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U of C Berkeley: Florida electronic vote favored Bush

The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections

Full report

Summary:

- Irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000 excess votes or more to President George W. Bush in Florida.

- Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases in support for President Bush between 2000 and 2004. This effect cannot be explained by differences between counties in income, number of voters, change in voter turnout, or size of Hispanic/Latino population.

- In Broward County alone, President Bush appears to have received approximately 72,000 excess votes.

- We can be 99.9% sure that these effects are not attributable to chance.

Details:

Because many factors impact voting results, statistical tools are necessary to see the effect of touch-screen voting. Multipleregression analysis is a statistical technique widely used in the social and physical sciences to distinguish the individual effects of many variables.

This multiple-regression analysis takes account of the following variables by county:

- number of voters - median income

- Hispanic population

- change in voter turnout between 2000 and 2004

- support for President Bush in 2000 election

- support for Dole in 1996 election

When one controls for these factors, the association between electronic voting and increased support for President Bush is impossible to overlook. The data show with 99.0% certainty that a county’s use of electronic voting is associated with a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush.

The data used in this study come from CNN.com, the 2000 US Census, the Florida Department of State, and the Verified Voting Foundation – all publicly available sources. This study was carried out by a group of doctoral students in the UC Berkeley sociology department in collaboration with Professor Michael Hout, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center.

Prophecy

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." --H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

The CIA and cyber-war

Evidence of a Second Bush Coup?

By Robert Parry
November 6, 2004

[Used by permission. See link for full story.]

Theoretically at least, it is conceivable that sophisticated CIA-style computer hacking -- known as "cyber-warfare" -- could have let George W. Bush's campaign transform a three-percentage-point defeat, as measured by exit polls, into an official victory of about the same margin.

Whether such a scheme is feasible, however, is another matter, since it would require penetration of hundreds of local computer systems across the country, presumably from a single remote location. The known CIA successes in cyber-war have come from targeting a specific bank account or from shutting down an adversary's computer system, not from altering data simultaneously in a large number of computers.

'Cyber-War'

The highly secretive practice of "cyber-warfare" has advanced far more than many Americans understand, with U.S. intelligence agencies pioneering methods for surreptitiously entering enemy computer systems.

Through the 1990s, the CIA and the U.S. military aggressively expanded "cyber-war" capabilities, bringing online powerful computer systems and recruiting some of the nation's best hackers, intelligence sources say. During the CIA's recruitment rush, some hackers were hired despite criminal records and questionable backgrounds. One got in trouble when he was found masturbating in front of his computer screen.

By the mid-1990s, cyber-war -- also known as "information warfare" -- was such a hot topic within the U.S. military that the Pentagon produced a breezy 13-page booklet called "Information Warfare for Dummies."

The primer said traditional information warfare would target an enemy's battlefield command-and-control structure to "decapitate" senior officers from their fighters, thereby "causing panic and paralysis." But the primer added that "network penetrations" -- or hacking -- "represents a new and very high-tech form of warfighting."

Indirectly, the booklet acknowledged secret U.S. capabilities in these areas. The manual described these info-war tactics as "fairly ground-breaking stuff for our nation's mud-sloggers. … Theft and the intentional manipulation of data are the product of devilish minds."

The primer also gave some hints about the disruptive strategies in the U.S. arsenal. "Network penetrations" include "insertion of malicious code (viruses, worms, etc.), theft of information, manipulation of information, denial of service," the primer said.

The booklet also recognized the sensitivity of the topic. "Due to the moral, ethical and legal questions raised by hacking, the military likes to keep a low profile on this issue," the primer explained.

Despite the Pentagon's nervousness, the booklet said the cyber-war tactics do have advantages over other military operations. "The intrusions can be carried out remotely, transcending the boundaries of time and space," the manual said. "They also offer the prospect of 'plausible deniability' or repudiation."

The booklet indicated that U.S. intelligence has found it relatively easy to cover its tracks. "Due to the difficulty of tracing a network penetration to its source, it's difficult for the adversary to prove that you are the one responsible for corrupting their system," the primer said. "In fact, viral infections can be so subtle and insidious that the adversary may not even know that their systems have been attacked."

Drug Scam

U.S. intelligence sources described one case study of a CIA high-tech "dirty trick" that worked in the mid-1990s. After learning of a drug lord's plans to bribe a South American government official, the spy agency waited for the money to be transferred and then accessed the bank records to remotely delete the bribe.

Besides stopping the bribe, the money's disappearance spread confusion within the cartel. The recriminations that followed -- with the corrupt official and the drug lord complaining about the lost money -- led eventually to the execution of a hapless bookkeeper, according to the story.

During the war over Kosovo in 1999, U.S. government hackers tried to expand on these strategies, targeting Serbian computer systems and government bank accounts. By most accounts, the cyber-war attacks on Serbian targets achieved only limited success.

