This just in...

Justice Through Music, which strongly supports the democratic principles of transparency and honesty in the electoral process, is offering at least a $100,000 reward to any person or persons who provide conclusive and verifiable evidence that the results of the 2004 presidential election were not correctly tabulated because of one or more of the following reasons: 1) hacking into the voting machines; 2) software or coding problems with voting or tabulating machines; 3) multiple counting by machines or humans, 4) improperly implanted codes in voting machines; 5) tampering with voting machines, voting cards or final tabulation numbers; 6) officials or machines not counting all the votes or adding votes; 7) official influence which changed vote totals, or other problems with vote tabulation not noted here. All information and evidence should be submitted to reward@jtmp.org. Questions should be submitted to questions@jtmp.org.

There's been much talk about the 97,489 more votes than voters cast in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. A plausible explanation for the huge difference between votes and actual voters, as reported via the Cuyahoga County website), is being attributed by County Officials to the strange method they have for including absentee ballots into the vote counts separately from the Election Day voters. Or something.

So setting that oddity aside for the moment, take a look at this interesting graph. I have not been able to confirm the specific numbers it shows, so I can't testify to it's accuracy, but I'm posting it here because, if accurate, this seems worth getting out to the world for further scrutiny.

Though it's difficult to read this small, the trend-lines are all that really matter here (The full sized graph is here).

If correct, this graph would seem to show that precinct-by-precinct in Cuyahoga County, Ohio --- where Cleveland is, and thus it's a heavily Democratic county --- the larger the turnout in each precinct, the smaller the percentage of the vote for Kerry!

The GREEN trend line is the size of voter turnout in each precinct, and the BLUE trend line is the percentage of votes for Kerry.

While conventional wisdom is often wrong, if the above numbers are accurate, it does seem a bit odd to say the least that the higher the turnout in a strongly Democratic county (Kerry won Cuyahoga 63%-33% if I recall correctly), would result in a smaller percentage of votes for the Democrat!

I don't know what to make of it, or how to explain it, but it seems worth putting out there for the armchair investigators.

UPDATE: I was asked what the balloting/counting methods are in Cuyahoga County. Apparently punch card, as counted by machines made by our old friends at ...Election Systems and Software, Inc. (ES&S). Source

Apparently this story appeared last Friday, but I missed it. I'm trying to keep all of these stories straight, report them only once, and attempt to confirm them before passing them on.

In this case, as many as 22,000 miscounted votes were caught in time to reverse the results of two different races in state races in North Carolina according to the Charlotte Observer.

Please remember the announced margin of "victory" for Bush in Ohio was about 135,000 in a state of 5.5 million. How many of these types of errors went undetected and/or unreported in Ohio?

How many more of these types of articles do you we need, folks? The system is a disaster, and Congress is sitting on their hands waiting for the Electoral College deadline to pass.

Sign this online letter now if you haven't already! And this one too!

MyDD has a telling analysis of the situation in North Carolina where problems with vote counting (some votes apparently counted twice in some places, 4,500 votes completely lost elsewhere, etc.) may require a re-vote in all, or part, of North Carolina.

Nonetheless, it's telling that, though the Republican candidates for President and U.S. Senate were able to claim victories down there, Democrats somehow had virtually all the rest of the success in NC.

The NC Democratic candidate for Governor won in a landslide (55%-44%), Dems won control of the NC House by at least 3 seats, and in the NC Senate the Dems added to their "already healthy" margin. Additionally, the first openly gay lesbian to be elected to the NC statehouse was also victorious in her Senate race!

That victory on the state level mirrors other results around the country, where Dems solidly increased their foothold, or took control of many State Legislatures and Governships.

Even Dallas, TX(!!!) elected a lesbian/hispanic Sheriff!

All of which just serves to make me even more suspicious of the election results.

Republicans control the "Solid South" says conventional wisdom --- but then how does one account for North Carolina? "Value voters" showed up and gave Bush his victory, says CV, and yet gay and lesbian candidates had unprecedented victories in "solid" GOP strongholds.

