[Vision2020] Fwd: Article from Lester Brown

[Tom Trail]

>Visionaires:   I had trouble downloading this article so here is the whole
article.

Rep. Tom Trail

>
>
>http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/111806B.shtml 
>Clear Evidence 2006 Congressional Elections Hacked
>     By Rob Kall
>     OpEd News
>     Friday 17 November 2006
>Results skewed nationwide in favor of Republicans by 4 percent, 3 
>million votes.
>     A major undercount of Democratic votes and an overcount of 
>Republican votes in US House and Senate races across the country is 
>indicated by an analysis of national exit polling data, by the 
><http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/>Election Defense Alliance 
>(EDA), a national election integrity organization.
>     These findings have led EDA to issue an urgent call for further 
>investigation into the 2006 election results and a moratorium on 
>deployment of all electronic election equipment.
>     "We see evidence of pervasive fraud, but apparently calibrated 
>to political conditions existing before recent developments shifted 
>the political landscape," said attorney Jonathan Simon, co-founder 
>of Election Defense Alliance, "so 'the fix' turned out not to be 
>sufficient for the actual circumstances." Explained Simon, "When you 
>set out to rig an election, you want to do just enough to win. The 
>greater the shift from expectations, (from exit polling, 
>pre-election polling, demographics) the greater the risk of exposure 
>- of provoking investigation. What was plenty to win on October 1 
>fell short on November 7.
>     "The findings raise urgent questions about the electoral 
>machinery and vote counting systems used in the United States," 
>according to Sally Castleman, National Chair of EDA. "This 
>is nothing less than a national indictment of the vote counting 
>process in the United States!"
>     "The numbers tell us there absolutely was hacking going on, just 
>not enough to overcome the size of the actual turnout. The tide 
>turned so much in the last few weeks before the election. It looks 
>for all the world that they'd already figured out the percentage 
>they needed to rig, when the programming of the vote rigging 
>software was distributed weeks before the election, and it wasn't 
>enough," Castleman commented.
>     Election Defense Alliance data analysis team leader Bruce 
>O'Dell, whose expertise is in the design of large-scale secure 
>computer and auditing systems for major financial institutions, 
>stated, "The logistics of mass software distribution to tens or even 
>hundreds of thousands of voting machines in the field would demand 
>advance planning - at least several weeks - for anyone attempting 
>very large-scale, systematic e-voting fraud, particularly in those 
>counties that allow election equipment to be taken home by poll 
>workers prior to the election.
>     "The voting equipment seems to be designed to support two types 
>of vote count manipulation - techniques accessible to those with 
>hands-on access to the machines in a county or jurisdiction, and 
>wholesale vulnerabilities in the underlying behavior of the systems 
>which are most readily available to the vendors themselves. 
>Malicious insiders at any of the vendors would be in a position to 
>alter the behavior of literally thousands of machines by infecting 
>or corrupting the master copy of the software that's cloned out to 
>the machines in the field. And the groundwork could be laid well in 
>advance. For this election, it appears that such changes would have 
>to have been done by early October at the latest," O'Dell explained.
>     In a reprise of his efforts on Election Night 2004, Jonathan 
>Simon captured the unadjusted National Election pool (NEP) data as 
>posted on CNN.com, before it was later "adjusted" to match the 
>actual vote counts. The exit poll data that is seen now on the CNN 
>site has been adjusted already. But Simon points out that both 
>adjusted and unadjusted data were instrumental to exposing the gross 
>miscount.
>     Simon, surprised that unadjusted polling data was publicly 
>revealed, given the concerns after the 2004 election about the use 
>of exit polls, downloaded as much of the data as he could in real 
>time. Scheduled and planned revisions on the CNN site took place 
>throughout the evening and by the following morning, the unadjusted 
>exit poll data had been replaced with data that conformed with the 
>reported, official vote totals. This was the planned procedure as 
>indicated by the NEP's methodology.
