California Adopts Discredited Voting Machines - Bush Camp Power In 2008 'Guaranteed'

"Two weeks ago, an obscure, unelected, Republican-appointed official in California decided the future of the world. That future - at least for the next several years - will be an accelerating nightmare of war, corruption, repression, atrocity and terror. That's because the loyal apparatchik has, with the stroke of a pen, guaranteed the perpetuation of the Bush faction in power in 2008 and beyond. One of the few certainties in modern U.S. politics is that no Democrat can win the presidency without carrying California.... Thus, the sudden, hugger-mugger decision by California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson to override the objections of his own experts and certify the eminently hackable voting machines of the politically partisan firm, Diebold, for use throughout the state means, quite simply, that the fix is in for 2008. It doesn't matter who the Democrats run - Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, George Clooney or Jesus H. Christ in an Uncle Sam suit. It won't make a bit of difference. California is lost, the presidency is lost and the Bushists are in - already. It's over... What's more, 'hackers wouldn't need to know passwords or cryptographic keys, or have access to any other part of the system to do their dirty work,' the Los Angeles Times notes. 'Voters, candidates and election monitors wouldn't necessarily know they'd been rooked.' A more perfect vehicle for fixing an election can hardly be imagined. And it would require nothing more than a handful of high-tech zealots, not a vast conspiracy."
Party Hacks
Moscow Times, 3 March 2006

"... there's no excuse for exposing the integrity of our election system to computer hackers. Yet that's what California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson may have done last week by approving electronic voting machines from Diebold Election Systems for use in California elections through the end of this year....it's proper to demand of the high-tech machines replacing the paper ballots and punch cards of yore that they be technologically bulletproof. The Diebold systems certified by McPherson; an optical scanner that reads hand-marked ballots and a touch screen that totes up votes directly; fall well short of that standard. How do we know this? It's the conclusion of a panel of computer security experts McPherson commissioned specifically to study Diebold's software. Three days after they issued their report Feb. 14, McPherson gave Diebold thumbs up, noting that the panel regarded the software problems it found as 'manageable' and had said the risks could be 'mitigated' if election officials took care. But the experts were plainly troubled by flaws in Diebold's systems. The panel, which included David Jefferson of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and David Wagner of Berkeley, observed that the removable memory cards used by Diebold were vulnerable to undetectable acts of tampering. The panel found 16 software bugs that could cede 'complete control' of the system to hackers who might then 'change vote totals, modify reports, change the names of candidates, change the races being voted on,' and even crash the machines, bringing an election to a halt. Hackers wouldn't need to know passwords or cryptographic keys, or have access to any other part of the system, to do their dirty work. Voters, candidates and election monitors wouldn't necessarily know they'd been rooked. The bugs lead some computer professionals to believe that Diebold's software designers never treated security as a high priority. 'It's like they were making a mechanical device, and never heard of computer security,' says David Dill, an expert in electronic voting at Stanford University who wasn't on the panel. The bugs pale next to another discovery by the panel. This is the presence of a cryptographic key written into the source code, or basic software, of every Diebold touch-screen machine in the country. The researchers called this blunder tantamount to 'a bank using the same PIN code for every ATM card they issued; if this PIN code ever became known, the exposure could be tremendous.' Here's the punch line: The Diebold key became known in 2003, when it was published by researchers at JohnsHopkins and Rice universities. It can be found today via a Google search. What's worse, the key was first identified in 1997 by a University of Iowa researcher, who promptly warned the manufacturer of the flaw, apparently to no avail."
California: Integrity of E-Balloting System Still In Doubt
Los Angeles Times, 23 February 2006

"The state has recommended on Friday that elections officials across Florida enhance security safeguards for all voting systems after tests in California and Tallahassee exposed weaknesses. Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho called the technical advisory a vindication of his findings last year that some Diebold optical-scan voting machines can be hacked by election office insiders to change results. 'In other words, you could steal the election and no one would ever know,' Sancho said. The advisory to supervisors in all 67 Florida counties cites testing reports by California's Voting Systems Technology Assessment Advisory Board.... Sancho said the California testing verified his earlier results, which had been disputed by the Division of Elections and Diebold. Sancho contends he has been ostracized by the voting machine industry as a result of his dispute with Diebold."
State orders security safeguards for voting machines
Associated Press, 3 March 2006

"President Bush said his 2004 re-election victory over Sen. John Kerry was inadvertently aided by Osama bin Laden, The Washington Examiner newspaper reported Tuesday. The al Qaeda leader had issued a taped diatribe against Bush the Friday before Americans went to the polls. Bush said there were 'enormous amounts of discussion' inside his campaign about the 15-minute tape, which he called 'an interesting entry by our enemy' into the presidential race. Bush's comments in the Washington newspaper were excerpts from the new book 'Strategery' by Bill Sammon, a longtime White House correspondent."
Report: Bush thinks bin Laden tape helped re-election bid
CNN, 28 February 2006

"Which is going to be the bigger influence on the outcome of the US elections? Osama Bin Laden or electronic voting machines made by Diebold? Below is an excerpt from an interesting and detailed article on the potential for US election fraud on Tuesday using electronic voting machines. Many of the machines in question (which will reportedly count large chunks of the vote in 37 states following a multi-billion dollar investment in a new voting system under the 'Help America Vote Act' signed by President Bush in October 2002), are supplied by a company that has allegedly put over $1 million into the Republican Party.... If an attempt to tamper with electronic votes in key swing states were to be made on Tuesday then an 'intelligent' fraud would, of course, be to fix the numbers in such a way that the result was sufficiently close to look plausible. The media punditry would probably still be too diverted discussing the impact of the sudden arrival of [the] Bin Laden [video tape] on the election scene to notice in any case."
Bin Laden and The Voting Machines - Tipping The Election Balance?
Fight Smart, 31 October 2004

