Glitch gave Bush extra votes in Ohio

[Division56]

Glitch gave Bush extra votes in Ohio


COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said.

Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.

Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch.

State and county election officials did not immediately respond to requests by The Associated Press for more details about the voting system and its vendor, and whether the error, if repeated elsewhere in Ohio, could have affected the outcome.

Bush won the state by more than 136,000 votes, according to unofficial results, and Kerry conceded the election on Wednesday after acknowledging that 155,000 provisional ballots yet to be counted in Ohio would not change the result. (Full Ohio results)

The Secretary of State's Office said Friday it could not revise Bush's total until the county reported the error.

The Ohio glitch is among a handful of computer troubles that have emerged since Tuesday's elections. (Touchscreen voting troubles reported)

In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. And in San Francisco, a malfunction with custom voting software could delay efforts to declare the winners of four races for county supervisor.

In the Ohio precinct in question, the votes are recorded onto a cartridge. On one of the three machines at that precinct, a malfunction occurred in the recording process, Damschroder said. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred.

Damschroder said people who had seen poll results on the election board's Web site called to point out the discrepancy. The error would have been discovered when the official count for the election is performed later this month, he said.

The reader also recorded zero votes in a county commissioner race on the machine.

Workers checked the cartridge against memory banks in the voting machine and each showed that 115 people voted for Bush on that machine. With the other machines, the total for Bush in the precinct added up to 365 votes.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a glitch occurred with software designed for the city's new "ranked-choice voting," in which voters list their top three choices for municipal offices. If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes outright, voters' second and third-place preferences are then distributed among candidates who weren't eliminated in the first round. (E-vote goes smoothly, but experts skeptical)

When the San Francisco Department of Elections tried a test run on Wednesday of the program that does the redistribution, some of the votes didn't get counted and skewed the results, director John Arntz said.

"All the information is there," Arntz said. "It's just not arriving the way it was supposed to."

A technician from the Omaha, Neb. company that designed the software, Election Systems & Software Inc., was working to diagnose and fix the problem.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.



http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/11/05/voting.problems.ap/index.html


:( :o :ph34r: :rant:

[Claverhouse]

These aren't exactly 'glitches'.



Claverhouse :ph34r:

[int]

This is why I've never trusted electronic voting.

Even in college I was able to login anonymously to the ftp server tracking the student elections and found an Access database file - that had 777 permissions. The file contained every student number (social security number) of the voters and the candidates, and tracked their votes. There was a week long debate about the entire ordeal.

[file cabinet]

one person's view:
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won_.php

[candela]

As far as I know, you punch out the ballots in Ohio. What the hell? I probably should have voted just so I'd be more sure of this.

[Dunearhp]

What is wrong with using a pencil to write 1 on a piece of paper?

[gypseymothlee]

As far as I know, you punch out the ballots in Ohio. What the hell? I probably should have voted just so I'd be more sure of this.

There are different methods in different parts of the state. Where I live we had to fill out little bubbles on a sheet of paper with number 2 pencils.

[Nighthawk]

Unfortunately, these "glitches" are all to common whenever Guardians try to use computers. If they ever figure out how to use them correctly, I'll probably be out of a job.

[Claverhouse]

From Edgar Steele's latest: [excerpts]


We get the government we deserve, it is said. What, exactly, did I do to deserve this? And I'm a conservative, too. Imagine how the liberals must feel.

For every person I know who voted for Bush, I know four who voted for Kerry or a third-party candidate, not to mention another six who didn't vote at all! But, then, I run in some unusual circles. Even so...

The Zogby Polls, which usually are pretty accurate, had Kerry winning a clear majority, not just a plurality, and sweeping the Electoral College. Exit polls, which are even more accurate, had Kerry winning going away, especially in the key "Battleground States" of Ohio and Florida, both of which inexplicably ended up in Bush's column at the end. I noticed that, for once, none of the network anchors really discussed either type of poll, though CNN has been accused of jiggering its report of exit poll results. In an excuse switch reminiscent of Iraq being blamed for possessing weapons of mass destruction, suddenly the blame for the voting-booth conversion to Bush is being placed upon the desire of the common man to stamp out homosexual marriage. As comedienne Judy Tenuta likes to say: "It could happen!" Yeah...right.

It seems clear to me that Bush didn't win fairly. I think Kerry actually won the election and allowed Bush to steal it. In retrospect, it appears to me that Al Gore did the same thing, albeit less abjectly than did Kerry. But, this time Bush got caught with his hand in the ballot box. I've just had a heel-of-the-hand-forehead-thumping "aha" experience. How could I, of all people, have missed something so obvious?

Yes, I have noted rampant vote fraud in the past and expected it this time, as well. I have witnessed it first hand at the local level. I have read many credible reports from others at all levels, concerning past vote fraud. Yet, I did not believe it was so blatant...so massive as what obviously just occurred. How could I possibly expect others to see it now if I didn't see it coming? How could I be so...dumb?

