Science Guardian

Stealing America doc review makes convincing case that George W. robbed the ballot box twice

End of paper trail resolutely ignored in massive media myopia

NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller got nowhere with taboo topic

But now New York Times allows Adam Cohen to blog reasons to worry about 2008

One of the most striking acts of political cowardice by the otherwise topic hungry mainstream media in the US has been their enduring unwillingness to take the cover off what is widely recognized by students of the political scene as a very ripe smelling data dumpster.

We refer to the strong circumstantial evidence that in both 2000 and 2004 that our blithely underqualified president avoided rejection by the voters only by allowing his devoted minions and supporters to hack the voting machines and flip the required number of votes from Gore and Kerry to Bush.

Whether Bush stole votes in seizing the presidential throne for eight years would seem to be the Story of the Century by the standards of traditional journalism whereby a pair of Washington Post reporters did not hesitate to bring down the Nixon presidency by mining the allegations of Deep Throat.

But for some reason unknown to us there has been a mysterious disinclination to get to the bottom of what looks like the greatest and most costly political theft in history. The nettle has not been grasped.

The media apathy about the topic is probably understandable in the absence of hard evidence but it has left the average Times reader seriously uninformed, and therefore naturally skeptical of this allegation as yet another paranoid conspiracy theory from the far left.

Valuable chance to review the story

But for the next week in New York City a new documentary will do what it seems only documentaries can do these days - parade the evidence and the witnesses in front of our eyes and ears so that we can review the matter in a hands on manner that the ordinary media cannot rival.

Our advice is to hurry to see Stealing America: Vote by Vote when it opens briefly tomorrow in Manhattan, or two weeks later in LA and in other venues around the country. In each case it will only be on for one week, and it seems likely there will be as usual scandalously little media coverage of the significant event.

For Stealing America: Vote by Vote is a persuasive account which makes it painfully clear that there is only one way to explain the evidence that has accumulated: both presidential elections were stolen by Republican operatives who tampered with the new fangled electronic voting machines and reversed the voting outcomes in major states.

The red flags in both cases are the exit polls which predicted an outcome different from the official count. In 2000 the picture was complicated when the vote count of the narrow Florida race, on which the final outcome turned, was actually challenged. The Supreme Court cut this short with its unprecedented “this is not a precedent” 5-4 decision to give George the prize, but the media review a year later found that Florida and the election itself would have been won by Al Gore if the state wide recount had been completed, and one thing was certain: the obstacles placed in the way of free and fair elections interfered with a lot more Democratic votes than Republican.

The evidence of electronic skulduggery became clearer in 2004, when more efficient hacking of the voting machines was apparently all that was needed to achieve a similar coup d’etat. According to the film this was the likely means by which the predicted John Kerry win was neatly reversed in a few hours on Election night in favor of the incumbent George W.

On what does this sickening conclusion rest? Simply that exit polls predicted the Kerry win, and there is no other way to explain why they have suddenly become unreliable indicators.

We challenge anyone with faith in the democratic system to see this movie without being disturbed.

Vote changing in front of your eyes

That is the story persuasively laid out by Stealing America: Vote by Vote by Dorothy Fadiman (pic), which will open August 1 in New York and August 15 in LA (see press release below), which features unusually convincing testimony from key figures involved in a clearly laid out, hour by hour rerun of the overnight election drama in 2004, when the Kerry win flipped to a Bush victory.

The film doesn’t leave any other way of accounting for the stark disparity that has opened up between the previously infallible exit polls and the official counts they reliably matched for thirty years before 1996, when the new fangled electronic voting machines first played their unreliable part. Unreliable because they are as susceptible to failure and hacking as your desktop PC, according to computer experts interviewed in Stealing America.

The heart of the story is 2004, when the biggest conflict to date between exit polling and outcome came about. Kerry was predicted on the basis of exit polling to win the 12 big states that mattered - including Ohio where the crucial official count was barred to reporters owing to a “terrorist threat”, one that national security agency officials later said was new to them - Kerry was expected to win by 51-48%. By the early morning the official vote counts had reversed the outcome and Bush was the winner by about the same margin as (not) predicted - an unprecedented flip of 6%.

The stunning final hour reversal was all the more incredible given the enthusiastic turnout of blacks and college students we see waiting in line many hours to vote in precincts which mysteriously tended to be the ones short of working machines, or to have machines plagued by the strange glitch which registered a vote for Kerry as one for Bush right before the voter’s eyes.

More votes for president were corrupted than any other time in the checkered history of US elections, if the evidence of the film is taken at face value.

Given the tone and style of the witnesses featured and the record they expose it is hard to think of a reason not to do so. There is very little of the conspiracy theorist about any of them, and producer-director Dorothy Fadiman has drawn them from both sides of the political spectrum:

• Bob Hagan – Ohio State Senator and first-hand witness to on-screen vote switching.
• Paul Craig Roberts — Economist and former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan and sometimes
called the “Father of Reaganomics.” He is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week
and Scripps Howard News Service, and is at present a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate.
• Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. – Activist, author, environmental lawyer and co-host of Ring of Fire on the Air America Radio network.
• Charles Lewis – Investigative journalist and former 60 Minutes producer. Founder, Center for Public Integrity.
• Bruce O’ Dell and Chuck Herrin – Fortune 100 company computer security analysts.
• Greg Palast – BBC investigative journalist whose reportage on the issue made the front page in U.K. and Europe, but was suppressed in the U.S.
• Dr. Avi Rubin – Director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
• Ion Sancho – Leon County Supervisor of Elections. Appointed by the Florida Supreme Court to count the
votes in the disputed 2000 presidential election, Sancho blazed a trail in proving that it is possible to “hack”
into voting machines and change the totals.
• Dr. Jonathan Simon – Data analyst, who has been focusing on exit poll discrepancies.
• John Zogby – International polling authority.

