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'Terror' on Election Day!
the Village Voice ^ | July 16th, 2004 | James Ridgeway

Posted on 08/03/2004 8:51:58 AM PDT by Area Freeper

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Thursday's request by New York senator Hillary Clinton for an independent study of the nation's voting system before the November election comes amid growing fears that the Bush administration may try to fix the vote in a tight election. According to Clinton's press aides, Clinton and a group of other top congressional Dems asked the Government Accountability Office "for a thorough independent review," adding, "We already know of the potentially serious problems posed by the widespread use of electronic voting machines."

Clinton's press aides went on, "There are, however, other problems that have received little notice but have great potential to disrupt the election process and cause voters to be disenfranchised on November 2." The group asked the GAO (which just last week changed its name to Government Accountability Office, from General Accounting Office) to take a look at protections for voter registration and requirements for identification and to see whether voter rolls are properly purged of dead people and felons—and also to see what safeguards are in place to guard against "erroneous purges."

There may be more to fear than just those problems. Wayne Madsen, who worked at the National Security Agency (NSA) during the Reagan administration and currently is a journalist, sketches a more plausible scenario than the recent trial balloon floated by the administration-controlled Election Assistance Commission about possibly postponing the vote if there is a terrorist attack. Here's Madsen's scenario, step by creepy step:

If, on November 2, Kerry is ahead in key battleground states, then Bush will announce an imminent terrorist threat in California and maybe Washington state.

By 5 p.m. EST (2 p.m. on the Pacific Coast), Bush HQ will know whether Kentucky and Indiana—key states—are lost. If it looks like they are going down the drain, then the White House will flash the go-ahead, and the U.S. Northern Command (which has military jurisdiction over the U.S.) will, along with the Homeland Security Department and California authorities, declare an imminent terrorist threat.

Polls will remain open, but everyone will be trying to get out of urban centers as fast as they can. Traffic jams will cause panic and make people change their plans to vote after work. "A number of working-class voters in urban centers," Madsen theorizes, "will either be caught up in California's infamous freeway traffic and be too late to get to their polling places or be more concerned about their families and avoid voting altogether."

The people mostly likely thrown off balance who will decide not to vote will be middle- and low-income Californians—the Democratic base. Well-to-do voters (Republicans, more often than not) will likely have cast their ballots early.

By reducing the turnout among urban Democrats, Bush HQ will thus be manipulating the state's 54 votes into the Republican column. If things get worse for Bush as the Eastern vote comes in, the "terrorist alert" can be expanded to Washington state, where panicky rush-hour traffic jams in cities like Seattle can reduce the Democratic vote there, too.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Front Page News; Government; Politics/Elections; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: demvoterfraud; electronicvoting; kettleisblack; villagevoice
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To: Area Freeper

The Legacy of Gore the LOSER...


21 posted on 08/03/2004 9:02:17 AM PDT by Publius6961 (I don't do diplomacy either.)
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To: Area Freeper

The Village Voice used to be avant-garde and beatnikish. Now it is just Deadheads.


22 posted on 08/03/2004 9:03:22 AM PDT by RightWhale (Withdraw from the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty and establish property rights)
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To: Area Freeper

These people have become truly psychotic. The Bush administration was trying to develop a plan to PROTECT the right to vote in case of a terrorist act, and the Dems are trying to turn that upside down and make it seem like an attempt to STOP the election. We NEED a plan to prepare for an election day terrorist attack. Does anyone know if those plans were scuttled because of the outcry? (I realize any such plan would need to be passed into law by Congress.) Or are we just going to be utter morons and wait for a terrorist attack to happen, then figure out a plan AFTER the election? Like in Florida?


23 posted on 08/03/2004 9:03:46 AM PDT by Steve_Seattle
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To: Area Freeper
Real voters all have ID.

By law, it is not allowed to ask for authentication of a legal voter.

Go figure.

24 posted on 08/03/2004 9:03:58 AM PDT by Publius6961 (I don't do diplomacy either.)
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To: Area Freeper

The Dims are terrified that it might be a clean election. Without frequent voters, dead voters and just plain fraud, they wouldn't have a chance


25 posted on 08/03/2004 9:07:11 AM PDT by cloud8
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To: Area Freeper
Village Voice

Too bad they let the Village Idiot speak for them...

26 posted on 08/03/2004 9:07:41 AM PDT by ravingnutter
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To: Area Freeper
to see whether voter rolls are properly purged of dead people and felons

Wow! The Dems are shooting themselves in the foot there, after all Chicago is full of dead Dem voters... Also if they purge the system of felons, does that mean that the Clintons won't be voting either?

