Time to put on the Tinfoil Hat?
I'm not a conspiracy theory guy, but like a lot of people, I was curious at why the exit poll numbers we were seeing on Tuesday out of Ohio (and a few other states) were not matching up with the actual results being reported out of each of the precincts. It's even more suspicious that the state where the exit polling didn't match up were also states with e-voting machines. Reload reader TABS has sent me a series of links that describe the case being made by those that feel that something was not quite right with the voting. There is no smoking gun in any of this, but I hope to be able to find the questions we should be asking to get from suspicious data to any actual evidence of widespread malfeasance, if it exists.
The two main states that are under suspicion are Florida and Ohio.
In Florida, the main evidence seen so far is a chart showing that in many counties with small populations, there were large discrepancies between the percentages of registered Democrats and Republicans, and who actually voted for the candidates representating that party. On the surface, this looks very suspicious, but is actually not a big surprise. In most rural areas in the South, there's been a large shift from supporting Democrats to supporting Republicans, and the same wide differences were also seen in 2000. The more troubling evidence, though, is a chart showing the results from counties with between 80,000 and 500,000 voters. In counties with touch screen voting, the percentage difference between the expected vote and the actual vote was random. In counties with the optican scan voting that fed into a centralized PC that tabulated the results, the percentage of votes for Bush were much higher than the expected vote in nearly every county. That is certainly a red flag.
In Ohio, author and Columbus State Community College Professor, Bob Fitrakis, has written a summary of the events in Ohio. Most of what Fitrakis has found amounts to voter suppression tactics that happened on and around Election Day, but provides little insight as to how the exit polling would not have matched up to the actual results there. Elsewhere in Ohio though, there were two other events that have drawn attention. In Gahanna, a suburb of Columbus, President Bush was given 4,258 votes from a precinct where only 638 people voted. And in Warren County, northeast of Cincinnati, county officials cited terrorism as a reason to lock down the county administration building during the vote count, keeping the media out during the process.
On a national level, this story is starting to get some attention. Keith Olbermann at MSNBC has talked about it, several House Democrats are seeking an inquiry into the irregularities, and Beverly Harris of Black Box Voting is filing a substantial Freedom of Information Act request. We'll see where any of that goes, but there are still way more questions than answers. The situation in Gahanna appears isolated, and Warren County used punch cards, so even if there were some tampering there, that alone wouldn't have thrown the election either (but should of course be investigated). If there was some statewide issue, though, how could it have been done? For each county that uses the type of E-voting systems that used a centralized PC, the kind that Beverly Harris showed was simple to tamper with, there still must have been a large effort by voting officials to comply with the fraud and keep it secret. I don't see that as being likely in a swing state like Ohio, even if Ken Blackwell wanted it to happen. That leaves several other possibilities.
1. The centralized PC was programmed to revise voting numbers as it received tallies from individual precincts
2. The Opti-Scan machines that were feeding into the centralized computers were programmed to skew the results it was sending
3. There were individuals who were able to hack the modem connection between the individual precincts and the centralized server
I've had trouble convincing myself that any of these three things would have been easy to do, either from the standpoint of keeping it secret, or from technically being able to pull it off on a large scale. My mind is open on this, but I'm still not convinced. The things to look at right now are getting companies like Diebold and ES&S to open up their source code for public scrutiny (this shouldn't even be an issue for something as important as voting machines) and to get to the bottom of how the results in Gahanna became skewed by so much. I don't think that anyone trying to rig the election would've been dumb enough to produce voting results showing Bush with more votes than votes cast, so something else happened there, and it's strange. If there was code in either an E-vote machine or at the centralized server that was skewing the election results, was this a result of a glitch in that code? Or was it just an innocent bug in machines that were supposed to be tested, but really weren't?
The two main states that are under suspicion are Florida and Ohio.
In Florida, the main evidence seen so far is a chart showing that in many counties with small populations, there were large discrepancies between the percentages of registered Democrats and Republicans, and who actually voted for the candidates representating that party. On the surface, this looks very suspicious, but is actually not a big surprise. In most rural areas in the South, there's been a large shift from supporting Democrats to supporting Republicans, and the same wide differences were also seen in 2000. The more troubling evidence, though, is a chart showing the results from counties with between 80,000 and 500,000 voters. In counties with touch screen voting, the percentage difference between the expected vote and the actual vote was random. In counties with the optican scan voting that fed into a centralized PC that tabulated the results, the percentage of votes for Bush were much higher than the expected vote in nearly every county. That is certainly a red flag.
In Ohio, author and Columbus State Community College Professor, Bob Fitrakis, has written a summary of the events in Ohio. Most of what Fitrakis has found amounts to voter suppression tactics that happened on and around Election Day, but provides little insight as to how the exit polling would not have matched up to the actual results there. Elsewhere in Ohio though, there were two other events that have drawn attention. In Gahanna, a suburb of Columbus, President Bush was given 4,258 votes from a precinct where only 638 people voted. And in Warren County, northeast of Cincinnati, county officials cited terrorism as a reason to lock down the county administration building during the vote count, keeping the media out during the process.
On a national level, this story is starting to get some attention. Keith Olbermann at MSNBC has talked about it, several House Democrats are seeking an inquiry into the irregularities, and Beverly Harris of Black Box Voting is filing a substantial Freedom of Information Act request. We'll see where any of that goes, but there are still way more questions than answers. The situation in Gahanna appears isolated, and Warren County used punch cards, so even if there were some tampering there, that alone wouldn't have thrown the election either (but should of course be investigated). If there was some statewide issue, though, how could it have been done? For each county that uses the type of E-voting systems that used a centralized PC, the kind that Beverly Harris showed was simple to tamper with, there still must have been a large effort by voting officials to comply with the fraud and keep it secret. I don't see that as being likely in a swing state like Ohio, even if Ken Blackwell wanted it to happen. That leaves several other possibilities.
1. The centralized PC was programmed to revise voting numbers as it received tallies from individual precincts
2. The Opti-Scan machines that were feeding into the centralized computers were programmed to skew the results it was sending
3. There were individuals who were able to hack the modem connection between the individual precincts and the centralized server
I've had trouble convincing myself that any of these three things would have been easy to do, either from the standpoint of keeping it secret, or from technically being able to pull it off on a large scale. My mind is open on this, but I'm still not convinced. The things to look at right now are getting companies like Diebold and ES&S to open up their source code for public scrutiny (this shouldn't even be an issue for something as important as voting machines) and to get to the bottom of how the results in Gahanna became skewed by so much. I don't think that anyone trying to rig the election would've been dumb enough to produce voting results showing Bush with more votes than votes cast, so something else happened there, and it's strange. If there was code in either an E-vote machine or at the centralized server that was skewing the election results, was this a result of a glitch in that code? Or was it just an innocent bug in machines that were supposed to be tested, but really weren't?
posted by thehim at 9:46 PM
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