Rampant Voter Fraud in America
01 November 2006
by Sara Scafe Toole, Contributing Writer for AnaiRhoads.org
AnaiRhoads.org - Voter fraud has been a major issue with Americans ever since the 2000 election, when Bush beat Al Gore in the controversial battle over the Florida outcome. There have been several investigations concerning voting machines, but nothing ever gets resolved. Part of the problem is that there is no receipt, or proof, that a vote has been placed. The strange thing about this is that the companies, ES&S and Diebold, which make these voter machines also make ATM machines, which, as we all know, print receipts of all transactions, so why don't voters receive a copy of their votes, in case of irregularities of vote counts? There's something fishy here; it's as if they don't want us to have proof of who we voted for.
Let's look at Senator Chuck Hagel, of Nebraska. Hagel was the CEO and Chairman of ES&S when he ran for Senate. Guess which voting machines were used for his election? You got it! Hagel's campaign finance director, Michael McCarthy, is the current owner of ES&S, and recently admitted to Alexander Bolton, of The Hill, that Hagel is still an owner in the McCarthy group; ES&S' parent company.(1) By the way, Senator Hagel was caught lying by the Senate Ethics Committee about his ownership of ES&S, and the vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers. Also, California banned the use of Diebold systems because the security was so terrible. Despite Diebold's claims that the audit logs couldn't be hacked, a chimpanzee was able to do it! See the video here.
In Snohomish County, WA., there were so many discrepancies in voter counts in their 2004 election that two attorneys, Paul R. Lehto, and Dr. Jeffrey Hoffman, Ph.D. did an exhaustive study on the cause of the errors. Although most of their focus was on the gubernatorial race between Democrat Christine Gregoire and Republican Dino Rossi, I will be focusing on their results of the faulty machines themselves. You can find this thesis online by searching for the title, Evidence of Election Irregularities in Snohomish County, Washington General Election, 2004.
In their executive summary, three points bothered me:
1. many people reported that touch screens appeared pre-voted, or would select the Republican box once the Democrat box was pushed by the voter. Some voters pushed the Democrat box over seven times before asking a pollster for assistance.
2. Statistical analysis shows high correlation between voting irregularities and high Republican voting results.
3. Sequoia screens are required to have their power cords daisy-chained, forming a de facto network that third parties can use to tap into the machines, or have the machines communicate with each other.
This third point bothered me because I have heard several times that these machines are in no way connected, yet, they are all hooked together to one cord that is plugged into the power source, so how can they not be connected? These machines also have modems in them, which is completely unnecessary, unless they want to interact with one another; if this is not illegal, it certainly should be.
After the authors of the Snohomish work looked over the many discrepancies concerning the Sequoia machines, they requested a copy of the owner's manual from the company. The company outright refused to give the manual over, even resorting to threaten litigation.
However, the authors did receive a copy of the Snohomish pollworker's guide, and a troubleshooter's guide for the machine's operation. This is how it works: a card activation machine is used to activate a card that tells the touch screen that the person is authorized to vote, and it brings up the pre-programmed ballots in it's memory for the voter in that precinct. However, in Section XIII of the Troubleshooter's Guide shows a manual mode which gets around the security measures; see Appendix D, copy of excerpt of Troubleshooter's Manual.
The Manual tells workers how to activate manual code by pressing a color coded button twice. A soft beep is heard, and the manual warns that the worker must observe the voters to make sure that ONLY ONE VOTE PER VOTER IS RECORDED. In other words, while in manual mode, voters and/or technicians can vote as many times as they want, provided that nobody is around to hear the "soft" beep. (3)
One of the major problems that we face today in elections is that there is no paper trail to follow accurately; if all of us Americans had "voter receipts" from 2004, the world would be a different place. Officials can print the results from the screens, but there's no way to know if it's an accurate reflection of the voter's true intentions. Adding to the chaos, one network news reporter received a tip that mercenary hackers were hired to alter the code of a particular brand of machine so that every tenth vote for Candidate A was recorded as a vote for Candidate B.
In Colorado, another group of hackers is boasting that they stole a box of electronic smartcards used to activate e-voting machines, and reprogrammed them to allow multiple votes; just for fun. (4)
I received a memo from the US Congress House of Representatives, dated 12-15-2004. I will write this verbatim: Sherole Eaton, a Deputy director of Board Election in Hocking County, Ohio, has first hand knowledge of inappropriate and likely illegal election tampering in the Ohio presidential election in violation of Federal law.