"The latest critical confirmation of key indicators that the election of 2004 was stolen comes in an extremely powerful, penetrating report from the Government Accountability Office that has gotten virtually no mainstream media coverage. Click here for GAO Report The government's lead investigative agency is known for its general incorruptibility and its thorough, in-depth analyses. Its concurrence with assertions widely dismissed as 'conspiracy theories' adds crucial new weight to the case that Team Bush has no legitimate business being in the White House.... the GAO report now confirms that electronic voting machines as deployed in 2004 were in fact perfectly engineered to allow a very small number of partisans with minimal computer skills and equipment to shift enough votes to put George W. Bush back in the White House. Given the growing body of evidence, it appears increasingly clear that's exactly what happened. .... The CEO of one of the most crucial suppliers of electronic voting machines, Warren O'Dell of Diebold, pledged before the 2004 campaign to deliver Ohio and thus the presidency to George W. Bush.... [According to the GAO] Some electronic voting machines 'did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected.' In other words, the GAO now confirms that electronic voting machines provided an open door to flip an entire vote count. More than 800,000 votes were cast in Ohio on electronic voting machines, some seven times Bush's official margin of victory....The GAO also confirms that access to the voting network was easily compromised because not all digital recording electronic voting systems (DREs) had supervisory functions password-protected, so access to one machine provided access to the whole network. This critical finding confirms that rigging the 2004 vote did not require a 'widespread conspiracy' but rather the cooperation of a very small number of operatives with the power to tap into the networked machines and thus change large numbers of votes at will. With 800,000 votes cast on electronic machines in Ohio, flipping the number needed to give Bush 118,775 could be easily done by just one programmer..... The GAO findings are particularly damning when set in the context of an election run in Ohio by a Secretary of State simultaneously working as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. Far from what election theft skeptics have long asserted, the GAO findings confirm that the electronic network on which 800,000 Ohio votes were cast was vulnerable enough to allow a a tiny handful of operatives - or less - to turn the whole vote count using personal computers operating on relatively simple software...."
Powerful Government Accountability Office report confirms key 2004 stolen election findings
Columbus Free Press, 26 October 2005

" In a conference call with Rev. Jackson, Attorney Cliff Arnebeck, Attorney Bob Fitrakis and others, John Kerry confirmed that he lost every precinct in New Mexico that had a touchscreen voting machine. The losses had no correlation with ethnicity, social class or traditional party affiliation - only with the fact that touchscreen machines were used."
Powerful Government Accountability Office report confirms key 2004 stolen election findings
Columbus Free Press, 26 October 2005

"The US presidential election could have been computer hacked, the wife of Democrat candidate John Kerry has claimed. Teresa Heinz Kerry is openly sceptical about George Bush's victory some four months after the election, questioning the legitimacy of the optical scanners used in some states to record votes. 'Two brothers own 80 per cent of the machines used in the United States,' she said during a fund raising event in Seattle. They are 'hard-right' Republicans, she claimed, arguing that it was 'very easy to hack into the mother machines'. Heinz Kerry urged Democrats to push for accountability and transparency, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. 'We in the United States are not a banana republic,' she said. 'I fear for 2006. I don't trust it the way it is right now,' she added, referring to mid-term elections."
Hackers may have won Bush office: Kerry's wife
Press Association, 10 March 2005

"These bugs [in the Diebold machines] would have no effect at all in the absence of deliberate tampering, and would not be discovered by any amount of functionality testing; but they could allow an attacker to completely control the behavior of the [voting machine]. An attacker could change vote totals, modify reports, change the names of candidates, change the races being voted on, or insert his own code into the running firmware of the machine."
California State Voting Systems Technology Assessment Advisory Board
Report, 14 February 2006

"The accuracy of California elections could be undermined if the state switches to all-electronic voting machines owned by private companies, according to San Mateo County’s chief of elections.... Most, if not all, of the private companies that have so far developed election machine software have refused to turn over their programming code for inspection, citing proprietary concerns. Without the code, the systems are unverifiable and opaque, according to a panel of computer technology experts who also testified before the Senate Elections, Reapportionment and Constitutional Amendments Committee chaired by state Sen. Debra Bowen, D-Redondo Beach."
Elections chief questions use of electronic voting
San Francisco Examiner, 16 February 2006

"As the [California] Secretary of State held a hearing today on whether voting systems from four manufacturers should be certified for use in California, Senator Debra Bowen (D-Redondo Beach), the chairwoman of the Senate Elections, Reapportionment & Constitutional Amendments Committee, criticized the Secretary’s continuing refusal to hold a public hearing on the security flaws that have been identified in the Diebold systems he re-certified for use on February 17. 'The Secretary can’t be allowed to have it both ways,' said Bowen. 'He laid out a process for dealing with the Diebold re-certification request, one that people who are concerned about the reliability and accuracy of these machines relied on, and then he ignored it. He says he’s for public hearings and a public process, yet he continually changed the process he established and refused to release critical information about the flaws in the Diebold machines until after he decided to re-certify them.... In August, he said he wouldn’t certify any voting system that didn’t meet all of the federal standards, yet the Diebold machines he re-certified in February don’t meet the federal standards. In December, he said he wouldn’t act on Diebold’s re-certification request until he heard back from the ITA, yet he approved the Diebold machines in February without waiting for the ITA’s report on the Diebold memory cards.'”
WHERE’S THE HEARING ON THE DIEBOLD SECURITY FLAWS DISCOVERED BY THE SECRETARY OF STATE?
California Chronicle, 2 March 2006

California Diebold Machine Decision Timeline
California Chronicle, 2 March 2006

"Following is a timeline of the important dates and actions related to the Secretary of State’s decision to re-certify the Diebold voting systems:

August 3, 2005 – Secretary McPherson announces, 'All systems certified by the Secretary of State’s Office shall comply with the standards and requirements of the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) [Public Law 107-22, 106th Congress], including all requirements, standards and regulations promulgated pursuant to authority derived from HAVA, as well as complying with all other applicable requirements and standards explicit in federal and state laws, and any requirements, standards and regulations deriving authority from federal and state laws.' This means all systems certified for use in California have to comply with the 2002 Voting System Standards adopted by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) that ban the certification of voting machines that contain interpreted code.

October 3, 2005 – The Diebold system is federal qualified and is assigned NASED number N-1-06-22-22-002. However, as the Secretary notes on December 20, this review and qualification failed to look at the machine’s memory cards.

November 21, 2005 – Secretary McPherson conducts a public hearing on Diebold’s application to have its voting systems re-certified for use in California. Although the Secretary’s staff report recommends re-certifying the machines, no decision on re-certification is reached due in part to concerns raised during the hearing.

December 20, 2005 – Secretary McPherson announces he won’t consider approving the Diebold systems until the ITA acts on his request to review the Diebold memory cards. He states, 'During a thorough review of the application for the Diebold system currently pending certification, we have determined that there is sufficient cause for additional federal evaluation. I have consistently stated that I will not certify any system for use in California unless it meets the most stringent voting system requirements.' Attached to his statement is a letter from the chief of the Secretary’s Elections Division to Diebold stating, 'We require this additional review before proceeding with further consideration of your application for certification in California. Once we have received a report from the federal ITA adequately analyzing this source code, in addition to the technical and operational specifications relating to the memory card and interpreter, we will expeditiously proceed with our comprehensive review of your application.'

