COMPUTER FRAUD ARTICLE 17

Did Dubbya rig the election?

Sunday, November 28 2004 @ 06:47 PM

Michael Meacher

29th November 2004

Michael Meacher smells something fishy in Bush's return to office. The 

evidence of fraud is not yet conclusive but, given the Republicans' 

record, it is all too plausible.

The great mystery of the 

US

 presidential election was that the exit 

polls, which had been reliable guides in all previous elections, did not 

tally with the final results. Tony Blair, it is said, went to sleep on 2 

November thinking John Kerry had won, but woke in the morning to find 

that George W Bush was the victor. Many Britons and Americans had the 

same experience. Nobody has advanced a satisfactory explanation. Now 

allegations are surfacing that the use of electronic voting systems and 

optical scanning devices may have had a significant influence on the 

result. Computer security experts insist that such sys- tems are not secure 

and not tamper-proof, yet they were used to count a third of the votes 

across 37 states. Though the Democrats remain strangely coy about the 

whole subject, academics and political analysts are now drawing 

comparisons between areas that used paper ballots and areas that used 

electronic systems. Is it possible that results in the latter were rigged?

An analysis of the poll by different states points up inconsistencies 

that cannot be explained by random variation. In 
Arizona
, 

Colorado

, 

Louisiana
, 
Michigan
, 
Iowa
, 
New Mexico
, 
Maine
, 
Nevada
, 

Arkansas

 and 

Missouri

, where a variety of different voting systems were used, including 

paper ballots in many cases, the four companies carrying out exit polls 

were almost exactly right and their results were certainly within the 

margin of error. In 
Wisconsin
, 
Pennsylvania
, 
Ohio
, 
Florida
, 

Minnesota

, New 

Hampshire and 

North Carolina

, however, where electronic or optical 

scanning machines were used (though not exclusively), the tracking polls 

were seriously discrepant from the published result.

Two aspects of this are immediately striking. One is the large size of 

the variance, and the other is that in every case it favoured Bush. In 

Wisconsin
 and 

Ohio

, the discrepancy favoured Bush by 4 per cent, in 

Pennsylvania
 by 5 per cent, in 
Florida
 and 

Minnesota

 by 7 per cent, in 

North Carolina
 by 9 per cent and in 

New Hampshire

 by an astonishing 15 per 

cent.

Moreover, extensive voting irregularities have been reported across the 

US

 - including intimidation, exclusion of black voters from electoral 

rolls, touchscreens that consistently registered support for Bush when 

the name Kerry was touched, and a large number of county precincts 

(including in 

Ohio

) where the number of votes cast exceeded the total number

of registered voters, sometimes by large margins. In 

Florida

, for 

example, the number of votes reported for all the candidates exceeded the 

maximum possible voter turnout by 237,522, so that a minimum of 3.1 per 

cent of the votes must be fraudulent, and possibly considerably more. 

Florida

 

uses electronic voting machines in 15 counties, and these account for a majority 

of the state's residents. 

None of this is conclusive evidence of fraud. But an independent 

inquiry is surely needed to expose what really happened in 

Florida

 and 

several other states. Some Americans are already demanding such an inquiry. 

Court hearings, held in public in 

Columbus
, 
Ohio

, will very likely lead 

to at least a partial recount in that state. Ralph Nader, the Green 

candidate, may have secured a recount in 

New Hampshire

, and is demanding 

recounts also in 
Ohio
, 
Florida
 and 

North Carolina

. And a survey by the 

University of Berkeley
, 
California

, has shown that irregularities in 

Florida

 associated with electronic voting machines seem to have awarded 

130,000 to 260,000 or more excess votes to Bush.

One's immediate reaction is that such large-scale fraud is implausible. 

But look at the history of the Republican Party, and its willingness to 

go to extraordinary lengths to manipulate the popular vote, and the 

idea seems all too likely.

The best-known example was the Watergate break-in of 1972, designed to 

get illicit access to Democrat plans for a presidential election that 

Richard Nixon feared he would lose. At the previous election in 1968, 

Nixon's aides were charged with persuading the South Vietnamese to delay 

their participation in peace talks to deny possible advantage to the 

Democrats, then in office.

But that was only a precursor for 1980. In that year, when Ronald 

Reagan was the Republican candidate trying to stop the re-election of 

President Jimmy Carter, a potentially treasonable plot was hatched, which 

came to be known as the "October surprise". To stop Carter getting the 

credit for securing the release of the 52 

US

 embassy hostages seized after 

the Iranian revolution, members of the Reagan campaign flew to 

Paris

 to 

meet Iranian and Israeli representatives in October, less than a month 

before the election on 4 November. Several sources, including the New 

York

 Times (15 April 1991), confirm that not only did William Casey, the 

CIA director, attend those meetings, but so did the vice-presidential 

candidate George Bush (father of George W). 

It was agreed with the Iranians that the hostages would not be released 

before the election. In return, the Reagan-Bush team promised to supply 

$40m of military equipment if elected. Military equipment started to 

flow to 
Iran
 from 

Israel

 on 21 October, the proffered release of the 

hostages was withdrawn, and Carter was defeated. The hostages were finally 

released on 21 January 1981, minutes after Reagan was sworn in as 

president.

The Iran-Contra affair followed in 1986-87. After the US Congress had 

passed the Boland Amendment in 1982 forbidding direct military aid to 

the Contras in 

Nicaragua

, the Reagan administration again ferried arms 

secretly to 
Iran
 (then subject to a 

US

 arms embargo), and then used the 

proceeds to fund weaponry for the Contras. Even when this deal, illegal 

at both ends, was later exposed, the administration's web of deceit 

managed to shield Reagan and Bush from the consequences of their 

conspiracy.

Once elected, Bush junior used his authority to keep this material 

hidden for ever. In November 2001, he signed an executive order that 

limited freedom of information by allowing either a past or sitting president 

to block access to White House papers. He then vetoed access to 

Reagan's papers, which would otherwise have been opened to public scrutiny in 

January 2002. Under this order, Bush's personal papers, detailing the 

decision-making process in the war on terrorism, could remain secret in 

perpetuity.

The most recent example of Republican manipulation is notorious. After 

the Bush-Gore race for the presidency in 2000, it later emerged that, 

under the governorship of George W's brother Jeb in 

Florida

, around 

30,000 black voters (overwhelmingly Democratic) had been illegally excluded 

from the voting rolls. When a stop was put to the recounts in the 

state, Bush was declared the winner by fewer than 540 votes.

So can we really be sure that this year's result was an accurate 

reflection of the popular will? It has emerged that the Diebold Gems software 

and optical scan voting machines used in counting a high proportion of 

the votes may not be tamper-proof from hacking, particularly via remote 

modems. Two 

US

 computer security experts, in their recently published 

book Black Box Voting, argue that "by entering a two-digit code in a 

hidden location, a second set of votes is created; and this set of votes 

can be changed in a matter of seconds, so that it no longer matches the 

correct votes". After the 
Florida
 fiasco four years earlier, the 

US

 

Congress voted $3.9bn to improve the quality of voting systems. Perhaps 

the latest revelations about what happened where electronic systems were 

used may become known as the "November surprise".

Michael Meacher is Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton

This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For the latest in 

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http://nov2truth.org/article.php?story=20041128184711474