Voting Machine Issues

Voting Machine Issues

November 2000 George W. Bush Election Hanging Chads in Palm Beach County- Dan Rather blamed Sequoia’s poor-quality punch cards “Vendors – Sequoia Voting Systems Responsible for 2000 Presidential Debacle?”Kim Zetter August 20, 2007  Votomatic machine failure blamed, Palm Beach County, FL spent $14.5m in 2001, Miami-Dade spent $24.5m, on touch-screen machines sold by Sequoia and ES&S that it removed by July 1, 2008

Voting Machines Giving Florida New Headache NY Times By ABBY GOODNOUGH After failures in the Votomatic machines in 2000, Florida turned to touch-screen voting in 2004, when a worker in Miami-Dade County showed some residents how to use the new system.

November 2004 4,438 of votes in the general election is lost byNorth Carolina’s electronic voting machines. The machines continued to count electronic votes past the device’s memory capacity and the votes were irretrievably lost. Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting

Dec 2005 Black Box Votingshowed how easy it is to hack an electronic voting system. Computer experts in Leon County, Fl lead a simulation where they changed the outcome of a mock election by tampering with the tabulator without leaving evidence of their actions.

Sep 13, 2006

It was demonstrated thatDiebold Electronic Voting Machine can be hacked in less than a minute. Princeton’s Professor of Computer Science, Edward Felten who installed a malware which could steal votes and replace them with fraudulent numbers without physically coming in contact with the voting machine or its memory card. The malware can also program a virus that can spread from machine to machine.

Sep 21, 2006

The governor of Maryland,Bob Ehrlich (R), advised against casting electronic votes as an alternative method for casting paper absentee ballots. This was a complete turn around since Maryland became one of the first states to accept electronic voting systems statewide during his term.

March 2008 Sequoia Voting Systems Admits To Hackers Attacking Their WebsiteeFlux By Dee Chisamera March 21, 2008Sequoia sent machines for Prof. Edward Felten & Andrew Appel of Prineton University to analyze but in March 2008, threatened to sue Felten in order to protect full code access. Soon after, Felten discovered that Sequoia’s corporate website was hacked.

Sep 2, 2009 Diebold, responsible for much of the technology in the election-systems business, sells their hold to Election Systems & Software, Inc for $5 Million, less than 1/5 of its price seven years earlier. [81]

 Voting Machine Company Mega Thread Part 1 – 203 sourced posts  on ProtectOurVotes.com

  • Election Systems & Software (“ES&S”) § Diebold Election Systems, § Help America Vote Act (“HAVA”) By Jennifer Cohn @JennyCohn1

Florida 33rd District State Legislature Representative Tom Feeney, West Palm Beach

September 2000 FL State Rep. Tom Feeney asked programmer Clint Curtis & Lee Yang at Yang Enterprises (ExxonMobil, NASA, FL DOT clients) to steal the election in West Palm Beach. Feeney testified before Rep. John Conyers in 2004. Feeney was Yang’s corporate attorney and a registered lobbyist for Yang at the time. He became Florida’s Speaker in November 2000.

The Council for National Policy (to which Kellyanne, Bannon, the DeVos family, the Mercers, Pence, Ken Blackwell, and two men whose families funded the largest voting machine vendor in the U.S.) has set a deadline of 2020 for restoring “religion and economic freedom and Judeo-Christian values” under the Constitution. Dec 27, 2017 By Jennifer S. Cohn Citations updated July 20, 2018December 27, 2017 Citations updated July 20, 2018.

Continued from the Jack Abramoff page

“55. With paperless machines, there is no way (absent a forensic audit) to know if the tallies have been rigged because there are no paper ballots that can be hand counted to compare to the electronic result.Want to Know if the Election was Hacked? Look at the Ballots J. Alex Halderman  November 23, 2016  [Article by IT expert Alex Halderman who testified to Congress about voting machine security]

THE SIMPLE FIX THAT’D HELP PROTECT GEORGIA FROM ELECTION HACKS  LILY HAY NEWMANJune 15, 2017 

“If there is uncertainty after an election, either because of the possibility of tampering or just the possibility of error or malfunction, a paperless system like Georgia’s doesn’t have any way to go back to other evidence to figure out what really happened,” says Ed Felten, one of the security researchers who showed that the voting machine model used in Georgia can be hacked, and who served as deputy US chief technology officer from 2015 until this year. “That evidence is key to being able to resolve any kind of uncertainty or dispute that might arise.”

