History
The important point to draw from history is that if corrupt forces can steal an election, they will try. CountedAsCast proves that one person can steal an election using the new voting machines.
What follows are just a few examples of inaccurate vote counts and voter suppression. This is hardly a complete list. While some incidents are certainly honest mistakes, they are not all honest mistakes. We have corrupt companies building secretive machines, a failed testing and certification system, and vote collection and (re)counting procedures that just don't cut it. There is a pattern here. Ignoring that pattern puts our democracy at risk.
Florida 2006 An astounding 18,000 people allegedly chose not to vote in a congressional race in Florida's 13th district that was decided by a few hundred votes. The "undervote" rate on the voting machines was much higher than that of the absentee voters. Because the machines had no paper trail, there is no way of knowing what happened. The latest news can be found at BradBlog. Florida is dumping all paperless machines.
Ohio 2006-7 -
Here's a lot of smoke coming from just one state :
More Than 1 In 4 Diebold Systems Found To Have Recorded Votes Incorrectly In Cuyahoga County, According To 2006 Election Audit
Bob Bennett, Ohio GOP Head And Last Holdout On Cuyahoga County Election Board, Suspended By Brunner
Diebold Fails Again: Nearly 50% Of Dre Touch-Screen Systems Fail Accuracy Test In Montgomery County, Oh!
Ohio Sos Demands Immediate Resignation Of All Cuyahoga County Election Board Members
Ohio Election Workers Sentenced To 18 Months For Rigging 2004 Presidential Recount
20 Voters File Complaint Alleging Touch-Screen Vote-Flipping In Montgomery County, Oh
Oh My Ohio: Cuyahoga County Election Director Resigns! New Sos Requests Audit Of Blackwell, Shredded Documents!
Two Ohio Election Officials Convicted For Rigging 2004 Presidential Recount!
USA 2006 "The reported vote count showed Democrats winning by a 7.6 margin, 3.9 percent less than the Exit Poll and far outside the poll’s +/-1% margin of error."
http://ElectionDefenseAlliance.org/landslide_denied_exit_polls_vs_vote_count_2006 Ohio 2005 Several election reform initiatives
were leading very strongly in polls the week before the election, and wound up "loosing" badly. On other initiatives in the same election, the polls were very accurate.
Alaska 2004 Alaska Nov, 2004 : George Bush's district-by-district totals added up to 292,267, but his official total was only 190,889. In the US Senate race, Lisa Murkowski received 226,992 votes in the district-by-district totals, but her official total was only 149,446. In 20 of the 40 State House Districts, more ballots were cast than there are registered voters in the district, according to information on the state's web site. In 16 election districts, the voter turnout percentage shown is over 200%. Diebold fought letting the public inspect the public's computerized ballots. The public finally won the case.
Alameda County, CA 2004-07
This is an example of registrars' stonewalling attempts to get computerized election data :
"Superior Court Judge Winifred Y. Smith issued a tentative ruling that the Alameda County Registrar of Voters and Alameda County 'have engaged in a pattern of withholding relevant evidence and failure to preserve evidence'. ... Copies of the votes from 96% of the machines used in the election had been destroyed. No audit logs from any individual machine were found."
The judge later overturned the election.
Ohio 2004 The preponderance of evidence indicates that the vote in Ohio and other states may have been stolen. Exit polls could not have been so wrong in so many places, and there was massive and blatant voter suppression. I would call vote fraud in Ohio in 2000 as least as likely as that which occurred in Illinois in 1960.
The best summary that I've seen is an article by Robert Kennedy :
Was the 2004 Election Stolen?
See also You can also search your favorite book site for "election Ohio 2004". Here's a few books:
Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?: Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count by Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss
"Bush's purported victory was a statistical impossibility. Moreover, according to the data, it appears that Kerry won by a sizeable amount, in excess of seven million votes."
What Went Wrong In Ohio: The Conyers Report On The 2004 Presidential Election by Congressman John Conyers
What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election by Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld, and Harvey Wasserman
Fooled Again by Mark Crispin Miller
1968-2005 -
www.ecotalk.org/VotingMachineErrors.htm
Nationwide Election Incidents 2004
Nationwide Election Incidents 2005
History Books & Articles -
"Counting Votes" by Ronnie Dugger, New Yorker Magazine, 1988
Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America by Andrew Gumbel
Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, an American Political Tradition-1742-2004 by Tracy Campbell
Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy by John Fund
Nobody, and no machine, should be counting
American votes in secret.
For further information, email Jim Soper at :
Jim.Soper@GMail.com
CountedAsCast.com/issues/history.php
(May 29, 08)
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