The "MASSIVE CONSPIRACY"

[skids]

Ask yourself this.

"How many people are in a position to intentionally cause the loss of even just a few democratic votes at at least one precinct in the United States?"

. 1 to 5 poll workers, per precinct, who can intentionally screw something up.
. 1 election judge, per precinct, who can wrongly tell a voter they are not eligible
. An unknown number of people at the power company, who can discourage voters by taking the machines down for a few hours with a brown-out or power outage
. 3 to 20 people at the county board of elections, per county, who can "accidentally" screw up a ballot, or give poll workers confusing training, or any of many, many other things.
. A voting company field technician
. One of many other employees of a voting machine company
. A print shop, by printing bad opscan ballots
. 5 to 50 people, per state, at the secretary of state's office
. An unknown number of thug freepers running disinformation campaigns and challenging voters at the polls
. A dishonest registration drive canvasser prior to the election, by destroying registration forms
. An unknown number of post office employees, by delaying absentee ballots to or from the voter
. An unknown number of e-spooks tapping into communications links to central tabulators
. Some number of Police officers, by threatening to tow voters cars as they wait in line, putting up roadblocks in inconvenient places, and who knows what else
. Emergency personnel, real or fake, who can temporarily close the polls for "security threats", trash-can fires, or anything else they can come up with, causing a few inconvenienced voters to leave
. Employers, by being ultra strict about lunch-break durations for those trying to squeeze a trip to the poll between their two day jobs
. Several minor court judges, in badly timed findings about election law especially with regard to provisional ballots


...did I miss any? What's that make, maybe an average of 100 people for each precinct has a way to screw up the vote?

Now, as to this "massive conspiracy" how many of those 100 or so people would actually do such a thing? We do know that at least a few would do so, and a whole lot more, because we know about the "Texas Strike Force", the posters telling people to vote on Wednesday, and the "you're not registered" canvassers.

But of those 100 people or so, how many would do just one shady little thing to help their beloved chimp along? Keep in mind now, for some "It's for the good of the country" and for others "to protect our fundamental values" and still for others "because my business will profit from another Bush term" and even "because someone will pay me to."

While you are pondering your answer, ponder also these snippets of statistics from various Google results on cheating:

. 22% of married men reportedly have cheated on their spouses
. 14% percent of women have claimed infidelity
. About a third of the 2,100 students taking part in a 1999 survey on 21 campuses admitted to serious test cheating, 75% to less serious cheating
. A 2002 national survey by Rutgers' Management Education Center of 4,500 high school students found that 75 percent of them engage in serious cheating
. More than half have plagiarized work they found on the Internet.
. Some 50 percent of those responding to the survey said they don't think copying questions and answers from a test is even cheating.
. 10.7 percent of taxpayers have written off a vacation as a business expense
. 14.5 percent have neglected to report cash income
. 6.2 percent say that it's fine to report a higher donation to charity than was actually given
. 21 percent of taxpayers say that they believe it's OK to cheat by claiming personal automobile use for business

... and those are just the polls, look at our court systems to see how many people get caught doing sleazy things... think how many get away with it.

So out of those 100 or so people, how hard would it be to find a petty bribe taker? How likely would that 100 or so people be to include a "true believer" or personally motivated individual that doesn't even need to be told what to do...

Enough with the "massively impossible conspiracy" canard people. ENOUGH!

[On the Road]

1. That Appears to be What Happened in Florida 2000

lots of small things added up to a Bush win. And if Ohio was indeed stolen, it was probably done the same way.

[berniew1]

18. Florida had some big things: touch screen fraud & dirty tricks,etc.

Touch screen fraud/switching from Kerry to Bush(and Castor to Martinez) in the big touch screen counties; widespread systematic dirty tricks statewide to reduce minority and student vote, manipulation of registrations, absentees, provisionals, widespread malfeasance, etc.
http://www.flcv.com/fraudpat.html
http://www.flcv.com/palmbeao.html
http://www.flcv.com/browardo.html
http://www.flcv.com/dadeo.html

Florida had by far the most touch screen switching reported in EIRS hotline system election day than any other state; plus more reported irregularities statewide than any other state. And the most widespread systematic(illegal)dirty tricks to reduce minority and student votes.
http://www.flcv.com/studentv.html

[kster]

2. I don't know

if it was true, about the guy in Florida that said criminal's where rigging the vote in a Florida correctional facility.If this is true,they would have full control over the people who would be possible whistle blowers.If you were promised 10 years instead of 25 years, for helping to rig an election, wouldn't you shut your mouth and do it? To top it all off the criminals may not have even known what they where rigging.

[GuvWurld]

6. Welcome to Manchuria

kster wrote: "the criminals may not have even known what they where rigging."

