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WORLD
EXCLUSIVE
Jan 25, 2007--Venice,FL
by Daniel Hopsicker
An
analysis of early news accounts of the massive and
unprecedented "undervote" in Sarasota FL after the hotly-contested Congressional race
there indicates the major cause is not
the innocuous "poor ballot
design" and "voter disgust at negative campaigning"
recently cited by The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, but
rather electronic voting machine malfunction, or,
in short, vote fraud.
Election officials,
including Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent
and the Florida Secretary of State's office, appear
uninterested in explaining just what the by now
oft-cited phrase "massive 18,000 undervote" really means: approximately 13,000 voters in
Sarasota County were arbitrarily disenfranchised, and
had their votes go uncounted in the Congressional
contestbetween Republican Vern Buchanan
and Democrat Christine Jennings.
Moreover, the New York
Times-owned Sarasota Herald-Tribune's
recent election reporting is filled with falsehoods
and misinformation on a scale not seen since the
pro-war sales job performed by New York Times reporter
Judith Miller during the run-up to the war in Iraq,
when she debuted the slogan used to justify war: "The first sign of a smoking gun may be a mushroom
cloud."
All
the news that's ripped from print
In
a story last month headlined "Analysis points to
bad ballot design," the Herald-Tribune offers what
clearly seems meant to be the definitive explanation
for the "irregularities" in the election.
"A
Herald-Tribune analysis of the 2006 election results
shows that Sarasota County's ballot design
was likely the most significant factor that
led to more than 18,000 undervotes in the disputed
District 12 Congressional race."
Unfortunately, their
"analysis" is almost completely at odds with the
paper's own often-laudable early coverage, when recollections were
still fresh and voter
outrage burned fierce.
In a Nov.7th story headlined "Dozens
of voters complain about glitch," the
Herald-Tribune had already reported what
actually happened on election day:
"Throughout
the day, dozens of people complained that their votes
in the 13th Congressional District were not recorded
properly. One volunteer election watcher said he heard
dozens
of such complaints."
"Those statements
have been rendered inoperable"
The Herald Tribune confirmed the account
and added new details a week later, in the results of
their
own survey of half
of the county's 156 precinct officials, a clearly
representative sample.
"More
than one-third of precinct officials responding said
they received complaints that voters struggled
to get their votes to register... Poll workers' experiences
seem to support claims by hundreds of voters
who said
they did not intentionally skip the District 13 race
to protest negative campaigning."
More in a moment. But
it is not too soon to pose the question: Does this in any way square with the Sarasota Herald
Tribune's meant-to-be-the-final-word report that ballot design was likely
the most significant factor?
The Herald-Tribune's
own
very first story on the day of the election
was headlined "Voting glitch prompts warning,"
and spoke of trouble voting:
"At least four
people complained that their initial votes for
Democrat Christine Jennings weren't recorded..."
The very first
voter complaints the Sarasota Herald Tribune reports
do not concern a poorly-designed ballot. They are about
"votes for Democrat Christine Jennings
not being recorded.
A
response so vague as to suggest...
Kathy Dent's
response can only be characterized as a total non sequitor,
establishing a pattern of "non-denial
denials:"
Dent issued an email directive that
"Poll workers are to remind every voter to look out
for the 13th Congressional District race."
She believes "a very small number of
early voters overlooked the 13th Congressional District
race because it is sandwiched in between the Senate
and the governor's race."
Huh? Does
this response in any way address the four voters who
are complaining--on the very morning of the
election, so its not sour grapes from sore losers in
the aftermath--that their votes for Christine
Jennings were not recorded?
"Try to get
a tight shot of her nose growing."
Nor is this an isolated
incident on Dent's part. The following exchanged
occurred in her one press conference.
Question:
There is a lost of concern about the undervote in
the Jennings-Buchanan race. Are you looking at that
and how that factors into a possible recount?
Kathy
Dent: Well, the undervote doesn't factor into
the recount per say. There does seem to be a higher
number in the 13th congressional race. I do not know
what to attribute it to completely to. I do know we
did not have equipment failure yesterday ... It was
recorded with all the other races we had.
Question: So there was no complaints about
... there were people telling us "we pushed the button
and it didn't go through. It didn't show up.' You saying
you didn't have any of those?
Kathy
Dent: No, we have reports from our poll workers
who were advising the voters. Make sure you go back
if no selection made showed up on the review screen;
the voters could go back and cast their vote. So,
on the review screen, most of the voters that my poll
workers talk to actually said their vote did show
up on the review screen and were able to cast their
ballot.
Legal definitions of "Okie-Dokie" notwithstanding
This statement is so
deliberately vague that it makes it difficult to
parse; but she appears to be suggesting that anything
over 50%--if "most of the votes" are counted, is Okie-Dokie with her.
In
the coming days, in explaining the unexplainable, Dent will blame voters,
blame poll workers,
and blame negative campaigning... But she will never once
address the far more serious charge which is voters central complaint:
that their
votes were not registering, and thus not
counted, on the electronic voting machines on which
the election was conducted.
Kathy Dent had lobbied
hard for these self-same electronic voting machines, a
fact to consider should there be any subsequent
charges of felony vote fraud.
"Break
that down into English for me."
The
Sarasota Herald-Tribune shares Dent's squeamishness
about delving into the real cause of the controversy
enough to have seemingly deliberately obfuscated
the results of their own survey of election
officials.
"About
half of the county's 156 precinct officials responded
to the unofficial survey," the paper reported.
"Of
those, about one in five officials said voters complained
they did not notice the congressional race when initially
voting. About one in eight said their precincts had
problems with voting machines that forced them to
shut down or replace machines. And a much larger number,
more than one in three, had general
complaints from voters about having trouble getting
votes to record in that race."