27 posted on 08/03/2004 9:10:23 AM PDT by CompSciGuy ("I speak softly and carry a big stick" -- Teddy Roosevelt, Progressive Reforming Republican)
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To: Area Freeper

"Wayne Madsen, who worked at the National Security Agency (NSA) during the Reagan administration and currently is a journalist, sketches a more plausible scenario than the recent trial balloon floated by the administration-controlled Election Assistance Commission about possibly postponing the vote if there is a terrorist attack. Here's Madsen's scenario, step by creepy step."

Is this the same Madsen who can't tell time? I think he wrote an article claiming some mysterious conspiracy when Bush made that trip to Iraq for Thanksgiving -- but it turned out it's just that Wayne can't tell time.

I'm guessing this broken clock is not right this time, either.


28 posted on 08/03/2004 9:10:42 AM PDT by Gothmog (The 2004 election won't be about what one did in the military, but on how one would use it)
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To: Area Freeper

"Wayne Madsen" held a top security clearance and worked at NSA?


29 posted on 08/03/2004 9:13:31 AM PDT by silverleaf (Fasten your seat belts- it's going to be a BUMPY ride.)
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To: Area Freeper
the Bush administration may try to fix the vote in a tight election

I always find it interesting when people project what they would do to others. Yes that would be what Democrats would do and they know that and assume Republicans would do the same. Yes, the Chicago, San Francisco, New Orleans, Texas, and NYC Republican machines are known for rigging the votes in the late 1990's and early 2000 elections. (NOT!)

30 posted on 08/03/2004 9:14:57 AM PDT by Robert357
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To: Area Freeper
The people mostly likely thrown off balance who will decide not to vote will be middle- and low-income Californians—the Democratic base. Well-to-do voters (Republicans, more often than not) will likely have cast their ballots early.

Bullcrap. The "low-income" group that votes most consistently for the 'Rats don't have jobs and don't want them. Hell, they set up polling booths IN THE PROJECTS to make sure that the welfare moms only have to walk out their front door to vote. Republicans don't get to vote until they are off work for the day.

31 posted on 08/03/2004 9:19:26 AM PDT by Blood of Tyrants (Even if the government took all your earnings, you wouldn't be, in its eyes, a slave.)
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To: Area Freeper

More likely this: from Worldnetdaily.......

To view this item online, visit http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=17718

Monday, November 13, 2000



'How Democrats
steal elections'
Veterans of hand recounts describe techniques used to change outcome



IMPORTANT NOTE: The following exclusive investigative report is included in the current edition of WND's monthly Whistleblower magazine, "THE PARTY OF TREASON."

By Jon E. Dougherty and David Kupelian



© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com

The manual vote recounts being insisted on by Democratic operatives in Palm Beach County, Fla., have been used for over 20 years to steal elections from Republicans, claim several GOP veterans of hand-recount election-upsets.

According to Bob Haueter, who served as chief of staff for former California Assembly Minority Leader Scott Baugh, and who is an expert on manual recounts, a Democrat lawyer intimately involved in "stealing" elections from Republicans through hand recounts admitted to the process and even shared the techniques involved.

After Tuesday's vote and an automatic recount still left GOP nominee George W. Bush ahead by a slim 288-vote margin, Palm Beach elections officials decided that a manual recount of all 425,000 votes should be undertaken.

"What's happening in Florida is exactly the game plan laid out to me by an attorney who represented the Democrats in a recount in California where they stole a seat from us," former California Assemblyman Pat Nolan told WorldNetDaily.

A staunch conservative legislator, Nolan served in the California Assembly from 1978 until 1994, when he was convicted, along with several other lawmakers, in a federal corruption probe. After spending a little over two years in federal prison, he emerged to become president of Justice Fellowship, the public policy arm of Watergate figure Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries. For the past four years, Nolan has worked with Colson -- another fallen-but-reformed public figure -- to reform the criminal justice system.

Regarding the 1980 California Assembly race between Republican Adrian Fondse and Democrat Pat Johnston, Nolan recalled that the Republican won "by about 54 votes or so."

But after the election, Democrats "brought in their junkyard dog lawyers from around the country," said Nolan, "and basically harassed the local registrar -- got in their faces and demanded to handle ballots" -- which were of the same type now in dispute in Palm Beach.

