John Kerry says he kept quiet, allowed Bush to steal the 2004 election, because he feared his objections would be viewed as "sour grapes."

Sorry, no, we won't buy that canard.

If I'm extremely charitable I can almost forgive Al Gore for yielding in the 2000 election, because the notion that a presidential election might be brazenly stolen by the Supreme Court was something of a surprise. By 2004, another stolen election was no surprise at all, yet Kerry was so milquetoast he wouldn't even make a fuss.

He conceded the election, and the democracy, overnight.

Sincerely and with all due respect to John Kerry, the word for that is 'treason'. Same for the Democratic Party.   =Helen & Harry Highwater= | LINK

Excerpt:  The tests focused on two areas: outside or external hacks, specifically examining the modem and any lines going to the vote tabulation computer, and simulated inside or internal penetrations. The results were clear. No outside hack was accomplished. This was not the case however when the hacker was physically present at the vote tabulation computer terminal.

Granted the same access as an employee of our office, it was possible to enter the computer, alter election results, and exit the system without leaving any physical record of this action. It was also demonstrated that false information or instructions could be placed on a memory card (the device used to program the individual voting machines and record the voter’s votes) and create false results or election reports.

If they can disable an election, what's coming next?

Syndicate rejects columnist’s article on 2004 election theft

# This guy's been spot on about a few things already. He's earned more respect, in my eyes, than the staff at many big-city dailies ...   =H&HH=

Excerpt:  The irregularities were so massive and widespread it took Conyers 102 pages to list them. His report, "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio," was released on January 5, and is a clear indictment of the shameful lengths to which Republicans will go to derail democracy. At the same time, in a buoyant fund-raising letter to Ohians while the votes were still being counted, Blackwell made the case that he should be elected governor in return for saving the Great Buckeye State from "an unapologetic liberal named John Kerry," and for delivering the spoils to Bush.

# The recount that wasn't, for the election that wasn't, of the President that isn't ...   =Phil H.=

• Ohio recount highlights continuing vote trouble
  
• Vote protesters try last hurrah
  
• Vote challengers accuse Blackwell of trying to let 'clock run out'

Excerpt:  "We've documented in this filing how this recount was not conducted in accordance with uniform standards throughout Ohio" as required by the U.S. Constitution, said John Bonifaz, a lawyer from the National Voting Right Institute representing the candidates.

Ohio law requires an elections board to manually recount a randomly selected 3 percent of ballots. If the totals match certified results for those precincts, all the county's votes are then machine-counted. If the hand count is off, a county must manually recount all its ballots.

The filing, part of an ongoing lawsuit originally brought by a county board of elections to stop the recount, alleges counties did not randomly select precincts for the manual recount and some workers altered votes to prevent a full hand count.

# TruthOut says the video supports and adds to the Hocking County elections official's affidavit, and I have no reason to doubt TruthOut, but the video didn't work on our computer.   =H&HH=

Excerpt:  "One more interesting thing to note: the AccuVote knows that it has dropped the ballot. So the question has always been, should we increment the card counter, and should we log the event. Currently we do neither. There are two schools here. One says we should notify the voter, log it, add a dropped ballot counter, send an incident report to the secretary of state, etc etc. The other is to increment the counter and send the voter on their ignorantly blissful way. Right now we kind of split the difference."

# So, they didn't increment the counter, they didn't log the event, and they sent the voter on his/her ignorantly blissful way? What if they put these machines in places with Democratic majorities?   =Underground Panther in the Sky=

Excerpt:  TRIAD is owned by a man named Tod Rapp, who has also donated money to both the Republican Party and the election campaign of George W. Bush. TRIAD manufactures punch-card voting systems, and also wrote the computer program that tallied the punch-card votes cast in 41 Ohio counties last November.

... A representative from TRIAD Systems came into a county board of elections office un-announced. He said he was just stopping by to see if they had any questions about the up-coming recount. He then headed into the back room where the TRIAD supplied Tabulator (a card reader and older PC with custom software) is kept. He told them there was a problem and the system had a bad battery and had "lost all of its data". He then took the computer apart and started swapping parts in and out of it and another "spare" tower type PC also in the room. He may have had spare parts in his coat as one of the BOE people moved it and remarked as to how very heavy it was. He finally re-assembled everything and said it was working but to not turn it off.

