understand the weird and highly suspect circumstances of the 2004 election, in which all the votes--80% of which were "tabulated" by two rightwing Bushite corporations (Diebold and ES&S), using "trade secret," proprietary programming code (code so secret that not even our secretaries of state are permitted to review it)--were fed to the TV networks through an AP computer--with AP not only having rightwing connections (see Landes) but also a rightwing, pro-war, pro-Bush, pro-corporate bias in its news stories. Simultaneously, one pollster serving all the corporate news monopolies, produced exit polls that showed a Kerry win until late in the day, which were then altered to force them to fit the results of Diebold/ES&S's "trade secret" vote counting (making it a Bush win). DU election analyst TruthIsAll has shown the absurdity of this force-fit. (To sum it up, Bush cannot have won the 2004 election; the untweaked exit polls were right, the official results that they were matched to were wrong. See TruthIsAll.net.)
As of 2004, the American people no longer have the right to know how their votes are counted. It's all done by Bushite corporations with "trade secret" code, then fed through another private corporate system--AP--to the public. And they also have no right to review the exit poll raw data, how the exit polls are conducted or this formula for "adjusting" the numbers to fit the secretly derived official results. Exit polls are used worldwide as an independent check on election fraud. Samples of voters are interviewed just after they voted, and the numbers extrapolated to an overview of the election. This is how news organizations in the past have predicted winners before all the votes were counted. Exit polls are highly accurate. In other countries, if there is a significant discrepancy between the exit polls and the official vote count, alarm bells go off and votes are recounted. But that is not how exit polls are used in the U.S.--as an independent check. Here they are tweaked to CONFIRM the official results.
Nowhere in this perfect loop of secrecy in the 2004 election was there any public oversight. Election officials have no right to review the "trade secret" vote tabulation code, and often have no idea how it works. (They are not computer experts.) Independent statistical experts--and also Congressman John Conyers and his committee--later asked to review the raw data of the corporate news monopoly exit pollster, Edison/Mitofsky. E/M refused. Their excuse? That the raw data would violate the secrecy of the ballot. (They take names.) Scientific peer review occurs all the time in many fields, and often the peer reviewers are asked not to disclose certain things. So this E/M argument was bogus.
Landes takes the unusual position that we should get rid of the secret ballot. She says earlier US elections, conducted by a show of hands, were far more transparent, and points to John Hancock's bold signature and other signatures on the Declaration of Independence--signed at peril of the lives of the signatories--as examples of having the courage of your convictions. Why should we not boldly state or write our voting choices, and sign them? Are we such wusses?
I think she rather glides over the problems of a non-secret ballot, but I like her bold thinking. Her point is that secrecy of any and all kinds--including the secret ballot, which she believes was initially proposed when blacks and women were enfranchised, in order to commit election fraud against these voters--has destroyed our election system.
When 18,000 votes for Congress in Democratic precincts in the FL-13 election in '06 were 'disappeared,' the Democratic candidate (Christine Jennings) took the matter to court. ES&S refused to permit review of its "trade secret" vote tabulation code! --even with 18,000 blanked out votes, in an election that was decided by only 300 votes--and the judge let them get away with this. The matter is now in Congress. What strikes me is the outrageous behavior of ES&S. How dare they hold possible evidence of election fraud as a "trade secret"? (And who appointed this asshole of a judge?)
In conditions like these, how can we KNOW who was elected? The very idea of democracy has been trashed.
Here is Landes on AP and the exit polls:
----------
"COVER-UP & NETWORKS' EXIT POLL
"Although public debate has been framed to target suspicion on outside hackers, the bigger threat is clearly company insiders. As previously noted, these
companies are in a perfect position to rig elections nationwide.
"And some investigators say that is exactly what's been happening, with vital assistance from the Associated Press and the major news networks' exit poll. This group currently calls their collaboration, the National Election Pool
(NEP). (See:
http://www.exit-poll.net)
"NEP claims to have been formed in 2003. In fact, the news networks have controlled exit poll reporting on Election Day since the 1960's. They have used
different names, such as News Election Services, Voter Research and Survey, and most recently, Voter News Service.
"Since 1964, when the networks first started projecting election night winners, they have never provided any hard evidence that they actually conducted exit polls at all. Worse yet, researchers from Election Defense Alliance (EDA) report that NEP makes sure that at the end of the day their exit polls match election results. NEP calls it 'forcing'. Others might call it fraud. (See:
http://www.electiondefensealliance.org)
"It is a theory among some researchers that the NEP bases their exit polls on extensive pre-election polling. In that way, if someone wants to rig an election and not raise red flags, the exit polls can get tweaked or "forced", using NEP's parlance, to match election results. That would account for the NEP's long track record of producing seemingly accurate exit pools early in the evening on election day, then altering the results later that night to eventually match election results, as it appears they did in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.