I have information that similar actions of this nature may be occurring in other counties in Ohio. I therefore ask that you immediately investigate this alleged misconduct, and that, among other things, you consider the immediate impoundment of election machinery to prevent further tampering
On December 13th, my staff met with Ms. Eaton who explained to them last Friday, Dec. 10th, Michael Babarian, Jr., a representative of Triad GSI ,(voting machine co.), unilaterally sought, and obtained access to the voting machinery and records in Hocking County, Ohio, modified the computer tabulator, learned which precinct was planned to be the subject of the initial test recount and made further alterations based on that information, and then Mr. Barbian advised the election officials how to manipulate the machinery so that the preliminary hand count matched the machine. Ms. Eaton first relayed this information to Green Party Representatives, and then completed, signed and notarized an affidavit of events.
The Triad official sought access to the voting machinery based on the apparent pretext that he wanted to review some "legal questions" the officials might receive as part of the recount process. Several times during his visit, Mr. Barbian phoned Triad's offices to obtain programming information relating to the machinery, and the precinct in question. Subsequently, Triad officials have been doing this to several counties in Ohio.
This course of conduct would appear to violate several provisions of law, in addition to the Constitutional guarantees of equal protection and due process. 42U.S.C.1973 provides for criminal penalties against any person who, in any election for Federal office, knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to defraud the residents of a state of a fair and impartially conducted election process. 42 U.S.C.1974 also requires the retention and preservation for a period of twenty two months from the date of a Federal election, of all voting records, and makes it a felony for any person to "willfully steal, destroy, conceal, mutilate, or alter any such election.
Further, any tampering with ballots and/or election machinery would violate the Constitutional rights of all citizens to vote, and have their votes properly counted, as is guaranteed by the Equal Protection and due Process clause of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Second, the course of action would also appear to violate several provisions of Ohio law. No less than four provisions of the Ohio Revised Code make it a felony to tamper wit, or destroy election machines. (5)
There have been other grievous mistakes, as well. Nearly half of the six million Americans that live abroad, only half received ballots, or they received them after it was too late to vote. A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states, was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.
New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes, had malfunctioning machines that mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential candidate on more than 20,000 votes; plenty enough to cover the 5,988! A review of the data reveals that, in Ohio alone at least 357,000 voters, the majority of them Democrats did not have their voted counted. (6) If the votes were tallied correctly, we would have Kerry in the White House right now, and he wouldn't be funneling billions of dollars in a war when we have so many Americans in need, ourselves. Speaking of Kerry, 80,000 votes that were meant for him actually went to the Bush camp!
Now, let's move on to the exit polls, and why they were so off of the outcome. As you probably know, exit polls are for when voters have finished their voting, and they are asked how they voted; exit polls are very reliable, but not in the 2004 election. However, they are considered so reliable that in November of 2004, exit polling made in the Ukraine, paid for by the Bush Administration, proofed fraud, and Viktor Yushchenko was denied the presidency.
That same month, when exit polls here showed amazing disparities in the US election, the six media organizations that had commissioned the polls treated it's very existence as an embarrassment. Instead of treating the discrepancies as a story meriting investigation, the networks scrubbed the offending results from their websites. They then substituted them with corrected numbers that had been weighted, retroactively to match the official vote count. "The people who ran the exit polling, and all of those of that are clients, recognized that it was deeply flawed," says Tom Brokaw, who served as an anchor for NBC News for the election. "They were really screwed up- the old models just don't work anymore; I would not go on- air with them again." (6)
The person that we need to worry the most is J. Kenneth Blackwell. He was the co-chair of Bush's re-election Committee, and he was the Secretary of State in Ohio. As Ohio's Secretary of State, Blackwell had authority to interpret and implement state laws regarding voter registration. In a ruling two weeks before the election, he used his official powers to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens in Democratic strongholds. A judge rebuked him for his actions, saying that he was trying to accomplish the same result as in Florida, 2000. Instead of welcoming the citizen's involvement, instead Blackwell permitted officials to purge their voter rolls. If a voter hadn't voted in two years, they were stripped of their registrations!
Those that were stripped of their registrations were sent certified letters. Many didn't respond; some were students that were away from, others didn't want to sign for something they weren't aware of, some were in the military, and people do move from place to place. These voters were to go to court to maintain that they were indeed who they said they were, and they wanted their right to vote back. The problem was that the court appearance time was sent to the previous address, and they were sent out impossibly late in the process.