He then asked which precinct would be counted for the 3% recount test, and the one which had been selected as it had the right number of votes, was relayed to him. He then went back and did something else to the tabulator computer.

The TRIAD Systems representative suggested that since the hand count had to match the machine count exactly, and since it would be hard to memorize the several numbers which would be needed to get the count to come out exactly right, that they should post this series of numbers on the wall where they would not be noticed by observers. He suggested making them look like employee information or something similar. The people doing the hand count could then just report these numbers no matter what the actual count of the ballots revealed. This would then "match" the tabulator report for this precinct exactly. The numbers were apparently the final certified counts for the selected precinct.

^. Professor says vote numbers don't add up
^. Congressman wants 'raw' exit poll data
^. Who did voters pick on Nov. 2?    In some cases, we'll never know
^. Former Congressman jailed for confronting Blackwell
^. Ohio Supreme Court won’t block certification?
^. Some voters hold out hope for Kerry victory
^. Ohio counties dealing differently with Kerry recount requests
^. FBI, Congressional staffers curious
   about self-described vote fraud programmer

Excerpt:  Mr Curtis, are there programs that can be used to secretly fix elections? Yes.

How do you know that to be the case? Because in October of 2000 I wrote a prototype for present Congressman Tom Feeney, at the company I work for in Oviedo, Florida, that did just that.

And when you say, "Did just that," it would rig an election? It would flip the vote fifty-one forty-nine to whoever you wanted it to go to, and whichever race you wanted it to win.

And would that program that you designed be something that elections officials, that might be on county boards of elections, could detect? They'd never see it.

This is just a prediction, of course, but I'll wager this will still be unknown news years from now.   =H&HH= | LINK

Excerpt:  So at around 10 am, Carrie and I went to the front desk with a copy of the Conyers letter and presented our driver's licenses. We were told to wait while the receptionist called the Secretary of State's office, which told her "someone will come down and get the letter."

At that point, we retreated to Zuppa's, a very untrendy cafe located on the north side of the lobby. We ordered orange juice and sat down at a table. Within minutes, security was all over us.

"You must leave this building now,” said an exasperated Borden security cop, his hands shaking quite visibly.

“What’s the charge?” I asked. “Are we trespassing or do you just ‘reserve the right to refuse service to anyone?’”

“You must leave this building now,” he repeated. ...

Excerpt:  On Friday December 10 two certified volunteers for the Ohio Recount team assigned to Greene County were in process recording voting information from minority precincts in Greene County, and were stopped mid-count by a surprise order from Secretary of State Blackwell’s office. The Director Board of Elections stated that “all voter records for the state of Ohio were “locked-down,” and now they are not considered public records.”

Excerpt:  In a November 30 article titled "Nearly a Month Later, Ohio Fight Goes On," detailing the controversy in Ohio over the results of the November 2 election, the Associated Press correctly identified J. Kenneth Blackwell -- who, as Ohio's secretary of state, oversees the election process -- as "a co-chairman of Bush's re-election campaign in Ohio." But two large news organizations, FOXNews.com and the Chicago Sun-Times, omitted that reference from their versions of the story.

^. Nearly a month later, fight over Ohio count goes on
^. Jesse Jackson seeks voting probe
^. More questions raised about Ohio vote
^. Judge says Ohio recount must wait until after election is certified
^. Florida group sues over election results
^. Kerry picks up 1,070 more votes in Ohio
^. Commission says voting problems were widespread
^. Concerned locals push for presidential election fraud probe

# One of the diarists on the Daily Kos is urging people to go to CNN's webpage and request customized email alerts on the topics "Ohio elections" and "voting irregularities." The idea is that CNN might actually give the story some coverage if they are faced with overwhelming demand for it. CNN wants you to register in order to do this, so have your fake ID ready.   =Madeline Zane=

• Lawsuit challenges Nevada’s Republican electors
  
• Ohio Finds at least 2,600 ballots counted twice
  
• Lingering doubts about 2004 election

# Now that they control the vote counting, of course they do!   =Phil H.=

Excerpt:  Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie said he was personally affected by the early reports, discouraged by what he was seeing. "But I've been through this before," he said. "In 2000 the exit data was wrong on Election Day. In 2002, the exit returns were wrong on Election Day. And in 2004, the exit data were wrong on Election Day -- all three times, by the way, in a way that skewed against Republicans and had a dispiriting effect on Republican voters across the country."

