The apparent re-election of George W. Bush as US President seems to have its roots in a mechanical failure. On 12 March 2004, a car went out of control on a busy highway and propelled itself in front of an 18-wheeler. The driver – an African-American clergyman called Athan Gibbs – was killed outright. Gibbs, 57, was the President and CEO of a company called TruVote International.(1) Gibbs founded TruVote after witnessing the electoral debacle in Florida’s 2001 presidential election. He spent the next three years and $2 million on developing and marketing his secure electronic voting system.
A month before his death, he had demonstrated his machine at a trade fair in Columbus, Ohio. A paper receipt displayed the voter’s touchscreen selection under plexiglass, before it dropped into a secure box when the voter pressed ‘approve’. The TruVote system provided the voter with a second receipt that included a voter ID and PIN. With this, an internet connection could be used to make sure the vote was actually counted. Brooks Thomas, Co-ordinator of Elections in Tennessee, was rapt: ‘I’ve not seen anything that compares to the TruVote validation system.’ The Assistant Secretary of State of Georgia claimed Gibbs had come up with the ‘perfect solution’.
Speaking to media after the exhibition, Gibbs asked: ‘Why would you buy a voting machine from a company like Diebold which provides a paper trail for every single machine it makes except its voting machines?'(2)
Anyway, let us turn our attention from the everyday, banal, humdrum, nothing-to-see-here, tragic and accidental death of Athan Gibbs (which is not suspicious in the slightest) and get on with the election stuff, shall we?
The election proper got off to a good start in mid-October when the ‘defeated’ Presidential candidate of 2000, Al Gore, returned, like Banquo’s ghost, to warn about the forthcoming election. He told a meeting at Georgetown university:
‘The widespread efforts by Bush’s political allies to suppress voting have reached epidemic proportions. Some of the scandals of Florida four years ago are now being repeated in broad daylight even as we meet here today. It is love of power for its own sake that is the original sin of this presidency.’
But Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt exhibited the discreet charm of the right-winger when he commented that:
‘Al Gore seems intent on shattering whatever minuscule credibility he has left with baseless, mean-spirited personal attacks and conspiracy theories.’
Florida again
Since we’ve already invoked the spirit of Florida 2000, let’s start with what happened there. Florida excelled itself, this time getting into the swing of things before the election had even started. An early-voting woman in Palm Beach County visited a site in West Boca, but realised the touch-screen hadn’t given her the option to vote on three other electoral runs up for grabs. An official later said:
‘They basically said this is human error, meaning she was given the wrong ballot because the computer was programmed for the wrong ballot. But she can’t re-vote because it was a mistake. They said they would try to put forces into place to make sure it doesn’t happen again.’
In other words, tough.(3)
After the election, on 5 November, Broward County elections officials noticed that in some races, the number of votes had – impossibly – gone down. A panicky investigation was started, and it was found that software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct……after which it starts counting backwards towards zero again. Broward Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes said the glitch affected ‘only’ 97,434 absentee ballots.
This was a problem with those lovely punch-card vote-slips that gave us so much fun last time, but with a computerish twist. The voting slips were counted by being conveyored over optical scanners, which tallied votes by seeing where in the paper a hole had been punched. Figures were then fed to a main computer, which was where the problems surfaced. Secretary of State spokeswoman Jenny Nash said all counties using this system had been told that such problems would occur if a precinct is set up in a way that would allow votes to get above 32,000. She said Broward should have split the absentee ballots into four separate precincts to avoid that problem, and that a Broward elections employee admitted to not doing so.(4)
In Albuquerque, two early voters reported that whenever they tried to vote for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, the touch-screen registered a green ‘tick’ mark next to Bush’s name instead. (To be fair, another three voters reported the opposite problem.)(5)
An electronic voting system gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus. Which is bad enough until you learn that only 638 people voted. In New York, voting machine problems surfaced in a contested state Senate race. Elections officials disclosed in court that seals were missing or broken on 22 impounded voting machines.(6)
Similar stories could be multiplied almost endlessly.
But elections are about steaks, not sizzles. If the result was probably wrong, how wrong was it? At the time of writing (mid November), the picture is distinct enough to discern the potential for an absolutely huge row before Bush is inaugurated in January. The challenge is being prepared already by Democrat officials,(7) although whether it will come off is another matter. These things have a habit of ending up in the US Supreme Court……. and we all know what happened last time that happened. The direct evidence of wrongdoing is not utterly conclusive across the board; however, the evidence of (shall we say) wronghappening is beyond question.
The exit polls
The first rule of machines – including the machines that count the US votes – is ‘garbage in, garbage out’. If these machines were turning out garbage, human beings (in the form of programmers, hackers, corrupt officials, or inept engineers, etc) were ultimately responsible for it. One good measure exists by which we may get our bearings. Exit polls – traditionally, the most accurate measure of the outcome of an election, barring the actual result – went wrong nationwide this year (as they did in Florida last time). At 1.05 am on Wednesday morning, CNN’s exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio’s male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. As everyone’s favourite journo, Greg Palast, remarked, ‘Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.’