56. Here is an article by Adam Cohen (former member of NYT Editorial Board, former senior writer for Time magazine and a current editor of the National Book Review) explaining that “It’s impossible to know for sure” if results from paperless voting machines “accurately reflect voters’ choices..” How to make voting easy, efficient, fair: ClevelandPlain Dealer guest columnist Adam Cohen Updated Jul 22, 2013; Posted Jul 20, 2013 https://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2013/07/how_to_make_voting_easy_effici.html

57. Back in 2004 — when Hillary was in the Senate and Ney was defeating paper audit trail bills — Hillary “told the press that without a voter-verified paper trail GOP-leaning corporations might program voting machines to help Republicans steal elections.” How They Could Steal the Election This Time Electronic counts, unaudited touch-screen ballots, enhance opportunities for fraud. The NationBy Ronnie Dugger  JULY 29, 2004   “In the US Senate seven Democrats and the one Independent are co-sponsoring a bill by Senators Bob Graham and Hillary Clinton to require paper trails on DREs by November, with a loophole for jurisdictions whose officials deem it to be technologically impossible. Clinton told the press that without a voter-verified paper trail GOP-leaning corporations might program voting machines to help Republicans steal elections [see sidebar, page 16]. In an interview in his hideaway office in the Capitol, Graham told me that he regards his and Clinton’s bill as so obviously needed that it’s “a no-brainer.” The absence of a paper trail on the DREs could endanger “the legitimacy” of November’s election, Graham said.”

58. To this day, five states exclusively use paperless voting machines and another nine use paperless machines in at least some of their counties. Why Worries About Paperless Voting Loom Larger This Year 4:53QUEUE.DOWNLOAD TRANSCRIPTOctober 18, 2016. Heard on  All Things Considered NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE  And the CNP has indeed benefited from a number of questionable election outcomes.

60. In January 2005, the CNP gave Tom Feeney (former Representative from Florida) the “Winston Churchill award.” [CNP Main page, closed to non-members]

  1. The month before the CNP gave Feeney this award, a fellow Republican and senior programmer with Yang Enterprises in Florida testified to the House Judiciary Committee (led by John Conyers) that Feeney asked him to design a vote flipping program for the 2000 election. MORE QUESTIONS FOR FLORIDA WIRED December 24, 2004 “Curtis said Feeney asked for code that could go undetected on a voting machine and be easily triggered without any devices by anyone using the machine. Curtis had never seen source code for a voting machine, but in five hours, he said he designed code in Visual Basic that would launch if someone touched specific spots on the voting screen after selecting a candidate.

Once the code was activated, it would search the machine to see if the selected candidate’s total was behind. If it was, the machine would award that candidate 51 percent of the total votes recorded on the machine and redistribute the remaining votes among the other candidates in the race.

Curtis said he initially believed Feeney wanted the code to see if such fraud were possible and to know how to detect it. The programmer told Feeney that such code could never be undetectable in source code, and he wrote a paper describing how to look for it. But when he gave the paper and code to his employer, Yang told him he was looking at it all wrong. They weren’t looking at how to find code, Curtis said she told him. They needed code that couldn’t be found.

“Her words were that it was needed to control the vote in West Palm Beach, Florida,” Curtis said. “Once she said, ‘We need to steal an election,’ that put me back. I made it clear that I could not produce code that could do that and no one else should.”

Curtis says he left the company in February 2001 because he found its ethics questionable. He doesn’t know if his code was ever used.”

  1. Curtis passed a polygraph test. Wikipedia[“On March 3, 2005, Curtis passed a polygraph test given by Tim Robinson, the retired chief polygraph operator and 20-year veteran of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.”]. IS THIS MAN CRAZY? To some, Clint Curtis is a hero. Orlando Weekly By Jeffrey C. BillmanAugust 10, 2006 [“In December 2004, Curtis testified before a panel of House Democrats investigating charges of vote tampering in Ohio. And in 2005, he took — and passed — a polygraph test to bolster his claims.”]
  2. Curtis later signed a sworn affidavit repeating in detail his claims against Feeney. http://www.bradblog.com/Docs/CC_Affidavit_120604.pdf[link to affidavit]
  3. A Global machine did inexplicably lose at least 16,000 Gore votes in Volusia County, Florida during the 2000 election.