January 18, 2006 – The Secretary of State’s staff, in a hearing of the Senate Elections, Reapportionment & Constitutional Amendments Committee, publicly announces that the state process for certifying voting machines can’t begin until the federal process is completed. The Secretary of State’s staff notes it won’t begin the process of determining whether the Diebold machines should be re-certified until the ITA responds to the Secretary’s December 20, 2005, request for further testing.

February 17, 2006 – Secretary McPherson announces that he has re-certified the Diebold machines despite the fact that the ITA report he requested in December hasn’t been completed. The Secretary explains he made his decision after receiving a yet-to-be-released report conducted by his own Voting Systems Technology Assessment Advisory Board (VSTAAB).

February 17, 2006 – After issuing his certification order, Secretary McPherson releases the VSTAAB report, which is dated February 14, 2006. Prior to its release, there was no public notice that such a report was being developed or would be the basis for the Secretary’s decision. The report concludes there are a minimum of 16 security flaws in the Diebold machines, noting, 'These bugs would have no effect at all in the absence of deliberate tampering, and would not be discovered by any amount of functionality testing; but they could allow an attacker to completely control the behavior of the [voting machine]. An attacker could change vote totals, modify reports, change the names of candidates, change the races being voted on, or insert his own code into the running firmware of the machine.' The report also notes the Diebold machines rely on interpreted code, stating, 'Interpreted code in general is prohibited by the 2002 FEC Voluntary Voting System Standards, and also by the successor standard, the EAC’s Voluntary Voting System Guidelines due to take effect in two years. In order for the Diebold software architecture to be in compliance, it would appear that either the AccuBasic language and interpreter have to be removed, or the standard will have to be changed.' The FEC standards that ban the use of interpreted code are the very standards the Secretary pledged to follow on August 3, 2005.

February 22, 2006 – Senator Bowen writes to Secretary McPherson, calling on him to reverse his February 17 decision to re-certify the machines. The letter states the Secretary’s decision is: 1) Contrary to his August 3, 2005, promise not to certify machines that don’t comply with all federal guidelines and regulations; 2) Contrary to his December 20 statement to wait for the ITA to act; 3) Contrary to state law requiring any machine that’s certified for use in the state to also be federally certified (although technically the Diebold machines have a federal certification number from October 3, 2005, the Secretary himself pointed out on December 20, 2005, that the certification didn’t review the Diebold memory cards, which is why the Secretary sent them back for review); 4) Contrary to the state law requiring all direct recording electronic voting machines to have an accessible voter verified paper trail that provides a visually-impaired voter with an audio read-back of what’s recorded on the paper trail; and 5) Out of compliance with the law requiring a public hearing on a voting system because the report upon which the Secretary’s approval was based wasn’t prepared or released until nearly three months after the original public hearing.

February 28, 2006 – Secretary McPherson releases the ITA report – dated February 23, 2006 – from CIBER on the Diebold memory cards. The report notes the Diebold system uses interpreted code – something banned by the FEC standards the Secretary said on August 3, 2005, he would follow. The report also identifies at least three security vulnerabilities and a number of requirement violations. The report notes, 'Certain vulnerabilities in this report may require a portion of the code to be modified in order to correct the vulnerabilities identified. To ensure that the efforts to correct vulnerabilities do not introduce new vulnerabilities, CIBER strongly recommends retesting of the remediated code prior to its migration to a production environment.' The report also states, 'Error handling appears to be adequate for a system that executes in a perfect running environment. However, the interpreters do not have the proper degree of effort checking to identify or recover from key failures in a damaged, altered or dysfunctional environment. Our reasoning for increasing the security on the code is because the object code traverses potentially untrustworthy hands . . . Since the object code is on the memory cards being distributed, it is a prime target for potential tampering.' "

"An examination of Palm Beach County's electronic voting machine records from the 2004 election [in Florida] found possible tampering and tens of thousands of malfunctions and errors, a watchdog group said Thursday. Bev Harris, founder of BlackBoxVoting.org, said the findings call into question the outcome of the presidential race.... Harris said one machine showed that 112 votes were cast on Oct. 16, two days before the start of early voting, a possible sign of tampering. She said the group found evidence of tampering on more than 30 machines in the county."
Watchdog Group Questions 2004 Fla. Vote
Associated Press, 23 February 2006

"Florida's top elections officials, who in December dismissed a report that computer experts had hacked into a Leon County voting system, on Friday abruptly ordered new security measures for all 67 counties. The decision comes on the heels of a Feb. 14 report in which California experts concluded security flaws exposed in Florida were 'a real threat.' The Republican secretary of state in California then ordered changes to have Diebold machines certified for the 2006 elections in that state. Twenty-nine counties in Florida, including Monroe, use different versions of paper-ballot voting systems manufactured by Diebold, a leading manufacturer of security systems and voting machines. One county uses Diebold touch-screens. The security changes, which were ordered 'immediately' by Florida Division of Elections Chief Dawn Roberts, require that election supervisors counties keep an inventory of all memory cards used inside voting machines and that the cards are never left with just one person.... 'We feel vindicated,' said Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho. An outside group that had Sancho's permission to test his machines' security was able to hack them. When Sancho made the results public, he came under fire from both the Florida Department of State and Diebold.... Sancho moved to switch away from the Diebold machines after a Finnish computer expert was able to hack into one, alter voting results and leave no trace of tampering. State officials initially said they were not concerned about the security breach the test exposed.But an independent panel put together by California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson concluded in a February report that the 'attack does work' and the results of the hack cannot be detected without 'paper ballots.'"
Voting bosses must boost security
Miami Herald, 4 March 2006

"Today the University of California's Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team released a statistical study - the sole method available to monitor the accuracy of e-voting - reporting irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election. The study shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods - what the team says can be deemed a 'smoke alarm.' Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by chance - the probability is less than 0.1 percent. The research team formally disclosed results of the study at a press conference today at the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center, where they called on Florida voting officials to investigate.... The research team is comprised of doctoral students and faculty in the UC Berkeley sociology department, and led by Sociology Professor Michael Hout, a nationally-known expert on statistical methods and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center.... 'No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained,' said Hout. 'The study shows, that a county's use of electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. There is just a trivial probability of evidence like this appearing in a population where the true difference is zero - less than once in a thousand chances."
UC Berkeley Research Team Sounds 'Smoke Alarm' for Florida E-Vote Count
University of California Berkeley, Press Release 18 November 2004