While avoiding clear confirmation of a U.S. offensive cyber-war capability, American officials occasionally have discussed the topic in the third person, as if the United States were not a participant in this new arms race.

On Feb. 2, 1999, for instance, then-CIA director George Tenet said "several countries have or are developing the capability to attack an adversary's computer systems." He added that "developing a computer attack capability can be quite inexpensive and easily concealable."

Left unsaid in Tenet's statement was that the U.S. government, with the world's most powerful computers and the most sophisticated software designs, has led the way both in offensive "cyber-war" strategies and defensive countermeasures.

With questions lingering about discrepancies between the Nov. 2 exit polls and Bush's final tallies, some Democrats are wondering whether the intelligence community's cyber-war capabilities may have come home to roost.

/Robert Parry, who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek, has written a new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq. It can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com./

Heal or heel?

A BONE OF CONTENTION by Rosemary R. Brasch

I heard it.

I knew I would.

John Kerry said it.

George W. Bush said it.

And myriad others will join the chorus.

They told us it's now a time of healing. I don't want to heal, and I don't intend to be healed.

"Healing" is merely code for shutting up and allowing the President to do whatever it is he plans to do. But we did that for four years.

Four years we waited for the President to stop rending this nation apart and be a uniter not a divider, as he promised. Four years we gave him the benefit of the doubt as to his truthfulness. Four years the subservient press went along with whatever he and his minions said; there was almost no investigating, no insisting on substantive answers to important questions, no in-depth reporting on the effect the Bush administration was having on the country. And we kept watching.

Now we should "heal"? I think not. It's ludicrous to even use that word given the state of our country's health care, with 45 million Americans unable to afford medical insurance.

Possibly, I've mistaken the spelling of "heal." Perhaps what the politicians want from us is not to "heal," but to "heel." Like subservient pets, we're supposed to be quiet, walk behind them, and continue to obey their commands without question.

I don't want to obey. I don't want to agree with this President's immoral war. I don't want to quietly accept the unnecessary deaths and maiming of our good young men and women and innocent Iraqi children. I don't want to be forced to stand in a "Free-speech zone" to disagree-about anything. I want to protest wherever and however I can. It used to be a right under the First Amendment in the pre-Bush and Ashcroft era. I want to dissent even more fiercely and disagree more loudly than before. My voice still isn't being be heard in Washington. I want my civil rights -- I want your civil rights -- returned.

I don't want to accept that my liberalism is worse than leprosy. I don't want to accept that my Christian, Baptist, background is boiled down to immoral heathenism because I don't agree with many of the President's followers and their views of religion. And, as a registered Republican, I don't want my political views to ever be equated with those who think they have a God-given mandate to crusade against all who see things differently.

George Bush again says he'll reach out to Democrats. How about reaching out to all good Americans-regardless of their beliefs-who disagree with his first four year reign of terrorism? The last time he reached out to all of America, he patted us with a tax refund with one hand and with the other hand swatted away our civil liberties by shredding our Constitution with the PATRIOT Act. A second term, with a conservative House and Senate, will give him the opportunity to add to the PATRIOT Act with even more restrictions in the name of "freedom."

No second term "honeymoon." Four years was long enough. And, while we wait for the next election, the war against Iraq rages, destroying lives of Americans and Iraqis while al-Qaeda flourishes and grows. Our environment continues to reek with Presidential destruction. Our health care system continues to deteriorate. The President, more of a "tax and spend" fanatic than any liberal ever was, will continue to weaken our economy by adding to the national debt he created. And, most of all, our rights and liberties will continue to wither under the guise that the "war on terrorism" means we have to sacrifice our country's principles, while the upper classes become even richer through tax cuts and no-bid contracts.

I want the world's people (I think God may have even created them-hard to believe he made such a huge mistake with everyone but us) to see massive demonstrations throughout our country against an unjust and inhumane war and against a president who lied to get us into it-while deceiving us about how well it's going. It's not going well-and the rest of the world knows it-while we Americans get the purified propaganda spoon fed at "briefings" and "press conferences" about the wonders of a new democratic Iraq by a scared-to-be-called-liberal press. Read the opinions of the rest of the world about Bush -- not America, but Bush. We need to protest and demonstrate loudly and constantly until the Administration, the House, and the Senate -- ever fearful of not being reelected -- are moved to act. I want once again to be a proud American.

So heal/heel if you want to -- but it behooves those millions of Americans who disagreed before to do so even more vociferously now. Patriotic citizens need to be the nation's watchdogs -- we've allowed ourselves to be lapdogs too long.

[Rosemary R. Brasch is a national disaster family services specialist for the Red Cross and a former union grievance officer. You may contact her at espyrose@hotmail.com]