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Court Filing On How 2004 Ohio Election Hacked
chimpo13 writes "A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush."
or a nonpartisan transparent one that works and is sized in proportion to the population, area governed, world role, and gdp
The thing is, he didn't win, he stole the election. The same thing happened in Florida.
That ass should be in jail for so many reasons.
Real Clear Politics poll aggregation showed that Bush led Kerry going into the election in Ohio, and had led nationally since the September before the election - it would have been surprising if Kerry won. Exit polling can be and has been unreliable - that's why it's only used as an indicator and not on it's own (precinct turnout is usually more indicative of who's going to win).
Really, just let it go. Kerry just lost - sometimes that's all there is to it.
Hmm, could that sudden shift have been caused by people getting off of work and then voting?
That's a good one, there. We heard about the massive lines in the largest cities in Ohio, where working people had to stand in line for several hours to vote if they lived in less-than-affluent districts. Many people were unable to take enough time off of work, and simply walked away from the line, not casting a vote at all.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Well, when the CEO of Diebold (the company making the voting machines), Walden O'Dell is also doubling as a major Bush fundraiser and promising to "to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President", is anyone really surprised that serious questions were raised about these e-voting machines--which were already controversial long before Wally O'Dell ever started fundraising?
Some things are still best done the old-fashioned way. And voting is one of them.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I read through the article and all I found was information that it was possible to do so - but we at Slashdot ALL know that all electronic voting systems are heavily flawed. I didn't see any evidence in the article that voter fraud actually did occur, only that it was possible.
What IS mentioned is that an intermediate vote count was transferred to another server, but that just means that early vote totals were made available, not that fraudulent votes were cast.
What is with Slashdot and the craptacular headlines lately?
Love sees no species.
Kerry's biggest problem in 2004 was not the voting machines in Ohio or Pennsylvania, but his inability to coherently and succinctly answer a simple question.
In 2004, a ham sandwich would have out-polled George W, but the Democrats nominated John Friggin Kerry. Vote tampering in Ohio does not excuse the Democrats for losing that election.
Sadder still, the electorate will continue to care more about American Idol, instead of rising up in utter outrage about what has been done to their nation.
Check your facts. News orgs. did check in FL after the 2K election and found that Bush would have won. He did not steal the election. However, I disagreed with the Supremes when they wrote that it was too late and gave Bush the win.
Except for that whole removing thousands of democratic voters from the roles even though they were qualified to vote thing, right? I'm sure that had no possible impact on an election that hinged on a few hundred votes, right?
Umm... The unemployment numbers have always been garbage. The length of time that unemployment could be collected has been increased, so the numbers went up.
The Republicans would drop it to a month, and the numbers would be down to a couple of percent, and they'd say "Look how we improved things! Low unemployment!" while people are jobless, starving in the streets.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Oh, there is way more to this one than mere liberal whining and "it could have happened, therefore it happened." I fully concede that the whining over the 2000 election was unwarranted (and frankly made the Dem's look like sore losers, which was embarrassing). But in the particular case of Ohio in 2004, there was some REALLY FISHY stuff going on there. The CEO of the company making the e-voting machines was a major Bush fundraiser (which is highly unethical and a serious conflict of interest in and of itself), promising to help deliver Ohio for Bush in fundraising letters. Combine that with the discrepancy between the results and the exit polling, and you have a situation where serious questions have to be raised about the whole situation there. And O'Dell later resigning from Diebold amid charges of insider trading a year later didn't exactly bolster a reputation for honesty on his part. The whole thing cast a real cloud over the legitimacy of the results in Ohio.
Does all that NECESSARILY point to corruption? Of course not. But it sure as hell raises the question of it.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Actually, what you need is a political culture in your state that values integrity and good ideas over party loyalty. A great example of this is New Hampshire: Their Secretary of State, Bill Gardner, has been in office since 1976, throughout both Democratic and Republican governorships and legislatures, mostly because he's very good at his job and widely seen as valuing clean elections expressing the will of the voters.
Compare that to Ohio, where Secretary of State is often a very politicized position and where Ken Blackwell (the defendant) was doing everything he could to ensure that his party would win. These kinds of things were widely reported in newspapers:
- Rejecting voter registrations from heavily Democratic areas because they were on the wrong paper stock.
- Rejecting voter registrations from liberal political groups because they had, in order to comply with applicable laws, submitted all the registration forms they got, including ones from Mickey Mouse and the like.