Tampering With The Election Process In 2004
Was Much Easier And Cheaper Than In 2000
And Yet The BBC Confirms They Even Managed To Pull It Off In 2000

"We want to know whether George W Bush won the [2000] election or did brother Jeb steal it for him? Our investigation suggest the answer lies in this shuttered building and in a very expensive contract between Governor Jeb's division of elections and a private company named DBT, which accidentally wiped off the voter rolls thousands of Democratic voters. 18th floor division of elections, we have come to ask Mr Clayton Roberts, the director, a few questions. Roberts agreed to talk, but became a bit uncomfortable when he learned that we had obtained the secret DBT contract, and asked him if he knew what DBT were up to.... 'It says here in the contract that the verification is supposed to be done by DBT. That you paid them $4 million. It could look to others don't you think that you paid $4 million to purchase this election for the Republican party. 95% wrong on the felon list. Mr Roberts, could you answer the question regarding the contract.'... Instead, Mr Roberts called out State troopers..... The difficult questions are: Did Governor Jeb Bush, his Secretary of State Katherine Harris, and her Director of Elections, Clayton Roberts, know they had wrongly barred 22,000 black, Democrat voters before the elections? After the elections did they use their powers to prevent the count of [yet another] 20,000 votes for the Democrats?...This is Database Technologies. This is the company that the state of Florida hired to remove the names of people who committed serious crimes from the voter lists. I have obtained a document marked 'confidential and trade secret'. It says the company was paid millions of dollars to make telephone calls to verify they got the right names - but they didn't. There is nothing in the state of Florida files that says they made these telephone calls. So the question remains, why did the Republican leaders of this state pay millions for a list that stopped thousands of innocent Democrats from voting? The first list from DBT included 8,000 names from Texas supplied by George Bush's state officials. They said they were all felons, serious criminals barred from voting. As it turns out, almost none were. Local officials raised a ruckus and DBT issued a new list naming 58,000 felons. But the one county which went through the whole expensive process of checking the new list name by name found it was still 95% wrong. Because of the way DBT generated the list, every genuine black felon in the United States could knock out every black voter in Florida with the same surname and similar date of birth..... Altogether, it looks like this cost the Democrats about 22,000 votes in Florida, which George Bush won by only 537 votes.... Their [DBT's] vice-president told us that 'manual verification by telephone calls' does not mean ringing people up to check they have got the right person. So were they paid to produce a list which they knew would name thousands of innocent black people? In fact DBT told Newsnight that Clayton Roberts and the State of Florida: '... wanted there to be more names than were actually verified as being a convicted felon.' ...."
Greg Palast - What really happened in Florida?
BBC Newsnight, 16 February 2001

"More than 30 million Americans will be looking at new and unfamiliar voting machines when they cast their ballots this year, perhaps the most rapid changeover of voting equipment in history.... Voters used to manual machines with levers or punch-card devices could instead be seeing touch screens or optical scanners."
Election officials fear '06 season of the glitch
USA Today, 5 February 2006

"After weeks of debate, Butler County commissioners approved a contract last week to buy 490 electronic voting machines. The decision comes despite pending legal action aimed at sidetracking a plan linking touch-screen voting with federal aid due to concerns over accuracy of punch card ballots. Elections Bureau Director Regis Young advised commissioners to approve the contract because the county would almost certainly lose a nearly $1 million grant if a new system isn't in place by the May primary. In fact, he suggested that if the county did not buy its own system, the U.S. Attorney General's Office would purchase a new system for Butler, bill the county for it, and take the federal grant away to boot. The contract with Election System & Software of Omaha, Neb., known as ES&S, will be finalized after noneconomic issues are settled, said Solicitor Julie Graham....A lawsuit from Westmoreland County is before the state Supreme Court on the issue of whether a referendum is needed before the county switches its voting system. Butler County also is party to a lawsuit in Commonwealth Court that, among its challenges, questions whether two previous referendums on the issue were worded adequately. The state Supreme Court heard arguments on the Westmoreland case Wednesday. Briefs have been filed with Commonwealth Court in the Butler County case but no hearing date had been set as of press time. In the Westmoreland case, Commonwealth Court had ruled that the county would have to hold a referendum before switching from its mechanical lever balloting system to an electronic one. The electronic voting issue was spurred by the federal Help America Vote Act in response to the ballot problems of the 2000 presidential election in Florida. Punch-card voting systems like the one used in Butler County are to be eliminated under the act. Citizens groups are opposed to electronic voting because there currently are no provisions in state or federal law for paper trails of the balloting process. Concerns also have been raised about the quality of the machines."
Grant pressure forces OK of electronic voting machines
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 6 March 2006

"After weeks of negotiations, the Justice Department sued the State of New York yesterday for failing to upgrade its voting machines to make them accessible to the disabled and for not creating a statewide database of voters as required by law. The first such lawsuit filed in the country comes after New York's Board of Elections officials said the state would not be ready to replace its lever action machines in time for the the Sept. 12 primary and the Nov. 7 general election... In the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Albany, federal attorneys are asking that New York be declared out of compliance with the law and that an order be issued requiring the state to submit a plan promptly to comply. Brehm defended the state's approach to replacing its machines, saying it wanted to make sure 'we do it correctly the first time,' and that whatever equipment is used is vetted and tested."
Feds sue NY over voting machines
Newsday, 2 March 2006

Why There Is Resistance

"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'."
Did Dubbya rig the election?
New Statesman, 29 November 2004