Media myopia on a taboo topic

As things went down that night and the numbers rolled in and the great reversal took place the close observers of the election on tv had one plain choice to make in their commentary. Were the exit polls suddenly a poor guide to the final voting outcome, for some unknown reason, or was there a serious need to review and recount the sudden Bush surge?

Apparently loathe to question the system or those in power, the commentators at once all turned into ostriches, and they have by and large resolutely kept their heads in the sand ever since, though Harpers magazine has been an exception.

They were helped along in this attitude by the company doing the exit polling, which immediately rolled over and played dead when their results were contradicted. According to “standard practice” the company (Edison/Mitofsky) simply brought their numbers in line with the official supposed outcome, though not before a computer freeze allowed interested observers to download the real breakdown.

The bottom line is that no one then or since has been able to account for the increasing divergence between exit polling and official vote count over the last decade. From the sixties, exit polls had proved an essential tool of election analysts because they were so helpful. Suddenly they went bad.

Since the emerging discrepancy coincides with the arrival of electronic voting machines the implication is obvious: someone has been manipulating the new electronic voting machines (You Tube video on hacking a Diebold).

Now who could that be? By some even stranger coincidence the bias introduced has been uniformly in favor of the Republicans, amongst whom are the people who run the machine system.

All kinds of electoral interferences took place. Apart from direct hacking, which one computer consultant testified was something a certain Florida politician requested that he demonstrate how to do, the election officials and others interviewed list a litany of outrages aimed at Democrat votes, including a skewed distribution of machines which forced waits of up to 11 hours for some black voters and 12 or more hours for Ohio’s Kenyon college students.

Requests for replacement machines were ignored even when the fact that other polling stations had closed made substitutes freely available.

Tears trickle down both cheeks of one beautiful African American volunteer as she recalls how all her registration work went for nought as even her own vote was hijacked by a machine which translated her Kerry vote to a Bush vote before her eyes. Also interviewed is Ohio State Senator Bob Hagan, whose vote flipped from one candidate to another while he was voting.

A taboo topic

The most astonishing part of the story (except perhaps to readers of this site) is the behavior of the no doubt honorable but apparently critically challenged senior members of the media. There is a vivid shot of Judy Woodruff expressing bewilderment as the numbers changed and their forecasts fell by the wayside.

To a man and woman however she and the liberal media reporters and commentators then and since have resolutely avoided raising the specter of intentional fraud as something apparently unmentionable, perhaps lest the faith of the American voter in the system might be undermined. If so, this matches one motivation of editors and reporters in HIV/AIDS who treat the possibility of grand error in the science of that field as a taboo topic, since if it is true full exposure will undermine the faith of the public in science, science journals and science reporting to an unprecedented extent.

One author stymied by this reaction is Mark Crispin Miller of NYU, whose Fooled Again received few reviews or mentions, yet when he was featured on WBAI in New York City provided much food for thought for listeners.

In this belated exposé—and clarion call for electoral reform—Miller (The Bush Dyslexicon) accuses George W. Bush and his “theocratic militants” of orchestrating electoral fraud to “hijack” the 2004 presidential race. Miller relies on original reporting, secondary sources and unadulterated outrage to make his case, marshaling evidence (much of it circumstantial) of Democratic voter disenfranchisement, mysterious computer snafus and discrepancies between exit poll results and official vote counts. He is especially critical of the press for what he describes as silence in the face of Bush’s and Cheney’s denials of fraud.

Whatever their motives the record stands as evidence of the current social psychology of reporters and talking heads who feel themselves to be invested in the system and more members of the club than independent watchdogs whose profession is to stand guard over the elite and watch where they put their hands on the levers of power.

That is the story persuasively laid out by Stealing America: Vote by Vote. As the movie reminds us the New York Times led this rush to reassure readers with its astonishing front page item immediately after the November 2004 election, Vote Fraud Theories, Spread By Blogs, Are Quickly Buried , noting that bloggers had raised questions but they had been reliably poo-pooed by knowledgeable mainstream officials and experts and there was no need to worry.

Mr. White also quickly withdrew his own analysis of voting systems in Ohio when he realized the data he had used was inaccurate.

John Byrne, editor of an alternative news site, BlueLemur.com, says it is too easy to condemn blogs and freelance Web sites for being inaccurate. The more important point, he said, is that they offer an alternative to a mainstream news media that has become too timid. “Of course you can say blogs are wrong,” he said. “Blogs are wrong all the time.”

For its part, the Kerry campaign has been trying to tamp down the conspiracy theories and to tell supporters that their mission now is to ensure that every vote is counted, not that the election be overturned.