It adds up:

brainwash the masses with Orwellian paradoxes so they ardently defend their oppressors and the destruction of their planet;

ask them about Raymond "*" Shaw and they'll swear he's a man of God who only unleashes powerful armies to kill in the name of good;

and then herd people through a system designed with every possible susceptibility to fraud, creating maximum temptation to unwittingly do wrong even while consciously "doing the right thing"

[Wilms]

3. But, but, but...you mean some people are dishonest? n/t

[Senator]

4. They don't consider it "dishonesty," as such

What we fail to comprehend here on the left (though it's demonstrated to be true over and over) is that they literally believe that not getting caught is the same as doing right. They simply believe their own propaganda of irresponsibility and "self-defense" against evil liberals.

Yes, to us members of the "reality-based" crowd this is in fact a form of mental illness. But this is exactly what people mean when they say a society's "gone mad" (Roman Empire, Nazi Germany).

You can't bargain or reason with these people.

It matters little whether their "higher calling" is SuperPatriotism, the Lord's Will, or simply some self-delusional Machiavellian claptrap about Projecting our SuperPowerfulness for the Freedom and Happiness of the World (unless of course it begins to eat into the profits).

For them, it is a higher morality. And yes, simply because they believe so. And yes, they can believe the polar opposite tommorrow should it suit their immediate purpose. And yes, they can rationalize any crime against humanity, nature, or their fellow (former) Americans.

That's just how "belief" works.

__

[Wilms]

5. I understand and agree

I was just being snarky in my post.

But I've assumed that a given decent person, hoodwinked "to save democracy", would do anything.

And remember Fawn "Sometimes you have to go above the law" Hall, Ollie North's assistant?

I know just what she means. I walk my dog off leash.

[sacxtra]

7. Well Said Skids. It fits right in with my FLOWCHART no problem.

[skids]

9. A few suggestions on the diagram

It isn't quite clear whether the diagram is meant to represent a particular system or a general look at common features of most systems. A title might clear that up.

In the section on chips:

You hardly ever see discrete logic gates anymore. What you do see, though, are FPGA chips, which don't need to be hacked in the core design sheets because you load firmware into them before using them. Only the firmware needs to be hacked, and on many of the chips, the firmware is not burned in permanantly and can be reprogrammed anytime. In addition numerous chips are not surface mounted, but mounted in sockets and could be replaced by hacked chips in the field, including chips which embedd radio frequency transponders or transponders that can communicate over power lines or any other attached wire.

About "takeup reel": that's an obselete term. In the voting world they are called "precinct tapes" (though they are usually strips of paper.)

About hacking signals: "Add an invertor" is pretty much gibberish. It is sufficient to say that any signal travelling on any wire can be hacked as long as there is a way to tap into the signal.

About the bottom of the diagram: The scanner should be labeled as either a scanner or DRE screen. Precinct tapes should pop directly out of the scanner or from a central unit, because the diagram is a bit confusing as is.

[BeFree]

8. Just one person

The person who writes the code can steal a million votes.

For those idiots who have faith in the current mish-mash of inherently corruptible voting systems, I say: Grow Up. Quit with the childish foolishness of believing the slave-masters are doing you right. They are screwing you every way they can. Grow the F**k Up!

[Einsteinia]

10. Huh? It doesn't take a conspiracy in the

traditional sense. Avi Rubin of Johns-Hopkins says what people fail to realize is that new computer fraud methods do not require any more than ONE corrupt software programmer.

It used to be that you'd need people at each "retail" site--each precinct--to stuff ballot boxes, etc.

Nowadays, you need just one software programmer (at the "wholesale" site) to write an algorithm to make certain that your candidate wins by a certain margin.

Many people refuse to believe that the election was stolen, because they can't believe that the amount of people required to pull it off would keep quiet. This is the primary reason why fellow liberals, such as Molly Ivins, Michael Moore, Jon Stewart, Al Franken, and others, fail to get it.

Look at this way, Saddam Hussein won by a 100-to-1 margin. Does that make it an incontrovertible fact of his election's accuracy.

Stepford Dems: WAKE UP!

[Helga Scow Stern]

11. Yes! Thanks for saying this, Einsteinia.

[FogerRox]

12. yeah ditto

[skids]

13. Let's temper this a bit.

First off, "one" software developer cannot influence 100% of the vote, because more than one company is selling the machines. Yes, the companies and all their employees are in a position to influence a large portion of the vote. But when you say "fraud methods do not require any more than ONE corrupt software programmer" you make it sound like one single programmer could have done the whole job in 2004. It is hyperbole, and it takes away from your credibility.

Secondly, there WAS fraud and suppression (you guys really seem to like to forget about the latter) at non-computerized precincts. A LOT of low-tech tricks were used both before and after the voters walked in the door of the polling place. If you come out screaming "it's the tabulators" then how is that going to sound in a county where there were no tabulators? Like you're a screaming looney, that's what.

People, you have to recognize that this was NEITHER a massive conspiracy of BoE officials, NOR was it one hacker in a dimly lit room. To borrow from BattleStar Galactica, it was a well coordinated Keep-In-The-Vote operation (a fraud/suppresion mothership of big machine companies and Republican skunk works) leading a rag-tag fleet of small-time local corruption.

I know, I know ... "if they hadn't done the suppression; if they hadn't had a few user-visible glitches; if they hadn't caused a few pre-election controversies, they wouldn't be able to sheild the mothership from public view. It was all just a smokescreen."

