Quotes Archive: Election Fraud and Election Reform
"As to the Board as a whole, all of our major votes were unanimous. .... One can only assume, based on the tone of the editorial, the numerous inaccuracies, and the over-the-top slam at Al Franken ('tainted and undeserving'?) that had Norm Coleman come out on top in this recount, the members of the Board would have been praised as 'strong-willed, intelligent, and perceptive.'
Judge Edward J. Cleary, who served on the Minnesota State Canvassing Board, rebutting the smears by the Wall Street Journal editorial board.
"Those 12,000 actually are my big interest in the next legislative session, because I think those 12,000 valid Minnesota voters face a system too complicated that disenfranchised them."
MN Sec. of State Mark Ritchie, speaking about 12,000 absentee ballots that were rejected, mostly due to voter error with complex rules, or delays in overseas mail, and of course 1352 mistakenly rejected by election workers.
"Given the 'shoot first, ask questions never ethos,' I expect their vetting will be less than thorough and 'better' only from a partisan perspective."
Journalist David Brauer, who actually investigated the Mountain Iron tally story, responding to a commenter who suggested Powerline as a better place to get information on election procedures.
"Since the 'Star Trek' teleporter has not yet been invented, these ballots are driven to the polling places."
Journalist David Brauer, who actually investigated the ballots in the car story, explaining that election workers use their cars to carry absentee ballots to the voter's precinct on election day, debunking the lie pushed by the Republicans to undermine the recount.
"Since these changes are part of the canvassing process, since it says unofficial counts, since every recount always occurs likes this, we assume that campaign professionals know this. And the decision to use words designed to create a cloud over the election is a political strategy. It's a well-known political strategy. It's unfortunate."
MN Sec. of State Mark Ritchie, calling out Norm Coleman on his attempt to claim fraud because the vote count changes slightly during the final stages of the first count, which it does in all elections. Which even us non-professionals knew and I'm sure the state Republicans knew it too.
"The timing of the challenges is so transparent, it defies common sense to believe the purpose is anything but political chicanery."
U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy, regarding allegations the Montana GOP was challenging voters in Democratic counties as a means of voter suppression.
"I'm astounded that this issue is being trotted out again. Based on what I saw in 2004 and 2006, it's a scare tactic."
Former US Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias, who was fired for refusing to bring trumped-up voter fraud charges, referring to the decision of the FBI to not only launch a national investigation of ACORN, but to immediately leak it.
"The statistics bear me out. From 2002 to 2005 only one person was found guilty of registration fraud. Twenty people were found guilty of voting while ineligible and five people were found guilty of voting more than once. That's 26 criminal voters -- voters who vote twice, impersonate other people, vote without being a resident -- the voters that Republicans warn about. Meanwhile thousands of people are getting turned away at the polls."
Political Science Professor Lori Minnite, who has been studying voter fraud for eight years, while the Bush administration has focused heavily on catching and prosecuting any allegation of voter fraud they can find and still can't find it.
"Well, if you don't know what it stands for, you shouldn't be talking about it."
Rep. Maxine Water (D-CA), replying to Real Time co-panelist Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal editorial page (Fox News for people who can spell), who was attacking ACORN and then had to ask what the acronym stood for.
"There's no issue for snowbirds who live in Iowa but fly to Florida for the winter."
Sujatha Jahagirdar, program director of the Student Public Interest Research Group's New Voters Project, on how some (conservative-run) states try to intimidate students out of registering and voting by lying about the consequences. If you're a student trying to decide how to vote, remember that Republicans target you for voter suppression campaigns.
"If the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court was really concerned about fairness, it could have simply asked the Florida Supreme Court to devise a universal standard, appoint a judge to enforce it, and then extend the state's meaningless 'safe harbor' deadline to make it possible to complete the recount. It did not do so because it was not interested in counting the votes. It wanted George W. Bush to win."
Gary Kamiya, Salon writer at large, in a review of the HBO's "Recount", on how the Supreme Court stole the election for Bush.
"The Indiana Voter ID Law is thus unconstitutional: the state interests fail to justify the practical limitations placed on the right to vote, and the law imposes an unreasonable and irrelevant burden on voters who are poor and old."
US Supreme Court Justice David Souter, in his dissent to Crawford v. Marion which upheld Indiana's voter ID law.
"In fact, the first serious critics of the machines --- beginning 10 years ago --- were computer scientists. One might expect computer scientists to be fans of computer-based vote-counting devices, but it turns out that the more you know about computers, the more likely you are to be terrified that they're running elections."
