The 2004 election revisited, part 11–Florida

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Margie Burns

Revisiting the 2004 election in Florida

Following up previous posts—

The affidavit by computer programmer Clinton Curtis, written about previously, refers to the unexpected death of Raymond C. Lemme. After Curtis left Yang Enterprises (YEI), he went to work for the Florida Department of Transportation. There he found instances of over-billing by Yang Enterprises, a state contractor.

Curtis

Curtis discussed Yang several times with Lemme, an IG investigator for the DOT. Soon afterward, Mr. Lemme was found dead in a motel room in Valdosta, Ga., death reported initially as a suicide. He died July 1, 2003. Lemme was 56, in good health, and had no known ties in Valdosta. Lemme’s supervisor at the Florida DOT, Robert (Bob) Clift, said in telephone interviews that “So far as I know, only Ray Lemme knows what he was doing in Valdosta, Georgia.”

The question remains, what was Lemme doing in Valdosta? July 1 was the Tuesday before the Fourth; was he on vacation? Was he on a work assignment? Calling in response to questions by voice mail, Clift said, “Neither.” Clift added, “As you know from the police reports, his wife and children are in Tallahassee, so he wasn’t on vacation or anything. And he certainly wasn’t on a work assignment.” In answer to a further question, he says also, “No, he wasn’t on leave.”

At the time of the interviews, Clift himself supported the hypothesis that Lemme’s death was suicide. He declined to speculate on motives, saying the family had been through enough. Clift said emphatically, however, that the death was not related to Lemme’s job performance, which he called “stellar.”

This assessment is borne out by a house organ of the transportation department. The Aug. 2003, Perspectives on Excellence, a Florida DOT newsletter, features an award won by the Inspector General’s Contract Fraud Investigation Team. Lemme was on the team.

A team photograph is followed by paragraphs of praise:

“The Inspector General’s office executed Florida government’s most successful attack on vendor contract fraud, producing 15 criminal convictions and recovering $1.5 million. This team is responsible for placing 83% of individual and company names on the Department of Management Services’ list of convicted vendors who are no longer eligible to compete for state business.

Governor Bush’s Inspector General recently presented this accomplishment as a best practice, at a national conference of Inspectors General.”

One of the vendors “no longer eligible to compete for state business” was Curtis’s former employer and Rep. Tom Feeney’s former client, Yang Enterprises. Curtis alleges in his affidavit that the vote-tampering software developed at Yang was a project initiated by Feeney. Feeney, who also served in the Florida state house and had been Jeb Bush’s running mate for lieutenant governor in 1994, went on to Congress in 2002.

Feeney

Lemme’s supervisor confirmed that Lemme was part of an award-winning team and reiterates that his work was excellent. “I worked with him probably for about 18 months to two years,” Clift said, and Lemme was “an outstanding performer, one of the most thorough investigators that I’ve ever worked with.”

“Everyone here who worked with him would say the same thing; we would all say that.”

Clift also emphasized that “All of us who worked with him support the conclusions of the Valdosta, Georgia, police,” that the death was a suicide. Calling suspicions about the surprising death “unfortunate,” Clift also repeated emphatically that Lemme’s “assignment had absolutely nothing to do with voting machines.” “It was not anything secret.” The IG unit investigates “employee misconduct and contract frauds as they impact DOT,” Clift explained, giving as examples employees claiming more time than actually put in, or travel claimed that is not supported, etc. “On the contractor perspective, [we investigate] contractors who billed us for work they did not do.”

Clift clarified emphatically that Lemme’s job was not in jeopardy. Asked whether Lemme had been fired or going to be fired, Clift said, “Absolutely not. I was his supervisor. His job performance was stellar; other people under him and around him looked up to Ray and modeled their performance on his.” It was Clift who nominated the contract fraud investigation team for a job award. Whatever the cause of death, it was not related to Lemme’s job performance.

But in Clift’s opinion, “this voting machine stuff doesn’t square with the cause of death either.” He reiterated that the cloud of suspicion was “unfortunate.” Responding to further questions, Clift said he had read Clinton Curtis’s affidavit. He confirmed that Curtis reported Yang’s over-billing to the Florida DOT. Without going into specifics, he also confirmed what Curtis said. “Every investigation has varying degrees” of accuracy in its leads, Clift said in general terms, with some facts or details more solid than others. Referring to public record, he also confirmed that Yang Enterprises “doesn’t hold the contract any more.”

Clift filed an affidavit with Florida police about Lemme June 30, 2003. Clift told police, in part,

“I arrived at my office this morning at about 6:30 a.m. My message light was blinking. I had a message from Ray which was left at 6:20 a.m. He said “Something’s come up. I’ll be in late. I’ll call you later I knew Ray had a appointment at the FDOT General Counsel’s office at 1:30. I was called about 2:00 by the attorney he was to meet—he didn’t show up. This is very out of character for Ray . . .”

Strange timing

The unexpectedness of Lemme’s death, Lemme’s unexplained presence in Valdosta, Ga., and the timing of the death in the context of Florida’s nefarious electoral politics raised questions that were never answered. As written previously, Clinton Curtis’s sworn statement alleges that software company Yang Enterprises had developed a prototype for vote fraud. The project was developed, the affidavit states, at the specific request of Rep. Tom Feeney (R- Fla.). Before running for Congress Feeney was lobbyist and counsel for Yang. The strangeness of Mr. Lemme’s death, like Curtis’s affidavit, was not considered a news topic by larger corporate media outlets—intensifying suspicions that the death might be foul play, and might be connected to events at Yang. A more normal reaction in the press would at least have reported allegations in the affidavit.

One lengthy account of the matter is given here, with graphic photographs included. Setting aside any hypothetical China connection, from the perspective of several years afterward it still looks as though the crime should have received greater, sober attention than it got.

The 2004 election revisited part 10, Florida

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Margie Burns

Revisiting the 2004 election, part 10–Florida

Today there are still gaps in federal regulatory authority and oversight of the voting technology industry. Not surprising, when you look at the standard GOP talking point about ‘regulation’ as a ‘job killer’, but it is a bit jarring that even the Federal Election Commission (FEC) had a complete list of all the voting machine manufacturers responsible for counting votes in 2004. The GOP in Congress has sustained an ongoing tactic of refusing to confirm nominees for the FEC (as for other agencies and commissions), leaving it consistently short-handed under the Obama administration.

Not that the election commissioners were exactly unleashed under the GWBush administration.

Cartoon

Something to remember, when GOP presidential candidates rail against ‘regulation’:

Diebold, now Premier Election Solutions, and Election Systems and Software (ES&S) made most of the electronic voting machines. The two companies, competitors, were also similar and entertwined. A former president of the company that became ES&S is Bob Urosevich. Bob Urosevich went on to become president of what became Diebold. A former vice president of ES&S, meanwhile, is his brother Todd Urosevich. Predictably, both brothers were significant GOP donors. The political ties between Diebold in particular and George W. Bush, in both 2000 and 2004, have been widely reported.

Imagine what GOPers and the Tea Party would say, if a voting machine manufacturer today had equally close ties to the Obama White House?

This is not to imply that problems stemmed only from the largest companies. Far from it.

The most startling and dramatic testimony on Florida’s election problems in 2004 has come from computer programmer Clinton Curtis. Curtis was an employee of Florida company Yang Enterprises, Inc. He left YEI in good standing.

Curtis

While at Yang, Curtis had an experience since brought to light in sworn testimony and in a startling affidavit.

In fall 2000, Curtis witnessed Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.), at that time YEI’s company counsel and lobbyist, visit the company with an unusual request. In a meeting with at least half a dozen people participating, “Mr. Feeney said that he wanted to know if YEI could develop a prototype of a voting program that could alter the vote tabulation in an election and be undetectable.”

The request was not a joke. In the conversation, which involved company personnel including Curtis, Feeney “was very specific in the design and specifications required for this program,” Curtis testified. Curtis was directed to create the vote fraud software prototype and did so.

Feeney

Feeney, also a Florida state legislator who had run as Gov. Jeb Bush’s running mate for lieutenant governor, ran for Congress in 2002 and won. His 24^th district was one of the new Florida House districts drawn after the 2000 census, while Feeney was in the Florida state house.

Note: When I was working on this issue after the election in 2004, I called Feeney’s congressional office. Through spokespersons, Feeney declined to comment on the affidavit, saying “We’re not making any statements on the Clinton Curtis affidavit. We haven’t made any statements about it, and we have no plans to make any statement.”

I published an article on the issue–including this flat statement that there would be no comment on the allegations, whatsoever, in future. The column ran in a small local community paper, The Prince George’s Journal. Curtis’s affidavit was not reported at the time in the Washington Post (picking a random example here). For a time, Feeney’s office attempted to pass off the allegations as a joke, Feeney laughing heartily in the occasional interview. However, the “we’re not making any statements” phase soon passed. Subsequently Feeney denied the allegations in response to questions placed by Florida newspapers. Feeney lost his race for reelection to Congress in 2008.

What Feeney did not comment on

Given the content of the affidavit, this was one of the more remarkable “no comments” in legislative affairs.

Curtis made his notarized statement on Dec. 6. A registered Republican, he began working for Yang Enterprises (YEI) in 1998. He became lead programmer and had daily meetings with the company CEO. In fall 2000, Curtis sat in on “at least a dozen” meetings about computer projects with Feeney, with Curtis as technology advisor.

