Archive for the 'Election Fraud' Category

Alaska’s Fishy Vote Total?

Published by
shinai
November 10, 2008 in Dirty Tricks, Election '08, Election Fraud, Politics, State and Local, Voting and video. 0 Comments

Courtesy Rawstory:

The 2008 presidential race is over, but several Senate races still remain undecided. Georgia is headed for a runoff, Minnesota for a recount — and in Alaska things just keep getting stranger.

“It looks like senator and convicted felon Ted Stevens and Congressman-currently-under-investigation Don Young will both hold onto their seats,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow noted on Thursday. “That said, there’s a case to be made that there’s something fishy going on up there.”

Even though the polls this year have generally been pretty accurate, they were way off in Alaska. Stevens was running between 7% and 22% behind his Democratic challenger in the polls, but now he is narrowly ahead in the vote count

Polling analysis website 538.com comments, “The emerging conventional wisdom is that there was some sort of a Bradley Effect in this contest — voters told pollsters that they weren’t about to vote for that rascal Ted Stevens, when in fact they were perfectly happy to. Convicted felons are the new black, it would seem. The problem with this theory is that the polling failures in Alaska weren’t unique to Stevens.”

The polls also consistently showed Rep. Young as losing by at least 6%, but he is currently ahead in the vote count by 8%. Even in the presidential race, where polls showed McCain leading by 14% or less, the vote count has him winning by 61% to 35% — precisely the same margin as George Bush in 2004. That represents a polling error of at least 11% to 14% in all three races.

At the same time, total voter turnout appears to be about 11% lower in Alaska this year than in 2004 — despite over 20,000 new registrations, heavy turnout in the primaries, record early voting, long lines at the polls on Election Day, and the state’s own governor being on the ballot, all of which had led to an expectation of record participation.

Maddow turned for explanations to Nate Silver of 538.com, who pointed out that tens of thousands of absentee ballots, early votes, and provisional votes are yet to be counted. However, these appear to be spread fairly evenly across the state, not concentrated in Democratic areas, so even a final tally is unlikely to jibe with the polls. “Clearly it didn’t go how the pollsters expected,” Silver commented.

-Article Continues With Video @ Soured Site.

Some early W.Va. voters angry over switched votes

Published by
admin
October 18, 2008 in Dirty Tricks, Election Fraud, Politics, The Dems, Voting and Voting Machines. 0 Comments
At least three early voters in Jackson County had a hard time voting for candidates they want to win.

Virginia Matheney and Calvin Thomas said touch-screen machines in the county clerk’s office in Ripley kept switching their votes from Democratic to Republican candidates.

“When I touched the screen for Barack Obama, the check mark moved from his box to the box indicating a vote for John McCain,” said Matheney, who lives in Kenna.

When she reported the problem, she said, the poll worker in charge “responded that everything was all right. It was just that the screen was sensitive and I was touching the screen too hard. She instructed me to use only my fingernail.”

Even after she began using her fingernail, Matheney said, the problem persisted.

When she tried to vote for candidates running for two open seats on the Supreme Court, the electronic machine canceled her second vote twice.

On her third try, Matheney managed to cast votes for both Menis Ketchum and Margaret Workman, Democratic candidates for the two open seats.

Calvin Thomas, 81, who retired from Kaiser Aluminum in Ravenswood in 1983 and now lives in Ripley, experienced the same problem.

“When I pushed Obama, it jumped to McCain. When I went down to governor’s office and punched [Gov. Joe] Manchin, it went to the other dude. When I went to Karen Facemyer [the incumbent Republican state senator], I pushed the Democrat, but it jumped again.

Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

How McCain will Steal the Election from Obama (Sort of)

Published by
admin
October 13, 2008 in Deceit, Election Fraud, Politics, The Dems, The GOP and Voting. 0 Comments

Courtesy Huffington Post

Imagine an election where one of the participants calls foul. Investigations are launched or at least called for. Prosecutors raise the specter of charges, the U.S. attorney and FBI get involved. No voter fraud is ever actually found. But by the time that conclusion is reached, the myth has been solidified both to soothe the loser’s supporters and condemn the winner.

Sound familiar? Sound like the recent ACORN scandal?

Well, actually I’m talking about the 1960 election between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. That Nixon was cheated out of a win is the stuff of legend on the Right. The allegations say that Kennedy loyalists fixed the vote counts in Illinois and Texas–swinging 51 electoral votes and a majority in the Electoral College to Kennedy. In more hyperbolic versions there is alleged involvement by the mob, the Teamsters Union or legendary Chicago mayor Richard Daley.

