Gulag Blog

We’re not out of the woods with "falsified election tallies"…

Republicrat or Demican – same corrupt system…

This just in from some very dedicated Constitutionalists:

PART 1

Impossible numbers certified in NY-23, phantom voters

A reminder: Black Box Voting got thumped by some of our members for calling attention to the anomalies in Maine, where the second-biggest election jurisdiction, Lewiston, had over 1,000 vote discrepancies in three races. We were admonished not to be for gay marriage. Here in the NY-23 race, because a Democrat won, we’ll probably be thumped again, this time claiming that exposing problems with the election show that we support the Conservative candidate.

Black Box Voting is nonpartisan. We have no dog in these fights except public right to know and authenticate results. We shouldn’t have thousand-vote anomalies in Maine, with a secretary of state that won’t release the real results. We shouldn’t have negative votes and phantom voters in NY-23. But most of all, we shouldn’t allow systems that conceal essential parts of public elections from the public! And THAT is where we stand.

TURKEY NUMBERS WITH STUFFING?

For several days now, I have been in close communication with Richard Hayes Phillips, author of WITNESS TO A CRIME, a book detailing his findings when conducting a ballot examination after the 2004 Ohio election. Phillips lives in New York 23, the site of one of the nation’s most controversial political races in 2009.

Today, he wrote a disturbing article about the impossible numbers certified by election officials in the NY-23 race. I’ll reprint portions of that article below; first, let me share the comments of V. Kurt Bellman, former elections director for Berks County, Pennsylvania, concerning what an election official should do when asked to sign off on mathematically impossible numbers:

"Not even ONE mathematically impossible number gets even one ‘cell’ on any document I would need to sign," writes Bellman, "and anyone who might try to get me to sign it needs to be prepared to see the inside of another kind of ‘cell."

There is no doubt that New York election officials are under the gun, and NY-23 districts are no exception. New York locations are being pushed into abandoning their cost-effective and trusty old mechanical lever machines to implement new Sequoia/Dominion ImageCast optical scanners. This change was not embraced by many of the New York elections officials, who are now struggling to explain machine failures in many different counties, and in NY-23, officials were certainly under massive pressure to sign off on the numbers, and they probably never had never dealt with NEGATIVE numbers before.

That said, the traditional method of tampering with a lever machine, is to "roll back the odometer" so that before the day starts, you have your guy at +25 and the other guy at -25, and at the end of the day after the votes all roll in, all the numbers match the number of votes cast. Unless, of course, the other guy only got 24 votes, in which case it all comes unraveled.

It is exactly this "roll back the odometer" tactic that WE used when hacking the optical scan memory card, as seen in the film Hacking Democracy and in this short video (which also shows that — unlike the lever machines — the counter can read "zero" at the beginning of the day with software-driven systems, even when votes have been preloaded):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiiaBqwqkXs

Whew. Ready to read the whole article by Richard Hayes Phillips, detailing the anomalies in NY-23?

YOU CAN READ THE WHOLE THING HERE:
http://www.gouverneurtimes.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8425: impossible-numbers-certified-in-ny-23&catid=60:st-lawrence-news&Itemid=175

Excerpts from the article, which appears in the Gouverneur Times:
* * * * * *
"The election results certified by the St. Lawrence County Board of Elections for New York’s 23rd Congressional District contain some numbers that are mathematically impossible. These numbers were requested in person and transmitted by e-mail just hours before certification on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009.

For six election districts in St. Lawrence County (the 2nd, 4th, 6th, and 7th districts in Canton, the 14th district in Massena, and the 2nd district in Oswegatchie) negative numbers appear in the column for ‘blank’ ballots, known in other states as ‘undervotes.’

"Blank vote counts are ballots in which the voter did not choose any candidate in a given election and are determined by subtracting the total number of votes cast for the candidates from the number of voters who completed ballots. The remaining number would be those voters who didn’t cast a vote for that election.

"In Canton’s 7th district, the certified results show a total of 148 ballots cast. The results of those votes were counted as 88 votes for Owens, 11 votes for Scozzafava, and 80 votes for Hoffman. The problem is that these numbers add up to 179 votes counted for the candidates, and there were only 148 ballots cast; St. Lawrence County certified these numbers to the state as accurate with the number of ‘blank’ ballots reported as minus 31.

"The Board of Elections stated repeatedly that their numbers add up, and strictly speaking, they do. But negative numbers should not be required to make this happen."

* * * * *
Yep, I’d say the matching numbers are turkeys: "NEGATIVE NUMBERS SHOULD NOT BE REQUIRED TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN."

Phillips goes on to write:
* * * * *
"Election analysts refer to this phenomenon as ‘phantom voters,’ because they are apparitions. They do not actually exist. There can never be more votes counted for any office than the number of actual voters who cast ballots. There could be one or two, if on occasion an actual voter forgot to sign the poll book, but never 31.

"In addition to the 31 ‘phantom votes’ certified in Canton’s 7th district, there are 16 more in Canton’s 2nd district, two in Canton’s 4th district, 20 in the 7th, 22 in Massena 14th district, and 2 in Oswegatchie 2nd district. "

* * * * *

Unless we know for certain (and this doesn’t mean just hypothesizing) what caused the minus numbers, an error of, say, 31 doesn’t at all mean that the real error is 31. It might be 3100, or 8,573.

Some election officials, followed dutifully by the media, may shrug off anomalies like minus 31 votes, saying "but it didn’t affect the result."

Now, if I get a bank statement and somehow the transaction total is $5.40 less than the transactions, I don’t shrug that off saying "but it didn’t bounce a check!" I have questions. What caused this? Aren’t computers supposed to be able to add and subtract? How many other customers have a total that is not correct? Who got the missing $5.40?

Any accountant will tell you that one small anomaly can add up to a substantial embezzlement once you unravel the whole thing. In elections, when the books don’t balance it can be a Very Bad Thing.

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