>     Adjusting the exit poll data is, by itself, not a troublesome 
>act. Simon explained, "Their advertised reason to do the exit polls 
>is to enable analysis of the results by academic researchers - they 
>study the election dynamics and demographics so they can understand 
>which demographic groups voted what ways. As an analytic tool, the 
>exit poll is considered more serviceable if it matches the vote 
>count. Since the vote count is assumed to be gospel, congruence with 
>that count is therefore assumed to give the most accurate picture of 
>the behavior of the electorate and its subgroups.
>     "In 2004 they had to weight it very heavily, to the point that 
>the party turnout was 37% Democrat and 37% Republican, which has 
>never been the case - leading to the claim that Rove turned out the 
>Republican vote. This was nowhere witnessed, no lines in Republican 
>voting places were reported. As ridiculous as that was, the 
>distortion of actual turnout was even greater in 2006. The adjusted 
>poll's sample, to match the vote count, had to consist of 49% 2004 
>Bush voters and only 43% 2004 Kerry voters, more than twice the 
>actual margin of 2.8%. This may not seem like that much, but it 
>translates into more than a 3,000,000 vote shift nationwide, which, 
>depending on targeting, was enough to have altered the outcome of 
>dozens of federal races.
>     "It should be very clear that weighting by a variety of 
>carefully selected demographic categories, which yields the 
>pre-adjustment exit polls, presents a truly representative 
>electorate by every available standard except the vote count in the 
>present election. So you have a choice: you can believe in an 
>electorate composed of the correct proportions of men and women, 
>young and old, rural and urban, ethnic and income groups, Democrats, 
>Republicans, and Independents - or you can believe the machines. 
>Anyone who has ever wondered what is really in a hot dog should be 
>aware that the machines are designed, programmed, deployed, and 
>serviced by avowedly partisan vendors, and can easily be set up to 
>generate entirely false counts with no one the wiser, least of all 
>the voters."
>     Simon concluded, "These machines are completely and utterly 
>black box. The idea that we have this enormous burden of proof that 
>they are miscounting, and there's no burden of proof that they are 
>counting accurately - that, first and foremost, has to change."
>     Election Defense Alliance issued the following statement:
>     As in 2004, the exit polling data and the reported election 
>results don't add up. "But this time there is an objective yardstick 
>in the methodology which establishes the validity of the Exit Poll 
>and challenges the accuracy of the election returns," said Jonathan 
>Simon, co-founder of Election Defense Alliance. The Exit Poll 
>findings are detailed in a paper published today on the EDA website.
>     The 2006 Edison-Mitofsky Exit Poll was commissioned by a 
>consortium of major news organizations. Its conclusions were based 
>on the responses of a very large sample, of over ten thousand voters 
>nationwide*, and posted at 7:07 p.m. Election Night, on the CNN 
>website. That Exit Poll showed Democratic House candidates had 
>out-polled Republicans by 55.0 percent to 43.5 percent - an 11.5 
>percent margin - in the total vote for the US House, sometimes 
>referred to as the "generic" vote.
>     By contrast, the election results showed Democratic House 
>candidates won 52.7 percent of the vote to 45.1 percent for 
>Republican candidates, producing a 7.6 percent margin in the total 
>vote for the U.S. House ... 3.9 percent less than the 
>Edison-Mitofsky poll. This discrepancy, far beyond the poll's +/- 1 
>percent margin of error, has less than a one in 10,000 likelihood of 
>occurring by chance.
>     By Wednesday afternoon the Edison-Mitofsky poll had been 
>adjusted, by a process known as "forcing," to match the reported 
>vote totals for the election. This forcing process is done to supply 
>data for future demographic analysis, the main purpose of the Exit 
>Poll. It involved re-weighting every response so that the sum of 
>those responses matched the reported election results. The final 
>result, posted at 1:00 p.m. November 8, showed the adjusted 
>Democratic vote at 52.6 percent and the Republican vote at 45.0 
>percent, a 7.6 percent margin exactly mirroring the reported vote 
>totals.
