I
have received several messages in response to an email I sent out about
apparent evidence of voter fraud on the Cuyahoga county website in Ohio. This email has apparently been edited
and posted on several websites. I’m glad people are doing this sort of
thing, but it does mean I should clarify certain things that were left out of
my original message. I’ve also learned some things which greatly alter
the significance of that data.
First of all, I did not
do these tabulations myself. I received this information in a forwarded
email. Before I forwarded it
myself, I went to the Cuyahoga election website myself and confirmed that
several of the figures in the email were accurate. I think the person who did
this hard careful work deserves credit for it, but I have not been able to
trace the message I received back to the original source.
Secondly,
the Cuyahoga election officials now claim that this discrepancy appeared on the
website because of a software glitch, and does not appear in the actual counted
totals. The following website contains a plausible explanation for the glitch
by someone who talked directly to the folks in Cuyahoga. This site has lots of
other investigations of voting irregularities, and is well worth a visit.
http://pages.ivillage.com/americans4america/id20.html
The Cuyahoga site has
apparently since revised its figures to reflect the official totals, so you can
no longer find the discrepancies I described in my original post. It now seems
most likely to me that the discrepancies originally posted on the Cuyahoga
website were merely evidence of incompetence, not fraud, and it was
incompetence that apparently had no impact on the tabulation of votes.
(Although there was a very similar error involving absentee ballots in Craven
County, NC which did affect the vote tabulation. see http://www.newbernsj.com/SiteProcessor.cfm?Template=/GlobalTemplates/Details.cfm&StoryID=18297&Section=Local
I would not write off the possibility that if we had not called attention to
this problem in Cuyahoga, it might very well have affected the final result the
way it did it Craven County.)
Some people have remarked that the fact that Cuyahoga voted
overwhelmingly for Kerry shows that an altered vote there couldn't have
benefited Bush. Not So. Around 230
thousand people were reported as voting for Bush in Cuyahoga, so it is possible
that if there were evidence of fraud there, the bogus votes could have almost
doubled Bush's total. But as you can see, the point is moot, because the
figures I described in that first message don't provide evidence for fraud.
The
original assumption of fraud was perfectly reasonable. Everyone acknowledges
that a precinct in Franklin County gave Bush thousands of extra votes, which
have now been officially removed from the Ohio total. The Franklin County
discrepancy was discovered exactly the same way: by Bloggers who checked public
records and compared registered voter totals to final counts. It seemed
reasonable to many people that the discrepancies on the Cuyahoga site were the
same problem, but on a greater scale. But many reasonable assumptions are
wrong, and it looks like this was one of them.
So
where does voter fraud investigation stand now? As far as I can tell,
we’ve got a lot of smoke, (which may mean there is fire), but no smoking
gun. Before I give you my personal evaluation of this evidence, however, I
think we need to make an important distinction between degrees of proof.
1)Proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
This is what you need to
convict someone of a criminal offense, and arguably what you need to invalidate
an election. I don’t think anyone thinks we have that yet.
2) A preponderance of the
evidence
This what is required to
win a civil lawsuit. It means it is more likely than not that the wrongful
action was performed. I think
there is already a preponderance of the evidence that this election should be
invalidated, but I realize that this is a point on which honest people may
differ.
3) Evidence that further
investigation is warranted.
You don’t need
proof or a preponderance of the evidence to justify starting an investigation.
Otherwise there would be no need to have the investigation. I think if you
examine the evidence you will agree that there are facts here that must not be
ignored. Careful investigation requires going down promising paths that often
turn out to be blind alleys, and the discovery of a few blind alleys
doesn’t invalidate any other evidence. There is lots of new evidence
coming in every day, and it is not surprising that some of it may be misleading
until it is more closely analyzed. We need to be willing to debunk the misleading
evidence, because it weakens the impact of the substantial amount of strong
evidence.
So
take a look at the links and arguments below and see what you think. If I can
find anything else that looks especially convincing, or a good debunking of a
story which has been misleading people, I will send it your way. I won’t
do this very often, if at all. But if you don’t want to receive any more
posts from me on this subject, let me know and I’ll take you off this
list.