To further his goal of winning Ohio for Bush, Blackwell incited an arcane law that stated that Ohio would only process registration forms if they were printed on eighty pound unwaxed white paperstock. Amazingly enough, Blackwell's own office didn't have these voter registrations, nor did anyone else, for that matter. Blackwell's directive clearly violated the Voting Rights Act, which states: No one may be denied the right to vote because of a registration error that is NOT material in determining whether such individual is qualified under state law to vote. Blackwell's directive was repealed, but the damage had already been done.
Repeated studies have shown that touch-screen machines, with no paper record of their ballots, are highly susceptible to tampering. The machines are eminently hackable, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office. In a demonstration, conducted last year before the Board of Elections in Leon County, Florida, computer expert Herbert Thompson cracked into the voting machine in less than 60 seconds, altering the internal code and changing the vote count. (6)
Recently, Princeton University's study of a Diebold machine found ways to install disastrous viruses that can go undetected, and piggyback onto other machines, thus sabotaging the entire voting system. Even when this machine gave a receipt that stated the correct vote was received, when they went back into the machine with a voting card, the votes had been changed to the other party.
Here is the executive summary from Princeton's findings (7):
This paper reports on our study of an AccuVote-TS, which we obtained from a private party. We analyzed the machine's hardware and software, performed experiments on it, and considered whether real election practices would leave it suitably secure. We found that the machine is vulnerable to a number of extremely serious attacks that undermine the accuracy and credibility of the vote counts it produces.
Computer scientists have generally been skeptical of voting systems of this type, Direct Recording Electronic (DRE), which are essentially general-purpose computers running specialized election software. Experience with computer systems of all kinds shows that it is exceedingly difficult to ensure the reliability and security of complex software or to detect and diagnose problems when they do occur. Yet DREs rely fundamentally on the correct and secure operation of complex software programs. Simply put, many computer scientists doubt that paperless DREs can be made reliable and secure, and they expect that any failures of such systems would likely go undetected.
Previous security studies of DREs affirm this skepticism, but to our knowledge, ours is the first public study encompassing the hardware and software of a widely used DRE. The famous paper by Kohno, Stubblefield, Rubin, and Wallach studied a leaked version of the source code for parts of the Diebold AccuVote-TS software and found many design errors and vulnerabilities, which are generally confirmed by our study. Our study extends theirs by including the machine's hardware and operational details, by finding and describing several new and serious vulnerabilities, and by building working demonstrations of several security attacks.
The main findings of our study are:
1. Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss. We have constructed demonstration software that carries out this vote-stealing attack.
2. Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute. In practice, poll workers and others often have unsupervised access to the machines.
3. AccuVote-TS machines are susceptible to voting-machine viruses - computer viruses that can spread malicious software automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre- and post-election activity. We have constructed a demonstration virus that spreads in this way, installing our demonstration vote-stealing program on every machine it infects.
4. While some of these problems can be eliminated by improving Diebold's software, others cannot be remedied without replacing the machines' hardware. Changes to election procedures would also be required to ensure security.
The details of our analysis appear in the full version of this paper [PDF]. One can see the demonstration of this serious problem here.
The only way to counteract this type of fraud, is to go back to paper ballots. The results may take longer, but at least they'll be precise, and what the people of America want. After doing research for this article, I have read of rampant voter fraud; it's everywhere, and it's the Republicans that are doing it. The one thing that really bothered me was the "manual mode" that has a button to push; then, one could "vote" as many times as they want, and the repercussions of that, alone, are enormous! It is time for us, as a nation, to stand up for our voting rights! We should receive a receipt for our votes, in case of yet another miscount, but what's better than just using paper ballots instead? Sure, it might take a week to find out who the winner, but at least we know he's the real winner! With so many crucial issues at stake right now, paper ballots are the only way for VOTERS to feel confident that they're votes have been counted, and not shredded, or given to their opponents.
References:
1 Onlisareinsradar.com
2 Nightweed.com
3 Voters Unite (.pdf)
4 Popular Science - Online, 08/11/2006, Sorry, Your Vote Has Been: Lost, Hacked, Miscast, Recorded.
5 Congress of the United States- House of Representatives: Committee of the Judiciary. December 15, 2004.
6 Rolling Stone Magazine; June 15, 2006
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