"Incorporated into the foundation of the Diebold Precinct-Based Optical Scan 1.94w system is the mother of security holes, and no apparent cure will produce infertility, or system safety. ... the removable media (memory card), which should contain only the ballot box, the ballot design and the race definitions, but also contains a living thing – an executable program which acts on the vote data. Changing this executable program on the memory card can change the way the optical scan machine functions and the way the votes are reported. The system won’t work without this program on the memory card. Whereas we would expect to see vote data in a sealed, passive environment, this system places votes into an open active environment. With this architecture, every time an election is conducted it is necessary to reinstall part of the functionality into the Optical Scan system via memory card, making it possible to introduce program functions (either authorized or unauthorized), either wholesale or in a targeted manner, with no way to verify that the certified or even standard functionality is maintained from one voting machine to the next. .... Before each election, the Diebold central tabulator program, called 'GEMS,' defines the races in the election. The optical scan machine is then connected to the GEMS server via an RS-232 serial port connection. The removable storage (memory card) is placed into the optical scan machine, and GEMS writes information onto the memory card through the optical scan unit. According to the Diebold optical scan user’s manual, the programming of the memory card can also be done remotely by modem connection over a public telephone network.(7) After the cards have been programmed, they are interchangeable among voting machines with the same or similar firmware version. Therefore a single machine can be used to program all cards needed. During the election, voters place filled-out ballots into the scanner, which interprets the ballot data and stores the totals (but not the individual votes) on the memory card. After the election, the data on the memory card is transferred into the central tabulator by a modem through a modem pool, or is physically brought to the county elections office and uploaded through an optical scan machine there via an RS-232 serial port connection. It is noteworthy that operational practices may vary - from election office in-house operated modem pools to a virtual modem pool purchased as access service from a 3rd party provider. .... With this design, the functionality – the critical element to be certified during the certification process - can be modified every time an election is prepared. Functionality is downloaded separately into each and every machine, via memory card, for every election. With this design, there is no way to verify that the certified or even standard functionality is maintained from one voting machine to the next. With regard to certification, please also note that, because of the architecture, a trustworthy certification cannot be done separately for hardware and software. For a true understanding of the execution environment, the certifier must understand both of these components.... Exploits available with this design include, but are not limited to:

According to public statements by elections officials(20), the paper trail produced by the precinct optical scan has been placed into the role of a vital safeguard mechanism. The paper report from the optical scan machine is the key record used to confirm the integrity of the central tabulator record. ... It is important to understand that, because the AccuBasic program is aware of the election definitions and structure, attacks can be prepared months ahead of time, before the candidate and ballot design have been decided..... combining the false report method (demonstrated on page 16) with the pre-arranged integer overflow (demonstrated on 18) seems to be an especially efficient exploit because it is a one-step process that takes out both the actual process and its safeguard at the same time, while surviving scrutiny of almost anything short of a full manual recount. "
Critical Security Issues In Diebold Optical Scan
Scoop, 6 July 2005

"What happened at 3:31 p.m. on election day in San Luis Obispo County California? A file from the Diebold stash examined by Jim March, of Alameda County California, turns out to be from a real election, and it contains real votes. And it also contains a real problem for Diebold, because it is illegal to count the votes before the polls close. Even more interesting: What mechanism was used to get votes to migrate from 57 polling places into a central tally in the middle of the afternoon?... For some reason, the Diebold optical scan machines in 57 precincts simultaneously had an E.T. moment. They 'called home' with election results while the election was still in progress, summing up the votes in 57 precincts, then tagged the file to a Diebold employee and placed it on a Diebold company web site. This file is from the 2002 primary election in San Luis Obispo, California. It is dated March 5, 2002. It is date and time-stamped, and contains an internal audit log which confirms the date and time. It was saved as a 'backup file' at exactly 3:31 p.m. on election day, about five hours before the polls closed. This file contains a tabulation taken from 57 precincts. The votes in the file correspond with the final vote tally, which can be found on the San Luis Obispo County web site for that election - but only about 40 percent of the votes had come in by 3:31 in the afternoon. This file was put on the Diebold FTP site used by Diebold employees to transfer files. Why? It is against the law to count votes before the polls close.... Although Diebold has claimed modem connections are one-way (but the machines must handshake and that creates a two-way pipeline for information), because it’s two-way, you can use the same method you used to gather the votes up to send data back into the voting machine. You can even erase the evidence that you accessed the machines. But now Diebold and the county elections registrar claim that the optical scan machines are not hooked up to a modem at all. This is a recent development; interviews as late as February 2003 say the machines are equipped for remote communication, and so do the hardware and user manuals. However, if the machines aren’t hooked up, this leaves only option 1) Have all 57 precincts shut down the polls and drive in to the county office in the middle of the day.... only one-half percent of the precincts in California are audited by looking at the paper ballot. It is illegal to count the paper ballots except in unusual circumstances, usually requiring a court order. Your chances of slipping by the paper ballot spot check are 99.5 percent. And if you do get audited, you can say it was a 'computer glitch' and you’ll have the tech look into it."
Bev Harris: Diebold Voting Machines Phone Home
Scoop, 4 September 2003

"Using an intelligent Voter Card as the voter interface, the AccuVote-TS permits voters to view and cast their votes by touching target areas on an electronically generated ballot. Each unit provides a direct-entry computerized voting application that automatically records and stores appropriate ballot information and results. At the end of the voting period, the system can print precinct totals to be included as part of the permanent record and modem the results to a host computer via TeleResults."
Diebold Election Systems (Web Site, March 2006)

"Concerned citizens have been warning that new electronic voting technology being rolled out nationwide can be used to steal elections. Now there is proof. When the State of Maryland hired a computer security firm to test its new machines, these paid hackers had little trouble casting multiple votes and taking over the machines' vote-recording mechanisms. The Maryland study shows convincingly that more security is needed for electronic voting, starting with voter-verified paper trails. When Maryland decided to buy 16,000 AccuVote-TS voting machines, there was considerable opposition. Critics charged that the new touch-screen machines, which do not create a paper record of votes cast, were vulnerable to vote theft. The state commissioned a staged attack on the machines, in which computer-security experts would try to foil the safeguards and interfere with an election. They were disturbingly successful. It was an 'easy matter,' they reported, to reprogram the access cards used by voters and vote multiple times. They were able to attach a keyboard to a voting terminal and change its vote count. And by exploiting a software flaw and using a modem, they were able to change votes from a remote location. Critics of new voting technology are often accused of being alarmist, but this state-sponsored study contains vulnerabilities that seem almost too bad to be true. Maryland's 16,000 machines all have identical locks on two sensitive mechanisms, which can be opened by any one of 32,000 keys. The security team had no trouble making duplicates of the keys at local hardware stores, although that proved unnecessary since one team member picked the lock in 'approximately 10 seconds....' The Maryland study confirms concerns about electronic voting that are rapidly accumulating from actual elections. In Boone County, Ind., last fall, in a particularly colorful example of unreliability, an electronic system initially recorded more than 144,000 votes in an election with fewer than 19,000 registered voters, County Clerk Lisa Garofolo said. Given the growing body of evidence, it is clear that electronic voting machines cannot be trusted until more safeguards are in place."
How to Hack an Election
New York Times 31 January 2004

"... the GAO report now confirms that electronic voting machines as deployed in 2004 were in fact perfectly engineered to allow a very small number of partisans with minimal computer skills and equipment to shift enough votes to put George W. Bush back in the White House. Given the growing body of evidence, it appears increasingly clear that's exactly what happened. .... [According to the GAO] Some electronic voting machines 'did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected.' In other words, the GAO now confirms that electronic voting machines provided an open door to flip an entire vote count. More than 800,000 votes were cast in Ohio on electronic voting machines, some seven times Bush's official margin of victory..... The GAO also confirms that access to the voting network was easily compromised because not all digital recording electronic voting systems (DREs) had supervisory functions password-protected, so access to one machine provided access to the whole network. This critical finding confirms that rigging the 2004 vote did not require a 'widespread conspiracy' but rather the cooperation of a very small number of operatives with the power to tap into the networked machines and thus change large numbers of votes at will. With 800,000 votes cast on electronic machines in Ohio, flipping the number needed to give Bush 118,775 could be easily done by just one programmer..... The GAO findings are particularly damning when set in the context of an election run in Ohio by a Secretary of State simultaneously working as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. Far from what election theft skeptics have long asserted, the GAO findings confirm that the electronic network on which 800,000 Ohio votes were cast was vulnerable enough to allow a a tiny handful of operatives - or less - to turn the whole vote count using personal computers operating on relatively simple software.... "
Powerful Government Accountability Office report confirms key 2004 stolen election findings
Columbus Free Press, 26 October 2005

"In a conference call with Rev. Jackson, Attorney Cliff Arnebeck, Attorney Bob Fitrakis and others, John Kerry confirmed that he lost every precinct in New Mexico that had a touchscreen voting machine. The losses had no correlation with ethnicity, social class or traditional party affiliation - only with the fact that touchscreen machines were used"
Powerful Government Accountability Office report confirms key 2004 stolen election findings
Columbus Free Press, 26 October 2005

http://context.themoscowtimes.com/print.php?aid=166395
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/story/166395/

MOSCOW TIMES

Global Eye

Party Hacks

By Chris Floyd
Published: March 3, 2006

Two weeks ago, an obscure, unelected, Republican-appointed official in California decided the future of the world. That future -- at least for the next several years -- will be an accelerating nightmare of war, corruption, repression, atrocity and terror. That's because the loyal apparatchik has, with the stroke of a pen, guaranteed the perpetuation of the Bush faction in power in 2008 and beyond.

One of the few certainties in modern U.S. politics is that no Democrat can win the presidency without carrying California. Thanks to the Electoral College system set up by the Founding Oligarchs to keep the low-born rabble from voting directly for president, the big haul of California's electoral votes is crucial for Democrats to offset the multitude of small, sparsely populated states that reliably vote Republican. Bagging California doesn't guarantee Democratic victory, but without it, the cliffhanger electoral counts in the goosed elections of 2000 and 2004 wouldn't even have been close.

Thus, the sudden, hugger-mugger decision by California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson to override the objections of his own experts and certify the eminently hackable voting machines of the politically partisan firm, Diebold, for use throughout the state means, quite simply, that the fix is in for 2008. It doesn't matter who the Democrats run -- Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, George Clooney or Jesus H. Christ in an Uncle Sam suit. It won't make a bit of difference. California is lost, the presidency is lost and the Bushists are in -- already. It's over.

After Diebold's machines failed miserably in a battery of tests last year, McPherson vowed to put their certification on hold until his own hand-picked panel of experts had fine-combed the system to a fare-thee-well, blogger Brad Friedman reports. The panel delivered their conclusions last month -- and the results were staggering, far beyond the worst fears of the most hard-core "conspiracy theorist." The panel found that Diebold's machines were riddled with curious built-in glitches that effectively "ceded complete control of the system" to hackers who could "change vote totals, modify reports, change the names of candidates and change the races being voted on."

What's more, "hackers wouldn't need to know passwords or cryptographic keys, or have access to any other part of the system to do their dirty work," the Los Angeles Times notes. "Voters, candidates and election monitors wouldn't necessarily know they'd been rooked." A more perfect vehicle for fixing an election can hardly be imagined. And it would require nothing more than a handful of high-tech zealots, not a vast conspiracy.

Naturally, after such a blistering condemnation, McPherson did what any official charged with guaranteeing the integrity and credibility of his state's elections would do: He approved the slipshod system by the dark of the moon, on a Friday before a holiday weekend, without any public hearings -- indeed, without waiting for the results of a pending federal review of Diebold's mole-infested code. Now, the Diebold contraptions, whose chronic "breakdowns" have featured in numerous contested elections and last-second "miracle" victories by Republican candidates across the country in recent years, will control California's pot of electoral gold.

A good example of how this control works can be found in Alaska. There, the state Democratic Party has long been seeking an audit of some of the 2004 Diebold-counted returns, which produced a series of strange anomalies -- including awarding President George W. Bush an extra 100,000 votes that turned out to be phantoms. First, state officials blocked the request because that information, the vote count of a public election, was a "company secret" that belonged exclusively to Diebold, Friedman reports. Then they decided that the returns could be examined -- but only on the condition that Diebold and the Republican officials be allowed to "manipulate the data" before it was released. In the end, even this tainted transparency was too much for the Bushist ballot crunchers; late last month, Alaska officials suddenly declared that examining the returns would pose a dire but unspecified "security risk" to the state.

America's votes are increasingly controlled by a small number of interrelated corporations: Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia, all of which have close political and financial ties to the Bush faction -- and to other dark forces as well. Diebold and ES&S were both bankrolled by tycoon Howard Ahmanson, who was also a major funder of the Christian "Reconstructionist" movement, which openly advocates a totalitarian theocracy in America, including the death penalty for homosexuals, slavery for debtors, stoning for sinners and stripping nonbelievers of citizenship. As journalist Max Blumenthal reports, these extremists have been welcomed as a key part of the Bushist base of politicized evangelicals, whose cadres have been quietly filling government posts for the past five years. Meanwhile, Sequoia -- whose machines racked up 100,000 "mistakes" in just one Florida county in 2004, according to a recent audit -- is owned by a business partner of the Carlyle Group, the investment firm whose insider deals and war profiteering have earned millions for the Bush family.