THE 2000 CAMPAIGN: THE FLORIDA VOTE; Democrats Tell of Problems At the Polls Across Florida NY TimesBy DON VAN NATTA JR.November 10, 2000 https://nyti.ms/2hKVJjK [“Volusia County election results were delayed several hours by a computer disk error that subtracted 16,000 votes from Mr. Gore…Employees of a software company determined that the disk was damaged.”]

Diebold’s Political Machine Political insiders suggest Ohio could become as decisive this year as Florida was four years ago. Which is why the state’s plan to use paperless touch-screen voting machines has so many up in arms. Mother Jones.  BOB FITRAKIS AND HARVEY WASSERMANMARCH 5, 2004 [“The first signs that the Diebold-made system in Volusia County was malfunctioning came early on election night, when the central ballot-counting computer showed a Socialist Party candidate receiving more than 9,000 votes and Vice President Al Gore getting minus 19,000. Another 4,000 votes poured into the plus column for Bush that didn’t belong there. Taken together, the massive swing seemed to indicate that Bush, not Gore, had won Florida and thus the White House.”]

  1. Volusia County was within Feeney’s district. OurCampaigns.comhttp://www.ourcampaigns.com/CandidateDetail.html?CandidateID=3416
  2. Internal Global/Diebold memos obtained by Beverly Harris acknowledged and discussed the Volusia error but did not resolve how it happened. One memo said the “problem precinct had two memory cards uploaded” (there should have been just one), and said it was “possible the second memory card came from an unauthorized source.” (Emphasis added.) “Harris has posted a series of internal Diebold memos relating to the Volusia County miscount on her website, blackboxvoting.com. One memo from Lana Hires of Global Election Systems, now part of Diebold, complains, “I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16,022 [votes] when it was uploaded.” Another, from Talbot Ireland, Senior VP of Research and Development for Diebold, refers to key “replacement” votes in Volusia County as “unauthorized.”” Mother Joneshttp://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/03/diebolds-political-machine/

63 Documents The Government Doesn’t Want You To Read by Jesse Ventura and Dick Russell Skyhorse Publishing 2011   Link to Global/Diebold memos re: the Volusia error, p. 180]. Pg 180 “We all know how the Supreme Court awarded the disputed 2000 election to George W. Bush. What’s often forgotten is how, on election night, a computer “error” made it look like Al Gore had lost Florida-and prompted the media to announce prematurely that Bush was the winner…All of a sudden that night, 16,022 votes for Gore got subtracted from his total in Volusia County. It wasn’t until 2003, when a bunch of internal Global Election Systems memos got leaked, that it became clear company officials knew all about this at the time.” Pg 182: “John, Here is all the information I have about the ‘negative’ counts. Only the presidential totals were incorrect. All the other races the sum of the votes + under votes + blank votes = sum of ballots cast.

The problem precinct had two memory cards uploaded. The second ones the one I believe caused the problem. They were uploaded on the same port approx. 1 hour apart. As far as I know there should only have been one memory card uploaded. I asked you to check this out when the problem first occurred but have not heard back as to whether this is true….4. There is always the possibility that the ‘second memory card’ or ‘second upload’ came from an un-authorized source.…Tab”   Tab is Iredale GES tech.

  1. The Volusia error was discovered “only because an alert poll monitor noticed Gore’s vote count going down through the evening, which of course is impossible.” Diebold’s Political Machine  Mother Jones
  2. You may recall that “The Florida vote was ultimately settled in Bush’s favor by a margin of 537 voteswhen the U.S. Supreme Court, in Bush v. Gore, stopped a recount that had been initiated upon a ruling by the Florida Supreme Court. That in turn gave Bush a majority of votes in the Electoral Collegeand victory in the presidential election.” Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidential_election_recount_in_Florida
  3. The 2004 election had as many (or more) irregularities.