“We know this was an emotional election, and the losing side is very upset,” said Daniel Hoffheimer, the lead lawyer for the Kerry campaign in Ohio. But, he said, “I have not seen anything to indicate intentional fraud or tampering.”

A preliminary study produced by the Voting Technology Project, a cooperative effort between the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came to a similar conclusion. Its study found “no particular patterns” relating to voting systems and the final results of the election.

“The ‘facts’ that are being circulated on the Internet,” the study concluded, “appear to be selectively chosen to make the point.”

Whether that will ever convince everyone is an open question.

“I’d give my right arm for Internet rumors of a stolen election to be true,” said David Wade, a spokesman for the Kerry campaign, “but blogging it doesn’t make it so. We can change the future; we can’t rewrite the past.”

Even the worldly Wall Street Journal failed to look into the matter, Paul Craig Roberts complains, he being Reagan’s assistant secretary of the Treasury and an editor and columnist for the normally bloodhound paper.

This and the premature capitulation of Kerry before all the Ohio votes were counted suggests that Democrats have some innate resistance to challenging the integrity of the system they share. When Ohio state senator Bob Hagan saw his own vote switched in front of his eyes and realized what was going on, he called the Kerry HQ, only to be told they didn’t wish the raise the issue.

Meanwhile according to the film, Edison/Mitofsky have never released the raw data for their exit polling. All anyone has been able to prise out of them is a summary report.

Watch out in 2008

Given the results of the 2006 elections,where Democratic hopes of 40-50 new seats were reduced to 28, it seems clear that the same thing is still going on. Meanwhile the Ohio ballots from 2004 have lost or destroyed in a variety of ways, against all the rules. When Dan Rather investigated for CNN he found nothing but stonewalling from the companies involved: AMERICA’S VOTING MACHINES NOT READY FOR 2008 ELECTION” (YouTube video).

Sites to visit include Black Box Voting. A very good source both comprehensive and detailed is this page, Introduction: Did George W. Bush steal America’s 2004 election? Essential documents, by Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman June 16, 2005 and other pages at Freepress.org.

In this volume’s first three documents, we reproduce articles published before November 2, 2004. Widely distributed throughout the Internet weeks before the election, they warned that a wide range of abuses stemming from Secretary Blackwell’s office and other sources had already tainted the outcome of the upcoming Ohio vote.

On Election Day, these warnings seemed tragically prophetic. The balloting throughout Ohio was riddled with a staggering array of irregularities, apparent fraud and clear illegalities. Many of the questions focused on electronic voting machines whose lack of official accountability and a reliable paper trail had been in the news since the bitterly contested election of 2000, four years earlier. (Similar questions also arose in Georgia in 2002, where Democratic candidates for Governor and US Senate had substantial leads in the major polls right up to election day, only to lose by substantial margins).

The most widely publicized Ohio problems came as predominantly African-American precincts turned up suspiciously short of voting machines. Inner-city voters waited three hours on average and up to seven hours, according to election officials and to sworn testimony of local residents. Many voters stood in the cold rain to cast their ballots while nearby white Republican suburbs suffered virtually no delays. The wait at liberal Kenyon College, located in Knox County, Ohio, was eleven hours, while voters at a nearby conservative Bible school could vote in five minutes.

To this day no one can definitively tell how many citizens, seeing the long lines, went home or to work or to take care of their children, thus losing their right to vote.

Could it happen in 2008?

Will Obama lose to McCain owing to similar skulduggery, even now that everyone is watching more closely? A top right front page story in the Times the other day, Influx of Voters Expected to Test New Technology, suggests that this is not unlikely, since its description of continuing problems in the supply and distribution of new paper ballots and laser recorders bodes ill for accuracy. New Mexico has converted entirely to paper ballots but the time for other states to follow is too short.

Today the Times carries opinion by Adam Cohen which suggests that problems will continue without being resolved:

A Tale of Three (Electronic Voting) Elections:
Electronic voting has made great strides in reliability, but it has a long way to go. When reformers push for greater safeguards, they often argue that future elections could produce the wrong result because of a computer glitch or be stolen through malicious software. That’s being too nice.

There have already been elections in which it is impossible to be certain that the right candidate was declared the winner. Here are three such races. It is not just remarkable that these elections were run so badly, but also that the flaws are still common — and could easily create havoc in this fall’s voting…..

After the 2000 election debacle, Americans demanded a better system of voting. What we have gotten is new technology with different flaws. If the presidential race is close, this year’s “hanging chad” could be a questionable result on electronic voting machines that cannot be adequately investigated.

Note the interesting attitude of the attorney general who threatened a contender with arrest if he did a hand recount with the permission of the local election officials.

” Mr. Siegelman says local officials gave him permission to count the paper ballots by hand, but the attorney general threatened to arrest anyone who did. No count was done.”

July 31, 2008
Editorial Observer
A Tale of Three (Electronic Voting) Elections
By ADAM COHEN

Electronic voting has made great strides in reliability, but it has a long way to go. When reformers push for greater safeguards, they often argue that future elections could produce the wrong result because of a computer glitch or be stolen through malicious software. That’s being too nice.

There have already been elections in which it is impossible to be certain that the right candidate was declared the winner. Here are three such races. It is not just remarkable that these elections were run so badly, but also that the flaws are still common — and could easily create havoc in this fall’s voting.