Clive Thompson, writing about the problems caused by touchscreen voting machines.
"Oh yeah, we suspect it happens all the time."
Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita, a Republican and defendant in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, when asked whether there were any proven cases of voter fraud. He couldn't get more specific because the answer is there are no proven cases at all.
"After 10 full years inside the GOP, 90 days among honest criminals wasn't really any great ordeal."
GOP operative Allen Raymond, who ran the phone jamming scheme on New Hampshire Democrats in 2002 (as well as admitting to others), and went to prison for it while his bosses in the party and White House pretend they never knew.
"The same situation occurred in Clermont County [Ohio]. We have sworn affidavits from people who saw white stickers placed over the Kerry-Edward ovals in this optical scan county. So the missing unused ballots would suggest they were used to remake ballots to reflect the desired vote for Bush."
Cliff Arnebeck, representing a neighborhood association which brought a voter suppression suit, on the sorts of fraud that might be revealed if most of Ohio's 2004 ballots hadn't been destroyed in direct violation of court order.
"Their job was to confuse the public about voter fraud and offer bogus solutions to the problem. And like the Tobacco Institute, they relied on deception and faulty research to advance the interests of their clients."
Michael Slater, the deputy director of Project Vote, on the attempt to suppress minority voters by faking a problem with voter fraud.
"This is all made up of whole cloth. I didn't cage votes."
Former USA and caught cager Tim Griffin, hoping no one actually looks at his many e-mails and attached spreadsheets which wound up in the hands of Greg Palast, who isn't buying the denial.
"With no notice and little comment, ACVR—the only prominent nongovernmental organization claiming that voter fraud is a major problem, a problem warranting strict rules such as voter-ID laws—simply stopped appearing at government panels and conferences. Its Web domain name has suddenly expired, its reports are all gone (except where they have been preserved by its opponents), and its general counsel, Mark "Thor" Hearne, has cleansed his résumé of affiliation with the group. Hearne won't speak to the press about ACVR's demise. No other group has taken up the "voter fraud" mantra."
Richard L. Hasen, Loyola Law School professor, in an expose of the campaign to trick Americans into thinking voter fraud was a real problem.
"Schlozman didn't know anything about voting law. . . . All he knew is he wanted to be sure that the Republicans were going to win."
Joe Rich, career DOJ employee, and head of the voting rights section of the civil rights division until 2005, on how Bradley Schlozman made Republican loyalty the criteria for hiring career staff, and the effect on Republicans was the criteria for deciding when ID an redistricting was legal.
"Voter fraud continues to plague our nation's federal elections, diluting and canceling out the lawful votes of the vast majority of Americans."
First sentence of a Republican Policy Committee report on voter fraud which is based on pure suspicion, and has since been shown completely false.
"I might not have a home, but that doesn't mean I don't care about right and wrong. No one has the right to use me that way."
Yusuf El-Bedawi, a homeless man from Philadelphia who was tricked into handing out fraudulent sample ballots for the Maryland Republicans.
"They have said that Democrats have taken black votes for granted, but that flier tried to take black people for fools."
Michael Fauntroy, assistant professor of public policy at George Mason University, on the GOP trick of handing out voter guides to blacks which identify Republicans as Democrats and make up endorsements of Republicans by prominent Democrats. Do Republicans still not get why they can't win the black vote?
"It's already over. The election's over. We won. It's all over but the counting. And we'll take care of the counting."
Rep. Peter King, R-NY, in response to a question on how he knew the Republicans would win in 2004. Here's the video.
"[Diebold's] system is utterly unsecured. The entire cyber-security community is begging them to come back to reality and secure our nation's voting."
Cyber-security expert Stephen Spoonamore, commenting on the security holes in Diebold touchscreen machines.
"[Rebecca] Vigil-Giron [New Mexico Secretary of State and a Republican], after putting a stop to the [2004] recount, rather than schlep out to investigate the missing vote among the iguanas and Navajos, left the state to officiate at a dinner meeting in Minneapolis for her national association. It was held on a dinner boat. The tab for the moonlight ride was picked up by touch-screen voting machine maker ES&S Corporation. Breakfast, in case you're curious, was served by touchscreen maker Diebold Corp."
Greg Palast, writing about the New Mexico election fraud, and how mysteriously the spoiled ballots were almost all in non-white precincts, and would have likely been overwhelmingly for Kerry by enough to easily overturn Bush's "win".