Hidden
in this gobbledygook is
real news. Here's how they would write it if the
subject were something less... sensitive.
"More
than a third of the county's precinct officials
responding to the Herald-Tribune's survey reported
that "voters had trouble getting votes to
record in that race."
In other words, more
than 50 election officials told them the machines
didn't work right.
It probably wasn't the reporters fault
These
decisions tend to come from above. In fact, the Herald-Tribune reporters
did an admirable job documenting the reports of
hundreds of eyewitnesses/voters.
But when it came to correlating
their results, once more someone couldn't
bear to have the results reported straight and the
paper again printed the results in gobbledygook.
(Don't believe us:
Read it for yourself.)
"More
than 300 voters have so far contacted the Herald-Tribune
by telephone or e-mail about their experience at the
polls on Tuesday.
The vast majority of
voters interviewed by the Herald-Tribune reported one
of two major problems.
Either they couldn't find the District 13 race as they
scrolled through their voting screens (about 36
percent) or their votes for either candidate did not
initially register on the ballot summary page (more
than 62 percent).
Although most of the callers say they voted for
Jennings, about 18 percent of the voters who reported
problems were Republican. Callers spanned the
demographic spectrum: young and old, male and female,
and from a variety of precincts."
With the obfuscation
removed, voters reported to Herald-Tribune reporters
that well more than half of them (62 percent)
said their votes for either candidate did not
initially register on the ballot summary page. Most
clearly remember voting for Christine Jennings. But
once they reached the final review page on their
ballot, they saw their vote had not registered.
That's a
big story. Too bad no one's reporting it.
Voters get a knuckle sandwich
The
Miami Herald
found the same thing. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune
did, before they began to back-pedal as fast as they
could.
"(Election
official) Leslie Rowland walked into the polling station
where she worked and realized there was serious trouble.
Some voters complained that the touch-screen machines
weren't registering votes for Congress, prompting
Rowland to shut two down briefly for inspection."
"Some of the criticism
might be blunted if people didn't vote simply because
they didn't notice the race."
"But
Rowland, other poll workers and voters say more
than bad ballot design was involved. She said
some people had such trouble getting the screen to
register their votes that she devised other techniques
for ballot casting.
"I
was telling people to use their knuckles,"
she said. She said she then turned the machines off
and called technicians to check them out. When the
machines were turned on again after 40 minutes, she
said, the technicians gave her a frustrating explanation:
"They
have to really press down hard. They're not
pressing hard enough," she said the technician
told her.
Who
you calling "Orwellian?"
The
Miami Herald, in the same story, also reports that problems began
even before the day of the election.
"During
early voting the week before Election Day, Dent's
office was beset with complaints from voters who said
they couldn't find the race. Others said they cast
votes, but noticed during their review that no mark
was recorded in the congressional race."
Here
are three uncontested fact:
1.
The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported that one third
of the county's precinct officials whom they contacted
reported "voters had trouble getting votes to
record in that race."
2.The
Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported well more
than half (60%) of the 300 voters who called the paper
complained of discovering that after they
voted their vote
in the Congressional race had not registered.
3.The
Sarasota Herald-Tribune's conclusion is
"ballot design was likely the most significant
factor" in the massive undervote.
"Okay, well what does "Orwellian" mean, anyway?
Here
are three more uncontested facts (all
reported in the major media) which help explain the
three uncontested facts already cited.
1. The battle for the 13th Congressional
District was the most expensive U.S.
House race in history, obliterating the previous spending
record by more than $1
million. So the undervote occurred in an "extraordinary" Congressional
race which both sides deemed crucial.
2. The massive" undervote"
occurred in only one of the three
counties which make up the District, Sarasota
County. Unsurprisingly, Sarasota County is also the
only county which
voted for Christine Jennings.
3. If the "undervote" in Sarasota County had been consistent
with that of the other two counties in the 13th District...or with
that of the rest of the state... or with that of the rest of
the nation... the new Representative in Florida's
13th Congressional District would today be Democrat
Christine Jennings.
"If the missing votes had broken for Jennings by the
same percentage as the counted votes in Sarasota
County, the Democrat would have won the race by about
600 votes instead of losing by 368,
according to a Herald Tribune review.
Taken together, even
this set of agreed-upon facts indicates
strongly that something went horribly—and very
likely deliberately—wrong in the Congressional
election conducted by Sarasota County.
Moreover the unsatisfactory explanations offered by
local Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent, as well as
the Sarasota
Herald-Tribune's summary reporting, are both at such variance with
the facts that the more cynical among
us might easily conclude they suggest some other
agenda, or perhaps even some degree of guilty
knowledge.
Of
course, we wouldn't suggest that. We're
already looking at defending two slander
lawsuits at the same time.
But
we certainly think somebody should.
NEXT: EYEWITNESSES
TO VOTE FRAUD SPEAK OUT
THEN: THE RETURN OF GARY GREENHALGH
"Threats of law suits against journalists have
become the hallmark of the Bush administration
in a not too clever tactic used to silence
independent media in the U.S. -Wayne
Madsen
In
the aftermath of the 2000 Presidential election
in Florida the nation’s eyes were riveted
on punch cards being held up to the light,
and no one thought to investigate the
ownership of the election companies
that count America’s vote...
Except us.
Sequoia Voting Systems, the election
company currently embroiled in controversy
over its connection to Venezuelan President
Hugo Chavez, was owned at the time of
the 2000 election by a shadowy international
financier who got his big break in a sweetheart
deal with a subsidiary of Mobil Oil, Container
Corp of America, at a time when the company
was controlled by the Rockefeller Family.
"The
Big Fix 2000" is a documentary about
our investigation into the ownership of same
company under suspicion today.
Discover
why this company, and the other major firms
in the industry, are regularly been accused
of electoral fraud.