U.S. Electoral Fraud: “Critical Condition” for U.S. Democracy

By Joel Bleifuss and Steven F. Freeman

During the past four years, official counts in U.S. elections have increasingly been conducted not by a transparent public count, but rather by voting machines that have been proven unreliable, have been shown to be easily hackable, and, in some instances, have been manufactured by corporations controlled by highly partisan individuals.

Older voting machines and processes had their problems. Indeed, Florida 2000 provided a window into problems, such as manipulation of voter rolls, minority vote “spoilage” and un-audited voting systems.
During 2002, the state of Georgia adopted direct recorded electronic (DRE) voting machines produced by Diebold. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is Walden “Wally” O'Dell, one of President Bush's most able fundraisers who in 2004 brought in more than $100,000 in bundled contributions, a feat that earned him the honorary designation “Pioneer” and an invite to a party at the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch. In that 2002 Diebold-facilitated election, Georgia's popular governor Roy Barnes lost his re-election bid by 5 percentage points despite being 11 points ahead in the polls. Triple-amputee war-hero Max Cleland was similarly upset in his Senate re-election bid.

Election Day 2004 saw the rest of the nation following Georgia's lead. With the advent of a congressional mandate under the Help America Vote Act of 2002, states around the country began to replace punch-card voting systems with new, fundamentally flawed technologies. In the 2004 election, 64 percent of Americans voted on DRE or optical-scan systems, both of which are vulnerable to hacking or programming fraud. According to a September 2005 investigation by Congress's Government Accountability Office , such systems contained flaws that “could allow unauthorized personnel to disrupt operations or modify data and programs that are critical to … the integrity of the voting process.”

In June 2006, a Brennan Center for Justice report that examined the security flaws in electronic voting machines found that it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that operates the voting machines, to change the election outcome of a state. In other words, a few people could swing a national election. It would not require a far-reaching grand conspiracy.

To illustrate, in Leon County, Florida, the supervisor of elections, Ion Sancho, authorized a “test” of his Diebold voting system to see if election results could be altered using only a memory card. Harri Hursti, a computer programmer from Finland, facilitated the test, in which voters voted on a touch-screen machine and also recorded their votes separately. By using a doctored memory card in the machine, Hursti was able to produce results completely different from what the test voters intended. Following the test, Diebold and other vendors retaliated by refusing to sell new voting machines to Leon County.

To make matters worse, these fraud-enabling changes are introduced into a system where election referees are often highly partisan and highly conflicted. In Ohio, Kenneth Blackwell, the Republican secretary of state and the Ohio co-chairman of the 2004 Bush/Cheney Campaign, borrowed a chapter from Secretary of State Katharine Harris's Florida 2000 playbook. Like Harris, he used the power of his office to suppress turnout and thwart voters in heavily Democratic areas. Vote suppression and electoral irregularities in Ohio have been thoroughly documented, first in January 2005 by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee and then in June 2005 by the Democratic National Committee, which found, in the words of DNC Chair Howard Dean that, “More than a quarter of all Ohio voters reported problems with their voting experience.”

In light of both the GOP electoral track record and the widespread introduction of easily “hack-able” voting technologies, a reasonable person could argue that a well-conducted exit poll that confirmed the official count would be about the only reason we would have to believe the results of such an election.

But in 2004 the exit poll results, which for 20 years had been considered too reliable in that they allowed the press to know who won an election before the results were in, showed results that diverged sharply from official numbers. In key state after key state, official tallies differed significantly from the projections. In every case, the shift favored President George W. Bush. Nationwide, exit polls projected a 51 to 48 percent Kerry victory, the mirror image of Bush's 51 to 48 percent win. And, in the 11 battleground states the discrepancy between the exit polls and the official count was even greater.

Moreover, as we explain in our book, “Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count,” careful analysis of the exit poll data indicates that the results are inconsistent with polling error, but are consistent with findings of a corrupted count.
There are more than a dozen indicators. We'll mention just two of them. First, there is no statistical reason why exit polls should be more or less accurate in swing states than in non-swing states. However, swing states do share a key political variable: If you are going to steal an election you go after votes most vigorously where they are most needed. The discrepancy between the exit polls and the official count is significantly higher in the 11 swing states than in other states and significantly higher yet in the three critical battleground states of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania.
Second, in light of the charges that the 2000 election was not legitimate, the Bush/Cheney campaign would have wanted to prevail in the popular vote. If fraud was afoot, it would make sense that the president's men would also steal votes in their strongholds, where the likelihood of detection is least. Lo and behold, the report indicates that in those precincts that went at least 80 percent for Bush, the average disparity was 10 percentage points. That means that in those Bush strongholds, Kerry, on average, received only about two-thirds of the votes that exit polls predicted. In contrast, in Kerry strongholds, exit polls matched the official count almost exactly. To this day, such anomalies have not been satisfactorily explained.
In January 2005, on the eve of Bush's inauguration, the two men who conducted the 2004 exit poll, Warren Mitofsky and Joe Lenski, released their explanation for why their exit polls were so wrong. Most importantly, their report notes: “The inaccuracies in the exit-poll estimates were not due to the sample selection of the polling locations at which the exit polls were conducted.” In other words, the precincts they sampled were representative of the nation, so the discrepancy was not the result of choosing unrepresentative precincts.

