Re: So, What IS a Fascist, anyway?

"Desertphile" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> On Sun, 30 Nov 2003 20:34:36 GMT, Gunner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 30 Nov 2003 19:02:58 GMT, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > (Desertphile) wrote:
>
> > >It's entirely possible that Mr. Ball is not aware of Bush2's friends
> > >engaging in voting machine tampering in Florida (where Bush2's brother
> > >is governor). That might explain his odd claims.
>
> > You have cites?
>
> How is it possible that this is not widely known?! Good bloody grief.
> Just when I thought the state of the informed citizenry is at its
> worse, someone comes along and tells me it's ever worse than I had
> thought. Yee, ghads.
>
>
>
>
> Subject: Volusia County Memos Disclose Election 2000 Vote Fraud
>
> The Diebold Memos' Smoking Gun
> Volusia County Memos Disclose Election 2000 Vote Fraud
>
> By Alastair Thompson
>
> http://www.blackboxvoting.com
>
> "DELAND, Fla., Nov. 11 - Something very strange happened on election
> night to Deborah Tannenbaum, a Democratic Party official in Volusia
> County. At 10 p.m., she called the county elections department and
> learned that Al Gore was leading George W. Bush 83,000 votes to
> 62,000. But when she checked the county's Web site for an update half
> an hour later, she found a startling development: Gore's count had
> dropped by 16,000 votes, while an obscure Socialist candidate had
> picked up 10,000--all because of a single precinct with only 600
> voters."

Why wasn't this found in the manual recount of Volusia County?

>
> - Washington Post Sunday , November 12, 2000 ; Page A22
>
> Yes. Something very strange happened in Volusia County on election
> night November 2000, the night that first Gore won Florida, then Bush,
> and then as everybody can so well remember there was a tie.
>
> Something strange indeed. But what exactly? In the above report (
> click for full version), written days after the election, hotshot
> Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank goes on to attribute the strange
> 16,022 negative vote tally from Volusia's precinct 216 to an
> apparently innocent cause.
>
> ".. faulty 'memory cards' in the machines caused the 16,000-vote
> disappearance on election night. The glitch was soon fixed," he wrote.
>
> But thanks to recent investigations into Black Box Voting by
> Washington State writer Bev Harris we now know this explanation is not
> correct. In fact it is not even in the ballpark.
>
> According to recently discovered internal Diebold Election Systems
> memos, Global Election Systems' (which was later purchased by Diebold)
> own technical staff were also stumped by the events in Volusia County/
>
> In Chapter 11 of her new book "Black Box Voting In the 21st Century"
> released early today in .PDF format at Blackboxvoting.com and here at
> Scoop Ms Harris observes.
>
> "If you strip away the partisan rancor over the 2000 election, you are
> left with the undeniable fact that a presidential candidate conceded
> the election to his opponent based on [results from] a second card
> that mysteriously appears, subtracts 16,022 votes, then just as
> mysteriously disappears."
>
> Working in parallel with Ms Harris Scoop has also been inquiring into
> the events on election night in Volusia county. Much of the material
> that follows is similar to that which appears in Chapter 11 of her
> book.
>
> The starting point in this shocking discovery about election 2000 came
> in a series of internal Diebold ES technical support memos.
>
> The following is an abbreviated version of the exchange concerning the
> peculiar events in Volusia county. For the purposes of research the
> exchange is included in full as an Appendix to this report (APPENDIX
> TWO). The discussion took place in early 2001 as an audit was underway
> in Volusia county into the events.
>
> ********** (NOTE: The names below each extract link to the full text
> of the emails in the appendices below.)
>
> I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I
> have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why
> Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded. Will
> someone please explain this so that I have the information to give the
> auditor instead of standing here "looking dumb".
>
> Lana Hires - Volusia County Florida - January 17, 2001 8:07 AM
>
> My understanding is that the card was not corrupt after (or before)
> upload.
>
> They fixed the problem by clearing the precinct and re-uploading the
> same card. So neither of these explainations washes. That's not to say
> I have any idea what actually happened, its just not either of those.
