black box voting

[David Nicol]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Adam Shand <adam at shand.net>
Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 11:56:39 +1300
Subject: [wordup] Was the election rigged?
To: wordup at lists.spack.org


This is a series of articles.  Note that the one immediately below I'm
quite suspicious of, but I got the link from someone I quite trust the
the third story seems to at least partially back it up so I'm leaving
it in.

   IE.
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=Avi+Rubin&btnG=Search+News

I'm pretty suspicious of accusations until there's some real proof one
way or another, it's too easy for people who poured their heart and
soul into the election to *want* there to be foul play.  Regardless it
is a real possibility and the Diebold voting machines sound awful.

Lets see how it all plays out and keep and open mind until the end.

Adam.

From: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/10/1172/9052

Dr. Avi Rubin is currently Professor of Computer Science at John
Hopkins University. He "accidently"got his hands on a copy of the
Diebold software program--Diebold's source code--which runs their
e-voting machines.

Dr. Rubin's students pored over 48,609 lines of code that make up this
software. One line in partictular stood out over all the rest:

#defineDESKEY((des_KEY8F2654hd4"

All commercial programs have provisions to be encrypted so as to
protect them from having their contents read or changed by anyone not
having the key..The line that staggered the Hopkin's team was that the
method used to encrypt the Diebold machines was a method called Digital
Encryption Standard (DES), a code that was broken in 1997 and is NO
LONGER USED by anyone to secure prograns.F2654hd4 was the key to the
encryption. Moreover, because the KEY was IN the source code, all
Diebold machines would respond to the same key. Unlock one, you have
then ALL unlocked.

I can't believe there is a person alive who wouldn't understand the
reason this was allowed to happen. This wasen't a mistake by any
stretch of the imagination. This was a fixed election, plain and
simple.

This second coup d'etat is either stopped now or America ceases to be.

From: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm

Published on Saturday, November 6, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked
by Thom Hartmann

When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06,
2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives
from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show
up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election
was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he
said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic
primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against
Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against
Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.

"It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.

And some believe evidence is accumulating that the national effort
happened on November 2, 2004.

The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record
of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net
denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a
table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and
noticed something startling.

While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to
produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios
largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote,  in Florida's counties using
results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central
tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking –  the results  seem to
contain substantial anomalies.

  In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of
them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180
for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere
else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In Dixie County, with 9,676 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats
and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for
Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the  counties
where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered
Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered
Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.

Yet in the  touch-screen  counties, where  investigators may have been
more vigorously looking for such anomalies,  high percentages of
registered Democrats  generally  equaled high percentages of votes for
Kerry.  (I had earlier reported that county size was a variable – this
turns out not to be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus
optical scanners.)

More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://us
together.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and
www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm.  Note the trend line – the
only variable that determines a swing toward Bush was the use of
optical scan machines.

One possible explanation for this is the "Dixiecrat" theory, that in
Florida white voters (particularly the rural ones) have been registered
as Democrats for years, but voting Republican since Reagan. Looking at
the 2000 statistics, also available on Dopp's site, there are similar
anomalies, although the trends are not as strong as in 2004. But some
suggest the 2000 election may have been questionable in Florida, too.

One of the people involved in Dopp's analysis noted that it may be
possible to determine the validity of the "rural Democrat" theory by
comparing Florida's white rural counties to those of Pennsylvania,
another swing state but one that went for Kerry, as the exit polls
there predicted. Interestingly, the Pennsylvania analysis, available at
http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm, doesn't show the
same kind of swings as does Florida, lending credence to the
possibility of problems in Florida.

Even more significantly, Dopp had first run the analysis while
filtering out smaller (rural) counties, and still found that the only
variable that accounted for a swing toward Republican voting was the
use of optical-scan machines, whereas counties with touch-screen
machines generally didn't swing - regardless of size.

Others offer similar insights, based on other data. A professor at the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in Florida the vote to
raise the minimum wage was approved by 72%, although Kerry got 48%.
"The correlation between voting for the minimum wage increase and
voting for Kerry isn't likely to be perfect," he noted, "but one would
normally expect that the gap - of 1.5 million votes - to be far smaller
than it was."

