News StoriesExcerpts of Key News Stories in Major Media
Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.
We have found numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election. Cumulatively, these irregularities, which affected hundreds of thousand of votes and voters in Ohio, raise grave doubts regarding whether it can be said the Ohio electors selected on December 13, 2004, were chosen in a manner that conforms to Ohio law, let alone federal requirements and constitutional standards. In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio. First...the following actions by Mr. Blackwell, the Republican Party and election officials disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens. The misallocation of voting machines led to unprecedented long lines. Mr. Blackwell's widely reviled decision to reject voter registration applications based on paper weight may have resulted in thousands of new voters not being registered in time for the 2004 election. Mr. Blackwell's decision to prevent voters who requested absentee ballots but did not receive them on a timely basis from being able to receive provisional ballots likely disenfranchised thousands, if not tens of thousands. A federal court found Mr. Blackwell's order to be illegal. Second, on election day, there were numerous unexplained anomalies and irregularities involving hundreds of thousands of votes that have yet to be accounted for. There were 93,000 spoiled ballots where no vote was cast for president, the vast majority of which have yet to be inspected.
Our correspondent discovers a burial site for 10,000 bodies near a Buddhist temple in Thailand. The bodies of british and other Western tourists are being secretly buried in vast mass graves in an open field close to a busy road. Local Red Cross officials told The Times that they were ordered to prepare a site for 10,000 bodies, far more than the Thai Government says were killed by the tsunami, raising doubts that a true count of victims will ever be known.
A review of election results in 10 counties nationwide by the Scripps Howard News Service found more than 12,000 ballots that weren't counted in the presidential race, almost one in every 10 ballots cast in those counties. When the mistakes were pointed out to local officials, some were chagrined; others said they didn't want to be bothered correcting mistakes.
Hunting for guerillas, handling roadside bombs, crawling across the caves and crumbling towns of Afghanistan and Iraq -- all of that was just a start. Now, the Army is prepping its squad of robotic vehicles for a new set of assignments. And this time, they'll be carrying guns. "Putting something like this into the field, we're about to start something that's never been done before," said Staff Sgt. Santiago Tordillos, waving to the black, 2-foot-six-inch robot rolling around the carpeted floor on twin treads, an M249 machine gun cradled in its mechanical grip. "This opens up great vistas, some quite pleasant, others quite nightmarish. On the one hand, this could make our flesh-and-blood soldiers so hard to get to that traditional war -- a match of relatively evenly matched peers -- could become a thing of the past," he said. "But this might also rob us of our humanity. We could be the ones that wind up looking like Terminators, in the world's eyes."
Voters in Utah County had more than a one in five chance that their ballots did not get counted in the initial, unofficial tally from Election Day. A programming glitch in the punch-card counter dropped 33,000 ballots from the totals - all of them straight-party ballots. That was more than 22 percent of the 145,769 ballots cast in the Republican stronghold. "The card readers were fine; it was just the way it was programmed initially," Utah County elections coordinator Kristen Swensen said Friday. "It was just off by one letter."
A hand recount of ballots cast using optical scanning technology gave a Democrat enough extra votes to bump a Republican from victory in a county commissioner's race. The erroneous tally was caused when the Fidlar Election Co. scanning system recorded straight-Democratic Party votes as votes for Libertarians in southeastern Indiana's Franklin County.
Note: How many cases like this go unnoticed?
In Baker County, Fla...there are 12,887 registered voters: 69.3 percent are Democrats, 24.3 percent are Republicans. Yet 2,180 of county residents voted for Kerry while 7,738 voted for Bush -- the opposite of what some election critics say was the typically pattern elsewhere in the United States. In Florida's Dixie County...77.5 percent of the 4,988 registered voters are Democrats, 15 percent are Republicans. On Election Day, Bush carried the county with 4,433 votes vs. 1,959 for Kerry. Nationally, few outlets have pursued the story of what happened in Baker and Dixie.