Thus, the 2008 election will be conducted largely on wide-open machines programmed by avowed partisans and paymasters of a ruthless gang that has already committed demonstrable vote fraud on a massive scale in engineering narrow "victories" in 2000 and 2004. So it doesn't matter who runs, who votes or how unpopular the Bush faction becomes through the murderous ruin of its radical agenda. The "consent of the governed" will be drowned in the blood money that has bought the nation's electoral process.

Annotations

Integrity of E-Balloting System Still in Doubt
Los Angeles Times, Feb. 23, 2006
Watchdog Group Questions 2004 Florida Vote
Associated Press, Feb. 23, 2006
Vanishing Act: Disappearing the Republic at the Push of a Button
Empire Burlesque, Sept. 19, 2003
Bush Poll Ratings at All-Time Low
CBS News, Feb. 28, 2006
Audit Shows Electronic Voting in Disarray
Bradblog.com, Feb. 23, 2006
Alaska Now Refuses Release of 2004 Election Data Citing Security Concerns
Bradblog.com, Feb. 24, 2006
Loot the Vote
Empire Burlesque, Jan. 19, 2006
Is the GOP "Shock-the-Vote" Brigade Planning to Heist California?
Huffington Post, Feb. 21, 2006
A State Senator Says Diebold Re-Certification in Violation of State Law
Bradblog.com, Feb. 23, 2006
Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too
Mark Crispin Miller, Basic Books, October 2005
Pin Heads: The New Bush Push for Theocracy
Empire Burlesque, March 12, 2004
The "Pro-Family" Movement and Killing Gays
Max Blumenthal, Feb. 14, 2006
Body Blow: Bush's Worldwide War Against Women
Empire Burlesque, Oct. 3, 2003
Millions Are Dying Because of American Policies
Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2005
Cry Havoc: Bush's Own Personal Janjaweed
Empire Burlesque, Aug. 27, 2004

US Wants to Build Network of Friendly Militias to Fight Terrorism
AFP, August 15, 2004
The Brutal Christ of the Armageddonites
Antiwar.com, Feb. 24, 2006
Pentagon Plan for Global Anti-Terror Army
Sydney Morning Herald, Aug. 11, 2004
Into the Dark: The Pentagon Plan to Foment Terrorism
Empire Burlesque, Nov. 1, 2002
Darkness Visible: The Pentagon Plan to Foment Terrorism is Now in Operation
Empire Burlesque, Jan. 25, 2005
Slavery Under God's Laws
The Institute for Christian Economics
Stoning: Integral to Commandment Against Murder
The Institute for Christian Economics
World Conquest: The Obligation of Christian Politics
The Changing of the Guard, Dominion Press
An Anthology of Reconstructist Thought
Christian Reconstructionism, November 2002
Judicial Warfare: Christian Reconstructionism and its Blueprint for Dominion
Crown Rights Press, 2003
E-Voting: How it Can Put the Wrong Candidate in Office
Common Dreams, Sept. 3, 2003
The Theft of Your Vote is Just a Chip Away
Thom Hartmann, July 31, 2003
Now Your Vote is the Property of a Private Corporation
Thom Hartmann, March 11, 2003
From Superpower to Tin-Horn Dictatorship
Lew Rockwell.com, Feb. 28, 2006

"The recent and ongoing proliferation of sophisticated computerized vote recording and tallying equipment, much of it unverifiable and hence 'faith-based', dramatically augments the opportunities for wholesale and outcome-determinative distortions of the vote counting process. That the lion's share of this equipment is developed, provided, and serviced by partisan private corporations only amplifies these serious concerns. The fact that, in the 2004 election, all voting equipment technologies except paper ballots were associated with large unexplained exit poll discrepancies all favoring the same party certainly warrants further inquiry. The absence of any statistically-plausible explanation for the discrepancy between Edison/Mitofsky’s exit poll data and the official presidential vote tally is an unanswered question of vital national importance that demands a thorough and unblinking investigation."
Response to the Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report
Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies
US Count Votes' National Election Data Archive Project, 31 March 2005
(Analysis Carried Out By Academics From Nine US Universities)

"In a conference call with Rev. Jackson, Attorney Cliff Arnebeck, Attorney Bob Fitrakis and others, John Kerry confirmed that he lost every precinct in New Mexico that had a touchscreen voting machine. The losses had no correlation with ethnicity, social class or traditional party affiliation - only with the fact that touchscreen machines were used.... the GAO report now confirms that electronic voting machines as deployed in 2004 were in fact perfectly engineered to allow a very small number of partisans with minimal computer skills and equipment to shift enough votes to put George W. Bush back in the White House. Given the growing body of evidence, it appears increasingly clear that's exactly what happened."
Powerful Government Accountability Office report confirms key 2004 stolen election findings
Columbus Free Press, 26 October 2005

"So can we really be sure that this year's result [2004 US election] 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'."
Did Dubbya rig the election?
New Statesman, 29 November 2004

"Today the University of California's Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team released a statistical study - the sole method available to monitor the accuracy of e-voting - reporting irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election. The study shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods - what the team says can be deemed a 'smoke alarm.' Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by chance - the probability is less than 0.1 percent. The research team formally disclosed results of the study at a press conference today at the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center, where they called on Florida voting officials to investigate.... The research team is comprised of doctoral students and faculty in the UC Berkeley sociology department, and led by Sociology Professor Michael Hout, a nationally-known expert on statistical methods and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center.... 'No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained,' said Hout. 'The study shows, that a county's use of electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. There is just a trivial probability of evidence like this appearing in a population where the true difference is zero - less than once in a thousand chances."
UC Berkeley Research Team Sounds 'Smoke Alarm' for Florida E-Vote Count
University of California Berkeley, Press Release 18 November 2004

"Concern over electronic voting technology was not assuaged Tuesday as glitches, confusion and human error raised a welter of problems across the country, even while e-vote watchdogs prepared to file suits challenging the results derived from the controversial machines.....Nearly one in three voters, including about half of those in Florida, were expected to cast ballots using ATM-style voting machines that computer scientists have criticized for their potential for software glitches, hacking and malfunctioning.... Many of the problems with electronic voting — whether accidental or intentional — may not be known until well after Tuesday, if at all. Most of the ATM-style machines, including all of Florida's, lack paper records that could be used to verify the electronic results in a recount. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's VerifiedVoting.org, which has been monitoring the implementation of e-voting machines in the U.S., warned on Monday that over 20 percent of the machines tested by observers around the country failed to record votes properly. The organization recommended that voters choosing to use touchscreen voting methods be sure to double-check the summary screen to confirm that their votes had been properly registered. BlackBoxVoting.org, the site organized by e-voting activist Bev Harris, announced early Wednesday that it plans to conduct what the site describes as the largest Freedom of Information Act request in history, requesting internal computer logs and other documents from 3,000 individual counties and townships using electronic voting machines".
E-voting irregularities raise eyebrows, blood pressure
USA Today, 3 November 2004