Yang Enterprises

The affidavit details a chilling sequence in which the vote-altering project was developed, was handed to one of the company managers, and was then delivered elsewhere after an open statement that it was intended to control the vote in South Florida by manipulating margins and percentages in some precincts.

Feeney, the affidavit continues,

“was very specific in the design and specifications required for this program. He detailed, in his own words, that; (a) the program needed to be touch-screen capable, (b) the user should be able to trigger the program without any additional equipment, (c) the programming to accomplish this remain hidden even if the source code was inspected.”

After discussion, the company CEO agreed to try to develop the prototype. The affidavit goes on to describe the vote fraud software prototype developed.

“Hidden on the screen were invisible buttons. A person with knowledge of the locations of those invisible buttons could then use them to alter the votes of any candidate listed.”

Fairly simple, the software was also fairly easy to conceal.

“In an actual application, the user would receive no visible clues to the fraud that had just occurred. Since the vote is applied by race, any single race or multiple races can be altered. The supervisors or any voter would never notice this fraud. Additionally, the procedure could be repeated as many times as was necessary to achieve the desired results. No amount of testing or simulations would expose the fraud as its activation and process is completely invisible to everyone except the person programming the vote fraud routine.”

Vote fraud could be detected by someone looking at the source code. But the source code would have to be provided.

Curtis’s affidavit goes on to describe other conversations in which Feeney “bragged that he had already implemented ‘exclusion lists’ to reduce the ‘black vote.’

[Update

Speaking of vote suppression tactics, today Florida seniors and others gathered in Tampa to protest legislation designed to reduce the vote. The new law reduces opportunity for early voting, creating an additional burden for seniors and Americans with disabilities who cannot stand in long lines.]

On a separate tactic for influencing the election, Curtis alleges that Feeney “further mentioned that ‘the proper placement of police patrols could further reduce the black vote by as much as 25%’.”

Curtis left YEI soon afterward and took a job in the Florida Department of Transportation. YEI threw a farewell party for him. His farewell card is posted on Brad Blog, which has done a solid job reporting this story. At the Transportation department, he found that YEI, a state contractor, was over-billing. He and another whistleblower were fired, as the affidavit narrates.

Yang Enterprises subsequently lost the contract with the state of Florida, according to Bob Clift, a supervisor in the fraud investigation unit.

Meanwhile, in Congress

Rep. Feeney, Jeb Bush’s running mate in the unsuccessful race for governor against Lawton Chiles in 1994, served on the House Judiciary Committee, which held hearings on the 2004 election. Curtis’s testimony was presented fairly early in local hearings convened by Conyers. (In the Judiciary hearings on Capitol Hill that I observed, Feeney did not speak much. He tended mostly to sit, red-faced.) The election hearings went nowhere under the GWBush administration. Massive counter-attacks and a DOJ investigation involving Conyers’ wife, Monica Conyers, continued to take their toll even after the 2008 election.

Feeney also served on the Committee on Science. One of its subcommittees, Environment, Technology, and Standards, shared oversight with the full committee on issues regarding voting standards. Their press person stated that the subcommittee and full committee have both been “very active” on vote issues.

Feeney was also a member of Judiciary subcommittees on Commercial and Administrative Law; the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security; and the Subcommittee on the Constitution.

2004 election revisited, part 8: Florida

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Margie Burns

Revisiting the 2004 election, part 8, Florida again

“Something went awry with the electronic voting in Florida”

Several organizations, groups of investigators and individual researchers were intrigued by the results of the 2004 election in Florida. Among them was a research team at Berkeley (U. Calif.).

The research team, led by Professor Michael Hout, announced its study of the results of the Florida election in a press conference Nov. 18, 2004. In short form:

“A research team at UC Berkeley will report that irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000 – 260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election. The study shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods. Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by chance–the probability is less than 0.1 percent.”

Prof. Hout, a sociologist, walked listeners through the study in a short talk followed by questions.

The research team used quantitative methods. Salient points:

Its released report showed 130K-260K excess votes to GWBush in Florida in counties where electronic voting machines were used, an unexplained discrepancy. This could occur by chance, Dr. Hout stated, less than 1 time in 1000.
The discrepancy was most prevalent in the more heavily Democratic counties—Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade, in order of magnitude.
Voting machines tallied a net gain of 81K votes for President Bush; 41K in Palm Beach; 37K in Miami-Dade.

U-Cal Berkeley

Dr. Hout reiterated that the discrepancy could not be explained by other factors, and there was virtually no chance of its arising by chance. “For the sake of future elections, officials should explore this.”

The genesis of the project was that after the election, two grad students shared their frustration at having so many rumors, re the outcome of the election, with a lack of statistical basis. Key concern was to start with a model that accurately predicted votes or vote breakdown; to knock down false claims. So they decided to start with measuring change between 2000 and 2004, and they downloaded data from Florida and Ohio. The results showed that something odd was happening. Further tests showed that “the anomalous effect of this e-vote held up. It couldn’t be made to go away.”

“The students and I went back and forth several times with a number of revisions,” Hout said, and “results held up.” They were also run by a number of different faculty members, who concluded that “something went awry with the electronic voting in Florida.”

Organizers of the press conference hoped to draw the authorities–“somebody”– “to examine the results in Florida.”

As he commented, “a statistical approach is just about the only way to find out if anything goes wrong with e-voting, except in Nevada which has a paper trail.”

Walking the audience through some of the results, Hout concisely explained that a multiple regression analysis was used in the study. Statistical technique was used to assign different weights to different variables, for example the Bush vote in 2004 compared to the Bush vote in 2000; raw percentages in 2004 compared to 2000. Researchers assigned weight to a number of reasonable factors or not-so-reasonable factors. Expectations were taken into account.

Three counties stood out–Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade.

Three metro counties in Florida

All three counties produced “a different pattern from what we would expect” given factors including their median family income, history of voting Republican, markers of age structure (senior populations), and racial ancestry. Not that Metro Miami went for GWBush by large margins. But the popular vote showed some oddities.

With all the other variables statistically controlled, the e-vote variable continued to show a significant relationship with both change in votes 2000-2004 and the absolute level of support for Bush in 2004.

“Inability of all other factors to explain away this discrepancy,” Hout said, “has us convinced of an e-vote anomaly” of 1,018,010 compared to 1.16M votes actually tallied for Bush. “130,000 to 260,000 is our best estimate of the number.”

“How this happened beyond our ability to observe.” Researchers left it to Florida officials to explain.

Didn’t happen, of course.

The formal study in final form was published on the Berkeley web site, where it remains.

A short round-up of similar or related material on Florida is accessible here.

Side note:

This year I finally read Timothy Crouse’s book on the 1972 election and the press, The Boys on the Bus. Should have read it earlier. Ranging back and forth between the elections of 2000 or 2004 and this year’s primary season is illuminating, but going back to the obsession with Who-will-win in 1972 is even more so. How did it happen that hordes of hard-working (often) reporters could miss so much about Nixon’s plans to consolidate control? How could the reporters fail to report the Nixon team’s ongoing control of the press?

Same way it happens now, apparently, with days of air time devoted to speculation over who will win—and perhaps one one-hundredth of that time devoted to cogent, accurate analysis of what GOP candidates’ policies would actually do to the U.S.

Needless to say, even less than one-hundredth of the coverage time goes to problems with voting technology. Little goes to vote-suppression efforts, either, although at least the open efforts to suppress the vote in a number of states have been mentioned, mostly on cable.

Now as ever, Bev Harris’s team continues to do good work on this crucial issue at Black Box Voting.

Revisiting the 2004 election, part 7: Florida

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Margie Burns

2004 election revisited, part 7: Florida further

Following up previous posts

Obama at SOTU

President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night demonstrated again the greater quality of this president over the loon rhetoric coming from our current GOP debates. The quality gap is huge, and growing larger.

Mitt Romney

As written before, the guys coming out of the GOP field are going to need all the help they can get at election time, and previous elections involve some warning signs. Forewarned is forearmed.

In the 2000 election, 25 Florida counties used the maligned punch-card ballots, 41 used op-scan, and one county used paper ballots counted manually. Seventeen counties switched to optical scanners for the 2004 election.

Florida

Counties that switched from punch-card to op-scan did not necessarily show the biggest swings to Bush, but there was a distinct difference—in Bush’s favor–between op-scan counties and other counties. The picture over-all:

Total registered voters for the state of Florida, 2004 election: 10,301,290

Total registered voters in the 15 counties using touch-screens: 5,576,264

Total registered voters in the 52 counties using op-scan ballots: 4,725,026

Outcome in the touch-screen counties: Kerry 1,983,210 to Bush 1,845,876

Outcome in the op-scan counties: Bush 2,110,414 to Kerry 1,591,790

Statistics come from election results and from election researcher Kathy Dopp’s analysis of touch-screen machines versus optical-scan paper voting in 2004.

There were further differences between op-scan voting results and touch-screen results, Florida 2004:

15 Florida counties used touch-screen voting machines. Only 3 of these counties showed a 100+ percent jump in Republican votes, and 3 others showed a 100+ percent jump in Democratic votes. Neither party jumped more than 120 percent.
52 counties used op-scan ballots. Of these, 43 showed a triple-digit jump for Republicans, two for Democrats. One had a whopping 602 percent jump in votes for Repubs, one over 400 percent, and two over 300 percent. Another ten op-scan counties had an over 200 percent jump in votes for Repubs. Nothing equivalent for Dems.