1. The 2002 Georgia Senate and Governor Races — Senator Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was defeated for re-election and Gov. Roy Barnes, a Democrat, was unseated. Polls had suggested that both men would win.

The votes were cast on Diebold A.T.M.-style machines. A whistle-blower who helped prepare the machines reported that secret “patches” — software intended to fix glitches — were installed late in the process without being certified by the state, as the law required.

The unexpected outcomes were likely because of heavy turnout by rural whites, prompted by a Confederate flag dispute, not faulty voting machines. Still, skeptics wonder if the patches contained malicious software that changed votes. Because the Diebold machines did not produce paper records, there is no way to put those doubts to rest.

Lesson: Electronic voting makes large-scale vote theft easy. A patch slipped onto voting machines or centralized vote tabulators can change an election’s outcome. Every piece of software must be scrutinized by neutral experts. If there is not enough time, election officials need a backup plan, such as conducting voting entirely on paper ballots.

2. The 2006 Congressional Race in Florida’s 13th District — The machines said that Republican Vern Buchanan defeated Democrat Christine Jennings by 369 votes. But in Sarasota County, a Democratic area, up to 18,000 ballots, about 13 percent of the total cast, did not record a vote for Congress. That is extraordinarily high; in Republican Manatee County, only 2 percent of ballots didn’t contain a vote for Congress.

Sarasota’s low vote may have been because of a bad ballot design, which made the Buchanan-Jennings race hard to find. But the Jennings campaign said it received hundreds of complaints that the machines would not accept a vote for Ms. Jennings, or recorded a vote for her as a vote for Mr. Buchanan.

Did Ms. Jennings lose a seat in Congress because of a glitch? Could there have been sabotage? We’ll never know, because there are no paper records.

Lesson: Electronic voting machines must produce a voter-verifiable paper trail for each vote so voters can see that their choices register properly. In a disputed election, the paper, not the machine tallies, should decide who wins.

More than half the states require votes to be recorded on paper, but many still don’t. These include battleground states like Virginia.

3. Alabama’s 2002 Race for Governor — Former Gov. Don Siegelman has been in the news because it appears that federal prosecutors may have put him in prison for political reasons. The controversy has brought attention to the odd way he lost the governorship.

Mr. Siegelman went to sleep on election night thinking he had won. But overnight, Republican Baldwin County reported that a glitch had given Mr. Siegelman, a Democrat, about 6,000 extra votes. When they were subtracted, Republican Rob Riley won by roughly 3,000 votes.

James Gundlach, a professor at Auburn University, crunched the numbers and concluded that Mr. Siegelman lost because of “electronic ballot stuffing,” possibly by an operative who accessed the computers and “edited” the results, though others dispute his analysis.

Baldwin County used paper ballots that were then read by an optical scan machine. Mr. Siegelman says local officials gave him permission to count the paper ballots by hand, but the attorney general threatened to arrest anyone who did. No count was done.

Lesson: Paper ballots alone are not enough. There must be strong audit laws that mandate comprehensive hand recounts when an election is close.

After the 2000 election debacle, Americans demanded a better system of voting. What we have gotten is new technology with different flaws. If the presidential race is close, this year’s “hanging chad” could be a questionable result on electronic voting machines that cannot be adequately investigated.

In all this our basic point remains: the media seem limited in their coverage in this extraordinarily important matter by a built in reluctance to cross a line in the sand, where they would turn from questioning the machines to questioning the men and women in power.

If a scandalous abuse of power is sufficiently big in the information arena, it seems that we can count on the media to sweep it under the carpet. Any outcry from the Web will be ignored as just another conspiracy theory.

Will this movie have any effect? It will be interesting to see. Our guess would be, very little.

After all, as Greg Palast, the BBC journalist (pic) who is an investigative terror in this realm and had a lot to do with the film, in which he is featured, says, he has tried very hard to get this material on to the US airwaves and utterly failed.

Influx of Voters Expected to Test New Technology (NYTimes)

Stealing America: the PR Release:

STEALING AMERICA: VOTE BY VOTE

For more than 20 years exit polls had accurately predicted election results. Over the last 10 years that reliability has progressively disappeared. What is going on?

STEALING AMERICA: VOTE BY VOTE is Emmy Award winning and Academy Award nominated filmmaker Dorothy Fadiman’s revealing new documentary which brings together seemingly unrelated anomalies of the U.S. electoral puzzle to paint a chilling picture of widespread “glitches” that have the capacity to alter election results. STEALING AMERICA: VOTE BY VOTE will screen at the Netroots Nation political convention in Austin on Saturday, July 19 before opening in New York on Friday, August 1 and in Los Angeles on Friday, August 15, with a national rollout to follow.

Narrated by Peter Coyote, STEALING AMERICA: VOTE BY VOTE brings together behind-the-scenes perspectives from the U.S. presidential election of 2004 – plus startling stories from key races in 1998, 2000, 2002 and 2006. The film sheds light on a decade of vote counts that don’t match votes cast – uncounted ballots, vote switching, under-votes, and many other examples of election totals that warrant serious investigation. The last two presidential elections both came down to a relatively small number of votes, and in both elections the integrity of the voting process has been called into question. With the upcoming election looking to be similarly close, the time has come to ask the questions: What happened in 2000 and 2004? What has changed since? What can be done to ensure a fair and honest tabulation of votes in 2008?

