Voter Fraud?
Ok, I don't get how this voter fraud story isn't getting more attention. I mean, "Kerry-Edwards" can't possibly be turned into "Sore-Loserman" or anything, so what the hell's the problem?
A few quick facts about the situation:
- Exit polls showed Kerry winning nearly all the battleground states. Strangely enough, the exit polls were largely accurate...except in those battleground states that went for Bush. According to one analysis of this, in every state that has e-voting but no paper trail, there is a +5% advantage for Bush from the exit polls to the final results. In every state with paper audit trails (even Nevada, which has e-voting, but with a paper trail) the exit poll results match the reported final results.
- As Greg Palast's article I linked to the other day shows, there were anywhere from 175,000 to 250,000 provisional ballots - likely overwhelmingly Democratic because they were a result of Republican challenges in minority areas as well as a few hundred thousand "spoiled" votes that, again, disproportionately affect minority areas.
- Exit polls were most off in voting places that used electronic voting machines. At 1:05 a.m. Wednesday morning (note, CNN's exit poll had Kerry beating Bush by 53-47% among women and 51-49 among males. CNN later took down the exit polls, replacing it with the regular results.
- In at least one county using electronic voting machines in Ohio, elections officials discovered yesterday that unofficial results had given 4,258 extra votes to Bush. (There were only 638 voters in that county.) In one county in North Carolina, 4,500 votes were lost apparently because elections officials thought a computer could store more data than it did.
- In Florida, something may have happened with the optical scan machines. If you break down all counties into "op-scan" counties as opposed to other methods (even touchscreen), you find that there's a huge percent change in turnout for Republicans compared to the amount of registered Republicans. So either having optical scan machines has some sort of magic effect on Republican voter turnout in Florida, or something fishy is going on. Go here for the numbers - she's using official data from the state of Florida, by the way.
- Black Box Voting has filed the largest Freedom of Information Act request in history and is in the process of examining the files. They haven't released all of their findings, but say they have evidence hackers targeted the the central computers counting the votes: Windows PCs, if that makes you feel any better...or not.
- There were actually fewer voting machines in black neighborhoods than in 2000 in Ohio.
- In the South, there are "hundreds of voting irregularities" affecting, you guessed it, poor and minority voters.
- Ken Blackwell, Ohio's Secretary of State, responsible for running elections in the state, was co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio. Echoes of Katherine Harris, anyone?
- Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold, the company that made the electronic voting machines in Ohio, was active in the Bush-Cheney campaign and, in a fund-raising letter last year said that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
I could go on.
I don't want to wear the tin-foil hat, really. And like I said in my posting on this the other day, the fact is that we have a poor person's penalty in our country when it comes to voting: if you're poor, your vote is less likely to be counted. So there are systemic problems with our voting and this is distinct (to a certain extent, at least) from out-right fraud. The question is: did both happen? More and more news suggesting this is the case is this is coming out from different sources. Is all of this...or even some of this...true? I don't know yet. But we have to look at this stuff and talk about it!