Leaving the eye-blearing numbers aside, think about the larger context of the 2004 election. Was John Kerry two or three times less popular in Florida in 2004 than Al Gore in 2000? Was GWBush—after the escape of Osama bin Laden, the invasion of Iraq, the war profiteering, the tax cuts for the rich—two or three times more appealing?

Back to those voting machines

Only three counties using op-scan machines had larger jumps for Democrats than for Republicans. The percentages below are vote gains, 2000 to 2004:

Flagler: 102% Rep, 103% Dem –Bush 19633 to Kerry 18578 (close)
Manatee: 96% Rep, 97% Dem –Bush 56.6 to Kerry 42.7
Monroe: 98% Rep, 106% Dem –Kerry 49.7 to Bush 49.2

(Dem Senate candidate Betty Kastor won Flagler County over Mel Martinez.)

Only four counties using op-scan had balanced percentage jumps in party voting:

Hernando: 87% Rep, 82% Dem –Bush 52.9 to Kerry 46.2
Seminole: 100% Rep, 99% Dem –Bush 58.1 to Kerry 41.3
St. Lucie: 77% Rep, 76% Dem –Kerry 51.80 to Bush 47.56
Volusia: 90% Rep, 85% Dem –Kerry 50.49 to Bush 48.85

Note that where the jump in voting by party was balanced, the outcomes were also reasonably divided. No one party or candidate (Bush) won all the time.

Turnout always matters.

Ten Florida counties with biggest turnout by number, in 2004:

Miami-Dade: 772,743
Broward: 707,202
Palm Beach: 547,340
Hillsborough: 464,253
Pinellas: 457,426
Orange: 388,095
Duval: 379,257
Brevard: 265,764
Lee: 242,434
Volusia: 229,098

Of these, Brevard, Duval, Orange, and Volusia used op-scan voting.

Ten Florida counties with highest turnout by percentage of registered voters, in 2004:

Flagler: 81.9% –jump gap only 102 to 103, Bush won, but close
Sarasota: 81.6%
Jefferson: 80.7% –jump gap 171 to 61, Kerry won
Leon: 79.8% –jump gap 105 to 81, Kerry won
Lee: 79.5%
Nassau: 79.2%
St Johns: 79% –jump gap 100 to 84, Bush won
Sumter: 79%
Brevard: 78.6% –jump gap 101 to 89, Bush won
Gadsden: 78.5% –jump gap 207 to 66, Kerry won

Of these, Brevard, Flagler, Gadsden, Jefferson, Leon and St Johns used op-scan voting. Nobody flipped the elections in Gadsden or Jefferson and Leon counties.

Ten Florida counties with lowest turnout by percentage of registered voters:

Hendry 57.2%
Osceola 63.3%
DeSoto 64% –jump gap 146 to 44, Bush won
Okeechobee 65.7% –jump gap 126 to 47, Bush won
Union 66.7% –jump gap 263 to 23, Bush won
Broward 66.8%
Dixie 66.9% –jump gap 305 to 26, Bush won
Hamilton 67.1% –jump gap 244 to 37, Bush won
Putnam 68.5% –jump gap 144 to 47, Bush won
Highlands 69.6% –jump gap 77 to 44, Bush won

Of these, DeSoto, Dixie, Hamilton, Highlands, Okeechobee, Putnam and Union all used op-scan voting. Low turnout, discouraged voters, unappealing voting technology—Bush swept.

The pattern held in the ten counties with lowest voter turnout by number, in 2004. Numbers are local turnout as reported:

Liberty 3,051 –Bush won

Lafayette 3,352 –Bush won

Glades 4,204 –Bush won
Union 4,714 –Bush won
Hamilton 5,131 –Bush won
Franklin 5,973 –Bush won

Calhoun 6,006 –Bush won
Dixie 6,472 –Bush won
Gilchrist 7,047 –Bush won
Hardee 7,281 –Bush won

Of these, all used op-scanned paper ballots, and all went for Bush. We have a winner. Were they Florida’s ten smallest counties? Not quite: A list of the state’s ten smallest counties would bump Hardee, Gilchrist, Dixie, and Union. Baker, Bradford, Gulf, Holmes, Jefferson, Madison, Taylor, Wakulla and Washington all had populations in the twenty-something thousand range. The smallest counties also all used op-scan ballots, so we have another winner: Of these, only Jefferson went for Kerry, and Madison was close.

On a brighter note, in all these counties but Hardee, about half the total population (2000 census) turned out to vote–not too shabby for the lowest numerical turnout in the state. It was a high-interest election.

The middle

Continuing the test of brain-strain, let’s look at some middling turnout. Since the highest turnout ran 82% and the lowest percentage about 57%, midpoint would be about 70%.

Ten Florida counties with mid-range turnout, 2004:

Charlotte: 70.4%
Glades: 70.5% –jump gap 134 to 37, Bush won
Hardee: 70% –jump gap 182 to 32, Bush won
Okaloosa: 70.5% –jump gap 95 to 61, Bush crushed
Calhoun: 71.9% –jump gap 381 to 30, Bush won
Highlands: 69.6% –jump gap 77 to 54, Bush won
Pasco: 72.1%
Santa Rosa: 69.9% –jump gap 97 to 54, Bush won
Putnam: 68.5% –jump gap 144 to 47, Bush won
Polk: 71.5% –jump gap 107 to 68, Bush won

Of these, all but Charlotte and Pasco counties used op-scan. Charlotte and Pasco had predictable results, in line with voter registration and with voter turnout, with some crossover (Dem for Charlotte, Repub for Pasco).

I wrote on this material at the time.

A similar analysis can be found here. The author further pursues similar anomalies in the rural areas of other southern states. The author sums up:

“I started this page when I first saw the breakdown by voting machine of the results in Florida. Since the way people vote shouldn’t depend on the machines they use, it seemed to signal cheating. A careful examination of the voting patterns in Florida in 2000 and in Louisiana in 2000, however, has led me to conclude that the difference was due to the lopsided use of the opscan machines in rural northern Florida counties where there is a preponderance of “Dixiecrats”. A statistical analysis of the data from the 1996 election also supports this conclusion. The remainder of this page contains my analysis and reasoning in detail.”

2004 election revisited, part 6: Florida

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Margie Burns

2004 election revisited, part 6: Florida

Monday night’s GOP debate in Tampa ( NBC) may not have produced much warmth or light, except for Ron Paul’s comments on the Strait of Hormuz. But it further highlighted reason to look back at the 2004 campaign. These guys are going to need all the help they can get in the general election. Citizens United notwithstanding, half a billion in paid political ads goes only so far when the the other ticket is Newt Gingrich. He says his message is that of Washington outsider because he was detested in Washington.

Gingrich is campaigning on a claim to be about “changing Washington.” It’s like the fat, intemperate, unreliable old Falstaff yelling, “They hate us youth!”

Shakespeare

Déjà vu all over again

The issue went nowhere in the political press at the time, but there were striking anomalies in the Florida vote count in 2004. The headlines were different from 2000. The problems were less blatant. No tiny white-collar mob of Republican congressional staffers and lobbyists raised fists against the vote counters. But even after all the attention directed to Florida’s electoral process in 2000, there were still problems in 2004.

Take a look at the numbers on the ground, including party registration. Unlike South Carolina, Florida registers voters by party.

Florida counties 2008 election

Of Florida’s 67 counties, in 2004 Republicans constituted more than 50 percent of registered voters in only eight. This fact might surprise readers who get their information from the national political press, which represents Florida as a red state. But eight it was:

Collier
Indian River
Martin, Clay
Okaloosa (57.2%)
Santa Rosa
St. Johns
Walton (barely)

Population of the eight red counties in 2000: 1,083,846. Population of Florida: 15,982,378.

In contrast, Florida had 31 counties where Democrats constituted more than 50% of registered voters. In 21 counties, Democrats constituted more than 60% of registered voters. In thirteen of them more than 70% of registered voters were Democrats, and in four of them more than 80% of registered voters were Democrats.

Population in preponderantly Democratic counties: 2,700,000+.

This is a red state?

In 28 counties where neither party registered more than 50%, nineteen had more Republicans and nine had more Democrats. The biggest plurality county was huge Miami-Dade (pop. 2.3 million, 43% Dem). The smallest was Highlands (pop. 87K, 45% GOP).

Population in counties where GOP registration was heaviest, over 50 percent, totaled less than majority-Democratic Broward County alone. Population in counties with a less lopsided Democratic majority totaled 8.4 million.

A bigger anomaly

The biggest divide between Florida counties in the 2004 election was not red and blue but touch-screen and op-scan.

As in voting machines.

Fifteen counties used touch-screen voting machines, produced by ES&S or Sequoia. The other 52 counties used paper ballots, BUT not counted manually. Instead, the paper ballots were processed by optical-scanning equipment similar to that used by supermarkets, manufactured by ES&S, Diebold and (in one county) Sequoia.

Optical scanning in voting has been used for years, generally without the checking that turns up mistakes about 5 percent of the time in supermarket scanners. Mathematician and independent researcher Kathy Dopp tabulated differences between touch-screen counties and op-scan counties.

The difference? A simple and blatant pattern:

In touch-screen counties, the county’s vote for president went with its majority party almost always.
In op-scan counties, the county’s vote for president went opposite to its majority party most of the time.

If this sounds like a small difference, it’s not. Whatever problems the touch-screens had, 14 out of 15 counties using touch-screen equipment had an outcome at least in line with registration. Counties with more Republicans went Republican. Counties with more Democrats went Democratic. Plant a tomato, get a tomato.