Officials in Franklin County — which includes state capital Columbus — acknowledged that they may have improperly counted votes for Bush because of a touch-screen voting system malfunction. A precinct in the county reported that a 4,000-vote margin won by Bush appeared to exceed the number of registered voters.”
Note: How many cases like this go unnoticed? How can we trust our elections to unreliable machines?
Note: The best reporting by far in the mainstream media of the 2004 election was by MSNBC's news anchor Keith Olbermann. Both on TV and on his blog, Mr. Olbermann asked the tough questions. He even asked why other major media weren't reporting
many of these crucial stories. His most excellent blog gave continual
updates of developments in the elections scandals. Here are a few key
quotes from three of the entries there:
Nov. 7, 6:55 p.m:
Officials in Warren County, Ohio, "locked down" its administration
building to prevent anybody from observing the vote count there....Emergency
Services Director Frank Young explained that he had been advised by the
federal government to implement the measures for the sake of Homeland
Security. The majority of the media has yet to touch the other
stories of Ohio or huge margins for Bush in Florida counties in which
registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 2-1.
Nov. 9, 12:55 a.m:
...the remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29
precincts there, the County's website shows, we had the most unexpected
results in years: more votes than voters. I'll repeat that: more votes than
voters. 93,000 more votes than voters. [more on this below]
November 10, 12:43 p.m: The
computerized balloting in North Carolina is so thoroughly messed up that all
state-wide voting may be thrown out and a second election day
scheduled.
Dec. 2, 8:13 p.m.: We are
not only busting our humps on the voting irregularities beat, but we remain
the only mainstream news organization to continue to cover this
vital story.
Note: Click below to watch 16 minutes of the excellent MSNBC news program broadcast nationally on November 11th covering this topic. Note that it may take several minutes to download. You must have installed either QuickTime (QT) or Windows Media. For dial-up connections, use the 56K option.
http://websrvr20.audiovideoweb.com/avwebdswebsrvr2143/news_video/5.countdown_300k.mov
(QT high speed)
http://websrvr20.audiovideoweb.com/avwebdswebsrvr2143/news_video/5.countdown_56k.mov
(QT 56K)
http://win20ca.audiovideoweb.com/ca20win15004/5.countdown_300k.wmv (Windows Media high speed)
http://win20ca.audiovideoweb.com/ca20win15004/5.countdown_56k.wmv (Windows Media 56K)
In Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking - the results seem to contain substantial anomalies. In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry. In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush. The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used.
The vote counting was marred in several places by computer glitches. The most serious appears to be in Ohio, which provided Bush with his decisive margin. Election officials in Franklin County, in the Columbus area, said yesterday that a computer error gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in one precinct. Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct out of 638 votes cast. It was not clear whether Ohio experienced any other problems with electronic ballots. About 30 percent of the voters in the state voted electronically. In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials misjudged the amount of data that could be stored electronically by a computer.
An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said. Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct. In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. And in San Francisco, a malfunction with custom voting software could delay efforts to declare the winners of four races for county supervisor. In the Ohio precinct in question, the votes are recorded onto a cartridge. On one of the three machines at that precinct, a malfunction occurred in the recording process, Damschroder said. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred. Damschroder said people who had seen poll results on the election board's Web site called to point out the discrepancy. The reader also recorded zero votes in a county commissioner race on the machine.
A North Carolina newspaper reports that "a systems software glitch in Craven County's electronic voting equipment is being blamed for a vote miscount that ... swelled the number of votes for president here by 11,283 more votes than the total number cast.
Early Thursday, as Broward County elections officials wrapped up after a long day of canvassing votes, something unusual caught their eye. Tallies should go up as more votes are counted. That's simple math. But in some races, the numbers had gone down. Officials found the software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward."