The story goes on that Nixon, “for the good of the country,” conceded honorably and exited the scene. No matter that Nixon was later chased out of the White House for cheating in an election. The myth endures.

This whole story–maybe to be replayed with Obama playing Kennedy and McCain playing Nixon–is a canard. It is a fable. A lie made up by the conservative movement to hold together their fraying coalition.

In 2008 the stakes are bigger than they’ve ever been before for conservatives and the canard is that much more important to them.

In the case of Obama the conservative movement is lining up a serious of story elements. They are:

• Obama was a community organizer.
• ACORN, a group that does community organizing, has committed voter fraud.
• Obama is from Chicago.
• You know what happens in elections in Chicago. Remember the 1960 election.

The story is half true and half lies. As we all know, Barack Obama is from Chicago and was a community organizer. Those are the only true parts of the conservative story. But the other two facts are myths: the 1960 election wasn’t stolen (says the conclusion of recounts and investigations in 1960 and numerous academic studies since). And, ACORN has not committed voter fraud. Not one bit.

The facts about ACORN are worth getting out. ACORN is an organization that, among other things, registers low-income people to vote. One of the ways they do this is to hire door-to-door canvassers from the neighborhoods they are working in. This sort of work is tightly regulated. So, when one of the thousands of people they give jobs to doesn’t do their work right and brings back bogus or phony voter registration cards, the law REQUIRES that ACORN turn the forms in to the voter registration office. The law, rightly, doesn’t want anybody throwing out voter registration forms for any reason.

But ACORN goes a step farther. They have people assigned to do quality control on all the cards–calling people on the forms after they fill them out. When they find bad information on the cards they attach a cover sheet to the card but, as mentioned above, they turn in the cards as required by law. The effect is that a few bad canvassers or a poorly run office will mean that bad cards are submitted as part of the normal process. But ACORN has done everything possible to make sure voting officials know to check the forms.

The sad fact is that in at least one state–Nevada–the voting officials disregarded ACORN’s cover sheets flagging the voter registration forms. That should have never happened. The resulting blowup was a scandal in search of a scandal.

Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

Q&A: E-voting security results ‘awful,’ says Ohio secretary of state

Published by
admin
October 8, 2008 in Corruption, Election Fraud, Government, Politics, State and Local and US News. 0 Comments

October 8, 2008 (Computerworld) Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner will be under the national spotlight next month, overseeing what’s expected to be the state’s largest-ever turnout for a presidential election. It will also be her first as the state’s chief election official.

The stakes will be just as high as they were for her Republican predecessor, J. Kenneth Blackwell, four years ago, when the narrowly decided state election was marred by charges of questionable results and complaints that some residents, largely in minority areas, were forced to wait hours to cast their votes.This year, denizens of the Buckeye State who mistrust touch-screen systems will be allowed to vote on a paper ballot if they prefer. The directive to allow “paper or plastic” came in the wake of Brunner’s landmark 2007 “Evaluation & Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Standards & Testing” analysis, otherwise known as EVEREST, in which “critical security failures” were found in every system tested by several teams of both corporate and academic computer scientists and security experts.

Ohio officials discovered in March that some voting systems manufactured by Premier Elections Solutions Inc., a subsidiary of Diebold Inc., dropped votes as they were being uploaded to a main server. Because the problem is in the tabulator system, it affects votes cast on both Diebold’s direct recording electronic (DRE) systems, which are usually touch screen, and paper ballot optical-scan systems. The same central tabulators will be used in more than 30 states next month.
Unfortunately, correcting the problem is not as easy as simply applying a patch to work around the problem. Voting systems, at least at the federal level, must be certified as an entire end-to-end unit. In order to receive a certification “stamp of approval” from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), companies must submit every piece of hardware and software to be used — such as optical-scan devices, “paper trail” printers and central tabulators — as a single unit so that tests can determine whether they all work together without conflict.

Critics have long complained that testing at the federal level has been lax and secretive. Recently, the EAC revamped its certification process, but it has yet to approve any of the systems currently submitted by vendors. Therefore, systems criticized as insecure in the EVEREST study will once again be in use this November.

Brad Friedman, publisher of The Brad Blog, recently sat down with Brunner to discuss the many challenges she has faced since taking office as Ohio’s first Democratic secretary of state in 16 years. Those challenges range from the delicate task of encouraging county election administrators to move to more secure and verifiable voting systems to addressing concerns about how to best ensure that votes will be counted accurately in the upcoming election. The following are edited excerpts from that conversation.

I think other election officials around the country are now realizing, thanks to you and [California Secretary of State Deborah Bowen] coming up with these tests, that it’s not just crazy bloggers who are concerned about this stuff.