I don't velieve that. Haven't you hacker-in-the-back-room-did-it people stopped for a moment to consider that all these documented cases, the ones for which there is ample evidence, might amount to just as many lost votes as the large systematic variety of fraud? Isn't it just faintly plausible that they would have preferred small isolated incidents of fraud and used the large scale technological manipulation as a last resort? After all, swamping us with thousands of things to investigate, all of which can be argued at the end to not have been "signifigant enough to effect the final result" is a pretty clever strategy.

Take a moment and look at yourself in the proverbial mirror. Can you honestly say that anyone who already doesn't know will believe a word of the hyperbole you come out shouting? If you want to make a dent, you have to tone down the screaming and present the unaware people with a plausible scenario.

[Wilms]

14. If you want to make a dent...

...listen to the man.

[roseBudd]

16. You said: "non-computerized precincts", huh...

what would constitute a non computer tabulated vote system. Levers?

[skids]

17. Not all precincts are even tabulated.

Small towns using a variety of methods, including paper ballots, "tabulated" by hand. They read the results off the machine with human eyeballs, deliver paper with human hands, and someone in the town clerk's office adds together the results of the 1-10 precincts in the town on a 99 cent calculator. The "tabulator" in this case is a human being.

In Massachussetts, where we have a large amount of opscan, some places are centrally tabulated but most are not. The way this works is that there is a scanning machine at the precinct, which produces two copies of a paper tape at the day's end.

One copy of the tape is taken by the town clerk and used to report the results to the state SoS.

The other copy of the tape is pasted to the door of the precinct. All a citizen would need to do to verify that there was no tabulation problem is go to each precinct in his town with a notepad or a hand-scanner, scan in the tape on the door, add them up himself, and look later at the state SoS's results and see if they match. Now did anyone actually do that? Probably not many this year. If we get our act together instead of running around yelling about our personal pet theories as to "how it happened" then maybe it will actually get done in 2006. Then at least we will know, if there was fraud, whether it happened before or after those paper tapes got printed.

In summary, the "tabulator" is NOT the best point of attack in some systems. In fact, the VERY BEST point of attack this year was... drumroll please... voter registration and provisional ballots. HAVA was perverted to make an age-old tactic twice as effective. This works and has always worked because they can try to blame that on the voters or "clerical error"... "Oh they should have checked in 4 weeks before the election to make sure their name hadn't been removed" or "oh they voted at the wrong precinct."

Untold numbers of votes were lost this year due to people getting knocked off the roles, having their precincts changed, or being told to file a provisional ballot (which was later disqualified) when they should have been allowed to vote on a normal ballot -- or at least told the correct precinct to go to.

How is all this "tabulator" ranting going to fix THAT problem? I'm not saying it isn't a part of the solution, but we need a FULL BORE solution to all these problems.

And it isn't coming from Washington DC or from your statehouse. Do you really in your wildest dreams believe that the incompetant patronage-job asshats that are in a lot of the town and county offices are going to be able to pull off changing their voting systems in UNDER A YEAR, which is about how much time will be left before anything gets passed through the distended intestinal tract of D.C.

No, what we need is armies of citizens prepared to do what they can to prevent disenfranchisement and audit the system. Help people register and stay registered. Get the registration list from the clerk's office once a week and look for the voter role purges and changes and contact everyone who was kicked off, get them back on the rolls before the election. Get people out to vote even in small town elections so they don't have an excuse to knock them off. Harange the clerks to get those absentee ballots out on time, and let them know you expect everything to be by the numbers and you'll be watching. Volunteer, train as poll-workers, and make damn sure everyone working at the polls knows what the hell they are doing and can spot a systematic error. Show up at the long lines on voting day with a few lawn chairs and some beverages. Catch the push pollers and misinformation canvassers and get them thrown in jail for trying to thwart the vote. Check the posted poll tapes, get the serial numbers off voting machines, document broken machines and problems better, faster, and more thoroughly.

We need -- GASP! -- of all things, community involvement.

And you don't build community involvement by waving your hands in the air and shouting "tabulators!" You get it from planning ahead. You get it from holding meetings, making TODO lists, recruiting volunteers, and convincing the public not that "this is what happened in 2004" but rather "unless you do these things, you have no idea what is going to happen in 2006."

Fortunately the first half is done. GOTV and voter protection organizations from 2004 are still around and now they have a bit of experience under their belt. If your state has one, join up, get your friends to join up, and get them to get theirs.

[roseBudd]

15. I agree it's like the mob, literally anyone could be the proverbial...

"dirty cop" by way of bribery, extortion or by volunteering. We (dems) have been so demonized by the right, that many repugs would not think twice about doimg the kinds of things we know they have done and more.

[berniew1]

19. Touch screen switching documented in 16 states; & manipulation & suppressi

suppression of minority and student voters in over 30, including sytematic dirty(illegal tricks) in most.

http://www.flcv.com/ussumall.html

[understandinglife]

20. Thank you again for these exceptional resource references (nt)