Hillary 2004: "Without paper, voting machines could be programmed to help GOP steal elections"

[Amaryllis]

Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Bob Graham co-sponsored a bill to require paper prior to the 2004 election because they saw the writing on the wall This is an excellent article that lays out all the problems and controversy around the introduction of paperless DREs.

I read this August of 2004 and knew then it was going to be stolen, along with a lot of other DUers. Now finally we have NYT publishing a video of a voting machine hack by a cyber security expert.
See https://www.democraticunderground.com/100210459183

It has been exceedingly difficult to get attention on this issue. Verified Voting has worked tirelessly since before the 2004 election and it was through their efforts that the NYT piece happened.


The Nation
How They Could Steal the Election This Time
Electronic counts, unaudited touch-screen ballots, enhance opportunities for fraud.
By Ronnie Dugger
July 29, 2004


In the US Senate seven Democrats and the one Independent are co-sponsoring a bill by Senators Bob Graham and Hillary Clinton to require paper trails on DREs by November, with a loophole for jurisdictions whose officials deem it to be technologically impossible. Clinton told the press that without a voter-verified paper trail GOP-leaning corporations might program voting machines to help Republicans steal elections [see sidebar, page 16]. In an interview in his hideaway office in the Capitol, Graham told me that he regards his and Clinton’s bill as so obviously needed that it’s “a no-brainer.” The absence of a paper trail on the DREs could endanger “the legitimacy” of November’s election, Graham said.

New Jersey Democrat Rush Holt introduced a House bill more than a year ago requiring a paper trail on DREs. It has 149 co-sponsors, including a few prominent Republicans. Holt says, “The verification has to be something that the voter herself or himself has to do”; without that, “we will never have a truly secure election.” Holt’s bill has opened up a partisan divide in the House. The chairman of the committee to which his bill is assigned, Ohio Republican Bob Ney, informed Holt that he is against the bill and would not allow a hearing on it. A few days later Graham and Holt wrote their fellow members of Congress that “without an independent, voter-verified paper trail, we will be able only to guess whether votes are accurately counted.” Last month Ney relented and scheduled two hearings. Holt plans to offer his bill as an amendment to the Treasury appropriation after Congress returns from its August recess. Graham is still mulling his strategy.

Much more:
https://www.thenation.com/article/how-they-could-steal-election-time/

And of course we know that much more than a paper trail is needed, but the point is a lot of people were on it way back then and trying to do something about it.

[questionseverything]

1. a paper trail is not enough but it is better than no paper

until we have hand marked ,hand counted paper ballots and a tight chain of custody for the reporting we don't have true elections

[Amaryllis]

4. Yes, we need much more than that, but my point was that Hillary and many others

were sounding the alarm long ago and trying to do something about it.

[questionseverything]

5. election integrity is my main concern

I wish hc would of sued to examine voting machines/software and for handcounts in wis,mich

even from the limited recount stein got done we discovered in wis between 2-30% of votes were not counted correctly before the repubs stopped it

my point was it isn't enough to have paper, we average citizens need to be able to oversee the count

[diva77]

11. +1,000,000 This!!!

Do you have a link to the 2-30% info?

In addition to the need for hand counted paper ballots at precinct level with public oversight, there needs to be oversight of how elections officials handle requests for recounts -- they are getting away with 100% obstruction with tactics such as intimidation, and obscene $$ charges for recounts.

[questionseverything]

14. o worse than i remembered...9% to 30%

http://bradblog.com/?cat=563

I'm joined on today's show by longtime election integrity advocate and WIE's statewide coordinator KAREN McKIM to discuss the group's findings, revealing that the ballot scanning computers used in some 57 municipalities across the state had failed to tally anywhere from 2% to 6% of the ballots with valid Presidential votes in each of the Racine precincts they were allowed to examine a week or so ago. In other WI cities which chose to count by hand during Stein's "recount", McKim tells me, those same scanners had originally missed anywhere from 9% to 30% of valid Presidential votes! All of that in a state which Donald Trump is said to have won last year by less than 1%.

"They were ignored by the voting system entirely," says McKim, "and that's what made the miscount - or should have made the miscount obvious to the election officials even before they certified. You could look at those election results that the voting machines spit out on their face and you could see that hundreds of votes were just missing. If you compared the total number of ballots cast to the total number of presidential votes counted, you should have known --- they should have known --- that two percent of the voters didn't go to the polls so that they could cast a blank ballot. The miscounts were obvious at the time of the canvas, and the county officials did nothing about it."

