Washblog

The Bush campaign of 1988, as historians have since recollected it, was filled with CIA type disinformation operations and deceptions of the sort that America used in Viet Nam, Chile, and the Soviet Union. Since George Bush was one of the most admired CIA directors in the history of the organization, this was not so surprising.

Yet George Bush stood to lose the Republican Party nomination if he was beaten by Senator Robert Dole in the snows of New Hampshire.  He had suffered a terrible political wound when Dole won big by a show of hands in an unriggable Iowa caucus. Bush came to New Hampshire with all the earmarks of a loser whom the press had come to identify as a "wimp."

Political observers were downbeat in their observations of Bush's chances in the face of Dole's Iowa momentum. Virtually every television and newspaper poll had Bush losing by up to eight points just hours before the balloting.

Desperate times require desperate measures.  Perhaps that's what it required for "steps to be taken," and phone calls to be made. Then came a widely reported promise made by Bush to his campaign manager, Gov. Sununu.  It happens that Sununu's computer engineering skills approach "genius" on the tests.  If Sununu could "deliver" New Hampshire, and Bush didn't care how and didn't want to know how -- then Sununu would become his chief of staff in the White House.

When election day was over the following headline appeared in the Washington Post:

NEW HAMPSHIRE CONFOUNDED MOST POLLSTERS -- Voters Were a Step Ahead of Tracking Measurements

The article read:

For Vice President Bush and his supporters, Tuesday's 9-percentage-point victory over Sen. Robert J. Dole (R-Kan) in New Hampshire was a delightful surprise; for Andrew Kohut, it was a horror story.

Kohut is president of the Gallup poll, whose final New Hampshire survey was wrong by 17 points: it had put Dole ahead by 8; Bush won by 9. "I was dismayed," Kohut acknowledged yesterday.

This New Hampshire primary was perhaps the most polled primary election in American history, and in the end, the Republican voters in the state confounded the predictions of nearly every published survey of voter opinion.

Gallup's glaring error and the miscalls of other polling organizations once again raise questions about the accuracy of polls, their use by the media and the impact they have on voters'choices and the public perception of elections...
...

Had the terms of Bush's "promise" to Sununu been met?

Whatever magic Sununu was able to conjure up during those final hours preceding the overnight resurrection of the Bush campaign, it worked.

There are those who believe that such a wild reversal of form would have been subject to an immediate inquiry by the stewards if it happened in the Kentucky Derby. Any horseplayer would have nodded sagely, put a finger up to his eye, pulled down the lower lid, and signaled: "Fix."

Yet in New Hampshire, there was some wonderment expressed in the press, and little more. There was no rechecking of the computerized voting machines, no inquiry into the path of the vote from the vote machines to the central tallying place, no public scrutiny of the mechanisms of the mighty peculiar vote that saved George Bush's career and leapfrogged the relatively obscure Sununu into the White House.

Nothing was said in the press about the secretly programmed computer chips inside the "Shouptronic" Direct Recording Electronic (DRE)voting machines in Manchester, the state's largest city.

These 200-pound systems were so easily tampered with that the integrity of the results they gave -- and George Bush was the beneficiary of their tallies - will forever be in doubt..." (end of excerpt)

Now we fast forward to January 8, 2008.  There was another "upset" and a massive shift in the expected final totals that contradicted the pre-polling results.  Surprisingly, the shift occurred only in a single race, the Democrats' presidential race; all the other poll results were as expected. Once again we are faced with the question, were all the polls wrong or were the final totals wrong?  Once again, we will never know the answer to that question.

Eighty percent of New Hampshire's votes were counted in secret on Diebold (now Premier) optical scan machines. Although NH used paper ballots, no one intends to verify that the computer totals match the actual votes cast on the paper ballots.

The company that programs the memory cards, LHS Associates, admits that the cards can be altered undetectably by using plus (+)and minus(-)votes on the memory cards(like the Harri Hursti hack in Florida)and that such alteration should not be done, but that the company has taken no steps to protect the cards from such tampering.(1) Furthermore, LHS Assoc. Marketing and Sales director, convicted felon Ken Hajjar, admits to carrying extra memory cards in the trunk of his car which he uses from time to time to "swap out" memory cards during an election. (2)

An election that either is not or cannot be verified is theater. It is not a democratic election.

Election officials and politicians must restore democratic elections by restoring public vote counts. This issue must be raised with every candidate in every election. It needs to be a litmus test issue for every presidential candidate, every U.S. Congressional candidate, every WA State senator or house member, every  candidate for Secretary of State, every county council member, and every election auditor. Every candidate must promise to restore public vote counts and verifiability. If they don't, then we as voters will not support that candidate.

Additionally, it should be part of the Democratic Party's platform.

(1)Hursti and LHS Associates owner, John Silvestro video.

(2) Black Box Voting Report on LHS Assoc..