The data the pollsters released allows us to correlate voter characteristics (race, age, sex, etc.) with voting preferences, but they did not release the data that identified specific exit poll results with specific precincts. That vital data remains the property of the media consortium (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN, and the AP) that commissioned the polls.

The pollsters' report indicates that for rural and small-town precincts—the only precincts for which comparable data does exist—the difference between the exit poll results and the official count is three times greater in precincts where voters used machines than in precincts where voters voted on paper ballots. In other words, in precincts that used paper ballots there was no discrepancy between the exit polls and the official count. If we had access to the precinct-level data, which the pollsters have withheld, we would be able to investigate whether the size of the exit poll discrepancy specifically correlates with the voting technology used in that precinct.
Ironically, even though the media ignored the exit poll discrepancy in the United States, a contemporaneous and equivalent exit poll discrepancy halfway around the world in Ukraine made front page headlines here and was deemed sufficient to overturn that election result.

Despite this documented threat to American democracy, there is some good news. First, the country is beginning to wake up. It is almost certainly a good sign that, despite the dearth of reporting, the public is clearly concerned. One month after the election, a Zogby poll found that 28 percent of Americans thought that there was a “very valid” reason to question the official count, and another 14 percent thought that such concerns were “somewhat valid.” Simply put, 42 percent of all Americans had immediate concerns about what had really happened on November 2, 2004. A Zogby poll this August found that 80 percent of those surveyed “said they want votes to be counted in front of observers representing the public, and that elections officials should not rely solely on the proprietary software that operates electronic voting machines that are presently being installed all over the United States.”

Second, careful investigation has been forthcoming. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and the other members of the House Judiciary Committee have produced compelling reports documenting fraud and malfeasance. Several books, including ours, have explored the subject. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose article in Rolling Stone, this past June moved the issue of a stolen election to center stage, has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in [XX], alleging that Diebold and other electronic voting machine companies fraudulently represented to state election boards and the federal government that their products were “unhackable.” Kennedy says he has witnesses “centrally located, deep within the corporations,” who will confirm that company officials withheld their knowledge of problems with accuracy, reliability and security of electronic voting machines in order to procure government contracts. As Kennedy wrote in his Rolling Stone article, “The single greatest threat to our democracy is the insecurity of our voting system. Whoever controls the voting machines can control who wins the votes.”

Third, legislative efforts are underway. Legislation sponsored by Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) would require the use of voter-verified paper records in audits and recounts and make the paper ballot the ballot of record in the case of inconsistencies with electronic totals. The act would also prohibit the use of undisclosed software and wireless communication devices in voting systems. Under the leadership of VerifiedVoting.org, voting rights activists across the country are working to ensure that there is a paper record of every vote and that voters are able to verify the accuracy of that record before the ballot is cast. So far, 27 states have established regulations that require what is known as a “voter-verified paper record” (VVPR). But 23 states as of yet have no such requirement, including Pennsylvania, Texas and Florida.

Fourth, verification initiatives are under way. Bev Harris of Blackbox voting has produced a series of machine verification initiatives. And in 2006, Steven Freeman, one of the present authors, and exit pollster Ken Warren will be conducting the nation's first election verification exit poll, a fully transparent project to put election survey data in the public domain. This will begin as a pilot project in scattered test precincts, with the aim of conducting a full-scale national exit poll in 2008 .

But much more must be done.

The media needs to begin taking this issue seriously. Both Project Censored and Mark Crispin Miller in his book “Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them)” have documented the dearth of meaningful reporting of electoral shortcomings in the United States. And, with the exception of “In These Times,” few independent media outlets have given the subject the attention it deserves.
Voting machines must be audited and official counts must be verified. The Holt bill, while clearly an improvement over current practice, is also insufficient. Precinct hand counts must be used to systematically verify official counts. Machines and their tabulations must be systematically audited. Even if paper trails cannot be made available in upcoming elections, administrators can audit machines under Election Day conditions to test whether machines are, in fact, counting votes as they have been cast.

Another critical verification measure is independent exit polls. In Germany, the minute the polls close, television stations publish exit-poll projections conducted by independent firms. This provides the nation with an immediate projection of the winner and mitigates the need for a rapid count. Like most democracies, Germany, despite its technological prowess, votes by hand-marked ballots. In three recent years for which data is available, exit polls for both the German national elections and the German elections for the European Parliament have averaged results within 0.44 percentage points of the official count. We need a comparable nationwide poll published and publicized.

Finally, a crucial element of a functioning democracy is political parties that defend the interests of their constituencies. Ken Blackwell is widely and justly seen as a criminal. But the Democrats have been his enablers. The single most important reason why the crimes of the 2004 election went unreported and are still largely unknown is that the Democrats failed to contest the results. To remedy this, groups such as the recently formed Election Defense Alliance are rallying thousands of volunteers and raising money to undertake a variety of related verification measures.

In a way we are too complacent when we place the blame only on the media and our national oversight bodies. A nation depends also on its professional and educated elite to speak out against abuse of power. But so few of the professionals and academics, who sit comfortably atop the status quo, have been willing to take responsibility as individual citizens. And in the end the question does rest with the citizenry, all the citizenry.
How far are we going to let things go?

How hard are we willing to fight for our democratic principles and processes?

Joel Bleifuss and Steven F. Freeman are the authors of “Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count.” (Seven Stories Press, 2006).