>
> The problem is its going to be very hard to collect enough data to
> really know what happened. The card isn't corrupt so we can't
> post-mortem it (its not mort).
>
> Ken Clark - Diebold ES R&D Manager - January 18, 2001 1:41 PM
>
> - the negative numbers on media display occurred when Lana attempted
> to reupload a card or duplicate card. Sophia and Tab may be able to
> shed some light here, keeping in mind that the boogie man may me
> reading our mail. Do we know how this could occur?
>
> John McLaurin - Diebold ES - 18 Jan 2001 15:44:50
>
> The problem precinct had two memcory cards uploaded. The second one is
> the one I believe caused the problem. They were uploaded on the same
> port approx. 1 hour apart. As far as I know there should only have
> been one memory card uploaded. I asked you to check this out when the
> problem first occured but have not heard back as to whether this is
> true.
>
> When the precinct was cleared and re-uploaded (only one memory card as
> far as I know) everything was fine.
>
> .
>
> Given that we transfer data in ascii form not binary and given the way
> the data was 'invalid' the error could not have occured during
> transmission.
>
> Therefore the error could only occur in one of four ways:
>
> .
>
> [4.] There is always the possiblity that the 'second memory card' or
> 'second upload' came from an un-authorised source.
>
> Tab Iredale - Diebold ES - 18 Jan 2001 13:31
>
> If this problem is to be properly answered we need to determine where
> the 'second' memory card is or whether it even exists. Heh. Second
> shooter theory. All we need now is a grassy knoll.
>
> Ken Clark - Diebold ES R&D Manager - 18 Jan 2001 16:42:50
>
> I will be visiting with Lana on Monday and will ascertain the
> particulars related to the second memory card. One concern I've had
> all along is "if" we are getting the full story from Lana.
>
> I'll be back in touch and thanks for all of y'alls (that's southern
> for all of you) help.
>
> John McLaurin - Diebold ES - Thu, 18 Jan 2001 16:56:06
>
> ********** Unfortunately whether or not John McLaurin got to the
> bottom of the mystery of Volusia County is something the memos cannot
> tell us.
>
> Searches of the Diebold memos database find a single followup memo
> from McLaurin about the Checksum Errors experienced in Volusia, but
> nothing on the mysterious 16,022 negative vote count.
>
> Which leaves us where exactly?
>
> What we know from the memos can be summarised as follows:
>
> - Two memory cards were uploaded from Volusia Couny's precinct 216,
> the second one was loaded sometime close to 2am in the morning. It
> automatically replaced the first card's results and reduced Gore's
> total by 16,022 votes and added several thousand votes to Bush plus a
> variety of minor candidates;
>
> - Both memory cards loaded into the system clean and without errors,
> indicating (contrary to the official line) that they were not faulty;
>
> - After the error was noticed the original card was reloaded and the
> mistake was rectified;
>
> - The error was introduced in such a way that the total number of
> votes remained unchanged (again something that could not happen by
> chance.);
>
> - According to the technical boffins, the chance of the memory card
> being corrupted and still passing the checksum error test are less
> than 60,000 to 1;
>
> - The technical managers at Diebold Election Systems considered it a
> reasonable possibility that the second card was part of deliberate
> conspiracy to rig the election results.
>
> In her book Bev Harris explains the issue of whether the card was a
> chance fault or a deliberate example of tampering"
>
> "A memory card is like floppy disk. If you have worked with computers
> for any length of time you will know that a disk can go bad. When it
> does, which of the following is most likely? In an Excel spreadsheet
> that you saved on a "bad disk," might it read a column of numbers
> correct the first time: "1005, 2109, 3000, 450." but the second time,
> replace the numbers like this: "1005, 2109, -16022, 450." Or is it
> more likely that the "bad disk" will fail to read the file at all,
> crash your computer, give you an error message, or make weird humming
> and whirring noises."
>
> source: page 239, Chapter 11, "Black Box Voting in the 21st Century"
>
> However officially, as we learned earlier, the explanation given
> publicly - and accepted without demur by the media - for the strange
> events in Volusia county is that there was simply a "faulty memory
> card".