Of the 52 counties using op-scanned ballots, 21 voted in the direction predicted by their voter registration–fewer than half. The other 31 counties went opposite their own voter registration. The kicker is that almost always, they went to Bush.

In the 21 op-scan counties where the vote ran with party registration, it was often skewed. Somehow Democrats there did not vote Democratic, and Kerry also picked up NO percentage from independents and unaffiliated–in a national election where the independent vote trended toward Kerry.

How it works

If an operative wanted to help a candidate win, in a state like Florida with many counties, the way to do it would be subtly so as not to affect the outcome of any individual county. That way, no local challenges would be provoked; the only way to examine the outcome would be to challenge the entire state. A few hundred or a few thousand votes in a lopsided county would not be missed, or suspect.

This process would be aided by the predominant media focus on red and blue.

Access to county statistics on population, demographics, and voter registration is already in the hopper, remember. Source code does not control turnout, but the political experts could weigh in on that little problem; look at the lines in big touch-screen counties inadequately supplied with voting machines, the problems with provisional ballots and early voting, the misleading flyers and robo-calls, etc. In the op-scan counties, I wouldn’t need help with turnout; I would need primarily to be able to work without scrutiny.

This is not to say that touch-screen machines are off the hook. If as a shady operative I wanted that badly to help my man win, odds are that I would overreach once in a while.

Florida counties 2004

More later

2004 Election revisited, part 5: DC games versus democratizing the vote

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Margie Burns

2004 Election revisited, part 5: DC games versus the grassroots

Dean

The presidential election cycle suffered an odd interlude in winter 2004. Few people remember now, and this kind of topic is not usually revived on cable or network talk shows, but what happened derailed or destroyed the most promising grassroots activity on the Democratic side.

Most politicos remember in some fashion the swift turn downward for Howard Dean’s campaign when CNN jumped on the so-called ‘Dean scream’ nonstop. Few to no politicos mention that the Dean campaign was also on the receiving end of attack by a particularly shadowy 527 organization.

This particular org seems to have been roused to action by some mention of health care in a campaign year. (Danger afoot; the public might like health.) A weird little one-or-two-man ‘group’ called “Americans for Jobs, Healthcare [sic], and Progressive Values” sprang suddenly into action, not to mention into existence.

Any investigation is, of course, history now. However, the trajectory of events looks to be uncomfortably relevant in election 2012, when those 527s are dwarfed by current super-PACs.

Midnight, February 2, 2004, was the deadline for filing IRS form 8872, the comprehensive financial disclosure required of political organizations called 527s. Form 8872 is another of those ‘regulations’ so hated by GOP presidential candidates. It is important because it reveals who has contributed money to the organizations, which, unlike individual candidates and political parties, do not have to file disclosure statements with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) but only with the Internal Revenue Service. Federal law requires that the forms be filed electronically, by any 527 organizations that took in or spent more than $50,000 in 2003.

Early the next morning, I checked the IRS web site to see the financial contributors for the elusive group called “Americans for Jobs, Healthcare [sic], and Progressive Values.” (Slight warning sign: politicians genuinely concerned about health care can usually spell it.)

The group officially began in November 2003, ran three anti-Howard Dean ads including an especially noxious one picturing Osama bin Laden, and almost immediately went inactive. Its web site went down or “under construction,” and it listed few contacts. Its second president in two months was insurance executive and former Ohio congressman Edward F. Feighan, but his insurance office in Columbus said that Feighan was no longer connected to “Americans for Jobs etc.” Feighan’s office could provide no current information about the group, its current officers, or whether it had a head. Spokesman Robert Gibbs, a former staffer of John Kerry’s in DC, did not return numerous calls and voice messages.*

There was no form 8872 or other quarterly filing for the group, and no filing beyond the initial form 8871 dated Nov. 14, 2003.

After more attempts, I was able to talk to the group’s treasurer, David W. Jones, a Democratic fundraiser in DC, who informed me that the organization was not dissolving but also stated that he was the group’s sole officer listed at this point. Jones referred me to Kenneth A. Gross, a partner in the large law firm Skadden, Arps, for information regarding Americans for Jobs’ financial filing.

Many attorneys do not even take Election Law in law school. Gross, in Bethesda, Md., has extensive credentials as an election law attorney and served in the FEC for six years under Reagan (1980-1986). Maryland public records show that Gross was a registered Republican but switched to the Democratic party in March 1993. “I’m a man of all trades,” he said affably. “I represent both Democrats and Republicans; I’m one of the few who do.”

Gross’s GOP credentials, however, were substantially more weighty, surprisingly for someone hired by Democrats. Gross’s resume:

counsel for the 2004 GOP national convention.
counsel for the Republican Leadership Council (RLC)
the program for the RLC 2003-2004 Strategy Meeting featured Gross as a speaker on campaign finance reform
counsel for Bob Dole’s campaign committee in 2000
counsel for the Dole campaign in 1996, as he confirmed in his conversation with me.

Past candidates for whom Ken Gross had worked were either Republicans or, when Democrats, only in the Democrats in primary elections. All in all, an odd choice for any Democratic candidate, or at least for any candidate who wanted Democrats to win in November 2004. You’re running for office and have a hard-fought campaign in a tight election ahead. You hire Bob Dole’s legal counselor?

Ken Gross explained that Americans for Jobs etc had filed the required form with the IRS, the Friday before the deadline, but it had filed by fax, and the IRS did not immediately post the filing online. “It was filed,” he said. “The IRS failed to give us a [sort of] PIN number,” so the group could not file electronically. “They’re not very well equipped,” Gross commented. “It’s totally their fault. It’s not our fault at all.”

When all else fails, blame the IRS. So, Gross continued, “we worked it out with Ogden, Utah [an IRS office],” and sent it in by fax. “I guess they haven’t scanned it into the system yet.” When I asked to see the filing, or have it faxed to me, Gross turned me back over to Jones, who corroborated the filing by fax.

An IRS spokesman explained that 527s were required to file electronically, but if some glitch prevented their doing so in a timely manner, they could file by fax or on paper to show good faith. Electronic filing was still required when they received their PIN number. Form 8872 is required to disclose all financial information.

Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2004, was the day Democrats held primaries in seven states including South Carolina and Oklahoma. As of that date, Americans for Jobs, Healthcare etc still had a single filing online, its initial electronic filing dated Nov. 14, 2003, posted with its Employer Identification Number (EIN). On Tuesday, Jones offered to fax me the filing. I returned his call, leaving phone numbers and a fax number. No form arrived. Gross said that the filing was handled in his office, by Mark Ward. I called Ward on Wednesday to request a copy of the form, leaving my mailing address and a fax number with him. Ward explained nicely that he did not have a copy of the filing, and that he could not get into either the fax machine or the copier without a client number–“This is such a dumb thing to be held up by, you’ll think, what planet did I drop from”–but would try to see what he could do, and suggested that I call Jones again to request a copy.

Later that day I got a call from Melissa Miles, a SkadArps attorney representing Jones. She explained that “Dave knows he’s legally required to make a copy available” for viewing, within regular business hours, and recommended that I stop by Jones’ office, giving his address at Corporate Visions, Inc., on M Street. I said I could certainly stop by the next day, Thursday, Feb. 5.

Thursday morning I called Corporate Visions, where I happened to get a voice twin of Jones. When I asked whether I was speaking to Mr. Jones, however, the voice said “No, this is Corporate Visions.” Thursday afternoon, after repeated messages, Jones called me, saying that he had just gotten back from New York. When I offered to go to his office to see the filing, he offered instead to overnight it to me, saying at least twice that he had to show me “an original.” He assured me that he would UPS it to my home on Friday. The news that evening was full of a bad weather forecast for Friday, with possible icing; UPS headquarters confirmed that they do hold up deliveries in dangerous weather, but on Friday I received the filing.

The political calendar was loaded. Caucuses were held on Saturday, Feb. 6. Some large-state primaries were held on Tuesday, Feb. 10. On the phone, Jones offered to go over the form with me. He explained at length and repeatedly that the group had purchased three [anti-Dean] ads, totaling about $500,000. Of the total, the two ads referring to Dean’s gun and trade positions cost $485,000. Only $15,000, Jones emphasized, was spent on what he called the “foreign policy ad,” i.e. the one featuring Osama bin Laden. Jones reiterated that that one ad ran only sixteen times in South Carolina and New Hampshire, and never ran in Iowa.

Sounding somewhat harried, Jones also said that the Osama ad (“foreign policy”) got “hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of free media attention,” with several major network news programs giving it national air play. As he remarked, that one ad, on which the group spent only $15K, got the most coverage, “national coverage for four or five straight days.” Jones: “You can blame your colleagues in the media for that.”

Numerous news reports linked the Osama ad to the Gephardt campaign. While the ad did not verbally compare Dean to bin Laden, visually it connected bin Laden’s face with Dean’s name, with a dark-aura image hard to shake off. By all accounts, the attack threw the Dean campaign off-message, away from his successful critique of Bush policies. Negative ads work.

Tthey also boomerang. The smarmy, dark, negative ad ended Gephardt’s candidacy. Jones, formerly a fundraiser for Gephardt among others, reiterated emphatically that the ads were not coordinated in any way with the Kerry campaign or with the Gephardt campaign, describing them as intended to make issues of Dean’s positions.

“His campaign is over.”

