DATA DRIVEN VIEWPOINT: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs. I don't think this story meets the requirement of extraordinary proof, yet given what so many of us have already learned about the privatized voting industry it is worth the risk to post this claim and ask anyone with contrary or supporting information to comment. [PS: As I was reading and researching this the database became unavailable. You may experience the same when you click on the links provided, but hopefully it will be fixed and the site will be back on line by the time you read this.] ADDENDUM: See Tucson Citizen Article from 2007 below.
from: UK Progressive
Retired NSA Analyst Proves GOP Is Stealing Votes
By Denis G. Campbell andCharley James
(c) 25 October 2012
(c) 25 October 2012
UPDATED: Why is Mitt Romney so confident?
In states where the winner will be decided by less than 10%, of the vote he already knows he will win. This is no tinfoil hat conspiracy. It’s a maths problem. And mathematics showed changes in actual raw voting data that had no statistical correlation other than programmable computer fraud. This computer fraud resulted in votes being flipped from Democrat to Republican in every federal, senatorial, congressional and gubernatorial election since 2008 (thus far) and in the 2012 primary contests from other Republicans to Mitt Romney.
This goes well beyond Romney’s investment control in voting machine maker Hart Intercivic and Diebold’s close ties to George W. Bush. Indeed all five voting machine companies have very strong GOP fundraising ties, yet executives (including the candidate’s son Tagg Romney) there is no conflict between massively supporting one party financially whilst controlling the machines that record and count the votes.
A retired NSA analyst has spent several sleepless nights applying a simple formula to past election results across Arizona. His results showed across-the-board systemic election fraud on a coordinated and massive scale. But the analysis indicated that this only happens in larger precincts because anomalies in small precincts can be more easily detected.
The bigger the precinct (x axis) the higher the number of votes for Romney and corresponding decrease for Santorum and Paul when all lines should look like the Gingrich line. (Source: MA Duniho)
“Easy to Cheat”
Retired NSA analyst Michael Duniho has worked for nearly seven years trying to understand voting anomalies in his home state of Arizona and Pima County. This publication has written extensively about apparent vote machine manipulation in a2006 RTA Bond issue election that is still being fought in the courts. Said Duniho, “It is really easy to cheat using computers to count votes, because you can’t see what is going on in the machine.”
Retired NSA analyst Michael Duniho has worked for nearly seven years trying to understand voting anomalies in his home state of Arizona and Pima County. This publication has written extensively about apparent vote machine manipulation in a2006 RTA Bond issue election that is still being fought in the courts. Said Duniho, “It is really easy to cheat using computers to count votes, because you can’t see what is going on in the machine.”
When Duniho applied a mathematical model to actual voting results in the largest voting precincts, he saw that only the large precincts suddenly trended towards Mitt Romney in the Arizona primary – and indeed all Republicans in every election since 2008 – by a factor of 8%-10%. The Republican candidate in every race saw an 8-10%. gain in his totals whilst the Democrat lost 8-10%. This is a swing of up to 20 point, enough to win an election unless a candidate was losing very badly.
Since sifting through and decoding massive amounts of data was his work for decades on behalf of the National Security Agency, he wanted to understand why this was ONLY happening in large precincts.
Nose Counting
The idea of examining large precinct results came via a link to a report written by Francois Choquette and James Johnson. Choquette became curious about South Carolina primary results in the February Republican contest. There a poll observer noted an unusually big gain of votes for Mitt Romney in larger precincts than in smaller ones. Choquette wanted to know why?
The idea of examining large precinct results came via a link to a report written by Francois Choquette and James Johnson. Choquette became curious about South Carolina primary results in the February Republican contest. There a poll observer noted an unusually big gain of votes for Mitt Romney in larger precincts than in smaller ones. Choquette wanted to know why?
He examined and applied all of the normal statistical markers to see where a variance might occur: income level, population density, race, urban vs. rural, even party registration numbers. He found no correlation to explain why Romney votes trended upward while Paul and Santorum votes trended downward -yet only in large precincts.
Choquette then looked at all 50 states and found roughly a 10% switch in votes from Democrat to GOP. This was noted in every state except Utah, where the presumption was, as it was Mitt’s religious home state and very conservative, there was no chance of Romney losing and no variance was found.
