The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #75297   Message #1321029
Posted By: Genie
08-Nov-04 - 10:29 PM
Thread Name: BS: Bev Harris
Subject: RE: BS: Bev Harris
For anyone who is seriously suggesting -- from a nonpartisan perspective -- that we "get over it" and move on, let me say this:

First, it AIN'T over.   
There's more than the Presidency at stake -- many state, county, and local elections, and some Congressional races -- and it is NOT too late to correct inaccurate vote counts. The "results" shown in the media are NOT BINDING. Actually, the electoral vote for President is not officially certified by the Senate until January 6.
(The electoral college meets Dec. 18, but several things can happen between now and then to determine how the electors vote.)

More importantly, this is NOT JUST about THIS election.
Had the public and the media not taken their eye off the ball after the debacle of 2000 -- had they not "just moved on" -- we might have gotten REAL electoral reform passed and implemented by this year's election.
The problem is that our politicians and press did not make enough noise about the lack of funding for HAVA and about the many problems that occurred in 2002 with the voting machines.

Right now there's much -- and growing -- outrage about election abuses and suspect occurrences.   If we do not use the energy of this outrage NOW, do you really think anyone in Congress or the media will pay any attention before the 2006 elections?

The major SNAFUS and abuses that have been found so far include:
1. Evidence of hacking into precinct vote count files as they were transmitted via simple modems to central computers.
2. Machines clearly malfunctioning -- e.g., recording hundreds or thousands more votes than were cast (or even registered).   Or counts of NEGATIVE millions of votes.   Machines dumped data, broke down for hours (preventing people from voting), and yielded bizarre results, e.g., thousands of voters in one county leaving the Presidential race un-voted-for.
3. Equally bizarre -- and suspect -- results such as getting a 75% vote for Bush in a precinct with 75% registered Democrats vs. 25% Republicans.
4. Systematic finding of about 5% more votes for Bush where there was no paper trail than where there was.
5. Most of the wild discrepancies occurring where there were no paper trails.
6. Urban precincts that are heavily African-American being given far fewer voting machines than comparable size mostly-white precincts.
7. Hundreds of precincts in "swing" states "running out" of provisional ballots by 11 AM on Nov. 2, though HAVA requires that every "challenged" voter be allowed to cast a provisional ballot.
8. Provisional and absentee ballots not being counted and, in some cases, being destroyed before such counts can be demanded.
9. Many reports of harrassment, threat, or intimidation of would-be-voters, mostly black, Native American, or Hispanic voters.
10. Voting machines that select candidate X when the voter touches the screen for candidate Y. (Mostly cases where the machine selected Bush.)

And more.

Some of these problems -- like deliberately providing too few voting machines in African-American communities -- are a CLEAR violation of the Voting Rights Act. Others are cases where the "official" result is simply not verifiable, even where state law allows for or even demands a recount under certain circumstances.

The HACKING problems suggest that it would not take a true "conspiracy" for millions of votes to have been stolen. If, as is the case in Ohio, more Republicans have access to the machines, they simply have more chance to hack. And if the errors are in the computer source code, that gives the private companies who make the machines way too much control over the election results.