“The likelihood of any two of these statistical anomalies occurring together is on the order of one-in-a-million. The odds against all three occurring together are 250 million to one. As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.”
But of course, none of this is cause for additional investigation, right, Pubs? Adhering to statistical probability is for the tinfoil-hat crowd. :rolleyes:
You don’t need to hack into the voting machine. You hack into the machine where the votes go. They went to a windows PC. You open up a database. You fudge the figures. The only check is whether the votes add up to more than the total number of voters. It can be done and I’m confident that it WAS done.
Okay, the Jeff Fischer guy looks like a bit of a nutter. His web site looks too conspiracy laden. But, I admire him because he’s doing what black box should be doing. IF you feel you have hard evidence of fraud, don’t just go yelling from the mountain tops. Show the evidence to the press, show the evidence to the FBI, show the evidence to the world,* then *go yelling from the mountain tops.
Enough of the “pssssssst. I’ve got evidence of fraud…” bullshit.
Freenman’s analysis looks interesting, of course he also completely ignores the non-battleground states. I’d like to see if similar discrepencies pop up in those as well.
You think it’s worth investigating? Lovely. Just remember what is being suggested. Ten different states, each with widely disparate voting and tallying techniques, even within state, were subject to an organized conspiracy to change the vote tally. A conspiracy so tight that the ONLY evidence that anything was amiss is from exit polling that doesn’t match up.
The changes are large enough that you cannot effect them via individual voting districts, thus the changes have to happen at the top, or through a further organized effort to hack into multiple districts.
All of this without a single person getting caught, telling their spouse or getting drunk and bragging, or just maybe feeling bad about committing massive election fraud.
The alternative to this massive conspiracy is that the exit polls were incorrect.
How centrally organized would it have had to have been? I think they would have been fairly clear on the main objective (Us want Bush win).
And what kind of evidence would you expect tampering to yield, espeically with electronic machines that leave no paper trail? As BobLibDem points out, we may be talking about something as simple as accessing a Windows database, for Og’s sake. Anyone who thinks that’s beyond Karl Rove’s willingness or means just hasn’t been paying attention to the guy.
I’m sorry, people who laugh it off with these “oooh, massive conspiracy” jibes aren’t doing the populace any favors. I know the culture is still in an Oliver Stone-induced hangover from the glut of conspiracy theory over the past few decades, but guess what. Sometimes men in power actually do try to get their way by other than above-board means. To categorically dismiss it as paranoid fantasy is as deluded as assuming that every coincidence equals a machination.
I’ve noticed blackboxvoting.org has not been updated in almost a week.
Does anyone know why this is?
-FrL-
No offense to BobLibDem, but he is not presenting factual information – only conjecture. He didn’t indicate that he knew first hand how the voting machines and the underlying databases worked.
This doesn’t add to your argument at all. Rove’s nature, which is a matter of opinion anyway, does not constitute evidence.
I can’t speak for others, but I’ll say this: for an accusation this extraordinary, the evidence has to be extraordinary. Freeman connecting the dots as he does is far, far from sufficient.
Sure, the objective is clear, but how do you get it done? You need people with intimate knowledge of how each election process works. You need people to do the deed. You need to be absolutely sure that you’re not going to get one of your people caught, what kind of investigation would THAT generate?
I see fixing elections in 10 states as being a fairly complex task. You have electronic voting machines, mechanical machines, punch cards, optical scan cards all being used. Added up by district, then sent out and added up in total. Any district should be able to tell if their figures were fudged at the top, so you’re going to have to be pretty damn clever to get away with it.
You want anyone other than angry liberals to believe it, show us how it can be done. “Hack the Windows PC” is not a sufficient action plan. :rolleyes:
He…he. If hanky-panky indeed existed in the machines on November 2nd, release of Diebold software would not prove anything.
Diebold can release a kosher version of the software source code. But that does not equate with the object code version that ran on November 2nd.
To prove what actually ran on November 2nd, we need the Checksum of the object code that ran on the machines that day. Then we should compile the released Diebold software and get its Checksum. If both Checksums are identical, then we can conclude there was no hanky-panky.
True. However, the fraud may not have been in the Diebold machines but in the Windows PCs to which the Diebolds dumped data to. The election for the most powerful office in the world goes into unsecure PC databases and once changes are made in those databases, it is untraceable.
As I tried to make clear, I’m not deriding people who think there isn’t enough evidence to point to fraud (they’re right- so far), but rather, those who scrunch up their faces like little old ladies at the first whiff of suggested collusion among parties with a common goal.
Rove’s nature is not a matter of opinion; it’s a matter of public record. I direct you to Bush’s Brain by James Moore and Wayne Slater if you remain unconvinced. That being said, no, of course it isn’t evidence. But once you become familiar with some of the outrageous shit he’s managed, tampering with a vote count comes off as something he could swing in his spare time. Let’s just say it most certainly walks and talks like a duck.
