Suspicions Stir
Belief That US Presidential Election Was Hijacked
By Greg Guma
12 November, 2004
Vermont
Guardian
Could
sophisticated CIA-style "cyber-warfare" have helped George
W. Bush change a three percent defeat, as measured by exit polls, into
a victory of about the same margin? Yes, at least in theory. But it
would require hacking into multiple local computer systems, presumably
from a remote location.
There is as yet
no solid proof that such a cyber-attack occurred on Nov. 2. But suspicions
are mounting that the U.S. presidential election results were manipulated
to some extent. Voting analyses of selected precincts in Florida and
Ohio have found surprisingly high percentages for Bush, and critics
say that spoiled ballots and provisional votes, both disproportionally
affecting minorities, made the difference in at least two states.
Into the evening
of Election Day, exit polls showed Kerry rolling to a clear victory
nationally and carrying most of the battleground states, including Florida
and Ohio. Winning either would have ensured his victory in the Electoral
College.
Polls also showed
Republicans carrying the bulk of the tight Senate races. When the official
results were tallied, however, the presidential exit polls proved wrong
while the Senate polls were correct.
As suspicions about
the integrity of the election grew, Sen. John McCain tried to quell
talk of mischief in the Florida and Ohio with a Nov, 4 appearance on
the Tonight Show.
Exit polling showed Kerry with a 3 percent lead over Bush in Florida
and 4 percent edge in Ohio. He ended up losing Florida by 5.2 percent
and 2.5 percent in Ohio. That makes the spread between the Florida poll
and results 8.2 percent, more than double the standard error rate. In
Ohio, the difference is 6.5 percent, also beyond the usual variation.
In Florida's Baker
County, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3 percent of them Democrats
and 24.3 percent of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry
and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in
the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry, Hartmann
reports.
In Dixie County,
with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5 percent of them Democrats and a mere
15 percent registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry,
but 4,433 voted for Bush.
The pattern repeated
elsewhere, but only in the smaller counties. On Nov. 5, MSNBCs
Keith Olbermann took note of the obvious: all the voting machine irregularities
being uncovered seemed to favor Bush. But that was the exception. Most
media focused instead on why the exit polling system failed.
Skeptics have dismissed
the exit polls as flawed, and said that they may have influenced the
narrative of election coverage, but couldnt affect the outcome.
To explain the difference,
architects of the exit poll sampling system said Kerry voters were simply
more willing to answer the questions. Called the "chattiness thesis,"
this answer has been ridiculed as a post-facto excuse.
In an article for
Tom Paine.com called Kerry Won, journalist Greg Palast claims,
Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched
cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded.
But Palast thinks the election was decided not by hackers but by "spoilage,"
the small part of the vote that is voided and thrown away.
In Ohio, as in Florida
four years ago, most spoiled votes were cast on punch cards.
Whose cards were they? Palast writes, Expert statisticians investigating
spoilage for the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots
thrown in the dumpster were cast by black folks.
Other factors that
may have affected the outcome include the legal challenges brought by
Republicans in several states and the large number of provisional ballots.
Taken together, they could bring the full count more into line with
the exit poll results. Palast has identified similar voting irregularities
in New Mexico.
Writing for Common
Dreams. Thom Hartmann reports that Jeff Fisher, the Democratic candidate
for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District claimed
to have solid evidence that the Florida election was manipulated through
information warfare.
Since the mid-1990s,
"information warfare" has been a hot topic within the U.S.
military. The Pentagon has even produced a 13-page booklet, "Information
Warfare for Dummies."
Indirectly, the
booklet acknowledges secret U.S. capabilities in these areas. It 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 explains.
The booklet says
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 says. "They also offer the
prospect of 'plausible deniability' or repudiation.
The CIA has reportedly
succeeded in pursuing some aspects of cyber-warfare, including targeting
specific bank accounts and shutting down computer systems. But stealing
an election is considerably more difficult, requiring the alteration
of data in many computers.
According to Robert
Parry, writing for Consortium News, a preprogrammed kernel
of brain would have to be inserted into election computers beforehand,
or teams of hackers would be needed to penetrate the lightly protected
systems, targeting touch-screen systems without a paper backup for verifying
the numbers.