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Monday, November 15, 2004 |
QUOTE OF THE DAY
"We write with an urgent request that the Government Accountability Office immediately undertake an investigation of the efficacy of voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election, how election officials responded to difficulties they encountered and what we can do in the future to improve our election systems and administration."
- - Congressmen John Conyers, Jerrold Nadler & Robert Wexler
Members of the House Judiciary Committee
(Letter dated 11/ 5/04 to Comptroller General, David Walker, posted on the House Web Site)
http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/gaoinvestvote2004ltr11504.pdf
KNOW YOUR HISTORY - November 15th
1969 -- While President "Tricky" Dick Nixon watches the Ohio State football team beat Purdue on TV, over half a million people march on Washington in a MOBE-organized protest of the Viet Nam War. Protesters rally in front of the White House to conclude the March Against Death which began two days ago in darkness & near-freezing temperatures near the gates of Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. 1,200 protesters crossed the Arlington Memorial Bridge every hour & then walked four miles to the White House. Each marcher carried a candle & a placard that named a soldier killed in Vietnam. Reaching the White House, they paused to say aloud the name of their soldier, then headed for Capitol Hill, where they put their placards in 40 coffins. Recitation of U.S. deaths in Vietnam War takes 36 hours. All told, 45,000 marched through the two cold, stormy nights. The first marcher was Judy Droz, a 23-year-old mother whose husband died in Vietnam this April. Speakers included Senators Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Charles Goodell; African Americans Coretta King, Dick Gregory; Conductor Leonard Bernstein; Singers: Arlo Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul, & Mary, John Denver, Mitch Miller; & the touring cast of Hair.
2001 -- US Government admits that not 1 of the 1,200 suspects arrested after Sept. 11 has been linked to the terrorist attacks. Too bad they let all those Saudis flee the country in week 1 without any questioning.
RHINO SEZ:
The Rhino's been on a documentary mission (the day job), traveling hundreds of miles by car, zig-zagging across the Dakotas gathering interviews for the DVD re-release of "Wiping The Tears Of Seven Generations." (http://www.kifaru.com)
Traveling through these red states, especially just as hunting season begins, (Rhinos must keep their horns down) gives clues as to who the hell would vote for shrub & company.
Responding to all who have written, The Rhino will continue to Blog, but less often, and on an as able basis.
Updating the election fraud story, to stay abreast of ongoing developments, keep your eyes & ears on MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. In both his blog & on TV, he continues to ask relevant questions, including why the other tri-letter broadcasters haven't been reporting on the multi-state scandals.
"Bloggerman" - Keith Oberman's Blog
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240
Meanwhile, The national Green Party, The Libertarian Party, Common Cause of Ohio & the Alliance for Democracy are all pushing for a recount in Ohio. They need to raise funds to make it happen so if you're moved, to do so, you can contribute at: http://www.votecobb.org
(o/)(o/)(o/)
A Legitimate Recount Effort in Ohio
By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet. November 12, 2004
Efforts to launch an official statewide recount of the Ohio presidential vote are underway. While it's unclear if a recount will result in a Kerry victory, it's likely to highlight many flaws in Ohio elections that may have tilted results toward Republicans and against Democrats. Common Cause of Ohio and the Alliance for Democracy, a progressive coalition, Thursday announced they were launching a recount campaign for Ohio. Columbus, Ohio attorney Cliff Arnebeck, who represents both groups, said both the Green Party and Libertarian Party presidential candidates would seek a recount if the $110,000 filing fee could be raised. "Common Cause and the Alliance for Democracy are not partisan. The purpose of the recount is to verify the honesty of the process," Arnebeck said. "That is in the interest of anyone who would be declared the winner." A coalition of progressive groups will hold a public hearing on election abuses this Saturday in Columbus calling on the Kerry campaign to pay for the recount. Meanwhile, they have created a Web page to collect donations at the Alliance for Democracy site. The Kerry campaign reportedly was sending lawyers to Ohio to look into election irregularities, but Arnebeck said only the public interest groups were now committed to a recount...