Oh no, no. When I finally saw the results of our [EVEREST] tests, I thought I was going to throw up.

I didn’t think it would be that bad. And it was — it was awful. I looked at it on a Saturday morning, and that night I went to bed and woke up [just before 4:00 on] Sunday morning going, “Oh my God.” I never wake up on the weekends — trust me.

You know, I’ve been pushing against the tide, but when Premier [Elections Solutions] sent that letter out [admitting that their tabulators drop votes], it’s like vindication.

Article Continues with links @ Sourced Site.

Former Diebold Contractor Blows The Whistle On Election Manipulations

Published by
admin
October 5, 2008 in Election Fraud and Wistle-Blower. 0 Comments

Courtesy The Scoop (NZ)


YouTube Download

VR has an exclusive interview with former Diebold contractor Chris Hood that talks about many disturbing actions by Diebold during prior elections, including illegal, uncertified and unreported patches, and improper feeding of tabulation results by Diebold Chief Bob Urosevitch. This interview was prepared for a major news program special that was supposed to air two weeks before the 2006 midterm election. At the last moment, however, the special was killed by the corporate media. Check out this important ten minute interview.

Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

CBS NEWS ON NATIONWIDE VOTE PURGING

Published by
admin
October 1, 2008 in Election Fraud, Politics and video. 0 Comments

Courtesy Bradblog/CBS News


YouTube Download

Tonight’s CBS Evening News finally covered what may well be the November Surprise that we’ve been trying to warn about for months here at The BRAD BLOG: Massive voter roll purges being done in secret, with little or no oversight, and often under federal Justice Department cover, in states and counties around the country.

And the Democrats, who likely have the most to lose via such secret purges, are doing little or nothing about it.

The CBS story, posted below (appx 2 mins) starts with an elderly New Jersey voter who was suddenly removed from the voting rolls after thirty years, for apparently no reason whatsoever, before launching into findings from a new non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice study on “Voter Purges”.

We’ve yet to read this Brennan report, but the brief coverage from tonight’s Evening News notes 10,000 voters purged in Mississippi, 21,000 in Louisiana and “to top it off, another new study discovered 19 states are ignoring federal law (the National Voter Registration Act), banning systematic purges within 90 days of a federal election.”

Among those 19, are a number of battleground states. The report lists: Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Delware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Masachusetts, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Texas and Washington, as places where massive purges have recently taken place.

Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

Lose your house, lose your vote

Published by
admin
September 15, 2008 in Economy, Election Fraud, Housing, State and Local and The GOP. 0 Comments

Courtesy: The Michagan Messenger.

Michigan Republicans plan to foreclose African-American voters

The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.

“We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” party chairman James Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview earlier this week. He said the local party wanted to make sure that proper electoral procedures were followed.

State election rules allow parties to assign “election challengers” to polls to monitor the election. In addition to observing the poll workers, these volunteers can challenge the eligibility of any voter provided they “have a good reason to believe” that the person is not eligible to vote. One allowable reason is that the person is not a “true resident of the city or township.”

The Michigan Republicans’ planned use of foreclosure lists is apparently an attempt to challenge ineligible voters as not being “true residents.”

One expert questioned the legality of the tactic.

“You can’t challenge people without a factual basis for doing so,” said J. Gerald Hebert, a former voting rights litigator for the U.S. Justice Department who now runs the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington D.C.-based public-interest law firm. “I don’t think a foreclosure notice is sufficient basis for a challenge, because people often remain in their homes after foreclosure begins and sometimes are able to negotiate and refinance.”

As for the practice of challenging the right to vote of foreclosed property owners, Hebert called it, “mean-spirited.”

GOP ties to state’s largest foreclosure law firm

The Macomb GOP’s plans are another indication of how John McCain’s campaign stands to benefit from the burgeoning number of foreclosures in the state. McCain’s regional headquarters are housed in the office building of foreclosure specialists Trott & Trott. The firm’s founder, David A. Trott, has raised between $100,000 and $250,000 for the Republican nominee.

The Macomb County party’s plans to challenge voters who have defaulted on their house payments is likely to disproportionately affect African-Americans who are overwhelmingly Democratic voters. More than 60 percent of all sub-prime loans — the most likely kind of loan to go into default — were made to African-Americans in Michigan, according to a report issued last year by the state’s Department of Labor and Economic Growth.

Challenges to would-be voters

Statewide, the Republican Party is gearing up for a comprehensive voter challenge campaign, according to Denise Graves, party chair for Republicans in Genessee County, which encompasses Flint. The party is creating a spreadsheet of election challenger volunteers and expects to coordinate a training with the regional McCain campaign, Graves said in an interview with Michigan Messenger.