>     The forcing process in this instance reveals a great deal. The 
>Party affiliation of the respondents in the original 7:07 p.m. 
>election night Exit Poll closely reflected the 2004 Bush-Kerry 
>election margin. After the forcing process, 49-percent of 
>respondents reported voting for Republican George W. Bush in 2004, 
>while only 43-percent reported voting for Democrat John Kerry. This 
>6-percent gap is more than twice the size of the actual 2004 Bush 
>margin of 2.8 percent, and a clear distortion of the 2006 electorate.
>     There is a significant over-sampling of Republican voters in the 
>adjusted 2006 Exit Poll. It simply does not reflect the actual 
>turnout on Election Day 2006.
>     EDA's Simon says, "It required some incredible distortions of 
>the demographic data within the poll to bring about the match with 
>reported vote totals. It not only makes the adjusted Exit Poll 
>inaccurate, it also reveals the corresponding inaccuracy of the 
>reported election returns which it was forced to equal. The 
>Democratic margin of victory in US House races was substantially 
>larger than indicated by the election returns."
>     "Many will fall into the trap of using this adjusted poll to 
>justify inaccurate official vote counts, and vice versa," adds Bruce 
>O'Dell, EDA's Data Analysis Coordinator, "but that's just arguing in 
>circles. The adjusted exit poll is a statistical illusion. The 
>weighted but unadjusted 7 pm exit poll, which sampled the correct 
>proportion of Kerry and Bush voters and also indicated a much larger 
>Democratic margin, got it right." O'Dell and Simon's paper, 
>detailing their analysis of the exit polls and related data, is now 
>posted on the EDA website.
>     The Election Defense Alliance continues to work with other 
>election integrity groups around the country to analyze the results 
>of specific House and Senate races. That data and any evidence of 
>election fraud, malicious attacks on election systems, or other 
>malfunctions that may shed more light on the discrepancy between 
>exit polls and election results will be reported on EDA's website.
>     This controversy comes amid growing public concern about the 
>security and accuracy of electronic voting machines, used to count 
>approximately 80 percent of the votes cast in the 2006 election. The 
>Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy, in a 
>September 2006 study, was the latest respected institution to expose 
>significant flaws in the design and software of one of the most 
>popular electronic touch-screen voting machines, the AccuVote-TS, 
>manufactured by Diebold, Inc. The Princeton report described the 
>machine as "vulnerable to a number of extremely serious attacks that 
>undermine the accuracy and credibility of the vote counts it 
>produces." These particular machines were used to count an estimated 
>10 percent of votes on Election Day 2006.
>     A separate "Security Assessment of the Diebold Optical Scan 
>Voting Terminal," released by the University of Connecticut VoTeR 
>Center and Department of Computer Science and Engineering last 
>month, concluded that Diebold's Accuvote-OS machines, optical 
>scanners which tabulate votes cast on paper ballots, are also 
>vulnerable to "a devastating array of attacks." Accuvote-OS machines 
>are even more widely used than the AccuVote-TS.
>     Similar vulnerabilities affect other voting equipment 
>manufacturers, as revealed last summer in a study by the Brennan 
>Center at New York University which noted all of America's 
>computerized voting systems "have significant security and 
>reliability vulnerabilities, which pose a real danger to the 
>integrity of national, state, and local elections."
>     The most prudent response to this controversy is a moratorium on 
>the further implementation of computerized voting systems. EDA's 
>O'Dell cautioned, "It is so abundantly clear that these machines are 
>not secure, there's no justification for blind confidence in the 
>election system given such dramatic indications of problems with the 
>official vote tally." And EDA's Simon summarized, "There has been a 
>rush by some to celebrate 2006 as a fair election, but a Democratic 
>victory does not equate with a fair election. It's wishful thinking 
>at best to believe that the danger of massive election rigging is 
>somehow past."