While all of this may or may not be evidence of vote tampering, it
again brings the nation back to the question of why several states
using electronic voting machines or scanners  programmed by private,
for-profit corporations and often connected to modems  produced votes
inconsistent with exit poll numbers.

Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever since
Election Day.

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.

But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal
states.

Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were
rigged.

Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton
campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote
an article for The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie
in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.

"Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the
two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly
separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots
but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in
judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state."

He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was
slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa,
all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going
to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."

Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep,
as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various
states the election was called for Bush.

How could this happen?

On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago,
Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was
Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org
from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were
tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small
towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they
Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by
pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch
cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all
cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.

That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.

"In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television,
"you have all the different voting machines at all the different
polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand
polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one
machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were
going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be
more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in
here and deal with all of them at once?"

Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What
surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what
you and I use. It's just a regular computer."

"So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a
central tabulator?"

Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program
called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it
into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that
the County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was
sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software.

Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test
election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and
waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the
various precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean
had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was
winning.

"Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold
wrote a pretty good program.

But, it's running on a Windows PC.

So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the
normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose
"Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder
"LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where
they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in
that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to
open the vote count in a database program like Excel.

In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one
precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.

"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the
numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously,
"let's give 100 votes to Tiger."

They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software
"the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking
on the progress of your election."

As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said,
"And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor
has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.

Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an
election, and it took us 90 seconds."

On live national television. (You can see the clip on
www.votergate.tv.)  And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris
said, noting that it would be nearly impossible for the election
software – or a County election official - to know that the vote
database had been altered.

Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had
Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a
landslide.

Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to
cause people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since
the networks would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry.
But the networks didn't do that, and had never intended to.

According to congressional candidate Fisher, it makes far more sense
that the exit polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and
that the vote itself was hacked.

And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this
hit him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national
office in the most-hacked swing states.

So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this
story was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when
he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities
so far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington
Post and other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like
contortions to explain how the exit polls had failed.

But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part.
Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final
paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong
across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored
Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated
daily progressive talk show.  www.thomhartmann .com His most recent
books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection:
The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The
People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A
Return To Democracy."

From:
http://www.ilcaonline.org/modules.php?
op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=961

Presidential Election: Questions Raised About Electronic Voting
Posted by : DavidSwanson on Monday, November 08, 2004 - 04:38 PM

Questions Raised About Electronic Voting

Serious questions are being raised about the use of electronic voting
machines in the 2004 presidential election. In an Ohio county, Bush
mistakenly received some 3,900 extra votes. We speak Johns Hopkins
University professor Aviel Rubin and investigative reporter Bev Harris.
[includes rush transcript]

President Bush arrives back in Washington today after spending a 3-day
weekend at Camp David. Since John Kerry conceded to Bush last
Wednesday, the president and his advisers have talked extensively about
what they call Bush's strong mandate to govern following the November 2
election. But as the rumor mill swirls about a reshuffling of Bush's
cabinet and John Kerry returns to the Senate, there are many people who
are not willing to simply move on from last Tuesday's election.

Many of John Kerry's supporters were stunned last Wednesday when their
candidate conceded the presidency to Bush. Just hours earlier, his
running mate John Edwards told a rally of their supporters in Boston
that they would not stop until every vote was counted, a reference to
the hundreds of thousands of provisional ballots in the key state of
Ohio that some Democrats believed could have tipped the balance. But
it's not just the provisional ballots.

Even though Kerry has stopped fighting for the presidency, serious
questions abound about the use of electronic voting machines. Take this
story: In a voting precinct in Ohio's Franklin County, records show
that 638 people cast ballots. Yet, George W Bush got 4,258 votes to
John Kerry's 260. In reality, Bush only received 365 votes. That means
Bush got nearly 3,900 extra votes. And that's just in one small
precinct. This in a state that Bush officially won by only 136,000
votes. Elections officials blamed electronic voting for the extra Bush
votes.