Jones took exception to my saying foreign policy experience as an issue usually benefits an incumbent president or vice president, or in the rare case of Richard Nixon, a former vice president. Most people do not connect governors or Congress with foreign policy, regardless of the campaign year. This is an advantage of presidential incumbency. In any case, there can be little doubt about the damage wrought by the Osama bin Laden ad: of the two previously strongest Democratic candidates for president, one (Gephardt) was out of the race, and the other (Dean) dropped behind.

Gephardt

At that point, Howard Dean was still second to John Kerry in delegates won (121 to Kerry’s 260), and the race was still early. Dave Jones, however, vehemently and angrily insisted that Dean was “out”: “His campaign is over.”

Be it noted that Dean’s campaign had sidestepped professional fundraisers, getting its money through a successful Internet drive. This fundraising strategy employed by Dean, and by Ron Paul, was carried forward with even greater success by Obama in 2008 and is going forward for 2012 as well.

A more wide-open race generates more voter interest, by allowing voters more choice and more participation.** The best chance Democrats have to air issues of concern to the public is their primary season, in Democratic primaries and caucuses. Corporate media outlets are often less than eager to devote air time and print space to topics that they have failed embarrassingly to report.

Too bad they knocked Dean out.

Meanwhile, the filing belatedly reviewed showed that Americans for Jobs etc received $663,000 from 26 donors. The “Progressive Values” fell out of the basket. The donors had a strikingly not-progressive profile. Two-thirds of the donations were corporate, with two executives donating $100,000 each and another retired executive donating $50,000. Another $80,000 came from attorneys. The Torricelli for Senate Committee kicked in $50,000. Six labor unions donated $200,000; thus the laborers’ union and Loral corporation gave to the same folks. Expenditures, besides the half-million for television, included $40,000 to Jones’ firm, DWJ Consultants, and $15,000 to Skadden, Arps for legal expenses.

It would be odd if the highly experienced Kenneth Gross, with Americans etc from the beginning, did not foresee the dysfunctional impact of the Osama ad. The GOP, after all, had already used images of bin Laden and Saddam with great effect against Tom Daschle in South Dakota and even against decorated Vietnam veteran Max Cleland in Georgia.

Also, more expeditious filing would have been becoming from such experts. Referring to campaign finance in the Clinton White House, Gross said that all contributions to a party have to be reported and the contributors identified, and that the system falls apart when the parties try to find loopholes in disclosure (MSNBC interview, Oct. 30, 1996). In the same interview, Gross also said the amount of soft money in the system needs to be cut down.

Gross was a go-to speaker on campaign finance reform. Time quoted him as saying that the campaign finance law “doesn’t mean a whole lot,” and that “It’ll affect the process only at the margins.” The New York host committee for the Republican national convention stated an aim of raising $20M for the 2004 convention (which it exceeded handsomely); Gross earlier expressed an opinion that the new law does not limit fundraising for conventions.

When I asked Jones whether he was aware that Gross was representing the GOP convention, he said coldly that he did not get into his attorney’s other clients.

And there, gentlemen and ladies, you have one difference between Republicans and Democrats, in the horse race, in a nutshell: There is very little chance that any GOP candidate or group would naively hire a Democrat.

It must be agreed that the immediate beneficiary of the fall of Gephardt and Dean was John Kerry, whose biggest contributor was coincidentally SkadArps. Even Gross, who donated to Bob Dole in the 1990s, donated (modestly) to Kerry in 2004. Bush, after all, scared a lot of people. But Kerry was not the ultimate beneficiary. Corporatist commentators George F. Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Bill Kristol were openly gleeful over what they called Dean’s “implosion,” although previously they insisted fervently, not looking happy, that the White House was eager to have Dean as an opponent. (Krauthammer, Kristol and Will did not discuss the Osama bin Laden ad.)

As I wrote back then, “If corporate shills for the Bush team in the media were gleeful, it’s a safe bet that the Bush team was, also.”

I should have put money on it. With the twenty-twenty of hindsight, we now know that Kerry was not the most electable, the strongest, the best qualified candidate to oppose the Bush White House and Team Bush. Kerry ran a stronger campaign in 2004 than did Gore in 2000, but Howard Dean could have run an even better one.

The entire series of events drew less press coverage in 2004 than it should have drawn—like the efforts at vote suppression and intimidation. The New York Times reported the story only as an intramural fight among Dems. The Washington Post barely touched it. (The Post fought against Dean like a wounded wolverine, running a front-page story about a younger female aide in Dean’s inner circle. The Post facilitated GWBush’s reelection as it had facilitated his election, again with the corporate incentive of Bush education policies—standardized testing front and center)

*Gibbs went on to become press secretary for the Obama White House. Howard Dean, who should have been appointed head of Health and Human Services, was not. This is not to knock Kathleen Sebelius. The new Obama administration wisely took on board its former competitors, making a good choice in Hillary Clinton for State among others. But the White House went overboard in taking in Rahm Emanuel and leaving out Howard Dean.

Speaking of public health and public safety issues, it will be little short of a miracle if Emanuel as mayor of Chicago does anything to make the Chicago region less of a safe haven for rapists. Remember which archdiocese has had little to no successful prosecution of clergy abuse?

**I took this view in both 2004 and 2008. More commentators now discuss the same point.

The 2004 election revisited, part 4: Ohio

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Margie Burns

: Rep. Conyers

Revisiting the 2004 election. Part 4–Ohio.

Heading toward the new year, following up previous 2004 election entries. This history may become newly relevant.

: GWBush and his ‘brain’

On Election Day 2004, the close states were hit hardest: Voters in some areas in Ohio, Florida, Iowa and New Mexico suffered significant problems casting their votes successfully. Most of the problems were not widely reported, although subsequent efforts in Congress to address the situation did draw some media attention.

: Ad hoc committee on election abuses 2004

Anecdotal evidence bears out the thesis presented by statistical researchers, posted previously, that the problems were indeed widespread.

Take for example Mercer County, Ohio, where following the election the information below was relayed to me.

At the time, Washington Journal had just run an article titled “How the Bush camp won Ohio,” remarking that “in some small conservative counties which have experienced net job losses nearing 10% of business payrolls, Republicans still lined up for the president. In Mercer County, which has lost 5% of its jobs in the last four years, residents voted 3-to-1–15,022 to 4,924–for Mr. Bush, a sharp increase over his winning margin in 2000.”

The none-too-subtle subtext here seems to be either that voters in Ohio were peculiarly dumb or, putting the same idea more charitably, that Team Bush successfully persuaded people to vote against their own interest.

: book: What Happened in Ohio?

The voter on the ground in Ohio offers a rational second opinion, noting that “this is very peculiar since over 4,800 people voted in this year’s Democratic primary” in Mercer County. So “Mercer County has over 30,000 registered voters and yet Kerry was only able to pick up a measly 87 additional votes compared to the March primary”?

Not only did Kerry allegedly receive only 87 votes above the total cast in the Democratic primary, but Gore had over 5,200 votes in 2000 (when there were 6,227 fewer registered voters in Mercer County).

The reader provides some relevant numbers:

Mercer County, Ohio:

Year 2000: 25,079 registered voters; 18,285 votes cast

Bush 12,485

Gore 5,212

Ralph Nader 392, Howard Philips 13, John Hagelin 24, Pat Buchanan 125, Harry Brown 43

Year 2004: 31,306 registered voters, 20,058 votes cast

Bush 15,022

Kerry 4,924

Other 112

The same reader adds that people might think “this is a conservative county and that many voters may have switched to Bush especially with gay marriage on the ballot. But with 5 percent of the people losing their jobs in the past four years in this county, I think people are far more concerned about putting food on the table and meeting mortgage payments than worrying about gay people getting married.”

Be it noted that Mercer County, Ohio, is among the places where turnout increased in 2004 over 2000. As the researchers previously quoted point out, higher turnout historically favors the challenger, not the incumbent. Voter registration also increased from 2000 to 2004 in Mercer County, by 6,227.

Rampant problems voting in Ohio

Many Americans saw the video footage of voters patiently waiting in line to vote in Ohio, in 2004. Mercer County was by no means the whole story, and the previously indicated statistical anomalies were amply reinforced by anecdotal report from around the state.

Readers and other correspondents sent me an ongoing and growing list of anomalies, deceptions and intimations of vote fraud in Ohio. Part of the list follows.

Discrepancies:

Returns certified by officials recorded that all but 10 registered voters in the Miami County, Ohio, town of Concord voted on Election Day. So far, the election challenge team has identified more than 10 registered Concord citizens who did not vote.
About 580 more absentee voters were certified in Mahoning County than election board officials identified.
Cleremont County was among the counties with challenges to contested returns. In December 2004 a team of volunteer attorneys pored over election records at the Cleremont County Board of Elections, with the Board’s cooperation.
In Lucas County, four elections officials were suspended after mistakes or worse in the election.
In Cuyahoga County, a third of all provisional ballots cast were thrown out because of alleged registration irregularities.
The Associated Press reported a difference of over 17,000 votes in Kerry’s favor after the election more than in the initial vote tallies.
In December 2004, Rep. Conyers and Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee asked Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell to respond to inquiries about voting irregularities.

Problems with voting-machine technology:

In Mahoning County, election observers have testified under oath, more than a dozen voting machines switched Kerry votes to Bush votes repeatedly, while voters watched.

Citizens in Trumbull County using electronic machines, who voted for Kerry, saw their votes register as votes for Bush. Subsequent hearings in Trumbull County, as elsewhere, partially brought to light further possible election fraud.

A public hearing at the Warren Heights and Trumbull Library, in Mahoning Valley, where the vote count went to Bush, recorded thousands of complaints of voting irregularities.

