There are a couple of terrible reports showing up on the radar. I do not know if they are true, or not. I hope the mainstream media does their job and researches and either dispels this myth, or affirms the truth. Each of these articles has serious implications:

1.) Published on Saturday, November 6, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked by Thom Hartmann

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm

This Common Dreams article has a couple of important elements in it that raised warning signals for me. The first is that on television, the founder of BlackBoxVoting.Org had Howard Dean hack the result of a Diebold Machine in less than 90 seconds–without any traces. She provides the “How” for the conspiracy theory (or one of them). In addition, they uncover some common voting irregularities in Florida.

2.) Glitch gave Bush extra votes in Ohio

Friday, November 5, 2004 Posted: 4:15 PM EST (2115 GMT)

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

In this CNN article, a mainstream news organization actually provides an example of problems. Isn’t anyone else investigating this?

3.) Board awaits state followup

By ERIN MILLER

http://www.theeveningleader.com/articles/2004/11/06/news/news.01.txt

This is a smaller news source, but in The Evening Leader of St. Marys, OH, they reported that a former employee of ES&S (the company that programmed the voting machines) was working on the machines. I guess his presence on the system was prohibited by the election guidelines/policies. They are awating information about an investigation, but have not heard anything from Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell’s office.

This is another example of tampering. You cannot make a generalization from a specific example–it is a logical fallacy. As the evidence continues to stream in, however, perhaps the amount of evidence warrants an invesigation by the FBI?

4.) Black Box Voting

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/

On the homepage of BlackBoxVoting.Org, they interviewed the independent company that tested the software on the voting machines. According to the report, the cosultants did not review the security or potential vulnerabilities within the systems. After the NASED (National Association of State Election Directors) received the report, they certified the machines anyway.

I wish that the group were a little more serious. The article has pictures of young adults (presumably the Web designers) embedded within their article asking silly spin-off questions. I guess they did not want to seem legitimate (one of the comments is a spin-off of the National Enquirer’s former advertisement). If the content of their article is potentially true, the implications are pretty bad.

5.) KERRY WON. HERE ARE THE FACTS. TomPaine.com

Friday Nov 5, 2004 by Greg Palast

http://www.gregpalast.com/



This article is pretty disturbing. Remember Katherine Harris? She was the famous Florida election supervisor that eliminated 179,855 votes erroneously from Florida in the 2004 elections. I guess they are called “spoiled” votes, and they are discarded for various reasons. Kenneth Blackwell’s office spoiled 1.96% (110,000) of Ohio’s votes. Greg Palast calls it a “Democracy-damaging” number. In addition, there were somewhere between 175,000 – 250,000 uncounted provisional ballots. The spoilage in New Mexico was 18,000 votes, and Bush won by 11,620. Most of the “spoiled” voters cast Democratic ballots.

6.) New Florida vote scandal feared

By Greg Palast Reporting for Newsnight

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/3956129.stm

Here is another article by Greg Palast published at BBC.com. This was before the election. There were some e-mails that were intercepted with a list of names, and it was possible that it would be used as a target list to intimidate voters.

The interesting thing in this article is the rebuttle and the subsequent rebuttle. Also, someone anonymously hired a private investigator to film the voters in certain areas with a high concentration of African-Americans.

We now know that voter intimidation was a factor with the Republican Party resurrecting the Ku Klux Klan laws that were passed years ago to place party-designated challengers within the polling place.

If there is anyone with the power to investigate these allegations, please do so–and confirm or deny the rumors going around. I wish transparency would return to our society.