MORE AT: http://www.alternet.org/election04/20494/
Green Party Has Raised More Than $98,000 Towards Estimated $150,000 Ohio Recount
By John Byrne, RAW STORY, 11/11/2004
The Green Party in concert with the Libertarian Party has raised more than $98,000 towards an estimated $113,000 filing fee for a recount of Ohio ballots in the presidential election as of 9:00 a.m. Saturday morning, RAW STORY has learned. The Greens have also raised their collection threshold to $150,000 total, to pay for associated costs. The party, which posted an appeal and press release at 11 a.m. Thursday, has received a flood of small contributions, according to Green Party Media Coordinator Blair Bobier. Their donation site is www.votecobb.org...
MORE AT: http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?pA5
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The Kerry Campaign seems to be getting dragged kicking & screaming into the recount.
Kerry Campaign Scrutinizes Ohio
By Scott Hiaasen, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 11, 2004
Lawyers with John Kerry's presidential campaign are gathering information from Ohio election boards about uncounted ballots and other unresolved issues from last week's election. Attorneys say they are not trying to challenge the election but are only carrying out Kerry's promise to make sure that all the votes in Ohio are counted. They describe this effort, which began this week, as a "fact-finding mission." Unofficial totals give President Bush a 136,000-vote advantage over Kerry in Ohio, but the totals won't be certified until early next month. Dan Hoffheimer, the statewide counsel for the Kerry campaign, said the goal is to identify any voting problems to prevent them in the future - and quell doubts about the legitimacy of the Ohio election being raised on the Internet. "We're not expecting to change the outcome of the election," Hoffheimer said. "We want to be sure that the public knows what really happened."...
http://www.cleveland.com/cuyahoga/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/1100169336227680.xml
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WHAT YOU CAN DO
- Email your support to the 3 Congressmen who wrote the letter as quoted in the Quote Of The Day at http://www.workingforchange.com/activism/action.cfm?itemid=18055
- Sign 2 petitions demanding an investigation at:
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/uselect/petition.html
http://www.moveon.org/investigatethevote/
Monitor election fraud websites for more suggestions on how to help:
Voters Unite: http://www.votersunite.org
Black Box Voting at: http://www.blackboxvoting.org
Vote Scam at: http://www.votescam.com
Want To Know: http://www.wanttoknow.info/electronicvoting
View the 30-minute documentary, "Votergate" at:
http://www.votergate.tv
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Here's a potpourri of links detailing our scandal ridden "democratic" election:
WOWT/NBC (Nebraska) - "Sarpy County election officials are trying to figure out how they ended up with more votes than voters in the general election. Sarpy County borrowed the election equipment from Omaha-based Election Systems & Software. Its employees operated the machines that are now double-checking the ballots. No one is sure exactly what went wrong."
http://www.wowt.com/news/headlines/1161971.html
Sun Journal - A North Carolina newspaper reports that "a systems software glitch in Craven County's electronic voting equipment is being blamed for a vote miscount that ... swelled the number of votes for president here by 11,283 more votes than the total number cast."
http://www.newbernsj.com/SiteProcessor.cfm?Template=/GlobalTemplates/Details.cfm&StoryID=18297&Section=Local
Associated Press/USA Today - "There were also several dozen voters in six states who said the wrong candidates appeared on their touch-screen machine's checkout screen."
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/evoting/2004-11-04-e-voting-error-nc_x.htm
Palm Beach Post (Florida) - "Early Thursday, as Broward County elections officials wrapped up after a long day of canvassing votes, something unusual caught their eye. Tallies should go up as more votes are counted. That's simple math. But in some races, the numbers had gone . . . down. Officials found the software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward."
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/politics/content/news/epaper/2004/11/05/a29a_BROWVOTE_1105.html
Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Board of Elections Website - 29 precincts in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, reported votes cast above the number of registered voters - 93,136 extra votes total. And the numbers are on the official Cuyahoga County Board of Elections website below. To verify the discrepancies, first look at the number of registered voters for the below precincts, then scroll down to the number of ballots cast for the precinct. In particular, compare the numbers for the precincts listed below.
