Stats to Make You Go "Hmmm?"

"Sen. John Kerry looks to make a victory of the electoral college, according to all sets of exit polls conducted by a consortium of six media organizations (the National Election Pool) that RAW STORY acquired earlier today, from the six major networks who conducted the polls."

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All of the polls put Kerry ahead in Florida, Ohio, and New Mexico. The two for which polling was available for other states had Kerry ahead in Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Wisconsin. In the polls received, Bush leads in Colorado, Louisiana and Arizona. Iowa is a tie.

A source connected to the White House has dismissed the early polls as “skewed” and told a conservative magazine reporter that Bush would certainly win both Florida and Ohio.

Here are the first exit polls, confirmed from sources in both parties, as leaked to RAW STORY. The first number is the percentage of voters supporting Kerry, the second are those supporting Bush.

AZ 45-55
CO 48-51
LA 42-57
MI 51-48
WI 52-48
PA 60-40
OH 52-48
FL 51-48
MICH 51-47
NM 50-48
MINN 58-40
WISC 52-43
IOWA 49-49
NH 57-41

Here are the second polls:

U.S.: 50-49
FL: 50-49
OH: 50-49
CO: 48-50
NM: 50-48

Here are the third polls:

Confirmed:

Florida: 50/49 - KERRY
Ohio: 50/49 - KERRY
Michigan: 51/47 - KERRY
Minnesota: 58/40 - KERRY
New Mexico: 50/48 - KERRY
Pennsylvania: 54/45 - KERRY
Wisconsin: 51/46- KERRY
Colorado: 46/53 - BUSH
North Carolina: 49/51 - BUSH

Unconfirmed:

IA: 50/48 - KERRY
NH: 58/41 - KERRY
ME: 55/44 - KERRY
NV: 48/49 - BUSH
AR: 45/54 - BUSH

And the final 6 p.m. polls:
(The first number is the percentage of voters supporting Kerry, the second are those supporting Bush.)

PA 53 46
FL 51 49
NC 48 52
OH 51 49
MO 46 54
AK 47 53
MI 51 47
NM 50 49
LA 43 56
CO 48 51
AZ 45 55
MN 54 44
WI 52 47
IA 49 49

Also for your consideration:

Voting Machine Controversy
by Julie Carr Smyth

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COLUMBUS - The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.

Diebold, Electronic Voting and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy
by Bob Fitrakis

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Diebold, located in North Canton, Ohio, does its primary business in ATM and ticket-vending machines. Critics of Diebold point out that virtually every other machine the company makes provides a paper trail to verify the machine’s calculations. Oddly, only the voting machines lack this essential function.

State Senator Teresa Fedor of Toledo introduced Senate Bill 167 late last year mandating that every voting machine in Ohio generate a “voter verified paper audit trail.” Secretary of State Blackwell has denounced any attempt to require a paper trail as an effort to “derail” election reform. Blackwell’s political career is an interesting one: he emerged as a black activist in Cincinnati supporting municipal charter reform, became an elected Democrat, then an Independent, and now is a prominent Republican with his eyes on the Governor’s mansion.

Johns Hopkins researchers at the Information Security Institute issued a report declaring that Diebold’s electronic voting software contained “stunning flaws.” The researchers concluded that vote totals could be altered at the voting machines and by remote access. Diebold vigorously refuted the Johns Hopkins report, claiming the researchers came to “a multitude of false conclusions.”

Perhaps to settle the issue, someone illegally hacked into the Diebold Election Systems website in March 2003 and stole internal documents from the company and posted them online. Diebold went to court to stop, according to court records, the “wholesale reproduction” of some 13,000 pages of company material.

Wherever Diebold and ES&S go, irregularities and historic Republican upsets follow. Alastair Thompson, writing for scoop.co of New Zealand, explored whether or not the 2002 U.S. mid-term elections were “fixed by electronic voting machines supplied by Republican-affiliated companies.” The scoop investigation concluded that: “The state where the biggest upset occurred, Georgia, is also the state that ran its election with the most electronic voting machines.” Those machines were supplied by Diebold.

Wired News reported that “. . . a former worker in Diebold’s Georgia warehouse says the company installed patches on its machine before the state’s 2002 gubernatorial election that were never certified by independent testing authorities or cleared with Georgia election officials.” Questions were raised in Texas when three Republican candidates in Comal County each received exactly the same number of votes – 18,181.

Following the 2003 California election, an audit of the company revealed that Diebold Election Systems voting machines installed uncertified software in all 17 counties using its equipment.

Former CIA Station Chief John Stockwell writes that one of the favorite tactics of the CIA during the Reagan-Bush administration in the 1980s was to control countries by manipulating the election process. “CIA apologists leap up and say, ‘Well, most of these things are not so bloody.’ And that’s true. You’re giving politicians some money so he’ll throw his party in this direction or that one, or make false speeches on your behalf, or something like that. It may be non-violent, but it’s still illegal intervention in other country’s affairs, raising the question of whether or not we’re going to have a world in which laws, rules of behavior are respected,” Stockwell wrote. Documents illustrate that the Reagan and Bush administration supported computer manipulation in both Noriega’s rise to power in Panama and in Marcos’ attempt to retain power in the Philippines. Many of the Reagan administration’s staunchest supporters were members of the Council on National Policy.

There's so much more, but for the sake of efficient information crunching, I continue later.