Computer error giving Bush votes caused by ES&S - has Bush connections

[mcg]

At Yahoo News: Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes

<http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=694&e=2&u=/ap/voting_problems>

"A technician from the Omaha, Neb. company that designed the software,
Election Systems & Software Inc., was working to diagnose and fix the problem."

ELECTION SYSTEMS & SOFTWARE
11208 John Galt Blvd
Omaha, NE 68137-2320
402-593-0101
Aldo Tesi President
Bill Welsh Chairman Of The Board
Michael Limas Chief Operating Officer
Tom Brien Chief Financial Officer
Computer Peripheral Equipment, Optical Scanning Devices

<http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/news/die_bold.htm >

"ELECTION SYSTEMS & SOFTWARE (ES&S).
CEO: Aldo Tesi
Supplies nearly half the voting machines used in the United States.
ES&S is a subsidiary of McCarthy Group Inc., which is jointly held
by the holding firm and the Omaha World-Herald Co., which publishes
the state’s largest newspaper.
Former conservative radio talk-show host and now Republican U.S.
Senator Chuck Hagel was the head of, and continues to own part
interest in, ES&S (then AIS), who installed, programmed, and largely
ran the voting machines that were used by most of the citizens of
Nebraska, in elections where Hagel won very unexpected landslide victories.
Senator Hagel is a key advocate for the Bush campaign, and with his
experience on the Senate Commerce Committee focusing on telecommunications
and trade, was once considered as a Vice Presidential running mate for
George Walker Bush"

This needs to be media blasted.

[eleonora]

1. the media are owned by Bush corporate whores

it'll take a fight ...grr

[demnan]

2. Kerry didn't want to fight

why should I at this point?

[BUSHOUT]

8. A concession speach means nothing legally.

Are you incapable of action without a visible leader saying "do this"?

[Straight Shooter]

19. Perfect comeback.

Thank you. Kerry must remain above the fray. He absolutely must for there to be any credibility on his part, at this stage of the game.

[Politicub]

10. I think you need to ask yourself that question

Not us. If you've pinned all your hopes on Kerry or the Dem party, you have to be prepared for setbacks and disappointments.

[rock]

11. Well, I cast my vote for Kerry

to help myself, not Kerry. And in 2000, I cast it for Gore, again to help myself.

[trotsky]

3. ES&S, formerly run by now-Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE)

His machines gave him 84% of the vote in his last election - an unheard of margin, even for a Republican in Nebraska.

[Gato Moteado]

6. and no mention in the mainstream news.....

go figure.

[symphony]

25. wow, no thoughts of CONFLICT OF INTEREST

this is so cheeky :grr:

[Don Claybrook]

4. Anyone else notice John Galt Blvd?

If the company named the street, as opposed to just moving into quarters that already resided on the street, it's pretty telling. Rand freaks.

[Sabriel]

14. On the other hand, it could be prophetic

I don't know about you, but I have a Galt-ish braindrain planned of my own.

[Bluebear]

17. Chimpy Shrugged.

[foo_bar]

45. in fairness to Ayn Rand freaks, they're scared too

http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=8400

[grannylib]

5. *sigh* I guess that comes as no surprise now, does it? Still, it never

ceases to amaze me, really - the level of corruption to which people will sink, all while waving the flag, wearing their shallow theology/theocracy on their sleeves, and touting their "moral" values. It makes me sick.:puke:
You bet I'll help get the word out.
Thanks for the post.B-)

[glitch]

7. Take a few minutes to read this - they all have * connections

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm

[teryang]

12. J'accuse!

Awesome article. Thanks.

Too bad Gibbs suffered an "untimely death."

[glitch]

18. Hallelujah I do not post in vain! I've been posting this all over DU

today - thanks for reading. It helps to know who we're dealing with, doesn't it?

[teryang]

20. It's an awesome link

I've seen various aspects of these facts posted on DU at one time or another for some time now, but it is beautifully put together and undeniably convincing.

[symphony]

24. here is the CNN article on the same topic

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/11/05/voting.problems.ap/index.html

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said.

Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.

Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch.

State and county election officials did not immediately respond to requests by The Associated Press for more details about the voting system and its vendor, and whether the error, if repeated elsewhere in Ohio, could have affected the outcome.
Bush won the state by more than 136,000 votes, according to unofficial results, and Kerry conceded the election on Wednesday after acknowledging that 155,000 provisional ballots yet to be counted in Ohio would not change the result
The Secretary of State's Office said Friday it could not revise Bush's total until the county reported the error.
The Ohio glitch is among a handful of computer troubles that have emerged since Tuesday's elections.
In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. And in San Francisco, a malfunction with custom voting software could delay efforts to declare the winners of four races for county supervisor.
In the Ohio precinct in question, the votes are recorded onto a cartridge. On one of the three machines at that precinct, a malfunction occurred in the recording process, Damschroder said. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred.
Damschroder said people who had seen poll results on the election board's Web site called to point out the discrepancy. The error would have been discovered when the official count for the election is performed later this month, he said.
The reader also recorded zero votes in a county commissioner race on the machine.
Workers checked the cartridge against memory banks in the voting machine and each showed that 115 people voted for Bush on that machine. With the other machines, the total for Bush in the precinct added up to 365 votes.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a glitch occurred with software designed for the city's new "ranked-choice voting," in which voters list their top three choices for municipal offices. If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes outright, voters' second and third-place preferences are then distributed among candidates who weren't eliminated in the first round.
When the San Francisco Department of Elections tried a test run on Wednesday of the program that does the redistribution, some of the votes didn't get counted and skewed the results, director John Arntz said.
"All the information is there," Arntz said. "It's just not arriving the way it was supposed to."
A technician from the Omaha, Neb. company that designed the software, Election Systems & Software Inc., was working to diagnose and fix the problem