>
> The "faulty memory card" explanation is also included in a CBS News
> Network investigation into the Election 2000 debacle.
>
> And it is here that we find a considerable amount of information about
> just how significant the Volusia County events were on election night.
>
> The first thing we learn from CBS's investigation into the events of
> election night is that according to the Voter News Service (VNS) exit
> polls for Florida Al Gore should have won comfortably.
>
> 7:00 PM: The vast majority of Florida polls close. CBS News decides
> not to project a winner in the Florida Presidential race at poll
> closing, even though the best estimate, based upon exit-poll
> interviews from the 45 survey precincts, shows Gore leading Bush by
> 6.6 points. The Decision Desk decides to wait for some actual votes
> from sample precincts to confirm the exit-poll results.
>
> 7:40 PM: The VNS computation shows a "call" status in the Florida
> Presidential race. This status means that statistically Gore is
> leading, but the Decision Team needs to check more data.
>
> Source
>
> VNS eventually officially called the Florida race to Gore at 7.52pm,
> notwithstanding comments early in the vote count from George Bush that
> he was confident he would win both Florida and Pennsylvannia (comments
> which were never fully explained).
>
> With the benefit of hindsight we think we now know that the VNS data
> was wrong. That is certainly what the CBS inquiry found.
>
> In the report attached below there are a range of explanations for
> this given [click here to view], none of them adequately explain the
> magnitude of the error however.
>
> Most of the news networks followed the VNS call giving Florida to
> Gore. And by 8.02pm all networks had announced Gore as the winner in
> Florida. And it wasn't till 9pm that some doubts about this call
> started to emerge.
>
> First up a significant error - attributed to a typing mistake - was
> found in the VNS data at 9.07pm. This led to closer examination of the
> rest of the data and the incoming returns. By around 10pm the Florida
> calls to Gore were all officially withdrawn. This is recorded in the
> CBS report as follows:
>
> 9:54 PM: The CBS News Decision Desk recommends that the call in
> Florida for Gore be withdrawn. CBS is in a local cutaway at 9:54 PM
> (the seven minutes at the end of the hour when local stations
> broadcast their own election results), and so CBS does not withdraw
> the call until 10:00 PM.
>
> 10:16 PM: VNS retracts its Florida call for Gore.
>
> - Source
>
> The CBS timeline then jumps forward four hours to 2am EST.
>
> By now an apparently substantial lead of 29,000 votes has opened up in
> favour of George Bush.
>
> 2:09 AM: VNS adds Volusia County's erroneous numbers to its tabulated
> vote.
>
> With 171 out of 172 precincts in the county reporting, Gore's vote
> drops by more than 10,000 while Bush's rises by almost the same
> amount. This 20,000-vote change in one county increases Bush's VNS
> statewide lead to more than 51,000 votes.
>
> - Source
>
> What the news networks, and the Al Gore, camp do not realise at this
> point in the evening is that over 24,000 of votes that make up this
> significant lead are attributable to two Diebold Election Systems
> computer errors.
>
> First there are the 16,022 votes stolen from Gore in Volusia county by
> the "faulty memory card". Meanwhile over in Brevard County another
> error - also involving Global Elections System (the predecessor of
> Diebold) equipment is responsible for a further 4000 votes being
> lopped off the Gore total.
>
> And it is also worth noting that nobody knows whether the Brevard and
> Volusia county errors were the only ones in play at this time. These
> errors were both big ones. They were noticed and corrected on the
> night. How many smaller vote subtractions could have taken place on
> the night? Theoretically hundreds. As Dana Milbank's Washington Post
> report shows it was only because someone noticed the error in Volusia
> that it was corrected and remarkably the software itself contains no
> automatic system for rejecting negative vote totals being reported by
> precincts, events which by definition can only be nefarious and wrong.