Throughout STEALING AMERICA: VOTE BY VOTE, we hear from voters who experienced a wide range of problems, including those whose votes flipped from one candidate to another when using electronic voting machines and polling places that didn’t have enough machines to serve the number of voters. Investigative journalists describe how their reportage on election fraud was sidelined. First-person citizen testimonies speak of waiting in line for over nine hours to vote. Polling experts’ requests for essential information – such as precinct voting data necessary to examine irregularities – were rejected, while ballots were systematically destroyed, making audits impossible.

Experts appearing in the film include Bob Hagan – Ohio State Senator and first-hand witness to on-screen vote switching; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. – Activist, author, environmental lawyer and co-host of Ring of Fire on the Air America Radio network; Charles Lewis – Investigative journalist, former 60 Minutes producer and founder, Center for Public Integrity; Bruce O’ Dell and Chuck Herrin – Fortune 100 Company computer security analysts; Greg Palast – BBC investigative journalist; Paul Craig Roberts – Economist and former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan and former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service and presently a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate; Dr. Avi Rubin – Director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins; Ion Sancho – Appointed by the Florida Supreme Court to count the votes in the disputed 2000 presidential election and who blazed a trail in proving that it is possible to “hack” into voting machines and change the totals; Dr. Jonathan Simon – Data analyst, who has been focusing on Exit Polls discrepancies; and John Zogby – International polling authority.

Filmmaker Dorothy Fadiman has been producing media with a focus on social justice and human rights since 1976. She has won more than 50 major awards for her work on such films as WHEN ABORTION WAS ILLEGAL: UNTOLD STORIES, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.

Screening times around the US:

1. August 1st thru 7th at the Quad Cinema
GREG PALAST will introduce the film at the early evening
(after dinner) screening. Check the website on Aug. 1 for
for the exact time.
34 West 13th St. New York City, NY
www.quadcinema.com

2. August 15th thru 21st at the Laemmle’s Music Hall 3
BRUCE O’DELL and JONATHAN SIMON will introduce the film
at the early evening (after dinner) screening.
Check the website on Aug. 2 for
for the exact time.
9036 Wilshire Blvd. Beverly Hills, CA
www.laemmle.com/viewtheatre.php?thid=4

3. August 15th thru 21st at the Chez Artiste 3
4150 E Amherst Ave. Denver, CO
www.landmarktheatres.com/Market/Denver/Denver_Frameset.htm

4. August 22nd thru 28th at the Ritz at Bourse
400 Ranstead Street On Fourth Street between Market and Chestnut
Philadelphia, PA
http://www.landmarktheatres.com/market/Philadelphia/RitzatBourse.htm

5. August 29th thru September 4th at the E Street Cinema
555 11th Street NW Washington, D.C.
www.landmarktheatres.com/market/WashingtonDC/EStreetCinema.htm

6. August 29th thru September 4th at the Kendall Sq Cinema
One Kendall Sq. Cambridge, MA
www.landmarktheatres.com/Market/Boston/KendallSquareCinema.htm

7. August 29th thru September 4th at the Lagoon 5
1320 Lagoon Ave. Minneapolis, MN
www.landmarktheatres.com/Market/Minneapolis/Minneapolis_Frameset.htm

8. August 29th thru September 4th at the Devargas Mall Cinema 6
562 N Guadalupe St. Santa Fe, NM
www.fandango.com/TheaterPage.aspx?tid=AAGJF

9. September 5th thru 11th at the Shattuck 10
2230 Shattuck Ave. Berkeley, CA
www.landmarktheatres.com/Market/SanFranciscoEastBay/ShattuckCinemas.htm

10. September 5th thru 11th at the Lumiere 3
1572 California St. San Francisco, CA
www.landmarktheatres.com/market/SanFrancisco/LumiereTheatre.htm

11. September 5th thru 11th at the Regal Arbor Cinema
9828 Great Hills Trail Suite 800 Austin, TX
www.fandango.com/TheaterPage.aspx?tid=AAEUJ

12. September 5th thru 11th at the Varsity 3
4329 University Way NE Seattle, WA
www.landmarktheatres.com/market/Seattle/VarsityTheatre.htm

13. September 26th thru October 2 at Landmark’s Gateway Theatre
50 N. High Street Columbus, OH
http://www.landmarktheatres.com/market/Columbus

A Times brief notice today (Aug 1 Fri) by hard to please, Village Voice-style critic Nathan Lee (pic) dismisses the film on aesthetic grounds as “might have been this year’s most alarming and patriotic movie if it weren’t so shoddy and dull” and full of “cheesy computer effects, graceless rhetoric and preaching-to-the-choir irrelevancy of the awkward advocacy doc”. Lee claims to share Dorothy Fadiman’s outrage at…”the unprecedented discrepancies between exit polls and final vote tallies, the wildly divergent wait times for differing populations, and the anecdotal frequency of ‘vote switching’ on machines designed as if to encourage hacking,” but is too preoccupied with flaunting his red crayon to take the implications seriously:

August 1, 2008
A Glitch in the System
By NATHAN LEE
Published: August 1, 2008

“Stealing America: Vote by Vote” might have been this year’s most alarming and patriotic documentary if it weren’t so shoddy and dull. Remember all those complaints about “An Inconvenient Truth” playing like an aggrandized PowerPoint presentation? “Stealing America,” by comparison, barely qualifies as a glorified Google search.