70. At the time, Ohio’s Secretary of State was Ken Blackwell, who also co-chaired Bush’s re-election campaign in Ohio. No conspiracy theorist, and no fan of John Kerry’s, the author nevertheless found the Ohio polling results impossible to swallow: Given what happened in that key state on Election Day 2004, both democracy and common sense cry out for a court-ordered inspection of its new voting machines. OHIO’S ODD NUMBERS VANITY FAIR  BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS OCTOBER 17, 2006. [In 2004, Blackwell was both Ohio Secretary of State and a co-chair of Bush’s reelection campaign]

71. Blackwell is currently a member of Trump’s voter suppression commission.  Trump’s commission on ‘election integrity’ could instead restrict voting Washington Post  By Michael WaldmanMay 12, 2017

  1. The 2014 CNP directory lists Blackwell as a member. Like KellyAnne, his interests include “campaign election technology.”
  2. As Secretary of State, Blackwell fought for paperless (unverifiable) voting machines Mother Jones Diebold’s Political Machine Political insiders suggest Ohio could become as decisive this year as Florida was four years ago. Which is why the state’s plan to use paperless touch-screen voting machines has so many up in arms. BOB FITRAKIS AND HARVEY WASSERMAN MARCH 5, 2004  http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/03/diebolds-political-machine/

“Lawmakers in Congress and the Ohio legislature are scrambling to do just that. In Ohio, State Sen. Teresa Fedor of Toledo has proposed a bill requiring a “voter verified paper audit trail” for all elections in the state. Congressman Rush Holt of New Jersey is pushing a similar measure in Washington. But the efforts are being fought by Republicans in both places. In Ohio, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell has already signed $100 million in agreements to purchase voting machines. The bulk of the purchases would go to Diebold and ES&S, and Blackwell insists there is no need for paper receipts. Considering the political opposition and the companies’ wait-and-see approach, it’s almost certain that voters using touch-screen machines in November will walk away from their polling places without ever seeing a printed record of their choices.”

  1. In the 2004 election, Blackwell tried to block exit polls, but lost in court.  News Media Access to Polls in Ohio ABC v. Blackwell (Michael H. Watson, S.D. Ohio 1:04-cv-750) and Beacon Journal Publishing Co. v. Blackwell (Paul R. Matia, N.D. Ohio 5:04-cv-2178) …

“On the morning before the 2004 general election, news media sought federal court orders granting them access to polls in Ohio. Separate lawsuits were filed in the Southern District of Ohio and the Northern District of Ohio. The Southern District action challenged a directive by Ohio’s secretary of state that exit polling not be conducted within 100 feet of a polling place. Late at night on the day the case was filed, the judge granted the media injunctive relief against the directive. In the Northern District, news media sought access to the polls for reporters and photographers. The second district court denied the media relief, but the court of appeals vacated that decision and granted the media injunctive relief a few hours before the polls closed.

In the Southern District’s Cincinnati courthouse, a complaint and a motion for a temporary restraining order challenged the constitutionality of an oral directive by Ohio’s secretary of state that exit polling not be conducted within 100 feet of a polling place.1

The court assigned the case to Judge Michael H. Watson,2 who had joined the bench in September.3 His primary chambers were in Columbus, but most of his cases were Cincinnati cases during his first few years on the bench.4 Judge Watson held an informal status conference at 11:00 a.m. on the day of filing.5 The motion was heard that evening at 6:40 p.m.6 Late at night following the hearing, Judge Watson granted the temporary restraining order, and the news media were able to conduct exit polls the next day within 100 feet of polling places.7 Judge Watson reaffirmed this ruling by summary judgment on September 26, 2006.8 Both sides appealed elements of Judge Watson’s opinion, but the appeals were voluntarily dismissed in 2007.9”

75.Blackwell also hired Karl Rove’s IT guru, Mike Connell, to design a “backup server” that re-routed Ohio’s election results through a hosting company in Tennessee called “Smartech,” which also hosted a range of sites for the RNC. Computer expert denies knowledge of ’04 vote rigging in Ohio GREG GORDON – MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERSNOVEMBER 03, 2008  NOVEMBER 04, 2008. “Records show that Blackwell hired Connell’s Govtech Solutions, LLC, of Richfield, Ohio, as an Internet consultant. SMARTech Corp. of Chattanooga, Tenn., was retained to provide a backup server, which was needed because the secretary of state’s Web site got more than 40 million election-night visits, said a spokesman for Ohio’s current Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat.