Now comes the hard part: How do we make clear that free elections in America were a thing of the past as long as four years ago?


The smell left over from Election Day is bad enough, all by itself, but there is evidence, lots of evidence, of vote fraud on a scale not seen since the heydays of Communist Russia. Next we will see ballots with only one name appearing in each slot (given our "choice" of candidates, we essentially got there years ago, however).

How on earth did despicable Democrat Tom Daschle get beaten? Mind you, the only Senators I would be more pleased to see go are Hillary, Feinstein and the execrable Charles Schumer, but it seems extremely unlikely that Daschle's constituents would have voted him out of office in a fair election. Is it just coincidence that Daschle has been a particularly nettlesome thorn in George W. Bush's side for the past four years?

The problems in Ohio on election day are starkly outlined by attorney Ray Beckerman in his Basic Report from Columbus: "Touch screen voting machines in Youngstown OH were registering "George W. Bush" when people pressed "John F. Kerry" ALL DAY LONG." One precinct in suburban Columbus reported that nearly 4,000 votes were "accidentally" credited to Bush. Mr. Beckerman also reports that lines in predominantly-Democratic precincts were 5-10 hours in length, versus near nonexistent in Republican strongholds, for the simple reason that precincts expected to line up in the Republican column had five times as many voting machines as others. Beckerman outlines a number of other irregularities in one of this election's two key "battleground" states, the one that gave the election to Bush, just as Florida did four years ago with a healthy assist from the US Supreme Court. Is all of this simply coincidental in an election where the disputed votes decided the outcome?

The other key battleground state, Florida, reported similar problems: "(S)everal dozen voters in six states - particularly Democrats in Florida - who said the wrong candidates appeared on their touch-screen machine's checkout screen...In many cases, voters said they intended to select John Kerry but when the computer asked them to verify the choice it showed them instead opting for President Bush..." (Globe and Mail, 11/3/04). More coincidence?

But, the machines don't have to be obviously in error to be rigged. Ronnie Dugger, in How They Could Steal the Election This Time, several months ago described the November 2004 election machinery: "36 million (votes) will be tabulated completely inside the new paperless, direct-recording-electronic (DRE) voting systems, on which you vote directly on a touch-screen...you get no paper record of your vote...you never know, despite what the touch-screen says, whether the computer is counting your vote as you think you are casting it or, either by error or fraud, it is giving it to another candidate. No one can tell what a computer does inside itself by looking at it; an election official 'can't watch the bits inside,' says Dr. Peter Neumann, the principal scientist at the Computer Science Laboratory of SRI International and a world authority on computer-based risks...The four major election corporations count votes with voting-system source codes (which) are kept strictly secret..."

Even if they aren't obviously in error or secretly rigged, these new machines can still have their tabulations changed, with nobody the wiser. One of my favorite Internet columnists, Devvy Kidd, two weeks ago predicted "monstrous problems that will make Florida 2000 pale in comparison." Quoting from the December 1996 issue of Cincinnatus News Service, a vote fraud newsletter, Devvy went on to note, "The missing link in the vote fraud investigation has been found. The November 1996 issue of Relevance Magazine reveals that two-way hidden modems are being built into the ever growing number of computerized optical scanner/direct recording voting machines in use all across the country from New England to California...these hidden modems are accessible by remote cell phone technology...these voting machines can be accessed and manipulated from a central super computer without a phone line connected to the wall, and without the local precinct workers knowing that anything is happening at all." I wonder why Dan Rather didn't tell us about this?

Just look at all the "user login" notations in this rare audit log from Washington State's King County, where a number of voting tabulation irregularities are now under investigation. No notation is made, of course, of what those anonymous users did, once logged into the database. Go here for an interesting report and speculation about how and by whom the voting machines are being hacked - particularly, note the Republican connection through an attorney.

Diebold, Inc., is one of the country's biggest suppliers of paperless, touch-screen voting machines. Diebold's CEO, Walter O'Dell, wrote a letter four months ago soliciting major-league campaign contributions for Bush, in which he said, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." Diebold is based in Canton, Ohio. Coincidence?


Now pay particularly close attention to the very next sentence from Mr. Chin's article: "A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly 'glitched' local election went to court to have the computers examined - but the case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the innards of America's voting machines are the 'trade secrets' of the private companies who make them." So, the legal system steps in and removes any chance of our being able to audit what these things do. Coincidence?

And it's not just the touch-screen voting machines that are susceptible. CommonDreams.org's Thom Hartmann notes that "(I)n Florida's smaller counties the results from the optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking - seem to have been reversed" (Evidence Mounts that the Vote was Hacked, Rense.com). Mr. Hartman's analysis shows that Florida would have gone to Kerry, had those small-county anomalies been more consistent with actual party affiliation registration by voters. Do you believe in coincidence? Did all those rural Floridian Democrats really vote for Bush, do you suppose? Florida, alone, would have changed the outcome of the election.