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus pointed out that more than half the votes cast in Ohio and the nation were recorded on electronic voting machines owned by Republicans, with no audit trail. One voting machine company, Diebold, also manufactures ATMs (automated teller machines) that do provide a paper receipt for transactions.

Low-tech old-fashioned vote suppression:

In Franklin County and other counties, largely Democratic precincts suffered a shortage of voting machines. All the precincts where voting machines were short and lines were long were Democratic precincts. Voters in more affluent neighborhoods reported no shortage of voting machines and no problem with long lines.

Obstruction and failure to investigate by public officials:

In December 2004 a legal team partly comprising volunteer attorneys issued subpoenas to top election officials in ten counties where vote-count fraud was suspected.

The subpoenas, a first step in interviewing people under oath, were rejected by the Ohio Secretary of State, Republican Kenneth Blackwell. Blackwell served as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio.

Ten depositions were served by the election challenge legal team; the other side filed a motion to stop the process; the challengers responded.

A lawsuit was filed at the Ohio Supreme Court, charging that a fair vote count would give the state and the presidency to John Kerry rather than to Bush. Notice of depositions was sent to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell to appear and give testimony in Moss v Bush et al. The election challenge lawsuit was filed Dec. 17. Blackwell, the Bush-Cheney campaign, and Ohio’s Republican electors had ten days to respond. Each side then had 20 days for discovery or to gather additional evidence, plaintiffs going first. The Bush-Cheney team moved as slowly as possible, to run out the clock until the Jan. 20 inauguration.

: Company logo

Subsequently, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee found that one precinct in Youngstown, in Mahoning County, recorded a negative 25 million votes. Back in Mercer County, Judiciary found that only 51 votes were recorded for one voting machine showing that 289 people cast punch card ballots president–a loss of 248 votes. The county’s website reported that 51,818 people cast ballots but only 47,768 ballots were recorded in the presidential race, including 61 write-ins, meaning that approximately 4,000 votes, or nearly 7%, were not counted for a presidential candidate.

Problems with Triad GSI voting technology company in Ohio reported on the Internet, not in print

Problems with vote technology in Ohio were not restricted to Diebold. Some concrete information is provided below, involving another major voting machine company, Triad GSI, based in Xenia, Ohio.

The following is a 2004 affidavit by the Hocking County, Ohio, deputy director of elections, Sherole Eaton. It deserved wider dissemination than it received. Ms. Eaton deserved not to be fired for being a whistleblower.

[Text follows:]

“On Friday, December 10 2004, Michael from TriAd called in the AM to inform us that he would be in our office in the PM on the same day. I asked him why he was visiting us. He said, “to check out your tabulator, computer, and that the attorneys will be asking some tricky questions and he wanted to go over some of the questions they may ask.” He also added that there would be no charge for this service.

He arrived at about 12:30PM. I hung his coat up and it was very heavy. I made a comment about it being so heavy. He, Lisa Schwartze and I chatted for a few minutes. He proceeded to go to the room where our computer and tabulation machine is kept. I followed him into the room. I had my back to him when he turned the computer on. He stated that the computer was not coming up. I did see some commands at the lower left hand of the screen but no menu. He said that the battery in the computer was dead and that the stored information was gone. He said that he could put a patch on it and fix it. My main concern was – what if this happened when we were ready to do the recount. He proceeded to take the computer apart and call his offices to get information to input into our computer. Our computer is fourteen years old and as far as I know had always worked in the past. I asked him if the older computer, that is in the same room. could be used for the recount. I don’t remember exactly what he said but I did relay to him that the computer was old and a spare. At some point he asked if he could take the spare computer apart and I said “yes”. He took both computers apart. I don’t remember seeing any tools and he asked Sue Wallace, Clerk, for a screwdriver. She got it for him. At this point I was frustrated about the computer not performing and feared that it wouldn’t work for the recount. I called Gerald Robinette, board chairman, to inform him regarding the computer problem and asked him if we could have Tri Ad come to our offices to run the program and tabulator for the recount. Gerald talked on the phone with Michael and Michael assured Gerald that he could fix our computer. He worked on the computer until about 3:00 PM and then asked me which precinct and the number of the precinct we were going to count. I told him, Good Hope 1 # 17. He went back into the tabulation room. Shortly after that he (illegible) stated that the computer was ready for the recount and told us not to turn the computer off so it would charge up.

Before Lisa ran the tests, Michael said to turn the computer off. Lisa said, “I thought you said we weren’t supposed to turn it off.” He said turn it off and right back on and it should come up. It did come up and Lisa ran the tests. Michael gave us instructions on how to explain the rotarien, what the tests mean, etc. No advice on how to handle the attorneys but to have our Prosecuting Attorney at the recount to answer any of their legal questions. He said not to turn the computer off until after the recount.

He advised Lisa and I on how to post a “cheat sheet” on the wall so that only the board members and staff would know about it and and what the codes meant so the count would come out perfect and we wouldn’t have to do a full hand recount of the county. He left about 5:00 PM.

My faith in Tri Ad and the Xenia staff has been nothing but good. The realization that this company and staff would do anything to dishonor or disrupt the voting process is distressing to me and hard to believe. I’m being completely objective about the above statements and the reason I’m bringing this forward is to, hopefully, rule out any wrongdoing.”

This dramatic material was ignored by the larger media outlets. It was followed up in the online Free Press, by Ken Hoop here and by Victoria Parks here. Investigation by the House Judiciary Committee found copious indications of problems with Triad GSI. Daily Kos pointed out that the Rapp family behind Triad GSI was headed by a longtime contributor to the Republican Party.

The Judiciary Committee’s analysis stated,

“Based on the above, including actual admissions and statements by Triad employees, it strongly appears that Triad and its employees engaged in a course of behavior to provide “cheat sheets” to those counting the ballots. The cheat sheets told them how many votes they should find for each candidate, and how many over and under votes they should calculate to match the machine count. In that way, they could avoid doing a full county-wide hand recount mandated by state law. If true, this would frustrate the entire purpose of the recount law–to randomly ascertain if the vote counting apparatus is operating fairly and effectively, and if not to conduct a full hand recount. By ensuring that election boards are in a position to conform their test recount results with the election night results, Triad’s actions may well have prevented scores of counties from conducting a full and fair recount in compliance with equal protection, due process, and the first amendment. In addition, the course of conduct outlined above would appear to violate numerous provisions of federal and state law. As noted above, 42 U.S.C. §1973 provides for criminal penalties for any person who, in any election for federal office, “knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process, by . . . the procurement, casting, or tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held.” Section 1974 requires the retention and preservation of all voting records and papers for a period of 22 months from the date of a federal election and makes it a felony for any person to “willfully steal, destroy, conceal, mutilate, or alter” any such record.398 Ohio law further prohibits election machinery from being serviced, modified, or altered in any way subsequent to an election, unless it is so done in the presence of the full board of elections and other observers. Any handling of ballots for a subsequent recount must be done in the presence of the entire Board and any qualified witnesses.399 This would seem to operate as a de facto bar against altering voting machines by remote access. Containers in which ballots are kept may not be opened before all of the required participants in are attendance.400 It is critical to note that the fact that these “ballots” were not papers in a box is of no consequence in the inquiry as to whether state and federal laws were violated by Barbian’s conduct: Ohio Revised Code defines a ballot as “the official election presentation of offices and candidates…and the means by which votes are recorded.” OHIO REV. CODE § 3506.01(B) (West 2004). Therefore, for purposes of Ohio law, electronic records stored in the Board’s computer are to be considered “ballots.” Triad’s interference with the computers and their software would seem to violate these requirements.”

[emphasis added]

The 2004 election revisited, part 2

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Margie Burns

Revisiting the 2004 election. Part 2.

Still in the spirit of the holidays, following up on the 2004 presidential election

: Electoral College, 2004

Not merely was the Electoral College manipulated. What happened in November 2004 to the popular vote? The question is raised by, among others, Jonathan D. Simon, J.D., of the non-profit Verified Vote 2004, and Ron P. Baiman, Ph.D., Institute of Government and Public Affairs, U. of Illinois-Chicago.

Baiman and Simon’s paper, “The 2004 Presidential Election: Who Won the Popular Vote? An Examination of the Comparative Validity of Exit Poll and Vote Count Data,” focuses on disparities discussed by U. Penn research professor Steven Freeman, quoted previously.

: Key question from 2004

Substantive and solidly researched, the paper bears out the fact that vote tallies diverged significantly from the reasonably expectations based on exit polling. Here quoted for convenience are Baiman and Simon’s main points:

“Executive Summary

There is a substantial discrepancy–well outside the margin of error and outcome determinative–between the national exit poll and the popular vote count.

The possible causes of the discrepancy would be random error, a skewed exit poll, or breakdown in the fairness of the voting process and accuracy of the vote count.

Analysis shows that the discrepancy cannot reasonably be accounted for by chance or random error.

Evidence does not support hypotheses that the discrepancy was produced by problems with the exit poll. [emphasis added]

Widespread breakdown in the fairness of the voting process and accuracy of the vote count are the most likely explanations for the discrepancy.

In an accurate count of a free and fair election, the strong likelihood is that Kerry would have been the winner of the popular vote.”