During the same year, Bush’s campaign paid New Media Communications, which was owned by Connell, more than $806,000 to for Web services, according to Federal Election Commission records. Connell’s firm also has served as a consultant to John McCain’s 2008 Republican presidential campaign.”

  1. “Smartech was paid more than $72,000 by Bush’s 2004 campaign and has hosted hundreds of Republican Web and e-mail sites…”Computer expert denies knowledge of ’04 vote rigging in Ohio GREG GORDON – MCCLATCHY
  2. “Connell was the Bush campaign’s chief IT strategist.” How to Rig an Election Harper’s Magazine
  3. Connell was also a zealous anti-abortion activist. Harper’s Magazine
  4. The backup server was supposed to “kick in … if the official Ohio servers were overwhelmed by Election Day traffic.” Harper’s MagazineThe G.O.P. aims to paint the country red By Victoria CollierNovember 2012.

“In 2004, Connell was hired by Blackwell to design a website that would post Ohio election results to the public. Connell’s contract also required that he create a “mirror site” that would kick in to display the vote totals if the official Ohio servers were overwhelmed by Election Day traffic. For the latter portion of the job, he turned to SmarTech, a little-known company headquartered in Chattanooga, Tennessee. SmarTech was as partisan as Connell himself, and the company’s servers hosted hundreds of high-profile Republican websites (and, later on, an assortment of anti-Obama websites).”

  1. “The SmarTech site [in Tennessee] went into action at 11:14 p.m. on Election Day.” Harper’s Magazine
  2. The transfer of Ohio’s vote count to the backup server remains a mystery because there’s no evidence Ohio’s system failed.  “In the Connell deposition, plaintiffs’ attorneys questioned Connell regarding gwb43, a website that was live on election night operating out of the White House and tied directly into SmarTech’s server stacks in Chattanooga, Tennessee which contained Ohio’s 2004 presidential election results. Court Filing Reveals How 2004 Ohio Presidential Election was Hacked: “Unexpected Shift in Votes For George W.” ByBob FitrakisGlobal Research, July 26, 2011 A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio’s 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush. 

The transfer of the vote count to SmarTech in Chattanooga, Tennessee remains a mystery. This would have only happened if there was a complete failure of the Ohio computer election system. Connell swore under oath that, “To the best of my knowledge, it was not a fail-over case scenario – or it was not a failover situation.”

  1. In 2008, attorney Cliff Arnebeck (formerly a Republican) filed a civil racketeering case against Karl Rove, which included allegations that the 2004 election was rigged. “Four years later, Ohio attorney (and former Republican) Cliff Arnebeck began gathering evidence to file a racketeering claim against Karl Rove, which included the charge that Rove had masterminded the theft of the 2004 election. “We detected a pattern of criminal activity,” Arnebeck told the British journalist Simon Worrall. “We identified Connell as a key witness, as the implementer for Rove.” On November 3, 2008, he took a sworn deposition from Connell, who had repeatedly tried to quash Arnebeck’s subpoena.” Harper’s Magazine
  2. On November 3, 2008, “Connell swore under oath [in deposition] that, ‘To the best of my knowledge, it was not a fail-over case scenario…”. Court Filing Reveals How 2004 Ohio Presidential Election was Hacked: “Unexpected Shift in Votes For George W
  3. “Bob Magnan, a state IT specialist for the Ohio Secretary of State during the 2004 election, agreed that there was no failover scenario. Magnan said he was unexpectedly sent home at 9 p.m. on election night and private contractors ran the system for Blackwell.” . Court Filing Reveals How 2004 Ohio Presidential Election was Hacked: “Unexpected Shift in Votes For George W
  4. “Late on Election Day, John Kerry showed an insurmountable lead in exit polling, and many considered his victory all but certified. Yet the final vote tallies in thirty states deviated widely from exit polls, with discrepancies favoring George W. Bush in all but nine.”Harper’s Magazine
  5. “The greatest disparities [in 04] were concentrated in battleground states — particularly Ohio.”Harper’s Magazine
  6. “In one Ohio precinct,” exit polls gave Kerry “67 % of the vote, but the certified tally gave him only 38%.”Harper’s Magazine
  7. Although Connell testified in a deposition on November 3, 2008, he died in a plane crash on December 9, 2008, before he could testify at trial.Harper’s Magazine “Arnebeck hoped to have Connell testify in open court against Rove. But the prospective witness died on December 19, 2008, at age forty-seven, when his single-engine Piper Saratoga, which he was piloting alone, crashed en route from Washington, D.C., to Ohio. The circumstances of his death were viewed with suspicion by his family and close friends and sparked a firestorm of conspiracy chatter on the Internet, but no criminal investigation was launched. Whether Rove and his collaborators orchestrated the electronic theft of the 2004 election will likely never be known. Still, Election Day exit polls make a compelling case that somebody may have been tampering with the presidential vote count, in Ohio and elsewhere.”