Choquette even saw in Maricopa County, which is Phoenix and its suburbs, that in 2008 Romney used this technique against John McCain. But McCain beat him by too much for a 10% fraud gain to matter. McCain tried to do the same thing in the general election to President Obama but 9 million votes nationally were too many to make up.
Examining every county across America was too massive an undertaking for any one person so he included a simple set of instructions and encouraged others to do the same with raw vote totals in their county/state.
1. Download the text files of all raw actual vote results by precinct from the Secretary of State’s Office.
2. Arrange them in precinct order.
3. Put in all of the candidate totals for each precinct.
4. Sort the data by total vote smallest on the top.
Now here it gets a bit dense: He needed to add columns that show cumulative totals by candidate then compare them by candidate to establish trend lines.
That reveals trends should remain statistically constant throughout an election.
Stealing Votes
But as the spreadsheet shows, the larger the precinct, the numbers start to change dramatically.
But as the spreadsheet shows, the larger the precinct, the numbers start to change dramatically.
“If percentages did not change from one precinct to the next, we would see a flat line, but what we are seeing is sloped lines downward for Democrats and upward for Republicans (or, in the case of the Presidential primary, upward for Romney and downward for his opponents), said Duniho.”
In every election contest, the trend lines dramatically crossed for no apparent reason. It was revealed that votes were being systemically bled off for Rick Santorum and Ron Paul and then being credited to Mitt Romney.
Once Duniho completed the spreadsheet, he pumped in actual vote totals from other Arizona election contests.
Chart showing Barber v Kelly special election to replace Gabby Giffords result in Pima County where the margin of victory was too large even with the supposed 'fix' in to overcome.
He looked at every 2010 race in Arizona from Governor Brewer to Senator McCain and Congresswoman Gabby Giffords. The trends lines all did the exact same thing. Someone had manipulated the election outcome, most likely one person inserting a programme inside the system’s central computer… that flipped votes.
The results were astounding.
They showed that Governor Brewer actually lost her election and Gabby Gifford’s razor thin less than 1% point re-election victory over Tea Party Conservative Jesse Kelly was closer to a 20 point victory for her.
Duniho added, “We need to have strong hand count audits to confirm the integrity of these elections. This means comparing hand counts with official reports of the election.”
Ohio PrecedentThis isn’t the first time Republicans have been charged with vote theft. It happened in the 2004 presidential election, in Ohio and Florida.
In Ohio, GOP consultant Michael Connell claimed that the vote count computer program he had created for the state had a trap door that shifted Democratic votes to the GOP.
He was subpoenaed as a witness in a lawsuit against then-Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, and lawyers for the plaintiff asked the Dept. of Justice to provide him with security because there were two threats made against Connell’s life by people associated with Karl Rove. But in Dec. 2008, before the trial began, Connell was killed in a plane crash outside Akron Ohio.
There were problems in Florida, as well.
A study by the Quantitative Methods Research Team at the University of California at Berkeley found that anomalies between Florida counties using touch-screen voting and those using other methods could not be explained statistically. Noting the higher-than-expected votes for Bush in three large Democratic counties, Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach, Michael Hout, a Berkeley professor who did the study said there were strong suspicions of vote-rigging.
“No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained,” Hout said. “The study shows that a county’s use of electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. There is just a trivial probability of evidence like this appearing in a population where the true difference is zero—less than once in a thousand chances.”
Don’t Trust, Verify
Indeed the only way to 100% verify this election fraud would be through handcounts of ballots by precinct, matching those results to the reported totals. But as was mentioned earlier, a group in Pima County has been trying unsuccessfully to get access to ballots to conduct such a count for almost five years since anomalies first surfaced in voting machines in 2006.
Indeed the only way to 100% verify this election fraud would be through handcounts of ballots by precinct, matching those results to the reported totals. But as was mentioned earlier, a group in Pima County has been trying unsuccessfully to get access to ballots to conduct such a count for almost five years since anomalies first surfaced in voting machines in 2006.
Is there a judge in Arizona likely to suddenly reverse past trends and allow access to conduct such a handcount of ballots 12 days before a national election? And if not, why not? Maybe someone needs to commission the Anonymous hacker group to re-level the playing field because the courts are not going to do it.
