Bush & Company

With election 2004 quickly fading into the past, George W. Bush stands poised to be inaugurated as President of the United States, yet again, under dubious circumstances.

Democratic contender, Mass. Sen. John Kerry, conceded his bid on November 3, based on Republican Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell’s initial findings, which showed the president winning the state, thus clinching the election.

Since then, reports of voting machine irregularities persist to stream in from precincts across the nation, with particular uncertainty in the crucial battleground states of Florida and Ohio. Yet, mainstream American media and even Democratic officials have remained largely silent regarding such accounts.

Greg Palast, a reporter who investigated Florida’s 2,000 election debacle for the BBC, has questioned the numbers. According to Palast, about 3% of votes cast are regularly discarded because results are considered inconclusive. In Ohio, alone, more than 92,000 ballots were “spoiled” due to the same type of punch card ballot mishaps previously seen in the sunshine state. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission has calculated that 54% of punch card ballots were cast by African Americans, who vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates.

But, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The Warren County, Ohio, Board of Commissioners claimed the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security issued warnings that the county had been ranked at 10, on a scale of 1-10, as a site for a possible terrorist attack on election day. As a result, the administration building was locked down, preventing anyone from observing the vote count. Both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have since denied issuing those warnings.

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Further irregularities nationwide include Sarper County, Nebraska, where a computer glitch doubled the votes in half the precincts; Guilford County, North Carolina, where vote totals were so large that the computer threw votes away; Carteret County, North Carolina, where a machine discarded 4,532 ballots; Boulder County, Colorado, where an optical scanning system stretched or crushed thousands of paper ballots, rendering bar codes unreadable.

In Broward County, Florida, some voting machines malfunctioned, causing ballots to be counted backward at 32,000, per precinct and, in the same county, poll workers cited boxes of absentee ballots remained uncounted in the central storage facilities. In additional Florida counties, including Baker, Dixie, Franklin and Holmes results from optically scanned paper ballots contained sizeable abnormalities— Baker County’s 12,887 registered voters (69.3% Democrat and 24.3% Republican) voted 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush. Dixie County’s 4,988 registered voters (77.5% Democrat and 15% Republican) voted 1,959 for Kerry, while 4,433 voted for Bush. Some have speculated these switch hitters are actually “Dixicrats,” spurred on by Georgia’s firebrand Democratic turncoat, Gov. Zell Miller.

The Associated Press reported that in six states, including Ohio and Florida, electronic touch-screen machine voters claimed their ballots cast for Kerry were recorded as votes for Bush.

The Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002, introduced the paperless electronic touch-screen voting machine. They were tested by professors and researchers from Johns Hopkins, who issued this statement: “The voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts. We identify several problems including unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software development processes. We show that voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal software.”

The major manufacturers of these voting machines and scanners are the Sequoia Company, Elections Systems and Software and Diebold Corporation which registered votes for machines in 37 states, including Florida and Ohio. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Diebold contributed $195,000 to the RNC, between 2000-2002. Last year, company CEO, Walden O’Dell, wrote to Bush contributors he is “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”

House winners and members of the Judiciary Committee, John Conyers (D-Mich.), Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), Robert Wexler (D-Fl), Robert C. Scott (D-VA), Melvin Watt (D-N.C.) and Rush Holt (D-N.J.) have written David Walker, Comptroller General of the United States, asking for an investigation into the irregularities.

Rep. Holt, who has a bill in the House that would require a paper trail, issued a statement to the World reading in part: “I have joined my colleagues in requesting that the Government Accountability Office examine the scope and validity of complaints from voters about malfunctioning electronic voting machines, failures to count absentee ballots, and efforts to preclude monitoring of vote tabulations around the country.”

Rep. Nadler hopes to gather information directly from voters to help the investigation. “The House Judiciary Committee has jurisdiction over the Voting Rights Act, the Help America Vote Act, and constitutional rights to free and fair democratic elections,” Nadler told the World in a written statement. “I am hopeful that the information people provide will be helpful."

Green Party candidate, David Cobb and Libertarian Party candidate, Michael Badnarik, who between them got more than 14,000 of Ohio‘s 28 million votes, intend to file for a recount in that state. Ralph Nader who got over 4,400 votes in
New Hampshire, has picked 11 specific precincts he wants recounted there. All registered a momentous bounce for Bush (anywhere from seven to 12 points) and used optical scanners made by Diebold or Sequoia.

Other developments have attorneys with the Kerry campaign in Ohio on a fact-finding mission. Dan Hoffheimer, counsel for the campaign, stated they are only carrying out Kerry's promise to make sure that all the votes in Ohio are counted.

Syndicated: November; 2004