It's certainly reasonable to assume that voters preferred the GOP at the national level while opting for Dems back at home...for whatever reason. Had there not be so many other oddities in the days following this election, I'd likely not have given it all too much thought. But taking everything we now know about highly improbable disparities in the Exit Polling --- where alleged "inaccuracies" just happened to only benefit Bush and never Kerry in the final results --- along with everything else we now know about the manufacturers of the E-Voting and Counting machines, their secrecy and their exceedingly close ties to the Republican party, it all just adds to my existing suspicions here that something stinks. Bad.

I've lived in L.A. for nearly 10 years now. I've never seen armored tanks in the streets.

Last night, during an otherwise peaceful anti-war demonstration in front of the Federal Building in Westwood, two armored tanks were called out.

Here's the story, here's the QuickTime video. What the hell is this country coming to?

(Via Raw Story)

UPDATE: The links above are not broken as one reader reported, but traffic at both the page and the video is now very heavy, so keep trying. Here, in the meantime, is the text of the article:

UPDATE: AMERICAblog now has more details on this.

Please sign this Online Petition calling on Congress to open an immediate investigation into possible fraud and/or mistabulation of votes by the American People in Election 2004.

Then use this link to ask everyone you know to sign it as well!

(A reader points out that your name, city and state will be available to those who choose to view the petition signatures. Obviously, I have no fear of publically speaking out against what's happening, but if you have any privacy concerns, just enter your first initial, last name, city, state. E-mail address is required for cross verification; but if you check the box for "privacy," no one will see your e-mail address. What's important is that you sign it and stand up bravely to demand that our votes be counted properly! Go sign it now!)

UPDATE: Act for Change --- a rather large activist group --- is finally getting into the game! They too have an ONLINE PETITION / EMAIL DUMP! They will send your Email straight to your U.S. Congress people for you! Please sign that one as well! And again, let your friends know about it!

BuzzFlash is running a recent editorial of mine. It begins this way:

Click here to read the rest at BuzzFlash...

Yesterday Bev Harris' BlackBoxVoting.org site began issuing "Bandwidth Exceeded" messages to users attempting to access the site. Such a message generally occurs when more users are attempting to access the site than the server can comfortably handle or when the bandwidth allocated by the domain's Internet Provider is exceeded.

Today, attempts to access the site now simply return a "Cannot Find Server" page, leading me to believe that hack attempts and/or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have been successful for the time being. [UPDATE: BlackBoxVoting.org is now finally back online. At least for now.]

We have had such attacks here at the BRAD BLOG for the last three days which have taken us similarly down and/or greatly slowed page retrieval at various times. Given the much higher profile BBV has had, it's little surprise that folks who'd rather see patriotic efforts like theirs discontinued would work feverishly to disrupt it.

Ms. Harris and BBV has been spearheading a huge "Freedom of Information Act" filing to collect and review audit logs and other materials from the election in some 3,000 US counties, and thus, her group has attracted quite a bit of attention in the past week. BBV has been attempting to warn Americans for at least the past year about the ticking time-bombs of unregulated, unauditable, and privately owned Electronic Voting machines and their corporate owners (the vast majority of them very closely tied to the Republican party).

Attempts to silence and/or disrupt sites like hers and ours, I believe, speak volumes in support of the underlying charges that we've been making. If there was nothing to fear in examining the inner-workings of these companies, and the way that our votes our counted --- specifically in last week's election --- there would be no reason to attempt to silence and disrupt those who are attempting to do so.

In other words, if the election was clean and fair, what's the fear of giving it a close inspection?

Now perhaps the problem at BBV really is simply related to an overage of bandwidth demand, however, given past attacks the site has received, similar attacks here, and the message changing from "Bandwidth Exceeded" to "Cannot Find Server", I'm inclined to believe that the problem is hostile attacks.

To those who claim that the roughly 150,000 (so far) documented votes that have been reported and confirmed by Election Officials as being mis-allocated would not have changed any election results, I'd point out:

1) Those are just the numbers reported by a mainstream media which by and large went "on vacation" after Kerry's "concession" last Wednesday.