The evidence absolutely has to be extrordinary. And while of course I’d agree with you that Freeman’s paper doesn’t prove anything (as he states, this was never his goal), the statistical odds he cites are -to use your word- quite extraordinary.
I can’t accept that without proof. Unsecure databases? No way.
I don’t quite see how a paper-trail would prevent fraud. Also, there was fraud before electronic voting machines.
He bases his analysis on somewhat iffy unofficial exit poll numbers (mid pg 2). Freeman concedes himself that he doesn’t have access to raw exit poll numbers (top of pg 3). I think his whole premise – that the exit poll numbers he used should have accurately predicted the election – is flawed.
Freeman also doesn’t appear to give a margin of error for the Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania exit polls – I’m looking over pgs 6-7 as I write this. The exit poll numbers differed from the actual results by about 3.0 - 3.5%. Freeman needs to show that this is outside the margin of error. He shows a graph on pg 6 of his report, but does not show his work. Those 95% and 99% confidence interval lines … where did those come from? His numbers may well be good, but I’d like to have seen them.
Still in all, even Freeman himself seems to wave away accusations of fraud on pg 11. So Freeman is not saying what some people seem to think he is saying.
This may not be an authoritative source but check this out
And as much as I loathe quoting FOX News, even in an article to discredit the possiblity of hacking you see these nuggets:
Of course, there was this defense:
Yeah, right.
And if you simply Google “Diebold GEMS hack” you’ll get a ton of results. This site is quite informative and very damning of Diebold. Not sure if all the downloads works, the site shows a lot of zip files of demos and sample databases.
Well, I read through your cite and I have to say it smells fishy to me. First off, she talks about ‘hacking’ the computer because its using Windows (I agree btw that this isn’t the optimal OS to use for this kind of thing). However, there is no mention of physical security…i.e. how accessable were these workstations to someone physically sitting down at the terminal and ‘hacking’ them? You can’t just hack a computer via magic, so unless it was hooked up to a public network (like the internet), or a local network (in which case you’d need access to the local network) you’d need to physically sit at the machine to ‘hack’ the database. My understanding is that all these kinds of machines were watched by representatives of BOTH parties pretty much at all times…no?
As to ‘hacking’ the database with Access, Excell or a simple text editor, this assumes that the databases are the exact same as whats deployed on the actual machines. This could very well be true (I note your Fox article seems to say this as well), but I’ve seen no PROOF that its true. What I’m driving at here is that the databases on the ACTUAL machines may have been encrypted (a simple precaution to take)…in which case using any of those tools wouldn’t have worked for you.
There are a lot of things missing from Bev Harris’s analysis that are key to whether this is just a bunch of BS or if its a serious problem. And I find it incredible that something as simple as physical security was totally overlooked as far as these machines goes.
-XT
All good points. What I can’t assume is integrity on the part of the election officials- somehow Katherine Harris’ performance in 2000 did not fill me with confidence that Florida officials are unbiased arbiters of fairness. You and I can’t break into the PCs from here, but I for one would be surprised if all the PCs were babysat all during the election.
Better technical solutions exist. A competent Oracle database staff could have made the database infinitely more secure and enforce logging of any changes to the data.
I will pull select quotes from your link and address them individually:
I need to add that in much of the South, a lot of conservatives are registered Democrats. I, myself, am one. The reason is that until maybe a decade ago, registered Republicans could not vote in local primary elections when all candidates were Democrats – which was very common before about 1990 or so.
Ok, so now onto the rest of the link:
I find that using “hacking” and “hackers” as bogeymen to be intellectually questionable. Security measures are in place, and Harris should acknowledge that.
A Windows PC with quite limited access.
Hang on: is GEMS saving these files as Excel files? Sounds like not. This will be important later.
Wait a minute – you didn’t just close the database, you closed the Excel program (which isn’t a database program anyway, but never mind). And you’d have been prompted to Save. Now then, can Excel save into GEMS’s file format? If it were saved as an Excel file, that would be a giant red flag if Excel were not GEMS’s file format (which I doubt seriously – why writte proprietary software when Excel would do?).
No, you edited a mock election – one without network security and one with free access to the tabulating computer. I don’t think Harris accurately rendered the conditions of an actual election.
An Excel file in place of a GEMS file would be a pretty sizable track. Also, Windows timestamps when a file is modified.
…
I don’t know, BobLibDem … I found the information in that cite full of holes. The PC they used had no operating-system-level user authentication. Neither did the GEMS program have any kind of authentificatioon. I can’t buy that Harris’ demonstration was in any way meaningful.
BTW, out of curiosity, did anyone actually see Harris and Dean on “national TV”? What network? When?