"There's a one-in-959,000 chance that exit polls could have been so wrong in predicting the outcome of the 2004 presidential election, according to a statistical analysis released Thursday... The report says if the official explanation -- that Bush voters were more shy about filling out exit polls in precincts with more Kerry voters -- is true, then the precincts with large Bush votes should be more accurate, not less accurate as the data indicate. The report also called into question new voting machine technologies. 'All voting equipment technologies except paper ballots were associated with large unexplained exit poll discrepancies all favoring the same party, (which) certainly warrants further inquiry,' the report concludes."
Exit poll analysis points to 2004 election corruption
Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio, 1 April 2005

"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..... 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... "
Did Dubbya rig the election?
New Statesman, 29 November 2004

"Suspicions about a deal between the Reagan campaign and Iran over the hostages have circulated since the day of President Reagan's inaugural, when Iran agreed to release the 52 American hostages exactly five minutes after Mr. Reagan took the oath of office. Later, as it became known that arms started to flow to Iran via Israel only a few days after the inauguration, suspicions deepened that a secret arms-for-hostages deal had been concluded. Five years later, when the Iran-contra affair revealed what seemed to be a similar swap of hostages for arms delivered through Israel, questions were revived about the 1980 election. In a nice, ironic twist, the phrase `October surprise,' which Vice Presidential candidate George Bush had coined to warn of possible political manipulation of the hostages by Jimmy Carter, began to be applied to the suspected secret activities of the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign... In a Madrid hotel in late July 1980, an important Iranian cleric, Mehdi Karrubi, who is now the speaker of the Iranian Parliament, allegedly met with Mr. Casey [Reagan's campaign manager and later his Director of the CIA] and a U.S. intelligence officer who was operating outside authority. The same group met again several weeks later.... From Oct. 15 to Oct. 20, events came to a head in a series of meetings in several hotels in Paris, involving members of the Reagan-Bush campaign and high-level Iranian and Israeli representatives. Accounts of these meetings and the exact number of participants vary considerably among the more than 15 sources who claim direct or indirect knowledge of some aspect of them. There is, however, widespread agreement on three points: William Casey was a key participant: the Iranian representatives agreed that the hostages would not be released prior to the Presidential election on Nov. 4; in return, Israel would serve as a conduit for arms and spare parts to Iran. At least five of the sources who say they were in Paris in connection with these meetings insist that George Bush was present for at least one meeting. Three of the sources say that they saw him there... Immediately after the Paris meetings, things began to happen. On Oct. 21, Iran publicly shifted its position in the negotiations with the Carter Administration, disclaiming any further interest in receiving military equipment.... Between Oct. 21 and Oct. 23, Israel sent a planeload of F-4 fighter aircraft tires to Iran in contravention of the U.S. boycott and without informing Washington. Cyrus Hashemi, using his own contacts began privately organizing military shipments to Iran. On Oct. 22, the hostages were suddenly dispersed to different locations. And a series of delaying tactics in late October by the Iranian Parliament stymied all attempts by the Carter Administration to act on the hostage question until only hours before Election Day... On Jan. 15, Iran did an about-face, offering a series of startling concessions that reignited the talks and resulted in a final agreement in the last few hours of Jimmy Carter's Presidency. The hostages were released on Jan. 21, 1981, minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President. Almost immediately thereafter, according to Israeli and American former officials, arms began to flow to Iran in substantial quantities... Moshe Arens, the Israeli Ambassador to Washington in 1982, told The Boston Globe in October 1982 that Israeli's arms shipments to Iran at this time were coordinated with the U.S. Government `at almost the highest of levels.' ... The allegations of these individuals have many disturbing implications for the U.S. political system. One is the tampering with foreign policy for partisan benefit. That has, of course, happened before and it may well happen again, but it assumes special poignancy in this case since it would have involved tampering with the lives and freedom of 52 Americans. Another implication is that leaders of the U.S. exposed themselves to the possibility of blackmail by Iran or Israel. Third, the events suggest that the arms-for-hostage deal that in the twilight of the Reagan Presidency became known as the Iran-contra affair, instead of being an aberration, was in fact the re-emergence of a policy that began even before the Reagan-Bush Administration took office."
Gary Sick - The Election Story of the Decade
New York Times, 15 April 1991

What was the 1980 'October Surprise' and why is it still a live issue? - click here

"On election day 2000, after Florida was first called for Gore, candidate Bush was indignant while speaking with reporters. It was just impossible, he said. His big brother Jeb had 'promised to deliver' the state for him. More telling words are rarely spoken. Consider, if you will, the history of John Ellis 'Jeb' Bush. ¹⁷ This is no Jeb-come-lately: not only is he a party veteran, but his documented ties to covert operations are worthy of his family heritage. During the mid-'80s, while head of the Dade County Republican Party, Jeb served as a secret White House liaison to Contras and allied anti-Castro Cubans operating out of Miami.... In June, between 8,000 and 12,000 Florida voters were wrongly purged from the voting rolls as felons. Many of those disenfranchised had never even been arrested; one was even a sitting judge..... The Florida State Government uses an outside contractor to vet their voter rolls; it is the only state to do so. In 1998, the $4 million contract was awarded to a Boca Raton company called Database Technologies (DBT). Earlier this year, DBT was acquired by an Atlanta-area company called ChoicePoint Inc. According to SEC documents, ChoicePoint's acquisition of DBT was completed on May 15, just one month before the grossly inaccurate 'purge lists' were turned over to Florida election officials. ²⁶ Curiously, it turned out ChoicePoint had obtained this false list of 'felons' from the state of Texas. ²⁷ Yes, Texas. According to the company, a list of Texans convicted of misdemeanors had 'somehow' been added to the Florida lists as felons. Some effort was made to contact those who had been wrongly purged, but most did not find out until they had arrived at their polling place only to be refused ballots. Curiouser and curiouser, it turns out that ChoicePoint is closely tied to the Republican Party, and that its top executives and board members include many high-dollar donors...."
COUP 2K by JOHN DEE
Published in Lumpen, Jan. 2001