The best centralized link
site I have found so far is:
http://www.solarbus.org/stealyourelection/
Based on what I have
discovered from using this site and other sources, this seems to be the state
of the evidence.
The
discrepancies between the exit polls and the final result cannot be dismissed
by saying “hey, everybody knows polls aren’t accurate all the
time”. Exit polls have proven time and time again to be accurate to less
than 1 percent. In countries where
there is doubt about the honesty of a government, (such as in the former Soviet
Georgia a few years ago.) disparities between election results and exit polls
are often used as a basis for invalidating elections. These polls aren’t
perfect, but they deviate from accuracy according to certain statistical laws.
According to the Steven Freeman, a statistician at the University of
Pennsylvania, the chances of the exit polls in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania
all being this wrong for purely statistical reasons are 250 million to one. (see
http://www.solarbus.org/stealyourelection/articles/exit-poll-discrepancy-1110.pdf
) This does not prove that the election was fraudulent. If just shows that
these results cannot be explained as a purely chance deviation. If there were
another explanation, backed by good evidence, there would be reason to discount
the claims of fraud. But as Freeman points out, the only other explanation
given so far is that Bush supporters might have been less willing to talk to
pollsters than Kerry supporters. There is, however, no evidence supporting this
claim, and lots of evidence that voter fraud took place. You can’t use
the final vote itself as evidence; that would be begging the question. So given
that an explanation is needed, we must accept the explanation with the best
evidence.
Here is a
small sample of the evidence for fraud:
1)The
manufacturers of the voting machines
are all heavy contributors to the Bush campaign. The president of the
Diebold voting machine company said in a Republican fund raising letter that he
would deliver the state of Ohio to Bush. Several of the programmers who wrote
the code for Diebold Voting Machines are convicted felons (which means that if
they lived in Florida, they would be legally barred from voting on the machines
they had programmed.)
http://www.solarbus.org/stealyourelection/articles/20things.html
2)These
machines repeatedly make huge errors which benefit Bush.
A) Almost
4,000 extra votes awarded to Bush.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/11/05/voting.problems.ap/
B) Ohio Votes
for a straight Democratic ticket are given to the Libertarians.
http://www.indystar.com/articles/3/193880-4433-102.html
C)Members of Congress have received
numerous reports from voters in Florida and Ohio who repeatedly tried to vote
for Kerry on an electronic machine, and had their votes changed into votes for
Bush.
http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/gaoinvestvote2004ltr11504.pdf
D) In
Guilford country, NC, a recount discovered 22,000 votes which should have gone
to John Kerry.
http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/gaoinvestvote2004ltr11804.pdf
E) When www.BlackBoxVoting.org’s Beth
Harris subpoenaed voting records in Volusia County, Florida, she was given
copies that were not signed by the poll workers. She later found the signed
originals in the trashcan outside the elections warehouse. The originals had
fewer votes for Bush than the versions she had been given.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1118-22.htm
I have seen
no accounts of any errors which benefited Kerry.
When you
combine even these few examples with the discrepancies in the exit polls, there
is no reason to assume that these are isolated incidents. The most plausible
explanation is that this sort of thing happened in all of the swing states, and
this is why the swing states had these discrepancies in the final results. (http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/article.cfm?issue=11-19-04&storyID=20131)
There is also
a strong correlation between states that had electronic voting and states that
gave more votes to Bush in the final results.
http://www.bandsagainstbush.org/cgi-bin/archives/exit_poll.gif
This seems to
me like a preponderance of the evidence that this election was fraudulent. But
the evidence is still coming in, if you’re not yet convinced. I suggest
you keep an eye on it and give money to organizations like www.blackboxvoting.org
which are continuing this investigation. This problem is too important to be
ignored.
If you want
to get the topic of rigged elections discussed by the people who can do the
most about it, then send a message to the Democrats on the house judiciary who
are actively trying to investigate this problem. The media cannot ignore
discoveries by elected congresspeople.
Here's the
message I sent:
The evidence
supporting the existence of voting fraud is too strong to ignore. It must be
proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Bush won this election fairly. If he did
not, this country is no longer a democracy.
http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/contact.html
Teed Rockwell
Philosophy
Department
Sonoma State University