(snip) (She cites an example from 1970 of news organizations being unable to provide any evidence that a real exit poll had been conducted.)
"On Election Day 2004, the NEP website stated that vote totals were 'collected' from 2,995 "quick count precincts". Although, the AP admits it was the sole source of raw vote totals for the major news broadcasters on Election Night, AP spokesmen Jack Stokes and John Jones refused to explain how the AP received that information. They refused to confirm or deny that the AP received direct feed from central vote tabulating computers across the country. Cook County, Illinois election spokesperson, Cass Cliatt, told reporters that after the polls close any journalist can use the county's 'connector cables' in order to allow them to download the latest vote totals. Cliatt said that this did not constitute a connection to the mainframe computer. She did admit that AP employees were there on election night and had cables dedicated to them specifically.
"Computer security specialist Dr. Rebecca Mercuri was asked for her reaction. Was it a good idea to allow reporters to 'hook up' to a cable in order to access vote tabulation data? Mercuri didn't think so. 'It's not as if they are handing them a CD with the data on it. That would be the safest thing to do and probably faster. Why would they allow them to connect up?' she asked.
"The AP is in control of exit poll reporting on election night. But who controls the AP? The Associated Press (AP) was founded in 1848. It is a not-for-profit national news cooperative, some would say monopoly, that earns about $500 million dollars a year. The AP is owned by its 1,500 U.S. daily newspaper members. Their board of directors is elected by voting bonds. However, it is not clear who owns the bonds.
"AP leadership in 2004 appeared quite conservative. Burl Osborne, chairman of the AP board of directors, is also publisher emeritus of the conservative The Dallas Morning News, a newspaper that endorsed George W. Bush in the last election. Kathleen Carroll, senior vice president and executive editor of AP, was a reporter at The Dallas Morning News before joining AP. Carroll is also on the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME)'s 7-member executive committee. The APME 'works in partnership with AP to improve the wire service's performance,' according to their website.
"It is worth noting that former APME vice president, Deanna Sands, was the managing editor of the ultra conservative Omaha World Herald newspaper, whose
parent company owns the largest voting machine company in the nation, Election Systems and Software (ES&S), which counts 50% of the vote.
"Even if the AP's actions were not suspect, one should consider the obvious absurdity of the situation. The AP reports exit poll data based on secret sources to verify election results based on secret ballots that are counted in secret by private corporations."
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_lynn_lan_070116_america_s_unverifiab.htm----------------------------------
Me again:
So we have Bush "Pioneer" fundraiser and campaign chair, Wally O'Dell, as CEO of DIEBOLD, and its spinoff corporation, ES&S, funded by rightwing billionaire Howard Ahmanson (who gave a million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon foundation), counting all the votes under a veil of corporate secrecy, and AP, with its rightwing managers and reporters, "feeding" the official totals to the public through its private computers, and an additional private organization, Edison-Mitofsky, in the pay of the war profiteering corporate news monopolies, "verifying" the "official results" with private data that neither the public nor its experts are permitted to review.
As I said, a perfect loop of secrecy. But it's more than that. It is a perfect loop of RIGHTWING secrecy.
Is it any wonder, then, that we have a rightwing president who is unaccountable to the people--who is escalating a war that 70% of the people oppose, and who has shredded Constitutional protections against indefinite detention without trial, spying and torture, in addition to other serious crimes?
And is it any wonder, also, that a Democratic Congress appears to lack the will to stop him? How was that Congress elected? The same way that George Bush was--by rightwing corporations in complete secrecy. There is polling evidence that suggests that the "trade secret" vote tabulation was used in '06 to limit the Democratic/leftist/antiwar victory by means of a 5% to 10% "thumb on the scales" for Bushites, warmongers and corporatists. (The Democrats should have won 50 seats in the House, not just 30.) Given this complete secrecy of the private corporate vote tabulation--a recent coup that was perpetrated in the 2002-2004 period--we have to rely on inferential evidence. The inferential evidence from 2004 points overwhelmingly to rightwing election fraud. The evidence from 2006 points to clever use of this election theft capability to give the appearance, but not the substance, of a transparent election--a Congress that appears Democratic, but with insufficient numbers to impeach Bush or stop his war. The limited Democratic win was likely an effort to protect this election theft system for '08. If people think the system is working, they will be less likely to demand that it be reformed.
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