Also in Florida, the other key "battleground" state that was widely expected to go Kerry, the official election results of Palm Beach's (of 2000's "butterfly ballot" fame) disclosed that, while 454,427 people voted, 542,835 votes were tallied, a discrepancy of 88,000 votes. Shortly after this oddity was picked up and reported by The Washington Dispatch, officials inexplicably "found" over 91,000 additional absentee ballots which had, somehow, already been counted, thus balancing its own tally. More coincidence, I suppose.

Americans seem to believe that the world thinks as we do; that, somehow, Bush is viewed favorably. He is not, as vividly demonstrated by England's Danny Dayus in his article, Don't Be American: "According to recent opinion polls, a majority of people in the USA actually believe that most of the world favoured the re-election of George W Bush as president - this despite several surveys that suggest that support for Kerry over Bush in the wider world was something between a 2:1 and 10:1 ratio."

http://www.intpcentral.com/uploads/fubush.jpg


At left: George W. Bush in an increasingly typical pose. Talk about character. Can you imagine George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy or, even, Richard Nixon ever doing this publicly? Why is this man's obvious mental imbalance, intemperance and lack of propriety not apparent to every American? This is precisely the image of America now held by the rest of the world.

This election was a foregone conclusion, as some noted beforehand. Greg Palast, Harper's editor who investigated American vote fraud on behalf of the British Broadcasting System, reported on November 1 that upwards of one million votes, expected to be cast overwhelmingly for Kerry, would not be counted "(B)ecause, in important states like Ohio, Florida and New Mexico, voter names have been systematically removed from the rolls and absentee ballots have been overlooked—overwhelmingly in minority areas..." More coincidence, of course.

Houston, we have a problem. Many have taken me to task recently for advocating voting - just not voting for Democrats or Republicans - rather than pointedly not voting. In view of the massive and unprecedented vote fraud that now is apparent, my attitude concerning this is undergoing revision...and I'm leaning toward not voting. Of course, I'm having some other leanings, too - leanings that might get me put in jail, were I to share them with you.

Look - the people apparently disenfranchised this time around primarily are those with whom I generally disagree, but it is the fundamental unfairness of what has taken place that most offends me, not to mention the path down which America now treads. If I really believed this election showed the true color of conservatism, I would join the liberals in a heartbeat and replace my "Nuke the Whales" bumper sticker with one that says "Save the Baby Seals."

If this is what it means to be conservative today, I want to be liberal.

Not that it matters that much; if Kerry had won, most agendas would have still run on time. Democrats like bombing too.

Now if Nader had got in...


Claverhouse :ph34r:

[jimkopelli]

...then things would have gotten interesting. I want to see the "none of the above" box on the ballot in my lifetime...

[songbird36]

Re the photo, is there any assurance that it hasn't been digitally altered?

[int]

I think he needs a vacation in the Bahamas to work on his tan.

If it was edited the editor would have at least had the decency to give the guy some color.

[Claverhouse]

None whatsoever. Still, the chap sounds rather more outraged by it than I am, so one might assume that he wouldn't forge it in order to add an extraneous bit to his rant. In Britain we use the more sophisticated two-finger salute. ( With the back of the hand facing the target ).

My only thought was that he's looking increasingly like Frasier's father.



Claverhouse :ph34r:

[Star Cannon]

How about:

SOMEONE HACKED THE DAMN THING?
There.

Star Cannon

[Claverhouse]

Who ? How ? Why ?

It's not as if he hasn't got a record of this sort of thing. Why would anyone attempt to give this sad little man some spurious glamour ?



Claverhouse :ph34r:

[songbird36]

OK I saw the nose picking shot too.

Now I'm waiting for the sudden trouser drop exposing women's frilly underwear...

[Postblank]

Now if Nader had got in...


Claverhouse :ph34r:Sadly, he didn't get that many votes. The Libertarians tripled his amount, I think (don't quote me on that).

[mgb]

The Green Party is organizing a recount in Ohio. That should be interesting.

Also, no one had to hack into the system to alter the vote, the president and CEO of Diebold (who makes the voting machines) said in a news conference months before the election that he would deliver Ohio to the president. Why hack in when you can program the vote for Bush to win by a slight margin?

[int]

From: http://www.7onyourside.com/Global/story.asp?S=2558518&nav=7CPDT4VX



A recently found computer glitch in the voting machines in Franklin County, Indiana has given a democrat enough votes to bump a republican from victory in a County Commissioner's race.

The glitch in the machines recorded straight Democratic Party votes for Libertarians.

The votes were re-counted last night, by hand.

The company who made the voting machine is also checking into programming of it's equipment in nine other Indiana counties.

[gypseymothlee]

Sadly, he didn't get that many votes. The Libertarians tripled his amount, I think (don't quote me on that).
Nader wasn't even on the ballot in ohio and a few other states, the Libertarian candidate was.