Many of us couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

Regrettably, Baiman and Simon’s paper never cracked through the surface in large media outlets. A quick search of the Lexis-Nexis database shows zero mention of the paper in U.S. newspapers. The print press collectively did not quote, or mention, the public statement released through U.S. Newswire Jan. 4, 2005, announcing a press conference at the National Press Club by the authors, other election experts, and activist groups including the NAACP. No magazines ran articles on election fraud as an issue.

The authors echoed questions raised by my North Carolina reader quoted in the previous entry. As they pointed out,

“Although it is the Electoral College and not the popular vote that legally elects the president, winning the popular vote does have considerable psychological and practical significance. It is fair to say, to take a recent example, that had Al Gore not enjoyed a popular vote margin in 2000, he would not have had standing in the court of public opinion to maintain his post-election challenge for more than a month up until its ultimate foreclosure by the Supreme Court. [emphasis in original]

In the 2004 election now under scrutiny, the popular vote again has played a critical role. George Bush’s apparent margin of 3.3 million votes clearly influenced the timing of John Kerry’s concession. Although the election was once again close enough that yet-to-be-counted votes offered at least the mathematical possibility of a Kerry electoral college victory–and although, once again, concerns about vote counting were beginning to emerge from early post-election reports and analyses–Kerry apparently believed that, unlike popular vote-winner Gore, he did not have effective standing to prolong the race.”

Baiman and Simon were well aware of the sensitive situation in Ohio,

“Yet to overturn the Ohio result, giving Kerry an electoral college victory (or even to disqualify the Ohio electors via challenge in Congress, which would deprive Bush of an electoral college majority and throw the election to the House of Representatives), would likely be regarded as unjust and insupportable by a populace convinced that Bush was, by some 3.3 million votes, the people’s choice.

Thus, although the popular vote does not legally determine the presidency, its significance is such that we must give due consideration to any evidence which puts the popular vote count itself at issue.”

[emphasis in original]

Hence the analysis of the anomalies. Citing the historical track record of exit polling and the 2004 results reported by exit polling authority Warren Mitofsky, Baiman and Simon argue convincingly for the credibility of the exit polls.

The crux:

“On election night 2004, the exit polls and the vote counting equipment generated results that differed significantly.”

As the authors remind readers,

“In the early morning of November 3, 2004, a CNN.com website screenshot entitled “U.S. PRESIDENT/NATIONAL/EXIT POLL” posted national exit poll results updated to 12:23 A.M., broken down by gender as well as a variety of other categories.[note] The time of the update indicates that these results comprised substantially the full set of respondents polled on election day, but were free from the effects of a subsequent input of tabulated data used to bring about ultimate congruence between the exit poll and vote count results.”

The outcome of this national exit poll was 48.2% Bush, 50.8% Kerry.

There has perhaps never been a less reported headline in the history of U.S. politics. In a world, or in a political realm, now bating its breath over the possibility that Iowa Christian conservatives may wander from Newt Gingrich to Rick Santorum or vice versa–in an election neither can hope to win–the fact that historically reliable exit polling showed John Kerry on top in the presidential election in 2004 went unremarked.

Baiman and Simon quoted Freeman’s discussion of the close battleground states, cited earlier:

“In particular, the odds against the discrepancies in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania occurring together are computed at 662,000-to-one, or a virtual statistical impossibility that they could have been due to chance or random error.”

The same pattern held on a broader scale:

“Receiving somewhat less emphasis is the overall pattern of discrepancy in the state polls—again with the vote counts turning in Bush’s favor, though less dramatically in the nonbattleground states, as will be discussed below. The national popular vote is not addressed in that paper, but the same statistical principles are applicable, and will be
employed in this analysis.”

The authors emphasize the large size of the national exit poll, even more accurate than other exit polls:

“While the individual state samples totaled 73,678 reported respondents,[note] a national sub-sampling was undertaken by Edison/Mitofsky, which comprised 13,047 reported respondents, chosen as a representative random sample of the nation as a whole. This sample was drawn from 250 targeted polling places and from 500 individual telephone interviews with absentee and early voters.”

Baiman and Simon concluded with 95% certainty “that Kerry’s popular vote percentage would fall in the range 49.7% to 51.9%; that is, it would fall outside that range only once in 20 times.”

As they summarize, dryly, “Kerry’s reported vote count of 48.1% falls dramatically outside this range.”

That is, the vote reported for Kerry fell well outside the realm of probability.

The reaction to this solid analysis? In the immortal words of Sinclair Lewis, it made as much noise as a bladder hurled into the ocean. It had as much effect as a tract left in a speakeasy (paraphrase from Ann Vickers, 1933).

Despite the disregard in the national political press, other researchers have pursued the issues raised by the 2004 election. In a lengthy footnote, Baiman and Simon cite the work of MIT grad student William Kaminsky:

“Kaminsky finds that in 22 of the 23 states which break down their voter registrations by party ID the ratio of registered Republicans to registered Democrats in the final, adjusted exit poll was larger than the ratio of registered Republicans to registered Democrats on the official registration rolls. In other words, the adjustments performed on the exit polls in order to get them to agree with the official tallies would, if valid, require Republicans to have won the get-out-the-vote battle in essentially every state. We find this requirement implausible, and indeed observational evidence pointed to just the opposite: massive new voter turnout, which virtually always cuts in favor of the challenger; huge lines in Democratic precincts; unadjusted exit poll data showing apparently greater Democratic turnout; etc. Exit polls appropriately stratified to official party ID percentages, which would effectively neutralize any suspected “reluctant Bush responder” phenomenon by including the expected proportions of Republican and Democratic voters, would on the basis of Kaminsky’s analysis have yielded results at least as favorable to Kerry as those upon which we have relied in our calculations.”

Again the Amen Corner.

The public out in front, again

As written previously, it wasn’t only eggheads who perceived the issue of lost votes. Taking a leaf from Ronald Reagan’s book, here it seems only fitting to quote an email from one of my gracious readers:

“Margie,

Thank you for your recent piece on the above that I read today at buzzflash.com. Bush is the worst president of my fifty-three year lifetime and I lived through Johnson and Nixon back-to-back.

Bush has managed to combine the guns and butter policies of the Johnson administration with the excessive secrecy and lies of Nixon. This is almost as big an accomplishment as his uniting of Sunni and Shiite factions against us in Iraq.

I was a precinct captain for the Kerry campaign for the three months prior to the 2004 Iowa caucuses. I would often ask the Democrats I called upon what they were hearing about Bush from their Republican acquaintances. They usually replied in the following way, “You know, it is funny that you should ask that question. I cannot believe the number of Republicans that I know who have VOLUNTEERED the information to me that they will never, ever vote for Bush again.” And this was well before things in Iraq turned really, really bad.

What is your sense about the mood among Republicans these days? Thanks, again, for your efforts on behalf of truth, justice and peace. The best, [name]”

The 2004 election revisited, part 1

Posted on December 27, 2011 by Margie Burns

Revisiting election 2004. Part 1

: Ohio results as published 2004

As the U.S.A. heads into a new election year, a string of GOP presidential candidates has demonstrated conclusively that each will need all the help s/he can get, to get into the White House. Thus it is timely, in this holiday season, to review the 2004 election.

Short story: Election Day 2004 involved more signs of election fraud, in more states, than any other election including that of 2000, when our not counting votes in Florida gave George W. Bush the White House without compelling him to win it.

: Exit polling in Venezuela

The 2004 anomalies were revealed when polling consultants Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International released final exit polls conducted in all states. A troubling pattern emerged, which has not to this day been explained away. Although the data were analyzed in an excellent paper by Prof. Steven F. Freeman, “The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy,” there was no significant follow-up by the national political press. Undoubtedly this cavalier disregard for the fundamental right to vote contributed to fuel the big changes of 2008, including the rise of Barack Obama and the further decline of the news media in public esteem.

: Media rep 2004

Quick run-down, 2004:

In 2004, contrary to results in every other election for the previous twenty years, there was a variance between exit polls and the published vote tally of more than two points in 33 of 51 jurisdictions.
This variance amounted to a swing in each state of 4% or 5% or more to Bush.
That is, regardless of which candidate won in those states, a significant variance allegedly occurred in every exit poll in all of them, and always in the same direction.
This crucial swing occurred in all the close states: Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Iowa all had the same alleged ‘red shift.’
Most of the close states seemingly shifted more than two points, a swing of 4% or 5% favorable to Bush, regardless of the size or region of the state, and regardless of whether the state ultimately went for Bush or Kerry.
Exit polls from nine other states, less close, were also contradicted by a smaller swing toward Bush in the published vote tally. The same seeming swings to Bush occurred in the District of Columbia and Maryland.
Thus four out of five states are alleged to have swung to Bush, in an election where previous polling had consistently indicated new voters, independent voters, and younger voters trending toward Kerry and/or away from Bush.
This four-out-of-five swing is alleged for an election in which turnout increased, although increased voter turnout is generally held to favor the challenger against the incumbent.
In four states, the swing from exit poll to published vote tally was enough to swing the state from Kerry to Bush–Ohio, Florida, New Mexico, and Iowa.
These four states added up to 59 electoral votes, more than enough to change the outcome of the national election.
Numerous election problems were reported on the ground from counties and precincts in Ohio, Florida, New Mexico and Iowa.

According to Professor Freeman, whose PhD in organizational studies came from MIT and who holds professorships at the University of Pennsylvania and at an international MBA program founded by Harvard, the swing between exit poll and vote tally is an anomaly even in just three battleground states. Take Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida alone, and as Freeman calculated, “The likelihood of any two of these statistical anomalies occurring together is on the order of one-in-a-million. The odds against all three occurring together are 250 million to one.”