The filmmaker, Dorothy Fadiman, would argue that that’s exactly the point. In reporting on the suspicious circumstances of recent elections, she relies on information gathered by bloggers, local newspapers and personal testimony as opposed to the “mainstream media” — those TV networks and national newspapers, which supposedly ignored or dismissed evidence of electoral malfeasance.

Ah, “supposedly”! There I go being a tool of the hegemonic MSM.

Personally, I happen to share Ms. Fadiman’s outrage over certain details: the unprecedented discrepancies between exit polls and final vote tallies, the wildly divergent wait times for differing populations, the anecdotal frequency of “vote switching” on machines designed as if to encourage hacking.

Professionally, I prefer to have my paranoid liberal indignation enflamed by a little cinematic savoir faire. A call to arms, then: Let us reform our glitch-ridden electoral system, and while we’re at it retire the cheesy computer effects, graceless rhetoric and preaching-to-the-choir irrelevancy of the awkward advocacy doc.

The New York Sun critic James Snyder is more attentive to the theme but still shows the same level of denial of the logical consequences as the rest of the press, even claiming that Dorothy Fadiman the producer-director “doesn’t want to sell us on the theory of a swindled populace”, even while “she makes a compelling argumenht that now is not the time to take the right to vote, or the security of our voting apparatus, for granted.”:

The documentary is quick to point out that manipulating election results is as old as elections themselves, but conspiracy theories of corruption are not the goal here, despite the ring of the title. What has changed in recent years is the degree of reliance on technology, which is more vulnerable to sabotage and less helpful in terms of verifying or scrutinizing results — not to mention in clarifying who has won a tight race.

‘Stealing America’: When Democracy Loses the Vote by S. James Snyder | August 1, 2008“Stealing America: Vote by Vote,” a compelling examination of modern-day voting practices that opens Friday at Quad Cinemas, is a bold, if slightly dry, act of journalism. The documentary begins with a rather straightforward thesis that has not been examined as thoroughly as it should be: The past two presidential elections, in which victory has been determined by razor-thin margins, have been beset by a skyrocketing number of mishaps at the polls. The mainstream press often dubs them “voting irregularities,” and one doesn’t have to be a supporter of any of the candidates involved to know that they are damaging our concept of free and fair elections.

It wasn’t until the infamous re-count of 2000 and the difficulty in deciding whether, for example, a dimpled chad indicated voter intent, that the average American became familiar with the weaknesses inherent in our voting infrastructure. For her part, “Stealing America” director Dorothy Fadiman became infuriated during the 2004 presidential election about the way in which the confusion, fear, and outright suspicion felt by so many voters went all but unaddressed by major news organizations.

Ms. Fadiman was working as a volunteer at the polls in Florida on Election Day in 2004 when she heard numerous reports of citizens voting for one candidate, only to have another name light up on the electronic screen before them. The director was struck by the mounting frustration of the voters, who could not find acceptable solutions to the problems they had encountered at the polls.

The documentary is quick to point out that manipulating election results is as old as elections themselves, but conspiracy theories of corruption are not the goal here, despite the ring of the title. What has changed in recent years is the degree of reliance on technology, which is more vulnerable to sabotage and less helpful in terms of verifying or scrutinizing results — not to mention in clarifying who has won a tight race.

Not surprisingly, given the results of the 2000 and 2004 elections, the majority of the voters and election volunteers interviewed by Ms. Fadiman are Democrats. But she takes pains to balance the voices in her film in order to show that the irregularities that have come to plague our electoral system represent a bipartisan concern. The dozens of interviewees include state Senator Kay Hagan, a Democrat, who witnessed on-screen vote switching; the BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast; Avi Rubin, who runs the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University; the pollster John Zogby, and Ion Sancho, who was appointed to conduct the 2000 Florida recount by the state’s Supreme Court.

“Stealing America” aligns these interviews to support a couple of distinct arguments. First, Ms. Fadiman argues, technological upgrades in the polling booth have left our elections more susceptible to interference, malfunctions, and tampering. In some cases, analysts attempting to re-examine past election results have been told that the raw voting data are proprietary information owned by a private company, and that the only figures available for study are the summaries the company delivered to election officials.

Moreover, the costly equipment and software upgrades for the new machines have not been evenly distributed, leaving many precincts underserved. In 2004, various reports out of Florida and Ohio described citizens waiting in excess of six hours to vote — and in some cases longer.

Ultimately, though, Ms. Fadiman’s ire (as communicated through Peter Coyote’s narration) is directed firmly at the press. Using the firsthand evidence of what she witnessed, not only unreliable computer terminals but election-night results that deviated widely, for the first time in history, from exit polls — a fact that alone should have drawn greater scrutiny — “Stealing America” lambastes the press for its failure to properly dissect the problem. Juxtaposing the exasperation of voters and election volunteers with the calm and steady news reports of the same day in 2004, it’s clear that these are two versions of Election Day that do not mesh.