- Refusing to do anything at all about churches explicitly endorsing Republican candidates (if a religious body endorses a candidate, they are supposed to lose their tax-exempt status).
- Putting fewer voting machines in precincts likely to vote Democrat than in precincts likely to vote Republican, so that Democratic voters had to wait for hours to vote while Republican voters took about 15-30 minutes.
I am officially gone from
You are correct. Unemployment is closer to 25%.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
But while we're at it, why not replace the old fashion voting with an American Idol style one? I mean, it's not like money didn't already rule the whole deal, let's at least be honest about it. And while we're at it, we could use that lot of 1-900 money to balance the budget.
It's not like it matters what sock puppet sits on the throne.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not only that, but the Secretary of State in Ohio - they guy charged with making sure the voting process was fair and uncorruptable, and that all precincts had enough resources - was the leader of the Bush campaign for Ohio. The systems engineer was a Rove operative. Everything's done in secret and no one can audit the system. And when the votes are cast, there's a deviation from the poll results that make statisticians suspicious.
What? The? Fuck? How does that pass ANY sniff test, ever? Especially Blackwell's conflict of interest?
You know, you can have one orange finger and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Two orange fingers, and you'll still get the 'innocent until proven guilty' treatment. But when your whole hand is orange and there's cheese powder on your lips and teeth? Dude, I didn't have to see you do it to know that you stole the fucking cheetos.
I can see the fnords!
"Just remember, this is the United States of America. We write 80 million checks a month. There are millions and millions of Americans that depend on those checks coming on time," Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner
Well, THERE's your problem.
And of course, it seems the more he talks, the less people like him.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Here's what's really annoying about that particular quote: I can't find the full text of it, least not in 15 minutes of noodling around on Google. There are tons of references to that quote, plenty of references to the responses to the quote, but nothing at all which could put that quote into context. I'm not saying it's a case of misinterpretation... but I am saying that we don't have the facts. What we have is a great soundbite.
Then we have this FTA:
Spoonamore also swore that "...the architecture further confirms how this election was stolen. The computer system and SmarTech had the correct placement, connectivity, and computer experts necessary to change the election in any manner desired by the controllers of the SmarTech computers."
Which sums it up nicely. The filings show how it could have been stolen - but do not prove that it was stolen. It seems to me that the same can be said of any election using this equipment and architecture.
In spite of that, I agree with your statement. The old fashioned way seems to be the one that is most foolproof. While that process can obviously be hacked as well, it typically needs to be done on a machine by machine basis and is quite a bit more traceable.
Actually it just proves that we should trust neither slashdot nor truth-out.org for headlines. If you read TFA it essentially says that a case is made that the architecture made it *possible* for fraud to have occurred; and TFA is apparently trying to slant that as proof that it *did* occur. It is less clear whether or not those pursuing the case are trying to make the same point; or if their point is only to prove that the architecture allowed the possibility of fraud.
The voting machines are not beyond doubt. Any time they are being used, the losing side can cry foul. Even if they were "secure", which they are not.
The reason is that the majority of affected people cannot verify their honesty. I could audit them. Probably. Provided I'd be allowed to. Can you? Possibly. Can Joe Randomvoter? No. Joe'd have to trust us. But why should he? Why should he trust you or me? We could be part of the big conspiracy. We've been bought by those that want to steal the election. And there is actually no good way to disprove it.
With pen and paper, it's easy. Here, Joe, have all the voting cards, you can read, you can count, go check. It's very easy to debunk conspiracy theories like that with good ol' paper voting. Nearly everyone can recount that.
This is why voting machines are dangerous to democracy and faith in it. Not because they are insecure and can be rigged. The danger is that it is very hard to prove beyond doubt to technical illiterates that their pet candidate didn't lose because of shenanigans.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If what you say is true, and I have heard nothing to back that up, then it sounds like the Democrats screwed themselves. So Bush didn't steal the election. Democrats gave it to him.
In more ways than one. The outrage over Clinton's handling of the Elian Gonzalez debacle enraged the quite sizable Cuban American community in Florida. And while Gore did some half-assed back pedaling on the issue, there were probably more than 500 people who were so mad over how Clinton, and by extension Gore, handled the whole thing that they either changed their vote, voted for a 3rd party, or abstained. Had Clinton just let the whole thing slide then the election may have turned out very differently.
I guess you could consider the whole thing a study in chaos theory. Had Gonzalez's family waited another year to try to flee Cuba history may have turned out differently.
