[Mb-civic] STUNNING---has American democracy died electronic death??

[Mha Atma Khalsa]

	http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1112-21.htm
Published on Saturday, November 12, 2005 by the Free
Press

Has American Democracy Died an Electronic Death in
Ohio 2005's Referenda Defeats?
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
 
While debate still rages over Ohio's stolen
presidential election of 2004, the impossible outcomes
of key 2005 referendum issues may have put an
electronic nail through American democracy.

Once again, the Buckeye state has hosted an
astonishing display of electronic manipulation that
calls into question the sanctity of America's right to
vote, and to have those votes counted in this crucial
swing state.

The controversy has been vastly enhanced due to the
simultaneous installation of new electronic voting
machines in nearly half the state's 88 counties,
machines the General Accounting Office has now
confirmed could be easily hacked by a very small
number of people.

Last year, the US presidency was decided here. This
year, a bond issue and four hard-fought election
reform propositions are in question.

Issue One on Ohio's 2005 ballot was a controversial $2
billion "Third Frontier" proposition for state
programs ostensibly meant to create jobs and promote
high tech industry. Because some of the money may seem
destined for stem cell research, Issue One was
bitterly opposed by the Christian Right, which
distributed leaflets against it.

The Issue was pushed by a Taft Administration
wallowing in corruption. Governor Bob Taft recently
pleaded guilty to misdemeanors stemming from golf
outings he took with Tom Noe, the infamous Toledo coin
dealer who has taken $4 million or more from the
state. Taft entrusted Noe with some $50 million in
investments for the Ohio Bureau of Workers'
Compensation, from which some $12 million is now
missing. Noe has been charged with federal money
laundering violations on behalf of the Bush-Cheney
campaign. Taft's public approval ratings in Ohio are
currently around 15%.

Despite public fears the bond issue could become a
glorified GOP slush fund, Issue One was supported by
organized labor. A poll run on the front page of the
Columbus Dispatch on Sunday, November 6, showed Issue
One passing with 53% of the vote. Official tallies
showed Issue One passing with 54% of the vote.

The polling used by the Dispatch had wrapped up the
Thursday before the Tuesday election. Its precision on
Issue One was consistent with the Dispatch's historic
polling abilities, which have been uncannily accurate
for decades. This poll was based on 1872 registered
Ohio voters, with a margin of error at plus/minus 2.5
percentage points and a 95% confidence interval. The
Issue One outcome would appear to confirm the Dispatch
polling operation as the state's gold standard.

But Issues 2-5 are another story.

The Dispatch's Sunday headline showed "3 issues on way
to passage." The headline referred to Issues One, Two
and Three. As mentioned, the poll was dead-on accurate
for Issue One.

Issues Two-Five were meant to reform Ohio's electoral
process, which has been under intense fire since 2004.
The issues were very heavily contested. They were
backed by Reform Ohio Now, a well-funded bi-partisan
statewide effort meant to bring some semblance of
reliability back to the state's vote count. Many of
the state's best-known moderate public figures from
both sides of the aisle were prominent in the effort.
Their effort came largely in response to the stolen
2004 presidential vote count that gave George W. Bush
a second term and led to U.S. history's first
Congressional challenge to the seating of a state's
delegation to the Electoral College.

Issue Two was designed to make it easier for Ohioans
to vote early, by mail or in person. By election day,
much of what it proposed was already put into law by
the state legislature. Like Issue One, it was opposed
by the Christian Right. But it had broad support from
a wide range of Ohio citizen groups. In a conversation
the day before the vote, Bill Todd, a primary official
spokesperson for the opposition to Issues Two through
Five, told attorney Cliff Arnebeck that he believed
Issues Two and Three would pass.

The November 6 Dispatch poll showed Issue Two passing
by a vote of 59% to 33%, with about 8% undecided, an
even broader margin than that predicted for Issue One.

But on November 8, the official vote count showed
Issue Two going down to defeat by the astonishing
margin of 63.5% against, with just 36.5% in favor. To
say the outcome is a virtual statistical impossibility
is to understate the case. For the official vote count
to square with the pre-vote Dispatch poll, support for
the Issue had to drop more than 22 points, with
virtually all the undecideds apparently going into the
"no" column.

The numbers on Issue Three are even less likely.

Issue Three involved campaign finance reform. In a
lame duck session at the end of 2004, Ohio's
Republican legislature raised the limits for
individual donations to $10,000 per candidate per
person for anyone over the age of six. Thus a family
of four could donate $40,000 to a single candidate.
The law also opened the door for direct campaign
donations from corporations, something banned by
federal law since the administration of Theodore
Roosevelt.

The GOP measure sparked howls of public outrage.
Though again opposed by the Christian Right, Issue
Three drew an extremely broad range of support from
moderate bi-partisan citizen groups and newspapers
throughout the state. The Sunday Dispatch poll showed
it winning in a landslide, with 61% in favor and just
25% opposed.