Meanwhile, a number of Congresspeople are asking the General Accounting
Office to investigate electronic voting and the 2004 election and the
nonprofit group Blackbox Voting has begun the process of filing the
largest Freedom of Information Act request in history.

Bev Harris, investigative reporter and author of the book "Black Box
Voting." She has announced plans to file the largest FOIA action in
history by seeking the internal logs from voting machines from every
county that used electronic voting machines.

Aviel Rubin, professor at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of the
report "Analysis of an Electronic Voting System" the initial study of
security flaws in voting machine software. He served as an election
judge in Baltimore County on November 2nd.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------
RUSH TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is available free of charge, however donations help us
provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV
broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the woman behind that process,
investigative reporter, Bev Harris. She is the author of the book,
Black Box Voting. We also are joined by Professor Aviel Rubin who
teaches at Johns Hopkins University and is co-author of the report,
"Analysis of an Electronic Voting System," the initial study of
security flaws in voting machine software. He served as an election
judge in Baltimore county on November 2. Bev Harris, let's begin with
you. What exactly -- what kind of information are you looking for now?

BEV HARRIS: Well, first, we're seeking internal audit logs of the
machines, which are public record. There's nothing proprietary about
this. It's interesting so far. We have been getting responses, but the
officials who run the machines, the county officials, are really so
clueless. They don't know what their machines' records are, or how to
print them out. So we find ourselves guiding them through the menus on
their own software to show them how to print this information out which
is a bit scary. But we also sought documentation on all of the troubled
slips in all of the documentation of any problems that they had. Right
now, we're following up, you know, we have all of the anomalies such as
the viewer mentioning, and we're following up with specific public
records requests, for example, give me the internal log of machine
number such and such of that precinct, or depending on the type of
anomaly they're reporting, we are seeking the specific types of records
that will shed more light on that.

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to go to a break and then come back to this
discussion of the counting of the votes last Tuesday. This is Democracy
Now!. We'll be back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and
Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman, as we continue on the issue of the
electronic voting machines and the overall count in the election. Our
guest are Bev Harris, author of the book, Black Box Voting, has plans
to file the largest Freedom of Information Act Request in history, by
seeking the internal logs from voting machines of every county that
used electronic voting machines, and Aviel Rubin, professor at Johns
Hopkins University, who served as an elections judge in Baltimore
county on November 2 and is co-author of the report, "Analysis of the
Electronic Voting System." Professor Rubin, your assessment of what
happened Tuesday.

AVIEL RUBIN: Well, I think that we have a problem now, which is that we
have dug ourselves a big hole by running an election using systems that
-- there's really no way to tell what's going on inside the voting
machines. So, when -- I'd like to separate out all of the talk about
the glitches and things not working from the idea that somebody, you
know, security -- somebody may have rigged the machines or tampered
with them. And I think the fact that we're using systems where it's
impossible to tell is very scary. So, Bev talked about these problems
that they're trying to uncover, and we have seen the news stories about
problems, but what I worry about are the ones that may have happened
that are totally undetectable. For example, it doesn't make bug news if
a voting machine switches 5% of the votes from one candidate to
another, because nobody ever knows it because we have a secret ballot
in this country. I think it's very important that we move away from
systems where nobody can really see what's going on inside at the time
of the election. And there's no capability of doing a recount towards
more verifiable, auditable systems, for example, if you had a voter
verified paper ballot.

AMY GOODMAN: Why the opposition? You had the Election Monitoring Group,
that the State Department brought in itself from the OSCE, the
Organization of Security and Cooperation Europe. Some of their election
monitors were saying that this is worse than the situation in Serbia,
another one referring to the Venezuelan elections and saying, their
electronic voting machines, people were given a ticket that they
dropped in a box and randomly around the country, they can compare the
paper trail in the boxes to the voting machines. Why is there such
fierce opposition to having any paper trail, which means zero
possibility of recount?