[glitch]

28. Bit different - my post article is about the rw idealogues who own the

vote machines written in Feb 2004. Here's a snip:

"Increasingly, investigative writers seeking an explanation have looked to Diebold’s history for clues. The electronic voting industry is dominated by only a few corporations – Diebold, Election Systems & Software (ES&S) and Sequoia. Diebold and ES&S combined count an estimated 80% of U.S. black box electronic votes.

In the early 1980s, brothers Bob and Todd Urosevich founded ES&S’s originator, Data Mark. The brothers Urosevich obtained financing from the far-Right Ahmanson family in 1984, which purchased a 68% ownership stake, according to the Omaha World Herald. After brothers William and Robert Ahmanson infused Data Mark with new capital, the name was changed to American Information Systems (AIS). California newspapers have long documented the Ahmanson family’s ties to right-wing evangelical Christian and Republican circles.

In 2001, the Los Angeles Times reported, “. . . primarily funded by evangelical Christians – particularly the wealthy Ahmanson family of Irvine – the institute’s $1-million annual program has produced 25 books, a stream of conferences and more than 100 fellowships for doctoral and postdoctoral research.” The chief philanthropists of the Discovery Institute, that pushes creationist science and education in California, are Howard and Roberta Ahmanson.

According to Group Watch, in the 1980s Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr. was a member of the highly secretive far-Right Council for National Policy, an organization that included Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, Major General John K. Singlaub and other Iran-Contra scandal notables, as well as former Klan members like Richard Shoff. Ahmanson, heir to a savings and loan fortune, is little reported on in the mainstream U.S. press. But, English papers like The Independent are a bit more forthcoming on Ahmanson’s politics."

[symphony]

31. yes, I'm sorry, I meant

"in the general vicinity of the topic"

voter fraud through electronic voting

sorry

[glitch]

36. No need to apologize! I just wanted to make sure you read it

and didn't pass over it, thinking it was about the same thing.

[skip fox]

9. I hope Soros's reward of $10,000,000 for proof of this type of fraud

flushes out a programer or some up in management.

[OutsourceBush]

40. I diod not hear of this, if it is true it needs to be posted all over

the Internet.

[Trillo]

13. Translation

From the yahoo article titled Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes: "Either way, he said, such tallying software ought to have a way to ensure that the totals don't exceed the number of voters."

Translation:
Controls must be put in place so that synthetic margin adjustments don't exceed actual voter turnout. The evidence of any synthetic count must be hidden so that it's undiscoverable during audit.

[Sabriel]

15. Another article for people to ignore

Yes, it was rigged. Does anyone care except us? Apparently not.

[kayell]

16. A bizarre *coincidence*

When I rated the article and got the results

You have given the news article Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes a rating of 5.
Its current average rating is 3.55 with 3568* vote(s).

Yahoo also did me the favor of showing me an ad for depression medication.

*someone is really having to work hard to keep the rating of this story down.

[laundry_queen]

26. hmm, when I rated it the numbers were different...

Avg Rating: 4.10, 162 votes - Your Rating: 5

Maybe if there were many votes coming from one IP they blocked it? Or is the tally just screwed?

[kayell]

33. Maybe they let ES&S program their rating system

I've seen some strange numbers over there at times.

[DeadManInc]

43. rating

You have given the news article Ohio Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Votes a rating of 5.
Its current average rating is 3.78 with 332 vote(s).

[Cattledog]

21. It's gonna be worse in 2008

if we don't move on these machines fast. Donate to www.blackboxvoting.org

[Gyre]

22. You can say that again!

I gave $50 today. Can only hope that we're in time.

Gyre

[dhinojosa]

35. Especially if George W. Bush runs again......

don't believe me? Republicans with control of all aspects of gov't will make it so.

[Nancy Waterman]

23. ESS also makes punch card ballots in Ohio

A friend of mine was involved in a project to uncover the fraud about the punch card ballots. It was supposed to come out in Vanity Fair, but they canned it at the last minute. Now that it seems the process has been repeated in Ohio, I have convinced him to go public with the story (though still anonymously). Here it is:

WHAT HAPPENED IN FLORIDA 2000

I was involved in uncovering some serious irregularities that occurred in Florida's 2000 election. At the time, we had neither the mandate nor the resources to conduct a further investigation.