Tuesday's official results showed Issue Three going
down to defeat in perhaps the most astonishing
reversal in Ohio history, claiming just 33% of the
vote, with 67% opposed. For this to have happened,
Issue Three's polled support had to drop 28 points,
again with an apparent 100% opposition from the
previously undecideds.

The reversals on both Issues Two and Three were
statistically staggering, to say the least.

The outcomes on Issue Four and Five were slightly less
dramatic. Issue Four meant to end gerrymandering by
establishing a non-partisan commission to set
Congressional and legislative districts. The Dispatch
poll showed it with 31% support, 45% opposition, and
25% undecided. Issue Four's final margin of defeat was
30% in favor to 70% against, placing virtually all
undecideds in the "no" column.

Issue Five meant to take administration of Ohio's
elections away from the Secretary of State, giving
control to a nine-member non-partisan commission.
Issue Five was prompted by Secretary of State J.
Kenneth Blackwell's administration of the 2004
presidential vote, particularly in light of his role
as co-chair of Ohio's Bush-Cheney campaign. The
Dispatch poll showed a virtual toss-up, at 41% yes,
43% no and 16% undecided. The official result gave
Issue Five just 30% of the vote, with allegedly 70%
opposed.

But the Sunday Dispatch also carried another headline:
"44 counties will break in new voting machines."
Forty-one of those counties "will be using new
electronic touch screens from Diebold Election
System," the Dispatch added.

Diebold's controversial CEO Walden O'Dell, a major GOP
donor, made national headlines in 2003 with a
fundraising letter pledging to deliver Ohio's 2004
electoral votes to Bush.

Every vote in Ohio 2004 was cast or counted on an
electronic device. About 15%---some 800,000
votes---were cast on electronic touchscreen machines
with no paper trail. The number was about seven times
higher than Bush's official 118,775-vote margin of
victory. Nearly all the rest of the votes were cast on
punch cards or scantron ballots counted by opti-scan
devices---some of them made by Diebold---then tallied
at central computer stations in each of Ohio's 88
counties.

According to a recent General Accounting Office
report, all such technologies are easily hacked. Vote
skimming and tipping are readily available to those
who would manipulate the vote. Vote switching could be
especially easy for those with access to networks by
which many of the computers are linked. Such machines
and networks, said the GAO, had widespread problems
with "security and reliability." Among them were "weak
security controls, system design flaws, inadequate
security testing, incorrect system configuration, poor
security management and vague or incomplete voting
system standards, among other issues."

With the 2005 expansion of paperless touch-screen
machines into 41 more Ohio counties, this year's
election was more vulnerable than ever to centralized
manipulation. The outcomes on Issues 2-5 would
indicate just that.

The new touchscreen machines were brought in by
Blackwell, who had vowed to take the state to an
entirely e-based voting regime.

As in 2004, there were instances of chaos. In inner
city, heavily Democratic precincts in Montgomery
County, the Dayton Daily News reported: "Vote count
goes on all night: Errors, unfamiliarity with
computerized voting at heart of problem." Among other
things, 186 memory cards from the e-voting machines
went missing, prompting election workers in some cases
to search for them with flashlights before all were
allegedly found.

In Tom Noe's Lucas County, Election Director Jill
Kelly explained that her staff could not complete the
vote count for 13.5 hours because poll workers "were
not adequately trained to run the new machines."

But none of the on-the-ground glitches can begin to
explain the impossible numbers surrounding the alleged
defeat of Issues Two through Five. The Dispatch
polling has long been a source of public pride for the
powerful, conservative newspaper, which endorsed Bush
in 2004.

The Dispatch was somehow dead accurate on Issue One,
and then staggeringly wrong on Issues Two through
Five. Sadly, this impossible inconsistency between
Ohio's most prestigious polling operation and these
final official referendum vote counts have drawn
virtually no public scrutiny.

Though there were glitches, this year's voting lacked
the massive irregularities and open manipulations that
poisoned Ohio 2004. The only major difference would
appear to be the new installation of touchscreen
machines in those additional 41 counties.

And thus the possible explanations for the staggering
defeats of Issues Two through Five boil down to two:
either the Dispatch polling---dead accurate for Issue
One---was wildly wrong beyond all possible statistical
margin of error for Issues 2-5, or the electronic
machines on which Ohio and much of the nation conduct
their elections were hacked by someone wanting to
change the vote count.

If the latter is true, it can and will be done again,
and we can forget forever about the state that has
been essential to the election of every Republican
presidential candidate since Lincoln.

And we can also, for all intents and purposes, forget
about the future of American democracy.

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of
How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election and is
Rigging 2008 available at http://www.freepress.org/
and http://www.harveywasserman.com/, and, with Steve
Rosenfeld, of What Happened in Ohio, available from
The New Press in spring, 2006.

© 1970-2005 The Columbus Free Press

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