>
> At 2am another VNS error came into play. VNS's estimates of the
> outstanding votes underestimated those that remained to be counted by
> half, around 180,000. The two errors combined led news executives at
> CBS to conclude that Bush's final winning margin in Florida would be
> around 30,000 votes. At this stage Bush had a lead of around 50,000
> votes and late reporting precincts were expected to pare this back as
> many of them were in Democrat leaning counties.
>
> At 2.16am Fox and NBC called the race to Bush, unaware that the
> Volusia error had now been discovered. Over at Associated Press - the
> news service that Network News controllers do not read - the margin to
> Bush had by now fallen to 30,000 after correcting the Volusia error.
>
> At 2.17am and 2.20am the remaining two major networks CBS and ABC
> called the race to Bush. Their decision continued to be bolstered by
> the VNS data stream - which even at 2.47am - was still recording a
> margin to Bush of close to 50,000 votes.
>
> Remarkably it was not till 2.51am that VNS fixed the Volusia error in
> its data.
>
> Meanwhile with all the networks showing the race for the White House
> won by Bush, the pressure is mounting on Gore to concede.
>
> In the book, "Too Close to Call" by journalist Jeffrey Toobin, the
> author gives a behind-the-scenes account of how Gore reacted when the
> television networks concluded that Bush had taken Florida.
>
> "Al Gore happened to be in the staff room on the seventh floor when
> the votes spiked up in Bush's favor. Dressed casually, the vice
> president was watching television while lying on the floor, with his
> chin propped up in his hands. As a result of the Volusia votes, Fox
> News called Florida- and the presidency- for Bush at 2:16 a.m. CBS and
> NBC followed suit a minute later and ABC came in at 2:20 a.m.," Toobin
> wrote in his book.
>
> "Following the news reports, Gore was silent and absorbed the news. A
> moment later he told members of his campaign that he was ready to
> concede the election to Bush, which he did several minutes later over
> the telephone.
>
> "Unwilling to take the television networks reports at face value, one
> of Gore's campaign staffers did a little investigating and discovered
> that the networks erred in stating that 50,000 votes from Volusia
> county were cast for Bush. Turns out that Gore was ahead by 13,000
> votes in Volusia and trailing Bush by 6,000 votes overall. Something
> was wrong in Volusia it would be revealed later.
>
> One of Gore's campaign advisers then checked Florida's law on
> recounts. The nearly dead heat between Bush and Gore in Florida and
> the fact that Gore was ahead in Volusia County meant a mandatory
> recount. It was time to rescind Gore's concession to Bush and
> scrutinize the ballots. Gore was traveling in a motorcade en route to
> deliver a concession speech to his supporters. His staff stopped him.
> At this point, the margin between Bush and Gore was down to 2,000
> votes. A recount was all but certain."
>
> Gore called Bush and Gore's staff surrounded the vice president to
> listen in on what would become a historic conversation at 2:30 a.m.
>
> "Circumstances have changed dramatically since I first called you,"
> Gore said to Bush, Toobin wrote. "The state of Florida is too close to
> call."
>
> "Are you saying what I think you're saying?" Bush asked according to
> Toobin.
>
> "Let me make sure that I understand. You're calling back to retract
> that concession?" Gore sensed an annoyance in Bush's tone and shot
> back "you don't have to be snippy about it."
>
> Toobin says Bush then told Gore that his "little brother", Florida
> Gov. Jeb Bush, had assured him that he won the state of Florida and
> for that matter the presidency of the United States.
>
> "Let me explain something," Toobin quoted Gore as saying in his
> response to Bush. "Your little brother is not the ultimate authority
> on this."
>
> "You do what you have to do," Bush said and hung up the phone on Gore.
> When Gore turned around to face his staff they exploded in cheers.
>
> It is not till 3.10am that the CBS news controllers notice the huge
> difference between their numbers and those of AP which by now show the
> margin to Bush at under 10,000.
>
> We also know, thanks to the CBS inquiry report, that by around 3.40am
> the Gore camp had decided not to concede. Gore Campaign Chairman
> William Daley rang CBS News President Andrew Heyward in the control
> room and asked him whether CBS would be reversing its call soon.