Based on the irregularities we found, we concluded that an election equipment manufacturing company called Election Systems and Software deliberately supplied different types of paper ballots to predominately Democratic Counties than were supplied to predominately Republican Counties. The differences, which are nearly impossible to ascertain without sophisticated tests, resulted in the statistically high number of undervotes or hanging chads in Democratic areas.

Apparently the same type of punch card technology was used in both Democratic and Republican counties yet there were never any statistical abnormalities in the Republican counties. We believe this was not by accident but by design and this action was sufficient to alter the election results. Without noticeable difference, punch cards can differ by the direction of the grain in the paper and by the amount of pressure used by the production machine that scores the cards for the rectangular punch holes.

This does not appear to have been an isolated situation in Florida, but a pattern of illegality that has been occurring for several years in key races nationwide and possibly in several foreign countries.

For two years we have been waiting for a major network news operation to break the story. Even though they had given us their word, they postponed the airdate three times. As we have seen what could be a repeat of this pattern in the 2004 election, we believe it is imperative to alert the public, since we are doubtful that the network program will ever be shown.

Our concern is that these same individuals have attempted a similar action in 2004 with paper ballots in those counties that are still using them, as well as with versions of optical scan and electronic touchscreens. Adding to this concern is a unique bond between ESS and the other major manufacturer of election equipment, Diebold. Two brothers who began ESS now run both Diebold's Election Division and ESS and together account for the lion's share of the market in the United States.

The way it would work was this: County Election Supervisors are often overworked and quite overwhelmed at times. The ESS sales representative would stop by and offer to print the county ballots for a very competitive fee. Many times the Supervisor would go ahead as it would be much easier than preparing all the specs for an outside printer since ESS knows the exact specifications for their machines. Once ESS got the order, each ballot lot was assigned numerical codes. Certain lots were manufactured one way and others a different way. Electron microscopic tests seem to indicate that one of the indentations was not as deep as the others in the Gore chad. This would allow it to "hang" or even curl back up thus resulting in an undervote.

As to the approaches used in the optical scan, touch screen machines and even the software used in the machines that count the punch cards, I would have to defer to others and their expertise.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

[glitch]

29. Maybe Vanity Fair will reconsider, given recent events.

Harpers is good, perhaps they'd like an option?

[loudsue]

27. This needs to get more air time....awesome articles here..

:kick::kick::kick::kick:

[B Calm]

46. I agree..

KICK

[bettyellen]

30. whoa, kck!

[anotherginger]

32. and wasn't this Microsoft based software?.....

and Bill Gates gave mucho money to *....

I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you!

[0rganism]

38. Microsoft gave more money to Kerry than they did to bush, actually

Microsoft is Kerry's 5th largest corporate donor, at $269,047
Microsoft is bush's 19th largest corporate donor, at $193,040

[AP]

34. ES&S was the company that would have counted Venezuelan recall votes had..

...Chávez not given them la bota.

[yardwork]

37. kick

[OutsourceBush]

39. I was posting about this on DU before the election and I was ignored

[SoCalDem]

41. Hundreds of us have been researching and reporting this since 2K

Bev STARTED here.. We at DU have known and reported on it FOREVER.....but....

DU does not run CNN/ABC/NBC/MSGOP/FOX/CBS..


We are a teensy cardboard tube compared to the major media megaphone who steadfastly REFUSES to cover this issue, except for a few minutes here and there..and even then, they report it as if anyone who actually believes "this stuff" is a conspiracy nuy..

They are little help..

[Baja Margie]

42. So the software was rigged

and there's no way to prove it. Maybe that's why it's so quiet. I guess the next question is, will we ever know life as it was before the last two elections, or is this the beginning of the end.

Damn it.

[SoCalDem]

44. The overwhelming numbers were our last hope..and it almost

worked..but blabbermouths that the Dems are, they shouted it from the rooftops.. Karl has excellent hearing..

Exit polls were right again..just like Florida, so they were immediately discredited, and halted AGAIN..just like in 02.. they started, but the abruptly stopped, and NEVER released the info...and Georgia was Diebolded..bigtime..

I knew in my herat that Florida would not be "it" this year.. they strategy was to tweak the popular numbers here and there all over, in safe states, causing no attention to be drawn to it.. and Ohio would be "it" this time....There's only a difference of 136K.. THAT's his mandate..

Why else would they have been SO eager to holler fraud, and post so many challenges?? they put all the eggs in Ohio's basket..

[quiet.american]

47. So much corruption

All the President's Men is one of my favorite movies, but each time I watch it, I can't help but think if those events took place now they would never see the light of day.

Why was Hagel allowed to take office when his company counted the votes?????

Here's an idea, let's all open up our own electronic voting machine companies and vote ourselves into office. :)

[BlueNomad]

48. kick

kick