 Republican IT Guru Dies In Plane Crash CBS News

  1. “Arnebeck believes the data being routed to Tennessee was used by G.O.P. partisans to target Ohio counties that were ripe for vote tampering. ‘The SmarTech people may have been guiding the manipulation of paper ballots in places like Warren County,’ Arnebeck told me.”Harper’s Magazine
  2. According to “Stephen Spoonamore, an IT specialist (and Republican) who has consulted on cybersecurity for Boeing, MasterCard, the Navy, and the State Department,” SmartTech “might have been able to use Connell’s interface to gain access to and modify vote totals.”Harper’s Magazine
  3. Here is a link to Jon Conyers’ House Judiciary Committee Report re: 2004 voting irregularities.  Preserving Democracy:

What Went Wrong in Ohio Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff January 5, 2005 

  1. Here is a link to the transcript of a Congressional hearing about the 2004 recount in Ohio.
  2. Directors of the Election Boards in two Counties stated that Triad (an affiliate of the butterfly ballot company in 2000) had remote access to computers used in the 2004 recount; Triad reportedly also handed out recount “cheat sheets.”

https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-2005-01-06/html/CREC-2005-01-06-pt1-PgH84-6.htm Congressional hearing about the 2004 recount “It is noteworthy that the companies implicated in the misconduct outlined above, Triad and its affiliates, are the leading suppliers of voting machines involved in the counting of paper ballots and punch cards in the critical states of Ohio and Florida. Triad is controlled by the Rapp family, and its founder Brett A. Rapp has been a consistent contributor to Republican causes. In addition, a Triad affiliate, Psephos Corporation, supplied the notorious butterfly ballot used in Palm Beach County, Florida, in the 2000 presidential election. The Directors of the Board of Elections in both Fulton and Henry County stated that the Triad company had reprogrammed the computer by remote dial-up to count only the presidential votes prior to the start of the recount. The voting computer company Triad has essentially admitted that it engaged in a course of behavior during the recount in numerous counties to provide “cheat sheets” to those counting the ballots. The cheat sheets informed election officials how many votes they should find for each candidate, and how many over and under votes they should calculate to match the machine count. In that way, they could avoid doing a full county-wide hand recount mandated by state law.”

  1. After the election, it was discovered that, in late Aug. 04, the DHS had quietly released this Cyber Alert regarding the Diebold GEMS system, which felon Dean had programmed. http://www.bradblog.com/?p=2724. Howard Dean on Electronic Voting Machines, Diebold and Otherwise…

By BRAD FRIEDMANon 4/22/2006

  1. Fortunately, Jennifer Brunner (a Democrat), replaced Blackwell in 2007, and she worked hard to improve Ohio’s election system for 2008.  Brunner promises cleaner presidential election in Ohio this fall When U.S. voters go to the polls in November to elect the next president, media pundits and advocacy groups again will be keeping a close eye on Ohio.  City Beat KEVIN OSBORNEJULy 27, 2008 https://www.citybeat.com/news/article/13019136/brunner-promises-cleaner-presidential-election-in-ohio-this-fall.   “As almost anyone with a pulse knows, President Bush won reelection in 2004 thanks to Ohio’s 20 electoral votes. And he won the Buckeye State by a meager 2.1 percent margin over John Kerry in what many critics allege was a deeply flawed election process.