"I would have just one piece of advice for churches that are going to engage in this kind of illegal activity: don't tape it and videotape it and broadcast it over the Internet."
Melanie Sloan of CREW on the endorsement by a church of Republican 6th congressional district of Minnesota candidate Michelle Bachmann. The quote is about 1:24 into the October 17 Al Franken Show podcast.
"You can't break it - I've tried. There's something funky in the results from the electronic-machine Democratic counties."
Charles Stewart III, MIT professor specializing in voter behavior and methodology, on the results of a study indicating that touchscreen machines were used to inflate Bush's vote total in Florida in 2004. Yes, 2004, not 2000.
"It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state. We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from Urosevich. It was very unusual that a president of the company would give an order like that and be involved at that level."
Chris Hood, a contractor for Diebold in the 2002 Georgia election, who revealed the suspicious activity consistent with an intention to use touchscreens to steal the election.
"Every board of election has staff members with the technological ability to fix an election. Even one corrupt staffer can throw an election. Without paper records, it could happen under my nose and there is no way I'd ever find out about it. With a few key people in the right places, it would be possible to throw a presidential election."
Ion Sancho, election supervisor in Leon County, FL, on the security problems of voting without a paper trail for audits.
"What we found is that these voting machines are susceptible to computer viruses that can steal votes from one candidate and give them to another. So the bottom line is that a malicious person who can get access to one of the voting machines for as little as one minute can potentially steal a large number of votes in a real election."
Princeton professor Edward Felten, co-author of a study on the vulnerabilities of touchscreen voting machines, on what I suspect has been the most common method of election theft in recent years, and a prime reason why I believe Bush stole the 2004 election.
"We're the oldest and proudest democracy in the world, and we have our citizens writing votes out in pencil on the back of flyers."
Rachel Maddow on the primary in Maryland where the touchscreen machines worked even a bit worse than usual, so voters were scrounging for paper to use for ballots. This comment is about 44 minutes into the podcast.
"The ballots are the smoking gun to explain what happened in Ohio in 2004. They were not made public until earlier this year, and after September 2, 2006, election officials across Ohio are legally allowed to destroy them. We have been told by election officials in the most problem-plagued counties they can't wait until Sept. 3rd, because then people asking questions will go home."
Save the Ballots on the coverup that's about to occur in Ohio where the 2004 ballots will be destroyed in order to destroy the evidence of the election fraud that has Bush falsely in the White House.
"You've got electronic voting machines. Many people called in and shared their concern. They pushed the button for Cynthia McKinney and Hank Johnson came up. It wasn't one time, it wasn't two times, it was many, many times."
Karen Fitzpatrick, poll watcher for the Cynthia McKinney campaign, indicating Georgia's touchscreen machines are as unreliable as ever. There is no paper trail for auditing election results.
"Right now in Mexico's capitol, nearly a million ballots sit in tied bundles uncounted. That's four times the 'official' margin of victory of the ruling party over Lopez Obrador. Supposedly, they're 'votos nulos' --- null votes, unreadable. But, not surprisingly, when a few packets were opened, the majority of these supposedly unreadable votes were Lopez Obrador's.
If you think that's a Mexican game, think again. Because that's exactly what happened in Florida and Ohio."
BBC reporter Greg Palast, observing the radically different reactions to their elections being stolen between Obrador and US Democrats.
"To trust the official tally, in other words, you must believe that thousands of rural Ohioans voted for both President Bush and gay marriage."
Robert Kennedy Jr. on the indications of massive election fraud in Ohio in 2004.
''When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that supports the supposition of election fraud. The discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in states where there were the most Election Day complaints. All these are strong indicators of fraud -- and yet this supposition has been utterly ignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party.''
Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, on the oddity that differences between election results and exit polls occurred only in certain places, not nationwide.
"Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen. You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb."
Pollster Lou Harris on the bizarre way almost every discrepancy in the 2004 election benefitted Bush and indicates Ohio was stolen. Its electoral votes would have put Kerry over the top.
"It's the most serious security breach that's ever been discovered in a voting system. On this one, the probability of success is extremely high because there's no residue. ... Any kind of cursory inspection of the machine would not reveal it."
Michael Shamos, computer science professor, on the new security hole discovered in Diebold touchscreen voting machines. It means hacking is not only quick, but undetectable after.
