corrente

You know, this story shows why Kerry should never have conceded until all the votes were counted. That would have given the SCLM a frame for the story immediately. (No, there was no point litigating Ohio. What Kerry should have said is that "Yep, it looks like Bush won. And I'll concede officially when all the votes are counted. And now the country can go about its business." It's FOLLY to concede the Republicans anything.) And now we see why:

When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.

"It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.

While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking – the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.

More visual analysis of the results can be seen [here], and [here].

Note the trend line – the only variable that determines a swing toward Bush was the use of optical scan machines.

(via Common Dreams)

What could enable such a discrepancy in the counties with optical scanners? The answer could be in the network architecture that Diebold adopted: A central server where the votes from the polling places are tabulated, which stores the data—I kid you not—in Microsoft Access. The whole system is totally insecure and eminently hackable:

Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.

That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.

[Says Bev Harris:] "What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer."

"So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?"

According to congressional candidate Fisher, it makes far more sense that the exit polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that the vote itself was hacked.

And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this hit him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national office in the most-hacked swing states.

Still in the interesting if true category. The story is kinda schizzy—the lede is about Fisher and the FBI, but the statistics in the story don't give a clue to what Fisher actually has. And why hack the optical scan machines, since those are the ones that leave a paper trail?

It's also interesting that the Harris quote comes from an interview with Howard Dean. Where is he on this?

UPDATE Interesting statistical analysis on California here.