[diva77]

21. thanks for this

[questionseverything]

23. so glad you are interested

[questionseverything]

15. about request for recounts...you are so right

paper ballots don't do any good if the public is not allowed to count them

but I feel we really need to" get it right election night"

technology should be used to make vote counting transparent, I would love to see every precinct hand counted and live streamed

[RandomAccess]

19. Recounts

Oversight is good.

Perhaps you know this, but for anyone who may not know -- each state determines how recounts can be requested and held. One of the things the manufacturers of electronic voting machines did when they were first getting them bought and installed was to get various state leges to change the laws making it actually more difficult to even get a recount.

[elleng]

2. Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Bob Graham co-sponsored a bill

to require paper prior to the 2004 election.

[saidsimplesimon]

3. Yes, we need paper ballots.

It troubles me that technology has become a tool to exploit rather than serve a fair and honest election voting process. Hackers, stalkers and attacks on American democracy. Is that what my ancestors died for?

[RandomAccess]

6. Not just could be, have been

at least since 2002, but more likely 2000. In 2000 it wasn't hanging chads but the scanners in other counties in FL that were the problem.

[questionseverything]

16. lance dehaven smith counted the overvotes

votes where the person voted for gore and then also wrote his name in as a write in(or for bush)

2/3of those 175,000over votes were for gore

a hand count would of shown the intent of the voter but as things happened those votes ( from mostly black precincts) went uncounted

[RandomAccess]

17. It's the funniest thing --

most of the anomalies -- and by most I mean something like 90+ percent -- you ever see, go in favor of the Republicans.

[questionseverything]

18. richard charnin has done alot of research about that

Bev Harris ( http://blackboxvoting.org/fraction-magic-1/
Fraction Magic – Part 1: Votes are being counted as fractions instead of as whole numbers ), and against the media that was complicit in covering up the crime of election theft by adjusting the exit polls to match the fraudulent voting machine counts which was found by Richard Charnin and Beth Clarkson ( http://showmethevotes.org/ ).

http://bradblog.com/?p=11713

Richard's math

______________________________________________
Consider this:

The Election 2004 Incident Database shows that Kerry votes were flipped to Bush votes in 86 of 88 vote switching incidents.

The probability P that at least 86 of 88 votes would flip to Bush is ONE IN SEVENTY-NINE BILLION TRILLION.

Here is the proof:
Let P be the probability that 86 or 87 or 88 votes flip to Bush.
P = Prob(86)+ Prob (87)+ Prob(88)

Prob(86)= 1.23689E-23 = BINOMDIST(86,88,0.5,FALSE)
Prob(87)= 2.84343E-25 = BINOMDIST(87,88,0.5,FALSE)
Prob(88)= 3.23117E-27 = BINOMDIST(88,88,0.5,FALSE)

P = Prob (86 or 87 or 88)= 0.00000000000000000000001266
or 1 in 79,010,724,999,066,700,000,000

How do you express a number that large?
Is there anything comparable, anywhere?
Are there that many stars in the universe?
Are there that many grains of sand on the Earth?

How long would it take to flip that many coins?
If you flip one coin every second, that's 3600 in an hour, 86,400 in a day, 31,536,000 in a year.
It would take 2,505,413,654,206,830 (2505 trillion) years!

To put it in perspective, the universe is is "only" 14 billion years old.

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9302

so yes it seems mathematically impossible that the shift benefits the repubs so often

[malaise]

7. K & R

Elections matter

[C Moon]

8. This is still relevant today.

[YOHABLO]

9. What I don't understand (well I kind of do) why this is not front and center to the U.S. public.

I posted this in another thread but if you'd like to read: "The myth of the hacker proof voting machine"

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/magazine/the-myth-of-the-hacker-proof-voting-machine.html

[triron]

10. Well at least 1/2 the public don't bother to vote.

[Cha]

12. She knew back then..

Mahalo, Amaryllis

[DFW]

13. My brother 2002: give me a laptop and a cell phone, and I'll control any of the voting machines

My brother is not just some computer geek. He works on sensitive computer projects for DARPA and other government agencies.

He is very closed-mouthed, and never tells me any details about anything, but when the first round of questionable results came out of the 2002 midterms (Max Cleland "losing" his Senate seat to Saxby Chambliss in Georgia, for example), I asked him how reliable he thought the results reported from those machines were. He said "Give me a laptop and a cell phone, and I'll make any one of those things give you any result you want." It didn't even matter if they were connected to the internet or not. He said there were ways around that, and their programming had more holes than Swiss cheese. In 2002, he said that no one interested in tamper-proof vote tallying would ever use them.

He has not changed his assessment of the situation since.

[RandomAccess]

20. +1,000,000,000

[R B Garr]

22. K&R