"It was not our goal to stop rides to the polls. Our goal was to disrupt communications."
Charles McGee, former executive director of the New Hampshire GOP, giving his best excuse for his felonious (literally --- he was convicted) behavior in the 2002 denial of service attacks.
"Anyone who questions the reliability of the election is assumed to be a sour-grapes bad sport who has fallen into the thrall of aluminum-foil helmeted conspiracy theorists. And the media, ever tremulous about affirming their critics' allegations of liberal bias, would sooner remove a hot radiator cap than make a mission of investigating the anomalies.
But the anomalies were real. Many have been documented. They kept thousands in swing states from voting, and prevented thousands of ballots from being counted.
Not [co]incidentally, most of the 2004 anomalies benefited one party.
Robert Steinback on the consequences of election fraud going uninvestigated and unpunished.
"It would be very, very hard to prove. Every computer scientist I talk to reports a queasy feeling when voting on these machines."
Dr. David L. Dill, professor of computer science and founder of Verified Voting, regarding the possible purchase of Diebold touchscreens by Allegheny County, PA, (Pittsburgh).
"I am positive an eighth grader could do this.''
Herbert Thompson, computer security expert, who showed has easily Diebold voting machines could be hacked to change results.
"Our current political leaders would suffer greatly if either house of Congress changed hands in 2006, or if the presidency changed hands in 2008. The lids would come off all the simmering scandals, from the selling of the Iraq war to profiteering by politically connected companies. The Republicans will be strongly tempted to make sure that they win those elections by any means necessary. And everything we've seen suggests that they will give in to that temptation."
Paul Krugman writing about the pattern of election fraud in the last three elections.
"Replacing all paperless DREs with accessible optical scan machines will cost about $20.5 million, well within the federal funds that are allocated. Replacing all paperless DREs with paper-fitted DREs will cost about $63.5 million."
Justin Moore, a computer scientist who advised the North Carolina legislature's Joint Select Committee on Verified Voting, describing how switching to optical scanners is far cheaper than fitting printers to touchscreens.
"It doesn't really make any sense to put more money into these machines that nobody trusts.''
Miami-Dade County Commissioner Katy Sorenson on the proposal to replace the county's touchscreen machines with optical scanners.
"We know that margins for error are valid, and that results have fallen within the error range for every Presidential election for the past fifty years prior to last fall. NEVER have exit polls varied by beyond-error margins in a single state, not since 1948 when this kind of polling began. In this past election it happened in ten states, all of them swing states, all of them in Bush's favor. Coincidence? Of course not."
Jim Lampley writing about the bizarre inaccuracies necessary for Bush to have legitimately won the election.
"So I asked, 'What if all the anomalies and malfunctions, to give them a neutral name, were distributed along one axis of consistency: in other words, that they kept on disadvantaging only one candidate?' My question was hypothetical, as she had made no particular study of Ohio, but she replied at once: 'Then that would be quite serious.'"
Journalist Christopher Hitchens writing about the striking peculiarities of the Ohio presidential election, namely that every problem favored Bush.
"There is also the curious case of Lea County who had the strongest Bush vote in the state at 79% against just 20% for Kerry. And yet Lea using the worst of the DRE under-vote machines on election day returned a missing vote percentage of just 0.93%, similar to op-scan counties. It's odd to say the least. Either that result is telling us that the e-voting machines in Lea are somehow all good whereas the ones in the rest of the state are really shoddy or it's telling us that something about the high percentage of Bush votes didn't trigger blank and miscast ballots."
Robert Glenn Plotner in "A Guide to Irregularities in the 2004 New Mexico General Election"
"You're looking at it from the point of view of the winner or the loser - shouldn't we be looking at it from the point of view of the voter?"
Justice Susan Owens of the Washington Supreme Court about Republican claims that counting wrongly disqualified ballots would cause irreparable harm. She could be speaking about election messes all over the country.
"A lot of people left in the four hours I waited. A lot of them were young black men who were saying over and over: 'We knew this would happen.' How is that good for democracy?"
Tanya Thivener, who voted in a Franklin County (Columbus, Ohio) precinct that's majority black and Democratic.
"She said, 'Jack, your vote doesn't count.' I'm very upset, very distressed.''
Jack Oxford, a voter in King County, Washington, one of 723 absentee voters whose ballot was disallowed in the recount due to election worker error while the voters did everything right.
"All of these 'glitches' and 'irregularities' nationwide and not one improperly credited vote to Mr. Kerry? What are the chances of that being random?"