The same issue of "hanging chads -- the little squares in the punch cards -- was also an issue in Stockton," says Nolan. The Democrats' strategy, he says, was to handle them as often as possible -- perhaps bending, crinkling or otherwise altering them -- so that additional chads become displaced, thereby disqualifying the ballot.

The result? In the Stockton election, Nolan said Democrats were successful in getting the vote count reversed from a plus-54 win by Republicans to a minus-17 loss.

"I vowed that I'd never let that happen again," Nolan said. "So I asked my staff to track down the lawyer that headed up the team for the Democrats."

Haueter was, at that time, chief of staff for Nolan, and it was he who first contacted attorney Tim Downs, who readily admitted the Democratic strategy and even described the tactics to Nolan.

"When I first called him and explained to him who I was and why I was calling, he chuckled and said, 'I wondered when you guys would get around to calling me,'" Haueter said, adding that Downs told him -- "'I've taken several seats from you across the United States.'"

"Downs told me, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, 'You get me within 100 votes and I can steal any election,'" Haueter told WorldNetDaily.

Nolan subsequently hired Downs and "brought him out to train my staff in the techniques they [Democrats] were using" so they could protect themselves against future election-fraud victimization, Nolan said.

Nolan and Haueter said Downs described three basic tactics:


"The first rule is, you keep counting until you're ahead. And if that doesn't put you ahead, you recount, re-recount -- you keep counting until you're ahead. If you're behind, then you've got nothing to lose."

Second, Nolan said, "the more times those ballots are handled, the more chance there is that chads will break loose" and hence disqualify the ballot.

Third, he said, "the minute you're ahead, you stop and declare yourself the victor."

"After that, you don't want the ballots handled any more," Nolan said, "because some of the chads for your candidate might break loose. While you're behind it doesn't matter, but if you're ahead and more break off or become disqualified for your candidate, that's a bad thing."
A favorite tactic, said Nolan, is to ask election officials for ballots, "allegedly so they can look at it more closely." When operatives do, often they will bend or crinkle ballots covertly in an effort to break another chad loose and thus have the ballot thrown out.

"This whole process sounds like exactly what is going on in Florida," Nolan said. "And the more times those ballots are handled, the more chances are you'll break some of them [chads] loose."

Nolan referred to Fox News' Tony Snow's weekend interview with Bush campaign representative and former Secretary of State James Baker, in which he asked Baker why -- after each time election officials run ballots through mechanical vote-tally machines -- there have been more votes counted or taken away from both candidates.

"Baker didn't have an answer to that," Nolan said. "But the answer is, because they've handled those ballots more times, breaking loose more of those chads" -- those that perhaps weren't completely punched through.

"The tactics fit what [Downs] told me back in 1982 and 1983," Nolan said, who added that he didn't know who Downs may have worked with using these tactics recently.

WorldNetDaily attempted to reach Downs by phone on Sunday, but was unsuccessful.

Following a mechanical recount over the weekend, Palm Beach election officials awarded an additional 36 votes to Gore, while Bush lost three.

"A hand count of four selected precincts turned up enough additional votes for Gore to prompt the Democratic majority on the county election commission to order the hand recount in all 531 precincts," the Associated Press reported.

Republicans, news accounts said, lodged "strenuous protests" and pledged to file a lawsuit halting yet another recount of Palm Beach votes. That hearing is scheduled for today.

Reports said nearly 30,000 ballots have already been rejected in Palm Beach County because they had two or more holes punched for president, or because computers could not detect any holes at all. Ballots with two votes also are rejected in hand counts.

Corroborating Haueter's and Nolan's account is a parallel story by Los Angeles-area political strategist Arnold Steinberg. In a National Review.com piece titled "Beware of Hanging Chads," Steinberg asks, "Do you know what two words will determine the Presidential election?" The chilling answer, he said: "Hanging chads."

Steinberg, describing a 1980 congressional race between long-time incumbent, Democrat James C. Corman, and Steinberg's client, Republican challenger Bobbi Fiedler, recalls how after Fiedler's upset victory -- by a slim margin -- over the heavily favored Corman, the Democrats called for a hand recount.

"Democratic Party lawyers and recount specialists descended on the county registrar's office," says Steinberg. "Each recount station had a government employee to do the counting, flanked by one Democratic and one Republican observer.

"The Democrats' agenda was, of course, to change the election result, and they went about it systematically. At their urging, the recounting began with Corman's strongest precincts, Fiedler's weakest. Their intention was to recount ballots in those areas until the election outcome was reversed, and then stop the recount. Similarly, today in Florida, the Gore people are demanding hand recounts in their favored counties, where they would be most likely to gain."