2) Many of those mistabulated and/or lost votes discovered were due to software errors that likely exist on many other identical computers in many other counties in America where they may not yet have been noticed and/or reported.

3) The results of at least one ballot initiative last Tuesday has already been reversed when 70,000 previously mis-counted votes due to "software error" were "discovered" in Broward County, FL!

4) There has been a long record of elections in this country being mis-tabulated and/or reversed due to Electronic Voting Machine error in recent history.

Chapter 2 of Bev Harris' book, Black Box Voting outlines tons of those recently overturned elections. Here's the PDF version of Chapter 2, but since it's currently offline as of this posting, here's a summary of just a few such recent incidents summarized courtesy of Hunter over at DailyKos:

If an official investigation doesn't take place immediately, there is little hope of determing the correct winner of any number of races from last week's election. Not the least of which is the race for President of the United States. And I would think, especially after four years of questions about George W. Bush's legitimacy as "President" that even the Right Wingnuts would like to be able to demonstrate once and for all to the American People that he was, in fact, legitimately elected this time.

For more on the suddenly silent Right Wingers, see my recent BuzzFlash Editorial. And be sure to sign this Online Petition calling for an immediate investigation!

Excellent and cogent analysis and action items concerning Florida and the Exit Polls from Ian Welsch over at BOP. Please give it a look and see if you can help.

I would add one further question/action item to Ian's list. It would be useful to learn what type of counting machine was in use in Broward County when it began subtracting votes from the tally, due to a bug in the software, and what other counties in Florida and/or the rest of the country used the same machine and software. 70,000 votes were "found" in that incident, and a local initiative overturned with the discovery of them.

The code used in these machines is not written separately for each individual machine that I know of. If the error occurred once in Broward (and was reportedly noticed), where else did it also occur and not get noticed?

Ditto for the UniElect machine in North Carolina that entirely lost at least 7,000 votes in a single county because it's memory chip only held 3005 votes instead of the 10,000 that manufacturer UniLect had promised. Where else was the same type of computer in use? I know Ohio used UniLect machines, and they reported unfixable problems with them on Election Day, but I haven't been able to tell if they were the same type as those in North Carolina.

(It must be up to us to figure this crap out, because the MSM is enjoying their well-deserved nap.)

The headline --- courtesy of The Onion's Election Coverage --- is funny.

The fact that it seems to be true --- with MoveOn.org remaining mum so far about what could potentially be the biggest crime in this country since...the last election --- is not.

A couple of other funny Onion headlines from the same page...

Both Attorney-General John Ashcroft and Commerce Secretary Donald Evans were booted resigned just moments ago.

And they were so darn effective! What a shame that, like Fallujah (where at least 16 American troops have been killed in the last 48 hours), this terrible news just happened to break after the election! What luck!

UPDATE: In related news...in case you didn't notice...The "Orange" security alert in both D.C. and NYC was lowered back to "Yellow" for the first time the day after the election and today pedestrian traffic was once again re-opened on Pennsylvania Ave. in front of the White House. The timing for all of these events should continue to not be noticed in any way. Thank you.

UPDATE: Looks like Ashcroft submitted his resignation on Nov. 2. Election Day. But, always in the service of politicizing justice, he remarked in his resignation letter:

But rest easy! He also informed the "President-Elect":

Phew! Thank you Mr. A-G!

And now, ladies and gentlemen, for (hopefully) the last time...The Attorney General sings.

UPDATE: While I thought the above toon was clearly absurd, apparently, it may not be. See this post on the Conservative Leader who seems to now be claiming "God is indeed a Republican". (Via AMERICAblog)

American democracy is the beacon and light and hope for the rest of the world. While their emerging democracies may not always take the exact form that ours does, central to all of them is --- and must continue to be --- "the expression of the will of the people" via clean and open elections.

Emerging democracies in the world, however, are taking note of the debacle we've had here again. Twice now in a row with our most important election. And with so many countries that we are attempting to push towards delicate democracies at this time, it's more important than ever.

This is the story running today Russia's PRAVDA: "Did Bush fix the elections? - Why did Kerry throw in the towel so soon?"