David Lytel, who served in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under Clinton, noting the pattern of election irregularities.
"I am deeply convinced that we have no moral right to push a big European state to any kind of massive disorder."
Russian president Vladimir Putin who endorsed the "winner" of the stolen election in Ukraine, apparently blaming those who denounce the fraud instead of those who carried it out. He endorsed Bush too.
"...Knox County has two colleges. The one that has been profiled is Democrat, had long lines, that has already been testified to. The other one, Mt. Vernon Nazarene University, that has been profiled as a Republican. That one did not have any problems as to waiting lines, and then they were not intimidated by the representative from Blackwell's office."
Mike Swinford, Knox County, Ohio, testifying at a hearing on election problems in Ohio.
"When one controls for these factors, the association between electronic voting and increased support for President Bush is impossible to overlook. The data show with 99.0% certainty that a county's use of electronic voting is associated with a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush."
UC Berkeley research team which did a statistical analysis of the Florida election, the only kind possible with touchscreen voting, and found Bush mysteriously awarded 130,000 - 260,000 extra votes.
"We should have had trained observers - computer scientists, not lawyers! - verifying the integrity of polling data from machine upload through the tabulation of countywide and statewide results. Somehow we neglected the most vulnerable step in the vote-counting process, leaving a gaping hole for error and fraud, casting in doubt the validity of election results in many states."
Ian H. Solomon, Democratic poll watcher in Florida and associate dean at the Yale Law School expressing grave doubts about the election results in Florida and elsewhere.
"Oh and by the way: how come the 'Kerry's winning' part of the election night exit polling is presumed to have been wrong, or tampered with, but the 'Moral Values' part of the same (italics Olbermann's) polling is graded flawless, and marks the dawn of a new American century?"
Keith Olbermann of MSNBC's Countdown, commenting in his blog on press coverage of election fraud.
"In my 16 years as an election administrator, I've never seen anything like this. I see it as an expression of a political culture that has evolved in the United States of win at any cost. It's not partisan, but it's just lie, cheat and steal, and ethics be damned."
Ion Sancho, supervisor of elections in Leon County, Fla.
"I stood in line ... to vote, and as they were handing out the plastic cards that you insert, some lady said to me, 'Judge, you sure this isn't preprogrammed.' So people still have their doubts."
Judge Charles Burton, one of the judges who inspected Florida ballots in 2000, describing his experience voting this year.
"Very long queues were reported in many areas, with polling stations lacking the capacity to ensure a reasonably prompt throughput of voters. Delays may have been exacerbated by the fact that election day voting took place during working hours."
The OSCE Election Observation Mission preliminary report on the U.S. elections.
"The fact that we're restricted means ... it can be staged."
St. Paul Pioneer Press editor Vicki Gowler on the new Minnesota law restricting media access to polling places to 15 minutes pre-arranged.
"They told us we were shooting a Greenpeace commercial!"
The wolves in Bush's wolf pack commercial according to Wolf Packs for Truth.
"That was it. That was the last straw for me. That was the defining moment I'll never forget. That was my epiphany." "What I do know is that any party that would find the words, 'Protect Our Civil Liberties' offensive or even threatening, is a party I won't belong to anymore."
Carl F. Worden explaining why a lifelong conservative and Republican can't vote Republican anymore.
"We lost an election four years ago because they fooled around with the paper ballots and couldn't recount them. Now we're moving to a system without paper, and they won't even have the ballots to recount. I can't be a part of this."
Edward Bitet, former Florida poll worker, on why he won't volunteer this year.
"Why is there this need to get all these people registered? If people want to vote, they will vote. If they want to stay in bed and not vote, they don't have to bother."
Doug Haag, Chairman of the Milwaukee County Commission and of the county Republican Party, questioning voter registration efforts in parts of Milwaukee and the concern over the county government's refusal to print as many ballots as the city requested.
"Conceptually, the whole electronic voting thing is now so far from what I think is acceptable that I would never vote for it, if I had the choice. These standards aren't any more mission critical than your average video game." "What happens if there's a hurricane on election day, or terrorists knock the power out? The reality is these machines are dependent on electricity, and unless you're going to have generators at polling places, you need a paper backup system."
Vincent Lipsio, a firmware design engineer who is helping draft e-voting equipment standards for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers on the crash of a tabulating computer during a touchscreen test in Palm Beach County, Florida.
