Election Fraud Continues in the US
New Data Shows Widespread Vote Manipulations in 2004
By Prof Peter Phillips, 11 Aug 2005
In the fall of 2001, after an eight-month review of 175,000 Florida
ballots never counted in the 2000 election, an analysis by the National
Opinion Research Center confirmed that Al Gore actually won Florida and
should have been President. However, coverage of this report was only
a small blip in the corporate media as a much bigger story dominated
the news after September 11, 2001.
New research compiled by Dr. Dennis Loo with the University of Cal Poly
Pomona now shows that extensive manipulation of non-paper-trail voting
machines occurred in several states during the 2004 election. The facts
are as follows: In 2004 Bush far exceeded the 85% of registered Florida
Republican votes that he got in 2000, receiving more than 100% of the
registered Republican votes in 47 out of 67 Florida counties, 200% of
registered Republicans in 15 counties, and over 300% of registered Republicans
in 4 counties. Bush managed these remarkable outcomes despite the fact
that his share of the crossover votes by registered Democrats in Florida
did not increase over 2000, and he lost ground among registered Independents,
dropping 15 points. We also know that Bush "won" Ohio by 51-48%,
but statewide results were not matched by the court-supervised hand count
of the 147,400 absentee and provisional ballots in which Kerry received
54.46% of the vote. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio the number of recorded votes
was more than 93,000 greater than the number of registered voters.
More importantly national exit polls showed Kerry winning in 2004. However,
It was only in precincts where there were no paper trails on the voting
machines that the exit polls ended up being different from the final
count. According to Dr. Steve Freeman, a statistician at the University
of Pennsylvania, the odds are 250 million to one that the exit polls
were wrong by chance. In fact, where the exit polls disagreed with the
computerized outcomes the results always favored Bush - another statistical
impossibility.
Dennis Loo writes, "A team at the University of California at Berkeley,
headed by sociology professor Michael Hout, found a highly suspicious
pattern in which Bush received 260,000 more votes in those Florida precincts
that used electronic voting machines than past voting patterns would
indicate compared to those precincts that used optical scan read votes
where past voting patterns held."
There is now strong statistical evidence of widespread voting machine
manipulation occurring in US elections since 2000. Coverage of the fraud
has been reported in independent media and various websites. The information
is not secret. But it certainly seems to be a taboo subject for the US
corporate media.
Black Box Voting (http://www.blackboxvoting.org.) reported on March
9, 2005 that voting machines used by over 30 million voters were easily
hacked by relatively unsophisticated programs and audits of the computers
would not show the changes. It is very possible that a small team of
hackers could have manipulated the 2004 and earlier elections in various
locations throughout the United States. Irregularities in the vote counts
certainly indicate that something beyond chance occurrences has been
happening in recent elections.
That a special interest group might try to cheat on an election in the
United States is nothing new. Historians tell us how local political
machines from both major parties have in the past used methods of double
counting, ballot box stuffing, poll taxes and registration manipulation
to affect elections. In the computer age, however, election fraud can
occur externally without local precinct administrators having any awareness
of the manipulations - and the fraud can be extensive enough to change
the outcome of an entire national election.
There is little doubt key Democrats know that votes in 2004 and earlier
elections were stolen. The fact that few in Congress are complaining
about fraud is an indication of the totality to which both parties accept
the status quo of a money based elections system. Neither party wants
to further undermine public confidence in the American "democratic" process
(over 80 millions eligible voters refused to vote in 2004). Instead we
will likely see the quiet passing of legislation that will correct the
most blatant problems. Future elections in the US will continue as an
equal opportunity for both parties to maintain a national democratic
charade in which money counts more than truth.
Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University
and Director of Project Censored. Dennis Loo's report "No Paper
Trail Left Behind: the Theft of the 2004 Presidential Election," can
be viewed at
http://www.proje ctcensored.org/newsflash/voter_fraud.html
--
Peter Phillips Ph.D.
Sociology Department/Project Censored
Sonoma State University
1801 East Cotati Ave.
Rohnert Park, CA 94928
707-664-2588
http://www.projectcensored.org/
|
