A Smelly Situation: This Isn't the Least Bit Funny

The people who cast the votes decide nothing.
The people who count the votes decide everything.
-Joseph Stalin


Friends, the information coming out about the exit polls versus the actual vote tabulations is beginning to look very, very bad. If the allegations turn out to be correct, Kerry actually won in a landslide. You think I'm making this up? No, I wouldn't have questioned the election outcome if it hadn't been for Thom Hartmann and Greg Palast. They are respected, award-winning journalists who have very convincing evidence that this election was stolen.

The FBI has been called into Florida as of Saturday, November 6th. Jeff Fisher, the Democratic candidate for the U. S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. He claims that this was also done by the same people in the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb. Fisher says such tactics proved successful in 2002 and were then used last Tuesday in the presidential election. Evidence is accumulating that he is right.

When the county-by-county record of votes cast was compared with the number of people registered to vote (by party affiliation), a woman by the name of Kathy Dopp noticed something startling. In the larger counties in Florida, the registered Democrat/Republican ratios matched the Kerry/Bush vote both in places where the touch-screen voting machines and the optically-scanned paper ballots were used. The problem was that, in Florida's smaller counties, the results from the optically scanned paper ballots- fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking- seemed to have been reversed.


Here are two examples from Hartmann's article:
Baker County 12,887 registered voters 69% Dem 24% Rep
Kerry votes 2180 Bush votes 7738

Dixie County 4988 registered voters 77.5% Dem 15% Rep
Kerry votes 1959 Bush votes 4433

Everywhere else in the country registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry. This baffling pattern was repeated over and over again, but only in smaller counties where, it may have been assumed, the small voter numbers wouldn't be as noticeable. In the larger counties, high percentages of registered Democrats equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry.

At some point in the evening on Election Day, Karen Hughes sat George W. Bush down and informed him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear. Kerry was winning in a landslide. Reportedly, "Bush took the news stoically." (AP)

Then magically, the computers reported something different in several pivotal states. A few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states, the election was called for Bush.

How could this happen?

It all comes down to something called the central tabulator computer. Regardless of how the votes are tabulated (except for hand counts), the real "counting" is done by computers. No matter what kind of voting machines are used, the final tally in all cases is sent to a central tabulator machine. This machine is a Windows-based PC. So all the different polling places in a given county feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. If you decided to do something you shouldn't do to a voting machine, it would make sense to do it at this point rather than to change thousands of machines.

Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room, explains that anyone who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator. Harris found that, while you can't tamper with the software, for example, on a Diebold machine, you can get to the Election Summary Report quite easily, and you can change the numbers in a matter of seconds.

It is Sunday night. Will this news come out in the coming week? What can be done? Could election fraud change the result at this point? Probably not. However, most two-term presidents encounter serious trouble in the second term. Will this be the start of Bush's very miserable second and last term as president? If his people did steal the election, what will be his legacy?

[Click on the blog title to read the article by Thom Hartmann, "Evidence Mounts That the Vote Was Hacked."]