“As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.”

Even for a non-scientist, the statistical problem above seems fairly obvious: If the exit polls were simple mistakes, then they should have diverged from the vote tallies randomly. Honest mistakes should vary at different locations. Honest mistakes should vary in favor of different candidates, benefiting different parties. You don’t have a nationwide set of honest mistakes all magically benefiting one candidate. This is not random, it is a pattern.

: Freeman

It would also be near miraculous for a nationwide set of honest mistakes all to fall within a fairly short percentage range, just significant enough to affect the outcome of the election but not dramatic enough to trigger federal and state investigation under the law.

Disclaimer: It is only reasonable to read opinion polls and other polling with skepticism. Incessant polling can weaken the individual’s reliance on his/her own judgment, can plant suggestions, can intimidate reporters, and can manipulate public acceptance of the unacceptable. Following the 2004 election, an opinion poll was quickly published suggesting that most people were relieved—ironically–that the outcome was clear.

All well and good, if it was clear. But the integrity of vote counting is essential to our nation’s survival as a democracy. The horse-race obsession about who is ahead before the election often makes news media look silly. The question of who won the election, after the election, is fundamental.

Exit polls hit closer to the mark than do opinion polls. Exit polls are taken on the ground with people who show up to vote, are taken just after the voting, and are weighted to take into account a preponderance of one group. As Dr. Freeman points out, exit polls have been used globally to check and verify the validity of elections in countries including Germany and Mexico. When exit polls contradicted Eduard Shevardnadze’s claim that he had won election in the former Soviet country of Georgia, Shevardnadze was forced to resign under pressure from the U.S. among other nations.

Pundits’ disdain for the issue of what happened to the 2004 election not shared by the public

Writing about these issues soon after the 2004 election, this author focused initially on the small tilts that added up to a big tilt in the U.S. Electoral College. However, even then I pointed out that questions had also arisen affecting the popular vote count in ‘safe’ states. The responses below, from readers who vote, include this interesting anecdotal account:

“Margie,

A friend pointed me to your article “Did Bush lose the election?” which I found very interesting. I was also interested in your final comment about irregularities “even in safe states.”

I live in the “safe state” of North Carolina where something I observed may be worth passing along.

During the early voting period, the state Board of Elections was releasing daily turnout reports. The early voters were identified by their party registration. It occurred to me that comparing this year’s turnout with early voting in the 2000 election might reveal a trend.

At the close of early voting on Oct. 31, SBOE recorded 705,462 early voters. In 2000, 393,152 early voters were recorded. Four years ago, early voters were 46% Democrat and 38% Republican. This year, early voters were 50.4% Democrat and 36% Republican.

Given a 6-point net gain in Democratic turnout, it seemed reasonable to expect that John Kerry would gain at least several percentage points over Al Gore’s showing four years ago. But when the votes were tallied, Kerry registered virtually no improvement on Gore’s vote in North Carolina (Kerry 43.6%, Gore 43.2%).

Knowing who is voting doesn’t reveal how they are voting, and crossover voting has long been a feature of North Carolina elections. But there’s nothing to suggest that crossover voting was any different this year from four years ago. [emphasis added]

When a similar pattern was observed in parts of Florida, the response was that “Southern Democrats may have been more willing to vote for a moderate Southerner (Gore) than a Massachusetts liberal.” But that doesn’t explain why Democratic turnout increased while Republican turnout seemed to decrease.

This year’s early vote in North Carolina was 20% of the total vote. Four years ago it was 13.5% of the total. So, there’s a statistically significant sample to use as a basis for comparison. If a correlation exists between early voting patterns this year and four years ago, it seems pretty improbable that a significant jump in Democratic turnout would not have translated to some improvement for Kerry over Gore.

If Kerry were getting, say, 47% in North Carolina, that would have put another 130,000 votes in his column. It’s not enough to win the state’s 15 electoral votes, but a 4-point upward shift across the country is in line with the exit poll projection of a 51-48% popular vote lead for Kerry. And it would have moved Ohio and a couple other close states into his column.

It would be interesting to do these comparisons in states where the relevant data is available to see if Democratic turnout increased from 2000 to 2004, and if so, whether it translated to gains for Kerry over Gore.

I’m not ready to conclude there was vote manipulation. But there are a lot of questions about the results that need to be examined and answers provided.

Thank you for your efforts.”

“Dear Ms. Burns,
Thank you for your interesting, informative, and truthful article, “Did Bush
Lose the Election?”
The evidence of what you say has existed for quite some time now

patent evidence of election fraud presaged by Avi Rubin at Johns Hopkins University
and echoed in the recent UC Berkeley study, by Zogby International as reported in IPS News, and

as Bill Simpich observes in the SF Bay View

by former MIT mathematics professor David Anick, among others. Notwithstanding, the mainstream media continue to exclude from its purvue this most heinous and glaringly evident act of deception

the defrauding of the American people of its vote and therefore of its sovereignty. By failing to lend their attention to this issue, the mainstream media act as aiders and abettors of a blatant attack against the security of the United States of America.

It is therefore extremely refreshing to hear someone valiantly speak out for the American people in our time of crisis. I thank you most profoundly for being one of the seminal figures to tell the truth about the Third Millenium scandal that is now gaining a reputation worldwide as “Votergate” or, as I also like to call it: “the NeoCons” [Election] Piracy 2004.”

[name redacted]

So They ‘Surveilled’ Financial Institutions? – You Don’t Say

Posted on August 21, 2004 by Margie Burns

So they ‘surveilled’ financial institutions? – You don’t say

On July 29, the Democrats wound up their national convention and awaited the anticipated ‘bounce’ in the week’s opinion polls. On August 2, the administration announced, with maximum fanfare, that U.S. financial institutions and locales in New York and Washington were under surveillance by terrorists.

Bush, Porter Goss

Some thoughts here:

(1) My own call on this one is that it demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that the Bush White House uses terror alerts as bludgeons in domestic politics, especially since–as it turns out–some of the purported information on terrorism was three years old. It seems to have worked, too, at least for the capital’s pundits: the following Sunday, Chris Matthews’ weekly opinion-experts’ panel voted that Bush had ‘won’ the week, and administration media shills including Charles Krauthammer gleefully proclaimed that Kerry had gotten no bounce.

(2) Unfortunately, along with the older information, the flamboyant items also involved some sensitive information. The news released by the administration compromised a (rare) actual investigation by disclosing the name of an undercover intelligence asset, and was followed by an equally abrupt round-up of several suspects, with more risk and less stealth than law enforcement personnel would have preferred. To call the media release cavalier would be charitable.

(3) The release was also timed fortuitously in another way: old though some of the information was, it came just that little bit too late for the suspects and other witnesses to be interviewed by the 9/11 Commission or by congressional investigators. Two of the suspects were relatives of alleged 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohamed. Why weren’t they pulled in shortly after KSM’s capture, if not before?

(4) Anyone privileged to read about the CIA’s role in supporting the Taliban, through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), has to be aware of Pakistan’s support for terrorism. Much terrorist funding came (and still comes) from Saudi Arabia, more than ever now after the invasion of Iraq. But mujahideen training, schooling, transportation and logistics have come extensively from Pakistan, as the administration knows: the Osama bin Laden-ISI-Taliban triangle is an old story. Presumably, the CIA and ISI could have pulled in the usual suspects earlier than summer 2003.

(5) One last, sad story. Among the genuine 9/11 investigations short-changed and/or outright impeded by the administration are scientific investigations of the sites. The National Science Foundation gave several special awards immediately after September 11, 2001, for expert investigation including a study of the World Trade Center debris by a much-credentialed engineering professor at Berkeley. The result? –Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki had the debris hauled away immediately and destroyed; the authorities involved never gave the engineering researchers the videos, blueprints and other primary material requested; and wild conspiracy theories of ‘controlled demolition’ are floating around three years later, even though hundreds of people saw the planes hitting the towers.

Professor Astaneh’s own suggestion about the skyjackers is that they did not know the buildings would implode but intended the towers to topple onto the Stock Exchange, causing thousands more deaths and crippling the much-hated US financial sector. It’s only a guess–as he points out, “there are not enough data for a hypothesis”–but it sounds like a good guess.

The item that purported assailants had financial institutions under surveillance sounds valid. Three years ago, however, we were all barraged through corporate media outlets about an “attack on America.” An attack on Wall Street and the Pentagon is still an attack on America, but it’s too bad the networks’ thrust had to be so aggressive on this point; I think the American people could have been trusted to draw the right conclusions on their own. Surely, given all the deaths and injuries, the grief and heroism, we could safely have been allowed to hear that the hijackers thought they were dealing a crippling blow to US military and financial centers. Couldn’t we?

Iraq WMD

But only now, safely after wars have been launched against pitiful Afghanistan and starved-and-strangled Iraq, are we allowed to hear widely that the assailants had financial institutions in their sights.

Afghanistan

Margie Burns

Blog on government, law, and politics

Tag Archives: 2004 election

The 2004 election revisited, part 11–Florida

The 2004 election revisited part 10, Florida

2004 election revisited, part 8: Florida

Revisiting the 2004 election, part 7: Florida

2004 election revisited, part 6: Florida

2004 Election revisited, part 5: DC games versus democratizing the vote

The 2004 election revisited, part 4: Ohio

The 2004 election revisited, part 2

The 2004 election revisited, part 1

So They ‘Surveilled’ Financial Institutions? – You Don’t Say