>     EDA continues to call for a moratorium on the deployment of 
>electronic voting machines in US elections; passage of H.R. 6200, 
>which would require hand-counted paper ballots for presidential 
>elections beginning in 2008; and adoption of the Universal Precinct 
>Sample (UPS) handcount sampling protocol for verification of federal 
>elections as long as electronic election equipment remains in use.
>     The Exit Poll analysis is a part of Election Defense Alliance's 
>six-point strategy to defend the accuracy and transparency of the 
>2006 elections. In addition to extensive analysis of polling data, 
>EDA has been engaged in independent exit polling, election 
>monitoring, legal interventions, and documentation of election 
>irregularities.
>     *The sample was a national sample of all voters who voted in 
>House races. It was drawn just like the 2004 sample of the 
>presidential popular vote. That is, precincts were chosen to yield a 
>representative (once stratified) sample of all voters wherever they 
>lived/voted - including early and absentee voters and voters in 
>districts where House candidates ran unopposed but were listed on 
>the ballot and therefore could receive votes. As such, the national 
>sample EDA worked with is exactly comparable to the total aggregate 
>vote for the House that we derived from reported vote totals and 
>from close estimates in cases of the few unopposed candidates where 
>2006 figures were unavailable but prior elections could be used as 
>proxy. It is a very large sampling of the national total, with a 
>correspondingly small (+/-1%) MOE. There were four individual 
>districts sampled for reasons known only to Edison/Mitofsky
>
>     About Election Defense Alliance
>     The purpose of EDA is to develop a comprehensive national 
>strategy for the election integrity movement, in order to regain 
>public control of the voting process in the United States. Its goal 
>is to insure that the election process is transparent, secure, 
>verifiable, and worthy of the public trust. EDA fosters 
>coordination, resource-sharing, and cohesive strategic planning for 
>a nationwide grassroots network of citizen election integrity 
>advocates.
>     Jonathan Simon, Co-founder, Election Defense Alliance. He is an 
>attorney whose prior work as a polling analyst with Peter D. Hart 
>Research Associates helped persuade him of the importance of an exit 
>poll-based election "alarm system." 617.538.6012 
><mailto:jonathan at electiondefensealliance.org>jonathan at electiondefensealliance.org
>     Bruce O'Dell is head of the Election Defense Alliance Data 
>Analysis Team. His expertise is in the design of large-scale secure 
>computer and auditing systems for major financial institutions. 
>612.309.1330 
><mailto:bodell at electiondefensealliance.org>bodell at electiondefensealliance.org
>     Sally Castleman, National Chairperson, Election Defense 
>Alliance. She has worked to recruit and train attorneys and 
>scientists for election integrity roles. She has a long career in 
>grassroots political activism and comes to EDA from Boston-based 
>Coalition Against Election Fraud. 781.454.8700 
><mailto:sallyc at electiondefensealliance.org>sallyc at electiondefensealliance.org
>
>     Rob Kall is executive editor and publisher of 
><http://www.opednews.com,/>OpEdNews.com, President of 
><http://www.futurehealth.org/>Futurehealth, Inc, and organizer of 
>several conferences, including <http://www.storycon.org/>StoryCon, 
>the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story and 
>The <http://www.brainmeeting.com/>Winter Brain Meeting on 
>neurofeedback, biofeedback, Optimal Functioning and Positive 
>Psychology. He is a frequent Speaker on Politics, The art, science 
>and power of story, heroes and the hero's journey, Positive 
>Psychology, Stress, Biofeedback and a wide range of subjects. See 
>more of his articles 
><http://www.opednews.com/author/author2.html?entry=diary>here and, 
>older ones, <http://www.opednews.com/archives%20kall.htm>here.
>


-- 
Dr. Tom Trail
International Trails
1375 Mt. View Rd.
Moscow, Id. 83843
Tel:  (208) 882-6077
Fax:  (208) 882-0896
e mail ttrail at moscow.com
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