Just as important as the order in which the precincts are recounted, however, is outright ballot tampering, says Steinberg.

"Their hired guns tried lots of tricks on Corman's behalf, but what I remember most was the hanging chads. A chad is the perforated square (or circle) on the ballot that a voter depresses with a pin to indicate his preferred candidate. The chad hangs from the ballot if the voter didn't fully depress it -- for instance, if an older person did not press firmly enough. This matters because voter machines usually are not able to tabulate cards with hanging chads.

"It often comes down to interpreting the voter's intention. Does the chad hang 'strongly' -- i.e, detached only a little -- meaning that it is a mistake that should not be counted? Or does it hang loosely -- i.e., mostly detached -- as an intended vote would be?

"What my lawyers soon discovered was that the opposition would eyeball a disputed ballot before picking it up to officially inspect it. If the hanging chad indicated a vote for Fiedler, the lawyer for the other side picked up the ballot ever so carefully, so he could argue that the voter really never intended to vote for Fiedler. If the hanging chad was a Corman vote, the lawyer picked up the ballot quite vigorously, so that the chad soon was no longer hanging.

"'You see,' their guy would declare, 'that voter obviously intended to vote for Corman.'"

Luckily, says Steinberg, "it didn't take long to figure out all the opposition's tricks. I added more lawyers, more observers, and the bad guys eventually caved. Bobbi Fiedler's victory was preserved. But it was a nasty business."

Echoing Nolan's and Haueter's experience with manual-vote recounts, Steinberg says, "The more things change, the more they stay the same."






Jon Dougherty is a staff reporter and David Kupelian is managing editor of WorldNetDaily.com.


32 posted on 08/03/2004 9:26:41 AM PDT by combat_boots
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To: Area Freeper
President Bush, please just come out and ask the American people to sound off publicly on which they would prefer: warnings of an imminent attack on election day, or no warnings of an imminent attack on election day?

I would assume that if there were an actual attack anywhere in the country on election day, we would postpone all voting for a time. Big deal.

Hillary Clinton is projecting her kind of evil craftiness onto Bush. This is reason enough never to put her up as a nominee for President. These ideas come from her brain.

33 posted on 08/03/2004 9:32:39 AM PDT by Yaelle
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To: Area Freeper
"We already know of the potentially serious problems posed by the widespread use of electronic voting machines."

"WE" do? I suspect the biggest problem is that the DEMS haven't figured out how to stuff electronic ballot boxes. Yet.

"Potentially serious problems" - there are "potentially serious problems" with any technology. I think the old paper punch ballots were actually relatively free of real problems, the Dims fabricated complaints about confusing "butterfly ballots" and "hanging pregnant chads" in a baldfaced attempt to steal the election.

A decisive, unambiguous, tamper-resistant voting system is the last thing that the Dims want.

34 posted on 08/03/2004 9:36:27 AM PDT by Lonesome in Massachussets (Ideas so stupid only intellectuals could believe them.)
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To: Area Freeper

Their "projection" is really getting pathetic.


35 posted on 08/03/2004 9:36:39 AM PDT by Not A Snowbird (Official RKBA Landscaper and Arborist, Duchess of Green Leafy Things)
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To: dead; aculeus; general_re

From the Voice's back ward, a frantic message in crayon.


36 posted on 08/03/2004 9:42:52 AM PDT by dighton
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To: Area Freeper

Jaw hitting the floor here. Of all the nerve!


37 posted on 08/03/2004 9:44:46 AM PDT by BlessedBeGod
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To: Area Freeper
...The group asked the GAO (which just last week changed its name to Government Accountability Office, from General Accounting Office) ...

And the language takes another small step toward complete banality...

38 posted on 08/03/2004 9:51:12 AM PDT by bondjamesbond (We live in a wonderful country where any child can grow up to be the next Ronald Reagan.)
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To: Area Freeper

DIMRATS HAVE A CHRONIC PROBLEM

tending to accuse GOP of what the DIMRATS habitually do.


39 posted on 08/03/2004 9:52:25 AM PDT by Quix (PRAYER WARRIORS, DO YOUR STUFF! LIVES, SOULS AND NATIONS DEPEND ON IT)
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To: Gothmog
Is this the same Madsen who can't tell time?

Yep.

40 posted on 08/03/2004 9:53:32 AM PDT by spodefly (This post meets the minimum daily requirements for cynicism and irony.)
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