– In Georgia, polls going into the election showed Dem. Senator Max Cleland with a 5% lead over Rep. Saxby Chambliss (who also had a 100% approval rating from the Christian Coalition). Cleland lost to Chambliss 46 to 53 %, an incredible last-minute 12 point swing . And in the governorship race, polls right up to the election showed Roy Barnes, the incumbent Democratic governor, leading by 11 points. Amazingly Barnes lost the governorship to the Republican, Sonny Perdue, 46 to 51 per cent, a swing of 16 percentage points! The press failed to point out that Georgia had became the first state in the country to conduct an election entirely with touch screen voting machines and that the entire election was run, not by the government, but by Diebold.
– In Colorado, a Zogby poll just before the election put Democrat Tom Strickland leading Republican Wayne Allard with a comfortable 5 point lead. Allard, who also happened to have one of those 100% approval rating from the Christian Coalition, experienced another miracle come from behind victory, winning by 70,000 votes. Diebold touch-screen machines were used in a number of counties, collectively accounting for over 750,000 votes.
–In Alabama, Democratic incumbent Gov. Don Siegelman had won the governor's race, but the Republican National Committee's regional director determined that a faulty chip was at issue. After a new chip arrived, the Republicans were the victors. Governor Siegelman claimed the results were changed on the electronic machines after poll watchers left.
– In Nebraska, Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel ran against Democrat Charlie Matulka and won in a landslide. As his Website says, Hagel "was re-elected to his second term in the United States Senate on November 5, 2002 with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska." What the media had neglected to point out is that in both 2002, as well as 1996, 80% of the votes in Nebraska were counted confidentially not by the government, but by computer-controlled voting machines supplied, controlled and purchased from Hagel’s own company, ES&S. Said the Democratic challenger Matulka, "They can take over our country without firing a shot, just by taking over our election systems."
Random anomalies? Remarkable coincidences? Consider these facts:
– When Hagel first ran for the U.S. Senate in 1996, his own company's computer-controlled voting machines showed he'd won stunning and unexpected victories in both the primaries and the general election. The Washington Post said Hagel's "Senate victory against an incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November election." A Gallop Poll had put Hagel in a dead heat with Democratic Ben Nelson, but unexpected popularity with African-American and Native American precincts, communities that had never before voted Republican, accounted for the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska.
– Not only Senator Hagel’s ES&S, but all electronic voting is done by Republican-controlled machines. Diebold and Sequoia are both owned by prominent Republican Party donors and a smaller company, Triad, also a Republican contributor, was responsible for counting half of Ohio’s 88 counties in 2004 and was found in the Conyers report to have been involved in fraudulent activity).
– In August, 2003 Wally O’Dell, the CEO of Diebold and a major donor to the to the Bush campaign invited friends to a Bush/Cheney fundraiser at his home in Ohio with an invitation that read: "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year".
– In the summer of 2003, more than a year before the 2004 election, Representative Peter King (R., N.Y.) stated in an interview: "It’s already over. The election’s over. We won". Asked how he knew that Bush would win, he answered, "It’s all over but the counting. And we’ll take care of the counting."
Maybe, in the final two days of the race, those voters who'd pledged themselves to Georgia's popular incumbent Governor Roy Barnes suddenly and inexplicably decided to switch to Republican challenger Sonny Perdue.
Maybe George W. and Jeb Bush, Alabama's new Republican governor Bob Riley, and a small but congressionally decisive handful of other long-shot Republican candidates around the country really did win those states where conventional wisdom and straw polls showed them losing in the last few election cycles, but computer controlled voting or ballot-reading machines showed them winning.
Perhaps, after a half-century of fine-tuning exit polling to such a science that it's now used to verify if elections are clean in Third World countries, it really did suddenly become inaccurate in the United States in the past few years and just won't work here anymore. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that the sudden rise of inaccurate exit polls happened around the same time corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots.
Perhaps..........
The 2004 Presidential Election
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