed that when the vote totals came back on
the screen after the announcement, they had mysteriously lost 15 percentage
points. They didn't get another vote for the rest of the
night. When they examined the "official"
election results from for the September primary, October run-off and
November final election in Dade County, the record listed a total of 141,000
votes cast for the governors race in each election. The exact same
number of total votes were cast for three elections with a different number of
candidates running each time. The same identical figures were listed
for the Senate race in the primary, run-off and final election. This,
of course, is a statistical impossibility.
When they compared the "official" vote results with a
print-out of the vote "projections" broadcast by the TV networks on the final
election night, they found that channel 4 had "projected" with near
perfect accuracy the results of 40 races with 250 candidates only 4 minutes
after the polls closed. Channel 7 came even closer; at 9:31 pm,
they "projected" the final vote total for a race at 96,499 votes. When the
Colliers checked the "official" number . . . it was also
96,499.
The networks
then made the astonishing claim that the results from a single voting machine
somewhere in Dade County were run through a computer program in order to get
these vote projections. Elton Davis was the
computer programmer responsible for the magic formula that could convert one
machine's vote results into near perfect projected vote totals for 40 races and
250 candidates. When Jim and Ken confronted Davis in his office at the
University of Miami, he responded: "You'll never prove it, now get
out."
Finally the networks
claimed that members of the League of Women Voters were out in the field on
election night, calling in vote totals to channels 4 and 7. When the
Colliers confronted the head of the League, Joyce Deiffenderfer, she admitted
that there were no LWV members out in the field that night. She broke down
crying, saying "I don't want to get caught up in this thing.
When the TV
networks claimed that the courthouse computer had broken down, and they
would no longer be reporting actual vote totals, they were lying. They had never
been reporting actual vote totals. The final shoe
dropped months later when an official press release appeared from Dade data
processing chief, Leonard White, which stated emphatically: The county
computer at the courthouse was never down, and it was never
slow.
This was the
beginning. The Collier brothers had slammed
their boat into the tip of a giant iceberg. As they continued to investigate,
they were horrified to discover vote fraud collusion among key individuals in
every branch and on every level of the American political system. Those who were
not benefiting from the fraud were too afraid to fight it. Their search for
justice led to dead-ends. Their lives were threatened. They were vilified as
conspiracy theorists by the mainstream press . . . and yet they
persevered.
The next
quarter century was spent compiling a wealth of FBI documented
evidence proving that elections in the United States have come
under the tight control of a handful of powerful and corrupt
people. Jim and Ken both died
young during the 90's, as heroes to many thousands who heard them speak on
the radio and at political meetings across the country. They helped to guide
individuals and groups working for clean elections in their
communities. The Collier's last hope was that Votescam would be
used as evidence in a serious Congressional investigation into election
fraud.
Many people still in
power have yet to be held accountable for their role in aiding and abetting vote
fraud. I'll give you two important examples. Famous Miami lawyer Ellis Rubin brought the original
Votescam evidence to the Florida assistant State Attorney at the time,
Janet Reno. The evidence included the shaved wheels of lever voting
machines, forged canvass sheets, and pre-printed vote tally sheets. Reno
refused to prosecute, claiming falsely that the statue of limitations had run
out on the crime. Years later, Rubin would tell my father that behind
closed doors Reno had stated that she could not prosecute. Why? Because she
would bring down many of the most powerful people in the
state.
Another notable
Votescam criminal can now be found sitting on the bench of the highest court in
the nation. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, while still a Federal
Appeals Judge, single handedly destroyed what would have been an historic
lawsuit filed against Justice Department lawyer Craig Donsanto, who had
refused to prosecute the extensive vote fraud evidence brought to him by the
Colliers. The evidence included videotape of the League of Women voters
tampering with ballots in a close door vote "counting" session. The women were
illegally punching holes in already cast ballots.
I'd like to offer a brief list of important lessons learned
from twenty-five years of fighting vote fraud in the trenches.
-
Secret vote counting is illegal. Counting faster is
not a justification for counting secretly.
-
Lever
machines were the first to appear, and they were riggable in a number of
ways. One could rig the lever machine itself, or the electronic scanning
machines that counted the ballots. (See the Votescam video for footage of
ballot rigging).
-
Computerized voting machines are the easiest to rig. Their software
is not open to public scrutiny, or the scrutiny of Election Supervisors.
There are nearly infinite ways to program the machines to count
votes fraudulently. Since they are accessible by modem, they can be
controlled from a remote, centralized location.
-
Voting machine companies operate with no federal
oversight, certification process, standards or
restrictions. Just two companies -- Election Systems and Software
(ES&S) and Diebold Voting Systems -- now control about 80% of the
vote count in the U.S.
-
Both
the Democratic and Republican parties have been complicit in vote rigging
for decades, to their mutual benefit. Vote rigging is NOT a partisan
issue.
-
The
corporate major media networks play a vital role in perpetrating and
covering up vote fraud.
-
Election Day media polls are untrustworthy at
best.
The gravest error of
judgment these days comes from those vote reformers who honestly believe that
the answer to the butterfly ballot and hanging chad problems in the 2000
election is to embrace the ballot-less computerized voting machine. With
the ballot-less computer, there is no way to recount, no way to prove any
discrepancy, inaccuracy or fraud. Just the fact that companies like
ES&S and Diebold would even make a ballot-less machine should be cause
for a Congressional investigation. (There are also many other reasons
to investigate them. For a detailed examination of these sinister corporations,
check out http://www.blackboxvoting.com )
A most grave error of judgment also comes from
those who think that returning to a hand-counted paper ballot system is somehow
impossible. An MIT/Cal Tech
study done in 2001 shows that manually counted paper ballots are the most
accurate system out of the 5 systems used in the last 4 presidential elections.
They are totally verifiable, and first-world nations across the globe still use
them, including Canada which counted their last presidential election in four
hours.
The bottom
line is that a computerized vote count is a secret vote count, and that's
illegal. Technology cannot supercede the constitutional and
mandatory provisions of election law, which require open and verifiable
elections. There is no way to do a public vote count with computers. The count must be done by hand, in public, video-taped,
aired live on television, and the results posted on the precinct wall --
just like they used to be. Ballots should be counted on the same day as the
voting takes place, making it much more difficult to alter ballots. Hand counted paper ballots and eternal vigilance are the
only hope left for us.
A long time writer and political
activist, Victoria Collier continues to educate the public on the subject of
vote fraud in place of her father and uncle. She is the editor of http://www.votescam.com Victoria
is available for interviews and can be reached at 1-866-280-9090 and at
editor@votescam.com
For
reliable, verifiable information on other major cover-ups which directly affect
our democracy, see www.WantToKnow.info The
WantToKnow.info team is a group of dedicated researchers from around the world
who are deeply committed to revealing
information being hidden from the public, and to designing ways that we can
work together to build a
brighter future for us, for our children, and for our world. To
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day.
With very best
wishes,
Fred Burks for the WantToKnow.info team
P.S.
Please help to spread this important news by forwarding this email to your
friends and colleagues.
Explore these empowering websites coordinated by
Fred:
http://www.WantToKnow.info - Revealing major cover-ups & working together for a
better world
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Strengthening the Web of Love that interconnects us all
Together, we are
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