The election four years ago was marred by various problems throughout Ohio, including dubious purges of voter rolls, areas that didn’t receive enough voting machines, long lines at the polls and lingering questions about whether every ballot cast was in fact counted.

Some believe the process was intentionally manipulated by then-Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell — a Cincinnati native — to help his Republican brethren, while others say the problems were simply the result of incompetence. Regardless, Americans were saddled with yet another presidential election that left a bad taste in their mouths.

Jennifer Brunner, the Democrat who was elected in 2006 to replace Blackwell as Secretary of State, is determined that this presidential election will be different.

Last winter Brunner overhauled security procedures for the touch screen e-voting machines known as Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) systems — used in many Ohio counties — after bipartisan testing revealed they could be easily manipulated by outside factors and had “critical security failures” that could compromise the integrity of elections.”

  1. Brunner even sued Diebold/Premier alleging the company’s touch-screen voting machines “didn’t work properly” and that “votes in at least 11 counties were ‘dropped’ in prior elections when memory cards were uploaded to computer servers.” The case was settled in 2010, with the company agreeing to pay $470,000 plus up to $2.4 million in free software licensing. The company also agreed to provide up to 2,909 new machines statewide, plus a 50% discount in maintenance fees, plus a 50% discount for “precinct-based optical scanner voting machines.” State, maker of voting machines settle case Columbus Dispatch August 12, 2010

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2010/08/12/state-maker-of-voting-machines-settle-case.html

  1. But American had not seen the last of its election irregularities.

[Jim DeMint 2010 US Senator from South Carolina, inexplicable Democratic primary on ES&S machines elected a homeless sex offender with not one sign, over a Retired Judge. CNP, Reliegious Right, Tea Party Hero, Constitutional Convention].

Continue to Jim DeMint page

Jim DeMint Is Resigning: Here Are His 7 Craziest Moments Mother JonesDANA LIEBELSONDECEMBER 6, 2012  http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/senate-loses-jim-demint-and-his-crazy/#

 

Continued From Scott Walker Page

  1. Governor Scott Walker’s recall election in 2012 was also anomalous. Whereas exit polls had Walker within .1% of his Democratic rival, Walker officially won by 6%. How Scott Walker and Company Used Fraud to Win the Recall ElectionJune 10, 2012 https://johnhively.wordpress.com/2012/06/10/how-scott-walker-and-company-used-fraud-to-win-the-recall-election/
  2. Scott Walker is not in the CNP directory. But he won the “Paul Weyrich award” in the run-up to his 2012 election.
  3. And let’s not forget Trump’s own astonishing defeat of Hillary Clinton, which landed Kellyanne, Bannon, and DeVos high profile positions in the administration. The “red shifts” between the exit polls and the official results in the 2016 general election are striking — especially in Ohio (7.9%), Pennsylvania (5.1%), and Wisconsin (4.7%). (“Red shift”= shift to right between exit poll & official result.) http://tdmsresearch.com/2016/11/10/2016-presidential-election-table/ 
  4. Each of these poll-defying Republican victories has furthered the goals of the CNP.
  5. If you still think those goals are unrealistic, think again.
  6. The CNP is virulently anti-LGBT, & 150 members signed a letter early this year urging Trump to sign an anti-LGBTQ executive order. Conservatives Call on Trump to Protect Religious Liberty By Todd Starnes March 1, 2017 https://www.toddstarnes.com/uncategorized/conservatives-call-on-trump-to-protect-religious-liberty/

Secretive Council for National Policy Pushing Trump to Sign ‘Religious Liberty’ Order AlternetMarch 3, 2017 https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/secretive-council-national-policy-pushing-trump-sign-religious-liberty-order

  1. Several months later, the Trump administration argued that federal law doesn’t protect gay employees. Trump Administration Argues Federal Civil Rights Law Does Not Protect Gay EmployeesSlate July 26, 2017 On Wednesday, the Department of Justice filed an amicus brief in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals arguing that…www.slate.com
  2. And in July 2017, Trump tweeted that transgender people are no longer welcome in the military.”/ End Jennifer Cohn Thread

Continue Thread on CNP Goals & the Trump Administration