VotersUnite!

VotersUnite! presents the following compilation of problems reported in the media about the 2004 general election. Starting with early voting, we are seeing a wide array of problems, some of which appear in multiple states. This page allows you to see how widespread the problems are as they accumulate.

E-Voting News and Analysis, from the Experts

Nader requests N.H. vote recount By KEVIN LANDRIGAN, Telegraph Staff

Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader requested a hand recount of ballots in New Hampshire after getting seven-tenths of 1 percent of the vote.

“We have received reports of irregularities in the vote reported on the AccuVote Diebold Machines in comparison to exit polls and trends in voting in New Hampshire,’’ Nader wrote.

“These irregularities favor President George W. Bush by 5 percent to 15 percent over what was expected. Problems in these electronic voting machines and optical scanners are being reported in machines in a variety of states.’’

Nader/Camejo Challenge Electronic Voting Results in New Hampshire — Main Story Archive – Nader for President 2004 – www.votenader.org

Paperless electronic voting machines make it impossible to safeguard the integrity of our vote thereby threatening the very foundation of our democracy.

The seller of the machines, the Diebold Corporation, is a supplier of money to one of the major party candidates, George W. Bush. The CEO and top officers of Diebold are major contributors to the Bush campaign. This does not pass the smell test. Voters should report immediately any suspected malfunctions and deficiencies at voting precincts around the country to their Board of Elections. And voters should urge their legislators to require a voter verified paper ballot trail for random audits and independent recounts.

The Agonist: Diebold Machines

While differing in implementation, these systems share a crucial feature: all information about the votes is stored exclusively in digital format. The crucial difference from more traditional voting systems (e.g., punch card and optical scan machines) is that those systems keep the original vote in a physical form (usually paper) that can be directly verified by the voter. This “paper trail” can later be used during a recount, if the need were to arise.

A recount is generally possible with Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines, but what is recounted is simply what the machine recorded in the first place and this can be quite different from the intended vote.

Discrepancies arise through a number of factors, ranging from machine malfunction to malicious tampering with its software. Without the hard-copy redundancy offered by traditional voting systems, performing an independent audit is virtually impossible.

AxisofLogic/ The 2004 Elections

[I]t’s critical that we keep the largest issue at the forefront at all time: Why are We The People allowing private, for-profit corporations, answerable only to their officers and boards of directors, and loyal only to agendas and politicians that will enhance their profitability, to handle our votes?

Black Box Voting: Ballot – Tampering in the 21st Century

VOTERGATE

Diebold Election Systems – AccuVote-TS Product Information

AccuVote TS

The AccuVote-TS™ system is a robust voter-activated interactive touch-screen system that is hailed as the future of voting systems. Featuring an easy-to-operate touch-screen interface, it offers voters enhanced visibility and brightness.

Using an intelligent Voter Card as the voter interface, the AccuVote-TS permits voters to view and cast their votes by touching target areas on an electronically generated ballot. Each unit provides a direct-entry computerized voting application that automatically records and stores appropriate ballot information and results. At the end of the voting period, the system can print precinct totals to be included as part of the permanent record and modem the results to a host computer via TeleResults.

While classified as a direct record entry (DRE) device, the AccuVote-TS system has capabilities that transcend traditional DRE technology.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: AP – U.S. Headlines
Wisconsin city allows teaching creationism

GRANTSBURG, Wis. — The city’s school board has revised its science curriculum to allow the teaching of creationism, prompting an outcry from more than 300 educators who urged that the decision be reversed.

School board members believed that a state law governing the teaching of evolution was too restrictive. The science curriculum “should not be totally inclusive of just one scientific theory,” said Joni Burgin, superintendent of the district of 1,000 students in northwest Wisconsin. …

There have been scattered efforts around the nation for other school boards to adopt similar measures. Last month the Dover Area School Board in Pennsylvania voted to require the teaching of alternative theories to evolution, including “intelligent design” – the idea that life is too complex to have developed without a creator.

School Board Considers Censoring Books, Handing Out Bibles, Teaching Creationism (washingtonpost.com)

Some Teachers Decry List of Ideas as Attempt to Inject Christian Values Into Curriculum
By Joshua Partlow

To Margaret Young, vice chairman of the Charles County Board of Education, the required reading lists in her Southern Maryland school system are teeming with “profanity and pornography, fornication and adultery.”

Take, for example, “Dust Tracks on a Road,” an autobiography by acclaimed American author Zora Neale Hurston. Young said the book contained “disgusting” scenes of “inappropriate” sexual conduct. …

One of the more controversial proposals was to invite Gideons International to hand out Bibles to students. …

“Basically these people are telling you how you should be and, if you’re not, you’re a bad person….”

Science > Creationism and Science Clash at Grand Canyon Bookstores” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/26/science/26cany.html”>The New York Times > Science > Creationism and Science Clash at Grand Canyon Bookstores By CORNELIA DEAN

[You may] not seen “Grand Canyon: A Different View,” but others who have, including geologists on the Park Service staff, say it does not meet that test. A compilation of photographs, biblical quotations and essays published last year by Master Books, the book says God created the heavens and the earth in six days, 6,000 years ago, and that the canyon formed in a flood God caused in order to wipe out “the wickedness of man.” The geology of the canyon proves it, the books’ contributors say.