“Stealing America” suffers from limited production values, arriving complete with canned music, second-rate graphics, and awkward segues between interview and archival footage. It also lacks the flair of a singular personality, such as Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock. But perhaps that’s precisely the point. The movie almost goes out of its way to avoid being provocative for the sake of provocation. It substantiates its arguments, and though it asks big questions, Ms. Fadiman offers a virtual bullet-point list defending why they deserve to be asked.

The 21st century has become an era of neck-and-neck elections that play out moment by moment on 24/7 cable news — elections run by machines and managed by people fixed in the political structure. Ms. Fadiman doesn’t want to sell us on the theory of a swindled populace, but she makes a compelling argument that now is not the time to take the right to the vote, or the security of our voting apparatus, for granted.

ssnyder@nysun.com

The movie “Free For All” on the Ohio experience is available online here for downloads, for DVDs, and for FREE streaming. The film “pulls down the pants of the Ohio election… Follow John Ennis into the colon of American democracy, Ohio 2004. It’s funny as hell - oddly, democracy’s death can tickle your funny bone while laying out the story of the latest quadrennial vote heist.” (Greg Palast).

The bottom line: are there thieves in the machines?

So is the movie saying that the friends of Bush hacked the machines or not?

Here is an interview with Bruce O’Dell Fortune 100 Computer Security Analyst and Co-Producer of STEALING AMERICA: Vote by Vote on A Citizen’s Guide to Voting Technology. He certainly seems well qualified to speak on the issue:

Q: Why are you questioning the honesty of the people who create and program voting machines and who run our elections?

A: I’m not questioning anyone’s honesty—but human nature is what human nature is. There’s ample room for insider misconduct in any organization. Surprisingly enough, the most severe security risks in any organization are from insiders. Despite extraordinary security measures, banks and financial institutions continue to be ripped off by trusted insiders who understand exactly where the weaknesses are in the system. According to Dan Verton’s recent book Identity Thieves, insiders accounted for approximately 70% of the $3.4 billion that banks lost to internal and external fraud and hacker incidents in 2004.

Q: What could possibly motivate so-called “malicious insiders” at the voting equipment companies to risk getting caught?

A: Our elections determine those leaders who command the world’s only superpower military, set the agenda for federal law enforcement and who control the world’s largest checkbook: our federal budget. By the “Willy Sutton” rule, voting systems are truly “where the money’s at.” Common sense tells me that constant, ruthless and highly sophisticated attempts by insiders to subvert voting software must be assumed to be currently underway, given such a valuable target.

Yet when it comes to voting systems, the presumption currently seems to be that attacks by malicious insiders are unthinkable.

A Citizen’s Guide to Voting Technology Bruce O’Dell Fortune 100 Computer Security Analyst and Co-Producer of STEALING AMERICA: Vote by Vote

Q: There are a lot of academics and experts that say voting software is perfectly secure. What basis do you have for questioning their judgment?

A: I’ve made a career of helping my clients protect billions of dollars of other people’s money from thieves, hackers and embezzlers, and I design very large-scale computer systems with extraordinary requirements for security and integrity. At American Express, I led a project to provide customer access to transactions from financial institutions throughout North America. I’ve served as the technical leader of a project to replace the access control software at one of the twenty biggest companies in America. And – unlike some of my academic and professional colleagues, who consult for or provide software to voting technology vendors or their clients – I have never had any financial interest in promoting e-voting technology.

Q: There are a lot of academics and experts that say voting software is perfectly secure. What basis do you have for questioning their judgment?

A: I’ve made a career of helping my clients protect billions of dollars of other people’s money from thieves, hackers and embezzlers, and I design very large-scale computer systems with extraordinary requirements for security and integrity. At American Express, I led a project to provide customer access to transactions from financial institutions throughout North America. I’ve served as the technical leader of a project to replace the access control software at one of the twenty biggest companies in America. And – unlike some of my academic and professional colleagues, who consult for or provide software to voting technology vendors or their clients – I have never had any financial interest in promoting e-voting technology.

Q: Why are you questioning the honesty of the people who create and program voting machines and who run our elections?

A: I’m not questioning anyone’s honesty—but human nature is what human nature is. There’s ample room for insider misconduct in any organization. Surprisingly enough, the most severe security risks in any organization are from insiders. Despite extraordinary security measures, banks and financial institutions continue to be ripped off by trusted insiders who understand exactly where the weaknesses are in the system. According to Dan Verton’s recent book Identity Thieves, insiders accounted for approximately 70% of the $3.4 billion that banks lost to internal and external fraud and hacker incidents in 2004.

Q: What could possibly motivate so-called “malicious insiders” at the voting equipment companies to risk getting caught?

A: Our elections determine those leaders who command the world’s only superpower military, set the agenda for federal law enforcement and who control the world’s largest checkbook: our federal budget. By the “Willy Sutton” rule, voting systems are truly “where the money’s at.” Common sense tells me that constant, ruthless and highly sophisticated attempts by insiders to subvert voting software must be assumed to be currently underway, given such a valuable target.

Yet when it comes to voting systems, the presumption currently seems to be that attacks by malicious insiders are unthinkable. In the wake of a report of what was (at the time) “the worst security vulnerability ever found in a voting system,” David Bear, a representative of Diebold Election Systems, was quoted as follows (New York Times, May 12, 2006):

For there to be a problem here, you’re basically assuming a premise where you have some evil and nefarious election officials who would sneak in and introduce a piece of software… I don’t believe these evil elections people exist. Imagine the reaction of a CEO or CFO upon hearing a company representative selling cash management software say that their clients do not need to worry about reports of a major security flaw in their software, because he doubted that any “evil bankers” existed. Heads would roll.