The results of Duniho’s analysis can only happen if votes are being stolen, and the only way that’s possible is if the computerised machines are programmed to steal them. Welcome to Zimbabwe.
More than 100 million Americans will cast their ballots thinking their vote will be fairly counted. It should be. Yet the crooks know they can safely flip up to 10% of votes without consequence. Anything more than that is statistically suspect.
President Obama won by such a huge margin in 2008 that even with this anomaly built into the system, he cruised to victory. This year the election is much closer. Can American democracy afford yet another election crisis placing three of the four last national Presidential election results in question or worse: The outcome was stolen, the outcome a victim of election theft?
Don’t Take Our WordUse the spreadsheet above to do the maths in your own state, county or precinct. The results are compelling. Then demand that the Justice Department stop this insane view that results need to be reported by 11 pm for the television networks. Demand hand ballot counts!
We use paper ballots in the UK and results do not even begin to trickle in until 3 am. The final outcome can take up to three days to finalise. But voters in Britain know the count is accurate because every ballot is transparently hand-counted. When I read this article that Serbia, Belarus and Kazakhstan were sending election monitors to watch the US Election?, I knew we’d jumped the shark.
We are already being victimized by vote fraud on a scale that, in another country, would lead to calls for international election monitors. It is time for Americans to stop being victims of ghosts in the machine.
UPDATE: There was an error in the italicised paragraph in the section titled ‘Nose Counting.’ It originally read ‘from GOP to Democrat’ and the sentence was awkwardly constructed. The correct wording is now there. We thank our readers and regret the original error. -Ed
(This story was simultaneously released on the magazine and The David Pakman Show of 25 October.)
Denis G. Campbell is the author of 6 books including ‘Billionaire Boys Election Freak Show,’ ‘The Vagina Wars’ & ‘Egypt Unsh@ckled.’ He is the editor of UK Progressive Magazine and provides commentary to the BBC, itv Al Jazeera English, CNN, MSNBC and others. His weekly ‘World View with Denis Campbell’ segment can be heard every Thursday on the globally syndicated The David Pakman Show. You can follow him on Twitter via @UKProgressive and on Facebook.
Charley James is a long-time independent journalist who covers social justice, politics and economic issues. He’s worked in print and broadcast media for national magazines, large newspapers and major market radio and television outlets. Follow Charley on Twitter @SuddenlyHomeles.
Michael Duniho | UK Progressive
www.ukprogressive.co.uk/tag/michael-duniho
As a journalist the story intrigued, as a citizen it outraged. For seven years Michael Duniho, a quiet, determined and dignified man had been
As a journalist the story intrigued, as a citizen it outraged.
For seven years Michael Duniho, a quiet, determined and dignified man had been sending quarterly or so e-mails, quietly seething about the conduct of elections in his new home of Tucson (Pima County), Arizona. Though I never have, Michael, (we all call him Mickey) has a poker face of steel one would not wish to play against, yet the warmest, most genuine of smiles one could ever hope to be on the receiving end of.
Mickey worked for decades in the NSA (no such agency or National Security Agency, you pick…) and lived a few miles away from their enormous facility in the town of Laurel, MD. His wife Dani was Mayor of that small town (much bigger than Wasilla and I’d have more faith in her on any ticket, but that’s another story). We attended the same church for the year before I moved to California and they to Arizona soon after.
Mickey always reminded me of the old EF Hutton telly commercials… “when EF Hutton talks, people listen.” He would take in every syllable around him, allow that computer of a brain to process it and when Mickey finally spoke, everyone in the room shut up because you knew he had synthesised the perfect solution taking all sides into account.
So when another e-mail arrived in July, I decided to begin the journey that became this article. I wrote him an e-mail explaining that because of our association I needed to talk to those around him on this story so his name does not appear until here.
When Margaret Mead wrote, “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has,” she was speaking of AUDIT AZ and Mickey specifically.
Passionate local activism is alive and well in Tucson. There was always a keen, deeply personal sense of not wanting to “let the story down” hanging over my head. Right wing talking points network FOX News uses the slogan “Fair and Balanced” like a birthright without a shred of truth to it so this story had to be truly fair and balanced and I had to know in my being every word was factual. For three months, I never spoke to Mickey out of a sense of journalistic integrity. When I called Bill Risner for the third or fourth time to back check our discussion and dig for more, it was clear to him I was taking this very seriously.