AVIEL RUBIN: I have always been very surprised that the people running
elections are not jumping at the chance of having a way to recount the
election. I think that, you know, the best thing would be to get one of
those people on the show and ask them that question, because it doesn't
make any sense it me. From the vendor's perspective, they would sell a
more expensive, more feature-rich product if they could add photograph
verifiable printout. I have been completely confused about why they're
-- everybody is not embracing this concept.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you convinced, Professor Rubin, that President Bush
won this election?

AVIEL RUBIN: I don't know. I think that as long as we use systems where
you cannot really tell what's going on inside the machine -- you know,
when I was an election judge, I watched people walk into the precinct,
walk up to Diebold machines, vote, and walk out. And at the end of the
day we printed results. And I was thinking if I had written that
program that's running on those machines, I could have made any outcome
that I wanted come out. So, you know, do I believe that Bush really
won? Well, I don't know.

AMY GOODMAN: What about this letter, Bev Harris, that has been signed
by three Congress members, including Florida Congress member Robert
Wexler, John Conyers, and Gerald Nadler. Can you talk about it? We have
hardly seen any reference to it.

BEV HARRIS: Well, you know, the concern I have is, we have got to go
after this from all fronts. I haven't seen any reference to it in the
media. I have also been told from sources that I have inside the media
that are fairly high up that particularly in TV, there's been -- there
is now a lockdown on this story. It is officially and from an executive
producer level, let's move on time. And I am very concerned about that,
because it looks like we're going to have to go to places like BBC, to
get the real story out. I find it amazing that we went ahead with an
election without even auditing it. You are never going to find the
problems with the machines that you can quantify until you at least do
the basic canvassing that's in the current election procedures, such
as, comparing how many people showed up to vote with how many
signatures are in this poll book with how many votes show up in the
machines. They haven't even done that. And to make it even worse, Ohio,
they don't even know how many provisional ballots there are. They don't
know if there's 150,000 or 500,000. They don't seem to be able to tell
us what records they have. This is amazing, and I knew this was going
to happen. They set up this thing. They said we're going to have
provisional ballots nationwide. They didn't set up any auditing for
them. And so, in case after case, we're not able to account for those
ballots. We ought to know, because they're cast at the precinct. We
ought to know how many provision ballots we have on election night. Why
wouldn't we if we have proper book keeping?

AMY GOODMAN: There's been serious questions raised about New Mexico,
but does it hurt trying to find out the ultimate counts that John Kerry
and John Edwards so immediately conceded, despite the fact that Edwards
had said as they promised during the campaigns, making references to Al
Gore squelching protests four years ago, that they would make sure that
the votes were counted?

BEV HARRIS: Oh yes, they conceded very prematurely. As I was saying in
Ohio, they don't even know if they won or lost in Ohio, really. They
are basing this on, I think, a verbal okay from someone in the
Secretary of State's office that said, that they were being assured
there was only 150,000 provisional ballots. Well I said, where is the
source data on that? What auditing do they have on those? They couldn't
tell me. You see, I don't understand how you would concede anyway
without even beginning the canvassing, because with these voting
machines, we don't have adequate auditing in place, but we have some.
The full auditing we have does -- it does find some anomalies that are
quite big and sometimes they flip elections. So, you know, why not just
wait a couple of days. The other thing I'm seeing is that in some parts
the media gave a huge push to hurry, hurry, hurry, certify. This was
happening in New Mexico. They're saying -- they're putting tremendous
pressure on Governor Bill Richardson to hurry and certify the election.
Well why? You have x-number of days to certify the election. One would
think you would want it to be right, and you'd think would you want to
go through and you want to check out the information. And understand, a
lot of this is already election procedures. We keep saying that
election procedures are what really save us from the insecure and
mysterious machines, and that the election procedures would catch
anomalies. Understand, that they have not done the election procedures
yet in most cases. They have chosen to go ahead and call elections
without doing the very procedures that they say protect the system.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us, Bev
Harris, who is filing the largest Freedom of Information Act request in
the history of the act, and Professor Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins
University.

AVIEL RUBIN: Thanks a lot.

AMY GOODMAN: Thank you.

--
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-- 
David L Nicol
"It's what God and Dwight Eisenhower intended,
and it's what I use today." -- Gerald Combs