Q: Before it spun off its voting equipment division, Diebold manufactured both ATMs and electronic voting machines. Isn’t casting your ballot on an electronic voting machine just as secure as taking cash from an ATM?

A: That’s a common misconception – but in terms of security, ATM devices and electronic voting machines actually have almost nothing in common. It all comes down to one simple consideration: on the one hand, votes must be anonymous; while on the other hand, electronic financial transactions must be based on strong proof of identity. Electronic financial transactions are as secure as they are – where embezzlement is the exception and not the rule – simply because you must first prove your identity to all the parties involved in any ATM transaction. Voting is ananonymous transaction. Electronic voting machines cannot apply to voting transactions any of the identity-based financial auditing mechanisms universally used by ATM machines. If they did, the secrecy of your ballot would disappear.

Q: I’m not sure I understand – can you give a concrete example why ATMs and electronic voting machines are so different?

A: Just imagine what would happen if an election is run using e-voting equipment that applies the same security standards as banks do to ATMs. You sign on, enter your PIN number, and then cast your “ATM ballot.” Your name is immediately sent to the computers owned by each candidate you vote for, and your name and ballot choices also go to your county and state election officials. You receive a printed receipt listing your ballot selections that is yours to take home with you. When the polls close, there’s little doubt about who won the “ATM” election; every candidate would have a complete a list of all the voters who voted for him or her. You would even receive a statement from your county election office listing all your ballot choices as officially recorded. Since ATM-style security measures can’t be applied in real world elections, voting by computer is extraordinarily risky.
Q: There’s got to be some kind of process that election administrators use to double-check the accuracy of the voting machines after an election.

A: In contrast to banks that always audit all of their transactions, in the real world only a relative few states routinely audit any of their paper ballot records (if they still have any) to independently verify the accuracy of the machine tallies. Those few states that check their paper ballot records, only do so for a few percent of their precincts. If current “best practices” in American election administration were applied to the financial services industry – for example, if there were a bank that chose to independently audit only a few percent of its accounts, or simply trusted that its accounts were all accurate without any independent audit at all – its customers would flee in panic, regulators would shut it down, and its Board of Directors would face possible jail time.

Q: But you make it sound like there are no safeguards in place. Aren’t voting machines certified by independent inspectors and subject to strict testing to make sure they are accurate?

A: The computer industry as a whole does not do a good job when it comes to building security into software products. But both practically and theoretically, it is impossible through testing to determine that any computer system has no flaws – much less, to rule out the existence of secret back-door functions to be triggered on a future date. After all, all computers have clocks and can tell time, and there are a vast number of ways to program them to behave differently when being tested than when deployed in the field during an election.

Q: How does the way Las Vegas protects electronic gambling equipment compare to how we protect electronic voting equipment?

A: Nevada performs elaborate, stringent and intrusive ongoing independent random inspections of the hardware and software of the actual electronic gambling equipment in use at all casinos. In stark contrast, the details of our electronic vote tallying systems are considered by their manufacturers to be “trade secrets” and as such are legally shielded from independent inspection. No voting system has ever been examined and tested in any jurisdiction in America with anything approaching comparable rigor, and if these manufacturers continue to have their way, none ever will. Despite all the stringent measures Nevada takes, insiders at the gaming equipment vendors and at the casinos have successfully compromised computerized gambling machines. Even though successful manipulation of election equipment yields far greater financial returns, those who suggest that electronic election manipulation by insiders is possibly underway are dismissed as “conspiracy theorists.”

Q: But what if someone could inspect the voting machine software? Wouldn’t an inspection of this kind find problems or even deter people from manipulating election equipment?

A: The source code is just a document. Source code, which is readable by humans, becomes translated into a “binary” version that is no longer human readable – but can be run by a computer. So I cannot tell simply by reading the official source code what binary logic is actually installed and running on any particular voting device in the field. “Source code inspection” actually misleads the public, making it seem as if IT professionals have superhuman powers to “know” what is actually running in a particular device in the field during an election – when of course, we do not.

The answer, clearly, is Yes. Contrary to the ongoing, oddly myopic presumption of the reviewers, who once again like Nelson bring their telescopes up to their blind eye, the documentary is indeed suggesting there are thieves in the machine.

A fine summary of what is involved here came in Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s piece in Rolling Stone two years ago, “Was the 2004 Election Stolen? Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House. Jun 01, 2006 5:02 PM”. Kennedy appears several times in the film.

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush — and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush’s victory as nut cases in ”tinfoil hats,” while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ”conspiracy theories,”(1) and The New York Times declared that ”there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.”(2)

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots — or received them too late to vote(4) — after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment — roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush’s victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)

`The Kennedy article is notable for providing a reason why the Democrats might have been wary of pushing through reform:

To help prevent a repeat of 2004, Kerry has co-sponsored a package of election reforms called the Count Every Vote Act. The measure would increase turnout by allowing voters to register at the polls on Election Day, provide provisional ballots to voters who inadvertently show up at the wrong precinct, require electronic voting