In the UK and most of the US, journalism has been reduced to 2 opposing quotes front and back with an expert comment in the middle. 500 words, tops. Reporters are lazy and if my so-called colleagues invested good old-fashioned leg work we’d have real news instead of the noise passing for news today. When getting to the pub is more important than getting it right for far too many, we end up the losers.
It’s 6:50 am Sunday morning here in Wales. The sun is rising behind me and this e-magazine gets about 80-hours a week of my time because it is both a labour of love and this time it is too important for our world for anyone to sit on their hands.
Working with wonderfully thoughtful writers like Charley James and Dorret Groot Wassink has been a joy. This story took about 50-hours of time. Charley and I slaved back in forth in e-mails over the lede to get it just right. I originally was going to write four articles or one massive article of 7,000 words. Charley, the much recently maligned former Business Week pro (he broke the “So Sambo beat the bitch” story that ran worldwide about a pattern of racism and cronyism with Sarah Palin) kept beating me up online and over the phone to “stop burying the lede!” and for which I was the ever grateful student.
The end result is a tight piece on the challenges facing us to ensure this election is a test between two candidates who have endured an epic battle and is decided by your vote, correctly counted vs. some computer hacking thief.
That’s how important it is.
And for this we all have Citizen Mickey and his small band to thank.
From: The Tucson Citizen in 2007
Electronic vote results skewed easily, judge told
by Garry Duffy on Dec. 05, 2007,
Electronic voting systems such as the one used by Pima County can easily and almost undetectably be tampered with to skew election results, a Pima County Superior Court judge heard during a trial challenging that system Tuesday.
The Pima County Democratic Party is suing Pima County to force elections officials to turn over the electronic elections system’s database for a study to see if the results of the May 2006 Regional Transportation Authority’s 20-year improvement plan and half-cent sales tax to help fund it may have been tainted.
Both sides appeared before Pima County Superior Court Judge Michael Miller on Tuesday in what is expected to be a three-day trial.
County elections officials have refused to turn over the database, claiming that to do so would reveal sensitive information about the county’s voting system and process, and increase the chances of a hacked election.
“Because it is a computer, there are a million things somebody could do to alter the outcome of an election,” said Michael Duniho, a witness for the Democratic Party.
Duniho was a senior computer scientist for the National Security Agency for 26 years and is working with the Democrats to advise the county on improving vote system security and its effort to obtain the database to determine whether there is evidence of vote tampering.
The database could provide information not available elsewhere in the county elections computer system about whether the results of the RTA and sales tax election were rigged, he said.
Democrats have postulated that the vote could have been “flipped” if someone with knowledge and access to the system changed database codes to have votes counted the opposite of what a voter intended. But it would be difficult for someone to do that without leaving behind tracks that show the vote was manipulated, Duniho said.
The county uses a Diebold Global Election Management System, in which voters fill in ovals on ballots and then take their ballots to scanners in their precincts to be read and later tabulated with other election results.
Tabulating is done with computers in the elections division’s offices.
Chief County Civil Attorney Christopher Straub argued that an investigation by a computer consultant hired by the Arizona Attorney General’s Office found no evidence of vote tampering or fraud in the system or the election.
“Pima County has taken great care in safeguarding its elections system,” Straub said.
The county has implemented recommendations by the consultant to tighten security, including cameras installed to monitor access to elections computers and vote-tabulating areas, Straub said.
William Risner, attorney for the Democratic Party, said the consultant did not look at the county voting system’ database in the investigation.
Much of the Democrats’ focus has been on election worker Bryan Crane, who has acknowledged that he printed tally sheets for early voting before the election to check the accuracy of the tabulating process. Crane also has admitted taking backup tapes of still-to-be-finalized elections results home.
Using Microsoft Access software, it would be possible to alter election results and it would be difficult to detect, Democrats have said.
By not providing the database for study, the county is essentially saying “Trust our system. Trust us,” Risner said.
The case is being closely watched by critics of electronic voting systems who maintain that the vulnerabilities in Pima County’s system are widespread across the nation.
The trial will resume Wednesday with Risner calling more witnesses for the plaintiffs. The county will then call defense witnesses.
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