If we are unable to demonstrate to world an example of how clean, fair and transparent elections must be run, what in God's name gives any of you people the illusion that other countries will do any better? And what of the Moral Authority that we must have to require of them that their elections be clean, fair and transparent?

I don't care which side of the political winds you're on (Bush's, Kerry's or anyone else's), if America doesn't have a national election that we can proudly hold up as a shining beacon of democracy in our own country, we'll hardly be able to demand the same from any country in the rest of the world.

Wake up, America.

UPDATE: For more on all of this from "the Internationals" see this from The International Herald-Tribune as reported by AltWeeklies.com:

(Thanks Fin for the tip!)

CLARIFICATION: The Pravda article reported above is from Pravda Online - a distinct publication from the old Communist Party-Controlled Pravda Newspaper. Though Pravda Online is published in Russian as well as English, and it's journalists are made up of reporters from the old Pravda Newspaper, I should have made that distinction in my original article. See the comments on this item for more detail. Thanks Raw Story's John Byrne for calling the issue to my attention.

Okay, lots of stuff now beginning to come out this morning, folks.

First, credit where it's due to MSNBC's Countdown for being amongst the first and only major Mainstream Media to give full coverage to this scandal. You can watch most of the full 17-minutes report they did last night courtesy of our bandwidth friendly friends at "Crooks & Liars" (via Windows Media Player here) and Brian Duffy (via QuickTime version here).

Second, it looks like the DNC is finally beginning to show up and play. Ever timidly, as we'd expect from them, but they're beginning to show up nonetheless and have now issued a Press Release calling for accounting from the 50 Secretaries of States on their counting practices. Read their Press Release here. More on this later today. (and thanks to reader Mazelle for the tip!)

Also, according to that MSNBC report, 3 more House Democrats have now joined the call of the original 3 Dems (Nadler, Wexler & Conyers) on the House Judiciary Committee asking the GAO for an investigation. That's good news, but we're still waiting for the rest

Last, for the moment (though certainly not least!) --and I will have more detail on this shortly --- it looks as though 97,000 more votes than voters have been added to the tallies in Cuyahoga County, OH! Now that's where Cleveland is, so it's a heavily Democratic district (I believe it went 63%-33% in favor of Kerry), and it was that counties totals that everyone was watching on Tuesday night to see if it would close the previously announced gap for Bush in Ohio.

In some precincts, the vote tallies show as being some 1000% (yes, that's thousand!) higher than the number of actual voters in the precinct! I will have much more on that later today.

Could that mean too many votes were added for Kerry there? Yup. Could that mean too many votes were added for Bush there? Yup. Could there be an innocent explanation for it? Yup.

Would I like to see this cleared up even if it means fewer votes for Kerry in the end? Yup.

Do I think elections should be a helluva of a lot cleaner and more organized than the mess we're seeing in Election '04? Hell yeah.

Check out the DailyKos story and see what you think. More on that one in particular, shortly...

What's clear is that your hard work is beginning to get the traction it deserves! Keep making noise! Pass these links around, and demand that the Media and the Politicians account for whatever the hell is going on with these increasingly pungent smelling election "results"!

I referred to Auglaize County, Ohio in the previous item as having the 4th highest percentage of votes for George W. Bush in all of Ohio.

The Evening Leader is reporting on some very strange goings on in that county just prior to the election when the entire Elections Board was notified by Sec. of State J. Kenneth Blackwell's office that they were being placed on "administrative oversight". No explanation was has yet been given by the Ohio Sec. of State's office.

The nugget that caught my eye was this report of an ES&S employee reported using the main vote tallying computer --- against election protocol --- about two weeks prior to the election:

I've attempted, to no avail, to get more information on this story since the original report is not particularly well written, and offers quite a few vagaries. I couldn't reach the original reporter and Mr. Nuss did not return my call. Few other reporters seem to be looking into it. So at this point, I think it's important to get the story out there, and let the Internets take over. (Since apparently the Mainstream Media is more interested in Scott Peterson's hung jury, than the will of the people in the world's most important democracy.)