Whether the Republicans will challenge voters with foreclosed homes elsewhere in the state is not known.

Kelly Harrigan, deputy director of the GOP’s voter programs, confirmed that she is coordinating the group’s “election integrity” program. Harrigan said the effort includes putting in place a legal team, as well as training election challengers. She said the challenges to voters were procedural rather than personal. She referred inquiries about the vote challenge program to communications director Bill Nowling, who promised information but did not return calls.

Party chairman Carabelli said that the Republican Party is training election challengers to “make sure that [voters] are who they say who they are.”

When asked for further details on how Republicans are compiling challenge lists, he said, “I would rather not tell you all the things we are doing.”

Vote suppression: Not an isolated effort

Carabelli is not the only Republican Party official to suggest the targeting of foreclosed voters. In Ohio, Doug Preisse, director of elections in Franklin County (around the city of Columbus) and the chair of the local GOP, told The Columbus Dispatch that he has not ruled out challenging voters before the election due to foreclosure-related address issues.

Hebert, the voting-rights lawyer, sees a connection between Priesse’s remarks and Carabelli’s plans.

Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

Barack Puts A Spoke In McSame’s Caging Operation!

Published by
admin
September 14, 2008 in Civil/Human Rights, Election Fraud, Politics and The Dems. 0 Comments

You can check the status of your registration every day right up to the cutoff date. This puts a monster spike in the right wing caging operation. Check that registration every few days until the election. If you suddenly fall off of the rolls and it is before the cutoff date–re-register! If after that date get on the phone to the Obama campaign! Way to go Obama campaign!

Emailed from the Obama campaign:

You’d be surprised how many people you know aren’t registered to vote.

Registration deadlines are coming up soon, and we need every single vote we can get to win this election.

Tell your friends, family, and neighbors to check out our new one-stop voter registration website.

VoteforChange.com makes it easier than ever to register. Instead of tracking down the right forms, all you need to do is answer a few basic questions and you’ll be ready to vote. You can also:

  • Confirm your existing registration
  • Apply to vote absentee
  • Find your polling place

If you don’t know your own registration status or you’d like to learn more, take a minute to visit the site right now.

This race is too close and too important to stay home on Election Day.

A Step Backward For Voting System Transparency

Published by
admin
July 29, 2008 in Election Fraud, Government and US News. 0 Comments

Courtesy Slashdot:

Verified Voting is reporting that Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Senator Robert Bennett (R-UT) introduced the Bipartisan Electronic Voting Reform Act (S. 3212). While having many commendable features, this bill also has a few stinkers, including language that would exempt from any verification requirement those paperless voting systems purchased before January 1, 2009 to meet HAVA’s accessibility requirements. This would leave millions of voters (particularly those with disabilities) dependent on insecure paperless electronic machines for years to come. The Senate Rules and Administration Committee will hold a hearing tomorrow, so if you have an opinion, now is the time to make yourself heard. Rush Holt has a much better bill.

Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

Voter Rolls in several States purged!!!

Published by
admin
July 29, 2008 in Election Fraud, Government and Politics. 0 Comments

From DKos:

I understand this isn’t a “Diary” per say, but it is incredibly important we get this out in front of as many people as possible and I am willing to sacrafice my daily diary to do that.

Basically the one and only Greg Palast has teamed up with Robert F. Kennedy to investigate several cases on voter purges taking place right now all over the United States but most notably in the West/Southwest area. He’s asking all of us to donate whatever we can to get his documentary about this produced and on the air. You can read the details below I will be quoting extensively from Palast’s article since he wants the word to be spread on this.

DeanDemocrat’s diary :: ::
In swing-state Colorado, the Republican Secretary of State conducted the biggest purge of voters in history, dumping a fifth of all registrations. Guess their color.

In swing-state Florida, the state is refusing to accept about 85,000 new registrations from voter drives – overwhelming Black voters.

In swing state New Mexico, HALF of the Democrats of Mora, a dirt poor and overwhelmingly Hispanic county, found their registrations disappeared this year, courtesy of a Republican voting contractor.

In swing states Ohio and Nevada, new federal law is knocking out tens of thousands of voters who lost their homes to foreclosure.

Think about those figures. In 2000 they purged the voter rolls in Florida and Gore officially “lost” by 532 Votes. Today they’re purging 85,000! New Mexico has been one of the closest states in the Union for the last 3 Presidential Elections and our Primary literally came down to a handful of ballots in the state. Today they’re purging half a city.

This needs to be fixed and it needs to be fixed soon!

Heres how you can help Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy fix this problem and restore fairness in this election.

Article Continues @ Sourced Site.

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