Thousands of new votes on some constitutional amendment questions were discovered early Thursday, potentially forcing a recount on the question of a South Florida vote on slot machines. As absentee ballot counting wound down after midnight in Broward County's elections warehouse, attorneys scrutinizing the close vote on Amendment Four noticed that vote totals changed in an unexpected way after 13,000 final ballots were counted. Election officials quickly determined the problem was caused by the Unity Software that pulls together votes from five machines tabulating absentee ballots. Because no precinct has more than 32,000 voters, the software caps the total votes at that number. From there, it begins to count backward. The glitch was discovered two years ago, and should have been corrected by software manufacturer ES&S of Omaha, Neb., according to Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman. "I was so angry last night," Lieberman said. She spoke to representatives from ES&S early Thursday morning, and later was having a spirited telephone conversation with Secretary of State Glenda Hood.
Sarpy County election officials are trying to figure out how they ended up with more votes than voters in the general election. Sarpy County borrowed the election equipment from Omaha-based Election Systems & Software. Its employees operated the machines that are now double-checking the ballots. No one is sure exactly what went wrong.
Note: What the article fails to mention is that with no paper trail, there is not way to know what happened. How is it possible we let our elections use machines that could not be audited or verified?
In LaPorte County, Indiana, a Democratic stronghold, electronic voting machines decided that each precinct only had 300 voters. "At about 7 p.m. Tuesday," according to this report, "it was noticed that the first two or three printouts from individual precinct reports all listed an identical number of voters. Each precinct was listed as having 300 registered voters. That means the total number of voters for the county would be 22,200, although there are more than 79,000 registered voters.
Voters nationwide reported some 1,100 problems with electronic voting machines on Tuesday, including trouble choosing their intended candidates. There were also several dozen voters in six states...who said the wrong candidates appeared on their touch-screen machine's checkout screen. In many cases, voters said they intended to select John Kerry...but when the computer asked them to verify the choice it showed them instead opting for President Bush. The reports did highlight computer scientists' concerns about touch screens, which they say are prone to tampering and unreliable unless they produce paper records for recounts. Roberta Harvey, 57, of Clearwater, Fla., said she had tried at least a half dozen times to select Kerry-Edwards when she voted Tuesday at Northwood Presbyterian Church. After 10 minutes trying to change her selection, the Pinellas County resident said she called a poll worker and got a wet-wipe napkin to clean the touch screen as well as a pencil so she could use its eraser-end instead of her finger. Harvey said it took about 10 attempts to select Kerry before and a summary screen confirmed her intended selection. The Election Protection Coalition received a total of 32 reports of touch-screen voters who selected one candidate only to have another show up on the summary screen, Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a coalition member.
Concern over electronic voting technology was not assuaged Tuesday as glitches, confusion and human error raised a welter of problems across the country. Nearly one in three voters, including about half of those in Florida, were expected to cast ballots using ATM-style voting machines that computer scientists have criticized for their potential for software glitches, hacking and malfunctioning. In Volusia County, Fla., a memory card in an optical-scan voting machine failed Monday at an early voting site and didn't count 13,000 ballots. Most of the ATM-style machines, including all of Florida's, lack paper records that could be used to verify the electronic results in a recount. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's VerifiedVoting.org, which has been monitoring the implementation of e-voting machines in the U.S., warned on Monday that over 20 percent of the machines tested by observers around the country failed to record votes properly. "A request filed in King County, Washington...uncovered an internal audit log containing a three-hour deletion on election night; 'trouble slips' revealing suspicious modem activity; and profound problems with security, including accidental disclosure of critically sensitive remote access information to poll workers, office personnel, and even, in a shocking blunder, to Black Box Voting activists."
A team of former National Security Agency (NSA) computer experts conducted a weeklong exercise with six Diebold machines and a server. According to team leader Michael Wertheimer, the group uncovered "considerable security risks." They found that the smart cards used to provide supervisors with access to the machines could be easily hacked; the removable media containing voting information was protected by flimsy locks that the team picked in under a minute using bent paper clips. The paper clips weren't even necessary, since all 32,000 keys supplied by Diebold for the machines are identical, allowing any key to open all of the machines. On the software side, the most glaring weakness was in election headquarters servers: Dell PCs ran the Windows 2000 operating system without Microsoft's security upgrade patches, which left servers susceptible to viruses and worms, enabling a remote attacker to tamper with election systems by phone.
Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.