Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked

November 6th, 2004 6:53 pm
Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked

by Thom Hartmann

When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how.

Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.

But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal states.

"Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state."

On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.

That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.

Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.

"Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program.

But, it's running on a Windows PC.

So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel.

In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.

"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger."

They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election."

As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.

Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."

FULL STORY


Very interesting! I had to really condense this story.. for the full thing see the link above.

What do you think about this?

What I really think about this is that it's truly delightful that Michael Moore's website is designed by a Canadian design firm: Plank of Montreal ... well, they're only half Canadian, Montreal's in Quebec.

:D

Seriously though, all joking and jabbing aside, I'm not the least bit surprised. I do, however, wonder how one would ever fix a problem like this. And it certainly does make one think that some things shouldn't be left in the hands of the electronic frontier.

Cheers
Dzinerbear

Quote:

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Originally posted by Dzinerbear
I do, however, wonder how one would ever fix a problem like this. And it certainly does make one think that some things shouldn't be left in the hands of the electronic frontier.

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It would have been easy for the programmers to encrypt the database, perhaps even password protect it? simple enough.. at least some measure... instead of anyone being able to open an excel file, change the numbers, click save and have new results. That is not responsible programming. IMHO :high:

Our government is very experienced in developing software and systems which are most certainly NOT hackable.....

Look to the defense industry for their controls and systems involved in the control and operation of nuclear weapons systems.

The government knows how to do this properly, the question is why have they choosen purposely NOT to do so?

There is a need for checks and balances in the design, creation, manufacture and operation of electronic voting systems.

Think about this for a minute, our elections determine who will be controling our nuclear weapons arsenal, so why should
election not also require an elaborate set of checks and balances?

i don't think windows should be the os that runs any weapons. for goodness' sake, the thing is FULL of security holes.

maybe if this article is based on reality, people can go to their local papers and tv stations - this would make an interesting article for them. and call your senators and congresspeople and demand that this be looked into.

make some noise! the republicans always do...

The only thing we can hope for at this point is that as the evidence mounts, this hits the news hard and it starts to make people wonder.

If Bush just barely won this election and a large majority of America believes there was a conspiracy, then the electoral college COULD take this into consideration when they vote. You just never know.

But this is all Dependant upon the TV news media picking up on this story in a big way..... Which is highly unlikely unless some stunning pieces of evidence come out real quick.