Actually, the universe formed billions of years ago, Earth formed billions of years later and the Grand Canyon was shaped by millions and millions of years of hydrology, chiefly the action of the Colorado River. Other ideas, however dearly held, are myths. Or, as the Geologic Resources Division of the Park Service put it in a memo, “The book purports to be science when it is not. The book repudiates science.”

Nevertheless, it is for sale at the six bookstores at Grand Canyon National Park.

News from Agape Press

“The interesting thing is that, really, from a creationist perspective, we have no trouble at all explaining variation within human kind like this,” he explains. “I like to help people understand that by saying, ‘Look — eight people got off Noah’s ark, and as they increased in number, and then you have the Tower of Babel, and you split up the human gene pool.'” …

[H]e says creationists understand that there are some differences between modern man and the ancient skeleton, and that this is just another example of God’s creativity in designing people. …

Ham says evolutionists simply do not know what to do with this conflicting information. But he says these die-hard Darwinists will fit all their contradictory conclusions into their faulty evolutionary framework anyway.

Questionable Tactics by GOP by Thom Hartmann

in Florida’s counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots – fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking — the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The pattern repeats over and over again – but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.

Those faulty exit polls were sabotage=The Hill.com= by Dick Morris

Exit polls are almost never wrong. … So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries. … But this Tuesday, the networks did get the exit polls wrong. Not just some of them. They got all of the Bush states wrong.

To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here. …

At the very least, the exit pollsters should have to explain, in public, how they were so wrong. Since their polls, if biased or cooked, represented an attempt to use the public airwaves to reduce voter turnout, they should have to explain their errors in a very public and perhaps official forum.

This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play.

Note that the infamous Dick Morris is suggesting that Dems rigged the infallible Exit Polls. mjh

How can we process billions of ATM, credit card, debit card and other financial transactions every single day with a miniscule error rate and not be able to do the same when it matters most to the entire nation? Because voting machines are a business and every business wants to get things done as cheaply as possible. mjh

NewsNet5.com – Politics – Computer Glitch Gives Bush 3,893 Extra Votes

Computer Glitch Gives Bush 3,893 Extra Votes

Software flaw found in Florida vote machines

Software flaw found in Florida vote machines

Wired News: Computer Loses 4,500 Votes

Computer Loses 4,500 Votes

Politics News Article | Reuters.com

It will not be an easy task. Defeated in the presidential election, the party that dominated U.S. politics from the 1930s until the 1990s also lost ground in both chambers of Congress and the Republicans retained control of most of the state governorships.

“I think this is a realigning election. The Democrats are going to have to get used to permanent minority status for a generation or two,” said Tom Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. …

In many ways, the Democrats have become a coalition of minorities — blacks, homosexuals, Jews, the unmarried and the unreligious. Bush’s political strategist Karl Rove characterized the typical Democrat as “somebody with a doctorate … people who imbibed the values of the sixties and seventies and stuck with them.”

Yeah, those crazy sixties ideas like equality, justice, peace, love — what bunch of looney liberals! And, heck, we need to find a way to express ourselves more simply. mjh

TimesDispatch.com | Bush advances his agenda

A day after declaring victory in a hard-fought election, President Bush said at a news conference, “I’ll reach out to everyone who shares our goals,” adding that “I earned capital in this election, and I’m going to spend it.” …

Bush said he felt it was “necessary to move an agenda that I told the American people I would move,” adding: “When you win, there is a feeling that the people have spoken and embraced your point of view.”

Stop the Tape: President Bush Has Learned About The Enemy, Declares: “I Meant What I Said”

See, to them, you have to understand, to many in Washington and the White House press corps, and many in the left in general, you say things to fool people.

You say things to avoid controversy or you say things to actually deceive people. But you never say what you mean. That’s a sign of weakness. That’s giving your intentions away. You don’t do that. You gotta fool people. You gotta lie to ’em. You gotta set ’em up. You gotta deceive ’em, and I think that’s why so many people have trouble understanding Bush.

Democrats must learn from loss By Matthew Miller

There are other lessons. Democrats may simply need to have a governor atop the ticket; a senator may never be marketable as an executive leader. Democrats sure need a good Southerner. But above all, Democrats need ideas.

Think about it. By 2008 we will have had 40 years of GOP presidents broken only by Southern governor Jimmy Carter (a post-Watergate fluke) and Southern governor Bill Clinton (a rare force of nature). During this time American politics have drifted dramatically to the right, to the point where Richard Nixon’s combined plans for universal health coverage and a minimum family income is now far too “liberal” for John Kerry to have supported in 2004.

Showing how progressive goals are consistent with American values, bolstering the party’s security agenda in an age of terror, reframing the language and means with which Democrats propose to solve the problems of ordinary Americans – all this, as with Clinton in 1992, will mean challenging some ancient doctrines and interest groups in order to reach out to more Americans with real answers.

It’s a tall order. And it’s hard to see how the current Democratic establishment – which, after all, has presided over these losses and the rightward drift of the country – is up to the task.

Forty years of Republican presidents and we’re not doing so bad. Much of the world hates us or thinks we’re insane. We’re headed towards bankruptcy. We’re ready to shred the Constitution. There’s a record to run on in 2008! mjh