When you zoom in, you find that the problem is not the voters but – surprise! – the counters. Although exit polls show that most Ohio voters went for Kerry, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. It doesn’t even factor in the nice round results which always add up to 100 per cent – the spoiled ballots are subtracted from the results. Florida exit polls in 2000 showed Gore with a majority of at least 50,000, but (Republican) Secretary of State Katherine Harris excluded 179,855 spoiled votes.
Whose votes get spoiled? Expert statisticians calculate that 54 per cent of spoiled ballots were cast by black people (overwhelmingly Democrat). Ohio is one of the last states in America to still use the vote-spoiling punch-card machines discussed in ‘Vote-rigging USA‘ in Lobster 47.
Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell (Republican) won’t say – though the law requires it be reported – how many votes got spoiled this time round. But in 2000’s Presidential, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached 1.96 per cent. That’s 110,000 votes, tending to be overwhelmingly Democratic. Many Republican-mounted challenges resulted in ethnic minority (= Democrat) voters getting ‘provisional’ ballots, pending verification of voter legality. At the last, election officials were in the process of counting up those outstanding provisional ballots and a result may be available by late December.(8)
Estimates of the number of provisional ballots issued in Ohio range between 175,000 (a Republican claim) and 250,000 (a Democrat claim). Even at the lowest claims, a probable 59,000 Democrat vote total from spoilage, and a split-the-difference 88,000 Democrat vote from provisionals, makes 147,000 ‘lost’ Kerry votes. Bush ‘won’ by 136,483 votes in Ohio.
The discrepancies between other exit polls and the actual results in machine-vote states are so astonishing that they do actually have to be seen to be believed. A simple look at some of the proportions involved will probably suffice to prove that that evocative term ‘margin of error’ was in no way involved.(9) And a closer look at a breakdown of Florida voters alone (by county, method, allegiance and outcome) will raise the hackles on anyone.(10) This pattern has caused some suspicion – oh, OK, an incredible amount of suspicion – but barely a whiff of it has surfaced beyond the internet.
Online multi-author encyclopaedia Wikipedia found itself with a brand new entry entitled ‘2004 U.S. presidential election controversy’ which has grown like Jack’s beanstalk as partisans and disinteresteds alike slug it out.(11) However, history is written by the victors.
Former Clinton ally (i.e. converted neo-conservative) Dick Morris gave the world the benefit of his insight shortly after election day. Who does Mr Morris think is to blame for the discrepancies in exit polling? Why, the usual monolithic conspiracy of liberal, leftie, terrorist-loving, media pantywaists, of course. Mr Morris’s extravagant claims are worth quoting at some length.
‘Exit polls,’ he (rightly) remarked, ‘are almost never wrong. They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout……But this Tuesday, the networks did get the exit polls wrong. Not just some of them. They got all of the Bush states wrong…. To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible…… Dark minds will suspect that these polls were deliberately manipulated to dampen Bush turnout in the Central, Mountain, and Pacific time zones by conveying the impression that the president’s candidacy was a lost cause….the possibility of biased exit polling, deliberately manipulated to try to chill the Bush turnout, must be seriously considered…..exit pollsters should have to explain, in public, how they were so wrong.’
Morris concluded:
‘This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play .'(12)
So do many of us, Mr Morris.
So would Athan Gibbs, in fact.
Notes
1 Gibbs obit: <www.tennessean.com/obits/archives/04/03/48330576.shtml>
2 <www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm> Diebold, as readers of Alfred Mendes’s piece in Lobster 47 will recall, is the voting machine company with ties to the Republican party.
3 <www.bocanews.com/index.php?src=news&prid=9999&category=Local%20News&PHPSESSID=a352b86a2ffb772f3fd1d3d96abe871b>
4 Predictably enough, this statement itself later became the centre of a distracting row, and your humble correspondent lost track of it. It may still be going on for all I know. <www.palmbeachpost.com/politics/content/news/epaper/2004/11/05/a29a_BROWVOTE_1105.html?>
5 <http://abqjournal.com/elex/246845elex10-22-04.htm>
6 <www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/11/05/politics1149EST0515.DTL>
7 See <www.democrats.com>
8 Andrew Buncombe,’Ohio starts to count up stray votes while lawyers keep an eye on the outcome’, The Independent, 13 November 2004
9 <http://img103.exs.cx/img103/4526/exit_poll.gif>
10 <http://thesquanderer.com/votingmachines.html>
11 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_controversies_and_irregularities>
12 <www.thehill.com/morris/110404.aspx>