No hi ha al món re més repugnant que un botifler

When I
spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the
Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from
Florida’s 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up.
Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was
hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said,
but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary
race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno,
who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride,
who Jeb beat.

"It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.

And evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.

The
State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of
votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net
denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a
table, available at
http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.

While the heavily
scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in
which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios matched the Kerry/Bush
vote, and so did the optically-scanned paper ballots in the larger
counties, in Florida’s smaller counties the results from the optically
scanned paper ballots – fed into a central tabulator PC and thus
vulnerable to hacking – seem to have been reversed.

In
Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them
Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for
Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else
in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In
Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and
a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for
Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The
pattern repeats over and over again – but only in the smaller counties
where, it was probably assumed, the small voter numbers wouldn’t be
much noticed. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5%
for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for
Bush.

Yet
in the larger counties, where such anomalies would be more obvious to
the news media, high percentages of registered Democrats equaled high
percentages of votes for Kerry.

More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and
www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm.

And,
although elections officials didn’t notice these anomalies, in
aggregate they were enough to swing Florida from Kerry to Bush. If you
simply go through the analysis of these counties and reverse the
"anomalous" numbers in those counties that appear to have been hacked,
suddenly the Florida election results resemble the Florida exit poll
results: Kerry won, and won big.

Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever since Election Day.

Election
night, I’d been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the radio
stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight,
during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled
to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W.
Bush down to inform him that he’d lost the election. The exit polls
were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news
stoically," noted the AP report.

But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal states.

Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were rigged.

Dick
Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton campaign
who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an
article for The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.

"Exit
Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two
major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating
actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never
do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the
relative turnout of different parts of the state."

He
added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was
slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa,
all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going
to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."

Yet a
few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the
computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states the
election was called for Bush.

How could this happen?

On the
CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean
had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris,
the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org
from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were
tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small
towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they
Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by
pencil or ink in the voter’s hand, or the scanners that read punch
cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all
cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.

That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.

"In a
voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you
have all the different voting machines at all the different polling
places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there’s a thousand polling
places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine
so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do
something you shouldn’t to a voting machine, would it be more
convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here
and deal with all of them at once?"

Dean
nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises
people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I
use. It’s just a regular computer."

"So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?"

Harris
nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called
GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into
the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the
County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting
between them loaded with Diebold’s software.

Bev
then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test
election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and
waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the
various precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean
had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was
winning.

"Of course, you can’t tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program.

But, it’s running on a Windows PC.

So
Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal
Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk
C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB"
which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that’s where they keep
the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder
titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote
count in a database program like Excel.

In
the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one
precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.

"Let’s
just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from
one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let’s give
100 votes to Tiger."

They
closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the
legitimate way, you’re the county supervisor and you’re checking on the
progress of your election."

As
the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And
you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has
900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.

Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."

On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.)

Which
brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen
Hughes telling George W. Bush that he’d lost the election in a
landslide.

Morris’s
conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to cause
people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since the
networks would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry. But
the networks didn’t do that, and had never intended to. It makes far
more sense that the exit polls were right – they weren’t done on
Diebold PCs – and that the vote itself was hacked.

And
not only for the presidential candidate – Jeff Fisher thinks this hit
him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national
office in the most-hacked swing states.

So
far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this story
was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he
noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so
far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post
and other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like
contortions to explain how the exit polls had failed.

But I
agree with Fox’s Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part.
Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final
paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong
across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."

Thom
Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning
best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily
progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann
.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."