http://boe.cuyahogacounty.us/BOE/results/currentresults1.htm
Bay Village - 13,710 registered voters / 18,663 ballots cast
Beachwood - 9,943 registered voters / 13,939 ballots cast
Bedford - 9,942 registered voters / 14,465 ballots cast
Bedford Heights - 8,142 registered voters / 13,512 ballots cast
Brooklyn - 8,016 registered voters / 12,303 ballots cast
Brooklyn Heights - 1,144 registered voters / 1,869 ballots cast
Chagrin Falls Village - 3,557 registered voters / 4,860 ballots cast
Cuyahoga Heights - 570 registered voters / 1,382 ballots cast
Fairview Park - 13,342 registered voters / 18,472 ballots cast
Highland Hills Village - 760 registered voters / 8,822 ballots cast
Independence - 5,735 registered voters / 6,226 ballots cast
Mayfield Village - 2,764 registered voters / 3,145 ballots cast
Middleburg Heights - 12,173 registered voters / 14,854 ballots cast
Moreland Hills Village - 2,990 registered voters / 4,616 ballots cast
North Olmstead - 25,794 registered voters / 25,887 ballots cast
Olmstead Falls - 6,538 registered voters / 7,328 ballots cast
Pepper Pike - 5,131 registered voters / 6,479 ballots cast
Rocky River - 16,600 registered voters / 20,070 ballots cast
Solon (WD6) - 2,292 registered voters / 4,300 ballots cast
South Euclid - 16,902 registered voters / 16,917 ballots cast
Strongsville (WD3) - 7,806 registered voters / 12,108 ballots cast
University Heights - 10,072 registered voters / 11,982 ballots cast
Valley View Village - 1,787 registered voters / 3,409 ballots cast
Warrensville Heights - 10,562 registered voters / 15,039 ballots cast
Woodmere Village - 558 registered voters / 8,854 ballots cast
Bedford (CSD) - 22,777 registered voters / 27,856 ballots cast
Independence (LSD) - 5,735 registered voters / 6,226 ballots cast
Orange (CSD) - 11,640 registered voters / 22,931 ballots cast
Warrensville (CSD) - 12,218 registered voters / 15,822 ballots cast
Michigan City News-Dispatch - In LaPorte County, Indiana, a Democratic stronghold, electronic voting machines decided that each precinct only had 300 voters. "At about 7 p.m. Tuesday," according to this report, "it was noticed that the first two or three printouts from individual precinct reports all listed an identical number of voters. Each precinct was listed as having 300 registered voters. That means the total number of voters for the county would be 22,200, although there are more than 79,000 registered voters."
http://www.wanttoknow.info/041104newsdispatch
Common Dreams - 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 4,988 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.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm
Popular Mechanics - A team of former National Security Agency (NSA) computer experts conducted a weeklong exercise with six Diebold machines and a server. According to team leader Michael Wertheimer, the group uncovered "considerable security risks." They found that the smart cards used to provide supervisors with access to the machines could be easily hacked; the removable media containing voting information was protected by flimsy locks that the team picked in under a minute using bent paper clips. The paper clips weren't even necessary, since all 32,000 keys supplied by Diebold for the machines are identical, allowing any key to open all of the machines. On the software side, the most glaring weakness was in election headquarters servers: Dell PCs ran the Windows 2000 operating system without Microsoft's security upgrade patches, which left servers susceptible to viruses and worms, enabling a remote attacker to tamper with election systems by phone."
http://popularmechanics.com/science/research/2004/11/hack_the_vote/index3.phtml (pg 3 of 4 webpages)
Popular Science - In South Carolina, officials bought machines too late for adequate testing. And on many of their onscreen ballots, the presidential contest included names of candidates from local elections. Several Texas counties are thousands of votes short because a bug in the software failed to record Spanish-language ballots. For hundreds of thousands of votes, there will be no paper record at all. In Colorado, a group of hackers is boasting that they stole a box of electronic smartcards used to activate e-voting machines and reprogrammed them to allow multiple votes, just for fun. In virtually every state, officials failed to invite outside technical experts to participate in the process of e-voting machine selection. Because none of the major vendors of e-voting machines release their code for security testing, states and counties are forced to trust vendors' own assessments of their machines' reliability.
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/generaltech/article/0,20967,714491-1,00.html (3 web pages)
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Articles are reprinted under Fair Use Doctrine of international copyright law.
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All copyrights belong to original publisher.
9:14:28 AM 
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© Copyright 2005 Gary Rhine.
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