>
> CBS's Andrew Heyward waited another 15-20 minutes after the phone call
> before ordering CBS to officially withdraw the call to Bush. And by
> 4.05am all the other networks had also withdrawn the call.
>
> By 4.10am the reported Bush lead in the race had dropped to 1800
> votes, and thereabouts it remained until the first recount - albeit
> the Florida Secretary of State's office website reported the race to
> Gore on the day after the vote.
>
> And it is there that the narrative in this tale ends and the analysis
> starts.
>
> In its internal conclusions about these events the CBS inquiry team
> found the two Diebold County level errors, Volusia and Brevard, were
> conclusive in their networks decision to call the race to Bush.
>
> " The mistakes, both of which originated with the counties, were
> critical, since there were only about 3 percent of the state's
> precincts outstanding at this time. They incorrectly increased Bush's
> lead in the tabulated vote from about 27,000 to more than 51,000. Had
> it not been for these errors, the CBS News call for Bush at 2:17:52 AM
> would not have been made."
>
> - source
>
> You do not get much clearer than that.
>
> The record already shows that events of election night 2000 turned on
> the errors in the Volusia and Brevard vote counts. Both of which
> occurred on Global Election Systems (now Diebold) equipment.
>
> Of course we now know Al Gore did not concede.
>
> But had he done so would that have altered what followed? Would there
> have been the hanging-chad phenomena, the lawsuits over recounts and
> the recriminations?
>
> Most of what is contained in the preceding analysis is well trodden
> territory. Everybody knows that the TV networks screwed up big time on
> election night, and the issue of bias at those networks has also been
> well traversed.
>
> What has not been discussed, or even conceived of till now, is that
> the events that occurred between around midnight and 4am might have
> been the result not of mistakes but of organised voting fraud.
>
> Yet that is precisely what Talbot Iredale and Ken Clark's memos
> confirm is a distinct possibility, in fact, reading between the lines
> they suggest it is the most likely possibility.
>
> Consider this:
>
> How plausible is it that an error such as this - of such magnitude,
> with no apparent physical explanation, and in one of the few counties
> still receiving incoming results that late in the night - was really
> the simple result of a "faulty memory card"?
>
> We also now know, again thanks to the work of Black Box Voting
> investigators like Washington State's Bev Harris and California's Jim
> March, that the Diebold vote tallying programme used in several
> Florida counties, GEMS, is easily hackable, both by outsiders and by
> insiders.
>
> [See. Bev Harris's " Inside A U.S. Election Vote Counting Program "
> for details and Jim March's "DIEBOLD'S VOTE-TALLY SOFTWARE- Security
> Review Instructions" for a kit to demonstrate the hack on your own
> computer.] We do not know what would have happened had a full
> state-wide recount been undertaken as the efforts to have one were
> blocked in the courts.
>
> Would they have discovered other counties where unusual events like
> those discovered in Brevard and Volusia counties?
>
> Is it possible that the original VNS exit polling data was closer to
> correct than conventional wisdom suggests?
>
> Is it possible that less egregious vote stealing took place in
> counties all over Florida?
>
> Add into the mix the blatant roll scrubbing in Florida discovered by
> Greg Palast and exposed in his best-selling book "The Best Democracy
> Money can buy" and you have a recipe of reasons to reopen a full scale
> inquiry into the Florida debacle.
>
> Perhaps more importantly. With paper-less touchscreen voting systems
> in place in many Florida counties come November 2004, should such
> events occur again, there will be no record with which to conduct a
> recount.
>
> And the other big mystery of course is this: if someone did try to rig
> the election returns in Florida in 2000, who was it?
>
> ******* STORY ENDS ******* Alastair Thompson is an award winning New
> Zealand investigative journalist and the Co-Editor of Scoop.co.nz.
>
> This report draws heavily from the work of Bev Harris in her new book
> "Black Box Voting in the 21st Century". California based investigative
> reporter Jason Leopold also contributed to this report.
>
> For more information on Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering In The 21st
> Century . See http://www.blackboxvoting.com/ and it's activist arm
> http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
>
> http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0310/S00211.htm