Monstar L
Voting intimidation is eliminated when you vote in your own home and you don't have to deal with crowded poll places. I don't understand why more states don't do this.
And now for the tangent, more and more we are seeing the evil republican label. Similarly, it is the socialist, Marxist liberals. Both labels are hyperbole. The two parties aren't all that different really, they agree on most things. The thing that kills me is people don't realize that to make it to congress, you must be at least millionaire. You want to know why the Bush tax cuts haven't expired? Why the democrats haven't beaten the republicans over the head with it? They don't want to see their own taxes go up, just like the republicans. They just have to talk a good game to continue to be elected.
It is only when their supporters really get pissed off that they do something, because they like their cushy job and free, government run health care.
As for claims of vote hacking, neither side really wants an investigation. Think about it, right now the US is seen is fat, lazy and stupid. Do you really want to add slow to that mix? While it would make a lot of us feel good, from the outside, if a former president is put in jail, what does it look like?
Probably something like, we're stupid, fat, lazy, slow and cannot properly investigate a crime. The last thing anyone on either side wants to do is suggest that our law enforcement is somehow inadequate, it would just invite others to exploit that. It is the same security theater as TSA, just on a different stage.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
There are no meaningful differences between Republicans and Democrats, unless you count their donors. It is, and has been for some time, a one-party system with the veil of "choice" pulled over the eyes of the voters. Both parties increase the power of the Federal government (against the constitution and the will of the people), and both parties want more of our money.
The only difference (if you can call it that) between the parties (besides the mascot) is their stance on "scary social problems" like gay marriage and abortion. Both of which have nothing to do with governing and the federal government, if it were Constitutionally sound and legal, would not be involved in either item at all. The Constitution makes clear what the federal government can do, yet we keep electing these asspiles who ignore it.
I wish there was enough outrage to give a third party support, but it appears the deck is stacked against any candidate that isn't an elephant or donkey.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
And the real bitch? They didn't need to hack shit to rig the election, just run off those they didn't want to vote. Look up videos taken in Ohio of the 04 election and you'll see the poor neighborhoods would get one or two broke ass machines while the rich areas got MUCH more machines than required, those that tried to hand voters a slip that pointed out their right to ask for a provisional ballot, since they were making people wait several hours in line only to tell them "you're in the wrong place" and expect them to go do it all over again were first threatened and then arrested, the whole thing was a scam from the word go.
Of course with BOTH parties now owned legally by the megacorps thanks to Citizens United you might as well not bother, hell the ballots might as well only have two choices "Show your love, vote for supermegacorp!" or "Teach those guys in DC a lesson, vote for supermegacorp!".
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Not to comment at all on the rest of it (I've got a paper to write!) but, I thought it was strange people jumped on that number and conflated it to mean that our government is supporting 80 million freeloaders (not saying you specifically, but if you look at the rabid articles about it on the internet, that's the impression I get)
a) There's no comparison made to other countries, so that's just an arbitrary measurement in arbitrary units (If I told you the higgs boson was 114 GeV, and didn't give you any sense of scale, would you think that was big or small?)
b) When you look at the breakdown, 55 million of those checks come from only social security. Are we now arguing that people who collect SS are freeloaders?
c) Of the remaining 35 million checks, 10 million checks comes from tax refunds (they obviously cluster around april 15th, but when you amortize it, it's 10 million/month)
d) We're down to 25 million checks then, and pay for veterans benefits (4.1 mil), retirements (2.6 mil), and contractors (1.4 mil) out of that leaving us with ~16.9 million or so checks.
The breakdown I found has more categories, but I picked off all the things that would be pretty non-contentious (I didn't include medicare or medicade, which seems to be a lot of people's big target these things). It's not like our government is a freewheeling money-printing machine like people keep making it out to be
-Bucky
Actually it just proves that we should trust neither slashdot nor truth-out.org for headlines. If you read TFA it essentially says that a case is made that the architecture made it *possible* for fraud to have occurred; and TFA is apparently trying to slant that as proof that it *did* occur. It is less clear whether or not those pursuing the case are trying to make the same point; or if their point is only to prove that the architecture allowed the possibility of fraud.
TFA is guilty of not having any idea how computers work. They claim the vote totals were manipulated by a "man in the middle" machine that received votes from the precincts, changed them, and then forwarded them on be counted. The site assumes that electronic data is the same as paper data, meaning that once you send it, you no longer have a copy of it. The article never makes any attempt to show that the data forwarded by the supposed "man in the middle" computer was somehow different than the data it received and even implies that such verification would be impossible. All TFA does is say that the servers that collected the data changed it, as if it were fact, for no other reason than a result they didn't expect, even though it matched polling data prior to the election.
Here is just a single example of the crap from the article (emphasis mine):
The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio's vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a suspicious small plane crash.
So the vote totals went from the precincts (article doesn't say how GovTech received the data or where from, so we have to assume), and sent it to a "partisan Republican server", (can a server be partisan?) out of state, which is where the vote totals changed. What happened to the totals after they hit SmarTech? Does SmarTech host a website that simply posts vote totals to the public? Article doesn't say. We are left to assume that somehow, SmarTech then forwarded the totals to the Ohio Secretary of State. So, according to TFA, the votes went like this: precincts --> GovTech --> SmarTech --> (We don't know, but somewhere official), instead of precincts --> Secretary of State servers. Why?
Seriously? No independent, or even partisan group has bother to look at the vote totals, reported precinct by precinct on every news network in America received directly from the precincts themselves, and realized that the numbers that reported then were different than the final count?
This article is pure BS. I think the point is to accuse Republicans of vote tampering to insulate the Democrats from any accusations in the next election. Or maybe they are just hoping that GWB was never really elected. Who knows. It's BS either way.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
He was using 'tax exempt' as a shorthand for donations to it are tax exempt.
There are various types of non-profits that exist in various ways. 501(c)(3) is 'charitable' organizations. To be a 'charity', which means people can donate money to it and those donations be tax deductible, it cannot endorse a political candidate. It must serve the public good, or at least not do various things that the government explicitly excludes from 'the public good' list, and promoting individual candidates or legislation is the most obvious exclusion. (And the other most obvious one is that it must be organized to help society at large, or at least some subset of society, and not just members.)
Other non-profits, generally under the 501(c) area of code, do not have to, for example, pay income tax, but people cannot deduct donations to them from their taxes. For example, the Freemasons are a 501(c)(10). You cannot deduct the dues to the Freemasons from your taxes.
Almost all churches attempt to fall under the 501(c)(3) 'charity' banner. If they endorse candidates, they risk losing their 'charity' status, which means people cannot get a tax deduction from donations to them.
The law's over here. Although the 'you can deduct the donation from your taxes to a 501(c)(3)' rule is somewhere over under the personal income tax code.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
No, the elections are run by the state they're in, not "locally". In Ohio, they're run by the Secretary of State, who was Ken Blackwell. That's why Blackwell is the defendant in this court case. Blackwell was also simultaneously the Bush/Cheney 2004 Ohio Campaign Manager, the clearest possible conflict of interest. Evidently that conflict itself is not illegal in Ohio, though it's probably up to the SoS (Blackwell) whether that conflict is prohibited. But in this case the conflict evidently saw the Bush/Cheney campaign manager to change the votes cast to hand Bush/Cheney the state's Electoral Votes. Not to mention how the conflict saw Blackwell short poor/Black (Democratic) neighborhoods of machines in which to cast original votes.
And of course Ken Blackwell executed directly to whatever plans Karl Rove dictated to him. That's what state campaign managers' jobs are. And both of them have lied about it for years now.
The real question is why you are lying about how elections are run. You're a Republican, right? And don't tell me you're a "Libertarian", or an "independent". Did you vote for Bush in 2004? 2000?
--
make install -not war
Maybe someone should give you a pony too.
It's particularly disappointing that you want the size given to you. It sounds like you're saying you refuse to vote for real candidates (assuming someone else does the job of giving them to you), unless a bunch of other people vote for them first (of course, by then, it's too late and the candidate has lost, because you refused to vote along side them, since that candidate's victory had not already been assured).
Your attitude is why we can't escape the Democrats and Republicans. You are the problem that you're complaining about.
Imagine the world where Thomas Jefferson wrote:
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
What I have seen is the opposite. In many states, ID requirements are weak, and urban districts are notorious for less than robust verification of IDs. Illegal aliens have a number of ways to slip through the cracks and vote. Although the Ohio system may have been designed to facilitate fraud, the low-tech systems of other states were designed to facilitate other types of fraud. There are many ways to rig an election.
The beneficiaries of tax-and-spend policy are those who receive the spending, not those who pay the taxes. Considering how much money gets pumped into welfare and medicaid, I find it hard to believe that poor people are under-represented at the voting booth.