Gillespie's implication that the final tally was correct, but the exit polls were wrong implies that our voting process is flawless and the people building our voting machines are nonpartisan and only interested in seeing a fair election.

Anyone with the slightest knowledge of the seriousness of the widespread problems we have with our voting systems or the highly compromised partisans running our voting machine companies knows a truly fair election is not possible.

Why would the GOP want to eliminate exit polls? Because it's the last semi- independent check of an election's accuracy and the only way to quickly determine if the votes cast for a candidate match those counted by the machines.

Excerpt:  Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.

Excerpt:  Without question, the evidence presented thus far should raise suspicion among honest individuals. While maintaining a calm and reasonable demeanor, the results of the Novermber 2nd election should be fully investigated simply for the sake of the nation and our future confidence in the democratic process.

Excerpt:  Ohio State Senator Teresa Fedor said today: "There was trouble with our elections in Ohio at every stage. It's been a battle getting people registered to vote, getting to the ballot on voting day and getting that vote to count. There is a pattern of voter suppression; that's why I called for [Ohio Secretary of State] Blackwell's resignation more than a month ago. Blackwell, while claiming to run an unbiased elections process, was also the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio.

Excerpt:  The county's technical consultants contacted UniLect Corp., the manufacturer of Carteret County's electronic voting system, had given misinformation about how many votes the system can store.

The county was told its units could store up to 10,500 votes when, in fact, the limit is 3,005 votes.

Excerpt:  The poll managers had such an extensive list of voters rights and regulations that they had to follow, including it being illegal to have any partisan buttons etc. in the polling place, yet the ballots for voters in over 40 precincts were put in the hands of Bush-Cheney partisans.

I don't know whether the Bush partisans did or didn't play any games with the ballots they received, but it sure doesn't look good, and I wonder whether it's even legal. And let's not forget, this is a state that was already well on its way to becoming the new Florida of GOP election fraud.

Excerpt:  In most states, the returns were pretty much as predicted by the last polls. Florida seems the odd exception -- the last polls were for Kerry, 49-44%, but the returns are running 52-47 Bush.

So in just one day -- and in just one state -- Bush went from five points down to five points ahead.

Statistical analysis:  George Bush's 8 million new votes found

Excerpt:  At 8:30 p.m. Election Night, Black Box Voting blanketed the U.S. with the first in a series of public records requests, to obtain internal computer logs and other documents from 3,000 individual counties and townships. Networks called the election before anyone bothered to perform even the most rudimentary audit.

... Among the first requests sent to counties (with all kinds of voting systems -- optical scan, touch-screen, and punch card) is a formal records request for internal audit logs, polling place results slips, modem transmission logs, and computer trouble slips.

An earlier FOIA is more sensitive, and has not been disclosed here. We will notify you as soon as we can go public with it.

Excerpt:  A secret document obtained from inside Bush campaign headquarters in Florida suggests a plan - possibly in violation of US law - to disrupt voting in the state's African-American voting districts, a BBC Newsnight investigation reveals.

Two e-mails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign's national research director in Washington DC, contain a 15-page so-called "caging list".

It lists 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly black and traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville, Florida.

An elections supervisor in Tallahassee, when shown the list, told Newsnight: "The only possible reason why they would keep such a thing is to challenge voters on election day."

... In Jacksonville, to determine if Republicans were using the lists or other means of intimidating voters, we filmed a private detective filming every "early voter" - the majority of whom are black - from behind a vehicle with blacked-out windows.

The private detective claimed not to know who was paying for his all-day services.

• Republicans phone voters to discourage Democrats' voting

Excerpt:  Although 37,000 citizens have requested absentee ballots, Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore says she'd only received 22,000 when she began the count. Where are the others? Don't ask: though she posts the names of requesters, she won't release the list of those who have voted, an eyebrow-raising deviation from standard procedure.

Excerpt:  By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer m